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honoratby Honorat
Rating: PG-13 for language
Characters: Jack Sparrow, Anamaria, the crew of the Black Pearl, Commodore Norrington, Lieutenant Gillette
Pairing: Jack/Anamaria though you couldn’t tell by this chapter
Disclaimer: The characters of PotC! She’s taken them! Get after her, you feckless pack of ingrates!
Summary: 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? All death threats may be sent, as usual, to the Andromeda galaxy. And may I remind you that, dead, I am of no use to you and cannot write chapter 4.
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
Joshamee Gibbs squinted up at the helm where Jack was refusing to let go. How a man the size of the captain could manage to cluck and fuss like a broody hen over a ship the size of the Pearl had always amused Gibbs. You’d think she was a soft, fuzzy little chick instead of a 44-gun, hulking, proud, snarling queen of a battleship. Every ship had its own personality, and the Black Pearl was as mercurial and stubborn and sly as her captain, imperiously demanding to boot, with a malicious streak a yard wide. Gibbs wouldn’t have wanted to serve on her under any other command than Jack’s.
To Jack, she was altogether lovely. For him, the Black Pearl sailed as sweetly as the most compliant of ships.
Just now, however, the ship was bucking and twisting at her moorings like an untamed beast in the angry seas. She would need every ounce of that fighting spirit once her sails filled and Jack set her at that bar.
Gibbs was not surprised that Jack Sparrow was going to get them all killed. He was only surprised that it had taken this long. The man had a positive knack for sailing too close to the wind for Gibbs’ comfort. It was always canvas nigh ripping to ribbons and leeward rails under with Captain Sparrow. Jack had the vocabulary of a Cambridge don combined with that of a Newgate gallows bird in a handful of different languages, but it didn’t include the word “prudence” anywhere at all. Not for the first time, Gibbs wondered why he was still with the Black Pearl. This kind of madness couldn’t be good for his health.
“Anamaria, set double-reefed courses, and full topsails and t’gallants,” Jack was ordering. With such heavy seas running, the captain would have no desire to ship his lower sails full of seawater for as long as it took them to shred. Best raise them so they’d clear the water breaking over the Pearl’s decks. But the ship would need as much of her upper canvas as possible to counteract the force of those waves.
Anamaria dropped down the poop steps hands on the rails, feet not touching, and headed forward along the maindeck shouting, “Move it, you pack of worthless scum! Time to work like sailors—if y’can remember how!”
Her job was to make sure the captain’s orders got carried out. If Jack was king of this ship, his first mate was his executioner. Her voice harried the crew, letting them know in no uncertain terms that since the dawn of time, no lower, more illegitimate human beings had ever trod a ship’s deck.
Gibbs was glad to be out of her line of fire. But before he could join the larboard watch, Jack detained him.
“Mr. Gibbs. I’ve got a task for you.”
The captain had that far-away, calculating look in his eyes that let Gibbs know he was seeing possibilities hours ahead.
“I need you to prepare one of our spare spars with a span of cable. Then make fast a hawser forward to the lee bow. Carry the other end aft to windward and bend it to the span on that spar.”
Bloody hell. Jack was serious. Gibbs reminded himself that any way you looked at it, they weren’t likely to make it out of that passage alive, but the cold-blooded preparations for the most appalling circumstances, made his liver turn. For the first time it really began to hit him. Jack Sparrow fully expected the Black Pearl to go down. He just wasn’t planning on letting her do it without a fight.
It was all very well to cheer and agree to the grand gesture in the heat of defiance. But the cold reality was waiting for them out on that bar.
“Mr. Gibbs?” Jack prompted.
There was no point in raising any objections. The alternatives were even worse. Gibbs met his captain’s blank, hard gaze. He shrugged. “Aye, sir. I’ll see that it’s done.”
He turned and made his way slowly down the stairs. He had too many years to go leaping down like Anamaria, the show-off. Snagging a ship’s boy, he sent the kid after the hawser while he scrounged up a spar. Jip was one of Jack’s strays. Gibbs grinned to himself. Captain had showed up after a few days' carouse in Brazil with a new collection of head lice, one less tooth, a curious wooden idol and the kid.
He wasn’t what one would expect to pick up in Brazil—hair as white-gold as a Caribbean beach and eyes as blue as the rare Paraiba tourmalines Jack had stashed in that wood carving. He looked like a cherub in a cathedral mosaic. He also looked as if a stiff breeze would blow him right off the Pearl. Both appearances were entirely deceptive. The little rotter proved to have more vices than any five of Jack’s men and a mouth like a sewer. Jack found him amusing. So Jip stayed on as one of the ship’s boys. Mostly he was a plague. But he was a bright little pestilence. Knew his job, and mostly did it in between raising hell. And as far as Jip was concerned, Captain Sparrow was God. Which amused Jack too. Gibbs snorted.
As Gibbs and Jip set to rigging the contraption Jack had ordered, the watches were climbing the ratlines up the masts fifty, seventy feet in the air, scrambling out along the windward side of the yards, slithering on the treacherous footropes. Hands grasping the jackstays, feet clinging to the swaying, jumping footropes, they struggled to cast off the gaskets and loose the sails.
The slender hull, pitching and rolling simultaneously, acted as a fulcrum for the wild pivots of the masts, dipping the yards gracefully towards the sea, whipsawing the men who clung with every flexing inch of their bodies—teeth and bellies and knees. Gibbs had seen men fall in just such circumstances, disappearing into the ocean as though they had never been there at all, silent and swift and irrevocable.
