On Stranger Tides

The seas and the weathers are what is; your vessels adapt to them or sink.

—Jack Shandy

Chapter One

Gripping one of the taut vertical ropes and leaning far out over the rail, John Chandagnac waited a moment until the swell lifted the huge, creaking structure of the stern and the poop deck on which he stood, and then he flung the biscuit as hard as he could. It looked like quite a long throw at first, but as it dropped by quick degrees toward the water, and kept on falling instead of splashing in, he saw that he hadn't really flung it very far out; but the gull had seen it, and came skimming in above the green water, and at the last moment, as if showing off, snatched it out of the air. The biscuit broke as the gull flapped back up to a comfortable altitude, but he seemed to have got a good beakful. Chandagnac had another biscuit in his coat pocket, but for a while he just watched the bird glide, absently admiring the way it seemed to need only the slightest hitch and flap now and then to maintain its position just above the Vociferous Carmichael's starboard stern lamp, and he sniffed the elusive land smell that had been in the breeze since dawn. Captain Chaworth had said that they'd see Jamaica's purple and green mountains by early afternoon, then round Morant Point before supper and dock in Kingston before dark; but while the unloading of the Carmichael's cargo would mean the end of the worrying that had visibly slimmed the captain during this last week of the voyage, disembarking would be the beginning of Chandagnac's task.

And do remember too, he told himself coldly as he pulled the biscuit out of his pocket, that both Chaworth and yourself are each at least half to blame for your own problems. He flung the thing harder this time, and the sea gull caught it without having to dip more than a couple of yards. When he turned back toward the little breakfast table that the captain let the passengers eat at when the morning's shiphandling jobs were routine, he was surprised to see the young woman standing up, her brown eyes alight with interest.

"Did he catch them?" she asked.

"Certainly did," said Chandagnac as he walked back toward the table. He wished now that he had shaved. "Shall I throw him yours too?"

She pushed her chair away and surprised Chandagnac still further by saying, "I'll throw it to him myself … if you're sure he doesn't object to maggots?"

Chandagnac glanced at the gliding bird. "He hasn't fled, at least." With only the slightest tremor of hesitation she picked up the inhabited biscuit and strode to the rail. Chandagnac noticed that even her balance was better this morning. She drew back a little when she got to the rail and looked down, for the poop deck was a good dozen feet above the rushing sea. With her left hand she took hold of the rail and pulled at it, as if testing to see if it was loose. "Hate to fall in," she said, a little nervously.

Chandagnac stepped up next to her and gripped her left forearm. "Don't worry," he said. His heart was suddenly beating more strongly, and he was annoyed with himself for the response. She cocked her arm back and pitched the biscuit, and the white-and-gray bird obligingly dived for it, once again catching it before it hit the water. Her laugh, which Chandagnac heard now for the first time, was bright and cheerful. "I'll wager he follows every Jamaica-bound ship in, knowing the people aboard will be ready to throw the old provisions overboard."

Chandagnac nodded as they returned to the little table. "I'm not on a lavish budget, but I keep thinking about dinner tonight in Kingston. Rare beef, and fresh vegetables, and beer that doesn't smell like hot pitch."

The young woman frowned. "I wish I was permitted meat."

Chandagnac shifted his stool a foot or two to the left so that the tall, taut arch of the spanker sail shaded his face from the morning sun. He wanted to be able to see the expressions on the face of this suddenly interesting person. "I've noticed that you only seem to eat vegetables," he said, idly picking up his napkin.

She nodded. "Nutriments and medicaments—that's what my physician calls them. He says I have an incipient brain fever as a result of the bad airs at a sort of convent I was going to school at in Scotland. He's the expert, so I suppose he's right—though as a matter of fact I felt better, more energetic, before I started following his diet regimen."

Chandagnac had snagged up a loop of thread from his napkin and began working on another. "Your physician?" he asked casually, not wanting to say anything to break her cheery mood and change her back into the clumsy, taciturn fellow passenger she'd been during the past month. "Is he the … portly fellow?"

She laughed. "Poor Leo. Say fat. Say corpulent. Yes, that's him. Dr. Leo Friend. An awkward man personally, but my father swears there's no better medical man in the world." Chandagnac looked up from his napkin work. "Have you been avoiding your … medicaments? You seem cheerier today." Her napkin lay on the table, and he picked it up and began picking at it too.

"Well, yes. Last night I just threw the whole plateful out of my cabin window. I hope that poor sea gull didn't sample any—it's nothing but a nasty lot of herbs and weeds Leo grows in a box in his cabin. Then I sneaked across to the galley and had the cook give me some sharp cheese and pickled onions and rum." She smiled sheepishly. "I was desperate for something with some taste to it." Chandagnac shrugged. "Doesn't sound bad to me." He'd drawn three loops of thread out of each of the napkins, puckering the squares of cloth into bell shapes, and now he slipped three fingers of either hand into the loops and made the napkins stand upright and approach each other with a realistic simulation of walking. Then he had one of them bow while the other curtsied, and the two little cloth figures—one of which he'd somehow made to look subtly feminine—danced around the tabletop in complicated whirls and leaps and pirouettes.

The young woman clapped her hands delightedly, and Chandagnac had the napkins approach her and perform another curtsy and a sweeping Gascon bow before he let them fall from his fingertips.

"Thank you, Miss Hurwood," he said in a master-of-ceremonies voice.

"Thank you, Mr. Chandagnac," she said, "and your energetic napkins, too. But don't be formal—call me Beth."

"Very well," said Chandagnac, "and I'm John." Already he was regretting the impulse that had prompted him to draw her out—he had no time, nor any real wish, to get involved with a woman again. He thought of dogs he'd seen in city streets, and called to, just to see if they'd wag their tails and come over, and then too often they had been eager to follow him for hours. He stood up and gave her a polite smile. "Well," he said, "I'd better be wandering off now. There are a couple of things I've got to be discussing with Captain Chaworth." Actually, now that he thought of it, he might go look for the captain. The Carmichael was toiling along smoothly before the wind right now and couldn't be needing too much supervision, and it would be nice to sit down and have one last beery chat with the captain before disembarking. Chandagnac wanted to congratulate Chaworth on the apparent success of his insurance-evasion gambit—though unless they were absolutely alone he would have to deliver the congratulations in very veiled terms—and then to warn the man sternly against ever trying such a foolhardy trick again. Chandagnac was, after all, or had been, a successful businessman, and knew the difference between taking carefully calculated risks and letting one's whole career and reputation depend on the toss of a coin. Of course Chandagnac would be careful to deliver the reproof in a bantering tone, so as not to make the old man regret the drunken confidence.

"Oh," said Beth, clearly disappointed that he couldn't stay and talk. "Well, maybe I'll move my chair over by the railing and watch the ocean."

"Here, I'll carry it for you." She stood up, and Chandagnac picked up her chair and walked to the starboard rail, where he set it down on the deck a few yards from one of the post-mounted miniature cannons that he'd heard the sailors call swivel guns. "The shade's only intermittent here," he said doubtfully, "and you'd be catching the full breeze. Are you sure you wouldn't be better off below?"

"Leo would certainly think so," she said, sitting down with a smile of thanks, "but I'd like to continue my experiment of last night, and see what sort of malady it is that one gets from normal food and sunlight and fresh air. Besides, my father's busy with his researches, and he always winds up covering the whole cabin floor with papers and pendulums and tuning forks and I don't know what all. Once he's got it all arranged, there's no way in or out."

Chandagnac hesitated, curious in spite of himself. "Researches? What's he researching?"

"Well … I'm not sure. He was involved pretty deeply in mathematics and natural philosophy at one time, but since he retired from his chair at Oxford six years ago … " Chandagnac had seen her father only a few times during the month's voyage—the dignified, onearmed old man had not seemed to desire shipboard sociability, and Chandagnac had not paid much attention to him, but now he snapped his fingers excitedly. "Oxford? Benjamin Hurwood?"

"That's right."

"Your father is the—"

"A sail!" came a shout from high among the complicated spider webs of the mainmast shrouds. "Fine ahead port!"

Beth stood up and the two of them hurried across the deck to the port rail and leaned out and craned their necks to see past the three clusters of standing rigging, which they were viewing end on. Chandagnac thought, it's worse than trying to see the stage from above during a crowded scene in a marionette show. The thought reminded him too clearly of his father, though, and he forced it away and concentrated on squinting ahead.

At last he made out the white fleck on the slowly bobbing horizon, and he pointed it out to Beth Hurwood. They watched it for several minutes, but it didn't seem to be getting any closer, and the sea wind was chillier on this side in spite of the unobstructed sun, so they went back to her chair by the starboard rail.

"Your father's the author of … I forget the title. That refutation of Hobbes."

"The Vindication of Free Will." She leaned against the rail and faced astern to let the breeze sweep back her long dark hair. "That's right. Though Hobbes and my father were friends, I understand. Have you read it?"

Again Chandagnac was wishing he'd kept his mouth shut, for the Hurwood book had been a part of the vast reading program his father had led him through. All that poetry, history, philosophy, art! But a cloddish Roman soldier had shoved a sword through Archimedes, and a bird had dropped a fatal turtle onto the bald head of Aeschylus, mistaking it for a stone useful for breaking turtles open upon.

"Yes. I did think he effectively dismissed Hobbes' idea of a machine-cosmos." Before she could agree or argue, he went on, "But how do pendulums and tuning forks apply?" Beth frowned. "I don't know. I don't even know what … field … he's working in now. He's withdrawn terribly during the years since my mother died. I sometimes think he died then too, at least the part of him that … I don't know, laughed. He's been more active this last year, though … since his disastrous first visi to the West Indies." She shook her head with a puzzled frow: "Odd that losing an arm should vitalize him so."

Chandagnac raised his eyebrows. "What happened?"

"I'm sorry, I thought you'd have heard. The ship he was on was taken by the pirate Blackbeard, and a pistol ball shattered his arm. I'm a little surprised he chose to come back here—though he does have a dozen loaded pistols with him this time, and always carries at least a couple." Chandagnac grinned inwardly at the idea of the old Oxford don fingering his pistols and waiting to come across a pirate to shoot at.

From out across the blue water rolled a loud, hollow knock, like a large stone dropped onto pavement. Curious, Chandagnac started to cross the poop deck to look again at the approaching vessel, but before he'd taken two steps he was distracted by the abrupt white plume of a splash on the face of the sea, a hundred yards ahead to starboard.

His first thought was that the other vessel was a fishing boat, and that the splash marked the jump of some big fish; then he heard the man at the mast-top shout, more shrilly this time, "Pirates! A single sloop, the mad fools!"

Beth was on her feet now. "God in heaven," she said quietly. "Is it true?" Chandagnac felt light-headed rather than scared, though his heart was pounding. "I don't know," he said, hurrying with her across the deck to the port rail, "but if it is, he's right, they're mad—a sloop's hardly more than a sailboat, and on the Carmichael we've got three masts and eighteen heavy guns." He had to raise his voice to be heard, for the morning, which had been quiet except for the eternal creak-and-splash-and-slurry, had instantly become clamorous with shouted orders and the slap of bare feet on the lower decks and the buzz of line racing through the block spools; and there was another sound too, distant but far more disquieting—a frenzied metallic clatter and banging underscored by the harsh discord of brass trumpets blown for noise instead of music.

"They are pirates," said Beth tensely, clutching the rail next to him. "My father described that noise to me. They'll be dancing, too—they call it 'vaporing'—it's meant to frighten us." It's effective in that, thought Chandagnac; but to Beth he grinned and said, "It would frighten me, if they were in more of a vessel or we in less."

"Coming over!" came an authoritative call from one of the lower decks, and below him to his right Chandagnac saw the helmsman and another man pushing the whipstaff hard to starboard, and at the same moment there was a racket of squealing and creaking from overhead as the long horizontal poles of the yards, and the bellied sails they carried, slowly twisted on the axes of the masts, the high ones more widely than the low ones.

All morning the ship had been leaning slightly to starboard; now it straightened to level and then, without pausing there, heeled so far over to port that Chandagnac flung one arm around Beth and the other around a taut length of standing rigging, his hand clutching the limp ratline, and braced his knees against the gunwale as the deck rose behind them and the breakfast table skidded and then tumbled down it to collide with the rail a yard from Beth. The plates and silverware and deformed napkins spun away in the sudden shadow of the hull and splashed directly below where Chandagnac and Beth were clinging.

"Damn me!" grated Chandagnac through clenched teeth as the ship stayed heeled over and he squinted straight down at the choppy sea, "I don't believe the pirates can kill us, but our captains certainly having a try!" He had to tilt his head back to look up at the horizon, and it so chilled his stomach to do it that after a few moments he wrenched his gaze back down to the water—but he'd seen the whole vista shifting from right to left, and the pirate vessel, no longer distant, wheeling with the seascape out away from the bow to a position closer and closer to exactly abeam; and though he'd seen it nearly head on, he'd noticed that it was indeed a sloop, a single-masted, gaff-rigged vessel with two shabby, much-patched triangular sails, one tapering back along the boom, the other forward past the bow to the end of the extra-long bowsprit. The gunwales were crowded with ragged figures who did seem to be dancing.

Then the deck was pressing against the soles of his boots and the horizon was falling as the ship righted itself, with the wind and the sun at the starboard quarter now. Keeping his arm around her, Chandagnac hustled Beth toward the companion ladder. "Got to get you out of here!" he shouted. Her father was clambering up the ladder from the quarterdeck just as they got there, and even in this crisis Chandagnac stared at him, for the old man was wearing a formal vest and long coat and even a powdered wig. He was pulling himself up the ladder by hooking the rungs with the butt of a pistol he gripped in his only hand, and there were at least half a dozen more thrust into the loops of a sash slung over his shoulder. "I'll take her below!" the old man roared, standing up on the poop deck and nudging Beth toward the ladder with his knee. She started down, and the old man was right behind her, peering at her over his shoulder as he followed her. "Carefully!" he shouted. "Carefully, God damn it!"

For one irrational moment Chandagnac wondered if old Hurwood had found time to melt lead and cast some pistol balls in the minute or two since the alarm, for the old man certainly smelled of heated metal … but then Hurwood and Beth had disappeared below, and Chandagnac had to skip back across the poop deck to get out of the way of several sailors who were scrambling up the ladder. He retreated to the breakfast table, which stuck out like a little partition from where it was wedged in the railing, and he hoped he was out of everybody's way, wondering all the while what it would feel like when the twelve-pounders were fired, and why the captain was delaying their firing. Three distinct booms shook the deck under his boots. Was that them? he wondered, but when he spun to look out over the rail to port he saw no smoke or splashes.

What he did see was the pirate sloop—which had just swerved east, close-hauled into the steady wind — tack and then continue around so that it was coming up on the Carmichael from astern on the port side.

Why in hell, he thought with mounting anxiety, didn't we fire when they were coming straight at us, or when they turned east and showed us their profile? He watched the busy men hurrying past him until he spotted the burly figure of Captain Chaworth on the quarterdeck below, way up by the forecastle ladder, and Chandagnac's stomach felt suddenly hollow when he saw that Chaworth too was surprised by the silence of the guns. Chandagnac edged around the table and hurried to the rail by the ladder to see better what was going on down in the waist.

He saw Chaworth run to the gun deck companionway just as a billow of thick black smoke gushed up from it, and he heard the dismayed shouts of the sailors: "Jesus, one of the guns blew up!" "Three of 'em did, they're all dead below!" "To the boats! The powder'll go next!" The crack of a pistol shot cut through the rising babble, and Chandagnac saw the man who'd advocated abandoning ship rebound from the capstan barrel and sprawl to the deck, his head smashed gorily open by a pistol ball. Looking away from the corpse, Chandagnac saw that it was the usually good-natured Chaworth who held the smoking pistol.

"You'll go to the boats when I order it!" Chaworth shouted. "No gun blew up, nor's there a fire! Just smoke—"

As if to verify the statement, a dozen violently coughing men came stumbling up the companionway through the smoke, their clothes and faces blackened with something like soot.

"—And it's still just a sloop," the captain went on, "so man the swivels and break out muskets and pistols! Cutlasses hold ready."

A sailor shoved Chandagnac aside to get at one of the swivel guns, and he hurried back to the relative shelter of the jammed table, feeling wildly disoriented. Damn me, he thought bewilderedly as he crouched behind it, is this seagoing warfare? The enemy dancing and blowing horns, men in blackface rushing up from belowdecks like extras in a London stage comedy, the only serious shot fired by our captain to kill one of his own crew?

There were now several sailors standing near him, tensely ready to manipulate the sheets and halliards, and a couple more had sprinted up to the two swivel guns mounted on the poop deck's port rail, one on either side of Chandagnac, and after checking the loads and priming they just waited, watching the pirate sloop and, every few seconds, blowing on the smoldering ends of their slow matches.

Chandagnac crouched to peer between the stanchions rather than over the rail, and he too watched the low, shallow-draft boat gain on the ship. The sloop carried several fairly sizeable cannon, but the capering pirates were ignoring them and hefting pistols, cutlasses and sabers, and grappling hooks. They must want to capture the Carmichael undamaged, Chandagnac thought. If they somehow do, I wonder if they'll ever know how lucky they were that some mephitic catastrophe incapacitated our gunners.

Benjamin Hurwood came struggling back up to the poop deck now, and he absolutely bristled with pistols—there were still six in his sash and one in his hand, and he now had another half-dozen thrust under his belt. Peering over the table edge and seeing the determined look on the one-armed professor's face, Chandagnac had to concede that there was, in this perilous situation, at least, more of dignity than ludicrousness in the man.

The sailor at the aft swivel gun, grasping the ball at the end of the long handle, turned his gun astern and lowered the muzzle to sight along the barrel. He raised his slow match carefully. He was only about five feet from Chandagnac, who was watching him with tense confidence. Chandagnac tried to picture the gun going off, all the swivel guns going off, muskets and pistols too, lashing lead and scrap shot down into the crowded little pirate boat, two or three volleys perhaps, until a cloud of gunpowder smoke veiled the listing, helpless vessel, on which a few pirates would be glimpsed crawling stunned over the ripped-up corpses of their fellows, as the Carmichael came back about onto course and resumed its interrupted journey. Chaworth would have had a bad fright, thinking about his insurance-evasion trick, and would be readier than ever for that beer. But the gunshot crack came from behind Chandagnac, and the sailor he'd been watching was kicked forward over his gun, and before he tumbled away over the rail Chandagnac had seen the fresh, bloody hole in his back. There was a heavy metallic clank on the deck and then another gunshot, instantly followed by the same clank.

Chandagnac shifted around and peeked over his oak rectangle in time to see old Hurwood draw a third pistol and fire it directly into the astonished face of one of the two men who'd been handling the spanker sheet. The sailor arced backward to whack the back of his shattered head against the deck, and the other man yiped, ducked, and ran for the ladder. Hurwood dropped the pistol to snatch out another, and the fired one clanked still smoking to the deck. His next shot split the belaying pin the spanker sheet was looped around, and the released line snaked up and down through the bouncing blocks, and then the thirty-foot-tall sail, uncontrolled, bellied and swung its heavy boom to port, tearing through the lines of the standing rigging as though they were rotten yarn; the suddenly unmoored shrouds and ratlines flew upward, the ship shuddered as the mizzen mast leaned to starboard, and from above came the rending crack of overstrained yards giving way. The man who'd been at the other swivel gun lay face down on the deck, apparently the target of Hurwood's second shot.

