On Stranger Tides

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To Jim and Viki Blaylock most generous and loyal of friends and to the memories of Eric Batsford and Noel Powers.

With thanks to David Carpenter, Bruce Oliver, Randal Robb, John Swartzel, Phillip Thibodeau and Dennis Tupper, for clear answers to unclear questions.

… And unmoor'd souls may drift on stranger tides

Than those men know of, and be overthrown

By winds that would not even stir a hair …

—William Ashbless

"The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide,

And I am next of kin;

The guests are met, the feast is set:

May'st hear the merry din."

He holds him with his skinny hand,

"There was a ship," quoth he …

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Though the evening breeze had chilled his back on the way across, it hadn't yet begun its nightly job of sweeping out from among the island's clustered vines and palm boles the humid air that the day had left behind, and Benjamin Hurwood's face was gleaming with sweat before the black man had led him even a dozen yards into the jungle. Hurwood hefted the machete that he gripped in his left—and only—hand, and peered uneasily into the darkness that seemed to crowd up behind the torchlit vegetation around them and overhead, for the stories he'd heard of cannibals and giant snakes seemed entirely plausible now, and it was difficult, despite recent experiences, to rely for safety on the collection of ox-tails and cloth bags and little statues that dangled from the other man's belt. In this primeval rain forest it didn't help to think of them as gardes and arrets and drogues rather than fetishes, or of his companion as a bocor rather than a witch doctor or shaman. The black man gestured with the torch and looked back at him.

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