Over the racket of the gale in the rigging, Anamaria was hollering at them to get the damn gaskets off before nightfall. Did she have to climb up there herself to cast off a few bloody lines and then knock their useless arses into the sea?
You could scrape barnacles off the hull with that woman’s tongue, Gibbs decided. He had seen men do far more impossible things under the scourge of Anamaria’s voice than he’d ever seen done under the threat of Navy floggings.
The cry came down, first from the mainmast, then almost simultaneously from fore and mizzen masts, “Main and tops’l gaskets away!”
Shortly there followed, “To’ga’nt gaskets away!”
Then all hell broke loose as the sails shook free and the wind sunk its teeth into the unyeilding stiffness and weight of the number one canvas Jack had ordered bent on when he’d first expected foul weather. Part of the fore topsail flicked back and caught one of the men on the chest. With only his knees braced on the yard, he lost his balance, teetering back as the footrope swayed out from under him. The man beside him reached out and grabbed his arm, pulling him in to the yard, a casual act of salvation, barely acknowledged by the two of them.
A fusillade of rapid orders from the captain and mate orchestrated the complicated choreography.
“Slack away clewlines and buntlines!”
“Haul away main and tops’l sheets!”
“Slack away jib down hauls! Haul away all jibs!”
“Belay mizzen tack!”
Out on the great yards, in that high, cold, open air hell, the men began their battle with the wet, flogging sails. The main topsail, alone, was a third of a ton of thunderclapping, death-dealing, rock-hard canvas. Their job was to sheet it home before the sail blew itself to rags or someone was killed. The Black Pearl was not making their task any easer as she rolled heavily in the surf, her masts etching dark, frightening arcs against the glowering seas.
Just when they would almost have it, gusts of wind would rip the lines out of their bleeding fingers, or the ship would roll precariously and the sail would break free, and the whole heart-breaking task of getting it under control had to begin again.
The wind swallowed their oaths and shouts at the ship, the driving rain, a clumsy or slow comrade—whatever let that damn bitch of a sail break loose again.
A sharp cry broke from the foremast topsail yard. Through the driving rain, Gibbs saw with heart-stopping clarity the violent snap of one of the clewlines. Free of restraint, the great cable whipped through the air, catching one of the men—Gibbs swore under his breath when he saw it was Duncan—across his chest and arm, shredding his ragged garments and opening a long gash through which white bone glared for an instant before blood gushed in a spray to leeward, spattering the sail now attempting to flog itself to tatters and raining down on the deck. At that the man was lucky that cable hadn’t taken off his head.
By some miracle, the blow did not knock Duncan off the yard, but he clung there, eyes closed, unmoving. His crewmates had their own battle to fight with the sail that was threatening to self-destruct and to batter them all off the plunging foot ropes. They had no hands to spare to help him. With an agonizing effort, Duncan inched his way to the rigging within his reach. He made it onto the windward foremast shroud, but after one attempt to descend in which his arms nearly gave way and one foot slipped, the injured man sagged against the cables. He’d never make it down in this wild sea, and it was only a matter of time before he lost his grip.
“Anamaria!” Jack’s voice surmounted the storm. “Get that man on deck! Move!”
“Aye sir!” she snapped back, already bolting for the shrouds, scarcely seeming to touch the wildly pitching lines. Sometimes Gibbs forgot how uncanny that woman was walking the wind. Then she was behind the struggling crewman, interposing her body between him and the devouring sea, her ferocious tones reaching across the entire ship.
“You comin’ down, Duncan? Or you plannin’ on spendin’ the night?”
“Just enjoyin’ the fuckin’ view, mate!” Duncan gasped.
But he started his descent again, hugging the windward side of the shroud, spurred on by Anamaria’s curses. Occasionally he faltered, swaying back against the small figure holding him to the lines. Anamaria hung on fiercely, supporting the extra weight on straining arms.
“Duncan, you bloody great ox! You weigh a ton!” she screamed at him. “Climb like a sailor, not a lubber, you whoreson dog!”
Duncan retaliated with his own curses, calling into question all of Anamaria’s ancestry and personal habits in a spate of furious creativity that impressed Gibbs. The man had better hope the first mate wasn’t paying too close attention. However, the anger fueled his painful creep downward.
As the two neared the deck, Gibbs and two other men who had been hauling lines, rushed to help the injured man off the rigging. Duncan was two shades paler than his normal sun-baked bronze, and he was sweating even in the chill rain. His breath was coming in short sharp gasps. Leaning heavily on Gibbs and Anamaria, he slumped, dark head bowed, no energy left to do anything more than bleed on the deck.
He needed stitching up, but there was no time for patchwork.
“In my cabin,” Jack ordered, joining them.
Duncan looked up, his mouth opened to protest. The captain forestalled him.
“I’ll not be sending a man belowdecks for this passage, but you’ll never hang onto the lines when the Pearl’s decks are awash. So don’t be an idiot, Duncan.” Captain Sparrow jerked his head in the direction of the door. “Cabin. Now! That’s an order!”
Gibbs and Anamaria hustled Duncan off to the captain’s cabin over his objections that they were needed and he could make his own way. Since Gibbs was having to grab the lifelines himself as the decks angled and swooped, he didn’t pay his staggering burden the least mind. Together, he and Anamaria hauled Duncan into the cabin.
“Now lie down before you fall down,” Gibbs suggested.
Anamaria didn’t bother to suggest. She just shoved the off-balance man into Jack’s bed.
