On Stranger Tides (31 page)

Davies had no time for a deceptive attack; he ran the last few steps to the undead sailor and simply swung his sword at the thing's neck.

The blade struck deep, but with his bad hand and lack of breath Davies hadn't been able to put enough force behind the blow to cut the head entirely off, and the dead eyes rolled toward him—and before he could pull his sword free, the thing's corroded cutlass was driven horrifyingly far up into his abdomen.

Suddenly ashen, Davies hitchingly breathed a curse, then tightened his burned hand around the grip of his sword, and with a convulsive heave that was as much a violent shudder of disgust as it was an attacking move, shoved his blade across the gray neck with his last strength, sawing the head free.

The two dead bodies tumbled away across the deck.

SHANDY HADN'T even noticed the encounter. Near Beth now, he dropped his sword and strained every muscle and tendon in a high jump for her, but his upstretched fingers brushed against an invisible resistance a foot short of her—though for a moment her downward staring eyes met his imploringly, and her lips formed words he couldn't hear.

Then he fell, rebounding painfully from the splintered cabin bulkhead to sprawl breathless on the sun-hot deck and wait, completely exhausted now, for a green blade or two to nail him to the planks.

But suddenly all the lich combatants were paler, translucent against the bright sky. The weight of the dead man's forearms on his chest all but disappeared.

At the same moment Shandy became aware that he was lying on the well-remembered quarterdeck of the
Vociferous Carmichael,
staring at armored planks he remembered having bolted in place himself—and he guessed that Friend was too
busy defending himself against Hurwood to maintain the spell that had provided him with a crew.

“I could kill her,” Friend said, relaxing his frown of concentration and baring bloody teeth in a smile.

It was Hurwood who wavered now, and Friend pointed his free hand at the older sorceror—and a ball of fire, white-bright even in the cloudless noon, rushed through yielding rigging straight at Hurwood.

The one-armed man parried it with a flailing gesture and it rebounded down into the
Jenny
where it was greeted with alarmed yells; but Hurwood fell a couple of feet and then caught himself joltingly, and he whimpered and reached out his hand toward his daughter, on the other side of the waist, who was slowly rising toward his adversary. There was no fire at all now flickering around Friend, who, grinning and swollen with triumph, looked like some grotesque, beribboned hot-air balloon.

The young magician inhaled deeply, leaned back and stretched his arms out to either side.

Then in spite of the strong breeze the air was foul with the smell of an empty iron skillet on a fire, and the ship was the squat, multi-decked
Charlotte Bailey
again, and the English and Spanish sailors were not only substantial again but alive-looking—ruddy cheeks, tanned arms, brightly flashing eyes—and Friend was actually glowing in the sky, brightly, like a man-shaped sun ...

LEO FRIEND knew he was close to understanding it all now; he was on the very threshold of godhood—and without any external help, without drawing on anything but his own resources! He could see now that that was how it had to be. You did it for yourself or it didn't happen; and to overpower Benjamin Hurwood he would have to do it, and do it right now.

But to be God—which of course meant to have been God all along—he had to justify every event in his past, define every action in terms that made it consistent with godhood ...there could no longer be any incidents that were too uncomfortable to remember.

With superhuman rapidity he held up for mental review year after year of remembered behavior—the torturing of pets, the malice toward playmates, the poisoned candy left near schoolyards and workhouses—and he was able to face, and incorporate into divinity, every bit of it, and he could feel himself growing incalculably more powerful as he bloomed closer and closer to the perfect self-satisfaction that would bring omnipotence ...

And finally, with Hurwood virtually vanquished, there was only one incident of Friend's life that needed to be sanctified out of plain squalid reality ...but it was the most harrowing and traumatic experience he'd ever undergone, and even just facing it, even just making himself remember it, was supremely difficult ...but now, as he hung in midair over his ship, facing his all-but-shattered enemy and watching his all-but-won prize rising up from the broken cabin beneath him, he forced himself to relive it.

