Then Toñina, wearing only a loose shift, walked slowly up the ravine, the freed fur of her body astonishing him even in his fatigue, with its blurred grace, the late sun behind her setting her lush form alight.

“Oh!” Hans exclaimed, his heart returning to him all at once. “I thought I’d lost you!” He smiled foolishly, stood up, staggering a little and nervously brushed the leaves and sand from his ragged body.

She smiled and answered in a hoarse voice, “And I thought you too were gone.”

They held one another with weary joy and relief.

Then Toñina stepped away, clasping his hand, and said, “I need help with Mari,” and wondrous apparition, she led him back down toward the sea.

He stumbled behind her, seeping sand.  They had to carry her friend who was too weak to walk. Marilena didn’t speak though she looked up gratefully at Hans. He took her by the shoulders and Toñina by her feet. Though she appeared to be an ample woman, they had little trouble bearing her up the canyon.  She was thinner from the voyage and the hardship, though it seemed only a week had passed. Hans had grown lankier and though Toñina’s fur softened her form, she too looked thinner. Hans expanded the windbreak for the three of them, hanging some of the women’s clothes to dry on the boards, though Marilena shook her head and refused to remove her damp garments.

After a long time, Cook said, “I wonder if another ship’ll ever come and find us.”

She mumbled at Toñina, even in her fatigue, “Put on your dress and bodice. . . It’s not right to go about in nothing but a shift.”

Toñina laughed ruefully.  “I may never wear them again.  I can breathe!”

Hans looked away up the wash, discomfited, though the sight of her wouldn’t leave him.  Her breasts shone under the damp cloth for they were not as furry as the rest of her body, and her nipples rose like small pink stones. But he was also glad to feel life flooding back into him. 

Marilena and Toñina lay down beside one another up against the curve of the cliff wall, to give and get warmth. Hans heaped warm sand and leaves upon them to bring further comfort until only the heads of the women protruded. Toñina didn’t speak but she looked at him from out of her exhaustion with gratitude. 

Hans had heard of a farmer once who found a boy’s head rising from his plowed field.  The boy sprang up beaming and fully formed, naked as a babe from the furrow and told the farmer he would grant him three wishes.  Would Hans’s own wishes be granted? Would Toñina return his affection? Her gaze without guile humbled him and reminded him of the woman’s face reflected in the water of the bucket those many weeks ago.  She was so foreign and still so close, as close as the welcome earth, the bed of leaves he’d once found in the forest during his solitary wanderings before he shipped aboard the Cockaigne.  He lay down a short distance away from the women and burrowed in.

A ceiling of stars lowered towards them, settling just above his makeshift windbreak. The sea grew louder and paced the beach, to and fro, to and fro. Hans couldn’t sleep even in extremis, for his mind filled with thoughts of Toñina’s haloed body against the sun, her fluent contours beneath cloth and fur.  He ached for her.  He also ached with bruises from the beating the sea had given him.  But at last, he sank into sleep. 

When he woke midday, the women were gone.  Had he dreamt them?  No, Toñina’s clothes hung from the planks; her light shift had blown along the ravine and caught on a prickly bush where it flapped like a pale spirit of the island. 

But now Hans was famished and began to rummage in the cracked barrel he’d found. He pulled out some soggy tack, something to jaw at least, and soothe his hunger, though the seawater choked him. He examined the other barrel that had remained sealed and discovered to his delight, a spigot that once opened, yielded a cloudy but untainted black beer. He happily slaked his thirst.

Down the ravine, he could see a wedge of innocent blue ocean, placid now as if nothing had happened.  But the onshore breeze brought back the corpse-reek.  To escape the stench, he wandered up the ravine and after some time found a thread of water seeping down from the red cliffs above. Jubilant, he wanted to tell the others and then realized by the prints (from Toñina’s delicate foot smudged by fur and Marilena’s leather slipper) that the women had already discovered the spring. He doubled back and stumbled out to the beach, half-giddy, looking for them.

Toñina stood wrapping her body in a long ragged red shawl, something she must’ve found onshore, covering the middle of her body but leaving her shoulders and lower legs free, in the style of those islanders on the other side of the world.  Hans had seen the colored engravings in the print shop from the books of the Dutch East Indies Company, where the natives of Malacca simply wound themselves in cloth as if they were gaudy caterpillars binding themselves in cocoon. Marilena, the little dog, and what was this?! – a wiry man limping heavily scavenged the shore behind her.

 “Cook, You’re alive then!” Hans shouted and hopped as fast as he could over the cobbles toward him. 

Cook grinned and waved at him.

Hans threw his arms around the man who protested and pushed him away. “Don’t knock me down now.”

“Good to see a man who knows how to make a meal, even if it’s foul.”

Cook grinned but then grumbled at him, “And where’s my pot and ladle?”  He pulled a sad face, his knobby arms hanging at his sides. 

“Probably at the bottom of the blasted sea.”

“Oh! No more pottage for us.” 

Toñina stood nearby watching them with amusement, one hand on her hip.  Hans looked over at her, and said, “Good morning, I saw that you found the water.”

She squinted up at the sun and answered, “Midday, and yes the water was delicious!”

“Ah, Good Day then, especially when I see you alive and lovely in red.” 

She laughed.  “Here we stand half-starved and bruised from the storm and you flatter me.”

“I’m glad to see you.”

She turned away and answered quietly, “And I, you.  But there are things to tend.  Do you see that man down the shore? He needs help, but won’t let me get near.  Maybe you can approach him.”

