On Stranger Tides

by Powers, Tim

  Davies pushed a stray lock of hair back from his forehead and sat down on the rower’s thwart. “My dear fellow, consider it done.”

  There was a sound like dogs barking or pigs grunting around them; with his ears still ringing it took Shandy a minute to realize that it was the fungus heads making the noise. “Vegetable boys noisy tonight!” he called over their racket.

  “Drunk, I expect!” returned Davies with a slightly hysterical joviality. “Damned nuisance!”

  Beth had pulled herself up and was sitting in the stern. She was staring ahead through half-shut eyes, and might have looked relaxed if it hadn’t been for the white knuckles of her gunwale-clutching hands.

  Fog began making faint halos around the torches. Some distance ahead of them Blackbeard’s boat veered south, and, though Shandy directed Davies through what seemed to be the same channel, they could no longer see his boat; all the glints of reflected orange light seemed to be cast by their own boat’s torch, and though they could hear Blackbeard’s answering roar when they called, it was distant and they couldn’t tell which direction it came from.

  After he admitted to himself that they’d lost Blackbeard, Shandy looked back the way they had come. The boat with Hurwood, Friend and Bonnett in it was nowhere to be seen.

  “We’re on our own,” he told Davies. “Do you think you can get us back to the sea?”

  Davies paused to stare around at the pools and channels that were identical to all the others they had passed through, partitioned by crowded trees and roots and vines that differed in no perceptible way from any other part of the swamp. “Sure,” he said, and spat into the oily water. “I’ll steer by the stars.”

  Shandy looked up. The high roof of moss and branches and tangled vines was as solid as a cathedral ceiling.

  For the next hour, during which Shandy called to the other boats but got no reply, and Beth didn’t move a muscle, and the fog got steadily thicker, Davies rowed through the twisting channels, watching the slow current and trying to move in the same direction; he was impeded, though, by dead-end channels, still pools, and areas where the current turned back inland. Finally they found a broad channel that seemed to be flowing strongly. Shandy was glad they did, for the torch was burning more dimly all the time.

  “This has got to work,” Davies gasped as he rowed out into the middle of the current.

  Shandy noticed that he winced as he hauled on the oars, and he suddenly remembered that Davies had burned his hand throwing the mud ball at the swamp-boa. He was about to insist on a turn at the oars when one of the fungus balls on the shore spoke. “Dead end,” it croaked. “Bear left. Narrower, but you get there.”

  To his surprise, Shandy thought he recognized the voice. “What?” he called quickly to the white, blurry-featured sphere.

  It didn’t reply, and Davies kept rowing down the broad channel.

  “It said this is a dead end,” Shandy ventured after a moment.

  “In the first place,” said Davies, his voice hoarse with exhaustion, “it’s stuck in the mud, so I don’t see how it can know. And in the second place, why should we assume it wants to give us straight advice? We almost took root back there—this lad obviously did. Why should such a one want to help us? ...Misery loves company.”

  Shandy frowned doubtfully at the low-flickering torch. “But these ...I don’t think these are what we were turning into. We were all turning into normal plants—flowers and bushes and whatnot. And we all seemed to be different from one another. These boys are all alike.”

  “Back, Jack,” piped up another of the puffy white things. Again Shandy thought he caught a familiar intonation.

  “If anything,” said Davies stubbornly, “this channel is getting wider.”

  One of the fungus balls was dangling from a tree over the water, and as they passed it it opened a flap and said, “Bogs and quicksand ahead. Trust me, Jack.”

  Shandy looked at Davies. “That’s ...my father’s voice,” he said unsteadily.

  “It ...can’t be,” snarled Davies, hauling even more strongly on the oars.

  Shandy looked away and said, into the darkness ahead, “Left, you say, Dad?”

  “Yes,” whispered another of the fungi. “But behind you—then with the current, to the sea.”

  Davies pulled two more strokes, then angrily jammed the oars down into the water. “Very well!” he said, and began working to turn the boat around. “Though I expect we’ll wind up as mushroom-heads ourselves, giving wrong directions to the next lot of fools to venture in here.”

