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He had been looking back at the remote dot that was the torch, and so he bumped into Hurwood when the group halted.
There was only one bridge now, and they were right in front of it. It was about six feet wide and paved with broad, flat stones, and stone walls rose at the sides to shoulder height. Though when seen from afar the bridges had seemed to arch steeply up from the pool's edge, from where Shandy now stood it looked almost level, rising only very gradually as it narrowed away with distance and faded among the shifting clouds of the Fountain. In spite of its outlandish location, Shandy thought he'd seen the bridge before.
"After you," said Hurwood to Blackbeard.
The giant pirate, whose belt and boots, Shandy noticed, were smoking and sparking like the match-cords in his mane, stepped onto the bridge -
- and seemed to explode. Fluttering blurs of gray erupted from his mouth, nose and eyes and shot away in all directions, and his clothes leaped and shook on his huge frame like waves in a choppy sea. His hands jigged helplessly in front of him as the gray things blasted out of his sleeves, but in the midst of the ferocious detonations Blackbeard roared and managed to turn around.
"Stay there!" shouted Hurwood. "Don't step off the bridge! It's your ghosts leaving you!"
The exodus was tapering off, but Blackbeard didn't stop jumping. His belt and shoes were on fire, and he grabbed the smoldering hilt of his cutlass, drew the redly glowing blade and touched it to his belt, instantly burning through the leather. He tossed the cutlass out onto the sand and with sizzling fingers snatched his belt buckle loose, drew the pieces of leather free and kicked it all after the sword. He sat down and pulled off his boots, then stood up again and grinned at Hurwood.
"Now abandon all iron," he said.
Ye who enter here, thought Shandy.
"You can step down and just wait for Leo and me right here, with the others," said Hurwood. "Your ghosts are gone, and there's still plenty of the black herb - when we recover the two other torches and get them lit too, there'll be no danger of becoming reinfected on the way out of the jungle. Our bargain is completed, and Leo and I will be back here before long to lead you all back to where this region links with the world you know."
Shandy sighed with relief, and he had started to look around for a place to sit, when he noticed that Friend had made no move to put Beth Hurwood down.
"Wh-who," Shandy stammered, "who's going over and who's staying here?"
"Leo and the girl and myself are going over," said Hurwood impatiently, putting his lantern down on the sand. He took off his belt and shoes, and then in a grotesquely unwitting parody of intimacy he knelt in front of Friend and, one-handed, disconnected the ornate belt buckle from the fat man's belt. Friend's mud-caked slippers evidently contained no iron.
"I'm going over, too," pronounced Blackbeard, not stepping down from the bridge. "I didn't fight my way in here two years ago just to pick up a peltful of ghosts." He looked past Hurwood, and a moment later Stede Bonnett and the boatman stepped forward. Bonnett began unbuckling his belt and stepping out of his shoes, but the boatman's clothes were sewn shut and he was barefoot. "They're coming too," Blackbeard said.
Davies' face had become perceptibly more lined and hollowed since leaving the fires by the seashore, but there was some kind of humor in his eyes as he took a step forward and then crouched to shed his boots.
No, Shandy thought almost calmly. It just can't be expected of me. I'm already on the sidewalk outside reality - I'm simply not going out farther, into the street. None of these people will ever come back, and I'll have to figure out Hurwood's magic lantern just to find my way back to the goddamned jungle! Why did I ever come along? Why did I ever leave England?
He found he was implicitly confident of a way out ... and his face reddened when he realized that it was an axiom called up from early childhood - the conviction that if he cried hard enough and long enough, someone would take him home.
What right had these people to put him into such a humiliating situation?
He looked at Beth Hurwood, draped over Friend's shoulders. She was still unconscious, and her face, though heartbreakingly beautiful to him, was drawn and tautened by recent horrors - innocence intolerably abused. Wouldn't it be - couldn't a case be made for it being - kinder to let her die now, unconscious and not yet ruined?
While still in doubt he caught Leo Friend's eye. Friend was smiling at him with confident contempt, and he shifted his pudgy hand on Beth's thigh.
At the same moment, Hurwood began crooning reassuringly, and he got down on his hands and knees. He muttered some vague endearments and then, gently but strongly, he lowered himself flat, face down on the sand. Still murmuring, he began to flop there in a ponderous rhythm.
Leo Friend blushed furiously and snatched his hand off of Beth's leg. "Mr. Hurwood!" he screeched.
Hurwood, not stopping, chuckled indulgently.
"He seems to snap out of these fits before too long," said Blackbeard. "We'll wait this one out and then get moving."
Are you all crazy? wondered Shandy. Hurwood was the only chance, and a damn slim one at that, of anyone recrossing this bridge alive, and now he's madder than old Governor Sawney. There is no chance of surviving any further advance, and I don't want to take my eternal place among the silent gray legions on this unnatural horizon. Jack Shandy will wait right here, until dark, and when you doomed fools have failed to reappear I'll somehow use Hurwood's lantern to get back to the torch and the jungle and the boats and the shore. I'll no doubt regret this cowardice later, but at least I'll be able to lie in the sun and have a drink while I'm regretting it.
Shandy stepped back, away from the bridge, and sat down. He had meant to avoid meeting anyone's eyes, but as he looked around tor Hurwood's lantern, he glanced up and found Davies looking straight at him.
The lean old pirate was grinning at him, evidently pleased.
Shandy grinned back in relief, glad Davies understood ... and then he realized that Davies thought he had sat down in order to take off his boots.
And suddenly he knew, unhappily, that he couldn't just sit it out. This was stupid, as stupid as his father pulling a woodworking knife on a gang of Nantes alley toughs, or Captain Chaworth rushing with an unfamiliar sword at a pistol-armed pirate chief; but somehow, perhaps like them, he had been robbed of every way out of it. He took off his boots and stood up again.
By the time Friend tore his gaze away from the ludicrously bobbing figure of Benjamin Hurwood, Shandy's boots and knife lay abandoned in the sand and Shandy was standing in front of him.
