ON STRANGER TIDES 14 page

I'll bet Stede Bonnett will help out with that—and then make his way south to New Providence Island. I think he'll want to speak to you, Phil—and I think it'd be a good thing if you'd got the Carmichael back."

Davies nodded. "Do you … want us to accept this pardon Rogers is bringing?"

"I don't see why not," Blackbeard said.

"Hear that, Jack?" Davies asked Shandy. "Back in the shop window again."

Shandy opened his mouth to answer, then closed it and just shook his head.

"He's too great a sinner, Phil," Blackbeard said, amusement rumbling in his voice.

Benjamin Hurwood covered the last ten yards in a sort of anxious, bounding prance, making the square wooden box tied to his belt jiggle and whirl wildly. "When do we leave"?" he screamed.

"Don't you realize how essential it is that we hurry? He may kill her, he's certainly got the power now to overcome the protections she has."

Blackbeard ignored Hurwood. "I'm going north," he said, and plodded away back toward the fires.

Davies eyed the pale, trembling Hurwood speculatively. "Can you find 'em?"

"Of course I can find them—her, anyway." He slapped the wooden box irreverently. "This thing's a damn lodestone for her now, better than the pointer that led you to the Carmichael a month ago."

"We'll leave instantly," said Davies. "As soon as we get the Jenny manned. We—" He paused. "The Carmichael's crew," he said. "What's to become of them, the lads we can't carry on the Jenny?"

"Who cares?" yelled Hurwood. "Let them split up—half with Thatch, half with Bonnett. Damn my soul, what I'm going to do to that fat young worm when I find him! Prometheus never suffered as much as Leo Friend will, I promise you—"

"No," said Davies, still thoughtfully, "none of my lads sail north with Thatch … I'll load the Jenny gunwale-deep with men before I permit that … "

Hurwood had been dancing with impatience, and now the raging old man screwed his eyes shut and clenched his fist, and slowly rose up from the sand until he hovered unsupported with his boots dangling fully a yard above the ground. He opened his eyes a squint, hissed angrily and shut his eyes harder—and then was flung like a loose-jointed doll at the sea, and struck with an enormous splash out beyond where the breakers began to swell and roll in.

A number of pirates were on the beach, and several of them had paused in their various labors to gape at this performance, and now were staring wonderingly out at the falling splash spray.

"Get him," Davies rasped at the nearest cluster of them, and the men leaped to the boat, dragged it down to the water and got busy with the oars. To Shandy, Davies muttered, "You want to find the girl, right?"

"Right."

"And I want to find my ship. So let's get Hurwood aboard the Jenny before he perfects his flying and flaps away to find them without us."

The sailors had carried and shoved their wide-beamed boat out into the surf. "Don't bring him back,"

Davies shouted to them. "Take him on to the Jenny!"

"Aye aye, Phil," yelled back one of the laboring rowers.

Davies seized Shandy's shoulder. "Back to the camp, Jack," he said. "Send as many of the Carmichael's lads to Bonnett's crew as the Revenge can hold—the rest bring down here, and get 'em aboard the Jenny. But none of our mates sail on the Queen Anne's Revenge, understand?"

"Sure do, Phil," Shandy said. "I'll have 'em down here getting into the boats in three minutes."

"Good. Go."

Shandy had no sooner run back uphill to the crowd around the smoking charcoal piles than Woefully Fat grabbed him by the upper arm. The bocor's brown eyes glared at him out of the broad black face.

"You damn slow, boy," the man said. "I thought you'd fix things upriver. Too late now for it to be any kind of easy—now you got to kill him an' burn him ashore."

"Kill who?" blurted Shandy, forgetting the man was deaf.

"You ain't sailin' on the Queen Anne's Revenge," said Woefully Fat.

Belatedly remembering the bocor's deafness, Shandy shook his head and put on an earnestly agreeing expression. He was standing on tiptoe and hoping the giant bocor wouldn't lift him any higher. "No sir!" he yelled.