“No!” Duncan gasped. “I’m a bloody soddin’ mess!”
“There’ve been far worse things in that bed, mister!” Anamaria informed him. “Now are you goin’ to stay quiet like a sensible man or do I have to tie you there myself?”
She glared him into cowering submission. It helped that the man was quite thoroughly exhausted. “There are plenty of sheets there, Duncan,” she informed him. “Bandage yourself up if you can. Or at least hold some pressure on that.”
“I thought Cap’n said we’re just goin’ to Davy Jones anyway,” Duncan gave the ghost of a laugh.
“Maybe he did,” Anamaria snapped. “But he’s Captain Jack Sparrow and this is the bloody stupidest thing we’ve ever done, so maybe we won’t.”
“Aye, that’s about the right of it,” Duncan grimaced.
“Besides,” said Anamaria over her shoulder as she turned to go. “I didn’t lug your carcass down off that yard so’s you could bleed to death.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” Duncan saluted sloppily with his good arm. “Permission to drown if the ship goes down?”
“I think we’ve all got that,” she said shortly.
“Take care o’ yerself, lad,” Gibbs added gruffly. “Ye did good work out there.”
And they left him. The ship was running out of time.
Out on deck, Jack had taken over the direction of the crew in Anamaria’s absence. The last recalcitrant sail had been sheeted home, the stay sails had been set, and the men came swinging down to the decks for the heavy, sweating work of hoisting the upper topsail and topgallant yards. Tired beyond exhaustion, wet to the core, hands bleeding, clinging to railings and lines, they asked only for orders.
Captain Jack Sparrow’s voice, rising calmly above the storm, gathered them all in, renewing their courage, brushing fear from too young faces, touching sea-hardened eyes with greater determination. All the flash and foolery was buried in fifty fathoms of water. His steady presence was a reassurance. He’d see them through the coming war with the bar as he had always done before. The captain was a man who refused to lose; they would ride on his back, win with his fire.
Oh, thought Mr. Gibbs. This was why he was still with the Black Pearl. This was the captain the mutiny and those ten years of enduring had made. This was a man who now understood that in the intertwined mortality of men and ships, it is the men who count—what they have in them. What they can drag out from deep inside in the final extremity. Jack had sculpted this fractious, ill-sorted bunch of men into a united crew who now worked desperately and suffered uncomplainingly to save the ship.
He joined the rest of the crew on the halyards, hauling until his arm muscles almost quit.
* * * * *
Through the biting rain, Jack Sparrow watched the fragile figures of his men who would risk their lives to follow his orders, so in love with freedom themselves that they were willing to let him lead them to the bottom of the sea rather than raise the white flag to Norrington. He had asked that the last dregs of their courage and resolve be spent here, and behold their splendid response. Amidst the clash of the elements, the bombardment of the seas, and the driving rain making every surface treacherous, they had battled the tons of wet canvas and won, setting sails in weather where only reefing made sense. Out in the open sea, the Dauntless and the Defender prowled. At this moment, Jack knew that he loved these men. That he would do everything in his power to bring them through this fatal passage, but that if he failed, as seemed likely, he was content to die beside them.
He felt the Black Pearl quivering under his hands, as though she were as eager as he to go down fighting rather than surrender.
“Anamaria, I’m going to be needing your help, love,” Jack called. Swiftly and soberly she joined him.
Tightening his hands on his ship’s wheel, he glanced at Anamaria, took a deep breath and shouted the final command: “Let go and haul to run free!”
For once, Anamaria did not follow this with a spate of orders. The men knew what to do. For the first time they performed their tasks in silence. The only sounds were those of ship and sea and storm. The anchors were catted and fished. The sails were trimmed for the close reach that would take her into the mouth of the harbour. And then the ship came fully to life.
The wind resounded like a great pipe organ in the tall cathedral of the Black Pearl’s sails, thundering through her fretwork of standing and running rigging, vibrating her deckplates, and singing along the bones and sinews of her crew. It was a sound to thrill the soul and tighten the throat and sting the eyes—the sound of a great ship taking flight in catastrophic splendour amidst the fanfare of the elements. As her canvas stretched taut, humming in the wind, the Black Pearl lifted her head out of the seas, faced the channel she must clear or die trying, and shot forward. Her crew gave a shout of triumph. Jack smiled grimly. The sea might win this day, but the Royal Navy would lose its prey one way or the other.
* * * * *
From his vantage point back as close to the harbour mouth as he dared in this wretched weather, the commodore had not taken his eyes off the Black Pearl for an instant. So he saw her begin her run at the bar. Even though he had admitted the possibility that Sparrow might do something this hair-brained and desperate, the sight still shocked him.
“He’s going to do it!” Norrington exclaimed, almost to himself. “The bloody fool is actually going to do it!”
“Do what, sir?” Lieutenant Gillette asked at his shoulder.
“Cross that bar,” Norrington answered in disbelief.
“Impossible,” Gillette objected. “That ship would have no chance in those seas.”
“Of course it is impossible. You know it. I know it. I’m sure that madman Sparrow knows it. But it is, nevertheless, what he is doing. See for yourself.”
He handed Gillette the glass. After a moment watching, the lieutenant handed it back.
“Idiot,” he said, without any heat. Both of them remembered the last time Gillette had made that remark.
“Precisely,” Norrington agreed. “Which is why I have ordered the Dauntless and the Defender prepared for battle or pursuit. Jack Sparrow seems to break the laws of nature and probability with the same aplomb as he breaks the laws of England. But this time, if the sea does not take him, I shall.” His voice was grim.
