ON STRANGER TIDES 17 page

"Christ," Richards said hoarsely, "this is exactly how they caught Bonnett two months ago—cornered him up an inlet on an early morning low tide."

Blackbeard frowned. "You're right," he growled.

Richards glanced up at him, clearly hoping that the pirate-king had finally comprehended the extent of their danger here.

But Blackbeard was just recalling what he had heard about Bonnett's capture. Yes, by the Baron, he thought angrily, aside from the fact that it took place a hundred and fifty miles south of here, it was damned similar.

Bonnett stole my defeat scene!

Not only did he disqualify himself for the role I had planned for him, subtly enough for me not to have noticed until it was too late and he'd got himself captured, but he also remembered and appropriated—pirated!—the long-planned defeat scene I intend to enact—re-enact!—today! And the two magicians I sent to fetch him from that island came back without him, and wounded … and this last Sunday, at exactly noon, I stopped being psychically aware of him. Apparently he found a loophole through which to escape me—the loop at the end of a hangman's rope.

"Hailing distance in a moment," croaked Richards, his face slick with sweat in spite of the chill that made his breath visible as steam.

"Hailing distance now," said Blackbeard. He squared his massive shoulders and then with slow, measured steps walked up to the bow and braced one booted foot on the bowsprit trunk. He filled his lungs, then shouted at the Navy sloops, "Damn you for villains, who are you? And from whence came you?"

There was commotion on the deck of the nearest sloop, and then the British ensign flag mounted fluttering to the top of the mast. "You may see by our colors," came a shouted reply, "we are no pirates!"

Almost formally, as if this were a rhetorical exchange in an old, old litany, Blackbeard called, "Come aboard so that I may see who you are."

"I cannot spare my boat," yelled back the Navy captain, "but I will come aboard of you as soon as I can, with my sloop!"

Blackbeard smiled and seemed to relax. He shouted back, "Damnation seize my soul if I give you quarters, or take any from you."

"We expect none, nor will extend any!"

Blackbeard turned to Richards. "I'd say that's clear," he remarked. "Run up our colors and cut our cable—we're off."

"Aye aye, cap'n," said Richards. "Leaving the prize?" he added, pointing at the captured merchant sloop.

"Sure, I never did care about the prize."

The foremost Navy vessel tacked north, evidently intending to loop around and prevent any flight by Blackbeard to the east, but in a moment Blackbeard's sloop, the Adventure, was skating west before the wind across the smooth surface of Pamlico Sound, aiming straight as an arrow between the other Navy sloop and the Ocracoke Island shore, toward the inlet and the open sea beyond. Every man aboard the Adventure except for Blackbeard was holding his breath, for the water was hardly more than six feet deep, and the tide was ebbing. Several even dug coins out of their pockets and flung them over the side—the sun hadn't yet cleared the hump of the island, and the coins fell lustreless into the smoke-gray water.

Richards was looking north, at the sloop that had hailed them. He laughed softly. "They're aground again!" he whispered.

Feeling suddenly very tired, Blackbeard drew one of his pistols and said, "Loose sails. We're going to pause to give these boys a broadside."

Richards spun to face him. "What? We've got it right now, we can get away if we—"

Blackbeard raised the pistol and poked Richards in the mouth with the muzzle. "Loose sails and ready the starboard guns, damn you!"

"Aye!" said Richards in a voice that was nearly a sob, turning to relay the order. Most of the men gaped in surprise, but they could see the pistol, and Hands' retirement was still fresh in everyone's memory, and so they obeyed, and the Adventure slowed, sails fluttering loosely, and coasted up alongside the Navy sloop.

"Fire starboard guns!" Blackbeard roared, and the Adventure rocked as the guns went off, fouling the dawn air with billows of acrid smoke and raising a clamoring scatter of alarmed sea birds.

The smoke drifted away west, toward the inlet, and Black-beard laughed to see the Navy vessel wallowing helplessly, her rigging blown to tatters and her rail and gunwales a ruin of torn wood.

"Set sail now?" pleaded Richards, eyeing the Ocracoke shore that was drawing slowly closer as the tide ebbed.

