He returned his attention to Venner, whose face, despite the smile, shone with sweat in the firelight.
"That's what I told 'em, cap'n," he said, and for a moment the falsity of his smile must have been obvious to everyone present, "but several have said they plain won't sail if we be goin' to that damned place on the Florida coast where Thatch got infested by ghosts."
Davies shrugged. "Any of 'em who be not satisfied with my promise to make 'em rich, or who doubt my word on that, can see me privately to settle it. And any that want to desert in mid-endeavor know the prescribed penalties. Do you fit into any of those groups, Venner?" Friend, peering in from the periphery, whispered and held up his hand.
Venner tried to reply, but produced only a choked grunt.
Should I have him provoke his own death, Friend wondered, or save him? Better let him live—there is real fear and anger in this crowd, and I don't want it stirred to a blaze. He whispered and gestured again, and Venner suddenly hunched forward and vomited onto the sand. The people near him drew away, and coarse laughter broke the tension.
Playing to the audience, Davies said, "I don't call that a responsive answer." Friend's fat fingers danced in the air, and Venner straightened and said, loudly but haltingly, "No … Phil. I … trust you. I … what's happening here? These aren't my … I was just drunk, and wanted to … stir up a bit of trouble. All these lads … know you've got their best … damn me! … interests at heart."
Davies raised his eyebrows in surprise, then frowned suspiciously and peered around among the crowd; but Venner's words had been convincing enough for one pirate, who clumped up and punched the would-be mutineer in the face.
"Treacherous pig," the pirate muttered as Venner sat down in the sand, blood spilling from his nose. The man turned to Davies. "Your word sooner'n his, anytime, cap'n." Davies smiled. "Try not to forget, Tom," he said mildly.
Out at the edge of the crowd, Friend smiled too—all this was so much easier here than it had been back in the eastern hemisphere—and then he turned to Elizabeth Hurwood. "We can return to the fort now," he told her.
She stared at him. "That's all? You ran down here, so fast I thought your heart was going to burst, just to see that man throw up and get hit?"
"I wanted to make sure that was all that did happen," said Friend impatiently. "Now come on."
"No," she said. "As long as we're here, I'll say hello to John." Friend turned on her furiously, then caught himself. He smirked and raised his eyebrows. "The keelscraper and brigand chef? I believe he's here," he said, simpering, "unless what I smell is a wet dog."
"Go back to the fort," she said wearily.
"So you c-can … have c-c-congress with him, I suppose?" sputtered Friend, his voice shrill with scorn. He wished he could refer to sexual matters without stuttering. "B-banish that thought, my d-d-d — Elizabeth. Your father commanded me not to let you out of my sight." He nodded virtuously.
"Do as you please then, you damned wretch," she said softly, and with a flash of uncharacteristic and unwelcome insight Friend realized she wasn't using damned as a mere adjective of emphasis. "I'm going to go and speak to him. Follow or not."
"I'll watch you from here," said Friend, and he raised his voice as she walked away from him: "Fear not I'd follow! I'd not subject my nostrils to proximity to the fellow!" The confrontation by the fire being over and more or less settled, some of the pirates and prostitutes nearby looked toward Friend for further amusement—and evidently found some, for there were whisperings and guffaws and giggling behind jewel-studded hands.
Friend scowled and raised his hand, but already he could feel the strain in his mind, so he lowered his hand and made do with just saying, "Vermin!" and striding away to stand on a slight rise, his arms crossed dramatically, and staring at Hurwood's daughter. She had found the Shandy fellow, and they'd moved a dozen yards away to talk.
Despise me, he thought, all of you—you've only got about a week left to do it in. For the first time in years, Friend thought about the old man who had started him on the … he paused to savor the phrase … the road to godhood. How old had Friend been? About eight years old—but already he had learned Latin and Greek, and had read Newton's Principia and Paracelsus' De Sagis Earumque Operibus … and already, he now recalled, envy of his intellect and his sturdy physique had begun to cause small-minded people to dislike and fear him. Even his father, sensing and resenting a greatness he could never hope to comprehend, had abused him, tried to make him take up pointless physical exercises and reduce his daily allotment of the sweets that provided him with the blood sugar his body required; only his mother had truly recognized his genius, and had seen to it that he didn't have to go to school with other children. Yes, he'd been about eight when he'd seen the ragged old man leaning in the back window of the pastry shop.
The old fellow was obviously simple-minded, and drawn to the window by the smell of fresh-cooked fruit pies, but he was gesturing in an odd way, his hands making digging motions in front of him as if they were encountering resistance in the empty air; and for the first time in his life Friend's nose was irritated by that smell that was like overheated metal.
Already graceful and sure-footed despite what everyone thought about his bulk, Friend had silently climbed onto a box behind the old man to be able to see in through the window—and what he saw set his young heart thumping. A fresh pie was moving jerkily through the air toward the window, and its hesitations and jigglings corresponded exactly to the old man's gestures. The shop girl was on her hands and knees in the far corner, too busy being violently ill to notice the airborne pie, and every few seconds the old man would let the pie pause while he gigglingly made other gestures that, at a distance, disarranged the girl's clothing.
Tremendously excited, Friend had climbed down from the box and hidden, and then a few minutes later followed the old man as he gleefully pranced away with the stolen pie. The boy followed the old man all that day, watching as he procured lunch and beer and caused pretty girls' skirts to fly up over their heads, all simply by gesturing and muttering, and little Leo Friend's breathing was fast and shallow as it became clear that none of the people the old man robbed or manhandled realized that the grinning, winking old vagabond was responsible. That night the old man broke the lock of an unoccupied house and retired, yawning cavernously, within.
Friend was out in front of the house next morning, walking back and forth carrying the biggest, grandest cake he'd been able to buy with the money from his father's rent-box. It was a sight to arouse lust in any lover of sweets, and the boy had been careful to refrost it to conceal all evidence of the tampering he'd done.
After an hour and a half of plodding back and forth, his chubby arms aching cruelly with the torture of holding up the heavy cake, little Friend finally saw the old man emerge, yawning again but dressed now in a gaudy velvet coat with taffeta lining. Friend held the cake a bit higher as he walked past this time, and he exulted when, simultaneously, abruptly induced cramps knotted his stomach and the cake floated up out of his hands.