Gillette bared his teeth in a shark’s grin. “Good.”
Nevertheless, James Norrington, who loved ships with a pure, clear love that transcended his duty, could not repress a shudder as he watched Sparrow force his slender, dark lady with her shivering black-winged sails into the gaping maw of that channel. Norrington would have let himself be hanged before he committed such an atrocity to his own ship. His heart went out to the gallant, ill-fated vessel. The seas, breaking across the bar and holding the Navy ships at bay in deeper water, already rose above the Black Pearl’s bowsprit.
Norrington could tell that Sparrow was attempting to gauge his approach based on the frequency of the highest seas, but such an attempt was of limited effect. The chaos in that confluence of opposing forces was too great, the timing between the series of breakers too short. As the Pearl leapt forward into the channel, the seas crashed across her bow, shuddering her nearly to a halt. Her entire decks were awash. Only her masts showed above water.
The men of the Royal Navy were true seamen. Even though this was a vessel they were sworn to destroy, watching her futile struggle against the power of the sea was not a pleasant experience. They could almost feel the slam of tons of water on that fragile hull. She might be a pirate ship, but it was still a blood-chilling sight to watch that lovely vessel go down.
She hadn’t gone down yet. Her bow rose defiantly again and again out of the foaming waves, throwing off the water in white cascades. The wash of water boiled and tumbled down the sweep of deck like river rapids, burying her crew up to their waists, sometimes their chests, each shipped wave mowing them down like cannon fire. But the pirates always appeared again, still clinging to her rigging as the ship rolled heavily from side to side. Steadily, the dark ship clawed her way deeper into that deadly channel.
Suddenly, the Black Pearl wheeled sharply to starboard.
“Mary, Mother of God!” an able seaman exclaimed in horror.
Pulling his gaze from the beleaguered vessel, Norrington lowered the glass and scanned the increasingly violent seas for the cause of the outburst. A sense of fate swept over him. The brave ship was doomed. Three huge seas, stacked up by the gale winds against the ebb tide and the built-up bar, were heading directly for her starboard side. The first one was surely 25 feet from trough to crest. And each one towered higher than the preceding one. Sparrow’s bid to throw the Pearl’s head into that threat was a valiant one, but he would never manage it in time.
As the first sea struck her, the Black Pearl shied heavily to port. The volley of spray from the ton of water crashing over her windward rail shot a hundred feet up and out to leeward. Even though her crew had to be completely swallowed by the wash of water, Norrington could see through his glass that Sparrow was already fighting to swing her bow back to starboard. Nevertheless, when the second sea slammed into that black hull, the commodore was sure the effort had been insufficient. The blow laid over her masts nearly 65 degrees to port. Every moment he expected to see the ship continue her collapse. However, in what surely was a miracle, the Black Pearl dragged herself agonizingly upright, her masts still stepped, and braced for the final strike.
Jack Sparrow might not be that “best pirate” Lieutenant Groves claimed he was, but he was captain of the most incredible ship.
Nevertheless, the sea was not finished with its efforts to devour her alive. She was now hopelessly broadside to the third and greatest sea. Double in size from the first one, this snarling monster blotted out the commodore’s view of all but her top masts. Its crest was a solid mass of sea-foam, curling and breaking and licking like ice cold flames.
There was something terrible about standing by and watching the death of a ship and the frail human fragments aboard her, no matter that hanging was all they were destined for.
As that angel of death wave swept over the Black Pearl with inexorable power, it picked her up as though she were a bit of flotsam and dashed her down on her side. Norrington saw her masts hit the water. And then, through the malevolent froth of grey and green and white, he saw her rudder protrude. The legendary Black Pearl, terror of the Caribbean, had gone down.
Commodore Norrington bowed his head. This was how it was to end. The inimical waves had been judge and executioner. Her captain had chosen to lead his ship and his crew to the bottom of the sea, to cross a far more solemn bar than this merely mortal one, rather than give the Royal Navy the chance to scuttle her or chain her as a prize—rather than accept the loss of his freedom one more time.
The Black Pearl was gone, and Jack Sparrow with her. It seemed appropriate somehow, that the two of them should be together in the end.
TBC
I promise
4 The Sea Pays Homage
Rating: PG-13 for language
Characters: Jack Sparrow, Anamaria, the crew of the Black Pearl, Commodore Norrington, Lieutenant Gillette
Pairing: Jack/Anamaria though you couldn’t tell by this chapter
Disclaimer: The characters of PotC! She’s taken them! Get after her, you feckless pack of ingrates!
Summary: 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? All death threats may be sent, as usual, to the Andromeda galaxy. And may I remind you that, dead, I am of no use to you and cannot write chapter 4.
Thanks to
geek_mama_2 for the beta help.1 Ambush
2 No Regrets
* * * * *
3 The Judgment of the Sea
Joshamee Gibbs squinted up at the helm where Jack was refusing to let go. How a man the size of the captain could manage to cluck and fuss like a broody hen over a ship the size of the Pearl had always amused Gibbs. You’d think she was a soft, fuzzy little chick instead of a 44-gun, hulking, proud, snarling queen of a battleship. Every ship had its own personality, and the Black Pearl was as mercurial and stubborn and sly as her captain, imperiously demanding to boot, with a malicious streak a yard wide. Gibbs wouldn’t have wanted to serve on her under any other command than Jack’s.
