The storm-wind stirred the green leaves till they flew like banners above us; and as we passed beneath their shelter I looked back once, and out of the iron-clad confidence within me I shouted a command. Before the first echo died a blue finger of lightning pressed down, once, twice, three times to the solemn beat of the dance. The altar flew into fragments, the white stones tumbled; the barren hill-crown was blasted clean. Still dancing, I turned away, and holding Mall’s hand – who held Jyp’s, who held Clare’s who held Pierce’s – we paced away, without breaking our dance, down into the darkling jungle towards the sea.
How long we danced for, to the beating of the iron and the crashing in the heavens, I’ve no idea. All the way down to the beach, perhaps; for it was on the sand I woke up, face pillowed in my arms, as the first grey foretaste of dawn touched me. The first thing I decided was that I’d been eating the sand, because my mouth seemed full of it, and my body was weighed down, my guts leaden; I couldn’t so much as move, even though I heard voices beside me. Stryge was holding forth, sardonic as ever.
‘You did not recognize the thing? You surprise me. I knew at once; and if I had not been sure, I would have when I remembered the castle’s guardians – the coat and hat figures, the zombie, the rats. That was Baron Samedi, guardian of the underworld, the graveyard god – personification of death. That was the loa with which Don Pedro was so proud to have allied himself.’
‘Sounds natural,’ muttered Jyp. ‘One as evil as the other –’
‘Hardly!’ said Le Stryge with all his usual contempt. ‘Samedi is not evil – he has his honoured place among the Invisibles, he is essential to the natural order. That he should seek to extend his dominion, his realm, is only natural to him, by whatever means imbecile mankind may give him – murder, famine, war. The evil in that is not his; he would not understand it. Did you see any in him, when he stood revealed? In their partnership it was all Don Pedro’s – and so it was only his evil nature that endured, in the end, beyond his normal span. Whatever else there might once have been in the man, Samedi had already devoured. So, when the shell perished, there was only naked Death remaining. And we were well equipped, just then, to laugh at the fear of Him.’
With a low devastated moan I managed to roll over. My own head seemed to be full of black rocks. Through gummy eyes I saw Clare bending over me, and behind her Jyp. ‘How do you feel?’ she asked softly, passing a cool hand over my brow.
‘Terrible …’ I croaked. ‘Mouth like the docks at low tide. Like the worst hangover I ever had – and worse again, much worse –’
‘Yeah, well, that’s not surprising,’ chuckled Jyp gently. ‘Guess you don’t know it, but you’re lucky you’re not waking up slightly dead. You put away nigh on five quarts of high-proof hooch in about the space of half an hour last night.’
‘Yes,’ I gargled, feeling the acid rise at the back of my throat. ‘I remember. But Somebody else got most of the benefit. That wasn’t entirely me –’
‘You remember?’ barked Le Stryge, pushing the others aside and hauling me up by the scarlet sash I still wore. ‘You remember?’ He barked in my face. ‘That’s unheard-of. You can’t do that –’
‘Well, I can,’ I mumbled, thrusting him back from me so sharply he sat down hard on the sand, ‘all about it, so piss off. No offence intended.’
I scrambled unsteadily to my feet. Le Stryge’s breath had finished off what the acid had begun. The sea was nearer than the bushes, so I staggered to the water’s edge and proceeded to heave the entire contents of my stomach into the tide. After that I sat down heavily, a lot better but weaker, only half aware of Le Stryge still rabbiting on behind me.
‘– but that – that is impossible! The one ridden by the loa is the merest instrument – a vessel, a vehicle for the Invisible. After such possession – such total domination of the self – the conscious mind cannot recall anything of what happened when the loa was in command.’
‘Zat so?’ demanded Jyp sceptically. ‘And yet you heard me talking to him just after the whole shebang broke – didn’t you? Listen, that was Steve there, and nobody else – not that I could see, anyhow. What about Don P? You were saying that was kind of a fifty-fifty partnership.’
‘Indeed – but that was no mere possession. That was more like a conscious alliance, of a kind that could only come about with a being of vast potential. Not such an empty commonplace shadow of a creature as this boy –’ The hard, creaking voice tailed off. Suddenly I had the sensation of keen eyes on the back of my neck, that I was being studied with a new and suspicious intensity.
I didn’t turn round. I hardly cared. Empty, a shadow, that was exactly how I felt – like a discarded garment forgotten on the ground. I thought of Don Pedro’s flesh slipping away, and shuddered; little better than that. It wasn’t just the hangover, it was worse, far worse. It was the memory of having been suddenly full, full to overflowing with a furious joy in life. I had been given a glimpse, a taste of what it was I most lacked – and it had all gone in fighting, all save those last few minutes. I had had no chance to turn my thoughts to anything else. I had tasted fullness, and had it snatched from my mouth.
But then Clare, who had held back while I was being sick, came to put a comforting arm about my shoulder, and that didn’t feel bad at all. And only a minute later came Pierce’s cheerful hail.
‘Ahoy there, my gentle lords and ladies! The boats are readied, the wind is from the land. Let us make all haste aboard, that we may be quit of this demon-haunted place with the first light of dawning!’
That fetched us. We scrambled up and half-staggered along to where the captain and Mall stood waiting by the boats. There rode the two ships at anchor in the mirroring bay, just as we had left them; but no ill shapes hung from the rigging now. ‘Aye, we’ve been aboard,’ said Mall, following my gaze. ‘While you yet slept. Made all secure, though in truth little enough was touched – unusual for Wolves, they must have been on the tightest leash.’
‘They were,’ I agreed, thinking of how nothing had been stolen from our office.
She smirked mischievously. ‘Even your gold was yet there in your cabin,’ she added, and a great cheer went up from the surviving crew. I looked at them, and thought of all they had risked, and of those whose long existences had found their eventual end on this quest – and I looked at Clare; and I thought how little money that gold actually represented, even with what more I’d promised.
‘I’ll double it!’ I shouted. ‘The whole bloody bonus! Double what I promised you!’
We were all but swept aboard shoulder-high. They nearly upset the boats. But Pierce’s bellow broke up the turmoil at once; we were shorthanded, and the rush to set sail was overwhelming. Everyone had to plunge in and help, whether they knew what they were doing or not. I found myself quite blithely scrambling up the ratlines with the mastheaders. Even shuffling out along the yard on the looped footrope to undo the sail-lashings wasn’t too bad, since the ship wasn’t heeling. And it was a great moment when the white mainsail boomed out beneath us, and seemed to fill with the very first high beam of the rising sun, a golden wind. I could even look down below and see Clare’s slender limbs among the team at the capstan, hauling up the anchor; and there was Israel Hands limping along, leading a party below.