On Stranger Tides

"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 sugarand-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 turtleboat! 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 skyspanning 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 onesided 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."

"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 openair 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 choppedshort 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-andreturn 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?

"Uh … thank you," Shandy mumbled. "Why … why are you doing this, letting me off? Bonny said you were protecting him."

"Seeing that he comes to no harm. Do you mean him any harm?"

"No—not now, not anymore."

"Then I am not remiss." Something changed silently in the sky. Shandy glanced up and saw that the stars had become less distinct, as if a pane of faintly frosted glass now hung between them and him; Maitre Carrefour was apparently letting the illusion dissipate. The old black man chuckled. "You are fortunate, Mr. Chandagnac, that I am one of the Rada loas and not one of the younger Petro ones. I have the option of not taking offense."

"I, uh, am glad of that." The taste of strawberries was gone.

"I hope so. You got that tactic, that mud-ball trick, from Philip Davies—and you have wasted it. He gave you something else as well; it would not please me to see you waste that too." Soft sand was under Shandy's left side and the starry night sky above his right, and he realized he was back on the New Providence beach; and when he heard the thup of the upflung bit of mud hitting the sand, he knew that his talk with Maitre Carrefour had not taken place in local time. He was now able to deflect Bonny's magical attacks with a gesture and a whistle; he did so, and struggled tiredly to his feet.

Bonny was still flinging them, and Shandy kept knocking them aside.

"Give it a rest, Jim," he sighed. "You're just buying yourself a month of needing help even to lift a fork. Get a lot of liver and raisins and blood sausage inside you and maybe it won't hit too hard." Bonny blinked at him in surprise, then clenched his fists and, dark-faced with effort, barked out half a dozen syllables.

Shandy deflected it toward the sea, and a fish leaped out of the water and exploded with a blue flash and a wet pop. Shandy shook his head at Bonny. "Keep it up and your hair's gonna turn white too, as well as your gums."

Bonny swayed, took a step toward Shandy and then collapsed limply, face down. Shandy walked around Ann to him and crouched to roll him over so that he wouldn't smother in the sand. Ann had sat up and half rolled over. "Get over here," she said. He walked over to her but didn't sit down. "I've got to go, Ann. That … wouldn't have been good, what we were about to do. I'm only staying on New Providence Island long enough to get the Jenny repaired and provisioned," he said, having decided it only as he was saying it, "and then go take care of some business."

Ann was on her feet in an instant. "Is it him?" she demanded, kicking her unconscious husband. "The tale-bearing dog who keeps Governor Rogers' boots damp with lickin"em? I've been saving up for a divorce-by-sale, and you could buy one for me right now."

"No, Ann, it ain't him—or only partly. I just—"

"You bastard," she shrilled, "you're going after that damned Hurwood bitch again!"

"I'm going to Haiti," he said patiently. "I've got an uncle there who is going to set me up with a proper ocean-going three-masted ship … before he hangs."

"Liar!" she yelled. "Goddamn liar!"

He walked back up toward the fires, one hand twitching a parry against any malefic spells she might be inserting among the catalog of obscenities she was shouting after him. I wasn't lying, Ann, he thought. I really am going to go to Haiti and ruin my uncle if I possibly can, and use his stolen money to buy a ship. But at the same time you were right. As soon as I get a ship that can take the open seas, I'm going to find, and rescue, and—if there's still any worth in me — marry the only woman in whom I can see both a body and a face, and with whom I need not resign one or the other of my own.

Chapter Twenty-Two

And so for the next three days he had plied his weary crew with the most lavish dinners he could assemble and the best liquor he could get hold of, in exchange for which he made them slave at the overhauling of the Jenny; but even Venner, who complained most often, couldn't claim that their new captain was making them do an unfair amount of work, for Shandy was always the first awake in the morning, the one who made himself lift heavier loads than anyone else was willing to, the one who didn't take rest breaks … and then, when evening darkness made further work impossible, Shandy was the one who cooked the bountiful dinner, making works of art out of whatever marinades and slow-simmering stocks he'd left developing when he went to the boat at dawn. On the morning of Wednesday, the seventeenth of August, the Jenny sailed out the southern end of the New Providence harbor. She had taken on powder and shot as well as food and drink, and she carried at least twice as many men as she needed, but the deadline for taking the pardon was still nearly three weeks away, and Shandy was bringing no bocor along—he had managed to convey to Woefully Fat a plea to sail with them to Haiti, but the giant sorceror, who had somehow reappeared on the island days before the Jenny had arrived, refused—and so Woodes Rogers decided not to imperil his own still-shaky position by attempting to prevent the sloop's departure. Shandy's crew was nervous about hurricanes, for this was the dangerous month of August, and in every previous year the Caribbean pirates would be well up the American coast by now, but Shandy argued that the southeast trip to Port-au-Prince was actually a little shorter, and far more direct, than the trip to the Florida west coast had been, and that on the way down they could hug the Exumas and the Ragged Islands and the Inaguas, and thus never be more than an hour's close haul from some sheltering shore. And twice during the three-day voyage they did see the ominous iron-gray helmets of distant storm clouds on the southern horizon, but both times the storms moved west to ravage Cuba before the Jenny got anywhere near them.

On Saturday morning the Jenny tacked in to the Haitian harbor called the Bight of Leograne, in past the fortifications on the jungle slopes at St. Marc and on through the St. Marc Channel to the colonial French village of L'Arcahaye. Shandy rowed the sloop's little boat to shore, and then he used some of Philip Davies' accumulated gold to get his hair cut and buy a coat and a neckerchief to cover his ragged shirt. Looking at least halfway respectable now, he gave a black farmer a couple of coins in exchange for letting him ride along with a wagonload of cassavas and mangoes to the town of Portau-Prince, eighteen miles farther down the coast. It was late afternoon by the time they reached town, and the native fishermen were already rowing ashore, dragging their crude longboats up onto the sand beneath the shadowed palms, and hauling away heavy woven-straw baskets and bamboo cages with crabs and rock lobsters moving around like big spiders inside them.

The town of Port-au-Prince proved to be a latticework of narrow streets laid out around a central plaza. The plaza and most of the streets were paved in white stone, though around the shops and warehouses by the waterfront the pavement was nearly hidden beneath hundreds—no, it must have been thousands—of brown, flat-trodden husks. Before stepping out into the crowded square, Shandy picked up one of the husks and smelled it; it was sugarcane, and he realized that this was the source of the gaggingly sweet, half-fermented smell that blended in the afternoon air with the usual rotten fish and smoky cooking odors shared by seaports everywhere. He tossed the thing away, wondering for a moment if it had come from the Chandagnac plantations.

Most of the people bustling through the plaza were black, and several times as Shandy made his way toward the official-looking buildings on the far side, he was courteously greeted with, "Bon jou', blanc." Good day, white. He nodded politely each time, and once, when a young black man muttered to a companion a quick joke in half-Dahomey patois about Shandy's discreditable shirt cuffs, he was able to quote back, in the same patois, a marron proverb to the effect that any sort of cuffs, or none at all, were preferable to iron ones. The young man laughed, but stared curiously after Shandy, and he realized he would have to watch himself here. This was civilization, not New Providence Island. Wary of any kind of law enforcement officers—for it was possible that the English authorities had told the French about the John Chandagnac who had assisted in the total destruction of a Royal Navy man-of-war less than a month ago—Shandy asked a merchant where he should go to settle questions about deeds and titles to local property, and he was directed to one of the government offices right on the plaza.

Yes, he thought as he strode across to the place, first I'll find out where the old homestead is, and go pay Uncle Sebastian a visit. No need to let him know right away who I am, though I will definitely want to do that pretty soon.

The interior of the building looked like any European office—several white men working at high writing stands, leather-bound ledgers along one wall—but the tropical breeze swaying the lace curtains in the tall windows undid the illusion, and the clink of pen-nib in inkwell, and then the scratch of the nib on paper, seemed as incongruous here as would the cry of a parrot in Threadneedle Street.

One of the clerks looked up when Shandy entered. "Yes?"

"Good day," said Shandy, trying for the first time in two months to speak pure French. "I have a question about the, uh, Chandagnac estate—"

"Are you another of the employees? There is nothing we here can do to help you get your back wages."

"No, I'm not an employee." Shandy summoned up his best Parisian accent. "I have a question about—

the title to the house and land."

"Ah, I see, you are another creditor. Well, as I understand it, everything was sold; but of course you will want to talk to the executor of the estate."

"Executor?" Shandy's stomach went cold. "Is he—is Sebastian Chandagnac dead?"

"You did not know? I am sorry. Yes, he committed suicide some time Wednesday night. His—"

"This last Wednesday?" Shandy interrupted, fighting to keep from shouting. "Three days ago?"

"Yes. His body was found on Thursday morning by the housekeeper." The clerk shrugged. "Business reversals, it seems. They say he had to sell everything, and still left behind many debts." Shandy's face felt numb, as if he'd had too much to drink. "I … heard that he was a … speculator."

"Exactly, m'sieu'."

"This executor. Where would I find him?"

"At this hour he will probably be having brandy on the terrace below Vigneron's. He is a small man, somewhat bucktoothed. His name is Lapin, Georges Lapin."

Shandy found Mr. Lapin at a table overlooking the crowded harbor, and from the number of saucers in front of him he guessed he'd been there quite awhile.

The smaller man started violently when he saw him, then apologized and accepted Shandy's offer to buy him another brandy.

"You are the executor, I understand, of the Chandagnac estate," began Shandy when he'd pulled out a chair for himself and sat down. "Uh, two brandies, please," he added to the steward who had halfsuspiciously followed him to Lapin's table.

"You are of Sebastian's family," said Lapin with certainty.

" … Yes," Shandy admitted.

"There is resemblance—for one instant I thought you were him." He sighed. "Executor, yes, that is me. Though as it happens there is nothing to execute—eh?—and all I am doing is pointing various creditors at one another so that they may fight. Unknown to any of us his friends, Sebastian had destituted himself." He picked up his brandy as soon as the steward set it down, and he drained it at a gulp as if in illustration of Sebastian Chandagnac's profligacy.

"One more for Mr. Lapin, please," Shandy told the steward. Turning back to Lapin he asked, "And he's dead? Certainly?"

"I saw the body myself, M'sieur Chandagnac. How odd it is to call someone else that! He had no other surviving family here, you know. Yes, he primed a blunderbuss pistol and then loaded it with all his remaining gold and jewelry." Lapin held out his two hands cupped together. "Not much as a fortune, but as a load of shot it was kingly. And then he raised the gun so that the bell muzzle was a foot away from his face, took one last look, we may suppose, at what remained of his fortune, and then sent that fortune into his brain! Ah, it was poetical, in a way. Though messy in a pragmatic sense, of course—virtually the entirety of his head wound up in the garden below his bedchamber window. Poor Sebastian!—I am certain the local gendarmerie made off with most of the … ammunition."

Then Shandy remembered where he'd heard the name Lapin—Skank had said that the big dealers with pirates on Haiti were "Lapin and Shander-knack." And you're right, Skank, Shandy thought now — he does look like a rabbit.

"I suppose I can see why they made it look like suicide," Shandy said ruminatively.

"I beg your pardon," said Lapin— "Look like? There was no question—"

"No no," said Shandy hastily, "keep thinking precisely that, I certainly don't mean to tell you anything you don't need to know. You're in no danger. I'm sure you never had any dealings with," he leaned forward and spoke quietly over the brandies, "pirates."

Lapin's plump face actually turned pale in the evening light. "Pirates?" Shandy nodded. "An English governor has been sent out to New Providence Island, which is the pirates' home base. Now the pirates are killing off all the respectable merchants they once had dealings with—so as to leave no one to," Shandy winked, "testify." Shandy almost started laughing at the idea of the New Providence pirates being methodical about anything, but he forced himself to maintain a mournful expression.

Lapin swallowed. "Kill the merchants?"

"That's right. The pirates are just waiting for each merchant to establish contact. As soon as one of their old customers gets in touch with them, or consents to see them if they approach him," Shandy shrugged, "that man is as dead as Sebastian."

"Mon Dieu!" Lapin got hastily to his feet, spilling his brandy. He cast a fearful look at the harbor, as if expecting brigands to rush ashore even now. "It is—later than I had thought. It has been pleasant talking to you, M'sieur Chandagnac, but I am afraid I must bid adieu." Shandy didn't get up, but raised his glass. "To your very good and continuing health, Monsieur Lapin."

But after Lapin bumbled away, Shandy's momentarily raised spirits fell. His uncle was dead and penniless. There would be no revenge and no ship. He rented a room for the night and then in the morning hitched a ride back out to L'Arcahaye and the waiting Jenny.

For the next two weeks he led the Jenny on a frantic roundabout tour of the Caribbean, but though he checked at every port registry, even the English ones where he was a wanted man, there was no record of any Vociferous Carmichael or even Charlotte Bailey having been seen anywhere since the first of August, when, after having magically picked up Shandy and dropped him over the side, Benjamin Hurwood had got his corpse-crew in motion and sailed away.

At the end of the two weeks of fruitless search his crew was on the verge of mutiny and the deadline for taking the King's Pardon was only two days away, so Shandy ordered his men to turn the old sloop toward New Providence Island.

They arrived in the midafternoon of Tuesday, the fifth of September, and when Shandy stepped off the Jenny he didn't look back; Venner could captain her from now on, and take her to Hell or the Heavenly Kingdom for all he cared. Once ashore, Shandy had time to go to the fort, officially take the pardon from Governor Rogers, and still be back on the beach in time to cook up a vast dinner. And, in what was to become a tradition through the next three months, he ate nearly none of it himself, contenting himself instead with huge quantities of drink.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Yes, Skank, Shandy thought again now as he watched someone out in the harbor keep on trying to yank the Jenny's gaff-spar higher, yes I was more jumpy in those days. I had things to do then; now there's only one task left, and that's … forget. He stretched out more comfortably in the sand and swirled the sun-warmed rum in his cup affectionately.

A young Navy ensign hesitantly approached Shandy. "Excuse me … you're Jack Shandy?" Shandy was finishing the cup, and stared owlishly at the young man over the rim. "Right," he said, lowering it finally.

"You're the one—excuse me—that sank the Whitney, aren't you?"

"I don't think so. What was the Whitney?"

"A man-o'-war that blew up and sank, this last June. They'd captured Philip Davies, and—"

"Oh." Shandy noticed that his cup was empty, and got to his feet. "Right. Until now I never knew her name. Actually, it was Davies that blew her up—I just helped." He put his cup down on the table in front of the liquor tent and nodded at the man who ran it.

"And you shot the captain?" the young ensign went on.

Shandy picked up his refilled cup. "It was a long time ago. I don't remember." The ensign looked disappointed. "I arrived here on the Delicia, with Governor Rogers," he explained.

"I, uh … guess this was a pretty wild place before, huh? Swordfights, shootings, treasure … " Shandy laughed softly and decided not to burst the boy's romantic bubble. "Oh, aye, all o' that." Encouraged, the young man pressed on. "And you sailed with Blackbeard himself, I hear, on that mysterious trip to Florida? What was that like?"

Shandy gestured expansively. "Oh … hellish, hellish. Treachery, swordfights, men walking the plank, sea battles … trackless swamps, terrible fevers, cannibal Carib Indians dogging our tracks … " He paused, for the young ensign was blushing and frowning.

"You don't have to make fun of me," the boy snapped.

Shandy blinked, not recalling exactly what he'd been saying. "What do you mean?"

"Just because I'm new out here doesn't mean I don't know anything. I knew the Spaniards completely wiped out the Carib Indians two hundred years ago."

"Oh." Shandy scowled in concentration. Where had he heard of Carib Indians? "I didn't know that. Here, lemme buy you some rum, I didn't mean any … any … "

"I can't drink in uniform," the ensign said, though he seemed mollified.

"I'll have yours then." Shandy drained his cup and put it down on the table again. The man behind the table refilled it and made yet another mark on his credit sheet.

"It does seem that I've missed the great days of piracy," the ensign sighed. "Davies, Bonnett, Blackbeard all dead, Hornigold and Shandy have taken the pardon—though there is one new one. Do you know Ulysse Segundo?"

"No," said Shandy, carefully picking up his cup. "Dressy name."

"Well, sure. He's got a big three-masted ship called the Ascending Orpheus, and he's taken dozens of ships in the last couple of months. He's supposed to be the most bloodthirsty of all—people are so scared of him that some have jumped into the sea and drowned themselves when it became clear he was going to take their ship!"

"That's pretty scared," Shandy allowed, nodding.

"There's all sorts of stories about him," the ensign went on eagerly, then halted. "Of course, I don't believe most of them. Still, a lot of people seem to. They say he can whistle the wind out of your sails and into his, and that he can navigate and catch you even in the densest fog, and when he captures a ship he not only takes all the gold and jewelry off her, but also the dead bodies of any sailors killed in the capture! Why, he won't even bother with stuff like grain or leather or hardware—he takes only real treasure, though they say he values fresh blood most of all, and has sometimes drained whole crews. One captain who lost his ship to him but lived says there were corpses in the Orpheus's rigging, obviously corpses, rotting—but one of them was talking!" Shandy smiled. "What'd it have to say?"

