Fic: Crossing the Bar (12/?)
Jun. 5th, 2006 10:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
honoratAuthor: Honorat
Rating: PG-13 for language and violence
Characters: Commodore Norrington, Jack Sparrow, Anamaria, Gibbs, the crew of the Black Pearl,
Pairing: Jack/Anamaria if you squint.
Disclaimer: The characters of PotC! She’s taken them! Get after her, you feckless pack of ingrates!
Summary: The battle continues. Jack’s patience finally runs out. On the rollercoaster of this story, this one has a major dip. The sense of humour is in abeyance again. Every once in awhile, I have to write some raving sailing. Norrington has finally got the Black Pearl trapped. Jack is bound to do something crazy, but will it be the last thing he does?
Thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
geek_mama_2 for the beta help.
1 Ambush
2 No Regrets
3 The Judgment of the Sea
4 The Sea Pays Homage
5 Risking All That Is Mortal and Unsure
6 Troubles Come Not Single Spies
7 To Dare Do All That May Become a Man
8 Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here
9 A Special Providence in the Fall
10 For Where We Are Is Hell
11 To Beat the Surges Under and Ride Upon Their Backs
* * * * *
12 One Equal Temper of Heroic Hearts
The trap was closing. Jack could feel its teeth sinking deep into his soul. Already the Dauntless was nearly upon them, driving hard, masts rolling beneath the leaden sky, seas boiling past her bow, inexorably stalking his tortured Black Pearl. The Defender continued to nip at her flanks, snarling shots from the lee. If his ship did not move soon, the fight would be over. Norrington’s men would board her, and his drained and shattered crew would be fighting steel and pistol shot for their lives.
Out on the bowsprit, he knew Anamaria was contending with the sea and the storm to steal time from the jaws of death. She had asked him to make that sacrifice mean something, to let the ship run free the minute running was possible, and he knew he would give that order. He had no other choice. One good death. That was all he had been able to promise any of them. He hoped, if it came to that, it would be good enough.
The shout drifted aft. The foretopsail stay was in place. She had done it.
Cotton stood beside him at the Pearl’s helm. Gibbs was a stout-hearted presence to his right. Captain Sparrow kept his eyes on the rain-smudged silhouette of his ship’s bow and gave the word.
“Let her loose, gentlemen.”
As Gibbs set in motion the trimming of her sails and Cotton brought her helm up, the Black Pearl began to pay off, her head falling off from the wind and dropping to leeward. Gradually, the great black ship began to make way again, and only just in time. The first of the returning Dauntless’s broadsides was already chewing into her hull.
Each time his ship buried her bowsprit in gray-green water, Jack held his breath. When the shout went up to raise the jib and the dark, triangular sail billowed and caught the wind, he knew Anamaria had managed to hang on at least this long. One more stay and she could return to the ship. His other crewmen faced their own battles with wind that sought to pluck them from the yards, splitting canvas that nearly whipped them off into the sea, and deadly hissing shots that hungered for their blood. Even as he waited, his men on the mizzen topgallant succeeded in sheeting it home. He could not have asked for a more magnificent group of souls with whom and for whom to make this last stand
His ship, drawing strength from the greater press of canvas, heeled over further, lee rail all but buried in frothing water. Neck and neck the Dauntless and the Black Pearl ran, like the thoroughbreds they were, knifelike cutwaters slicing through the sea, sails straining aloft, graceful hulls now leaping high from crest to crest, now smothered in foam.
Watching the Dauntless, Jack was struck anew by the terrible beauty of a warship, her sides spangled with fire, the deadly pulse of her guns shivering the air. His broken and bleeding Black Pearl strained to flee her splendid nemesis, bitterly flogging nearly to windward, clawing her way towards the open sea. The wind screamed around her. Her plates ground and groaned with her effort. However, she could not shake the tall ship that paced serenely beside her. Even with the return of her headsails and the new topgallant, they had not been able to keep enough whole canvas on the Pearl to make the difference. They were caught, like insects in amber, in that ship-straining, man-killing, sea-swept battle.
* * * * *
Anamaria was slithering her way back past the bowsprit cap down towards the fore stay collar when the shot struck. White heat coursed up her right leg as she was nearly thrown off the spar. Only the fact that the impact drove her against the fore top staysail clew lines kept her from plunging into the sea churning far below.
Her first wild thought, when she could think again, was that the dolphin striker was gone and the martingales that guyed the jib boom were lost.
Oh shitshitshitshit! her mind chanted in hysterical panic. But a swift inspection revealed that it was not so bad as that. The spritsail yard had been blown away. Easy love, she soothed the ship with one shaking hand, You’ll be able to live with that.
