ON STRANGER TIDES 16 page

The pile of broken lumber kept shifting even after the animate planks had eeled away to provide bars for Beth's cage, and finally two bloody human figures crawled out from underneath. Shandy started to yell a pleased greeting—then noticed the broken and emptied head of one, and the completely caved-in chest of the other. After that he looked at their eyes and wasn't surprised at the emptiness in them.

Nearer Shandy, the corpse of Mr. Bird sat up, got laboriously to its feet and shambled over to the blocks where the mainsail sheet was controlled; one by one the other corpses joined him there, and when they had all gathered, somehow managing to look expectant in spite of their dead faces, Shandy counted fourteen of them.

"Not Davies," he said thickly, seeing that body standing among them and realizing for the first time that his friend had been killed. "Not Davies."

Hurwood came sailing in over the rail, swerving like a big bird over the heads of Shandy and the rest of the exhausted survivors, and landed on the poop deck near the now partially boarded-over hole. He stared expressionlessly down at Shandy for several seconds, then shook his head. "Sorry," he said to him. "I don't have a big enough crew to be able to spare him. Now get off of my ship."

Shandy looked toward the Jenny, whose mast and scorched sail were visible poking up above the starboard rail. The smoke that had been billowing up right after the fireball had fallen into the vessel was just wisps and curls now—evidently the men still aboard her had managed to put out the fire.

The twenty or so living pirates on the Carmichael's deck, many of whom were wounded and bleeding, looked toward Shandy.

He nodded. "Back aboard the Jenny," he said, trying to keep out of his voice the choking bitterness he felt. "I'll join you in a moment."

As his men shuffled and limped across the deck to where the Jenny's grappling hooks still clung to the Carmichael's gunwales and rigging, Shandy took a deep breath and, though knowing that it would be useless and quite possibly fatal, walked purposefully across the deck toward the damaged cabin Beth was in.

Hurwood just watched him approach, a faint smile on his face.

Shandy stopped in front of the bolted door, and, feeling ridiculous as well as frightened and determined, knocked on the door. "Beth," he said clearly. "This is Jack Shandy—that is, John Chandagnac." Already the name seemed unnatural to him. "Come with me and I promise to take you directly to the nearest civilized port."

"How," came Beth's voice, surprisingly calm, through the warped door, "can I trust a man who murdered a naval officer in order to save killers from the just consequences of their acts, and later held a knife at my throat to keep me from my own father?"

Shandy brushed a stray lock of salt-stiff hair back from his forehead and squinted up at Hurwood—

who smiled at him and shrugged in mock sympathy.

"That Navy captain," Shandy said, striving to keep his voice level, "was about to murder Davies—kill him without a trial. I had no choice. And your father—" He stopped for a moment in despair, then forced himself to go on, ridding himself of the words like a crew flinging cannons and casks overboard from a foundering vessel. "Your father intends to evict your soul from your body so that he can replace it with your mother's."

There was no answer from inside the cabin.

"Please get off my ship now," said Hurwood courteously.

Instead Shandy reached for the door's bolt—and a moment later found himself suspended in midair, rising up and away from the cabin door. His eyes went wide and then clamped shut, and then opened in a tense squint, and his whole body was rigid with uncontrollable vertigo.

When he had passed over the Carmichael's gunwale and hung thirty feet above the water in front of the Jenny's fire-blackened bow, he was released, and plummeted through the air for one long second before plunging into the cold water.

He thrashed his way to the surface, and wearily swam to the Jenny, and brawny arms reached out and pulled him aboard. "It's stinkin' magic, cap'n," Skank said to him when he was safely aboard and leaning against the mast and breathing deeply while a puddle of sea water spread out on the deck around his boots. "Lucky even to get away, we are."

Shandy didn't let show his surprise at being addressed as captain. After all, Davies was dead and Shandy had been his quartermaster. "Expect you're right," he muttered.

"I'm sure glad you made it, though, Jack," Venner assured him with a broad smile that didn't conceal the chill in his gray eyes.

