The Windflower (33 page)

As the day wore on, the likelihood that they were not going to be found by the
Joke
began to seem less and less of a virtue, though Merry would never have admitted it to herself.

They passed more than a dozen islands, weaving between them as the land grew in narrowing perspective and then shrank slowly into bright abandoned smears of color, dappling a seascape of pristine, simple beauty. There was no sign on land or sea that a human presence had ever touched this wild place. About them were only the marks of happy nature, where creatures moved on their innocent quests unconstrained by the greedy predations of man. Schools of tiny fish sparkled beneath clean, colorless water; and sometimes a shark passed below in silence, a swift, dark shadow amid the sunken canyons. Kingfishers hunted in the warm sunlit shallows, and flocks of killdeer plovers wheeled in screaming flight under giant castles of opalescent clouds.

The sun had dropped and became a brilliant orange ball on the horizon before they found Ben Treadwell's island. Merry surveyed the place over a sunburnt nose and for the second time that day dropped her aching forehead into her palm. If Ben Treadwell's island was a tropical paradise, it was designed for Lacor, the king of the trolls, and his seven bad fairies.

From the sea before them the vast cone of an ancient volcano, extinct, it was to be hoped, rose from the ocean depths, its steep slopes roughcast by a somber tropical forest. As they neared the mangrove trees growing straight out of the sea at the island's edge, Merry could smell the foul miasma that crept from their fetid bases, where brown water oozed between the tangle of their narrow arched roots. The shoreline was strewn with the jagged boulders torn from the limestone cliff above. Rain had pocked the cliff surface, and the residue of ancient embedded minerals ran as brandy-colored streaks from cracks that nested clumps of spotted orchids and dwarf shrubs with yellow blossoms High above them turkey vultures drifted in a slow oval, black mocking dots against the fading sky.

"Yep. Tropical heaven," said Meadows as he landed them on a shallow spur of beach. 'The Devil's Kettle. See them loose spots there on the beach? That there's the sign wild pigs been diggin' here. Good island for game, this. That old Ben Treadwell. He's a knowin' one. About half an hour's walk up that mountain there is a trading post run by an old pirate by the name o' Jameson. Got him a woman there they call Fat Molly. She's something, she is. Short-heeled wench. Short-heeled. See the joke? Means she goes over easy on her back. Heh, heh . . , Well, Jeez, all I ever get out o' you is them sarcastic looks. No sense o' humor. So, get ye out o' the boat, or are we going to sit here till the Second Coming?"

Merry got out. But in three steps she'd crumpled to her knees. No one had warned her that after a period of time on a ship your body makes an adjustment to the sea's heaving motion, and the readjustment to a stable land surface doesn't happen instantly. Wheezy guffaws racked Meadows's sweaty body as Merry sat in damp sand with her brain aslosh; and a small crab ran up on its back legs, its pinchers held over its head, and inspected her with a pair of eyes that sat on wobbling stalks.

"Mr. Meadows," Merry said, "if you say heh, heh, heh to me one more time, I won't be responsible for the consequences."

Before long they left the beach, the silver light of the rising moon finding a narrow path for them through the boulders. A lone hawk, sitting hunched on a stone pillar, watched them as they disappeared into the jungle.

Patches of light and shadow fell through the leathery foliage onto Meadows's swaying back as he strode on confidently in front of Merry, waxing eloquent on the soon-to-be-sampled charms of Fat Molly. The air was almost unbearable, a thick syrup of insect hum and chattering birds. Wings flapped overhead, reptiles skittered in the dry mulch of dead leaves, and wisps of spider threads fell like spirit fingers on Merry's cheeks. She touched the butt end of the pistol wedged carefully into her belt.

Finally she said, "How long do you think we've been walking? It must have been at least an hour."

Meadows hesitated. "Well now, old Ben Treadwell he liked his rum. And when he was a drinkin', he lost track o' time. So the tradin' post might be a wee bit more 'n an hour, think again. It'll be just a mite farther along here."

