On Stranger Tides (44 page)

Hurwood opened his eyes again and stared wonderingly at Shandy. “Why…the dumping of her mind. Elizabeth's mind—her soul. He'll drive it out of her body, with magic. I showed him how. Though,” he added with a yawn, “it's a waste of time now. Now there's nobody to put in her place.”

Sudden pain in his kneecaps let Shandy know he'd fallen to his knees. “Will she come back, then?” he asked, forcing himself not to shout. “Will Beth's soul go back into her body then?”

Hurwood laughed, the light, carefree laughter of a child. “Come
back?
No. When she's gone, she'll be…
gone
.”

Shandy restrained himself from hitting or strangling the old man, and he didn't speak until he was sure he could again match Hurwood's casual tone. “Well,” he began, but there was a rough edge in his voice, so he started again. “Well, you know what? I'm going to see to it that this ship does get to Jamaica by tomorrow dawn. And then you'll wave at your… friend, this Hicks, won't you?” He was smiling, but his maimed hands were clenched into fists as tight as stressed knots.

“Very well.” Hurwood yawned again. “I'd like to sleep now.”

Shandy stood up. “Good idea. We'll be getting up damned early tomorrow.”

PEERING FROM the corners of his eyes—he was supposed to look as if he were deep in prayer—the altar boy had to admit that the church really was getting darker. And while he was afraid of the dry, dusty, birdlike things that would be free to come out when all the light was gone, he was hoping that total dark would come soon—for after the wedding ceremony the minister would dispense communion, and the altar boy knew he had sinned too direly to take it, and so he wanted to be able to slip away unseen…even if that meant becoming one of the cobwebby birdlike creatures himself. He shivered, and wondered unhappily what had become of all the nice things. There had been friends, a wife, scholarship, the respect of colleagues, the respect of himself… Perhaps they had only been a tormenting dream, and there had never really been anything but darkness and cold and the slow in-creeping of imbecility.

He took comfort in the thought.

The wedding couple finally came together in the shadows below the altar and linked arms, slowly, like lengths of seaweed tangled by listless sea-bottom currents. Then they began ascending the steps, and the altar boy realized that the absolute darkness had held off too long.

The bride was just an empty but animate dress; that wasn't so bad—it was always reassuring to find only an absence where it had seemed there might be a presence—but the groom was present and alive: it was impossible to be sure that it was human, for the skinned, bleeding flesh it consisted of might be manlike in form only because of the constriction of the clothes. If it had eyes they were closed, but the altar boy could tell the thing was alive because blood kept running out of it everywhere, and its
mouth, albeit silently, was opening wide and clamping shut over and over again.

All at once the altar boy realized that the flayed thing there was himself, but the knowledge carried no horror, because now he knew too that he could move out of himself: all the way, if he was ready to let go of everything, to non-being.

This, with profound relief, he did.

WHEN THE first hints of the dawn's glow began to dim the brightness of Sirius and the three bright stars in Lepus, Shandy called for the telescope and scanned the faint contrast in dark grays that was the southeast horizon—and then, though after the night-long labor he was too exhausted and hoarse to shout, he bared his teeth in pleasure, for he could see the irregularity that couldn't be anything but Jamaica.

“We're there, Skank,” he said quietly to the man beside him as he handed the telescope back. “Ten hours of night sailing and navigating our course by the stars, on one reach because we couldn't tack, and the pre-dawn shows us sitting squarely where we wanted to be! By God, I wish Davies could have seen it.”

“Aye,” Skank croaked dully.

“Have one of the lads go fetch Hurwood up here. It's nearly time for him to step onstage.”

“Aye, cap'n.” Skank lurched away into the darkness, leaving Shandy alone on the bow.

Shandy stared out at the dim horizon, trying to spot Jamaica again without the telescope's aid, but after going two nights without sleep, focusing his eyes was a physical effort, and all he could see were illusory transparencies that swirled in different directions every time he moved his eyes. He was desperately looking forward to rescuing Beth, but more because he could
then relax and go to sleep somewhere than because of any glory or fulfillment he might derive from accomplishing it.

