If Fetz prayed now or thought anything at all, Bonnie Mary couldn’t tell. Did he hear the birds as well? Listening carefully, she could pick out a number of distinct bird calls now, some lower, some higher. At times a particular cry might even be answered by a chorus of others, until the whole tunnel rang with the echoing sounds. To her ears their warbling seemed almost human, like the quavering voices of aged crones, speaking some language all their own. Maybe they were the ghosts of dead sailors trapped here as she soon would be, warning doomed visitors of their fate.
Bonnie Mary shivered.
The ceiling of the tunnel finally became so low that they were forced to crawl along on their hands and knees. The air was growing steadily hotter, but no longer tasted so stale; instead it took on an oddly familiar odour that Bonnie Mary just couldn’t place. And still the tunnel grew narrower. Just as she thought the hole would at last grow too small for them to go any farther, she saw a faint glow up ahead.
“Look!” she cried, nearly babbling with relief. “Daylight! The tunnel must come out on the other side of the mountain! That’s why I heard the birds and —”
“Quiet,” hissed Madsea. “Keep moving.”
Whatever exit the birds had found, Bonnie Mary hoped it could accommodate a full-sized human.
Suddenly, the passageway widened abruptly and they could stand up again. There was a sudden rush of heat and the visible air unfurled itself around them, half lit by the weak reddish light up ahead.
Madsea found himself growing quite warm in the sudden humidity, his shirt and breeches clinging wetly to his body. The sulphurous smell in the air unexpectedly recalled to his mind a fashionable hot spring in Bath. In the reddish glow he watched the steamy swirls of vapour move around him like ghostly dancers.
Red steam? Bonnie Mary wondered, perplexed. Was the sun setting already? Had they truly been in the tunnel that long? And where was all this vapour coming from?
Before she could ponder these incongruities further, the passageway angled abruptly downward. With Madsea behind her and no way to back up, Bonnie Mary felt herself skidding down the incline, forced into a stumbling run.
As she slipped and slid, the tunnel opened wide before her. It was at this point that Madsea lost his footing and bowled into her, knocking her down. Together they tumbled down a smooth incline and emerged through a thick cloud of steam to find themselves suddenly landing on level ground.
Disentangling herself from Madsea, Bonnie Mary sat up and straightened her shirt. She noticed that the rock beneath her was a featureless black and strangely warm to the touch, yet stranger still was the bizarre sight that met her eyes when she chanced to look up.
It was as if someone had opened a Turkish bathhouse in the centre of the mountain. Clouds of steam blanketed the ground. The air was intensely humid, but unlike the baths it was filled with the stench of sulphur and bird guano.
She clambered shakily to her feet, her good eye quickly adjusting to the dim light of the cavern. As the scene before her sharpened, her jaw dropped in surprise. A Turkish bath house would have made more sense than what she now saw before her.
She turned around, open-mouthed with disbelief.
Jim, if you could only see this!
At the moment, however, all Jim could see as he opened his bruised eyelids and blinked himself back into consciousness was the broad chest of Kingly. With a groan, he rolled himself off the bosun’s body and sat up. Every part of his body vied painfully for his attention at the exact same moment. His head spun so badly he had to hold it in his hands.
Buck up, old man. You’ve had worse, he cajoled himself, but even he didn’t buy that one. His skull hurt and his mouth hurt, and as he shifted clumsily in the black dust, his broken knee and bruised shoulder nearly blinded him with pain. The skin of his palms and the sole of his foot were scraped raw and bleeding, and his eyes were beginning to swell shut from the blow to his head. He was a mess, no question.
Yet as awful as this all was, what pained him most at the moment, what hurt him more than any ache in his ache-filled body, was the thought of Bonnie Mary caught in Madsea’s clutches. It was that thought alone that forced him to crawl back and retrieve the knife from where it lay in the dust by the motionless bosun.
“Sorry, mate,” he mumbled through split lips as he turned the bosun aside. “It weren’t meant for you. I’ll bury you decent, once this be over, I give you me word.”