Hurwood hadn't noticed Chandagnac behind the table—he drew a fresh pistol, stepped to the head of the ladder and calmly aimed down into the disordered crowd on the quarterdeck. Without pausing to think, Chandagnac stood up and covered the distance to him in two long strides and drove his shoulder into the small of Hurwood's back just as the old man fired. The shot went harmlessly wide and both men fell down the ladder.

Chandagnac tucked his knees up to somersault in midair and land on his feet, and when he hit the deck he rolled and collided hard with a sailor, bowling the man over. He bounced to his feet and looked back to see how Hurwood had fallen, but in the press of panicking sailors he couldn't see him. Gunfire cracked and boomed irregularly, and the pyang of ricochets had people ducking and cringing, but Chandagnac couldn't see who was shooting or being shot at.

Then, preceded by a snapping of cordage overhead, a thick spar came spinning down to crash into the deck, jolting the whole ship and smashing a section of rail near Chandagnac before rebounding away over the side, and just inboard of him a man who'd fallen from aloft hit the deck hard, with a sound like an armful of large books flung down; but it was the next thing landing near him that snapped him out of his horrified daze—a grappling hook came sailing over the rail, its line drawn in as it fell so that its flukes gripped the rail before it could even touch the deck.

A sailor ran forward to yank it free in the moment before weight was put on it, and Chandagnac was right behind him, but a pistol ball from behind punched the sailor off his feet, and Chandagnac tripped over him. Coming up into a crouch against the gunwale, Chandagnac looked around wildly for Hurwood, certain that the one-armed old man had killed the sailor; but when a ball from ahead blew splinters out of the deck in front of his feet and he jerked his head around to see where it had come from, he saw Leo Friend, Beth's fat and foppishly dressed physician, standing on the raised forecastle deck ten yards away and aiming a fresh pistol directly at him. Chandagnac jackknifed out across the littered deck as the pistol ball tore a hole in the gunwale where he'd been leaning, and he rolled to his feet and ducked and scurried through the crowd all the way across to the starboard rail.

A sailor lay near him curled up on the deck in a shifting puddle of fresh blood, and Chandagnac hastily rolled him over to get at the two primed pistols whose butts he could see sticking up from his belt. The man opened his eyes and tried to speak through splintered teeth, but Chandagnac had for the moment lost all capacity for sympathy. He took the pistols, nodded reassuringly to the dying man, and then turned toward the forecastle.

It took him a few seconds to locate Friend, for the ship was broadside to the wind and rolling and Chandagnac kept having to shuffle to stay upright. Finally he spied the fat man leaning on the waistfacing forecastle rail, dropping a spent pistol and calmly lifting a fresh one out of a box he held in the crook of his left arm.

Chandagnac forced himself to relax. He crouched a little to keep his balance better, and then when the ship paused for a moment at the far point of a roll to port, he raised one of the pistols and took careful aim, squinting over his thumb knuckle at the center of Friend's bulging torso, and squeezed the trigger.

The gun went off, almost spraining his wrist with the recoil, but when the acrid smoke cleared, the fat physician was still standing there, still carefully shooting into the mob of sailors below him. Chandagnac tossed away the fired pistol and raised the remaining one in both hands and, scarcely aware of what he was doing, walked halfway across the deck toward Friend and from a distance of no more than fifteen feet fired the gun directly up at Friend's stomach.The fat man, unharmed, turned for a moment to smile contemptuously down at Chandagnac before selecting still another pistol from his box and taking aim at someone else below. Through the smells of burned powder and fear-sweat and fresh-torn wood, Chandagnac caught again a whiff of something like overheated metal. A moment later Friend put the pistol back into his box unfired, though, for the fight was over. A dozen of the pirates had clambered aboard, and more were swinging over the rail, and the surviving sailors had dropped their weapons.

Chandagnac dropped his pistol and walked slowly backward to the starboard rail, his eyes fixed incredulously on the pirates. They were cheerful, their eyes and yellow teeth flashing in faces that, except for their animation, would have looked like polished mahogany, and a few of them were still singing the song they'd been singing during the pursuit. They were dressed, Chandagnac reflected dazedly, like children who'd been interrupted while ransacking a theater's costume closet; and in spite of their obviously well-used pistols and swords, and the faded scars splashed irregularly across many of the faces and limbs in random patterns of pucker and pinch, they seemed to Chandagnac as innocently savage as predatory birds compared to the coldly methodical viciousness of Hurwood and Friend.

One of the pirates stepped forward and sprang up the companion ladder to the poop deck so lithely that Chandagnac was surprised, when the man turned and tilted back his three-cornered hat, to see the deep lines in his dark cheeks and the quantity of gray in his tangled black hair. He scanned the men below him and grinned, narrowing his eyes and baring a lot of teeth.

"Captives," he said, his harshly good-humored voice undercutting the agitated babble, "I am Philip Davies, the new captain of this ship. Now I want you to gather around the mainmast there and let our lads search you for any … concealed weapons, eh? Skank, you and 'Tholomew and a couple of others, trot below and fetch up any that're down there. Carefully, mind—there's been blood enough spilt today."

The eight surviving members of the conquered crew shuffled to the center of the deck; Chandagnac joined them, hurrying to the mast and then leaning against its solid bulk and hoping his unsteady gait would be attributed to the rocking of the deck rather than to fear. Looking past the pirate chief, Chandagnac saw the seagull, evidently reassured by the cessation of the gunfire, flap down and perch on one of the stern lanterns. It was difficult to believe that less than half an hour ago he and Hurwood's daughter had been idly tossing biscuits to the bird.

"Master Hurwood!" called Davies. After a moment he added, "I know you weren't killed, Hurwood — where are you?"

"No," came a gasping voice from behind a couple of corpses at the foot of the poop deck companion ladder. "I'm … not killed." Hurwood sat up, his wig gone and his elegant clothes disordered. "But I wish … I had had a charm … against falling."

"You've got Mate Care-For to keep you from hurt," Davies said unsympathetically. "None of these lads did." He waved at the scattered corpses and wounded men. "I hope it was a hard fall."

"My daughter's below," said Hurwood, urgency coming into his voice as his head cleared. "She's guarded, but tell your men not to—"

"They won't hurt her." The pirate chief squinted around critically. "It's not too bad a ship you've brought," he said. "I guess you did pay attention to what we told you. Here, Payne, Rich! Get some lads aloft and cut away all bad wood and line and canvas, and get her jury-rigged well enough to get us across the Grand Bahama Bank."

"Right, Phil," called a couple of the pirates, scrambling to the shrouds. Davies climbed back down the ladder to the quarterdeck, and for several seconds he just stared at the clump of disarmed men by the mast. He was still smiling. "Four of my men were killed during our approach and boarding," he remarked softly.

"Jesus," whispered the man next to Chandagnac, closing his eyes.

"But," Davies went on, "more than half of your own number have been slain, and I will consider that amends enough."

None of the sailors spoke, but Chandagnac heard several sharp exhalations, and shufflings of feet. Belatedly he realized that his death had come very close to being decreed.

"You're free to leave in the ship's boat," Davies continued. "Hispaniola's east, Cuba north, Jamaica southwest. You'll be given food, water, charts, sextant and compass. Or," he added cheerfully, "any of you that fancy it may stay and join us. It's an easier life than most on the sea, and every man has a share in the profits, and you're free to retire after every voyage." No, thank you, thought Chandagnac. Once I finish my … errand … in Port-au-Prince and get home again, I never want to see another damned ocean in my whole life.

Old Chaworth had for several minutes been slowly looking around at the ship he'd been owner of so recently, and Chandagnac realized that though the captain had reconciled himself to the loss of his cargo, he hadn't until now imagined that he would lose his ship, too. Pirates, after all, were a shallowwater species, always eluding capture by skating over shoals, and seldom venturing out of sight of land. They should have had as little use for a deep-water ship like the Carmichael as a highwayman would have for a siege cannon.

The old man was ashen, and it occurred to Chandagnac that until this development Chaworth hadn't quite been ruined; if he hadn't lost the Carmichael herself, he could have sold her and perhaps, after paying off the stockholders or co-owners, cleared enough money to reimburse the cargo owners for their losses; the move would no doubt have left him broke, but would at least have kept concealed the secret he'd confided to Chandagnac one drunken evening—that since the price of insurance was now higher than the greatest profit margin he could plausibly try for, he had in desperation charged the cargo owners for insurance … and then not bought any.

One of the pirates who'd gone below now stepped up from the after-companionway and, looking back the way he'd come, gestured upward with a pistol. Up the ladder and into the sunlight climbed the cook—who had obviously followed the time-honored custom of facing seagoing disaster by getting drunk as quickly and thoroughly as possible—and the two boys who ran all the errands on the ship, and Beth Hurwood.

Hurwood's daughter was pale, and walked a bit stiffly, but was outwardly calm until she saw her disheveled father. "Papa!" she yelled, running to him. "Did they hurt you?" Without waiting for an answer she whirled on Davies. "Your kind did enough to him last time," she said, her voice an odd mix of anger and pleading. Meeting Blackbeard cost him his arm! Whatever he's done to you people today was—"

"Was greatly appreciated, Miss," said Davies, grinning at her. "In keeping with the compact he and Thatch—or Blackbeard, if you like—agreed on last year, your daddy's delivered to me this fine ship."

"What are you—" began Beth, but she was interrupted by a shrill oath from Chaworth, who sprang on the nearest pirate wrenched the saber from the surprised man's hand, and theni shoved him away and rushed at Davies, cocking his arm back for a cleaving stroke.

"No!" yelled Chandagnac, started forward, "Chaworth, don't—" Davies calmly hiked a pistol out of his garish paisley sash, cocked it and fired it into Chaworth's chest; the impact of the fifty-caliber ball stopped the captain's charge and punched him over backward with such force that he was nearly standing on his head for a moment before thumping and rattling down in the absolute limpness of death.

Chandagnac was dizzy, and couldn't take a deep breath. Time seemed to have slowed—no, it was just that each event was suddenly distinct, no longer part of a blended progression. Beth screamed. The burst of smoke from the pistol muzzle churned forward another yard. The sea gull squawked in renewed alarm and flapped upward. The dropped saber spun across the deck and the brass knuckleguard of it whacked against Chandagnac's ankle. He bent down and picked up the weapon. Then, without having consciously decided to, he was himself rushing at the pirate chief, and though his legs were pounding and his arm was keeping the heavy blade extended in front of him, in his mind he was deftly rocking the stick and crosspiece and making the Mercutio marionette which dangled from them spring toward the Tybalt marionette in the move his father had always called coupe-and-fleche.

Davies, startled and amused, tossed the spent pistol to a companion and, stepping back, drew his rapier and relaxed into the en garde crouch.

Taking the final stride, Chandagnac almost thought he could feel the upward yank of the marionette string as he quickly twitched his point over the other man's sword and extended it again in Davies' inside line; and he was so used to the Tybalt puppet's answering lateral parry that he was almost too quick in letting his saber drop under this real, unrehearsed one—but Davies had believed the feint and made the parry, and in the last instant the disengaged saber was pointed at the pirate chief's unguarded flank, and Chandagnac let the momentum of his rush drive it in, and yank the hilt out of his inexpert grip, as he ran past.

The saber clattered to the deck, and then for one long moment all motion did stop. Davies, still standing but twisted around by the thrust, was staring at Chandagnac in astonishment, and Chandagnac, empty-handed and tense with the expectation of a pistol ball at any moment and from any direction, held his breath and stared helplessly into the wounded pirate's eyes. Finally Davies carefully sheathed his sword and, just as carefully, folded to his knees, and the silence was so absolute that Chandagnac actually heard the patter of blood drops hitting the deck.

"Kill him," said Davies distinctly.

Chandagnac had half turned toward the rail, intending to vault it and try to swim to Hispaniola, when a sarcastic voice said, "For excelling you in swordsmanship, Phil? Faith, that's one way to maintain your supremacy."

This statement was followed by a good deal of muttering among the pirates, and Chandagnac paused hopefully. He glanced back toward Davies and prayed that the man might bleed to death before repeating the order.

But Davies was looking at the pirate who'd spoken, and after a few seconds he smiled wolfishly and pointed at his own gashed side. "Ah, Venner, you think this will do? This cut?" Davies leaned forward, placed his hands flat on the deck, and strugglingly got one booted foot, and then the other, under him. He looked up at Venner again, still grinning, and then slowly stood up from the crouch. His grin never faltered, though he went pale under his tan and his face was slicked with sweat.

"You're … new, Venner," Davies said hoarsely. "You should ask Abbott or Gardner how dire a wound must be to slow me down." He inhaled deeply, then swayed and stared down at the deck. His breeches shone darkly with blood down to the calf, where they were tucked into his boot. After a moment he looked up. "Or," he went on, stepping back unsteadily and drawing his rapier again,

"would you like to … discover for yourself how much this has disabled me?" Venner was short and stocky, with a ruddy, pockmarked face. Half-smiling, he stared at his captain with the speculative look one gives a card-game opponent whose drunkenness may be a sham, or at least exaggerated. Finally he spread his hands. "Damn me, Phil," he said easily, "you know I didn't mean nothing challenging."

Davies nodded and allowed himself to close his eyes for a moment. "Of course not." He thrust his sword away and turned to Chandagnac. "Venner's right, though," he grated, "and I'm glad … that nobody killed you … if only so I can learn that feint." He permitted himself to lean against the aftercabin bulkhead. "But God's blood, man," he burst out loudly, "how in hell is it that you know such a thefty move when you run like a duck and hold a sword the way a cook holds a pot handle?" Chandagnac tried and failed to think of a good lie, and then hesitantly told the man the truth. "My father ran a marionette show," he faltered, "and I'm … for most of my life I was a puppeteer. We … performed all over Europe, and when the scripts called for sword fights—we did a lot of Shakespeare—he consulted fencing masters to make it absolutely realistic. So," he shrugged, "I've memorized any number of fencing moves, and performed each of them hundreds of times … but only with puppets."

Davies, holding his side, stared at him. "Puppets," he said. "Well, I—goddamn. Puppets." Slowly he let himself slide down the bulkhead until he was sitting on the deck. "Where the devil's Hanson?"

"Here, Phil." One of the pirates hurried over to him, opening a small clasp knife. "You're gonna have to be lying down," he said.

Davies obediently lay back, but propped himself up on his elbows to look at Chandagnac while Hanson, who evidently served as the pirates' surgeon, began cutting away the blood-sopped shirttail.

"Well!" Davies said. "Venner has suggested that I was too … harsh, in ordering you killed, and we — ow, damn your soul, Hanson, be careful!" He closed his eyes for a moment, then took a deep breath and resumed. "And we do business on the understanding that all orders are open to discussion, except when we're in serious action. Nevertheless you did stab me, so I can't just … let you leave in the boat." He looked around at his companions. "I propose giving him the choice." There were satisfied nods and shouts of agreement.

Davies looked up at Chandagnac. "Join us, wholly adopt our goals as your own, or be killed right now where you stand."

Chandagnac turned to Beth Hurwood, but she was whispering to her father, who didn't even seem to be aware of her. Looking past the two of them he saw the broad figure of Leo Friend, who was scowling—possibly disappointed that Chandagnac was still alive. Chandagnac had never felt more friendless and unprotected. Suddenly, and terribly, he missed his father. He turned back to Davies. "I'll join you."

Davies nodded thoughtfully. "That is the standard decision," he said. "I wasn't entirely sure it'd be yours."

Hanson stood up and stared dubiously at the bandage he'd belted to his chief. "That's all I can do for you, Phil," he said. "Get milord Hurwood to make sure it stops bleeding and don't mortify." Chandagnac glanced at Hanson in surprise. Surely, he thought, you mean Leo Friend. Philosophy doesn't knit up wounds.

Hearing his name, Hurwood came out of his reverie and blinked around. "Where's Thatch?" he asked, too loudly. "He was supposed to be here."

"He's runnin' late this year," Davies said, not even bothering to try to twist his head around and face Hurwood. "Right now he's up in Charles Town getting the supplies you wanted. We'll meet him in Florida. Now come here and do something to make sure I don't die of this perforation." Beth started to say something, but Hurwood waved her to silence. "He let you have the pointer?" he said, obviously not pleased.

Davies grimaced. "The mummied dog head? Sure. And it sure enough did start hissing and spinning around in its bucket of rum yesterday, and then at noon or so settled, staring hard southeast, and shifting only when we'd shift course, so we headed where it was looking." He shrugged as well as he could. "It led us to you, right enough, but it's sure a nasty-looking bit of trash. Had a time keeping the rats from chewing it up."

"Damn that lunatic Thatch," Hurwood exploded, "for letting common brigands carry sophisticated apparatus! If rats have touched that pointer, then they'll devour you entire, Davies, I promise you. You careless fool, how often do you think two-headed dogs are born? Send a man back to your vessel for it immediately.

Davies smiled and lay back on the deck. "Wellll," he said, "no. You can have the other half of your filthy pair back as soon as I've stepped ashore at New Providence Island, as healthy as I was an hour ago. If I don't recover totally between now and then, my lads will burn the goddamn thing. Am I right?"

"You said it, Phil!" shouted one of the pirates, and the others were all nodding happily. Hurwood glared around, but crossed to where Davies was lying and knelt beside him. He looked at the bandage and lifted it and peered underneath. "Hell, you might very well recover even without my help," he said, "but just for the sake of my pointer set I'll make it certain." He began digging in the deep pockets of his knee-length coat.

Chandagnac looked to his left and behind him. Chaworth's body, clearly dead, shifted loosely back and forth in the sun as the ship rolled, and one outflung hand rocked back and forth, palm up and then palm down, in an oddly philosophical gesture. It comes and goes, the movement seemed to indicate; good and bad, life and death, joy and horror, and nothing should come as a surprise. Chandagnac found it embarrassingly inappropriate, as if the dead man had been left with his pants down, and he wished somebody would move the hand to a more fitting position. He looked away. Never having seen a wound worked on by a physician, which it seemed Hurwood was, Chandagnac stepped forward to watch; and for one bewildering moment he thought Hurwood was going to begin by tidying up Davies' appearance, for what he pulled out of his pocket looked like a small whisk broom.

"This ox-tail," said Hurwood in what must have been his auditorium-addressing voice, "has been treated to become a focus of the attention of the being you call Mate Care-For. If he was a grander thing he could pay attention to all of us at once, but as it is he can only thoroughly look after a couple of people at a time. In this recent scuffle he preserved myself and Mr. Friend, and since the danger to us is passed, I'll let you occupy his attention." He tucked the bristly object down the front of Davies' lime green shirt. "Let's see … " Again he went fumbling through his pockets, "and here," he said, producing a little cloth bag of something, "is a drogue that makes the bowels behave properly. Again, you are in more danger in that regard than I am, at the moment—though I'll want it back." He took Davies' hat off and set it on the deck, laid the little bag on top of the pirate's head and then replaced the hat. "That's that," he said, standing up. "Let's waste no more time. Get the ones who are leaving into the boat, and then let's go."

The Carmichael's new owners swung the ship's boat out on the davit cranes and lowered it with a careless splash to the water on the starboard side, and they flung a net of shrouds and ratlines after it for the people to climb down on. At the next swell the boat was slammed up against the hull of the ship and took on a lot of water, but Davies tiredly called out some orders and the ship shifted ponderously around until the wind was on the starboard quarter and the rolling abated. Davies got to his feet, wincing irritably. "All off that's getting off," he growled. Wistfully Chandagnac watched the Carmichael's original crew shambling toward the starboard rail, several of them supporting wounded companions. Beth Hurwood, a black hood pulled over her coppery ringlets, started forward, then turned and called, "Father! Join me in the boat." Hurwood looked up, and produced a laugh like the last clatter of unoiled machinery. "Wouldn't they be glad of my company! Half of these slain owe their present state to my pistol collection and my hand. No, my dear, I stay aboard this ship—and so do you."

