On Stranger Tides

by Powers, Tim

  The intensifying pain in his stomach made him hunch back against the rail, but he forced himself to go on thinking. What then, he asked himself, is the light that makes these grisly things visible? Well, obviously—hostile magic, unencumbered by being performed on land. You’d have known it by the hot iron smell, too, if it weren’t for this wind. This pain in your belly is a gift from someone.

  Sea water surged over him as the Jenny took another wave, and then he straightened up against the powerful preference of his body to fold double—cold sweat on his face made the spray seem even warmer—and he reached out and grabbed the nearest man and dragged him close enough to shout at. “Where’s,” Shandy roared, “Venner?”

  The man gaped at the gray forearms swinging from his captain’s jacket, but he pointed forward, then down.

  Shandy nodded and let go of him and then, one agonized step at a time, hitched himself toward the hatch, bracing against anything he could reach; a sudden gust of wind at the crest of a wave punched him off his feet, and he crawled the last few yards flat on his belly, the spread-out arms giving him an insect-like look. With an effort that seemed to pull all his abdominal muscles loose he lifted the hatch cover and rolled himself in and half climbed, half tumbled down into the low-ceilinged hold.

  It was dark, but he knew where the weapons rack was, and he let the next roll pitch him against it and he snatched a hilt and pulled a sword free; it was lighter than a cutlass, but it seemed to be the right length, and he let his hand settle comfortably around the grip. There was a dim red glow up in the bow, and he hunched toward it, his grisly lapel ornaments swinging wildly.

  Venner was crouched over a little firepot, whispering and dropping shreds of stuff onto the glowing coals in it.

  Shandy extended the sword and kicked himself into an agonizing lunge, but the Jenny abruptly rocked forward at the crest of a wave at that moment, and his lunge became a somersault—he collided heavily with the stocky figure of Venner and the two of them tumbled into the deep, swirling puddle against the bow bulkhead. Even over their gasping and the creaking of over-stressed timbers and the howl of the wind, Shandy heard the firepot hiss for an instant as it was extinguished; and even crumpled nearly upside down in cold water in the angle of canted deck and bulkhead, with Venner’s elbow jabbing into his back, he felt the pain in his belly suddenly unkink and disappear, and the dead man’s arms no longer tugged at his jacket.

  The bow slammed into a trough, and for several seconds the two men were pressed even harder against the bulkhead—Shandy felt water thrusting in through gaps between the strakes, as if the sea were spitting at him between wooden teeth, and he felt the still-hot firepot roll scorchingly across his throat—and then the sloop tipped sharply back as it began to climb the next slope.

  Shandy and Venner and a lot of salty water tumbled aft, and Shandy tried to keep his sword up and pointed at Venner; twice he felt the point poke something more yielding than deck timbers, and he tried to thrust, but sliding prone on the sloshing deck he could get no traction. Gray light from the open hatch silhouetted his opponent clearly for a second, but a moment later Venner had scrambled up the ladder to the deck.

  Shandy got to his feet and followed him up, keeping his sword which, he now noticed, was a spare rapier of Davies’—between himself and the light to block any blows from Venner; but when he reached the deck he saw that Venner had run forward and was now facing him from ten yards away, pointing at Shandy a pistol he’d snatched from someone.

  Shandy throttled his instant impulse to dive back down the hatch, for he was the captain, and even in the midst of this storm most of the men were gaping at this confrontation—and a thirty-foot shot on a wet, pitching deck in hard rain would probably miss, and perhaps the rain had got in under the pan-cover to the powder. He did, though, allow himself to stand in profile, facing Venner over his right shoulder. He lifted his sword in a fencer’s salute, both for the apparent coolness of the gesture and in the hope that the pistol ball, if well aimed, might strike the blade or the guard.

  The rain had not got to the powder. At the same instant that he saw the muzzle flash Shandy felt the hot ball punch across the skin over his solar plexus; he flinched back away from it but didn’t fall or drop his sword, and when he had regathered his scattered wits a second or two later he bowed as courteously as he could on the rocking deck—it required grabbing the ratlines with his free hand and planting his feet a little more widely than was customary—and then he advanced toward Venner.

