ON STRANGER TIDES 8 page

As neatly as if it were a dance move they'd been practicing, Davies stepped out and punched the old surgeon in the head with the knuckle-guard of his sword, and Nourse caught the man as he fell.

"Great," said Davies with satisfaction. "Off we go."

Chapter Eight

No more than a minute later Shandy and the trembling officer were dragging the blanket-wrapped corpse and swords across the deck. The long bundle had proved to be too heavy and awkward to carry

—especially if Shandy was to keep his concealed pistol aimed at the officer, who had the feet-end of the burden—and so they'd had to simply drag it in this awkward, crouching, torturingly slow way.

Shandy was sweating heavily, and not just because of the hot tropical sun that beat down on his head and glared on the white deck—he was as acutely aware of each armed sailor as he would have been of a scorpion clinging to his clothing, and he tried to keep his mind on the task of lugging the unwieldy bundle to the forecastle, and not imagine what would happen when the powder magazine exploded, or when the sailors caught on and opened fire on them, or when it occurred to the white-lipped officer at the other end of the blanket that when pandemonium erupted he'd be caught squarely in the crossfire.

As they scuffed and shambled along, passing the midships hatch cover now, both men panting through open mouths, the officer's eyes never left Shandy's concealed right hand, and Shandy knew that if his cramping grip of the sweat-slick weapon should slip, his corpse-carrying partner would instantly be sprinting away, shouting the alarm.

The disarmed captives up on the forecastle watched their approach. They had heard that this was the corpse of Philip Davies being dragged over to them, and they were bitterly glad that Shandy was being made to bring it.

"Come just a bit closer, Shandy, you boasie raasclaat!" shouted one man. "It'll be worth missing my hanging to get my hands on your neck."

"This is how you thank Davies for letting you live?" put in another. "There'll be zombies sent after you, don't doubt it."

Some of the Navy sailors, mostly younger ones, snickered at this bit of superstition.

A long, scuffling minute later—just as they were hobbling past the forward hatch cover—Shandy actually saw his unwilling companion finally work out what would happen in the next couple of minutes.

"I won't hesitate," Shandy gasped, but the officer had suddenly dropped the captain's feet and was running back the way they'd come.

"It's a trick!" he was yelling. "Davies is below rigging a fuse to the magazine!"

Shandy breathed a sigh of what was almost relief, for at least the tight, silent suspense was over.

Quickly but carefully he crouched, flipped the blanket open and rolled Captain Wilson's body flop-thudding onto the deck, kicked the weapons back onto the cloth, bundled it all up like a sack … then paused for an instant, looking around.

Only one of the surrounding Navy men had grasped the situation and was leveling a pistol at him.

Shandy fired at him without aiming—missing, but spoiling the man's aim so that the ball splintered the rail behind Shandy—and then, waving the bundle of weapons around his head, he ran headlong for the forecastle.

Gunfire banged and cracked, and he heard pistol balls buzz past and felt one whack against his whirling bundle. Just short of the raised forecastle deck he flung the bundle up at the astonished pirates, and let the momentum of the contortion carry him into a leap sideways toward the companion ladder.

Sounding like quick strokes of a hammer, two pistol balls punched the bulkhead he'd been in front of.

One foot touched a ladder rung and then he was up on the forecastle, wrenching open the dueling-pistols case. "Onto the Jenny!" he gasped, snatching the two pistols out of the velvet-lined case and turning back toward the waist.

But before he could decide who to shoot at he was flung to his knees as the whole ship lurched violently forward and a basso profundo thunderclap shook the air all the way up to the mast-tops and the entire stern of the ship swelled incredibly upward and outward, dissolving into a towering cloud of dust and smoke and spinning timbers. The boiling sea was shadowed for dozens of yards to port and starboard by the sudden, churning cloud, and pockmarked by the splashes of things falling into it, and the prolonged thunder rolled away across the waves.

Then masts started coming down, first with a snapping of lines, which, though loud as pistol shots, could scarcely be heard over the continuing roar of the explosion, then with a ponderous rushing through the smoky air, finally culminating in the twangy yielding of the safety nets and the bone-jarring crash as the timbers hit the deck.

