Chapter Ten

To Beth Hurwood's right lay the vast swamp that penetrated, they said, far inland—a region where land and water blurred into each other, seldom distinct, where snakes swam in the pools and fish crawled along the banks, where the very arrangement of channels and islands would, like a diabolically animate maze, change, rendering maps no more useful for navigating than sketches of clouds would be, where still air became stagnant like still water, and so miasmally thick that insects too large to do more than crawl anywhere else could fly here. Even as she glanced at that dark quarter of the landscape, far off in the marsh there appeared one of the randomly floating spheres of phosphorescence that the pirates called spirit balls; it lifted above the wispy surface of the fog and bounced slowly among the cypress branches and the dangling masses of Spanish moss, and then, just as slowly, fell back into the fog-river, and the glow became nebulous and then died out.

She looked in the other direction then toward the steel-gray sea, below which the sun had sunk half an hour before in so vast and molten a blaze that the high, wispy cirrus clouds still glowed pink; and being on higher ground and undazzled by the fires, she saw the sail a moment before the pirates did.

First a shout came faintly across the water from one of the three moored ships, and then one of the men down by the fires pointed and yelled, "A sail!"

The pirates all leaped up and sprinted for the boats, instinctively preferring to be on the water rather than on the land if there was to be trouble. Beth wavered uncertainly. If the sail—a single one, and disappointingly small—was a Royal Navy craft, she certainly didn't want to be aboard any ship that succeeded in fleeing them; but if she hid and stayed behind, would the Navy craft stop and send someone to check for stragglers ashore?

Someone giggled very close by, and she jumped and smothered a scream.

Leo Friend stepped out from behind a cluster of swamp maple trees. "Going for a walk, my d-d-d—Elizabeth?" His eyes, she noticed, seemed to show too much white around the irises, and a smile came and went on his face as quickly and randomly as something that should have been secured in a wind.

"Uh, yes," she said, wondering desperately how to be rid of him. "What sail is that, do you suppose?"

"It doesn't matter," Friend said. His voice was shriller than usual tonight. "Royal Navy, rival pirates—it's too late for anyone to stop us." The smile poked his pudgy lips out and then disappeared again. "And t-t-tomorrow w-w-we'll—to-m-morrow we s-s-sail from h-h … damn it … here." He pulled a lace handkerchief from his sleeve and mopped his forehead. "In the meantime I'll walk with you."

"I'm going down toward the fires to see what's going on," she told him, knowing that since shooting Davies the fat physician had been reluctant, even with his various protective fetishes, to mingle with the pirates.

"Your buccaneer s-sweetheart's dead, Elizabeth," Friend snapped, his sparky cheer abruptly gone, "and I think it shows at least a lack of imagination to choose his suc-suc-suc-successor from out of the same stew."

Beth ignored him and began picking her way down the slope. To her alarm, she heard Friend following. How on earth, she wondered frantically, can I get away from him and keep the appointment with Bonnett?

A man out on the anchored Carmichael shouted something Beth couldn't hear, but the message was repeated by the men on the beach. "It's the bleedin' Jenny!" came a wondering shout. "The Jenny got free of that man-o'-war!"

With no clear transition point the pirates' panicky rout became a riot of celebration. Bells began ringing on the Vociferous Carmichael and Bonnett's Revenge—though not on Blackbeard's ship)—and muskets were fired into the darkening sky, and the various ships' musicians hastily snatched up their instruments and began clamoring.

Glad now that it wasn't a Royal Navy vessel, Beth Hurwood quickened her pace, while Friend, seeing that the vessel was not one that offered her a chance of escape, sulkily slacked off his own pace.

Having a much shallower draft than the three ships, the Jenny was able to tack in very close to shore before dropping her anchor—the rattling of the chain lost in the general pandemonium—and a few of the men aboard her didn't wait for boats but took running dives off the bow, daringly trusting the speed and angle of their dives to carry them into water that wouldn't be over their chins in depth. A few could actually swim, and took this opportunity to show off their exotic skill by paddling around in circles, splashing and blowing like dolphins, before heading in to shore with theatrically nonchalant strokes.