Farther along there was no trading post. With some misery Merry was about to conclude that the trading post was a fiction of Ben Treadwell's imagination when they reached a clearing. The jungle opened on the left to a broad view of the moon-silvered sea, and on a small rise above stood a shack. Meadows gave an excited "Ha!" and ran toward it, but stopped in his tracks ten feet from the entrance.

It was not a dwelling, Merry saw as she stood at his side, but a structure of stone and ironwork. An altar. And on the altar were china plates smeared with the residue of charred herbs. Between the plates lay sun-faded artificial flowers, dusty, unopened wine bottles, vials of perfume, candle stubs.

"Voodoo," Meadows whispered. "Makes your stomach turn, some of them stories they have about these here little devils they call baka that live under bridges and such and'll sneakity-weakity out in the night to eat of the flesh of them that walks nearby. They got these here cigouaves too, and they's a wolf with a man's head, and they'll come up on a fellow and rip away that what a man's got that a woman ain't. Mighty gruelsome. And them voodoos don't like outsiders." He looked about uneasily. "Don't see any signs that they've been here lately. Probably long since deserted the island. I'm athinkin', though, that we'd best push on anyway. We're kinda out in the open here." Suddenly, close by them, a white owl screamed as it slaughtered a young wood dove. Merry and Michael Meadows moved so fast that he lost his hat and she three hairpins. They didn't stop until the path died at the edge of a brackish pool, where they dropped, puffing and sweating, under the sweeping head of a giant chestnut tree. When she could speak. Merry said, "The trading post?''

With a ludicrously crestfallen air Meadows said, "Looks like it ain't here."

Frogs chorused in the treetops, and from far off Merry could hear the trickle of water over mossy rock.

"Old Ben," said Meadows uncertainly, "he could be quite a |oker, he could. I recollect one time when we was sleepin' on a beach—I disremember where—-he sewed up me blankets and stuffed a live coal in there with me, and 1 had to jump into the bay to put it out. Damned near burned to death and drowned all at once."

"I don't want to
hear
the name Ben Treadwell again as long as I live," Merry said dangerously. But that was not to be. As she sat resting with Meadows in the waving moonlight he began to recollect more and more incidents that reflected poorly on the absent Mr. Treadwell, until finally Meadows had worked himself into such a state that old Ben had changed into that damned rapscallion Treadwell. Meadows finished with, "We'll just have to bed down here and find our way back to the boat come morning."

The last month had done much to condition Merry to disaster. She was, therefore, not going to cry. All she'd had to eat since yesterday was Meadows's pilfered hardtack biscuits and a few wrinkled apples; the grass she'd have to sleep on was damp, pebbly, and probably full of spiders; and she was stranded on an island rife with snakes and strange altars to the supernatural. Gazing at a tiny star through the feathered leaves above her. Merry thought,
Devon, Devon, why did I let you panic me into this?
She was too tired to fight off the memory of his face, or of the lingering warmth that had come whenever he touched her. And his golden eyes. It was so hot for her sometimes, looking into them, as though they held sun fragments. It might be a rather stupid thought, but for all Devon's faults he would never have gotten her lost in a place with voodoos and no supper. Tomorrow looked grim.

Meadows stood up and stretched. Announcing with satisfaction that
he
at least wasn't going to sit around under trees and moan like a girl, he hacked with his dirk at the base of the chestnut tree until he had enough of its flammable gum to kindle a small fire and a torch. He stood among the reeds with the torch, letting the rosy firelight dribble over the water. Almost at once a tiny dark head, like a coal scrap, poked up through a tangle of duckweed. Meadows plunged into the shallow water after it, and the hot night air was filled with
ah's
and
heh heh's
and curses until he emerged a few minutes later, dripping mud slime, triumphantly holding a snapping turtle and sucking a bitten and bleeding finger. He set down the turtle on its back, and Merry quickly turned away her head as | Meadows drew his knife.

When she looked back again, there was turtle meat roasting over the fire on a makeshift spit.

"Want some?" he asked her. "Tastes good. Mighty good." When she shook her head, he smacked his lips, taunting her with his appreciation. His spirits, at least, were improving.

"No, sir," he said. "Nothing like a full belly to make a body into an optimisht. Smell that fat crackin'! Say! Why're you lookin' so doleful? Come morning, we'll take to our boat. I'll lay odds that trading post is on the next island."