The deck Shandy crouched on wasn't level anymore—it was tilted down toward the stern, and even as he noticed it, the tilt became more pronounced. He scrabbled around, dropping both pistols, and on his hands and knees crawled up the slanting forecastle deck to the port rail and grabbed one of the stanchions.

He looked aft, which was down. The stern half of the ship was probably under water, but the torn and crumpled sails, and beyond them the thick smoke, made it impossible to be sure. Captain Wilson's corpse had apparently rolled away while he wasn't looking, but he saw one of the unfired dueling pistols cartwheel into oblivion. All around him he could hear air hissing up out of the hull, and bits of wood and metal still clattering down out of the black sky.

Someone was shaking his arm, and when he looked up he saw that it was Davies, his Navy jacket hacked to tatters, straddling the rail and shouting at him. Shandy couldn't make out the words, but it was clear that Davies wanted him to follow him, so Shandy scrambled up onto the rail.

In the choppy water below rocked the Jenny, freed of all but one of the lines mooring her to the stricken man-of-war, and even as he noticed it he saw one of the pirates chop the last line through with a saber and then jump from the ship's up-tilted bow to the water thirty feet below.

"Go!" yelled Davies, giving Shandy a hard slap between the shoulders and then leaping from the rail after him.

The first few minutes aboard the Jenny were a scrambling nightmare—a dozen men, half of them wounded, struggled to hoist sails, half of them torn by shot, in a desperate effort to get headway and tack clear before the man-of-war sank, creating a turbulence powerful enough to founder bigger vessels than the Jenny.

At last, when the Navy ship had sunk to her middle, and her vast, dripping bow was raised entirely out of the water, and her two boats, crowded with sailors, had rowed thirty yards to the south, the Jenny's mainsail stopped luffing and flumped out taut. A few moments later the sloop began moving through the water and Davies ordered the tiller eased. They were a hundred yards southeast and picking up speed when the man-of-war's bow, spurting smoke as the explosion-fouled air in her was forced out, disappeared and was replaced by a white commotion of boiling and splashing.

"Hold her steady as she is … while we inventory," called Davies wearily, leaning by the stern. He was pale under his tan, and didn't seem to have the strength to push away from the rail.

Skank secured the jib sheet around a belaying pin and then leaned on the gunwale to catch his breath.

"How … in hell … did we get out of that?"

Davies laughed weakly and waved at Shandy, who was crouched on the stern rail and shivering, more from shock than because of his wet clothes. "Our boy Shandy got the captain's confidence with his song-and-dance about being a forced man—and then, first chance he got, Shandy shot him."

In the stunned silence that followed this pronouncement, Shandy turned away, looking back at the tangled litter visible on the distant blue-green wave faces whenever the swell raised the Jenny's stern.

Skank, his weariness forgotten, scrambled over the corpses and fouled rigging to the stern. "Really?"

he asked, his voice hoarse with awe. "All that I'm-not-one-of-these talk you gave him was just play-acting?"

Shandy sighed, and when he shrugged he could feel that the tension had cramped its way back into his muscles. This is my life now, he thought. The men in those lifeboats know who I am. I couldn't be more committed. He turned around and grinned at Skank. "That's right," he said. "And I had to make it convincing enough to fool you lads too, so you'd react naturally."

Skank was frowning in bewilderment. "But you couldn't have been pretending … I was right next to you … "

"I told you I was involved with the theater for years, didn't I?" asked Shandy with affected lightness.

"Anyway, you saw that Davies was bound when he was brought aboard, didn't you? Who do you think cut him loose, the captain? And who threw the swords to you?"

"Damn," Skank muttered, shaking his head. "You're good."

Davies was squinting at Shandy, and he laughed softly. "Yes," he said, "You're a good actor, Jack."

Davies blinked and swayed, paler than before, then shook his head sharply. "Did Hodge's old bocor survive?"