“Aye, aye, Cap’n,” came the slurred reply from the body on the ground. Long John nearly dropped the shiv, he was so startled. The bosun moaned and grabbed at his side where the knife had cut his flank. Long John inched backward. There was no way of telling how badly Kingly was injured. He’d best be going before the big ox fully woke up.
With a Herculean effort he pulled himself up on a nearby boulder. Standing up again, he swayed unsteadily, the world blurring around him.
He realized in panic that he was going to fall, and that slight surge of terror gave him the tiny bit of energy he needed to remain upright and awake.
He thought of Bonnie Mary and dug his fingers into the rock, concentrating on its coolness, its utter solidity. He conjured her face before him and the dizziness passed. He dared to take a small hop forward and all the bones in his body seemed to jangle loose within him. It was a near thing, but he managed to stay upright.
Something was wrong, though. Ordinarily his balance was flawless, but now the ground seemed to be tilting this way and that like a deck in a storm. He tried another hop forward, but this time he tripped, staggered forward, and came crashing down painfully to the ground, mashing his nose against his arm. Blood leaked from his nose, but he was too tired to wipe it away.
What’re ye lying here for? Move, ye useless lump. Get up n’ save her, he thought angrily to himself. But try as he might, he just couldn’t stand up. All he could do was move forward like a snail, trying to ignore the disturbing feel of something wet and sticky soaking through the knotted-off leg of his breeches. A cool breeze gently pushed his damp curls from his forehead. He swallowed and crawled forward, inching slowly to the rescue.
Chapter Sixteen
The Secret of the
Orange Birds
Doc Lewiston had barely begun his explanation of how he’d become acquainted with Little Jane’s parents when Little Jane interrupted him.
“They’re alive! They’re alive!” she shouted, overjoyed with relief.
“Well, yes, at least they were the last time I saw them,” he added, somewhat flustered.
“Then what’re we waiting for? Let’s go after ’em.” With that, Little Jane bolted off along the path toward the mountain.
“Wait!” shouted Villienne.
He and Doc Lewiston looked at each other, shrugged, then took off after her, doing their best not to fall on the slippery surface.
The rock bridge ended in a short spit of grey-black sand on the other side. The enormous shadow of the volcanic mountain loomed over it, nearly blocking out the sun. The peak of the volcano was so high that it appeared to curve down toward them, bending to meet the horizon like a tall man lowering his head to enter a doorway.
Villienne leapt lightly onto a flat rock on the other side of the bridge and looked around. He spotted Little Jane a little ways ahead. She was already clambering up a narrow trail that wound its way between huge boulders at the base of the mountain. He craned his neck and could just make out what appeared to be dozens of caves dotting the side of the rock face above her.
He lost sight of her as she disappeared behind a large boulder. All of a sudden he heard a high-pitched scream from behind the rock. When Villienne and Lewiston got there, out of breathe, they found Little Jane standing in the middle of the path.
“I thought it was Papa,” gasped Little Jane. The sand beneath her feet was speckled with blood. Little Jane stood over the body of a large man. “Is he … is he dead?” her voice twisted in fear.
Villienne looked away, blinking back tears himself, resisting the si
ck feeling that rose in his throat at the sight of the red liquid pooling around the body.
“Who is he?” asked Little Jane.
“The Panacea’s quartermaster, Kingly,” answered Doc Lewiston as he approached the body. He mopped his sorrowful face with his handkerchief and bent down for a closer look. “Looks like he’s been shot.”
“Oh, for goodness sake, can’t you get anything right?” complained the exasperated bosun, startling them all by abruptly sitting up. “I ain’t been shot, I been stabbed. Then I knocked meself in the head when I fell. And I ain’t the bleedin’ quartermaster neither,” he continued crossly. “I’m the bosun. You only been serving aboard ship for what, eight months? I mean, I knows you’re just a surgeon, but come on.”
Doc Lewiston’s eyes nearly popped straight out of his head at the bosun’s apparent resurrection, but Little Jane didn’t miss a beat.