His statement had rocked her, but she turned and started toward the rail.

"Stop her," snapped Hurwood impatiently.

Davies nodded, and several grinning pirates stepped in front of her.

Hurwood permitted himself another laugh, but it turned into a retching cough. "Let's go," he croaked. Chandagnac happened to glance at Leo Friend, and he was almost glad that he'd been forced to stay aboard, for the physician was blinking rapidly, and his prominent lips were wet, and his eyes were on Beth Hurwood.

"Right," said Davies. "Here, you clods, get these corpses over the side—mind you don't pitch 'em into the boat—and then let's be off." He looked upward. "How is it, Rich?"

"Can't jibe," came a shout from aloft, "with the spanker carried away. But this wind and sea are good enough to tack her in, I think, if we get all the lads up on the footropes."

"Good. Elliot, you take a couple of men and pilot the sloop back home."

"Right, Phil."

Beth Hurwood turned her gaze from her father to Leo Friend, who smiled and stepped forward — Chandagnac noticed for the first time that the fat physician's finery included a ludicrous pair of redheeled shoes with "windmill wing" ties—and proffered an arm like an ornate, overstuffed bolster, but Beth crossed to Chandagnac and stood beside him, not speaking. Her lips were pressed together as firmly as before, but Chandagnac glimpsed the shine of tears in her eyes a moment before she impatiently blotted them on her cuff.

"Shall I take you below?" Chandagnac asked quietly.

She shook her head. "I couldn't bear it."

Davies glanced at the two of them. "You've got no duties yet," he I s".:.told Chandagnac. "Take her up forward somewhere out of the way. You might get her some rum while you're at it."

"I hardly think—," Chandagnac began stiffly, but Elizabeth interrupted.

"For God's sake, yes," she said.

Davies grinned at Chandagnac and waved them forward.

A few minutes later they were on the forecastle deck by the starboard anchor, shielded from the wind by the taut mainsail behind them. Chandagnac had gone to the galley and filled two ceramic cups with rum, and he handed one to her.

Line began buzzing through the blocks again and the spars creaked as the sails, trimmed and full once more, were turned to best catch the steady east wind; the ship came around in a slow arc to the north, and then to the northeast, and Chandagnac watched the crowded lifeboat recede and finally disappear behind the high stern. The sloop, still on the port side, was pacing the Vociferous Carmichael. From where he now leaned against the rail sipping warm rum, Chandagnac could see the mast and sails of the smaller vessel, and as their speed picked up and the sloop edged away from the ship to give it room he was able to see its long, low hull too. He shook his head slightly, still incredulous.

"Well, we could both be worse off," he remarked quietly to Beth, trying to convince himself as much as her. "I'm apparently forgiven for my attack on their chief, and you're protected from these creatures by … your father's position among them." Below him to his left, one of the pirates was walking up and down the waist, whistling and sprinkling sand from a bucket onto the many splashes and puddles of blood on the deck. Chandagnac looked away and went on. "And when we do manage to get out of this situation, all the sailors in the boat can testify that you and I stayed unwillingly." He was proud of the steadiness of his voice, and he gulped some more rum to still the post-crisis trembling he could feel beginning in his hands and legs.

"My God," Beth said dazedly, "all I can hope for is that he dies out here. He can't ever go back. They wouldn't even put him in a madhouse—they'd hang him."

Chandagnac nodded, reflecting that even hanging was less than what her father deserved.

"I should have seen his madness coming on," she said. "I did know he'd become … eccentric, taking up researches that … seemed a little crazy … but I never dreamt he'd go wild, like a rabid dog, and start killing people."

Chandagnac thought of a sailor he'd seen killed at the swivel gun, and the one Hurwood had shot in the face a moment later. "It wasn't done in any kind of … frenzy, Miss Hurwood," he said shortly. "It was cold—methodical—like a cook squashing ants on a kitchen counter, one by one, and then wiping his hands and turning to the next job. And the fat boy was at the other end of the ship, matching him shot for shot."

"Friend, yes," she said. "There's always been something hateful about him. No doubt he led my poor father into this scheme, whatever it is. But my father is insane. Listen, just before we left England last month, he stayed out all night, and came back all muddy and hatless in the morning, clutching a smelly little wooden box. He wouldn't say what it was—when I asked him, he just stared at me as if he'd never seen me before—but he hasn't been without it since. It's in his cabin now, and I swear he whispers to it late at night. And my God, you read his book! He used to be brilliant! What explanation besides lunacy could explain the author of The Vindication of Free Will babbling all that nonsense about oxtails and two-headed dogs?"

Chandagnac heard the note of strain and doubt under her carefully controlled diction. "I can't argue with that," he conceded gently.

She finished her rum. "Maybe I will go below. Oh, uh, John, could you help me get food?" Chandagnac stared at her. "Right now? Sure, I guess so. What did you—"

"No, I mean at mealtimes. It might be even harder now to avoid the diet Friend has prescribed for me, and now more than ever I want to stay alert."

Chandagnac smiled, but he was thinking again about the consequences of throwing scraps to stray dogs. "I'll do what I can. But God knows what these devils eat. Friend's herbs might be preferable."

"You haven't tried them." She started toward the ladder, but paused and looked back. "That was very brave, John, challenging that pirate the way you did."

"It wasn't a challenge, it was just … some kind of reflex." He found that he was getting irritable. "I'd got to like old Chaworth. He reminded me of … another old man. Neither one of them had any goddamn sense. And I guess I don't either, or I'd be in the boat right now." He bolted the remainder of his rum. "Well, see you later."

He looked ahead, past the bowsprit at the blue horizon, and when he looked back she had left. He relaxed a little and watched the new crew at work. They were scrambling around up in the rigging, agile as spiders, and casually cursing each other in English, French, Italian and a couple of languages Chandagnac had never heard, and though their grammar was atrocious he had to concede that, in terms of obscenity, blasphemy and elaborate insult, the pirates got the most out of every language he was able to understand.

He was smiling, and he had time to wonder why before he realized that this multilingual, goodnaturedly fearsome badinage was just like what he used to hear in the taverns of Amsterdam and Marseille and Brighton and Venice; in his memory they all blended into one archetypal seaport tavern in which his father and he were eternally sitting at a table by the fire, drinking the local specialty and exchanging news with other travelers. It had sometimes seemed to the young Chandagnac that the marionettes were a party of wooden aristocracy traveling with two flesh-and-blood servants; and now, seven years after quitting that life, he reflected that the puppets hadn't been bad masters. The pay had been irregular, for the great days of European puppet theaters had ended in 1690, the year of Chandagnac's birth, when Germany lifted the clergy's ten-year ban on plays using living actors, but the money had still occasionally been lavish, and then the hot dinners and warm beds were made all the pleasanter by memories of the previous months of frosty rooms and missed meals. The pirate with the bucket of sand had apparently finished his job, but as he was stumping aft past the mainmast his heel skidded. He glared around as though daring anyone to laugh, and then he dumped all the rest of his sand on the slippery patch and strode away.

Chandagnac wondered if the blood he'd slipped on had been Chaworth's. And he remembered the night in Nantes when his father had pulled a knife on a gang of rough men who'd waited outside one wine shop for Chandagnac pere et fils and then had cornered the pair and demanded all their money. Old Francois Chandagnac had had a lot of money on him on that night, and he was in his mid-sixties and doubtful of his future, and so instead of handing over the cash as he'd done the couple of times he'd been robbed before, he unpocketed the knife he carved marionette faces and hands with, and brandished it at the thieves.

Chandagnac leaned back against one of the unfired starboard-side swivel guns now and, cautiously, basked in the realization that the sun was warm on his back, and that he was slightly drunk, and that he wasn't in pain anywhere.

The knife had been knocked out of his father's hand with the first, contemptuous kick, and then there had simply been fists, teeth, knees and boots in the darkness, and when the gang walked away, laughing and crowing as they counted the money in the unexpectedly fat purse, they must certainly have supposed they were leaving two corpses in the alley behind them.

In the years since, Chandagnac had sometimes wished they'd been right in that supposition, for neither his father nor he had ever really recovered.

The two of them had eventually managed to get back to their room. His father had lost his front teeth and eventually lost his left eye, and had suffered fractures in several ribs and possibly his skull. Young John Chandagnac had lost most of the use of his right hand because of a heavy man's bootheel, and for a month he walked with a cane, and it was a full year before his urine was quite free of blood. The bad hand, though he eventually regained nearly full use of it, provided a good excuse to quit that nomadic career, and through thinly disguised pleading he managed to secure travel money and lodging with a relative in England, and before his twenty-second birthday he had got a position as a bookkeeper with an English textile firm.

His father, in ever-worsening health, had single-handedly run the marionette show for another two years before dying in Brussels in the winter of 1714. He never even learned about the money that had become his, the money that could so dramatically have prolonged and brightened his life … the money that had been cleverly stolen from him by his own younger brother, Sebastian. Chandagnac looked over his right shoulder, squinting at the eastern horizon until he thought he saw a faintly darker line that might have been Hispaniola. I was to have arrived there in about a week, he thought angrily, after establishing my credit with the bank in Jamaica. How long will it take now? Don't die, Uncle Sebastian. Don't die before I get there.

Chapter Two

Even in the twilight, with cooking fires beginning to dot the darkening beach, the harbor's mottling of shoals was clearly visible, and the boats rounding the distant corner of Hog Island could be seen to change course frequently as they kept to the darker blue water on their way in from the open sea to the New Providence settlement. Most of the settlement's boats were already moored for the night, out in the harbor or along the decrepit wharf or, in the cases of a number of the smaller craft, dragged right up onto the white sand, and the island's population was beginning to concern itself with dinner. At this hour the settlement's stench contended most strongly with the clean sea breeze, for added to its usual melange of tar-smoke, sulfur, old food and the countless informal latrines was the often startling olfactory spectrum of inexpert cooking: the smell of feathers burnt off chickens by men too impatient to pluck them, of odd stews into which the enthusiastic hand of the amateur had flung quantities of hijacked mint and cilantro and Chinese mustard to conceal the taste of dubious meats, and of weird and sometimes explosive experiments in the art of punch-making. Benjamin Hurwood had taken his daughter and Leo Friend off the Carmichael four hours earlier, shortly after the ship was laboriously tugged, tacked and block-and-tackled into the harbor, and long before the pirates had begun the job of careening the vessel. He'd hailed the first boat that had come alongside andrdemanded that the men in it take them ashore, and he had not only been obeyed, but, it had seemed to Chandagnac, recognized too.

And now the Carmichael lay bizarrely on her side, tackles fastened to the mastheads, and relieving tackles strung under the keel and tied to solid moorings on the exposed side, fully half of her hundredand-ten-foot length out of the water and supported by the sloping white-sand shore of a conveniently deep inlet a hundred yards south of the main cluster of tents; and Chandagnac was plodding up the beach in the company of the pirates, reeling from exhaustion as much as from the novelty of having a motionless surface underfoot, for the pirates had cheerfully assumed that as a new member of the crew he ought to do the work of two men.

"Ah, damn me," remarked the toothless young man who was stumping along next to Chandagnac, "I smell some lively grub." Chandagnac had gathered that this young man's name was Skank. The ship behind them groaned loudly as her timbers adjusted themselves to the new stresses, and birds — Chandagnac supposed they must be birds—cawed and yelled in the dim jungle.

"Lively's the word," Chandagnac nodded, reflecting that, considering the flames, smells and shouting up ahead, it seemed that the dinner being cooked was not only still alive, but unsubdued. To Chandagnac's left, visible above the palm fronds, was a rounded rock eminence. "The fort," said his toothless companion, pointing that way.

"Fort?" Chandagnac squinted, and finally noticed walls and a tower, made of the same stone as the hill itself. Even from down on the beach he could see several ragged gaps in the uneven line of the wall. "You people built a fort here?"

"Naw, the Spaniards built it. Or maybe the English. Both of them have took turns claiming this place for years, but there was only one man, a daft old wreck, on the whole island when Jennings came across the place and decided to found his pirate town here. The English think they've got it now — King George has even got a man sailing over here with a pardon for any of us as will quit wickedness and take up, I don't know, farming or something—but that won't last either." They were in among the cooking fires now, weaving around clusters of people sitting in the sand. Many of these diners had barrels or upright spar sections to lean against, and they all shouted greetings to the new arrivals, waving bottles and charred pieces of meat. Chandagnac nervously eyed the firelit faces, and he was surprised to see that about one in three was female.

"The Jenny's moored over there," said Skank, waving unhelpfully. "They'll have got a fire going, and with luck scrounged some stuff to throw in the stewpot."

The ground still felt to Chandagnac as if it were rocking under his boots, and as he stepped over one low ridge of sand he swayed as if to correct his balance on a rolling deck; he managed not to fall, but he did knock a chicken leg out of a woman's hand.

Jesus, he thought in sudden fright. "I'm sorry," he babbled,

But she just laughed drunkenly, snatched another piece of chicken from an apparently genuine gold platter and mumbled something in a slurred mix of French and Italian; Chandagnac was pretty sure it had been a half-sarcastic sexual invitation, but the slang was too unfamiliar, and the tenses too garbled, for him to be certain.

"Uh," he said hurriedly to Skank as he resumed his lurching pace, "the Jenny?"

"That's the sloop we took your Carmichael with," said the young pirate. "Yeah," he added, peering ahead as the two of them crested another crowded, littered sand ridge, "they've got a pot of sea water on the fire and they're flinging some junk or other into it."

Skank broke into a plodding run, as did the rest of Davies' men. Chandagnac followed more slowly, peering ahead. There was a fire on the beach, and the cooking pot resting on the blazing planks was almost waist-high. He saw several chickens, headless and gutted but otherwise unprepared, arc out of the darkness and splash in, and then a man lurched up and dumped a bucket of some lumpy fluid into it. Chandagnac suppressed a gag, and then grinned as it occurred to him that he was less afraid of these people than he was of their food.

One stocky old fellow, bald but bearded like a palm tree, leaned over the fire and thrust his tattooed right arm into the stew and stirred it around. "Not hot enough yet," he rumbled. He Pulled out a soggy chicken, stepped away from the fire and bit off a wing. Wet feathers made a startling spectacle of his beard, and even over the general conversation Chandagnac could hear bones being crunched. "But it's getting savory," the man decided, tossing the devastated bird back into the pot.

"Let's have a song!" yelled someone. "While we wait." Cheers followed, but then a lean, grinning figure stepped into the firelight. "Hell with songs," said Philip Davies, staring straight at Chandagnac. "Let's have a puppet show." The amused scorn in his voice made Chandagnac's face heat up.

Davies might have been joking, but the other pirates took up the idea eagerly. " 'At's right," shouted one man, his lone eye nearly popping from his head with excitement, "that lad from the Carmichael can work puppets! Christ! He'll do us a show, won't he?"

"He'll do it," belched one very drunken man sitting nearby. "He'll do it or I'll … kick his arse for him." All of them seemed to feel that this was the right spirit, and Chandagnac found himself thrust into the open area in front of the fire.

"Wha—but I—" He looked around. The drunken threat didn't seem to have been a joke, and he remembered the casualness of Chaworth's murder.

"You gonna do it or not, boy?" asked Davies. "What's the matter, your shows too good for us?" A wide-eyed black man stared at Chandagnac and then looked around at his fellows. "He called me a dog, didn't he?"

"Hold it!" said Chandagnac loudly, raising his hands. "Wait, yes, I'll do it. But I'll need … uh … a lot of string, a stout needle, a sharp knife and a, say, three-gallon-jug-sized piece of very soft wood." Several of the pirates who'd sat down leaped to their feet, shouting joyfully.

"Oh," Chandagnac added, "and a couple of bits of cloth'd be useful, and tacks, or small nails. And I see some bottles being passed around back there—how about a drink for the puppeteer?" A few minutes later he was crouched over his crude tools near the fire, alternately working and taking swigs from a bottle of really very good brandy, and as he quickly whittled limb, torso, pelvis and head pieces out of a split section of palm bole, Chandagnac wondered what sort of show this audience would relish. Shakespeare seemed unlikely. There had been a couple of quick, vulgar dialogues his father would occasionally do in taprooms years ago, when he'd thought young John had gone upstairs to bed, and Chandagnac suspected that they'd formed part of the old man's professional repertoire back in the lean years before the German ban on live actors. If Chandagnac could remember them, those routines would probably go over well here.

With a deftness he would have claimed not to have anymore, he notched the fronts of the two little wooden heads, producing rough but accurate faces; next he cut small bands of cloth to serve as tacked-on hinges, and then bigger, more complicated shapes to be clothing. It took him no more than one more minute to tack it all together and then cut lengths of string and tack them onto the ears, hands, knees and backs of his two marionettes, with the other ends of each mannikin's strings connected to a cross he'd grip in one hand. Controlling two puppets at once meant he would have to dispense with a separately held stick to control each puppet's knees, but he had learned long ago how to use the stiffly extended first two fingers of each hand instead.

"Very well, here we go," he said finally, trying to seem confident, as his father had always advised when facing a potentially unruly audience, which this certainly was. "Everybody's got to sit down. Could one of you toss me that … wrecked barrel there, please? Better than nothing for a set." To his surprise, one of them brought it over and set it down carefully in front of him. Chandagnac eyed the sprung, topless barrel for a moment, then kicked the whole front in, pulled away the broken stave ends and the one remaining hoop and then stood back. He nodded. "Our stage." Most of the pirates had sat down and had at least stopped shouting, so Chandagnac picked up the control crosses and slid his fingers into the loops. He lifted the marionette whose legs were encased in crude trousers—"Our hero!" he said loudly—and then the one for whom he'd made a dress—"And a woman he encounters!"

His audience seemed to find this promising.

The female puppet was whisked into the open front of the barrel, and the male puppet began sauntering up from a yard away.

Chandagnac was acutely aware that he was standing on a beach on the wrong side of the world, in front of a crowd of drunken murderers. To be performing a puppet show under these circumstances seemed as weirdly inappropriate as May Day garlands on a gibbet … or, it occurred to him, as dancing and playing musical instruments when getting into position to board a merchant ship and kill more than half of her crew.

From the direction of the other fires now came shambling into the firelight the oldest-looking man Chandagnac had seen since leaving England. His beard and long, ropy hair were the color of old bones, and his face was dark old leather stretched taut over a skull. Chandagnac couldn't guess the man's race, but when several of the pirates greeted the old man as "governor" and made room for him to sit down he guessed that this must be the "daft old wreck" Skank had mentioned, the one who'd been the island's only inhabitant when the pirates found the place.

The male puppet had walked up to the barrel and seemed about to go on past, but the female leaned out of the doorway-like opening and cocked her head. "Evening, sir," said Chandagnac shrilly, feeling like a fool. "Would you care to buy a lady a drink?"

"I beg your pardon?" Chandagnac had the other puppet say in a broad parody of an upper-class English accent. "I'm very hard of—"

"Please speak up, sir," the female puppet interrupted. "I don't hear very well."

"—of hearing."

"You say what, sir? Something you're fearing? I think I know what you're referring to, sir, and you needn't fear it with me. I can guarantee—"

"No, no, hearing, hearing."

"Herring? Hungry, are you? What about herring?"

"I say I'm very hard of it."

