Chapter IV - Various Revelations of Varying Importance
"How are you feeling, Fezzik?"
"I'm bleeding a bit, Ini-- Robertz."
"Bad off?"
"I shood be all right."
"And you, Jack?"
The string of obscenities that followed spoke volumes.
"Right."
Inigo flopped back, intending to rest on the cobbles,
but slumped against the corpse of one of his victims instead. He was too
tired to care.
"Captain Sparrow!" a voice reverberated through
the streets.
"Hey? Someone calls?" Jack answered with mock enthusiasm.
"Anamaria," said his quartermaster, appearing on
the roof over their heads. She had a sack slung over her shoulder "I've
been looking all over for you, you bloody wastrel. It's hard work at me
age."
"Don't talk to me about age," Jack warned, raising
a finger toward her, before he lost the strength to do so and it flopped
back down by his side. "Report."
"Pearl's got four down. Eight for the Revenge.
And we got a couple stragglers from the Talon still but I set Stede
and his men on that job, Jack."
"Fine, fine. Patch up the ships, be ready to leave
by afternoon."
"Can't."
"Come again, Ana?"
"Black Pearl's taken a lot of damage. She
won't be able to sail 'til tomorrow evenin', and that's if we get a full
repair crew on the job. As for the Revenge, she won't be sailin'
anywhere, Mister Sparrow."
"What do you mean?" Inigo asked.
"She's sunk, s'what I mean. Might be able to salvage
things but I wouldn't get me hopes up."
The look on Inigo's face was unmatched in anguish,
even if the top half of it was obscured by a mask. "All the Roberts of
the earth will haunt me to the grave..." he said mournfully.
"We'll commandeer the Talon, then," Jack
said decidedly, after a pause.
"Excellent idea, Jack," Anamaria said cordially.
"Except, you know that explosion you heard a bit ago?"
"...Uh..."
"Powder magazine."
"Well, this is a right mess."
"It gets worse."
Anamaria swung the bag from over her shoulder, and
it landed heavily on the ground on top of some blood-smeared corpses. The
Black
Pearl's quartermaster followed after, landing without much flare or
bravado on a clear space of ground between bodies. She retrieved the bag
and carefully picked her way across the square, where Jack rested limply
against a crate. He clutched at a large wound in his side, but tried to
not seem put out over it.
The quartermaster dug into one of her trouser pockets
and produced a crumpled piece of parchment. She unfolded it and held it
out at eyelevel for Jack. "I found this on Captain Hawk. Or what was left
of 'im, anyway."
Jack regarded it with strained contempt. "And?"
"It's a letter of amnesty," Anamaria explained.
All the living occupants of the square, which numbered few, perked up slightly
in attention. "The crew of the Talon renounced piracy in exchange
for hunting in the king's service."
"Hunting... piratez?" Fezzik asked.
"Aye."
"But they were trackin' the Revenge," Jack
said, slightly stunned. "Hundreds of miles they went to catch up with your
lot, Roberts. Lot o' effort, wouldn't you say?"
"Bounty hunters," Inigo said, realization dawning
on him as he spoke. "Not just after your average pirate crew. It's too
small game. No, you go after the big prize..."
"Big name pirates, y'mean?"
"It would seem so. The Dread Pirate Roberts has
a sizable reputation."
"Aye, but so does me."
"Perhaps they're after you too."
Jack belted out a laugh, then stopped, cringing.
"On the up," Anamaria said, "we've secured the guv's
mansion. We're basing operations outta there 'til we're back on our feet."
"Perfect," Captain Jack Sparrow announced. He began
climbing to his feet. Slowly. Taking numerous breaks. "Shall we be off,
then?"
"You're all in rotten shape. It'll take me a few
to round up some men to help carry you boys." She glanced at Fezzik. "Maybe
more than a few."
"I'll help," said Mr. Turner, speaking up for the
first time. He had sat near the edge of the square, and was already on
his feet by the time Jack had begun that same process.
