"What about you, Friday?" Ishmael asked. "Did you find anything else besides the castaways and those awful sunglasses?"
Friday looked quickly at Sunny, but then shook her head firmly. "No," she said.
"Then please go help your mother with lunch," he said, "while I talk to our new colonists."
"Do I have to?" Friday asked. "I'd rather stay here, with the Baudelaires."
"I'm not going to force you," Ishmael said gently, "but I'm sure your mother could use some help."
Without another word, Friday turned and left the tent, walking up the sloping beach toward the other tents of the colony, and the Baudelaires were alone with their facilitator, who leaned down to speak quietly to the orphans.
"Baudelaires," he said, "as your facilitator, allow me to give you a piece of advice, as you begin your stay on this island."
"What might that be?" Violet asked.
Ishmael looked around the tent, as if spies were lurking behind the white, fluttering fabric. He took another sip from his seashell, and cracked his knuckles. "Don't rock the boat," he said, using an expression which here means "Don't upset people by doing something that is not customary." His tone was very cordial, but the children could hear something less cordial almost hidden in his voice, the way a coastal shelf is almost hidden by water. "We've been living by our customs for quite some time. Most of us can scarcely remember our lives before we became castaways, and there is a whole generation of islanders who have never lived anywhere else. My advice to you is not to ask so many questions or meddle around too much with our customs. We have taken you in, Baudelaires, which is a kindness, and we expect kindness in return. If you keep prying into the affairs of the island, people are going to think you're unkind—just like Friday thought Olaf was unkind. So don't rock the boat. After all, rocking the boat is what got you here in the first place."
Ishmael smiled at his little joke, and although they found nothing funny about poking fun at a shipwreck that had nearly killed them, the children gave Ishmael a nervous smile in return, and said no more. The tent was silent for a few minutes, until a pleasant-looking woman with a freckly face walked into the tent carrying an enormous clay jar.
"You must be the Baudelaires," she said, as Friday followed her into the tent carrying a stack of bowls fashioned from coconut shells, "and you must be starving, too. I'm Mrs. Caliban, Friday's mother, and I do most of the cooking around here. Why don't you have some lunch?"
"That would be wonderful," Klaus said. "We're quite hungry."
" Whatya fixin?" asked Sunny.
Mrs. Caliban smiled, and opened the jar so the children could peek inside. "Ceviche," she said. "It's a South American dish of chopped raw seafood."
"Oh," Violet said, with as much enthusiasm as she could muster. Ceviche is an acquired taste, a phrase which here means "something you don't like the first few times you eat it," and although the Baudelaires had eaten ceviche before—their mother used to make it in the Baudelaire kitchen, to celebrate the beginning of crab season—it was none of the children's favorite food, and not precisely what they had in mind as a first meal after being shipwrecked. When I was shipwrecked recently, for instance, I had the fortune to wash aboard a barge where I enjoyed a late supper of roast leg of lamb with creamed polenta and a fricassee of baby artichokes, followed by some aged Gouda served with roasted figs, and finished up with some fresh strawberries dipped in milk chocolate and crushed honeycomb, and I found this to be a wonderful antidote to being tossed like a rag doll in the turbulent waters of a particularly stormy creek. But the Baudelaires accepted their bowls of ceviche, as well as the strange utensils Friday handed them, which were made of wood and looked like a combination of a fork and a spoon.
"They're runcible spoons," Friday explained. "We don't have forks or knives in the colony, as they can be used as weapons."
"I suppose that's sensible," Klaus said, although he couldn't help but think that nearly anything could be used as a weapon, if one were in a weaponry mood.
"I hope you like it," Mrs. Caliban said. "There's not much else you can cook with raw seafood."
" Negihama," Sunny said.
"My sister is something of a chef," Violet explained, "and was suggesting that she could prepare some Japanese dishes for the colony, if there were any wasabi to be had."
The younger Baudelaires gave their sister a brief nod, realizing that Violet was asking about wasabi not only because it might allow Sunny to make something palatable—a word which here means "that wasn't ceviche" — but because wasabi, which is a sort of horseradish often used in Japanese food, was one of the few defenses against the Medusoid Mycelium, and with Count Olaf lurking about, she wanted to think about possible strategies should the deadly fungus be let loose from the helmet.
"We don't have any wasabi," Mrs. Caliban said. "We don't have any spices at all, in fact. No spices have washed up on the coastal shelf."
"Even if they did," Ishmael added quickly, "I think we'd just throw them in the arboretum. The stomachs of the colonists are used to spice-less ceviche, and we wouldn't want to rock the boat."
Klaus took a bite of ceviche from his runcible spoon, and grimaced at the taste. Traditionally a ceviche is marinated in spices, which gives it an unusual but often delicious flavor, but without such seasoning, Mrs. Caliban's ceviche tasted like whatever you might find in a fish's mouth while it was eating. "Do you eat ceviche for every meal?" he asked.
"Certainly not," Mrs. Caliban said with a little laugh. "That would get tiresome, wouldn't it? No, we only have ceviche for lunch. Every morning we have seaweed salad for breakfast, and for dinner we have a mild onion soup served with a handful of wild grass. You might get tired of such bland food, but it tastes better if you wash it down with coconut cordial." Friday's mother reached into a deep pocket in her white robe, and brought out three large seashells that had been fashioned into canteens, and handed one to each Baudelaire.
"Let's drink a toast," Friday suggested, holding upher own seashell. Mrs. Caliban raised hers, and Ishmael wiggled in his clay chair and opened the stopper of his seashell once more.
"An excellent idea," the facilitator said, with a wide, wide smile. "Let's drink a toast to the Baudelaire orphans!"
"To the Baudelaires!" agreed Mrs. Caliban, raising her seashell. "Welcome to the island!"
"I hope you stay here forever and ever!" Friday cried.
The Baudelaires looked at the three islanders grinning at them, and tried their best to grin back, although they had so much on their minds that their grins were not very enthusiastic. The Baudelaires wondered if they really had to eat spiceless ceviche, not only for this particular lunch, but for future lunches on the island. The Baudelaires wondered if they had to drink more of the coconut cordial, and if refusing to do so would be considered rocking the boat. They wondered why the figurehead of the boat had not been found, and they wondered where Count Olaf was, and what he was up to, and they wondered about their friends and associates who were somewhere at sea, and about all of the people they had left behind in the Hotel Denouement. But at this moment, the Baudelaires wondered one thing most of all, and that was why Ishmael had called them orphans, when they hadn't told him their whole story. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny looked first at their bowls of ceviche, and then at Friday and her mother, and then at their seashells, and finally up at Ishmael, who was smiling down at them from his enormous chair, and the castaways wondered if they really had reached a place that was far from the world's treachery or if the world's treachery was just hidden someplace, the way Count Olaf was hidden somewhere very nearby at that very moment. They looked up at their facilitator, uncertain if they were safe after all, and wondering what they could do about it if they weren't.