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Certainly this is the last time the Jenny will besiege the Carmichael, he thought as he began climbing hand over hand up the rope.
The effort started his nose bleeding and made his head feel as if it would burst, and when he finally got to the top of the rope and paused for breath straddling the rail he couldn't remember why he was there. Some time seemed to have passed - this was the Vociferous Carmichael, he was sure ... but most of the railing was gone, and the whole forecastle structure, too! Had they still not reached Jamaica? Where was Captain Chaworth? And that sick girl with the fat physician?
His disorientation ebbed a little when he recognized the girl's father coming down the ladder from the poop deck - what was his name? Hurwood, that was it - but then Shandy frowned, for he had remembered the man as having only one arm.
He was distracted then by fighting on the quarterdeck, and when he looked closely - it was hard to focus in all this glaring sunlight - he really thought he was losing his mind. Haggard men in ragged but gaudy clothes were climbing aboard all around him and doing desperate battle with impossibly animate corpses whose withered hands shouldn't have been able to clutch a cutlass, and whose milky, sunken eyes shouldn't have been able to direct the strokes. The blood running sluggishly from Shandy's ears and the pounding in his head robbed the scene of nearly all sounds, giving everything the grotesque unreality of a fever dream, and the question of why he had chosen to adorn his jacket with two mummified human forearms seemed relatively unimportant.
He didn't trust his balance, so he climbed very carefully down onto the deck. The man who seemed to be Benjamin Hurwood was coming toward him now, a welcoming smile crinkling his old face ...
And then Shandy was dreaming, had to be, for he was standing beside his father in the dimness of the scaffolding above a marionette stage, both of them staring into the brightness below and busily working the crosses that controlled the dangling puppets; and it must have been a crowd scene they were doing, for many more crosses were hung in the spring-hooks that kept the idle marionettes below swaying and bobbing slightly. In a moment he had forgotten that it had to be a dream, and was panicking because he didn't know what play they were doing.
He squinted at the little figures below, and instantly recognized them. They were the Julius Caesar marionettes. And luckily the third act had begun, there wasn't all that much more to do - they were already in the assassination scene, and the little wooden senators all had their standard right hands replaced by the dagger-clutching ones.
The Caesar puppet was speaking - and Shandy stared, for the face was no longer wood but flesh, and he recognized it. It was his own face. "Hence!" he heard his miniature self say. "Wilt thou lift up Olympus?"
The senator puppets, who were also flesh now, moved in for the kill ... and then the scene abruptly winked out, leaving Shandy standing on the Carmichael's deck again, squinting against the sun-glare at Hurwood.
A confident smile was fading from the old man's face, but he struck again, and Shandy was kneeling in hot sand on the New Providence beach, staring critically at the four bamboo poles he'd shoved upright in the sand. They had stood well enough until he'd tried to lash others across the tops of them, and now they were all leaning outward like cannons ready to repel an attack from all sides.
"Weaving a basket?" Beth Hurwood asked from behind him.
He hadn't heard her approach, and for a moment he was going to reply irritably, but then he grinned. "It's supposed to be a hut. For me to sleep in."
"It'd be easier if you made a lean-to - here, I'll show you."
It had been a day in July, during the refitting of the Carmichael; Beth had shown him how to put together a much stabler structure, and there had been one moment when, standing on tiptoe to loop twine over the peak of one of the leaning poles, she had fallen against him, and for a moment she'd been in his arms, and her brown eyes and coppery hair had made him dizzy with an emotion that included physical attraction only to the extent that an orchestra includes a brass section. It was a memory that often recurred in his dreams.
This time, though, it was going differently. This time she was using a hammer and nails instead of twine, and her eyelids and lips were pulled open as far as they could go and her teeth and the whites of her eyes glared in the tropical sun as she laid his arms out along the bamboo poles and held the first nail to his wrist ...
... and again he was standing on the Carmichael's deck, blinking at Hurwood.
Hurwood now looked definitely uneasy. "What the hell's wrong with your mind?" he snarled. "It's like a stripped screw."
Shandy was inclined to agree. He kept trying to remember what he was doing here, and every time he glanced at the nightmare combat going on around him he was astonished and horrified anew. And now, as if to outdo all his previous disorientations, the deck stopped pressing against his boot-soles and he slowly began to rise unsupported into the air.
Instinctively he reached to grab something - and what he grabbed for was not a rail or the rigging, but the hilt of his saber. The protruding compass needle punctured his palm, but the same impulse that had made him grab it made him hang on. He began to sink, and a few seconds later he was again standing on the deck.
He looked around: the fighting was going on as horribly as before, though all sounds were still muffled for him, but none of the combatants were coming anywhere near Hurwood and Shandy - apparently they considered it a private duel.
There was an expression of alarmed wonder on Hurwood's face, and he was saying something too softly for Shandy to hear. Then the old man drew a rapier of his own and ran nimbly at him.
Shandy was still painfully gripping the hilt of his own sword, and now he wrenched it free from his belt just in time to sweep Hurwood's point away with an awkward parry in prime, and then he hopped back and more easily knocked aside the old man's next thrust - and then the next. The gray forearms attached to his jacket swung and bumped against each other sickeningly.
Blood from his spiked hand made the saber grip slippery, and every time his blade clanked against Hurwood's the compass needle grated against the bones in his palm, sending an agony like tinfoil on a carious tooth all the way up to his shoulder.
Hurwood barked a harsh syllable of laughter and sprang forward, but Shandy clenched his fist on the saber grip - driving the needle even deeper between the bones of his palm - and caught the incoming blade in a corkscrewing bind that yanked the hilt out of Hurwood's fingers; the pain of the action made Shandy's vision go dark for a moment, but with a last twist he sent Hurwood's sword spinning over the rail, and then he just stared down at the deck and took deep, gasping breaths until his vision cleared.
Hurwood had scrambled back, and now looked off to the side and pointed imperatively at Shandy. Obviously this was no longer a private duel.
One of the decayed mariners lurched obediently across the deck toward them; his clothes were ragged scraps and Shandy could see daylight between the bones of one shin, but the shoulders were broad and one bony wrist was whipping a heavy cutlass through the air as easily as a sailmaker wields a needle.
Shandy was already close to exhaustion, and the needle embedded in his hand was a hot, grating agony. It seemed to him that the jar of a butterfly alighting on the blade of his saber would be more torture than he could bear and stay conscious, but he made himself step back and lift his sword, though the move made the world go gray and drenched him in icy sweat.
The dead man shambled closer - Hurwood smiled at the thing and said, "Kill Shandy." - and the cutlass was whipped back over the bony shoulder for a stroke.
Shandy forced his eyes to focus, forced his ploughed hand to be ready ...
But the cutlass lashed out sideways, slamming into Hurwood and flinging him away aft across the deck, and in the instant before the necrotic sailor collapsed in skeletal ruin and, simultaneously, the gray arms evaporated from Shandy's jacket, Shandy's eyes met the gleam in the sailor's sunken eye-sockets and there was exchanged recognition and wry greeting and a farewell between true comrades. Then there was nothing but tumbling old bones and some scraps of gaudy cloth on the deck, but Shandy let go of the torturing saber and dropped to his knees, then forward onto his ravaged hands, and his ears had cleared enough so that he could hear his tears patter on the deck.