"Well … I don't believe this, of course … but the captain swore this one corpse kept saying, over and over, 'I am not a dog.'—hey, watch it!" he added angrily, for Shandy had dropped his cup, and rum had splashed on the boy's uniform trousers.

"Where was he seen last," Shandy asked quickly, "and when was it?" The ensign blinked in surprise at this sudden intense interest, so uncharacteristic of the sleepy-eyed, easygoing man who had seemed to have no other goal in life than to be the settlement drunkard.

"Why, I don't know, I—"

"Think!" Shandy seized the young man by his uniform collar and shook him. "Where and when?"

"Uh—near Jamaica, off Montego Bay—not quite a week ago!"

Shandy flung him away, turned on his heel and sprinted toward the shore. "Skank!" he yelled.

"Skank, dammit, where—there you are. Come here!"

The young ex-pirate trotted up to him uncertainly. "What's up, Jack?"

"The Jenny's leaving today, this afternoon. Get all the men you can—and provisions—and get aboard her."

"But .. Jack, Venner's going to wait till January, to link up with Charlie Vane … "

"Damn Venner. Did I ever say I was resigning the captaincy of the Jenny?"

"Well, no, Jack, but we all assumed—"

"Damn your assumptions. Round 'em up and get aboard.

Skank's puzzled frown became a smile. "Sure … cap'n." He turned and hurried away, his bare feet kicking up sprays of white sand.

Shandy had just run to a beached rowboat and begun to drag it to the water when he remembered where he'd heard of Carib Indians. Crazy old Governor Sawney had mentioned them to him, the night before the Carmichael and the Jenny sailed to meet Blackbeard in Florida. What had the old man said? Something about having killed his share of them in his day.

Shandy paused to squint speculatively up the slope toward the corner of the settlement where the weird old man had set up a little tent for himself. No, he told himself, resuming his struggle with the heavy boat—Sawney's old, but he's not two hundred.

But Shandy paused again a moment later, for he'd remembered something else. The old man had said something about "when you get to that geyser." The Fountain of Youth had been a sort of geyser. And when Shandy gave that first puppet show, and Sawney interrupted it with his ravings, hadn't he said, "faces in the spray … almas de los perditos … "? Faces in the spray, souls of the damned …

Had Sawney been there at one time?

If so, he might be more than two hundred years old. It wouldn't really be surprising. Though it is surprising that he's so deteriorated. I wonder, he thought as once again he resumed tugging at the boat, what he did wrong.

Again he stopped. Well, now, if there is something, he thought, some effect, that can make a babbling idiot of a sorceror who's powerful enough to get to Erebus and buy a century or two of added lifetime, it's something I damn well better know about—if I want to do something more this time than just be picked up and dropped into the ocean.

Slowly at first, then more quickly as he remembered other puzzling things about old Sawney—his flawless but archaic Spanish, his handiness with magic—Shandy climbed back up the slope to the tents.

"Seen the governor around today?" he asked one lean old ex-pirate. "Sawney, I mean—not Rogers." Shandy was smiling and had tried to keep his tone casual, but the man had seen the end of his conversation with the young ensign, and he stepped back and raised his hands placatingly as he answered. "Sure, Jack, he's in that tent of his, up toward the inlet. Take it easy, huh?" Oblivious to the muttering and head-shaking in his wake, Shandy sprinted across the sand, broadjumped over the cold cooking pit and pounded away toward the inlet where, half a year ago, he'd helped refit the Carmichael; and he paused to grin and catch his breath when he saw old Sawney crouched in front of the sailcloth tent he lived in these days, alternately taking swigs from, and peering intently into, a half-full bottle of rum.

The old man was wearing baggy, bright yellow trousers and an embroidered silk jacket, and if he had on any sort of neck-cloth it was concealed under his tangled beard, which was the color of old bleached bones.

Shandy plodded down the slope and sat down near him. "I'd like to talk to you, governor."

"Ah?" Sawney squinted at him. "Not fevered again, are you? Stay away from them chickens."

"No, governor. I want to know … about bocors, magicians. Especially ones that have been to the … the Fountain of Youth."

Sawney had another gulp from, and peek into, his bottle. "Plenty of bocors about. I ain't one."

"But you know what I mean by the Fountain of Youth? The … geyser?" The old man's only response was to spin the liquor around in the bottle and sing, in a high, cracked voice,

Mas molera si Dios quisiere— Cuenta y pasa, que buen viaje faza. Shandy did a rough translation of this in his head— More will flow if God wills— count and let it happen, and the voyage will pass more quickly—and decided it was no help. "Very well," he said, controlling his impatience, "let's start somewhere else. Do you remember the Carib Indians?"

"Aye, cannibals. We wiped 'em out. Killed 'em all in the Cordoba expedition in '17 amd '18, killed 'em or took 'em to be slaves in Cuba, which meant the same thing. They had all the magic; they kept pens of Arawak Indians, the way you'd keep cattle. To eat, sure—but you know what was more important than that? Hah? The blood, fresh blood. The Caribs kept those Arawaks alive like you'd keep gunpower dry."

"Did they know about the place in the rain forest in Florida? The Fountain in the place where it feels like the ground is … too solid?"

"Ah, Dios … si," Sawney whispered, darting a glance at the sunlit harbor as if something in the sea might overhear. "It wasn't so dark there, I've heard, before they came … damned hole into hell … " Shandy leaned forward a little and spoke quietly. "When did you go there?"

"1521," said Sawney clearly. He took an enormous gulp of rum. "I knew by then where it had to be — I could read the signs, in spite of the padres with their holy water and prayers … I went in, and kept the gnat-clouds of ghosts away until I found it; vinegar will drive lice away from your body, but you need the black tobacco weed to drive away ghosts … and I shed blood there, by the Fountain … sprouted that plant. Did it just in time, too—as soon as I got out of that swamp there was a skirmish with the Indians, and I caught an arrow, and the wound festered … I made sure some of my blood got into the sea. Blood and sea water, and I'll live forever, over and over again, while that plant's still there … "

Shandy suddenly remembered the dead, dried shrub he'd seen in Erebus, and he realized that this would probably be the last of Sawney's lifetimes. "How does it happen," he asked gently, "that one powerful enough to plant blood there, and use the blood and sea water magic here to buy many lives, can deteriorate? Can lose the big magics, can become … simple?"

Sawney smiled and raised one white eyebrow. "Like me, you mean, eh? Iron." Though embarrassed that the old man had understood him so clearly, Shandy pressed on. "Iron? What do you mean?"

"You must have smelt it. The magic smell, you know? Like a pan left on a hot fire. Wide-awake iron. And fresh blood smells that way too, and magic needs fresh blood, so obviously there's iron in it. Ever hear the story that the gods came here out of the sky as splashes of red-hot iron? No? Why, the very oldest writers claimed that the souls of stars were in the stuff, because it was the last thing a star exhaled before it started to die."

Shandy was afraid the old man had lost his lucidity again, for obviously there was no iron in blood or stars, but he decided to invest one more question in this tangent. "So how does it diminish magicians?"

"Hm?" Sawney blew across the mouth of the bottle, producing a low hooting. "Oh, it doesn't." Shandy thumped his fist into the sand. "Damn it, governor, I need to know—"

"It's cold iron that messes 'em up— solid iron. It's finished, you see, you can't do magic around it because all the magic is finished too, before you even start. You ever make wine?" Shandy rolled his eyes. "No, but I know about vinegar and lice, thanks. I—"

"You know vino de Jerez? Sherry, the English call it. Or port?"

"Sure, governor," said Shandy tiredly, wondering if the old man was going to ask him to fetch him a bottle.

"Well, you know how they're made? You know why some of 'em are so sweet?"

"Uh … they're fortified. They mix brandy into the wine and it stops the fermentation, so some sugar can remain in it and not all turn to alcohol."

"Good boy. Yes, the brandy stops the fermentation. And so you still have sugar, yes, but for it to change to alcohol now is not possible. And what is this stuff, this brandy, that stops everything so?"

"Well," said Shandy, mystified, "it's distilled wine."

"Verdad. A product of fermentation makes more fermentation impossible; do you see?" Shandy's heart was beating faster, for he thought he almost did see. "Cold iron, solid iron, works on magic the way brandy works on fermentation," he said unsteadily. "Is that what you mean?"

"Seguro! A cold iron knife is very good for getting rid of a ghost. Those stories you have heard, I'm sure. With a lot of iron around, solid iron and cold, you still have blood, like the sugar in the sherry, but it cannot be used for magic. Bocors carry no iron, and they do magic, and they are very lacking in blood. You've seen their gums? And around the houses of the most powerful ones is a fine rusty red dust of," he leaned closer and whispered, "iron." Shandy felt goosebumps starting up along his arms.

"And in the Old World," he said softly, "magic stopped being an important factor of life at around the same time iron came into general use for tools and weapons."

Sawney nodded and smiled wryly through his wild white beard. "Not a … coincidence." He blew across the neck of his bottle again: hoot. "And any magically resurrected consciousness is damaged by proximity to cold iron. (Hoot.) A little at a time. (Hoot.) By the time I learned that, it was too late for me. It turns out that ever since I came out of that damned hole in Florida I should have been staying clear of iron—not wear it, not hold it, not even eat something that was cooked in an iron pot!

(Hoot.) High kings used to have to live that way in the Old World, before magic was quite all gone there. Hell. Salads and raw legumes and such you have to eat if you pursue it."

"No meat?" asked Shandy, who'd thought of something.

"Oh, aye, lots of meat, for magic power but also for plain strength, because sorcerors tend to get so pale and dizzy and weak. But of course it's got to be meat that wasn't killed or cleaned or cooked with anything iron. (Hoot.) But you know, I'm not sorry. I've had two hundred extra years of living like a normal man, doing what I please. I'd really be crazy if I'd lived the whole time like some damned bocor, worrying about every bite I ate and terrified to pound a nail into a board."

"So do you know any way, governor, that I could use cold iron to break a sorceror who's so fresh from the Fountain that he's still got the dust of Erebus in the creases of his boots?" Sawney stared at him for a long moment and then put the bottle down. "Maybe. Who?" Shandy decided to be honest with him. "Benjamin Hurwood. Or Ulysse Segundo, as he's apparently calling himself now. He's the—"

"Yo conozco, the one with the missing arm. The one who's grooming his daughter's body for his wife's ghost. Poor child—you notice she's fed only greens, and biscuits kept in wood casks? They want her to be conductive magically, but they don't want any strength of will in her, so no meat at all." Shandy nodded, having realized the significance of Beth Hurwood's odd diet a few moments ago.

"Sure, I'll tell you how to break him. Stab him with a sword."

"Governor," said Shandy in an agony of impatience, "I need something more than that. He—"

"You think I'm simple? Haven't you been listening? Link your blood to the cold iron of the sword. Make the atoms of blood and iron line up the way a compass needle lines up to face north. Or vice versa. It's all relative. A working magical force will add energy to it, to its own undoing. Or else the force is undone because the lined up iron system is so energetic, you see? If you don't like the idea of a penny falling to the ground, look at it as the ground rushing up to hit the motionless penny, right?

(Hoot.)"

"Great, so how do I do it?"

"(Hoot-hoot.)"

"Governor, how do I get the atoms to line up? How do I link blood and iron?" Sawney drained the bottle and then put it down and began to sing,

Bendita sea el alma,

Y el Senor que nos la manda; Bendita sea el did

Y el Senor que nos lo envid.

Again Shandy translated mentally: Blessed be the soul, and the Lord that keeps it in order; blessed be the day, and the Lord that drives away.

He tried for at least another minute to get a coherent answer to his question, but the rum had extinguished the brief spark of alertness in the old man's eyes, and eventually he gave up and got to his feet.

"So long, governor."

"Keep well, lad. No chickens."

"Right." Shandy started away, then paused and turned back. "Say … what's your name, governor?"

"Juan."

Shandy had heard several versions of the name the governor claimed, but it had always been something like Sawney or Ponsea or Gawnsey—he hadn't heard Juan before. "What's your full name, governor?"

The old man cackled and grubbed in the sand for a bit, then looked up at Shandy and said softly but distinctly, "Juan Ponce de Leon."

Shandy simply stood there for several seconds, feeling chilled in spite of the tropical sun that was raising wavering heat mirages over the white sand. At last he nodded, turned, and plodded away, hearing the hooting start up again behind him.

Only after he had crested the rise, and was winding his way through the tangle of tents and huts, did it occur to him that the derelict he'd left hooting into an empty rum bottle really was, or had been, at least, governor of this island—as well as of every other island between here and Florida. He was striding along between the tents, mentally calculating how much of Davies' money he still had after three months of spending it lavishly on rum, and wondering how long a voyage he could afford—of course it wouldn't have to be very long, Christmas was less than two weeks away, and Hurwood had said that he'd consummate the eviction of Beth from her body "come Yule"—when a figure stepped in front of him. He looked up, and recognized Ann Bonny. He remembered that she had started up a romance with another pardoned pirate, Calico Jack Rackam, very shortly after Shandy had sailed for Haiti, and that the two of them had tried, unsuccessfully, to get Ann a divorceby-sale.

"Hello, Ann," he said, pausing, for he felt he owed her the opportunity to revile him a little.

"Well, well," said Ann, "if it ain't the cook! Crawled out o' the rum cask for once, eh?" She looked both leaner and older—not surprisingly, for Governor Rogers had chosen to view the time-honored English common law custom of divorce-by-sale as the height of lewdness, and had promised to have her publicly stripped and flogged if she ever raised the subject again, and a couple of monstrously vulgar songs about that imagined punishment had sprung up and become very popular — but she still had the hot aura of sexuality in the way she stood and canted her head. Shandy smiled cautiously. "That's right."

"And how long do you think it'll be before you crawl right back in?"

"I'm sure it'll be at least two weeks."

"I'm not. I give you … half an hour. You're going to die here, Shandy, after a few years of being Governor Sawney's apprentice. Well I'm not going to—Jack and I are getting out of here, damned soon. I finally found a man who's not scared of women."

"I'm glad. I've got to admit they often scare me. I hope you and Rackam are happy." Ann seemed disconcerted, and stepped back. "Huh. So where are you going?"

"Somewhere north of Jamaica. A ship's been seen there that I think is the old Vociferous Carmichael." She grinned and seemed to relax, though at the same time she was shaking her head sadly. "My God, it's that girl, still, isn't it? Hurley?"

"Hurwood." He shrugged. "Yeah, it is."

"So will this trip be violating your pardon?"

"I don't know. Will Rackam's involve violating his?"

She smirked. "Just between you and me, Shandy—of course it will. But my Jack's got a girl that don't mind living with an outlaw. Do you?"

"I don't know that either."

She hesitated, then leaned forward and kissed him—very lightly.

"What was that for?" he asked, startled.

Her eyes were very bright. "For? For luck, man."

She turned and walked away, and he strode on toward the shore. Some children were playing with a couple of puppets he'd made once, and as they scrambled out of his way he noticed that they were using strings now to move the little jointed figures. Learn a trade, youngsters, he thought. I don't think your generation will have Mate Care-For to take care of them.

Someone was walking ponderously behind him. He stopped and turned, and then flinched a little to see Woefully Fat staring incuriously down at him. For once remembering that the man was deaf, Shandy just nodded.

"They'll get along without him," the giant bocor rumbled. "Every land go through the time when magic work. We heahabouts is nearin' the end o' dat time. Ah'm sailin' with you."

"Oh?" Shandy was surprised, for he'd tried, with no success, to get Davies' bocor to come along on the trip to Haiti. "Well great, sure, it certainly seems like a trip we could use a good bocor on, and I'm just wasting my time talking, aren't I?" He made do with nodding emphatically.

"You a-goin' to Jamaica."

"Well, no, actually—I mean, we might, we're going near there—"

"Ah was bo'n in Jamaica, though they ship me to Virginia when Ah was fahv. And now I'm goin' back — to die."

"Uhhh … " Shandy was still trying to think of a response to this, and how to express it in gestures, when the bocor lumbered past him toward the shore, and Shandy had to sprint to catch up. There was a gang of arguing men clustered around the boat Shandy had been wrenching at, and when Shandy approached, two of them strode over to him, waving their arms and shouting. One was Skank, and the other was Venner, his face so red at the moment that his freckles were invisible. "One at a time," said Shandy.

With a furious chop of his hand Venner silenced Skank. "The Jenny isn't going anywhere until Vane gets here," he stated.

"She's sailing for Jamaica this afternoon," said Shandy. Though he kept a mild grin on his face, he was peripherally measuring yards and inches and wondering how quickly he could get to Skank's cutlass.

"You're not captain of her anymore," Venner went on raspingly, his face even darker.

"I'm still her captain," Shandy said.