  The helmsman, distracted by the drama on the deck, didn’t put the bow squarely enough into the next wave, and the Jenny took it on her port bow; she heeled ponderously as the solid green water surged over her deck, splashing up explosively at the mast and sweeping at least one man overboard.

  Then she lay in the trough, abeam to the waves. More scared by this than by Venner, Shandy scrambled back to the stern, having to drop the sword in order to grab rigging to steady himself. Skank and the other men at the mainsail boom had managed to get several feet of the sail unreefed and threaded with rope, and one man was trying to shinny up the swaying mast with the end of the rope in his teeth, apparently hoping to throw it over the narrow topsail yard so that the men below could use it as a halliard. It was all they could do, and Shandy knew it wouldn’t be enough.

  Behind him, moving slowly because he didn’t want to abandon the cutlass he’d picked up, Venner was picking his way aft.

  Shandy glanced at the helmsman, who had the tiller all the way over to port, and he knew he should be there to help the man hold it when the full wind hit them at the crest, but then he saw Woefully Fat.

  The big bocor had pulled himself away from the transom, and was now standing on the deck and grasping the wooden shaft that impaled him; and even as Shandy watched, Woefully Fat bent it in front of himself—the wind took all sounds, but splinters began to spring up between the two black hands. Shandy assumed the bocor was using magic to accomplish it, but Woefully Fat had to shuffle around as the spar was bent farther, and Shandy felt his arms prickle with awe, for he could see the bloody gaff-saddle protruding an inch or so from the broad back, and though the iron still steamed, it wasn’t glowing—the bocor was breaking the spar with nothing but his own physical strength.

  Finally it broke, and the bocor fell to his knees. Shandy rushed up to help him, but Woefully Fat one-handedly lifted the gaff-spar and shoved it toward him—an impressive feat in itself, for, even broken off, the thing was a good six feet long, and draped with rigging and the sopping head end of the mainsail.

  “Sea anchor!” the bocor shouted. “Throw it over the starboard quarter!”

  Shandy understood at once, and took the spar from Woefully Fat—he had to use both hands, and still his teeth ground together at the weight of it—and he turned and heaved it over the starboard rail into the sea.

  In that moment they crested the next wave, and the Jenny heeled sharply as the wind hit them on the port beam, and then they were sliding down the weather side, the helmsman straining to keep the tiller over. Shandy hastily untied the mainsail halliard and let it play out over the rail to give the sea-anchor line some length.

  The Jenny hit the trough only slightly straightened out, and again the sea surged entirely over the deck. Shandy clung to the rail underwater, wondering if they had been rolled over, if the Jenny was simply going to implode and sink without ever bobbing up again; but then the water became heavy on his hunched shoulders and sluiced away, freeing his head first, then his arms, and when it was still sloshing around his knees he resecured the halliard, for nearly all of the line had been played out.

  The spar itself was somewhere behind the last crest, and even as they climbed the next one Shandy could feel the tug of it, could feel the old stoop pulled more straight, and then begin to respond to the sail and the rudder. The bow was coning up into the wind.

  Through his fingertips he had been paying very close attention to the feel of the deck, and when he felt a faint scratch
nearby he looked up—and then flung himself flat. Venner’s cutlass split the rail instead of Shandy’s head.

  Shandy rolled away while Venner was rocking the heavy blade loose, and when he got up in a crouch Skank took time out from improvising a mainsail to toss him the dropped rapier.

  The deck was heaving, and rain and spray were in his eyes—he missed the toss, heard the sword clank and slide across wet deck, heard too the creak of the cutlass blade levered free, and Venner’s sliding footsteps approaching.

  Shandy dove after the saber just as the bow plunged into a wave—he shut his eyes and braced himself against the gunwale as the water crashed over him, then shook his head and blinked around frantically. The light was bad, but he saw the sword rolling in the water, and he went after it in a half-swimming crawl and caught its hilt.