The last couple of pirates freed the grappling hooks and leaped down into the water and were soon aboard the Jenny and demanding rum.

"Yeah, give 'em rum," Shandy said, pushing the stray hair off his forehead again and reflecting that he'd soon have to draw his hair back and add another inch or two to his tarred pigtail. "How bad's the Jenny hurt?"

"Well," said Skank judiciously, "she wasn't in great shape even before that fireball. But we ought to be able to get her back to New Providence easy enough—all tack, no jibe."

"New Providence," Shandy said. He looked up and saw the corpse of Mr. Bird climbing the Carmichael's shrouds. The body stepped into the footrope loop that hung just below the yard that supported the main course sail, and with the precision of a clockwork mechanism began unreefing the sail while cooling hands below worked the halliards. The sails filled, the sheets creaked through the blocks, and, slowly at first, the big ship moved away from the Jenny.

"New Providence," repeated the new captain of the Jenny thoughtfully.

And in the Carmichael's cabin the spell was finally lifted from Beth Hurwood's throat, and she gasped, "I believe you, John! Yes—yes, I'll come with you! Take me away from here, please!"

But by then the Jenny was a shabby scrap of discolored canvas in the middle distance of the sea's glittering blue face, and, aside from her father's, the only ears her words reached were those of the dead men crewing the Vociferous Carmichael.

BOOK THREE

"What's o'clock?"

It wants a quarter to twelve,

And to-morrow's doomsday.

—T. L. Beddoes

Chapter Nineteen

Six men climbed out of the boat when it rocked to a halt in the shallows. Stede Bonnett, peering down at them from behind a dogwood tree at the crest of the sandy hill that sheltered his campfire from the chilly onshore wind, grinned with relief when he recognized their leader—it was William Rhett, the same British Army colonel who had captured Bonnett more than a month ago, and was now clearly here to recapture him after his recent escape from the watchhouse that doubled as Charles Town's jail.

Thank God, thought Bonnett; I'm about to be locked up again—if I'm very lucky, in fact, I may be killed here today.

He turned quickly and trudged back down the other side of the hill before any of his companions could come after him and notice the attacking party themselves; and he tried to dampen his excitement, for the black man could sense moods nearly as well as Blackbeard could.

He found the three of them still sitting around the fire, the Indian and the black man on one side, David Herriot on the other.

"Well, David," he said, striving to sound enthusiastic, "the weather is definitely lightening. I imagine you've been looking forward to getting off this damned island and onto another ship, eh?"

Herriot, who had been Bonnett's docile sailing-master from the day the Revenge was launched until the day Colonel Rhett captured the ship in the Cape Fear River, just shrugged. His childish elation at their escape from Charles Town had begun to turn to superstitious fear when inexplicably bad weather forced them to take shelter here on Sullivan's Island, and ever since the Indian and the black man joined them he had sunk into a morose lethargy.

The Indian and the black man had simply been standing outside Bonnett's tent one morning a week ago, and though they had offered no introductions they had greeted Bonnett and Herriot by name, and explained that they had come to help them get another ship. Bonnett thought he had seen the Indian aboard the Queen Anne's Revenge in May, when Blackbeard had been terrorizing Charles Town to get the ghost-repelling medicinal weed, and the black man's gums were as white as his teeth, the mark of a bocor. It was as clear to the simple-minded Herriot as it was to Bonnett that Blackbeard had found them.

For almost a month and a half after that terrible inland voyage to the Fountain of Youth, Bonnett had had no control over his own actions. The Revenge accompanied the Queen Anne's Revenge north to Virginia, and though it was Bonnett's mouth that called shiphandling orders to his sailors, it was Blackbeard who spoke through it. Like a sleepwalker Bonnett found himself taking the King's Pardon from North Carolina's Governor Eden, and making arrangements to sail south, back home to Barbados, where he would, to whatever extent possible, resume his role as a member of the island's high society of plantation owners. Blackbeard was of course planning to be killed so that he could return in a new body, and he obviously felt that it would be useful to have a wealthy gentleman—or even ex-gentleman—working as his puppet on that rich island.

