On Stranger Tides E-Book

Tim Powers

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award Shortlisted for the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel 1718: Puppeteer John Chandagnac has set sail for Jamaica to recover his stolen inheritance, when his ship is seized by pirates. Offered the choice to join the crew, or be killed where he stands, he decides that a pirate's life is better than none at all. Now known as Jack Shandy, this apprentice buccaneer soon learns to handle a mainsail and wield a cutlass - only to discover he is now a subject of a Caribbean pirate empire ruled by one Edward Thatch, better known as Blackbeard. A practitioner of voodoo, Blackbeard is building an army of the living and the dead, to voyage together to search for the ultimate prize: the legendary Fountain of Youth.

Leseprobe

TIM POWERS is the author of several acclaimed works of speculative fiction. His books have won both the World Fantasy and the Philip K. Dick Memorial Awards, twice. He has received the Locus Award three times. He lives in San Bernardino, California.

TIM POWERS

WINNER OF:

THE WORLD FANTASY AWARD THE INTERNATIONAL HORROR GUILD AWARD THE PHILIP K. DICK MEMORIAL AWARD THE LOCUS AWARD

‘A brilliant writer... wonderfully original.’ WILLIAM GIBSON

‘Philip K. Dick felt that one day Tim Powers would be one of our greatest fantasy writers. Phil was right.’ ROGER ZELAZNY

‘Tim Powers has long been one of my absolutely favourite writers, those whose new books I snatch up as soon as they appear… Narrative sparkle, great dialogue, speculative imagination, and emotional power.’ PETER STRAUB

‘Powers knows that science poses its questions in search of a premeditated answer, [his writing] is a swift, colourful pursuit of the truth visible only to those with humility and a sense of wonder.’ DEAN KOONTZ

‘Tim Powers is the apostle of gonzo history, and On Stranger Tides is as good as story-telling ever gets. It promises marvels and horrors, and delivers them all. You’ll stay awake all night reading it, and when you finally do sleep, you’ll find this story playing through your dreams.’ ORSON SCOTT CARD

‘Powers orchestrates reality and fantasy so artfully that the reader is not allowed a moment’s doubt.’ NEW YORKER

‘One of the most original and innovative writers of fantasy currently working… The quality of Powers’s prose never falters… His writing defies characterization and he never repeats himself… Keeps you reading for the joy of it.’ WASHINGTON POST

‘Tim Powers is an uncommon literary talent. If heavenly muses were to put Dean Koontz, John Le Carré and Robert Parker into a creative blender, then moulded the mix into a brand new writer, the result would be something akin to Tim Powers.’ DENVER POST

‘Powers has forged a style of narrative uniquely his own, one filled with sharply drawn characters, fully imagined settings and elaborate underpinnings.’ LOS ANGELES TIMES

‘Powers’ novels are big in every sense: vast in scope, philosophically deep, impeccably wrought.’ GUARDIAN

‘Measured and pitch perfect prose… Powers levitates your incredulity like a masterly stage magician.’ INTERZONE

‘Fantastical… eclectic worldbuilding unlike anything else you may have read, except, maybe, another Tim Powers book.’ SF SIGNAL

Also by TIM POWERS

The Skies Discrowned An Epitaph in Rust The Drawing of the Dark The Anubis Gates Dinner at Deviant’s Palace The Stress of Her Regard Declare Three Days to Never

FAULT LINES SERIES

Last Call Expiration Date Earthquake Weather

TIM POWERS

ON STRANGER TIDES

First published in the United States of America in 1988 by Subterranean Press

This paperback edition first published in the UK in 2011 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Tim Powers, 1988.

The moral right of Tim Powers to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-84887-512-8

eBook ISBN: 978-0-85789-460-1

Printed in Great Britain.

Corvus An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd Ormond House 26-27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ

www.corvus-books.co.uk

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Book One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Book Two

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Book Three

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Epigraph

To Jim and Viki Blaylock, most generous and loyal of friends and to the memories of Eric Batsford and Noel Powers.

With thanks to David Carpenter, Bruce Oliver, Randal Robb, John Swarzel, Philip Thibodeau and Dennis Tupper, for clear answers to unclear questions.

And unmoored souls may drift on stranger tides Than those men know of, and be overthrown By winds that would not even stir a hair...

—WILLIAM ASHBLESS

“The bridegroom’s doors are open wide And I am next of kin; The guests are met, the feast is set: May’st hear the merry din.”

He holds him with his skinny hand, “There was a ship,” quoth he...

—SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

PROLOGUE

THOUGH THE evening breeze had chilled his back on the way across, it hadn’t yet begun its nightly job of sweeping out from among the island’s clustered vines and palm boles the humid air that the day had left behind, and Benjamin Hurwood’s face was gleaming with sweat before the black man had led him even a dozen yards into the jungle. Hurwood hefted the machete that he gripped in his left—and only—hand, and peered uneasily into the darkness that seemed to crowd up behind the torchlit vegetation around them and overhead, for the stories he’d heard of cannibals and giant snakes seemed entirely plausible now, and it was difficult, despite recent experiences, to rely for safety on the collection of ox-tails and cloth bags and little statues that dangled from the other man’s belt. In this primeval rain forest it didn’t help to think of them as gardes and arrets and drogues rather than fetishes, or of his companion as a bocor rather than a witch doctor or shaman.

The black man gestured with the torch and looked back at him. “Left now,” he said carefully in English, and then added rapidly in one of the debased French dialects of Haiti, “and step carefully—little streams have undercut the path in many places.”

“Walk more slowly, then, so I can see where you put your feet,” replied Hurwood irritably in his fluent textbook French. He wondered how badly his hitherto perfect accent had suffered from the past month’s exposure to so many odd variations of the language.

The path became steeper, and soon he had to sheathe his machete in order to have his hand free to grab branches and pull himself along, and for a while his heart was pounding so alarmingly that he thought it would burst, despite the protective drogue the black man had given him—then they had got above the level of the surrounding jungle and the sea breeze found them and he called to his companion to stop so that he could catch his breath in the fresh air and enjoy the coolness of it in his sopping white hair and damp shirt.

