“Quite a storm, wasn’t it?” asked Ishmael, after a short silence. “We scavenged even more junk than usual.”
“Were any other castaways found?” Violet asked.
“Do you mean Count Olaf?” Ishmael asked. “After Friday abandoned him, he’d never dare approach the island. He’s either wandering around the coastal shelf, or he’s trying to swim his way back to wherever he came from.”
The Baudelaires looked at one another, knowing full well that Count Olaf was likely hatching some scheme, particularly as none of the islanders had found the boat’s figurehead, where the deadly spores of the Medusoid Mycelium were hidden. “We weren’t just thinking of Olaf,” Klaus said. “We had some friends who may have been caught in the same storm—a pregnant woman named Kit Snicket who was in a submarine with some associates, and a group of people who were traveling by air.”
Ishmael frowned, and drank some cordial from his seashell. “Those people haven’t turned up,” he said, “but don’t despair, Baudelaires. It seems that everything eventually washes up on our shores. Perhaps their crafts were unharmed by the storm.”
“Perhaps,” Sunny agreed, trying not to think that they might not have been as lucky as that.
“They might turn up in the next day or so,” Ishmael continued. “Another storm is heading this way.”
“How do you know?” Violet asked. “Is there a barometer on the island?”
“There’s no barometer,” Ishmael said, referring to a device that measures the pressure in the atmosphere, which is one way of predicting the weather. “I just know there’s one coming.”
“How would you know such a thing?” Klaus asked, stopping himself from retrieving his commonplace book so he could take notes. “I’ve always heard that the weather is difficult to predict without advanced instruments.”
“We don’t need any advanced instruments on this colony,” Ishmael said. “I predict the weather by using magic.”
“Meledrub,” Sunny said, which meant something along the lines of, “I find that very difficult to believe,” and her siblings silently agreed. The Baudelaires, as a rule, did not believe in magic, although their mother had had a nifty card trick she could occasionally be persuaded to perform. Like all people who have seen something of the world, the children had come across plenty of things they had been unable to explain, from the diabolical hypnotism techniques of Dr. Orwell to the way a girl named Fiona had broken Klaus’s heart, but they had never been tempted to solve these mysteries with a supernatural explanation like magic. Late at night, of course, when one is sitting upright in bed, having been woken up by a sudden loud noise, one believes in all sorts of supernatural things, but it was early afternoon, and the Baudelaires simply could not imagine that Ishmael was some sort of magical weatherman. Their doubt must have shown on their faces, for the facilitator immediately did what many people do when they are not believed, and hurriedly changed the subject.
“What about you, Friday?” Ishmael asked. “Did you find anything else besides the castaways and those awful sunglasses?”
Friday looked quickly at Sunny, but then shook her head firmly. “No,” she said.
“Then please go help your mother with lunch,” he said, “while I talk to our new colonists.”
“Do I have to?” Friday asked. “I’d rather stay here, with the Baudelaires.”
“I’m not going to force you,” Ishmael said gently, “but I’m sure your mother could use some help.”
Without another word, Friday turned and left the tent, walking up the sloping beach toward the other tents of the colony, and the Baudelaires were alone with their facilitator, who leaned down to speak quietly to the orphans.
“Baudelaires,” he said, “as your facilitator, allow me to give you a piece of advice, as you begin your stay on this island.”
“What might that be?” Violet asked.
Ishmael looked around the tent, as if spies were lurking behind the white, fluttering fabric. He took another sip from his seashell, and cracked his knuckles. “Don’t rock the boat,” he said, using an expression which here means “Don’t upset people by doing something that is not customary.” His tone was very cordial, but the children could hear something less cordial almost hidden in his voice, the way a coastal shelf is almost hidden by water. “We’ve been living by our customs for quite some time. Most of us can scarcely remember our lives before we became castaways, and there is a whole generation of islanders who have never lived anywhere else. My advice to you is not to ask so many questions or meddle around too much with our customs. We have taken you in, Baudelaires, which is a kindness, and we expect kindness in return. If you keep prying into the affairs of the island, people are going to think you’re unkind—just like Friday thought Olaf was unkind. So don’t rock the boat. After all, rocking the boat is what got you here in the first place.”
Ishmael smiled at his little joke, and although they found nothing funny about poking fun at a shipwreck that had nearly killed them, the children gave Ishmael a nervous smile in return, and said no more. The tent was silent for a few minutes, until a pleasant-looking woman with a freckly face walked into the tent carrying an enormous clay jar.
“You must be the Baudelaires,” she said, as Friday followed her into the tent carrying a stack of bowls fashioned from coconut shells, “and you must be starving, too. I’m Mrs. Caliban, Friday’s mother, and I do most of the cooking around here. Why don’t you have some lunch?”
“That would be wonderful,” Klaus said. “We’re quite hungry.”
“Whatya fixin?” asked Sunny.
Mrs. Caliban smiled, and opened the jar so the children could peek inside. “Ceviche,” she said. “It’s a South American dish of chopped raw seafood.”
