On Stranger Tides (37 page)

YES, SKANK, Shandy thought again now as he watched someone out in the harbor keep on trying to yank the
Jenny's
gaff-spar higher, yes, I
was
more jumpy in those days. I had things to do then; now there's only one task left, and that's… forget. He stretched out more comfortably in the sand and swirled the sun-warmed rum in his cup affectionately.

A young Navy ensign hesitantly approached Shandy. “Excuse me…you're Jack Shandy?”

Shandy was finishing the cup, and stared owlishly at the young man over the rim. “right,” he said, lowering it finally.

“You're the one—excuse me—that sank the
Whitney
, aren't you?”

“I don't think so. What was the
Whitney?
”

“A man-o'-war that blew up and sank, this last June. They'd captured Philip Davies, and—”

“Oh.” Shandy noticed that his cup was empty, and got to his feet. “right. Until now I never knew her name. Actually, it was Davies that blew her up—I just helped.” He put his cup down on the table in front of the liquor tent and nodded at the man who ran it.

“And you shot the captain?” the young ensign went on.

Shandy picked up his refilled cup. “It was a long time ago. I don't remember.”

The ensign looked disappointed. “I arrived here on the
Delicia
, with Governor rogers,” he explained. “I, uh…guess this was a pretty wild place before, huh? Swordfights, shootings, treasure…”

Shandy laughed softly and decided not to burst the boy's romantic bubble. “Oh, aye, all o' that.”

Encouraged, the young man pressed on. “And you sailed with Blackbeard himself, I hear, on that mysterious trip to Florida? What was that like?”

Shandy gestured expansively. “Oh…hellish, hellish. Treachery, swordfights, men walking the plank, sea battles… trackless swamps, terrible fevers, cannibal Carib Indians dogging our tracks…” He paused, for the young ensign was blushing and frowning.

“You don't have to make fun of me,” the boy snapped.

Shandy blinked, not recalling exactly what he'd been saying. “What do you mean?”

“Just because I'm new out here doesn't mean I don't know
anything
. I know the Spaniards completely wiped out the Carib Indians two hundred years ago.”

“Oh.” Shandy scowled in concentration. Where had he heard of Carib Indians? “I didn't know that. Here, lemme buy you some rum, I didn't mean any…any…”

“I can't drink in uniform,” the ensign said, though he seemed mollified.

“I'll have yours then.” Shandy drained his cup and put it down on the table again. The man behind the table refilled it and made yet another mark on his credit sheet.

“It does seem that I've missed the great days of piracy,” the ensign sighed. “Davies, Bonnett, Blackbeard all dead, Hornigold and Shandy have taken the pardon—though there is one new one. Do you know Ulysse Segundo?”

“No,” said Shandy, carefully picking up his cup. “Dressy name.”

“Well, sure. He's got a big three-masted ship called the
Ascending Orpheus
, and he's taken dozens of ships in the last couple of months. He's supposed to be the most bloodthirsty of all—people are so scared of him that some have jumped into the sea and drowned themselves when it became clear he was going to take their ship!”

“That's pretty scared,” Shandy allowed, nodding.

“There's all sorts of stories about him,” the ensign went on eagerly, then halted. “Of course, I don't
believe
most of them. Still, a lot of people seem to. They say he can whistle the wind out of your sails and into his, and that he can navigate and catch you even in the densest fog, and when he captures a ship he not only takes all the gold and jewelry off her, but also the dead bodies of any sailors killed in the capture! Why, he won't even bother with stuff like grain or leather or hardware—he takes only real treasure, though they say he values fresh blood most of all, and has sometimes drained whole crews. One captain who lost his ship to him but lived says there were corpses in the
Orpheus
's rigging, obviously corpses, rotting—but one of them was
talking!
”

Shandy smiled. “What'd it have to say?”

“Well…I don't believe
this
, of course…but the captain swore this one corpse kept saying, over and over, ‘I am not a dog.'—Hey, watch it!” he added angrily, for Shandy had dropped his cup, and rum had splashed on the boy's uniform trousers.

