Peter was the one who’d wanted the little brat. Let him look after Charlie, let him . . .
My steps slowed, then stopped. I was about halfway up the path, the raucous shouts of the boys in the cave practically inside my ear, they were so loud. I looked back.
Charlie stood at the base of the path, his face upturned in the moonlight, tears streaming from his eyes.
He appeared frozen, his muscles locked, unable to follow, unable to do anything but wait. Wait for me to return for him.
I sighed, and my anger went out with that sigh. Peter chose the boys, yes, he did. But he didn’t care for them. He didn’t look after them. He didn’t teach them how to find the best mushrooms or how to string a line to catch a fish. He took them to fight the pirates but didn’t teach them how to do it properly so they wouldn’t get killed. He didn’t show them how to skin a deer for clothes or comfort them when they cried in the night or bury them when they died. I did that.
Peter was good for showing you the quickest path to the mermaid lagoon and for picking teams in Battle and for sneaking through the pirate camp at night, stealing shiny things that he stored in a hollow in our tree like he was an overgrown magpie. Peter was for fun, for play, for adventures. Me, I kept his playmates alive—even when he didn’t want them anymore. Like Charlie.
I went back down the path, sure-footed despite the narrow track and the crumbling edge that promised a hard bruising fall, if not a broken bone.
I wasn’t sure Charlie would forgive me, but as I approached he broke into a run and leapt at me. I stumbled a little until I had his weight, saying, “Hey, now, you’ll make us both fall,” but not in a gruff way.
Charlie’s wet face pressed against my neck and he said over and over, “I’m sorry, Jamie, I’m sorry. I’ll listen. I’ll be good. I’m sorry, only don’t leave me.”
I patted his back and told him I wouldn’t. And I wouldn’t. I was better now. I would look after him.
I wished I could promise him he wouldn’t be hurt. But you can’t make promises like that—not on the island, not in the Other Place. Boys got hurt. They fell. They bloodied one another’s noses. They called one another cruel names. Sometimes they got eaten by crocodiles. Sometimes they got stabbed by pirates.
I wouldn’t lie to Charlie. But I could promise not to leave him.
chapter 4
Just before we crested the top of the cliff I set Charlie on his feet and wiped his face. My hands were dirty and left streaks on his cheeks.
“Can’t let the others see you like this,” I said.
“Boys aren’t supposed to cry,” Charlie said. “My brother Colin said so. He said only babies and girls cry and I’d better quit it. That’s why he sent me outside.”
“Outside?” I asked.
I was only half listening until then, my head cocked to one side to see whether I could hear Peter’s voice amid the chorus of noise coming from the cave. I wanted desperately to beat Nip and Peter, to prove somehow that Charlie was worth more than Peter thought he was, to show that Charlie wouldn’t drag him down. I didn’t hear our fearless leader, who usually liked to be the loudest.
Charlie spoke again. “Yes, he put me outside because he scared me and I was crying. Mama told him to watch me, only he didn’t. He hid in the cupboard and knocked on the inside of the door and pretended he was a ghost and then he jumped out and scared me. He scared me and I cried and he said, ‘Shut it, I don’t want to hear your noise; only babies cry like that,’ and when I didn’t stop he sent me outside and shut the door. I hit the door and I cried and told him to let me in but he only made a face at me from the window and went away. Then I stopped crying and he still wouldn’t let me in and I was thirsty. I was going to get a drink from the pump—it’s in the square—only I got lost and couldn’t find it and I was crying and so thirsty. Then I got tired and stopped crying but I couldn’t find home again. Then you and Peter found me and said we could have an adventure and I couldn’t find my way home so I came with you.”
I stared at him. This was the most words Charlie had ever said in one go, and they confirmed the great wrong I’d suspected. We hadn’t saved Charlie from an unhappy home or a life in an orphanage. We’d stolen him from a mama who’d probably cried every day he was gone, just like the mother duck in Peter’s story.
I don’t know what I would have said or done then, though my first inclination was to scoop him up and take him home straightaway, damn Peter and his pirate raid.
But just then a sound reached me, a chittering, clackety sound, a sound that should not be so close to the Bear Cave, should not be so close to this part of the island at all.
“What’s that?” Charlie asked.
“Sh,” I said. “Stay close and do as I say.”
He didn’t ask any more questions. Maybe it was my manner or maybe the memory of me leaving him at the bottom of the path, but he listened. Charlie huddled close to my legs as I strained, trying to figure where the noise was coming from.
It wasn’t from the forest or the path we’d just climbed; I was certain of that. It hadn’t somehow gotten around behind us.
Anyway, that didn’t make any sense. They wouldn’t come from that side, the forest side. They’d come from the other side of the cave. There was a downhill track there that went along through the foothills that bordered the plains. The Many-Eyed lived in the plains, and usually stayed in the plains.
Lately we’d been finding one or two on their own, probing into the forest like scouts. We would chase them off when we found them there, using our slings to throw rocks and scare them away. It was easy to scare them when we were in the forest, for we could climb trees and stay safely out of reach.
I’d proposed more than once that we should just kill them if they came in our territory, that it would send a message to them to stop sniffing about that part of the island. But Peter thought they would see a killing as an act of war, and that it would invite an angry invasion of Many-Eyed upon us. Peter knew the island best of us all, so we listened, and didn’t kill them.
But now one was nearby, far from its home in the plains. The Many-Eyed nested in the very center part of those plains, and that made it easy to avoid most of them. One had never come as far as Bear Cave, mostly because they didn’t seem to like climbing—or so we thought. The mountains were the one part of the island where there had never been any sign of them.
The clicking and chittering drew closer, and I was certain now that it was coming up the track—the track we would take the next morning to go down to the pirate camp. I hoped there was only one—maybe a young one that had gotten lost and just needed to be encouraged to go back to its proper home, far from us.
The boys in the cave shouted and screeched and seemed entirely unaware of what was happening. I tugged Charlie toward the cave. I had to get him inside and hidden, for he would be nothing but a little sweetmeat to a Many-Eyed.
We moved quickly and quietly across the flat rock outcropping that led to the cave. My heart pounded in my chest. I wasn’t scared for myself; I was scared for Charlie and the other boys. The new boys, especially. They’d never seen a Many-Eyed, and might panic, and that would make things harder when I wanted them to be safe.