“Oh,” Violet said, with as much enthusiasm as she could muster. Ceviche is an acquired taste, a phrase which here means “something you don’t like the first few times you eat it,” and although the Baudelaires had eaten ceviche before—their mother used to make it in the Baudelaire kitchen, to celebrate the beginning of crab season—it was none of the children’s favorite food, and not precisely what they had in mind as a first meal after being shipwrecked. When I was shipwrecked recently, for instance, I had the fortune to wash aboard a barge where I enjoyed a late supper of roast leg of lamb with creamed polenta and a fricassee of baby artichokes, followed by some aged Gouda served with roasted figs, and finished up with some fresh strawberries dipped in milk chocolate and crushed honeycomb, and I found this to be a wonderful antidote to being tossed like a rag doll in the turbulent waters of a particularly stormy creek. But the Baudelaires accepted their bowls of ceviche, as well as the strange utensils Friday handed them, which were made of wood and looked like a combination of a fork and a spoon.
“They’re runcible spoons,” Friday explained. “We don’t have forks or knives in the colony, as they can be used as weapons.”
“I suppose that’s sensible,” Klaus said, although he couldn’t help but think that nearly anything could be used as a weapon, if one were in a weaponry mood.
“I hope you like it,” Mrs. Caliban said. “There’s not much else you can cook with raw seafood.”
“Negihama,” Sunny said.
“My sister is something of a chef,” Violet explained, “and was suggesting that she could prepare some Japanese dishes for the colony, if there were any wasabi to be had.”
The younger Baudelaires gave their sister a brief nod, realizing that Violet was asking about wasabi not only because it might allow Sunny to make something palatable—a word which here means “that wasn’t ceviche”—but because wasabi, which is a sort of horseradish often used in Japanese food, was one of the few defenses against the Medusoid Mycelium, and with Count Olaf lurking about, she wanted to think about possible strategies should the deadly fungus be let loose from the helmet.
“We don’t have any wasabi,” Mrs. Caliban said. “We don’t have any spices at all, in fact. No spices have washed up on the coastal
shelf.”
“Even if they did,” Ishmael added quickly, “I think we’d just throw them in the arboretum. The stomachs of the colonists are used to spiceless ceviche, and we wouldn’t want to rock the boat.”
Klaus took a bite of ceviche from his runcible spoon, and grimaced at the taste. Traditionally a ceviche is marinated in spices, which gives it an unusual but often delicious flavor, but without such seasoning, Mrs. Caliban’s ceviche tasted like whatever you might find in a fish’s mouth while it was eating. “Do you eat ceviche for every meal?” he asked.
“Certainly not,” Mrs. Caliban said with a little laugh. “That would get tiresome, wouldn’t it? No, we only have ceviche for lunch. Every morning we have seaweed salad for breakfast, and for dinner we have a mild onion soup served with a handful of wild grass. You might get tired of such bland food, but it tastes better if you wash it down with coconut cordial.” Friday’s mother reached into a deep pocket in her white robe, and brought out three large seashells that had been fashioned into canteens, and handed one to each Baudelaire.
“Let’s drink a toast,” Friday suggested, holding up her own seashell. Mrs. Caliban raised hers, and Ishmael wiggled in his clay chair and opened the stopper of his seashell once more.
“An excellent idea,” the facilitator said, with a wide, wide smile. “Let’s drink a toast to the Baudelaire orphans!”
“To the Baudelaires!” agreed Mrs. Caliban, raising her seashell. “Welcome to the island!”
“I hope you stay here forever and ever!” Friday cried.
The Baudelaires looked at the three islanders grinning at them, and tried their best to grin back, although they had so much on their minds that their grins were not very enthusiastic. The Baudelaires wondered if they really had to eat spiceless ceviche, not only for this particular lunch, but for future lunches on the island. The Baudelaires wondered if they had to drink more of the coconut cordial, and if refusing to do so would be considered rocking the boat. They wondered why the figurehead of the boat had not been found, and they wondered where Count Olaf was, and what he was up to, and they wondered about their friends and associates who were somewhere at sea, and about all of the people they had left behind in the Hotel Denouement. But at this moment, the Baudelaires wondered one thing most of all, and that was why Ishmael had called them orphans, when they hadn’t told him their whole story. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny looked first at their bowls of ceviche, and then at Friday and her mother, and then at their seashells, and finally up at Ishmael, who was smiling down at them from his enormous chair, and the castaways wondered if they really had reached a place that was far from the world’s treachery or if the world’s treachery was just hidden someplace, the way Count Olaf was hidden somewhere very nearby at that very moment. They looked up at their facilitator, uncertain if they were safe after all, and wondering what they could do about it if they weren’t.
“I won’t force you,” Ishmael said quietly to the children, and the Baudelaire orphans wondered if that were true after all.