  By the guttering torchlight they found a gap in the mudbank, and Davies reluctantly rowed into it, leaving the wide, steady course behind. The cool white light of a spirit ball or two glowed for a moment in the fog behind them.

  The fog was moving downriver thickly now, filtering through the tangled branches and vines like milk dripping into clear water; soon it was solid, and their torch was a diffused, luminous orange stain on the gray-black fabric of the night—but the channel they were in was so narrow that by stretching out his arm Shandy could feel the wet shrubbery on either side.

  “It is beginning to quick up a bit,” Davies admitted grudgingly.

  Shandy nodded. The fog had made the night chilly, and when he began to shiver it occurred to him that Elizabeth was clad only in a light cotton shift. He took off his coat and draped it around her.

  Then the boat passed through an arch so narrow that Davies had to draw in the oars, and a moment later the craft had surged out onto the face of a broad expanse of water, and they had left enough of the fog behind in the rain forest so that, after a few dozen more downstream oar-strokes, Shandy was able to see the glow of the three shore fires ahead.

  “Hah!” he exclaimed joyfully, slapping Davies on his good shoulder. “Look at that!”

  Davies peered around, then turned back with a grin. “And look back there,” he said, nodding astern.

  Shandy shifted around to look back, and saw, back in the fog, the weak glows of two torches. “The others made it as well,” he observed, not very pleased.

  Beth was looking back too. “Is ...my father in one of those boats?”

  “Yes,” Shandy told her, “but I won’t let him hurt you.”

  For several minutes none of them spoke, and the boat began gradually slanting in toward shore as Davies let his burned hand do less work. The pirates on the shore finally noticed the approaching boats and began shouting and blowing horns.

  “Did he try to hurt me?” Beth asked.

  Shandy looked back at her. “Don’t you remember? He ...” Belatedly, it occurred to him that there might be a better time to awaken her recent grisly memories. “Uh ...he made Friend cut your hand,” he finished lamely.

  She glanced at her hand, then didn’t speak until they had drawn in near the fires, and men were wading out to help them ashore. “I remember you holding a knife to my throat,” she said distantly.

  Shandy bared his teeth in anguished impatience. “It was the dull side, and I never even touched you with it! That was to test him, to see if he still needed you to accomplish this magic, if some of your blood wasn’t all he needed! Damn it, I’m trying to protect you! From him!” Several men had splashed up to their boat, and hands gripped the gunwales and began dragging it in toward shore.

  “Magic,” said Beth.

  Shandy had to lean forward to hear her over the excited questions of the pirates. “Like it or not,” he said to her loudly, “it’s what we’re involved in here.”

  She swung a leg over the side and jumped into the shallow water and looked back at him. The rocking bow-torch had almost expired, but it was bright enough to show the lines of strain in her face. “What you’ve chosen to become involved in,” she said, then turned and began wading up toward the fires.

  “You know,” Shandy remarked to Davies, “I’m going to get her out of this ...just for the pleasure of showing her one more thing she’s all wrong about.”

  “ARE WE glad to see you boy
s!” one of the jostling pirates exclaimed. They had dragged the boat all the way up onto the sand of the mangrove-shorn notch, and Shandy and Davies got out and stood up, stretching. The shouting began to die down.

  “Glad to be out of there,” Davies said.

  “You must be hungry as hell,” another man put in. “Or did you find something to eat in there?”

  “Didn’t have the leisure.” Davies turned to watch the progress of the other two boats. “What time is it? Maybe Jack’d throw together some kind of pre-breakfast for us.”

  “I don’t know, Phil, but it ain’t late—no more’n an hour or two after sunset.”

  Shandy and Davies both turned to stare at him. “But we left about an hour after sunset,” Shandy said. “And we’ve been gone at least several hours ...”

  The pirate was looking at Shandy blankly, and Davies asked, “How long were we gone upriver?”

  “Why ...two days,” the man replied in some bewilderment. “Just about precise—dusk to dusk.”

  “Ah,” said Davies, nodding thoughtfully.