Blackbeard was looking at it too. "Yes," he said thoughtfully after a moment, for it was too late.

The wind, fitful at best, had died, and though the pirates crowded on every square yard of canvas like starving fishers spreading nets, the Adventure was drifting.

The sloop to the north had got afloat again and the men aboard her had got their oars out and were rowing toward the Adventure.

With the gentlest of jars, the Adventure went aground.

"Hurry up reloading the starboard guns!" called Blackbeard. "You lads," he added to a gang of pirates who were desperately flinging barrels and lengths of chain over the side, "nevermind that, you can't raise her faster than the tide's dropping her! Look to your pistols and cutlasses."

The remaining Navy sloop was closing steadily. "Hold fire until I say," said Blackbeard.

"Right," said Richards, who had drawn his cutlass and was slowly whirling it at arm's length in a warm-up exercise. Now that there was no hope of avoiding the encounter, most of his anxiety had disappeared. He grinned at Blackbeard. "I hope this is the closest you ever do cut it."

The giant pirate briefly squeezed Richards' shoulder. "Never this close again," he said quietly. "I promise you."

The Navy sloop was only a couple of dozen yards away now, and Blackbeard could even hear, over the knocking of the oars in the ports, grunts of effort from the rowers. He knew that the Navy captain must be considering when to discharge his own guns, and when things were a moment short of being lined up, Blackbeard called, "Fire."

Again the Adventure's starboard guns boomed, lashing small-shot like a whistling scythe across the other vessel's deck. Bodies, punched off their feet, spun away like kicked debris in a spray of splinters and blood, and the pirates cheered—but Blackbeard, standing on the Adventure's bowsprit, saw the young officer in charge hurriedly herding all his remaining ambulatory sailors belowdecks.

"Now the grenades!" Blackbeard yelled eagerly as soon as the last of the healthy Navy sailors had disappeared down the hatch.

The pirates happily got busy lighting the fuses protruding from the shot- and powder-filled bottles, and, as soon as a sputtering fire was near a bottle's neck, pitching the thing across the gap onto the Navy vessel's deck. With a staccato series of bangs the bottles exploded, flinging shot in all directions, ravaging the corpses on the deck and finishing off any Navy men who had been too badly hurt to get below.

"They're all dead, except three or four," Blackbeard yelled, drawing his cutlass. "Let's board and cut

'em to pieces!"

Boarding proved easy, for the tide was pulling the Navy sloop toward them, and Blackbeard was able to leap across the gap onto the shot-raked deck; at the same instant the hatch cover was flung back and the officer in charge of the Navy sloop, a lieutenant by his uniform, scrambled up to the deck.

Blackbeard bared his teeth in a grin so full of recognition and welcome that the lieutenant actually glanced behind himself to see what old friend the pirate-king had spied.

But behind him was nothing but a crowd of his own men scrambling up the ladder, the eighteen—of the original thirty-five—who could still wield a sword or fire a pistol. The pirates were leaping and clambering aboard right behind their chief, and the lieutenant and his men scarcely had time to draw their rapiers before the yelling pirates were upon them.

For the first few moments the deck was a chaotic riot of howling, clanging, stamping, chopping savagery, punctuated by the occasional bang of a pistol shot, as the pirates used their heavy cutlasses to hatchet through the line of Navy men and then turn back upon them again, and many of the Navy men's rapiers were broken in attempting to parry the sledgehammer blows of weapons that caused nearly as much damage striking flat as they did striking edge on. The deck was soon slippery with the blood that spouted from wrist-stumps, undone bellies and opened throats, and the air that shook with yelling and clanking was foul with the hot iron smell of fresh blood.

But the Navy men had all along been trying simply to evade the ponderous swings of the cutlasses rather than oppose their own fragile blades to them, and, after the first brutal couple of minutes, the panting, sweating pirates worked their ten-pound chunks of steel with less quickness and force, and the light rapier blades were able to dart in around the slow strokes, and puncture throats and eyes and chests. Though damaged less spectacularly, as many pirates were falling now as Navy men.

