Pedro has always known to be wary of pirates, those lawless sailors who came sometimes to the island and stole whatever they wished, then slipped away again in their fast ships. Everyone knows to be wary of pirates. But there has not been an attack for years, at least not in their port; the danger seemed, until this moment, as imaginary as the danger of being swallowed by a sea creature.
Now he is curled in a ship’s damp hold, cheek pressed to a coil of half-rotted rope. He listens to the slapping of water against the sides of the ship, and the voices of the men above. They speak some tongue Pedro cannot understand.
A man in a brown jerkin brings him hard bread and some fresh water, speaks to him in that strange ugly language, and looks angry when Pedro cannot respond. Pedro spills half the water down his chin in fear.
All through the sea voyage, he is ill. He retches and retches, though there is little enough in his belly to bring up. The man in the brown jerkin shouts at him and makes him clean the mess, but the stench of vomit lingers, mingling with the smell of damp and the slick green-black mold that grows in ever-widening spots on the hold walls.
In between bouts of sickness he lies on his side, eyes closed against the terrible sight of the ship’s walls heaving up and down with the waves, hands over his ears to keep out the sounds of men from above—the thump of their footsteps, the creaking of the wood, their voices raised in laughter and in anger—and drifts in and out of a restless sleep. In his sleep, he returns to the island, to his nook. The beach riddled with stones and shells. The water rushing in and out, offering treasures and taking them back again.
Inside the ship, his eyes adjust to the dimness, to the shadows that creep and shift and cast out tendrils of themselves like tentacles, reaching for him, beckoning to him until he has pulled his legs as close to his belly as he can, clutched his arms around them, tucked his head down so that he occupies as little space as possible, so that he is more difficult to reach. He is surrounded by bulging sacks—supplies, he wonders, or items stolen from his town of Garachico, and from other towns, as well? Pedro stares at the sacks but dares not open them, though his heart pounds against his chest and his fingers curl into fists. Like other children, he was brought up on stories of pirate attacks, which left so many Guanche families in fragments and so many churches and rich houses looted. These pirates did not come only for him—they must have come for many treasures. The church’s silver candlesticks; wealthy ladies’ jewels. Manuel has teased Pedro for years about how soundly he sleeps—could he have slept that day through the screams from an attack?
No, he thinks. No, no, no. But still his fists long to punch. Instead, he puts his palm into his own mouth to stopper the screams trying to hurl themselves into the world.
He weeps when he thinks of Isabel—stringing beads and waiting for him to return home. This thought is more substantial than his imaginings of what could have happened to the town during a pirate attack, and the tears stream and stream, mixing with snot from his nose and saliva from his open, grieving mouth. Manuel will calm her when Isabel grows worried about Pedro’s absence; Manuel will promise to find Pedro, without knowing how impossible the promise will be to keep. He will scour the port and the streets and climb the neighboring hills. He will ask and ask whether anyone has seen the hairy boy—the little beast. At last, perhaps, he will search the shore for a small washed-up body. But he will not find even that, only the bag of perfect shells and a pair of empty shoes.
When the ship docks at last, Pedro is thin and shaky from days and days of vomiting, his tongue dry and sticky. There was no sense of day and night in the ship’s hold, but he was given one meal each day, and he kept count of those—eighteen in all. Eighteen days away from home.
He is bundled roughly up the stairs, his wrists tied tight with rope. He cries out a question, but the man just shoves him up the last steps to the deck, where he stands, eyes squeezed shut against the dazzling sun and shoulders hunched against the stares of the other men, their tongues muttering and their throats laughing. His blood whooshes, loud but not loud enough to deaden other sounds. The tall mast creaks, seabirds scream above their heads, and the sea air blows cool over his face, fresh and salty as it was at home. He keeps his eyes closed and inhales it in great gulps. The salt that runs from between his lids makes the men laugh louder.
There are people all around. Eyes everywhere. Pedro is used to having eyes upon him, but these press hard, encircling him like cage bars.
Isabel, he thinks, and tries very hard not to snivel, though he has never been so frightened, not even when the boys pelted him with rocks. Not even when the new priest sketched the sign of the cross like a barrier before his own chest, eyes as wide as if he had just spied a demon, when Pedro came forward for the holy communion. Isabel, Isabel.
There are other people in this square, men and women and even children, bound and drooping. Most have Moor-dark skin; others look like they should be pale, except that the sun has burned them until they appear almost cooked, red-brown and crispy. But none of them draws the attention that Pedro does; the man in the brown jerkin smiles with half his mouth, pulls up Pedro’s shirt to show his hairy back. Fingers brush, marveling, at his spine. Pedro tries to keep his head down, eyes upon his own bare feet, but the man will not let him, squeezing the sides of Pedro’s jaw until his mouth opens. Pedro’s own breathing rattles inside his ears, half-drowning the excited murmurs of the men who surround him, peering at his teeth.
He longs to run away; Manuel used to say Pedro darted like a fish. But the man in the brown jerkin holds his chin in one hand, and keeps his other hand on Pedro’s shoulder, gripping tight. So Pedro’s eyes dart instead, from face to avid face.
