On Stranger Tides

by Powers, Tim

  “Naw, ’at’s all right, Venner,” Shandy said, crouching to get a grip on the topmost marble slab. He hoisted it up, stumped stiff-legged and grimacing to the boat, and then slid the stone over the gunwale and onto the rear thwart, and from there to the floor. “At the Carmichael they’re lowering me a stout net, and I just loop it around each block and then wave ’em to lift.” He walked back to the stack as Skank edged past him, carrying another one of the blocks.

  “Good,” said Venner, taking the other side of the next block Shandy crouched over. “Take it easy and don’t lose no sweat nor blood is my way.”

  Shandy squinted thoughtfully at Venner as the two of them shambled toward the boat. Venner never seemed to do quite his share of any hard work, but the man had prevented Shandy from being killed on that day when Davies took the Carmichael, and his avoid-all-strain philosophy tempted Shandy to confide his escape plan to him. Venner must regard the upcoming enterprise as at least a regrettable strain, and if Shandy was going to hide ashore until the Jenny and the Carmichael had left, and then re-emerge and wait for the arrival of the new governor from England, a partner who knew the island and its customs would be valuable indeed.

  Mr. Bird had picked up one of the blocks and was shambling along behind them, peering around suspiciously. Shandy was about to ask Venner to meet him after this job was finished, to discuss some pragmatic applications of his philosophy, but he heard a scuffing from up the slope and turned to see who was approaching.

  It was the woman in the purple dress, and when he and Venner had disposed of their block, Shandy shaded his eyes to look at her.

  “Howdy, Jack,” she said, and Shandy realized it was Jim Bonny’s wife.

  “Hello, Ann,” he said. It annoyed him to realize that, even though she was a big, chunky teenager with crooked teeth, his chest felt suddenly chilly inside, and his heart was thudding like a hammer into soft dirt. Though in Beth Hurwood’s company he was a little ashamed of his beard and tarred hair and deep-bitten tan, when Bonny’s wife was around he was furtively proud of them.

  “Still ballasting that thing?” she said, nodding past him at the Carmichael. She had learned the term while watching him work one afternoon a few days ago.

  “Yeah,” he said, walking up out of the water and trying not to stare at her breasts, clearly visible under her carelessly buttoned blouse. He forced himself to keep his mind on his job. “At least this is the last of it, the moveable ballast. The Carmichael was awfully crank—heeled something terrible coming over sharply in a strong wind. Almost spilled us all right over the side when she came around to face the Jenny that day.” He recalled the breakfast table tumbling across the poop deck, and the napkins spinning away into the sea directly below where he and Beth had clung to the rail and each other—and then he realized that his gaze had drifted back to Ann’s bosom. He turned to the stack and took hold of another slab.

  “Sounds like an awful lot of work,” Ann said. “Do you have to do quite so much of it?”

  He shrugged. “The seas and the weathers are what is; your vessels adapt to them or sink.” He lifted the slab, turned his back on her and shuffled toward the boat, where Mr. Bird and Skank were lowering one in. Venner was sitting on the beach, making a show of worriedly scrutinizing the bottom of his foot.

  Shandy’s pulse and breathing were loud in his head, so he didn’t hear Ann splashing along right behind him; Skank and Mr. Bird strode back ashore, and when Shandy straightened up from laying down his block, and turned around, he found himself being kissed.

  Ann’s arms were around him and her mouth was open, and against his bare chest he could feel her nipples right through the fabric of her blouse; like most people on the island she smelled of sweat and liquor, but in her case it was with such a female tang that Shandy forgot his resolutions about her and forgot Beth and his father and his uncle, and just brought his arms up and pulled her closer. The girl, together with the hot sun on his back and the warm water around his ankles, seemed for a moment to moor him to the island like some tree, animated only by biological promptings and reflexes and not even minimally self-aware.

  Then he recollected himself and lowered his arms; she stepped back, grinning at him.

  “What,” Shandy began to croak, “what,” he went on more strongly, “was that for?”

  She laughed. “For? For luck, man.”

  “Heads up, Jack,” said Skank quietly.

  Jim Bonny was floundering down the slope, his round face red under a dark cloth, and his boots kicking up plumes of white sand. “Shandy, you son of a bitch!” he was squalling. “You god-damn sneaking son of a bitch!”