  Venner struck as Shandy was trying to stand up, but the deck rocked sharply back just as Venner lunged, and he lost his balance, and though the blow numbed Shandy’s shoulder, it was the flat that had hit him, not the edge.

  It knocked him back down onto his knees, but Venner had fallen too, and Shandy took a moment to drive his own sword point into the only reachable part of Venner—his knee—before wearily hauling himself to his feet one more time.

  Venner was up too.

  Shandy realized he might not be able to beat Venner, that this interminable fight might end with that damned cutlass breaking open his head or splitting his abdomen—but he was too exhausted to derive anything more than an oppressive unhappiness from the idea. He leaned back against the transom and flexed his hand on the slippery saber grip.

  Venner swung the cutlass at Shandy’s head, and Shandy made his numb arm lift the rapier to deflect the blow, but he only succeeded in turning the heavier blade, so that once again it was the flat that hit him—squarely on the side of the head this time. His knees gave for a moment as the hot, nauseating pain seemed to ring in his sinuses.

  He tried to straighten, but Venner’s blade was driving in point-first now—Shandy let himself slump further and then barely managed to jerk his body aside as the blade struck—it scraped his ribs and caught in a loose fold of his jacket, nailing him to the bulkhead and stopping his fall; but he had raised his own sword in a parry that, while late, had put his point more or less in line. As cloppingly as a carelessly worked puppet he got his feet under himself.

  His shirt tore as he lunged forward, and then the front of Vernier’s jacket was punctured to admit two inches—then four, as Shandy caught his balance and remised—of rusty steel.

  Suddenly pale, Venner reeled back, off the blade, and the cutlass slipped out of his hand and rang on the deck. The Jenny crested the next wave and tilted sharply back for an instant. Everyone except the two combatants grabbed for a handhold or tried to make the tumble a controlled one, but Shandy lunged forward again, in midair as the deck dropped away beneath him, and drove his point into Venner’s broad chest with such force that the blade snapped off and both of them sailed through the rainy air toward, and higher than, the port rail. Shandy let go of the broken sword and grabbed the rigging, but Venner and Davies’ sword went spinning away over the side. Then the bow fell and the stern rose, tearing Shandy’s grip loose and flinging him hard down onto the deck.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  HE CAME back to consciousness in slow stages, reluctantly abandoning the dreams that were so much preferable to the cold, aching situation that seemed to be reality—memory dreams, like traveling with his father and the marionettes, and wish dreams, like finding Beth Hurwood and finally telling her the things he wanted to tell her. At first it had seemed that he might be able to choose the situation he would wake up to, just by concentrating on it; but the wet and cold and rocking one became more and more insistent, and when he opened his eyes he was on the Jenny’s deck.

  He tried to sit up, but sudden nausea pitched him back flat, weak and sweating. He opened his eyes again and saw Skank’s concerned face. Shandy started to speak, but his teeth were chattering. He clamped his jaw tight for a moment and then tried again. “What…happened?”

  “You hit the deck pretty solid after you killed Venner,” said Skank.

  “Where’s Davies?”

  Skank frowned in puzzlement. “He’s…uh, dead, cap’n. When Hurwood took the Carmichael. You remember.”

  It seemed to Shandy he did remember something like that. He tried to sit up again, and again flopped back, shivering. “What happened?”

  “Well—you were there, cap’n. And I told you about it today, remember? How one of Hurwood’s dead sailors killed him?” Skank looked around unhappily.

  “No, I mean what happened just now?”

  “You fell on the deck. I just told you.”

  “Ah.” Shandy sat up for the third time and made himself stay up. The nausea surged up in him and then abated. “You may have to keep telling me.” He struggled to his feet and stood swaying and shuddering, clutching the rail for balance and looking around dizzily. “Uh…the storm has…stopped,” he remarked, proud to be able to demonstrate his awareness of things.

  “Yes, cap’n. While you was out cold. We just kept her hove to and rode it out. Your sea-anchor made the difference.”

