He was getting weak now. He caught some more seaweed and used it as bait on the lines. The effort left him trembling. He set the heading and sat in the shade.
He woke with a jerk and there was splashing near the raft. Skimmers. They leaped into the noonday glare and beyond them was a brown haze. He blinked and it was an island. The wind had picked up and the canvas pulled full-bellied toward the land.
He sat numb and tired at the tiller and brought the raft in toward the island, running fast before the wind and cutting the waves and sending foam over the deck. There was a lagoon. Surf broke on the coral reefs hooking around the island. The land looked to be about a kilometer across, wooded hills and glaring white beaches. The Skimmers moved off to the left, and Warren saw a pale space in the lagoon that looked like a passage.
He slammed the tiller over full and the raft yawed and bucked against the waves that were coming harder now. The deck groaned and the canvas luffed, but the raft came into the pocket of the pale space and then the waves took it through powerfully and fast. Beyond the crashing of surf on the coral he sailed close to the wind to keep away from the dark blotches in the shallows, and then turned toward shore. The Skimmers were gone now, but he did not notice until the raft tugged on a sandbar and he looked around, judging the distance to the beach. He was weak and it would be stupid to risk anything this close. He stood up with a grunt and jumped heavily on the free side of the raft. It slewed and then broke free of the sandbar and the wind blew it fifty meters more. He got his tools and stood on the raft, hesitating as though leaving it after all this time was hard to imagine. Then he swore at himself and stepped off.
He swam slowly until his feet hit sand and then took slow steps up to the beach, careful to keep his balance, so he did not see the man come out of the palms. Warren pitched forward onto the sand and tried to get up. The sand felt hard and hot against him. He stood again with pains in his legs and the man was standing nearby, Chinese or maybe Filipino. He said something to Warren and Warren asked him a question and they stared at each other. Warren waited for an answer, and when he saw there was not going to be one he held out his right hand, palm up. In the silence they shook hands.
Three
For a day he was weak and could not walk far. The Chinese brought him cold food in tin cans and coconut milk. They talked at each other but neither one knew a single word the other did and soon they stopped. The Chinese pointed to himself and said “Gijan” or something close to it, so Warren called him that.
It looked as though Gijan had drifted here in a small lifeboat. He wore clothes like gray pajamas and had two cases of canned food.
Warren slept deeply and woke to a distant booming. He stumbled down to the beach, looking around for Gijan. The Chinese was standing waist-deep in the lagoon. He pointed a pistol into the water and fired, making a loud bang but not kicking up much spray. Warren watched as slim white fish floated up, stunned. Gijan picked them from the water and put them in a palm frond he carried. He came ashore smiling and held out one of the fish to Warren. Its eyes bulged.
“Raw?” Warren shook his head. But Gijan had no matches.
Warren pointed to the pistol. Gijan took the medium caliber automatic and hefted it and looked at him. “No, I mean, give me a shell.” He saw it was pointless, talking. He made a gesture of things coming out of the muzzle and Gijan caught it and fished a cartridge out of his pocket. Gijan took the fish up on the sand as they started flopping in the palm frond, waking up from the stunning.
Warren gathered dry brush and twigs and mixed them and dug a pit for the mixture with his hands. He still had his knife and some wire. He forced open the cartridge with them. He mixed the gunpowder with the wood. He had been watching Gijan the night before and the man was not using fire, just eating out of cans. Warren found some hardwood and rubbed the wire along it quickly while Gijan watched, frowning at first. The fish were dead and gleamed in the sun.
Warren was damned if he was going to eat raw fish now that he was on land. He rubbed the wire harder, bracing the wood between his knees and drawing the wire quickly back and forth. He felt it warming in his hands. When he was sweating and the wire was both burning and biting into his hands, he knelt beside the wood and pressed the searing wire into it. The powder fizzled and sputtered for a moment and then with a rush it caught, the twigs snapped and the fire made its own pale yellow glow in the sun. Gijan smiled.
Warren had felt a dislike of using the gun to get the fish. He thought about it as he and Gijan roasted them on sticks, but the thought went away as he started eating them and the rich crisp flavor burst in his mouth. He ate four of them in a row without stopping to drink some of the coconut milk Gijan had in tin cans. The hunger came on him suddenly, as if he had just remembered food, and it did not go away until he finished six fish and ate half the coconut meat. Then he thought again about using the gun that way but it did not seem so bad.
Gijan tried to describe something, using his hands and drawing pictures in the sand. A ship, sinking. Gijan in a boat. The sun coming into the sky seven times. Then the island. Boat broken up on the coral, but Gijan swimming beside it and getting it to the shore, half sunken.
Warren nodded and drew his own story. He did not show the Swarmers or the Skimmers except at the shipwreck, because he did not know how to tell the man what it was like and also he was not sure how Gijan would like the idea of eating Swarmer. Warren was not sure why this hesitation came into his head but he decided to stick with it and not tell Gijan too much about how he survived.
In the afternoon Warren made a hat for himself and walked around the island. It was flat most of the way near the beach with a steep outcropping of brown rock where the ridgeline of the island ran down into the sea. There were palms and scrub brush and sea grass and dry stream beds. He found a big rocky flat space on the southern flank of the island and squinted at it awhile. Then he went back and brought Gijan to it and made gestures of picking out some of the pale rocks and carrying them.
The man caught the idea on the second try. Warren scratched out SOS in the sand and showed it to him. Gijan frowned, puzzled. He made his own sign with a stick and Warren could not understand it. There were four lines like the outline of a house and a crossbar. Warren thumped the sand next to the SOS and said “Yes!” and thumped it again.
He was pretty sure SOS was an international symbol but the other man simply stared at him. The silence got longer. There was tension in the air. Warren could not understand where it came from. He did not move. After a moment Gijan shrugged and went off to collect more of the light-colored rocks.
They laid them out across the stony clearing, letters fifty meters tall. Warren suspected the airplane he had seen was searching for survivors of Gijan’s ship, which had gone down nearby, and not the Manamix. It was funny Gijan had not thought of making a signal but then he did not think of making a fire either.
The next morning Warren drew pictures of fishing and found that Gijan had not tried it. Warren guessed the man was simply waiting to be picked up and was a little afraid of the big silent island and even more of the empty sea. Gijan’s hands were softer than Warren’s and he guessed maybe the man had been mainly a desk worker. When the canned food ran out Gijan would have tried fishing but not before. So far all he had done was climb a few palms and knock down coconuts. The palms were stunted here though, and there was not much milk in the coconuts. They would need water.