After a moment's search, the bocor's eviscerated body was found draped from the deck edge down into the hold. "No, Phil," came a hoarse call from a narrowed throat.

"Well, find where he hid his restorative snackies and bring 'em to me up by the bow." He turned to Shandy and said, more quietly, "Dried liver and black sausage and raisins, mostly. Bocors always gorge on such trash after doing heavy magic, and I did one hell of a piece of it today. Them fire-sprites were ready and hungry."

"So I saw. Why liver and sausage and raisins?"

"Don't know. They claim it keeps their gums red, but all old bocors have white gums anyway."

Davies took a deep breath, then slapped him on the back. "There's rum forward—I need some to wake up Mate Care-For so he'll get busy on my shoulder wound, and I'll bet you won't turn down a gulp or two."

"No," Shandy said fervently.

"Did Hodge come through?" Davies asked a man near him.

"No, Phil. He caught a ball in the belly as we were going over the rail, and he jumped but he never bobbed up again."

"All right, I'll take it. Bear to southwest," Davies called to the disheartened crew. "All of you that are too hurt to work, mend sails and splice line. We're going to have to sail thefty, night and day, to get to the Florida rendezvous in time."

"Aw hell, Phil," complained one lean old fellow, "we're too shot up. Nobody could blame us if we just went back to N'Providence."

Davies gave him a wolfish grin. "When did any of us worry about what we'd be blamed for? The Carmichael is my ship, and I want her back; and I think Ed Thatch is soon to be King of the West Indies, and I want to be sitting high when the smoke clears. It's too bad some of you are old enough to remember the peaceful buccaneer days, because those days are long gone—the summer's over and empire season is here, and in a few more years it probably won't be possible anywhere in the Caribbean to just sit in the sun and cook scavenged Spanish livestock over the buccan fires. It's a new world, right enough, a world for the taking, and we're the ones who know how to live in it without having to pretend it's a district of England or France or Spain. All that could hold us back is laziness."

"Well, Phil," the man said, a bit baffled by this speech, "laziness is what I do best."

Davies dismissed him with a wave. "Then obey orders—stick with me and you'll eat and drink your fill, or be dead and not care." He pulled Shandy along toward the nodding bow, and when they got there he fumbled under a pile of canvas, and, with a glad cry, produced a bottle. He pulled out the cork with his teeth and handed the bottle to Shandy.

Shandy took several deep gulps of the sun-warmed liquor; it seemed to consist of vapor as much as liquid, and when he inhaled after handing the bottle back, it was like taking another sip.

"Now tell me," said Davies after swigging quite a bit of it himself, "why did you shoot Wilson?"

Shandy spread his hands. "He was going to kill you. Like that midshipman said, it would have been murder."

Davies peered intently at him. "Really? That was the entire reason?"

Shandy nodded. "Yes, God help me."

"And when you got your new clothes, and said you were a forced man and no real pirate … was that sincere?"

Shandy sighed hopelessly. "Yes."

Davies shook his head in wonder and took another sip of the warm rum.

"Uh," said Shandy, "who's … was it Peachy Bander?"

"Hm?"

"Could I have a bit more of that? Thanks." Shandy took several gulps and handed the bottle back.

"Percher Bandy?" he said, a bit dizzily. "You know, the one who told you something about Captain Wilson, and was it true?"

"Oh!" Davies laughed. "Panda Beecher! He was—still is, maybe—a spice wholesaler, and he always got Navy captains to carry his goods in the holds of Navy ships; it's illegal as hell, but a lot of merchants do it—they can pay the captain enough to make it worth his while, but still come out lots better than if they had commercial captains do it, what with either their extra insurance charges or the twelve-and-a-half percent of the cargo charge for an official Navy escort to keep pirates away. I was in the Navy myself for twenty-four years, and I know of many a Navy captain who's made extra cash by dealing with Panda and his sort, even though being caught at it would mean a nasty court-martial for the captain. I learned the captain's name from one of the men in the boat, so I pretended to remember him. It seemed not too long a shot to hope that Wilson had had such dealings, and would believe I knew of 'em. Then too, back in the nineties, Panda ran a couple of whorehouses that particularly catered to Royal Navy officers, and I've heard that the … stresses of Caribbean service led some of the young officers to prefer oddities—boys, you know, and whips, and Oriental variations

—and there was the possibility that Wilson might have been one such."