"Oh! Oh, well, splendid, sir, splendid, very hard of it, are you, well, let's get down to business and stop discussing fish, then, shall we—"

"It's a trap!" yelled one of the pirates from the audience. "She'll be leading him straight into the hands of a press gang! That's how the Navy got me!"

"With a woman?" called another pirate incredulously, " I just got a drink—and I didn't even down half of it before they clocked me in the head and I woke up in the ship's boat." Davies laughed as he uncorked a fresh bottle. "They got me with candy. I was fifteen, and walking home from the woodcarving shop where I was 'prenticed." He tipped the bottle up and took a long sip.

"They can't!" another man spoke up. "It's illegal! Apprentices younger than eighteen is exempt. You should have told the captain, Phil, he'd have put you back ashore with an apology."

"Queen Anne made that law in 1703, but I was pressed four years before that." Davies grinned and tilted the bottle up again, then wiped his moustache and said, "And they didn't make it retroactive." He looked up at Chandagnac. "Yeah, have her lead him to a press gang."

"Uh … all right." Chandagnac had seen press gangs in action in several countries, though his age, or citizenship, or possibly an occasional discreet bribe from his father, had kept him from ever becoming their prey.

"Step right this way, sir," the female puppet said alluringly, slinking back inside the barrel. "We can have a drink before proceeding to other matters."

The other puppet's head bobbed idiotically. "I beg your pardon?"

"I say I know this place. We can get a drink."

"Stink? I'll say. My word, no wonder, look at these rough lads, I'm not certain I—" The male puppet followed her inside, and then Chandagnac shook the puppets and rattled the toe of his boot against the back of the barrel. "Ow!" he had a rough voice yell, "Look out! Get him! That's it! Hold him down! And there you go, sir! May I be the first to congratulate you on having took up a life on the high seas."

Chandagnac had some hope of getting his story back into its accustomed channel, but his audience now demanded that he follow his unfortunate protagonist onto a Navy ship, and so he had to tip the barrel over onto its side to serve as the ship, and quickly snip-and-tack the woman's skirt into a pair of trousers so that various male roles could be taken by that puppet.

Prompted by his reminiscent audience, Chandagnac had the poor protagonist puppet—whose upperclass accent had by now disappeared—suffer all sorts of punishments at the hands of the feared and despised officers. He had an ear cut off for replying to an order in tones an officer chose to consider sarcastic, his teeth were knocked in with a belaying pin for some other offense, and then he was

"flogged around the fleet," which apparently meant that he was ceremoniously boated to each of a number of ships in order to be flogged aboard each one. Finally the audience permitted him to jump ship at a tropical port and wade ashore. Several members of the audience seemed to lose interest at this point, and began singing, and a couple were fencing with sticks out beyond the circle. Chandagnac continued despite the distractions, and had the runaway hiding in the jungle to await the arrival of some pirate boat that could use another sailor, but then the very old man leaped to his feet.

"The spring!" the old man yelled. "The water that is foul even as it wells from the earth!"

"'At's right, governor," Skank said, "but you're interrupting the show."

"The faces in the spray! Almas de los perditos!"

"Pipe down, Sawney!" yelled someone else.

"Ah!" The old man looked around wide-eyed, then winked. "Vinegar," he said then, as portentously as if he was telling them the password to the Heavenly Kingdom, "will drive lice away from your body."

"I am not a dog!" yelled the black man who had helped intimidate Chandagnac into giving this performance. It looked to Chandagnac as though the whole thing was degenerating into chaos.

"That's news Charlie Vane's crew needs more than we do, governor," said Davies. The pirate chief handed the old man the bottle he'd been working on, which was still more than half-full. "Why don't you go tell him?"

Governor Sawney took a long sip and then ambled away, back into the darkness, pausing twice to call out admonitory-sounding bits of Old Testament scripture.

At this point, to Chandagnac's relief, someone yelled that the food was ready. He left the puppets in the barrel and joined the rush to the cooking pot, where he was handed a board with a hot, wet, bloated-looking chicken on it. It smelled fairly good, though, for the bucket he'd seen emptied into the pot earlier had contained a curry that some other crew had found too spicy to be eaten, so he shucked his chicken out of its loosened skin and then impaled the bird on a stick and held it over the flames. Several of the pirates who also were less than enthusiastic about half-boiled chicken did the same, and after they'd all eaten, and chased the still-dubious food with more brandy, someone called out a proposal that the puppeteer should be made the official cook.

The idea drew assenting shouts, and Davies, who'd been among the number who had followed Chandagnac's cooking example, got drunkenly to his feet. "Get up, pup," he said to Chandagnac. Choosing to regard the term of address as a diminutive of the word puppeteer, Chandagnac stood up — though not smiling.

"What's your name, pup?"

"John Chandagnac."

"Shandy-what?"

"Chandagnac." A board in the fire popped loudly, throwing sparks into the sky.

"Hell, boy, life's too short for names like that. Shandy's your name. And plenty of name it is, too, for a cook." He turned to the rest of the pirates, sprawled like battle casualties across the sand. "This here's Jack Shandy," he said, loudly enough to be heard over the perpetual babble. "He's the cook." Everyone who comprehended it seemed pleased, and Skank perched one of the unclaimed boiled chickens on a three-cornered hat and made Chandagnac wear it while draining a mug of rum. After that the evening became, for the new cook, a long foggy blur punctuated by occasional clear impressions: he was splashing in the surf at one point, taking part in some complicated dance, and the music was a drumming that took in as counterpoint the surf roll and the warm wind rattling in the palms and even Chandagnac's own heartbeat; later he had broken free of it and had run ashore and then wandered for a long time between the water and the jungle, skirting the fires and whispering

"John Chandagnac" over and over to himself, for with a new name assigned to him he could imagine forgetting the old one, out here in this world of murder and rum and small, vivid islands; and some time after that he saw a gang of naked children who had found his puppets and were making them dance, but weren't touching the wooden figures in any way, only cupping their hands near them, and each tack-head in the jigging puppets was glowing dull red; and then finally he found himself sitting in soft sand that would be even more comfortable to lie down in. He lay back, realized he still had the hat on, fumbled it off, accidentally thrust his hand into the cold chicken's abdomen, jackknifed up to vomit a couple of yards down the slope, then sank back again and slept.

Chapter Three

The summer of 1718 was not a typical one for the outlaw republic on New Providence Island. Traditionally the Caribbean pirates careened their larger vessels in the spring, and when the hulls were cleaned of weed and barnacles, and all rotten planks and cordage were replaced, they stocked the holds with food, water and the best of the winter's loot and then sailed off to the northwest, skating around the Berry Islands and the Biminis and then letting the eternal Gulf Stream assist them as they worked their way up the North American coastline. The governors of the English colonies generally welcomed the pirates, grateful for the prosperity their cut-rate goods brought, and the Caribbean in summer was a steamy breeding ground for malaria and yellow fever and every sort of flux, to say nothing of the hurricanes that chose that season, more often than not, to come slanting up westward from the open Atlantic beyond Barbados, ripping around Cuba and up into the Gulf of Mexico like spinning drill bits across a pane of glass, creating and splitting and even totally obliterating islands in their paths.

But it was July now, and the New Providence harbor was still crowded with sloops and schooners and brigantines, and even a couple of three-masted ships, and cooking fires still smudged the air above the huts and shacks and sailcloth tents along the beach, and the whores and black market wholesale buyers still sauntered among the crews and watched eagerly for incoming craft; for word had it that Woodes Rogers had been appointed governor of the island by King George, and was due to arrive with a Royal Navy escort any day now, bringing the King's Pardon for any pirates that wanted to renounce piracy, and the punishments prescribed by law for any that didn't. The philosophy commonest among the New Providence residents in the early weeks of July was most frequently summed up in the phrase "Wait and see." A few, such as Philip Davies, were determined to be gone by the time Rogers arrived, and a few others, chiefly Charlie Vane and his crew, had resolved to stay and forcibly resist this incursion from the authorities across the Atlantic; but most of the pirates were inclined to accept the offer of amnesty, and eliminate from their futures the specter of the ceremonial silver oar carried by the executioner when he escorted a condemned pirate to the gibbet and the clergyman and the crowd and the last knot the pirate would ever have dealings with. And after all, if they didn't find life under the new regime an improvement, they could always steal a boat and follow the wind to some other island. Two hundred years ago the Spanish had made a point of stocking all their islands with pigs and cattle, and a man could do a lot worse than to live on some unmonitored shore, subsisting on fruit and fish and meat dried over the buccan fires; the buccaneer way of life had effectively ended a century ago when the Spaniards drove all such harmless beachgypsies off their islands and onto the sea—and the Spaniards had soon regretted it, for the evicted buccaneers quickly became seagoing predators—but the islands were still there. Oranges stippled the jungle now like bright gold coins on green satin and crushed velvet, and even the people who'd been raised in England followed the examples of the other races and graced their plain fare with tamarinds, papayas and mangoes; avocados by the hundreds hung fat and darkly green in the trees, often falling and thudding heavily to the sand and startling pirates who weren't accustomed to seeing the things in the season when they were ripe.

Cookery, in fact, had become a bigger part of daily life in the New Providence settlement, both because the imminent arrival of Woodes Rogers meant at least the postponement of piratical ventures, leaving people the time to pay more attention to what they ate, and because the ship's cook of the Vociferous Carmichael had not only proven to be competent, but had undertaken to prepare batches big enough to feed several crews in exchange for help in procuring the cooking supplies. In the three weeks since the Carmichael had arrived, for example, there had been seven "bouillabaisse endeavors," in which just about everyone, pirates and whores and black marketeers and children, waded out into the harbor at low tide, armed with nets and buckets, and dragged out of the sea enough animals of one sort and another for the cook to make a vast fish stew, and when the stuff was bubbling in the several huge pots over the fire on the beach, pungently aromatic with garlic and onion and saffron, they said incoming ships would smell the stew long before they'd see the island. And as the month wore on and the days grew to their longest, at dinnertime more and more people had been drifting over to where Davies' crews clustered around the moored sloop Jenny, for the Jenny and the Carmichael were supposed to leave New Providence Island, taking the cook along, on Saturday the twenty-third.

On Friday afternoon the cook was rowing a boat up the harbor from the deep inlet where the Carmichael sat; the ship was restored to her normal upright position now, and had been pulled almost all the way back down into the water, and as Jack Shandy watched her recede, his muscled brown arms hauling on the oars and propelling the boat forward, he saw section after section of scaffolding, axed and pried loose from the hull, spin down and splash into the sea.

Before the end of the month, he told himself, I should be able to get to Kingston and get my credit situation established, and then get a boat to Port-au-Prince and pay a visit to the … family estate. Now that he'd seen the colors of these western skies and seas and islands, he didn't feel nearly as disoriented by the drawing he'd seen in the letter his lawyer had found; the wide porches and windows of the Chandagnac house in Port-au-Prince, with the waving palms and giant tree ferns in the background and the parrots sketched flying overhead, now seemed much more attainable, much less like a drawing of imagined dwellings on the moon.

After the death of old Francois Chandagnac, his father, John's lawyer had located a hitherto unknown Chandagnac cousin in Bayonne, and this cousin had let them have a file of letters from an aunt in Haiti, where John had always vaguely understood he had a grandfather and an uncle. These letters, and then a lot of expensive research in obscure labyrinths of deeds, quitclaims, probate and birth and death records, had finally turned up the information which caused John Chandagnac to terminate his engagement to the daughter of a successful coal merchant, resign from his position with the textile firm and book passage aboard the Vociferous Carmichael to the far side of the globe: John learned that his grandfather in Haiti had, in his will, left his house, sugarcane plantation and considerable fortune to his eldest son Francois, John's father, and had then died in 1703; and that Francois' younger half-brother Sebastian, also a resident of Haiti, had produced forged documents to indicate that Francois was dead.

On the basis of this fraud, Sebastian had inherited the estate … and John Chandagnac's father, not even aware of the inheritance, had gone on giving his marionette performances, in ever-increasing poverty and ill health, until that last lonely night in Brussels in the winter of 1714. His uncle had, in effect, killed his father as well as robbed him.

Jack Shandy squinted now, and pulled harder on the oars as if that might get him into his uncle's presence sooner, as he remembered talking to the landlady of the shabby rooming house in which his father had died. John Chandagnac had gone there as soon as he'd heard of his father's death, and he plied the woman with quantities of syrupy Dutch gin to get her to focus her dim attention on the old puppeteer whose body had been carried down her stairs four days earlier. Finally she had remembered the incident. "Ah, oui," she'd said, smiling and nodding, "oui. C'etait impossible de savoir ci c'etait lefroid ou la faim." His father had either frozen to death or starved, and there'd been no one there to notice which death had got him first.

Jack Shandy had no real plan, no particular idea of what he'd do when he got to Port-au-Prince — though he had brought his father's death certificate to show to the French authorities in Haiti—but his lawyer had told him that the charges would be virtually impossible to press from another country in another hemisphere, so he was bringing it to where his uncle Sebastian lived. He could only guess at what problems he would run into, difficulties of pressing criminal charges as an alien, hiring a resident attorney, ascertaining precisely which—if any!— local laws had been broken … he simply knew he had to confront his uncle, let the man know that his crime had been uncovered, and had led to the death of the cheated brother …

Shandy hauled on the oars, and watched the long muscles flex in his arms and braced legs, and he allowed himself a grim smile. In addition to extra cannon, powder and shot, sorcerous apparatus—the tools of vodun, or voodoo—had been loaded aboard the Carmichael, and one magical procedure required the use of a large mirror; another pirate crew had acquired several, and had sold one to Woefully Fat, Davies' chief bocor, and Shandy had been given the job of getting the thing aboard. During the operation he had happened to face the mirror squarely—and for a moment he actually hadn't recognized himself, and thought he was looking at one of the pirates beyond the glass. The weeks of laboring at reconditioning the Carmichael had broadened his shoulders, leaned his waist and given him a couple of new scars on his hands, and he realized that he'd have to stop thinking of himself as unshaven and admit he had a beard—sun-bleached in irregular blond streaks, as was his hair, which for convenience he now wore pulled back into a tarred pigtail—but it was the deep cigar-hued tan, acquired during weeks of shirtless work under the tropical sun, that really made him look indistinguishable from the wild men around him.

Yeah, he thought, I'll sneak onto Uncle Sebastian's pirated estate and then when he's walking around, routing poachers from the shrubbery or whatever it is the gentry does around here, I'll rise up all fearsome-looking and menace him with a cutlass.

Then his savage grin turned sheepish, for he remembered the last time he'd talked to Beth Hurwood. She had once again managed to elude Leo Friend, and Shandy and she had gone walking south along the beach in the relaxed hour after dinner when the breeze was cooling and the parrots were fluttering in raucous flocks overhead. Shandy had told her about seeing himself in the mirror, and how he'd thought for a moment that he was seeing one of the members of Davies' crew; "One of the other members, I guess I should say," he had added, with perhaps just a touch of adolescent pride in his voice.

Beth had laughed indulgently and taken his hand. "You're not a member, John," she said. "Could you have killed those sailors, or shot old Captain Chaworth?"

Sobered, and hoping his tan would conceal the sudden reddening of his face, he had muttered, "No." They had walked without speaking for a while then, and Beth didn't take her hand from his until they reached the careened Carmichael and had to turn around.

Pulling a little harder on the left oar to slant the boat toward shore, he looked over his right shoulder and saw Skank and the others waiting for him beside the stack of Carrara marble slabs, which was at least visibly lower now than it had been that morning. Behind them the white beach, dazzling in the afternoon glare, sloped up to the tawdry litter of tents and shacks, and beyond that to the jungle. A woman in a tattered purple dress was trudging along the top of the sand slope. Venner waded out when Shandy had got the boat into the shallows, and Shandy climbed over the gunwale and helped him drag it up onto the sand.

"I could row the next few lots over if yer gettin' tired, Jack," said Venner, his smile as constant as the sunburn across his broad shoulders. Behind him stood Mr. Bird, the black man who frequently thought someone had called him a dog.

"Naw, 'at's all right, Venner," Shandy said, crouching to get a grip on the topmost marble slab. He hoisted it up, stumped stiff-legged and grimacing to the boat, and then slid the stone over the gunwale and onto the rear thwart, and from there to the floor. "At the Carmichael they're lowering me a stout net, and I just loop it around each block and then wave 'em to lift." He walked back to the stack as Skank edged past him, carrying another one of the blocks.

"Good," said Venner, taking the other side of the next block Shandy crouched over. "Take it easy and don't lose no sweat nor blood is my way."

Shandy squinted thoughtfully at Venner as the two of them shambled toward the boat. Venner never seemed to do quite his share of any hard work, but the man had prevented Shandy from being killed on that day when Davies took the Carmichael, and his avoid-all-strain philosophy tempted Shandy to confide his escape plan to him. Venner must regard the upcoming enterprise as at least a regrettable strain, and if Shandy was going to hide ashore until the Jenny and the Carmichael had left, and then re-emerge and wait for the arrival of the new governor from England, a partner who knew the island and its customs would be valuable indeed.

Mr. Bird had picked up one of the blocks and was shambling along behind them, peering around suspiciously. Shandy was about to ask Venner to meet him after this job was finished, to discuss some pragmatic applications of his philosophy, but he heard a scuffing from up the slope and turned to see who was approaching.

It was the woman in the purple dress, and when he and Venner had disposed of their block, Shandy shaded his eyes to look at her.

"Howdy, Jack," she said, and Shandy realized it was Jim Bonny's wife.

"Hello, Ann," he said. It annoyed him to realize that, even though she was a big, chunky teenager with crooked teeth, his chest felt suddenly chilly inside, and his heart was thudding like a hammer into soft dirt. Though in Beth Hurwood's company he was a little ashamed of his beard and tarred hair and deep-bitten tan, when Bonny's wife was around he was furtively proud of them.

"Still ballasting that thing?" she said, nodding past him at the Carmichael. She had learned the term while watching him work one afternoon a few days ago.

"Yeah," he said, walking up out of the water and trying not to stare at her breasts, clearly visible under her carelessly buttoned blouse. He forced himself to keep his mind on his job. "At least this is the last of it, the moveable ballast. The Carmichael was awfully crank—heeled something terrible coming over sharply in a strong wind. Almost spilled us all right over the side when she came around to face the Jenny that day." He recalled the breakfast table tumbling across the poop deck, and the napkins spinning away into the sea directly below where he and Beth had clung to the rail and each other—and then he realized that his gaze had drifted back to Ann's bosom. He turned to the stack and took hold of another slab.

"Sounds like an awful lot of work," Ann said. "Do you have to do quite so much of it?" He shrugged. "The seas and the weathers are what is; your vessels adapt to them or sink." He lifted the slab, turned his back on her and shuffled toward the boat, where Mr. Bird and Skank were lowering one in. Venner was sitting on the beach, making a show of worriedly scrutinizing the bottom of his foot.

Shandy's pulse and breathing were loud in his head, so he idn't hear Ann splashing along right behind him; Skank and Mr. Bird strode back ashore, and when Shandy straightened up from laying down his block, and turned around, he found himself being kissed.

Ann's arms were around him and her mouth was open, and against his bare chest he could feel her nipples right through the fabric of her blouse; like most people on the island she smelled of sweat and liquor, but in her case it was with such a female tang that Shandy forgot his resolutions about her and forgot Beth and his father and his uncle, and just brought his arms up and pulled her closer. The girl, together with the hot sun on his back and the warm water around his ankles, seemed for a moment to moor him to the island like some tree, animated only by biological promptings and reflexes and not even minimally self-aware.

Then he recollected himself and lowered his arms; she stepped back, grinning at him.