The men standing around shifted and muttered, obviously not sure whose side they wanted to be on. Shandy caught part of a sentence: " … damned drunk for a captain … " Then Woefully Fat stepped forward. "Jenny goin' t' Jamaica," he said in Old Testament prophet tones.

"Leavin' now."

The men were startled, for not even Shank had realized that Davies' bocor was Shandy's ally in this; and though Shandy never took his eyes off Venner's face he could feel their confidence shift toward himself.

Venner and Shandy stared at each other for several seconds, then Skank drew his cutlass and tossed it to Shandy, who caught it by the grip without looking away from Venner. At last Venner looked down at the blade in Shandy's hand, and Shandy knew Venner had decided he wasn't quite drunk enough to take. Then Venner looked around at the other men, and his mouth became a straight, bitter line as, clearly, he realized that the emotional tide had turned against him when Woefully Fat had spoken.

"Well," growled Venner, "I wish you'd … keep us better informed of these things, captain—I—" He paused, then started again, choking out the words as if it hurt his teeth to pass each one. "I certainly … didn't mean to crowd you."

Shandy grinned and clapped him on the shoulder. "No problem!"

He turned and surveyed his crew—and carefully didn't let show in his face the disappointment and apprehension that he felt. This crew, he thought, is a testimonial to the effectiveness of Woodes Rogers' tactics—the only ones who'll sign onto a pirating voyage now are the ones who are too stupid, bloodthirsty or lazy to possibly get along in a law-abiding situation. And a pirating voyage it may well have to be, if we can't find the Carmichael—these thugs and clods will demand plunder. Here goes my pardon, likelier than not, he thought. But maybe it's better to be an outlaw with purpose than a citizen without.

"Skank," he said, deciding that that young man was the most reliable of them, "you're quartermaster." He noted, but didn't acknowledge, Venner's quick frown. "Get 'em all aboard and let's be gone before these Navy lads figure out what we intend."

"Aye aye, cap'n."

And twenty minutes later the Jenny, with no fanfare, but with some uncertain glances from the officers aboard the H.M.S. Delicia, sailed out of the New Providence harbor for the last time.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Patterns of morning sunlight dappled the south-facing balcony of one of the grandest houses on the hill above Spanish Town, and when the breeze-shifted pepper tree branches overhead let the sun shine directly on the elegantly bearded man sitting at the breakfast table, he instinctively shaded his face, for it was important to him to keep himself as unlined and youthful-looking as possible. For one thing, investors seemed to feel that a younger man would know more about current markets and the most recent developments in prices and currency values; and for another, the whole point of attaining wealth was lost if one was obviously an old man when one got it.

Another groan from upstairs made his hand shake so that a splash of tea landed in the saucer instead of in the china cup. Damn, thought the man who called himself Joshua Hicks as he pettishly clanked the teapot down. Can't a man have a peaceful breakfast on his own balcony without all these … lamentations? Six more days, he reminded himself, and then I'll have fulfilled my bargain with that damned pirate, and he'll do his tricks and take her away from here and leave me alone. But even as the thought passed through his mind he recognized it as a vain wish. He'll never leave me alone, he realized, as long as I'm still even a remotely useful tool.

Maybe I should terminate my usefulness, as poor Stede Bonnett had the courage to do when he was in this sort of a situation, with Blackbeard—turn myself in, confess … hell, I met Bonnett a couple of times when the vagaries of the sugar market brought him on business trips to Port-au-Prince, and he was no hero, no saint …

No, he thought, looking past the polished balcony rail, and past the palm fronds waving in the cool mountain breeze, at the descending terraces of white houses that were the residential area of Spanish Town, and, distantly, just visible along the edge of the blue sea, at the red of the roof-tiles of the surviving, landward end of Port Royal. He reached to the side, lifted the stopper out of a crystal decanter and poured amber cognac, glowing gold in the morning sun, into his tea. No, whatever else he was, Bonnett was a braver man than I am. I could never do what he did—and Ulysse knows it, too, damn him. If I've got to live in a cage, I prefer a luxurious one, with bars which, though stronger than iron, can't be seen or touched.

He drained the fortified tea and got to his feet, making sure he had a calm smile on his face before he turned around to face the sitting room … and face the stuffed dog head mounted on the wall like some paltry hunting trophy.

He crossed through the wide sitting room to the hall, but he maintained his smile, for there was a dog head mounted here too. He remembered, with a shudder that made his smile falter, the day in September, shortly after his arrival here, when he'd hung a cloth over every dog head in the house; it had given him a welcome sense of privacy, but within the hour the fearsome black nurse had come in, without knocking of course, and padded all over the house and taken all the cloths off. She hadn't even glanced at him, and of course she couldn't speak with her jaw bound up that way, but the visitation had so upset him that he'd never again tried to blind Ulysse's monitors. Braced by the brandy, and by the knowledge that the nurse didn't usually arrive until midmorning, Hicks clumped up the stairs and listened outside the door of his guest's room. There was no more moaning, so he pulled back the brass bolt, turned the wooden doorknob and opened the door. The young woman was asleep, but she woke with a cry when, tiptoeing into the dim room, he accidentally kicked the untouched dinner she'd left on the floor—the wooden bowl turned over in midair and thumped against the wall, scattering the greens all over the carpet. She sat up in bed and squinted at him. "My God … John … ?"

"No, damn it," said Hicks, "it's me. I heard you moaning, and just wanted to make sure all was well. Who's this John? You've mistaken me for him before."

"Oh." Beth Hurwood slumped back, the hope fading from her eyes. "Yes, all's well." There were three dog heads in this room, so Hicks drew himself up to his full height and gestured sternly at the scattered leaves and herbs. "Trying to avoid your medicaments again?" he asked. "I won't have that, you know. Ulysse wants you to have them, and what he wants, I enforce!" He just stopped himself from nodding virtuously at the head that was nailed up over the bed.

"My father's a monster," she whispered. "Some day you'll enforce your own immolation." Hicks forgot the heads and frowned uneasily. In the early days of her captivity he had laughed at Beth's claims that Ulysse Segundo was her father, for she always claimed too that her father had only one arm, while Ulysse very obviously had two; but on the pirate's next visit Hicks had glanced at the man's right hand—it was unarguably living flesh, but it was pink and smooth as a child's, and had no tiniest scar.

"Well," he said now, gruffly, "less than a week from today it will be Christmas. At least then I'll be rid of you."

The young woman flung the bedclothes aside, swung her legs out and tried to stand, but she couldn't lock her knees, and fell back across the bed, panting. "Damn you and my father," she gasped. "Why can't I have food?"

"What do you call this stuff you leave around for people to trip over?" Hicks demanded, stooping to pick up a leaf and then waving it furiously in her face.

"Let me see you eat it," she said.

Hicks stared dubiously at the bit of vegetation, then flung it away with a snort, as if to indicate that he didn't have time for childish dares.

"Let's see you lick your fingers," Beth pressed.

"I … don't have to prove anything to you," he said.

"What is to happen Saturday? You said something once about some 'procedure.' " Hicks was glad the curtains were drawn across the windows, for he could feel his face getting red.

"You're supposed to be taking your damned medicaments!" he snapped. "You're supposed to be—" Sleepy, he finished mentally; somnambulistic. Not wide awake and asking awkward questions.

"Besides, your fa—Captain Segundo, I mean, will almost certainly be here by then, so I won't have to do the—what I mean is, you can take it up with him!"

He nodded resolutely and turned on his heel to leave, but he spoiled his dignified exit by emitting a shrill squeak and skipping backward, for the black nurse had silently entered the room and was standing right behind him.

Beth Hurwood was laughing and the nurse was just staring in her usual blank, unnerving way, and Hicks fled—wondering, as he edged hastily around the nurse, why the woman's dress was always sewn shut rather than just buttoned, and why, if she was so crazy about sewing things, she didn't repair her ripped-out pockets, and why she always went barefoot.

Also, he thought as he relaxed on the stairs and fished a handkerchief out of his sleeve to mop his forehead with, I wonder why other blacks fear the woman so. Why, the black cook that used to work here took one look at her and jumped through a second-floor window! And so after I discovered that any black would rather be flogged all day than set foot in this house for one second, I had to hire servants, white people. And even a lot of them have quit.

He went back to his chair on the balcony, but the morning's tranquility was shattered, and he flung the lukewarm tea out of his cup and refilled it with neat cognac. Damn Ulysse and his "help," he thought. I should never have left Haiti and changed my name.

He sipped his brandy and scowled, remembering how convincing Ulysse Segundo had been at first. The man had arrived in Port-au-Prince in the first week of August, and had immediately begun negotiating letters of credit from the most respected European banks. He had made a good impression, socially: he spoke French beautifully, he was cultured, well-dressed, the owner of a fine ship—which, though, he kept at a remote mooring, ostensibly because of a woman aboard who was recovering from a brain fever.

Hicks had been impressed with the man's evident wealth and independence when he was introduced to him, and, a few days later, when Segundo had dinner with him and quietly offered to let him participate in a couple of less than ethical but lucrative-sounding investments, was impressed too with his intimate knowledge of the international web that was New World economics. Evidently no deed or grant or purchase or fraud was too ancient or obscure for Segundo to know of it and make merciless use of it. Hicks had thought one would have to be able to read minds, or talk to the dead, to know some of these things.

And then, very late one mid-August evening, Segundo had come to Hicks' house with bad news. "I'm afraid," he had said as Hicks blinked sleepily at him and sent an awakened servant for some brandy, "that you're in danger, my friend."

The man who now called himself Hicks had only been awake for a minute or so, just since Segundo's midnight pounding on the door, and at first he thought Segundo meant that robbers or escaped slaves were approaching his house. "Danger?" he said, rubbing his eyes. "I have ten trustworthy servants and a dozen loaded guns—what—"

"I don't mean danger of injury tonight," Segundo had interrupted, smiling. "I mean danger of legal prosecution soon."

That had awakened him. He took a glass of brandy from his servant, sipped it, and then stared cautiously at Segundo. "On what charge?"

"Well," said Segundo with a laugh as he sat down in one of the dining room chairs, "that's difficult to say. You and I have a … business associate in common, and I'm afraid he's been captured, and is trying to ingratiate himself with the authorities by implicating everybody he has ever had extra-legal dealings with … smuggling and fencing, mostly, I believe, but he's been known to do other sorts of favors for certain Caribbean businessmen, the odd kidnapping or murder or arson. Thank you," he added as the servant brought him a glass.

Hicks sat down across the table from Segundo. "Who?"

Segundo glanced toward the yawning servant, then leaned forward. "Shall we call him … Ed Thatch?" Hicks drained his glass, started to ask for a refill, then told the servant to leave the decanter and get out. "What," he said when the man had gone, "extra-legal dealings has he told them about?" God knew Blackbeard had assisted him in a number of such, starting with the drowning of a tooknowledgeable maiden aunt when he had begun forging evidence to support his story that his brother was dead.

"Well now, there's the rub, you see. I don't know. As much as he can remember, we must assume." Hicks groaned and lowered his face into his hands, and Segundo reached across and refilled his glass.

"Don't despair," he told him. "Come on, now, look at me—I'm implicated too, at least as direly as you are, and am I downcast? There's a way out of every disaster except your last one." Hicks had looked up then. "What can we do?"

"That's easy. Leave Haiti. You can take passage on my ship."

"But," Hicks had protested unhappily, "how could I bring along enough money to live comfortably?

And they'd be sure to come after me."

Ulysse Segundo had winked. "Not if you were still here. What if a body were found in your bedchamber, in your night-clothes … a body of your height and build and color … with its face destroyed by a load of shot from a blunderbuss … and a suicide note beside it, in your handwriting?"

" … But … who … "

"Don't you have some indentured white men working for you? Would one be missed?"

"Well … I suppose … "

"And as for money, I'll buy you out right now—your house, lands and everything. Foreseeing this eventuality, I have had my solicitor draw up a series of quitclaims, promissory notes and bills of sale, back-dated throughout these last two years, which will seem to indicate that you've lost everything, piece by piece, to a group of creditors—it would take an international army of accountants years to discover that each of the creditors, tracked back through all the silent partnerships and anonymous holdings companies, is me." He smiled brightly. "And that way there will be a motive for your suicide, you see? Financial ruin! For I suppose you do owe various people money, and when they try to collect from your estate, our manufactured story will come out."

And so they had done it. Hicks had signed all the papers; then, after Segundo left, he went to the indentured servants' quarters, woke up a man of the right age and build, and curtly told him to come to the main house. Without explanation he led the man up to his bedchamber and gave him drugged wine, and when the man's mystified eyes had finally closed in unconsciousness, Hicks stripped him and threw his clothes into the fireplace, then dressed the slack body in his own nightshirt. He loaded a blunderbuss pistol with a good double-handful of rings and coins and gold chains, and packed all the rest of his gold and jewelry into three chests. Segundo returned with several ill-looking but powerful sailors before dawn, and the last thing Sebastian Chandagnac did, before abandoning his ancestral home and adopting the name Joshua Hicks, was to fire the gun into the face of the unconscious servant. The recoil sprained his wrist, and he was appalled by the noise and the instant destruction — the shot devastated one entire side of the room, and blew the servant's head, in a million pieces, right through the closed window and out into the garden.

Segundo, though, had been in good spirits, and as they'd ridden away in a four-horse wagon he had claimed to be able to smell the murdered servant's blood on the night breeze. "That's what I'm going after now, you know," he had remarked as he'd cracked the whip over the horses. "I've got just about all the wealth I need—what I've got to get now is sea water and blood—positively insane quantities of fresh, red blood." His hearty, almost boyish laughter rang away among the coconut palms and breadfruit trees on either side of the shoreward road.

Now, sitting on this balcony in Jamaica, Sebastian Chandagnac grinned unhappily into his brandy. Yes, he thought, I should have waited, and checked for myself. Segundo simply wanted an absolutely captive servant—a well-mannered puppet—to guard that girl upstairs; and, in case Segundo is not back here by Christmas, to … how had Segundo put it? … "perform the ritual that will make of her an empty vessel ready to be filled." I hope to God he is back before Christmas—not only because I can't bear the thought of performing that ritual he made me memorize, but also because of the dinner party I'm giving here Christmas night; after I've gone to all the itchy trouble of growing a beard just in case someone might otherwise have recognized me as Sebastian Chandagnac, it would be a shame if I had to attend my own introductory party all covered with blood and chicken feathers and smelling of grave dirt.

Chandagnac shook his head sadly, remembering the house and plantation he'd left behind in Port-auPrince … for nothing. He was paid a regular allowance by one of Segundo's banks, but no payment for all that he'd signed over to Segundo had ever been discussed; and only a week ago, in the course of a brief conversation with the postman, he learned that Blackbeard had been killed — not captured — in mid-November: fully three months after the midnight conversation in which Segundo had convinced Chandagnac that Blackbeard had been captured and was implicating everyone he could remember.

He heard the upstairs door close now, and the brass bolt rattle across into the locked position. He hopped to his feet, bolted what was left in his teacup, then grabbed the decanter and ran back into the house, hoping to lock himself into his bedchamber before the dreadful nurse could get downstairs.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Up in the rigging, straddling the headsail yard and leaning against the mast, Jack Shandy lowered his telescope at last, after having stared for nearly a quarter of an hour at the waves, the wispy clouds overhead, and, most intently, at the solid, dark, sharp-edged cloud swelling on the eastern horizon ahead. He reviewed all the weather lore he'd learned from Hodge and Davies and personal experience, and he had to admit, to himself at least, that Venner was right. It would be wisest to turn around and try to run the sixty-five miles back to Grand Cayman, jibe through the reef at the Rum Point Channel and then drag the Jenny ashore and break out the liquor. And damn soon, too, for the storm was moving faster than the Jenny could, and the wind seemed to be falling off. But today, he thought desperately, is the twenty-third of December. On the day after tomorrow Hurwood is going to do the magic that will evict Beth's soul from her body. I've got to find Ulysse Segundo, as the old fool apparently likes to call himself now, today or tomorrow, or I might as well never have left the New Providence settlement. And if we run back northwest and tuck in to wait out the storm, we'll lose at least the rest of today. But can I take these men out into a storm that may very well kill them all?

Oh hell, he thought, tossing the telescope to one of the pirates below and beginning to climb down, that's the captain's right—my job isn't to avoid risky situations, but to get us through them. And I can't believe Woefully Fat will let himself be prevented from getting onto Jamaican soil … even by a hurricane.

He dropped to the deck and grinned confidently at Skank.

"We could scoot under that with half of you dead drunk," Shandy said. "We'll continue southeast."

"Jesus Christ, Jack," Skank began hurriedly, but Venner interrupted him.

"Why?" Venner demanded. He pointed astern with one big, freckled arm. "Grand Cayman is only a few hours back that way! And even if this wind does die, which it's about to, the goddamn current'll take us there!"