On the other hand, Anamaria herself was not in such good shape. The heat in her leg had gone cold as ice, radiating up past her knee into her thigh. She knew how cold ice was. One of the bats that inhabited Jack’s head had stuck firmly under that red scarf of his and had flapped its wings until they’d been off to sail around Cape Horn. She’d climbed rigging three-inches-thick with ice, felt ice crackle in her clothing on deck as the salt-wash from those southern graybeards had frozen it stiff, strained her eyes through thick white fog for great ice islands that could loom silently out of the cold seas and swallow a ship alive.
Ice numbed your hands until you had to watch your fingers to know what they were doing, just as she was having to do now. Ice hurt—and sure enough, pain followed. Knifing pain. Pain that burned like fire and bitter cold until she could scarcely see, until flames licked at her vision and ice ran in her veins instead of blood.
She didn’t look at her leg, didn’t want to know what had happened. Bad enough anyway. She couldn’t use it. The next comber that swept the Pearl’s bow would take her with it. Except it didn’t. Somehow she was still on that dark wooden strip of life in the midst of the heaving chaos when the water drained away with a roar. She choked down a scream that nearly made her stomach writhe in revolt. Then Anamaria did the only thing she could do. She resumed her slow, inexorable creep towards that final stay.
Her world narrowed to her clumsy, uncooperative hands and the span of black timber between them.
Her arrival at the forestay collar was a surprise to her. It had seemed like her life would go on unchanging, forever. Bloodied fingers, rough scarred wood, crushing water, bright fierce pain, endless toil, over and over again. But here was her destination. She stared dumbly at the horseshoe-shaped wooden heart through which the collar ran, trying to remember why it had seemed so important to find it.
Somehow she did it. Somehow she got the final stay set and the fore staysail rigged. She had no memory of doing it. Her muscles were quivering from the exertion of holding herself on the bowsprit against the fury of the seas that battered her. Her fingers could scarcely obey a single command. But somehow the job was done.
Anamaria felt the last knot tug home. From a great distance she saw herself raise one hand in faint signal. All clear, Jack. Give this lady her head. As she began her final passage back to the ship, she heard the staysail crack and hold as the wind hit it, but the feel and the sound of the ship was receding until all Anamaria could hear was the rumbling, rushing voice of the sea, and all she could feel was its violent hand plucking her, unresisting, from the spar.
In the end, all she could see was shadow.
To stop struggling, to give in and fall, was such a blessed relief. Peaceful. Anamaria waited calmly for the sudden shock of water, waited to be sucked under by the seas rushing past the Pearl’s bow, waited to feel the blades of barnacled timbers score her flesh. She was numb now. Frozen as ice. She would not feel much, not for long.
But it never came. Instead the darkness into which she fell enfolded her like great black wings, and the last thing she felt before her mind went numb, too, was the comforting brush of feathers.
* * * * *
When Requin came running along the decks, ignoring the barrage of cannon fire, leaping up the stairways, his eyes wild, his mouth twisted into wrenching sobs, Gibbs felt an unexpected sick sensation slide down a comber into his gut. Jack leapt down the companionway to meet him on the quarterdeck, eyes full of questions and dread at what the answers might be.
The boy was babbling frantically to the captain in that heathen language of his, and the captain was trying to calm him even as Jack’s face was turning to cold, grey marble, the little expression left in him bleeding away, leaving only stone behind. The questions he fired at Requin, also in French, were terse and brittle.
When the report had reached its conclusion, Jack cursed long and fluently. Gibbs didn’t know what he was saying, but Requin’s eyes opened wide and his mouth dropped in awe.
“What is it, Cap’n?” Gibbs asked when the captain fell silent and simply stood, rooted to the deck.
“It’s Anamaria.” Jack’s voice was numb and toneless, his eyes full of starless night. “She’s been washed off the bowsprit.”
Gibbs stared at the captain, trying to drive such an impossible sentence into his head. Anamaria overboard. And they were unable to stop.
Jack continued translating. “He tried . . . they tried to get her to come back in when they lost the lifeline, but she wouldn’t take the time. Then when she caught a piece of shrapnel, she still wouldn’t strike her colours. Just kept on tryin’ to get those headsails on. One minute she was there, then the bowsprit was swallowed by a sea, and then she was gone.”
The captain gazed out towards the bow of the Black Pearl. “Bloody stupid woman, tryin’ t’ play the bloody hero,” he said. And Gibbs could hear some throttled emotion trying to get past the tightness of that statement.
“Did she get them on?” Gibbs asked.
“What?”
“The stays. Did she get them set before . . .” he trailed off.
“Oh, aye,” Jack spoke angrily. “She got them on. All of ‘em. Even after she’d been hit.”