Anamaria realized she had never in her life seen
Jack so terrified as he appeared right then, not even when she was about
to slap him.
"No," Jack said, stammering. "That's-- fine-- thank
you-- I--"
He made the mistake of trying to run for it, which
caused half a dozen wounds to reopen and a load of other unpleasant sensations
that, thankfully, probably meant he had lost consciousness before he hit
the ground.
Anamaria stared at his prone, bleeding form for
a moment, then glanced back at Turner.
"Oi," she said, slightly surprised. "You're Will!"
"I am," Turner said nervously, as if the admission
would get him into trouble.
"That explains this, then," Anamaria said, nodding
toward Jack. "He's always in a tizzy when you're about, you ever notice
that?"
"Sorry to interrupt," Inigo said hesitantly. "But
has anyone seen that nice young lady that was here earlier?"
They checked the corpses. Delphine was nowhere to
be found.
Governor Norrington's mansion was well-supplied with
beds. There was the master bedroom, the children's bedrooms, the guest
rooms and the servants' quarters, and even then there were numerous couches
and enough blankets and pillows and dresses to be very comfortable indeed.
In a pinch, they could use the drapes.
Jack was hauled up into what had once been the room
of a young Elizabeth Swann before she had become Elizabeth Turner. It was
different now, as the current owner favored lush amounts of green and gold,
and hopefully the owner was very fond of red as well, because Jack's blood
was probably never coming out of those sheets.
They dressed his wounds, cauterized the really bad
ones, and then Anamaria and Elizabeth (the entire Turner family had come
along as "hostages" at Mr. Turner's suggestion) went down into the kitchens
to prepare rumfustian, a drink that, Anamaria assured Elizabeth, would
speed the captain's recovery.
("Are you sure you want me to help in this?" Elizabeth
asked, lost among the cabinets of spices and seasonings. "Will's a far
better cook than I am..."
"A woman needs to prepare it," Anamaria told her.
"Otherwise it's useless.")
Inigo had his wounds seen to as well, and being
as his were not as bad as Jack's he remained in the latter's room, lounging
in a squashy armchair. After about half an hour Fezzik appeared as well,
not because he didn't need bed rest, but because all the beds broke from
under him. So he rested on the floor by Inigo Montoya's feet instead.
Not soon after that did young Will Turner III appear
in the doorway as well, balancing on one foot. One hand held onto the door
frame for support, while the other arm cradled a small, weathered treasure
chest set with a heavy steel lock.
Will hopped over to the table beside which Inigo
sat, and laid the chest down upon it. He borrowed the chair from the vanity
and sat down opposite the Spaniard, who had removed his bandana and mask
for comfort.
"Anamaria says she found my little brother carrying
this away from our house. He found it under the bench outside our door."
Inigo's eyes remained fixed on it as Will continued.
"We're not in the habit of finding treasure chests
under benches in Port Royal, Captain Roberts."
"Have you opened it?"
"No. I can't manage. I even asked some of the boys
on Jack's crew and none of them could pick it open either."
"All the better."
"Why did you ask Fezzik to plant it? Anyone could
have found it."
"Not precisely," said Inigo. "It's difficult to
explain. You see, only someone from your family can find it once it's hidden.
Jack made sure of--" Inigo stopped, realizing what he'd just let slip.
"It's from Jack?" Will inquired. "Jack Sparrow sent
that here, along with me?"
"That's... the long and short of it, yes."
"What's in it?"
"Have not the slightest idea," the Dread Pirate
Roberts told him apologetically. "I do know that he intended one of your
family to open it. Have you any enchanted keys passed down through the
generation as family heirlooms?"
"Surprising though it may seem, no."
Inigo shrugged. "Then I suppose it will remain a
mystery." He paused. "Unless..."
He prodded Fezzik awake with a foot.
"Oh, Robertz, can't I sleep more?"
"How are your arms feeling, my friend?"
"Fine, I guess."
"Then come on up and help us with something."
