Chapter XVI - The Hard-to-Name Chapter
 
 

    By the seventh day the rains had not abated, but neither had they grown worse, choosing to remain a constant, unceasing downpour that battered the Black Pearl's deck and drenched her sails, driving her crew below for most hours of the day. There was little need to be above deck; the first mate Fezzik had directed the ship into a small inlet farther up the coast, hiding her from view by all except those who happened to sail in directly in her line of cannon fire.
    A full week now having gone by without action or so much as a word from their one remaining captan, the Black Pearl's crew were growing restless. Losing themselves in the distraction of idle games was becoming harder and harder to do, and sooner or later, they knew, they'd run out of things to occupy their minds with and would be forced to come to terms with what they knew: that Jack Sparrow and Granuaile were probably dead, and their way of life would be soon to follow.
    Mainly, though, the crew was concerned for the state of their captain. After he had been put up in his bunk in the captain's cabin, he'd refused both rumfustian and a visit with the ship surgeon, and didn't eat for three days. He refused all visitors, even Fezzik, and didn't speak to anyone, except to occasionally ask the person bringing him his meals to send up more brandy. The man went through brandy like air. It was practically a talent.
    Seven days of this manner of silence, however, was growing to be too much, which is why, on the eighth day, the crew decided someone needed to go in and speak with him. And be willing to replace that verb with any other on a moment's notice, which is why it was agreed upon that one of the women should go, finally ending up with Anne Bonney, Mary Read, and the Jackal drawing lots.
    "Well, this should be interesting," said Read, examining the red painted tip of her selected straw. "'Though I gotta say, better you than me."
    "Uh, Mary..." Bonney began, realizing she hadn't explained the rules as clearly as she could have.
    About fifteen minutes later, after some largely vain attempts to improve Read's curly red hair, not to mention hide the smell (for it is this author's regretful duty to remind that our characters are 18th-century pirates, with no soap, fresh clothes, toothbrushes, or reasons to care), the crew told the young woman "godspeed" and sent her off to knock on the captain's door. Which she did not do. She simply opened it and slipped inside before anyone, let alone Inigo, could protest.
    "G'mornin', cap'n," she said sweetly, leaning against the closed door.
    "Who're you? Get out," Inigo mumbled into his sheets. He was lying in his bunk, face in his pillow, with his back to her. There was a heap of empty bottles on the floor beside him.
    "The others sent me to talk to you." Read locked the door as discreetly as she could before picking her way across the cluttered floor.
    "Did they, now."
    "They're awfully concerned 'bout you."
    "Are they, now." He didn't lift his head as she unceremoniously sat down on the edge of his bunk.
    Read stroked his back with one hand. "How long do you intend on hiding out 'ere, cap'n?" she asked softly.
    Inigo huffed and pulled away from the touch. "What matter of it is yours what I do?"
    "Don't think so little of yourself," she whispered, leaning over to rub his shoulders and kiss the back of his neck. To her surprise, the man turned over in his bed and looked up into her face, annoyed. "Something the matter?"
    "What on earth are you doing?"
    She tried giving him what she hoped was a sufficiently seductive smile. "I thought you could use some company."
    "Heh!" he laughed. She forced herself not to recoil from his breath. "Company. That'd work better on Jack, miss."
    And there it might've ended, except that Mary Read had not gotten to where she was today by taking men's words at face value. Even before she made her next move she knew that she already had an answer from him, because he was looking at her eyes and seemed to be having a difficult time looking away.
    She hunched up her shoulders and went into a bit of a pout. "You'd really prefer to be left alone?" Her eyes drifted downward a bit, and his followed.
    Inigo swallowed a dry throat. "Y-yes-- I mean, no! I--"
    "That's good enough," she said with satisfaction, and kissed him.

    The rains abated by mid-afternoon, allowing some weak yellow sunlight to filter in through the cabin windows and across the junk-ridden floor. Mary Read slid to the edge of the bed, stood up and stretched, then wandered to Jack's desk and began rummaging in the drawers until she found a drawstring bag of tobacco shreds and some cigarette papers.