He was fifteen years old, standing beside the bookcase in his cluttered, smelly bedroom ...no, in his elegant panelled bed-chamber, aromatic with the jasmine breeze wafting in through the open casements and the breath of fine leather bindings ... it had
always
been this way, there had
never
been the shabby, polluted room ...and his mother opened the door and came in. Only for a moment was she a fat, gray-haired old drudge in a black bag dress—then she was a tall, handsome woman in a patterned silk robe that was open down the front ...Seven years earlier he had discovered magic, and he had pursued it diligently since, and knew a lot now, and he wanted to share the wealth in his mind with the only person who had ever appreciated that mind ...

He went to her and kissed her ...

But it was beginning to get away from him, she was the dumpy old woman again, just come upstairs to put fresh sheets on his bed, and the room was the grubby room again and he was a startled fat boy interrupted in the midst of one of his solitary self-administrations, and he was kissing her dizzily because in his heart-pounding delirium he had misunderstood the reason for her visit. “Oh, Mommy,” he was gasping, “you and I can have the world, I know magic, I can do stuff ...”

With a huge effort of will he forced her to be the beautiful robed woman, forced the room to expand back out to its regal dimensions ...and he did it just in time, too, for he knew that his father, his mother's husband, entered the room next, and he really doubted that he could live through that scene again as it had really happened.

Well, he told himself unsteadily, I'm making reality here. In a few minutes that unbearable memory
won't
be what really happened.

Footsteps boomed ponderously on the stairs, ascending. Friend concentrated, and the steps diminished in volume until it might have been a child climbing the stairs. There was a lamp on the landing below, and a huge, bristling shadow darkened the open doorway and began to damage the room ...but again Friend fought it down to insignificance—now a stooped, thin shadow grew in the doorway, dim, as if the thing casting it wasn't solid.

Now a little man like an upright rat in baggy trousers shambled into the room, obviously of no danger to anyone, in spite of its squinting and scowling. “
What's
—” it began in a deafening roar, but Friend concentrated again and its voice came out scratchy and petulant: “What's going on here?” The thing's breath was foul with liquor and tobacco. The father-creature now swaggered ludicrously across the tiled floor to Leo Friend, and in
this
version of reality the blow it leveled at him was a light, trembling slap.

The mother faced the intruder, and just her gaze made the unshaven creature recoil away from the boy. “You ignorant animal,” she said softly to it, her low, musical voice echoing from the panelled walls and blending with the random tinkling of the fountains and wind chimes outside. “You thing of grime and sweat and laborer's tools. Beauty and brilliance are beyond your grubby perceptions. Go.”

The thing stumbled in confusion back toward the door, its stinks receding, though bits of its ill-fitting black overcoat and leather boots flaked off to mar the floor tiles.

HURWOOD FELL another foot; he was almost down to the level of the deck now. Sweat plastered his white hair across his forehead and he was breathing in harsh gasps. His eyes were shut—but for a moment one opened, just a slit, and there seemed to be a gleam of guile in it, of almost perfectly concealed triumph.

IT JARRED Friend, and for a moment his control shook; and in the remembered bedchamber the father began to get bigger and walk away slower. The room was decaying back to its original form, and Friend's mother was babbling, “What'd you hit Leo for, yer always hittin' 'im ...” and the father started to turn around to face them.

High above the poop deck Leo Friend clenched his glowing fists and used all his willpower; and, slowly, the father was pushed down again, the paneling became at least dimly visible on the walls ...

THEN HURWOOD stopped pretending defeat, and laughed openly, and struck.

AND FRIEND'S father, though his back was still turned to him, grew until the doorway lintel was almost too low and narrow for
him, and when he turned around he had Hurwood's grinning face, and he opened his huge mouth and assailed Friend's eardrums with the sentence that Friend had tried desperately to trim out of reality:
“What're ye doin' t'yer mother, ye little freak? Look, ye've got 'er sickin' up on the floor!”

Moaning in abject horror, Leo Friend turned to his mother, but in the moments since he'd last looked at her she'd deteriorated, and she was now a thing like a fat, hairless dog backing away from him on all fours, its belly heaving as it regurgitated its internal organs out onto the dirty floor ...

