The Cannibals Read Online Free Page A

calm lasted into evening. The air grew clammy hot, the sky full of clouds that looked torn and shredded, bleeding crimson through their wounds. My father had the topgallants furled, and reefs put in the topsails. Heordered a sailor to double the length of the longboat's towline. But he kept to his word and let the convicts dance.
    The fiddler sat where he always did, bobbing his black bush of a head as he squealed out cheerful songs. Boy danced with boy, convict with convict, in a wild confusion of stamping feet and swirling bodies. I saw the giant Gaskin Boggis whirling Penny by his webbed hands. The red hair of young Carrots was like a fire leaping through the crowd.
    I had always loved our dances. They were moments of joy in months of misery. But now the music failed to stir me, and I sat with Midge at the foot of the mainmast shrouds.
    The deck vibrated. The rigging trembled. Round went the boys in a lively reel, and their bare feet sent a drumroll over the sea and up to the sky, and it seemed to marshal the clouds. A breath of wind put a curl in the topsail; then the ship groaned from end to end.
    “Here comes that storm,” said Midge. “By cracky, don't your father know the sea?”
    The next puff filled the mainsail. With a creak in her timbers, the ship started moving.
    “It's Australia for me,” said Midge. “If the wind pipes up they'll hoist the boat. They'd never tow it in a storm.”
    I heard the laughter of the sailors, the thumps as pairs of boys collided.
    Midgely touched my arm. “Will you promise me something, Tom?” he asked. “When you get home, will you see if me mum's alive? And if she is, will you tell her I ain't angry that she didn't want me?”
    “Oh, Midge,” I said.
    “Tell her this,” said he. “Tell her, ‘He got to go to sea, missus. Your boy went all the way to halfway round the world.’ Will you say that to her?”
    The ship was sailing now. The yards were braced, the deck aslant. Like sixty spinning tops, the convict boys massed along the lower rail.
    I leapt up and grabbed Midgely. I pulled him to his feet; I danced him down the deck. We swirled among the boys and out again, past the lumber, past the fiddler. I pushed him against the mainmast shrouds. “Climb!” I told him.
    He didn't question me. In a flash he was gone, scurrying up the ratlines. I followed him, but not so quickly. It alarmed me to feel the rope closing round my feet, the steep tilt of the ship. Before I was halfway up, the deck seemed impossibly distant. But I struggled on, and finally Midge reached down from the maintop and helped me through the lubber's hole. I collapsed on the broad, curved surface.
    “Good for you, Tom,” he said.
    The top was more exposed than I'd thought it would be, nor as secure as I'd hoped. There was no rail or hoop to keep me there. I lay flat on my stomach, my hands wedged in the gap of the doubled mast. The big maincourse hung on its great yard, creaking as it shifted in the iron truss. I could look above it to the sails of the foremast, down to the dancing convicts. From side to side was empty sea.
    The fiddler's song came to an end, and the dancing petered out. I looked for Boggis and Weedle and Benjamin Penny, but couldn't find them on the bit of deck that I could see. When the sailors marched the boys below, not one of the three, nor Carrots, was anywhere in the line.
    “What are they up to?” I asked Midge. “Do you think they saw us? Do you think they know we're here?”
    “Not a chance,” said Midgely. “But even if they did, what does it matter?”
    The wind kept rising as the sky grew dark. I looked out to the north, hoping to see the island we would have to reach, or at least the breakers on its shore. But there was not so much as a speck of land, and soon we were fully in darkness. The wind hummed; the maintop tilted as the brig bounded through the waves.
    The air took on a hot tingle. Far away, lightning flashed and sizzled. Then the wind rose again, and a