Chapter VII - Enter Captain Kidd
Fontaleza was a Portuguese colony on the Brazillian
coast about 150 miles from the country's eastern-most point. One port was
very much like any other, and so only short words can suffice in its description.
It was hot, humid, loud despite its small size, and friendly, and, being
a port city, contained a lot of English-speaking merchants in every area
of business, from produce to sailing gear and from liquor to negotiable
affection.
Furthermore, as word had not yet gotten around about
their misdeeds aboard that unfortunately stubborn merchant ship, the Black
Pearl could politely sail in (or row in, at least, for the black sails
were a bit of a risk) and go about its business in the port without alerting
authorities to the extent that said authorities would care.
After docking, the co-captains addressed the crew
and informed them of the departure time, and quickly sent them on their
way to explore the town. Most of the crew made a beeline for the nearest
tavern. A few unfortunates were stuck with the task of selling off recently-acquired
goods and buying new supplies, a job no one envied. The Turner siblings
went off to browse the marketplace. Fezzik stayed aboard the ship, simply
for lack of better things to do, with the added bonus of singly relieving
two-thirds of the watch, because one giant was worth two-dozen regular
men.
The co-captains went to get drunk. It was a consciously
made decision and they pursued it quite actively.
Anamaria took Goethe to the task of helping her move
crates of silk to a merchant stall. Once there it took in excess of five
rings of the large copper bell to rouse the owner, a middle-aged man with
a thin beard and beet-red skin. Anamaria hefted one of the crates up onto
the counter, announcing "Want to sell!"
The merchant's eyes shifted from her to the small
Goethe. "Yes, young sir?"
The German boy looked ill at ease at being targetted.
"Want to... sell?" he suggested. Then, under the searing-hot glare that
the older woman was sending upon him, he frantically pointed at Anamaria
and added, "Her English better. She talk, yes?"
"I do not talk to slaves," the merchant said firmly,
turning up his nose almost theatrically.
"'Slave'?" Anamaria repeated, aghast. Her hand started
for the sword buckled to her belt. "I'll show you 'slave'..."
"Nein, nein, nein, nein!" Goethe said desperately,
holding onto her arm. "Fight no! No angry!"
"Your slave funny," the merchant told Goethe, over
the shouting. Around the stall, shoppers and other merchants were stopping
and turning to stare. "How much you take for her?"
In the end, they had to find a different merchant.
"What do you mean, you've stopped taking lessons
with Jack?" Will asked, sitting down opposite his older sister in an outside
restaurant.
"I told you," she said with ease, getting out a
few gold coins from a pouch, "he says I've got the basics of it down, and
figures I can handle meself now."
"But that's not right," said young William. "I saw
you the other day when we attacked that fishing boat on the way to Pasalacqua.
You're horrible."
"Little boys should know when you keep their mouths
shut," Delphine said with a sing-song tone. A serving wench approached
them then, and as Delphine looked up to meet her gaze, it was a meeting
of like minds, one barmaid meeting another. "You poor dear. Another drunkard?"
The wench nodded sadly. "Tough morning," she said,
with a thick accent.
Delphine looked over at her brother. "What'll you
have?"
"I don't see why we should bother eating out here
in port. We get plenty food on the ship."
"Bread for him," Delphine told the waitress. "I'll
have catch of the day and a beer. An' take yer time, love, there's no rush.
You look worn to the bone." She gave the woman the gold coins, which was
far too much for what the meals would cost, and off went a very happy serving
wench.
"You've been skipping meals lately," Will told her
meaningfully.
"Pipe down; there's no meaning to it."
"And what've you done with your face paint? You've
been without it for weeks now."
"Lost it."
"Along with your gloves and shirt, I expect. You
borrowed that one from the quartermaster, didn't you?"
"You are a cunning little bastard, aren't
ye."
"You're avoiding Jack."
"It's no matter of yours."
"You know," Will said irritably. "I do so wish you
would understand your place for once. You might be older than me but you
are
a lady. You really should start acting like one."
Delphine smirked. "What, like prance around in frilly
dresses and be saved by knights in armor all the time?"
Will, who didn't have much by way of a sense of
sarcasm, said, "A dress would be a nice start. You know how embarrassing
it is for me for you to walk around dressed in those trousers? It's not
as if you try to hide your-- your--"
"Knockers?" Delphine suggested.