    "Well, that was all very interesting," she said, glancing over her shoulder at Inigo, who had stirred but made no effort to sit up. "I don't know, I hate to say it, but that wasn't very enlivening chemistry."
    "I'm forced to agree," Inigo said with a bit of a sigh. He yawned.
    "'Spose it only stands to reason," Read reflected; "it's not exactly a smart match, is it?" She dabbed the edge of the rolled-up paper on her tongue and sealed the cigarette, and lit it using a match from a box.
    "How do you mean?" Inigo asked as she returned, shifting back a bit so that she would have more space to sit down. He rested his head in a hand and watched her take a few appreciative draws on her cigarette.
    "Well..." She appeared to debate how to frame her words, waving her hand with the cigarette vaguely. "I 'spose it's not any sort of secret, what me an' Annie an' the Jackal get up to, is it? An' you, well, you're..." She coughed. "Well, I don't need to tell you what you are, obviously; y'already know."
    "Sorry?"
    "Well, everyone knows about you an' Jack..."
    "I don't," Inigo said angrily, thinking back to Will's question from last week. "What about me and Jack?"
    Read held up her hands desperately. "Didn't mean to broach a touchy issue with you. I know it must be hard on you now that he's gone and snuffed it. Hell, we're all down and out about it, but I can see it's gotten you worse. I sympathize, I really do. Y'shoulda seen me an' Anne when they got Calico. But there's nothin' for it, cap'n. You've got to move on. S'the only way."
    "We need to do something about Kidd," Inigo said darkly.
    Read laughed in a billow of tobacco smoke. "What d'you propose we do, sail all the way to Bombay? It's outta our league now, cap'n."
    "What did you say?"
    "Outta our league. Impossible. Not feasible."
    "No, about Bombay."
    The cigarette froze halfway to Read's lips.
    "There's something you're not telling me," Inigo persisted.
    "Look, it's too late now, they're already underway--"
    "Who's underway?"
    "Them, all right?" Read burst out, turning to face him with livid eyes. "The night out of Libertalia, the Blessed and the Q.A.R. turned their guns on our ship. Me and Anne, we wanted to save what we could from Granny O'Malley's cabin, and we found these maps, chartin' a course for two ships, her's and Kidd's, from Madagascar to India. There were all these diagrams of the layout of the Order's meetin' hall, and these charts about cargo weight. It didn't take us long to figure out the two were fixin' to betray the Order. But who do we tell about that now that it doesn't make a difference? You were gone and out for a week, and now it's too late to matter."
    "Grace was no traitor. She had a change of heart last minute."
    "Aye, and now she's dead."
    Inigo hesitated. "Actually, she might not be..."
    "What d'you mean, 'might not'? You saw her die, didn't you?"
    "No, I saw her get caught."
    "What about Sparrow?"
    Inigo shook his head. "He wasn't in good shape when we left him, but..."
    To his amazement, Read smiled. "If you didn't see him die, then he's not dead."
    "How can you be so sure?"
    "Granny O'Malley was a hunter, remember? She had a chart full of how much different pirates were worth. Jack's not even got his name on there. He's smaller game than you could ever imagine. Makes you wonder, doesn't it? 'Cause Jack's the most famous pirate there is... among pirates anyway. So what me an' Anne and the Jackal were figuring, it's a matter of pride. If Kidd kills Jack on accident, where nobody will know, that's the end of it an' no one'll care."
    She offered her cigarette to Inigo, who refused it politely, and then continued. "On the other hand, he sends Jack up to the gallows in front of everyone, it'll go throughout the world that it was Kidd that caught him, making him more famous than Jack ever was, at least as far as pirates are concerned. 'Meanwhile, Kidd's got all those other Brethren members that've made names for themselves with landfaring folk, and he'll be popular with them too when he sends up Hands and Harlock and Granny O'Malley, if she's still alive."
    "If Jack's still alive, then your Captain O'Malley is too."
    "How can you be sure?"
    Inigo considered telling her the truth, but for some reason didn't think the woman was prepared for the idea of talking swords. "A mermaid told me."
    "Oh. Right."
    "...Mary?"
    "Aye?"