"Yes," Merry said glumly. "We can just follow the map."

He sidled over to her, carrying a spear of burnt turtle meat. "Come now. Eat a little," he said, offering her the spear. "It'll perk you right up. Nothing to be gained by starving yourself."

She looked at it dispiritedly and took a bite because the meat was hovering right under her nose and she didn't have the energy to reject it. The meat's odor was revolting, the flavor greasy. It was a meal only for the acutely hungry. Merry swallowed and took another bite.

"Yes, sirrah. That's turtle meat," Meadows said, grinning and watching her eat. "Some say it's poison."

Merry spit it quickly into her hand.

"But it ain't!" he finished and ducked, chuckling, as she threw the half-chewed piece of meat at him. She began to chuckle too and received into her open mouth the handful of sticky weeds that Meadows had tossed back at her in retaliation. Enough was enough. Tired she might be, but she was not going to take that sitting down. Merry snatched a long stick that was crooked at the end and flew at Meadows, advancing on him like a fencer.

"En garde!" cried Meadows, brandishing his meat spear.

Neither party had strength enough for a prolonged battle, so the match was short, zesty, and sparked with laughter. Excited sand fleas, kicked up in the dust, hopped around them, nipping. The exhausted combatants settled back under the chestnut tree, slapping insects off their arms and listening with weary pleasure to the night's song. How varied was the symphony of an evening at peace. The buzzes, hums, whistles, and the high bird calls soothed the senses like sleep. The luminous moon hung above them, close and gigantic. . . .

Merry woke, dazed and stiff, to the dawn's first breath. Meadows slept on, and on, and at last she came to her knees beside his dusty body and tried, rather playfully, to rouse him.

But Michael Meadows was dead. Prickly instinct warned her before she was able to roll him gently to his back, feeling the helpless droop of the muscle tone, the utter stillness of a body where function had ceased. His eyes were closed, the lids bloodless, his jaw hanging slightly open. This was not sleep. Sometime during the night the aging pirate's heart had stopped.

She sat on her heels for a long time, gazing with hollow sadness into the irrevocability of death.

Then she realized that she was alone.

She was not to realize how totally alone until she struggled on her own to the beach, following the siren scent of the sea, to find that her boat had vanished in the prankish crawl of a high tide.

Now she found a flat stone and began to dig a resting place for her companion in the soft sand. But crocodiles came from the depths of the pool to claim him before she could finish, and she fled for her life into a citrus tree and remained there, trembling in a fever bath of misery, trying to close her ears to the horrible sounds below. She did not cry then, nor when she found the boat was lost, nor even as her accidental footstep discovered the one remnant of Meadows, his head. Instead she was mercilessly ill, and then she stood up to begin doing what her days on the
Joke
had schooled her to do—survive.

In the two weeks that followed, she learned the full meaning of being alone. As though she were the last soul on earth, she became her own companion in the grim desolation of long nights filled with milky starlight and heavy dew; of days thick with the rustling voice of the forest. Hours passed when she heard no sound but the palm fronds rattling in the scorching breeze like dry finger bones. The heat was deadly, a withering stench that left her clothing clammy with perspiration moments after she had washed and dried it on the speared fingers of a poinsettia bush. Minute insects, steel blue pinpoints with wings, swirled around her in a humming mist. Pink welts marked her body from their venom. She rose each morning shaking wood ants, brushing speckles of grit and leaf rot from her skin, and grieving for her family, who would never know what had become of her.

Unfamiliar vegetation was lush around her. She had no way to know which of it was edible and which was not, and her experiments did unspeakable things to her digestion. It became hard to recall just why running away from the
Joke
had seemed like such a good idea. As she tried one more piece of bitter exotic fruit and wondered whether it was cassava or manioc or the Lord knew what, she remembered the times on the
Joke
when she had eaten on deck with Will Saunders making double entendres about her lips and what her fingers were doing that were so wicked Merry had never figured out even one, though everyone within hearing had collapsed in gales of laughter. At the time she had never guessed that a day would come when she would regard those moments with longing.