A couple minutes later, after a bit of warm-up,
Fezzik placed one meaty hand on the chest's lid, while the other enclosed
the lock in its grip, twisting and pulling in a single motion.
After some time at this, the giant's face began
to flush red.
A while after that, he was gritting his teeth, and
veins were appearing in his forehead. He was beginning to sweat.
"I can't break eet, captain," he said, after a few
more moments of trying.
Inigo Montoya stared at him as if certain he had
misheard the giant's words. "What do you mean, you can't break it? You're
you. It's a thing. You break it. That's all there is to it, right?"
"I can't break eet, though. I tried, it didn't go."
"You've knocked down whole mountains, yet you can't
open a damned lock?"
"It wasn't a whole mountain," Fezzik said
bashfully.
The shipless captain peered around Fezzik at Will
again. "You sure you have no enchanted keys?"
"Positive, I'm afraid."
As Fezzik returned to his floor napping spot ("goodnight
again, everybody"), Inigo sighed in exasperation and flopped down in his
chair again, then immediately wished he hadn't. The cry of pain came out
as a hiss between his clenched teeth. When it passed, he went on speaking
in a normal voice. "Well, then there's little we can do about this. Ask
your father about it later, maybe he'd know."
Will nodded reluctantly, removing his boot. The
other one had been taken off earlier to treat his ankle, but so many weeks
aboard ships without wearing them had rendered them practically insufferable.
Plus, they seemed to have accumulated all sorts of things, he discovered,
tipping the contents out onto the floor. Small pebbles, not so small pebbles,
a parrot feather, a whole shilling, and--
plink.
--a key.
A few minutes later, after rousing Fezzik again,
the three stood hovering over the small wooden chest as Will tentatively
took the lock in one hand --it was still warm from Fezzik's attempts to
break it-- and inserted the key. It fit.
"Whatever he has in this must be very valuable,"
Will said, beginning to turn the key's handle. The lock's internal mechanisms
groaned, "to go to such lengths to keep it safe. Mother won't accept his
generosity, you know, if he intends us to exchange it for money."
"Complaining about ill-gotten gains and this and
that?" Inigo suggested.
"More like the governor's never stopped suspecting
my family had ties with pirates. From something my father did when he was
young, I expect." The gears finally gave way under pressure, and the lock
unhinged with a finalistic squeak. Will took his time in removing it. "Not
like he'll have reason to believe anything else after this. You can't put
one over Governor Norrington; he won't believe your hostage ruse for a
moment."
The lid was stuck with sea salt. He had to use both
hands to pry it open, crumbles of salt scattering all over the table. Inside
was little more than an old, ruined piece of maroon-colored silk. Will
stuck his hand into the folds of it, sifting around to come upon something,
and his fingers touched upon something cold and patterned, like a chain.
He grabbed it and lifted it out from within the folded silk, and at the
end of it was a broad, nearly flat brass disc, one face of it inlaid with
small jewels and a pair of pointers. The jewels formed numbers, and were
aligned all the way around the circumfrence.
Will held the watch in both hands. "It's dead,"
he told his accomplices.
"Or at least," Inigo said quietly, "it's... stopped."
Young Turner shot him an astonished look. He didn't
need the pirate to explain what he meant by that.
"No wonder he wanted to hide this with my family,"
Will whispered, casting his gaze again onto its jeweled surface. "He told
me he could always trust my father, more than any other man alive... And
something as this..."
The door opened behind them, and Will's heart gave
a jolt. Without a thought, he stuffed the watch into the pocket of his
waistcoat, and spun around belatedly to see Anamaria and his mother emerge
with a pitcher of some undefinable reddish liquid between them, and a large
empty glass.
The three men backed away obediently to give the
women access to Jack Sparrow's bedside, and as they did so, Inigo Montoya
swept the empty chest behind his back and deposited it quietly on the floor
behind his chair.
"You work very quickly, Madam," Inigo said, sliding
into his seat. Will did likewise.
