by Powers, Tim
Shandy took a step toward the old man, but Blackbeard was suddenly in front of him. “Afterward, sonny,” the pirate said. “He and I are working together right now, and if you try to foul my plans you’ll find yourself sitting on the ground trying to stuff your guts back into your belly.” He turned to Hurwood. “You about ready?”
“Yes.” Hurwood stuck the still-flaming torch upright in the sand and then stood up with the lantern. The square wooden box now hung at his belt like a fishing creel. “Is she well?” he asked Friend.
“Fine,” said the fat man. “She just fainted.”
“Carry her.”
Hurwood raised the lantern in his single hand and stared at the patterns of light-lines it threw onto the sand. After a few seconds of study he nodded and began walking, on a course that led slightly away from the fountain.
Friend managed to stand up with Beth’s limp form draped over his shoulders, though the effort darkened his face. He stumped along after Hurwood, the breath whistling in and out of him, and the rest of the group followed, with Bonnett and the odd boatman lurchingly bringing up the rear.
It wasn’t a steady walk. Frequently Hurwood paused to peer at the light-lines and fiercely argue mathematical niceties with Friend, and once Shandy heard Friend point out an error in one of “your Black Newton equations.” Several times they led the shuffling group in sharp changes of direction, and for a long while they all just marched around and around in the outline of a square; but Shandy had noticed that, no matter what their apparent direction, the moon never shifted from its position above his left shoulder, and he shivered and wasn’t tempted to offer any sarcastic comments.
The torch that Hurwood had planted in the sand was as often visible ahead, or off to one side, as behind them, but every time Shandy looked at it it was farther away. The Fountain itself was so difficult to focus on that he couldn’t perceive any change in its distance, but he did notice that the two bridgelike structures had moved closer together.
Then he noticed the crowds. At first he thought they were low fog banks or expanses of water, but when he stared hard at the uneven gray lines on the horizon he saw that they were made up of thousands of figures rushing silently back and forth, their arms waving overhead like a field of grass blades stirred by a night wind.
“I should never have believed,” said Hurwood softly, pausing in his calculations to look at the distant multitudes, “that death had undone so many.”
The Inferno, thought Shandy—third canto, if I’m not mistaken. And, at the moment, who cares?
The bridges were very close together now, and the sky was lightening in a direction that might have been east. Hurwood’s light-lines were becoming less visible on the sand—which was, in the faint daylight, taking on a rusty hue—and Hurwood and Friend were working faster. The shapes rising and falling above the center of the pool were losing their color and becoming gray, and now looked much more like clouds of water spray than like billows of fire. With the approach of day the total silence seemed even more eerie—there were no bird or insect cries, and neither the unrestful crowds nor the Fountain made any audible sound. The air had cooled since they’d left the jungle, though his feet were warmed by the iron tacks in the soles of his boots, and it was easy to warm his hands by holding them near his smoking knife scabbard.
He had been looking back at the remote dot that was the torch, and so he bumped into Hurwood when the group halted.
There was only one bridge now, and they were right in front of it. It was about six feet wide and paved with broad, flat stones, and stone walls rose at the sides to shoulder height. Though when seen from afar the bridges had seemed to arch steeply up from the pool’s edge, from where Shandy now stood it looked almost level, rising only very gradually as it narrowed away with distance and faded among the shifting clouds of the Fountain. In spite of its outlandish location, Shandy thought he’d seen the bridge before.
“After you,” said Hurwood to Blackbeard.
The giant pirate, whose belt and boots, Shandy noticed, were smoking and sparking like the match-cords in his mane, stepped onto the bridge—
—and seemed to explode. Fluttering blurs of gray erupted from his mouth, nose and eyes and shot away in all directions, and his clothes leaped and shook on his huge frame like waves in a choppy sea. His hands jigged helplessly in front of him as the gray things blasted out of his sleeves, but in the midst of the ferocious detonations Blackbeard roared and managed to turn around.
“Stay there!” shouted Hurwood. “Don’t step off the bridge! It’s your ghosts leaving you!”
