The town of Port-au-Prince proved to be a latticework of narrow streets laid out around a central plaza. The plaza and most of the streets were paved in white stone, though around the shops and warehouses by the waterfront the pavement was nearly hidden beneath hundreds - no, it must have been thousands - of brown, flat-trodden husks. Before stepping out into the crowded square, Shandy picked up one of the husks and smelled it; it was sugarcane, and he realized that this was the source of the gaggingly sweet, half-fermented smell that blended in the afternoon air with the usual rotten fish and smoky cooking odors shared by seaports everywhere. He tossed the thing away, wondering for a moment if it had come from the Chandagnac plantations.>Ann laughed, but he could hear the tears in her voice. "I am not a dog!" she quoted softly.

"Time passes so much more ... quickly, here," he said, sliding one arm around her shoulders and waving with his other hand at the island's jungly darkness. "I feel as if I've lived here for years ... "

They were walking again, down the beach together, away from the fires. "It's a matter of being suited for it, Jack," she said. "This Governor Rogers could live here for fifty years and he still wouldn't belong - he's all wired up with duties and consequences, and punishment for crimes, and so much money for so much cargo on such and such a date at this here port. It's all Old World stuff. But you, why, the day I first saw you I said to myself, there's a lad who was born for these islands."

These islands. The words were pregnant with images: flocks of pink flamingoes visible at dawn behind impenetrable barriers of high-arching mangrove roots, piles of pearly conch-shell fragments scattered around the sooty crater of a cooking-fire pit in white sand, and blindingly sun-glittering blue-green sea seen through a haze of rum-drunkenness, scraps of smoke-blackened wadding-cloth tumbling along the beach after a pistol duel like the used penwipers of Mars himself ...

And he did fit in here, or could - there was a part of him that responded to the nearly innocent savagery of it all, the freedom, the abdication of all guilts and capacity for guilt ...

She turned to him and kissed him and his free arm went around her waist, and suddenly he wanted her terribly, wanted the loss of identity she could give him; in moments they were lying in the warm sand, and she was hiking her dress up and he was on top of her, panting feverishly -

And a close gunshot deafened him and for an instant lit Ann's straining face, and a moment later a pistol butt slammed down onto the back of his head - it landed on the tarred stump of his chopped-short ponytail, though, and instead of knocking him unconscious the blow only jarred him. He rolled off of Ann on the seaward side and scrambled to his feet.

Ann still lay there on her back; a pockmark in the sand nearby showed where the pistol ball had struck - she wasn't hurt - but she was whining impatiently and hitching up her hips and gnawing on the ragged hem of her dress, and Shandy wanted only to kill whoever had interrupted them and then return to her.

Jim Bonny stood on the other side of her, and he tossed the spent pistol away and raised a hand; Shandy felt the sudden heat in the air around him and flicked his right hand in a quick counter-and-return gesture, then bit his tongue to get blood and spat toward Bonny to give the return more power.

Bonny's hair started to smolder and smoke, but he grabbed a ball of braided fur at his belt, and the heat was dispelled. "Mate Care-For lookin' out for me, you bastard," Bonny whispered. "He and I gonna render you unfit for wife-stealin'."

Too impatient and breathless to be afraid, Shandy snapped his fingers and pointed two of them at Bonny; but Bonny's hand was still on the fur-ball and the attack rebounded, knocking Shandy over and doubling him up with terrible cramps. Bonny took the opportunity to give his wife a kick in the shoulder and to speak a quick rhyme at Shandy.

Blood burst from Shandy's ears and nose, and rationally he knew that he was out-classed here, and should try to flee or yell for help; but he wanted Ann - wanted, in fact, to take her with Jim Bonny's blood hot on his hands ...

But with Mate Care-For protecting Bonny there didn't seem to be much he could do. He hunched up onto his knees and whistled a blindness at Bonny, but despite his best parries it too bounced back upon him, and while Shandy was blind Bonny sent a spastic fit at him.

Shandy collapsed, jiggling and hooting helplessly on the sand like the caller at a Saint Vitus' Day dance, and he heard Bonny kick his wife again and then step over her to get at him.

Shandy knew that it was too late now to try to run or call for help) - he was going to die, here and now, if he didn't think of something, and - more unbearable than the thought of death - Jim Bonny would be the one who would kneel between Ann's thighs; and at this point she would probably neither notice the difference nor care.

Ignoring the pain of a snagged finger, he shoved his flapping right hand into his trousers pocket; there was still grit in there from the ball of mud he had scraped from his boot on the Florida coast, and he rolled it into a lump between his thumb and forefinger. Then he yanked his hand out and flung the bit of dirt up at the sky.

And then he was in a boat, passing under a bridge strung with colored lanterns, and instead of garlic and wine his mouth tasted of strawberries. He remembered this - this was Paris - he had been, what, nine years old when his father, having made some money, had taken him out for a good dinner and a boat ride down the Seine afterward. The figure beside him turned to him, but this time it was not his father.

It seemed to be an ancient black man, his hair and short beard as white and tightly curled as those of a marble statue.

"Serious vodun attacks are generally directed at, and take place in, the memories of the defensive combatant," the black man said in a lilting French dialect, "the memories being the accumulated sum of a person. If I meant you harm, you'd find this remembered scene, the remembered people in it, changing in lethal and frightening ways ... very like the delirium experienced during a high fever ... and it would get worse and worse until you either counterattacked or perished." He smiled and held out his hand. "My name is Maitre Carrefour."

After a moment's hesitation, Shandy shook the man's hand.

"Luckily for myself," the black man went on, "I am a loa whose domain is populated islands. I have many dealings with men, and can anticipate their actions, unlike the natural loa you encountered in the Florida rain forest. Your thrown bit of dirt would not kill me - it has lost much of its potency in the week and a half since you brought it out - but it will nevertheless injure me if I stay and refrain from counterattacking. Therefore I am even now withdrawing from the conflict between yourself and Mr. Bonny."

Ashamed, Shandy looked away from him, back the way they had come. Among the pedestrians on the bridge he could see several women; despite the bright lantern light, only their faces were in particular focus, and it occurred to him that that must have been the way women had looked to him at the age of ten. Not anything like the way Ann Bonny had looked to him a minute ago. Which view, he wondered bitterly now, was the narrower?

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

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

"No - not now, not anymore."

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

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

"I hope so. You got that tactic, that mud-ball trick, from Philip Davies - and you have wasted it. He gave you something else as well; it would not please me to see you waste that too."

Soft sand was under Shandy's left side and the starry night sky above his right, and he realized he was back on the New Providence beach; and when he heard the thup of the upflung bit of mud hitting the sand, he knew that his talk with Maitre Carrefour had not taken place in local time.

He was now able to deflect Bonny's magical attacks with a gesture and a whistle; he did so, and struggled tiredly to his feet.

Tags: Tim Powers Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net