"What," Shandy began to croak, "what," he went on more strongly, "was that for?" She laughed. "For? For luck, man."

"Heads up, Jack," said Skank quietly.

Jim Bonny was floundering down the slope, his round face red under a dark cloth, and his boots kicking up plumes of white sand. "Shandy you son of a bitch!" he was squalling. "You goddamn sneaking son of a bitch!"

Though apprehensive, Shandy faced him. "What do you want, Jim?" he called evenly. Bonny halted in front of his wife with his boots just short of the water, and for a moment he seemed about to hit her. Then he hesitated, and his gaze fell away from hers, and he scowled across at Shandy. He fumbled a clasp knife out of his pocket—Shandy stepped back, snatching at his own — but when Bonny had unfolded his blade he pressed the point into the tip of his own left forefinger and flicked the blade outward, throwing a couple of drops of blood toward Shandy, and at the same time he began chanting a nonsensical multi-language rhyme.

Shandy noticed that the sun was suddenly hotter—shockingly hotter—and then Skank had leaped onto Jim Bonny's back from behind and knocked him forward onto his knees in the water, and then hopped off and planted a bare foot between the shoulders of Bonny's coat and shoved him onto his face in the shallows.

Bonny was floundering and splashing and cursing, but the sudden sweat was cooling on Shandy's face and shoulders, and Skank waded in and kicked Bonny in the arm. "You ain't forgettin' any of the rules now, are you, Jim?" Skank asked. "No vodun offenses among us unless it's a declared duel, isn't that the way?" Bonny had been struggling to push himself up out of the water, but Skank kicked him again, harder, and he collapsed with a sputtering cry of protest.

Shandy glanced at Ann, and was a little surprised to see that she seemed concerned. Mr. Bird was watching with evident disapproval.

"You're no bocor" Skank went on, "and there's pickney infants on the island that could set your head blazing like a torch and laugh at any lame drogue you could make to stop 'em with, but Shandy's new and don't know nothin' about all that. You think Davies'll be pleased if I tell him about this?" Bonny had scuttled away, and now floundered to his feet. "But—but he was kissin' my—" Skank threateningly took a step forward. "Think he will?"

Bonny retreated, splashing. "Don't tell him," he muttered.

"Get out of here," Skank told him. "Ann—you too."

Without meeting Shandy's eye, Ann followed her sopping husband back up the slope. Shandy turned to Skank. "Thanks … for whatever."

"Ah, you'll learn." Skank looked toward the rowboat. "It's sitting low," he said. "One more block ought to make this load."

Shandy walked up to the rough wooden sled the marble blocks sat on—and then noticed Venner, who had not even stood up during the entire altercation. The man was smiling as amiably as ever, but all at once Shandy decided not to confide the escape plan to him.

Chapter Four

Because the Carmichael was to leave next morning, the talk around the fires that night was a fantastic fabric of speculations, warnings and impossible stories. Jack Shandy, insulated from the anxiety felt by the rest of Davies' crew, nevertheless listened with great interest to stories of ships crewed by zombies and glimpsed only at midnight by doomed men, of various magical precautions that would be necessary in Florida, so far from the protection of Mate Care-For and the rest of the vodun loas, of the Spaniards they might encounter in the Gulf of Mexico, and what tactics to use against them; old legends were retold, and Shandy heard the story of the pirate Pierre le Grand, who with a tiny boat and a handful of men took a galleon of the Spanish plate fleet fifty years earlier, and he heard a spirited version of the four-hour sea battle between the English Charlotte Bailey and the Spanish Nuestra Senora de Lagrimas, which ended with the sinking of both ships, and then for a while the pirates tried to outdo each other with stories about the suck-you-byes, female demons that weirdly and erotically occupied the last hours of men marooned on barren islands. And the Carmichael was supposed to rendezvous with Blackbeard's Queen Ann's Revenge in Florida, and so there was lots of gossip about that most colorful pirate chief, and speculations about why he was returning to that uncivilized shore where, a year or two ago, he had gone far inland in search of some sort of sorcerous power-focus and had come limping out days later, unsuccessful, sick, and infested with the ghosts that now plagued him as fleas would a dog.

Shandy had cooked up his best dinner yet, and, full and slightly drunk, was very much enjoying the evening … until he noticed the other members of the crew, the ones that weren't bravely drinking and laughing around the fire. Several had shuffled off to the sailcloth tents, and once when the wind slacked Shandy thought he heard quiet sobbing from that direction, and he saw Skank sitting in the dimness under a palm tree, carefully sharpening a dagger, an expression of intent concentration — almost of sadness — on his young face.

Shandy stood up and walked down to the shore. Just visible across the harbor's half mile of dark water was the silhouette of Hog Island against the stars, and nearer at hand he could see bare masts swaying gently to the breeze and the low swells. He heard the chuff of boots approaching from behind him, and when he turned back toward the fires he saw the lean figure of Philip Davies striding toward him, a bottle of wine in each hand. Behind him the settlement musicians had begun tuning up their random instruments.

"Here y'are," said Davies drunkenly. "Who deserves the best of the wine, if not the cook?" He held out one of the bottles, which for lack of a corkscrew had simply been broken off at the neck.

"Thank you, captain," said Shandy, taking the bottle and eyeing the jagged neck mistrustfully.

"Chateau Latour, 1702," Davies said, tilting up his own bottle for a swig. Shandy sniffed his and then raised it and poured some into his mouth. It was the driest, smoothest Bordeaux he'd ever tasted—and his father and he had had some fine ones at times—but he kept any pleasure from showing in his face. "Huh," he said carelessly. "Wish I'd found some of this when I was scouting up ingredients for the stew."

"For the stew." Half of Davies' face was lit by the firelight, and Shandy saw it crinkle in a sour grin.

"I was a youngster in Bristol, and one Christmas evening when I was just leaving the woodworking shop where I was 'prenticed, some street boys broke our window to snatch some stuff. What they didn't take they knocked over, and there was this … " He paused for a sip of the wine.

"There was this set of little carved choirboys, none of 'em bigger than your thumb, all painted nice, and I saw one of 'em fall out onto the snow, and one of the boys caught it with his toe as he ran off, and it ricocheted away down the street. And I remember thinking that whatever became of that little wooden fellow, he'd never again sit in that little slot he fell out of." Davies turned toward the harbor and breathed deeply of the sea breeze. "I know what you're planning," he said to Shandy over his shoulder. "You've heard about how Woodes Rogers is due here any day with the King's Pardon, so you're planning to slip away up the beach tonight, around out of sight of the settlement, and hide till the Carmichael leaves—no, don't interrupt, I'll let you talk in a moment—and then you'll walk back here and resume your cooking and lay about in the sun and the rum until Rogers arrives. Right?" After a long pause, Shandy laughed softly and had another sip of the excellent wine. "It did seem feasible," he admitted.

Davies nodded and turned to face him. "Sure it did," he said, "but you're still thinking in terms of that shop window you fell out of, see? You won't ever get back to where you were." He had a slug from his bottle and then sighed and ran a hand through his tangled black hair.

"First," Davies said, "it's a capital offense to jump ship in the middle of an enterprise, and so if you came wandering back into the settlement tomorrow after the Carmichael was gone, you'd be killed — regretfully, since you're a likeable lad and you can cook, but the rules are the rules. Remember Vanringham?"

Shandy nodded. Vanringham had been a cheerful boy of not more than eighteen, who'd been convicted of having hidden below when the brigantine he was in was fired on by a Royal Navy vessel. When the pirate ship had limped its way back to New Providence, its captain, a burly old veteran named Burgess, had let Vanringham believe that the prescribed penalty would be waived in consideration of his youth … and then that night after dinner Burgess walked up behind Vanringham and, with tears glinting in his eyes, for he liked the boy, put a pistol ball through Vanringham's head.

"Second," Davies went on, "you cut me, after having surrendered. True, it was because I'd just killed your friend when I suppose I could have stopped him less lethally—but then he'd surrendered, too. In any case, you owe your life to the fact that I didn't care to have my showdown with Venner right then. But when I let you take the choice, it wasn't a choice between death on the one hand and three weeks of free food and drink on a tropical island on the other. You owe me hard service for that cut, and I'm not letting you out of the bargain you made."

The musicians, having found some basis for cooperation, began to play Greensleeves, and the melancholy old melody was at once so familiar and so out of place here—the tune rolling away down the lonely beach, bizarrely mocked by the cries of alarmed tropical birds—that it made all Old World things, and gods, and philosophies, seem distant and tenuous.

"And third," Davies said, the hard edge gone from his voice, "it may be that all those kings and merchants on the far side of the Atlantic are about to see the end of their involvement with these new lands. To them, Europe and Asia are still the chessboard that matters; they can't see this new world except in terms of two purposes: as a source of quick, careless profit, and as a dumping ground for criminals. It may be a … surprising crop, that springs up from such ploughing and sowing, and Rogers may find when he arrives that none of us need, nor could even benefit from, a pardon issued by a man who rules a cold little island on the other side of the world." The sea breeze, a bit chilly now, whispered among the palms on Hog Island and made the pirates' fires flicker and jump.

Davies' words had upset Shandy, and not least because they seemed to take the righteousness out of the purpose he'd crossed the ocean for—suddenly his uncle's action seemed as impersonally pragmatic as the devouring of the baby sea turtles by the hungry sea gulls, and his own mission as illconsidered as an attempt to teach the gulls compassion. He opened his mouth to object, but was preempted by a call from the crowd around the fires behind him.

"Phil!" someone was yelling. "Cap'n Davies! Some of the boys is askin' questions too hard for me to answer!"

Davies dropped his bottle into the sand. "That's Venner," he said thoughtfully. "How did that move go? Over the blade and fake a poke inside, then when he parries across you duck under—but not all the way around—and hit him in the flank?"

Shandy shut his eyes and pictured it. "Right. And then run past him on his outside."

"Got it." Raising his voice, Davies said, "With you in a moment, Venner." As the two men trudged back toward the fires, Davies pulled a pistol out of his belt. "If Venner plays me square I can handle him," he said quietly. "But if he doesn't, I want you to hang back with this and make sure no—" He stopped talking suddenly and gave a weary laugh. "Never mind. I forgot I was talking to the little wooden choirboy." He put the pistol away and lengthened his stride. Shandy followed, angry with himself—partly for feeling bad at staying out of a squabble between pirates—like a child feeling bad about refusing a foolish dare!—but partly, too, at the same time, for staying out of it.

His petticoat breeches whirling out around his knees at each ponderous step, Leo Friend reached the bottom of the sandstone track that led down from the ruined fort, and, sweating profusely in the confinement of his fantastically ribboned doublet, struck out across the sand toward the fires where Davies' crew was. Beth Hurwood strode along next to him, sobbing with fury and trying to disentangle the mummified dog paw that Friend had shoved into her hair—"This'll protect you in case we get separated!" he'd snarled impatiently—-just before dragging her out of her windowless room and unceremoniously propelling her ahead of him down the track.

Though she was having no difficulty in keeping up with the laboring young man, he turned around to face her every few steps, both to wheeze, "Hurry, can't you?" and to peer furtively down the neckline of her dress.

Damn all these delays, Friend thought, and damn the sort of fools we have to consort with in order to get to the focus in Florida! Why did it have to be ignorant, bickering brigands that found it? Though of course if a more savvy sort had found it, Hurwood and I wouldn't be able to manipulate them this way … and I gather this Blackbeard fellow is very nearly too clever for us anyway. He's hanging back now, letting us commit ourselves to this Florida trip before joining us; he could have got those protective Indian medicinal herbs just by purchasing them, for God's sake, but instead he has to blockade the entire city of Charles Town, capture nine ships and a whole crowd of hostages including a member of the Governor's Council, and then ask for the crate of medicinal herbs as ransom. I wish I knew, thought Friend, whether the man is just showing off, just keeping his crew in battle trim, or whether he's using all that spectacle to conceal some furtive other purpose. But what plans could the man have that would involve the all-too-civilized and law-and-orderly Carolina coast?

He glanced again at Beth Hurwood, who had finally pulled the dog paw free of her hair, and as she flung it away he whispered a quick phrase and caressed the air, and her dress flew up—but she forced it back down before he'd seen anything more than her knees. Oh, just wait, girl, he thought, his mouth going dry and his heart thumping even faster—soon enough you'll be so hungry for me you won't be able to take a deep breath.

Friend came blundering into the fireside crowd just as Davies entered it from the beach side. The pirate chief was grinning confidently, and Friend rolled his eyes in exasperation. Oh, spare us the brave show, captain, thought the fat physician; you're in no danger from anyone here … unless you really annoy me with your gallant posturing.

"Ah, here's our captain!" cried one of the pirates, a stocky red-haired man with a broad, freckled, smiling face; and though some of the men in the crowd were frowning angrily, Friend watched this smiling man, for he sensed that it was he who posed the threat. "Phil," the man said earnestly, "some of the lads here were wonderin' exactly what action we've worked so hard outfitting the Carmichael for, and how much profit we stand to take from it compared to what sorts of perils there be waitin'. I tried to answer 'em in general, but they want specific answers." Davies laughed. "I'd have thought they'd all know better than to go to you for specifics, Venner," he said easily—though to Friend the apprehension behind the unconcerned pose was obvious. Friend saw the new recruit—Elizabeth's friend, what was his name? Shandy, that was it—scuffling his way through the crowd behind Davies, and for a moment the physician considered engineering things so that the interfering puppeteer would be killed … or, better, maimed, rendered simpleminded by a blow to the head … but he regretfully decided that it would be difficult enough to restrain a crowd this big and wild from mutiny, without trying to get them to swat his personal fly at the same time.

He returned his attention to Venner, whose face, despite the smile, shone with sweat in the firelight.

"That's what I told 'em, cap'n," he said, and for a moment the falsity of his smile must have been obvious to everyone present, "but several have said they plain won't sail if we be goin' to that damned place on the Florida coast where Thatch got infested by ghosts."

Davies shrugged. "Any of 'em who be not satisfied with my promise to make 'em rich, or who doubt my word on that, can see me privately to settle it. And any that want to desert in mid-endeavor know the prescribed penalties. Do you fit into any of those groups, Venner?" Friend, peering in from the periphery, whispered and held up his hand.

Venner tried to reply, but produced only a choked grunt.

Should I have him provoke his own death, Friend wondered, or save him? Better let him live—there is real fear and anger in this crowd, and I don't want it stirred to a blaze. He whispered and gestured again, and Venner suddenly hunched forward and vomited onto the sand. The people near him drew away, and coarse laughter broke the tension.

Playing to the audience, Davies said, "I don't call that a responsive answer." Friend's fat fingers danced in the air, and Venner straightened and said, loudly but haltingly, "No … Phil. I … trust you. I … what's happening here? These aren't my … I was just drunk, and wanted to … stir up a bit of trouble. All these lads … know you've got their best … damn me! … interests at heart."

Davies raised his eyebrows in surprise, then frowned suspiciously and peered around among the crowd; but Venner's words had been convincing enough for one pirate, who clumped up and punched the would-be mutineer in the face.

"Treacherous pig," the pirate muttered as Venner sat down in the sand, blood spilling from his nose. The man turned to Davies. "Your word sooner'n his, anytime, cap'n." Davies smiled. "Try not to forget, Tom," he said mildly.

Out at the edge of the crowd, Friend smiled too—all this was so much easier here than it had been back in the eastern hemisphere—and then he turned to Elizabeth Hurwood. "We can return to the fort now," he told her.

She stared at him. "That's all? You ran down here, so fast I thought your heart was going to burst, just to see that man throw up and get hit?"

"I wanted to make sure that was all that did happen," said Friend impatiently. "Now come on."

"No," she said. "As long as we're here, I'll say hello to John." Friend turned on her furiously, then caught himself. He smirked and raised his eyebrows. "The keelscraper and brigand chef? I believe he's here," he said, simpering, "unless what I smell is a wet dog."

"Go back to the fort," she said wearily.

"So you c-can … have c-c-congress with him, I suppose?" sputtered Friend, his voice shrill with scorn. He wished he could refer to sexual matters without stuttering. "B-banish that thought, my d-d-d — Elizabeth. Your father commanded me not to let you out of my sight." He nodded virtuously.

"Do as you please then, you damned wretch," she said softly, and with a flash of uncharacteristic and unwelcome insight Friend realized she wasn't using damned as a mere adjective of emphasis. "I'm going to go and speak to him. Follow or not."

"I'll watch you from here," said Friend, and he raised his voice as she walked away from him: "Fear not I'd follow! I'd not subject my nostrils to proximity to the fellow!" The confrontation by the fire being over and more or less settled, some of the pirates and prostitutes nearby looked toward Friend for further amusement—and evidently found some, for there were whisperings and guffaws and giggling behind jewel-studded hands.

Friend scowled and raised his hand, but already he could feel the strain in his mind, so he lowered his hand and made do with just saying, "Vermin!" and striding away to stand on a slight rise, his arms crossed dramatically, and staring at Hurwood's daughter. She had found the Shandy fellow, and they'd moved a dozen yards away to talk.

Despise me, he thought, all of you—you've only got about a week left to do it in. For the first time in years, Friend thought about the old man who had started him on the … he paused to savor the phrase … the road to godhood. How old had Friend been? About eight years old—but already he had learned Latin and Greek, and had read Newton's Principia and Paracelsus' De Sagis Earumque Operibus … and already, he now recalled, envy of his intellect and his sturdy physique had begun to cause small-minded people to dislike and fear him. Even his father, sensing and resenting a greatness he could never hope to comprehend, had abused him, tried to make him take up pointless physical exercises and reduce his daily allotment of the sweets that provided him with the blood sugar his body required; only his mother had truly recognized his genius, and had seen to it that he didn't have to go to school with other children. Yes, he'd been about eight when he'd seen the ragged old man leaning in the back window of the pastry shop.

The old fellow was obviously simple-minded, and drawn to the window by the smell of fresh-cooked fruit pies, but he was gesturing in an odd way, his hands making digging motions in front of him as if they were encountering resistance in the empty air; and for the first time in his life Friend's nose was irritated by that smell that was like overheated metal.

Already graceful and sure-footed despite what everyone thought about his bulk, Friend had silently climbed onto a box behind the old man to be able to see in through the window—and what he saw set his young heart thumping. A fresh pie was moving jerkily through the air toward the window, and its hesitations and jigglings corresponded exactly to the old man's gestures. The shop girl was on her hands and knees in the far corner, too busy being violently ill to notice the airborne pie, and every few seconds the old man would let the pie pause while he gigglingly made other gestures that, at a distance, disarranged the girl's clothing.

Tremendously excited, Friend had climbed down from the box and hidden, and then a few minutes later followed the old man as he gleefully pranced away with the stolen pie. The boy followed the old man all that day, watching as he procured lunch and beer and caused pretty girls' skirts to fly up over their heads, all simply by gesturing and muttering, and little Leo Friend's breathing was fast and shallow as it became clear that none of the people the old man robbed or manhandled realized that the grinning, winking old vagabond was responsible. That night the old man broke the lock of an unoccupied house and retired, yawning cavernously, within.

Friend was out in front of the house next morning, walking back and forth carrying the biggest, grandest cake he'd been able to buy with the money from his father's rent-box. It was a sight to arouse lust in any lover of sweets, and the boy had been careful to refrost it to conceal all evidence of the tampering he'd done.

After an hour and a half of plodding back and forth, his chubby arms aching cruelly with the torture of holding up the heavy cake, little Friend finally saw the old man emerge, yawning again but dressed now in a gaudy velvet coat with taffeta lining. Friend held the cake a bit higher as he walked past this time, and he exulted when, simultaneously, abruptly induced cramps knotted his stomach and the cake floated up out of his hands.