One of them, though, just dove in and made his way to shore in a swift, unpretentious crawl, and he was the first to stand up in the shallows and wade in through the surge and ebb to the sand.

"Saints be praised!" cried one of the men waiting ashore. "The cook survived!"

"Whip us up one of your dinners, Shandy," called another, "before the captains start inland!"

A few more sailors had made their way ashore by this time, and the ships' boats were being dragged down the sand to the surf to facilitate the more formal disembarking, and Jack Shandy was able to avoid the worst of the welcoming press. He glanced around, clearly trying to keep from ruining his night vision by looking directly into the fires, and then his dark, bearded face split in a smile when he saw the slim figure of Beth Hurwood just now striding into the central clearing.

She hurried across the sand to him even as he broke into an unsteady run toward her, and when they met it seemed to her only natural to throw her arms around his neck.

"Everybody told me you were all killed—in that last broadside," she gasped.

"A lot of us were," he said. "Listen, I've been talking to Davies a lot during these last five days, and—"

"No, you listen. Stede Bonnett and I are going to steal a boat and escape tonight, and I'm sure there'll be room for you too. The Jenny's arrival will postpone it a little, I imagine, but it should at the same time provide a fine diversion. Now here's what you do—linger by the shore for a while until Bonnett can choose a boat, and then watch for me. I'll—"

"Shandy!" came a yell from the fireside crowd. "Jack! Where in hell are you?"

"Damn," said Shandy. "I'll be back." He strode away from her toward the crowd.

"Here he is!" shouted Davies. "May I present, gentlemen, my new quartermaster!" The applause that followed this announcement was sporadic, but Davies went on. "I know—you all think it's cookery and puppets he does best, and so did I, but it develops his real values are brassier; courage and deceit and a quick, steady hand with a pistol. You want to know how we got away from that man-o'-war?"

The pirates loudly indicated that they wanted to know. On the outskirts of the crowd, Beth Hurwood took several slow steps backward, her face expressionless. Shandy looked back at her over his shoulder, clearly wanting to return and say something to her, but a dozen hands, and even an encouraging boot or two, were propelling him toward Davies and the flattened clearing between the fires. The lean old pirate chief grinned at him; though Davies had cursed the absence of a bocor during the past five days, he had, himself, taken the dead bocor's kit and managed to "slap Mate Care-For awake" and to some extent keep that personage's attention on the sloop, and now the wounded men were recovering unfevered and Davies' shoulder seemed to be restored.

"After I was shot off the Carmichael," said Davies loudly, "a circumstance I'll take up with certain parties presently, I was picked out of the water by the Navy boys and taken aboard their ship. I found the Jenny crippled and captured, and all her surviving lads under armed guard—except for our boy Shandy, who'd told the captain, 'Oh dear me, sir, I'm not one of these dirty pirates, I was forced to join them, and I'll be delighted to testify at their trials." Several of the Jenny's crew had attained the shore and joined the crowd, and now they hollered their delighted agreement.

"That's just what he said, Phil!"

"Innocent as a bloody sheep, that captain thought Jacky was!"

"But," Davies went on, "he tipped me a wink when no one was looking, so I waited to see what he was up to. And what Jack did was convince the captain that I should be questioned privately, down in the great cabin, and no sooner had the three of us and a couple of officers got in there and shut the door than Jack snatched a pistol and shot the captain's head clean off his body!"

The applause this time was tumultuous, and Shandy was forcibly picked up and marched around the fires on the shoulders of a number of pirates. Beth took another backward step and then turned and ran toward the dark shoreline, as Davies, behind her, went on with relish to describe the way Shandy had engineered the utter destruction of the British man-of-war.

She found Bonnett standing just to the dry side of the high-water line, staring out at the darkening sea, his hands locked behind his back and the tilt of his three-cornered hat indicating that he was staring into the sky.