  Though apprehensive, Shandy faced him. “What do you want, Jim?” he called evenly.

  Bonny halted in front of his wife with his boots just short of the water, and for a moment he seemed about to hit her. Then he hesitated, and his gaze fell away from hers, and he scowled across at Shandy. He fumbled a clasp knife out of his pocket—Shandy stepped back, snatching at his own—but when Bonny had unfolded his blade he pressed the point into the tip of his own left forefinger and flicked the blade outward, throwing a couple of drops of blood toward Shandy, and at the same time he began chanting a nonsensical multi-language rhyme.

  Shandy noticed that the sun was suddenly hotter—shockingly hotter—and then Skank had leaped onto Jim Bonny’s back from behind and knocked him forward onto his knees in the water, and then hopped off and planted a bare foot between the shoulders of Bonny’s coat and shoved him onto his face in the shallows.

  Bonny was floundering and splashing and cursing, but the sudden sweat was cooling on Shandy’s face and shoulders, and Skank waded in and kicked Bonny in the arm. “You ain’t forgettin’ any of the rules now, are you, Jim?” Skank asked. “No vodun offenses among us unless it’s a declared duel, isn’t that the way?” Bonny had been struggling to push himself up out of the water, but Skank kicked him again, harder, and he collapsed with a sputtering cry of protest.

  Shandy glanced at Ann, and was a little surprised to see that she seemed concerned. Mr. Bird was watching with evident disapproval.

  “You’re no bocor,” Skank went on, “and there’s pickney infants on the island that could set your head blazing like a torch and laugh at any lame drogue you could make to stop ’em with, but Shandy’s new and don’t know nothin’ about all that. You think Davies’ll be pleased if I tell him about this?”

  Bonny had scuttled away, and now floundered to his feet. “But—but he was kissin’ my—”

  Skank threateningly took a step forward. “Think he will?”

  Bonny retreated, splashing. “Don’t tell him,” he muttered. “Get out of here,” Skank told him. “Ann—you too.” Without meeting Shandy’s eye, Ann followed her sopping husband back up the slope.

  Shandy turned to Skank. “Thanks…for whatever.”

  “Ah, you’ll learn,” Skank looked toward the rowboat. “It’s sitting low,” he said. “One more block ought to make this load.”

  Shandy walked up to the rough wooden sled the marble blocks sat on—and then noticed Venner, who had not even stood up during the entire altercation. The man was smiling as amiably as ever, but all at once Shandy decided not to confide the escape plan to him.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  BECAUSE THE Carmichael was to leave next morning, the talk around the fires that night was a fantastic fabric of speculations, warnings and impossible stories. Jack Shandy, insulated from the anxiety felt by the rest of Davies’ crew, nevertheless listened with great interest to stories of ships crewed by zombies and glimpsed only at midnight by doomed men, of various magical precautions that would be necessary in Florida, so far from the protection of Mate Care-For and the rest of the vodun loas, of the Spaniards they might encounter in the Gulf of Mexico, and what tactics to use against them; old legends were retold, and Shandy heard the story of the pirate Pierre le Grand, who with a tiny boat and a handful of men took a galleon of the Spanish plate fleet fifty years earlier, and he hea
rd a spirited version of the four-hour sea battle between the English Charlotte Bailey and the Spanish Nuestra Señora de Lagrimas, which ended with the sinking of both ships, and then for a while the pirates tried to outdo each other with stories about the suck-you-byes, female demons that weirdly and erotically occupied the last hours of men marooned on barren islands.

  And the Carmichael was supposed to rendezvous with Blackbeard’s Queen Ann’s Revenge in Florida, and so there was lots of gossip about that most colorful pirate chief, and speculations about why he was returning to that uncivilized shore where, a year or two ago, he had gone far inland in search of some sort of sorcerous power-focus and had come limping out days later, unsuccessful, sick, and infested with the ghosts that now plagued him as fleas would a dog.

  Shandy had cooked up his best dinner yet, and, full and slightly drunk, was very much enjoying the evening…until he noticed the other members of the crew, the ones that weren’t bravely drinking and laughing around the fire. Several had shuffled off to the sailcloth tents, and once when the wind slacked Shandy thought he heard quiet sobbing from that direction, and he saw Skank sitting in the dimness under a palm tree, carefully sharpening a dagger, an expression of intent concentration—almost of sadness—on his young face.