    "Out of curiosity," Inigo said carefully, "these maps you mentioned... do you still have them?"

    The Queen Anne's Revenge has a long-held reputation as the world's largest pirate ship. This is untrue, as the Iompróir an Uisce clearly outgunned her, and the Arcadia easily surpassed her in sheer size, but it was the combination of larger-than-life elements that really made the Q.A.R. so impressive. She was akin to a floating fortress, a description that befit her quite well because she was, in fact, very much like a prison, especially after Captain Kidd had done away with some of the cabin space in order to expand the brig.
    Sooner or later, however, --as the captain was coming to realize-- he would have to deal with rearranging the cargo hold as well. There was no sense, his underlings stressed to him, in occupying perfectly good cell space with useless corpses, and he was forced to agree with the sentiment.
    Harder to accept was what his quartermaster was telling him, which were scarcely things befitting of a quartermaster to say. The man was a holdover from Hands's crew, who had been very eager to mutiny against his captain and help Kidd take command of the ship, but Kidd was starting to doubt the decision to keep him around.
    "They're dyin' off too quickly, cap'n," the pirate, who went by the name of Thunderbird, or at least said he went by the name Thunderbird, told Captain Kidd as the two patrolled the cells below-deck. Around them, a hundred sullen eyes glared out. They were resentful eyes, full of indignation over the lack of common courtesy in providing them with a means to make a daring escape. A couple hung on the bars, hands and arms looped around the metal, until Kidd hit them with his cane and forced them back.
    "They're too sick, too hungry, and they ain't got much will to live, either. This one here..." Thunderbird halted Kidd outside the edge of cell A and directed the man's gaze onto a crumpled heap that might have theoretically been a human being, but was more recently a mess of bloody garments and broken bead strands. "He's about to snuff it, y'can tell. They always go into a fetal position like that when they figure they're gonna croak. I'd give 'im another day. Two at most."
    "Send him to see the physician," was Kidd's answer, after a mere second's deliberation. "Or the physician to see him, at least."
    "Sir?"
    "We need this one alive."
    "It ain't likely," Thunderbird said slowly, scratching the back of his head. White flakes of dandruff floated down onto his shoulders like Christmas snow.  "He's got the death upon him like no man I've ever seen."
    "That's because he's been delaying it for longer than any man should. But he can hold 'til Bombay. See that he does."
    "An' the other captives, sir?"
    "Well, damn it all, heal them up too, if you really must," Kidd snapped. "Didn't you say you had news for me from our allies?"
    "Aye, sir. It concerns their prisoners. They're droppin' like flies over there too."
    "Heal them all. Give them rumfustian, too."
    "Rumfustian, sir?" Thunderbird asked, trying out the unfamiliar syllables.
    "Something I've discovered on my travels. I find that it helps," said Kidd, delighting in the small flicker of a glance he gained from the near-corpse by his feet. Satisfied with this day's work, he began strutting down the row between the cells again. "Any other news?"
    "Very little, sir," said the quartermaster. "One group picked up one of Sparrow's crew outside the meeting hall last week."
    "The Spaniard?"
    "Nossir. A lady. Negro."
    "She's alive?"
    "Barely, sir. Brink of death, same as that one back there," said Thunderbird, who was not good at attaching names to faces. "She'll be dead in a day or two at most, and we can't find her name on the charts, so..."
    "She lives. See to it."
    "...Aye sir."
    Thunderbird spun on his heel and left up the stairs to the deck, leaving Captain Kidd alone in the brig with the prisoners. Someone started playing a panpipe forlornly. He jabbed through the bars at random until the notes strangled to a halt.
    "Play it again, Samuel," came a voice from behind Kidd's back, with a spitefully heavy accent. The captain of the Queen Anne's Revenge turned around to come face to face with Granuaile, hanging defiantly onto the bars of her cell and glaring with a sort of smug contempt. She had a long cut over one eye that had swelled the surrounding area and clamped the eye shut, but for some reason this only made her seem more menacing. "Or play Loch Lomond; the captain likes that one."
    The reproachful voice of Samuel drifted up through the huddle. "Dun know the words, miss."
