“Where’s the guard’s weapon?”
Malink shrugged.
The Sorcerer turned his back and began walking up the beach. “Have your people bury this man, Malink. Don’t let the other guards see him. And be ready. The Sky Priestess will visit you soon.”
Sarapul crawled out from some nearby ferns and stood at Malink’s side, watching the Sorcerer walk away. “We should have eaten this guy,” he said, kicking Yamata’s body.
“This is very bad,” Malink said.
“He killed my friend.” Sarapul kicked the body again.
“The Sky Priestess will be very angry.” Malink was, once again, feeling the weight of his position.
The old cannibal shrugged. “Can I have my spear back?”
Tuck knew that there was a way to use the hands of a watch in conjunction with the movement of the sun to determine direction, but since he wore a digital watch, it wouldn’t have done him any good even if he knew the method, which he didn’t. He guessed that Guam lay to the west, so he steered for the setting sun, spent the night guessing, and corrected his course to put the sun behind them at sunrise.
He did know how to sail. It was required knowledge for a kid growing up in a wealthy family near San Diego, but celestial navigation was a complete mystery. Sepie was no help at all. Even if she knew anything, she hadn’t said a word since Kimi had been shot.
Tuck forced her to drink the water from a couple of green coconuts, but other than that, she had lain in the bow motionless for twenty-four hours.
He was now looking at his second sunset at sea. He corrected his course and realized that they must have been traveling north most of the day. How far, he couldn’t guess. He steered southwest until the sun lay on the water like a glowing platter, hoping to correct some of the damage.
He really wished that Sepie would come around. He needed some sleep, and he needed some relief from his own thoughts. Thoughts of the Sky Priestess, of the Sorcerer, and of his dead friend Kimi. Despite the navigat-or’s surly manner, he had been a good kid. Tuck, who had been brought up in relative luxury, couldn’t imagine having endured the life that Kimi had lived. And the navigator had never given up. He had lived and died with courage. And he would still be alive if he hadn’t met Tucker Case.
“Fuck!” Tuck said to no one. He wiped his eyes on his sleeve and squinted at the gunmetal waves.
There was a flapping noise up by the mast and Tuck adjusted the steering oar to catch the wind. The sail filled again, but the flapping continued for a second before it stopped.
Roberto caught the shroud line that was secured to the outrigger and did an upside-down swinging landing that left him looking to the back of the canoe.
Tuck couldn’t have been happier if it had been an angel hanging from his shroud line.
“Roberto?”
“Yes,” the bat said. He was speaking in his own voice, not Vincent’s. The accent Filipino, not Manhattan.
Tuck almost burst out laughing. His mood swings were so rapid and wide now that he was afraid his sanity might be falling through the chasm. “I didn’t recognize you without your glasses.”
“I no like the light,” Roberto said.
Tuck looked to Sepie, still lying in the bow. “Look, Sepie, it’s Roberto.” The girl did not stir.
“You are very sad about Kimi,” Roberto said.
“Yes,” Tuck said, “I am sad.”
“He tell you he was great navigator and you no believe him.”
Tuck looked away. Something about bats increases shame by a factor of ten.
“You are going the wrong way,” the bat said. “Go that way.”
He pointed with a wing claw. The wind caught his wing and nearly spun him off the shroud line. He braced himself with the other wing claw and pointed again. “I mean that way.”
“You’re shitting me,” Tuck said.
“That way.”
“That’s north. I’m going to Guam. West.”
“That’s west. I am born on Guam.”
“You’re a bat.”
“You ever see a lost bat?”
“No, but I’ve never seen a talking bat either.”
“See?” Roberto said, as if he had made his point. “That way.”
After all the evidence is in—after you’ve run all the facts by everything you know—and you’re still lost, you have to do some things on faith. Tuck steered in the direction Roberto was pointing.
A few minutes later he looked up to see Vincent sitting on the pile of coconuts in the center of the canoe. “Good call, listening to the bat,” Vincent said. “I just wanted you to know that the Shark People are going to build some ladders.”
“Well, that’s a useful bit of information,” Tuck said.
“It will be,” Vincent said. Then he disappeared.
58
Malink’s Song
“They’re flying the new pilot in tomorrow,” said Sebastian Curtis. “I told them that Tucker wouldn’t fly, so he had to be eliminated. They weren’t happy about losing the heart and lungs.”
Beth Curtis sat at her vanity, putting on her eye makeup for the appear-ance of the Sky Priestess. The red scarf was draped over the back of the chair. “Did you check the database? Maybe we can send another set of or-gans back with them. I can pick the chosen tonight and keep them in the clinic until tomorrow morning.”
“The customer already died,” Curtis said.
“Well, I guess he really was sick, then.” She laughed, a girlish laugh full of music.
Sebastian loved her laugh. He smiled over her shoulder into the mirror. “I’m glad you’re not concerned about Tucker Case. I understand, Beth. Really. I was just jealous.”
“Tucker who? Oh, you mean Tucker dead-at-sea Case? ’Bastian, dear, I did what I did for us. I thought it would keep him under control. Write it off as one of life’s little missteps. Besides, if he’s not dead now, he will be in a day or so.”
“He made it here on the open ocean. Through a typhoon.”
“And with the navigator. Remember, I’ve seen him fly. He’s dead. That old cannibal is probably munching on his bones right now.” She checked her lipstick and winked at him in the mirror. “Showtime, darling.”
Malink trudged through the jungle, his shoulders aching from the basket of food he was carrying. Each day he had been taking food to Sarapul’s hiding place. It was not that he didn’t trust his people, but he did not want to burden any of them with such a weighty secret. The last of them to see the cannibal saw him covered with blood, gasping in the sand. Malink had told them that Sarapul was dead and that Malink had given his body to the sharks. A chief had to carry many secrets, and sometimes he had to lie to his people to spare them pain.
After the third day, Malink was ready to let the cannibal go back to his house on the far side of the island. The guards were no longer searching, and the Sorcerer had stopped asking questions. Perhaps things would go back to the way they were. But maybe that wasn’t right either. Malink didn’t want to, but he believed the pilot. The Sky Priestess and the Sorcerer were going to hurt his people. He was too old for this. He was too old to fight. And how do you fight machine guns with spears and machetes?
He paused by a giant mahogany tree and put the basket down while he caught his breath. He saw smoke drifting in streams over the ferns and looked in the direction it was coming from. Someone was there, obscured by a tall stand of taro leaves as big as elephant ears.
There was a rustling there. Malink crouched.
“You’re not scared, are you, squirt?”
Malink recognized the voice from his childhood and he wasn’t scared. But he knew he didn’t have to say so. “I am not a squirt. I am old man now.”
Vincent swaggered out of the taro. His flight suit and bomber jacket looked exactly as Malink remembered. “You’re always gonna be a squirt, kid. You still got that lighter I gave you?”
Malink nodded.
“That was my lucky Zippo, kid. I shoulda hung on to it. Fuck it. Spilt milk.” Vincent waved his cigarette in dismissal. “Look, I need you to build some ladders. You know what a ladder is, right?”