Shandy shook his head worriedly. "But if the Caribee loas are weak here, as you told me, how on earth do they expect to keep her safe out in that swamp? And who is this Maitre Carrefour?"

"Hm? Oh, that's our old friend Mate Care-For. Thatch just pronounces it right. It means master of the crossroads. Master of different possibilities, in other words - of chance. But yes, he and Samedi and the rest of the spirit boys have grown weaker for us as we've moved so far north of the places they're anchored to. No doubt there are loas here too, but they'll be Indian ones - less than no help to us. Aye, we're pretty much on our own here. Like Thatch said, we've got to stand on our own feet. But of course after we get to this magical focus, or fountain, or whatever it is, if Hurwood can come through on his promise to show us how to use it - and not get infested, as Thatch did when he found the place - why then we'll probably be able to just fly out."

Shandy frowned angrily. "Damn it - I can't see why Blackbeard even came here in the first place. I guess he knew somehow that there was some big magic deep in this jungle, but what made him go to so much trouble to get at it? Especially since he doesn't even seem to have been handy enough at magic to keep himself out of trouble."

Davies started to speak, then chuckled and shook his head. 'You've been in the western hemisphere how long now, Jack?"

"You know how long."

"So I do. A month, call it. Well, I first saw these islands when I was sixteen, the year after the press gang grabbed me in a Bristol street and informed me I was a sailor in His Majesty's Navy. No, let me talk. You can talk after. Anyway, I was a sailor on the frigate Swan, and in May of 1692 - I was eighteen by then - the Swan was in Port Royal, which was Jamaica's main seaport in those days, and we had her up on the careening ground a hundred yards west of the walls of Fort Carlyle." Davies sighed. "I guess ten years earlier Port Royal had been a real hellhole - it was Henry Morgan's home base - but when I was there it was just a nice, lively town. Well, on the second day of June, while my mates were working in the sun scraping barnacles off the Swan's hull, I was down the beach a ways reporting a shipping error at the King's warehouses, and when I had finished that I ducked in next door, at Littleton's tavern. And I'll tell you what, Jack, just as I left the place, full of beer and Littleton's excellent stew - beef and turtle, it was, as I recall - Thames Street jumped under my feet, and a sound like cannons or thunder came rolling out from the mainland. I turned back toward the tavern just in time to see the whole front wall of the place split into quarters like you'd cut a pie, and then the brick street broke up into ... strips, like ... and slid right down into the sea, with the whole town following right behind."

Shandy was listening avidly, having for the moment forgotten their original topic.

"I think I was under water for three minutes," Davies went on, "being battered by bricks and dirt, and just about being disjointed by the water itself, which couldn't make up its mind which way it wanted to fall. Finally I got to the surface and grabbed hold of somebody's roof beam, which was bobbing around like a toothpick on the choppiest, craziest sea you ever heard of. Eventually I was picked up by the Swan herself, which was one of the damn few vessels that hadn't been wrecked - maybe because she was already tipped over when the earthquake struck. She was crisscrossing the new patch of ocean which had, until about noon, been Port Royal, and we pulled lots of others out of that white sea - it was all bubbling and seething, you know? Like a huge pot of wild beer - but I later heard that two thousand died there."

"Jesus," said Shandy respectfully. Then, "Uh, but how does this relate to - "

"Oh, right, sorry - I'm getting carried away by my memories. Well sir, three blocks inland, on Broad Street, on that same terrible June second, an old magician from England - sort of like Hurwood, I guess - was trying out a heavy piece of resurrection magic I don't think he was very skilled at it, but he had with him that day a sixteen-year-old boy who'd grown up among the free blacks in the Jamaica mountains, a boy who, though white, had been deeply educated in vodun and had, just the year before, been consecrated to the most fearsome of the loos, the Lord of Cemeteries, Baron Samedi, whose secret drogue is low-smoldering fire. It was reincarnation magic they were playing with, trying to learn how to put old souls into new bodies, and that requires fresh human blood, and they'd grabbed some poor devil to provide it. The old English magician had tried this stuff before, and, I don't know, maybe he'd managed on his best day to bring a dead bug or two back to life, but today he had this sixteen-year-old boy yoked in double harness with himself, right?"