“Then at least,” Gibbs said, trying to make sense of it for himself, “at least it weren’t for nothin’. Her goin’ out there, I mean.”
The look Jack turned on him shut him up like a door slammed in his face.
“Of course it was for nothing,” the captain snapped, cold fury stirring. “This is all for nothing. I do not know what we have done that merits this hell, but it ends here and it ends now. No more of mine will be cut down on these decks like cattle.”
His left hand closed around the hilt of his cutlass.
Gibbs shivered as the ship rocked under the fusillade of Navy guns. He reflected that Norrington had the right idea—to blast them to pieces from a distance. The commodore would not want to be facing the pirate captain over cold steel at this moment. He had a feeling he’d just seen Jack Sparrow’s patience run out.
Pivoting violently, Jack stalked back towards the helm of his ship, clawing his right arm out of the sling.
“Jack!” Gibbs was alarmed. “Jack Sparrow, what’s in your head, ye daft bugger?” He limped worriedly along behind the captain. What were they going to do if the captain really had slipped a cog?
Jack didn’t answer him. He took the poop deck steps two at a time, leaving Gibbs far in his wake.
“Mr. Cotton,” Captain Sparrow ordered, striding up to the Black Pearl’s great wheel. “I’ve got her helm.”
“Three sheets to the wind,” the parrot squawked, startled.
“Aye, ye’ve never said a truer word, Cotton,” Gibbs growled, coming up panting as Cotton stepped away from the helm and Jack closed his hands over it. “Jack Sparrow, ye can’t be doin’ that! Ye’ve broke your ribs!”
“Can.” Jack gasped as the weight of sea and ship crashed against his abused body. “Did.”
“Jack.” Gibbs tried to reason with him. “Captain, ye can’t make her go any faster just by torturin’ yourself!” But he could tell he was whistling psalms to the taffrail.
“Mr. Gibbs,” Jack said through clenched teeth, the words fractured by pain, “the Black Pearl— is not just any—ship. She has something—that is not bound by any law. It’s not something in her keel—or her hull or her decks—or her sails. It’s not something they can—blast away—with their little cannon. It’s something—in her heart.”
And then for all the attention the captain paid his quartermaster and his hovering helmsman, he might have been alone on her decks. His face contorted with effort, he held the wheel steady in the turmoil of the seas. With one hand, he caressed the Pearl’s helm like a man does a racehorse being asked for the final effort in the home stretch. Although Gibbs had to strain to catch his words, the captain’s anguished call to his ship, coming through shallow gasps for air, sent a chill down his quartermaster’s spine.
“Fly, my lady! Fly!—Take the wind—in your teeth and rip it—out of the heavens!—Do it!—Before we are all dead men!”
The wind did not change. The sea did not grow calmer. None of her sails were altered. There was no letup in the punishment she was taking from her opponent. However, as if in answer to her captain’s voice and to his touch alone, the great black ship surged forward, her masts raking, her shattered hull crying out, her shot-torn sails gathering in the thunder of the wind.
Slowly, impossibly, miraculously, she began to pull ahead of the Dauntless.
Gibbs felt his eyes sting with something that was not the spray of the sea or the wind in his face. Aye, Jack was right about this wild, free ship of his. And there was something more, too. Gibbs turned to consider Captain Jack Sparrow, gripping the helm of the Black Pearl until surely his knuckles must bruise his skin, eyes striking sparks into the storm, teeth bared in feral defiance, deliberately oblivious to his own agony. There was something in her captain that was not bound by any law either. It was not some strength in that slender, muscle-corded body, neither could they break it with his bones nor bleed it from his flesh. There was something about the heart of this man, like the heart of his ship, that in the end, refused to lose.
* * * * *
On the quarterdeck of the Dauntless, Commodore Norrington watched in disbelief as the distance between his sleek-hulled, perfectly-trimmed battleship and the splintered, crippled, sail-torn Black Pearl widened. The Dauntless was carrying as much canvas as she could in such weather, but she was being out-raced by the nearly-destroyed pirate vessel. The fastest ship in the Caribbean? Perhaps she had been. But now? He’d nearly stripped her planking down to her ribs with his long guns. Half her sails were shredded or flailing uselessly. Just how did that ship even continue to sail?
“Signal the Defender!” he snapped. “Now is the time to cross her T. I want that damned ship cut off!”
The flags rattled fiercely up their line, calling forth an answering signal from the smaller, swifter brig. As though unleashed, the Defender sprang to match the Black Pearl’s speed, then exceeded it. Norrington smiled grimly. He had at least done that much damage to Sparrow’s ship. Gracefully, the fiery little pirate-hunter curved her course in order to block the Pearl’s escape, her broadsides already lashing down the enemy’s decks.