"When your charge is Captain Jack Sparrow, you end
up making it a lot," Anamaria said, propping Jack up slightly while mindful
of his wounds. He didn't stir, so she pinched his nose and covered his
mouth until he did. "Rumfustian's ready, Jack."
"Is that all," Jack murmured, laying his head back
to return asleep. Anamaria forced his head up against his protests, while
Mrs. Turner poured a glass. The liquid that poured out was syrupy, the
color of dried blood, and just slightly steaming. As she approached Jack
with it, the pirate murmured, "Elizabeth, darling, you've grown lovelier
with age..."
"Good to see you, Jack," she said, keeping her expression
blank and failing. "You... haven't changed a bit..." It could have been
meant as a compliment. In many cases it would have. But in this instance,
it wasn't. And it sent an uneasy chill through the room as she said it.
"Eeeyes, about that..." Jack began.
"Later," Anamaria ordered him. "Drink."
Stede and his men had worked hard to search the city
for remnants of Hawk's crew, and by that evening they were satisfied with
their work. The majority of body counts matched the recovered records from
the Talon, and inconsistencies were written off as some people's
poor math. Pirates in the habit of counting "eight and twenty, nine and
twenty, ten and twenty, eleven and twenty..." don't have much credence
when it's all said and done.
They ajourned to the governor's mansion with the
rest of the crew, around which a proper guard had been set up to keep off
would-be heroes. Governor Norrington and his family were tied up and shut
in a small room where they could be very comfortable provided they didn't
ask for very much. And meanwhile, an uneasy but peaceful night fell on
Port Royal, the stars and look-out shifts changing without much enthusiasm
or splendor, while the wounded slept and the dying died, which was as much
as to be expected.
At around three in the morning a riot broke out
in a tavern down by the docks. Angry townsmen with heads full of romantic
heroism finally reached their limit, deciding to refuse to sit peacefully
by during a piratical occupation. They grabbed swords, pistols, pitchforks
and torches and stormed the streets, taking along every able-bodied man
they came across whether he wanted to fight or not.
It should have been containable, but the fights
that broke out at the perimeter of the mansion's premises went beyond scuffles
and broke out into full-on warfare, pushing the line of defense back and
farther back. And sometime during this, someone had set fire to the trees.
Jack was shaken awake by Anamaria to acrid smoke
and dizzying heat filling the room. His wounds were nearly gone, so he
sprang to his feet in a moment and immediately searched for his gear near
the foot of the bed.
"No time for that, Jack!"
"Just hold on one bloody minute," he told her distractedly,
pulling on his boots while standing up. He lost his balance and fell to
the floor. "Right. I'll handle this, you go get the others out. Now!"
She was gone through the doorway in a second, leaving
Jack alone. He gathered his sword, his pistol, his jacket, but his hat
seemed to have disappeared. He'd be damned if he went without his hat.
He bent his head and peered under the bed. Nothing
there, or at least nothing of interest. He checked the table, the wardrobe,
the vanity, behind the curtains (these were on fire), and no, no hat, anywhere.
Jack coughed, aware that the smoke in the room was
making it increasingly difficult to breathe. Clutching his chest, he stumbled
from the room, down the hallways to where other members of the crew had
been put up. Maybe Roberts had taken his hat with him while he'd slept,
as some sort of game...
"Why, there you are, Jack."
The voice caused Jack to pause. In the midst of
a burning building, no one should have possessed such a cheerful, teasing
tone. Gloating was even less likely.
Captain Sparrow looked over his shoulder, slowly.
Amid the flames, with wounded and scared pirates running past her on either
side without seeing her, stood a tall, West Indian woman with glittering
dark eyes and lips painted candy apple red. She wore a dress, old with
the lace fraying and missing in places, the skirt darned and patched. She
held an old leather trihorn hat to her breasts.
He turned around fully, eyes wide, lips parting
to say her name.
Her smile twisted into a scornful frown. "All you
ever had to do was apologize. That was all I'd ever asked of you. Instead
you bring this upon yourself again, and again, and again, Jack Sparrow."