  “And ashes to ashes,” put in Shandy, too tired to bother with making sense. He looked again toward the approaching boats. Idly, for in spite of his deductions all he wanted right now was an authoritative drink and a hammock and twelve hours of sleep, he wondered how he would prevent Hurwood from forcing Beth’s soul out of her body so that the ghost of her mother, his wife, could move in.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  IN THE morning the fog had overflowed its river boundaries and formed a damp, only dimly translucent veil over the land and sea, so chilly that the pirates huddled around the sizzling, popping fires, and it was almost midmorning, when the fog began to break up, before anyone noticed that the Vociferous Carmichael was gone; and another half hour of rowing up and down the shore in boats, and shouting and ringing bells, was wasted in confirming the ship’s disappearance.

  Most of her crew was ashore, and the first supposition was that she had somehow come unmoored and drifted away—then Hurwood came running down the slope from the hut yelling the news that his daughter was gone and he couldn’t find Leo Friend.

  Shandy was standing on the beach near one of the boats when Hurwood’s news was relayed. Davies and Blackbeard stood a hundred feet away, talking in low, urgent tones, but they looked up when this fresh lot of shouting began.

  “Not a coincidence,” pronounced Blackbeard flatly.

  “The fat boy?” protested Davies. “But why?”

  “Your quartermaster knows why,” Blackbeard said, nodding past Davies at Shandy. “Don’t you, Shandy?”

  Shandy walked up to them, feeling hollow and colder than the fog. “Yes, sir,” he said hoarsely. “I’ve seen the way he’d look at her.”

  “But why take my ship?” snarled Davies, whirling angrily to face the still-veiled sea.

  “He had to take Beth away,” said Shandy. “Her father had plans for her that were ...incompatible ...with the plans Friend had for her.” He spoke quietly, but he was as tense as a flexed length of steel.

  Blackbeard, also staring out to sea, shook his massive head. “I knew he was more than just Hurwood’s apprentice—that there was something he was after, all on his own. At the Fountain he finally got what he needed. I should have killed him last night, after we all got back. I think I could have.” The giant pirate reached out a hand and squeezed it into a fist, and then drove it into the palm of his other hand.

  The sound of the slap was lost in the sudden, jarring crack of a close thunderclap, and the flash of the sky-spanning lightning bolt sent Shandy and Davies reeling back, dazzled.

  “I think I could have,” Blackbeard repeated thoughtfully.

  As the echoes tumbled away along the shoreline and Blackbeard lowered his hands, Shandy half wished he’d thought of dropping some of his own blood on the mud by the Fountain. The thought reminded him of the way Davies had vanquished—perhaps killed—the loa-like thing in the jungle. Surreptitiously he lifted his foot and dragged a fingernail down the groove between the sole and the side, and he rolled the resulting bit of muck into a ball and tucked it into his pocket. He didn’t know whether it contained any mud actually from the marge of the Fountain, or what sort of enemy he might want to use it against even if it did, but it was clear that anyone with only guns and swords at his disposal was ludicrously ill-equipped for the kind of combat they were engaged in now.

  “I’ve got to get my ship back,” said Davies, and Shandy realized that when Davies had lost the ship he’d lost his rank, too—without the Vociferous Carmichael he was just the skipper of a notably battered but otherwise unimpressive little sloop. Davies looked desperately at Blackbeard. “Will you come along and help? He’s more now than he was, and he knew some good tricks even before.”

  “No,” said Blackbeard, his dark face impassive. “By now Woodes Rogers may have arrived in New Providence with the pardon calculated to rob me of my nation.” The breeze was from the sea, and it blew back the pirate-king’s lion-mane of black hair and beard, and Shandy noticed streaks of gray at the temples and chin. “I meant the Carmichael—with you as her captain—to be the flagship of my fleet ...and I hope you do get her back. But it seems the age of free-for-all piracy is ending ...just as the merry buccaneer days are passed ...this is the age of empire.” He grinned sidelong at Davies. “Would the Brethren follow me, or take the pardon, given the choice?”

  Davies grinned wearily back, and waited for a wave to crash, come swirling and churning almost to their boots, and then slide back, before answering. “They’ll take the pardon. To sail with Blackbeard is to leave a pledge with the hangman.”

  Blackbeard nodded. “But ...?”