The exodus was tapering off, but Blackbeard didn’t stop jumping. His belt and shoes were on fire, and he grabbed the smoldering hilt of his cutlass, drew the redly glowing blade and touched it to his belt, instantly burning through the leather. He tossed the cutlass out onto the sand and with sizzling fingers snatched his belt buckle loose, drew the pieces of leather free and kicked it all after the sword. He sat down and pulled off his boots, then stood up again and grinned at Hurwood.
“Now abandon all iron,” he said.
Ye who enter here, thought Shandy.
“You can step down and just wait for Leo and me right here, with the others,” said Hurwood. “Your ghosts are gone, and there’s still plenty of the black herb—when we recover the two other torches and get them lit too, there’ll be no danger of becoming reinfected on the way out of the jungle. Our bargain is completed, and Leo and I will be back here before long to lead you all back to where this region links with the world you know.”
Shandy sighed with relief, and he had started to look around for a place to sit, when he noticed that Friend had made no move to put Beth Hurwood down.
“Wh-who,” Shandy stammered, “who’s going over and who’s staying here?”
“Leo and the girl and myself are going over,” said Hurwood impatiently, putting his lantern down on the sand. He took off his belt and shoes, and then in a grotesquely unwitting parody of intimacy he knelt in front of Friend and, one-handed, disconnected the ornate belt buckle from the fat man’s belt. Friend’s mud-caked slippers evidently contained no iron.
“I’m going over, too,” pronounced Blackbeard, not stepping down from the bridge. “I didn’t fight my way in here two years ago just to pick up a peltful of ghosts.” He looked past Hurwood, and a moment later Stede Bonnett and the boatman stepped forward. Bonnett began unbuckling his belt and stepping out of his shoes, but the boatman’s clothes were sewn shut and he was barefoot. “They’re coming too,” Blackbeard said.
Davies’ face had become perceptibly more lined and hollowed since leaving the fires by the seashore, but there was some kind of humor in his eyes as he took a step forward and then crouched to shed his boots.
No, Shandy thought almost calmly. It just can’t be expected of me. I’m already on the sidewalk outside reality—I’m simply not going out farther, into the street. None of these people will ever come back, and I’ll have to figure out Hurwood’s magic lantern just to find my way back to the goddamned jungle! Why did I ever come along? Why did I ever leave England?
He found he was implicitly confident of a way out... and his face reddened when he realized that it was an axiom called up from early childhood—the conviction that if he cried hard enough and long enough, someone would take him home.
What right had these people to put him into such a humiliating situation?
He looked at Beth Hurwood, draped over Friend’s shoulders. She was still unconscious, and her face, though heartbreakingly beautiful to him, was drawn and tautened by recent horrors—innocence intolerably abused. Wouldn’t it be—couldn’t a case be made for it being kinder to let her die now, unconscious and not yet ruined?
While still in doubt he caught Leo Friend’s eye. Friend was smiling at him with confident contempt, and he shifted his pudgy hand on Beth’s thigh.
At the same moment, Hurwood began crooning reassuringly, and he got down on his hands and knees. He muttered some
vague endearments and then, gently but strongly, he lowered himself flat, face down on the sand. Still murmuring, he began to flop there in a ponderous rhythm.
Leo Friend blushed furiously and snatched his hand off Beth’s leg. “Mr. Hurwood!” he screeched.
Hurwood, not stopping, chuckled indulgently.
“He seems to snap out of these fits before too long,” said Blackbeard. “We’ll wait this one out and then get moving.”
Are you all crazy? wondered Shandy. Hurwood was the only chance, and a damn slim one at that, of anyone recrossing this bridge alive, and now he’s madder than old Governor Sawney. There is no chance of surviving any further advance, and I don’t want to take my eternal place among the silent gray legions on this unnatural horizon. Jack Shandy will wait right here, until dark, and when you doomed fools have failed to reappear I’ll somehow use Hurwood’s lantern to get back to the torch and the jungle and the boats and the shore. I’ll no doubt regret this cowardice later, but at least I’ll be able to lie in the sun and have a drink while I’m regretting it.
Shandy stepped back, away from the bridge, and sat down. He had meant to avoid meeting anyone’s eyes, but as he looked around for Hurwood’s lantern, he glanced up and found Davies looking straight at him.