After he had taken the pardon Bonnett began to regain control of his actions; apparently Blackbeard felt that a return to his previous life was what Bonnett wanted most on earth, and so he didn't particularly bother to force the man's cooperation anymore.

Actually, though, Bonnett dreaded returning to Barbados more than he dreaded death. He had been a respected citizen during his years there—a retired Army major and a wealthy planter—and he could not bear to return as an ex-pirate, one who was still at liberty only because he had chosen to hide under the skirts of the royal amnesty. And any hope he might have had that the citizens of that remote island would be ignorant of his piratical career had been shattered only days after he embarked, for the second ship he took was the Turbet … a Barbadian ship. Even at the time, he had known that he ought to kill everyone aboard so as to leave no one to testify, but he hadn't had the stomach to give the order … and besides, David Herriot would never have stood by while people he had sailed with all his life were murdered.

And the idea of seeing his wife again, now, nearly made him faint. The woman had been a vituperative harridan even before he set out—however unwillingly!—on his felonious cruise, and he still frequently woke up sweating, with her scornful cries ringing all too well-remembered in his ears:

"Get away from me, you brutal slug! You bitter pig!" Always he had fled the house, his own house, trembling with the desire to commit uxoricide or suicide … or both.

But a return to Barbados and her was what the future held … unless he could wreck the plans Blackbeard had for him. And so on the fourteenth of September he sent Herriot into town to round up as many members of his original crew as could be found—he wanted no one who had sailed with Blackbeard or Davies—and get them aboard the Revenge. The ship was not a prize of piracy—he had paid for every plank and every yard of rigging—and so the harbor authorities had no objection to his taking her out for a cruise. As soon as they were out of the harbor he had his men scrape the name Revenge off the ship's transom and paint Royal James on instead.

And then Bonnett set about violating his pardon as thoroughly and quickly as he could. Before the sun set on that Wednesday he had taken a ship, and during the next ten days he took eleven more.

The plunder was minor—tobacco, pork, pins and needles—but he was demonstrably engaging in piracy. He told the crews of the robbed ships that his name was Captain Thomas, for he didn't want word of his backsliding to get back to Blackbeard until he could get himself safely out of Blackbeard's reach.

To accomplish that, he decided to steal Blackbeard's own planned defeat scenario—being entirely under Blackbeard's control, Bonnett had been the only person the pirate-king had dared to discuss his defeat plan with—albeit Bonnett would now employ it for a humbler end; for while Blackbeard planned to use it as a stepping-stone to immortality, Bonnett hoped only for a quick death, or, failing that, a trial and eventual hanging far from Barbados.

He sailed the Royal James up the Cape Fear River, ostensibly to careen her for repairs—but he made sure that the captain and crew of the last ship he'd taken saw where his anchorage was before he turned them loose.

The governor's pirate-hunters under Colonel Rhett had obligingly arrived at the river mouth on the evening of the twenty-sixth; and Bonnett made sure that his feigned escape attempt took place at low tide the next morning. Though Herriot had stared in astonishment at the impracticality of his last few orders, Bonnett succeeded in running the ship aground in a position from which any effective fight would be impossible. At the last moment Bonnett had tried to detonate his own powder kegs, which would have scattered the remains of himself and most of his crew across the marshy landscape, but he was stopped before he could ignite it.

Then there had been the voyage back to Charles Town—in shackles. His crew was promptly locked up in the Anabaptist meeting house in the southern corner of town, under the guard of a full company of militia … but Bonnett and Herriot were just kept in the watchhouse south of town, on the banks of the Ashley River, with only two guards assigned to them.

One evening two weeks after their arrival there, both of their guards walked back to town for dinner at the same time … and the door's lock proved to be so rusty that a hard shove snapped the bolt. Even Bonnett had never really wanted to face the humiliation of a trial and public execution, and so, elated at what seemed to be a stroke of luck, he and Herriot had slipped out and stolen a boat and then rowed east past Johnson's Fort and right on out of the harbor.

