The Apprentices (25 page)

* * *

In Grayson, they stepped through the back door of Bruno’s restaurant into a bright, warm, busy kitchen. It smelled of delicious things to eat: grilling steak and tomato sauce and sizzling butter. The room was full of cooks and busboys in white, but there were also two people in dark overcoats, a man and a woman, talking to Raffaello’s aunt on the other side of the room. Something about the two of them tugged at Pip’s memory.

Giovanna waved Raffaello over, and the couple turned. They had worried, intelligent faces, and Pip recognized them at the same moment they recognized him. They were Janie’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Scott. Their faces brightened: hope mingling with despair.

Those looks made Pip think he was no actor, not really, because he could never fake an expression like that. It was how it looked when someone was the whole world to you, and was lost, and you would do anything to get them back.

A
great feast was held on the island, to celebrate the coming of the magnificent John Frum. An island pig was roasted, and there were bananas and yams, breadfruit and coconuts. Benjamin was served first, as a sign of honor. He ate everything that was given to him, knowing he had a long journey ahead. But he didn’t drink the kava. He tossed the contents of his bowl into the bushes when he was sure no one was looking. He had no desire for more visions, or for more retching. His fellow banqueters had a better tolerance for the stuff than he did, but still they got drunker and wilder as the feast wore on.

Through the firelight, Benjamin caught Tessel’s eye. The boy was eating roasted yam, scooping the soft orange flesh into his mouth. He nodded to Benjamin, clear-eyed and sober. Tessel’s father was a master navigator and the boy was his apprentice, which was going to come in handy.

The other boy, Salvation, was alert and watchful, too. While one of the island’s leaders gave a long speech in the
language Benjamin still couldn’t understand, Salvation trailed away into the darkness. Then Tessel vanished, too.

Benjamin waited, as agreed, taking thirty slow breaths. Then he stood, casually.

Toby Prophet, beside him, caught his arm. “Where you go, John Frum?”

“To—you know, relieve myself,” Benjamin said. “To take a piss.”

“Ah!” the prophet said, laughing. He clapped Benjamin on the back. “You drink too much kava, John Frum!”

No,
you
drink too much kava, Benjamin thought as he slipped away into the trees. The firelight had made him night-blind, so he made his way carefully in the direction of the hidden boats, waiting for his eyes to adjust. As he walked, the ground became clearer, the trees more visible. The water sparkled beyond the shore.

Tessel and Salvation had a small wooden boat, about sixteen feet long, waiting in the hidden cove. Benjamin waded into the water and then swam out, trying not to splash. Tessel helped haul him up, and Benjamin sat dripping in the cockpit. They hadn’t had much opportunity to talk or plan. “You have food?” he asked. “And water?”

“Yes,” Tessel said. The tone of his voice said that of
course
they had food and water. Did Benjamin think they were idiots? Or children?

But they
were
children, of course. These small boys were his guides, his rescuers, his hope. Benjamin looked to Salvation,
hoping to gain confidence from the boy’s solemn face, but the child in the stern wasn’t Salvation. It was a girl, with her hair in short pigtails. The night was dark, but Benjamin was quite sure it was a girl.

“Who are you?” he asked her.

“Efa,” she said.

“You speak English?”

She nodded uncertainly.

He looked back to Tessel. “Where’s Salvation?”

“He stays,” Tessel said.

Benjamin had gotten used to the idea of fleeing with Tessel and Salvation, but this was new. The punishment would be worse for a girl. “We must take her back,” he said.

“No!” the girl cried, then she clamped her hands over her mouth. “Please,” she said more softly, between her fingers.

Tessel’s face was jumping with nervousness. “She is in boat now,” he said. “It is tabu.”

Was this a bluff? Benjamin understood that girls weren’t supposed to be in boats, or even to be in the water with them. But would the islanders hurt her for it? He didn’t know. “If she goes back
now,
they won’t know,” he said.

“She wants to sail,” Tessel said. “To learn.”

“Yes,” Efa said, pleading.

Tessel took her hand. “I can’t make kava now,” he said. “We go.”

Benjamin looked at the children’s linked hands—the girl defying the tabu for a life at sea, the kava-maker despoiled by
contact with a girl—and realized that they were not here to help him escape. They were escaping themselves. He was not being rescued; he was aiding and abetting runaways.

Tessel had already raised the sail, and the breeze picked up briskly, as if commanded by a god. The sail filled and tightened, and the boat slid away from the island. Tessel adjusted the lines, watching the top of the sail. Efa watched him work. Then she looked shyly at Benjamin and patted a bundle by her side. “Food,” she said.

He nodded, resigned. The end result was the same: They were getting away.

Tessel studied the stars for their position and pushed the tiller to catch more wind. The three fugitives headed out of the hidden cove through a gap in the island’s protective reef, to sea.

