Tigerheart (18 page)

She brought her sword forward and cut him lightly on the thigh. He let out a surprised, pained gasp, like a sleepwalker who has just been awakened via the timely application of a bucket of cold water.

“Imagine that you rule the Anyplace, for all the difference it makes,” she whispered, and poked him again. “Imagine you can escape. Imagine that I am not about to sever your head from your shoulders with my sword. Use the full force of your imagination, by God, for all the good it will do you.” She waited as long seconds stretched by, and nothing happened. It might have been because the defeated Boy was hanging his head in mortified shame, consumed by the idea that he was helpless to control his own fate, much less anyone else’s, and feeling mighty foolish that he could ever have thought any other way.

Boys’ egos are fragile things. It doesn’t matter if they are run-of-the-mill boys or magnificent boys. In The Boy’s case, he was a slave of his ego, and his ego had just gotten a royal pounding from the pirate queen. As always a creature of extremes, The Boy had gone from believing he was totally in control to being not in control at all, not unlike when he had been confronted by the wave. The newest tide of events was once again threatening to overwash him; and this time the outcome was going to be considerably more fatal.

I am helpless. As helpless as any adult,
he thought miserably.

And then, an instant before she could administer the coup de grâce—with her sword arm poised and shaking with anticipation—Simon the Dancer suddenly said, “Captain! Look!”

She didn’t see it at first, peering through the underbrush as she was. But then she did, and her heart nearly stopped.

“A tiger!” she said. “And not any tiger! The great snow tiger!”

Sure enough, there was the unmistakable fur of the snow tiger, stalking them along the periphery of the clearing in which they stood. It had been utterly silent, but now with its presence clearly known, it growled softly…a precursor, no doubt, to the thunderously savage roar that would tear from its throat the instant it leaped into view.

Captain Slash lived in fear of being eaten by some sort of savage creature. Her brother’s arm had been given over as an appetizer to a fearsome beast, and eventually the rest of his body had provided the entrée. There were many ways in which Mary Slash wanted to emulate her brother, the formidable Captain Hack, but meeting her end in an animal’s gullet was definitely not one of them.

Consequently, the impending attack of the famed and formidable snow tiger of the Anyplace was more than enough to have Mary Slash sound the retreat. Her crew offered not the slightest argument, what with being cowards as mentioned earlier, and seconds later the pirates were fleeing the area. “What of The Boy?” said Simon the Dancer.

“He’s what will delay the beast coming after us!” Slash said. “Let it sup on that tender morsel! That’ll keep it occupied so that we can get back to the ship and safety! A good day’s work, lads, seeing our greatest enemy left tied up to become tiger chow!”

The Boy was not intimidated at all. His mind was barely on what was transpiring around him. He, like you, knew that the snow tiger had already met his fate. For that matter he also knew—as you no doubt have likewise intuited—just who, not what, was facing him now. But he felt nothing, even as the last of the pirate’s footfalls faded away into the bushes and trees and Paul’s fur-covered head popped up from behind the brush. “Are they gone?” he said with a lopsided grin.

What The Boy did not know, or care about, however, was how in the world Paul had come to be there. After all, the last he knew of it, Paul and the others had been trapped behind a rockslide. The Boy may not have cared about how Paul had escaped the dark recesses of the cave in order to provide a timely rescue, but certainly you have some interest in the process.

I would very much like to tell you that recounting Paul’s miraculous escape will be a grand and exciting adventure in which Paul displayed great cunning, and all the disparate members of the group formed a bond that enabled them to overcome their last mutual prejudices. And perhaps one of them was forced to make the Ultimate Sacrifice so that the others might live to tell the tale.

In fact, even though that’s all falsehood, I suppose I could still tell you that. How would you really know? But if I am to set an example to The Boy and the others, then nothing less than the truth will do. And the truth is this:

It was a tragically boring escape.

Our apologies. Even in the grandest of adventures, occasionally the staggeringly mundane rears its ugly head. Not all dreams are memorable and not all goals are soaring. Sometimes one simply goes from A to B and there’s not all that much to tell of it. This is one of those instances.

