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Shandy turned around and almost bumped into the imposing belly of Davies' bocor, Woefully Fat. A night for giants, Shandy thought as he tried to peer around the bulky sorceror. "Excuse me," he said before remembering that the bocor was supposed to be deaf, "have you seen Phil? Uh, Captain Davies? Oh hell, that's right, you can't hear, can you? So why am I ... " The intensity of the bocor's stare made him stop jabbering. Why can't these people give these looks to somebody else, Shandy thought with a shiver, or each other?
Unlike Blackbeard, who had seemed vaguely suspicious of Shandy, Woefully Fat stared down at him with evident doubt - almost with disappointment, as though Shandy were a bottle of expensive wine that someone might have left out too long in direct sunlight.
Shandy gave the sorceror a nervously polite smile, then backed away and hurried around him. Davies, he saw now, was standing on the edge of the sand slope a few yards away, and Shandy plodded over there.
Davies saw him, grinned, and then nodded down toward Blackbeard. "A powerful man, eh?"
"God knows," Shandy agreed, not smiling. "Listen, Phil," he went on quietly, "you never told me Beth Hurwood was coming along into the swamps with us."
Davies raised his eyebrows. "Didn't I? Perhaps not - probably because it's none of your concern."
Shandy thought the older man was speaking a little defensively and that alarmed him even more. "What do they mean to do with her?"
Davies sighed and shook his head. "Frankly, Jack, I'm not certain - though I do know they're anxious to keep her from all harm. Some higher magic, I gather."
"Having to do with Hurwood's dead wife."
"Oh, certainly that," Davies agreed. "As I told you on the Jenny, the hope of getting her back is all that keeps the old boy moving."
Shandy shook his head worriedly. "But if the Caribee loas are weak here, as you told me, how on earth do they expect to keep her safe out in that swamp? And who is this Maitre Carrefour?"
"Hm? Oh, that's our old friend Mate Care-For. Thatch just pronounces it right. It means master of the crossroads. Master of different possibilities, in other words - of chance. But yes, he and Samedi and the rest of the spirit boys have grown weaker for us as we've moved so far north of the places they're anchored to. No doubt there are loas here too, but they'll be Indian ones - less than no help to us. Aye, we're pretty much on our own here. Like Thatch said, we've got to stand on our own feet. But of course after we get to this magical focus, or fountain, or whatever it is, if Hurwood can come through on his promise to show us how to use it - and not get infested, as Thatch did when he found the place - why then we'll probably be able to just fly out."
Shandy frowned angrily. "Damn it - I can't see why Blackbeard even came here in the first place. I guess he knew somehow that there was some big magic deep in this jungle, but what made him go to so much trouble to get at it? Especially since he doesn't even seem to have been handy enough at magic to keep himself out of trouble."
Davies started to speak, then chuckled and shook his head. 'You've been in the western hemisphere how long now, Jack?"
"You know how long."
"So I do. A month, call it. Well, I first saw these islands when I was sixteen, the year after the press gang grabbed me in a Bristol street and informed me I was a sailor in His Majesty's Navy. No, let me talk. You can talk after. Anyway, I was a sailor on the frigate Swan, and in May of 1692 - I was eighteen by then - the Swan was in Port Royal, which was Jamaica's main seaport in those days, and we had her up on the careening ground a hundred yards west of the walls of Fort Carlyle." Davies sighed. "I guess ten years earlier Port Royal had been a real hellhole - it was Henry Morgan's home base - but when I was there it was just a nice, lively town. Well, on the second day of June, while my mates were working in the sun scraping barnacles off the Swan's hull, I was down the beach a ways reporting a shipping error at the King's warehouses, and when I had finished that I ducked in next door, at Littleton's tavern. And I'll tell you what, Jack, just as I left the place, full of beer and Littleton's excellent stew - beef and turtle, it was, as I recall - Thames Street jumped under my feet, and a sound like cannons or thunder came rolling out from the mainland. I turned back toward the tavern just in time to see the whole front wall of the place split into quarters like you'd cut a pie, and then the brick street broke up into ... strips, like ... and slid right down into the sea, with the whole town following right behind."
Shandy was listening avidly, having for the moment forgotten their original topic.