"Let's go, quickly," Beth panted. "I'm afraid I've confided our intentions to one who'll betray us, but perhaps if we leave instantly that won't matter. And the arrival of the Jenny can surely be used to our profit—you can pretend that the supplies you take from your ship are to replenish those of the ravaged Jenny, can't you? So for God's sake, let's go, every second—"

She halted then, for Bonnett had turned around to look at her, and his face bore an uncharacteristically sardonic smile. "Ah!" he said gently. "Escape, is it? Furtive flight? That explains his extreme tension and anxiety … very conspicuous states of mind, if one has learned to smell such things." He shrugged, and gave her a smile not devoid of sympathy. "I'm sorry. Neither of the two pieces you propose removing from the board is dispensable right now."

Beth gasped, then whirled and ran back in despair toward the fires, her most basic assumptions about the world shaken for the first time; for she knew beyond hope of rationalization that, though the voice had been Bonnett's and had come out of his mouth, it had been someone else speaking to her through them.

Shandy swore under his breath, for he'd lost sight of Beth, and he'd hoped to be able to give her his account of Davies' rescue before she heard the flamboyant version the Jenny's crew had come to agree on.

He was about to demand that the pirates put him down when he caught a whiff of the by now not unfamiliar smell of overheated metal. He tensed, trying to remember some of the things Davies had taught him during the past five days. He exhaled totally and hummed one of the simpler parrying-tunes, and he shifted around on his unsteady perch, trying to face all corners of the compass.

He found that his nose burned most uncomfortably when he was facing the farthest fire, and after a moment's peering he noticed the stocky, red-haired figure of Venner standing there. Shandy braced himself, then raised his left hand, curling the fingers into the uncomfortable position Davies had shown him, but as soon as Venner realized Shandy had noticed him he looked away, and the smell was gone instantly.

Shandy whistlingly sucked air into his heaving lungs. Well now, he thought as the pirates wearied of their sport and let him hop down to the packed sand, that's worth knowing. I guess Venner doesn't agree that I'm the best man for the quartermaster job.

The cheering and howling had abated in the clumps of the crowd nearest to the shore, and after a few seconds the stillness spread to the rest of the crowd; an inattentive pirate or two shouted, and one drunken old man worked his way to the end of a long fit of laughter, and Mr. Bird reminded everyone one more time that he was not a dog, but after that the silence on shore was absolute.

And from the dark sea came the kalunk … clunk … kalunk … clunk of oars knocking in oarlocks.

Shandy blinked around in uneasy puzzlement. "What's up?" he whispered to a man near him. "A boat's coming in—what's so terrible?"

The man's right hand darted to his forehead, but he hesitated and then just scratched his scalp. Shandy guessed his first impulse had been to make the sign of the cross. "It's Thatch," the man said quietly.

" … Oh." Shandy stared out at the boat that was now halfway between the shore and the lightless bulk of the Queen Anne's Revenge. There were two figures in the boat, one of whom, the bigger one, seemed at this distance to be wearing a tiara of fireflies.

More profoundly than ever, Shandy wished that Captain Wilson had not tried to kill Davies. He recalled all the stories he'd heard about this man in the approaching boat, and it occurred to him that Thatch—Blackbeard—the dreaded hunsi kanzo—was the most successful of the buccaneers who had tried to adapt to this new, western world. Blackbeard seemed as much and as inseparably a part of this world as the Gulf Stream.

Shandy glanced at Davies, who was squinting more than the fire glare called for, and though the set of his jaw made his cheeks even more lined and hollow than usual, Shandy caught a hint of how Davies must have looked as a young man—willful, and determined to conceal any misgivings once a course had been considered and decided on.

