On Stranger Tides (47 page)

Suddenly Shandy realized that, clean-shaven and with all the new lines of age and weariness in his face, he must look very much like his father had when Sebastian would have seen him last…and of course this man didn't know that his nephew John Chandagnac had come to the Caribbean.

Having decided not to kill him, Shandy found that he could not refrain from stirring up the man's guilt. “Look me in the eye,” he whispered chokingly.

The old man did, though with much trembling and moaning.

“I'm your brother, Sebastian,” Shandy said through clenched teeth. “I'm François.”

The old man's face was nearly purple. “I heard you had…
died. Really
died, I mean.”

Shandy grinned ferociously. “I did—but haven't you ever heard of
vodun
?—I've only come back from Hell tonight to fetch
you,
dear brother.”

Apparently Sebastian
had
heard of
vodun,
and found Shandy's claim all too plausible; his eyes rolled back in his head and, with as sharp an exhalation as if he'd been punched in the belly, he went limp.

Surprised but not really dismayed, Shandy let the body tumble to the floor.

Then, almost side by side, Shandy and the bald man sprang for the stairs; presumably Edmund Morcilla was pursuing the pirate, but it was hard to be sure they weren't both racing toward
some common goal. A few men with swords leaped quickly into their path, and then even more quickly out of it, and a moment later Shandy was bounding up the stairs three at a time, panting and praying that he wouldn't pass out quite yet.

At the top of the stairs was a corridor, and he paused there, his chest heaving, and turned to face the man who called himself Morcilla, who had stopped two steps short of the landing. His eyes were level with Shandy's.

“What…do
you
want?” Shandy gasped.

The giant's smile looked cherubic on his smooth face. “The young woman.”

There was more shouting and crashing below, and Shandy shook his head impatiently. “No. Forget it. Go back downstairs.”

The bald man raised his sword. “I'd rather not kill you, Jack, but I promise I will if I have to in order to get her.”

Shandy let his shoulders slump defeatedly and let his face relax into lines of exhaustion and despair—and then he flung himself forward, slamming the giant's sword against the wall with his left forearm while his right hand punched his rapier into the man's chest. Only the fact that the bald man stood his ground stopped Shandy from pitching head first down the stairs. Shandy caught his balance, raised his right foot and planted it on the man's broad breast next to where the blade transfixed it, and then kicked, bringing himself back upright on the landing and propelling the bald man in a backward tumble down the stairs. Exclamations of horror and surprise erupted above the general clamor below.

Shandy turned and looked down the corridor. One of the doorknobs was wooden, and he reeled to it. It was locked, so he wearily braced himself against the wall it faced, lifted his foot, and with a repetition of the move that had freed his blade from Morcilla's chest, drove his foot at the door. The wooden lock splintered and the door flew inward and Shandy dropped his saber as he fell forward into the room.

He looked up from his hands and knees. There was a lamp lit in the room, but the scene it showed him was far from reassuring: nasty-smelling leaves were all over the floor, someone had hung several severed dog heads on the walls, an obviously long-dead black woman was tumbled carelessly in the corner, and Beth Hurwood was crouched by the window apparently trying to eat the woodwork.

But Beth looked around in alarm, and her eyes were clear and alert. “
John!
” she said hoarsely when she saw who it was. “My God, I'd almost given up praying for you! Bring that sword over here and chop this wooden bolt in half—my teeth aren't making any progress at all.”

He got up and hurried over to her, slipping only once on the leaves, and he squinted blearily at the bolt. He raised his sword carefully. “I'm surprised you recognize me,” he remarked inanely.

“Of course I do, though you do look thrashed. When did you sleep last?”

“…I don't remember.” He brought the sword down. It cut the bolt, barely. Beth fumbled the pieces out of the brackets and pushed the window open, and the cool night air sluiced away the room's stale smells and brought in the cries of tropical birds out in the jungle.

