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Another pistol was fired directly into Blackbeard's chest, and as he staggered back, blood spattering onto the deck all around him, two rapiers were driven deep into his back; he whirled so quickly that one of them broke off in him, and his outflung cutlass broke the arm of the man who held the broken sword. Two more shots hammered into him and another blade chugged deeply into his side.
Finally he got his feet solidly under him and straightened to his full height - the Navy men drew back fearfully - and then, straight as a felled tree, he toppled forward, and the wet deck shook when he hit it.
"Jesus Christ," exhaled the lieutenant, sitting down abruptly, his exhaustion-tense hands still locked around the fired pistol and the broken sword.
After a pause, one of the Navy men picked up Blackbeard's cutlass, knelt by the corpse and raised the heavy blade over his head, obviously trying to guess where, under the tumble of tangled black hair, the pirate-king's neck was. A moment later he made up his mind and swung the blade down; it crunched through Blackbeard's spine and into the deck and Blackbeard's severed head rolled over to stare at the sky with a strained but sardonic grin.
When the tide rose again in the early evening, the four battered sloops filed past Beacon Island and out through the Ocracoke Inlet. The surviving pirates were under armed guard aboard the Adventure, and Blackbeard's head swung from the Navy sloop's bowsprit. Blood had stopped dripping from the grisly trophy hours ago, and most of it had long since threaded away in the cold salt water to feed tiny fishes, but one clot had remained solid, and clung now to the hull of the sloop just below the water line.
It was, very gently, pulsing.
Chapter Twenty-One
The bang of the pistol shot rolled away across the long harbor of New Providence Island, and though a glint showed on the deck of the Delicia as one of the Navy officers aboard her turned a glass on the shore, no one leaped up in fear of being murdered, or anticipation of seeing someone else be, as would have been the case six months ago, and Jack Shandy plodded barefoot across the hot sand to the chicken he'd beheaded with the pistol ball. It was evidently too early in the day for drink to have impaired his aim.
He picked up the head. As he'd feared, the beak had letters inked on it, and he let it drop.
Damn, he thought. So much for grilled chicken. I'm glad old Sawney hasn't started magicking the fever into lobsters yet.
He tucked the pistol into his sash and walked toward the fort. The darker-colored masonry of the new sections of wall gave the whole edifice a pied look, and Shandy thought it was probably the physical improvements, even more than the British flag and the presence of Woodes Rogers, the official governor, that had made mad old Governor Sawney move out of the place.
As he trudged toward the cluster of tents he glanced to his left at the harbor. There were fewer boats these days than there'd been before Rogers' arrival, and it was easy to spot the old Jenny. Shandy had abandoned his captaincy when he took the pardon three months ago, and Venner had stepped in and declared himself captain. By that time, though, everybody had taken the pardon, and it was clear to most that the days of piracy were dead, and nobody felt that the issue of who might be captain of one battered old sloop was important enough to dispute, and so Venner's claim had stood. He had careened the vessel, cleaned her up and rerigged her, and it was obvious that he intended to violate his pardon and go back on the account. Shandy had heard that he was furtively recruiting a crew from among the segment of the island's population that missed the bad old days - he hadn't asked Shandy, and Shandy wasn't interested anyway.
The Navy brigantine he'd seen wending its way in among the shoals this morning was moored now, but though supplies were being unloaded and taken ashore, there was none of the festive atmosphere he would have expected - men were standing around in little groups on the beach, talking quietly and shaking their heads, and one of the prostitutes was sobbing theatrically.
"Jack!" someone called. Shandy turned and saw Skank hurrying toward him.
"Mornin", Skank," he said when the young man stopped, panting, in front of him.
"Did you hear the news?"
"Probably not," said Shandy. "If I did, I forgot it."
"Blackbeard's dead!"
Shandy smiled reminiscently, as one might at learning that a game remembered from long-ago childhood is still being played by children today. "Ah." He kept walking, and Skank trotted along beside him. "Pretty sure, this news is?" Shandy asked, pausing at the tent that served as a sort of open-air pub.
"Oh, aye, couldn't be surer. It was in North Carolina, a month ago. Half his men were captured, and old Thatch's head was brought right to the governor."
"He died on the water, I daresay," remarked Shandy, accepting the cup of rum he didn't even have to bother specifying anymore.
Skank nodded. "Aye. He was in the Ocracoke Inlet, in a sloop called the Adventure. He'd hid the Queen Anne's Revenge somewhere, and all his lucre too, they say. They claim he didn't have a single reale aboard. That weren't like him, though - probably the Navy men took all the money."
"No - I'll bet - " Shandy paused to take a long sip of the rum. 'I'll bet he had hid it all. Adventure, eh? An apt name - it was his great adventure, I guess."
Skank looked around at the tents and the beach and the half-sunk hulks of abandoned ships that Governor Rogers was already getting people to break up and carry away. "I guess this really isn't a pirate island anymore."
Shandy laughed. "You just now noticed? Two days ago Rogers hanged eight men right over there, remember? - for violating the pardon. And we all just watched, and when it was done we all just wandered away."
"Sure, but - " Skank struggled with the complexity of the idea he was trying to express. "But just knowing old Thatch was out there somewhere ... "
Shandy shrugged and nodded. "And might come back. Yeah, I know. I can't picture even Woodes Rogers resisting him. Aye, soon now there'll be taxes and wages and laws about where to moor your boat. And you know something? I think magic will stop working here too, like it did back east."
"Goddamn." Skank absently took Shandy's cup, had a deep gulp and then handed it back. "Where'll you go, Jack? I'm thinking of signing on with Venner."
"Oh, I'll stay here till I run out of money for rum, and then I suppose I'll move on, get some kind of work. Hell, it's only a matter of time before England declares war on Spain again, and pirating will go back to being legal, and then maybe I'll enlist on a privateer. I don't know, it's a sunny day, and I've got rum - I'll worry about tomorrow's problems tomorrow."
"Huh. You used to be more - " This was Skank's day for abstract concepts. "More ... jumpy."