Tragic, really, that we live in a time when there is so much fundamental mistrust in the world. If we didn’t, I could simply tell you, “Take my word for it; Paul and the others escaped, but it’s not a particularly ripping yarn, so let’s just skip it.” But you wouldn’t take my word for it. You would start to think,
Why is he withholding the details from us? It must be an amazingly remarkable story, filled with secrets so monumental that perhaps Those in Power have decreed it cannot be disseminated
. Or else you might start thinking that I don’t actually know, and am trying to cover it up. Or some other variant steeped in refusing to believe that, well, there’s really nothing remarkable there, and we’d all be better served if we just skipped right over it.

However, we know that it will then just fester inside you, this not knowing. So in order to make certain your enjoyment of our little narrative isn’t ruined by something relatively insignificant, we will tell you as briskly as we can how Paul came to be where he was.

Was his escape entirely without drama? No. There was a brief time during which Paul, Gwenny, and the others bemoaned their imprisoned state and expressed concern over when they were going to run out of air. This lasted until the point where Princess Picca said, “Could use exit in back.”

Everyone stopped talking at once. Gwenny took a step toward the princess and said, “There’s an exit out the back?”

“Yes,” said Princess Picca.

“Well, why didn’t you say so earlier?”

“You not ask.”

Whereupon she led them, mostly through her sense of touch, to the rear of the cave where—sure enough—a narrow hole, but wide enough for them to squeeze through, presented itself in the back wall. They slithered through one by one, each gratefully gulping in air as they escaped from the confines of the cave. Princess Picca immediately set her braves to work on removing the debris that lay blocking the other cave entrances, since the other caves did not benefit from having a nature-provided means of rear access.

The damage done to the Indian camp was a devastating sight to behold. The simple wigwams and huts of the Picca tribe hadn’t stood a chance. The ground was thoroughly saturated, and clothes, trinkets, and weapons were scattered everywhere. Not only that, but a number of large trees had been flattened.

“Had we been out here, we crushed,” Picca said solemnly. “Boy saved us.”

“He tends to do that,” said Gwenny, a touch of unmistakable pride in her voice.

“Where is he?” said Paul, looking skyward. As it was still night, it was difficult to see. “Boy!” he called, and the others joined in, echoing his summons. But The Boy did not present himself.

Paul sensed something else in the air. Although he wouldn’t have known it, his nostrils were flaring slightly. He wouldn’t have been able to articulate the reasons, yet somehow Paul simply knew that danger was afoot.

“I’ll look for him,” he said.

“Yes. Let’s all go and—”

It had been Irregular who had spoken, but Paul turned and said firmly, “No. I’ll do it myself.”

Irregular was about to offer up protest, as were Gwenny and several others. But there was something in Paul’s face, his attitude, that stilled their protests. It made him seem different. It made him seem like someone whose statements should not be questioned. It made him seem like someone who would operate best on his own.

Perhaps it was the way he stood when he had the tiger’s skin wrapped around him. Or perhaps it was the fact that he’d growled slightly when he spoke, even though he didn’t realize it.

Still, Picca was the princess, and she felt the need to make her authority in the matter clear. “You go. We give you time. Take too much time…we come looking.”

“I’ll be fine,” said Paul, and he turned and sprinted toward the jungle. He vaulted easily over several fallen trees and melted into the greenery.

He’d never felt more alive than he did that night. He’d narrowly avoided death thanks to the efforts of The Boy, and was now determined to make certain that his savior was, in turn, quite all right. He moved quickly, and more, he moved silently. He passed through brush without rustling it, stepped through thickets without snapping a single branch. Paul felt growing excitement as he blended in with the lush natural surroundings, as if he had come home after a lengthy departure.

He made an unerring beeline straight toward where The Boy was dangling helpless in the trees. Paul didn’t know he was doing it. Tell him that he was tracking the scent and he would have given you a strange look, because he was unaware of anything except that he needed to head in a particular direction if he wanted to find The Boy. The hundred little pieces of information involving scent, forest craft, and so on that he was drawing upon were coming to him so instinctively that he didn’t even know it.

What was the cause of this remarkable tracking ability? You may well wonder about it, and may continue to do so if it pleases you. As for Paul, he wasn’t thinking about it at all, so—for the moment—we shall instead defer to his priorities and focus on the fact of his search rather than the means of its being possible.

Faster and faster he moved, and then his ears twitched slightly, detecting the voices of the pirates up ahead. He froze, and we must tell you that unless you had been looking right at him, you would not have known he was there. Then Paul started to pad through the woods, proceeding with such caution that he would have made more noise if he’d been a ghost.