Shandy turned, unhurriedly, to Venner. "I don't need to explain, but I will. We wouldn't get to Grand Cayman. This storm is going to catch us, and we'd better be bow on when it does." Venner's broad shoulders were hunching with tensed muscles, but Shandy made himself laugh. "And hell, man, the famous Segundo is somewhere ahead, remember? Those turtlers yesterday said they'd seen his ship only that morning! Not only does he have with him the booty from a dozen plundered ships, he's almost certainly in the old Carmichael, renamed. That's our ship—and it's a full-size, seaworthy vessel, and we'll need it, because little pond-scooters like the Jenny here are no good for the long reaches to Madagascar and the Indian Ocean, and that's what these days require. Look what happened to Thatch when he switched to a sloop."

"And this Ulysse fellow has got that woman," Venner almost spat, "and don't try to make us believe that ain't your whole reason for wanting to catch him! Well maybe she means more to you than your hide does, but she's nothing to me. And I ain't risking my hide to get her for you." He faced the rest of the men. "You lads think about that. Why do we have to catch up with this Ulysse or Hurwood today? What's wrong with next week?"

Shandy hadn't slept much during the last several days. "It's today because I say it is," he said, a little wildly. "What do you think of that?"

Woefully Fat stepped up beside Shandy, his huge shadow eclipsing Venner. "We goin' to Jamaica," he said.

For several long seconds, while the cloud ahead grew and Grand Cayman became still more distant, Venner stood motionless,, his eyes darting back and forth from Shandy and Woefully Fat to the rest of the crew, obviously wondering if he could provoke a mutiny.

Shandy, though he hoped he looked confident, was wondering the same thing. He had been an able enough captain during the month after Hurwood took the Carmichael, and he was still looked on with some awe because of the exaggerated part he'd played in the escape from that Navy man-of-war, and it helped to have the support of Davies' old bocor, even though his impending death seemed to be all the man could talk about these days; but Shandy could only guess, as Venner was obviously doing too, at how much the men's confidence in him had been eroded by his three months of drunken apathy in the New Providence settlement.

"Shandy knows what he's doin'," grumbled one toothless old wretch. Skank nodded with a fair show of conviction. "Sure," he said. "We couldn't get back to Grand Cayman before the storm overtook us."

Shandy was very grateful, for he knew Skank wasn't being sincere.

Venner's shoulders slumped, and his grin, which was beginning to look less like lines of cheer than wrinkles in a long-unchanged shirt, was hoisted back onto his face. "Well sure he does," he said hoarsely. "I just … wanted to make sure we were all in … agreement." He turned and, shoving a couple of men out of his way, lurched away toward the stern as Shandy ordered the removal of the jib and the reefing of the mainsail.

When the sloop was moving forward under minimum working canvas and Shandy paused to squint up at the cloud that now shadowed them, Skank tapped him on the shoulder and, with a jerk of his head, drew him aside.

"What's up?" Shandy asked, tension putting a tightness in his voice.

"Venner ain't near pleased," Skank said quietly. "Watch him. It'll be today, and probably from behind."

"Ah. Well, thanks. I'll keep an eye on him." Shandy started to turn away, but Skank stepped in front of him.

"Did you know," the young pirate went on hurriedly, "I don't think you know—he got Davies killed." Shandy's impatience was gone. "Tell me," he said. A few heavy drops of rain fell through the still air to thump on the deck and make long dark streaks on the canvas. Rain before wind, Shandy thought, remembering old Hodge's long ago warning. "Loosen the sheets a bit," he called, then turned back to Skank. "Tell me."

"Well," said Skank quickly, peering fearfully at the dark sky as he spoke, "the dead sailor that killed him was going to kill you, a minute before—you was runnin' toward the girl in the air, and you didn't see this dead fellow waitin' for you. So Phil ran up to nail the thing and save you, no trouble—but Venner saw what he was up to, and blocked him—Venner not bein' glad you was made quartermaster."

The rain was falling steadily now, and still there was no wind. "Reef the main a little more," Shandy called uneasily. "No—lower the gaff entirely. We'll meet her with bare spars—and be ready to heave to."

"It threw Davies off his stride," Skank went on, "when Venner bumped him, and it let you get two steps further; but Davies kept running anyway, and by then the only way he could hit the thing wasn't good enough to kill it outright. His second chop cut its head off, but by then it had got its cutlass into him."

Then the wind hit them, and even under bare spars the Jenny heeled sharply, losing headway and leaning over so far that men had to grab rails or rigging to keep from tumbling up against the port gunwales. The mast was nearly horizontal.

Close behind the wind came high waves, and Skank scrambled aft to help the helmsman drag the rudder through the strong sea and get the bow pointed more directly into the wind. Slowly, against resistance, the mast came back up.

As the little craft balanced at the top of one foam-streaked wave and then slid down the far side into the trough, the rudder swinging free in the air for a moment and then the long bowsprit stabbing into the next steep gray slope of water ahead, Shandy held his breath, expecting either the bowsprit to break off or the bow and the whole hull to follow it in, and not come up again—but after eight rapid heartbeats the bow did rise, bowsprit intact, throwing off the weight of solid water like a man flinging away a pack off murderous dogs that had almost got him down.

Shandy exhaled. Evidently whoever had built the Jenny had known his business. He yelled the order to heave to, and when they had crested the wave the wind was on the starboard bow and enough of the mainsail had been unreefed to keep the Jenny falling back onto the same tack and making no headway. In principle they could ride out the storm this way.

Shandy climbed and slid back to the stern and the men laboring at the helm. There were no further orders to give now, and the wind would have torn the words out of his mouth anyway and flung them away unheard, so he just leaned against the transom and tried to guess how long the Jenny could continue to take this without breaking up.

The warm wind was still somehow strengthening, and spray flew past in fast clouds like grapeshot, and stung his face and hands; he licked his lips and the salty taste let him know that it was sea-spray and not rain. The waves were as tall and solid-looking as cliffs, and every time the Jenny slid down the weather slope of one and crashed into the next, she was jolted and shaken so violently that the mast swung wildly back and forth overhead. The splash spray instantly blew away behind them, and solid water swirled around Shandy's thighs and tugged ever more strongly at him. He kept squinting against the lash of the wind to make sure they neither faced the wind too directly nor let it come around and hit them broadside, and for several minutes he was amazed at how perfectly the old sloop was riding; then he noticed wisps of steam fluttering away from the joint where the tiller bar was attached to the head of the rudder, and when he peered more closely he saw that the iron pin was glowing a dull red. Woefully Fat was standing braced on the other side of the helm, and Shandy cuffed water out of his eyes and squinted across the deck through narrowed, stinging eyes at the big magician. The bocor's eyes were closed and he was chewing the knuckles of one hand—and even though the rain and sea were scouring the brown hand, Shandy could see red blood springing from where the teeth were working—and he realized that the Jenny's progress was not entirely a result of the helmsman's skill.

Even so, each succeeding wave was taller, and when the little craft laboriously crested the next one, and Shandy blinked around at the sea, it looked to him as if the boat were attached to a vast shiny cloth that was being dragged over the Alps; and the shrieking of the wind was so furious that he had to keep reminding himself that there was no sentient wrath behind it.

They slid down the windward side of the wave and plunged into the next one—the old sloop heaved up, pouring solid water off to both sides—and when the Jenny climbed the lee face of it, Shandy could feel her forcibly shift around, and the gaff-saddle, lowered now to head height, glowed orange with the effort of it.

Then they were at the top, and the full force of the wind hit them again, and with a gunshot crack that was audible even over the wind the glowing gaff-saddle broke. The horizontal spar was now just a fire-headed spear laced to a big, fluttering flag—it slammed the deck under the mainsail boom, bounced up on the other side, spun all the way around like a crazy compass needle as the luff side of the sail tore, then flew aft. The boat shook as the spar thudded into the transom. Shandy had ducked in the second when the thing was so violently tearing around, and now he looked up, fearing that it might have killed the helmsman, or, worse, wrecked the tiller; but the helmsman was still braced against the tiller bar—only after sagging with relief did Shandy notice that the ironheaded spar had struck Woefully Fat squarely in the center of his massive torso, and had nailed him upright to the transom.

"Christ," Shandy cried through spray-numbed lips. Could they survive without the bocor?

Shandy was anything but confident, but he pushed away from the rail and grabbed the mainsail boom and pulled himself forward along it, past the tied-down leech-end of the mainsail to the mastward end where the luff side flapped loose. Someone was with him now, on the other side of the swinging boom — it was Skank, his face emaciated with effort, and he had a knife and a length of rope. Together, as the boat skewed down into the trough, the two of them managed to stab several holes through the top edge of what remained of the sail; they held on while the Jenny crashed into the streaked face of another wave, and then when the water had swept on past them Shandy strung the rope through the holes. Then as the sloop leaned back, rising to meet the next crest, Shandy threw the end of the rope high toward the port bow—the headwind flung it back around the mast to Skank, who caught it and fell to the port gunwale and managed to flip two loops of it around a belaying pin before the wind hammered them again.

The couple of square yards of raised canvas caught the wind enough to kick the stern back, but Shandy knew it couldn't hold for very long. Several more men had crawled up the deck to help, though, and Shandy fell back to the rail and let them take his place—his stomach felt knotted up, either with tension or something rancid at lunch, and he hoped he wouldn't have to do any hard work for a while.

All at once he became aware of a weight on his jacket pulling the back of his collar tighter against his neck, and he glanced down—and then recoiled away from the rail, for clamped tight onto his jacketfront, from God knew where, were what seemed to be two knobby-headed gray eels; it was only when he grabbed one to yank it off that he realized they were two unfresh human arms, severed at the elbows, with the fingers tightly gripping the fabric of his jacket.

One part of his mind was just moaning with the horror of the thing, but after the first frozen moment of shock it occurred to him that this was the same jacket he'd been wearing on the day Hurwood took the Carmichael away from Leo Friend—and on that day one of Friend's crew of dead men had hung on to the jacket after being rolled over the rail, and had fallen into the sea only because its arms had parted at the elbows. The clinging arms had seemed to disappear shortly after that, but apparently they'd been ghostily attached to the jacket ever since, like ceiling cobwebs that can be seen only in a certain light.

The intensifying pain in his stomach made him hunch back against the rail, but he forced himself to go on thinking. What then, he asked himself, is the light that makes these grisly things visible? Well, obviously—hostile magic, unencumbered by being performed on land. You'd have known it by the hot iron smell, too, if it weren't for this wind. This pain in your belly is a gift from someone. Sea water surged over him as the Jenny took another wave, and then he straightened up against the powerful preference of his body to fold double—cold sweat on his face made the spray seem even warmer—and he reached out and grabbed the nearest man and dragged him close enough to shout at.

"Where's," Shandy roared, "Venner?"

The man gaped at the gray forearms swinging from his captain's jacket, but he pointed forward, then down.

Shandy nodded and let go of him and then, one agonized step at a time, hitched himself toward the hatch, bracing against anything he could reach; a sudden gust of wind at the crest of a wave punched him off his feet, and he crawled the last few yards flat on his belly, the spread-out arms giving him an insectlike look. With an effort that seemed to pull all his abdominal muscles loose he lifted the hatch cover and rolled himself in and half climbed, half tumbled down into the low-ceilinged hold. It was dark, but he knew where the weapons rack was, and he let the next roll pitch him against it and he snatched a hilt and pulled a sword free; it was lighter than a cutlass, but it seemed to be the right length, and he let his hand settle comfortably around the grip. There was a dim red glow up in the bow, and he hunched toward it, his grisly lapel ornaments swinging wildly. Venner was crouched over a little firepot, whispering and dropping shreds of stuff onto the glowing coals in it.

Shandy extended the sword and kicked himself into an agonizing lunge, but the Jenny abruptly rocked forward at the crest of a wave at that moment, and his lunge became a somersault—he collided heavily with the stocky figure of Venner and the two of them tumbled into the deep, swirling puddle against the bow bulkhead. Even over their gasping and the creaking of overstressed timbers and the howl of the wind, Shandy heard the firepot hiss for an instant as it was extinguished; and even crumpled nearly upside-down in cold water in the angle of canted deck and bulkhead, with Venner's elbow jabbing into his back, he felt the pain in his belly suddenly unkink and disappear, and the dead man's arms no longer tugged at his jacket.

The bow slammed into a trough, and for several seconds the two men were pressed even harder against the bulkhead—Shandy felt water thrusting in through gaps between the strakes, as if the sea were spitting at him between wooden teeth, and he felt the still-hot firepot roll scorchingly across his throat—and then the sloop tipped sharply back as it began to climb the next slope. Shandy and Venner and a lot of salty water tumbled aft, and Shandy tried to keep his sword up and pointed at Venner; twice he felt the point poke something more yielding than deck timbers, and he tried to thrust, but sliding prone on the sloshing deck he could get no traction. Gray light from the open hatch silhouetted his opponent clearly for a second, but a moment later Venner had scrambled up the ladder to the deck.

Shandy got to his feet and followed him up, keeping his sword—which, he now noticed, was a spare rapier of Davies'—between himself and the light to block any blows from Venner; but when he reached the deck he saw that Venner had run forward and was now facing him from ten yards away, pointing at Shandy a pistol he'd snatched from someone.

Shandy throttled his instant impulse to dive back down the hatch, for he was the captain, and even in the midst of this storm most of the men were gaping at this confrontation—and a thirty-foot shot on a wet, pitching deck in hard rain would probably miss, and perhaps the rain had got in under the pancover to the powder. He did, though, allow himself to stand in profile, facing Venner over his right shoulder. He lifted his sword in a fencer's salute, both for the apparent coolness of the gesture and in the hope that the pistol ball, if well aimed, might strike the blade or the guard. The rain had not got to the powder. At the same instant that he saw the muzzle flash Shandy felt the hot ball punch across the skin over his solar plexus; he flinched back away from it but didn't fall or drop his sword, and when he had regathered his scattered wits a second or two later he bowed as courteously as he could on the rocking deck—it required grabbing the ratlines with his free hand and planting his feet a little more widely than was customary—and then he advanced toward Venner. The helmsman, distracted by the drama on the deck, didn't put the bow squarely enough into the next wave, and the Jenny took it on her port bow; she heeled ponderously as the solid green water surged over her deck, splashing up explosively at the mast and sweeping at least one man overboard. Then she lay in the trough, abeam to the waves. More scared by this than by Venner, Shandy scrambled back to the stern, having to drop the saber in order to grab rigging to steady himself. Skank and the other men at the mainsail boom had managed to get several feet of the sail unreefed and threaded with rope, and one man was trying to shinny up the swaying mast with the end of the rope in his teeth, apparently hoping to throw it over the narrow topsail yard so that the men below could use it as a halliard. It was all they could do, and Shandy knew it wouldn't be enough. Behind him, moving slowly because he didn't want to abandon the cutlass he'd picked up, Venner was picking his way aft.

Shandy glanced at the helmsman, who had the tiller all the way over to port, and he knew he should be there to help the man hold it when the full wind hit them at the crest, but then he saw Woefully Fat. The big bocor had pulled himself away from the transom, and was now standing on the deck and grasping the wooden shaft that impaled him; and even as Shandy watched, Woefully Fat bent it in front of himself—the wind took all sounds, but splinters began to spring up between the two black hands. Shandy assumed the bocor was using magic to accomplish it, but Woefully Fat had to shuffle around as the spar was bent farther, and Shandy felt his arms prickle with awe, for he could see the bloody gaff-saddle protruding an inch or so from the broad back, and though the iron still steamed, it wasn't glowing—the bocor was breaking the spar with nothing but his own physical strength. Finally it broke, and the bocor fell to his knees. Shandy rushed up to help him, but Woefully Fat onehandedly lifted the gaff-spar and shoved it toward him—an impressive feat in itself, for, even broken off, the thing was a good six feet long, and draped with rigging and the sopping head end of the mainsail.

"Sea anchor!" the bocor shouted. "Throw it over the starboard quarter!" Shandy understood at once, and took the spar from Woefully Fat—he had to use both hands, and still his teeth ground together at the weight of it—and he turned and heaved it over the starboard rail into the sea.

In that moment they crested the next wave, and the Jenny heeled sharply as the wind hit them on the port beam, and then they were sliding down the weather side, the helmsman straining to keep the tiller over. Shandy hastily untied the mainsail halliard and let it play out over the rail to give the seaanchor line some length. The Jenny hit the trough only slightly straightened out, and again the sea surged entirely over the deck. Shandy clung to the rail underwater, wondering if they had been rolled over, if the Jenny was simply going to implode and sink without ever bobbing up again; but then the water became heavy on his hunched shoulders and sluiced away, freeing his head first, then his arms, and when it was still sloshing around his knees he resecured the halliard, for nearly all of the line had been played out. The spar itself was somewhere behind the last crest, and even as they climbed the next one Shandy could feel the tug of it, could feel the old sloop pulled more straight, and then begin to respond to the sail and the rudder. The bow was coming up into the wind.