The Dauntless stayed hard on the pirate ship’s starboard quarter, pinning her.
This is it Jack Sparrow. Norrington thought. We have had our words. You have fought well, but it is finished now. There was never any doubt about this outcome. It is time to stand down.
* * * * *
From the distance that separated him from pain and grief and the sounds of his dying ship and his dying men, Jack Sparrow could hear a voice crying.
“Curse you for breathin’, Jack Sparrow! You’re bloody mad!”
Whoever it was did not know the half of it.
Jack’s hands were welded to the handles of his Pearl’s wheel. Sweat joined the rain in bathing his entire body. He could feel his muscles shaking, threatening mutiny, but still he held. The Black Pearl did not deviate one mark from her course.
Inside his head, a litany of curses and oaths ebbed and flowed through the sharp slices of pain he was ignoring. Damn you, Commodore Norrington! Damn you and your beautiful ships to every hell of every god and devil on Earth. No man of mine will stand alone on your scaffold to be jeered by your mobs. Not one of these brave men will rot in chains in that stone arch. Your hands, stained with their blood, will never touch the helm of this ship, nor will she ever sail in your shackles. You shall not take this prize. I swear it.
The Defender’s captain was obviously a man of iron nerve. He held his ground as the Black Pearl charged towards the smaller ship and the limitless, open sea just beyond her. To avoid a collision Jack would have to wheel his ship into the wind. With the Dauntless immediately on her flank and high-sided head seas halting her bow, the Pearl would find herself stuck in the eye of the wind, dead in the water, her sails luffing. Clearly the man expected that the pirates would prefer this to certain death. Admirable tactics except for one slight miscalculation.
Jack gritted his teeth and held the helm steady amidships. C’mon, he thought with ferocious concentration at the other captain. Move your bloody boat! Move her before we make you our escort to hell. For we have not yet tasted the hope that we might survive this battle and dead men have nothing to lose. You cannot turn us aside with misguided heroics. I will drive the Pearl’s bowsprit through the heart of your bonny brig before I let you edge us into the wind.
* * * * *
As the Black Pearl moved beyond range of all but the Dauntless’s bow chasers and swivel guns, Commodore Norrington called the orders that would send his ship in pursuit. He had to leave Sparrow no option but to engage the Defender.
Captain Walton had his ship perfectly positioned. But as Norrington kept watch through his glass, he felt like the pit of his stomach had sunk into the trough of a high wave. The Defender was blocking Sparrow’s path to the sea, leaving the pirate with no viable alternative. To veer to port would pin him too close to the rocks of the coast to make the necessary tack. To veer to starboard would effectively put his ship in irons. Under ordinary circumstances the trap would be exceptionally well-executed, the foe halted and boarded, and commendations would be forthcoming. However, Norrington reminded himself, this was no ordinary pirate with whom they were dealing. The Defender’s courage and nerve might not mean a thing.
Jack Sparrow had actually succeeded in running that bar during this storm in spite of capsizing his vessel. His little accidental envoy had proclaimed his crew’s determination to die before surrendering. In other words, that pirate was perfectly willing to take his ship down. Even now, the commodore could detect no hesitation in the Black Pearl’s headlong flight. Sparrow was hurling her right into the Defender.
In something akin to awe, he watched through the misty stew of spume and rain as the great black ship thundered down on the little brig, accelerating down the long fetch of the breakers, pale spray and solid sheets of water flying from her bow and quarters, her bowsprit rising sky-high out of the waves’ troughs, her rudder biting into face of the seas behind her. Ravaged and laid waste, yet with her straining sails and thrusting masts, her washports pouring the seas that rushed across her decks, she was a magnificent sight. And even without a single gun firing, she was as deadly as she was beautiful.
Commodore Norrington held his breath, hoping Walton would recognize the danger before it was too late.
* * * * *
At the last possible moment, as their crews stared at one another in horror, hearing each other’s loud curses, the Defender wrenched aside from the onrushing Black Pearl. Their jib-booms nearly kissed across less than five feet. For an instant the shadowy, lofty pirate ship loomed over the Navy brig still spitting fire at her, and the next she was soaring past.
She had made it through the last gate out of hell.
Straight as the flight of an albatross the Black Pearl swept into her element, the infinite, cleansing sea, chained no more to the corrupting land. The exulting voice of the wind rose in crescendo as she passed, a monarch, into her rightful dominion. Ahead of her was only a wilderness of foam-laced seas stretching out beyond the edge of thought.
Jack Sparrow’s heart lifted for one wild moment of aching exhilaration. Freedom.