The weather had turned foul then, with wind and rain and choppy seas, and they had had to land on Sullivan's Island, just outside and north of the harbor; and, too late, both of them began to wonder uneasily whether their escape really had been just luck.

The weather had not improved. The two fugitives managed to make a tent with their boat's sail, and for two weeks they lived on flounder and turtle cooked over a carefully concealed fire. Bonnett hoped the modest, wind-scattered smoke of it would pass unnoticed against the perpetually gray skies.

Clearly it had not.

Bonnett now tore a fan-shaped frond from one of the ubiquitous palmettos, and threw it onto the fire; it began popping and curling, and he hoped the sounds would cover any noises made by Colonel Rhett and his men as they crept up the seaward side of the hill. "Yes," he went on loudly, "it'll do us both good, David, to get off this island. I'm ready to go out and take more ships—and I've learned from my mistakes! Never again will I leave anyone alive to testify against me!" He hoped Rhett's party was hearing these sentiments. "Rape the women and shoot the men and pitch 'em all over the side for the sharks!"

Herriot was looking even more unhappy, and the bocor was staring at Bonnett with lively suspicion.

"What are you doing?" the bocor asked. Extra alert because of their distance from the protective Caribbean loas, he raised his hand and sifted the breeze through his fingers.

Where are you, Rhett? thought Bonnett desperately, his cheerful expression beginning to falter. Are you in position yet? Guns loaded, primed and aimed?

The Indian stood up and swept the clearing with his gaze. "Yes," he said to the black man, "there are concealed purposes here."

The bocor's fingers were still waving, but the hand was pointing to the seaward slope. "There are … others! Nearby!" He turned quickly to the Indian. "Protective magic! Now!"

The Indian's hand darted to the decorated leather bag at his belt—

"Fire!" yelled Bonnett.

A dozen nearly simultaneous explosions shook the air as sand was kicked up all over the clearing and the fire threw up a swirl of sparks. Voices were shouting at the top of the slope, but Bonnett couldn't hear what they were saying. Slowly he turned his head and looked around.

The Indian was sitting in the raked-up sand clutching his ripped and bloody thigh, and the bocor was gripping his own right wrist and scowling at his torn and nearly fingerless right hand.

David Herriot lay flat on his back, staring intently into the sky; a big hole had been punched into the middle of his face, and blood had already made a dark halo in the sand around his head.

Good-bye, David, thought Bonnett. I'm glad I was able to give you at least this.

Colonel Rhett and his men were sliding and running down this side of the slope, being careful to keep fresh pistols pointed at the men around the fire. It occurred to Bonnett that he himself had not been hit by any of the pistol balls that had been fired into the clearing.

That meant he would live … to stand public trial, and then to provide morbid amusement for all the Charles Town citizens—as well as any Indians, and sailors, and trappers that might be in town—with the spectacle of himself twitching and grimacing and publicly losing control of his bladder and bowels while he dangled by the neck for some long minutes at the end of a rope.

He shivered, and wondered if it was too late to provoke Rhett's men into killing him here and now.

It was. Rhett himself had come up behind him and now yanked his arms back and quickly lashed his wrists together with stout twine. "Good day, Major Bonnett," said Rhett coldly.

The fit of shivering had passed, and Bonnett found he was able to relax. He looked up, and he squared his shoulders as befitted a one-time Army Major. Well, I'll die with no credit, he thought, but at least with no outstanding debt either. I've earned the death they'll prepare for me. Not with piracy, for that was never my doing; but now I needn't work to deceive myself any longer about another matter.

"Good day, Colonel Rhett," he said.

"Bind the black and the Indian," Rhett told one of his men, "and then trot them to the boat. Prod them with a knife-point if they won't step along prompt." Then he gave Bonnett a shove. "The same goes for you."

Bonnett strode up the slope toward the gray sky. He was nearly smiling. No, he thought, I needn't pretend to myself any longer that I was drugged when I beat to death that poor whore who did such a convincing imitation of my wife. Now that I'm being called on, for whatever mistaken reasons, to atone for a horrible crime, I can at least be glad they found a man with one to offer.

