On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers

Free Will
babbling all that nonsense about ox-tails and two-headed dogs?”
    Chandagnac heard the note of strain and doubt under her carefully controlled diction. “I can’t argue with that,” he conceded gently.
    She finished her rum. “Maybe I will go below. Oh, uh, John, could you help me get food?”
    Chandagnac stared at her. “Right now? What did you—”
    â€œNo, I mean at mealtimes. It might be even harder now to avoid the diet Friend has prescribed for me, and now more than ever I want to stay alert.”
    Chandagnac smiled, but he was thinking again about the consequences of throwing scraps to stray dogs. “I’ll do what I can. But God knows what these devils eat. Friend’s herbs might be preferable.”
    â€œYou haven’t tried them.” She started toward the ladder, but paused and looked back. “That was very brave, John, challenging that pirate the way you did.”
    â€œIt wasn’t a challenge, it was just…some kind of reflex.” He found that he was getting irritable. “I’d got to like old Chaworth.He reminded me of…another old man. Neither one of them had any goddamn sense. And I guess I don’t either, or I’d be in the boat right now.”
    He looked ahead, past the bowsprit at the blue horizon, and when he looked back she had left. He relaxed a little and watched the new crew at work. They were scrambling around up in the rigging, agile as spiders, and casually cursing each other in English, French, Italian and a couple of languages Chandagnac had never heard, and though their grammar was atrocious he had to concede that, in terms of obscenity, blasphemy and elaborate insult, the pirates got the most out of every language he was able to understand.
    He was smiling, and he had time to wonder why before he realized that this multilingual, good-naturedly fearsome badinage was just like what he used to hear in the taverns of Amsterdam and Marseille and Brighton and Venice; in his memory they all blended into one archetypal seaport tavern in which his father and he were eternally sitting at a table by the fire, drinking the local specialty and exchanging news with other travelers. It had sometimes seemed to the young Chandagnac that the marionettes were a party of wooden aristocracy traveling with two flesh-and-blood servants; and now, seven years after quitting that life, he reflected that the puppets hadn’t been bad masters. The pay had been irregular, for the great days of European puppet theaters had ended in 1690, the year of Chandagnac’s birth, when Germany lifted the clergy’s ten-year ban on plays using living actors, but the money had still occasionally been lavish, and then the hot dinners and warm beds were made all the pleasanter by memories of the previous months of frosty rooms and missed meals.
    The pirate with the bucket of sand had apparently finished his job, but as he was stumping aft past the mainmast his heel skidded. He glared around as though daring anyone to laugh, andthen he dumped all the rest of his sand on the slippery patch and strode away.
    Chandagnac wondered if the blood he’d slipped on had been Chaworth’s. And he remembered the night in Nantes when his father had pulled a knife on a gang of rough men who’d waited outside one wine shop for Chandagnac père et fils and then had cornered the pair and demanded all their money. Old François Chandagnac had had a lot of money on him on that night, and he was in his mid-sixties and doubtful of his future, and so instead of handing over the cash as he’d done the couple of times he’d been robbed before, he unpocketed the knife he carved marionette faces and hands with, and brandished it at the thieves.
    Chandagnac leaned back against one of the unfired star-boardside swivel guns now and, cautiously, basked in the realization that the sun was warm on his back, and that he was slightly drunk, and that