“There's a roof out here,” she said. “At the north end of the house the hill catches up with it enough for us to jump safely. Now listen, John, I—”

“Us?” Shandy interrupted. “No, you're safe now. My uncle—Joshua Hicks—is dead. You're—”

“Don't be silly, of course I'm coming with you. But listen, please! That creature in the corner pitched over dead—dead again, I should say—last night, and so I haven't had to eat any more of those damned plants since then, but I'm terribly weak and I have spells of…I don't know, disorientation. I sort of fall
asleep with my eyes open. I don't know how long it lasts, but it's tapering off—so if I do it, if I go blank-eyed on you, don't worry, just keep me moving. I'll come out of it.”

“Uh…very well.” Shandy stepped through the window, out onto the roof. “You're sure you want to come with me?”

“Yes.” She followed him out, swayed and grabbed his shoulder, then took a deep breath and nodded. “Yes. Let's go.”

“Right.”

Through the open window behind them he could hear people hesitantly but noisily advancing up the stairs, so he took her elbow and led her as quickly as he dared toward the north end of the roof.

It faded on the crowing of the cock.
Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long;
And then, they say, no spirit can walk abroad;
The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow'd and so gracious is the tithe.
—William Shakespeare

THEY WALKED for hours, avoiding the wider, better-maintained roads because of the bands of mounted, torch-carrying soldiers who were riding back and forth, it seemed, through all of Spanish Town; Shandy led Beth over low stone walls and along narrow footpaths and between rows of sugarcane. Twice dogs barked at them, but both times Shandy was able to silence the alarm by crimping the breeze with a gesture and whistling a certain tune. He wasn't able to deal as easily with the mosquitoes, though, and had to make do with smearing mud on his face and Beth's. He could judge directions and even make a fair guess at the hour by studying the sky whenever their way wasn't roofed with vegetation…but he didn't throw away the compass he had bought that afternoon, even though it was an awkward, bulky weight in his coat pocket.

Several times Beth did seem to be sleepwalking, and would walk straight into trees if he didn't lead her carefully by the hand, and for a while she just slept, and he had to carry her, enviously, in his arms; but she was awake and lucid during most of the walk, and she and Shandy occupied the long miles by conversing in whispers. She told him about her years in the Scottish convent, and he described traveling with his father and the marionettes. She asked him about Ann Bonny in a tone so carefully casual that he could feel his heart thudding in his chest. Drunk with exhaustion and happiness, he let himself answer the question with a long, disjointed monologue that he didn't even bother to listen to—vaguely he knew that it dealt with love and loss and maturity and death and birth and the rest of their lives. Whatever he had said, she didn't seem displeased by it; and even though she wasn't sleepwalking he took her hand.

They kept moving south, and when he judged that it was about three in the morning they came to the sandy end of one of the jungle footpaths they'd been following, stepped out from under an awning of palm fronds, and saw that they were on the beach. Between them and the blackness that was the sea were the faintly starlit blobs of buildings; Shandy thought he recognized the Maritime Law and records Office, but he couldn't be sure. They walked forward to the beach, and then continued moving south, staying in the shadows of buildings as much as possible and getting across streets and open squares as quickly and quietly as they could. A few lamps glowed in buildings they passed, and a couple of times they could hear drunken voices not too far distant, but nobody hailed them.

They passed several docks and clusters of beached boats… but each time Shandy crept closer to look for a stealable boat, there was a stray lantern-gleam or whispering voice nearby; and twice on the night breeze Shandy heard the unmistakable metallic click-and-slide of a sword being loosened in its scab-bard,
and once he heard a dockside voice whisper a sentence in which the name “Shandy” figured emphatically. Having failed to keep him from entering, the British authorities obviously did not mean to let him get out.

More cautiously than ever, Shandy and Beth walked on southward, passing the last of the stone buildings, then tiptoeing through an area of bamboo shacks and sailcloth tents, and finally, as the stars were fading, they reached a stretch of broad marshes along which the occasional turtle pen or fisherman's shack was the high point of the landscape. The mosquitoes were much worse here, making it necessary for the two fugitives to tie bands of cloth across the lower halves of their faces to avoid inhaling the insects, but Shandy appreciated the loneliness of this stretch of beach, and, no longer having to be perfectly silent, he began taking longer strides.

