Tiger Lily (2 page)

The young people of the tribe were all looking at each other with a combination of exhilaration and fear, except for Tiger Lily, stony and unreadable, her eyes on the man below. Pine Sap grabbed her hand and pulled her back from the cliff’s edge; she had been standing so close the wind might have blown her over.

“They’ll be deciding what to do about him,” Stone said.

Because all Neverlanders knew what danger Englanders brought with them.

The children raced home to see what the village council would do. I stayed and watched the ship floundering in the waves for a while longer, then flew to catch up.

That was the beginning, or at least the beginning of the beginning, of the changes that were coming for Tiger Lily: the arrival of one little man on one little lifeboat. By that day, I had known of Tiger Lily for years. I also knew a little of her history: that Tik Tok, the shaman, had found her while he was out gathering wild lettuce for medicine, under a flower—either abandoned there or hidden from some peril by someone who didn’t survive to come back for her. He’d named her Tiger Lily, after the flower she was under, bundled her into his arms, and taken her home. When she’d grown old enough to seem like a real girl, he’d built her a house next to his down the path that led to the woods and moved her into it. He didn’t want her borrowing his dresses.

Tik Tok lived in a clay house he’d built himself—the most intricate in the village. It was my favorite home to sleep in when I was passing through, because it had the best nooks, and a faerie always likes to sleep in tight places for fear of predators. He’d seen the same constructions done in one of the other tribes on the island—the Bog Dwellers, who lived in the mud bogs among the old bones of prehistoric animals—and he’d dragged the whole rib cage of a beast home piece by piece to make the frame. With a craftsmanship possessed by no one else in any village, he’d fashioned shelves and windows, to create a dwelling that put the rest of the tribe’s simple houses to shame.

Now he was sitting by a warm fire inside, as the sun was setting and the night was growing cool, as it often did at the end of the dry season. He wore a long dress of raspberry-dyed leather—his favorite—and his hair braided down his back, a leather thong tied around his head with a peacock feather in back. His posture was straight and graceful as any woman’s. His eyes were closed in concentration, and his lips moved in a conversation with the invisible gods that, as shaman, he visited in trances. Out of breath, Tiger Lily moved into the room soundlessly and hovered, waiting for him to finish.

In a village where everything was uniform and tidy, Tik Tok’s house was like a treasure trove. The firelight cast shadows on the curved walls where he kept his curious collection of belongings: tiny bird skulls, feathers, a few stones that looked like any other stones but which he treasured, and a beloved collection of exotic items that had washed ashore over the years, which he had found scouring Neverland’s shores. A book, the pages stuck together, the ink blurred. A tarnished metal cup. And, most beloved of all, a box that told time—still ticking away, its mechanism having somehow survived a shipwreck or a long journey across the sea from the continent. The Englanders divided the endlessness of the world into seconds and minutes and hours, and Tik Tok thought this was wonderful.

Tiger Lily moved across the room quietly, examining the clock, the little metal bit he used to wind it, and bending her ear to the loud, steady ticktock, which Tik Tok had renamed himself after in a solemn ceremony attended by the whole village.

Now she sensed a movement, and turned to see that he was observing her.

“Well, my little beast, I hear we have a visitor,” he said, looking her up and down with an amused smile. She always managed to look like a wild beast, mud-stained and chaotic. Her hair was constantly escaping her braid to cling to her face, stuck to her, covered in dirt.

“Will we help him?” she asked.

Tik Tok shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Tiger Lily waited for him to say more, trying her best to remain in respectful silence.

Tik Tok smeared away some of the charcoal he used to line his eyes. “Have you seen my pipe?” he asked.

He stood and moved about the house, searching. He had carved it over two weeks of long intricate work, but it was the fifth one he’d made. He was always losing things. Finally he found it buried under his covers.

He turned his attention to her question, and sighed. Englanders had come to Neverland before. They’d brought their language with them and given it out as a gift to the Bog Dwellers, who had given it to the other tribes in turn over the years. But they’d also brought a strange discomfort to the wild, and they’d been loud and careless in the forest, and gotten themselves murdered by pirates, who hated their fellow Englanders more than anything else on earth and liked to kill them on sight. They’d brought fevers and crippling flus too. But it wasn’t any of this that the Sky Eaters feared.

The Englanders had the aging disease. As time went on they turned gray, and shrank, and, inexplicably, they died. It wasn’t that Neverlanders didn’t know anything about death, but not as a slow giving in, and certainly not an inevitability. This, more than the beasts of their own island, or the brutal pirate inhabitants of the far west shore, was what crept into their dreams at night and chased them through nightmares.

You never could tell when someone would stop growing old in Neverland. For Tik Tok, it had been after wrinkles had walked long deep tracks across his face, but for many people, it was much younger. Some people said it occurred when the most important thing that would ever happen to you triggered something inside that stopped you from moving forward, but Tik Tok thought that was superstition. All anyone knew was that you came to an age and you stayed there, until one day some accident or battle with the dangers of the island claimed you. Therefore sometimes daughters grew older than mothers, and grandchildren became older than grandparents, and age was just a trait, like the color of your hair, or the amount of freckles on your skin.