"Right ... ?" echoed Shandy.

"Well, it turns out - neither of 'em knew it at the time, though probably a few of the old bocors knew it, and certainly the Carib Indians before that - it turns out that big-yield resurrection magic has to be done at sea. Something to do with a relationship between blood and sea water, I understand. Well, this white boy turned out to be the most powerful natural magician of his color that anybody'd ever heard of ... and here he was doing resurrection magic in Port Royal - on the land."

Shandy waited a moment. "Uh ... yeah? So?"

"So the town of Port Royal jumped into the sea, Jack."

"Oh." Shandy looked out at the black ocean. "This ... this sixteen-year-old boy - "

" - Was named Ed Thatch. He's been trying to perfect the resurrection trick ever since. And that's what brought him to this coast two years ago. You asked, remember?"

"Yes." Shandy wasn't feeling at all reassured. "Very well, so what is this focus or fountain we're going into the jungle to find?"

Davies blinked at him. "Why, I thought you knew that, Jack. It's a hole in the wall between life and death, and anyone standing around is liable to catch the spray from one side or the other. Don't you know any history? It's what Juan Ponce de Leon was looking for - he called it the Fountain of Youth."

Chapter Eleven

When it was fully dark, and Blackbeard, Davies and the rest of them had drunk off the last fortifying cups of rum and begun plodding north along the beach toward the river and the waiting boats, Benjamin Hurwood forced himself to stand up and follow them.

The daydreams that had become increasingly vivid and insistent during the last couple of years had now reached the point where they could almost be called hallucinations, but Hurwood kept his mouth clamped shut and didn't allow his eyes to follow any of the figures and objects he knew were imaginary.

It's 1718, he told himself firmly, and I'm on the shore of the I west coast of Florida, with the pirate Edward Thatch and ... my daughter ... what in hell is her name? Not Margaret ... Elizabeth! That's it. Despite what I'm seeing half the time, I'm not at the church in Chelsea ... I am not forty-three years old, the year isn't 1694 ... and that is not my bride that I see there, my dear Margaret, my life, or at least my sanity ... that's our daughter, the ... the vehicle ...

Hurwood squinted against the bright sunlight streaming in through the vestibule window as he handed the flask back to his groomsman. "Thanks, Peter," he grinned. He peeked through the crack between the two doors that were the church's side entrance, but people were still moving uncertainly down the aisles and sidling into the pews, and the minister hadn't appeared yet ... though there was one frightened-looking altar boy at one of the far kneelers on the altar. "A little time yet," he told his best man. "I'll just take one more peek into the glass."

Peter smiled at the groom's nervousness as Hurwood crossed once again to the mirror he'd propped up on a nearby shelf. "The sin of vanity," Peter muttered.

"Today I believed a touch of vanity can be excused," Hurwood replied, patting his long brown locks into place. Hurwood was a studious, retiring man, but he did take pride in his hair, and, despite the fashion, never wore a wig - he always appeared in society "in his own hair," and despite his years there was no gray in it at all.

"I don't see Margaret yet," Peter remarked, pulling one of the doors open a bit and squinting toward the back of the church. "No doubt she's reconsidered."

Even the suggestion made Hurwood's stomach go cold. "God's blood, Peter, don't even speak such a thought! I'd ... go mad. I - "

"A joke, merely!" Peter assured him, a hint of concern detectable behind his jovial tone. "Do relax, Ben, of course she'll come. Here, have another pull at the brandy - you're the palest bridegroom I've ever seen."

Hurwood took the proffered flask and drank deeply. "Thanks - but no more. It wouldn't do to be drunk on the altar."

"Shall I put her in the boat?" asked Peter, somehow pulling a curtain across the window so that they stood in darkness except for the light of a lamp Hurwood hadn't noticed. The air was suddenly fresher, but smelled of the sea, and marshes; fleetingly it occurred to Hurwood that they should air out these rooms more frequently - a century of incense smoke and moth-riddled draperies and dry prayer-book bindings produced some unlikely smells.

Tags: Tim Powers Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net