"Stop - talking - like - that! Where's your sense
of decency?"
"Oh, it's with the face paint and the shirt and
the gloves, I expect."
It was not until their fourth round that either Jack
Sparrow or Inigo Montoya said anything. It was Jack that started it, head
hunched over the table, nose practically touching the contents of his glass,
mumbling something so unintelligible that Inigo had to ask him to repeat
it.
"I said-- You got any kids, Roberts?"
"None."
"Y'sure?"
"Quite sure."
"Hold on," said Jack, holding up a finger as a call
for pause. It was a long pause. His brain was having difficulty getting
focused enough to send signals back and forth successfully. "You're in
your-- what-- your early thirties?"
"Mid-thirties."
"And ye haven't started a family yet? You're not
gonna live forever, mate."
"Such words coming from you."
"Enough of that."
Inigo shrugged and took another swig of his brandy.
"Out of curiosity, why do you ask?"
If Captain Sparrow had started to make his response,
he wasn't able to finish it. A lovely young woman the two men had passed
on the way over had caught Jack's eye, and she was making her way over
to her table. She had a run-of-the-mill description of skin like silk and
a bosom fit for a herd of cows, strung up so tight in a tiny red dress
that Inigo could practically hear her corset creak under the strain.
She ran her lovely, bony hand on the support beam
by their table. "Alo, Spanish boy," she cooed.
"Who, me?" Inigo said, dumbfounded.
"Not you," she drawled, slinking her way over to
Jack and quite kitten-raffishly sliding into his lap. She wrapped her arms
around his neck. "This one."
"'Spanish boy'?" Jack mouthed silently to Inigo,
who shrugged. The woman, whose breasts were about eye-level with back,
leaned forward a bit and stroked the pirate's cheek with a hand.
"I see you on other side of room; I drawn to you,
like moth to flame, no?" she said.
Jack ignored Inigo rolling his eyes and smiled drunkenly
at the lady, and when he spoke his voice was silky smooth, low and lustful.
It made his drinking companion want to gag. "Not a moth, love, but a most
gorgeous butterfly. What in God's name is a lovely dame like yeself doing
in a place like this, when no temple in the world would be fit to honor
your beauty?"
The woman, whose knowledge of English was only slightly
more lacking than her looks, only smiled and said, "Want come back my place?
We have lots of fun. Low price."
"I could never resist an offer from such an enchanting
creature as yeself." He grinned at Inigo. "I'll catch up with you later."
"Have fun," said Inigo dully, as the woman led Jack
off out of sight. "Don't swindle too much money out of her," he muttered
into his tankard.
"I meet yoor shilling, and I raise yoo two francs."
"Isn't a franc less'n half a shilling?"
"Eet all I got. Yoo took everything else."
Ashley Trinity shrugged. "Fair anuff. Whatcha got?"
Fezzik laid down his card hand. "Four o' dees, and
one of dose," he said.
"Sorry, Fezzik," said Trinity, as nicely as possible.
She put down her own hand. "My four an' one beat your four an' one."
The giant's brow furrowed. "What beets a Jack?"
"Well... A King, for one."
"Ahoy!"
Fezzik and the small Trinity girl looked up from
their card game played on top of a beer barrel and peered over the side
of their ship. Standing below on the docks was a staunch, heavy-set man
on the wrong side of middle age, with a wirey beard and a broad-rimmed
hat that had probably at one time had some colorful feathers in it. He
was dressed richly, and carried an ornate cane, with the other hand hooked
onto a thin belt containing a shining new pistol and a cutlass in a gleaming
leather sheath.
"Who says 'ahoy'?" Trinity wondered, only loud enough
for her and her companion to hear.
"Maybe he old-fashioned?" Fezzik suggested. "What
eez it yoo want, sir?"
The older man tapped the side of the Pearl's
hull with his cane. "What ship is this?"
"Who askz?"
"No one of consequence," the man said promptly,
as if expecting the question.
"Oh," said Fezzik knowingly, with a nod. "Een dat
case I can't tell yoo. Eef eet waz someone of consequence, dey'd be important
an' I cood tell them. But I can't if dey're not consequential."