Boots grated on the sand nearby, and looking around Shandy saw old one-armed Benjamin Hurwood standing near him and staring out at the boat. Shandy thought Hurwood too was concealing what he felt, but, unlike Davies, Beth's father seemed to be tense with eagerness and impatience. Remembering some things Davies had told him about Hurwood, Shandy was pretty sure he knew why—and though he knew Hurwood was a murderer, he knew too that if he himself were ever to be in Hurwood's situation, and refrain from taking the course Hurwood was taking, it would be because of fear rather than virtue.

The boat crested an incoming breaker, and as the wave crashed to churning foam the boat rushed in until its keel jarred against the sand in the swirling shallows, and Blackbeard vaulted over the gunwale and splashed ponderously up to shore. His boatman—who, Shandy noticed with a shudder, had his jaw bound up—just sat in the boat, neither attempting to beach the thing nor to get out to deeper water before the next wave broke.

Blackbeard strode up the sand slope toward the fires, and paused for a moment where it leveled out, a big, jagged silhouette against the purple sky; his three-cornered hat seemed too tapering and long at the corners, and with the points of red light bobbing around his head he looked to Shandy like some three-horned demon newly climbed up from Hell.

Then he approached the fires, and the luminous red dots around his head were revealed to be the lit ends of match-cords woven into his shaggy mane and beard. He was a tall man, taller than Davies, and as solidly massive as a wind-etched rock outcrop.

"And here we are one year later, Mr. Hurwood," Blackbeard said. "You've brought us a fine ship, as you promised, and I've brought the herb you say we need—and here we are on Lammask in spite of your fears I'd be late." He spoke English with a slight accent, and Shandy couldn't decide whether it indicated a non-English origin or just a lack of interest and aptitude in speaking. "May we both get what we're seeking."

Behind the huge pirate Shandy saw Leo Friend, still panting from having hurried to the fires, grin furtively; and for the First time Shandy wondered if the fat young physician might have ambitions of his own in all this.

Blackbeard clumped in to the center of the cleared space, and Shandy noticed that his craggy face gleamed with sweat—perhaps because of his heavy black coat, the voluminous folds of which hung all the way down to his shins. "Phil?" said Blackbeard.

"Here, sir," said Davies, stepping forward.

"Feel recovered enough to come along?"

"Try me."

"Oh, aye, I'll do that. These are trying times." Blackbeard grinned, a rictus that exposed most of his teeth. "You were disobeying the orders."

Davies grinned back. "Unlike what you'd have done, of course."

"Hah." The giant looked around at the crowd, which was more or less separated into three groups—the three ships' crews. "Who else is—" He paused abruptly and stared at his own wide-cuffed sleeve, all expression leaving his dark face. The men nearby drew back, muttering cantrips, though Hurwood and Friend leaned forward and stared.

Shandy stared too, though not eagerly, and thought for a moment he saw the cuff twitch, and a faint puff of smoke curl out; then, very clearly, he saw a line of blood run down Blackbeard's two middle fingers and begin to drip off and fall to the sand. The pirate's long coat seemed to shiver, as though rats were running around underneath.

"Rum," the giant said in a voice both tense and quiet.

One of the men from the Carmichael's crew hurried forward with a jug, but Davies caught his collar and yanked him back. "Not just raw rum," Davies snapped. He took the jug, called for a cup, and after filling the cup he hurriedly uncorked his powder flask and shook a couple of handfuls of gunpowder into the drink. "Jack," he said. "A light, quick."

Shandy sprinted to the nearest fire and snatched up a stick with a flaming end, then hurried back to Davies, who was now holding the cup out away from himself, and he touched the blazing end of the stick to the cup's rim.

Instantly it was flaming and bubbling, and Davies took it to Blackbeard. Shandy thought he saw something like a little featherless bird clinging to Blackbeard's hand, but he was distracted by the sight of the huge pirate tilting his head all the way back and then simply inverting the fiery cup over his open mouth.

For a moment it seemed that his entire head had caught fire; then as quick as it had appeared the blaze was out, leaving just the dim corona of lit match-cords, and a puff of churning, redly luminous smoke hung over his head—and as soon as Shandy noticed its resemblance to a rage-contorted face, it was gone.