To Jack, she was altogether lovely. For him, the Black Pearl sailed as sweetly as the most compliant of ships.
Just now, however, the ship was bucking and twisting at her moorings like an untamed beast in the angry seas. She would need every ounce of that fighting spirit once her sails filled and Jack set her at that bar.
Gibbs was not surprised that Jack Sparrow was going to get them all killed. He was only surprised that it had taken this long. The man had a positive knack for sailing too close to the wind for Gibbs’ comfort. It was always canvas nigh ripping to ribbons and leeward rails under with Captain Sparrow. Jack had the vocabulary of a Cambridge don combined with that of a Newgate gallows bird in a handful of different languages, but it didn’t include the word “prudence” anywhere at all. Not for the first time, Gibbs wondered why he was still with the Black Pearl. This kind of madness couldn’t be good for his health.
“Anamaria, set double-reefed courses, and full topsails and t’gallants,” Jack was ordering. With such heavy seas running, the captain would have no desire to ship his lower sails full of seawater for as long as it took them to shred. Best raise them so they’d clear the water breaking over the Pearl’s decks. But the ship would need as much of her upper canvas as possible to counteract the force of those waves.
Anamaria dropped down the poop steps hands on the rails, feet not touching, and headed forward along the maindeck shouting, “Move it, you pack of worthless scum! Time to work like sailors—if y’can remember how!”
Her job was to make sure the captain’s orders got carried out. If Jack was king of this ship, his first mate was his executioner. Her voice harried the crew, letting them know in no uncertain terms that since the dawn of time, no lower, more illegitimate human beings had ever trod a ship’s deck.
Gibbs was glad to be out of her line of fire. But before he could join the larboard watch, Jack detained him.
“Mr. Gibbs. I’ve got a task for you.”
The captain had that far-away, calculating look in his eyes that let Gibbs know he was seeing possibilities hours ahead.
“I need you to prepare one of our spare spars with a span of cable. Then make fast a hawser forward to the lee bow. Carry the other end aft to windward and bend it to the span on that spar.”
Bloody hell. Jack was serious. Gibbs reminded himself that any way you looked at it, they weren’t likely to make it out of that passage alive, but the cold-blooded preparations for the most appalling circumstances, made his liver turn. For the first time it really began to hit him. Jack Sparrow fully expected the Black Pearl to go down. He just wasn’t planning on letting her do it without a fight.
It was all very well to cheer and agree to the grand gesture in the heat of defiance. But the cold reality was waiting for them out on that bar.
“Mr. Gibbs?” Jack prompted.
There was no point in raising any objections. The alternatives were even worse. Gibbs met his captain’s blank, hard gaze. He shrugged. “Aye, sir. I’ll see that it’s done.”
He turned and made his way slowly down the stairs. He had too many years to go leaping down like Anamaria, the show-off. Snagging a ship’s boy, he sent the kid after the hawser while he scrounged up a spar. Jip was one of Jack’s strays. Gibbs grinned to himself. Captain had showed up after a few days' carouse in Brazil with a new collection of head lice, one less tooth, a curious wooden idol and the kid.
He wasn’t what one would expect to pick up in Brazil—hair as white-gold as a Caribbean beach and eyes as blue as the rare Paraiba tourmalines Jack had stashed in that wood carving. He looked like a cherub in a cathedral mosaic. He also looked as if a stiff breeze would blow him right off the Pearl. Both appearances were entirely deceptive. The little rotter proved to have more vices than any five of Jack’s men and a mouth like a sewer. Jack found him amusing. So Jip stayed on as one of the ship’s boys. Mostly he was a plague. But he was a bright little pestilence. Knew his job, and mostly did it in between raising hell. And as far as Jip was concerned, Captain Sparrow was God. Which amused Jack too. Gibbs snorted.
As Gibbs and Jip set to rigging the contraption Jack had ordered, the watches were climbing the ratlines up the masts fifty, seventy feet in the air, scrambling out along the windward side of the yards, slithering on the treacherous footropes. Hands grasping the jackstays, feet clinging to the swaying, jumping footropes, they struggled to cast off the gaskets and loose the sails.
The slender hull, pitching and rolling simultaneously, acted as a fulcrum for the wild pivots of the masts, dipping the yards gracefully towards the sea, whipsawing the men who clung with every flexing inch of their bodies—teeth and bellies and knees. Gibbs had seen men fall in just such circumstances, disappearing into the ocean as though they had never been there at all, silent and swift and irrevocable.
Over the racket of the gale in the rigging, Anamaria was hollering at them to get the damn gaskets off before nightfall. Did she have to climb up there herself to cast off a few bloody lines and then knock their useless arses into the sea?
You could scrape barnacles off the hull with that woman’s tongue, Gibbs decided. He had seen men do far more impossible things under the scourge of Anamaria’s voice than he’d ever seen done under the threat of Navy floggings.
The cry came down, first from the mainmast, then almost simultaneously from fore and mizzen masts, “Main and tops’l gaskets away!”
Shortly there followed, “To’ga’nt gaskets away!”
Then all hell broke loose as the sails shook free and the wind sunk its teeth into the unyeilding stiffness and weight of the number one canvas Jack had ordered bent on when he’d first expected foul weather. Part of the fore topsail flicked back and caught one of the men on the chest. With only his knees braced on the yard, he lost his balance, teetering back as the footrope swayed out from under him. The man beside him reached out and grabbed his arm, pulling him in to the yard, a casual act of salvation, barely acknowledged by the two of them.
