The Island by Peter Benchley

Author:Peter Benchley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 0553133969
Publisher: Bantam Books
Published: 1980-03-04T00:26:59+00:00

He did not know how long he slept, for his sleep was restless and bothered by dreams of mayhem terrifying in their realism. At times he was hot, and he felt his face bathed by liquid and his nostrils stung with the smell of vinegar; at times cold, and he felt the scratchy texture of coarse cloth against his raw skin.

He awoke during a night, naked on his back on a mat of woven grass. He was in a grass-and-mud hut, an eight-by-eight-foot hemisphere. When he tried to move, he felt restraints, and he saw that his arms and legs were covered with vegetable poultices. The pain had subsided into a dull ache.

The woman sat beside him, cross-legged on the dirt floor, stirring something in a bowl. She had changed from the black coat into a gray poncho, had washed the charcoal from her face, and had cut off her waxed hair. What remained was a soft inch or two of brownish-blond turf. Maynard could not tell how old she was. Her angular face was creased and cracked from salt air and sun. Her fingers moved stiffly, arthritically, and her knuckles were swollen. But in a humid climate, arthritis often came to the very young. Her breasts—what little he could see of their outline beneath the poncho—were high and firm, and the flesh on her legs was lean. Allowing for the probability that weather and primitive living had aged her beyond her years, he guessed she could be thirty or thirty-five years old.

The light in the hut came from a rubber-covered flashlight that was propped between two bricks on the floor.

He pointed at the flashlight and said, “Where’d that come from?”

“A prize. Roche took it. A rich one it was. Two whole boxes of 6-12. Peaches. Nuts, too. And rum! He was hot for a week. They all were.”

“What happens when the batteries die?”

“They die. Like all things. Others come along.” She passed food to him. “Eat”

It was a slab of fish, raw, salted, and dried, but still slimy.

“You don’t cook food?”

“You’re mad. You think I want to lose my tongue?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Fires are dangerous. A green-wood fire during the day merits a flogging. For a fire at night, they cut your tongue.”

“Why are fires dangerous?”

“You are ignorant as well as craven. They would see us.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“They,” she said. “The others.”

Maynard raised the piece of fish to his mouth. He held his breath and tried to chew it. It was rubbery and caked with grit. He couldn’t swallow. He picked the fish from his mouth and dropped it in the dirt. “I’m not very hungry.”

“I thought as much,” she said. “I’ll fix that by and by.”

Maynard lay back and moved his limbs. The pain was ebbing. “What’s in these?” He patted one of the poultices.

“Spirea.” She poured liquid from a clay jug into the bowl in her lap and continued to stir.

Spirea, Maynard thought. Where had he read about spirea? Morison, Ernie Bradford, Homer? None of them, but Homer triggered the mnemonic.

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