A Neverland Tale - HOOKED (eng)

Chapter 6.1 - Filou

Filou. The drifter, scoundrel, sly, trickster, and good-for-nothing. The man who had belonged to (almost) all the factions of this island at one time or another and yet in the end was washed ashore like driftwood, ending up with the pirates. Not a true native, not a Lost Boy. He was nothing and everything at the same time. Sometimes you had to walk a rocky road to appreciate the experience. Every challenge made you stronger... and you needed that in Neverland. To build a callus, you had to trip over rocks and step on sharp pebbles. Even Indian children had to learn that pain was necessary and made you stronger until you could run over a thorny brush without turning a hair. So he, too, had had to take every single step to end up here: On the Jolly Roger, with the terror of the Neverseas. To rise from a small, unimportant deck scrubber to the first mate.

He had earned it. Not only with the odd fight but also by dealing with the pirates' viciousness, intrigue, and ruthlessness. Filou brought a breath of fresh air on board and into the sails. A different view of the world, a different feel for the island and its inhabitants. Knowledge was valuable in Neverland, a place full of oblivion and stagnation. The factions were conspiratorial, usually keeping to themselves, and so was their knowledge. Neverland had its own rules - as if it sensed when the soul chose a new home port. Then one forgot the past, and the secrets much faster. The way through the poppy fields... he would not have found again. He did not remember how to mix the poisonous projectiles that were the death of many pirates and lost people today from the blowpipes of his former tribal brothers. He did not remember the way to Hangman's Tree.

He was now a pirate. Hook was the great enemy of the natives and the lost. THE great nemesis, the (necessary) counterweight of a scale. As an Indian, he knew the necessity of a turning wheel of destiny. The night needed the day. The day needed the night. There had to be hunters and hunted. Dagger and Blackbeard...had come to the island later. And the outcast aborigine was sure that those had arisen from the chaos caused by the fading of the star. They did not belong to the origin of the island, to the spirits who belonged here and who represented those pillars. The chief and the natives, Hook and the pirates, Pan and the lost. This triumvirate had made up Neverland. For him, going to any of the others was not an option. But Filou stood out among the sailors here. Not just because of his skin color or the black symbols that had been stitched into his skin under his shirt, hiding his pirate attire. Faded, just shadows of what they had once been and partly even stitched over by other, nautical images by now.

But that was not it. It was something else. Something that seeped invisibly from his pores and settled into his posture. It was the way he carried his chin and nose, sometimes stretching them into the wind and listening to the waves as if they were whispering to him. Filou may not have surpassed most of the pirates in Hook's crew in physical strength, and in some cases not even in age - but he had other talents. He was clever, cunning, fast, and just as deadly. More than one foolish pirate had already tried to finish him off to usurp the position of first mate.... in vain. And by now, even the dirtiest rats on this ship - at least almost all of them - had realized that Filou belonged and that the position he held was not easily won.

Now he looked at the tobacco wrapped in yellowish paper. Crinkly and quietly crunching plants, their aroma already clung to his fingers. Boredom or tension, sometimes simply habit, drove the precious commodity between his fingers again and again. Now the thin paper in which the mixture of tobacco from the maritime city and his own herbs was wrapped rustled. A soft hiss faded as he lifted the stem to the candle and bent closer to light it. The end began to glow as he pursed his lips and pulled on it until smoke began to rise.