"Di'n't wait five years for you so you could be a puppet o' his, and die just to provide more blood an'

make his death scene look more convincin'."

"I ain't going!" said Shandy loudly, exaggerating the movement of his lips. Then he added, "What do you mean, 'five years'?"

Woefully Fat looked around—no one was paying particular attention to them, and he lowered his voice to a whisper that was somehow still a rumble. "When the white men's war ended, an' anybody could see that Thatch had learned too much."

Shandy couldn't tell if this was an answer or something Woefully Fat had been going to say anyway.

"He got away with a lot by calling himself a privateer," the bocor went on. "The English let him alone if they think he only be takin' Spanish ships. But he wa'n't interested in any distinctions between Spanish or English or Dutch, just in human lives and blood. He even kilt that old English magician he been studyin' with, an' then tried to bring him back." Woefully Fat laughed. "I help a little, that time, make a turtle eat the blood in the water. Wouldn't have worked for very long anyway, neither of 'em havin' shed blood in Erebus first, but you should have seen that turtle tryin' to write English words on the deck with its claws." He gave Shandy a sharp look. "You di'n't shed no blood there, did you?"

"Where?"

"In Erebus, as white people call the place. The place where the Fountain is, where ghosts can't be ghosts, where blood grows plants?"

"No no, not me." Shandy shook his head. "Now let go of me, will you? I've got—"

"No? Good. He have … uses for you, if'n you did. An' when the war was ended and he was still alive an' gettin' so close an' puttin' together a whole nation, it seem like, of badmen, I saw I had to call a death for him from the Old World. When the one-armed man came last year an' knew about ghosts, I was sure it was my man, 'specially since his wife died the same year I sent my summons—if the bigger loas sent him for me they'd maybe have caused her death, as long as the complications of it would drive him out here."

"That's great, really," said Shandy. He made a twisting hop and managed to pull his arm free of the bocor's huge hand. "But right now I've got to see to the crews, all right? Anybody who needs to be killed and burned is just going to have to wait." He turned and ran before Woefully Fat could grab him again.

By threats, and hints that maroonment here was a real possibility, and his own evident consternation, Shandy managed to get a little more than half of the Carmichael's crew accepted by David Herriot, Bonnett's half-bright sailing master, and hustle the remainder down to the boats and onto the water, before the boat that had picked up Hurwood had even reached the Jenny.

The fog was definitely breaking up now, and when the boat Shandy was in plunged out of the last veil of mist, he smiled with affection to see the battered old Jenny rocking sturdily out there in the bright morning sunlight.

"It'll be nice to get back down south where we belong," he said to Skank, who was crouched in the bow near him.

"Oh, aye," the young pirate agreed, "it's risky tactics to get too far from the attentions of Mate Care-For and that lot."

"Yeah." Shandy hastily patted his pocket to make sure he hadn't lost the ball of mud. "Yeah, there's some unlikely beasts in the world, and it's best to stay near the ones that you've bought drinks for."

In a few minutes they bumped the shot-scarred hull of the Jenny, and Shandy reached up, grabbed her gunwale and vaulted over it onto the deck. As he gave some orders about the handling of the tenuously repaired sails and lines, and oversaw the hasty loading of several casks of salt pork and beer he'd managed to commandeer from the camp, he became aware that the planks under his boots were vibrating briefly every couple of seconds, and when he made his way aft to report to Davies that they were ready to go, he saw Hurwood crouched over his grisly box on the narrow poop, and the old man's scratchy breathing exactly corresponded to the deck's vibration.

"Hope he doesn't sneeze," remarked Davies, who had also noticed the phenomenon. "All set?"

"I'd say so, Phil," Shandy answered with a tension-twitchy grin. "Far too many men, nearly no provisions, the rigging all held together with nipper twine, and the navigator a one-armed lunatic taking directions from a severed head in a box."

"Excellent," said Davies, nodding. "Good work. I knew I picked the right man for quartermaster." He looked down at Hurwood. "Which way?" Hurwood pointed south.

