"Yes. My father—"
"But are you certain? I'd have thought that, with Woodes Rogers due here any day, the obvious thing for your father to do would be—"
"Yes, John, I'm certain. I saw my father today, the first time I've seen him in a week or so, and of course he was carrying that little wooden box that smells so bad, and he told me I'm going along. He went on and on about how thoroughly I'd be protected from any injuries or ailments—but he wouldn't say a word about where we're going, or why."
"Jesus." Shandy took a deep breath and then let it out. "Well, Davies hasn't said either, but the rumor is that we're headed for a place on the Florida west coast, a place where the huns—uh, where Blackbeard accidentally let a number of ghosts attach themselves to him." He smiled nervously at her. "Something like lamprey eels, I gather; or leeches. And," he added, hoping he was concealing the apprehension he felt, "we'll rendezvous there with Blackbeard himself."
"God help us," she said softly.
And Mate Care-For too, thought Shandy.
With a lot of impressive swishing and spraying of sand and audible grunts of effort, Friend came waddling and arm-swinging over to them. "That's … enough, Elizabeth," he panted. "Dinner awaits us … at the fort." He mopped his forehead with a lacy handkerchief.
Beth Hurwood looked toward the pirates' cooking pots so longingly that Shandy asked, "Dinner?"
"Herbs and greens and black bread," she sighed.
"Plain but wholesome," pronounced Friend. "We have to keep her healthy." He too glanced toward the pots, briefly feigned gagging, then took Beth's arm and led her away. A couple of the people nearby laughed and told Shandy that such things were to be expected, that girls always chose men with good looks over ones that had nothing but honest hearts. Shandy laughed too, if a little forcedly, and said he thought it was more Friend's unfailing cheer and life-of-the-party attitude that did it. He turned down an offer of more stew but accepted another beheaded bottle of Latour, and he plodded away from the fires south along the beach toward the Carmichael.
The ship's bow was still up in the narrow inlet, supported by a stout wooden framework and a last couple of cables moored to trees, and the stern sat very low out in the harbor; but in spite of her present awkward posture she seemed much more like his ship now than she had during the month he'd been a passenger on her. He knew her intimately now—he'd been up scrambling like an ape in the high spars when they rerigged her, he'd swung an axe when they chopped down the forecastle structure and most of the railing, he'd sweated with saw and drill when they opened new ports for more cannon, and, for more hours than he could yet bear to remember, he'd sat in a sling halfway between the gunwale above and the sand or water below, and, foot by foot, chiseled charred seaweed and barnacles off her hull and dug out the teredo worms, and hammered into the wood little brass drogues, carved and chanted over by Davies' bocor to be powerful antiworm charms. And, he thought now as he approached her, tomorrow we tow her the rest of the way into the water, tighten the shrouds, and sail away. And my life as a pirate will commence. He noticed that there was someone sitting in the sand under the high arch of the bow, and after a moment of peering he saw by the moonlight that it was the mad old man the pirates always addressed as "governor"—possibly because of uncertainty about his name, which Shandy had variously heard rendered as Sawney, Gonsey and 'Pon-sea. The scene before Shandy—the old man sitting under ship's bow—reminded him of something that eluded him … but, oddly, he knew it was some picture or story that, by the comparison, lent a sad dignity to old Sawney. It startled Shandy to see the old lunatic, even by analogy, as something more than a sorcerously clever but half-witted clown. Then he remembered what the scene reminded him of: the age-crippled Jason, sitting under the hull of the beached and abandoned Argo.
"Who's that?" the old man quavered when he heard Shandy's boots in the sand.
"Jack Shandy, governor. Just wanted one last look at her in this position."
"Did you bring me a drink?"
"Uh, yes." Shandy paused, took several deep gulps, and then handed the half-full bottle to the old man.
"You sail tomorrow?"
"Right," said Shandy, surprised that the old man knew it and had remembered it.
"To join the hunsi hanzo and his puppy."
Shandy squinted at the old man and wondered if he really was in one of his lucid periods after all.
"His puppy?"
"Bonnett. I seen you playing at the poopets, you know about makin' the little fellows jump when you got the strings on 'em."
"Oh. Yeah." Shandy had heard of the new pirate Stede Bonnett, who'd recently, inexplicably, left behind a prosperous Barbados plantation in order to "go on the account," but he hadn't heard that the man had any connection with Blackbeard; of course old Sawney was hardly a reliable source.
"North, ye be goin', I hear," the governor went on. He paused to gulp some wine. "To Florida." He pronounced it with a strong Spanish accent. "Beautiful name, but fever country. I know the area. I've killed quite a few Carib Indians around there, and took a nasty arrow wound from 'em once. You want to watch out for 'em—they're the meanest. Cannibals. They keep pens of women and children from other tribes … the way we'd keep pens of cattle."
Shandy didn't believe this, but to be polite he whistled and shook his head. "Damnation," he said. "I'll steer clear of 'em."
"See you do … until you get to that damned geyser, anyway. After that, if you know how to handle it, you got nothing to worry about."
"That's what I want," agreed Shandy. "Nothing to worry about." The governor chuckled and replied in Spanish, but though Shandy was learning the crude Spanish of the mongrel pirates, the governor's dialect foiled him. It seemed at once too archaic and too pure. The old man finished, though, with an obscene suggestion, in all-too-fluent English, of what capabilities Blackbeard hoped to acquire by this trip.
Shandy laughed weakly, bade the old man farewell, and walked back the way he had come. After a couple of dozen paces he crested a sand dune, and he stopped and looked back at the ship. She was slightly heeled toward him, and he could see most of the quarterdeck and an end-on edge of the poop deck out over the water to his left. He tried to determine where Chaworth had died, and where he had stabbed Davies, and where he and Beth had stood when they'd tossed maggotty biscuits to that sea gull. He noticed that the section of rail they'd leaned on was cut away now, and it bothered him a little that he couldn't remember whether or not that was a section he'd cut down himself. He tried to imagine what other sorts of events might eventually take place on that deck, and after a moment he was startled to realize that he instinctively imagined himself as being present during them. But that's wrong, he told himself with a nervous smile. Beth and I will be jumping ship at the first opportunity. This ship will go on without me, in spite of all the sweat of mine—and blood, sometimes, when a chisel would slip—that's soaked into her wood. I've got an uncle who needs hanging.
He turned back toward the fires and started walking again, and it occurred to him that he wasn't far from the spot where he'd seen the man with the torn pockets and the bound-up jaw; and the memory of it made him walk a little faster, not because the man had looked threatening, but because of what Davies had said when Shandy told him about it.