Chapter 16 #4
“Yes,” Merry said glumly. “We can just follow the map.”
He sidled over to her, carrying a spear of burnt turtle meat. “Come now. Eat a little,” he said, offering her the spear. “It’ll perk you right up. Nothing to be gained by starving yourself.”
She looked at it dispiritedly and took a bite because the meat was hovering right under her nose and she didn’t have the energy to reject it. The meat’s odor was revolting, the flavor greasy. It was a meal only for the acutely hungry. Merry swallowed and took another bite.
“Yes, sirrah. That’s turtle meat,” Meadows said, grinning and watching her eat. “Some say it’s poison.”
Merry spit it quickly into her hand.
“But it ain’t!” he finished and ducked, chuckling, as she threw the half-chewed piece of meat at him.
She began to chuckle too and received into her open mouth the handful of sticky weeds that Meadows had tossed back at her in retaliation.
Enough was enough. Tired she might be, but she was not going to take that sitting down.
Merry snatched a long stick that was crooked at the end and flew at Meadows, advancing on him like a fencer.
“En garde!” cried Meadows, brandishing his meat spear.
Neither party had strength enough for a prolonged battle, so the match was short, zesty, and sparked with laughter.
Excited sand fleas, kicked up in the dust, hopped around them, nipping.
The exhausted combatants settled back under the chestnut tree, slapping insects off their arms and listening with weary pleasure to the night’s song.
How varied was the symphony of an evening at peace.
The buzzes, hums, whistles, and the high bird calls soothed the senses like sleep.
The luminous moon hung above them, close and gigantic. …
Merry woke, dazed and stiff, to the dawn’s first breath. Meadows slept on, and on, and at last she came to her knees beside his dusty body and tried, rather playfully, to rouse him.
But Michael Meadows was dead. Prickly instinct warned her before she was able to roll him gently to his back, feeling the helpless droop of the muscle tone, the utter stillness of a body where function had ceased.
His eyes were closed, the lids bloodless, his jaw hanging slightly open.
This was not sleep. Sometime during the night the aging pirate’s heart had stopped.
She sat on her heels for a long time, gazing with hollow sadness into the irrevocability of death.
Then she realized that she was alone.
She was not to realize how totally alone until she struggled on her own to the beach, following the siren scent of the sea, to find that her boat had vanished in the prankish crawl of a high tide.
Now she found a flat stone and began to dig a resting place for her companion in the soft sand.
But crocodiles came from the depths of the pool to claim him before she could finish, and she fled for her life into a citrus tree and remained there, trembling in a fever bath of misery, trying to close her ears to the horrible sounds below.
She did not cry then, nor when she found the boat was lost, nor even as her accidental footstep discovered the one remnant of Meadows, his head.
Instead she was mercilessly ill, and then she stood up to begin doing what her days on the Joke had schooled her to do—survive.
In the two weeks that followed, she learned the full meaning of being alone.
As though she were the last soul on earth, she became her own companion in the grim desolation of long nights filled with milky starlight and heavy dew; of days thick with the rustling voice of the forest. Hours passed when she heard no sound but the palm fronds rattling in the scorching breeze like dry finger bones.
The heat was deadly, a withering stench that left her clothing clammy with perspiration moments after she had washed and dried it on the speared fingers of a poinsettia bush.
Minute insects, steel blue pinpoints with wings, swirled around her in a humming mist. Pink welts marked her body from their venom.
She rose each morning shaking wood ants, brushing speckles of grit and leaf rot from her skin, and grieving for her family, who would never know what had become of her.
Unfamiliar vegetation was lush around her.
She had no way to know which of it was edible and which was not, and her experiments did unspeakable things to her digestion.
It became hard to recall just why running away from the Joke had seemed like such a good idea.
As she tried one more piece of bitter exotic fruit and wondered whether it was cassava or manioc or the Lord knew what, she remembered the times on the Joke when she had eaten on deck with Will Saunders making double entendres about her lips and what her fingers were doing that were so wicked Merry had never figured out even one, though everyone within hearing had collapsed in gales of laughter.
At the time she had never guessed that a day would come when she would regard those moments with longing.