The man opened his mouth to say something, then
stopped. He shut his mouth. He opened it again. Closed it again. Finally,
he said, "What sort of sense does that make?"
"Eet Fezzik sense. Best sort, yes?"
"Are you the captain of this ship?"
"Nope. I'm the firzt mate. One of two, but the other
one hazn't gotten heer yet."
"Where is your captain?"
Fezzik pondered this. "I dunno," he said finally.
"Getting drunk somewhere, I suppose."
The man standing on the dock seemed a little perturbed
by this. "You don't know where, exactly, the captain of this ship is? What
sort of operation are you running here?"
"Oh, don't worry," Fezzik assured him. "Eef I heer
about some man causing a disturbance, I know dat's heem, and I can go find
heem then. Eet no trouble at all."
The man gaped at this, but then resolved his expression
into one of slightly keener understanding. "So one needs only to track
the disturbance, then, correct?"
"All there eez to it," the giant confirmed.
"Well," said the older man, removing his hat from
his mostly-bald head and bowing politely. "Thank you very much for your
time, sir, I shall not trouble you further." He spun on the heel of his
shoes and walked quickly down the dock, toward the town.
"Who d'you think that was?" Trinity asked.
"Well, eet like he said," Fezzik told her, as the
two went back to their card game. "No one of consequence."
"There," said Anamaria, counting out the coins. "That's
all the junk gone, I think. Well over a hundred pounds in total." She took
a fistful of gold and silver and pushed it into Goethe's hands. "Take that
and go down to the fish market and pick up equal shares of every kind of
jerky they got." As an afterthought, she gave him another handful of shillings.
"And then go treat yerself to something; this'll be the last major port
we're stopping at 'til Africa, after all."
The teenager nodded eagerly, running off down a
random street. He dropped coins here and there in his haste, which were
gobbled up by the other shoppers long before he'd've had a chance to go
back to them. It didn't matter; if he bought too little, the Black Pearl
could always attack another couple of ships. It was just one of those things.
Anamaria surreptitiously counted the rest of the
coins in the draw-string purse as she walked down the garments street.
Not once did she look up during this act, except when she ran into the
shoulder of a squat, older man with a broad hat.
"'Scuse me, miss," the man said as he went.
"Yeah, watch where you're walkin' next time, mate,"
she snapped back, continuing on her way and not giving him another second's
thought. Her mind went back to calculating barrels of fresh water, bags
of flour and salt, sugar and pepper and vegetables and fruit... Twenty
years on the Black Pearl had taught her a lot about how to run it,
but she was by no means a chef. People on board the ship soon got used
to incredibly straight-forward meals, although the cook did the best he
could manage under the circumstances.
Upon stepping out onto a street lined with food
stalls, she became aware of someone crying.
Men and women both respond to crying in different
ways. Whereas the majority of women will bear the immediate instinct to
rush to the person's side to comfort them, the average man will immediately
want to run away. Masculine women are at a disadvantage in this regard
because they are at odds with instinct, torn between two driving forces.
Something of this nature can often wreck havoc on the mind, which is why
the masculine side of a tomboy's personality usually opts to avoid the
issue of the whole crying thing to begin with.
Fortunately for the conflicted Anamaria, upon looking
up she saw what was actually transpiring was a harried serving wench bawling
her eyes out onto Delphine Turner's shoulder, the latter giving her the
occasional awkward pat. A terrified William sat across from the two, and
once his eyes slid over to come upon Anamaria, he immediately slipped away
from the table and rushed over to her.
"This is absolute madness," Will told the quartermaster.
"This poor girl really needs to seek some kind of help. I mean, she's obviously
had it very bad, it's almost painful to listen to. We need to inform the
authorities of this."
Anamaria smiled hollowly at him. "Really now."
Over at the restaurant booth, there was a crash.
Anamaria and Will looked up in time to see Delphine stomping toward them,
eyes livid. Behind her, the table she had been sitting at had been knocked
over, and the serving wench lay in a heap on the floor, still crying.
"I hate women and their stupid bloody
emotions," Delphine seethed.
"Amen," said Anamaria, patting her on the shoulder.
"So good to run into you two. You're going to be my errand boys."
"Your what?" Delphine said, stopping mid-seethe.
"Oh, no. Either act female or don't; you can't have
it both ways, miss."