With the numb objectivity that follows total, all-consuming effort, he wondered if he would be captured in Jamaica…and what might ensue if he was. It could be argued that he hadn't violated his pardon, since the only ship he had taken was this one, and Hurwood was certainly not the legal captain. Is stealing stolen property less reprehensible than plain stealing? Well, even if he were captured, and the judgment went against him, he'd free Beth Hurwood first…and make her listen to the story her father had to tell, and show her that things were…different from the way she thought they were.

He rubbed his aching eyes and, again with no particular feeling, thought of all the things this summer and fall had cost him: his righteous convictions, his legal standing, his skepticism, his youth, his heart…and he grinned into the chilly darkness when he realized that, nearly as much as all the dead innocence and friends, he missed the old, battered, slipshod, jury-rigged loyal sloop called the
Jenny
. With no one to man the bilge pumps during yesterday's fighting and recuperation, she had filled and foundered, so that the grappling lines were stretched taut and were making the
Carmichael
list perceptibly to port. Sadly he had ordered her to be cut free, and there had been tears in his eyes as he had watched the mast and the patched sails slowly lean down to the water as the hulk receded away astern… and though his hearing was still bad, or perhaps because of it, it had seemed to him that for a few moments he faintly heard a babble of diminishing voices, one still insisting that he was not a dog…

Footsteps scuffed on the deck behind him now, and Skank tapped him on the shoulder. “Uh, cap'n?”

Shandy turned around. “Yes? Where's Hurwood? I don't care if he's ill, he's got to—”

“Cap'n,” said Skank, “he's dead.”

Shandy felt tears of rage welling up in his eyes. “
Dead?
What? No, he's not, the son of a bitch, he can't be, he—”

“Cap'n, he's cold and he ain't breathing—and he don't bleed if you prod him with a knife.”

Shandy fell back against the rail and slid down until he was sitting on the deck. “God damn the man,” he was whispering shrilly, “God damn him, am I supposed to swim ashore and climb the cliffs and find this Hicks person? How in hell am I to—” He lowered his head into his hands, and for several seconds the appalled Skank thought he was weeping; but when Shandy finally raised his head and spoke, his voice was harsh but level.

“Bring him here anyway.” Shandy slowly got to his feet, facing Jamaica and flexing his stiff hands. The sky was lightening in the east—the sun would be up terribly soon.

“Uh…sure, cap'n.” Skank started away, but paused. “Uh…
why?
”

“And a couple of stout, yard-long spar sections, and a roll of the strongest, thinnest twine,” Shandy went on, still staring at the island, “and a—” He paused, and seemed to gag.

“And a what, captain?” Skank asked softly.

“A sharp sailmaker's needle.”

WHAT WAS the point of leaving Port-au-Prince, Sebastian Chandagnac asked himself fretfully as he tried to find a comfortable position among the rocks and dew-drenched grass, if in this new Joshua Hicks identity I'm still skulking around desolate shores at dawn waiting for signals from pirate ships? He shivered and drew his cloak closer about himself and had another swig from his brandy flask, and was warmed by both the alcohol and the envy of the driver who waited on the carriage several yards behind him.

He scowled around at the horizon, then stiffened, for he could see a light gray fleck out on the sea's dark face. He fumbled the telescope to his eye and squinted through it. Yes, it was a ship, tall and square-rigged. Unable to learn any more about it for now, he lowered the telescope.

That
must
be him, he thought. What other ship would be slanting in past Portland Point at dawn on Christmas? He glanced back at the carriage—and the driver was looking resentful and one of the horses stamped impatiently and blew out a plume of steam—but Chandagnac didn't walk back to them yet, for Ulysse had ordered him to wait until he actually saw him on the deck. “It may be my ship, you see,” Segundo had said, with that smile of his which, though cheerful, seemed to expose too many teeth, “but I may not be on it—I may have been detained somewhere, or even killed, so that it wouldn't be until after Christmas that I'd be able to get back here. And the…eviction magic has to be done on Christmas. So you plan on doing it yourself unless you see me wave.”