  Shandy rubbed his face hard. “My sea-anchor.” He decided not to ask. “Good. What’s our course?”

  “Southeast, more or less.”

  Shandy beckoned Skank closer, and when the young man had crouched beside him he asked quietly, “Where are we going?”

  “Jamaica, you said.”

  “Ah.” He frowned. “What do we hope to find there?”

  “Ulysse Segundo,” said Skank, looking more worried every second, “and his ship, the Ascending Orpheus. You said he’s Hurwood, and the Orpheus is really the Carmichael. We followed reports of him out to the Caymans, where you heard he was heading back toward Jamaica again. Oh, and Woefully Fat wanted to get there, Jamaica, before he died.” Skank shook his head sadly.

  “Is Woefully Fat dead?”

  “Most of us think so. The gaff-spar speared him like a spitted chicken, and after he broke the big piece off and gave it to you he just flopped down. We got him below, for burial when we get to shore, ’cause you don’t just pitch a dead bocor into the sea if you know what’s good for you—but a couple of the men say they can feel a pulse in his wrist, and Lamont says he can’t keep his mind on his work because Woefully Fat keeps hummin’ real low, though I don’t hear nothin.”

  Shandy tried to concentrate. He remembered some of these things, vaguely, when Skank described them, and he remembered a sense of desperate urgency about them, but he couldn’t now remember why that should be. What he most wanted at the moment was an impossibility—a dry place to sleep.

  “That storm,” he said. “It was very sudden? There was no shelter we could have taken?”

  “We might have been able to run back to Grand Cayman,” Skank told him. “Venner was for doing that. You said we had to go on.”

  “Did I…say why?”

  “You said the storm would get us anyway, and we may as well go on after the Orpheus. Venner said you wanted to because of that girl. You know, Hurwood’s daughter.”

  “Ah!” He was beginning to see some hints of pattern in his concussion-shuffled memories. “What’s the date today?”

  “I don’t know. It’s Friday…and, uh, Sunday’s Christmas.”

  “I see,” said Shandy tightly. “Keep reminding me of that, will you? And now that the storm is past, get up as much canvas as you can.”

  THE NEXT morning at dawn they spied the Ascending Orpheus—and there was no disagreement about what to do, for they’d spent all night bailing water out of the Jenny, and in spite of having pulled a tar-smeared sail around under the forward keel, and hammering rice-filled rolls of cloth into the gaps between the strakes, the water was coming in faster every hour, and Shandy doubted that the battered old sloop could hold together long enough to make another landfall. Maximum canvas was crowded on, and the Jenny lurched u
nevenly across the expanse of blue water toward the ship.

  Crouched in the sloop’s bow, Shandy peered through the telescope, squinting against the blinding glitter of the morning sun on the waves. “She’s suffered,” he remarked to the haggard, shivering men around him. “There’s spars gone and rigging fouled on the foremast…but she’s still solid. If we do this next hour’s work right, there’ll be rum and food and dry clothes.”

  There was a general growl of approval, for most of his men had spent last night laboring over the bilge pumps in the rain, looking forward to the occasional brief break in which to swallow a handful or two of wet biscuit; and the rum cask had come unmoored and broken apart during the storm, filling the hold with the smell of unattainable liquor.

  “Did any of our powder stay dry?” Shandy asked.

  Skank shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “Hm. Well, we don’t want to wreck the Orpheus anyway.” He lowered the telescope. “Assuming our mast doesn’t snap off, we ought to be able to cut south and head her off—and then I guess just try to board her.”

  “That or swim for Jamaica,” agreed one ragged, red-eyed young pirate.

  “Don’t you think he’ll try to run when he sees we’re after him?” Skank asked.

  “Maybe,” said Shandy, “though I’ll bet we can catch him, even busted up as we are—and anyway, we can’t look too formidable.” He raised the telescope again. “Well, never mind,” he said a moment later. “As a matter of fact, he’s coming at us.”

  There was a moment of silence. Then, “Lost some men in that storm, I daresay,” commented one of the older men grimly. “Be wantin’ replacements.”