* * * * *
TBC
13 Though the Seas Threaten, They are Merciful
Rating: PG-13 for language and violence
Characters: Commodore Norrington, Jack Sparrow, Anamaria, Gibbs, the crew of the Black Pearl,
Pairing: Jack/Anamaria if you squint.
Disclaimer: The characters of PotC! She’s taken them! Get after her, you feckless pack of ingrates!
Summary: The battle continues. Jack’s patience finally runs out. On the rollercoaster of this story, this one has a major dip. The sense of humour is in abeyance again. Every once in awhile, I have to write some raving sailing. Norrington has finally got the Black Pearl trapped. Jack is bound to do something crazy, but will it be the last thing he does?
Thanks to
geek_mama_2 for the beta help.1 Ambush
2 No Regrets
3 The Judgment of the Sea
4 The Sea Pays Homage
5 Risking All That Is Mortal and Unsure
6 Troubles Come Not Single Spies
7 To Dare Do All That May Become a Man
8 Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here
9 A Special Providence in the Fall
10 For Where We Are Is Hell
11 To Beat the Surges Under and Ride Upon Their Backs
* * * * *
12 One Equal Temper of Heroic Hearts
The trap was closing. Jack could feel its teeth sinking deep into his soul. Already the Dauntless was nearly upon them, driving hard, masts rolling beneath the leaden sky, seas boiling past her bow, inexorably stalking his tortured Black Pearl. The Defender continued to nip at her flanks, snarling shots from the lee. If his ship did not move soon, the fight would be over. Norrington’s men would board her, and his drained and shattered crew would be fighting steel and pistol shot for their lives.
Out on the bowsprit, he knew Anamaria was contending with the sea and the storm to steal time from the jaws of death. She had asked him to make that sacrifice mean something, to let the ship run free the minute running was possible, and he knew he would give that order. He had no other choice. One good death. That was all he had been able to promise any of them. He hoped, if it came to that, it would be good enough.
The shout drifted aft. The foretopsail stay was in place. She had done it.
Cotton stood beside him at the Pearl’s helm. Gibbs was a stout-hearted presence to his right. Captain Sparrow kept his eyes on the rain-smudged silhouette of his ship’s bow and gave the word.
“Let her loose, gentlemen.”
As Gibbs set in motion the trimming of her sails and Cotton brought her helm up, the Black Pearl began to pay off, her head falling off from the wind and dropping to leeward. Gradually, the great black ship began to make way again, and only just in time. The first of the returning Dauntless’s broadsides was already chewing into her hull.
Each time his ship buried her bowsprit in gray-green water, Jack held his breath. When the shout went up to raise the jib and the dark, triangular sail billowed and caught the wind, he knew Anamaria had managed to hang on at least this long. One more stay and she could return to the ship. His other crewmen faced their own battles with wind that sought to pluck them from the yards, splitting canvas that nearly whipped them off into the sea, and deadly hissing shots that hungered for their blood. Even as he waited, his men on the mizzen topgallant succeeded in sheeting it home. He could not have asked for a more magnificent group of souls with whom and for whom to make this last stand
His ship, drawing strength from the greater press of canvas, heeled over further, lee rail all but buried in frothing water. Neck and neck the Dauntless and the Black Pearl ran, like the thoroughbreds they were, knifelike cutwaters slicing through the sea, sails straining aloft, graceful hulls now leaping high from crest to crest, now smothered in foam.
Watching the Dauntless, Jack was struck anew by the terrible beauty of a warship, her sides spangled with fire, the deadly pulse of her guns shivering the air. His broken and bleeding Black Pearl strained to flee her splendid nemesis, bitterly flogging nearly to windward, clawing her way towards the open sea. The wind screamed around her. Her plates ground and groaned with her effort. However, she could not shake the tall ship that paced serenely beside her. Even with the return of her headsails and the new topgallant, they had not been able to keep enough whole canvas on the Pearl to make the difference. They were caught, like insects in amber, in that ship-straining, man-killing, sea-swept battle.
* * * * *
Anamaria was slithering her way back past the bowsprit cap down towards the fore stay collar when the shot struck. White heat coursed up her right leg as she was nearly thrown off the spar. Only the fact that the impact drove her against the fore top staysail clew lines kept her from plunging into the sea churning far below.
Her first wild thought, when she could think again, was that the dolphin striker was gone and the martingales that guyed the jib boom were lost.
Oh shitshitshitshit! her mind chanted in hysterical panic. But a swift inspection revealed that it was not so bad as that. The spritsail yard had been blown away. Easy love, she soothed the ship with one shaking hand, You’ll be able to live with that.