The cramp doubled the boy up and had him rolling on the pavement, but he forced himself to open his eyes against the pain and watch the levitating cake; it was rising straight up into the air, and then it shifted a bit and descended on the far side of the house. The giggling old man went back inside, and Friend's cramp relaxed. The boy struggled to his feet, hobbled up to the front door, and, silently, went in.

He heard the old man noisily gobbling the cake in another room, and Friend waited in the dusty entry hall until the chomping stopped and the whimpering began. He walked boldly into the next room then, and saw the old man rolling on the floor between indistinct, sheet-covered pieces of furniture.

"I've got the medicine hidden," the boy piped up. "Tell me how you do your magic and I'll let you have it."

He had to repeat this a few times, more loudly, but eventually the old man had understood. Haltingly, and with much use of expressive gestures when his wretched vocabulary failed him, the old man had explained to the boy the basis for the exchange that was sorcery, as simple a concept, but as unevident, as the usefulness of a purchase and block and tackle to dramatically increase a pulling force. The boy grasped the notion quickly, but insisted that the old man actually teach him to move things at a distance before he'd fetch the antidote; and after young Friend had successfully impelled a couch against the ceiling hard enough to crack the Plaster, the old man had begged him to end his pain.

Friend had laughingly obliged, and then scampered home, leaving the devastated corpse to be found by the house's tenants whenever they might return.

As he grew older, though, and studied the records of the ancient magics—all so tantalizingly consistent, from culture to culture!—he came to the bitter realization that the really splendid, godlike sorceries had, gradually over the millennia, become impossible. It was as if magic had once been a spring at which a sorceror could fill the vessel of himself to the vessel's capacity, but was now just damp dirt from which only a few drops could be wrung, and even that with difficulty … or as if there were invisible stepping-stones in the sky, but the sky had expanded and pulled them far apart, so that, though ancient magicians had been able to step up them with just a little stretching, it now took almost a lifetime's strength just to leap from one stone to the next.

But he worked with what remained, and by the time he was fifteen he was able to take anything he wanted, and he could make people do virtually anything, against their wills … and then he tried to give his mother, who alone had always had faith in him, access to this secret world he'd found. He could never remember exactly what had happened then … but he knew that his father had hit him, and that he had fled his parents' house and had not ever returned.

His sorcerous skills enabled him to live comfortably for the next five years as a student. The best of food, clothing and lodging were his for the reaching—though a profound mistrust of sex had kept him from doing anything more about that subject than to have disturbing, unremembered, sheet-fouling dreams—and so one day he was alarmed, as a man might be alarmed to realize that his usual daily dose of laudanum is no longer enough to sustain him, to realize that he wanted—needed—more than this.

For after all, it was not what he was able to take that made magic wonderful, but the taking, the violation of another person's will, the holding of the better hand, the perception of his own will staining the landscape in all directions; and so it was disquieting to realize that his violation of other people was not complete, that there were spots in the picture that resisted his will the way waxed areas on a lithographer's stone resist ink—he couldn't reach their minds. He could force people to do his bidding, but he couldn't force them to want to. And as long as there was the slightest tremor of protest or outrage in the minds of the people he used, then his domination of them, his absorption of them, was not absolute. He needed it to be absolute … but until he met Benjamin Hurwood he'd thought it couldn't be done.

Chapter Five

"Why do you call him that?" Beth Hurwood asked irritably.

"What, hunsi kanzo?" said Shandy. "It's his title. I don't know, it seems too familiar to call him Thatch, and too theatrical to call him Blackbeard."

"His title? What does it mean?"

"It means he's a … an initiate. That he's been through the ordeal by fire."

"Initiated into what?" She seemed upset that Shandy should know all this. Shandy started to speak, then shrugged. "All this magic stuff. Even living up there in the old fort, you must have noticed that magic is as much in use here as … as fire is back in England."

"I've observed that these people are superstitious, of course. I suppose all uneducated communities — " She froze, then stared at him. "Good Lord, John— you don't believe any of it, do you?" Shandy frowned, and looked past the flickering fire to the jungle. "I won't insult you by being less than frank. This is a new world, and these pirates live much more intimately with it than the Europeans in Kingston and Cartagena and Port-au-Prince, who try to transplant as much of the Old World as they can. If you believe what's in the Old Testament you believe some weird things … and you shouldn't be too quick to dictate what is and isn't possible."

Mr. Bird flung his food away and leaped to his feet, glaring around at no one in particular. "I am not a dog!" he shouted angrily, his gold earrings flashing in the firelight. "You son of a bitch!" Beth looked over at him in alarm, but Shandy smiled and muttered to her, "Nothing to worry about — it's a rare night that he doesn't do this at least once. Whatever it is he's angry about has nothing to do with New Providence Island or 1718."

"God damn you!" shouted Mr. Bird. "I am not a dog! I am not a dog! I am not a dog!"

"I guess someone called him a dog once," Shandy said quietly, "and when he has a few drinks he remembers it."

"Evidently," agreed Beth bleakly. "But John, do you mean to tell me you … I don't know … carry charms so you'll be protected by this Mate Care-For?"

"No," said Shandy, "but I remember firing a pistol at your physician's stomach when he was carrying such a charm, that day Davies took the Carmichael.

"And listen, during the first week we were here, I caught a chicken and cooked it and ate it, and next day I came down with a bad fever. Old Governor Sawney was wandering by, jabbering and swatting invisible flies the way he does, and he saw me sweating and moaning in my tent, and right away he asked me if I'd eaten a chicken with words written on its beak. Well, I had noticed markings on its beak, and I admitted it. 'I thought so,' says the governor. 'That's the chicken I magicked Rouncivel's fever into. Never eat 'em if there's writing on their beaks—you'll get whatever it was someone wanted to get rid of.' And then he got another chicken, and did his tricks, and I was recovered next morning."

"Oh, John," Beth said, "don't tell me you think his tricks cured you!" Shandy shrugged, a little irritably. "I wouldn't eat that chicken." He decided not even to try to tell her about the man he'd seen down the beach one night. The man's pockets had all been torn open, and he didn't speak because his jaw was bound up in a cloth that was knotted over his head. As he had walked past Shandy, Shandy had noticed that his coat was sewn shut rather than buttoned. There was no point in telling her about it, or what he'd later learned about people who were dressed that way. She dismissed the subject with an impatient wave. "John," she said urgently, "Friend won't let me stay long—can you tell me where it is we're sailing for, tomorrow morning?" Shandy blinked at her. "You're not going, are you?"

"Yes. My father—"

"But are you certain? I'd have thought that, with Woodes Rogers due here any day, the obvious thing for your father to do would be—"

"Yes, John, I'm certain. I saw my father today, the first time I've seen him in a week or so, and of course he was carrying that little wooden box that smells so bad, and he told me I'm going along. He went on and on about how thoroughly I'd be protected from any injuries or ailments—but he wouldn't say a word about where we're going, or why."

"Jesus." Shandy took a deep breath and then let it out. "Well, Davies hasn't said either, but the rumor is that we're headed for a place on the Florida west coast, a place where the huns—uh, where Blackbeard accidentally let a number of ghosts attach themselves to him." He smiled nervously at her. "Something like lamprey eels, I gather; or leeches. And," he added, hoping he was concealing the apprehension he felt, "we'll rendezvous there with Blackbeard himself."

"God help us," she said softly.

And Mate Care-For too, thought Shandy.

With a lot of impressive swishing and spraying of sand and audible grunts of effort, Friend came waddling and arm-swinging over to them. "That's … enough, Elizabeth," he panted. "Dinner awaits us … at the fort." He mopped his forehead with a lacy handkerchief.

Beth Hurwood looked toward the pirates' cooking pots so longingly that Shandy asked, "Dinner?"

"Herbs and greens and black bread," she sighed.

"Plain but wholesome," pronounced Friend. "We have to keep her healthy." He too glanced toward the pots, briefly feigned gagging, then took Beth's arm and led her away. A couple of the people nearby laughed and told Shandy that such things were to be expected, that girls always chose men with good looks over ones that had nothing but honest hearts. Shandy laughed too, if a little forcedly, and said he thought it was more Friend's unfailing cheer and life-of-the-party attitude that did it. He turned down an offer of more stew but accepted another beheaded bottle of Latour, and he plodded away from the fires south along the beach toward the Carmichael.

The ship's bow was still up in the narrow inlet, supported by a stout wooden framework and a last couple of cables moored to trees, and the stern sat very low out in the harbor; but in spite of her present awkward posture she seemed much more like his ship now than she had during the month he'd been a passenger on her. He knew her intimately now—he'd been up scrambling like an ape in the high spars when they rerigged her, he'd swung an axe when they chopped down the forecastle structure and most of the railing, he'd sweated with saw and drill when they opened new ports for more cannon, and, for more hours than he could yet bear to remember, he'd sat in a sling halfway between the gunwale above and the sand or water below, and, foot by foot, chiseled charred seaweed and barnacles off her hull and dug out the teredo worms, and hammered into the wood little brass drogues, carved and chanted over by Davies' bocor to be powerful antiworm charms. And, he thought now as he approached her, tomorrow we tow her the rest of the way into the water, tighten the shrouds, and sail away. And my life as a pirate will commence. He noticed that there was someone sitting in the sand under the high arch of the bow, and after a moment of peering he saw by the moonlight that it was the mad old man the pirates always addressed as "governor"—possibly because of uncertainty about his name, which Shandy had variously heard rendered as Sawney, Gonsey and 'Pon-sea. The scene before Shandy—the old man sitting under ship's bow—reminded him of something that eluded him … but, oddly, he knew it was some picture or story that, by the comparison, lent a sad dignity to old Sawney. It startled Shandy to see the old lunatic, even by analogy, as something more than a sorcerously clever but half-witted clown. Then he remembered what the scene reminded him of: the age-crippled Jason, sitting under the hull of the beached and abandoned Argo.

"Who's that?" the old man quavered when he heard Shandy's boots in the sand.

"Jack Shandy, governor. Just wanted one last look at her in this position."

"Did you bring me a drink?"

"Uh, yes." Shandy paused, took several deep gulps, and then handed the half-full bottle to the old man.

"You sail tomorrow?"

"Right," said Shandy, surprised that the old man knew it and had remembered it.

"To join the hunsi hanzo and his puppy."

Shandy squinted at the old man and wondered if he really was in one of his lucid periods after all.

"His puppy?"

"Bonnett. I seen you playing at the poopets, you know about makin' the little fellows jump when you got the strings on 'em."

"Oh. Yeah." Shandy had heard of the new pirate Stede Bonnett, who'd recently, inexplicably, left behind a prosperous Barbados plantation in order to "go on the account," but he hadn't heard that the man had any connection with Blackbeard; of course old Sawney was hardly a reliable source.

"North, ye be goin', I hear," the governor went on. He paused to gulp some wine. "To Florida." He pronounced it with a strong Spanish accent. "Beautiful name, but fever country. I know the area. I've killed quite a few Carib Indians around there, and took a nasty arrow wound from 'em once. You want to watch out for 'em—they're the meanest. Cannibals. They keep pens of women and children from other tribes … the way we'd keep pens of cattle."

Shandy didn't believe this, but to be polite he whistled and shook his head. "Damnation," he said. "I'll steer clear of 'em."

"See you do … until you get to that damned geyser, anyway. After that, if you know how to handle it, you got nothing to worry about."

"That's what I want," agreed Shandy. "Nothing to worry about." The governor chuckled and replied in Spanish, but though Shandy was learning the crude Spanish of the mongrel pirates, the governor's dialect foiled him. It seemed at once too archaic and too pure. The old man finished, though, with an obscene suggestion, in all-too-fluent English, of what capabilities Blackbeard hoped to acquire by this trip.

Shandy laughed weakly, bade the old man farewell, and walked back the way he had come. After a couple of dozen paces he crested a sand dune, and he stopped and looked back at the ship. She was slightly heeled toward him, and he could see most of the quarterdeck and an end-on edge of the poop deck out over the water to his left. He tried to determine where Chaworth had died, and where he had stabbed Davies, and where he and Beth had stood when they'd tossed maggotty biscuits to that sea gull. He noticed that the section of rail they'd leaned on was cut away now, and it bothered him a little that he couldn't remember whether or not that was a section he'd cut down himself. He tried to imagine what other sorts of events might eventually take place on that deck, and after a moment he was startled to realize that he instinctively imagined himself as being present during them. But that's wrong, he told himself with a nervous smile. Beth and I will be jumping ship at the first opportunity. This ship will go on without me, in spite of all the sweat of mine—and blood, sometimes, when a chisel would slip—that's soaked into her wood. I've got an uncle who needs hanging.

He turned back toward the fires and started walking again, and it occurred to him that he wasn't far from the spot where he'd seen the man with the torn pockets and the bound-up jaw; and the memory of it made him walk a little faster, not because the man had looked threatening, but because of what Davies had said when Shandy told him about it.

Davies had spat and shaken his head in annoyance. "That'll be Duplessis, from Thatch's last stop here. Thatch never takes time to do the little things right anymore. Duplessis was a bocor, and he bought a lot of loas, and that creates a debt even death can't free you from. I guess Thatch buried him without all the proper restraints."

Shandy had stared. "Buried him?"

Davies grinned at him, and in a contemptuously faked upper-class accent quoted the punch line of the old joke: "Had to—dead, you know." Resuming his normal tone, he went on, "At least Thatch didn't bury him with his boots on. Ghosts like to wander onto the boats, and if they're shod, you can't sleep for them clumping about all night."

When Shandy got back to the fires, most of the pirates had either wandered off to the huts or had settled down with bottles for serious, laconic, all-night drinking; Shandy decided that he had drunk enough to be able to sleep, and he started for the planks-and-sailcloth lean-to he'd built for himself up under the trees. He walked up the sand slope, but halted when, from ahead, a voice as deep as an organ at the bottom of a mine shaft called quietly to him to stop. Shandy peered, trying to see by the shifting, dappled moonlight under the palm trees, and finally made out a giant black figure seated cross-legged in an outlined and carefully cleared circle in the sand.

"Don't enter the circle," the figure said to him without looking around, and Shandy belatedly recognized Woefully Fat, Davies' bocor. The man was supposed to be deaf, so Shandy just nodded — realizing as he did that it was of even less use than speaking, since the man was looking away—and shuffled back a step or two.

Woefully Fat didn't look around. He was digging at the air with the wooden knife he always carried, and he seemed to be having trouble moving it through the air. "Raasclaat," he swore softly, then rumbled, "Ah cain't quite get the faastie bastards to behave. Been reasonin' with 'em all naht." The bocor had been raised in Virginia, and, being deaf, had never lost that accent.

"Uh … ," Shandy said uncertainly, looking around and trying to remember the nearest alternate route up the slope, for Woefully Fat had this way blocked, "uh, why don't I … " The bocor's arm came up suddenly, pointing the wooden knife at the sky. Shandy automatically looked up, and between the shaggy blacknesses of two palms he saw a brief shooting star, like a line of luminous chalk on a distant slate. Thirty seconds later the wind stopped … then resumed, a little more strongly. ' Woefully Fat lowered his arm and stood up—lithely, in spite of his awesome bulk. He turned and gave Shandy an unreassuring smile and stood aside. "Go ahead," he said. " 'Tain't nothin' now but a line drawed in the sand."

" … Thanks." Shandy edged past the giant, skipped quickly over the circle and walked on. He heard Woefully Fat striding away toward the beach; the huge bocor chuckled and, in his low but eerily carrying voice, said, "C'etait impossible de savoir ci c'etait le froid ou la faim." Then, chuckling again, he receded out of Shandy's hearing.

Shandy paused, and for several minutes stared after the man restlessly, as if he might follow; then he glanced uneasily up at the stars, and picked his way silently to his lean-to, glad that he'd set it up under a particularly thick ceiling of greenery.

Chapter Six

Davies might not have slept—when dawn was still just a dim blue glow behind the palms on Hog Island he flung someone's old cape over the dusty white coals of one of last night's fires, and as the garment ballooned up, began smoldering and then erupted in flame, he strode around shouting, pulling the hair and beards of sleepers and kicking support poles out from under makeshift tents. The groaning pirates struggled up and shambled to the fire, many of them dragging pieces of their soon to be abandoned tents and shacks to throw onto the revived flames, and Davies gave them time to heat a pot of rum-and-ale, and swallow enough of the pungent restorative to ready them for work, before he got them trooping down the beach to where the Carmichael sat.

For an hour they strung up and hauled on—then took down and rearranged—various complicated webs of blocks and line, and swore terrible oaths, and fell into the water, and wept with rage … but when the sun was up the ship was in the water, and Davies was striding back and forth on the poop deck, calling directions to the sail-handlers and the men on the sloop Jenny, which was towing the ship. For another hour the Carmichael slowly zigzagged along the deepest channels of the harbor, working under minimum sail and frequently stopping altogether while Davies and Hodge, who was captaining the Jenny, shouted at each other, and the early rising members of the crews of other vessels stood on the beach and called rude suggestions across the brightening water; but eventually the ship was in the north mouth of the harbor, and then past it and into the deeper water that edged the Northeast Providence Channel, and Davies ordered all canvas spread, even the studdingsails that flanked the mainsails, and all three of the triangular jibs along the bowsprit. The tow cable was released, and both vessels picked up speed; their sails bright in the morning sun, they slanted away to the northwest.

Davies had claimed that the principles of sailing were better learned on a boat than on a ship, so Shandy was helping to crew the Jenny. After having become so familiar with the Carmichael, the Jenny with her single mast and fore-and-aft sails seemed like little more than a turtle boat to him; but she did carry fourteen small cannon and twelve swivel guns, and when they had crowded on sail after releasing the tow cable, he could feel through the soles of his bare feet that she was potentially a much faster vessel.

The Carmichael took the lead, though, and Shandy, who'd been told to stand idle and stay out of everybody's way until they were comfortably out at sea, crouched on the hardly table-sized forecastle deck and watched the ship surge along majestically a couple of hundred yards ahead, and he wondered what spot Beth had found to stay out of the way in, now that the ship had been so ruthlessly streamlined.

"Here y'go, Jack," said Skank, handing Shandy a wooden cup full of rum before lurching back to help trim the jib sheet. "Any more and I pitch over the side."

"Thanks," said Shandy, accepting it cautiously and wondering if these people were ever completely sober. He looked back over the port quarter and watched the jagged green and purple pile that was New Providence Island recede away behind them on the crystal! blue face of the sea. It occurred to him that in some ways he would miss the place.

Skank ambled back up to the forecastle and leaned on one of the swivel gun posts. "Yeah," he said, as if agreeing to something Shandy had said, "we may never go back there again. Next year it'll be harder to sell our take, 'cause there won't be the usual agreed-on place for the rich island merchants to send their buyers to."

Shandy sipped the rum. "Rich merchants deal with pirates?"

"Well, sure—how do you think they got rich? And stay it? Of course they generally didn't come over in person—they'd send their foremen and trusted fellows like that to arrange the buys. Sometimes for big money deals we'd even deliver the stuff; lots of moonless nights I've hauled a heavy-loaded boat with muffled oars into some nowhere cove in Jamaica or Haiti or Barbados. The whole thing makes sense for everybody, of course; we can sell goods to 'em tremendous cheap, since we didn't pay for 'em atall."

Not for quite everybody, Shandy thought. "These merchants you sell to—do they know the stuff's stolen?"

