“Then you shouldn’t have gotten yourself stabbed,” I said.
“I was trying not to let Charlie get stabbed,” she muttered.
Peter and Crow came over to us. Crow seemed only mildly curious, but Peter’s face was thunder. “You’re a girl.”
He said it like he was saying Sally was a slimy thing he’d found under a rock.
“We’ve already figured that out,” I said, getting irritated on her behalf. After all, so what if she was a girl? She’d been here a month and gotten on fine.
“There are no girls on my island!” Peter shouted. His face was red. I don’t think I’d ever seen him so angry. His mouth contorted in rage. “No girls! None! None! None! Girls are trouble and they aren’t allowed here. You tricked me.”
“I was keeping myself safe,” Sally retorted. “It’s more dangerous for girls than for boys when you sleep out in the street at night. I cut my hair after I ran away and I lived like a boy. You liked me fine when you thought I was a boy.”
“No, no, no, no, no! You can’t stay! There are no girls allowed here and so you have to leave.”
“Where will she go?” I asked. I was astonished at his behavior. He was like a small baby having a tantrum. I’d never seen him like this. Never.
“Back to the Other Place!” Peter shouted.
“But, Peter,” Crow said. “Nobody’s allowed to go back to the Other Place. You said so yourself. It’s one of your rules.”
“There are no girls allowed on this island!” Peter screamed. “That’s a rule too!”
I was less worried about Sally’s future home than I was about her living to see a future at all. The blood from the wound had soaked through the cloth and I couldn’t really see why. It was just a little stab wound, but it wouldn’t stop bleeding.
“Charlie, give me your shirt,” I said.
The smaller boy took off the shirt he’d been wearing since the day he’d arrived on the island. I made all the boys wash their clothes as well as themselves every several days or so; otherwise the smell in the tree became unbearable. Luckily we’d had a wash day not long before, so Charlie’s shirt wasn’t as filthy as it might have been.
“I’ll make you a new one,” I said, as I tore the shirt into strips.
“Out of deer hide?” Charlie asked. His upper body was thin and pale, though his arms and neck and face were brown from the sun. “Like your pants?”
“Of course,” I said, knotting the strips together into a long rope.
“Who the devil cares about your stupid shirt!” Peter shouted. “She’s a girl and I want her out. Out, out, out, out, out!”
There’s nothing worse than having a fit and no one giving you the proper attention for it. Crow seemed to find Peter’s behavior unseemly—he’d backed away and come to kneel next to Charlie and me. Peter ran around the arena, kicking Nip’s dead body several times and throwing whatever he could find.
Nod was sitting next to Fog’s body, holding his brother’s hand and crying, and not caring who saw him.
That was when Fog’s death was real to me, real in a way it hadn’t been before. I’d never seen Nod cry. I wanted to look after him, but I had to look after Sal first.
I wrapped the strips around Sally’s middle, pulling them tight so there would be pressure on the wound.
“I can’t breathe when you do that,” Sally said. Her face was dead white now and covered in sweat.
“Sorry,” I said. “I think you must choose between breathing or bleeding to death.”
“Oh, well, when you put it that way,” Sally said.
Her natural cheerfulness kept reasserting itself even though she was in a dire situation. I knew many boys who screamed and cried when they took wounds like Sally’s, and she’d done none of that.
I closed her shirt and waistcoat around her again and felt the tips of my ears heating. I don’t know why it was more embarrassing to cover her up when we’d all been staring at her exposed body for several minutes, but somehow it was.
“Crow, help me get her up,” I said.
We each put an arm around Sally until she was standing between us, breathing hard.
“Do you think you can walk?” I said.
“I’ll have to, unless I want to sleep alone on this mountain,” Sally said. Her hair was soaked with sweat and her cap had fallen off.
Charlie picked up the cap and presented it to her. She shook her head. “Can you wear it for me, Charlie?”
The little boy seem thrilled, turning the cap around so the brim was on the back of his neck, the way he’d seen Sal do it.
“Where are the others?” I said to Crow.
We were all pretending that Peter wasn’t screaming and throwing things. It seemed the best course of action at the moment. Charlie couldn’t stop himself staring, though, and then looking quickly away before Peter caught him at it.
“Are no others,” Crow said. “Just me and Nod and Peter made it.”
“Then it’s only us,” I said.
I wanted to run around in a circle and kick and throw things too. We’d come up the mountain with ten, and now four more were gone—Kit, Ed, Fog and Nip. From sixteen our band was down to six in less than a month.
Nip was no loss, and would have never gone back to the tree in any case, but losing Fog hurt. And the other two had been on the island long enough for me to give a damn for their own sakes, not just because it was a stupid loss of life.
“What I don’t see is how the pirates knew to come up here anyway,” Crow said as we slowly moved toward the track.
“Nip told them where we would be,” I said. “He was always going out on those long walks on his own. I should have known he was up to something.”
“You can’t always know everything, Jamie,” Crow said philosophically.
Peter dragged the corpse of the pirate who’d stabbed Sal over to the edge of the arena and threw it into the drop below, screaming his frustration the whole time. Del’s sword was still sticking out of the dead pirate’s chest when Peter did this, and I was annoyed that he’d wasted a perfectly good weapon.
We stopped next to Nod, who had not moved or acknowledged anything except Fog’s body since reentering the arena.
“Nod,” I said. “We’ve got to go now.”
He looked up at me slowly, very slowly, like he wasn’t sure what the words I said meant.
“We’re going back to the tree,” I said.
“What about Fog?” he asked, and his voice was a tiny broken thing.
“I can’t stay to bury him,” I said. “Sal’s been cut and she needs to get back to the tree.”
“She?” Nod asked, but it was only a vague curiosity about something out of place.
“She,” I said. “Sal’s a girl.”
“Oh,” Nod said. It didn’t seem to bother him very much.
“If you want to bury Fog you can do it in the meadow, and catch up to us later,” I said. “He’d like that. He’d be near the Battle place.”
“Battle was his favorite thing to do,” Nod said, rubbing at his dripping nose and eyes with his wrist.
He stood and lifted his brother over his shoulder. We let them go ahead of us on the track. Charlie followed Nod, though whether it was to help or to witness I didn’t know. Probably he thought Nod shouldn’t be alone.
As I passed the pile of weapons that Nip had brought to Battle, I hesitated, and Sal felt me pause and stopped moving. Crow looked curiously at both of us.
“He took them from the boys’ graves,” I said.
“But you don’t want to waste them,” Sal said, nodding.