Blackbeard had wound up fighting by the mast, back to back with one of his men, but when a rapier point spun around the other pirate's descending cutlass and sprang in to transfix his heart, and he tumbled instantly limp to the deck, Blackbeard stepped away from the mast and with his left hand drew his last pistol.

The Navy lieutenant, standing in front of him, drew one of his own.

The two shots were nearly simultaneous, but while Black-beard's ball missed and went skipping away across the shoals, the lieutenant's ball punched straight into the giant pirate's abdomen.

It rocked him back, but a moment later Blackbeard roared and leaped forward, whirling his cutlass in a chop that broke off the lieutenant's rapier blade an inch from the hilt; Blackbeard raised the cutlass again to split the man's head—but another Navy man stepped up behind the pirate and, with a full over-the-head swing like someone driving a stake, brought the heavy axelike blade of a pike down onto Blackbeard's left shoulder, barely missing his ear. The collarbone snapped audibly and the pirate was slammed down onto one knee. He raised his head and then, incredibly, straightened his massive legs and stood up, swaying back just as the pike came whistling down again, so that it tore open his forehead and cheek instead of crushing his skull.

Blackbeard had dropped the fired pistol, but his good right hand still gripped the cutlass, and he swung it around in a horizontal arc that sent the pike-wielder's head and body tumbling, separately, across the deck.

Another pistol was fired directly into Blackbeard's chest, and as he staggered back, blood spattering onto the deck all around him, two rapiers were driven deep into his back; he whirled so quickly that one of them broke off in him, and his outflung cutlass broke the arm of the man who held the broken sword. Two more shots hammered into him and another blade chugged deeply into his side.

Finally he got his feet solidly under him and straightened to his full height—the Navy men drew back fearfully—and then, straight as a felled tree, he toppled forward, and the wet deck shook when he hit it.

"Jesus Christ," exhaled the lieutenant, sitting down abruptly, his exhaustion-tense hands still locked around the fired pistol and the broken sword.

After a pause, one of the Navy men picked up Blackbeard's cutlass, knelt by the corpse and raised the heavy blade over his head, obviously trying to guess where, under the tumble of tangled black hair, the pirate-king's neck was. A moment later he made up his mind and swung the blade down; it crunched through Blackbeard's spine and into the deck and Blackbeard's severed head rolled over to stare at the sky with a strained but sardonic grin.

When the tide rose again in the early evening, the four battered sloops filed past Beacon Island and out through the Ocracoke Inlet. The surviving pirates were under armed guard aboard the Adventure, and Blackbeard's head swung from the Navy sloop's bowsprit. Blood had stopped dripping from the grisly trophy hours ago, and most of it had long since threaded away in the cold salt water to feed tiny fishes, but one clot had remained solid, and clung now to the hull of the sloop just below the water line.

It was, very gently, pulsing.

Chapter Twenty-One

The bang of the pistol shot rolled away across the long harbor of New Providence Island, and though a glint showed on the deck of the Delicia as one of the Navy officers aboard her turned a glass on the shore, no one leaped up in fear of being murdered, or anticipation of seeing someone else be, as would have been the case six months ago, and Jack Shandy plodded barefoot across the hot sand to the chicken he'd beheaded with the pistol ball. It was evidently too early in the day for drink to have impaired his aim.

He picked up the head. As he'd feared, the beak had letters inked on it, and he let it drop.

Damn, he thought. So much for grilled chicken. I'm glad old Sawney hasn't started magicking the fever into lobsters yet.

He tucked the pistol into his sash and walked toward the fort. The darker-colored masonry of the new sections of wall gave the whole edifice a pied look, and Shandy thought it was probably the physical improvements, even more than the British flag and the presence of Woodes Rogers, the official governor, that had made mad old Governor Sawney move out of the place.

As he trudged toward the cluster of tents he glanced to his left at the harbor. There were fewer boats these days than there'd been before Rogers' arrival, and it was easy to spot the old Jenny. Shandy had abandoned his captaincy when he took the pardon three months ago, and Venner had stepped in and declared himself captain. By that time, though, everybody had taken the pardon, and it was clear to most that the days of piracy were dead, and nobody felt that the issue of who might be captain of one battered old sloop was important enough to dispute, and so Venner's claim had stood. He had careened the vessel, cleaned her up and rerigged her, and it was obvious that he intended to violate his pardon and go back on the account. Shandy had heard that he was furtively recruiting a crew from among the segment of the island's population that missed the bad old days—he hadn't asked Shandy, and Shandy wasn't interested anyway.