The lean old pirate was grinning at him, evidently pleased.
Shandy grinned back in relief, glad Davies understood... and then he realized that Davies thought he had sat down in order to take off his boots.
And suddenly he knew, unhappily, that he couldn’t just sit it out. This was stupid, as stupid as his father pulling a woodworking knife on a gang of Nantes alley toughs, or Captain Chaworth rushing with an unfamiliar sword at a pistol-armed pirate chief; but somehow, perhaps like them, he had been robbed of every way out of it. He took off his boots and stood up again.
By the time Friend tore his gaze away from the ludicrously bobbing figure of Benjamin Hurwood, Shandy’s boots and knife lay abandoned in the sand and Shandy was standing in front of him.
“What’s the matter?” Shandy asked the fat physician. His voice quavered only slightly. “Can’t get familiar with a girl unless she’s asleep?”
Friend’s face got even redder. “D-d-d-don’t b-be ab-ab-ab—d-don’t—”
“I think he’s trying to say, ‘Don’t be absurd,’ Jack,” said Davies helpfully.
“Do you?” asked Shandy, his voice still a little wild. “I thought it was, ‘Yeah, because that was the only time even my mother didn’t gag at the sight of me.’ ”
Friend began squawking and stuttering in, weirdly, a little-boy voice; then blood burst from his nose and bright red drops tumbled to his silk shirt-front and soaked into the weave in blurrily cross-shaped stains. His knees started to give, and for a moment Shandy thought the physician himself was about to faint, or even die.
Then Friend straightened, took a deep breath, and, without looking at Shandy, shifted his hold on Beth and stepped up onto the bridge.
Hurwood finally rolled over and smiled at the sky for a few moments, then he twitched, glanced around, winced and got to his feet. He walked to the bridge. “Friend and I will lead,” was all he said.
Shandy and Davies followed him onto the bridge’s paving stones, and then Bonnett and the boatman stepped from the sand onto the bridge surface.
The boatman instantly collapsed in a pile of loose clothing. Shandy looked more closely and saw that clothing was all that lay on the stones—there was no body.
Hurwood noticed the phenomenon and raised an eyebrow. “Your servant was a dead man?”
“Well... yes,” said Blackbeard.
“Ah.” Hurwood shrugged. “To be expected—dust to dust, you know.” He turned his back on them and started forward.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
FOR QUITE a while they walked without speaking—footsteps were the only sounds, and they were just echoless thuds. As much to distract himself as to satisfy curiosity, Shandy began mentally counting paces; and he had counted more than two thousand when the light began to dim again. He found he had no idea how long the dawn period had lasted.
They seemed now to be passing through alternating patches of light and shade, and for a moment Shandy thought he smelled incense. Hurwood began walking more slowly, and Shandy glanced at him.
They were all walking down the center aisle of a church. Hurwood was somehow dressed in a long formal coat, and his hair was brown and long and carefully curled, but the rest of the people in the procession were still dressed in the mud-caked, ragged, scorched clothes they’d worn through the jungle. Hurwood had one hand on the wooden box that was slung at his side, and his other hand swung back and forth as he walked up the aisle ...
He’s got his other arm back, thought Shandy with a dreamlike lack of surprise.
Shandy looked ahead, toward the altar. A minister of some sort was smiling as this unsavory crowd approached, but there was an altar boy at a kneeler off to the side who stared at them with far more horror than even their devastated appearance seemed to call for. Nervously, Shandy looked behind himself ...
... And saw just the bridge, and the plain far beyond it, deeply shadowed now in twilight. He turned back toward the church scene, but it was fading. Shandy caught one more whiff of incense, and then the bridge was just the bridge again.
What was that? he wondered. A look into Hurwood’s mind, his memories? Did Davies and Blackbeard see it too, or was it just me because I happened to glance at him when he was projecting it?
There were smears of blood on the paving stones ahead of them, and when he reached them Shandy noticed that the drops and smudges and handprints seemed to be the tracks of two bleeding people crawling. He paused for a moment to crouch and touch one wide, splash-edged drop—the blood was still wet. For some reason this profoundly upset Shandy, though he had to admit that it was certainly a minor unpleasantness compared to most of the other recent events. There were no figures, walking or crawling, visible ahead of them, but Shandy kept glancing that way, almost fearfully.