    "Well, well," Kidd said, choosing to ignore the past few remarks, "Grace O'Malley. Harboring any regrets yet, milady?"
    She bore him a rueful smirk. "Should I be, captain?"
    "It's a shame you turned out this way, O'Malley. You could've bought half of Ireland with the money you'd make from this job."
    "There is not enough money in the world that can pay for even one blade of grass on the moors of my homeland."
    "Is that right? Well, I feel compelled to remind you, madam, that just because you didn't show any backbone back at Madagascar doesn't mean you had nothing to do with your fellows' current situation. You had as much to do with the preparation as I." His expression softened somewhat. "Naturally I am indebted to you for this, madam, so I will make one final offer. You switch sides here and now, I'll spring you from this cell and set you on your merry way with fifteen percent of the earnings, a nice healthy sum of money to... I don't know, build up your castle with extra turrets or something. Whatever you like."
    She spit in his face.
    "As I recall," said Kidd vehemently, wiping his face with a hankerchief, "Ireland and Scotland were once the strongest of allies."
    "You're no Scotsman, Kidd," said Granuaile, jutting out her chin. "No Scot can last as long without honor the way you have. And you're no Englishman, I've found that out too; no Englishman's as rotten a bastard as you are, 'cause they haven't the nerve. The thing you are, Sir William Kidd, is nothing but a bloody American. Always out to take what he can grab, abusing what's given to him 'til it's broken and Daddy England hands out a new one, snatching up the world and everything in it, and letting the consequences be damned."
    Kidd gripped the bars, leaning forward so that the two pirates were but inches apart. "And just what else is there to do, eh? Tell me that. The whole damned world is against us from the womb to the grave. Why not make the best of our situation and be what we are? Pirates. The world's only truly free men."
    "What you have with you are no more than a hundred slaves. But even they have more freedom than a man like you ever will, captain, for they are not caught in the grip of greed. Every man among us has plundered and coveted, aye, but none of them had ever thought to gain their wealth by another man's life."
    "Actually--" Harlock began.
    "Quiet," Granuaile snapped.
    "What men are these," Kidd scoffed, "that consider themselves the governors of piracy, a more useless profession than I have ever encountered? They're but objects to begin with: relics of an unachievable ideal, inert and cumbersome and frivilous, like a painting or a sculpture. A step away from property as it is. Why not use them as means to an end?"
    "Justify it however you want. How do you think the world will remember you for this? That they'll sing your praises to the heavens for your good deeds? All you've done is made yourself another brand of slave trader, and made Blackbeard's heart into a ship of death."
    "You presume to condemn my practices, woman? Just how many people did the four of us and our crews lay to waste en route to Libertalia?"
    "They were in our way."
    "Well," Kidd said, with satisfaction, "you're in my way."

    Read did, in fact, have the maps.
    After glancing at their slightly water-stained surfaces, Inigo had dashed out of the cabin in nothing but his trousers, leaving his female company to rush after him, before remembering herself and putting a shirt on first. A northward breeze had picked up on deck, causing Read to clutch her hat to her head and the rolled-up maps to her chest as she trailed after her captain, who had climbed up to the bow where Fezzik, Stede, and a few others had set up a (rather ill-fated) card game. The pirates were so unaccustomed to his presence after an eight-day reprieve that a few of them seemed to be wondering who he was.
    "We're setting sail," Inigo said.
    Still slightly stunned, Fezzik could only manage to say one thing. "Where?"
    Inigo swung an arm back and pulled a handful of maps from Read's arms, clenched in his fist, and threw them onto the table so that kings and jacks scattered everywhere. The topmost map uncurled slightly in the wind to reveal a red line painted along the west African coast, headed for the Arabian Sea.
    "There," said Inigo, pointing at the X marked on the seaport of Bombay, India. "If we run light and fast and don't stop but when necessary, we can reach it just a day after Kidd's ship has put into harbor."
    "Yer proposin' the impossible," Stede, the newly appointed quartermaster, said flatly.
    "How? How wouldn't it work?" Inigo found the nearest rope and hoisted himself up to get a better speaking distance across the ship. "Listen, everyone! Captain Sparrow and O'Malley are still alive! If we go after them--"
    "But what about the Code?" the third mate interrupted.
