On Stranger Tides (42 page)

“Well—you were there, cap'n. And I told you about it today, remember? How one of Hurwood's dead sailors killed him?” Skank looked around unhappily.

“No, I mean what happened just now?”

“You fell on the deck. I just
told
you.”

“Ah.” Shandy sat up for the third time and made himself stay up. The nausea surged up in him and then abated. “You may have to keep telling me.” He struggled to his feet and stood swaying and shuddering, clutching the rail for balance and looking around dizzily. “Uh…the storm has…stopped,” he remarked, proud to be able to demonstrate his awareness of things.

“Yes, cap'n. While you was out cold. We just kept her hove to and rode it out. Your sea-anchor made the difference.”

Shandy rubbed his face hard. “My sea-anchor.” He decided not to ask. “Good. What's our course?”

“Southeast, more or less.”

Shandy beckoned Skank closer, and when the young man had crouched beside him he asked quietly, “Where are we going?”

“Jamaica, you said.”

“Ah.” He frowned. “What do we hope to find there?”

“Ulysse Segundo,” said Skank, looking more worried every second, “and his ship, the
Ascending Orpheus
. You said he's Hurwood, and the
Orpheus
is really the
Carmichael
. We followed reports of him out to the Caymans, where you heard he was heading back toward Jamaica again. Oh, and Woefully Fat wanted to get there, Jamaica, before he died.” Skank shook his head sadly.

“Is Woefully Fat dead?”

“Most of us think so. The gaff-spar speared him like a spitted chicken, and after he broke the big piece off and gave it to you he just flopped down. We got him below, for burial when we get to shore, 'cause you don't just pitch a dead
bocor
into the sea if you know what's good for you—but a couple of the men say they can feel a pulse in his wrist, and Lamont says he can't keep his mind on his work because Woefully Fat keeps hummin' real low, though
I
don't hear nothin.”

Shandy tried to concentrate. He remembered some of these things, vaguely, when Skank described them, and he remembered a sense of desperate urgency about them, but he couldn't now remember why that should be. What he most wanted at the moment was an impossibility—a dry place to sleep.

“That storm,” he said. “It was very sudden? There was no shelter we could have taken?”

“We might have been able to run back to Grand Cayman,” Skank told him. “Venner was for doing that. You said we had to go on.”

“Did I…say
why?
”

“You said the storm would get us anyway, and we may as well go on after the
Orpheus
. Venner said you wanted to because of that girl. You know, Hurwood's daughter.”

“Ah!” He was beginning to see some hints of pattern in his concussion-shuffled memories. “What's the date today?”

“I don't know. It's Friday…and, uh, Sunday's Christmas.”

“I see,” said Shandy tightly. “Keep reminding me of that, will you? And now that the storm is past, get up as much canvas as you can.”

THE NEXT morning at dawn they spied the
Ascending Orpheus
—and there was no disagreement about what to do, for they'd spent all night bailing water out of the
Jenny
, and in spite of having pulled a tar-smeared sail around under the forward keel, and hammering rice-filled rolls of cloth into the gaps between the strakes, the water was coming in faster every hour, and Shandy doubted that the battered old sloop could hold together long enough to make another landfall. Maximum canvas was crowded on, and the
Jenny
lurched unevenly across the expanse of blue water toward the ship.

Crouched in the sloop's bow, Shandy peered through the telescope, squinting against the blinding glitter of the morning
sun on the waves. “She's suffered,” he remarked to the haggard, shivering men around him. “There's spars gone and rigging fouled on the foremast…but she's still solid. If we do this next hour's work right, there'll be rum and food and dry clothes.”

There was a general growl of approval, for most of his men had spent last night laboring over the bilge pumps in the rain, looking forward to the occasional brief break in which to swallow a handful or two of wet biscuit; and the rum cask had come unmoored and broken apart during the storm, filling the hold with the smell of unattainable liquor.

“Did any of our powder stay dry?” Shandy asked.