  Davies shrugged. “The problem will still be there—unless King George has the sense to get into another war. The Caribbean is full of men who know no other trade than sailing a fighting ship. Since the peace they’re all out of work. Sure, they’ll take the pardon—gratefully!—to write off their past crimes ...but a month or two later every one of ’em will be back on the account.”

  Blackbeard nodded, and though Shandy and Davies stepped back, he didn’t even look down as the next wave boiled up past where he stood and draped a length of kelp across his ankle. Finally he spoke, slowly. “Would they follow a new captain, who had ships and money?”

  “Of course—and if this captain truly had no criminal record, he could have his pick of every sailor in the New World, because they wouldn’t be violating their pardons by sailing with him. But who have you got in mind? Even Shandy here has got a fair reputation.”

  “Do you know, Phil, why Juan Ponce de Leon called that place the Fountain of Youth?”

  “No.” Davies laughed shortly. “If anything, I feel a lot older since being there.”

  Blackbeard turned to Shandy. “Any guesses, Jack?”

  Shandy recalled Hurwood’s antics with the head of his dead wife. “Because the place can be used to bring dead people back to life.”

  Blackbeard nodded. “I was sure you’d figured that out. Yes, old Hurwood plans to raise his wife’s ghost from her dried head and plant it in the body of his daughter. Hard luck on the daughter, left with no body.” The giant pirate laughed softly. “Hurwood came out to the New World last year—he’d heard that magic was as common as salt out here.”

  More shouting was going on around the fires behind them, but Blackbeard was caught up in remembering. “A pistol ball smashed his arm all to hell,” he said. “We had to chop it right off and tar the stump. Never thought a man his age would survive it. But then only the next day you’d swear he’d forgot about it—all he did was watch me. The ghosts were troubling me pretty bad then, and I was having a rum-and-gunpowder two or three times a day. And even though magic has been dried up in the Old World for thousands of years, he’d tracked down its old footprints and found its bones ...and studied ’em. He knew what my trouble was and had a pretty good idea of how I’d got infested by all those ghosts. He offered to cure me of ’em—exorcise
’em—if I’d show him exactly where it was that I’d picked ’em up. I said fine, let’s go, but he said not so fast. We need a ghost repellent, he said, this special medicine weed the Indians grow in Carolina—I was to sail north and get some—and he had to go back to England to get a couple of things: his daughter and his wife’s head, it seems. The whole reason he’d begun trying to track down living magic was to get the wife back. But before he went back to England he came to New Providence with us, and lived a few weeks with the bocors. One night he sailed off west with one of ’em, and came back next morning all worn out and crazy-looking—but excited. I knew he’d somehow managed to contact the wife. And then he left, promising as the last piece of the deal to bring back a fine ship for me.”

  Shandy remembered old Chaworth, and the realization that he was now one of the breed that had ruined and killed the kind old man brought a bitterness to his mouth.

  “And Hurwood was right, of course,” Blackbeard went on quietly. “We do use magic out here, and those of us who aren’t above listening to the black bocors—especially those of us who live on the sea—know some thefty tricks. I know more, maybe, than anyone ...and since our trip upriver, I’ve now got the power to do every one of ’em splendid.” He had been facing the sea, but now he turned back to Shandy and Davies. “For years I’ve heard about this Fountain, and I tracked it down because of a magic I’d heard of in connection with it. A man with the right kind of power can be immortal by means of it, if he takes care to live on the sea. Blood, fresh blood, and sea water, and you don’t need the head, nor a body for the soul to go into; the sorceror’s blood will grow a new one in the sea, in a kind of egg, within hours of dripping into the water ...”

  Davies was frowning thoughtfully. “I see. So you plan to—”

  “To sail north, Phil, to some place civilized, where things happen documentably and get recorded official. And I think maybe the famous Blackbeard will be trapped and killed in some sea fight, in such a way that some of his blood will fall into the ocean ...and then I wouldn’t be surprised if some stranger were to appear, who’ll happen to know where I’ve hid all my lucre, and he won’t have any reputation or previous history or fame to foul him up. I think he’ll get a ship in some quiet way—hah! I’ll bet Stede Bonnett will help out with that—and then make his way south to New Providence Island. I think he’ll want to speak to you, Phil—and I think it’d be a good thing if you’d got the Carmichael back.”