She drew Melvin out and crouched down beside Kingly. “Where’s me father and mother?” she asked. “Captains Bright and Silver, you know them? Tell us now or by thunder, I’ll run ye through!”
“They’s with the cap’n,” replied Kingly, taken aback by the strange girl’s intense demeanour.
“Where’s the Captain?” asked Doc Lewiston, worriedly.
“Gone to get his treasure, I wager, without a thought to the likes o’ us,” Kingly said with an irritated wave. “And he can have it, ye ask me. Let ’im rot here with it for all I care!”
“Thanks for your help,” said Villienne, turning to follow Little Jane, who had already started up the path. Lewiston made to follow.
“What about me then?” asked the injured bosun indignantly. “I near been stabbed cleaned through. All a’ you just gonna up and leave me like this? What if I bleed to death? Don’t nobody care about poor Kingly what never did a lick a harm to no one,” sobbed the big man piteously.
Doc Lewiston stopped in his tracks. Much as he wanted to help his friends and save his captain, he could not in good conscience leave an injured man. Villienne may have been a dabbling almost-doctor, but Lewiston was a ship’s surgeon in earnest and he’d sworn his oath to the Panacea’s crew.
“You two go on,” he called to his companions before turning to his new patient.
“Don’t worry, my good man, the cut doesn’t appear too deep. First thing we get back to the ship, I’ll get some nice fat leeches on you and you’ll be right as rain, you’ll see.”
Satisfied to see Kingly left in more competent medical hands than his own, Villienne waved back at his long-lost friend, then sprinted after Little Jane, eager to be away from all the blood before he fell into a swoon.
“Through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea,”[1] Madsea said in awe, stretching out a tremulous hand to touch the tendrils of curling yellow vapour rising from the ground. Unable to think of words of his own to describe the sight, he’d found himself speaking lines of long-forgotten poetry, as if fever-touched once more.
He and Bonnie Mary were in a hollow chamber inside the mountain that was high and wide enough to accommodate two tall ships side by side. Though there was no “sunless sea” in the centre of the cavern, there were several pools of strange glowing liquid. This was the source of the light they’d seen from the tunnel, Bonnie Mary realized. It was not the red light of the distant setting sun, but the hot, red glow of something else — lava. The lava appeared to be mixed with something else. The edges of the pools were crusted with large yellow crystals of what looked like sulphur, which would account for the horrid smell in the cavern.
Peculiar orange birds congregated around these pools in astounding numbers, despite the heat. There must have been hundreds of them gathered there, more than Bonnie Mary had ever seen before. She saw flocks aplenty of the spindly-legged variety she was used to seeing on the island, their orange crested heads bobbing back and forth like metronomes. Then there were smaller, patchy-feathered birds, which she took to be the juveniles of the species. She even saw baby chicks with no feathers at all, their skin the colour of pale cantaloupe flesh, waddling about on bandy legs. The patchy juveniles made it their business to herd these chicks away from the dangerous lava pools, nipping and squeaking at them to keep them in line, looking for all the world like bossy older siblings.
As unusual as all this was, it was nothing compared to what Bonnie Mary saw when she looked up.
At first she thought the objects she saw were oddly shaped stalactites and stalagmites, natural formations of water droplets in caves over millennia. Yet the tall columns contained shapes and textures that just didn’t seem right for something created by the process of nature alone. Had an ancient, long-deceased island tribe created them? Were they bizarre statues, perhaps, or tall symbolic thrones? The more she stared at the glittering columns, the more confident she felt that these were not formed naturally by the simple passage of time. Yet they were not things made by people either, she thought with a sudden jolt of comprehension, finally realizing what the objects were.
Nests! They were nests — fantastic golden nests! It seemed strange beyond belief, but it had to be true, for sitting atop each golden column, high up near the ceiling of the cavern, was a bird.