Be aboard, Chandagnac prayed to the man now, be aboard and wave.
I
don't want to get involved in that stuff. It occurred to him that, at the moment, he was happier here on this cold cliff than he would have been at home, for yesterday evening the frightful black nurse had begun making preparations for the magic: burning bugs and snakes in the fireplace—impervious to their frequent stings—then carefully collecting the ash and dusting a couple of spoonfuls of it over the pile of leaves and roots that was to be the captive girl's dinner; tuning and testing at least a dozen little tin whistles; whispering into various dirty old bottles and then instantly corking them, as if to keep the whispered words in; and, worst of all, the thing that had made Chandagnac rush out to keep his cliff-top appointment much earlier than was necessary, she had razored open a vein in her bony wrist and let some of the contents run into a cup, but what
had come out was not blood, or any kind of fluid, but a fine black powder…

He shuddered now at the memory of it. Yes, he thought, be aboard, Ulysse, so
you
can be the one who gets to perform your damned sorcery, and I can get everything ready for my big dinner tonight. And you'd better have been right when you assured me that all of your magical trappings will be cleared out of the garden before three o'clock, when the servants will be arriving to set up.

He peered through the telescope again. The sky was brighter and the ship was nearer and he could see that it was indeed the
Ascending Orpheus
…looking a bit battered, but coming on strongly enough.

So far so good, he thought with cautious satisfaction. In half an hour I can be rolling east, back toward Spanish Town…have lunch and a few drinks at the club, stay away from the house until Ulysse has finished his awful business…and then get my wig curled and make sure all my clothes are immaculate. Maybe take a nap. It's essential that I put all this unpleasantness out of my mind so that I can make a good impression on this Edmund Morcilla fellow.

Even in his semi-solitude Chandagnac had heard of Morcilla—the big, bald, smooth-faced rich man who had sailed into Kingston Harbor late in November and was reputed to be investing heavily in all sorts of Caribbean concerns, from sugar to land to slaves. And Morcilla had last week actually written to Joshua Hicks, proposing a partnership in a land deal. Chandagnac had written back in eager agreement, for he saw Morcilla as a possible means of freedom from Ulysse Segundo; and when Morcilla had replied with a long, friendly letter in which he mentioned his desire to marry some spirited, preferably auburn-haired young lady, Chandagnac was so anxious to ingratiate himself that in his next letter he actually mentioned
the young lady “with a slight touch of brain-fever” who was staying at his house. In the same letter he invited Morcilla to his Christmas dinner party, and Chandagnac was so pleased when Morcilla wrote back to accept the invitation that he didn't even let himself worry about Morcilla's postscript, in which the wealthy man expressed a strong interest in meeting the young lady.

A lance of red sunlight in the corner of his left eye snapped him out of his reverie, and when he raised the telescope this time he kept it raised, for the ship was moving past his cliff-perch, showing him her port profile. It did seem to have caught its share of the storm—several spars were broken, and much of the rigging had simply been hacked short and tied off, and somehow one of the lower foremast sails had torn free and become tangled in the standing rigging, and now formed a sort of tent around the crosstree platform—but he could clearly see men on the deck. He scanned these eagerly, bracing the telescope barrel on a ballata tree branch to keep it steady, and in moments he was sure he had spotted Segundo.

The man was standing by the foremast with his back to the shore, but Chandagnac recognized the figure, the clothes, and the white hair—and then Segundo turned around to face the cliff, and Chandagnac laughed with relief, for there was no mistaking that craggy face and that intent stare. While Chandagnac watched, Segundo bent his left knee and lifted his foot up onto one of the rail-stanchion stumps, and, though he kept his right hand in his coat pocket, he waved broadly with his left, nodding reassuringly all the while.

Chandagnac waved the telescope over his head, even though it was unlikely that the gesture would be seen, and he didn't even frown when the cylinder slipped from his cold-numbed fingers and spun away to crash to bits on the rocks below. Whistling
cheerfully, he turned away from the sea and strode toward the waiting carriage.

AND SHANDY, concealed on the cross-tree platform behind the roped-back forecourse sail, all at once sagged limp in the bindings that moored him to the mast, as the long held off rainbow glitter of unconsciousness finally filled his vision and overwhelmed him. His hands slipped off the blood-slick marionette cross he'd made, and it balanced for a moment on the yardarm, and then slipped off to one side and hung there, making the puppet on the deck below suddenly assume a startling posture: Hurwood's corpse, though still held more or less upright by the twine puppet strings, was now leaning backward at a forty-five degree angle, smiling confidently up into the sky and extending its left leg straight out and well above its head, like a dancer frozen in a particularly energetic moment.