On the other hand, Anamaria herself was not in such good shape. The heat in her leg had gone cold as ice, radiating up past her knee into her thigh. She knew how cold ice was. One of the bats that inhabited Jack’s head had stuck firmly under that red scarf of his and had flapped its wings until they’d been off to sail around Cape Horn. She’d climbed rigging three-inches-thick with ice, felt ice crackle in her clothing on deck as the salt-wash from those southern graybeards had frozen it stiff, strained her eyes through thick white fog for great ice islands that could loom silently out of the cold seas and swallow a ship alive.
Ice numbed your hands until you had to watch your fingers to know what they were doing, just as she was having to do now. Ice hurt—and sure enough, pain followed. Knifing pain. Pain that burned like fire and bitter cold until she could scarcely see, until flames licked at her vision and ice ran in her veins instead of blood.
She didn’t look at her leg, didn’t want to know what had happened. Bad enough anyway. She couldn’t use it. The next comber that swept the Pearl’s bow would take her with it. Except it didn’t. Somehow she was still on that dark wooden strip of life in the midst of the heaving chaos when the water drained away with a roar. She choked down a scream that nearly made her stomach writhe in revolt. Then Anamaria did the only thing she could do. She resumed her slow, inexorable creep towards that final stay.
Her world narrowed to her clumsy, uncooperative hands and the span of black timber between them.
Her arrival at the forestay collar was a surprise to her. It had seemed like her life would go on unchanging, forever. Bloodied fingers, rough scarred wood, crushing water, bright fierce pain, endless toil, over and over again. But here was her destination. She stared dumbly at the horseshoe-shaped wooden heart through which the collar ran, trying to remember why it had seemed so important to find it.
Somehow she did it. Somehow she got the final stay set and the fore staysail rigged. She had no memory of doing it. Her muscles were quivering from the exertion of holding herself on the bowsprit against the fury of the seas that battered her. Her fingers could scarcely obey a single command. But somehow the job was done.
Anamaria felt the last knot tug home. From a great distance she saw herself raise one hand in faint signal. All clear, Jack. Give this lady her head. As she began her final passage back to the ship, she heard the staysail crack and hold as the wind hit it, but the feel and the sound of the ship was receding until all Anamaria could hear was the rumbling, rushing voice of the sea, and all she could feel was its violent hand plucking her, unresisting, from the spar.
In the end, all she could see was shadow.
To stop struggling, to give in and fall, was such a blessed relief. Peaceful. Anamaria waited calmly for the sudden shock of water, waited to be sucked under by the seas rushing past the Pearl’s bow, waited to feel the blades of barnacled timbers score her flesh. She was numb now. Frozen as ice. She would not feel much, not for long.
But it never came. Instead the darkness into which she fell enfolded her like great black wings, and the last thing she felt before her mind went numb, too, was the comforting brush of feathers.
* * * * *
When Requin came running along the decks, ignoring the barrage of cannon fire, leaping up the stairways, his eyes wild, his mouth twisted into wrenching sobs, Gibbs felt an unexpected sick sensation slide down a comber into his gut. Jack leapt down the companionway to meet him on the quarterdeck, eyes full of questions and dread at what the answers might be.
The boy was babbling frantically to the captain in that heathen language of his, and the captain was trying to calm him even as Jack’s face was turning to cold, grey marble, the little expression left in him bleeding away, leaving only stone behind. The questions he fired at Requin, also in French, were terse and brittle.
When the report had reached its conclusion, Jack cursed long and fluently. Gibbs didn’t know what he was saying, but Requin’s eyes opened wide and his mouth dropped in awe.
“What is it, Cap’n?” Gibbs asked when the captain fell silent and simply stood, rooted to the deck.
“It’s Anamaria.” Jack’s voice was numb and toneless, his eyes full of starless night. “She’s been washed off the bowsprit.”
Gibbs stared at the captain, trying to drive such an impossible sentence into his head. Anamaria overboard. And they were unable to stop.
Jack continued translating. “He tried . . . they tried to get her to come back in when they lost the lifeline, but she wouldn’t take the time. Then when she caught a piece of shrapnel, she still wouldn’t strike her colours. Just kept on tryin’ to get those headsails on. One minute she was there, then the bowsprit was swallowed by a sea, and then she was gone.”
The captain gazed out towards the bow of the Black Pearl. “Bloody stupid woman, tryin’ t’ play the bloody hero,” he said. And Gibbs could hear some throttled emotion trying to get past the tightness of that statement.
“Did she get them on?” Gibbs asked.
“What?”
“The stays. Did she get them set before . . .” he trailed off.
“Oh, aye,” Jack spoke angrily. “She got them on. All of ‘em. Even after she’d been hit.”