Late morning sunlight drifted in through the angled
windows of a small, gaudily decorated flat (above the baker's shop, shared
with four people, all but one of which were out at the moment) and fell
upon crumpled bedsheets and a pair of bodies in a stage of undress very
close to the last. Fatima, the bony, overachieving prostitute whose high-kept
curly hair had fallen down sometime during the activities, rested her head
upon Jack Sparrow's chest, lovingly stroking his tattooed abdomen. She
let out a pleased sigh.
Jack Sparrow sat up abruptly, dislodging Fatima
back onto the sweat-soated sheets. The pirate moved to the edge of the
bed and started hunting for his trousers.
"Mmm, come back to bed," Fatima pleaded, gazing
adoringly at the blue tattoos covering his body. The main one, which took
up most of the flesh on his backside, resembled a pair of wings. This hidden
soon after as Jack pulled on his shirt.
"Much as I appreciate the offer, love, I really
must be off," Jack said, tucking his shirt in and procuring the first of
his belts. He had several belts. They were handy things. "'Got accomplices
that will be getting naughtily drunk if out of my presence for too long.
You know how it is."
Puzzled, Fatima climbed across the bed and knelt
behind Jack, wrapping her arms around his shoulders. "There's no need to
rush so. Please stay." In the act of fastening his waistcoat he knocked
her arms from his shoulders, and then he stood up to go looking for his
boots. "Did I do something to upset you, Jack?" she asked, sounding hurt.
"What? No, no. You were lovely, darling. Fantastic.
You have my compliments. I'm just in a bit of a rush 'ere..."
"You back later?"
Jack shot the woman a curious glance. "I rather
doubt it, being as we're setting sail in the afternoon, but I will recommend
you to some friends if y'like--"
"You just going to leave me?" Fatima cried.
"Well, that is sort of how it works..."
"But what of all the kind words you say to me when
we made love?"
"What?" he said distractedly, fixing his bandana
and a couple beaded strands of hair with the help of her vanity mirror.
"Oh, that junk. That's just what we call pillow talk, baby."
Fatima clutched some sheets around her body, feeling
naked for the first time in possibly her whole life. She seemed to be on
the brink of tears. "You don't love me?"
"Oh, I do, darling. You do things with that tongue
of yours I'd never even dreamed of--"
"You won't marry me?!"
"Now what the hell kind of question is--"
"You lying, incubus wretch!"
Jack glanced away from the mirror towards her. "Incubus?
Who're you calling incubus? You're the one who works as a--"
"You will pay for your treachery, Jack Sparrow!"
she howled, a red halo of light beginning to outline her body.
"Oh dear lord, not more gypsies..."
Moments later, passers-by outside the baker's shop
were treated to an odd spectacle as the window above the shop shattered
and a young man with a very rougeish appearance fell out onto the dirt
street. He sat up, clutching his head and groaning, and while doing so
a young woman covering her impressive bosom with a bedsheet appeared in
the remains of the window.
"By the spirits of my ancestors, Jack Sparrow, you
will never conceive children!" she yelled imperiously.
The man sitting amid the scattering of broken glass
gave this some consideration. "Can you do anything about the ones I got
already?"
"What?"
"Only," he said, climbing slowly to his feet, "if
ye could do it as a favor to me or something, I mean, it'd be really appreciated."
"Begone!" the woman roared, throwing something out
the window that turned out to be a cutlass and a pistol bound together
with a belt. "Begone or I will curse you a second time, you foul heathen
creature!"
"Can you at least gimme back me hat?"
Inigo knew he wasn't good with alcohol. He especially
knew he wasn't good with brandy. He'd had fifteen years to acquire this
knowledge, but no matter how well inground it was meant to be in his head,
time and again he found himself viewing the world through the bottom of
the bottle, usually his tenth one.
By the eleventh bottle it wasn't hard to find him,
even in such a crowded pub. All you had to do was follow the singing.
It wasn't very good singing. He may have been a
fairly good singer normally but the drink in his system had made him so
tone deaf that anything, anything, seemed preferable to listening to him.
But being as he had at some point in his self-induced inebriation drawn
his rapier, balancing across his lap with his free hand on the handle,
ready to strike at anyone who interrupted him, people dealt with it quietly.