    "Even Matthew and Bartholomew knew the Code was only meant to be followed when it suits! If we act now, we can save them, we can save the survivors of the Tirghráthóir, we can save the Order and we can save our way of life!"
    "Get down!" Stede hissed, pulling Inigo down from the rope by his upper arm. "Doncher understand it carn't be done?" The captain and his quartermaster locked eyes. "What yer plannin' carn't work, ye get me, lad? You've not the ships, the men, or the money, too. All you've got is a half-starved pack of vultures in foreign waters in a leaky ship with a-- a-- a Spaniard for a captain. How's that going to inspire anything?"
    "That's it, I give up. Why not a Spanish pirate?" This had been bugging Inigo for ages.
    The quartermaster sighed. "Because buccaneers are the direct result of Spanish tyranny in Caribbean waters," Stede said, as if explaining it to a child. "And pirates are the spiritu'l and biological descendants of buccaneers. Y'see? It's a violation o' sacred principle."
    Inigo stared at him for a long moment.
    "Look, m'just pointin' facts as they are--" Stede said hastily.
    "If this is about the crew..."
    "The crew don't need payin' at this point. They're past carin'. D'you see that? All y'd have to do for 'em is give 'em a cause an' they'd fight for you. WAIT!" Stede exclaimed, before Inigo could resume his post as town crier. "Tha's just the point, lad! Don't bait a dog if y'ain't got the goods, right? We carn't go to India. There's no money for it!"
    "No money," Inigo repeated flatly. He started to walk away.
    "Not fer what you're wantin'!" Stede said, following after him desperately. "I been over the accounts, an' we're lucky to get to Kenya 'less we pick up goods along the way, and y'said yerself even at top speed we'll be in a day after Kidd, an' that might be a day late as it is!"
    "We'll sell things," Inigo thought aloud, walking determinedly back toward his cabin. "We'll sell some of Jack's stuff, we'll sell clothes, we'll-- we'll sell the women if we have to--"
    "It's not good enough, captain!"
    Inigo Montoya rounded on him. "Well, what is good enough?!"
    "Nothing! Nothing is--"
    "Captain." Inigo and Stede turned their attention up above the stern cabin, to see the Jackal standing there with her arms crossed, one boot resting atop a wooden chest. As Delphine saw the two men's gaze drift toward the chest, she slid her foot back and pushed the chest forward, its lid swinging open and gold coins cascading on deck like the waterfall of El Dorado itself. Inigo and his quartermaster (and Read too, for she had just caught up with them) gawked at this sight, the coins tinkling across the planks and glittering in the sunlight, as the Jackal jumped down onto their level and said to her captain, "Whatever you're wanting's yours to have. It's technically Jack's money anyway."
    She made a sort of angry advance, causing Inigo to jump, and then stalked off.
    Puzzled, Inigo turned to Mary Read. "What's her problem?"
    "Oh, she's just jealous," Read informed him, with only the slightest hint of exasperation, mostly masked over by more noticable amusement.
    "...'Jealous'..?" Inigo repeated, shaking his head. Sometimes it didn't pay to figure it out.

    Sometimes it does pay to fast-forward.
    It's the sad truth of literature that, unlike its film counterpart, it does not have the benefits of tastefully-done montages and inspiring music to condense weeks and months into a few moments, to say nothing of maintaining that sense of tension and danger throughout. A human being on "the edge of adventure" for two months straight is nothing but a mental train wreck; the human mind isn't equipped to be on an adrenaline rush that long, especially when it usually can't last more than a few minutes. This is to the disadvantage of the viewer, who while consciously wants time to be expressed accurately, unconsciously doesn't want their enjoyment interrupted by a half hour of tedious-nothingness depicting a ship at sea while nothing very much happens.
    Well, there was sex.
    But you people didn't come to see that.
    ...
    Oh, come on.

    Half a day's sailing out of Bombay, hidden in a small cove up the eastern coast, the Black Pearl lay in calm wait while a hoard of multicolored parrots slowly fluttered in. When they did, the few literate people aboard the ship were gathered together to read the notes attached to the birds' legs.
