He found that his nose burned most uncomfortably when he was facing the farthest fire, and after a moment's peering he noticed the stocky, red-haired figure of Venner standing there. Shandy braced himself, then raised his left hand, curling the fingers into the uncomfortable position Davies had shown him, but as soon as Venner realized Shandy had noticed him he looked away, and the smell was gone instantly.
Shandy whistlingly sucked air into his heaving lungs. Well now, he thought as the pirates wearied of their sport and let him hop down to the packed sand, that's worth knowing. I guess Venner doesn't agree that I'm the best man for the quartermaster job.
The cheering and howling had abated in the clumps of the crowd nearest to the shore, and after a few seconds the stillness spread to the rest of the crowd; an inattentive pirate or two shouted, and one drunken old man worked his way to the end of a long fit of laughter, and Mr. Bird reminded everyone one more time that he was not a dog, but after that the silence on shore was absolute.
And from the dark sea came the kalunk ... clunk ... kalunk ... clunk of oars knocking in oarlocks.
Shandy blinked around in uneasy puzzlement. "What's up?" he whispered to a man near him. "A boat's coming in - what's so terrible?"
The man's right hand darted to his forehead, but he hesitated and then just scratched his scalp. Shandy guessed his first impulse had been to make the sign of the cross. "It's Thatch," the man said quietly.
" ... Oh." Shandy stared out at the boat that was now halfway between the shore and the lightless bulk of the Queen Anne's Revenge. There were two figures in the boat, one of whom, the bigger one, seemed at this distance to be wearing a tiara of fireflies.
More profoundly than ever, Shandy wished that Captain Wilson had not tried to kill Davies. He recalled all the stories he'd heard about this man in the approaching boat, and it occurred to him that Thatch - Blackbeard - the dreaded hunsi kanzo - was the most successful of the buccaneers who had tried to adapt to this new, western world. Blackbeard seemed as much and as inseparably a part of this world as the Gulf Stream.>Again he glanced out across the water at Blackbeard's lightless ship, this time with hatred. That's how it must have been, he thought; he wanted to rope me in, and he researched me to find the quickest, easiest lever with which to pry me out of my place in the ordered world. If I hadn't been married to that castrating woman, he'd have had to find some other lever ... I wonder what that might have been ... my pride, perhaps, he could have maneuvered me into an illegal but unavoidable-with-honor duel ... or my honesty, put me in the position of having to beggar myself by repaying some dire debt undertaken by my wife.
But of course I made it easy for him. All he had to do was pay
Ramona's whores to give me back what my wife had taken from me, and then eventually to drug me and send a girl in who was a perfect duplicate, in looks and derisive manner, of my wife ...
And then afterward, when my laboring heart had purged my bloodstream of the drug, and I was staring down at the dead girl's face, which no longer bore a resemblance to anyone, that evil giant strode into the room, a grin on him like a stratum of exposed granite in a mountainside, and he offered me the choice.
Some choice.
Chapter Ten
To Beth Hurwood's right lay the vast swamp that penetrated, they said, far inland - a region where land and water blurred into each other, seldom distinct, where snakes swam in the pools and fish crawled along the banks, where the very arrangement of channels and islands would, like a diabolically animate maze, change, rendering maps no more useful for navigating than sketches of clouds would be, where still air became stagnant like still water, and so miasmally thick that insects too large to do more than crawl anywhere else could fly here. Even as she glanced at that dark quarter of the landscape, far off in the marsh there appeared one of the randomly floating spheres of phosphorescence that the pirates called spirit balls; it lifted above the wispy surface of the fog and bounced slowly among the cypress branches and the dangling masses of Spanish moss, and then, just as slowly, fell back into the fog-river, and the glow became nebulous and then died out.
She looked in the other direction then toward the steel-gray sea, below which the sun had sunk half an hour before in so vast and molten a blaze that the high, wispy cirrus clouds still glowed pink; and being on higher ground and undazzled by the fires, she saw the sail a moment before the pirates did.
First a shout came faintly across the water from one of the three moored ships, and then one of the men down by the fires pointed and yelled, "A sail!"
The pirates all leaped up and sprinted for the boats, instinctively preferring to be on the water rather than on the land if there was to be trouble. Beth wavered uncertainly. If the sail - a single one, and disappointingly small - was a Royal Navy craft, she certainly didn't want to be aboard any ship that succeeded in fleeing them; but if she hid and stayed behind, would the Navy craft stop and send someone to check for stragglers ashore?
Someone giggled very close by, and she jumped and smothered a scream.
Leo Friend stepped out from behind a cluster of swamp maple trees. "Going for a walk, my d-d-d - Elizabeth?" His eyes, she noticed, seemed to show too much white around the irises, and a smile came and went on his face as quickly and randomly as something that should have been secured in a wind.
"Uh, yes," she said, wondering desperately how to be rid of him. "What sail is that, do you suppose?"
"It doesn't matter," Friend said. His voice was shriller than usual tonight. "Royal Navy, rival pirates - it's too late for anyone to stop us." The smile poked his pudgy lips out and then disappeared again. "And t-t-tomorrow w-w-we'll - to-m-morrow we s-s-sail from h-h ... damn it ... here." He pulled a lace handkerchief from his sleeve and mopped his forehead. "In the meantime I'll walk with you."
"I'm going down toward the fires to see what's going on," she told him, knowing that since shooting Davies the fat physician had been reluctant, even with his various protective fetishes, to mingle with the pirates.
"Your buccaneer s-sweetheart's dead, Elizabeth," Friend snapped, his sparky cheer abruptly gone, "and I think it shows at least a lack of imagination to choose his suc-suc-suc-successor from out of the same stew."
Beth ignored him and began picking her way down the slope. To her alarm, she heard Friend following. How on earth, she wondered frantically, can I get away from him and keep the appointment with Bonnett?
A man out on the anchored Carmichael shouted something Beth couldn't hear, but the message was repeated by the men on the beach. "It's the bleedin' Jenny!" came a wondering shout. "The Jenny got free of that man-o'-war!"
With no clear transition point the pirates' panicky rout became a riot of celebration. Bells began ringing on the Vociferous Carmichael and Bonnett's Revenge - though not on Blackbeard's ship) - and muskets were fired into the darkening sky, and the various ships' musicians hastily snatched up their instruments and began clamoring.
Glad now that it wasn't a Royal Navy vessel, Beth Hurwood quickened her pace, while Friend, seeing that the vessel was not one that offered her a chance of escape, sulkily slacked off his own pace.
Having a much shallower draft than the three ships, the Jenny was able to tack in very close to shore before dropping her anchor - the rattling of the chain lost in the general pandemonium - and a few of the men aboard her didn't wait for boats but took running dives off the bow, daringly trusting the speed and angle of their dives to carry them into water that wouldn't be over their chins in depth. A few could actually swim, and took this opportunity to show off their exotic skill by paddling around in circles, splashing and blowing like dolphins, before heading in to shore with theatrically nonchalant strokes.
One of them, though, just dove in and made his way to shore in a swift, unpretentious crawl, and he was the first to stand up in the shallows and wade in through the surge and ebb to the sand.
"Saints be praised!" cried one of the men waiting ashore. "The cook survived!"