"Hoist anchor!" Davies shouted. "And tiller hard to starboard!"

The old sloop came around to face south, and then she sped away so quickly, in spite of being jostlingly overcrowded, that Shandy knew Hurwood must be providing some sort of sorcerous propulsion to aid the tattered sails; and by noon they had ploughed their plunging, wide-waked way down past the tip of the Florida peninsula.

A half hour later things began to happen. Hurwood had been staring into the wooden box since they'd set out, but now he looked up. Shandy, who had been glancing frequently at the old man, noticed the change and walked back to the stern along the railing, balancing himself by reaching out to touch the shrouds every few steps. A few steps from the one-armed magician he paused.

"There are … others … ," the old man said.

Several of the pirates had climbed up the shrouds to escape the smell and crowding of their companions, perched themselves more or less comfortably in the loops of the ratlines, and were providing entertainment to those below by tossing an ever-lighter rum bottle back and forth among themselves without, so far, dropping it; but now one of them was staring intently to the west. "A sail!" he yelled. "Ow, damn it," he added as the bottle rebounded from his knee and fell into eager hands below. "A sail abeam to starboard and only a mile or two off!"

That's got to be her, thought Shandy, whirling so quickly to look that he had to crouch and grab the rail to keep from tumbling over the side. As soon as he saw the other ship, though, he knew it wasn't the Carmichael—this ship had a forecastle structure, and an extra-high poop, and had only two huge sails each on its fore and mainmasts, and even from this distance he could see bright patterns of red and white painted along her side.

"I am not a dog!" yelled Mr. Bird, who had wound up with the rum bottle and was backing away toward the bow with it and glaring around at the rest of the pirates.

Shandy stared at the strange ship. "What is she?" he asked Davies, "and how in hell did she get so close without any of us seeing her?"

"Damned if I know how," Davies growled. "We've been keeping no formal watch, but one of those drunken bastards should have noticed before now." He squinted at the ship, which seemed to be pacing them. "It's a Spanish galleon," he said wonderingly. "I didn't know there were any still afloat—

they haven't made 'em for at least half a century."

Shandy swore, then smiled tiredly at Davies. "Nothing to do with any of our concerns, obviously."

"Obviously."

"So do we just continue?"

"May as well. Even overloaded, we should be able to outrun that, especially with Hurwood lending his sorcerous push. If—"

"Drowned man!" yelled one of the men up in the shrouds. "To port, twenty yards off."

Shandy looked in that direction and saw sea birds circling over a sodden, floating lump that soon disappeared in the choppy agitation of their wake.

"'Nother one ahead!" the self-appointed lookout yelled. "We may run right over him."

"One of you get a boathook out," commanded Davies, "and snag him."

Another floating corpse was sighted, too far off to starboard to be visible from the deck, but the one that the lookout had seen bobbing ahead was hooked as it slipped past the bow. The sea birds squawked angrily as the floater was lifted out of the sea and dragged aboard.

"Saints preserve us!" exclaimed one of the men who lowered the sopping corpse to the deck. "It's Georgie de Burgo!"

"We're on the fat boy's track, right enough," said Davies flatly, starting forward. "De Burgo was one of the dozen men that were aboard the Carmichael when she was moored."

Davies was clearing a way through the crowd on the deck by cuffing men out of his way, and Shandy hurried along behind him before the path could close again. He was wishing he'd got a better look at the corpse he'd seen tumbling away in the wake, and he was torturing himself by trying to remember whether the cloth the thing had been wrapped in was the same color as the cotton shift Beth had been wearing when he'd seen her last.

By the time Davies and Shandy got to the bow the crowd had begun parting for them, and Shandy was able to glimpse de Burgo's corpse while he was still several steps away from it, and it was this moment of preparation that probably saved the contents of his stomach, for Georgie de Burgo's head had been all but cut free of his body by what seemed to have been one stroke of some very sharp and very heavy blade.

Shandy was staring down in queasy fascination at the thing when the lookout yelled again. "And another one to port!"