A fusillade of rapid orders from the captain and mate orchestrated the complicated choreography.
“Slack away clewlines and buntlines!”
“Haul away main and tops’l sheets!”
“Slack away jib down hauls! Haul away all jibs!”
“Belay mizzen tack!”
Out on the great yards, in that high, cold, open air hell, the men began their battle with the wet, flogging sails. The main topsail, alone, was a third of a ton of thunderclapping, death-dealing, rock-hard canvas. Their job was to sheet it home before the sail blew itself to rags or someone was killed. The Black Pearl was not making their task any easer as she rolled heavily in the surf, her masts etching dark, frightening arcs against the glowering seas.
Just when they would almost have it, gusts of wind would rip the lines out of their bleeding fingers, or the ship would roll precariously and the sail would break free, and the whole heart-breaking task of getting it under control had to begin again.
The wind swallowed their oaths and shouts at the ship, the driving rain, a clumsy or slow comrade—whatever let that damn bitch of a sail break loose again.
A sharp cry broke from the foremast topsail yard. Through the driving rain, Gibbs saw with heart-stopping clarity the violent snap of one of the clewlines. Free of restraint, the great cable whipped through the air, catching one of the men—Gibbs swore under his breath when he saw it was Duncan—across his chest and arm, shredding his ragged garments and opening a long gash through which white bone glared for an instant before blood gushed in a spray to leeward, spattering the sail now attempting to flog itself to tatters and raining down on the deck. At that the man was lucky that cable hadn’t taken off his head.
By some miracle, the blow did not knock Duncan off the yard, but he clung there, eyes closed, unmoving. His crewmates had their own battle to fight with the sail that was threatening to self-destruct and to batter them all off the plunging foot ropes. They had no hands to spare to help him. With an agonizing effort, Duncan inched his way to the rigging within his reach. He made it onto the windward foremast shroud, but after one attempt to descend in which his arms nearly gave way and one foot slipped, the injured man sagged against the cables. He’d never make it down in this wild sea, and it was only a matter of time before he lost his grip.
“Anamaria!” Jack’s voice surmounted the storm. “Get that man on deck! Move!”
“Aye sir!” she snapped back, already bolting for the shrouds, scarcely seeming to touch the wildly pitching lines. Sometimes Gibbs forgot how uncanny that woman was walking the wind. Then she was behind the struggling crewman, interposing her body between him and the devouring sea, her ferocious tones reaching across the entire ship.
“You comin’ down, Duncan? Or you plannin’ on spendin’ the night?”
“Just enjoyin’ the fuckin’ view, mate!” Duncan gasped.
But he started his descent again, hugging the windward side of the shroud, spurred on by Anamaria’s curses. Occasionally he faltered, swaying back against the small figure holding him to the lines. Anamaria hung on fiercely, supporting the extra weight on straining arms.
“Duncan, you bloody great ox! You weigh a ton!” she screamed at him. “Climb like a sailor, not a lubber, you whoreson dog!”
Duncan retaliated with his own curses, calling into question all of Anamaria’s ancestry and personal habits in a spate of furious creativity that impressed Gibbs. The man had better hope the first mate wasn’t paying too close attention. However, the anger fueled his painful creep downward.
As the two neared the deck, Gibbs and two other men who had been hauling lines, rushed to help the injured man off the rigging. Duncan was two shades paler than his normal sun-baked bronze, and he was sweating even in the chill rain. His breath was coming in short sharp gasps. Leaning heavily on Gibbs and Anamaria, he slumped, dark head bowed, no energy left to do anything more than bleed on the deck.
He needed stitching up, but there was no time for patchwork.
“In my cabin,” Jack ordered, joining them.
Duncan looked up, his mouth opened to protest. The captain forestalled him.
“I’ll not be sending a man belowdecks for this passage, but you’ll never hang onto the lines when the Pearl’s decks are awash. So don’t be an idiot, Duncan.” Captain Sparrow jerked his head in the direction of the door. “Cabin. Now! That’s an order!”
Gibbs and Anamaria hustled Duncan off to the captain’s cabin over his objections that they were needed and he could make his own way. Since Gibbs was having to grab the lifelines himself as the decks angled and swooped, he didn’t pay his staggering burden the least mind. Together, he and Anamaria hauled Duncan into the cabin.
“Now lie down before you fall down,” Gibbs suggested.
Anamaria didn’t bother to suggest. She just shoved the off-balance man into Jack’s bed.
“No!” Duncan gasped. “I’m a bloody soddin’ mess!”
“There’ve been far worse things in that bed, mister!” Anamaria informed him. “Now are you goin’ to stay quiet like a sensible man or do I have to tie you there myself?”
She glared him into cowering submission. It helped that the man was quite thoroughly exhausted. “There are plenty of sheets there, Duncan,” she informed him. “Bandage yourself up if you can. Or at least hold some pressure on that.”
“I thought Cap’n said we’re just goin’ to Davy Jones anyway,” Duncan gave the ghost of a laugh.
“Maybe he did,” Anamaria snapped. “But he’s Captain Jack Sparrow and this is the bloody stupidest thing we’ve ever done, so maybe we won’t.”
“Aye, that’s about the right of it,” Duncan grimaced.
“Besides,” said Anamaria over her shoulder as she turned to go. “I didn’t lug your carcass down off that yard so’s you could bleed to death.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” Duncan saluted sloppily with his good arm. “Permission to drown if the ship goes down?”
“I think we’ve all got that,” she said shortly.