The breeze clattered and rustled in the palm branches below, and through a gap in the sparser trunks around him he could see water—a moonlight-speckled segment of the Tongue of the Ocean, across which the two of them had sailed from New Providence Island that afternoon. He remembered noticing the prominence they now stood on, and wondering about it, as he’d struggled to keep the sheet trimmed to his bad-tempered guide’s satisfaction.

Andros Island it was called on the maps, but the people he’d been associating with lately generally called it Isle de Loas Bossals, which, he’d gathered, meant Island of Untamed (or, perhaps more closely, Evil) Ghosts (or, it sometimes seemed, Gods). Privately he thought of it as Persephone’s shore, where he hoped to find, at long last, at least a window into the house of Hades.

He heard a gurgling behind him and turned in time to see his guide recorking one of the bottles. Sharp on the fresh air he could smell the rum. “Damn it,” Hurwood snapped, “that’s for the ghosts.”

The bocor shrugged. “Brought too much,” he explained. “Too much, too many come.”

The one-armed man didn’t answer, but wished once again that he knew enough—instead of just nearly enough—to do this alone.

“Nigh there now,” said the bocor, tucking the bottle back into the leather bag slung from his shoulder.

They resumed their steady pace along the damp earth path, but Hurwood sensed a difference now—attention was being paid to them.

The black man sensed it too, and grinned back over his shoulder, exposing gums nearly as white as his teeth. “They smell the rum,” he said.

“Are you sure it’s not just those poor Indians?”

The man in front answered without looking back. “They still sleep. That’s the loas you feel watching us.”

Though he knew there could be nothing out of the ordinary to see yet, the one-armed man glanced around, and it occurred to him for the first time that this really wasn’t so incongruous a setting—these palm trees and this sea breeze probably didn’t differ very much from what might be found in the Mediterranean, and this Caribbean island might be very like the island where, thousands of years ago, Odysseus performed almost exactly the same procedure they intended to perform tonight.

IT WAS only after they reached the clearing at the top of the hill that Hurwood realized he’d all along been dreading it. There was nothing overtly sinister about the scene—a cleared patch of flattened dirt with a hut off to one side and, in the middle of the clearing, four poles holding up a small thatched roof over a wooden box—but Hurwood knew that there were two drugged Arawak Indians in the hut, and an oilcloth-lined six-foot trench on the far side of the little shelter.

The black man crossed to the sheltered box—the trone, or altar—and very carefully detached a few of the little statues from his belt and set them on it. He bowed, backed away, then straightened and turned to the other man, who had followed him to the center of the clearing. “You know what’s next?” the black man asked.

Hurwood knew this was a test. “Sprinkle the rum and flour around the trench,” he said, trying to sound confident.

“No,” said the bocor, “next. Before that.” There was definite suspicion in his voice now.

“Oh, I know what you mean,” said Hurwood, stalling for time as his mind raced. “I thought that went without saying.” What on earth did the man mean? Had Odysseus done anything first? No—nothing that got recorded, anyway. But of course Odysseus had lived back when magic was easy…and relatively uncorrupted. That must be it—a protective procedure must be necessary now with such a conspicuous action, to keep at bay any monsters that might be drawn to the agitation. “You’re referring to the shielding measures.”

“Which consist of what?”

When strong magic still worked in the eastern hemisphere, what guards had been used? Pentagrams and circles. “The marks on the ground.”

The black man nodded, mollified. “Yes. The verver.” He carefully laid the torch on the ground and then fumbled in his pouch and came up with a little bag, from which he dug a pinch of gray ash. “Flour of Guinée, we call this,” he explained, then crouched and began sprinkling the stuff on the dirt in a complicated geometrical pattern.

The white man allowed himself to relax a little behind his confident pose. What a lot there was to learn from these people! Primitive they certainly were, but in touch with a living power that was just distorted history in more civilized regions.

“Here,” said the bocor, unslinging his pouch and tossing it. “You can dispose of the flour and rum…and there’s candy in there, too. The loas are partial to a bit of a sweet.”

Hurwood took the bag to the shallow trench—his torch-cast shadow stretching ahead of him to the clustered leaves that walled the clearing—and let it thump to the ground. He stooped to get the bottle of rum, uncorked it with his teeth and then straightened and walked slowly around the trench, splashing the aromatic liquor on the dirt. When he’d completed the circuit there was still a cupful left in the bottle, and he drank it before pitching the bottle away. There were also sacks of flour and candy balls in the bag, and he sprinkled these too around the trench, uncomfortably aware that his motions were like those of a sower irrigating and seeding a tract.

A metallic squeaking made him turn toward the hut, and the spectacle advancing toward him across the clearing—it was the bocor, straining to push a wheelbarrow in which were tumbled two unconscious dark-skinned bodies—awoke both horror and hope in him. Fleetingly he wished it didn’t have to be human blood, that sheep’s blood would serve, as it had in Odysseus’ day—but he set his jaw and helped the bocor lever the bodies out onto the dirt so that their heads were conveniently close to the trench.

The bocor had a little paring knife, and held it toward the one-armed man. “You want to?”

Hurwood shook his head. “It’s,” he said hoarsely, “all yours.” He looked away and stared hard at the torch flame while the black man crouched over the bodies, and when, a few moments later, he heard the spatter and gush against the oilskin in the trench, he closed his eyes.

“The words now,” said the bocor. He began chanting words in a dialect that combined the tongues of France, the Mondongo district of Africa, and the Carib Indians, while the white man, his eyes still closed, began chanting in archaic Hebrew.

The randomly counterpoint chanting grew gradually louder, as if in an attempt to drown out the new noises from the jungle: sounds like whispered giggling and weeping, and cautious rustling in the high branches, and a chitinous scraping like cast-off snakeskins being rubbed together.