Jack took a few cautious steps toward her. "Dunno
what y'speak of, love. I guess me mem'ry must be failing me."
"Don't lie, you godless tramp!" she shrieked,
backing up a little to maintain the distance between them. "You deserve
this! You deserve all of this!"
"Gimme my hat, love. There's a good girl."
"Apologize! Apologize and it'll all be over, all
of this will end!"
"Hat first."
The woman forced a smile onto her face again, a
twitching, pained smile trying to scare away the madness haunting her eyes.
"Fine, then, fine. Your hat. Your reputation and your ship and your bloody
hat.
Fine!" She strode toward him, heeled shoes clomp-clomping on the floorboards,
and thrust the hat into his hands. He looked down at it, slightly stunned,
and that's when he saw the pistol.
BANG!
The world drifted slowly by him, the flames blurring
into a yellow haze as he fell down, down, down, and it seemed like ages
when he hit the ground. He tried to breathe, but nothing would come, as
if his throat had been welded shut. Fire and ice cascaded through his body.
The woman hovering over him cast the pistol aside
and drew another from a pocket in her skirts. She aimed it at his forehead.
"All you ever had to do," she said, "was apologize."
BANG!
"Jack!"
Captain Jack Sparrow lurched forward, and a strong
hand pushed him down onto the bed again. His eyes were open to their fullest,
stinging and dry, and he discovered he was breathing in huge gulps.
Mr. Turner kept his hand to Jack's chest until the
latter seemed to have calmed down a bit. "You were having a nightmare,"
he told him softly.
Their eyes met again, and this time it was Turner
who looked away. He removed his hand, leaving Jack's bedside. Out of the
corner of his vision, Jack could see the man seat himself in a nearby chair,
where, by the looks of it, he had been for a long time.
After a few minutes of near-silence, the only sounds
being Jack's breathing and the crackling of the dying embers in the fireplace
on the far wall, Jack Sparrow laughed.
"Night terrors. At my age."
The conversation died before it had even begun.
The two men watched what was left of the fire for a while.
Jack's stomach turned over when Mr. Turner finally
started to speak.
"It had troubled me too, when I first met you,"
he said, and it didn't need to be said that he wasn't talking about bad
dreams. "I didn't ask about it then because there were other things to
be concerned with. After a while I convinced myself that, oh... maybe you
were very talented for your age, maybe there was more to your vanity than
heaps of beads and too much kohl round the eyes... Back then, you know,
it was just possible to believe some bad math could account for it. Barely,
but possible nevertheless."
The pirate said nothing.
"After this morning there were no means by which
to explain where all the time had gone. I'm sure you were indeed talented
for your age, Jack, but no amount of math can tell me why you look as well
as you do at eighty years of age... It's always puzzled me how you were
able to garner more than a lifetime's worth of reputation, Jack. I suppose
it only follows logically that it's because you've had more than a lifetime
to do it. Am I correct?"
"In part."
"Sorry?"
"I only been around once, Will. It's just I've been
taking me own sweet time with it."
"You can't die?"
"Bollocks to that. If I couldn't shuffle off this
here mortal coil, why do you think I so enthusiastically try not
to all the time?"
Mr. Turner paused for a moment in thought. "But
if you're not cursed as Barbossa and his men were..."
Jack appeared to be getting a little frustrated.
He struggled to get the words out. "There is more'n one kind of
curse, Mister Turner. There's big ones and small ones and deadly ones and
nice ones and minorly annoying ones, ye savvy? Pirates just sort of...
accumulate them, like... doggy diseases or somethin'." His old friend seemed
to be struggling with the idea of a pirate bristling with a nearly-visible
cloud of assorted diseases and parasites, so he plunged onward. "You get
'em from treasure and jewelry and old suspicious wine bottles inside o'
chests they tell ya restore your health. There's loads of pagan gods just
itchin' to throw 'em out at people who breathe the wrong way inside their
temples an' shrines an' things, and that says nothin' of little gypsy princesses
who don't take well ta rejection."