Skank shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Hm. Well, we don't want to wreck the
Orpheus
anyway.” He lowered the telescope. “Assuming our mast doesn't snap off, we ought to be able to cut south and head her off—and then I guess just try to board her.”

“That or swim for Jamaica,” agreed one ragged, red-eyed young pirate.

“Don't you think he'll try to run when he sees we're after him?” Skank asked.

“Maybe,” said Shandy, “though I'll bet we can catch him, even busted up as we are—and anyway, we can't look too formidable.” He raised the telescope again. “Well, never mind,” he said a moment later. “As a matter of fact, he's coming at
us
.”

There was a moment of silence. Then, “Lost some men in that storm, I daresay,” commented one of the older men grimly. “Be wantin' replacements.”

Skank bit his lip and frowned at Shandy. “Last time you tangled with him he picked you up and dropped you into the ocean. You…got some reason to think it won't happen that way again?”

Shandy had been pondering that question ever since they had set out from New Providence Island.
Blood
, he remembered
Governor Sawney saying,
obviously there's iron in it. Link your blood to the cold iron of the sword. Make the atoms of blood and iron line up the way a compass needle lines up to face north. Or vice versa. It's all relative…

Shandy grinned, a little sickly in spite of his best efforts. “We'd all better hope so. I'll be at the bittacle—have somebody bring me a saber…and a hammer and a narrow chisel.”

The
Orpheus
had turned and was charging straight downwind west toward the
Jenny
, the morning sun behind her casting the shadows of her rigging and masts onto the luminous sails. Shandy kept an eye on her as he worked with the hammer and chisel over the grip of the saber Skank had brought him, and when she was still a hundred yards away he straightened and held the sword up by the blade.

He'd cut away the leather wrapping and half of the wood grip, exposing the iron tang that linked the blade to the pommel-weight, and, just where the heel of a swordsman's hand would press, he had chisel-punched a narrow crack into the metal.

Shandy stood up and leaned on the bittacle pillar, looking down through the glass. “If it should…go against us here this morning,” he said to Skank, who had been staring at him uncomprehendingly for the last several minutes, “get east of him—with the state the
Carmichael'
s in he can no more tack than fly—and try for Jamaica.”

“It better not go against us.”

Shandy smiled, and somehow it made him look even more tired. “right.” He raised the hammer and brought it down solidly on the bittacle glass, and then he dropped the hammer and fumbled around among the glass shards; a moment later he lifted the compass needle out with bloody fingers. “Get the lads ready with hooks and lines. With luck we'll be able to start boarding before he knows we're trying to be aggressors.”

Skank moaned faintly, but nodded and hurried forward.

Shandy carefully inserted the north-pole end of the compass needle into the crack he'd cut in the saber tang, then he crouched and picked up the hammer again and gave the needle a tap to keep it in place.

Shandy carefully slid the doctored saber through his belt, and for a minute after that he just breathed deeply with his eyes shut; then when the
Ascending Orpheus
jibed sharply in on the
Jenny's
port flank, putting her in shadow, he snatched up a grappling hook, whirled it a couple of times in a vertical circle and then let it fly up toward the big ship's rail; sunlight glittered on the points at the moment of pause, then the hook dropped onto the rail and gripped.

Certainly this is the last time the
Jenny
will besiege the
Carmichael
, he thought as he began climbing hand over hand up the rope.

The effort started his nose bleeding and made his head feel as if it would burst, and when he finally got to the top of the rope and paused for breath straddling the rail he couldn't remember why he was there. Some time seemed to have passed—this was the
Vociferous Carmichael
, he was sure…but most of the railing was gone, and the whole forecastle structure, too! Had they still not reached Jamaica? Where was Captain Chaworth? And that sick girl with the fat physician?

His disorientation ebbed a little when he recognized the girl's father coming down the ladder from the poop deck—what was his name? Hurwood, that was it—but then Shandy frowned, for he had remembered the man as having only one arm.