The Navy brigantine he'd seen wending its way in among the shoals this morning was moored now, but though supplies were being unloaded and taken ashore, there was none of the festive atmosphere he would have expected—men were standing around in little groups on the beach, talking quietly and shaking their heads, and one of the prostitutes was sobbing theatrically.

"Jack!" someone called. Shandy turned and saw Skank hurrying toward him.

"Mornin", Skank," he said when the young man stopped, panting, in front of him.

"Did you hear the news?"

"Probably not," said Shandy. "If I did, I forgot it."

"Blackbeard's dead!"

Shandy smiled reminiscently, as one might at learning that a game remembered from long-ago childhood is still being played by children today. "Ah." He kept walking, and Skank trotted along beside him. "Pretty sure, this news is?" Shandy asked, pausing at the tent that served as a sort of open-air pub.

"Oh, aye, couldn't be surer. It was in North Carolina, a month ago. Half his men were captured, and old Thatch's head was brought right to the governor."

"He died on the water, I daresay," remarked Shandy, accepting the cup of rum he didn't even have to bother specifying anymore.

Skank nodded. "Aye. He was in the Ocracoke Inlet, in a sloop called the Adventure. He'd hid the Queen Anne's Revenge somewhere, and all his lucre too, they say. They claim he didn't have a single reale aboard. That weren't like him, though—probably the Navy men took all the money."

"No—I'll bet—" Shandy paused to take a long sip of the rum. 'I'll bet he had hid it all. Adventure, eh?

An apt name—it was his great adventure, I guess."

Skank looked around at the tents and the beach and the half-sunk hulks of abandoned ships that Governor Rogers was already getting people to break up and carry away. "I guess this really isn't a pirate island anymore."

Shandy laughed. "You just now noticed? Two days ago Rogers hanged eight men right over there, remember?—for violating the pardon. And we all just watched, and when it was done we all just wandered away."

"Sure, but—" Skank struggled with the complexity of the idea he was trying to express. "But just knowing old Thatch was out there somewhere … "

Shandy shrugged and nodded. "And might come back. Yeah, I know. I can't picture even Woodes Rogers resisting him. Aye, soon now there'll be taxes and wages and laws about where to moor your boat. And you know something? I think magic will stop working here too, like it did back east."

"Goddamn." Skank absently took Shandy's cup, had a deep gulp and then handed it back. "Where'll you go, Jack? I'm thinking of signing on with Venner."

"Oh, I'll stay here till I run out of money for rum, and then I suppose I'll move on, get some kind of work. Hell, it's only a matter of time before England declares war on Spain again, and pirating will go back to being legal, and then maybe I'll enlist on a privateer. I don't know, it's a sunny day, and I've got rum—I'll worry about tomorrow's problems tomorrow."

"Huh. You used to be more—" This was Skank's day for abstract concepts. "More … jumpy."

"Aye, I did. I remember that." He emptied the cup and handed it back for a refill. "But I believe soon I won't remember it."

Obscurely troubled, Skank nodded and wandered back toward the boats from which the new supplies were being unloaded.

Shandy sat down in the sand and grinned over his sun-warmed rum. More jumpy, he thought. Well, sure, Skank—I had things to be jumpy about. Two things. I wanted to confront my uncle Sebastian and expose to the world—and the law!—what he had done to my father; and, even more than that, I wanted to rescue Beth Hurwood from her father and tell her … some conclusions I had come to. But neither of those things turned out to be possible.

Out in the harbor the Jenny's mainsail was jerking, and Shandy focused on it. Someone was apparently trying to raise her gaff-spar to a higher angle. Can't be done, friend, he thought. That old wrought iron gaff-saddle is so shot-bent that you're lucky you can raise the spar as high as you've got it—and frankly she takes the wind better with a few wrinkles up at the throat of the sail anyway. If old Hodge was still alive, or Davies, they'd tell you the same. You'd be better off spending your time replacing some of those overstrained hull-strakes.