Abruptly the two chanted litanies became identical, and the two men were speaking in perfect unison, syllable for syllable—though the white man was still speaking ancient Hebrew and the black man was still speaking his peculiar mix of tongues. Astonished by it even as he participated, Hurwood felt the first tremors of real awe at this impossibly prolonged coincidence. Over the sharp fumes of the spilled rum and the rusty reek of the blood there was suddenly a new smell, the hot-metal smell of magic, though far stronger now than he’d ever encountered it before…

And then all at once they were no longer alone—in fact, the clearing was crowded now with human-shaped forms that were nearly transparent to the torchlight, though the light was dimmed if a number of them overlapped in front of it, and all of these insubstantial things were crowding in toward the blood pit and crying out imploringly in tiny, chittering, birdlike voices. The two men let the chanting stop.

Other things, too, had appeared, though they didn’t cross the ash lines the bocor had laid around the perimeter of the clearing, but simply peered from between the palm trunks or crouched on branches; Hurwood saw a calf with flaming eye sockets, a head hanging in midair with a ghastly pendulum of naked entrails dangling from its neck, and, in the trees, several little creatures who seemed to be more insect than human; and while the ghosts inside the verver lines kept up a ceaseless shrill chatter, the watchers outside were all silent.

The bocor was keeping the ghosts away from the trench with wide sweeps of his little knife. “Hurry!” he panted. “Find the one you want!”

Hurwood stepped up to the edge of the trench and scrutinized the filmy creatures.

Under his gaze a few of them became slightly more visible, like webs of egg white in heating water. “Benjamin!” called one of these, its scratchy frail voice rising over the background babble. “Benjamin, it’s me, it’s Peter! I was groomsman at your wedding, remember? Make him let me sup!”

The bocor looked questioningly at the other man.

Hurwood shook his head, and the bocor’s knife flashed out and neatly razored the supplicating ghost in half; with a faint cry the thing dissolved like smoke.

“Ben!” screeched up another. “Bless you, son, you’ve brought refreshments for your father! I knew—”

“No,” said Hurwood. His mouth was a straight line as the knife flashed out again and another lost wail flitted away on the breeze.

“Can’t hold ’em back forever,” panted the bocor.

“A little longer,” Hurwood snapped. “Margaret!”

There was a curdling agitation off to one side, and then a cobwebby form drifted to the front. “Benjamin, how have you come here?”

“Margaret!” His cry was more one of pain than triumph. “Her,” he snarled at the bocor. “Let her come up.”

The bocor quit the sweeping motion and began jabbing back all the shadows except the one Hurwood had indicated. The ghost approached the trench, then blurred and shrank and became clearly visible again in a kneeling posture. She reached out toward the blood, then halted and simply touched the flour-and-rum paste on the rim. For a moment she was opaque in the torchlight, and her hand became substantial enough to roll one of the candy balls a few inches. “We shouldn’t be here, Benjamin,” she said, her voice a bit more resonant now.

“The blood, take the blood—” the one-armed man shouted, falling to his knees on the other side of the trench.

With no sound at all the ghost’s form relaxed into smoke and blew away, though the cold blade hadn’t come near her.

“Margaret!” the man roared, and dove over the trench into the massed ghosts; they gave way before him like spider webs strung between trees, and his jaw clacked shut against the hard-packed dirt. The ringing in his ears almost prevented him from hearing the chorus of dismayed ghost-voices fading away to silence.

After a few moments Hurwood sat up and squinted around. The torchlight was brighter, now that there were no ghost-forms to filter it.

The bocor was staring at him. “I hope it was worth it.”

Hurwood didn’t answer, just got slowly, wearily to his feet, rubbing his scraped chin and pushing the damp white hair back out of his face. The monsters still stood and crouched and hung just outside the ash lines; evidently none of them had moved, or even blinked, probably, during the whole business.

“Entertained, were you?” shouted Hurwood in English, shaking his lone fist at them. “Dive over the trench again, shall I, just so you won’t feel cheated?” His voice was getting tight and shrill, and he was blinking rapidly as he took a step toward the edge of the clearing, pointing at one of the watchers, a huge pig with a cluster of rooster heads sprouting from its neck. “Ah, you there, sir,” Hurwood went on in a travesty of hearty friendliness, “do favor us with your frankest opinions. Would I have been better advised to do a spot of juggling instead? Or, perhaps, with face paint and a false nose—”

The bocor caught his elbow from behind and turned him around and stared at him with wonder and something that was almost pity. “Stop,” he said softly. “Most of them can’t hear, and I don’t think any of them understand English. At sunrise they’ll go away and we’ll leave.”

Hurwood pulled free of the other man’s grasp, walked back to the center of the clearing and sat down, not far from the trench and the two drained corpses. The hot-metal smell of magic was gone, but the breeze wasn’t dispelling the blood-reek very much.

Sunrise wouldn’t be for another nine or ten hours; and though he had to stay here until then, it would certainly be impossible to sleep. The prospect of the long wait sickened him.

He remembered the bocor’s statement: “I hope it was worth it.”

He looked up at the stars and sneered a challenge at them. Try to stop me now, he thought, though it may take me years. I know it’s true now. It can be done. Yes—even if I’d had to have a dozen Indians killed to learn it, a dozen white men, a dozen friends…it would still have been worth it.

BOOK ONE

The seas and the weathers are what is; your vessels adapt to them or sink.

—Jack Shandy

CHAPTER ONE

GRIPPING ONE of the taut vertical ropes and leaning far out over the rail, John Chandagnac waited a moment until the swell lifted the huge, creaking structure of the stern and the poop deck on which he stood, and then he flung the biscuit as hard as he could. It looked like quite a long throw at first, but as it dropped by quick degrees toward the water, and kept on falling instead of splashing in, he saw that he hadn’t really flung it very far out; but the gull had seen it, and came skimming in above the green water, and at the last moment, as if showing off, snatched it out of the air. The biscuit broke as the gull flapped back up to a comfortable altitude, but he seemed to have got a good beakful.

