Del looked uncertainly from Nip to me to Peter. Peter was not inclined to do anything about Nip at the moment. His face was buried in the best piece of meat and he smacked his lips with every bite.
I didn’t like to step into every confrontation between the boys. First, it would mean I’d spend my whole bloody day solving problems and I had better things to do. Second, the other ones would never learn how to get along if someone always fixed it between them. So I waited. I didn’t care for Nip, but Peter had picked him and the boy needed to find his place in the group just as Del needed to defend his.
And Del is going to die soon anyway. It was a heartless thought, and it made me feel a little sick to think it, but it was true.
It wouldn’t matter what happened now, not really, because Del would be dead before we came back from the pirate raid. He would cough out all the blood in his lungs or he would be too weak to defend himself from the pirates or maybe, if he was lucky, one of the Many-Eyed would take him and kill him fast and use what was left of Del to feed its children.
So when Del looked at me I just looked back, and waited to see what happened. I liked Del better than Nip, but I didn’t think Del would get away from this one. Del was a good fighter—leastways, he had been before he was sick—but I didn’t like his chances against the bigger boy.
Del swallowed, like he knew what was coming, and said with only a little stutter, “It’s your share of the meat.”
Nip knocked it away with a hand that seemed twice the size of Del’s, Del being so thin and pale that he was half ghost already, and Nip hearty and strong from knocking boys down and taking their food in the Other Place.
“That’s no share,” Nip said, leaning over the fire to push his face in Del’s. “I want yours.”
Del had fairly allotted his own pile when his turn came up—it was larger than Nip’s, though not as much as Peter’s. He’d been on the island for some time, and he’d cooked it all besides. He looked at his food, then at Nip, and his chin came up.
“You’re new. You get your share last. That’s how it is here. If you don’t like it, you can get your own food.”
“Or,” Nip growled, “I can take it from a skinny little rat like you.”
Nip’s big hand was already reaching for Del’s share, but he was looking at Peter to see if our leader approved. That was stupid, because he was so busy looking at Peter instead of Del that the big lug didn’t see Del shift, shift so his foot was closer to the hot coals of the fire.
Good for you, Del, I thought.
Del kicked the red coals into Nip’s face with a sideswipe of his foot. Some of the boys near Nip got some ash on their food and shouted at Del about it, but their complaints were drowned in Nip’s scream.
The flaming coals touched his eyeballs and he made a noise like something dying. Nip immediately showed his brains were made of pudding by doing the one thing guaranteed to make it worse—he clapped his hands over his eyes and rubbed at them, shouting all the while and stumbling away from the fire like a blind bear.
Most of the boys had stopped eating to stare while Nip threatened Del. Now that there was no fight in the offing they went back to their rabbit, ignoring Nip.
Del calmly picked up his own meat and tore into it with his teeth. When he glanced at me I winked at him to show he’d done fine. Del gave me a half smile in return. I thought again how pale he looked and how powerless I was, even with the power to live forever, to stop what was to come.
Charlie paused in his eating and with big eyes watched Nip bellowing and blundering about. “Should we help him, Jamie? He’s hurt.”
“He got what he deserved for trying to take Del’s share,” I said, and patted his head to take some of the sting out of it. Too little, and too softhearted on top of it. Charlie would never make it unless he toughened up, unless he lost something of what made him Charlie.
Just for a moment I felt the weight of that bear down on me, and I could feel the deadweight of his small body in my arms as I carried him to a grave I spent all morning digging.
The vision was so real, so painful to my heart, that I lost where I was until Peter said, “Someone ought to make that noise stop. It’s hurting my ears,” and the spell was broken.
I sighed, knowing an order when I heard one, shoved the rest of the rabbit in my mouth and stood up. Nip shouted and flailed and staggered closer to the forest’s edge.
Really, I wondered what Peter saw in him. If I had been with him the last time he went to the Other Place (and I wasn’t because Ambro had just died and I’d taken his body out to the border where the Many-Eyed lived, in hopes that it would keep them satisfied. We did this now and again, when it seemed they were tempted to go into the forest), I would have advised against Nip. Peter had gone for just one boy, one especially to replace Ambro, and come back with this. He wasn’t half the boy Ambro had been, to my way of thinking, and because Peter took a trip just for Nip, he had a false sense of his own specialness.
But I was the only one who was special, truly special, for I was the first, and would be the last if it came to that. It would always be Peter and me, like we were in the beginning.
I watched Nip for a few moments. He made such a fuss I was embarrassed for him. My own inclination was to spin him around and point him to the path through the forest and come what may. If he got eaten by a bear or stumbled over a cliff, that was all right with me. But Peter hadn’t said to get rid of Nip, only to shut him up.
The other boy blinked as I approached. I could tell he was trying to get his eyes to focus on me, that I was nothing but a blurry shadow moving toward him.
“Here, now,” Nip said, his fists up. He sensed, I think, the dark thoughts in my mind. “Don’t you come near me. I didn’t do nothing wrong. That pasty little runt threw fire in my eyes and he’s the one who ought to . . .”
Nip didn’t finish, because my fist connected with his temple, hard enough that his ears would ring the next morning. That might not have been enough on a regular day, but Nip was already tired from checking the traps, sore from the coals in his eyes and hungry because he’d been too busy trying to take Del’s food to eat his own.
One punch was all that was needed for now, though I didn’t fool myself that it would be enough when Nip came looking for turnabout, as I knew he would. He was that kind.
Nip went down hard, face-first in the dirt, like a toy soldier kicked over by a careless boy. I went back to the fire.
“Quieter now,” Peter remarked.
You could still hear the buzzing of the small flies, and the soft sigh of the wind through the branches of the trees, and the crackle of wood burning in the fire. The sun was past its high midday point and the shadows were lengthening, though it was still a long time until night fell. The boys were eating and laughing and pushing and shoving one another, the way they did, and I was happy to be there, to see them all that way.
Then Peter got that look in his eye, the one that said he wanted to stir the pot. I don’t know why it was so but Peter just didn’t feel right when everyone was content. Maybe it was because he wanted all eyes on him or maybe it was because he wanted everyone to feel the way he did all the time. He told me once that when he sat still he felt like there were ants crawling under his skin, that if he wasn’t moving, running, planning, doing, it was just as though those ants would crawl right up inside his head and make him mad.
He leapt to his feet, and they all turned to look at him. I saw the satisfaction on his face and thought of a group of mummers I’d seen once in the Other Place, long ago, when I was very small. The leader of the troupe had the same look when he jumped on the box in the center of the stage, a feeling that must be like all the stars circling around the earth only for you.