A
s morning broke, a falcon and a snowy white owl flew over the island where they had determined that Benjamin must be. They had been flying by night, to avoid the notice of hunters and fishermen. The white owl wore a small leather canister on his back, attached with a clever harness that kept the canister clear of his wings. It had been designed for carrier pigeons by a German apothecary, to deliver medication to a sanitarium, and Marcus Burrows had adapted it for his own use.

The morning sun glinted pink on the water. The air was soft and expectant, not yet shimmering with the full day’s heat. The two birds, with their extraordinary vision, capable of seeing a mouse ear twitch a mile away, scanned the thatch huts for a sandy-haired boy sporting a nasty sunburn, but the island was still asleep.

They saw signs of a recent feast: a smoking fire pit, the carcass of a pig stripped bare, kava bowls made from coconuts abandoned on the ground. The island seemed to be suffering a hangover from the night before.

The apothecary sat on the ground in his simple cotton clothes. His left arm was bleeding through his shirt where the arrow had gone through his wing. He held his good hand up for protection.

“Please,” he said to the man. “Shon’t doot me.”

“You birdmen,” the man said, without seeming to notice the apothecary’s scrambled words. There was hot rancor in his voice. “You come from sky. You say John Frum, you say cargo. I very happy. Then you steal boat, you steal kava boy, you steal girl, you go. You tricky bad. This boy is not John Frum.”

“No,” the apothecary said simply.

The man looked at him with curiosity and the faintest trace of hope. “You John Frum?”

“No,” the apothecary said.

The man looked forlorn. “He
must
come.”

The apothecary clutched his bleeding arm. He could say nothing that the man wanted to hear. He could barely say anything that the man—or anyone else—could understand.

The man pointed to the leather canister. “What is this?”

“Medicine,” the apothecary said.

“Poison?”

“No.”

“Give me.”

The apothecary hesitated, but when the man pulled out a curved knife, he handed the little leather canister over.

“You come with me,” the man ordered.

The apothecary stood awkwardly, one-armed, and glanced up at the falcon, then allowed himself to be marched at knifepoint through the trees. Jin Lo moved from branch to branch overhead as she followed. She tried not to become agitated. It would do no good for her to tumble from the trees as a woman.

In a clearing, two other men seized the apothecary by the arms. He cried out, but they ignored his injury and tied him with rough twine to a tree in a small clearing. The man in the Coca-Cola T-shirt slid the glass vials from the leather canister out onto the ground. He called to some women, who hurried off on a task that Jin Lo didn’t quite understand. She had missed a few words.

Jin Lo caught herself, with a start.
She had missed a few words.
Otherwise she understood what the people were saying. She had read a description of the island’s grammar in her book, and a translation of some vocabulary, but that was all. The mushroom the apothecary had given her to help with his scrambled consonants had amplified her small knowledge of the language so that she could assemble meaning. She paid closer attention.

The man in the red T-shirt said that the birdman was not John Frum. John Frum would come from the sky, but
in an airplane
—everyone knew that. The boy had tricked them, and now this second birdman had come to do the same. They would not bring cargo. They would only bring poison. At this,
the man took a heavy rock and crushed the glass vials. Jin Lo watched all of the apothecary’s careful preparation spill out on the ground, muddying the dirt among the glass shards. So much for dressing slowly.

But the man was still talking. The bird people would steal the island’s boats, he said. They would steal the island’s daughters, and their best, most precious kava-makers. But the people,
his
people, knew what to do. It was ancient knowledge. They would take the birdman’s power. They would revenge the theft of their children. And they would punish the bird people for daring to impersonate their god.

Jin Lo suddenly understood the words she had missed. The women had been sent for dry
kindling,
to make a
cookfire.
They were going to roast the apothecary over a fire, and eat him.

J
anie lay in the dark in her room in the compound on the island. Her mind kept circling around the fact that she had found Benjamin and asked him to help her, and he had died trying to come to her rescue. She longed to be able to switch off her thoughts and go to sleep. But then she saw a flicker of something. The dark sea, near the surface of the water. A sliver of sail buffeted by the wind. Was Benjamin there? She couldn’t tell. It was too dark. The whole scene was flickering, fading.

Janie waited, but the image was gone. She opened her eyes and felt dizzy. It
had
been Benjamin. It had been a feeble signal. But she was sure that Benjamin was alive, in a small boat. She sat up in the dark room, full of new resolution.

She took her shoes in her hand and pushed her bedroom door open. The hallway was empty. They must have decided she was too depressed and apathetic to need a guard anymore. She slipped silently down the hall in her pajamas. The front door of the house was locked, but the long windows on either
side were open for the breeze. She took down one of the window screens, and was able to squeeze out through the gap.

She crossed the terrace to the lawn barefoot before putting on her shoes. She was sure the mine had something to do with the reason Magnusson wanted Benjamin and his father. She had to get there. But first she had to turn off the power to the electrified fence.

There were four white cottages that served as barracks for the guards, below the main house. If there was a way to turn off the fence, it might be near where the guards lived.

Silently, she made her way down to the cottages. A light came from one of the doors, and she heard voices. There was a card game going on: four men around a table.