"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.

Tags: Tim Powers Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net