Chandagnac had another biscuit in his coat pocket, but for a while he just watched the bird glide, absently admiring the way it seemed to need only the slightest hitch and flap now and then to maintain its position just above the Vociferous Carmichael’s starboard stern lamp, and he sniffed the elusive land smell that had been in the breeze since dawn. Captain Chaworth had said that they’d see Jamaica’s purple and green mountains by early afternoon, then round Morant Point before supper and dock in Kingston before dark; but while the unloading of the Carmichael’s cargo would mean the end of the worrying that had visibly slimmed the captain during this last week of the voyage, disembarking would be the beginning of Chandagnac’s task.

And do remember too, he told himself coldly as he pulled the biscuit out of his pocket, that both Chaworth and yourself are each at least half to blame for your own problems. He flung the thing harder this time, and the sea gull caught it without having to dip more than a couple of yards.

When he turned back toward the little breakfast table that the captain let the passengers eat at when the morning’s ship-handling jobs were routine, he was surprised to see the young woman standing up, her brown eyes alight with interest.

“Did he catch them?” she asked.

“Certainly did,” said Chandagnac as he walked back toward the table. He wished now that he had shaved. “Shall I throw him yours too?”

She pushed her chair away and surprised Chandagnac still further by saying, “I’ll throw it to him myself…if you’re sure he doesn’t object to maggots?”

Chandagnac glanced at the gliding bird. “He hasn’t fled, at least.”

With only the slightest tremor of hesitation she picked up the inhabited biscuit and strode to the rail. Chandagnac noticed that even her balance was better this morning. She drew back a little when she got to the rail and looked down, for the poop deck was a good dozen feet above the rushing sea. With her left hand she took hold of the rail and pulled at it, as if testing to see if it was loose. “Hate to fall in,” she said, a little nervously.

Chandagnac stepped up next to her and gripped her left forearm. “Don’t worry,” he said. His heart was suddenly beating more strongly, and he was annoyed with himself for the response.

She cocked her arm back and pitched the biscuit, and the white-and-gray bird obligingly dived for it, once again catching it before it hit the water. Her laugh, which Chandagnac heard now for the first time, was bright and cheerful. “I’ll wager he follows every Jamaica-bound ship in, knowing the people aboard will be ready to throw the old provisions overboard.”

Chandagnac nodded as they returned to the little table. “I’m not on a lavish budget, but I keep thinking about dinner tonight in Kingston. Rare beef, and fresh vegetables, and beer that doesn’t smell like hot pitch.”

The young woman frowned. “I wish I was permitted meat.”

Chandagnac shifted his stool a foot or two to the left so that the tall, taut arch of the spanker sail shaded his face from the morning sun. He wanted to be able to see the expressions on the face of this suddenly interesting person. “I’ve noticed that you only seem to eat vegetables;” he said, idly picking up his napkin.

She nodded. “Nutriments and medicaments—that’s what my physician calls them. He says I have an incipient brain fever as a result of the bad airs at a sort of convent I was going to school at in Scotland. He’s the expert, so I suppose he’s right—though as a matter of fact I felt better, more energetic, before I started following his diet regimen.”

Chandagnac had snagged up a loop of thread from his napkin and began working on another. “Your physician?” he asked casually, not wanting to say anything to break her cheery mood and change her back into the clumsy, taciturn fellow passenger she’d been during the past month. “Is he the…portly fellow?”

She laughed. “Poor Leo. Say fat. Say corpulent. Yes, that’s him. Dr. Leo Friend. An awkward man personally, but my father swears there’s no better medical man in the world.”

Chandagnac looked up from his napkin work. “Have you been avoiding your…medicaments? You seem cheerier today.” Her napkin lay on the table, and he picked it up and began picking at it too.

“Well, yes. Last night I just threw the whole plateful out of my cabin window. I hope that poor sea gull didn’t sample any—it’s nothing but a nasty lot of herbs and weeds Leo grows in a box in his cabin. Then I sneaked across to the galley and had the cook give me some sharp cheese and pickled onions and rum.” She smiled sheepishly. “I was desperate for something with some taste to it.”

Chandagnac shrugged. “Doesn’t sound bad to me.” He’d drawn three loops of thread out of each of the napkins, puckering the squares of cloth into bell shapes, and now he slipped three fingers of either hand into the loops and made the napkins stand upright and approach each other with a realistic simulation of walking. Then he had one of them bow while the other curtsied, and the two little cloth figures—one of which he’d somehow made to look subtly feminine—danced around the tabletop in complicated whirls and leaps and pirouettes.

The young woman clapped her hands delightedly, and Chandagnac had the napkins approach her and perform another curtsy and a sweeping Gascon bow before he let them fall from his fingertips.

“Thank you, Miss Hurwood,” he said in a master-of-ceremonies voice.

“Thank you, Mr. Chandagnac,” she said, “and your energetic napkins, too. But don’t be formal—call me Beth.”

“Very well,” said Chandagnac, “and I’m John.” Already he was regretting the impulse that had prompted him to draw her out—he had no time, nor any real wish, to get involved with a woman again. He thought of dogs he’d seen in city streets, and called to, just to see if they’d wag their tails and come over, and then too often they had been eager to follow him for hours.

He stood up and gave her a polite smile. “Well,” he said, “I’d better be wandering off now. There are a couple of things I’ve got to be discussing with Captain Chaworth.”

Actually, now that he thought of it, he might go look for the captain. The Carmichael was toiling along smoothly before the wind right now and couldn’t be needing too much supervision, and it would be nice to sit down and have one last beery chat with the captain before disembarking. Chandagnac wanted to congratulate Chaworth on the apparent success of his insurance-evasion gambit—though unless they were absolutely alone he would have to deliver the congratulations in very veiled terms—and then to warn the man sternly against ever trying such a foolhardy trick again. Chandagnac was, after all, or had been, a successful businessman, and knew the difference between taking carefully calculated risks and letting one’s whole career and reputation depend on the toss of a coin. Of course Chandagnac would be careful to deliver the reproof in a bantering tone, so as not to make the old man regret the drunken confidence.