He drew within sight of the pirates and saw Mary Slash speaking to The Boy in a manner that was, to say the least, disrespectful. Paul counted a half dozen pirates, all armed with fearsome sabers. Despite his newfound sense of aggression, Paul wasn’t foolish enough to think that he, like the true snow tiger, could leap into battle and shred the pirates with fearsome teeth and slashing claws that he didn’t possess. He quickly realized, though, that the pirates wouldn’t know he was bereft of such accoutrements. It would be easy enough to make that lack of knowledge work for him.

The rest you know.

“Are they gone?” Paul said with a lopsided grin as he emerged from cover. The Boy’s sword had fallen from his grasp several feet away when he’d been hanging unconscious from overhead, and Paul picked it up, intending to cut the net apart.

Then he saw that something was terribly, terribly wrong. The Boy was standing there, swaying slightly, and he had his fingers in his mouth. He was fumbling with something. “What’s wrong?” said Paul.

The Boy pulled his hand clear of his mouth and held something up. It was a perfect, white, shiny tooth, with a tiny dab of blood on it.

“You lost a tooth,” Paul said. “I’m not surprised. The way you must have been slammed around by the wave, it’s lucky they didn’t all get knocked out.” He started cutting at the rope.

“No,” The Boy said tonelessly. “You don’t understand. It wasn’t knocked out. It just…came out.”

The significance of this relatively mundane event didn’t register on Paul at first, but then slowly it began to dawn on him. He was so stunned that he lowered the sword and stared into The Boy’s soulless eyes.

“I’m growing up,” said The Boy.

Chapter 16

The Indian Way

T
he pirate raiding party returned to the
Skull n’ Bones
amid great hoopla and celebration. Naturally the Bully Boys (who had not been feeling well enough to accompany them) and the shadow of Hack (which was, by its very nature, restricted to the general vicinity of the ship itself ) were waiting for them with a mixture of curiosity and eagerness.

Captain Slash was leading her crew in song, and it wasn’t a bad song at all when one considered that she had written it en route to the ship. It’s a surprising bit of trivia to reveal that pirates are actually quite good at learning tunes. It’s a means of compensation they’ve developed as a group since they’re not terribly good at reading anything save treasure maps; and thus songs are the only means they have of immortalizing their triumphs.

“The Boy who harried Captain Hack,

Who took his hand to not give back,

Was captured well by Captain Slash,

Who helped to cook his boasting hash.

A fearsome fight The Boy did get

Before he fell into our net,

Tormented him about his flaws

And left him to the tiger’s claws!”

We should note that the words can’t begin to suggest the quality of the catchy little tune that Captain Slash had come up with. Really quite hummable. Had she not been committed to piracy, she might have made quite a career for herself in musical theater.

They boarded the ship, still singing merrily, and Mary Slash strode toward the shadow of her brother, singing the last lines of the song. She swept her sword through the air with a flourish and said, “So! What think you, Brother? The Boy is done for! He is gone! Your revenge is—”

And to the utter astonishment of all onlookers, the shadow of Captain Hack swept his hatchet around and struck Mary Slash with the flat of the blade. Had he hit her straight on, he could well have opened up her throat and sent her lifeblood spilling all over the deck. As it was, she was knocked clean off her feet, and she lay on her back with a look of total shock.

Captain Hack was gesticulating wildly. Clearly he wanted to convey something to her, and even more clearly he was quite irate.

Mary Slash scrambled to her feet. Her cheek stung something fierce; but in the best pirate tradition, she didn’t rub it or otherwise acknowledge the pain. Actually, the pain she felt was far more the emotional sort. She worshipped her brother, even in death, and such a violent reaction from him for reasons unknown was devastating to her. She was also all too aware that her entire crew was looking on, no less flummoxed than she. But it was unquestionably a stinging rebuke not only to her personally but also to her leadership. Pirate captains never fared well if challenges to their authority, from any quarter, went unanswered.