  Shandy stood up and walked down to the shore. Just visible across the harbor’s half mile of dark water was the silhouette of Hog Island against the stars, and nearer at hand he could see bare masts swaying gently to the breeze and the low swells. He heard the chuff of boots approaching from behind him, and when he turned back toward the fires he saw the lean figure of Philip Davies striding toward him, a bottle of wine in each hand. Behind him the settlement musicians had begun tuning up their random instruments.

  “Here yare,” said Davies drunkenly. “Who deserves the best of the wine, if not the cook?” He held out one of the bottles, which for lack of a corkscrew had simply been broken off at the neck.

  “Thank you, captain,” said Shandy, taking the bottle and eyeing the jagged neck mistrustfully.

  “Chateau Latour, 1702,” Davies said, tilting up his own bottle for a swig.

  Shandy sniffed his and then raised it and poured some into his mouth. It was the driest, smoothest Bordeaux he’d ever tasted—and his father and he had had some fine ones at times—but he kept any pleasure from showing in his face. “Huh,” he said carelessly. “Wish I’d found some of this when I was scouting up ingredients for the stew.”

  “For the stew.” Half of Davies’ face was lit by the firelight, and Shandy saw it crinkle in a sour grin. “I was a youngster in Bristol, and one Christmas evening when I was just leaving the woodworking shop where I was ’prenticed, some street boys broke our window to snatch some stuff. What they didn’t take they knocked over, and there was this…”

  He paused for a sip of the wine. “There was this set of little carved choirboys, none of ’em bigger than your thumb, all painted nice, and I saw one of ’em fall out onto the snow, and one of the boys caught it with his toe as he ran off, and it ricocheted away down the street. And I remember thinking that whatever became of that little wooden fellow, he’d never again sit in that little slot he fell out of.” Davies turned toward the harbor and breathed deeply of the sea breeze. “I know what you’re planning,” he said to Shandy over his shoulder. “You’ve heard about how Woodes rogers is due here any day with the King’s Pardon, so you’re planning to slip away up the beach tonight, around out of sight of the settlement, and hide till the Carmichael leaves—no, don’t interrupt, I’ll let you talk in a moment—and then you’ll walk back here and resume your cooking and lay about in the sun and the rum until rogers arrives. Right?”

  After a long pause, Shandy laughed softly and had another sip of the excellent wine. “It did seem feasible,” he admitted.

  Davies nodded and turned to face him. “Sure it did,” he said, “but you’re still thinking in terms of that shop window you fell out of, see? You won’t ever get back to where you were.” He had a slug from his bottle and then sighed and ran a hand through his tangled black hair.

  “First,” Davies said, “it’s a capital offense to jump ship in the middle of an enterprise, and so if you came wandering back into the settlement tomorrow after the Carmichael was gone, you’d be killed—regretfully, since you’re a likeable lad and you can cook, but the rules are the rules. Remember Vanringham?”

  Shandy nodded. Vanringham had been a cheerful boy of not more than eighteen, who’d been convicted of having hidden below when the brigantine he was in was fired on by a royal Navy vessel. When the pirate ship had limped its way back to New Providence, its captain, a burly old veteran named Burgess, had let Vanringham believe that the prescribed penalty would be waived in consideration of his youth…and then that night after dinner Burgess walked up behind Vanringham and, with tears glinting in his eyes, for he liked the boy, put a pistol ball through Vanringham’s head.

  “Second,” Davies went on, “you cut me, after having surrendered. True, it was because I’d just killed your friend when I suppose I could have stopped him less lethally—but then he’d surrendered, too. In any case, you owe your life to the fact that I didn’t care to have my showdown with Venner right then. But when I let you take the choice, it wasn’t a choice between death on the one hand and three weeks of free food and drink on a tropical island on the other. You owe me hard service for that cut, and I’m not letting you out of the bargain you made.”

  The musicians, having found some basis for cooperation, began to play Greensleeves, and the melancholy old melody was at once so familiar and so out of place here—the tune rolling away down the lonely beach, bizarrely mocked by the cries of alarmed tropical birds—that it made all Old World things, and gods, and philosophies, seem distant and tenuous.