“Oh,” said Beth, clearly disappointed that he couldn’t stay and talk. “Well, maybe I’ll move my chair over by the railing and watch the ocean.”

“Here, I’ll carry it for you.” She stood up, and Chandagnac picked up her chair and walked to the starboard rail, where he set it down on the deck a few yards from one of the post-mounted miniature cannons that he’d heard the sailors call swivel guns. “The shade’s only intermittent here,” he said doubtfully, “and you’d be catching the full breeze. Are you sure you wouldn’t be better off below?”

“Leo would certainly think so,” she said, sitting down with a smile of thanks, “but I’d like to continue my experiment of last night, and see what sort of malady it is that one gets from normal food and sunlight and fresh air. Besides, my father’s busy with his researches, and he always winds up covering the whole cabin floor with papers and pendulums and tuning forks and I don’t know what all. Once he’s got it all arranged, there’s no way in or out.”

Chandagnac hesitated, curious in spite of himself. “Researches? What’s he researching?”

“Well, I’m not sure. He was involved pretty deeply in mathematics and natural philosophy at one time, but since he retired from his chair at Oxford six years ago…”

Chandagnac had seen her father only a few times during the month’s voyage—the dignified, one-armed old man had not seemed to desire shipboard sociability, and Chandagnac had not paid much attention to him, but now he snapped his fingers excitedly. “Oxford? Benjamin Hurwood?”

“That’s right.”

“Your father is the—”

“A sail!” came a shout from high among the complicated spider webs of the mainmast shrouds. “Fine ahead port!”

Beth stood up and the two of them hurried across the deck to the port rail and leaned out and craned their necks to see past the three clusters of standing rigging, which they were viewing end on. Chandagnac thought, it’s worse than trying to see the stage from above during a crowded scene in a marionette show. The thought reminded him too clearly of his father, though, and he forced it away and concentrated on squinting ahead.

At last he made out the white fleck on the slowly bobbing horizon, and he pointed it out to Beth Hurwood. They watched it for several minutes, but it didn’t seem to be getting any closer, and the sea wind was chillier on this side in spite of the unobstructed sun, so they went back to her chair by the starboard rail.

“Your father’s the author of…I forget the title. That refutation of Hobbes.”

“The Vindication of Free Will.” She leaned against the rail and faced astern to let the breeze sweep back her long dark hair. “That’s right. Though Hobbes and my father were friends, I understand. Have you read it?”

Again Chandagnac was wishing he’d kept his mouth shut, for the Hurwood book had been a part of the vast reading program his father had led him through. All that poetry, history, philosophy, art! But a cloddish roman soldier had shoved a sword through Archimedes, and a bird had dropped a fatal turtle onto the bald head of Aeschylus, mistaking it for a stone useful for breaking turtles open upon.

“Yes. I did think he effectively dismissed Hobbes’ idea of a machine-cosmos.” Before she could agree or argue, he went on, “But how do pendulums and tuning forks apply?”

Beth frowned. “I don’t know. I don’t even know what… field…he’s working in now. He’s withdrawn terribly during the years since my mother died. I sometimes think he died then too, at least the part of him that…I don’t know, laughed. He’s been more active this last year, though…since his disastrous first visit to the West Indies.” She shook her head with a puzzled frown. “Odd that losing an arm should vitalize him so.”

Chandagnac raised his eyebrows. “What happened?”

“I’m sorry, I thought you’d have heard. The ship he was on was taken by the pirate Blackbeard, and a pistol ball shattered his arm. I’m a little surprised he chose to come back here—though he does have a dozen loaded pistols with him this time, and always carries at least a couple.”

Chandagnac grinned inwardly at the idea of the old Oxford don fingering his pistols and waiting to come across a pirate to shoot at.

From out across the blue water rolled a loud, hollow knock, like a large stone dropped onto pavement. Curious, Chandagnac started to cross the poop deck to look again at the approaching vessel, but before he’d taken two steps he was distracted by the abrupt white plume of a splash on the face of the sea, a hundred yards ahead to starboard.

His first thought was that the other vessel was a fishing boat, and that the splash marked the jump of some big fish; then he heard the man at the mast-top shout, more shrilly this time, “Pirates! A single sloop, the mad fools!”

Beth was on her feet now. “God in heaven,” she said quietly. “Is it true?”

Chandagnac felt light-headed rather than scared, though his heart was pounding. “I don’t know,” he said, hurrying with her across the deck to the port rail, “but if it is, he’s right, they’re mad—a sloop’s hardly more than a sailboat, and on the Carmichael we’ve got three masts and eighteen heavy guns.”

He had to raise his voice to be heard, for the morning, which had been quiet except for the eternal creak-and-splash-and-slurry, had instantly become clamorous with shouted orders and the slap of bare feet on the lower decks and the buzz of line racing through the block spools; and there was another sound too, distant but far more disquieting—a frenzied metallic clatter and banging underscored by the harsh discord of brass trumpets blown for noise instead of music.

“They are pirates,” said Beth tensely, clutching the rail next to him. “My father described that noise to me. They’ll be dancing, too—they call it ‘vaporing’—it’s meant to frighten us.”

It’s effective in that, thought Chandagnac; but to Beth he grinned and said, “It would frighten me, if they were in more of a vessel or we in less.”

“Coming over!” came an authoritative call from one of the lower decks, and below him to his right Chandagnac saw the helmsman and another man pushing the whipstaff hard to starboard, and at the same moment there was a racket of squealing and creaking from overhead as the long horizontal poles of the yards, and the bellied sails they carried, slowly twisted on the axes of the masts, the high ones more widely than the low ones.