Shandy remembered the overhaul he himself had given the Jenny, nearly four months ago now, after the old sloop had limped back into the harbor all scorched and sprung and jury-rigged, missing her old captain and half her crew. Woodes Rogers had arrived on New Providence Island only two weeks earlier, but the new governor had already driven out such unrepentant citizens as Charlie Vane, and had made speeches about civic pride, and raised the British flag, and distributed pamphlets from the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge—and so no one was terribly surprised by the news that Philip Davies was dead and the Vociferous Carmichael spirited away. It seemed consistent with the times.

At first Shandy had ignored the old sloop. He had sailed her into the harbor on a Friday afternoon, and that evening, drunk, he made his best yet "bouillabaise endeavor," using up most of the remaining pirated garlic, saffron, tomatoes and olive oil on the island, and it drew praise even from Woodes Rogers himself, who had asked what all the commotion was about on the beach, and, being told, requested some of the seafood stew for himself and his captains; but Shandy tasted only enough of the court bouillon and rouille and seafood to be sure they were cooked correctly, and himself mainly consumed bottle after bottle of Davies' hoarded 1702 Latour bordeaux. He laughed at every joke and joined in the several group songs—none of them, to be sure, rendered quite as heartily as they'd been in the days before Rogers' arrival—but his thoughts were clearly elsewhere, and even Skank noticed and told him to eat and drink and worry about tomorrow's problems tomorrow.

Shandy had eventually wandered away from the fires and the ex-pirates and the nervously observing Navy officers, and had walked down to the shore. He had first set foot on this island only six weeks before, but already it was more of a home than he'd ever had, and he knew its people better than he had known those of any other community. He had made friends here, and seen them die, before the current governor's ships had been even white dots on the eternal blue horizon.

Then he had heard someone scuffing across the sand in the darkness behind him, and he turned, frightened—"Who is it?" he called.

A chunky figure in a ragged dress was silhouetted against the fire. "It's me, Jack," came a girl's low voice in reply. "Ann. Ann Bonny."

He remembered hearing that she was trying to get a divorce from Jim Bonny. "Ann." He hesitated, then slowly walked over to where she stood. He put his hands on her shoulders. "So many of them are dead now, Ann," he said, wondering if he was about to start crying. "Phil … and Hodge … Mr.

Bird … "

Ann laughed, but he could hear the tears in her voice. "I am not a dog!" she quoted softly.

"Time passes so much more … quickly, here," he said, sliding one arm around her shoulders and waving with his other hand at the island's jungly darkness. "I feel as if I've lived here for years … "

They were walking again, down the beach together, away from the fires. "It's a matter of being suited for it, Jack," she said. "This Governor Rogers could live here for fifty years and he still wouldn't belong—he's all wired up with duties and consequences, and punishment for crimes, and so much money for so much cargo on such and such a date at this here port. It's all Old World stuff. But you, why, the day I first saw you I said to myself, there's a lad who was born for these islands."

These islands. The words were pregnant with images: flocks of pink flamingoes visible at dawn behind impenetrable barriers of high-arching mangrove roots, piles of pearly conch-shell fragments scattered around the sooty crater of a cooking-fire pit in white sand, and blindingly sun-glittering blue-green sea seen through a haze of rum-drunkenness, scraps of smoke-blackened wadding-cloth tumbling along the beach after a pistol duel like the used penwipers of Mars himself …

And he did fit in here, or could—there was a part of him that responded to the nearly innocent savagery of it all, the freedom, the abdication of all guilts and capacity for guilt …

She turned to him and kissed him and his free arm went around her waist, and suddenly he wanted her terribly, wanted the loss of identity she could give him; in moments they were lying in the warm sand, and she was hiking her dress up and he was on top of her, panting feverishly—

And a close gunshot deafened him and for an instant lit Ann's straining face, and a moment later a pistol butt slammed down onto the back of his head—it landed on the tarred stump of his chopped-short ponytail, though, and instead of knocking him unconscious the blow only jarred him. He rolled off of Ann on the seaward side and scrambled to his feet.

