“Well done, Captain Morgan!” The compliment confirmed my guess.
By disposing of the attacker at his rear, Captain Morgan had unknowingly opened an escape hatch for me— and in the nick of time, too. I scampered backwards up the gangway to the quarterdeck, dodging Pedro’s lunging sword all the way. I came up against the immovable back of Captain Morgan and could retreat no further.
“That’s it, man. Back to back! We’ll make these Spaniards eat our steel!” The pirate captain encouraged me over his shoulder.
“Except I don’t have any steel,” I told him as I frantically jumped from side to side to avoid Pedro’s thrusts.
“Then take this, comrade!” Morgan hooked the hilt of the blade held by one of the men he was dueling with his cutlass and sent it spinning high in the air. It practically fell into my hand hilt first. By the time I’d grasped it, Morgan had decapitated one of his two adversaries.
“Gosh, thanks,” I said. But my thanks were premature. No sooner had I held up the weapon in front of me to parry one of Pedro’s vicious stabs than he’d emulated Morgan’s maneuver and the sword went flying out of my hand and over the side.
“Help!” I remarked to Captain Morgan.
“Butterfingers!” He sneered at my plight. “Now hold onto this one.” He disarmed his second opponent, hacked him to the deck and handed me his sword. Then he stood back to watch me duel Pedro.
It took only a few seconds for Pedro to get past my defense and rake my forearm with his blade. My second weapon went clattering to the deck. Captain Morgan snorted with disgust. “Shiver me timbers if you aren’t the worst clod of a swordsman I ever saw,” he informed me.
“I was a fencing class dropout in college,” I panted.
Pedro’s blade shot groin-wards and I leaped into the air to avoid it. Morgan roared with laughter. “That’s one sword you handle not at all badly, bucko,” he complimented me.
I had no chance to reply. I was kept too busy swinging my weapon this way and that to keep from having it sliced apart by Pedro’s rapier. Morgan doubled over with laughter as he watched my mad dance. And the more I danced the more infuriated Pedro became and the louder Morgan roared.
Finally he leaped for me with a vengeance and I ran around behind Morgan to avoid being impaled. Pedro lunged again and when I ducked his blade nicked the Captain’s posterior. From Pedro’s point of view that was a serious mistake. Morgan roared with rage, brushed me aside with one sweep of his powerful arm and descended on Pedro like an angry bull.
“En garde!” Pedro saluted with his sword.
“En garde!” Morgan replied and ripped him up the middle with one mighty chop that split him like a chicken in a butcher shop.
“May you rot in hell, Engleesh peeg!” Pedro gasped as he flopped to the deck and died.
“Sore loser,” Morgan grumbled, kicking the remains aside. His eyes lit on me and a smile broke over his face. He started chuckling and soon he was roaring with laughter again. “Never—” he gasped. “Never have I seen a man duel with that before!” He pointed.
Self-consciously, I folded my hands in front of me.
“Where are your clothes?” he asked, still guffawing.
“A lady—” I started to improvise an explanation.
“Say no more.” He held up a hand. “I understand. But that should teach you never to neglect the battle for the reward. It’s the first rule of piracy. If you weren’t so funny, I should discipline you for breaking it. As it is, we are comrades in arms.” He clapped a hamhock of an arm about my shoulders. “Round up the prisoners!” he shouted over the heads of the buccaneers on the deck below. “And bring out the plank!”
I started to edge away.
“You stay with me, bucko.” He stopped me. “You can see the show better from here.”
“I thought I might find some clothes.”
“Nonsense. Stay here where the Spaniards can have one last look at buccaneer manhood before they die. Magnificent!” He eyed me and shook his head in wonder. “To maintain it under such stress—”
“It’s the fear reaction Kinsey noted in—”
“I take my hat off to you, bucko!” He swept the plumed, wide-brimmed cavalier’s hat from his head and bowed low with good-natured mockery.
“Thanks,” I muttered, blushing.
“They’re blue,” he noticed before he straightened up.
“It’s chilly.” I didn’t know what else to say.
“Then you shall be shielded from the wind.” With another sweeping gesture Captain Morgan hung the hat on my appendage and stood back to survey me. “A loose fit. No offense intended,” he assured me. “But it will have to do for now.”
Turned into a lusty hatrack, I stood beside the fabled pirate and watched the Spaniards walk the plank. A school of sharks, scenting blood, churned up the water around each plunging victim. Soon the briny beneath the plank was red with Spanish plasma.
“Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!” Captain Morgan chortled. He was enjoying the spectacle.
“Yo-ho-ho . . . ” I echoed. As the fear left me Captain Morgan’s hat slid slowly to the deck, deprived of its support.
“You’re out of uniform,” he told me sternly.
I picked up the hat and covered myself as best I could.
“Yo for the life of a buccaneer, hey, bucko!” Captain Morgan slapped me on the back.
“Yo-ho-ho . . . ” I agreed weakly.
“What’s the matter, lad?”
“Nothing.” I gulped.
“Your face is turning green.”
I opened my mouth to answer. I couldn’t quite make it. I dove for the rail and upchucked mightily. Yo-ho-ho for the life of the bounding main. I clung to the rail. I was seasick as hell . . .
Chapter Seven
MEANWHILE, BACK IN TIBET . . .
Dudley Nightshade had his palsied hands full. First, all the pressure had brought on a relapse. In Dudley’s case it might have been diagnosed as a sudden attack of death which he just managed to ward off.
He recovered to find I’d been twice bounced by Papa Baapuh who didn’t know (and didn’t seem to care) where I might have landed in time and space. Papa was still more interested in tinkering with his washing machine than in bringing me back. A grudge holder, he was also still smarting over my relations with his daughter, Ti Nih.
The only reason Papa Baapuh had fixed the short circuit in the time machine had been technical curiosity as to what had gone wrong. The jolt which dropped me in Syria was the result of his testing to see if the repair worked. The second jump occurred while Dudley was still sick when the Red Guard troop arrived and the cornmander demanded that Papa Baapuh demonstrate his equipment.
The Red Guard and their leader constituted Dudley’s second headache. They were convinced that he and I were engaged in some sort of espionage mission. Their orders from on high were not to harass us, but on the local level they were crowding both Dudley and Papa Baapuh. My disappearance had been reported to their masters and now they were simply awaiting word to fall on the operation like a ton of bamboo. Sure that permission would come, they were already starting to lean on Dudley.
The worst of it was that they might indeed be turned loose. Another aspect bugging Dudley was his communication with Charles Putnam. Putnam had strained his influence to the outer limits and now he was telling Dudley that he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to protect us any longer. The word from Putnam was for Dudley to instruct me to return immediately and for the two of us to get out of Tibet. Besides being on the spot with his Red Chinese contacts, Putnam was also catching it from the U.S. State Department, which wanted to know why I hadn’t checked in with the American Embassy in whatever country I’d gone to. And it would be no good telling the State Department or Putnam that there was no U.S. consul on board Captain Morgan’s pirate flagship.