CHAPTER
Five
Unless you are unusually insouciant—which is merely a fancy way of saying “the opposite of curious”—or one of the Baudelaire orphans yourself, you are probably wondering whether or not the three children drank the coconut cordial that was offered them rather forcefully by Ishmael. Perhaps you have been in situations yourself, where you have been offered a beverage or food you would rather not consume by someone you would rather not refuse, or perhaps you have been warned about people who will offer such things and told to avoid succumbing, a word which here means “accepting, rather than refusing, what you are given.” Such situations are often referred to as incidents of “peer pressure,” as “peer” is a word for someone with whom you are associating and “pressure” is a word for the influence such people often have. If you are a braeman or braewoman—a term for someone who lives all alone on a hill—then peer pressure is fairly easy to avoid, as you have no peers except for the occasional wild sheep who may wander near your cave and try to pressure you into growing a woolly coat. But if you live among people, whether they are people in your family, in your school, or in your secret organization, then every moment of your life is an incident of peer pressure, and you cannot avoid it any more than a boat at sea can avoid a surrounding storm. If you wake up in the morning at a particular time, when you would rather hide your head under your pillow until you are too hungry to stand it any longer, then you are succumbing to the peer pressure of your warden or morning butler. If you eat a breakfast that someone prepares for you, or prepare your own breakfast from food you have purchased, when you would rather stomp your feet and demand delicacies from faraway lands, then you are succumbing to the peer pressure of your grocer or breakfast chef. All day long, everyone in the world is succumbing to peer pressure, whether it is the pressure of their fourth grade peers to play dodge ball during recess or the pressure of their fellow circus performers to balance rubber balls on their noses, and if you try to avoid every instance of peer pressure you will end up without any peers whatsoever, and the trick is to succumb to enough pressure that you do not drive your peers away, but not so much that you end up in a situation in which you are dead or otherwise uncomfortable. This is a difficult trick, and most people never master it, and end up dead or uncomfortable at least once during their lives.
The Baudelaire orphans had been uncomfortable more than enough times over the course of their misadventures, and having found themselves on a distant island with only one set of peers to choose from, they succumbed to the pressure of Ishmael, and Friday, and Mrs. Caliban, and all of the other islanders who lived with the children in their new home. They sat in Ishmael’s tent, and drank a bit of coconut cordial as they ate their lunch of spice-free ceviche, even though the drink left them feeling a bit dizzy and the food left them feeling a bit slimy, rather than leaving the colony and finding their own food and drink. They wore their white robes, even though they were a bit heavy for the warm weather, rather than trying to fashion garments of their own. And they kept quiet about the discouraged items they were keeping in their pockets—Violet’s hair ribbon, Klaus’s commonplace book, and Sunny’s whisk—rather than rocking the boat, as the colony’s facilitator had warned them, not even daring to ask Friday why she had given Sunny the kitchen implement in the first place.
But despite the strong taste of cordial, the bland taste of the food, the unflattering robes, and the secret items, the Baudelaires still felt more at home than they had in quite some time. Although the children had always managed to find a companion or two no matter where they wandered, the Baudelaires had not really been accepted by any sort of community since Count Olaf had framed the children for murder, forcing them to hide and disguise themselves countless times. The Baudelaires felt safe living with the colony, knowing that Count Olaf was not allowed near them, and that their associates, if they, too, ended up as castaways, would be welcomed into the tent as long as they, too, succumbed to the islanders’ peer pressure. Spiceless food, unflattering clothing, and suspicious beverages seemed a fair price to pay for a safe place to call home, and for a group of people who, if not exactly friends, were at least companions for as long as they wished to stay.
The days passed, and the island remained a safe if bland place for the siblings. Violet would have liked to spend her days assisting the islanders in the building of the enormous outrigger, but at Ishmael’s suggestion she assisted Friday, Robinson, and Professor Fletcher with the colony’s laundry, and spent most of her time at the saltwater falls, washing everyone’s robes and laying them out on rocks to dry in the sun. Klaus would have enjoyed walking over the brae to catalog all of the detritus the colonists had collected while storm scavenging, but everyone had agreed with the facilitator’s idea that the middle Baudelaire would stay at Ishmael’s side at all times, so he spent his days piling clay on the old man’s feet, and running to refill his seashell with cordial.
Only Sunny was allowed to do something
in her area of expertise, but assisting Mrs. Caliban with the cooking was not very interesting, as the colony’s three meals were very easy to prepare. Every morning, the youngest Baudelaire would retrieve the seaweed that Alonso and Ariel had harvested from the sea, after it had been rinsed by Sherman and Robinson and laid out to dry by Erewhon and Weyden, and simply throw it into a bowl for breakfast. In the afternoon, Ferdinand and Larsen would bring an enormous pile of fish they had captured in the colony’s nets, so Sunny and Mrs. Caliban could mush it into ceviche with their runcible spoons, and in the evening the two chefs would light a fire and slowly simmer a pot of wild onions Omeros and Finn had picked, along with wild grasses reaped by Brewster and Calypso that served as dinner’s only spice, and serve the soup alongside seashells full of the coconut cordial Byam and Willa had fermented from coconuts Mr. Pitcairn and Ms. Marlow had gathered from the island’s coconut trees. None of these recipes was very challenging to prepare, and Sunny ended up spending much of her day in idleness, a word which here means “lounging around with Mrs. Caliban, sipping coconut cordial and staring at the sea.”