"Who's going with us?" Blackbeard asked harshly.

"Me and my quartermaster here, Jack Shandy," said Davies briskly, "and Bonnett and Hurwood, of course, and probably Hurwood's apprentice, Leo Friend, he's that fat boy there … and Hurwood's daughter."

People were looking at Shandy, though Blackbeard wasn't yet, so Shandy didn't let his astonishment show—but he was angry that Davies hadn't told him Beth would be coming along into the swamp, for Davies had described to him the journey they were going to make tonight through the perilous marshes, and, evidently even more perilous, the "magical balancing point" they sought, way back in the nearly impenetrable fastnesses of primeval ooze and loathesomely adapted creatures, and he couldn't imagine bringing Beth Hurwood along.

"Your quartermaster," Blackbeard rumbled, absently crushing the cup. "What became of Hodge?"

"He was killed when we escaped from the Navy man-of-war," Davies said. "Shandy accomplished that escape."

"Caught some news of that," Blackbeard said thoughtfully. "Shandy—step forward."

Shandy did, and the huge pirate-king turned his gaze on him, and Shandy felt buffeted by the sheer impact of the man's undivided attention. For a moment Blackbeard just stared down mto his eyes, and Shandy felt his face heating up, for he could almost feel the closets and cupboards of his mind being opened and their contents being appraised.

"I see there was more aboard the Vociferous Carmichael than we knew," the giant said quietly, almost with suspicion. Then, more loudly, he said, "Welcome to the world, Shandy—I can see that Davies picked the right man."

"Thank you, sir," Shandy found himself saying. "Though don't … I mean, it wasn't all quite … "

"It never is. Prove yourself tonight when we reach the Fountain … and though we travel with Baron Samedi and Maitre Carrefour, stand on your own feet." He turned away then, and Shandy, feeling as if he'd just stepped out of glaring sunlight into shade, heaved a sigh and let his constricted psyche spring back out to its normal extent.

Incoming waves had first half filled Blackbeard's boat but then nudged it up into the shallows, and several sailors had begun to unload a large box from the craft, awkwardly because of their reluctance to get near the stiffly motionless boatman. The pirate-king spat in disgust and strode away to oversee the work.

Shandy turned around and almost bumped into the imposing belly of Davies' bocor, Woefully Fat. A night for giants, Shandy thought as he tried to peer around the bulky sorceror. "Excuse me," he said before remembering that the bocor was supposed to be deaf, "have you seen Phil? Uh, Captain Davies? Oh hell, that's right, you can't hear, can you? So why am I … " The intensity of the bocor's stare made him stop jabbering. Why can't these people give these looks to somebody else, Shandy thought with a shiver, or each other?

Unlike Blackbeard, who had seemed vaguely suspicious of Shandy, Woefully Fat stared down at him with evident doubt—almost with disappointment, as though Shandy were a bottle of expensive wine that someone might have left out too long in direct sunlight.

Shandy gave the sorceror a nervously polite smile, then backed away and hurried around him. Davies, he saw now, was standing on the edge of the sand slope a few yards away, and Shandy plodded over there.

Davies saw him, grinned, and then nodded down toward Blackbeard. "A powerful man, eh?"

"God knows," Shandy agreed, not smiling. "Listen, Phil," he went on quietly, "you never told me Beth Hurwood was coming along into the swamps with us."

Davies raised his eyebrows. "Didn't I? Perhaps not—probably because it's none of your concern."

Shandy thought the older man was speaking a little defensively and that alarmed him even more. "What do they mean to do with her?"

Davies sighed and shook his head. "Frankly, Jack, I'm not certain—though I do know they're anxious to keep her from all harm. Some higher magic, I gather."

"Having to do with Hurwood's dead wife."

"Oh, certainly that," Davies agreed. "As I told you on the Jenny, the hope of getting her back is all that keeps the old boy moving."

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."