"Put him back over the side," said Davies tightly, turning back toward the stern.

He and Shandy didn't speak until they had elbowed their way back to the tiller and their eerie navigator. "I think," said Davies then, "we can assume that he's killed all twelve and heaved 'em over the side. I can't imagine how, but that's not the main mystery."

"Right," said Shandy, squinting at the empty blue horizon ahead. "Who's he got crewing for him?"

For a full minute neither of them spoke, then Shandy glanced to starboard at the Spanish galleon.

"Uh … Phil? Didn't you say we're faster than that Spaniard?"

"Hm? Oh, certainly, on her best day and our worst." Davies too looked to starboard—then froze, staring, for the galleon had moved well ahead of the Jenny. "God's teeth," he muttered, "that's not possible."

"No," Shandy agreed. "Neither's the fact that she's leaving no visible wake at all."

Davies stared for a few more seconds, then called for a telescope. One was brought, and for a long minute he peered through it at the receding galleon. "Get the men busy," he said finally, lowering the glass. "At anything, mending line, hoisting and lowering sails, man-overboard drill, even—-just keep their attention off that Spaniard."

"Aye aye, Phil," said the mystified Shandy, hurrying forward.

He assigned so many jobs so quickly that one man who had been furtively smoking a pipe—

forbidden aboard ship—managed in the confusion to ignite a puddle of Mr. Bird's rum and set half the bow ablaze; greasy hair and tarry clothes sprang into flame and a dozen suddenly burning men, hooting in alarm, went rolling and diving over the rail.

Shandy instantly ordered the helmsman to come about, and within minutes Davies' constant drilling had paid off—the fire was out, and the men in the water were all dragged back aboard before any of them had time to drown. After the excitement had died down and Shandy had had time to catch his breath and gulp some of the surviving rum, he went back to the stern. Hurwood, though he had probably protested when the Jenny came around, was staring silently into his wooden box again, and when Shandy looked ahead he saw that the Spaniard was by nowjust an irregular white fleck on the southern horizon.

"When I said to keep them busy," Davies began, "I didn't mean … "

"I know, I know." Shandy scratched at a scorched area of his beard and then leaned back against the taut shroud and looked at Davies. "So why? Just so they wouldn't notice the lack of a wake?"

"Partly that. But more important, I didn't want any of these lads to get a chance to turn a glass on her stern and read her name. She's the Nuestra Senora de Lagrimas," he said thoughtfully. "You may not have heard of her, but probably half of these men know her story. She was carrying gold from Veracruz and had the misfortune to meet an English privateer, the Charlotte Bailey. A couple of the Englishmen survived to tell about it. Terrible sea battle—lasted four hours—and both ships went to the bottom." He looked over at Shandy and grinned. "This was in 1630."

Shandy blinked. "Nearly a century ago."

"Right. You know anything about raising ghosts?"

"Not really—though the way things've been going I think I'll have it down pat long before I really understand sailing."

"Well, I'm no expert at it myself, but I do know it ain't easy. Even to get a misty, half-wit casting of a dead person takes a lot of sorcerous power." He waved ahead. "And here somebody's raised the entire damned de Lagrimas—sails, timber, paint and all, and crew too, to judge by the way she's handling, solid enough to look no different from a real ship, and in bright sunlight at that."

"Leo Friend?"

"I kind of think so. But why?"

Shandy glanced at Hurwood. "I'm afraid we'll probably find out." And I hope, he thought fervently, that he's been too busy—what with murdering pirates and conjuring up ghost ships—to visit his attentions on Beth Hurwood.

Chapter Seventeen

From where she crouched in the corner of the cabin Beth Hurwood could see only disjointed segments of Leo Friend's mincing advance across the deck toward her, for he had shut the door behind himself when he came in, and the only light in the cabin was the quick, regular blue-sky-flash of a bulkhead window that kept appearing and disappearing, evidently in time to the fat man's heartbeat.