Ann still lay there on her back; a pockmark in the sand nearby showed where the pistol ball had struck

—she wasn't hurt—but she was whining impatiently and hitching up her hips and gnawing on the ragged hem of her dress, and Shandy wanted only to kill whoever had interrupted them and then return to her.

Jim Bonny stood on the other side of her, and he tossed the spent pistol away and raised a hand; Shandy felt the sudden heat in the air around him and flicked his right hand in a quick counter-and-return gesture, then bit his tongue to get blood and spat toward Bonny to give the return more power.

Bonny's hair started to smolder and smoke, but he grabbed a ball of braided fur at his belt, and the heat was dispelled. "Mate Care-For lookin' out for me, you bastard," Bonny whispered. "He and I gonna render you unfit for wife-stealin'."

Too impatient and breathless to be afraid, Shandy snapped his fingers and pointed two of them at Bonny; but Bonny's hand was still on the fur-ball and the attack rebounded, knocking Shandy over and doubling him up with terrible cramps. Bonny took the opportunity to give his wife a kick in the shoulder and to speak a quick rhyme at Shandy.

Blood burst from Shandy's ears and nose, and rationally he knew that he was out-classed here, and should try to flee or yell for help; but he wanted Ann—wanted, in fact, to take her with Jim Bonny's blood hot on his hands …

But with Mate Care-For protecting Bonny there didn't seem to be much he could do. He hunched up onto his knees and whistled a blindness at Bonny, but despite his best parries it too bounced back upon him, and while Shandy was blind Bonny sent a spastic fit at him.

Shandy collapsed, jiggling and hooting helplessly on the sand like the caller at a Saint Vitus' Day dance, and he heard Bonny kick his wife again and then step over her to get at him.

Shandy knew that it was too late now to try to run or call for help)—he was going to die, here and now, if he didn't think of something, and—more unbearable than the thought of death—Jim Bonny would be the one who would kneel between Ann's thighs; and at this point she would probably neither notice the difference nor care.

Ignoring the pain of a snagged finger, he shoved his flapping right hand into his trousers pocket; there was still grit in there from the ball of mud he had scraped from his boot on the Florida coast, and he rolled it into a lump between his thumb and forefinger. Then he yanked his hand out and flung the bit of dirt up at the sky.

And then he was in a boat, passing under a bridge strung with colored lanterns, and instead of garlic and wine his mouth tasted of strawberries. He remembered this—this was Paris—he had been, what, nine years old when his father, having made some money, had taken him out for a good dinner and a boat ride down the Seine afterward. The figure beside him turned to him, but this time it was not his father.

It seemed to be an ancient black man, his hair and short beard as white and tightly curled as those of a marble statue.

"Serious vodun attacks are generally directed at, and take place in, the memories of the defensive combatant," the black man said in a lilting French dialect, "the memories being the accumulated sum of a person. If I meant you harm, you'd find this remembered scene, the remembered people in it, changing in lethal and frightening ways … very like the delirium experienced during a high fever … and it would get worse and worse until you either counterattacked or perished." He smiled and held out his hand. "My name is Maitre Carrefour."

After a moment's hesitation, Shandy shook the man's hand.

"Luckily for myself," the black man went on, "I am a loa whose domain is populated islands. I have many dealings with men, and can anticipate their actions, unlike the natural loa you encountered in the Florida rain forest. Your thrown bit of dirt would not kill me—it has lost much of its potency in the week and a half since you brought it out—but it will nevertheless injure me if I stay and refrain from counterattacking. Therefore I am even now withdrawing from the conflict between yourself and Mr. Bonny."

Ashamed, Shandy looked away from him, back the way they had come. Among the pedestrians on the bridge he could see several women; despite the bright lantern light, only their faces were in particular focus, and it occurred to him that that must have been the way women had looked to him at the age of ten. Not anything like the way Ann Bonny had looked to him a minute ago. Which view, he wondered bitterly now, was the narrower?

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 596