“Where was he seen last,” Shandy asked quickly, “and when was it?”

The ensign blinked in surprise at this sudden intense interest, so uncharacteristic of the sleepy-eyed, easygoing man who had seemed to have no other goal in life than to be the settlement drunkard. “Why, I don't know, I—”

“
Think!
” Shandy seized the young man by his uniform collar and shook him. “Where and when?”

“Uh—near Jamaica, off Montego Bay—not quite a week ago!”

Shandy flung him away, turned on his heel and sprinted toward the shore. “Skank!” he yelled. “Skank, dammit, where—there you are. Come here!”

The young ex-pirate trotted up to him uncertainly. “What's up, Jack?”

“The
Jenny
's leaving today, this afternoon. Get all the men you can—and provisions—and get aboard her.”

“But…Jack, Venner's going to wait till January, to link up with Charlie Vane…”

“Damn Venner. Did I ever say I was resigning the captaincy of the
Jenny?
”

“Well, no, Jack, but we all assumed—”

“Damn your assumptions. round 'em up and get aboard.”

Skank's puzzled frown became a smile. “Sure…cap'n.” He turned and hurried away, his bare feet kicking up sprays of white sand.

Shandy had just run to a beached rowboat and begun to drag it to the water when he remembered where he'd heard of Carib Indians. Crazy old Governor Sawney had mentioned them to him, the night before the
Carmichael
and the
Jenny
sailed to meet Blackbeard in Florida. What had the old man said? Something about having killed his share of them in his day.

Shandy paused to squint speculatively up the slope toward the corner of the settlement where the weird old man had set up a little tent for himself. No, he told himself, resuming his struggle with the heavy boat—Sawney's old, but he's not two hundred.

But Shandy paused again a moment later, for he'd remembered something else. The old man had said something about “when you get to that geyser.” The Fountain of Youth
had
been a sort of geyser. And when Shandy gave that first puppet show, and Sawney interrupted it with his ravings, hadn't he said,
“Faces in the spray…
almas de los perditos
…? Faces in the spray, souls of the damned…”

Had Sawney
been
there at one time?

If so, he
might
be more than two hundred years old. It wouldn't really be surprising. Though it
is
surprising that he's so deteriorated. I wonder, he thought as once again he resumed tugging at the boat, what he did wrong.

Again he stopped. Well, now, if there is something, he thought, some effect, that can make a babbling idiot of a sorceror who's powerful enough to get to Erebus and buy a century or two of added lifetime, it's something I damn well better know about—if I want to do something more this time than just be picked up and dropped into the ocean.

Slowly at first, then more quickly as he remembered other puzzling things about old Sawney—his flawless but archaic Spanish, his handiness with magic—Shandy climbed back up the slope to the tents.

“Seen the governor around today?” he asked one lean old ex-pirate. “Sawney, I mean—not rogers.”

Shandy was smiling and had tried to keep his tone casual, but the man had seen the end of his conversation with the young ensign, and he stepped back and raised his hands placatingly as he answered. “Sure, Jack, he's in that tent of his, up toward the inlet. Take it easy, huh?”

Oblivious to the muttering and head-shaking in his wake, Shandy sprinted across the sand, broad-jumped over the cold cooking pit and pounded away toward the inlet where, half a year ago, he'd helped refit the
Carmichael
; and he paused to grin and catch his breath when he saw old Sawney crouched in front of the sailcloth tent he lived in these days, alternately taking swigs from, and peering intently into, a half-full bottle of rum.

The old man was wearing baggy, bright yellow trousers and an embroidered silk jacket, and if he had on any sort of
neckcloth it was concealed under his tangled beard, which was the color of old bleached bones.

Shandy plodded down the slope and sat down near him. “I'd like to talk to you, governor.”

“Ah?” Sawney squinted at him. “Not fevered again, are you? Stay away from them chickens.”

“No, governor. I want to know…about
bocors
, magicians. Especially ones that have been to the…the Fountain of Youth.”

Sawney had another gulp from, and peek into, his bottle. “Plenty of
bocors
about. I ain't one.”