“Then at least,” Gibbs said, trying to make sense of it for himself, “at least it weren’t for nothin’. Her goin’ out there, I mean.”
The look Jack turned on him shut him up like a door slammed in his face.
“Of course it was for nothing,” the captain snapped, cold fury stirring. “This is all for nothing. I do not know what we have done that merits this hell, but it ends here and it ends now. No more of mine will be cut down on these decks like cattle.”
His left hand closed around the hilt of his cutlass.
Gibbs shivered as the ship rocked under the fusillade of Navy guns. He reflected that Norrington had the right idea—to blast them to pieces from a distance. The commodore would not want to be facing the pirate captain over cold steel at this moment. He had a feeling he’d just seen Jack Sparrow’s patience run out.
Pivoting violently, Jack stalked back towards the helm of his ship, clawing his right arm out of the sling.
“Jack!” Gibbs was alarmed. “Jack Sparrow, what’s in your head, ye daft bugger?” He limped worriedly along behind the captain. What were they going to do if the captain really had slipped a cog?
Jack didn’t answer him. He took the poop deck steps two at a time, leaving Gibbs far in his wake.
“Mr. Cotton,” Captain Sparrow ordered, striding up to the Black Pearl’s great wheel. “I’ve got her helm.”
“Three sheets to the wind,” the parrot squawked, startled.
“Aye, ye’ve never said a truer word, Cotton,” Gibbs growled, coming up panting as Cotton stepped away from the helm and Jack closed his hands over it. “Jack Sparrow, ye can’t be doin’ that! Ye’ve broke your ribs!”
“Can.” Jack gasped as the weight of sea and ship crashed against his abused body. “Did.”
“Jack.” Gibbs tried to reason with him. “Captain, ye can’t make her go any faster just by torturin’ yourself!” But he could tell he was whistling psalms to the taffrail.
“Mr. Gibbs,” Jack said through clenched teeth, the words fractured by pain, “the Black Pearl— is not just any—ship. She has something—that is not bound by any law. It’s not something in her keel—or her hull or her decks—or her sails. It’s not something they can—blast away—with their little cannon. It’s something—in her heart.”
And then for all the attention the captain paid his quartermaster and his hovering helmsman, he might have been alone on her decks. His face contorted with effort, he held the wheel steady in the turmoil of the seas. With one hand, he caressed the Pearl’s helm like a man does a racehorse being asked for the final effort in the home stretch. Although Gibbs had to strain to catch his words, the captain’s anguished call to his ship, coming through shallow gasps for air, sent a chill down his quartermaster’s spine.
“Fly, my lady! Fly!—Take the wind—in your teeth and rip it—out of the heavens!—Do it!—Before we are all dead men!”
The wind did not change. The sea did not grow calmer. None of her sails were altered. There was no letup in the punishment she was taking from her opponent. However, as if in answer to her captain’s voice and to his touch alone, the great black ship surged forward, her masts raking, her shattered hull crying out, her shot-torn sails gathering in the thunder of the wind.
Slowly, impossibly, miraculously, she began to pull ahead of the Dauntless.
Gibbs felt his eyes sting with something that was not the spray of the sea or the wind in his face. Aye, Jack was right about this wild, free ship of his. And there was something more, too. Gibbs turned to consider Captain Jack Sparrow, gripping the helm of the Black Pearl until surely his knuckles must bruise his skin, eyes striking sparks into the storm, teeth bared in feral defiance, deliberately oblivious to his own agony. There was something in her captain that was not bound by any law either. It was not some strength in that slender, muscle-corded body, neither could they break it with his bones nor bleed it from his flesh. There was something about the heart of this man, like the heart of his ship, that in the end, refused to lose.
* * * * *
On the quarterdeck of the Dauntless, Commodore Norrington watched in disbelief as the distance between his sleek-hulled, perfectly-trimmed battleship and the splintered, crippled, sail-torn Black Pearl widened. The Dauntless was carrying as much canvas as she could in such weather, but she was being out-raced by the nearly-destroyed pirate vessel. The fastest ship in the Caribbean? Perhaps she had been. But now? He’d nearly stripped her planking down to her ribs with his long guns. Half her sails were shredded or flailing uselessly. Just how did that ship even continue to sail?
“Signal the Defender!” he snapped. “Now is the time to cross her T. I want that damned ship cut off!”
The flags rattled fiercely up their line, calling forth an answering signal from the smaller, swifter brig. As though unleashed, the Defender sprang to match the Black Pearl’s speed, then exceeded it. Norrington smiled grimly. He had at least done that much damage to Sparrow’s ship. Gracefully, the fiery little pirate-hunter curved her course in order to block the Pearl’s escape, her broadsides already lashing down the enemy’s decks.