“How
dare
you!” Mary Slash railed in response, and there was such palpable fury from her that Hack paused in his mute diatribe. “How dare you, Brother, and here I thought so much better of you! I know what grinds your gizzard!” She pointed with her sword hand, waving it accusatorily. “You’re incensed because I disposed of The Boy when you were not able to! You—with all your greatness and your swagger and your confidence—were unable to put paid to one slip of a lad. Whereas I not only had the run of him for a full season of buccaneering but also, when he became himself again, trapped him and got rid of him without breaking the slightest droplet of sweat!” Her voice rose so that her entire crew would be sure to hear. “It infuriates you that my accomplishments are greater than yours, and in a fraction of the time! The
Skull n’ Bones
is now the premier force for villainy on the high seas, and your greatest enemy, The Boy, is currently working his way through a tiger’s bowels! Don’t you dare assail me again, and don’t you be trying to challenge me in front of my crew! Not our crew, and not your crew, but mine!
My crew! My ship! My—!
”

Mary Slash felt her heart thundering in her chest, and her forehead was beaded with sweat. She tried to regain her composure but wasn’t entirely successful. So she pivoted on her heel and stormed off to her cabin.

There she thrust her face toward a mirror and checked it on one side and then the other, up and down, back and forth. She looked for the slightest hint of smoothing out of any crow’s-feet or wrinkles. There appeared to be none. Everything was as she remembered it. She let out a sigh of relief and reminded herself that she needed to control her outbursts lest tragedy strike. A tragedy she had once seen befall her own mother, and she had no desire to follow suit. (Not that she felt pity over her mother’s fate. She just wanted to avoid it for herself.)

Meantime, the shadow of Captain Hack strode the deck in frustration. We will take the liberty of telling you that he was not, in fact, at all jealous over his sister’s disposing of The Boy. Hack wanted his revenge, and he didn’t care if it was done via proxy or via cat’s-paw, or even if The Boy was simply minding his own business one day and a huge tree fell upon him. What upset Hack, what irritated him to the point where he had struck down his sister in ire, was the awareness that she had not remained to make certain the job was finished. Hack didn’t remotely trust The Boy to do the decent thing and die. He was certain that if Captain Slash and her crew had not actually witnessed the tiger devour The Boy, then there was a chance that The Boy had in fact not been devoured. He could have escaped his fate in any number of ways. It never actually occurred to Hack that there had not been a tiger at all but rather a young lad sporting the hide of a tiger upon him. If it had occurred to him and he’d thought that his sister and pirate crew could be fooled by such a masquerade, his fury would have been beyond calculation. Not that he had never been fooled by such fakery himself, but one tended to forget one’s own transgressions when one was dead.

Since he wasn’t able to convey the reason for his anger to his sister, he chose instead to stalk about the deck in a fine stew. And when Captain Slash emerged from her cabin, she stood defiantly and glared at him, clearly waiting for him to issue some sort of further challenge to her authority. How she would have handled it if he had offered such a challenge, we couldn’t say, for she was no more capable of launching a feasible offensive attack against Hack than The Boy had been. But Hack made no move against her, for he saw no real point to it. After all, it wasn’t as if he could take back charge of his crew. The chances were nil that the pirates would be willing to take orders from little more than a ghost, even if he could figure out a way to convey his wishes. They tolerated his presence with a shiver of their timbers, but if he tried to assume command, they would doubtless abandon the
Skull n’ Bones
at their first opportunity. This would have left the shadow of Hack as skipper of a ghost ship, and of what worth was that?

No, his fortunes were tied to his sister. He knew it all too well. So when they faced each other, the shadow of Hack made the slightest of bows in deference to her, and then turned away. Captain Slash nodded approvingly and then said, “Hoist the mainsail! With The Boy dead, his leftovers aren’t worth bothering with! Let’s set to sea in search of new victims!”

The pirates prepared to set sail to wreak new havoc and new evil upon the waters, certain that there were none to stop them or stand in their way.

And at that particular moment, they were exactly right, for the one person who might pose a threat to them wasn’t posing a threat to anyone.

With the sun creeping up over the horizon, Paul had brought The Boy back to the Indian camp without the slightest idea of what to do. The Boy looked totally dispirited. More than that…The Boy was looking older.

It was not older in any way that getting older made sense. He wasn’t getting taller or broader. There was no beard stubble growing upon his face, nor did his features appear any more mature. But his eyes were looking glassy and, even more puzzling, his hair was starting to gray. He hadn’t lost any more of his baby teeth, although Paul had no doubt that that would be next.

Gwenny, Irregular, Porthos, and the Indian braves gathered around him as if they were looking in fear at a breathing dead man. “What’s wrong with him?” whispered Porthos.

