"Right."
"And I want to find my ship. So let's get Hurwood aboard the Jenny before he perfects his flying and flaps away to find them without us."
The sailors had carried and shoved their wide-beamed boat out into the surf. "Don't bring him back," Davies shouted to them. "Take him on to the Jenny!"
"Aye aye, Phil," yelled back one of the laboring rowers.
Davies seized Shandy's shoulder. "Back to the camp, Jack," he said. "Send as many of the Carmichael's lads to Bonnett's crew as the Revenge can hold—the rest bring down here, and get 'em aboard the Jenny. But none of our mates sail on the Queen Anne's Revenge, understand?"
"Sure do, Phil," Shandy said. "I'll have 'em down here getting into the boats in three minutes."
"Good. Go."
Shandy had no sooner run back uphill to the crowd around the smoking charcoal piles than Woefully Fat grabbed him by the upper arm. The bocor's brown eyes glared at him out of the broad black face.
"You damn slow, boy," the man said. "I thought you'd fix things upriver. Too late now for it to be any kind of easy—now you got to kill him an' burn him ashore."
"Kill who?" blurted Shandy, forgetting the man was deaf.
"You ain't sailin' on the Queen Anne's Revenge," said Woefully Fat. Belatedly remembering the bocor's deafness, Shandy shook his head and put on an earnestly agreeing expression. He was standing on tiptoe and hoping the giant bocor wouldn't lift him any higher. "No sir!" he yelled.
"Di'n't wait five years for you so you could be a puppet o' his, and die just to provide more blood an' make his death scene look more convincin'."
"I ain't going!" said Shandy loudly, exaggerating the movement of his lips. Then he added, "What do you mean, 'five years'?"
Woefully Fat looked around—no one was paying particular attention to them, and he lowered his voice to a whisper that was somehow still a rumble. "When the white men's war ended, an' anybody could see that Thatch had learned too much."
Shandy couldn't tell if this was an answer or something Woefully Fat had been going to say anyway.
"He got away with a lot by calling himself a privateer," the bocor went on. "The English let him alone if they think he only be takin' Spanish ships. But he wa'n't interested in any distinctions between Spanish or English or Dutch, just in human lives and blood. He even kilt that old English magician he been studyin' with, an' then tried to bring him back." Woefully Fat laughed. "I help a little, that time, make a turtle eat the blood in the water. Wouldn't have worked for very long anyway, neither of 'em havin' shed blood in Erebus first, but you should have seen that turtle tryin' to write English words on the deck with its claws." He gave Shandy a sharp look. "You di'n't shed no blood there, did you?"
"Where?"
"In Erebus, as white people call the place. The place where the Fountain is, where ghosts can't be ghosts, where blood grows plants?"
"No no, not me." Shandy shook his head. "Now let go of me, will you? I've got—"
"No? Good. He have … uses for you, if'n you did. An' when the war was ended and he was still alive an' gettin' so close an' puttin' together a whole nation, it seem like, of badmen, I saw I had to call a death for him from the Old World. When the one-armed man came last year an' knew about ghosts, I was sure it was my man, 'specially since his wife died the same year I sent my summons—if the bigger loas sent him for me they'd maybe have caused her death, as long as the complications of it would drive him out here."
"That's great, really," said Shandy. He made a twisting hop and managed to pull his arm free of the bocor's huge hand. "But right now I've got to see to the crews, all right? Anybody who needs to be killed and burned is just going to have to wait." He turned and ran before Woefully Fat could grab him again.
By threats, and hints that maroonment here was a real possibility, and his own evident consternation, Shandy managed to get a little more than half of the Carmichael's crew accepted by David Herriot, Bonnett's half-bright sailing master, and hustle the remainder down to the boats and onto the water, before the boat that had picked up Hurwood had even reached the Jenny. The fog was definitely breaking up now, and when the boat Shandy was in plunged out of the last veil of mist, he smiled with affection to see the battered old Jenny rocking sturdily out there in the bright morning sunlight.
"It'll be nice to get back down south where we belong," he said to Skank, who was crouched in the bow near him.
"Oh, aye," the young pirate agreed, "it's risky tactics to get too far from the attentions of Mate CareFor and that lot."
"Yeah." Shandy hastily patted his pocket to make sure he hadn't lost the ball of mud. "Yeah, there's some unlikely beasts in the world, and it's best to stay near the ones that you've bought drinks for." In a few minutes they bumped the shot-scarred hull of the Jenny, and Shandy reached up, grabbed her gunwale and vaulted over it onto the deck. As he gave some orders about the handling of the tenuously repaired sails and lines, and oversaw the hasty loading of several casks of salt pork and beer he'd managed to commandeer from the camp, he became aware that the planks under his boots were vibrating briefly every couple of seconds, and when he made his way aft to report to Davies that they were ready to go, he saw Hurwood crouched over his grisly box on the narrow poop, and the old man's scratchy breathing exactly corresponded to the deck's vibration.
"Hope he doesn't sneeze," remarked Davies, who had also noticed the phenomenon. "All set?"
"I'd say so, Phil," Shandy answered with a tension-twitchy grin. "Far too many men, nearly no provisions, the rigging all held together with nipper twine, and the navigator a one-armed lunatic taking directions from a severed head in a box."
"Excellent," said Davies, nodding. "Good work. I knew I picked the right man for quartermaster." He looked down at Hurwood. "Which way?" Hurwood pointed south.
"Hoist anchor!" Davies shouted. "And tiller hard to starboard!" The old sloop came around to face south, and then she sped away so quickly, in spite of being jostlingly overcrowded, that Shandy knew Hurwood must be providing some sort of sorcerous propulsion to aid the tattered sails; and by noon they had ploughed their plunging, wide-waked way down past the tip of the Florida peninsula.
A half hour later things began to happen. Hurwood had been staring into the wooden box since they'd set out, but now he looked up. Shandy, who had been glancing frequently at the old man, noticed the change and walked back to the stern along the railing, balancing himself by reaching out to touch the shrouds every few steps. A few steps from the one-armed magician he paused.
"There are … others … ," the old man said.
Several of the pirates had climbed up the shrouds to escape the smell and crowding of their companions, perched themselves more or less comfortably in the loops of the ratlines, and were providing entertainment to those below by tossing an ever-lighter rum bottle back and forth among themselves without, so far, dropping it; but now one of them was staring intently to the west. "A sail!" he yelled. "Ow, damn it," he added as the bottle rebounded from his knee and fell into eager hands below. "A sail abeam to starboard and only a mile or two off!" That's got to be her, thought Shandy, whirling so quickly to look that he had to crouch and grab the rail to keep from tumbling over the side. As soon as he saw the other ship, though, he knew it wasn't the Carmichael—this ship had a forecastle structure, and an extra-high poop, and had only two huge sails each on its fore and mainmasts, and even from this distance he could see bright patterns of red and white painted along her side.