That wasn’t what stopped me, though.
Just above his ribs Sal had wound several pieces of cloth tightly around his chest. It was enough to disguise the truth when his shirt and waistcoat were buttoned, but there was no hiding it once those were off.
Sal wasn’t a boy at all. She was girl.
Her face was now terrified and defiant all at once, and she said, very coolly though her voice was weak, “How bad is it?”
I think I fell in love with her then, when she pretended that everything was just the same as it had always been.
“What are those?” Charlie asked, pointing at Sal’s chest.
Sal laughed, then coughed. “Getting stabbed hurts. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Did you think it would be an adventure?” I said, with a levity I did not feel.
“That’s how you and Peter always made it out to be,” she said, and coughed again.
I didn’t like that coughing. It made me worry that the wound was worse than it looked. I fumbled with shaking hands in the pockets of my coat, where I always had something handy hidden, and yanked out a pirate’s head cloth that I’d stolen some time ago. It was covered in dust but it was the best I could do.
I folded the cloth and pressed it over the wound, hoping to staunch the bleeding. Sal cried out when I put pressure on it.
“That hurts too!” she shouted, and hit my arm.
“Do you want to bleed to death?” I said.
“Don’t bleed to death, Sal,” Charlie said.
“Is that your real name?” I asked.
Her dancing blue eyes looked away. “It’s Sally.”
Charlie looked from Sally to me and back again to the strips of cloth around her chest. He’d just made the connection. “You’re a girl!”
“Who’s a girl?” Peter’s voice, behind me.
I twisted around. Nod and Crow and Peter had returned to the arena. The three of them were painted in spattered blood. Peter’s face said he’d had the time of his life. Nod stared at his dead brother’s body.
“Sal’s a girl!” Charlie said, standing up and pointing at her.
“You couldn’t hide it for long,” I said. “Not on the island, surrounded by boys.”
“I’ve hid it for three years, surrounded by boys on the streets, ever since I was ten years old,” she said, her eyes sparking. “I’m no fool, Jamie.”
“Then you shouldn’t have gotten yourself stabbed,” I said.
“I was trying not to let Charlie get stabbed,” she muttered.
Peter and Crow came over to us. Crow seemed only mildly curious, but Peter’s face was thunder. “You’re a girl.”
He said it like he was saying Sally was a slimy thing he’d found under a rock.
“We’ve already figured that out,” I said, getting irritated on her behalf. After all, so what if she was a girl? She’d been here a month and gotten on fine.
“There are no girls on my island!” Peter shouted. His face was red. I don’t think I’d ever seen him so angry. His mouth contorted in rage. “No girls! None! None! None! Girls are trouble and they aren’t allowed here. You tricked me.”
“I was keeping myself safe,” Sally retorted. “It’s more dangerous for girls than for boys when you sleep out in the street at night. I cut my hair after I ran away and I lived like a boy. You liked me fine when you thought I was a boy.”
“No, no, no, no, no! You can’t stay! There are no girls allowed here and so you have to leave.”
“Where will she go?” I asked. I was astonished at his behavior. He was like a small baby having a tantrum. I’d never seen him like this. Never.
“Back to the Other Place!” Peter shouted.
“But, Peter,” Crow said. “Nobody’s allowed to go back to the Other Place. You said so yourself. It’s one of your rules.”
“There are no girls allowed on this island!” Peter screamed. “That’s a rule too!”
I was less worried about Sally’s future home than I was about her living to see a future at all. The blood from the wound had soaked through the cloth and I couldn’t really see why. It was just a little stab wound, but it wouldn’t stop bleeding.
“Charlie, give me your shirt,” I said.
The smaller boy took off the shirt he’d been wearing since the day he’d arrived on the island. I made all the boys wash their clothes as well as themselves every several days or so; otherwise the smell in the tree became unbearable. Luckily we’d had a wash day not long before, so Charlie’s shirt wasn’t as filthy as it might have been.
“I’ll make you a new one,” I said, as I tore the shirt into strips.
“Out of deer hide?” Charlie asked. His upper body was thin and pale, though his arms and neck and face were brown from the sun. “Like your pants?”
“Of course,” I said, knotting the strips together into a long rope.
“Who the devil cares about your stupid shirt!” Peter shouted. “She’s a girl and I want her out. Out, out, out, out, out!”
There’s nothing worse than having a fit and no one giving you the proper attention for it. Crow seemed to find Peter’s behavior unseemly—he’d backed away and come to kneel next to Charlie and me. Peter ran around the arena, kicking Nip’s dead body several times and throwing whatever he could find.
Nod was sitting next to Fog’s body, holding his brother’s hand and crying, and not caring who saw him.
That was when Fog’s death was real to me, real in a way it hadn’t been before. I’d never seen Nod cry. I wanted to look after him, but I had to look after Sal first.
I wrapped the strips around Sally’s middle, pulling them tight so there would be pressure on the wound.
“I can’t breathe when you do that,” Sally said. Her face was dead white now and covered in sweat.