He thought of Blackbeard. "Don't let me escape again, do you understand?" he called to Rhett. "Lock me up in some place I can't be got out of, and keep alert guards over me!"

"Don't worry," said Rhett.

Chapter Twenty

When the faint pink of dawn behind the shoulder of Ocracoke Island became bright enough to resolve the dim blur of the inlet mouth, Blackbeard chuckled softly to see the sails of the two Navy sloops still anchored where they had been at dusk. The giant pirate upended the last bottle of rum, and when it was empty he waved it at Richards. "Here's another one for Miller," he said. "I'll bring it to him."

He inhaled deeply, savoring the blend of chilly dawn air and rum fumes, and it seemed to him that the very air was tense—breathing it was like touching a beam of wood flexed to within half a hair of its snapping point.

Though he didn't relish them, he forced himself to chew up and swallow one more mouthful of sugar-and-cocoa balls, and he gagged but got them down. That's got to be enough, he told himself; probably no one in the world ever drank as much rum or ate as much damned candy as I've done this night. I'm sure there's not a drop of my blood that isn't saturated with sugar and alcohol.

"We could still slip east, cap'n," said Richards nervously. "The tide's still high enough for us to clear the shoals in this sloop."

Blackbeard stretched. "And abandon our prize?" he asked, jerking a thumb at the somewhat larger sloop, anchored thirty yards away to starboard, that they had taken yesterday. "Naw. We can deal with these Navy boys."

Richards still frowned worriedly, but didn't venture another objection. Blackbeard grinned as he started aft toward the boat's gun-deck ladder. It looks, he thought, as if shooting Israel Hands served two purposes. I've also made the rest of them afraid to argue with me.

His grin became more of a wince—on a tamer face it might have looked like wry sadness—when he remembered that gathering in his tiny cabin two nights ago. Word had just come from Tobias Knight, the collector of Customs, that Virginia's governor Spotswood knew Blackbeard was lingering here and had organized some sort of force to capture him. Israel Hands had instantly begun making plans to abandon this Ocracoke Inlet anchorage.

Blackbeard had leaned forward, keeping his face expressionless in the lamplight, and refilled the several cups on the rough table. "Do you decide what we do, Israel?" he had asked.

"If you fail to, Ed, then yes I do," Hands had replied cheerfully. The two of them had sailed together way back in the privateer days, and then again as pirates under the old buccaneer admiral Ben Hornigold, and Israel Hands dared to be far more familiar with Blackbeard than anyone else did.

"Why? Do you want to stay and try to fight from the Adventure?" He'd slapped the close bulkhead and low ceiling contemptuously. "She's nothing but a damned sloop, man, scarcely more than a turtle-boat! Let's get back to where we left the Queen Anne's Revenge hidden and get out to sea again! To hell with this surf-and-shoal dallying—I want to feel a real deck under my feet again, heaving on a real sea."

And moved by a sudden wave of affection for his loyal old shipmate, Blackbeard had impulsively decided to perform an act of mercy that would never be recognized as such. "I'll see to it," he said, under his breath, "that you do live to sail again, Israel."

Then under the table he drew two pistols, leaned forward and blew out the lamp flame, and crossed the pistols and fired them.

The simultaneous blasts flashed an instant of yellow light up through the cracks and holes in the table, and Israel Hands was flung spinning out of his chair to slam against the bulkhead. When the resulting shouting and scrambling had quieted enough for someone to think of relighting the lamp, Blackbeard saw that his aim had been perfect—one ball had gone harmlessly into the deck, and the other had made an exploded bloody ruin of Israel Hands' knee.

The several men in the cramped cabin, all on their feet now, had stared at Blackbeard with fear and astonishment, but Israel Hands, crouched against the bulkhead and trying to stop the flow of blood from his ruined leg, looked up at his old companion with hurt betrayal as well as pain in his suddenly gaunt face. "Why … Ed?" he managed to ask from between clenched teeth.

Unable to tell him the truth, Blackbeard had merely said, gruffly, "Hell—if I didn't shoot one of you now and then you'd forget who I was."