He is too dulled by terror to notice when he is finally bought, a price negotiated, coins clinking into the pirate’s fat purse. He only knows that suddenly there is a new hand upon him, less rough, plump fingers with a gold ring. A voice speaks to him, the words lost to the harsh rustle of his own frantic breaths, and Pedro looks up into a pair of pale blue eyes.
“Come,” the man says again, and this time Pedro understands the word, and could sob for the understanding.
The man does not ask Pedro’s name, or give his own. He speaks Spanish badly and with a strange accent, and calls Pedro his wild boy, which makes Pedro want to bite. But the man feeds him well, better even than his own two servants. He gives Pedro meat from his own plate and says, “We want you glossy,” laughing and wiping grease from his fingers.
This journey is jolting, over land rather than sea, and Pedro dozes through much of it despite his fear, his eyes drooping closed to the sounds of the horses’ hooves rhythmic upon the dusty, pitted roads. Though he is well-fed, his stomach recoils from food, rejecting much of what he eats as if he had drunk bad water; the blue-eyed man shouts in disgust the first time this happens, and begins demanding how long Pedro has been ill. Pedro forms a miserable curl. His belly doesn’t want food; it is too frightened.
They make their beds in fields, at times, one or the other of the big servants standing watch for thieves; other times they all pile into a stable or room at an inn. The man who bought Pedro always gets the bed in the room; Pedro sleeps between the two manservants on the hard floor.
At one inn, in a town that teems with scuttling people as busy and numerous as ants, the man leaves Pedro alone with the servants, who chuckle and toss dice together on the floor of the room while Pedro watches. They do not speak Spanish but another language, enough of whose words are familiar that Pedro can cobble together a small understanding of their conversation, dull as it is—admiration for a serving girl they saw downstairs; irritation for the fleas that leap fearlessly among them all. Pedro scratches at his own flea bites and wonders where these men come from; on his island, there were people from many lands, but he never had reason to pay close attention to any tongues besides his own. He watches the dice fall and clatter, again and again.
When the man returns, it is with two of the inn’s servants, who lug between them a rough wooden tub. As Pedro stares, they return again and again with buckets of steaming water. A serving girl scents the water with oil and herbs. And then the blue-eyed man who bought him directs Pedro to strip and get into the tub.
No, Pedro tries to say; but one servant is already pulling his shirt over his head, and then suddenly he is in the tub, the scalding water making him hiss. The blue-eyed man laughs a little at his reaction, then sets about briskly scrubbing him with harsh soap. The scented water turns quickly gray and murky.
After, he is dried and combed and stands naked before the man and his manservants, fists at his sides and heat that has nothing to do with the bath rushing up from his chest to his cheeks.
The blue-eyed man brought new clothes back with him from outside, and now he orders Pedro to dress. The hose are yellow as ranúnculo, the buttercups at home that send out their runners all along the island and twine, painted, along the edge of Isabel’s comb. There is lace at the shirt’s wrists and throat; the doublet is a deep green, stitched with silver thread. Pedro has never touched, let alone worn, clothes so fine; his fingers fumble with the lacings, and he looks down at himself in disbelief, then up, smiling shyly, to the man for approval.
But the man is frowning. “No,” he says slowly, running a finger around his mouth in thought. “Take them off.”
Tears prick, but Pedro obeys. When he is again bare, he looks back at the man, who nods and finally smiles.
“Yes,” he says. “Wild as God made you. You are perfect.”
When the big servants throw a blanket over him and bear him down the inn’s dark stairway and out, blinking, into the bustle of the street outside, he finds a cart waiting, not the coach they had been using; and in the cart, a cage.
Pedro has learned not to ask questions, for the blue-eyed man never answers them, but he begins crying out questions now. “Where are you taking me?” he says, and then, when there is no answer, only the blanket whipped away and one servant lifting him up, the other holding open the cage’s hinged door, he begins screaming: “No! No!” But as ever, the servants and the blue-eyed man—who has come out through the inn door dressed not in his dusty traveling clothes, but in a tooled leather doublet and bright trunk hose, a snowy plume in his hat—pretend to deafness. The only sign that Pedro is not voiceless and invisible are the curious glances and startled exclamations from passersby.
He kneels inside the cage and folds himself low over his genitals. He has grown accustomed, over the last endless weeks, to terror. It has become his only constant friend, buzzing with an almost-friendly familiarity inside his chest. But this is an entirely new terror; it roars inside his chest like the beast the people of Garachico said he was. The cage has bars of wood, round and oiled smooth, which are nonetheless too strong for Pedro to shift, no matter how he rattles them. They won’t move—they won’t move—and as the cart lurches forward, the servants perched to either side of the cage and the blue-eyed man on the seat in front with the driver, the roaring terror bursts between Pedro’s ribs, up the tunnel of his throat and out of the hole of his mouth. He shouts and shouts, wordless and wild as the man wants him to be, his skin burning under the bristle of hair. But the cart rolls inexorably on, and his throat begins to ache, and the shouts turn to pleadings. First with the man who purchased him, who does not even turn around; then to the God who made him, and to his Son, and to the Holy Mother. When they do not respond he turns to Isabel’s god—to the god and spirits of his mother’s people.
But, of course, he never learned their names, and so they cannot hear him.