The room had not only devolved back to its original shabbiness, but was becoming even darker, the air staler. Friend tried to escape from it back to the clean sea air and the
Charlotte Bailey
, or even the
Vociferous Carmichael
, but he couldn't find a way out.

“You used it up too fast,” said the terrible thing that was his father and Benjamin Hurwood and every other strong grownup who had ever despised him—and then it rushed in, as the room went totally dark, to devour him.

A THUNDERCLAP concussed the air and not only deafened Shandy, who had just climbed to his feet, but staggered him too, so that he had to grab a line of rigging to keep from falling, and when he glanced around, choking in the redoubled metallic stench, he saw that the ship had returned to being the familiar old
Carmichael
again and that the resurrected fighters were just dim shadows. The arms on his jacket were gone.

He glanced up. Beth Hurwood hung motionless in midair twenty feet above the poop deck, but Friend was rushing upward into the blue sky, and though he was glowing more brightly than ever now, almost too brightly to stare at, he was thrashing like a man attacked by wasps, and even over the ringing in his ears Shandy could hear him screaming. Finally,
far above, there was a flash that left a red blot in front of Shandy's eyes wherever he looked, and the sky was full of fine white ash.

Very gently, Beth Hurwood was lowered back into the cabin, and some of the planks that had been torn away slithered back up and clung across the ragged gaps. The ghosts of the Spanish and English sailors, nearly impossible to see now, drifted this way and that across the deck to the blood puddles around the killed members of
Jenny
's crew, and though the ghosts momentarily seemed to draw sustenance from the blood, some of the ash that had been Leo Friend swirled silently across the deck and seemed to poison them.

The pile of broken lumber kept shifting even after the animate planks had eeled away to provide bars for Beth's cage, and finally two bloody human figures crawled out from underneath. Shandy started to yell a pleased greeting—then noticed the broken and emptied head of one, and the completely caved-in chest of the other. After that he looked at their eyes and wasn't surprised at the emptiness in them.

Nearer Shandy, the corpse of Mr. Bird sat up, got laboriously to its feet and shambled over to the blocks where the mainsail sheet was controlled; one by one the other corpses joined him there, and when they had all gathered, somehow managing to look expectant in spite of their dead faces, Shandy counted fourteen of them.

“Not Davies,” he said thickly, seeing that body standing among them and realizing for the first time that his friend had been killed. “Not Davies.”

Hurwood came sailing in over the rail, swerving like a big bird over the heads of Shandy and the rest of the exhausted survivors, and landed on the poop deck near the now partially boarded-over hole. He stared expressionlessly down at Shandy for several seconds, then shook his head. “Sorry,” he said to him.
“I don't have a big enough crew to be able to spare him. Now get off of my ship.”

Shandy looked toward the
Jenny
, whose mast and scorched sail were visible poking up above the starboard rail. The smoke that had been billowing up right after the fireball had fallen into the vessel was just wisps and curls now—evidently the men still aboard her had managed to put out the fire.

The twenty or so living pirates on the
Carmichael
's deck, many of whom were wounded and bleeding, looked toward Shandy.

He nodded. “Back aboard the
Jenny,”
he said, trying to keep out of his voice the choking bitterness he felt. “I'll join you in a moment.”

As his men shuffled and limped across the deck to where the
Jenny
's grappling hooks still clung to the
Carmichael
's gunwales and rigging, Shandy took a deep breath and, though knowing that it would be useless and quite possibly fatal, walked purposefully across the deck toward the damaged cabin Beth was in.

Hurwood just watched him approach, a faint smile on his face.

Shandy stopped in front of the bolted door, and, feeling ridiculous as well as frightened and determined, knocked on the door. “Beth,” he said clearly. “This is Jack Shandy—that is, John Chandagnac.” Already the name seemed unnatural to him. “Come with me and I promise to take you directly to the nearest civilized port.”

“How,” came Beth's voice, surprisingly calm, through the warped door, “can I trust a man who murdered a naval officer in order to save killers from the just consequences of their acts, and later held a knife at my throat to keep me from my own father?”