"Oh, sure, Jack, how could they not? In fact, some can even afford to bribe the Royal Navy shore patrols to be lookin' somewhere else when we ferry it in. And Thatch himself set up most of our contacts with the really rich ones: Bonnet on Barbados—of course he's turned pirate himself now, I can't quite understand that—and Lapin and Shander-knack on Haiti, and—"

"Who on Haiti?" Shandy took hold of a taut shroud to steady himself, and he had to consciously keep from dropping the cup.

"Lapin—that means rabbit, they say, kind of fits the man, actually—and Shander-knack or however Frenchies pronounce it really." Skank frowned drunkenly. "Your real name is something like that, ain't it?"

"A little like it." Shandy took a deep breath and let it out. "Does this … Shander-knack character have a lot of dealings with y—with us?"

"Oh, aye, he's a speculator. Thatch does love comin' across a speculator. That sort is always just about to get rich, you know, but somehow if you come back in a year they're still just about to. When they have money they can't wait to give it to us, and when they don't have it they want credit—and with rich citizens Thatch is happy to give it to 'em."

"Must be a hard sort of debt to enforce, though," Shandy mused. Skank gave him a pitying smile, pushed away from the swivel gun post and ambled back aft. Shandy stayed on the forecastle, and a smile slowly deepened the lines in his dark face, and his eyes narrowed in anticipation of the day when he'd be able to use this new bit of information against his uncle. He was glad the pirates were only going to an uninhabited section of the Florida coast, and not aiming at some fray, for it would be unthinkable for him to be killed before dealing with his father's brother.

As soon as they had got north of the Bahama shoals and were into the deep blue water of the Providence Channel, Shandy was summoned aft by Hodge, the Jenny's lean, grinning skipper, and told that he would now begin to earn his keep … and for the next five hours Shandy was kept exhaustingly busy. He learned to hoist the peak of the gaff-spar until a few wrinkles were visible in the mainsail, running parallel to the spar, and not just so that the sail was smooth, as looked to him to be more correct; he had already grasped the baffling fact that sheets and shrouds were ropes, not sails, but now he learned some of the tricks of using the sheets to oppose the sails most profitably against the wind, and, the Jenny being so much more nimble than the Carmichael that Hodge decided to let the new recruit get a taste of maneuvering tactics, he learned the principles of tacking into the wind, and when to let a shift in the headwind be a cue to tack; he learned to glance up at the wooden hoops that held the mainsail to the mast, and to know by their trembling when the boat should bear slightly away from the wind for maximum speed.

As if to help out with Shandy's education, the cauliflower bump of a cumulo-nimbus cloud appeared on the eastern horizon, and though it must have been many miles away, Hodge got everyone busy preparing for a storm, "taking in the laundry," as Hodge referred to reefing the sails, and getting a white-haired old bocor up on deck to whistle a Dahomey wind-quelling tune, and restringing some of the shrouds so that loose sheets or likely-to-break spars wouldn't foul them. The squall crawled blackly across the cobalt blue of the sky and was on them within an hour of its first sighting—Shandy, who'd never had occasion to pay particular attention to the weather, was awed by its speed—and even just under the minimum working canvas the boat heeled when the wind buffeted her.

Hard-driving rain followed a minute later, giving the waves a steamy, blurred look and making a gray silhouette of the Carmichael. Hodge ordered all shrouds loosened against the inevitable shrinking, and Shandy was surprised that the skipper didn't seem at all dismayed by the storm.

"This anything serious?" he called nervously to Hodge. "This?" replied Hodge, shouting against the drumming of the rain on the deck. "Nah. Just enough to dry your clothes. Now if the rain had come first, we might be in some trouble."

Shandy nodded and went back up to the forecastle. The rain wasn't uncomfortably cold, and, as Hodge had pointed out, it would be pleasant to have the salt washed out of his clothes so that tomorrow they would—for once—dry out completely. The first fury of the downpour had abated, and the Carmichael was again clearly visible ahead. Chandagnac knew that in a few hours he'd be crawling below, still in his sopping wet clothes, to find a corner to sleep in, and he hoped Beth Hurwood was finding more comfortable accommodations aboard the ship. He leaned back and let his aching muscles relax for the next task Hodge would set for him.

The next day's leisure moments were spent in gunnery practice, and Shandy, always good at things demanding dexterity, was soon an expert at the tricky craft of aiming a swivel gun and touching a slow match to the vent without either jiggling the long barrel out of line or scorching out an eye when the powder charge went off. When he'd rapidly blown to splinters six in a row of the empty crates that the men aboard the Carmichael were dropping overboard for targets, Hodge had Shandy switch from pupil to instructor, and by dusk every man on the boat was at least a somewhat better marksman than he had been that morning.

On the third day they did more maneuvering practice, and in the afternoon Shandy was allowed to take the tiller and give the commands, and in a period of twenty minutes he piloted the sloop in a long but complete circle around the Carmichael. Emergency drills followed, and when they were practicing battle tactics Davies helpfully fired a couple of the Carmichael's cannons into the water near them to make it seem more realistic.

Shandy was proud of the way he could scramble around on the decks and in the rigging now, and of the fact that—though many of the pirates protested against these energetic activities—he was only pleasantly tired when the lowering, ambering sun began to bounce needles of gold glare off the waves ahead; but his pleasure in his seamanship evaporated when Davies, yelling across the water, told them that too much time had been lost last night when they had laid to, and that tonight they would keep sailing straight through to dawn.

Shandy was assigned the midnight-to-four watch, and the first thing he learned when he crawled up onto the deck was that night sailing was wet and cold. The dew was heavy, and made even the rough deck planks slick, and every length of rigging he grabbed on the way aft spilled chilly water down his sleeve. Hodge was sitting behind the bittacle-pillar, his humorous, angular face weirdly lit from below by the red-glassed bittacle lamp that let him watch the compass without being dazzled; to Shandy's relief, the jobs the skipper gave him were easy and infrequent: periodically take a lantern and check certain recalcitrant sections of the rigging, keep watch ahead against the long chance that another vessel might be somewhere nearby on the vast face of the sea tonight, and make sure the lamp on the bow stayed lit and kept casting the dim glow that prevented the Carmichael's night helmsman from either crowding the sloop or bearing too far off.

The Carmichael was a flapping, creaking tower of darkness on the starboard side, but sometimes Shandy stood by the port rail and stared out across the miles of moonlit ocean, sleepily wondering if he didn't see heads and upraised, beckoning arms in the farther middle distance, and faintly hear choirs singing an eternal two-toned song as old as the tides.

At four Hodge gave him a cup of rum warmed over the bittacle lamp, told him who to rouse and send up for a replacement, and then sent him below to sleep for as long as he could. It was at about noon of the next day, Tuesday the twenty-sixth of June, just as the two vessels encountered the north-flowing Gulf Stream between the Bimini Islands and Florida, that the Royal Navy man-of-war found them.

When it was first sighted, a white fleck on the southern horizon, it had seemed to be a merchant ship of about the Carmichael's size, and several of the pirates half-heartedly proposed taking it instead of going to Florida; then a few minutes later the man in the bow with the telescope shouted, excitedly, the news that it was a British Navy vessel.

In the first few minutes after this discovery there was tension but no panic, for the Carmichael had been altered for maximum speed and the Jenny could easily tack back to the Bimini shoals, where the water in many areas was twelve feet deep or less—the Jenny only drew eight feet of water, and could skate safely over shoals the man-of-war wouldn't dare approach.

But the Carmichael surged steadily along on her southwest course, her sails bright and unshifting in the tropical sunlight, and Hodge didn't call to have the Jenny come about.

"Why do we wait, cap'n?" queried one bare-chested, white-bearded giant. "We might not be able to lose 'em if they get too close."

Shandy was crouched on the starboard rail beside the horizontal bar—which was called, for some reason, the cathead—that supported the hoisted anchor, and he looked expectantly at Hodge. Shandy thought he saw a new pallor under the man's tan, but the captain swore foully and shook his head.

"We'd lose a day, at least, outrunning them and sneaking around back onto course, and with Saturday's rain and that damn layover Sunday night we'll already have to work her thefty to get to the rendezvous in Florida by Lammas Eve. No, lads, this is one time the Navy can run. But hell, the Carmichael is at least as well armed as yonder man-o'-war, and we're no fishing boat ourselves, and we've still got Mate Care-For and Legba and Bosu up our sleeves."

The burly old man stared at Hodge in disbelief; then as if explaining something to a child, he pointed at the no longer distant sails and said distinctly, "Henry—it's the bleeding Royal Navy." Hodge turned on him angrily. "And we're in action, Isaac, and I'm the captain here today, and Davies'

quartermaster besides. God's blood, man, do you think . I like these orders? The hunsi kanzo will have us all for zombies if we back off now—but in going on all we risk is death." To Shandy's uneasy surprise the crew found this logic unfortunate but unassailable, and they set hastily about preparing for combat. The lighter sails were reefed and a couple of men were sent aloft with buckets of alum solution to splash onto the sails to keep them from burning, the shrouds were replaced with lengths of chain, the cannons were trundled forward so that their muzzles poked out of the ports, the bocor went to the bow and began chanting and flinging shards of carefully broken mirror toward the British ship, and Shandy was ordered to fill all available buckets with sea water and soak a spare sail and then clump all of it around the powder kegs.

During the last three weeks Shandy had been taking some satisfaction in how well he'd behaved when the Carmichael was originally taken, but now, watching his own hands tremble while dragging another bucket of sea water up over the high gunwale, he realized that his relative coolness on that day had been a result of shock, and, even more than that, of ignorance: for he had hardly grasped the fact that he was truly in trouble before he was out of it. This time, though, the trouble was approaching with torturing slowness, and this time he knew in advance exactly how a man died of a gunshot wound in the head, or a saber chop in the abdomen. This time he was so terrified that he felt drunk—all colors were too vivid, all sounds too loud, he felt suspended halfway between weeping and vomiting, and he had to keep thinking about not wetting his pants.

When he'd got the powder kegs surrounded with full buckets and draped over with wet canvas, he hurried back up to the deck, where he was grabbed, handed a smoldering match-cord, and hustled to the starboard bow swivel gun. "Don't shoot till Hodge says, Jack," snapped the man who'd shoved him at the gun, "and then make it count."

Looking out ahead over the pitted muzzle of his gun, Shandy saw that all three vessels were slanting east, into the wind, the Carmichael and the Jenny more sharply than the man-of-war—which was in three-quarter profile to him now, the beige-and-black checkerboard pattern of her gunports visible along her port side.

I can't fire on a Royal Navy vessel, he thought. But if I refuse to shoot, these men will kill me … as a matter of fact, if I don't do a good job here, the Royal Navy may very well kill me, along with everyone else on the Jenny. My God, there simply isn't an acceptable course of action for me. A white plume of smoke jetted from the Navy ship's side, and a moment later the cannon's hollow drumbeat rolled across the half mile of blue water that separated the vessels, and a moment after that a towering splash bloomed on the sea face to Shandy's left, stood for an instant, and then fell back like an upflung shovelful of diamonds.

"That's past us," called the tension-shrill voice of Hodge. "She's in range—fire!" And, as many soldiers have been surprised to discover, the intensive, exhaustingly repetitive training he had received made obeying the order automatic; he had aimed, touched the match-end to the vent, and stepped back to the next gun before he'd even made up his mind whether or not to obey the order. Well you're in it now, he thought despairingly as he aimed the second gun; you may as well work hard for the side you've cast your lot with.

As he touched the match-cord to the second gun's vent, the csloop's seven starboard cannons all went off at more or less the same instant, and the boat, which he hadn't realized until now was heeled over to starboard, was kicked almost back up to level by the recoil.

Then the Vociferous Carmichael, moving awesomely fast for the bulk of her, swept into the smokeveiled gap between the man-of-war and the Jenny, close enough so that Shandy could clearly recognize the men in her rigging and hear Davies shout, "Fire!" an instant before the Carmichael's starboard guns went off with a sound like close thunder, rendering the man-of-war's sails quite invisible for a moment behind a churning mountain range of white smoke. The Jenny was maintaining her sharp turn to windward, following the Carmichael, and when the cannon smoke was left behind, Shandy was horrified to see the man-of-war, apparently unhurt, pacing the Jenny only a hundred yards away, but when Skank had grabbed him again and flung him onto another swivel gun, and he automatically sighted along the barrel at the bigger vessel, he realized that the man-of-war was not undamaged after all—the safety net over her waist was bouncing and angular with fallen spars, and the checkerboard pattern of the gunports was marred by a half-dozen fresh, ragged holes—and he realized too that the Jenny was moving faster than the Navy ship and would in a minute or so be safely out in front of her. Almost certainly against orders, Davies had driven through and punched the man-of-war to buy the Jenny time to get away.

"Hit a forward gun port!" Skank yelled, and Shandy obediently aimed at one of the gleaming cannon muzzles poking out of the Navy ship's bow and touched his match-cord to the vent. His gun went off with a jolting boom, and squinting through the acrid smoke he was pleased to see dust and splinters fly from the port he'd been aiming at.

"Good!" snarled Skank. "Now hit 'em—" Smoke erupted from the remaining guns in the man-of-war's flank but the roar of the cannon fire was lost in the sudden hammering crash that swept the Jenny, and Shandy was slammed violently away from his gun and flung tumbling into the mass of men behind him. Deafened and stunned, he wound up sprawled across a motionless body, trying to get air into his lungs without choking on all the blood and pieces of tooth in his mouth. Over the ringing in his ears he was aware of shouts of rage and panic, and of a new, sluggish shifting of the deck under him.

Hodge was shouting orders, and Shandy finally rolled over and sat up, coughing and spitting. Fearfully he looked down at his body, and he was profoundly grateful to see all limbs present, unpunctured and apparently unbroken—especially after he looked around at the vessel. Dead and injured men were scattered everywhere, and the luffing sails were torn and spattered with blood, and the weather-darkened wood of mast and gunwales was ploughed up in many places to show the bright, fresh wood underneath. It looked, thought Shandy dazedly, as if God had leaned down from heaven and swiped a sharp-tined rake across the boat a few times.

"Tiller hard to starboard, God damn it," Hodge was yelling. The captain cuffed away some of the blood that was coursing down his forehead. "And somebody grab the mainsail sheet!" A man by the tiller tried spasmodically to obey, but fell helplessly to his knees, blood frothing from a ragged hole in his chest; Skank had desperately clambered over a pile of his ripped-up companions to the sheet … but it was too late. The Jenny, uncontrolled in the moments after the gust of scrap metal and chain shot had lashed into her, had drifted around to the point where her bow pointed directly into the wind, and for at least the next several minutes she would sit dead in the water. Shandy had heard this predicament described as "being in irons," and it occurred to him that in this case the term could hardly be more appropriate.

The tall, graceful edifice of the man-of-war, slanted enough against the wind to maintain headway, now crowded across the sloop's starboard bow, and as the high hull ground up against the Jenny's forecastle, snapping the shroud chains and even breaking the catted anchor, grappling hooks clattered and thudded down onto the smaller vessel's deck, and a harsh voice shouted, "There's a pistol trained on every one of you bastards, so drop all weapons, and when we throw down the rope ladder come up one at a time and slow."

Chapter Seven

Though broken spars swung in the safety net overhead, the man-of-war's deck was intimidatingly clean and neat, the halliards spiral-coiled in perfect circles instead of just lying where they fell, as the Jenny's generally had been, and Shandy tried to keep his head tilted back so as not to drip blood onto the pale, sanded oak. His nose had been bleeding energetically ever since the Navy ship's blast, and the whole left side of his head was beginning to ache, and he decided that the blast must have struck the swivel gun he'd been standing behind, slamming the breech end of it against his head. Along with the ten other relatively unhurt members of the sloop's crew, he stood now in the ship's waist near the spoked barrel of the capstan, trying not to hear the screams and groans of the badly hurt pirates who had been left sprawled on the Jenny's deck.

The Navy sailors who stood by the rails and kept pistols pointed at the captives all wore tight gray jackets, striped breeches and leather caps, and their plain, utilitarian garb made the gaudy, tar-stained finery of the pirates look ridiculous. Glancing nervously at the Navy men, Shandy noticed something in their expressions besides contempt and anger, and he wasn't reassured when he finally identified it: the morbid fascination of looking at men who, though breathing well enough at the moment, would soon be naving their breath stopped forever in the bight of a noose.

Though the Carmichael was already just a distant tower of segmented white far off to the south, the Navy captain had lowered one of the ship's boats, and now, from his vantage point up on the poop deck, the captain peered through his telescope and laughed. "By God, Hendricks was right—one of

'em did fall overboard, and we've got him." He turned and looked down at his prisoners with a hard grin. "It seems," he called, "that one of your fellows just couldn't bear to leave you behind." After a moment of bafflement, Shandy decided it might very well be Beth, taking the chance of being missed in the water for the sake of getting away from the pirates and her insane father. He hoped that was the case, for then both of them would at last have come out the end of this savage interlude, and Davies and Blackbeard and Hurwood and Friend could go to Florida or to Hell, for all the two of them need care.

The thought reminded him that it was high time he stopped staring around, stupidly tonguing the gap where one of his molars had recently been, and told the Navy captain who he was, and how he had come to be aboard the sloop.

He took a deep breath, forced his eyes to focus, and then, holding his arms out placatingly, he stepped away from the huddled, silent pirates—and was promptly nearly killed, for one of the guards fired a pistol at him.

Shandy heard the bang of the shot but felt the concussion in the air as the ball whipped past his ear, and he fell to his knees, still holding up his hands. "Jesus!" he screeched, "don't shoot, I'm not doing anything!"

The captain's attention had been effectively drawn, and he shouted angrily at Shandy, "Damn you, get back among your fellows!"

"They're not my fellows, captain," called Shandy, cautiously standing up and trying to appear calm.

"My name is … is John Chandagnac, and I was a paying passenger aboard the Vociferous Carmichael before it was taken by Philip Davies and his men. During that … encounter, I wounded Davies, and so instead of being allowed to leave on the boat with the crew, I was forced on pain of death to enlist among my captors. Also forced to remain was another passenger, Elizabeth Hurwood, whom I suspect is the person who jumped overboard from the Carmichael just now." Glancing back at his recent companions, Shandy saw not only contempt but real hatred, and he added quickly, "I realize it will take time to verify my story, but I do request that you confine me somewhere separate from the rest of these men … just to make sure I survive to be a witness at the trial of Philip Davies." The captain had moved forward to the poop deck rail and was squinting down at him. "Davies?" He scanned the prisoners around the capstan and then glanced toward the Jenny's mast, visible above the forecastle. "Is he with you? Injured?"

"No," Shandy told him. "He's on the Carmichael." He nodded toward the departing ship.

"Ah," said the captain thoughtfully. "His trial won't be soon then." He blinked and looked again down at Shandy. "A forced man from the Carmichael, are you? You'll be pleased—or maybe not—to know that we can check your story right now. It was only this recentest Friday that we left Kingston, and the Carmichael was taken, as I recall, about a month ago, so our current shipping reports will cover it." He turned to a midshipman standing nearby. "Fetch the reports volume, will you, Mr. Nourse?"

"Aye aye, captain." The young officer hurried down the companion ladder and disappeared below.

"For a forced man, you handled that gun pretty thefty," said Skank, behind Shandy. "Turncoat son of a bitch." Shandy heard him spit.

The blood rushed to Shandy's face as he remembered the day Skank had roughed up Jim Bonny to save Shandy from a—real or imaginary—magical attack, and he wanted to face Skank now and plead with him to remember the circumstances of his recruitment three and a half weeks ago … but after a moment he just said quietly to the nearest armed sailor, "Can I take another step forward?"