Through his fingertips he had been paying very close attention to the feel of the deck, and when he felt a faint scratch nearby he looked up—and then flung himself flat. Venner's cutlass split the rail instead of Shandy's head.

Shandy rolled away while Venner was rocking the heavy blade loose, and when he got up in a crouch Skank took time out from improvising a mainsail to toss him the dropped saber. The deck was heaving, and rain and spray were in his eyes—he missed the toss, heard the sword clank and slide across wet deck, heard too the creak of the cutlass blade levered free, and Venner's sliding footsteps approaching.

Shandy dove after the saber just as the bow plunged into a wave—he shut his eyes and braced himself against the gunwale as the water crashed over him, then shook his head and blinked around frantically. The light was bad, but he saw the sword rolling in the water, and he went after it in a halfswimming crawl and caught its hilt. Venner struck as Shandy was trying to stand up, but the deck rocked sharply back just as Venner lunged, and he lost his balance, and though the blow numbed Shandy's shoulder, it was the flat that had hit him, not the edge.

It knocked him back down onto his knees, but Venner had fallen too, and Shandy took a moment to drive his own sword point into the only reachable part of Venner—his knee—before wearily hauling himself to his feet one more time.

Venner was up too.

Shandy realized he might not be able to beat Venner, that this interminable fight might end with that damned cutlass breaking open his head or splitting his abdomen—but he was too exhausted to derive anything more than an oppressive unhappiness from the idea. He leaned back against the transom and flexed his hand on the slippery saber grip.

Venner swung the cutlass at Shandy's head, and Shandy made his numb arm lift the saber to deflect the blow, but he only succeeded in turning the heavier blade, so that once again it was the flat that hit him—squarely on the side of the head this time. His knees gave for a moment as the hot, nauseating pain seemed to ring in his sinuses.

He tried to straighten, but Venner's blade was driving in point-first now—Shandy let himself slump further and then barely managed to jerk his body aside as the blade struck—it scraped his ribs and caught in a loose fold of his jacket, nailing him to the bulkhead and stopping his fall; but he had raised his own sword in a parry that, while late, had put his point more or less in line. As cloppingly as a carelessly worked puppet he got his feet under himself.

His shirt tore as he lunged forward, and then the front of Venner's jacket was punctured to admit two inches—then four, as Shandy caught his balance and remised—of rusty steel. Suddenly pale, Venner reeled back, off the blade, and the cutlass slipped out of his hand and rang on the deck. The Jenny crested the next wave and tilted sharply back for an instant. Everyone except the two combatants grabbed for a handhold or tried to make the tumble a controlled one, but Shandy lunged forward again, in midair as the deck dropped away beneath him, and drove his point into Venner's broad chest with such force that the blade snapped off and both of them sailed through the rainy air toward, and higher than, the port rail. Shandy let go of the broken sword and grabbed the rigging, but Venner and Davies' sword went spinning away over the side. Then the bow fell and the stern rose, tearing Shandy's grip loose and flinging him hard down onto the deck.

Chapter Twenty-Six

He came back to consciousness in slow stages, reluctantly abandoning the dreams that were so much preferable to the cold, aching situation that seemed to be reality—memory dreams, like traveling with his father and the marionettes, and wish dreams, like finding Beth Hurwood and finally telling her the things he wanted to tell her. At first it had seemed that he might be able to choose the situation he would wake up to, just by concentrating on it; but the wet and cold and rocking one became more and more insistent, and when he opened his eyes he was on the Jenny's deck. He tried to sit up, but sudden nausea pitched him back flat, weak and sweating. He opened his eyes again and saw Skank's concerned face. Shandy started to speak, but his teeth were chattering. He clamped his jaw tight for a moment and then tried again. "What … happened?"

"You hit the deck pretty solid after you killed Venner," said Skank.

"Where's Davies?"

Skank frowned in puzzlement. "He's … uh, dead, cap'n. When Hurwood took the Carmichael. You remember."

It seemed to Shandy he did remember something like that. He tried to sit up again, and again flopped back, shivering. "What happened?"

"Well—you were there, cap'n. And I told you about it today, remember? How one of Hurwood's dead sailors killed him?" Skank looked around unhappily.

"No, I mean what happened just now?"

"You fell on the deck. I just told you."

"Ah." Shandy sat up for the third time and made himself stay up. The nausea surged up in him and then abated. "You may have to keep telling me." He struggled to his feet and stood swaying and shuddering, clutching the rail for balance and looking around dizzily. "Uh … the storm has … stopped," he remarked, proud to be able to demonstrate his awareness of things.

"Yes, cap'n. While you was out cold. We just kept her hove to and rode it out. Your sea-anchor made the difference."

Shandy rubbed his face hard. "My sea-anchor." He decided not to ask. "Good. What's our course?"

"Southeast, more or less."

Shandy beckoned Skank closer, and when the young man had crouched beside him he asked quietly, "Where are we going?"

"Jamaica, you said."

"Ah." He frowned. "What do we hope to find there?"

"Ulysse Segundo," said Skank, looking more worried every second, "and his ship, the Ascending Orpheus. You said he's Hurwood, and the Orpheus is really the Carmichael. We followed reports of him out to the Caymans, where you heard he was heading back toward Jamaica again. Oh, and Woefully Fat wanted to get there, Jamaica, before he died." Skank shook his head sadly.

"Is Woefully Fat dead?"

"Most of us think so. The gaff-spar speared him like a spitted chicken, and after he broke the big piece off and gave it to you he just flopped down. We got him below, for burial when we get to shore,

'cause you don't just pitch a dead bocor into the sea if you know what's good for you—but a couple of the men say they can feel a pulse in his wrist, and Lamont says he can't keep his mind on his work because Woefully Fat keeps hummin' real low, though I don't hear nothin'." Shandy tried to concentrate. He remembered some of these things, vaguely, when Skank described them, and he remembered a sense of desperate urgency about them, but he couldn't now remember why that should be. What he most wanted at the moment was an impossibility—a dry place to sleep.

"That storm," he said. "It was very sudden? There was no shelter we could have taken?"

"We might have been able to run back to Grand Cayman," Skank told him. "Venner was for doing that. You said we had to go on."

"Did I … say why?"

"You said the storm would get us anyway, and we may as well go on after the Orpheus. Venner said you wanted to because of that girl. You know, Hurwood's daughter."

"Ah!" He was beginning to see some hints of pattern in his concussion-shuffled memories. "What's the date today?"

"I don't know. It's Friday … and, uh, Sunday's Christmas."

"I see," said Shandy tightly. "Keep reminding me of that, will you? And now that the storm is past, get up as much canvas as you can."

The next morning at dawn they spied the Ascending Orpheus—and there was no disagreement about what to do, for they'd spent all night bailing water out of the Jenny, and in spite of having pulled a tar-smeared sail around under the forward keel, and hammering rice-filled rolls of cloth into the gaps between the strakes, the water was coming in faster every hour, and Shandy doubted that the battered old sloop could hold together long enough to make another landfall. Maximum canvas was crowded on, and the Jenny lurched unevenly across the expanse of blue water toward the ship. Crouched in the sloop's bow, Shandy peered through the telescope, squinting against the blinding glitter of the morning sun on the waves. "She's suffered," he remarked to the haggard, shivering men around him. "There's spars gone and rigging fouled on the foremast … but she's still solid. If we do this next hour's work right, there'll be rum and food and dry clothes." There was a general growl of approval, for most of his men had spent last night laboring over the bilge pumps in the rain, looking forward to the occasional brief break in which to swallow a handful or two of wet biscuit; and the rum cask had come unmoored and broken apart during the storm, filling the hold with the smell of unattainable liquor.

"Did any of our powder stay dry?" Shandy asked.

Skank shrugged. "Maybe."

"Hm. Well, we don't want to wreck the Orpheus anyway." He lowered the telescope. "Assuming our mast doesn't snap off, we ought to be able to cut south and head her off—and then I guess just try to board her."

"That or swim for Jamaica," agreed one ragged, red-eyed young pirate.

"Don't you think he'll try to run when he sees we're after him?" Skank asked.

"Maybe," said Shandy, "though I'll bet we can catch him, even busted up as we are—and anyway, we can't look too formidable." He raised the telescope again. "Well never mind," he said a moment later.

"As a matter of fact, he's coming at us."

There was a moment of silence. Then, "Lost some men in that storm, I daresay," commented one of the older men grimly. "Be wantin' replacements."

Skank bit his lip and frowned at Shandy. "Last time you tangled with him he picked you up and dropped you into the ocean. You … got some reason to think it won't happen that way again?" Shandy had been pondering that question ever since they had set out from New Providence Island. Blood, he remembered Governor Sawney saying, obviously there's iron in it. Link your blood to the cold iron of the sword. Make the atoms of blood and iron line up the way a compass needle lines up to face north. Or vice versa. It's all relative …

Shandy grinned, a little sickly in spite of his best efforts. "We'd all better hope so. I'll be at the bittacle — have somebody bring me a saber … and a hammer and a narrow chisel." The Orpheus had turned and was charging straight downwind west toward the Jenny, the morning sun behind her casting the shadows of her rigging and masts onto the luminous sails. Shandy kept an eye on her as he worked with the hammer and chisel over the grip of the saber Skank had brought him, and when she was still a hundred yards away he straightened and held the sword up by the blade. He'd cut away the leather wrapping and half of the wood grip, exposing the iron tang that linked the blade to the pommel-weight, and, just where the heel of a swordsman's hand would press, he had chisel-punched a narrow crack into the metal.

Shandy stood up and leaned on the bittacle pillar, looking down through the glass. "If it should … go against us here this morning," he said to Skank, who had been staring at him uncomprehendingly for the last several minutes, "get east of him—with the state the Carmichael's in he can no more tack than fly—and try for Jamaica."

"It better not go against us."

Shandy smiled, and somehow it made him look even more tired. "Right." He raised the hammer and brought it down solidly on the bittacle glass, and then he dropped the hammer and fumbled around among the glass shards; a moment later he lifted the compass needle out with bloody fingers. "Get the lads ready with hooks and lines. With luck we'll be able to start boarding before he knows we're trying to be aggressors."

Skank moaned faintly, but nodded and hurried forward.

Shandy carefully inserted the north-pole end of the compass needle into the crack he'd cut in the saber tang, then he crouched and picked up the hammer again and gave the needle a tap to keep it in place. Shandy carefully slid the doctored saber through his belt, and for a minute after that he just breathed deeply with his eyes shut; then when the Ascending Orpheus jibed sharply in on the Jenny's port flank, putting her in shadow, he snatched up a grappling hook, whirled it a couple of times in a vertical circle and then let it fly up toward the big ship's rail; sunlight glittered on the points at the moment of pause, then the hook dropped onto the rail and gripped.

Certainly this is the last time the Jenny will besiege the Carmichael, he thought as he began climbing hand over hand up the rope.

The effort started his nose bleeding and made his head feel as if it would burst, and when he finally got to the top of the rope and paused for breath straddling the rail he couldn't remember why he was there. Some time seemed to have passed—this was the Vociferous Carmichael, he was sure … but most of the railing was gone, and the whole forecastle structure, too! Had they still not reached Jamaica? Where was Captain Chaworth? And that sick girl with the fat physician?

His disorientation ebbed a little when he recognized the girl's father coming down the ladder from the poop deck—what was his name? Hurwood, that was it—but then Shandy frowned, for he had remembered the man as having only one arm.

He was distracted then by fighting on the quarterdeck, and when he looked closely—it was hard to focus in all this glaring sunlight—he really thought he was losing his mind. Haggard men in ragged but gaudy clothes were climbing aboard all around him and doing desperate battle with impossibly animate corpses whose withered hands shouldn't have been able to clutch a cutlass, and whose milky, sunken eyes shouldn't have been able to direct the strokes. The blood running sluggishly from Shandy's ears and the pounding in his head robbed the scene of nearly all sounds, giving everything the grotesque unreality of a fever dream, and the question of why he had chosen to adorn his jacket with two mummified human forearms seemed relatively unimportant.

He didn't trust his balance, so he climbed very carefully down onto the deck. The man who seemed to be Benjamin Hurwood was coming toward him now, a welcoming smile crinkling his old face …

And then Shandy was dreaming, had to be, for he was standing beside his father in the dimness of the scaffolding above a marionette stage, both of them staring into the brightness below and busily working the crosses that controlled the dangling puppets; and it must have been a crowd scene they were doing, for many more crosses were hung in the spring-hooks that kept the idle marionettes below swaying and bobbing slightly. In a moment he had forgotten that it had to be a dream, and was panicking because he didn't know what play they were doing.

He squinted at the little figures below, and instantly recognized them. They were the Julius Caesar marionettes. And luckily the third act had begun, there wasn't all that much more to do—they were already in the assassination scene, and the little wooden senators all had their standard right hands replaced by the dagger-clutching ones.

The Caesar puppet was speaking—and Shandy stared, for the face was no longer wood but flesh, and he recognized it. It was his own face. "Hence!" he heard his miniature self say. "Wilt thou lift up Olympus?"

The senator puppets, who were also flesh now, moved in for the kill … and then the scene abruptly winked out, leaving Shandy standing on the Carmichael's deck again, squinting against the sun-glare at Hurwood.

A confident smile was fading from the old man's face, but he struck again, and Shandy was kneeling in hot sand on the New Providence beach, staring critically at the four bamboo poles he'd shoved upright in the sand. They had stood well enough until he'd tried to lash others across the tops of them, and now they were all leaning outward like cannons ready to repel an attack from all sides.

"Weaving a basket?" Beth Hurwood asked from behind him.

He hadn't heard her approach, and for a moment he was going to reply irritably, but then he grinned.

"It's supposed to be a hut. For me to sleep in."

"It'd be easier if you made a lean-to—here, I'll show you."

It had been a day in July, during the refitting of the Carmichael; Beth had shown him how to put together a much stabler structure, and there had been one moment when, standing on tiptoe to loop twine over the peak of one of the leaning poles, she had fallen against him, and for a moment she'd been in his arms, and her brown eyes and coppery hair had made him dizzy with an emotion that included physical attraction only to the extent that an orchestra includes a brass section. It was a memory that often recurred in his dreams.

This time, though, it was going differently. This time she was using a hammer and nails instead of twine, and her eyelids and lips were pulled open as far as they could go and her teeth and the whites of her eyes glared in the tropical sun as she laid his arms out along the bamboo poles and held the first nail to his wrist …

… and again he was standing on the Carmichael's deck, blinking at Hurwood. Hurwood now looked definitely uneasy. "What the hell's wrong with your mind?" he snarled. "It's like a stripped screw."

Shandy was inclined to agree. He kept trying to remember what he was doing here, and every time he glanced at the nightmare combat going on around him he was astonished and horrified anew. And now, as if to outdo all his previous disorientations, the deck stopped pressing against his boot-soles and he slowly began to rise unsupported into the air.

Instinctively he reached to grab something—and what he grabbed for was not a rail or the rigging, but the hilt of his saber. The protruding compass needle punctured his palm, but the same impulse that had made him grab it made him hang on. He began to sink, and a few seconds later he was again standing on the deck.

He looked around: the fighting was going on as horribly as before, though all sounds were still muffled for him, but none of the combatants were coming anywhere near Hurwood and Shandy — apparently they considered it a private duel.

There was an expression of alarmed wonder on Hurwood's face, and he was saying something too softly for Shandy to hear. Then the old man drew a rapier of his own and ran nimbly at him. Shandy was still painfully gripping the hilt of his own sword, and now he wrenched it free from his belt just in time to sweep Hurwood's point away with an awkward parry in prime, and then he hopped back and more easily knocked aside the old man's next thrust—and then the next. The gray forearms attached to his jacket swung and bumped against each other sickeningly.

Blood from his spiked hand made the saber grip slippery, and every time his blade clanked against Hurwood's the compass needle grated against the bones in his palm, sending an agony like tinfoil on a carious tooth all the way up to his shoulder.

Hurwood barked a harsh syllable of laughter and sprang forward, but Shandy clenched his fist on the saber grip—driving the needle even deeper between the bones of his palm—and caught the incoming blade in a corkscrewing bind that yanked the hilt out of Hurwood's fingers; the pain of the action made Shandy's vision go dark for a moment, but with a last twist he sent Hurwood's sword spinning over the rail, and then he just stared down at the deck and took deep, gasping breaths until his vision cleared.

Hurwood had scrambled back, and now looked off to the side and pointed imperatively at Shandy. Obviously this was no longer a private duel.

One of the decayed mariners lurched obediently across the deck toward them; his clothes were ragged scraps and Shandy could see daylight between the bones of one shin, but the shoulders were broad and one bony wrist was whipping a heavy cutlass through the air as easily as a sailmaker wields a needle.

Shandy was already close to exhaustion, and the needle embedded in his hand was a hot, grating agony. It seemed to him that the jar of a butterfly alighting on the blade of his saber would be more torture than he could bear and stay conscious, but he made himself step back and lift his sword, though the move made the world go gray and drenched him in icy sweat.