She had awakened at dawn to find herself walking down the chilly sand slope toward a boat that rocked in the shallows. When she had seen Leo Friend sitting in it and grinning at her she had tried to stop walking, but couldn't; then she tried to slant her course away from the boat, and couldn't do that either, and was not even able to slow her pace as she waded helplessly out into the icy water and clambered into the boat. She had tried to speak then, but hadn't been able to tense her vocal cords or open her mouth. The boat surged out past the breakers toward where the dim silhouette of the Vociferous Carmichael stood; the ride out to the ship had taken only a minute or so, during which time Friend never touched the loosely dragging oars and Beth never managed to move a muscle.

But that had all happened several hours ago, and she had since regained at least enough control over her own actions to crawl into this corner and, when she had heard the pirates screaming and dying, to cover her ears.

Now she watched Friend warily, estimating where on his blubbery frame she could use her teeth and fingernails to best effect, and trying to tense herself against another episode of magically induced, puppetlike helplessness.

But a moment later she felt herself standing up—painfully, in an awkward, tiptoe posture that she would never have assumed voluntarily; then finally her weight came down on her heels and her arms jerked up and outward, though not for balance, for she was as unable to fall as the mast of a strongly rigged ship.

Friend raised his own arms and she realized that she'd been pulled into this position in order to embrace him. His bulging lower lip was wet and trembling and the window was flashing into and out of existence as fast as the tails side of a spinning coin, and when he stepped into her arms she felt them close around his wobbly-fleshed back, and then his mouth came down hard on hers.

He stank of perfume and sweat and candy, and one of his hands was fumbling inexpertly about her torso, but Beth was for the moment able to keep her eyes and teeth clamped shut. Then his mouth slid off of hers and she heard him passionately whispering some pair of syllables over and over again.

She opened her eyes … and blinked in astonishment.

The flickering window, the whole ship's cabin, was gone. The two of them were standing on a knitted rag rug in what appeared to be a shabby English bedroom; the air was close and smelled of boiled cabbage. Beth tried again to pull away from him, and, though she didn't succeed, she did get a glimpse of herself. She was suddenly fat, wearing a long shapeless black dress, and her hair was gray.

And then she realized what it was that he was whispering.

"Oh, Mommy, Mommy," he gasped, panting hotly against her throat. "Oh, Mommy Mommy Mommy."

But it wasn't until she realized that he was spasmodically grinding his well-padded pelvis against her that she threw up.

Less than half a minute later Leo Friend was outside on the quarterdeck, pacing back and forth red-faced in the morning sun.

The thing about mistakes, he told himself as he dabbed at the spot on his frilly blouse with a silk handkerchief, is that one must learn from them. And that incident just now in the cabin certainly should have taught me something. I simply have to wait—and just a little longer, just until I can get enough peace and quiet to cook up some of the magic I'm now capable of.

And then, he thought, looking back at the cabin door which he'd just rebolted from the outside, then we'll see who has to fight off whose attentions. He took a deep breath and then let it out, nodding decisively. He looked around the quarterdeck of what he'd made of the Carmichael, and after scrutinizing his new crew he decided they were looking a good deal less lively than they had when he'd first conjured them up, several hours ago now. They seemed even paler, and puffier, and they kept cocking their heads as if listening to something, and glancing back north with expressions that even on their dead faces were recognizable as fearful.

"What's the matter?" he snapped at one of the figures working the whipstaff tiller. "You afraid of Blackbeard? Afraid he'll come stick a cutlass into your cold guts? Or Hurwood, come after us for his d-d-d-d—goddamn offspring? I've got more power than either of them, don't you worry."

The thing spoken to didn't seem to hear, and just kept turning its pearly gray head around—so far that its neck was beginning to tear—to peek back past the stern. Faintly from its useless throat came hissing that might have been whimpering.

Irritably, for his crew's evident fear had begun to infect him in spite of his confidence and the reassurance that sunny days bring, Friend climbed the companion ladders to the second poop deck—

levitation was still too new and uncontrolled a skill—and looked back over the stern rail.