Then someone tapped him on the shoulder.
"Where's Jack Sparrow?"
"Uh?" was Inigo's response.
"I see."
Which was when the newcomer punched the Spaniard
full in the face and sent him sprawled across the next table.
All an avalanche takes is one misplaced pebble.
The pebble, in this case, being Inigo Montoya, crashing into the table
that held a card game between some very important black market dealers
whose tempers were already short, which agitated the fish merchant who
was trying to calm his nerves after having to deal with an overexcited
German kid who wanted to buy out his entire stock of salmon jerky, who
took out his troubles on half a dozen other people.
In a few minutes, a glorious fight had erupted Vesuvius-like
in the tavern. Delightful.
"I still don't see how a King beetz a Jack."
"Look, it's simple. A King beats a Queen, right?"
"Right..."
"And a Queen beats a Jack."
"Now yoo lost me. Nothing beetz Jack."
"All right, all right. Pretend the King is a Roberts.
Now
would it beat a Jack?"
"Well..." Fezzik's face screwed up in thought. "Mebbe
they... tie?"
Trinity sighed.
"Hey," came a voice from over the side. Fezzik and
Trinity peered over to see the Turner siblings, each with a cart full of
barrels. "Lower the gangplank already so we can get these aboard," Will
said to them.
"Aye, aye," Trinity said dutifully. "C'mon," she
told Fezzik, pulling him along by the sleeve. As the giant rose from his
seat, his eyes wandered the view of the city surrounding him, and settled
upon a crowd amassing outside a nearby tavern door.
"Hey," he said. "What'z that?"
"Probably some tavern brawl," Delphine remarked
blandly.
"Uh-oh," said Fezzik. "Inigo."
Jack Sparrow careened back and forth a bit while
walking down the market street. Every new curse left him a bit tipsy, although
it might just be a delayed response to the alcohol he was feeling (inebriation
and curses seemed to run hand and hand these decades). At least he had
his hat.
A lot of townspeople seemed to be running down hill,
toward the docks. Lacking any other means of direction, he followed after,
coming at last to a huge crowd that could more or less, with a small margin
of error, be considered centered around the entrance to a tavern, wherein
a very loud, apparently very brutal fight was taking place.
Given the amount of attention the locals were giving
this, tavern brawls couldn't be very common in Fontaleza, which could only
mean the instigator was a visitor. The more Jack dizzily thought about
it, the more the whole thing smelled of a certain rapier-wielding Spaniard.
And lots of brandy.
While mulling over this, Jack Sparrow ran into something
he took at first to be the side of a building.
"Hello," said Fezzik.
"Oh, it's you."
"Yoo look like yoo have the flu."
"Nah, just gypsies."
"Dat sound icky."
"What's the situation?"
"I dunno. I jus got heer."
"Hm. Well..." Jack glanced around him for a moment,
appearing to calculate something. "How 'bout you clear me a way in, hey?"
"All right. I can do that."
"Much obliged."
The result of Fezzik's clearing the way was much
akin to a tornado that replaced the cows with humans, and when it had dissipated,
there was a clear line to the door of the tavern, which was presently half
off its hinges. Fezzik bowed, one arm extending toward the door cordially
like a butler.
"Thanks."
"Anytime, Jack."
"You may want to speed the preparations up a little
back on the ship. Looks like we'll be departing a bit early."
"Aye, captain."
The giant wandered off through the stunned remains
of the crowd, Captain Sparrow made a straight line for the door and pushed
it aside, into a room that was in many ways like the tornado he'd just
witnessed outside, except deliberate and with more broken bones. Sailors
and townsmen fought across the floor, the tables, the bar, the rafters.
They hung from the chandeliers, swinging their swords in a poor mockery
of a swashbuckling style.
And somewhere in the middle of it, largely ignored
in the throng, was an incredibly drunk Inigo Montoya, swinging his sword
at anything that came within five feet of him, and usually missing horribly.
The rest of the fighters were largely paying him no mind, but as Jack weaved
his way through the crowd toward his co-captain, he saw something come
up from behind the man.
"Roberts!" Jack shouted, drawing his sword. "About-face!"
At the command, the drunken pirate spun on a heel
in time for a chair to come down on his head.