The dead man shambled closer—Hurwood smiled at the thing and said, "Kill Shandy."—and the cutlass was whipped back over the bony shoulder for a stroke.

Shandy forced his eyes to focus, forced his ploughed hand to be ready …

But the cutlass lashed out sideways, slamming into Hurwood and flinging him away aft across the deck, and in the instant before the necrotic sailor collapsed in skeletal ruin and, simultaneously, the gray arms evaporated from Shandy's jacket, Shandy's eyes met the gleam in the sailor's sunken eyesockets and there was exchanged recognition and wry greeting and a farewell between true comrades. Then there was nothing but tumbling old bones and some scraps of gaudy cloth on the deck, but Shandy let go of the torturing saber and dropped to his knees, then forward onto his ravaged hands, and his ears had cleared enough so that he could hear his tears patter on the deck.

"Phil!" he wailed. "Phil! Christ, man, come back!" But Davies, and all the dead men, were gone at last, and aside from Hurwood the only men on the sunny deck were men who had climbed up from the Jenny.

Hurwood was leaning against the starboard rail, his face white as ashes, clutching the stump where his newly regrown arm had been. There was no blood leaking from it, but evidently it required all the man's sorcerous concentration to keep it that way.

Then Hurwood was moving. He pushed away from the rail and, one ponderously careful step at a time, plodded toward the aft cabin door. Shandy struggled to his feet and shambled after him. Hurwood gave the door a kick—it opened, and he tottered inside.

Shandy stopped just outside and stared into the dimness. "Beth!" he called. "Are you in there?" There was no reply except muttering from Hurwood, and Shandy took a deep breath, fumbled his clasp knife out of his pocket with his good hand, and stepped inside.

Hurwood was just straightening up from digging in an open chest against the bulkhead, and in his one hand he was clutching a wooden box Shandy had seen before. He turned and started toward Shandy, and Shandy felt the air thicken, pushing him back. It pushed him back out into the sunlight as Hurwood kept inexorably taking one step after another, and soon it became clear that Hurwood was heading for the ship's boat.

Shandy half opened his knife, laid his forefinger across the groove and then let the blade snap down. Blood spurted from his gashed finger, but the air stopped resisting him. Evidently even unmagnetized iron was enough now to fray Hurwood's spells. He stepped forward and, before Hurwood noticed his sudden freedom to get in close, punched the box out of Hurwood's hand.

The box bounced across the deck. Hurwood, his mouth hanging open from sheer effort, turned and tried to walk; he fell, but then on his knees and one hand he began crawling toward the box. Hardly able to move any better himself, Shandy lurched ahead of the creeping man and sat down on the hot deck beside the box and, his finger still painfully caught under the clasp-knife blade, fumbled the top of the box off.

"My saber," he croaked to Skank, who was tying a bandage around his own thigh. The weary young pirate paused long enough to kick Shandy's doctored sword clattering across the deck to him. Without unclamping the knife from his finger, Shandy grasped the injuring saber, squeezing the compass needle deep into his hand again, and then drove the sword's iron point down into the box. The dried head inside imploded with a sound like old upholstery ripping.

Hurwood stopped, staring, then took a rasping breath and expelled it in a howl that made even the most badly wounded of Shandy's pirates look over in wonder. Then he collapsed, and blood began jetting from the stump of his arm.

With a shudder Shandy dropped the sword again and pulled the knife off his finger. Then he began clumsily using the knife to cut his cursed jacket into strips to use as a tourniquet—for if Beth wasn't aboard, he didn't want Hurwood to bleed to death.

Dizziness, nausea, and occasional moments of blank forgetfulness all helped make Shandy's search of the Carmichael a time-consuming one, but the main reason he took so long—looking inside chests that couldn't possibly have contained Beth Hurwood, and checking some cabins twice to see if she'd doubled back on him—was that he dreaded what he'd probably have to do if it became certain she wasn't aboard. The moment came, though, seeming all the bleaker for the postponement, when he had to admit to himself that he'd checked every cubic foot of the vessel. There was more gold and jewelry in the hold than could be unloaded in a day, but no Beth Hurwood.

He climbed listlessly back up to the main deck and blinked around at the battered men who awaited him, until he spotted Skank. "Hurwood regained consciousness yet?" he asked.

"Not last I heard," said Skank. "Listen, though, did you have any luck down there?"

"No." Shandy turned reluctantly toward the cabin where Hurwood had been carried. "Get me a—" Skank stepped in front of him, backed up by the dozen other men who could still walk; the young pirate's face was as hollowed and hard as a sand-scoured twist of driftwood. "Captain," he rasped, "you said he had his goddamned loot aboard, damn you, the stuff from all the ships he—"

"Oh, loot." Shandy nodded. "Yeah, there's that. Plenty of it, just like I said. I think I sprung a gut moving chest of gold ingots around down there. You can all … go roll in it. But first, hoist me up a bucket of sea water, will you? And see if you can't find … fire, a candle or something … somewhere. I'll be in there with him."

A little disconcerted, Skank stepped back. "Uh, sure, cap'n. Sure." Shandy shook his head unhappily as he limped to the cabin door and went inside. Hurwood lay on the deck planks unconscious, his breath sounding like slow strokes of a saw in dry wood. His shirt was more dark than white, and spatters of blood, nearly dry, blackened the deck around his shoulder, but the bleeding seemed to have been stopped.

Shandy stood over him and wondered who the man really was. The Oxford don, author of A Vindication of Free Will? Beth's father? Husband of the unbearably dead Margaret? Ulysse Segundo the pirate? The bones were prominent in the open-mouthed face, and Shandy tried to imagine what Hurwood had looked like as a young man. He couldn't imagine it.

Shandy knelt down beside him and shook him by his good shoulder. "Mr. Hurwood. Wake up." The pace of the breathing didn't change, the wrinkled eyelids didn't flutter.

"Mr. Hurwood. It's important. Please wake up."

There was no response.

Shandy knelt there, staring at the devastated old man and trying not to think, until Skank clumped in. New orange light contended weakly with the sunlight from outside.

"Water," Skank said, letting a sloshing bucket clank onto the deck, "and a lamp." After looking around uncertainly he set that too on the deck.

"Fine," Shandy whispered. "Thank you."

Skank left, closing the door, and the lamp's agitated flame became the room's illumination. Shandy dipped up a handful of cold brine and tossed it across Hurwood's closed eyes. The old man frowned faintly, but that was all. "God damn it," Shandy burst out, almost sobbing, "don't force me!" He grabbed one of Hurwood's ears and twisted it savagely … to no effect. In horror as much as rage Shandy stood up, pushing the lamp away with his foot, then lifted the bucket and flung the entire contents onto Hurwood's head. The weight of water turned the old man's face away and plastered the white hair out like a crown, but the breathing continued as steadily as before, without even any choking.

Genuinely sobbing now, Shandy turned away and reached for the lamp … and then breathed a prayer of thanks when he heard spitting and groaning behind him.

He crouched beside Hurwood. "Wake up," he said urgently. "You'll never get better advice." Hurwood's eyes opened. "I'm … hurt," he said softly.

"Yes." Shandy brushed the tears out of his eyes to see the old man more clearly. "But you'll probably live. You survived it once. Where's Beth, Elizabeth, your daughter?"

"Oh … it's all over, isn't it? All done now." His eyes met Shandy's. "You! You destroyed it … Margaret's head … I could feel her spirit go out of it. A mere sword!" His voice was gentle, as if he was discussing events in a play they'd both seen. "Not just because it was cold iron … ?"

"And linked to my blood. Yes." Shandy tried to match Hurwood's quiet, conversational tone. "Where have you got your daughter hid?"

"Jamaica. In Spanish Town."

"Ah!" Shandy nodded and smiled. "Where in Spanish Town?"

"Nice house. She's restrained, of course. A prisoner. But in comfort."

"Whose house?"

"Uh … Joshua Hicks." Hurwood seemed childishly proud of being able to remember the name. Shandy's shoulders drooped with relief.

"Do you have any chocolates?" Hurwood asked politely. "I haven't any."

"Uh, no." Shandy stood up. "We can get you some in Jamaica."

"We're going to Jamaica?"

"You're damn right we are. As soon as we get this old hulk a little more seaworthy. We can afford to relax a little, now that I know where she is. Beth will keep for another day or two while we make some repairs."

"Oh, aye, Hicks will take very good care of her. I've given him the strictest instructions, and given him a nurse to make sure he does everything right."

A nurse? thought Shandy. I can't quite imagine a nurse ordering around a member of the landed gentry. "Well, fine. We'll—"

"In fact, what day is it today?"

"Christmas Eve." Can't you tell by everybody's festive manner? he thought.

"Maybe I should wave to him tomorrow."

Shandy, still smiling with relief, cocked his head. "Wave at who?"

"Hicks. He'll be on a cliff at Portland Point, tomorrow at dawn, with a telescope." Hurwood chuckled.

"He doesn't like the idea—he's giving a big dinner party tomorrow night, and he'd far rather be home preparing for it—but he'll be there. He fears me. I told him to watch for this ship and make sure he sees me out on deck, and sees me wave to him."

"We won't be anywhere near Jamaica by tomorrow dawn," said Shandy. "I don't think this ship could be."

"Oh." Hurwood closed his eyes. "Then I won't wave to him." Shandy had been about to leave, but now he paused, staring down at the old man. "Why were you going to wave to him? Why will he be out there watching?"

"I want to sleep now."

"Tell me." Shandy's eyes darted to, then away from, the lamp. "Or no chocolates." Hurwood pursed his lips pettishly, but answered. "If I don't sail past and wave, he'll assume I'm not going to arrive in time, and so he'll do the first part of the magic. The part that has to be done on Christmas day. I meant to be in Jamaica today, to save him the trouble of even going out there, but the storm yesterday and you today … " Hurwood opened his eyes, though not wide. "I just thought if we were going to be near there tomorrow, I'd wave to him and save everybody the trouble. After all, you've made the full procedure impossible by destroying the head." He closed his eyes again.

"What's this … first part of the magic?" Shandy asked, feeling the first faint webs of anxiety falling over him again.

"The part that can be done on land. The big part, which I would have had to do, has to take place at sea. Tomorrow noon he'll do the first part. He'd rather I did it. He'll be unhappy not to see me sail past."

"He'll do what? God damn it, what is this first part?" Hurwood opened his eyes again and stared wonderingly at Shandy. "Why … the dumping of her mind. Elizabeth's mind—her soul. He'll drive it out of her body, with magic. I showed him how. Though," he added with a yawn, "it's a waste of time now. Now there's nobody to put in her place." Sudden pain in his kneecaps let Shandy know he'd fallen to his knees. "Will she come back, then?" he asked, forcing himself not to shout. "Will Beth's soul go back into her body then?" Hurwood laughed, the light, carefree laughter of a child. "Come back? No. When she's gone, she'll be … gone."

Shandy restrained himself from hitting or strangling the old man, and he didn't speak until he was sure he could again match Hurwood's casual tone. "Well," he began, but there was a rough edge in his voice, so he started again. "Well, you know what? I'm going to see to it that this ship does get to Jamaica by tomorrow dawn. And then you'll wave at your … friend, this Hicks, won't you?" He was smiling, but his maimed hands were clenched into fists as tight as stressed knots.

"Very well." Hurwood yawned again. "I'd like to sleep now." Shandy stood up. "Good idea. We'll be getting up damned early tomorrow."

Peering from the corners of his eyes—he was supposed to look as if he were deep in prayer—the altar boy had to admit that the church really was getting darker. And while he was afraid of the dry, dusty birdlike things that would be free to come out when all the light was gone, he was hoping that total dark would come soon—for after the wedding ceremony the minister would dispense communion, and the altar boy knew he had sinned too direly to take it, and so he wanted to be able to slip away unseen … even if that meant becoming one of the cobwebby birdlike creatures himself. He shivered, and wondered unhappily what had become of all the nice things. There had been friends, a wife, scholarship, the respect of colleagues, the respect of himself … Perhaps they had only been a tormenting dream, and there had never really been anything but darkness and cold and the slow increeping of imbecility. He took comfort in the thought.

The wedding couple finally came together in the shadows below the altar and linked arms, slowly, like lengths of seaweed tangled by listless sea-bottom currents. Then they began ascending the steps, and the altar boy realized that the absolute darkness had held off too long. The bride was just an empty but animate dress; that wasn't so bad—it was always reassuring to find only an absence where it had seemed there might be a presence—but the groom was present and alive: it was impossible to be sure that it was human, for the skinned, bleeding flesh it consisted of might be manlike in form only because of the constriction of the clothes. If it had eyes they were closed, but the altar boy could tell the thing was alive because blood kept running out of it everywhere, and its mouth, albeit silently, was opening wide and clamping shut over and over again. All at once the altar boy realized that the flayed thing there was himself, but the knowledge carried no horror, because now he knew too that he could move out of himself: all the way, if he was ready to let go of every thing, to non-being.

This, with profound relief, he did.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

When the first hints of the dawn's glow began to dim the brightness of Sirius and the three bright stars in Lepus, Shandy called for the telescope and scanned the faint contrast in dark grays that was the southeast horizon—and then, though after the night-long labor he was too exhausted and hoarse to shout, he bared his teeth in pleasure, for he could see the irregularity that couldn't be anything but Jamaica.

"We're there, Skank," he said quietly to the man beside him as he handed the telescope back. "Ten hours of night sailing and navigating our course by the stars, on one reach because we couldn't tack, and the pre-dawn shows us sitting squarely where we wanted to be! By God, I wish Davies could have seen it."

"Aye," Skank croaked dully.

"Have one of the lads go fetch Hurwood up here. It's nearly time for him to step onstage."

"Aye, cap'n." Skank lurched away into the darkness, leaving Shandy alone on the bow. Shandy stared out at the dim horizon, trying to spot Jamaica again without the telescope's aid, but after going two nights without sleep, focusing his eyes was a physical effort, and all he could see were illusory transparencies that swirled in different directions every time he moved his eyes. He was desperately looking forward to rescuing Beth, but more because he could then relax and go to sleep somewhere than because of any glory or fulfillment he might derive from accomplishing it. With the numb objectivity that follows total, all-consuming effort, he wondered if he would be captured in Jamaica … and what might ensue if he was. It could be argued that he hadn't violated his pardon, since the only ship he had taken was this one, and Hurwood was certainly not the legal captain. Is stealing stolen property less reprehensible than plain stealing? Well, even if he were captured, and the judgment went against him, he'd free Beth Hurwood first … and make her listen to the story her father had to tell, and show her that things were … different from the way she thought they were.

He rubbed his aching eyes and, again with no particular feeling, thought of all the things this summer and fall had cost him: his righteous convictions, his legal standing, his skepticism, his youth, his heart … and he grinned into the chilly darkness when he realized that, nearly as much as all the dead innocence and friends, he missed the old, battered, slipshod, jury-rigged loyal sloop called the Jenny. With no one to man the bilge pumps during yesterday's fighting and recuperation, she had filled and foundered, so that the grappling lines were stretched taut and were making the Carmichael list perceptibly to port. Sadly he had ordered her to be cut free, and there had been tears in his eyes as he had watched the mast and the patched sails slowly lean down to the water as the hulk receded away astern … and though his hearing was still bad, or perhaps because of it, it had seemed to him that for a few moments he faintly heard a babble of diminishing voices, one still insisting that he was not a dog …

Footsteps scuffed on the deck behind him now, and Skank tapped him on the shoulder. "Uh, cap'n?" Shandy turned around. "Yes? Where's Hurwood? I don't care if he's ill, he's got to—"

"Cap'n," said Skank, "he's dead."

Shandy felt tears of rage welling up in his eyes. "Dead? What? No he's not, the son of a bitch, he can't be, he—"

"Cap'n, he's cold and he ain't breathing—and he don't bleed if you prod him with a knife." Shandy fell back against the rail and slid down until he was sitting on the deck. "God damn the man," he was whispering shrilly, "God damn him, am I supposed to swim ashore and climb the cliffs and find this Hicks person? How in hell am I to—" He lowered his head into his hands, and for several seconds the appalled Skank thought he was weeping; but when Shandy finally raised his head and spoke, his voice was harsh but level.

"Bring him here anyway." Shandy slowly got to his feet, facing Jamaica and flexing his stiff hands. The sky was lightening in the east—the sun would be up terribly soon.

"Uh … sure, cap'n." Skank started away, but paused. "Uh … why?"

"And a couple of stout, yard-long spar sections, and a roll of the strongest, thinnest twine," Shandy went on, still staring at the island, "and a—" He paused, and seemed to gag.

"And a what, captain?" Skank asked softly.

"A sharp sailmaker's needle."

What was the point of leaving Port-au-Prince, Sebastian Chandagnac asked himself fretfully as he tried to find a comfortable position among the rocks and dew-drenched grass, if in this new Joshua Hicks identity I'm still skulking around desolate shores at dawn waiting for signals from pirate ships?