“He says he’s growing up,” Paul said. “Can that be?”

“If he says it enough, I suppose it can,” Gwenny said. “This is the Anyplace. Anything is possible…especially when it comes to The Boy.”

“Y’hear that, Boy?” said Irregular, crouching in front of the listless youngster and prodding his shoulder. “Anything is possible when it comes to you.”

But The Boy simply shook his head, his graying hair hanging down around his ears. “I’m growing up,” he said for what seemed the umpteenth time.

And Gwenny, beginning to feel a little frustrated, placed her fists on her hips and said, “And what is so wrong with that?”

He didn’t seem to have heard her at first, but then slowly he focused his gaze upon her. “You need ask?”

“Of course I need ask. I mean—” She was about to say things that she should not, and so she pulled back and endeavored to phrase it in a way that would better serve her. “Let us say that I were to grow up. To become an adult. Would you want to hate me then?”

“No.”

“Well, there you see—”

“I wouldn’t want to. But I needs would.”

Her cheeks flushed brightly, and she almost upped and departed the Anyplace right at that moment.

But The Boy said, “Don’t you see, Gwenny? That’s what being an adult is all about. Hatred.”

“You’re wrong,” Paul said heatedly.

“Am I?” The Boy’s voice quavered slightly. “There was a time when I was hiding in Kensington Gardens. I was watching a group of very young children. They had been running about the park and, quite by accident, had converged in one area, having come from different directions. One of them touched another, said, ‘You’re it!’ and within seconds they were all playing tag. It was just a group of youngsters thrown together. They had different-color skin. Different-shaped eyes. The chances are that they all believed in different things, had different names for God. But they came together there, in the park, reveling in the joy of being with one another.

“Because they were children.

“And then their parents showed up. With their different skin colors and different-shaped eyes, and different names for God.

“And they looked at one another with suspicion and fear and anger. Then, very quickly, they went to their children and plucked them away from one another and pulled them back whence they’d come.

“That was when it was all made painfully clear to me. When you are a child, there is joy. There is laughter. And most of all, there is trust. Trust in your fellows. When you are an adult…then comes suspicion, hatred, and fear. If children ran the world, it would be a place of eternal bliss and cheer. Adults run the world; and there is war, and enmity, and destruction unending. Adults who take charge of things muck them up, and then produce a new generation of children and say, ‘The children are the hope of the future.’ And they are right. Children are the hope of the future. But adults are the damnation of the present, and children become adults as surely as adults become worm food.

“Adults are the death of hope.

“And you ask me why I would hesitate to leave my childhood behind. That shouldn’t be the question. The question is, why wouldn’t you? Why would anyone be glad about getting older?”

No one had an immediate response…and then very quietly, Paul said, “Because it’s change.”

“So?” said The Boy.

“So…change is good. Having everything being always the same—what’s the point of that?”

“It’s not a point so much as it is an end in itself,” The Boy said.

“Yes. That’s right. It’s an end,” Paul said. “And we’re too young to have something be an end. Childhood is about new beginnings. It’s about discovery. If you’ve found everything that you can do…why do anything else?”

“And that’s where our great divide is,” said The Boy. “Because you see that as a bad thing…and I see it as a good thing.”

And so it went, back and forth, with Gwenny or Paul putting forward notions as to why adulthood was not the terribly revolting thing that The Boy believed it to be, while The Boy presented his point of view with steadfast sadness and a sense of abandoning himself to a fate he felt would doom him. Meanwhile the Indians worked on repairing their camp. Princess Picca’s wigwam and several others had been rebuilt by the time the sun crawled high into the sky.

“I’m becoming more and more convinced that it’s the absence of his shadow that’s doing this,” Gwenny said to Paul at one point.

Paul looked surprised. That had never occurred to him. “Why do you think losing his shadow would have this kind of effect on him?”

“You didn’t see him the first time he lost it. He was practically frantic when he was separate from it. It’s not like your shadow or mine”—and she held up her hand and watched as her shadow mimicked the gesture. “It isn’t just a thing the sun makes. It’s part of him, sharing lives with him. As strange as it sounds, I think it anchored him to this world. That’s why he was so desperate to get it back. Without his shadow, he has no roots, nothing holding him down. His mind is wandering to places it shouldn’t go, and his body is following him into that abyss.”