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Shandy's horribly elongated toes had found the river bottom and begun to dig in, and he felt nutrients coursing up his legs. His hands were gone, with not even a seam in the fresh trunks to differentiate what had once been him from what had once been the boat.
Davies put one hand on the twitching gunwale, and instantly the hand took root; but the flowering pirate drew back his other hand, braced himself, and then flung the ball of mud straight up.
And a bomb seemed to go off. The air was compressed in a scream that deafened minds as much as ears, and sent the boats rocking violently away from one another. Then the pressure was gone and the air was suddenly very cold, and Shandy's teeth hurt when he drew a breath. He rolled over - and discovered that he could roll over, he was no longer rooted into the fabric of the boat, and the boat was a normal boat again and not a clump of writhing branches; it was even relatively dry inside. Beth was sprawled across the aft thwart - he couldn't tell if she was conscious, but at least she was breathing and had resumed her human shape. Davies was slumped over the oars, his eyes closed, laughing exhaustedly and cradling the hand he'd flung the mud ball with. The hand seemed to be burned. And somehow raindrops were pattering around them all, though the roof of the jungle was as solid as ever.
Shandy's ears were ringing, and he had to shout even to hear himself. "A ball of mud killed it?"
"Some of the mud on my boot was from the shore around the Fountain," Davies yelled back, just barely audible to Shandy, "well inside the area that's poison to all dead-but-animate things."
Shandy looked ahead. Blackbeard, apparently willing to get the explanation later, had picked up his oars and was rowing again. "May I presume to suggest," yelled Shandy giddily to Davies, "that we proceed the hell out of here with all due haste."
Davies pushed a stray lock of hair back from his forehead and sat down on the rower's thwart. "My dear fellow consider it done."
There was a sound like dogs barking or pigs grunting around them; with his ears still ringing it took Shandy a minute to realize that it was the fungus heads making the noise. "Vegetable boys noisy tonight!" he called over their racket.
"Drunk, I expect!" returned Davies with a slightly hysterical joviality. "Damned nuisance!"
Beth had pulled herself up and was sitting in the stern. She was staring ahead through half-shut eyes, and might have looked relaxed if it hadn't been for the white knuckles of her gunwale-clutching hands.
Fog began making faint halos around the torches. Some distance ahead of them Blackbeard's boat veered south, and, though Shandy directed Davies through what seemed to be the same channel, they could no longer see his boat; all the glints of reflected orange light seemed to be cast by their own boat's torch, and though they could hear Blackbeard's answering roar when they called, it was distant and they couldn't tell which direction it came from.
After he admitted to himself that they'd lost Blackbeard, Shandy looked back the way they had come. The boat with Hurwood, Friend and Bonnett in it was nowhere to be seen.
"We're on our own," he told Davies. "Do you think you can get us back to the sea?"
Davies paused to stare around at the pools and channels that were identical to all the others they had passed through, partitioned by crowded trees and roots and vines that differed in no perceptible way from any other part of the swamp. "Sure," he said, and spat into the oily water. "I'll steer by the stars."
Shandy looked up. The high roof of moss and branches and tangled vines was as solid as a cathedral ceiling.
For the next hour, during which Shandy called to the other boats but got no reply, and Beth didn't move a muscle, and the fog got steadily thicker, Davies rowed through the twisting channels, watching the slow current and trying to move in the same direction; he was impeded, though, by dead-end channels, still pools, and areas where the current turned back inland. Finally they found a broad channel that seemed to be flowing strongly. Shandy was glad they did, for the torch was burning more dimly all the time.
"This has got to work," Davies gasped as he rowed out into the middle of the current.
Shandy noticed that he winced as he hauled on the oars, and he suddenly remembered that Davies had burned his hand throwing the mud ball at the swamp-loa. He was about to insist on a turn at the oars when one of the fungus balls on the shore spoke. "Dead end," it croaked. "Bear left. Narrower, but you get there."
To his surprise, Shandy thought he recognized the voice. "What?" he called quickly to the white, blurry-featured sphere.
It didn't reply, and Davies kept rowing down the broad channel.
"It said this is a dead end," Shandy ventured after a moment.
"In the first place," said Davies, his voice hoarse with exhaustion, "it's stuck in the mud, so I don't see how it can know. And in the second place, why should we assume it wants to give us straight advice? We almost took root back there - this lad obviously did. Why should such a one want to give us straight advice? ... Misery loves company."
Shandy frowned doubtfully at the low-flickering torch. "But these ... I don't think these are what we were turning into. We were all turning into normal plants - flowers and bushes and whatnot. And we all seemed to be different from one another. These boys are all alike ... "
"Back, Jack," piped up another of the puffy white things. Again Shandy thought he caught a familiar intonation.
"If anything," said Davies stubbornly, "this channel is getting wider."
One of the fungus balls was dangling from a tree over the water, and as they passed it it opened a flap and said, "Bogs and quicksand ahead. Trust me, Jack."
Shandy looked at Davies. "That's ... my father's voice," he said unsteadily.
"It ... can't be," snarled Davies, hauling even more strongly on the oars.
Shandy looked away and said, into the darkness ahead, "Left, you say, Dad?"
"Yes," whispered another of the fungi. "But behind you - then with the current, to the sea."