The Brewer lay on his side further down the cobbles, watching them, head resting on his bent arm as if he were just loafing around, but the other arm was bloodied and oddly cocked on the sand.  He frowned at Hans and groaned.  And down at the far end of the curved shore there was still another survivor, Hilda. She flapped her arms about, as if testing the air to make sure that her cage was gone. Then she turned and disappeared into the palm jungle. Hans scanned the beach for others, hoping to see his friend Ferruccio, but there were no others moving.

“Give me a hand then with the Brewer,” Hans said to Cook.  “His arm wants a splint I think.”

“Yeah, he wants wood after all the trees he attacked.”

“Come on. . .” Hans chose two narrow lengths of bleached wood from the smash-up of some ship (for surely there lay more shipwreck on shore than their own), and they approached The Brewer. 

“We’re going to help you now, but it’ll hurt some,” Hans warned.

Hans rinsed the broken forearm with seawater he brought up in a tin, while the man cried out, but let him cleanse the place where the bone broke skin. Cook held the man down, as Hans straightened and lashed the arm between the boards and wrapped it with a strip of linen torn from his tunic, just as he’d once observed the Jonghelinck sisters do for one of his friends who’d fallen from a tree. The Brewer howled, and didn’t stop for a long while.

Then came the grim work.  Hans and Cook turned to the burials.  They each fastened a torn cloth around their faces to dull the smell. The first corpses Hans encountered turned out to be two of the oakum boys, Ferruccio’s helpers, clinging to each other like livid blue vines, like brothers from the bottom of the sea. The third boy was nowhere to be seen. 

Cook remained at some distance, swaying unsteadily and said, “I don’t know if I can do this, sailor.”

Hans sat down heavily and bent his head to his knees, overcome with burden.  No one comforted him, no one bothered him.  After a while Toñina came and touched him between the shoulders.  She placed a reassuring hand on his sinewy back and he breathed more easily, though he didn’t look up, for he felt responsible.  It made no sense but still he felt he should have saved the boys.

At last Cook shuffled up to him and the two of them silently carried the boys together up to an earthen clearing near the palms and began digging with broken spars and their hands.  They lay the boys twinned as they’d found them, in the earth and covered them with a large stone, to keep animals from digging them up. Then they heaped dirt upon the stone.

They didn’t find Ferruccio, the Captain or the Recluse that day. They discovered a few others though from their shipwreck and former wrecks too, in various stages of wasting away – dark bloated bodies or older skeleton sacks, briny and mummified by salt-air, some dismembered by animals or vultures, a few of which, even now strode about the bodies with the confidence of ownership, their pale blue beaks darkened.

Hans thought, first we belong to our mothers, then no one but ourselves, then Death who is generous and shares with the living.  The white legs and naked skulls of the vultures gave them a solemn, monkish look.  They were thorough.  Many of the long-dead had been reduced to bone cudgels, staves, pegs, and cups. Unwittingly Hans thought about how he could use them.

The women joined them now too, bending to each one of the dead and speaking words he didn’t understand, though his Spanish was fair. Like the men, the women also spoke through scraps of cloth they’d tied round their faces to check the smell.  Sometimes Toñina touched a skeletal shoulder or the curled white digits of a hand. Once he thought he heard her say, “Sleep well, castaway, back in the arms of your mother.”

After three burials the two men were exhausted and Cook’s limp more pronounced.  They sat and leaned up against a log facing the sea without speaking. After a long time, Cook said, “I wonder if another ship’ll ever come and find us.”  Then he promptly nodded off and began to snore even before Hans said, “Of course, Cook – they need a good stew maker like you!”

Hans stood and looked back on the unknown island.  They’d been thrown up on the verdant westerly side, marked by palm jungle then forests climbing up to the flat ridge and traversing the flanks of a volcano.  It was nothing like the peak of Teide.  Instead of looming heavily above, following you everywhere you went with its snowy glare, this volcano drifted lightly beyond the torn fog and appeared spectral.  Hans stared uneasily at the land.  The solitary peak after all, presided over shipwreck.  There was no smoke, nor any sign of town or encampment. Maybe the island had shrugged everyone off even as it received bodies from the storm seas that every season beat toward it.

Hans wandered farther up the shore to a place where the jungle ran down close to the water and he sat alone on a palm log. He slyly observed Toñina’s glistening form at a distance, light overlaying dark, the way an animal’s fur was never simply all one color, but richly hued and diverse. She’d gone back to scavenging.  Sometimes when she bent over, her upper back shook like a shield in the sun.  Other times it appeared liquid and various as the surface of the sea or feathered where she’d gotten wet, the clumps pointed and patterned as wings.  She was a splendid creature, a lioness, a dolphin, a falcon, a woman.

The women followed the tide out on a dark shelf of rock and foraged in the little pools left behind, netting a few small fish from the water with scraps of cloth.  Then they placed them in Marilena’s folded skirt, the hem drawn up and tucked into her waistband to make a sack. 

He imagined bright licks of fire roasting the fish and it cheered him. But they had no flint or punk to make fire, and so later when the five of them gathered for a meal they ate the gutted fingerlings raw with mingled gusto and disgust.  Hunger lowered expectations and necessity was cook.  Still Cook tried his best, spitting some of the fish on a driftwood stick and leaving them in the hot sun to cure for later. 

In the days that followed, the men buried the remaining half-dozen dead, and along with the women they collected what they could from the bodies (knives, pipes, shoes, shirts, breeches, and sometimes a ring or earring, once a silver locket with a snippet of a woman’s yellow hair) and from the shore (more wood, canvas, rigging, and even a wooden cleat attached to its plank, though they weren’t sure what they’d do with it, surely it would suggest a purpose). They created small ramshackle dwellings in the ravine and settled into a daily rhythm.  Carry water from the seep, gather what food could be found, stock up on wood. Watch the horizon for sails.