    "I need to speak wit' the captain," Stede said to Fezzik, after all the messages had been relayed to him.
    "He'z taking heez rest now," Fezzik told him, baring the shorter man from moving past him toward the captain cabin's door.
    "I'll take that to mean he's drinkin'. Look, this is important, right?" Stede ducked under the giant's arm and pushed himself into the room, just in time to see Inigo Montoya brushing half a dozen brandy bottles off the surface of the more-or-less clear desk, which had more recently been host to Granuaile's maps. "Captain," Stede said respectfully, while Inigo shifted into a relatively awake and sober position, "we've got news from our spies in the city. T'ain't good, sir."
    "How not good?"
    Stede told him.
    "Call a meeting immediately," said Inigo, pinching the bridge of his nose. "This is too much for one person to handle when he's drunk."
    The next ten minutes or so were composed of getting the exhausted Cottons sent out with new errands below-deck, rounding up the proper officers and other trusted persons, finally ending with a dozen or so people crowded into the captain's cabin around a table full of maps, on the top of which was one detailing the city of Bombay itself.
    "We undershot," Stede told the assembled, as soon as the door was shut and secured. "Accordin' to our scouts, Kidd's been into harbor for close to a week now, and the last of his allies have docked yesterday. A check wit' records at the city offices show four hundred seventy live captives, meanin' they lost roundabout fifty while sailing, if the cap'n's count was right. We weren't able to get names," Stede added, seeing the looks on some of his comrade's faces. "The local jail's all filled up, and the overflow's bin sent to the fort 'ere--" he pointed to a large boxed-off section on the map "--which is where they're wantin' to hold executions as well. Mass hangings, somewheres like fifty a day. Would be more, but 'pparently they wanted to ease up on the coroner."
    "How many have they killed now?" asked the third mate.
    "None yet. The word's been all through the papers 'bout Kidd and his haul. Nobs're comin' in from all over 'cos it's a once-in-a-lifetime sight, style of thing, so the officers're puttin' the hangings off 'til next Saturday."
    "That gives us four days," Inigo interpretted.
    "Well, that should be plenty of time..." the second mate began.
    "A check of defenses says otherwise, mate," Stede said gravely. "Both the jail an' the fort are under heavy guard. Forty for the jail, hundred-twenty for the fort, an' that's just for the time being. They're anticipatin' escapes during the hangings when everyone's attention's diverted, so the general idea's they'll double the watch. And the fort itself won't be a picnic busting into. Fortified walls, watch towers, gunmen, cannons, the works."
    "The hangings would be the best time to break in, when their minds are elsewhere," Inigo mused. He rubbed his chin and stared intently at the map. "But with two hundred and forty men..."
    "What about our captain?" the third mate asked Stede. "When do we know when his number's up?"
    "Sources say the guys're chosen random, but big-namers get their dates announced early in the paper so's people can know which ones they wants to see. Jack won't be in 'em."
    "If we storm the jail..." someone suggested.
    "Might draw forces away from the fort," another agreed.
    "Not enough," Stede said, shaking his head.
    "If we hired mercenaries..."
    "No funds left."
    "Infiltrated the fort as guards..."
    "We don't smell like soap enough to pass."
    "Why don't we disguise ourselves as caterers?"
    "There's no caterers at executions!"
    "Well, all those nobs out there wit' nothin' to eat, you ask me what's the logical thing to do."
    Inigo was muttering. "Fifty men with forty swords and twenty pistols in a single ship against over three hundred men set to guard five hundred older men, scattered across an enormous city in foreign territory and unsympathetic locals and four days left to their lives-- Eureka!" Inigo announced, snapping his head up.
    "Wossat mean?" the second mate asked.
    Inigo ignored him. In fact, he ignored everyone, extricating himself from around the table and throwing open the door onto deck, while announcing, "A siege of this magnitude requires the mind of a brilliant strategist, and for that none but one man will do. Fezzik, I need the Man in Black!"
    "Yoo are de Man in Black!" Fezzik called after him, exasperated.
    "I meant the other one!"
 

End Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XV