"Aye," the sailor said. "Slow."

Shandy did, listening to the pirates behind him moodily arguing about whether he was a treacherous coward or just a pragmatic one. Looking out over the starboard quarter he could see the returning ship's boat, and he squinted against the glitter of sunlight on the wet oars, trying to see if it was indeed Beth Hurwood huddled in the stern.

The captain raised his telescope again and scrutinized the boat. "It's no one named Elizabeth," he said drily.

Damn me, Shandy thought, then she's still with them. Why in hell didn't she think of jumping overboard? Well, it's not my business any longer—it's for people like this fellow, or some other Navy captain, to go and rescue her. I'm for Haiti. And perhaps Friend and her father mean her no harm. He grinned bleakly at the willful naivete of that thought; and then he allowed himself to remember, gingerly and one at a time, the stories he'd heard about Blackbeard—the time the man decided that his crew would benefit from spending some time in "a hell of our own," and so had everyone go below deck, where he gleefully lit a number of pots of brimstone, and at pistol point prevented anyone from leaving before half the crew was unconscious and in real danger of suffocation, and even then Blackbeard himself had been the last to emerge into the fresh air … though it was regarded as just another of his barbaric whims at the time, the ritualistic nature of the event was noted later, and one drunkenly indiscreet bocor had hinted that it had been a necessary renewal of Blackbeard's hunsi kanzo status, and not entirely successful because none of the crew had actually died of it; and Shandy recalled his rumored dealings with the genuinely dreaded loa known as Baron Samedi, whose domain is the graveyard and whose secret drogue is low-smoldering fire, which was why Blackbeard always braided lit slow matches into his hair and massive beard before going into any risky encounter; and he had heard of the superficially insane but sorcerously explainable uses to which the legendary pirate put any unfortunate woman that he could get linked to himself in wedlock … and Shandy thought of Beth's futile courage, and the innately cheerful nature she'd only been able to indulge for half an hour on the Carmichael's poop deck three and a half weeks ago. Midshipman Nourse reappeared from below with a bound journal or log and clambered up the companion ladder to where the captain stood.

"Thank you," said the captain, taking the volume from him and tucking the telescope under his arm. He leafed through the pages for a couple of minutes and then looked down at Shandy with somewhat less sternness in his craggy face. "They do mention a John Chandagnac who was forced to join." He flipped to another page. "You boarded the Carmichael when and where?"

"On the morning of the third of June, at the Batsford Company Dock in Bristol."

"And … let's see … what ship sailed with you through the St. George Channel?"

"The Mershon. They turned north past Mizen Head, bound for Galway and the Aran Islands." For a moment the captain lowered the book and stared at Shandy in reappraisal. "Hm … " He turned to the page he'd been reading before. "Yes, and the Carmichael survivors mention the attack by Chandagnac upon Davies … quite a brave thing that seems to have been … "

"Hah," said Skank scornfully. "Took him by surprise. Davies wasn't even looking."

"Thank you, young man," the captain said to Skank with a frosty smile. "You've effectively confirmed this man's claim. Mr. Chandagnac, you may step away from those brigands and come up here."

Shandy sighed and relaxed, and realized that he'd been tense for weeks without being aware of it, living among people for whom savage violence was a casual thing. He crossed to the companion ladder and climbed up to the higher deck. The officers standing there made room, staring at him curiously.

"Here," said the captain, handing him the telescope. "See if you can identify our swimmer." Shandy glanced down at the boat that was rocking closer on the blue water, and he didn't even have to look through the glass. "It's Davies," he said quietly.

The captain turned to the young midshipman again. "Keep those men where they are, Mr. Nourse," he said, pointing to the dispirited rabble around the capstan, "but have Davies brought to me in the great cabin. Mr. Chandagnac, I'll want you present, too, to witness Davies' statement." Oh God, thought Shandy. "Very well, captain."

The captain started toward the ladder, then paused. "It will be a few minutes before the prisoner is brought aboard, Mr. Chandagnac. The purser could give you some clothes from the slop chest, if you'd like to get out of that … costume."

"Thank you, captain, I'd like that." Standing among all these officers, with their sober blue uniforms and brass buttons and epaulettes, Chandagnac had begun to feel like a clown in his red breeches and gold-worked belt—though such dress hadn't been at all inappropriate on New Providence Island. Behind and below him he heard Skank's disgusted snicker.

A little later, feeling much more civilized in a blue-checked shirt, canvas breeches, gray woolen stockings and a pair of shoes, Shandy sat at one end of a long table in the great cabin and stared out the stern window—it was too hig to be called a port or scuttle—the bull's-eye leaded glass pane of which had been propped open to let the breeze into the cabin. For the first time, he wondered what he'd do after prosecuting his uncle. Go back to England and get another position as an accountant?

He shook his head doubtfully. England seemed chilly and far away.

Then, and the thought soothed a guilt-cramp that had been troubling his mind ever since the swimmer had been identified as Davies, Shandy knew what he would do: he'd work hard to get his uncle arrested, convicted and imprisoned as soon as possible, and then he'd use the — surely considerable — amount of money that would justly accrue to him to rescue Beth Hurwood. He ought to be able to hire a boat, a Caribbean-tempered captain and a tough, bounty-hungry crew …

He heard boots clumping beyond the bulkhead, and then the door opened and two officers led Philip Davies into the cabin. The pirate chief's arms were bound behind his back and the left side of his seawet shirt was glisteningly blotted with blood from the shoulder to the waist, and his face, half-hidden by tangled wet hair, was paler and more drawn than usual—but he grinned as he maneuvered himself into a chair, and when he noticed Shandy he winked at him. "Restored to the shop window, eh?"

"That's right," Shandy said evenly.

"No chips? Paint still bright?"

Shandy didn't answer. The two officers sat down on either side of Davies. The door opened again and the captain and Midshipman Nourse walked in. Nourse had pen, inkwell and paper, and sat down beside Shandy, while the captain ponderously sat down across the table from Davies. Each Navy man wore, evidently as part of the uniform, a sword and pistol.

"Let the record show, Mr. Nourse," said the captain, "that on Tuesday the twenty-sixth of June, 1718, we pulled from the sea the pirate captain Philip Davies, who had fallen overboard from the hijacked ship Vociferous Carmichael as a result of having been shot in the back by one of his confederates."

"Just the shoulder," Davies remarked to Shandy. "I think it was that fat boy, Friend."

"Why would Friend shoot you?" asked Shandy in surprise.

"The Jenny," said Davies, some strain beginning to rasp his voice, "was escorting the Carmichael only to … draw fire … occupy any hostiles so that the Carmichael would be able to carry on unimpeded. Hodge knew that. But I thought that if the Carmichael came around again and belted these Navy bastards one more time, we could all get away. Friend was mad as hell even when I cut in the first time to give the Jenny a few extra moments to run, and I guess he disagreed … strongly … with the idea of going back again. It's true I'd have been disobeying orders … and so just when I started to speak the command, I was shot right off the port ratlines." He started to laugh, but winced and had to make do with a jerky grin. "And I had Mate Care-For holding my hand! I expect … the ball would have split my spine, else." Sweat slicked his pain-lined face. Shandy shook his head unhappily.

"Such is honor among thieves," said the captain. "Philip Davies, you will be conveyed to Kingston to stand trial for a considerable number of offenses, perhaps the most recent of which is the murder of Arthur Chaworth, the rightful captain of the Vociferous Carmichael." The captain cleared his throat.

"Do you wish to make any statement?"

Davies was hunched forward, and he looked up at the captain with a skull-like grin. "Wilson, isn't it?" he said hoarsely. "Sam Wilson, right? I recognize you. What, now? A statement? Like for in court?" He squinted speculatively at the captain. "No, thank you, Sam. But tell me … " He seemed to brace himself, then spoke quickly, "Is it by any chance true what Panda Beecher once told me about you?" Captain Wilson's mouth pinched whitely shut, he glanced rapidly at the other officers in the room, and then in almost a single motion he got to his feet, drew his pistol, cocked it and raised it. Shandy had leaped to his feet in the same instant and lunged across the table to knock the gun out of line just as the captain pulled the trigger.

The loud bang set Shandy's abused ears ringing, but he heard the captain shout, "God damn you, Chandagnac, I could have you arrested for that! Nourse, give me your pistol!" Shandy darted a glance at Davies, who seemed tense but not uncheerful, then at Nourse. The young midshipman was shaking his head in horror.

"It's murder if you just shoot him, Captain," Nourse protested shrilly. "He has to stand trial! If we—" Captain Wilson swore furiously and, as Nourse and Shandy both shouted at him to stop, he leaned across the table, snatched the pistol from the belt of one of Davies' guards, then stepped back out of everyone's reach and raised the pistol—

—Davies was smiling derisively at him—

—And, dizzy with fear even as he did it, Shandy reached down, drew Nourse's pistol and fired it at the captain.

The two explosions were almost simultaneous, but while Captain Wilson's shot missed Davies and tore a hole in the arm of the officer at Davies' right, Shandy's shot punched straight through Captain Wilson's throat and sent the man's spouting body rebounding from the far bulkhead to tumble noisily to the deck.

The ringing in Shandy's ears seemed to be outside him, the sound of a second stretched out twanging taut. He turned his head, with difficulty in the tension-thickened air, and saw raw astonishment on the faces of the other four men in the room. By far the most astonished was Davies.

"Leaping Jesus, boy," he cried, consternation having replaced his cheer, "do you know what you've done?"

"Saved your life—I guess," gasped Shandy. He didn't seem to be able to take a deep breath. "How do we get out of here?"

The arm-shot officer had pushed his chair back and was trying to reach his pistol with his good hand. Shandy stepped forward and almost absent-mindedly struck him just above the ear with the gun he'd used to kill the captain; and as the man slumped sideways, half off of his chair, Shandy dropped his own spent pistol and quickly took the unfired one from the man's belt, and then with his other hand drew his sword, too. Straightening as the man rolled off the chair and thudded and clopped to the deck, Shandy crossed to the door and with two free fingers of his sword-gripping hand he slid the bolt into the locked position.

"You two," Shandy said to Nourse and the officer whose pistol Captain Wilson had taken, "lay your swords on the table and stand by the stern bulkhead. Davies, get up and turn around." Davies did, though the effort narrowed his eyes and bared his teeth. Keeping the pistol aimed at the two officers, Shandy worked the saber's point in under one loop of Davies' bindings, and thrust. Davies staggered, but the sawing edge cut the rope, and Davies shook free of it just as someone began pounding on the door.

"Is all well, Captain?" someone outside shouted. "Who's been shot?" Shandy looked at Nourse over the pistol's muzzle. "Tell 'em … tell 'em Davies knocked the captain unconscious, and then was slain by your officers," he said softly. "Tell him to fetch the ship's surgeon."

Nourse repeated the message loudly, the quaver in his voice lending a nice touch of sincerity. Davies held up a hand. "And the captured pirates," he whispered, "should be moved away—forward, up by the forecastle."

Nourse relayed this order too, and the man outside acknowledged it and hurried away.

"Now," Shandy repeated desperately, "how do we get out of here?" He glanced out the window at the sea, tempted simply to vault out and swim. The poor old Jenny seemed hopelessly far away. Some color had come back to Davies' lean face, and he was grinning again. "Why the surgeon?" Shandy shrugged. "Wouldn't it have sounded implausible otherwise?"

"Might have, at that." He ran his good hand through his damp gray hair. "Well! Unless the Navy's changed since my day, the powder magazine is two or three decks directly below us." He turned to Nourse. "Is that right?"

"I'll answer no such questions," said Nourse, trembling.

Davies picked up one of the swords from the table, walked over to Nourse and gave him a light poke in the belly with the point of it. "You'll take me there or I'll work you ill. I'm Davies," he reminded him.

Nourse had clearly heard stories about him, for the stiffness slumped out of his shoulders and he muttered, "Very well … if you give me your word you'll not harm me, or the ship." Davies stared at him. "You have my solemn word," he said softly. Then he turned to Shandy.

"Through that door's the captain's bunk. Get blankets and wrap up old Wilson in 'em, along with that sword you've got and the other two and any primed pistols you can find. Then you and this laddie," he nodded toward the officer who was still conscious, "will carry the bundle forward to where the Jenny's boys are. Say it's my corpse. Everybody got that? Good. Now when the powder magazine goes up—and it should really go, I've been saving a couple of potent fire-sprite rhymes, and I won't lack for blood to draw their attention—when it explodes I'll appear from the forward hatch, with weapons, Mate Care-For willing, and you'll flip open the captain's blankets for a weapon or three more, and we'll fight our way to the sloop and cut out. And if I don't appear right after the explosion, don't hang around waiting for me."

Nourse was gaping at Davies. "You—" he sputtered, "you gave me your word!" Davies laughed. "You see what it's worth. But listen, you'll lead me to the magazine or I'll cut off your ears and make you eat them. I've done that before to people who be troublesome." Nourse looked away, and again Shandy got the impression that the midshipman was remembering some awful story about Davies. How can it be, Shandy wondered in horror, that I'm on this monster's side?

A couple of minutes later they decided they were all ready to go—Shandy and the unhappy officer had the dead captain and the swords and a set of fancy dueling pistols rolled up in a portable position that would allow Shandy to keep his pistol both concealed by a flap of fabric and aimed at the officer, and Davies had struggled into the unconscious officer's bloody-sleeved jacket—when someone knocked on the cabin door.

Shandy jumped in surprise and nearly dropped his pistol.

"It's the surgeon," hissed Davies tensely. He crossed the cabin and leaned on the bulkhead beyond the door's hinges, then beckoned to Nourse with his sword point. "Let him in." Nourse was trembling even more than Shandy, and he rolled his eyes miserably as he unbolted the door and drew it open. "We carried the captain to his bunk," he stammered as the surgeon bustled in. As neatly as if it were a dance move they'd been practicing, Davies stepped out and punched the old surgeon in the head with the knuckle-guard of his sword, and Nourse caught the man as he fell.

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

Chapter Eight

No more than a minute later Shandy and the trembling officer were dragging the blanket-wrapped corpse and swords across the deck. The long bundle had proved to be too heavy and awkward to carry — especially if Shandy was to keep his concealed pistol aimed at the officer, who had the feet-end of the burden—and so they'd had to simply drag it in this awkward, crouching, torturingly slow way. Shandy was sweating heavily, and not just because of the hot tropical sun that beat down on his head and glared on the white deck—he was as acutely aware of each armed sailor as he would have been of a scorpion clinging to his clothing, and he tried to keep his mind on the task of lugging the unwieldy bundle to the forecastle, and not imagine what would happen when the powder magazine exploded, or when the sailors caught on and opened fire on them, or when it occurred to the whitelipped officer at the other end of the blanket that when pandemonium erupted he'd be caught squarely in the crossfire.

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

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

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

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

Some of the Navy sailors, mostly younger ones, snickered at this bit of superstition. A long, scuffling minute later—just as they were hobbling past the forward hatch cover—Shandy actually saw his unwilling companion finally work out what would happen in the next couple of minutes.

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

"It's a trick!" he was yelling. "Davies is below rigging a fuse to the magazine!" Shandy breathed a sigh of what was almost relief, for at least the tight, silent suspense was over. Quickly but carefully he crouched, flipped the blanket open and rolled Captain Wilson's body flopthudding onto the deck, kicked the weapons back onto the cloth, bundled it all up like a sack … then paused for an instant, looking around.

Only one of the surrounding Navy men had grasped the situation and was leveling a pistol at him. Shandy fired at him without aiming—missing, but spoiling the man's aim so that the ball splintered the rail behind Shandy—and then, waving the bundle of weapons around his head, he ran headlong for the forecastle.

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

Sounding like quick strokes of a hammer, two pistol balls punched the bulkhead he'd been in front of. One foot touched a ladder rung and then he was up on the forecastle, wrenching open the duelingpistols case. "Onto the Jenny!" he gasped, snatching the two pistols out of the velvet-lined case and turning back toward the waist.

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

Then masts started coming down, first with a snapping of lines, which, though loud as pistol shots, could scarcely be heard over the continuing roar of the explosion, then with a ponderous rushing through the smoky air, finally culminating in the twangy yielding of the safety nets and the bonejarring crash as the timbers hit the deck. The deck Shandy crouched on wasn't level anymore—it was tilted down toward the stern, and even as he noticed it, the tilt became more pronounced. He scrabbled around, dropping both pistols, and on his hands and knees crawled up the slanting forecastle deck to the port rail and grabbed one of the stanchions.

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

Someone was shaking his arm, and when he looked up he saw that it was Davies, his Navy jacket hacked to tatters, straddling the rail and shouting at him. Shandy couldn't make out the words, but it was clear that Davies wanted him to follow him, so Shandy scrambled up onto the rail. In the choppy water below rocked the Jenny, freed of all but one of the lines mooring her to the stricken man-of-war, and even as he noticed it he saw one of the pirates chop the last line through with a saber and then jump from the ship's up-tilted bow to the water thirty feet below.

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

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

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

"Hold her steady as she is … while we inventory," called Davies wearily, leaning by the stern. He was pale under his tan, and didn't seem to have the strength to push away from the rail. Skank secured the jib sheet around a belaying pin and then leaned on the gunwale to catch his breath.

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

Davies laughed weakly and waved at Shandy, who was crouched on the stern rail and shivering, more from shock than because of his wet clothes. "Our boy Shandy got the captain's confidence with his song-and-dance about being a forced man—and then, first chance he got, Shandy shot him." In the stunned silence that followed this pronouncement, Shandy turned away, looking back at the tangled litter visible on the distant blue-green wave faces whenever the swell raised the Jenny's stern. Skank, his weariness forgotten, scrambled over the corpses and fouled rigging to the stern. "Really?" he asked, his voice hoarse with awe. "All that I'm-not-one-of-these talk you gave him was just play- acting?"

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

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

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

"Damn," Skank muttered, shaking his head. "You're good." Davies was squinting at Shandy, and he laughed softly. "Yes," he said, "You're a good actor, Jack." Davies blinked and swayed, paler than before, then shook his head sharply. "Did Hodge's old bocor survive?"

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

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

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

"Don't know. They claim it keeps their gums red, but all old bocors have white gums anyway." Davies took a deep breath, then slapped him on the back. "There's rum forward—I need some to wake up Mate Care-For so he'll get busy on my shoulder wound, and I'll bet you won't turn down a gulp or two."

"No," Shandy said fervently.

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

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

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

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

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

"Well, Phil," the man said, a bit baffled by this speech, "laziness is what I do best." Davies dismissed him with a wave. "Then obey orders—stick with me and you'll eat and drink your fill, or be dead and not care." He pulled Shandy along toward the nodding bow, and when they got there he fumbled under a pile of canvas, and, with a glad cry, produced a bottle. He pulled out the cork with his teeth and handed the bottle to Shandy.

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

"Now tell me," said Davies after swigging quite a bit of it himself, "why did you shoot Wilson?" Shandy spread his hands. "He was going to kill you. Like that midshipman said, it would have been murder."

Davies peered intently at him. "Really? That was the entire reason?" Shandy nodded. "Yes, God help me."

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

Shandy sighed hopelessly. "Yes."

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

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

"Hm?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Preferred it, let's say. To a trial and eventual noose. Yes." He shook his head again, clearly still astounded by Shandy's action. "Just because it would have been murder?" Shandy waved back at the other men in the boat. "Any of them would have done the same."

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

"I beg your pardon?"

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

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

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

Shandy scowled in concentration. "No."

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