All morning the ship had been leaning slightly to starboard; now it straightened to level and then, without pausing there, heeled so far over to port that Chandagnac flung one arm around Beth and the other around a taut length of standing rigging, his hand clutching the limp ratline, and braced his knees against the gunwale as the deck rose behind them and the breakfast table skidded and then tumbled down it to collide with the rail a yard from Beth. The plates and silverware and deformed napkins spun away in the sudden shadow of the hull and splashed directly below where Chandagnac and Beth were clinging.

“Damn me!” grated Chandagnac through clenched teeth as the ship stayed heeled over and he squinted straight down at the choppy sea, “I don’t believe the pirates can kill us, but our captain’s certainly having a try!” He had to tilt his head back to look up at the horizon, and it so chilled his stomach to do it that after a few moments he wrenched his gaze back down to the water—but he’d seen the whole vista shifting from right to left, and the pirate vessel, no longer distant, wheeling with the seascape out away from the bow to a position closer and closer to exactly abeam; and though he’d seen it nearly head on, he’d noticed that it was indeed a sloop, a single-masted, gaff-rigged vessel with two shabby, much-patched triangular sails, one tapering back along the boom, the other forward past the bow to the end of the extra-long bowsprit. The gunwales were crowded with ragged figures who did seem to be dancing.

Then the deck was pressing against the soles of his boots and the horizon was falling as the ship righted itself, with the wind and the sun at the starboard quarter now. Keeping his arm around her, Chandagnac hustled Beth toward the companion ladder. “Got to get you out of here!” he shouted.

Her father was clambering up the ladder from the quarter-deck just as they got there, and even in this crisis Chandagnac stared at him, for the old man was wearing a formal vest and long coat and even a powdered wig. He was pulling himself up the ladder by hooking the rungs with the butt of a pistol he gripped in his only hand, and there were at least half a dozen more thrust into the loops of a sash slung over his shoulder. “I’ll take her below!” the old man roared, standing up on the poop deck and nudging Beth toward the ladder with his knee. She started down, and the old man was right behind her, peering at her over his shoulder as he followed her. “Carefully!” he shouted. “Carefully, God damn it!”

For one irrational moment Chandagnac wondered if old Hurwood had found time to melt lead and cast some pistol balls in the minute or two since the alarm, for the old man certainly smelled of heated metal…but then Hurwood and Beth had disappeared below, and Chandagnac had to skip back across the poop deck to get out of the way of several sailors who were scrambling up the ladder. He retreated to the breakfast table, which stuck out like a little partition from where it was wedged in the railing, and he hoped he was out of everybody’s way, wondering all the while what it would feel like when the twelve-pounders were fired, and why the captain was delaying their firing.

Three distinct booms shook the deck under his boots. Was that them? he wondered, but when he spun to look out over the rail to port he saw no smoke or splashes.

What he did see was the pirate sloop—which had just swerved east, close-hauled into the steady wind—tack and then continue around so that it was coming up on the Carmichael from astern on the port side.

Why in hell, he thought with mounting anxiety, didn’t we fire when they were coming straight at us, or when they turned east and showed us their profile? He watched the busy men hurrying past him until he spotted the burly figure of Captain Chaworth on the quarterdeck below, way up by the forecastle ladder, and Chandagnac’s stomach felt suddenly hollow when he saw that Chaworth too was surprised by the silence of the guns. Chandagnac edged around the table and hurried to the rail by the ladder to see better what was going on down in the waist.

He saw Chaworth run to the gun deck companionway just as a billow of thick black smoke gushed up from it, and he heard the dismayed shouts of the sailors: “Jesus, one of the guns blew up!” “Three of ’em did, they’re all dead below!” “To the boats! The powder’ll go next!”

The crack of a pistol shot cut through the rising babble, and Chandagnac saw the man who’d advocated abandoning ship rebound from the capstan barrel and sprawl to the deck, his head smashed gorily open by a pistol ball. Looking away from the corpse, Chandagnac saw that it was the usually good-natured Chaworth who held the smoking pistol.

“You’ll go to the boats when I order it!” Chaworth shouted. “No gun blew up, nor’s there a fire! Just smoke—”

As if to verify the statement, a dozen violently coughing men came stumbling up the companionway through the smoke, their clothes and faces blackened with something like soot.

“—And it’s still just a sloop,” the captain went on, “so man the swivels and break out muskets and pistols! Cutlasses hold ready.”

A sailor shoved Chandagnac aside to get at one of the swivel guns, and he hurried back to the relative shelter of the jammed table, feeling wildly disoriented. Damn me, he thought bewilderedly as he crouched behind it, is this seagoing warfare? The enemy dancing and blowing horns, men in blackface rushing up from belowdecks like extras in a London stage comedy, the only serious shot fired by our captain to kill one of his own crew?

There were now several sailors standing near him, tensely ready to manipulate the sheets and halliards, and a couple more had sprinted up to the two swivel guns mounted on the poop deck’s port rail, one on either side of Chandagnac, and after checking the loads and priming they just waited, watching the pirate sloop and, every few seconds, blowing on the smoldering ends of their slow matches.

Chandagnac crouched to peer between the stanchions rather than over the rail, and he too watched the low, shallow-draft boat gain on the ship. The sloop carried several fairly sizeable cannon, but the capering pirates were ignoring them and hefting pistols, cutlasses and sabers, and grappling hooks.

They must want to capture the Carmichael undamaged, Chandagnac thought. If they somehow do, I wonder if they’ll ever know how lucky they were that some mephitic catastrophe incapacitated our gunners.

Benjamin Hurwood came struggling back up to the poop deck now, and he absolutely bristled with pistols—there were still six in his sash and one in his hand, and he now had another half-dozen thrust under his belt. Peering over the table edge and seeing the determined look on the one-armed professor’s face, Chandagnac had to concede that there was, in this perilous situation, at least, more of dignity than ludicrousness in the man.

The sailor at the aft swivel gun, grasping the ball at the end of the long handle, turned his gun astern and lowered the muzzle to sight along the barrel. He raised his slow match carefully. He was only about five feet from Chandagnac, who was watching him with tense confidence.

