I soothed Charlie down again—the ruckus of the boys’ return had him sitting up and rubbing his eyes—and soon he was asleep like the others. The air filled with the sleeping breath of boys, their dreams dusted by the glow of the moon.
I stayed awake the rest of the night, watching that cold eye, and wondered what sort of boys Peter would return with this time.
• • •
There were three of them, not just two to replace Harry and Del. The extra one was, I perceived, to replace whichever of us (Nip or me) was lost in Battle, and Peter was trying to get ahead and save himself a trip later.
The first was called Crow, and he was in the Nod and Fog mold—small and energetic and liked to roughhouse. Soon enough he was always a part of their games and fights, and it was just as if they’d been born three instead of two. We found ourselves saying “the triplets” instead of “the twins” before we knew it.
The second boy was Slightly, and we called him that because he was thin and slow to talk and generally more thoughtful than the other boys Peter picked. We could have used a boy like Slightly in the long run, but it wasn’t likely that he would have lasted long with those qualities. At least, that was what I told myself later, when I was burying him.
And the third boy was Sal. Sal wore a brown cap over a head of short black curls and had blue eyes that were always laughing at me. They told me in a thousand ways to stop being so serious and to have more fun; that was what the island was for.
Yet Sal was also kind and good to all the boys, especially Charlie, and that made me like him, for no one else thought much of Charlie. The others wouldn’t hurt him, but he couldn’t keep up with them and so they didn’t think of him. Sal did think of him, and waited for him, and walked next to him while the little boy shyly showed him the best places to dig for worms.
Soon enough Sal was a favorite of everybody’s, for he had a way about him of making everyone feel like they belonged. Sal could make you feel happy just by smiling—those tiny white teeth flashing always made me warm in my belly. Some of the happiest days I had on the island were those days before that awful Battle day, when Sal and Charlie and I would break away from the others and go off roaming on our own.
Peter watched all this and pretended it was fine, that he wasn’t bothered in the least that this new boy had taken me away from him even more than Charlie had. He even pretended not to mind about Charlie so much.
He pretended, but I caught him watching.
He watched Sal and Charlie like that sneaking, peeking crocodile in his story, the one who waited for his time to come.
Peter brought Sal to the island, and Sal changed everything for all of us forever, though I couldn’t know that would happen.
I was only a boy then.
PART II BATTLE
chapter 9
I knew that business with the pirate camp burning would cause more trouble than Peter thought it would. He’d burned their camp and fed their Captain to a Many-Eyed and thought that nothing would change between us and them. We’d come a-raiding and they would try to kill us, but it would all be in good fun.
Though none of the group that followed Peter that day had survived to tell the tale, it was a certainty that the remaining pirates knew who was at fault. I thought that meant they’d know who to come looking for when it was time for revenge, and said so.
“No,” Peter scoffed. “They’ll leave. They’ll go off sailing somewhere else. Why would they stay? Their camp and all the supplies in it are gone. I didn’t burn their ship, and I could have. I left it there so they could go away and find a new Captain. Then they’ll tell him that he can find the secret to staying young forever on this island and he’ll sail back here and then we’ll all have a grand time fighting each other again.”
He laughed, and clapped my shoulder. “Did you know that they think it’s some kind of spring? I don’t know where they could have gotten such a notion, but I heard some of them talking about it when I was setting the tents on fire. They think they’ll dump out their rum bottles and fill them with ‘the water of youth.’ Pirates are so stupid.”
I didn’t really think the pirates were all that stupid, and anyway, who was to say it wasn’t the water that kept us all young? I’d lived there for years and didn’t know for certain why I was still a boy. I didn’t think Peter knew for sure himself.
That wasn’t a secret I was interested in, anyway. I wanted to know how Peter flew. I’d not mentioned it to anyone else, not even mentioned to Peter that I’d seen him. I tried following him a few times, if I saw him sneaking off on his own, but he always disappeared before I caught him. I was reluctant to spend much time chasing him, as I was still nervous about leaving Charlie alone for too long. Nip did his best to glare death at Charlie and me whenever we drifted into his view.
Sal was the best, most reliable boy to leave Charlie with if I was away, but much as I wanted to discover Peter’s secret, keeping Charlie safe was more important. And I didn’t want Sal to fall under Nip’s fury either.
Since the day the boys had tried to hang him, the others mostly avoided Nip. He spent almost all his time in the tree, watching his purple bruises turn yellow. He tried to reset the bone of his cheek himself, pushing the broken pieces more or less in place and tying a long strip of cloth from his sleeve around his jaw.
The necessity of not being able to move his teeth too far to chew meant he couldn’t eat much besides soft fruit. That meant he was constantly hungry and roared at any boy who walked too near him.
I knew how to make a broth out of deer bones and some certain green leaves that would keep any boy strong. I’d used it plenty of times when the others had a fever and it saw them through. It would have helped Nip heal faster, but that wasn’t any secret I’d be sharing with him. If he got weak, or even if he starved to death before Battle, it would save me the trouble of killing him later.
If I worried about Peter—which I didn’t, because Peter could take care of himself—I’d have worried about the way Nip watched him too. The bigger boy resented Peter for denying their plot. More than once I caught him squeezing his fingers together while he stared at Peter, like he was daydreaming a strangling.
It didn’t trouble me as much as it ought to, for Nip couldn’t catch Peter on his best day, and Nip was far from his best day. But still he watched, and planned, and waited.
• • •
On the day we saw the pirates, Peter took us south through the dunes and to the beach near Skull Rock. This beach was a very long stretch of sand—perhaps a mile or two—with jumbled rocks at the east end. On the other side of the rocks was a wet marshy place where the swamp emptied into the sea.
At the west end was a jutting promontory of forest that curled around the mermaid lagoon. The lagoon wasn’t visible from the beach—it was on the other side of the trees, which were thick and took the best part of an hour to cross if you went from the beach to the lagoon.
Skull Rock was a flat grey rock that looked like a skull facing up out of the water—the top end of the rock curved just like a human head, and it even had two large round depressions set roughly equidistant from each other that seemed to be blank eyes staring up in the sky above the sea.
The rock wasn’t that far from shore, but you had to swim through some very deep water to get there, and the waves could be rough. It was shallow from the beach for about twenty or so steps and then suddenly the bottom dropped away, which took a lot of the boys by surprise the first time. The rock was a good place for catching fish, though, and Peter had declared he was sick of deer and rabbit meat.