These were no ordinary birds, though. The golden nests were not the only things of abnormal size in the cavern. The orange birds that sat upon these marvellous creations were equally gigantic. To even call these peculiar birds “orange” seemed a grave injustice. Their luxuriant plumage ran the gamut of the entire orange spectrum, from pumpkin, jacinth, and ginger to canary, apricot, and bronze. Their long, curved beaks gleamed with streaks of silver and their massive heads nodded with framing ruffs of orange-red and tangerine feathers. Each was nearly the size of an ostrich, with a long, slender neck, and small, stubby wings. They sat on their perches in such perfect stillness, it was no surprise she initially mistook them for idols carved in stone.
Bonnie Mary held her breath, afraid to rouse the creatures. The gargantuan fowl sat silently on their lofty perches, eyes half-closed, as if heedless of the younger birds toiling on the chamber floor below.
The word toil was no exaggeration of the activities of the common birds (for when surrounded by their massive nest-sitting counterparts with their huge lion-like ruffs, they hardly seemed quite so peculiar). The cavern resembled a factory, with a procedure that went as follows: First, the common, ruffless birds entered the chamber through holes in the walls and ceiling. These passageways presumably exited out to different openings in the caves along the side of the mountain, just like one Bonnie Mary and Madsea had used to get in. In their beaks these birds carried fish and crustaceans from all over the island; plenty of food for the rest of the flock, which remained in the cavern, eager to be fed.
What Bonnie Mary never realized was that the birds she was used to seeing about the island were of the female variety only. The full-grown males of the species were nest-bound creatures that never strayed far from this single cozy cavern. Their enormous size was of great use to them for sitting on large clutches of eggs, for the wider their bottoms were, the more eggs they could incubate at a time. Of course, the males’ bulk was not the only thing that warmed the eggs of the orange birds to make them grow and hatch more quickly than those of other birds of their size. The heat given off by the lava pools was essential in providing the ideal temperature for speedy incubation.
There were also smaller males about the cavern, with patchier ruffs than the giants sitting upon the nests. These males were younger and more active. It was one of these young males that sauntered by Bonnie Mary at that moment, carrying what looked for all the world like a shiny silver boot buckle in its beak.
Bonnie Mary watched the strange little creature with undisguised curiosity. What in the world would a bird want with a boot buckle? she thought.
With the buckle in its beak, the small male hopped over to one of the lava pools. It transferred the buckle to its talons and then, clasping its precious piece of metal tightly, proceeded to flap awkwardly over the boil
ing lava.
As Bonnie Mary watched, it stretched out the claw that held the buckle and plunged it straight into the boiling liquid. It held its claw there, wings beating frantically to stay in place. After a few seconds the bird pulled the object out. It went on to repeat the process until the metal held between its smoking claws was suitably soft and malleable.
Then, still holding the half-melted metal in its talons, the bird flapped clumsily over to a small, shining mound of metal and pressed the drooping, half-melted piece of silver into its surface. The determined little bird pushed and prodded the piece carefully into place with its beak and claws, smoothing it out like an expert metallurgist, until the new addition to its nest was as uniform in shape as the rest.
As Bonnie Mary observed this industrious young avian and its companions at work, she began to comprehend the purpose of this bizarre behaviour. Bonnie Mary recognized part of a half-melted ruby tiara sticking out of the nest. Instantly she knew what’d become of all the loot they’d stored in the cave over the years. Piece by painstaking piece, each bird had improved its nest with their treasure, raising it just that little touch higher, making it just that tiny bit shinier, all in an effort to attract a female. In this half-lit cavern world, she could see that a nest had to be very large and very shiny to attract any attention at all.
In the beginning, the ancestors of the peculiar orange birds of the Nameless Isle had decorated their nests with shiny seashells and bits of beach glass. The recent generation’s discovery of the pirates’ treasure had changed all that. While they still used rocks to build their nests, they now coated these rocks with layers of melted gold, silver, and sparkling gemstones stolen piece by piece and year after year from the pirates’ hoard. Each individual piece of precious metal had been laboriously smelted and pressed into place on the nests at great physical cost by the birds who now sat upon them, still reaping the plentiful mating rewards of the discovery years later — well worth the singed talons.
Little Jane and the Nameless Isle Page 15