Just at dawn they found a decrepit pier with a sailboat moored at the end of it, and Shandy stared for several minutes at the half-dozen ragged men huddling around a small brazier—he could see pinpoints of red light in it when the erratic breeze fanned the coals—and then he relaxed and sat back down behind the bush that concealed him and Beth from the shore below.

“Just fishermen,” he whispered, mostly to himself, for Beth had drifted off into another of her somnambulistic trances. He had draped his compass-weighted velvet coat around her shoulders hours ago, and he shivered in the dawn sea breeze when he stood up and then laboriously hauled her up to stand swaying and blank-eyed beside him. “Come on,” he said, leading her forward and touching his baldric to make sure the weight of all the gold
scudos
was still there. “We're going to buy us a boat.”

He knew the two of them would be a strange spectacle with which to confront these fishermen on a chilly winter dawn—an evidently sleep-walking woman in a nightdress and velvet coat escorted from the jungle by a mud-splashed, blood-stained man
in formal dress, both their faces smeared with mud—but he was confident that half a dozen of the gold coins would allay all misgivings.

By the time they had slid down the slope and begun shambling through the sand toward the pier, most of the hunched figures had turned to stare at them, though one man, wearing a weathered straw hat and wrapped in a blanket, continued to sit on the end of the pier and face the newly sun-tipped gray waves.

Shandy smiled and held six
scudos
forward in the palm of his gloved hand as he led Beth Hurwood out onto the echoing boards of the pier…

Then his smile faltered and disappeared, for he had noticed the flat, filmed eyes in the gray faces, and the bound-up jaws, and the sewn-shut shirts and the bare feet.

“Oh, damn it,” he whispered hopelessly, realizing that neither of them had the strength to run—it was all he could do to continue standing. With no surprise he watched the figure at the end of the pier get to its feet, shed the blanket and toss away the hat so that the dawn sun gleamed on the bald scalp. The man took the cigar out of his mouth and smiled at Shandy.

“Thank you, Jack,” he rumbled. “Come, my dear.” He beckoned to Beth and she stumbled forward as if pushed from behind. The velvet coat slipped off her shoulders and fell onto the weathered planks of the pier.

Almost at the same moment, Shandy's knees unlocked and he found himself abruptly sitting on the planks. “You're dead,” he muttered. “I killed you…on the stairs.”

Beth took two more quick, balance-catching steps.

The bald man shook his head sadly, as if Shandy was proving to be a disappointing pupil. He puffed on the cigar and waved its glowing head at Shandy. “Come on, Jack, don't you remember the slow matches I used to braid into my hair and beard? Low-smoldering
fire, that's the
drogue
that holds Baron Samedi's protective attention. A lit cigar works just as well. Your blade stuck me, sure enough, but the Baron, the good old Lord of the Cemeteries, kept the blade from puncturing my vitals.”

Beth was swaying halfway between them now, and the sun made her hair gleam like fresh-sheared copper. Shandy scrab-bled at the wood and the tail of the coat, trying to find the strength to stand up again.

“But I don't hold grudges,” the giant went on, “any more than Davies did, when you cut him. I'm grateful to you for escorting to me my bride—the only woman in the world who has shed blood in Erebus—and I'd like you to be my quartermaster.”

Tears dripped from Shandy's squinting eyes onto the weathered planks. “I'll see you in Hell first, Blackbeard.”

The giant laughed, though his eyes were now fixed on the slim, approaching figure of Beth Hurwood. “Blackbeard's dead, Jack,” he said without looking away from the woman. “You must have heard. It's been
absolutely
verified. I need a new nickname now. Baldy, maybe.” He laughed again, and his motionless dead mariners did too, whickering like sick horses through their nostrils.

Shandy had been unthinkingly pulling the velvet coat toward himself, and now he felt a hard lump in it. He slid his hand into the pocket, and by touch recognized the brass-rimmed, glass-topped disk—it was the compass he'd bought. His heart began pounding, and with what he hoped was a convincingly despairing moan, he fell face down onto the pier, over the coat.