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Davies shook his head doubtfully. "Poop seems too high, but I guess we'll know soon enough; both of 'em seem to be slowing down. Are we getting every knot of speed out of this?"
Shandy shrugged and gestured down at Hurwood. "Ask him - but I'd say yes and a risky bit more. After that last speed-up to keep the Spaniard in sight we had to take down all sails, 'cause they were just slowing us down, and the hull strakes flex more and leak worse every time we skate over a big wave."
"Well, it shouldn't take too much longer." Whatever the ship was ahead, they were gaining on it fast, and after a minute or so Davies called "Catch!" and tossed the telescope to Shandy. "What's her name?"
Shandy peered through the telescope. "Uh ... the Vochi-flerouttes Barimychael? No ... no, it's the Carmichael, right enough, I see it clear now ... "
"Keep the glass on her," said Davies.
" ... Well," said Shandy tiredly after another few moments, "it blurs and shifts. But for a moment there it was the Charlotte Bailey." He sighed and muttered a curse he hadn't known a month ago. "So he raised the crew of the Charlotte Bailey to replace the men he murdered, but his new sorcerous strength is so great that he raised the ship's ghost too, and it's clinging to the Carmichael."
Davies nodded toward the Spanish galleon. "He even raised the ship that went down with the Bailey."
"God," said Shandy. "I wonder if he knows that."
"I don't think it matters. The de Lagrimas seems to want to take up their battle right where they left off a century ago ... and I don't think we want to permit that."
"No," said Shandy.
"No," agreed Hurwood, who had at last stood up and closed his noisome box. "And to answer your earlier question, no, Friend doesn't know what the Spaniard is, or he wouldn't have wasted energy trying to boil her - she's part of the same magic that's furnished him with a crew, and the only way he can be rid of her is to cancel that magic." He laughed without smiling. "The boy isn't in control of his new strength yet. He reached down to the sea floor for a crew and raised up as well everything and everybody in the vicinity. I'll wager there are fishes aswim below us now that were scattered skeletons yesterday."
"Excuse me," said Shandy quickly, "but can ghost cannon balls damage real ships? The Lagrimas seems to be lining up for a broadside."
"I don't know," grated Hurwood. The old man closed his eyes and took a deep breath, and then half the men aboard the Jenny were sent sprawling as the old sloop leaped forward across the shattering waves at a still greater speed. Shandy, braced against the transom and trying to snatch a lungful of the solid, rushing air, considered, and then giddily dismissed, warning Hurwood that the battered old vessel probably couldn't take it.
Smoke bloomed from the Spaniard's starboard flank, and a moment later Shandy rubbed his eyes incredulously, for the Carmichael had blurred, seeming simultaneously both to reel and to continue unchecked, seeming to lose spars and sails in a tangled explosion and at the same time maintain her broad spread of canvas untouched.
The drunken pirates aboard the Jenny burst out yelling at the sight of this prodigy, and several took it on themselves to try to hoist some sails while others scrambled for the helm. One man was wrenching at the sheaves of the cathead, trying to get the anchor to drop.
Davies grinned at the men who were rushing back toward the helm, and thoughtfully drew a pistol, and Shandy yelled, "There's enough ghosts in this fight without volunteers! Our only living opponent is the fat boy - do you want to let him get away with your ship?"
Shandy's words, and, even more effectively, Davies' pistol, halted the rush. The pirates wavered, covering uncertainty by redoubling their shouted oaths and demands and gestures.
Davies fired his pistol into the air, and into the relative silence that followed he yelled, "The Spaniard's a ghost, I admit - but she's distracting the fat boy. He's seen us now - so do we go in and hit him while he's occupied, or wait for him to turn on us at his leisure?"
Miserably, the pirates turned and fought their way back through the hammering headwind to their posts. They had only managed to raise one sail, the little square topsail, and before they could even begin to lower it again it split into a hundred fluttering ribbons, giving the plunging boat a shabbily festive appearance but doing nothing to slow it down.
Almost skipping over the waves now, the Jenny crashed into the narrowing gap between the two ships.
"All port guns fire!" Davies roared against the wind. "And then try putting the tiller over to port!"
The Jenny's seven portside guns all boomed jarringly, and then after a moment of recoil the sloop heeled sharply with the canvasless jibe to starboard, and Shandy held onto the port rail and blinked against the spray from the waves that were hurtling past just inches below him; and when the port side heaved back up to something closer to its normal position he craned his neck to look back at the de Lagrimas.
She was in trouble, sure enough, her stout mainmast broken off at a ragged point about halfway up its length, and most of her rigging was serving now only to connect her to the unwieldy sea-anchor that the mast-top had become - but Shandy swore softly in awe, for the Jenny was a much smaller vessel, and her broadside had been leveled at the Spaniard's hull, not up at the masts and rigging ... and it occurred to him that he was seeing the original conflict between the Nuestra Senora de Lagrimas and the Charlotte Bailey being re-enacted by the temporarily resurrected principals, who, in some deteriorated sense, still recalled the original sequence of events.
"Keep the tiller over!" commanded Davies, "and let us slow down now," he added to Hurwood. "We'll come around across the Carmichael's bow and board her on the starboard side."
The two ships had been slowing even before the de Lagrimas lost her mast, and so even overloaded and losing speed the Jenny had yards to spare when she came around, still heeling, under the Carmichael's bow. Then the Jenny's in-turning bow was scraping up splinters along the ship's hull and the sloop rocked and shuddered as it lost its momentum; Davies ordered grappling hooks flung up, and a moment later the pirates were swarming like big, ragged bugs up the ropes. Among the first of them was Shandy, who was finding it ironic that in this second capture of the Carmichael by the Jenny he should be one of the bearded wild men scrambling up the boarding lines.
When he was halfway up the line, bracing his boot-soles against the hull as he wrenched himself upward, the hull suddenly jumped like a whacked drumskin and he was swung over sideways and slammed hard against it; the impact rang his head against the hull strakes and numbed his right arm, but he managed to keep his left hand clamped onto the rope. Blinking down past his dangling boots, he saw most of the men who'd been on the lines with him splash into the turbulent water between the two vessels.
"The Spaniard just hit her on the other side!" shouted Davies, leaping for one of the slack lines himself. "Now or never!"
Shandy took a deep breath - through his mouth, for his nose was dripping blood - flexed the fingers of his right hand, swung it up to grab the rope, drew his legs up and pushed himself away from the hull and wearily resumed climbing. He was the first to grip the rail and swing a leg over, but, in spite of his concern for Beth Hurwood, when he had wincingly pulled himself up he just crouched there and stared for several seconds.
The Spanish ship was a sky-blotting tangle of shattered spars and fouled rigging, but Shandy's attention was on his immediate surroundings. The ship to whose rail he was clinging was simply not the Carmichael - the waist was broader across but shorter fore and aft, there were two poop decks, one behind and even higher than the first, and the cannons were mounted right out on the top deck rather than one deck down - but what drew his unhappy attention were the sailors aboard her.
They moved awkwardly, and their skin was the color of scummy cream of mushroom soup, and their eyes were the milky white that, in fish, was a sign of having been dead too long.
