On Stranger Tides (28 page)

The sailors had carried and shoved their wide-beamed boat out into the surf. “Don't bring him back,” Davies shouted to them. “Take him on to the
Jenny
!”

“Aye aye, Phil;” yelled back one of the laboring rowers.

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

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

“Good. Go.”

SHANDY HAD no sooner run back uphill to the crowd around the smoking charcoal piles than Woefully Fat grabbed him by the upper arm. The
bocor's
brown eyes glared at him out of the broad black face. “You damn slow, boy,” the man said. “I thought you'd fix things upriver. Too late now for it to be any kind of easy—now you got to kill him an' burn him ashore.”

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

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

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

“Di'n't wait five years for you so you could be a puppet o' his, and die just to provide more blood an' make his death scene look more convincin'.”

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

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

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

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

“Where?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hoist anchor!” Davies shouted. “And tiller hard to starboard!”

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

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

“There are ...others ...” the old man said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Obviously.”

“So do we just continue?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For a full minute neither of them spoke, then Shandy glanced to starboard at the Spanish galleon. “Uh ...Phil? Didn't you say we're faster than that Spaniard?”

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

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

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

“Aye aye, Phil,” said the mystified Shandy, hurrying forward.

He assigned so many jobs so quickly that one man who had been furtively smoking a pipe—forbidden aboard ship—managed in the confusion to ignite a puddle of Mr. Bird's rum and set half the bow ablaze; greasy hair and tarry clothes sprang into flame and a dozen suddenly burning men, hooting in alarm, went rolling and diving over the rail.

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

“When I said to keep them busy,” Davies began, “I didn't mean ...”

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

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