There was more than a little skepticism in Turner's
voice. "I'm sorry... A little gypsy princess you cast aside cursed you
to never age?"
"That's the long and short of it, yeah."
"While you were in the prime of your life?"
"I never said she was good at thinking things through,
Will."
William shook his head. "So that's it, then, is
it? That's the secret to the amazing immortality to Captain Jack Sparrow?
A stupid gypsy girl fouled up her curse?"
"Well, she was sort of in a bad mood at the time,
couldn't really concentrate..."
"How long ago was this?"
"It was..." Jack counted on his fingers for a few
moments. "Can't remember, mate," he said cheerfully.
"Long enough," came a heavily accented voice. Jack
and Mr. Turner turned their gaze to the doorway, where the black-clad Inigo
Montoya stood with a candle in one hand and a bundle of maps in the other.
"I took that into consideration when I charted our course earlier this
evening."
He walked to the table over by Turner and deposited
the scrolls of paper, while Jack said, "An' what course be it that you're
charting, Mister Roberts? You haven't a ship."
"Yes, but you do, and you're needing a first mate
anyway."
"Was your first mate killed today?" Turner asked
Jack, in the voice of one prepared to console if the answer was yes.
"He hasn't had a first mate in twenty years," Inigo
explained, savoring the murderous look on Jack's face as he imparted that
bit of information. "You'll have to ask him why yourself, he couldn't bring
himself to tell me. More to the point," he went on, unrolling one of the
maps, which was a bit of a difficulty one-handed, "this is something you
will be agreeing to anyway, and I'll tell you why. Letters of amnesty are
no new convention, this is true, and neither are pirate hunters. What troubles
me is that, judging by the papers found on the recently departed Captain
Hawk, this is on a far larger scale than anything we have encountered before.
It is a worldwide effort, an easy task considering the extent of the British
Empire, and its effect is overwhelming."
"How do you mean?" Jack asked, not as lost in Inigo's
words as he could have been.
"Name a pirate you know."
"Thomas Tew?"
"Dead."
"Come off it!"
"Dead," Inigo repeated. "Killed, and turned
in to British authorities for a reward of one hundred and fifty pounds.
Now, name another."
"Calico Rackman."
"Dead."
"What?"
"Turned in alive in North Carolina, sailed to London
for his execution. The bounty hunters were given eighty pounds for his
capture."
"What about Bikke?"
"Dead."
"Tribal?"
"Dead."
"...Munchausen?"
The grave look on Inigo's face said everything.
But it didn't match the one of shock that fall over Jack. He stared at
nothing for a few moments.
"They're killing us," Jack said quietly. "All the
Elder Pirates, they're..."
"How did you learn this?" Turner, who was less affected
by the roll call, asked the Dread Pirate Roberts.
Inigo bowed his head obligingly. He sifted among
the assorted maps and brought out a folded bundle of newsprint. He unfolded
this, and plopped it down on the table before the older man. It was flipped
to the obituaries.
"Something like this endangers pirates all over
the world," Inigo Montoya continued. "And the only way to fight such a
worldwide effort is to respond in kind. Which is why we must go to the
source."
Jack and Inigo's eyes met.
"Libertalia?" Jack said, in slight disbelief.
"Libertalia," Inigo confirmed, nodding.
Mr. Turner glanced from face to face. "What's Libertalia?"
"A pirate city."
"The pirate city."
"Imagine New Jerusalem..."
"And Mecca..."
"And Tortuga..."
"...all rolled into one."
Turner looked relatively impressed. Possibly for
their sakes. "Where is it?"
Inigo planted his index finger dramatically to a
point on the map. "Here," he said.
Jack craned his head to see. "A little to the left,
mate."
Captain Roberts glanced down at where he had pointed.
"Oh." He repositioned himself accordingly, so that "here" showed itself
to be, in fact, the island of Madagascar.
"You're going to need a bigger ship," Mr. Turner
said after a while.
End Chapter IV