Chandagnac tried to picture the gun going off, all the swivel guns going off, muskets and pistols too, lashing lead and scrap shot down into the crowded little pirate boat, two or three volleys perhaps, until a cloud of gunpowder smoke veiled the listing, helpless vessel, on which a few pirates would be glimpsed crawling stunned over the ripped-up corpses of their fellows, as the Carmichael came back about onto course and resumed its interrupted journey. Chaworth would have had a bad fright, thinking about his insurance-evasion trick, and would be readier than ever for that beer.

But the gunshot crack came from behind Chandagnac, and the sailor he’d been watching was kicked forward over his gun, and before he tumbled away over the rail Chandagnac had seen the fresh, bloody hole in his back. There was a heavy metallic clank on the deck and then another gunshot, instantly followed by the same clank.

Chandagnac shifted around and peeked over his oak rectangle in time to see old Hurwood draw a third pistol and fire it directly into the astonished face of one of the two men who’d been handling the spanker sheet. The sailor arced backward to whack the back of his shattered head against the deck, and the other man yiped, ducked, and ran for the ladder. Hurwood dropped the pistol to snatch out another, and the fired one clanked still smoking to the deck. His next shot split the belaying pin the spanker sheet was looped around, and the released line snaked up and down through the bouncing blocks, and then the thirty-foot-tall sail, uncontrolled, bellied and swung its heavy boom to port, tearing through the lines of the standing rigging as though they were rotten yarn; the suddenly unmoored shrouds and ratlines flew upward, the ship shuddered as the mizzen mast leaned to starboard, and from above came the rending crack of over-strained yards giving way.

The man who’d been at the other swivel guns lay face down on the deck, apparently the target of Hurwood’s second shot.

Hurwood hadn’t noticed Chandagnac behind the table—he drew a fresh pistol, stepped to the head of the ladder and calmly aimed down into the disordered crowd on the quarterdeck.

Without pausing to think, Chandagnac stood up and covered the distance to him in two long strides and drove his shoulder into the small of Hurwood’s back just as the old man fired. The shot went harmlessly wide and both men fell down the ladder.

Chandagnac tucked his knees up to somersault in midair and land on his feet, and when he hit the deck he rolled and collided hard with a sailor, bowling the man over. He bounced to his feet and looked back to see how Hurwood had fallen, but in the press of panicking sailors he couldn’t see him. Gunfire cracked and boomed irregularly, and the pyang of ricochets had people ducking and cringing, but Chandagnac couldn’t see who was shooting or being shot at.

Then, preceded by a snapping of cordage overhead, a thick spar came spinning down to crash into the deck, jolting the whole ship and smashing a section of rail near Chandagnac before rebounding away over the side, and just inboard of him a man who’d fallen from aloft hit the deck hard, with a sound like an armful of large books flung down; but it was the next thing landing near him that snapped him out of his horrified daze—a grappling hook came sailing over the rail, its line drawn in as it fell so that its flukes gripped the rail before it could even touch the deck.

A sailor ran forward to yank it free in the moment before weight was put on it, and Chandagnac was right behind him, but a pistol ball from behind punched the sailor off his feet, and Chandagnac tripped over him. Coming up into a crouch against the gunwale, Chandagnac looked around wildly for Hurwood, certain that the one-armed old man had killed the sailor; but when a ball from ahead blew splinters out of the deck in front of his feet and he jerked his head around to see where it had come from, he saw Leo Friend, Beth’s fat and foppishly dressed physician, standing on the raised forecastle deck ten yards away and aiming a fresh pistol directly at him.

Chandagnac jackknifed out across the littered deck as the pistol ball tore a hole in the gunwale where he’d been leaning, and he rolled to his feet and ducked and scurried through the crowd all the way across to the starboard rail.

A sailor lay near him curled up on the deck in a shifting puddle of fresh blood, and Chandagnac hastily rolled him over to get at the two primed pistols whose butts he could see sticking up from his belt. The man opened his eyes and tried to speak through splintered teeth, but Chandagnac had for the moment lost all capacity for sympathy. He took the pistols, nodded reassuringly to the dying man, and then turned toward the forecastle.

It took him a few seconds to locate Friend, for the ship was broadside to the wind and rolling, and Chandagnac kept having to shuffle to stay upright. Finally he spied the fat man leaning on the waist-facing forecastle rail, dropping a spent pistol and calmly lifting a fresh one out of a box he held in the crook of his left arm.

Chandagnac forced himself to relax. He crouched a little to keep his balance better, and then when the ship paused for a moment at the far point of a roll to port, he raised one of the pistols and took careful aim, squinting over his thumb knuckle at the center of Friend’s bulging torso, and squeezed the trigger.

The gun went off, almost spraining his wrist with the recoil, but when the acrid smoke cleared, the fat physician was still standing there, still carefully shooting into the mob of sailors below him.

Chandagnac tossed away the fired pistol and raised the remaining one in both hands and, scarcely aware of what he was doing, walked halfway across the deck toward Friend and from a distance of no more than fifteen feet fired the gun directly up at Friend’s stomach.

The fat man, unharmed, turned for a moment to smile contemptuously down at Chandagnac before selecting still another pistol from his box and taking aim at someone else below. Through the smells of burned powder and fear-sweat and fresh-torn wood, Chandagnac caught again a whiff of something like overheated metal.

A moment later Friend put the pistol back into his box unfired, though, for the fight was over. A dozen of the pirates had clambered aboard, and more were swinging over the rail, and the surviving sailors had dropped their weapons.

Chandagnac dropped his pistol and walked slowly backward to the starboard rail, his eyes fixed incredulously on the pirates. They were cheerful, their eyes and yellow teeth flashing in faces that, except for their animation, would have looked like polished mahogany, and a few of them were still singing the song they’d been singing during the pursuit. They were dressed, Chandagnac reflected dazedly, like children who’d been interrupted while ransacking a theater’s costume closet; and in spite of their obviously well-used pistols and swords, and the faded scars splashed irregularly across many of the faces and limbs in random patterns of pucker and pinch, they seemed to Chandagnac as innocently savage as predatory birds compared to the coldly methodical viciousness of Hurwood and Friend.