"I think I was under water for three minutes," Davies went on, "being battered by bricks and dirt, and just about being disjointed by the water itself, which couldn't make up its mind which way it wanted to fall. Finally I got to the surface and grabbed hold of somebody's roof beam, which was bobbing around like a toothpick on the choppiest, craziest sea you ever heard of. Eventually I was picked up by the Swan herself, which was one of the damn few vessels that hadn't been wrecked - maybe because she was already tipped over when the earthquake struck. She was crisscrossing the new patch of ocean which had, until about noon, been Port Royal, and we pulled lots of others out of that white sea - it was all bubbling and seething, you know? Like a huge pot of wild beer - but I later heard that two thousand died there."
"Jesus," said Shandy respectfully. Then, "Uh, but how does this relate to - "
"Oh, right, sorry - I'm getting carried away by my memories. Well sir, three blocks inland, on Broad Street, on that same terrible June second, an old magician from England - sort of like Hurwood, I guess - was trying out a heavy piece of resurrection magic I don't think he was very skilled at it, but he had with him that day a sixteen-year-old boy who'd grown up among the free blacks in the Jamaica mountains, a boy who, though white, had been deeply educated in vodun and had, just the year before, been consecrated to the most fearsome of the loos, the Lord of Cemeteries, Baron Samedi, whose secret drogue is low-smoldering fire. It was reincarnation magic they were playing with, trying to learn how to put old souls into new bodies, and that requires fresh human blood, and they'd grabbed some poor devil to provide it. The old English magician had tried this stuff before, and, I don't know, maybe he'd managed on his best day to bring a dead bug or two back to life, but today he had this sixteen-year-old boy yoked in double harness with himself, right?">Shandy glanced at Davies, who was squinting more than the fire glare called for, and though the set of his jaw made his cheeks even more lined and hollow than usual, Shandy caught a hint of how Davies must have looked as a young man - willful, and determined to conceal any misgivings once a course had been considered and decided on.
Boots grated on the sand nearby, and looking around Shandy saw old one-armed Benjamin Hurwood standing near him and staring out at the boat. Shandy thought Hurwood too was concealing what he felt, but, unlike Davies, Beth's father seemed to be tense with eagerness and impatience. Remembering some things Davies had told him about Hurwood, Shandy was pretty sure he knew why - and though he knew Hurwood was a murderer, he knew too that if he himself were ever to be in Hurwood's situation, and refrain from taking the course Hurwood was taking, it would be because of fear rather than virtue.
The boat crested an incoming breaker, and as the wave crashed to churning foam the boat rushed in until its keel jarred against the sand in the swirling shallows, and Blackbeard vaulted over the gunwale and splashed ponderously up to shore. His boatman - who, Shandy noticed with a shudder, had his jaw bound up - just sat in the boat, neither attempting to beach the thing nor to get out to deeper water before the next wave broke.
Blackbeard strode up the sand slope toward the fires, and paused for a moment where it leveled out, a big, jagged silhouette against the purple sky; his three-cornered hat seemed too tapering and long at the corners, and with the points of red light bobbing around his head he looked to Shandy like some three-horned demon newly climbed up from Hell.
Then he approached the fires, and the luminous red dots around his head were revealed to be the lit ends of match-cords woven into his shaggy mane and beard. He was a tall man, taller than Davies, and as solidly massive as a wind-etched rock outcrop.
"And here we are one year later, Mr. Hurwood," Blackbeard said. "You've brought us a fine ship, as you promised, and I've brought the herb you say we need - and here we are on Lammask in spite of your fears I'd be late." He spoke English with a slight accent, and Shandy couldn't decide whether it indicated a non-English origin or just a lack of interest and aptitude in speaking. "May we both get what we're seeking."
Behind the huge pirate Shandy saw Leo Friend, still panting from having hurried to the fires, grin furtively; and for the First time Shandy wondered if the fat young physician might have ambitions of his own in all this.
Blackbeard clumped in to the center of the cleared space, and Shandy noticed that his craggy face gleamed with sweat - perhaps because of his heavy black coat, the voluminous folds of which hung all the way down to his shins. "Phil?" said Blackbeard.
"Here, sir," said Davies, stepping forward.
"Feel recovered enough to come along?"
"Try me."