“Sorry,” I said. “I think you must choose between breathing or bleeding to death.”
“Oh, well, when you put it that way,” Sally said.
Her natural cheerfulness kept reasserting itself even though she was in a dire situation. I knew many boys who screamed and cried when they took wounds like Sally’s, and she’d done none of that.
I closed her shirt and waistcoat around her again and felt the tips of my ears heating. I don’t know why it was more embarrassing to cover her up when we’d all been staring at her exposed body for several minutes, but somehow it was.
“Crow, help me get her up,” I said.
We each put an arm around Sally until she was standing between us, breathing hard.
“Do you think you can walk?” I said.
“I’ll have to, unless I want to sleep alone on this mountain,” Sally said. Her hair was soaked with sweat and her cap had fallen off.
Charlie picked up the cap and presented it to her. She shook her head. “Can you wear it for me, Charlie?”
The little boy seem thrilled, turning the cap around so the brim was on the back of his neck, the way he’d seen Sal do it.
“Where are the others?” I said to Crow.
We were all pretending that Peter wasn’t screaming and throwing things. It seemed the best course of action at the moment. Charlie couldn’t stop himself staring, though, and then looking quickly away before Peter caught him at it.
“Are no others,” Crow said. “Just me and Nod and Peter made it.”
“Then it’s only us,” I said.
I wanted to run around in a circle and kick and throw things too. We’d come up the mountain with ten, and now four more were gone—Kit, Ed, Fog and Nip. From sixteen our band was down to six in less than a month.
Nip was no loss, and would have never gone back to the tree in any case, but losing Fog hurt. And the other two had been on the island long enough for me to give a damn for their own sakes, not just because it was a stupid loss of life.
“What I
don’t see is how the pirates knew to come up here anyway,” Crow said as we slowly moved toward the track.
“Nip told them where we would be,” I said. “He was always going out on those long walks on his own. I should have known he was up to something.”
“You can’t always know everything, Jamie,” Crow said philosophically.
Peter dragged the corpse of the pirate who’d stabbed Sal over to the edge of the arena and threw it into the drop below, screaming his frustration the whole time. Del’s sword was still sticking out of the dead pirate’s chest when Peter did this, and I was annoyed that he’d wasted a perfectly good weapon.
We stopped next to Nod, who had not moved or acknowledged anything except Fog’s body since reentering the arena.
“Nod,” I said. “We’ve got to go now.”
He looked up at me slowly, very slowly, like he wasn’t sure what the words I said meant.
“We’re going back to the tree,” I said.
“What about Fog?” he asked, and his voice was a tiny broken thing.
“I can’t stay to bury him,” I said. “Sal’s been cut and she needs to get back to the tree.”
“She?” Nod asked, but it was only a vague curiosity about something out of place.
“She,” I said. “Sal’s a girl.”
“Oh,” Nod said. It didn’t seem to bother him very much.
“If you want to bury Fog you can do it in the meadow, and catch up to us later,” I said. “He’d like that. He’d be near the Battle place.”
“Battle was his favorite thing to do,” Nod said, rubbing at his dripping nose and eyes with his wrist.
He stood and lifted his brother over his shoulder. We let them go ahead of us on the track. Charlie followed Nod, though whether it was to help or to witness I didn’t know. Probably he thought Nod shouldn’t be alone.
As I passed the pile of weapons that Nip had brought to Battle, I hesitated, and Sal felt me pause and stopped moving. Crow looked curiously at both of us.
“He took them from the boys’ graves,” I said.
“But you don’t want to waste them,” Sal said, nodding.
“The pirates won’t stop,” I said. “We’ve killed a bunch of their lot again.”
Crow let Sally go, and she leaned all her weight on me. There wasn’t much to her, really—none of the boys were anything but skinny and strong from all their adventuring—but it felt different, somehow, when she was pressed up against me. Was it because I knew she was a girl, or because I could feel the tiny curves at her chest that I wasn’t aware of before?
For her part, I think Sal only wanted to rest. The short hike across the arena seemed to have drained her.
Crow gathered up the weapons and put them in the bag Nip had carried, then slung it over his shoulder. He took up his place on Sal’s other side and we continued our slow, deliberate way.
Behind us, Peter was still screaming.
Nod had found a place for Fog in the meadow. I think Charlie wanted to stay there with him, see it through until the end, but I told him to come along with us. Nod needed to be alone with his twin, this one last time.
It took us a long while to get back to the tree. I carried Sal on my back down all the parts where climbing was necessary, and Crow took Charlie. Nod caught up with us fairly soon (he had Fog’s knife slung at his waist, the one they’d fought over) so he and Crow took it in turns to carry the smaller boy.
Peter did not return with us.
It was night when we staggered into the clearing, numb and exhausted. Nod and Crow and Charlie collapsed in a heap together just inside the tree, all three clinging to one another. Sal muttered incoherently, and I was afraid she might be building a fever.
I got her settled in a pile of skins and then lifted her shirt to check the wound. The blood had soaked through the bandage, and it was still fresh and red.