He was distracted then by fighting on the quarterdeck, and when he looked closely—it was hard to focus in all this glaring sunlight—he really thought he was losing his mind. Haggard men in ragged but gaudy clothes were climbing aboard all around him and doing desperate battle with impossibly animate corpses whose withered hands shouldn't have been able to clutch
a cutlass, and whose milky, sunken eyes shouldn't have been able to direct the strokes. The blood running sluggishly from Shandy's ears and the pounding in his head robbed the scene of nearly all sounds, giving everything the grotesque unreality of a fever dream, and the question of why he had chosen to adorn his jacket with two mummified human forearms seemed relatively unimportant.

He didn't trust his balance, so he climbed very carefully down onto the deck. The man who seemed to be Benjamin Hurwood was coming toward him now, a welcoming smile crinkling his old face…

And then Shandy was dreaming, had to be, for he was standing beside his father in the dimness of the scaffolding above a marionette stage, both of them staring into the brightness below and busily working the crosses that controlled the dangling puppets; and it must have been a crowd scene they were doing, for many more crosses were hung in the spring-hooks that kept the idle marionettes below swaying and bobbing slightly. In a moment he had forgotten that it had to be a dream, and was panicking because he didn't know what play they were doing.

He squinted at the little figures below, and instantly recognized them. They were the
Julius Caesar
marionettes. And luckily the third act had begun, there wasn't all that much more to do—they were already in the assassination scene, and the little wooden senators all had their standard right hands replaced by the dagger-clutching ones.

The Caesar puppet was speaking—and Shandy stared, for the face was no longer wood but flesh, and he recognized it. It was his own face. “Hence!” he heard his miniature self say. “Wilt thou lift up Olympus?”

The senator puppets, who were also flesh now, moved in for the kill…and then the scene abruptly winked out, leaving Shandy
standing on the
Carmichael
's deck again, squinting against the sunglare at Hurwood.

A confident smile was fading from the old man's face, but he struck again, and Shandy was kneeling in hot sand on the New Providence beach, staring critically at the four bamboo poles he'd shoved upright in the sand. They had stood well enough until he'd tried to lash others across the tops of them, and now they were all leaning outward like cannons ready to repel an attack from all sides.

“Weaving a basket?” Beth Hurwood asked from behind him.

He hadn't heard her approach, and for a moment he was going to reply irritably, but then he grinned. “It's supposed to be a hut. For me to sleep in.”

“It'd be easier if you made a lean-to—here, I'll show you.”

It had been a day in July, during the refitting of the
Carmichael;
Beth had shown him how to put together a much stabler structure, and there had been one moment when, standing on tiptoe to loop twine over the peak of one of the leaning poles, she had fallen against him, and for a moment she'd been in his arms, and her brown eyes and coppery hair had made him dizzy with an emotion that included physical attraction only to the extent that an orchestra includes a brass section. It was a memory that often recurred in his dreams.

This time, though, it was going differently. This time she was using a hammer and nails instead of twine, and her eyelids and lips were pulled open as far as they could go and her teeth and the whites of her eyes glared in the tropical sun as she laid his arms out along the bamboo poles and held the first nail to his wrist…

…and again he was standing on the
Carmichael
's deck, blinking at Hurwood.

Hurwood now looked definitely uneasy. “What the hell's wrong with your
mind
?” he snarled. “It's like a stripped screw.”

Shandy was inclined to agree. He kept trying to remember what he was doing here, and every time he glanced at the nightmare combat going on around him he was astonished and horrified anew. And now, as if to outdo all his previous disorientations, the deck stopped pressing against his boot-soles and he slowly began to rise unsupported into the air.

Instinctively he reached to grab something—and what he grabbed for was not a rail or the rigging, but the hilt of his saber. The protruding compass needle punctured his palm, but the same impulse that had made him grab it made him hang on. He began to sink, and a few seconds later he was again standing on the deck.

He looked around: the fighting was going on as horribly as before, though all sounds were still muffled for him, but none of the combatants were coming anywhere near Hurwood and Shandy—apparently they considered it a private duel.