The Dauntless stayed hard on the pirate ship’s starboard quarter, pinning her.
This is it Jack Sparrow. Norrington thought. We have had our words. You have fought well, but it is finished now. There was never any doubt about this outcome. It is time to stand down.
* * * * *
From the distance that separated him from pain and grief and the sounds of his dying ship and his dying men, Jack Sparrow could hear a voice crying.
“Curse you for breathin’, Jack Sparrow! You’re bloody mad!”
Whoever it was did not know the half of it.
Jack’s hands were welded to the handles of his Pearl’s wheel. Sweat joined the rain in bathing his entire body. He could feel his muscles shaking, threatening mutiny, but still he held. The Black Pearl did not deviate one mark from her course.
Inside his head, a litany of curses and oaths ebbed and flowed through the sharp slices of pain he was ignoring. Damn you, Commodore Norrington! Damn you and your beautiful ships to every hell of every god and devil on Earth. No man of mine will stand alone on your scaffold to be jeered by your mobs. Not one of these brave men will rot in chains in that stone arch. Your hands, stained with their blood, will never touch the helm of this ship, nor will she ever sail in your shackles. You shall not take this prize. I swear it.
The Defender’s captain was obviously a man of iron nerve. He held his ground as the Black Pearl charged towards the smaller ship and the limitless, open sea just beyond her. To avoid a collision Jack would have to wheel his ship into the wind. With the Dauntless immediately on her flank and high-sided head seas halting her bow, the Pearl would find herself stuck in the eye of the wind, dead in the water, her sails luffing. Clearly the man expected that the pirates would prefer this to certain death. Admirable tactics except for one slight miscalculation.
Jack gritted his teeth and held the helm steady amidships. C’mon, he thought with ferocious concentration at the other captain. Move your bloody boat! Move her before we make you our escort to hell. For we have not yet tasted the hope that we might survive this battle and dead men have nothing to lose. You cannot turn us aside with misguided heroics. I will drive the Pearl’s bowsprit through the heart of your bonny brig before I let you edge us into the wind.
* * * * *
As the Black Pearl moved beyond range of all but the Dauntless’s bow chasers and swivel guns, Commodore Norrington called the orders that would send his ship in pursuit. He had to leave Sparrow no option but to engage the Defender.
Captain Walton had his ship perfectly positioned. But as Norrington kept watch through his glass, he felt like the pit of his stomach had sunk into the trough of a high wave. The Defender was blocking Sparrow’s path to the sea, leaving the pirate with no viable alternative. To veer to port would pin him too close to the rocks of the coast to make the necessary tack. To veer to starboard would effectively put his ship in irons. Under ordinary circumstances the trap would be exceptionally well-executed, the foe halted and boarded, and commendations would be forthcoming. However, Norrington reminded himself, this was no ordinary pirate with whom they were dealing. The Defender’s courage and nerve might not mean a thing.
Jack Sparrow had actually succeeded in running that bar during this storm in spite of capsizing his vessel. His little accidental envoy had proclaimed his crew’s determination to die before surrendering. In other words, that pirate was perfectly willing to take his ship down. Even now, the commodore could detect no hesitation in the Black Pearl’s headlong flight. Sparrow was hurling her right into the Defender.
In something akin to awe, he watched through the misty stew of spume and rain as the great black ship thundered down on the little brig, accelerating down the long fetch of the breakers, pale spray and solid sheets of water flying from her bow and quarters, her bowsprit rising sky-high out of the waves’ troughs, her rudder biting into face of the seas behind her. Ravaged and laid waste, yet with her straining sails and thrusting masts, her washports pouring the seas that rushed across her decks, she was a magnificent sight. And even without a single gun firing, she was as deadly as she was beautiful.
Commodore Norrington held his breath, hoping Walton would recognize the danger before it was too late.
* * * * *
At the last possible moment, as their crews stared at one another in horror, hearing each other’s loud curses, the Defender wrenched aside from the onrushing Black Pearl. Their jib-booms nearly kissed across less than five feet. For an instant the shadowy, lofty pirate ship loomed over the Navy brig still spitting fire at her, and the next she was soaring past.
She had made it through the last gate out of hell.
Straight as the flight of an albatross the Black Pearl swept into her element, the infinite, cleansing sea, chained no more to the corrupting land. The exulting voice of the wind rose in crescendo as she passed, a monarch, into her rightful dominion. Ahead of her was only a wilderness of foam-laced seas stretching out beyond the edge of thought.
Jack Sparrow’s heart lifted for one wild moment of aching exhilaration. Freedom.
* * * * *
TBC
13 Though the Seas Threaten, They are Merciful