On Stranger Tides (33 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Good day, Colonel Rhett,” he said.

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

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

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

“Don't worry,” said Rhett.

WHEN THE faint pink of dawn behind the shoulder of Ocracoke Island became bright enough to resolve the dim blur of the inlet mouth, Blackbeard chuckled softly to see the sails of the two Navy sloops still anchored where they had been at dusk. The giant pirate upended the last bottle of rum, and when it was empty he waved it at Richards. “Here's another one for Miller,” he said. “I'll bring it to him.” He inhaled deeply, savoring the blend of chilly dawn air and rum fumes, and it seemed to him that the very air was tense—breathing it was like touching a beam of wood flexed to within half a hair of its snapping point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“If you fail to, Ed, then yes I do,” Hands had replied cheerfully. The two of them had sailed together way back in the privateer days, and then again as pirates under the old buccaneer admiral Ben Hornigold, and Israel Hands dared to be far more familiar with Blackbeard than anyone else did. “Why? Do you want to stay and try to fight from the
Adventure?
” He'd slapped the close bulkhead and low ceiling contemptuously. “She's nothing but a damned sloop, man, scarcely more than a turtle-boat! Let's get back to where we left the
Queen Ann's Revenge
hidden and get out to sea again! To hell with this surf-and-shoal dallying—I want to feel a real deck under my feet again, heaving on a real sea.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Damn right,” echoed Blackbeard.

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

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

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

“Here they come, cap'n,” said Richards grimly.

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

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

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

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

He could see the splashes as sailors on the Navy vessels got busy pitching ballast over the side. Hurry, you fools, he thought.
The tide's going out. And if I'm not ...replanted ...by Christmas, only five weeks distant now, I'll miss her, Hurwood will have done his silly connubial trick and disposed of her.

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

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

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

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

“We could try to slip around them while they're stuck,” observed Richards cautiously. “I think if we—” He sighed. “Never mind. They're off again.”

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

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

Blackbeard frowned. “You're right,” he growled.

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

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

Bonnett stole my defeat scene!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We expect none, nor will extend any!”

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

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

“Sure, I never did care about the prize.”