One of the pirates stepped forward and sprang up the companion ladder to the poop deck so lithely that Chandagnac was surprised, when the man turned and tilted back his three-cornered hat, to see the deep lines in his dark cheeks and the quantity of gray in his tangled black hair. He scanned the men below him and grinned, narrowing his eyes and baring a lot of teeth.

“Captives,” he said, his harshly good-humored voice under-cutting the agitated babble, “I am Philip Davies, the new captain of this ship. Now I want you to gather around the mainmast there and let our lads search you for any…concealed weapons, eh? Skank, you and ’Tholomew and a couple of others, trot below and fetch up any that’re down there. Carefully, mind—there’s been blood enough spilt today.”

The eight surviving members of the conquered crew shuffled to the center of the deck; Chandagnac joined them, hurrying to the mast and then leaning against its solid bulk and hoping his unsteady gait would be attributed to the rocking of the deck rather than to fear. Looking past the pirate chief, Chandagnac saw the sea gull, evidently reassured by the cessation of the gunfire, flap down and perch on one of the stern lanterns. It was difficult to believe that less than half an hour ago he and Hurwood’s daughter had been idly tossing biscuits to the bird.

“Master Hurwood!” called Davies. After a moment he added, “I know you weren’t killed, Hurwood—where are you?”

“No,” came a gasping voice from behind a couple of corpses at the foot of the poop deck companion ladder. “I’m…not killed.” Hurwood sat up, his wig gone and his elegant clothes disordered. “But I wish…I had had a charm… against falling.”

“You’ve got Mate Care-For to keep you from hurt,” Davies said unsympathetically. “None of these lads did.” He waved at the scattered corpses and wounded men. “I hope it was a hard fall.”

“My daughter’s below,” said Hurwood, urgency coming into his voice as his head cleared. “She’s guarded, but tell your men not to—”

“They won’t hurt her.” The pirate chief squinted around critically. “It’s not too bad a ship you’ve brought,” he said. “I guess you did pay attention to what we told you. Here, Payne, rich! Get some lads aloft and cut away all bad wood and line and canvas, and get her jury-rigged well enough to get us across the Grand Bahama Bank.”

“Right, Phil,” called a couple of the pirates, scrambling to the shrouds.

Davies climbed back down the ladder to the quarterdeck, and for several seconds he just stared at the clump of disarmed men by the mast. He was still smiling. “Four of my men were killed during our approach and boarding,” he remarked softly.

“Jesus,” whispered the man next to Chandagnac, closing his eyes.

“But,” Davies went on, “more than half of your own number have been slain, and I will consider that amends enough.”

None of the sailors spoke, but Chandagnac heard several sharp exhalations, and shufflings of feet. Belatedly he realized that his death had come very close to being decreed.

“You’re free to leave in the ship’s boat,” Davies continued. “Hispaniola’s east, Cuba north, Jamaica southwest. You’ll be given food, water, charts, sextant and compass. Or,” he added cheerfully, “any of you that fancy it may stay and join us. It’s an easier life than most on the sea, and every man has a share in the profits, and you’re free to retire after every voyage.”

No, thank you, thought Chandagnac. Once I finish my… errand…in Port-au-Prince and get home again, I never want to see another damned ocean in my whole life.

Old Chaworth had for several minutes been slowly looking around at the ship he’d been owner of so recently, and Chandagnac realized that though the captain had reconciled himself to the loss of his cargo, he hadn’t until now imagined that he would lose his ship, too. Pirates, after all, were a shallow-water species, always eluding capture by skating over shoals, and seldom venturing out of sight of land. They should have had as little use for a deep-water ship like the Carmichael as a highwayman would have for a siege cannon.

The old man was ashen, and it occurred to Chandagnac that until this development Chaworth hadn’t quite been ruined; if he hadn’t lost the Carmichael herself, he could have sold her and perhaps, after paying off the stockholders or co-owners, cleared enough money to reimburse the cargo owners for their losses; the move would no doubt have left him penniless, but would at least have kept concealed the secret he’d confided to Chandagnac one drunken evening—that since the price of insurance was now higher than the greatest profit margin he could plausibly try for, he had in desperation charged the cargo owners for insurance…and then not bought any.

One of the pirates who’d gone below now stepped up from the after-companionway and, looking back the way he’d come, gestured upward with a pistol. Up the ladder and into the sunlight climbed the cook—who had obviously followed the time-honored custom of facing seagoing disaster by getting drunk as quickly and thoroughly as possible—and the two boys who ran all the errands on the ship, and Beth Hurwood.

Hurwood’s daughter was pale, and walked a bit stiffly, but was outwardly calm until she saw her disheveled father. “Papa!” she yelled, running to him. “Did they hurt you?” Without waiting for an answer she whirled on Davies. “Your kind did enough to him last time,” she said, her voice an odd mix of anger and pleading. “Meeting Blackbeard cost him his arm! Whatever he’s done to you people today was—”

“Was greatly appreciated, Miss,” said Davies, grinning at her. “In keeping with the compact he and Thatch—or Blackbeard, if you like—agreed on last year, your daddy’s delivered to me this fine ship.”

“What are you—” began Beth, but she was interrupted by a shrill oath from Chaworth, who sprang on the nearest pirate, wrenched the saber from the surprised man’s hand, and then shoved him away and rushed at Davies, cocking his arm back for a cleaving stroke.

“No!” yelled Chandagnac, started forward, “Chaworth, don’t—”

Davies calmly hiked a pistol out of his garish paisley sash, cocked it and fired it into Chaworth’s chest; the impact of the fifty-caliber ball stopped the captain’s charge and punched him over backward with such force that he was nearly standing on his head for a moment before thumping and rattling down in the absolute limpness of death.