Shandy nodded owlishly. "And you phrased your question so that it could seem to refer to either business."

"Exactly. And one barb or the other did, sure enough, seem to strike home, didn't it? We'll never know now which one it was."

Skank shuffled up, handed Davies a foul-smelling canvas bag and then hurried away aft, wiping his hands on the rail. Davies pulled out an end of black sausage and took an unenthusiastic bite. "You see," he went on, chewing, "after the damned Utrecht Treaty left the privateers jobless, and ruined sailoring as a legal livelihood, and I turned pirate, I promised myself I'd never hang. I've seen too many hangings, over the years. So," he reached for the bottle and gulped quite a bit more, "I was thankful to have thought of that Panda Beecher question … in the same way that a man marooned on a barren reef is thankful to be left with a pistol."

Shandy frowned at the intricacy of this; then his eyebrows went up in comprehension. "It was suicide!" he exclaimed, too drunk to be tactful. "You wanted him to kill you when you said that."

"Preferred it, let's say. To a trial and eventual noose. Yes." He shook his head again, clearly still astounded by Shandy's action. "Just because it would have been murder?"

Shandy waved back at the other men in the boat. "Any of them would have done the same."

"With assured safety on the other hand?" Davies laughed. "Not ever. Not one. You remember Lot?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Lot—the fellow with the wife who was made out of salt."

"Oh, that Lot." Shandy nodded. "Sure."

" 'Member when Yahweh came over to his house?"

Shandy scowled in concentration. "No."

"Well, Yahweh told him he was going to stomp the town, because everybody was such bastards. So Lot says hold on, if I can find ten decent lads will you let the town alone? Yahweh huffs and puffs a bit, but finally allows as how yeah, if there's ten good men he won't kick the place to bits. Then Lot, being crafty, see, says, well, how about if there was three? Yahweh gets up and walks around, thinking about it, and then says, all right, I'll go three. So Lot says, how about one. Yahweh's all confused by this point, having had his heart set on wrecking the town, but at last he says all right, one decent man, even. And then of course Lot couldn't find even one, and Yahweh got to torch the town anyway." Davies waved at the other men in the boat, a gesture that managed to take in the Carmichael, too, and New Providence Island, and perhaps the whole Caribbean. "Don't, Jack, ever make the mistake of thinking he'd find one among these."

BOOK TWO

Cut off from the land that bore us,

Betrayed by the land we find,

Where the brightest have gone before us,

And the dullest are most behind—

Stand, stand to your glasses, steady!

'T is all we have left to prize:

One cup to the dead already—

Hurrah for the next that dies!

—Bartholomew Dowling

Chapter Nine

The evening breeze was strong and from the sea; the three ships moored offshore were nudged parallel, and the fires on the beach threw sparks away from the setting sun toward the black Florida cypress swamps. In the raised hut the pirates had built on a sandy rise just inland of the fires, Beth Hurwood peered out at the sky and the sea, and filled her lungs with the cool sea air, and prayed that the breeze would hold until dawn. She didn't want to spend a third night locked into the stifling

"mosquito shelter" her father had forced the pirates to build—a canvas-walled box just big enough to lie down in.

She had never thought she would look back fondly on her two and a half years in the convent in Scotland, but now she mourned the day her father took her out of the place. The pale sisters in their robes and hoods had virtually never spoken, the rooms were stark old stone, the only food ever served was an oily gray porridge with lumps of dispirited vegetable stuff in it, and there was not a book in the place, not even a Bible—in fact, she'd never learned what Order the sisters belonged to, nor even what sort of faith; there had been no pictures, statues or crucifixes, and they might have been Moslems for all she knew—but at least they had left her alone, and she was free to stroll through the garden and feed the birds, or stand on the catwalk at the top of the wall and watch the road across the fields of heather, hoping to see strangers. Once in a while she would see someone, a farmer driving a cart, or a hunter with dogs, but though she waved to them they always hurried away—almost as if they were afraid of the place. Nevertheless she'd felt closer to those distant, hurrying figures than to the more profoundly remote sisters. Everyone in her life, after all, was a stranger to her.