Hands had been taken off the vessel the next morning, feverish and vowing revenge. But, thought Blackbeard now as he climbed down to the low-ceilinged gun deck, at least you'll be alive tomorrow, Israel—you're not here.

"Here's another one," he told Miller, who had already filled a dozen bottles with shot and powder, and, after poking a slow match into the neck of each, laid them carefully in a blanket. "Pretty much ready?"

Miller grinned, further distorting his already scar-crimped face. "Anytime you say, cap'n," he replied happily.

"Fine." With a faint echo of the feeling he'd had for Israel Hands, Blackbeard wished for a moment that he'd cooked up some reason to send all of his crew away, to meet Spotswood's pirate-killers alone. But the more blood that was shed today the better his magic would work, and, sentiment aside, any misfortune for others that prospered him was an acceptable bargain. "No quarter," he said. "More blood-salt than sea-salt in the ocean today, eh?"

"Damn right," agreed Miller, giggling as he funneled powder into the new bottle.

"Damn right," echoed Blackbeard.

"Got match-cords lit over yonder, cap'n," Miller remarked. "Sun coming up, I reckon you'll want to be braidin"em on soon."

"No," Blackbeard said thoughtfully, "I don't think I'll wear any today." He turned to the ladder, then paused and, without looking back, waved over his shoulder to Miller and the men hunched over the cannon breeches. "Uh … thank you."

On deck again he saw that the day was indeed upon them. The east's faint pink had spread to a sky-spanning gray glow. A line of pelicans flapped past a few yards above the sand, and some stilt-legged birds were dashing busily back and forth on the Ocracoke Island beach a hundred yards off the port bow.

"Here they come, cap'n," said Richards grimly.

The sails of the two Navy sloops were now rigged and full, and the narrow hulls were advancing through the calm silver water, slowly because of its many shoals.

"I wonder if they've got a pilot that knows the inlet," mused Richards.

One of the sloops jarred to a mast-flexing halt; a moment later the other one did too.

"No," said Blackbeard, "they don't." I hope, he thought grimly, that all this hasn't been for nothing. I hope these Navy men aren't incompetent idiots.

He could see the splashes as sailors on the Navy vessels got busy pitching ballast over the side.

Hurry, you fools, he thought. The tide's going out. And if I'm not … replanted … by Christmas, only five weeks distant now, I'll miss her, Hurwood will have done his silly connubial trick and disposed of her.

He wished he had learned sooner—or guessed—that his marriage-magic wouldn't work with ordinary women anymore. Early in his career as a magician he had discovered that there were female aspects to magic as well as male ones, and that no man, alone, could have much access to the female areas. In the past he had always got around that obstacle by getting himself sacramentally linked to a woman and then using that link, which in effect made them equal partners, to complete his otherwise one-sided magical capacity. The ready availability of fresh wives had made him careless of individual ones, and they had all died or gone insane fairly soon after the wedding as he used them up, and the one who would become a widow today was his fourteenth.

She would be sixteen years old now, and had still been pretty when he last saw her, back in May. He had been linking himself to her pretty heavily before that, using the magic-capable areas of her female mind to keep Bonnett under control—for some reason Bonnett had been more vulnerable to the female aspects of magic—and he had finally broken her mind. She was in a madhouse in Virginia now, and when he had visited her there in May to see if she could still be of any use to him, she had screamed and fled from him and then broken a window and tried to kill herself with a long piece of glass. In the ensuing confusion a midwife as well as a priest had been called, for the attendant who caught her had at first thought she was trying to give herself an abortion.

But now Blackbeard was not even remotely of the same sorcerous status as the average woman. He had drastically changed his status, he had shed blood in Erebus … and so he could be profitably wed only to a woman who had also shed blood there.

As far as he knew there was only one woman alive who had done that.

"We could try to slip around them while they're stuck," observed Richards cautiously. "I think if we

—" He sighed. "Nevermind. They're off again."

Blackbeard suppressed a grin of satisfaction as he squinted ahead. "They are indeed."

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 683