  “And third,” Davies said, the hard edge gone from his voice, “it may be that all those kings and merchants on the far side of the Atlantic are about to see the end of their involvement with these new lands. To them, Europe and Asia are still the chess-board that matters; they can’t see this new world except in terms of two purposes: as a source of quick, careless profit, and as a dumping ground for criminals. It may be a…surprising crop, that springs up from such ploughing and sowing, and rogers may find when he arrives that none of us need, nor could even benefit from, a pardon issued by a man who rules a cold little island on the other side of the world.”

  The sea breeze, a bit chilly now, whispered among the palms on Hog Island and made the pirates’ fires flicker and jump.

  Davies’ words had upset Shandy, and not least because they seemed to take the righteousness out of the purpose he’d crossed the ocean for—suddenly his uncle’s action seemed as impersonally pragmatic as the devouring of the baby sea turtles by the hungry sea gulls, and his own mission as ill-considered as an attempt to teach the gulls compassion. He opened his mouth to object, but was preempted by a call from the crowd around the fires behind him.

  “Phil!” someone was yelling. “Cap’n Davies! Some of the boys is askin’ questions too hard for me to answer!”

  Davies dropped his bottle into the sand. “That’s Venner,” he said thoughtfully. “How did that move go? Over the blade and fake a poke inside, then when he parries across you duck under—but not all the way around—and hit him in the flank?”

  Shandy shut his eyes and pictured it. “Right. And then run past him on his outside.”

  “Got it.” raising his voice, Davies said, “With you in a moment, Venner.”

  As the two men trudged back toward the fires, Davies pulled a pistol out of his belt. “If Venner plays me square I can handle him,” he said quietly. “But if he doesn’t, I want you to hang back with this and make sure no—” He stopped talking suddenly and gave a weary laugh. “Never mind. I forgot I was talking to the little wooden choirboy.” He put the pistol away and lengthened his stride.

  Shandy followed, angry with himself—partly for feeling bad at staying out of a squabble between pirates—like
a child feeling bad about refusing a foolish dare!—but partly, too, at the same time, for staying out of it.

  HIS PETTICOAT breeches whirling out around his knees at each ponderous step, Leo Friend reached the bottom of the sandstone track that led down from the ruined fort, and, sweating profusely in the confinement of his fantastically ribboned doublet, struck out across the sand toward the fires where Davies’ crew was. Beth Hurwood strode along next to him, sobbing with fury and trying to disentangle the mummified dog paw that Friend had shoved into her hair—”This’ll protect you in case we get separated!” he’d snarled impatiently—just before dragging her out of her windowless room and unceremoniously propelling her ahead of him down the track.

  Though she was having no difficulty in keeping up with the laboring young man, he turned around to face her every few steps, both to wheeze, “Hurry, can’t you?” and to peer furtively down the neckline of her dress.

  Damn all these delays, Friend thought, and damn the sort of fools we have to consort with in order to get to the focus in Florida! Why did it have to be ignorant, bickering brigands that found it? Though of course if a more savvy sort had found it, Hurwood and I wouldn’t be able to manipulate them this way… and I gather this Blackbeard fellow is very nearly too clever for us anyway. He’s hanging back now, letting us commit ourselves to this Florida trip before joining us; he could have got those protective Indian medicinal herbs just by purchasing them, for God’s sake, but instead he has to blockade the entire city of Charles Town, capture nine ships and a whole crowd of hostages including a member of the Governor’s Council, and then ask for the crate of medicinal herbs as ransom. I wish I knew, thought Friend, whether the man is just showing off, just keeping his crew in battle trim, or whether he’s using all that spectacle to conceal some furtive other purpose. But what plans could the man have that would involve the all-too-civilized and law-and-orderly Carolina coast?

  He glanced again at Beth Hurwood, who had finally pulled the dog paw free of her hair, and as she flung it away he whispered a quick phrase and caressed the air, and her dress flew up—but she forced it back down before he’d seen anything more than her knees. Oh, just wait, girl, he thought, his mouth going dry and his heart thumping even faster—soon enough you’ll be so hungry for me you won’t be able to take a deep breath.