Her mother had died when Beth was thirteen, and that was when her father became a stranger. He quit his position at Oxford, put his daughter in the care of relatives, and then left—engaged in

"independent study," he had once said. And she was fifteen when he met Leo Friend.

The swish of boots approaching through the sand made her look down, and she was relieved to see that it was at least not Friend. Blinking against the afterimage of the sun, she didn't recognize the figure until he climbed the steps and ducked in under the low thatched roof; then she almost smiled, for it wasjust old Stede Bonnett. He had arrived only yesterday in his ship the Revenge, but though he was a pirate captain, and was said to be a partner of Blackbeard's, he seemed to have been well brought up, and had none of the mocking, sardonic cheer of a man like Philip Davies, nor the cold, driven savagery of her father. Beth wondered what could have led him into piracy.

"I'm sorry," he muttered, actually doffing his hat to her. "I didn't—realize—"

"It's all right, Mr. Bonnett." She waved at the log that served as a bench. "Do sit down."

"Thank you," he said, lowering himself onto it. A long-necked bird flapped up out of the marshes and gave a squawk that made Bonnett jump. He peered after the bird suspiciously.

"You … don't seem happy, Mr. Bonnett," Beth ventured.

He looked at her then, and seemed for the first time really to see her. He licked his lips and smiled hesitantly, but a moment later his worried scowl had returned and his gaze had moved away from her.

"Happy? Hah—I defy anyone, after that spectacle at Charles Town—before Thatch demanded the ransom, they thought we meant to take the town—I turned a glass on the place—women and children running weeping through the streets—Jesus—and for what? A chest of black medicinal tobacco, and so that he could go look at the Ocracoke Inlet. And I find myself saying things, doing things … even my dreams aren't my own anymore … " The breeze shifted slightly, blowing Beth's long hair across her face, and belatedly she smelled the brandy on Bonnett's breath. An idea struck her, but out of fear of disappointment she forced down her sudden surge of hope.

She bit her lower lip. She'd have to be careful …

"Where do you come from?" she asked.

For a long time he was silent, and she wondered if he hadn't heard her, or didn't intend to answer. I've got to get away from here, she thought; I have to believe that in some normal place, far from Friend and my father, my sanity won't seem such a fragile, flawed, imperiled thing.

"Barbados," he said quietly. "I … owned … a sugarcane plantation."

"Ah. You didn't prosper at it?"

"I was doing fine," he said hoarsely. "I'm a retired Army major, I had slaves and stables, the plantation was thriving … I was a gentleman."

Beth resisted the impulse to ask him why he had turned to piracy, if all that was true. Instead she just asked him, "Would you like to go back?"

Again he looked at her. "Yes. But I can't. I'd be hanged."

"Take the King's Pardon."

"I—" He stuck a finger in his mouth and gnawed at the nail. "Thatch would never let me."

Beth's heart was pounding. "We could sneak away tonight, you and I. They're all distracted by this thing they've got to do up the river." Looking up the shore to her right, she wondered why they called that expanse of marsh a river.

Bonnett smiled nervously and licked his lips again, and once more she smelled the brandy. "You and I," he began, reaching out a pudgy hand.

"Right," she said, stepping back away from him. "Escape. Tonight. When the hunsi kanzo is busy up the river."

The reference to Blackbeard sobered Bonnett, and he scowled and resumed chewing his fingernail.

Not wanting to let him see the desperate hope in her eyes, Beth Hurwood looked away from him, back toward the marsh, perhaps, she thought, they call it a river because it's so nearly one. All the local moisture does tend to move westward, though as slowly in most places as brandy working its way through a fruitcake, and the shallow evening fogs certainly follow the course of it and would soon drench an exposed person almost as thoroughly as if he'd been swimming.

