“Where, then, do you think he’s bound for?”
The saintly old man said, softly. “Where would a dead man be bound for, in these waters? Whv, sir, for Dead Man’s Cave.”
Jack broke the silence, and it seemed his own silence, it seemed the others were satisfied enough by that answer. “But. Archbishop. isn’t Dead Man’s Cave a myth?” They shook their heads at this, all three. “It’s not? I always thought. ” To be sure, he had given no systematic thought at all for it. He had heard the words, had thought them figurative. Did a drunken fisherman insist on setting off a state of drunkenness, be sure someone would say, perhaps with a sigh, perhaps with a scorn, “Mon, he gweyn no — place but Dead Mon C’ye!”
And, although he was aware enough that he had slipped out of the allegedly logical time-stream of the post-mid-twentieth century and into some odd and un-timebound area where other laws, at least, obtained, still… he clutched for some semblance of familiar things. He said, almost like a child who says, But you promised — He said: “But it’s not on the chart! And he spread his hand over the map as it lay spread out on the table.
The old archbishop nodded, faintly sighed. “No. You are correct. It is not on that chart. Not on that new chart. On old ones, yes. Dead Man’s Cave doesn’t break the surface any longer, even. It was smashed by the Great Storm — the hurricane, we would call it — of 1910. I well remember — but that is neither here nor there. No. The new chart, no. The old charts, now. ” He reached his parchmentv hand to the rack of scrolls, more and more reproducing the note of a time and place even more antique than the Caribbean. He might have been the last Librarian at Alexandria, taking up a map made by the hand of Claudius Ptolaemeius himself. Archbishop Le Beau spread it out so that it was roughly approximate to the new one. “Look here,” he said, pointing.
And yet his “here” was not where Limekiller’s eves at once settled. Without willing it or even witting it, his eyes at once went to the largest off-shore piece of land on the old map (and it was old): sure enough. Anne of Denmark Island. This, then, may well have been the map, the original map, the master printed map, that is, from which all other maps down to this most recent-printed one, had copied. And his eyes flitted from the outlines, familiar enough to him, of the once-solid island named for the once-solid queen of James I. flitted to the corners of the margins of the chart. He knew that he ought to be looking where the archbishop was pointing, and so he did look there — but not before he had looked elsewhere: several fingers of the old man’s other hand, holding the chart down to keep it from rolling back up, obscured some of the words Limekiller was looking for. But not all of them. Uncovered were the letters spelling, k, Lt., R.N. Very well, enough for now, some Lt. Black, or whatever, had made the old map, and had made it for the Royal Navy. Now -
Sure enough. A mere speckle of land. But it had its name. And its name was Dead Man’s Caye.
“It is there we shall be going, in the morning, my sons.”
Limekiller felt, anyway, some feeling of relief. “Might as well wait for daylight, I suppose,” he said.
The old man’s sunken eyes opened wider, looked at him. “It is not daylight that we are waiting for,” he said, “Night or day, it is all the same. We are waiting for His Excellency. For the Governor."
Not less than three times did waterspouts, those smaller cyclones of the sea, appear: and the third time there were three of them, evidently on a convergence course which would inevitably reach the vessel with a violence it could not hope to survive. “Steady at the helm,” the archbishop said. “If we flee, they will pursue.” The helm stayed more or less steady. Nearer and nearer came the waterspouts, like great gray-green twisting sea-serpents dancing on the surface of the sea.
“Elements of God, be not elementals of unrighteousness,” the old voice said (voice so feeble, and yet so strong); “unholv trinity deceived bv Satan, I bid vou three times in the Name of the God Who is One: Begone! Begone! Begone!” There was a sound like the simultaneous crashing of a thousand great waves. The sea heaved and swelled, the boat was drenched, the boat veered, shivered, tilted.
The boat righted itself. When Limekiller had wiped his eyes almost dry, dry enough to look around, the waterspouts were gone. But a small stand of tall mangrove trees, perhaps the only trees in all creation which can grow up out of the salt, salt sea — this stand of them was gone. Where it, they, had been, to starboard, the wrack and wreckage of them floated on the torpid waves.
Something moved and muttered in the small hold. Something scrabbled, gobbled in a voice clotted by something thicker than phlegm. Perhaps, Limekiller thought, feeling his bowels both twist and — almost — loosen — it was not in the hold at all, but -
There was a coral shoal clearly visible, a few feet down, to port. “Port the helm!” a voice screamed, all but in his ear. He had never moved so swiftly in his life, he fell forward and down upon the wheel, the cutlass slashed the air where his head had been. The man screamed again and raised the cutlass again, the man was filthy, vile, face distorted with no normal rage, face framed in tangled beard, and, in the tangles, things that smoked — The man was gone. It was not “Bloody Man.” The shoal slipped astern and behind.
“Teach,” said Sir Joshua, in a voice fainter than Jack had ever heard his voice. “It was Teach. Goddamn him. that is. ahh. Oh. Hm. Ah, well. His voice died away. The air stank of sulfur. And of worse.
But the clean breezes of the Bay soon swept all that away — a matter for which Limekiller wras giving thanks — when he heard Harlow give a cry without words, saw' his arm sweep outwards. Jack looked, saw an enormous shark, had not realized a shark could be so huge, had not believed such a shark would ever pass inside the reef: the shark was moving, and moving faster than he would have allowed for any shark to move: in a moment it would, must, surely strike them: and then -
“Ah, Satan, cease thy follies!” the archbishop said, almost impatiently. “Canst thou hope to enthrall leviathan, and draw' him on with a snare?”
Surely the shark sw erved. Certainly the shark missed them. A moment or so later, looking back, Limekiller though he saw a fin break the surface, heading out to sea again. But perhaps it was only a porpoise. Or a piece of flotsam.
Or nothing at all.
“It’s a good thing the Colony is already autonomous,” Sir Joshua said, wiping his red face with a red bandana — not part of his official accoutrements. “They don’t really need me very much at all. Not, mind you,” he added, stuffing the kerchief away and at once wiping his face on his forearm; “not, mind you, that I particularly want them to realize it in any particular hurry… ah, well.”
Dead Man’s Cave lay dead beneath them. The water was clear, the mass of sand and coral could be clearly seen. If Limekiller had stepped over the side and stood with both feet upon the surface of the sunken caye, his head would still be above the water.
They had been there quite some time. They had encountered nothing untoward since arriving — in fact, they had encountered nothing there at all, except a huge manta, locally called “sting-rav,” which, following the sun and avoiding the shadows of the clouds, flapped lazily away from them -