At first he thought the pursuing ship was Blackbeard's Queen Anne's Revenge, and his pudgy lips curled in a cruel smile—which disappeared a moment later, though, when he realized that it wasn't any ship he'd ever seen before. This one, he saw, was broader in the beam and was painted red and white around the bow … and wasn't the bow advancing awfully steadily? Didn't most ships' bows rise and fall a bit when they were making speed, and fling some spray out to the sides?

He walked to the rail that overlooked the poop and quarterdecks. At least for the moment his ship had stopped shifting its features, and there weren't any masts or decks changing their minds about whether they were there or not from moment to moment. Probably even that window in … that cabin … was either steadily there or steadily not.

"More speed!" Friend shouted to his necrotic crew. Several gray figures began creeping up the rigging. "Faster!" he shrilled.

"No wonder the damned Charlotte Bailey went down, if this is the way you handled her!"

He looked back at the pursuing ship, and wondered if he was just imagining that it was already closer. He was pretty sure it was. Planting his feet firmly on the deck, he roused the new areas of his mind and pointed a sausagelike finger at the strange ship. "Go," he said tightly.

Instantly a wide patch of the sea erupted in steam, curling and boiling up in a white, sharply edged cloud, and Friend giggled delightedly—but the giggling stopped a moment later when the ship came surging out of the cloud, apparently none the worse. Its sails, in fact, still shone the bright bone white of dry canvas.

"Damn," said Friend softly.

It doesn't matter who it is, he thought uneasily. I've got better things to do than deal with it. I could levitate myself and Elizabeth and just fly away … but if they pursued us rather than this ship I'd be at a disadvantage, for I'd have to keep using part of my power just to hold us up … of course I'm using a good deal of it even now, keeping these damned resurrected sailors moving …

He climbed back down to the next deck, and after shouting some more orders to the silently working gray figures, he glanced down, at the deck planks under his mud-stained but still ornate shoes. I could just rush in there and take her, he thought, the hot excitement beginning to choke him again in spite of his anxiety about the pursuing vessel. And this time I could hold her in a total sorcerous vise, so that she couldn't even blink an eye without me specifically letting her … or I could even just render her unconscious, and use magic to make her body behave in the ways I want …

He shook his head. No, that wouldn't really be any different from the activities he'd been indulging in ever since he learned, in his adolescence, how to sculpt ectoplasmic women in the air over his unrestful bed. At best all he could do right now would be to rape Beth Hurwood, and any common sailor could commit a rape. Friend wanted—needed—to commit a much more profound violation. He wanted to manipulate her very will, so that not only would she be powerless to prevent herself from coupling with him, she would live for the hope of it. And then if he happened to get her confused with his … with someone else … she'd be properly flattered.

To be able to control people as thoroughly as that, though, he would have to have control over vastly more of reality than he had ever had before—over all of it, in fact. In order fully to define the present, he would have to be able to revise the past—dictate the future—become, in effect, God.

Well, he thought with a nervous smile, why not? Haven't I been getting steadily closer to that all my life?

He crossed to the port rail, leaned out and glanced back again at the mysterious pursuer. The red-and-white painted ship had sped up since he'd last looked, and was slanting over as if to pass the Carmichael on the port side, and now he could see another sail, farther back, which the unknown vessel had been concealing. Friend hissed in alarm and squinted at it.

It's too small to be Blackbeard's ship, he thought, or Bonnett's. It must be that damned sloop, the Jenny. Hurwood will be aboard, certainly, and the Romeo sea-cook, that Shandy fellow … maybe even Davies, still angry about my having shot him. That must be what my lich crew has been looking back at for the last half hour. He glanced over at his ill-preserved helmsmen, but the focus of the dead men's attention had shifted. The lifeless figures weren't looking astern anymore, but off the port quarter instead, at the painted galleon.

"Idiots!" Friend yelled. "The danger's there!" He pointed back at the advancing sloop.

His crew of dead men didn't seem to agree.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 465