“Take care o’ yerself, lad,” Gibbs added gruffly. “Ye did good work out there.”
And they left him. The ship was running out of time.
Out on deck, Jack had taken over the direction of the crew in Anamaria’s absence. The last recalcitrant sail had been sheeted home, the stay sails had been set, and the men came swinging down to the decks for the heavy, sweating work of hoisting the upper topsail and topgallant yards. Tired beyond exhaustion, wet to the core, hands bleeding, clinging to railings and lines, they asked only for orders.
Captain Jack Sparrow’s voice, rising calmly above the storm, gathered them all in, renewing their courage, brushing fear from too young faces, touching sea-hardened eyes with greater determination. All the flash and foolery was buried in fifty fathoms of water. His steady presence was a reassurance. He’d see them through the coming war with the bar as he had always done before. The captain was a man who refused to lose; they would ride on his back, win with his fire.
Oh, thought Mr. Gibbs. This was why he was still with the Black Pearl. This was the captain the mutiny and those ten years of enduring had made. This was a man who now understood that in the intertwined mortality of men and ships, it is the men who count—what they have in them. What they can drag out from deep inside in the final extremity. Jack had sculpted this fractious, ill-sorted bunch of men into a united crew who now worked desperately and suffered uncomplainingly to save the ship.
He joined the rest of the crew on the halyards, hauling until his arm muscles almost quit.
* * * * *
Through the biting rain, Jack Sparrow watched the fragile figures of his men who would risk their lives to follow his orders, so in love with freedom themselves that they were willing to let him lead them to the bottom of the sea rather than raise the white flag to Norrington. He had asked that the last dregs of their courage and resolve be spent here, and behold their splendid response. Amidst the clash of the elements, the bombardment of the seas, and the driving rain making every surface treacherous, they had battled the tons of wet canvas and won, setting sails in weather where only reefing made sense. Out in the open sea, the Dauntless and the Defender prowled. At this moment, Jack knew that he loved these men. That he would do everything in his power to bring them through this fatal passage, but that if he failed, as seemed likely, he was content to die beside them.
He felt the Black Pearl quivering under his hands, as though she were as eager as he to go down fighting rather than surrender.
“Anamaria, I’m going to be needing your help, love,” Jack called. Swiftly and soberly she joined him.
Tightening his hands on his ship’s wheel, he glanced at Anamaria, took a deep breath and shouted the final command: “Let go and haul to run free!”
For once, Anamaria did not follow this with a spate of orders. The men knew what to do. For the first time they performed their tasks in silence. The only sounds were those of ship and sea and storm. The anchors were catted and fished. The sails were trimmed for the close reach that would take her into the mouth of the harbour. And then the ship came fully to life.
The wind resounded like a great pipe organ in the tall cathedral of the Black Pearl’s sails, thundering through her fretwork of standing and running rigging, vibrating her deckplates, and singing along the bones and sinews of her crew. It was a sound to thrill the soul and tighten the throat and sting the eyes—the sound of a great ship taking flight in catastrophic splendour amidst the fanfare of the elements. As her canvas stretched taut, humming in the wind, the Black Pearl lifted her head out of the seas, faced the channel she must clear or die trying, and shot forward. Her crew gave a shout of triumph. Jack smiled grimly. The sea might win this day, but the Royal Navy would lose its prey one way or the other.
* * * * *
From his vantage point back as close to the harbour mouth as he dared in this wretched weather, the commodore had not taken his eyes off the Black Pearl for an instant. So he saw her begin her run at the bar. Even though he had admitted the possibility that Sparrow might do something this hair-brained and desperate, the sight still shocked him.
“He’s going to do it!” Norrington exclaimed, almost to himself. “The bloody fool is actually going to do it!”
“Do what, sir?” Lieutenant Gillette asked at his shoulder.
“Cross that bar,” Norrington answered in disbelief.
“Impossible,” Gillette objected. “That ship would have no chance in those seas.”
“Of course it is impossible. You know it. I know it. I’m sure that madman Sparrow knows it. But it is, nevertheless, what he is doing. See for yourself.”
He handed Gillette the glass. After a moment watching, the lieutenant handed it back.
“Idiot,” he said, without any heat. Both of them remembered the last time Gillette had made that remark.
“Precisely,” Norrington agreed. “Which is why I have ordered the Dauntless and the Defender prepared for battle or pursuit. Jack Sparrow seems to break the laws of nature and probability with the same aplomb as he breaks the laws of England. But this time, if the sea does not take him, I shall.” His voice was grim.
Gillette bared his teeth in a shark’s grin. “Good.”
Nevertheless, James Norrington, who loved ships with a pure, clear love that transcended his duty, could not repress a shudder as he watched Sparrow force his slender, dark lady with her shivering black-winged sails into the gaping maw of that channel. Norrington would have let himself be hanged before he committed such an atrocity to his own ship. His heart went out to the gallant, ill-fated vessel. The seas, breaking across the bar and holding the Navy ships at bay in deeper water, already rose above the Black Pearl’s bowsprit.
Norrington could tell that Sparrow was attempting to gauge his approach based on the frequency of the highest seas, but such an attempt was of limited effect. The chaos in that confluence of opposing forces was too great, the timing between the series of breakers too short. As the Pearl leapt forward into the channel, the seas crashed across her bow, shuddering her nearly to a halt. Her entire decks were awash. Only her masts showed above water.
