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Sounding like quick strokes of a hammer, two pistol balls punched the bulkhead he'd been in front of.
One foot touched a ladder rung and then he was up on the forecastle, wrenching open the dueling-pistols case. "Onto the Jenny!" he gasped, snatching the two pistols out of the velvet-lined case and turning back toward the waist.
But before he could decide who to shoot at he was flung to his knees as the whole ship lurched violently forward and a basso profundo thunderclap shook the air all the way up to the mast-tops and the entire stern of the ship swelled incredibly upward and outward, dissolving into a towering cloud of dust and smoke and spinning timbers. The boiling sea was shadowed for dozens of yards to port and starboard by the sudden, churning cloud, and pockmarked by the splashes of things falling into it, and the prolonged thunder rolled away across the waves.
Then masts started coming down, first with a snapping of lines, which, though loud as pistol shots, could scarcely be heard over the continuing roar of the explosion, then with a ponderous rushing through the smoky air, finally culminating in the twangy yielding of the safety nets and the bone-jarring crash as the timbers hit the deck.
The deck Shandy crouched on wasn't level anymore - it was tilted down toward the stern, and even as he noticed it, the tilt became more pronounced. He scrabbled around, dropping both pistols, and on his hands and knees crawled up the slanting forecastle deck to the port rail and grabbed one of the stanchions.
He looked aft, which was down. The stern half of the ship was probably under water, but the torn and crumpled sails, and beyond them the thick smoke, made it impossible to be sure. Captain Wilson's corpse had apparently rolled away while he wasn't looking, but he saw one of the unfired dueling pistols cartwheel into oblivion. All around him he could hear air hissing up out of the hull, and bits of wood and metal still clattering down out of the black sky.
Someone was shaking his arm, and when he looked up he saw that it was Davies, his Navy jacket hacked to tatters, straddling the rail and shouting at him. Shandy couldn't make out the words, but it was clear that Davies wanted him to follow him, so Shandy scrambled up onto the rail.
In the choppy water below rocked the Jenny, freed of all but one of the lines mooring her to the stricken man-of-war, and even as he noticed it he saw one of the pirates chop the last line through with a saber and then jump from the ship's up-tilted bow to the water thirty feet below.
"Go!" yelled Davies, giving Shandy a hard slap between the shoulders and then leaping from the rail after him.
The first few minutes aboard the Jenny were a scrambling nightmare - a dozen men, half of them wounded, struggled to hoist sails, half of them torn by shot, in a desperate effort to get headway and tack clear before the man-of-war sank, creating a turbulence powerful enough to founder bigger vessels than the Jenny.
At last, when the Navy ship had sunk to her middle, and her vast, dripping bow was raised entirely out of the water, and her two boats, crowded with sailors, had rowed thirty yards to the south, the Jenny's mainsail stopped luffing and flumped out taut. A few moments later the sloop began moving through the water and Davies ordered the tiller eased. They were a hundred yards southeast and picking up speed when the man-of-war's bow, spurting smoke as the explosion-fouled air in her was forced out, disappeared and was replaced by a white commotion of boiling and splashing.
"Hold her steady as she is ... while we inventory," called Davies wearily, leaning by the stern. He was pale under his tan, and didn't seem to have the strength to push away from the rail.
Skank secured the jib sheet around a belaying pin and then leaned on the gunwale to catch his breath. "How ... in hell ... did we get out of that?"
Davies laughed weakly and waved at Shandy, who was crouched on the stern rail and shivering, more from shock than because of his wet clothes. "Our boy Shandy got the captain's confidence with his song-and-dance about being a forced man - and then, first chance he got, Shandy shot him."
In the stunned silence that followed this pronouncement, Shandy turned away, looking back at the tangled litter visible on the distant blue-green wave faces whenever the swell raised the Jenny's stern.
Skank, his weariness forgotten, scrambled over the corpses and fouled rigging to the stern. "Really?" he asked, his voice hoarse with awe. "All that I'm-not-one-of-these talk you gave him was just play-acting?"
Shandy sighed, and when he shrugged he could feel that the tension had cramped its way back into his muscles. This is my life now, he thought. The men in those lifeboats know who I am. I couldn't be more committed. He turned around and grinned at Skank. "That's right," he said. "And I had to make it convincing enough to fool you lads too, so you'd react naturally."
Skank was frowning in bewilderment. "But you couldn't have been pretending ... I was right next to you ... "
"I told you I was involved with the theater for years, didn't I?" asked Shandy with affected lightness. "Anyway, you saw that Davies was bound when he was brought aboard, didn't you? Who do you think cut him loose, the captain? And who threw the swords to you?"
"Damn," Skank muttered, shaking his head. "You're good."
Davies was squinting at Shandy, and he laughed softly. "Yes," he said, "You're a good actor, Jack." Davies blinked and swayed, paler than before, then shook his head sharply. "Did Hodge's old bocor survive?"
After a moment's search, the bocor's eviscerated body was found draped from the deck edge down into the hold. "No, Phil," came a hoarse call from a narrowed throat.
"Well, find where he hid his restorative snackies and bring 'em to me up by the bow." He turned to Shandy and said, more quietly, "Dried liver and black sausage and raisins, mostly. Bocors always gorge on such trash after doing heavy magic, and I did one hell of a piece of it today. Them fire-sprites were ready and hungry."
"So I saw. Why liver and sausage and raisins?"
"Don't know. They claim it keeps their gums red, but all old bocors have white gums anyway." Davies took a deep breath, then slapped him on the back. "There's rum forward - I need some to wake up Mate Care-For so he'll get busy on my shoulder wound, and I'll bet you won't turn down a gulp or two."
"No," Shandy said fervently.
"Did Hodge come through?" Davies asked a man near him.
"No, Phil. He caught a ball in the belly as we were going over the rail, and he jumped but he never bobbed up again."
"All right, I'll take it. Bear to southwest," Davies called to the disheartened crew. "All of you that are too hurt to work, mend sails and splice line. We're going to have to sail thefty, night and day, to get to the Florida rendezvous in time."
"Aw hell, Phil," complained one lean old fellow, "we're too shot up. Nobody could blame us if we just went back to N'Providence."