"Oops," Jack muttered, stepping over the black-clad
man's prone form. "Right. Where were we..."
A sword pressed itself to his shoulder.
"Stay where you are," said a hoarse, strangely familiar
voice, its owner obscured in the shadow left by his wide-brimmed hat.
"Oh dear," Jack sighed theatrically. "The young
ones never learn."
Jack reached up with his free hand, grasped the
blade of the cutlass, twisted until the owner's hand gave way, dropped
his own sword, grabbed his pistol, and pressed it to the man's forehead.
All in the estimated space of a blink.
It was a very difficult move. It took a lot of practice.
Don't try this at home, kids.
"Parlay?" the old man tried.
Jack seethed, growling under his breath. "When we
get to Libertalia we are going to abolish that damned parlay!" he
hissed between his teeth. He moved the gun slightly. "All right, who are
you?"
"I could take this opportunity to be cheeky, but
I can see that you've no patience for sarcasm at this point in time. So
to settle this matter, I confess: my name, good sir, is William Kidd."
Jack nearly dropped the pistol. "Ol' Billy Kidd?"
he asked, bordering on disbelief.
"The very same."
"Lord Almighty!" Jack laughed. He returned the gun
to his belt and slapped the other man on the back. "An' here I was fixing
to kill you. I ought to buy ye a drink! C'mon, I'll take you back to me
ship."
Kidd smiled calmly. "And what of your friend?"
"What?" Jack looked down. "Oh yeah."
"Well, word's gotten around about the bounty hunters
that attacked you in Port Royal," Kidd said, climbing up the gangplank
after Jack Sparrow onto the Black Pearl's deck. "Sailing out of
New York I'd heard much the same thing about ol' Rackman-- Crying shame,
that was, he was a good man."
"Oi," said Ashley Trinity, looking up from her solitaire
game, "you're that man from before."
The old pirate patted Trinity on the head affectionately.
"Seems I might be of a bit of consequence after all, boy."
"I'm a girl," Trinity told him, casting a most resentful
look toward Captain Sparrow.
"Of course you are. I say, Jack, you're running
a most interesting crew these days."
"That one's Roberts," Jack said offhandedly. Then,
seeming to remember something, turned his attention to Fezzik. "Just lay
him up in our cabin for right now, mate."
Fezzik nodded, shifting the bulk on his shoulder
that on closer inspection just might appear to be an unconscious Spaniard,
and wandered off toward the stern. While he departed, Jack and Kidd found
their own seats along the port railing, and sat side-by-side in calm silence
for a few minutes, watching the horizon.
"Simply amazing," said Kidd after a while.
"It owes a lot to the short life span of your average
pirate," Jack said, answering a question Kidd hadn't voiced. "Not a lot
of old men around to remember the likes of me."
"I didn't mean that," Kidd told him, waving a hand
dismissively. "I meant, what're the odds, meeting two such legendary pirates,
not only in the same port, but to find they're sharing a ship? Incredible.
You'd be a red target for any hunters running about." William Kidd bore
a strange accent, something Scottish that had been smeared over with a
coat of English and then trod over with American.
"Their funeral."
"I'm with you," Kidd said readily. "I fear for any
man trying to take the both of you at once. He'd have to be a real clever
bastard in order to manage it, I'll tell ya that. Probably why you two're
still around after all these years."
"You're still kicking yourself," Jack pointed out.
Kidd laughed derisively. "Barely, old friend, barely.
One of these days I fear I'll just have to call it quits and go back to
the wife and children. A dreadful eventuality, I don't mind telling you."
"Then why the show back there?"
"Had to call you out, Jack. Knew I needed something
to get your attention. Worked, didn't it?" Jack nodded reluctantly. "I
told you before that I'd heard about your plight. The way to Libertalia's
not an easy one, Jack, especially with every bounty hunter on the high
seas after your head."
Jack arched an eyebrow. "You want to come with us?"
"As your guard, you could say."
"I don't buy it, mate."
"Listen," Kidd rasped, turning toward him, "my days
are numbered, Jack. I want to die with dignity, not on the run from some
bloody prize-monger. I believe in your cause, Mister Sparrow, and I will
fight for you."
The two pirate captains locked eyes.
Finally, Jack said, "You got a ship?"
End Chapter VII