She closed her eyes. Calling this swamp a river seemed typical of the way this dreadful New World worked—everything was still raw and unformed out here on the world's western edge, and bore only the most remote resemblances to the settled and solidified eastern hemisphere. And though now she heard Bonnett shift on the log, and quickly turned to face him, it fleetingly occurred to her that the undeveloped nature of these lands might have a lot to do with why her father had come, and why he had taken her with him.

Bonnett was leaning forward, and in the early twilight she could see the frown of tenuous determination on his pudgy old face. "I'll do it," he said almost in a whisper. "I think I must. I think going up the river tonight would be the end of me … though no doubt my body would still walk and speak and carry out Thatch's orders."

"Are there enough men aboard your ship right now to sail it?" she asked, standing up so quickly that the hut rocked on its wooden stilts.

Bonnett squinted up at her. "The Revenge? We can't take her. Do you imagine no one would see or hear us raise anchor and set the sails and move out? No, we'll provision a boat and put in it whatever we can find to improvise a mast and sail, and row away down the coast with muffled oars, and then just take our chances on the open sea. God's far more merciful than Thatch." He gasped suddenly and grabbed her wrist. "Christ! Wait a minute! Is this a trap? Did Thatch send you here—to test me? I forgot your father's his partner … "

"No," said Beth tensely. "It's not a trap. I've got to get away from here. Now let's go get that boat."

Bonnett released her wrist, though he didn't look entirely convinced. "But … you've been with them for nearly a month, as I hear it. Why have you waited until now to escape? I'm sure it would have been far easier at New Providence."

She sighed. "It never would have been easy. But—" Another bird flapped past overhead, making both of them jump. Beth laughed weakly. "Well, for one thing, until we arrived here I didn't think my father actively meant me any harm, but now … well, he doesn't mean me any harm, but … the day before yesterday, when we were disembarking, I cut myself, and my father was frantic with worry that it might mortify and give me a fever. He told Leo Friend that the protective Caribbean magics,"

she spoke the words with distaste, "are sluggish here, and they'd have to watch me closely for any sign of illness. But his concern was … impersonal—it wasn't the concern of a father for a threatened daughter, but more like, I don't know, a captain's concern for the seaworthiness of a vessel his life depends on."

Bonnett hadn't really been listening—he patted the curls of his wig in place and licked his moustache, then stood up and walked over to where she stood—the hut swayed dangerously—and leaned beside her. Grotesquely, his face was puckered into a trembling but insinuating smile. " 'For one thing,' you said." His voice was huskier now. "Is there another?"

Beth wasn't looking at him, and she smiled sadly. "Yes; foolish, but I think so. I didn't figure it out until Tuesday, when the Navy killed him—he was aboard that boat, the Jenny, and Friend says none of them could have survived that broadside—but I don't think I really wanted to get away, without … well, you never met him. A man who was also a passenger on the Carmichael."

Bonnett pursed his lips and stepped away, letting his paunch relax again. "I needn't take you, you know," he snapped.

Beth blinked in surprise and turned to look at him. "What? Of course you need to. If you don't, what's to stop me from raising the alarm before you're well away?" Abruptly she remembered that this was, despite the good manners, a pirate, and she added hastily, "At any rate, your case will certainly look better to the authorities if you've not only repented but rescued a captive of Blackbeard's as well."

"Something in that, I suppose," Bonnett muttered grudgingly. 'Very well, now, listen. We'll go, right now, by separate routes, to the shore, where one of the Revenge's boats is dragged up on the sand—

you'll see me by it—and you'll get in quick and crouch low, out of sight. There's old canvas in there, hide under it. The tide's nigh again, so it shouldn't be difficult for me to wrestle the boat into the water. Then I'll row us out to the Revenge, load as much stuff into the boat as I can without raising the suspicions of that treacherous crew, and then just row away south along the coastline. Can you navigate by the stars?"

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 541