“But you know what I mean by the Fountain of Youth? The… geyser?”

The old man's only response was to spin the liquor around in the bottle and sing, in a high, cracked voice,

Shandy did a rough translation of this in his head—
More will flow if God wills—count and let it happen, and the voyage will pass more quickly
—and decided it was no help. “Very well,” he said, controlling his impatience, “let's start somewhere else. Do you remember the Carib Indians?”

“Aye, cannibals. We wiped 'em out. Killed 'em all in the Cordoba expedition in '17 and '18, killed 'em or took 'em to be slaves in Cuba, which meant the same thing. They had all the magic; they kept pens of Arawak Indians, the way you'd keep cattle. To eat, sure—but you know what was more important than that? Hah? The blood, fresh blood. The Caribs kept those Arawaks alive like you'd keep gunpowder dry.”

“Did they know about the place in the rain forest in Florida? The Fountain in the place where it feels like the ground is…too solid?”

“Ah,
Dios…si
,” Sawney whispered, darting a glance at the sunlit harbor as if something in the sea might overhear. “It wasn't so dark there, I've heard, before they came…damned hole into hell…”

Shandy leaned forward a little and spoke quietly. “When did
you
go there?”

“Fifteen twenty-one,” said Sawney clearly. He took an enormous gulp of rum. “I knew by then where it had to be—I could read the signs, in spite of the padres with their holy water and prayers…I went in, and kept the gnat-clouds of ghosts away until I found it; vinegar will drive lice away from your body, but you need the black tobacco weed to drive away ghosts…and I shed blood there, by the Fountain…sprouted that plant. Did it just in time, too—as soon as I got out of that swamp there was a skirmish with the Indians, and I caught an arrow, and the wound festered…I made sure some of my blood got into the sea. Blood and sea water, and I'll live forever, over and over again, while that plant's still there…”

Shandy suddenly remembered the dead, dried shrub he'd seen in Erebus, and he realized that this would probably be the last of Sawney's lifetimes. “How does it happen,” he asked gently, “that one powerful enough to plant blood there, and use the blood and sea water magic here to buy many lives, can deteriorate? Can lose the big magics, can become…simple?”

Sawney smiled and raised one white eyebrow. “Like me, you mean, eh? Iron.”

Though embarrassed that the old man had understood him so clearly, Shandy pressed on. “Iron? What do you mean?”

“You must have smelt it. The magic smell, you know? Like a pan left on a hot fire. Wide-awake iron. And fresh blood smells that way too, and magic needs fresh blood, so obviously there's iron in it. Ever hear the story that the gods came here out of the sky as splashes of red-hot iron? No? Why, the very oldest writers
claimed that the souls of stars were in the stuff, because it was the last thing a star exhaled before it started to die.”

Shandy was afraid the old man had lost his lucidity again, for obviously there was no iron in blood or stars, but he decided to invest one more question in this tangent. “So how does it diminish magicians?”

“Hm?” Sawney blew across the mouth of the bottle, producing a low hooting. “Oh, it doesn't.”

Shandy thumped his fist into the sand. “Damn it, governor, I need to know—”

“It's
cold
iron that messes 'em up—
solid
iron. It's finished, you see, you can't do magic around it because all the magic is finished too, before you even start. You ever make wine?”

Shandy rolled his eyes. “No, but I know about vinegar and lice, thanks. I—”

“You know
vino de Jerez?
Sherry, the English call it. Or port?”

“Sure, governor,” said Shandy tiredly, wondering if the old man was going to ask him to fetch him a bottle.

“Well, you know how they're made? You know why some of 'em are so sweet?”

“Uh…they're fortified. They mix brandy into the wine and it stops the fermentation, so some sugar can remain in it and not all turn to alcohol.”

“Good boy. Yes, the brandy
stops
the fermentation. And so you still have sugar, yes, but for it to change to alcohol now is not possible. And what is this stuff, this brandy, that stops everything so?”

“Well,” said Shandy, mystified, “it's distilled wine.”

“
Verdad
. A product of fermentation makes more fermentation impossible; do you see?”