He shivered and drew his cloak closer about himself and had another swig from his brandy flask, and was warmed by both the alcohol and the envy of the driver who waited on the carriage several yards behind him.

He scowled around at the horizon, then stiffened, for he could see a light gray fleck out on the sea's dark face. He fumbled the telescope to his eye and squinted through it. Yes, it was a ship, tall and square-rigged. Unable to learn any more about it for now, he lowered the telescope. That must be him, he thought. What other ship would be slanting in past Portland Point at dawn on Christmas? He glanced back at the carriage—and the driver was looking resentful and one of the horses stamped impatiently and blew out a plume of steam—but Chandagnac didn't walk back to them yet, for Ulysse had ordered him to wait until he actually saw him on the deck. "It may be my ship, you see," Segundo had said, with that smile of his which, though cheerful, seemed to expose too many teeth, "but I may not be on it—I may have been detained somewhere, or even killed, so that it wouldn't be until after Christmas that I'd be able to get back here. And the … eviction magic has to be done on Christmas. So you plan on doing it yourself unless you see me wave." Be aboard, Chandagnac prayed to the man now, be aboard and wave. / don't want to get involved in that stuff. It occurred to him that, at the moment, he was happier here on this cold cliff than he would have been at home, for yesterday evening the frightful black nurse had begun making preparations for the magic: burning bugs and snakes in the fireplace—impervious to their frequent stings—then carefully collecting the ash and dusting a couple of spoonfuls of it over the pile of leaves and roots that was to be the captive girl's dinner; tuning and testing at least a dozen little tin whistles; whispering into various dirty old bottles and then instantly corking them, as if to keep the whispered words in; and, worst of all, the thing that had made Chandagnac rush out to keep his cliff-top appointment much earlier than was necessary, she had razored open a vein in her bony wrist and let some of the contents run into a cup, but what had come out was not blood, or any kind of fluid, but a fine black powder …

He shuddered now at the memory of it. Yes, he thought, be aboard, Ulysse, so you can be the one who gets to perform your damned sorcery, and I can get everything ready for my big dinner tonight. And you'd better have been right when you assured me that all of your magical trappings will be cleared out of the garden before three o'clock, when the servants will be arriving to set up. He peered through the telescope again. The sky was brighter and the ship was nearer and he could see that it was indeed the Ascending Orpheus … looking a bit battered, but coming on strongly enough. So far so good, he thought with cautious satisfaction. In half an hour I can be rolling east, back toward Spanish Town … have lunch and a few drinks at the club, stay away from the house until Ulysse has finished his awful business … and then get my wig curled and make sure all my clothes are immaculate. Maybe take a nap. It's essential that I put all this unpleasantness out of my mind so that I can make a good impression on this Edmund Morcilla fellow.

Even in his semi-solitude Chandagnac had heard of Morcilla—the big, bald, smooth-faced rich man who had sailed into Kingston Harbor late in November and was reputed to be investing heavily in all sorts of Caribbean concerns, from sugar to-land to slaves. And

Morcilla had last week actually written to Joshua Hicks, proposing a partnership in a land deal. Chandagnac had written back in eager agreement, for he saw Morcilla as a possible means of freedom from Ulysse Segundo; and when Morcilla had replied with a long, friendly letter in which he mentioned his desire to marry some spirited, preferably auburn-haired young lady, Chandagnac was so anxious to ingratiate himself that in his next letter he actually mentioned the young lady "with a slight touch of brain-fever" who was staying at his house. In the same letter he invited Morcilla to his Christmas dinner party, and Chandagnac was so pleased when Morcilla wrote back to accept the invitation that he didn't even let himself worry about Morcilla's postscript, in which the wealthy man expressed a strong interest in meeting the young lady.

A lance of red sunlight in the corner of his left eye snapped him out of his reverie, and when he raised the telescope this time he kept it raised, for the ship was moving past his cliff-perch, showing him her port profile. It did seem to have caught its share of the storm—several spars were broken, and much of the rigging had simply been hacked short and tied off, and somehow one of the lower foremast sails had torn free and become tangled in the standing rigging, and now formed a sort of tent around the crosstree platform—but he could clearly see men on the deck. He scanned these eagerly, bracing the telescope barrel on a ballata tree branch to keep it steady, and in moments he was sure he had spotted Segundo.

The man was standing by the foremast with his back to the shore, but Chandagnac recognized the figure, the clothes, and the white hair—and then Segundo turned around to face the cliff, and Chandagnac laughed with relief, for there was no mistaking that craggy face and that intent stare. While Chandagnac watched, Segundo bent his left knee and lifted his foot up onto one of the railstanchion stumps, and, though he kept his right hand in his coat pocket, he waved broadly with his left, nodding reassuringly all the while.

Chandagnac waved the telescope over his head, even though it was unlikely that the gesture would be seen, and he didn't even frown when the cylinder slipped from his cold-numbed fingers and spun away to crash to bits on the rocks below. Whistling cheerfully, he turned away from the sea and strode toward the waiting carriage.

And Shandy, concealed on the cross-tree platform behind the roped-back forecourse sail, all at once sagged limp in the bindings that moored him to the mast, as the long held off rainbow glitter of unconsciousness finally filled his vision and overwhelmed him. His hands slipped off the blood-slick marionette cross he'd made, and it balanced for a moment on the yardarm, and then slipped off to one side and hung there, making the puppet on the deck below suddenly assume a startling posture: Hurwood's corpse, though still held more or less upright by the twine puppet strings, was now leaning backward at a forty-five degree angle, smiling confidently up into the sky and extending its left leg straight out and well above its head, like a dancer frozen in a particularly energetic moment. For several seconds the pirates gaped at this prodigy, and then one of them crossed himself, drew his cutlass and chopped through the taut lengths of twine sewn through Hurwood's spine, scalp, limbs and left hand. The suddenly slack twine sprang upward, lashing Shandy across the cheek, and Hurwood's head fell loosely back and the body rattled and thumped onto the deck. With a buzz of twine running over the yardarm, the marionette cross came down and whacked the deck a moment later. The body lay sprawled loose as a broken doll, for rigor mortis had set in, and Shandy had had to do some work with a saw before he'd got busy with his needle and twine.

Roused by the sting of the whipping twine, Shandy blinked around and began trying to stand up and get his weight off the rope that was looped under his arms.

"Fling that overboard," said Skank on the deck below, pointing at Hurwood's abused corpse.

"No!" screamed Shandy, almost losing consciousness again from the effort of it. The pirates stared up at him.

"Not … his body," Shandy grated, still trying to get his feet onto the yardarm, "nor one drop … damn these ropes! … of his blood … are to wind up in the sea." His feet under him at last, he straightened up, took several deep breaths, and then looked down. "You understand me? He's to be cremated when you put me ashore."

"Ashore," echoed one old pirate wearily. "You're goin' ashore."

"Of course I am," growled Shandy. He fumbled ineffectually at the knots in the ropes that moored him, hampered by dimming vision and bleeding hands. "Somebody climb up here and help me down. I've got—" He felt unconsciousness crowd him again, but he pushed it back. "I've got a dinner party to go to."

It took the Carmichael several hours to get to the southern end of Kingston Harbor, for the ship was unable to tack its bow across the wind, and so had to loop back on its path and jibe all the way around in order to switch the wind from one side of the bow to the other; and since the wind was blowing at them straight southwest from Kingston, they had to do a painstaking series of mile-wide figure-eights to move upwind, and the trip was sixty miles of constant work rather than the nearly straight twentyfive mile run it would have been for an undamaged vessel. Shandy had plenty of time to clip and shave off his gray-shot, salt-stiff beard, dress in some of Hurwood's clothes, and pull a pair of kid leather gloves on over his bandaged hands.

The sun was high when finally he was able to stare across the harbor's forest of masts to the red roofs of the city and, beyond and above them, the purple and green mountains. It occurred to him that he was finally seeing Kingston, and from the deck of the Carmichael … albeit six months late. He remembered how he and Beth Hurwood had prematurely celebrated the imminent end of the voyage by tossing maggoty biscuits to a hovering sea gull, and how he'd planned to dine ashore that night with Captain Chaworth.

He waved to the helmsman not to go in any closer, and then he turned to Skank. "Have 'em wrap up Hurwood and put him in the boat before you lower it. And then lower it carefully. Now I'll need somebody to row me ashore—then you take the Carmichael south around Wreck Reef and wait for us there … and if we're not back to the ship by midmorning tomorrow, take off—we'll probably have been captured, and with all these Navy craft about, this ship's peril will get worse with every passing hour. You'll be captain, Skank. Run far away, split up the loot, and go live like kings somewhere. I don't know whether this has been a violation of your pardons or not, so go somewhere they never heard of any of us. Get fat and lie in the sun and get drunk every day, because you'll be drinking for me too."

Skank probably wasn't capable of tears, but his narrow eyes were bright as he shook Shandy's hand.

"Christ, Jack, you'll make it back. You've been in worse places." Shandy grinned, lining his face deeply. "Yeah, you're right, quite a few of 'em. Well, have the lads get Hurwood—"

"Leave the body aboard for now," interrupted a rumbling voice from the belowdecks ladder. Both Shandy and Skank recognized the voice, and watched in horrified astonishment as Woefully Fat climbed ponderously up the ladder. The giant black man had draped himself toga-fashion in a section of sail that covered the jagged spar-end protruding from his chest, and he moved more slowly than usual, but otherwise he looked the same as he always had—strong, stern and impassive. "Burn Hurwood's body later on. Ah'll row you ashore now. Ah'm gonna die on Jamaican soil." Shandy exchanged a lost look with Skank, but then shrugged and nodded. "I, uh, guess I won't need a rower after all. Well—"

"Sure you will, Jack," Skank said. "It seems like Davies' bocor is stayin' ashore, an' you can't row back with your hands all cut up."

"That'll be tomorrow. I'll manage." He turned nervously to the bocor. Remembering for once that the man was deaf, Shandy made an "after you" gesture toward the rail and the boat that swung from the davit cranes.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The Carmichael jibed around after lowering the boat, and the wind filled her sails and she had disappeared around the southern point before Woefully Fat had taken fifty strokes at the oars. Shandy sat back on the stern thwart and, keeping his eyes off the bocor's weirdly placid face, allowed himself to enjoy the sun and the view and the spicy smells on the breeze. Now that the incriminating ship had retreated, they were just two men in a rowboat—though a look inside Woefully Fat's toga would no doubt surprise even the most worldly harbor-master—and Shandy thought it likely that they would be able to land without arousing any particular interest.

Even when a Royal Navy sloop came angling toward them, her brightwork gleaming and her tall jibsail intimidatingly white in the noon sun, he thought she might well be leaving the harbor on some errand that had nothing to do with him; it wasn't until the sloop cut in across the rowboat's bow and then loosed all sails and came rocking to a halt in front of it that Shandy began to worry. He caught Woefully Fat's eye and managed to convey to the bocor that there was an obstacle ahead. Woefully Fat looked over his shoulder, nodded, and lifted the oars out of the water. A few seconds later the rowboat collided gently with the Navy vessel.

Flanked by half a dozen sailors with pistols, a young officer stepped to the sloop's rail and stared down at the two men in the rowboat. "Are you John Chandagnac, also known as Jack Shandy, and the witch doctor known as Grievously Fat?" he asked nervously.

"We goin' to Jamaica," interrupted the bocor in the middle of the officer's question.

"It's no use talking to him—," Shandy began.

"Well? Are you?" the officer demanded.

"No, dammit," yelled Shandy desperately, "I'm Thomas Hobbes and this is my man Leviathan. We were just—"

"Woe to thee, Babylon warrior," intoned Woefully Fat in his deepest voice, pointing at the officer and opening his alarming eyes wide. "Lion of Judah be troddin' down yo' fig tree and grapevine pickneys!"

"You're under arrest!" shrilled the officer, drawing a pistol of his own. To one of his men he added,

"Get down there, make sure they're unarmed, and then bring them aboard as prisoners!" The sailor stared at the officer. "Aye aye, sir. Why, exactly?"

"Why? Did you hear what he threatened to do to my kidneys?"

"That's pickneys, it's a slang word for children—," began Shandy, but he stopped when the officer pointed the pistol directly into his face; instead he raised his open hands and smiled broadly. "Good job, man," he whispered to the deaf bocor.

The Navy sailors lowered a rope ladder, and Shandy and Woefully Fat climbed up onto the deck of the Navy sloop while a couple of sailors secured a painter to the rowboat to tow it behind. And when the wrists of his captives had been bound in front of them the officer had the two prisoners brought to him in the neat but narrow belowdecks cabin. Woefully Fat had to bend almost double to fit into the chamber. Shandy was uncomfortably reminded of his brief visit aboard the Navy man-of-war that had captured the Jenny.

"Prisoners," the officer began, "you were seen to disembark from the pirate vessel the Ascending Orpheus. We have received intelligence from the New Providence colony to the effect that John Chandagnac and Grievously Fat left that island on the thirteenth of December, sailing for Jamaica with the intention of making a rendezvous with the pirate Ulysse Segundo. Will you deny that you are these two men?"

"Yes, we deny it," blustered Shandy. "I told you who we are. Where are you taking us?"

"To the Kingston Jail to await arraignment." As if to emphasize his words, the sloop surged forward as the sails were raised again, and a moment later there was a tug aft as the rowboat's painter came taut. "The charges against you are severe," added the officer reprovingly. "I shall be astonished if you do not both hang."

Woefully Fat leaned forward, his massive head seeming to fill the cabin. "Wheah you takin' us," he said intensely, "is the Maritime Law and Records Office."

For a moment Shandy smelled red-hot iron, and smoke rose from behind the giant bocor. As if he hadn't spoken before or heard Woefully Fat's comment, the officer said, "We're taking you to the Maritime Law and Records Office." He added, a little defensively, "That's where the charges originate, after all."

Woefully Fat sat back, evidently satisfied. Shandy could smell the back of the bocor's chair burning where the gaff-saddle pressed against it, and he hoped that the dying sorcerer had something good in mind. Shandy knew that the Law and Records Office was a bookkeeper's den, not a place to which criminals were ever physically brought.

Shandy and Woefully Fat were locked into the cabin when the officer left, but even through the deck above him and the bulkheads to either side Shandy could hear incredulous protests from the sailors. The Maritime Law and Records Office proved to be the southernmost of half a dozen government buildings on the west side of the harbor, and it had a dock of its own, to which the Navy sloop made its way. Like most of the waterfront structures, the building was of whitewashed stone, roofed with overlapping redbrick tiles that looked to Shandy as if they'd been moulded over the bases of palm branches. As the officer and several armed sailors led him and Woefully Fat up the walk toward the building, Shandy could see a couple of clerks already peering curiously out through one of the tall, open windows at this incongruous procession. His hands were still bound in front of him, and his eyes were darting around for anything that might be used to cut himself free. One of the sailors sprinted ahead and held the door open. The officer, who was beginning to look a little unsure of himself, stepped inside first, but it was the sight of Woefully Fat in his sailcloth toga that made the clerks drop their pens and ledger books and leap to their feet with dismayed cries. Taller than any of them and as broad as three, the bocor rolled his eyes disapprovingly around the room. Shandy guessed he was looking for a patch of Jamaican soil, as opposed to floorboards. One of the clerks, prodded forward by his white-haired superior, approached the group. "Wh-what are you doing here?" he quavered. He stared in horror up at Woefully Fat. "What d-do you want?" The Navy officer started to speak, but Woefully Fat's earthquake-rumble voice easily overrode him.

"Ah'm deaf, Ah cain't hear," the bocor announced.

The clerk paled and turned to his superior. "Oh my God, sir, he says he's going to defecate here!" Chaos erupted on all sides as clerks and bookkeepers knocked over tables and inkstands in their frenzy to get to the doors—several simply leaped out of the windows—but Woefully Fat had seen, through a pair of French doors ahead, a small, enclosed yard with sidewalks, a flagpole, a fountain … and grass. He started purposefully toward the doors.

"Uh, stop!" called the Navy officer. Woefully Fat strode on, and the officer drew his pistol. Realizing that nobody was paying any particular attention to him, Shandy shuffled along parallel to the bocor but a few feet to the left.

Bang.

The pistol was fired and bloody spray and bits of cloth sprang away from a new hole in the back of Woefully Fat's toga, but the shot didn't even jar the bocor. He pushed the French doors open and stepped out onto the sidewalk. Shandy was right behind him.

The officer had dropped his spent pistol and now ran up and grabbed the giant black man, apparently intending to pull him back inside; but he only managed to pull the sailcloth toga free of the huge shoulders.

Several people, including the officer, screamed when they saw the stump of the gaff-spar jutting bloodily from the broad back, but Woefully Fat took another step forward, and one bare foot, and then the other, dented Jamaican soil.

Shandy was following him, and when the bocor suddenly toppled backward he instinctively raised his bound hands to break the man's fall.