It was because of the aging disease, Tiger Lily knew, that the Sky Eaters wouldn’t want to help the Englander. They didn’t want to catch what he had.

But something about the tiny lone figure, floating from one certain death into another, tugged at her—I could hear it. (As a faerie, you can hear when something tugs at someone. It’s much like the sound of a low, deep note on a violin string.)

“He won’t survive without our help,” Tiger Lily said. “We’re supposed to be brave, aren’t we?” The wrinkles in Tik Tok’s face moved in response. The story they told was familiar to her.

“I’m not a stranger to your love of lost causes, dear one. But you have to be careful who you meet,” he said, stoking a pipe thoughtfully. “You can’t unmeet them.” He took a long drag of his pipe. Being near Tik Tok always gave one the feeling that everything in the world was exactly in the place it ought to be, and that rushing through anything would be an insult and a waste. “And you should be thinking of other things. You’re getting too old to run wild like you do. Clean yourself up. Brush your hair. Try to look like a girl.”

“I will, if you try to look like a man.”

He smiled wryly, because they both knew how impossible that was; he didn’t have it in him. Tik Tok was as womanly as a man could ever be, and everyone just accepted it, like they accepted the color of the sky, and the fact that night followed the daytime. Grudgingly, he gave Tiger Lily a puff of his pipe. They sat and watched the colors outside the window. From my perch on a shelf, I inhaled the unfurling wisps as they dissipated: the tobacco made the colors thick, the smells richer. Outside, visible through the window, everyone was dispersing from the fire. The girls were walking ahead and the boys were running to catch up. There was, as always, a dance going on between them, one that I’d never seen Tiger Lily take part in.

She lay on her back and pushed her feet against the wall, wiped a layer of sweat from her neck though the air was chilly. She tapped her feet at the wall in a troubled rhythm.

Tik Tok gave her a knowing look. “You’re restless. Everything is too small for you, including your own body. That’s what it’s like to be fifteen. I remember.”

There was a noise in the doorway and they both glanced up to see Pine Sap, pale, with Moon Eye behind him looking pensive and sorry, the way she often did.

“They’ve decided to let the Englander die,” he said.

I was asleep on a leaf by the main fire when I heard her come out of her hut.

She went to the river to wash, after everyone else had gone to bed. Crocs sometimes made their way this far inland, but I knew she wasn’t as scared of them as some of the others, and that she liked to swim alone, after dark. Following her back to her house, I saw there was one candle burning among the huts. Pine Sap’s. He was probably up working on a project, or thinking his deep thoughts. I knew, from nights I’d slept in the village, that he was an insomniac.

When Tiger Lily emerged again from her house and into the square, she’d gathered up a bagful of food.

She set out before the sun came up, her arrows strapped to her back.

I watched her go, intrigued, but also sleepy, comfortable and content. I fell back to sleep before I even thought of following her.

B
efore he ran out on me and my mother for a twinkly-eyed nymph named Belladonna, my father told me a few things. He said rotten logs were the best places for mosquitoes. He told me humans weren’t to be trusted. And he warned me to stay clear of Peter Pan.

It was when he was tracing for me which parts of the island were forbidden territory, and which weren’t. He had called him Pan first. He signaled to me, in a form of language only faeries know:
He can fly. He has horns. He eats men. And he will kill you if he sees you
.

I learned more from the other faeries after that. My childhood friend Mirabella and I used to think about it before bed. We had never seen the lost boys; we didn’t know quite what they were—ghosts or demons or living men. They were the only creatures in the forest we couldn’t find to spy on, but they left evidence of themselves: carcasses of beasts and prey in their wake, and sometimes a pirate skull dangling from a tree. They left their tracks everywhere and sometimes left muddy handprints and the occasional curious artifact—like a papier-mâché mask or a tiny wooden sailing ship—to remind us of their presence. Sometimes the wind carried their yells and hoots to us while we lay in our cozy nooks, deep inside rotting hollow logs. They seemed to know the forest better than we did, and we knew the forest like we knew our own wings. These boys were famous for their violence; they were known to eat wild animals raw with their bared teeth, and to steal girls who wandered alone. Imagining what happened to these human girls once they were stolen made me shudder. My father had told me never to go near their territory. Faeries and tribes alike called that part of the forest “Forbidden.”

But after my father left, I had the irresistible urge to disobey every rule he’d ever given me. I’d fly all over the area I was supposed to avoid, looking for a thrilling glimpse of the boys, and when I got tired or hungry, I’d make a stop at the Sky Eaters’ village nearby, to eat the fleas that can always be found near the animals people keep.

Humans have been known to kill faeries and use us as festive, glowing decorations for certain rituals. But the Sky Eaters and a few other tribes considered the practice barbaric. I rarely felt nervous at all as I sat and ate among them, and it was always fun to observe them. They were colorful, for one thing. The women grew their hair long and fixed it elaborately, and the men—Tik Tok the shaman being the exception—cut theirs short. They had a great tradition of artistry, and made themselves beautiful clothes. They tried to listen to the gods in the trees and the clouds and the water, though they could never hear clearly exactly what they were saying.

It was during one of these visits that I first saw Tiger Lily.