The men of the Royal Navy were true seamen. Even though this was a vessel they were sworn to destroy, watching her futile struggle against the power of the sea was not a pleasant experience. They could almost feel the slam of tons of water on that fragile hull. She might be a pirate ship, but it was still a blood-chilling sight to watch that lovely vessel go down.
She hadn’t gone down yet. Her bow rose defiantly again and again out of the foaming waves, throwing off the water in white cascades. The wash of water boiled and tumbled down the sweep of deck like river rapids, burying her crew up to their waists, sometimes their chests, each shipped wave mowing them down like cannon fire. But the pirates always appeared again, still clinging to her rigging as the ship rolled heavily from side to side. Steadily, the dark ship clawed her way deeper into that deadly channel.
Suddenly, the Black Pearl wheeled sharply to starboard.
“Mary, Mother of God!” an able seaman exclaimed in horror.
Pulling his gaze from the beleaguered vessel, Norrington lowered the glass and scanned the increasingly violent seas for the cause of the outburst. A sense of fate swept over him. The brave ship was doomed. Three huge seas, stacked up by the gale winds against the ebb tide and the built-up bar, were heading directly for her starboard side. The first one was surely 25 feet from trough to crest. And each one towered higher than the preceding one. Sparrow’s bid to throw the Pearl’s head into that threat was a valiant one, but he would never manage it in time.
As the first sea struck her, the Black Pearl shied heavily to port. The volley of spray from the ton of water crashing over her windward rail shot a hundred feet up and out to leeward. Even though her crew had to be completely swallowed by the wash of water, Norrington could see through his glass that Sparrow was already fighting to swing her bow back to starboard. Nevertheless, when the second sea slammed into that black hull, the commodore was sure the effort had been insufficient. The blow laid over her masts nearly 65 degrees to port. Every moment he expected to see the ship continue her collapse. However, in what surely was a miracle, the Black Pearl dragged herself agonizingly upright, her masts still stepped, and braced for the final strike.
Jack Sparrow might not be that “best pirate” Lieutenant Groves claimed he was, but he was captain of the most incredible ship.
Nevertheless, the sea was not finished with its efforts to devour her alive. She was now hopelessly broadside to the third and greatest sea. Double in size from the first one, this snarling monster blotted out the commodore’s view of all but her top masts. Its crest was a solid mass of sea-foam, curling and breaking and licking like ice cold flames.
There was something terrible about standing by and watching the death of a ship and the frail human fragments aboard her, no matter that hanging was all they were destined for.
As that angel of death wave swept over the Black Pearl with inexorable power, it picked her up as though she were a bit of flotsam and dashed her down on her side. Norrington saw her masts hit the water. And then, through the malevolent froth of grey and green and white, he saw her rudder protrude. The legendary Black Pearl, terror of the Caribbean, had gone down.
Commodore Norrington bowed his head. This was how it was to end. The inimical waves had been judge and executioner. Her captain had chosen to lead his ship and his crew to the bottom of the sea, to cross a far more solemn bar than this merely mortal one, rather than give the Royal Navy the chance to scuttle her or chain her as a prize—rather than accept the loss of his freedom one more time.
The Black Pearl was gone, and Jack Sparrow with her. It seemed appropriate somehow, that the two of them should be together in the end.
TBC
I promise
4 The Sea Pays Homage
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-12-20 06:09 am (UTC)Thank you so much for your kind words. I'm glad you like the imagery. One Saturday during the time I was researching in Paris, my husband and I went out to St. Denis to the cathedral. It turned out that we were there on the day of the Festival of St. Denis, so the cathedral was free and open to the public. We were sitting in the nave when all of a sudden the organ began to play. That was the sensation I tried to capture in words here. As though all the air and every stone and every cell in one's body were resonating together. I can't even explain. We sat through a whole impromptu, unadvertised concert. It's still the most amazing musical experience I've ever had--and I wasn't even a particular organ fan until then. A cathedral is the architecture that instrument was meant to sound in. The towers of sails and the lace of rigging have always seemed cathedral-like to me.
The story is TBC of course. And we only have Norrington's POV on what has happened so far. So you shall see--after I get my grades out and do some more frightful research.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-20 01:53 pm (UTC)That sounds like a really spectacular experience! Your life is certainly more interesting than mine has been so far. * . *;
Yay TBC! I really can't wait for the next installment, but I suppose I'll have to try. *giddy*
no subject
Date: 2005-12-21 08:09 am (UTC)If you live long enough, interesting things happen. I picked the right program of study where I had to do my research on original medieval documents which just happened to be in the Biblioteque Nationale and the Vatican Secret Archives. Shucky darn! It was pretty exciting--I was broke for two years afterwards, but it was fun.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-21 03:21 pm (UTC)Wowowowow. That IS exciting! I've never been beyond the eastern half of the U.S. T_T; (My family doesn't do the whole 'vactioning' thing.) That's the kind of stuff that I only have ever had access to through reading.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-21 09:35 pm (UTC)Congratulations on being done. I've got one more set of papers to grade and then I'll be done too! Yay!
If you ever get a chance to travel, do it before you turn 24, because you get all sorts of discount rates. A lot of students at the college I teach at will take a year of college at one of our affiliated colleges in Europe, so they get credit that easily transfers here, and they get that international experience. My husband had never travelled much before he met me--he'd been east he said (all the way to Montana). But now I've dragged him all over Europe, and he's quite smitten with the idea. Travel is an education you'll never get in school. I learned about Thomas a Beckett in history class. I remembered him when I saw the spot where he died in the Cathedral at Canterbury.