This might have been because the wound was so much worse than it looked, or it might have been because Sally hadn’t been able to rest since she’d been injured. I took off her shirt and waistcoat entirely, carefully ignoring the wraps around her chest, and cut off the strips of Charlie’s shirt that I’d tied around the wound. Some scabbing came away when I lifted the cloth and Sal cried out.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said.
I ran outside to get some water from the skins that collected rainwater. These were hung all about the tree on the branches. The water was warm but it would do.
I poured some water in Sally’s mouth, holding her head up so she wouldn’t choke. She coughed and spluttered anyway and half of the water ended up on my face. I released her head back and she closed her eyes, drifting into sleep.
My own eyes were gritty from sleepiness and worry, but I washed out the wound as best I could and then put some spicy-smelling green leaves on it that I knew would make it stop bleeding. That boy Rob had also showed me this when he’d lived on the island.
How long ago was that? Fifteen seasons? More? It didn’t matter. I wrapped the wound again and hoped it would stop bleeding in the night. It was one thing to experiment with sewing up myself. I didn’t think I could do it to Sal.
Sally. Her name was Sally, not Sal.
I covered her up with one of the best skins, a nice soft fox-fur one. Then I lay beside her on my side, and watched her breath rise and fall until I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep for the first time since I’d lived on the island.
PART III
SALLY
chapter 12
Peter didn’t return the next day, or the next, or the next after that. In fact, he was gone for more than a week. He’d never done this before, and I might have worried about it, except that Sal did catch a fever.
The next morning when I woke up her skin was like fire. The wound had ceased bleeding, but she moaned and tossed and turned and it was hard to get her to swallow any water or broth. She soaked through any skins we put on her but if we took them off, she would cry out piteously that she was cold.
Nod and Crow were, surprisingly, a good help to me. They took it in turns to watch her and to bully her into swallowing soup, and even washed all the dirty clothes and skins so she’d have something clean to sleep in. Charlie ran back and forth collecting water and bathing Sal’s head with a cloth.
If the pirates knew where the tree was, they could have crept up on us and killed us all, for none of us was aware of anything except Sally.
On the fourth day, her fever broke.
We all cheered, and I think I never loved those boys more than at that moment. We had saved her. We’d all done it together.
Together wasn’t something that Peter understood, not really. He liked all the boys to be in one group, but he didn’t like sharing and he certainly didn’t like it when the boys banded together to do anything without him. He liked to sow discontent, to cause fights, and this, I realized, was why he never played at Battle. It was much more fun for him to watch us run to and fro and hurt each other. If we hurt one another, even in fun, then we could never like one another best—only him.
On the sixth day, Sally sat up and scowled at me when I changed the poultice.
“Must you put that foul-smelling stuff on there?” she said.
“If you enjoy living, then yes,” I said. “That foul stuff probably saved your life.”
“I thought Crow said it was your magic broth that saved me,” Sally said, her eyes twinkling. It was nice to see that twinkle again, to know that Sal was almost back to normal.
Nod, who was good at sewing, had made her a fresh pair of deerskin pants that stopped at the knee, and a matching shirt with silver wolf fur trimmed all around the edges. It was one of the finest things he had ever made, and he’d presented it to her with a blushing face that morning.
Sal had thanked him very prettily, her own cheeks pink, and then asked for some privacy so she coul
d change into Nod’s gift.
She’d washed and changed while the four of us stood outside the tree, looking up at the sky and trying not to be curious about what was going on inside.
When she called out that it was all right to come back in, she was wearing her new clothes and sitting up against the cave wall. There was something different about her, something I noticed after a few minutes. She’d stopped binding her chest, and now it was desperately obvious that she was, in fact, a girl.
Crow and Charlie didn’t seem to notice, but Nod looked everywhere except directly at Sal, and I tried to keep my eyes right on her face.
“Something saved you, the broth or the leaves or just plain luck,” I said, feeling the blood rise in my face as I glanced at her chest.
I had to stop being so foolish. It was only Sal, my friend Sal, and truthfully the curves were so small that she barely looked different from a boy.
But they were there. She was most definitely not a boy.
Nod and Crow and Charlie were outside, and I heard them laughing as they played some game. It was good to hear Nod laugh, though it never quite reached his eyes—the ghost of Fog lingered there.
“Jamie, do you remember your mother?” Sal asked.
I gave her a startled glance. “My mother? No.”
“Sometimes you sing a little song to yourself when you’re at some task, like you were doing just now,” Sal said. “I thought you might have learned it from your mother.”
I hadn’t even known I was singing, and wondered if this happened often and the other boys just never thought to mention it to me.
“I told you I came here a long time ago, Sal,” I said, feeling unaccountably angry. “I don’t remember my life before the island.”
“Certain of that?” she asked.
“Yes, I told you so. Do you think I’m a liar?”
She didn’t flinch. She didn’t seem even a little bit intimidated by my temper. “I just wondered if you remembered really, but didn’t want to say because it would make Peter angry.”
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