Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [56]
“Oh Lord,” said Sam, “give us a good day tomorrow.”
We stood with heads bowed, hands together like good children.
“Oh Lord, thank you for good weather.”
“Amen,” we mumbled.
Then we had the Lord’s Prayer—“… deliver us from evil …”—hanging our heads and thinking about cannibals and swamps and monsters awaiting us tomorrow. Billy had never shut up since we left Pulau Lomblen. You’d never get him on shore round these parts in a million years, he said, and Joe Harper agreed. There were tribes on these islands that thought no more of eating a person than they did of a chicken or a fish, they said, and when Tim said Dan knew his stuff and wouldn’t see us wrong, they asked how did he know? Did Dan know every single island? Did he? And if there was supposed to be some dragon thing that no one had ever even seen on this particular one, it was going to be a wild island, wasn’t it? One no one knew about. You could have anything on an island like that.
To look into the eyes of a cannibal. I turned away from the thought, but a fear crept in and peered over my shoulder.
“Was cannibals once,” Gabriel said, “but no more, not hereabouts. Not till you get to the Southern Sea.”
“Aha!” said Bill. “See! If there was once, then there still is. They don’t change. It’s in their nature.”
“Like dogs, you mean,” said John Copper, “can go on nice and sweet for years then suddenly …” baring his teeth.
“That’s exactly it,” said Bill.
Gabriel, his long legs hanging naked over the edge of his bunk, the brown skin yellow where he kept scratching his shins. His gaze sliding sideways and his big lower lip hanging loose, pink inside. “I saw a terrible thing once that made me think,” he said. “I saw a snake eat a dog. A small dog, though whether it was a pup or not I couldn’t say. It swallowed the poor thing whole, but it took a long time and the head was the last to go. And the poor thing was crying out at first, but by the end it had given all that up and it was like someone who cries silently.”
We were all quiet. He looked around, big eyed.
“You know, when someone is crying but not making any sound. Shaking with it, and its eyes closed tight and its mouth drawn back. That poor dog has stayed with me.”
Another silence.
“Why didn’t you stop it?” John Copper sounded angry.
“John,” Gabriel said, “why do you think? For fear of the snake. It was a monster. And it held the poor dog in its coils to keep it, what could we do?”
“Where was this?” asked Tim.
Gabriel thought for a moment. “On an island. Not here. Out in the Southern Sea.”
The Southern Sea was beginning to sound to me like a very bad place.
“You could have stopped it,” John persisted, “you could have done something.”
Gabriel shook his head. “No. There were three of us, you see, and one was our captain, Lovelace, and he told us not to. You didn’t go against Lovelace.”
“If I ever meet Captain Lovelace,” said John, “I’ll kick his face off for him.”
“How long did it take?” I asked.
“Too long.”
“How long?”
“Oh, much too long, little Jaf.”
I hated being patronised.
“Dogs don’t cry,” said Billy Stock.
“Yes, they do,” said Skip very quickly.
“Took about five minutes,” said Gabriel.
“And you just stood there and watched it?”
“Yes. Lovelace was very interested to see it. We all had to stay very still and quiet. It was strange. Made us all feel strange. Stayed with me.”
John Copper started to cry. He was furious. Lay down and thumped his mattress. “I hate it,” he said.
“Hate what, son?”
“I don’t know. Just hate it.”
We’d seen so many islands, some no bigger than a rock, others meandering along for miles with mountains rise on rise, and mangroves that seemed to walk on the water’s edge with their rooted limbs raised delicately like a lady’s tea finger. Coconut palms, blue sky, puffy clouds, pale green rocks, bald heights, lush lows, on we sailed. We went ashore on four or five. We took