The jagged iron gaff-saddle ripped the rope around his wrists as the limp body collapsed, and then Woefully Fat lay dead on the sidewalk, his feet still on the grass, a broad smile on his skyward-turned face … and Shandy strained at the damaged rope until it broke, and his hands were free. He skipped out into the enclosed yard. The gunshot had brought people to every surrounding doorway, and quite a number of them were holding swords and pistols. Shandy realized that he was recaptured … and then he thought of something.

At a fast walk, hoping to avoid drawing attention, he made his way to the flagpole; then, yawning as if to imply that this was a daily routine, he began climbing the wooden pole, several times gripping the paired flag-hoisting lines with one hand for extra traction. He was halfway to the top before the Navy officer lurched out into the yard and saw him.

"Come down from there!" the man yelled.

"Come up and get me," Shandy called back. He had reached the top now, and was hunched over the brass sphere at the top of the pole, his legs crossed just under it and the British flag draped over his head like a hood.

"Fetch an axe!" yelled the officer, but Shandy had heaved himself backward, hauling on the top of the pole; it swayed back several yards, then stopped, came back up and went past the upright point and bent over the other way; Shandy hung on, and when it swung back in the original direction again he pulled on the pole-top sphere even harder … and at the farthest, most straining moment of the bend, the flexed pole snapped. The top six feet, with Shandy at the end, spun rapidly end over end and crashed down onto the tile roof as the rest of the pole whipped its splintered top back over the yard. Half stunned by the sudden spin and impact, Shandy slid down the roof headforemost, toward the gutter, but he managed to spread his arms and legs and drag to an abrading halt; the flagpole-top and several broken loose tiles rolled past him into the abyss.

Whimpering with vertigo, he began doing a sort of spasmodic reverse backstroke on the slanting tiles, and by the time the bricks and flagpole section clattered and smashed on the sidewalk below, he had got his knees over the roof peak. He slithered around to one side until he could sit up, and then he got to his feet, ran bent-kneed across the cracking tiles to the roof-brushing branches of a tall olive tree, and, with an ease born of many hours scrambling around in the rigging of sailing craft, swung and slapped his way down to the ground. A vegetable wagon was rolling past through the alley he found himself in, and he hopped over its sideboard and lay flat among a bumpy, bristly load of coconuts as the wagon rattled on inland, away from the waterfront.

He clambered out of the wagon when it stopped outside a thatch-roofed market in a main street in Kingston. People stared, but he just gave them a benevolent smile and strode away toward the shops. Hurwood's clothes were torn now, and covered with red brick-dust and strands of coconut bristle, so as he walked he unobtrusively fumbled at the inner lining of his baldric, tore open the loose stitching he'd done that morning, and then worked out a couple of the gold scudos he'd sewn into the lining. He glanced at the coins in his gloved palm. That, he thought, should be plenty for a new set of clothes and a good sword.

He halted as a thought struck him, then smirked at himself and walked on, but after a few more steps he stopped again. Oh well, he told himself, why not—it can't hurt, and you can certainly afford it. Yes, you may as well buy a compass, too.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Somehow the fact of its being Christmas night only emphasized the land's strangeness: the warm odors of punch and roasted turkey and plum pudding just made the dinner guests more aware of the wild spice smells from the inland jungles; the yellow lamplight and stately violin music spilling out from the open windows couldn't stray far from the house before being absorbed by the darkness and the creaking of the tall palm trees in the tropical night breeze; and the guests themselves seemed faintly ill at ease in their European finery. There was a quality of defensiveness in their laughter, and their repartee seemed to strain forlornly for sophistication.

The party was well attended, though. Word had got out that Edmund Morcilla was to be there, and many of Jamaica's moneyed citizens, curious about the wealthy newcomer, had chosen to accept the hospitality of Joshua Hicks, who on his own had little beyond his street address to recommend him. And their host was clearly overjoyed by the success the evening had been so far. He bustled from one end of the wide ballroom to the other, kissing ladies' hands, making sure cups were filled, and tittering softly at witticisms; and, when he wasn't talking to anyone, glancing around anxiously and smoothing his clothes and well-groomed beard with manicured hands.

By eight o'clock the arriving horses and carriages were actually waiting in line in front of the house, and Sebastian Chandagnac found himself unable to greet each guest personally—though he made it a point to hurry up to the towering figure of Edmund Morcilla and shake his hand—and it happened that one man slipped in unnoticed and crossed unaccosted to the table where the crystal punchbowl stood.

His appearance drew no particular notice, for none of the invited guests could have known that his wig and sword and velvet coat had been purchased only that afternoon with pirates' gold; there was, perhaps, more of a sailor's roll in his walk than would be expected in one so elegantly dressed, and less formality than usual in the way his gloved hand occasionally brushed the hilt of his rapier, but this was after all the New World, and people far from home were often forced to acquire discreditable skills. The servant tending the punchbowl filled a cup and handed it to him without giving him a second glance.

Shandy took the cup of punch and sipped it while he let his gaze traverse the room. He wasn't sure how to proceed, and his only plan so far was to figure out which of these people was Joshua Hicks, get the man alone for a little while and induce him to say where Beth Hurwood was being kept, and then free her, hastily tell her a thing or two, and try to make good his escape from this island. The hot punch, tart with lemon and cinnamon, reminded Shandy of Christmases in his youth, hurrying with his father through the snowy streets of some European city to the warmth of the inevitable rented room, where his father would prepare at least a token Christmas dinner and drink over the fire that raised sparkling reflections in the glass eyes of the dozens of hanging marionettes. None of these memories—his father, snowy winters, or marionettes—were pleasant subjects for his thoughts, and he forced himself to concentrate on his present surroundings. Money had certainly been spent on this place—as a sort of informal import and export agent himself, Shandy knew how expensive and difficult it must have been to ship from Europe all these huge, giltframed paintings, these crystal chandeliers, this furniture. Nothing in the room was of local manufacture; and, to judge by the smells from the kitchen, even the food was to be as genuinely English as possible. It wasn't terribly enticing to Shandy, who'd grown fond of green turtle, manioc root and salmagundi salad.

One of Hicks's servants now entered the room and, raising his voice to be heard over the waves of conversation, announced, "If you will all please step this way—dinner will be served shortly." The guests began bolting the last sips of punch and shuffling across the hardwood floor toward the doors that led into the dining room; Shandy kept smiling and let himself be drawn along, but he was worried—if he followed everyone in, it would quickly become apparent that there was no place set for him, and that he hadn't been invited. Where the hell was Hicks? What Shandy needed was a diversion, and he glanced around, hoping to see some especially fat person that he could surreptitiously trip.

Just when he had spotted a likely candidate—a portly old fellow, entirely encased in lace-edged red velvet, who could probably be propelled right into the punchbowl—a diversion took place without his help.

On the far side of the ballroom four men came in through the front door at once, crowding considerably to do it. The first one was neatly bearded and had his back to Shandy most of the time — he seemed to be the host, for he was waving his arms and protesting about something; next to him was a burly giant of a man, watching with evident amusement and puffing on a thin black cigar—he was elegantly dressed but wore no wig, a peculiar omission since his head was completely bald; and behind them, obviously insisting on entering, came two British Naval officers.

"It's for your own safety, and that of your guests," one of the officers said loudly, and the man who Shandy guessed was Hicks finally shrugged and waved the two Navy men inside. Shandy inconspicuously stepped back so as to be behind the fat fellow in red velvet—and, just in case, closer to the window.

The bald giant moved aside to let the two officers get past, and his grin behind the little cigar was so sly and knowing that Shandy stared at him curiously. Abruptly it seemed to Shandy that he'd seen this man before, been in awe of him … though the broad, unlined face was certainly not familiar. He didn't get time to ponder it, though, for the nearest Navy man at once began speaking to the company. "My name is Lieutenant MacKinlay," he said loudly. "We won't prolong our interruption of your dinner longer than to warn you all that the pirate Jack Shandy was briefly apprehended in Kingston today; he escaped, though, and is at large in the island."

There was a stir of interest at this, and even in his sudden fright Shandy noticed that the bald giant raised his bushy eyebrows and took the cigar from his mouth in order to closely scrutinize the diners. The amusement was gone from his face, replaced by a look of watchful caution.

"The reason we feel you should be apprised of this," MacKinlay went on, "is that, after purchasing new clothes, he made several inquiries as to the location of this house. He is described as being well dressed, but wearing white kid leather gloves that show bloodstains at the seams." The portly old man in front of Shandy hitched ponderously around and pointed at Shandy's gloved hands. He was spitting excitedly and trying to produce words.

Lieutenant MacKinlay hadn't yet noticed the old man's consternation—though people near Shandy were craning their necks curiously—and he continued his speech. "It seems clear to us that Shandy has heard about this dinner, and intends to come here for the purpose of committing some robbery or kidnap. A group of armed Navy men is even now being mustered to come here and apprehend him, and in the meantime my companion and I—"

Hicks had noticed the commotion at the back of the crowd, and he peered alertly in that direction — and then the spitting old man fell to his knees, and Shandy found himself staring straight across the room at Hicks, meeting his gaze.

Both Shandy and Hicks flinched from what seemed the sight of a ghost.

After the first moment of shock, Shandy knew it wasn't his father—the face was too pudgy, and the mouth too pursed—but the eyes, the nose, the cheekbones, the forehead, were all his father's, and just for a moment he marveled that chance could have produced such a resemblance in a stranger; but in the next moment he realized who it must be, and what must have been the real story of the "suicide" of Sebastian Chandagnac.

"My God!" exclaimed a woman near Shandy. "That's him there!" Several men among the guests frowned and slapped the hilts of their dress swords, but somehow getting room to draw their blades involved moving quickly away from the pirate. Suddenly and jarringly, the bald man laughed, a deep, booming mirth like storm surf crashing on rocks, and Shandy recognized him.

Then the two Navy officers had drawn pistols and were shouting for the guests to move aside, and a number of men were reluctantly moving in on Shandy, waving the sort of swords one orders from a tailor, and Sebastian Chandagnac was loudly demanding that the officers shoot the pirate instantly. Women screamed, men tripped over chairs, and Shandy leaped up onto the table, drawing his saber in midair, and he kicked the punchbowl onto the floor as he sprinted down the table toward the front door; MacKinlay's pistol banged deafeningly, but the ball splintered the wall paneling above Shandy's head, and then he had leaped off the end of the table. MacKinlay's companion was pointing a pistol of his own directly at Shandy's chest, and Shandy, helpless to do anything else, lunged at him, caught the long pistol barrel with his saber blade and got a fast corkscrewing bind on it that sent it flying out of the officer's hand before he could fire.

Men were slipping and cursing on the wet floor behind him, and a couple of swords were noisily dropped, and Shandy leaped to the side, whipped his blade around, and put his point against MacKinlay's chest. Everyone froze. The pistol finished clattering across the floor and clanked against the wall.

"I believe I'll surrender," Shandy said into the sudden silence, "but before I do, I want to tell you who Joshua Hicks is. He's—"

Sebastian Chandagnac had dived for the dropped pistol and now came up with it; sitting, he fired it at Shandy.

The ball exploded the head of Lieutenant MacKinlay—and as the body cartwheeled away and the screaming and crashing resumed, louder, Shandy's uncle scrambled up, drew his own dress sword and ran at him. Shandy parried the blade easily, though his white gloves were gleaming red along the seams, and he rushed in and, one-handed, grabbed his uncle by the throat.

"Beth Hurwood, the girl you're holding," he snarled. "Where is she?" The bald man Morcilla had stepped forward as if to interfere, but at this he paused.

"Upstairs," wept Sebastian Chandagnac, his eyes closed, "locked room." Women were sobbing and several men stood nearby with drawn swords, glancing at one another uncertainly. The second Navy officer had drawn his sword but seemed reluctant to approach while Shandy was apparently holding a hostage.

Shandy's left thumb was on his uncle's larynx, and he knew he could crush it as easily as he could break an egg; but he was sick of deaths, and didn't think he'd derive any sense of fulfillment from watching this scared little man flop around on the floor choking to death on his own throat bones. He switched his grip to the man's collar.

"Who … are you?" Sebastian Chandagnac croaked, his eyes wide with horror. Suddenly Shandy realized that, clean-shaven and with all the new lines of age and weariness in his face, he must look very much like his father had when Sebastian would have seen him last … and of course this man didn't know that his nephew John Chandagnac had come to the Caribbean. Having decided not to kill him, Shandy found that he could not refrain from stirring up the man's guilt. "Look me in the eye," he whispered chokingly.

The old man did, though with much trembling and moaning.

"I'm your brother, Sebastian," Shandy said through clenched teeth. "I'm Francois." The old man's face was nearly purple. "I heard you had … died. Really died, I mean." Shandy grinned ferociously. "I did—but haven't you ever heard of vodun? —I've only come back from Hell tonight to fetch you, dear brother."

Apparently Sebastian had heard of vodun, and found Shandy's claim all too plausible; his eyes rolled back in his head and, with as sharp an exhalation as if he'd been punched in the belly, he went limp. Surprised but not really dismayed, Shandy let the body tumble to the floor. Then, almost side by side, Shandy and the bald man sprang for the stairs; presumably Edmund Morcilla was pursuing the pirate, but it was hard to be sure they weren't both racing toward some common goal. A few men with swords leaped quickly into their path, and then even more quickly out of it, and a moment later Shandy was bounding up the stairs three at a time, panting and praying that he wouldn't pass out quite yet.

At the top of the stairs was a corridor, and he paused there, his chest heaving, and turned to face the man who called himself Morcilla, who had stopped two steps short of the landing. His eyes were level with Shandy's.

"What … do you want?" Shandy gasped.

The giant's smile looked cherubic on his smooth face. "The young woman." There was more shouting and crashing below, and Shandy shook his head impatiently. "No. Forget it. Go back downstairs."

"I've earned her—I've been monitoring this house all day, ready to step in and interfere at the first indication of soul-eviction magic—"

"Which didn't take place because I undid Hurwood's plan," said Shandy. "Get out of here." The bald man raised his sword. "I'd rather not kill you, Jack, but I promise I will if I have to in order to get her."

Shandy let his shoulders slump defeatedly and let his face relax into lines of exhaustion and despair — and then he flung himself forward, slamming the giant's sword against the wall with his left forearm while his right hand punched his saber into the man's chest. Only the fact that the bald man stood his ground stopped Shandy from pitching head first down the stairs. Shandy caught his balance, raised his right foot and planted it on the man's broad breast next to where the blade transfixed it, and then kicked, bringing himself back upright on the landing and propelling the bald man in a backward tumble down the stairs. Exclamations of horror and surprise erupted above the general clamor below. Shandy turned and looked down the corridor. One of the doorknobs was wooden, and he reeled to it. It was locked, so he wearily braced himself against the wall it faced, lifted his foot, and with a repetition of the move that had freed his blade from Morcilla's chest, drove his foot at the door. The wooden lock splintered and the door flew inward and Shandy dropped his saber as he fell forward into the room.

He looked up from his hands and knees. There was a lamp lit in the room, but the scene it showed him was far from reassuring: nasty-smelling leaves were all over the floor, someone had hung several severed dog heads on the walls, an obviously long-dead black woman was tumbled carelessly in the corner, and Beth Hurwood was crouched by the window apparently trying to eat the woodwork. But Beth looked around in alarm, and her eyes were clear and alert. "John!" she said hoarsely when she saw who it was. "My God, I'd almost given up praying for you! Bring that sword over here and chop this wooden bolt in half—my teeth aren't making any progress at all." He got up and hurried over to her, slipping only once on the leaves, and he squinted blearily at the bolt. He raised his sword carefully. "I'm surprised you recognize me," he remarked inanely.

"Of course I do, though you do look thrashed. When did you sleep last?"

" … I don't remember." He brought the sword down. It cut the bolt, barely. Beth fumbled the pieces out of the brackets and pushed the window open, and the cool night air sluiced away the room's stale smells and brought in the cries of tropical birds out in the jungle.

"There's a roof out here," she said. "At the north end of the house the hill catches up with it enough for us to jump safely. Now listen, John, I—"

"Us?" Shandy interrupted. "No, you're safe now. My uncle—Joshua Hicks—is dead. You're—"

"Don't be silly, of course I'm coming with you. But listen, please! That creature in the corner pitched over dead—dead again, I should say—last night, and so I haven't had to eat any more of those damned plants since then, but I'm terribly weak and I have spells of … I don't know, disorientation. I sort of fall asleep with my eyes open. I don't know how long it lasts, but it's tapering off—so if I do it, if I go blank-eyed on you, don't worry, just keep me moving. I'll come out of it."

"Uh … very well." Shandy stepped through the window, out onto the roof. "You're sure you want to come with me?"

"Yes." She followed him out, swayed and grabbed his shoulder, then took a deep breath and nodded.

"Yes. Let's go."

"Right."

Through the open window behind them he could hear people hesitantly but noisily advancing up the stairs, so he took her elbow and led her as quickly as he dared toward the north end of the roof.