The air here had not ever been particularly fresh, but now it was stale—Shandy smelled boiled cabbage and unchanged bed-sheets. He glanced one by one at his companions; and when he looked at Friend a scene came into focus around the fat physician. The fat man was younger, a boy in fact, and though he was keeping up with Shandy and the others he was lying in a bed. Shandy followed the boy’s upward gaze, and was startled to see the vague female forms in diaphanous draperies that twisted slowly overhead. There was a naively exaggerated eroticism about them, like the crude naked-lady pictures a little boy might draw on a wall... but why did they all have gray hair?
The scene dissolved in a burst of whiteness, and again the bridge was visible underfoot, the shoulder-height walls moving past on either side. Shandy’s foot skidded on something that felt like a pebble—but he knew it was a tooth, and the knowledge increased his uneasiness.
Then there was deep sand underfoot, and Davies’ face was lit by firelight. His face was fuller, his hair darker, and he wore the tattered remains of a royal Navy officer’s jacket. Shandy looked around, and saw that they were walking along the shore of New Providence Island; Hog Island was dimly visible across the starlit harbor to their right, and cooking fires dotted the sand slope to the left—but there were fewer fires, and fewer craft in the harbor, and a couple of big pieces of storm-wrecked ships that Shandy remembered being up on the sand were nowhere to be seen. Shandy couldn’t hear the conversation, but Davies was talking to Blackbeard; and though Davies was laughing and shaking his head scornfully, Shandy thought he looked upset—frightened, even. Blackbeard seemed to be making an offer, and wheedling, and Davies didn’t seem to be refusing it so much as disparaging it—doubting its genuineness. Finally Blackbeard sighed, stepped back, seemed to brace himself, and gestured at the sand. Shandy smelled hot metal. Then the sand rippled and jumped, as if all the sand crabs were simultaneously struck with apoplexy, and white bones began poking up out of it and rolling and cartwheelin
g together into a pile; the pile heaved and shifted and shook, then steadied, and Shandy realized it was now a human skeleton in a crouching posture. As Davies stared, his half-smile a rictus of strain now, the skeleton straightened up and faced him. Blackbeard spoke, and the skeleton lowered itself and knelt on one bony knee, and it lowered its skull head. Blackbeard then made a dismissing gesture, at which the skeleton sprang apart and resumed its status as just a scattering of old bones, and Blackbeard continued his soliciting speech. Davies still didn’t answer, but his air of amused skepticism was gone.
Then Shandy was once more walking on blood-spattered paving stones.
“Are we getting any closer to the goddamned place?” he asked. As he spoke, he was afraid his voice would betray his mounting fear, but the dead air here muffled his words, and he hardly heard them himself.
They kept walking. A couple of times Shandy thought he heard scuffling sounds, and gasping sobs, ahead of them on the bridge, but it was too dark for him to see clearly.
The air seemed heavy, like syrup so thick that one more grain of sugar would cause the whole works to crystallize; and, though it terrified him to do it, Shandy couldn’t prevent himself from turning to look at Blackbeard... and he did look, and for a while Shandy stopped being Shandy.
He was a fifteen-year-old boy known to the outlaw mountain blacks as Johnny Con, though since his misuse of some of the spells of the hungan he’d been serving, he was no longer a fit assistant for a respectable vodun priest, and had no further right—nor even inclination any more—to call himself an adjanikon; Ed Thatch was his real name, his adult name, and in three days he’d be entitled to start using it.
Today would be the first day of his baptism to the loa that would be his guide through life, and whose goals he would henceforth share. The black marrons who had raised him since childhood had this morning escorted him down from the blue mountains to the house of Jean Petro, a legendary magician who had documentably lived here for more than a hundred years, and was said to have actually made many loas, and had to live in a house on stilts because of the way dirt turned rusty and sterile after any long proximity to him; compared to Petro, every other bocor in the Caribbean was considered a mere caplata, a street-corner turnip-conjuror.