This is an AU, set two years after the events of "Curse of the Black Pearl". None of the sequels happened, or are going to. Will and Elizabeth are married, and have not seen Jack since he escaped the gallows in Port Royal...
oOo
Sunlight danced on the water beneath the Dauntless' stern, throwing golden reflections up through the thick glass in the cabin windows to ripple like music across the underside of the deck above. For a moment, Elizabeth lay contentedly half-awake, watching it. Then a seagull cried close at hand, and she swung her legs over the side of the bunk, and began to dress in a hurry without calling her maid.
Will, of course, was already up. In the year and a half that they had been married, Elizabeth had never once known him to neglect his daily sword practice. But just recently, ever since they had set sail from Port Royal aboard the Dauntless, she thought he had been taking it more seriously than ever. Normally at this hour, if she had stopped to listen, she would have heard the steady thump of his feet overhead, back and forth across the deck in a series of near-perfect fencing lunges, while the crew found excuses to stop what they were doing and watch.
This morning was different. When she had scrambled into the boy's waistcoat and breeches which she wore aboard ship, and padded barefoot on deck tying up her hair as she went with a red silk scarf, she found Will standing quietly at the quarterdeck rail. The beautiful sword was back in its scabbard on his left hip, and his eyes were fixed on something far ahead.
Beside him, Captain Stanbury stood squarely with his fat legs in their white stocking planted wide apart, swaying at ease with the ship as he trained a long telescope on the horizon. Most of the ship's company seemed to be hanging over the side, shading their eyes from the sun with work-hardened hands, and placing bets.
"Four hills in a row," Stanbury was saying. He closed the telescope with a satisfied snap! and turned to the young officer of the watch, who was hovering beside the wheel looking nervous - and slightly pink beneath his sun-tan, as he often did when Elizabeth was on deck. "Enter it in the log, Mr Kenton, and get those men back to work. Good morning, ma'am."
Elizabeth smiled at him, and crossed to Will, who beamed. For a moment only, his delight at seeing her hid the worry in his brown eyes. "I heard seagulls," she said. "Are we near land?"
For answer, Will pointed ahead. Far away, faint in the misty line where sea met sky, was the loom of something darker, like a cloud. "The Captain thinks we should be there by tonight," he told her. "If the wind holds."
Stanbury had handed his telescope to a small midshipman, but Elizabeth whirled, snatched it from the boy's startled grasp, and was up into the rigging like a monkey. Heedless of the strong seas surging just below her, she leaned almost straight out over the ship's side, holding on precariously with one hand while the telescope waved crazily in the other - pointing at everything except the approaching island.
Will sighed. Hauling her back down to the deck, he put his hands on her shoulders and turned her gently but firmly in the right direction. Elizabeth leaned back against his chest, smiling as the island slid into view - and they stood together in the sunlight, watching the four hills rise steadily out of the morning.
"Well, there it is," Elizabeth said. "Ile Quatre-collines. You must admit, it's exciting."
Will's grip on her shoulders tightened. "It's evil," he said. "I won't be happy til we're all sailing safely away from it."
oOo
It was just over two weeks since the Governor of Port Royal, that ever-dignified gentleman, had taken a glass or three of brandy more than was good for him before going to bed, and had mistaken a china bowl in the corner of his bedroom for the chamber pot. Unfortunately, what the bowl in fact contained was a large cactus, and the Governor, in the shock of finding out his mistake, had jumped so violently that he blundered through an open window and fell thirty feet into the garden below.
By the time Will and Elizabeth arrived to see him next morning, he was sitting up in bed, nursing a hang-over, a leg broken in two places, and a peevish temper.
"Look at this!" He waved a pasteboard invitation, too quickly for Will to see more than the heavy gold edging and a garish coat-of-arms. "Just arrived on the mail sloop this morning. If I didn't know better I could almost believe El Juez put that dreadful... vegetable there himself, in order to embarrass the Government. I can't possibly go to his Ball now, not in my state of health..."
"El Juez?" Will glanced at Elizabeth, and was relieved to see she looked surprised as well as disapproving.
The man known only as El Juez, "the Judge", was a person of some importance, governor of the island of Quatre-collines. But he was said to owe his position more to bribery and terror than to anything else. He was a tyrant, who kept the island's population in a condition of abject slavery - though even that was nothing to some of the other stories Will had heard about him in the corners of the dockside inns, from hard men who kept their eyes on the door as they spoke.
"Yes, yes, El Juez." The Governor fidgeted uncomfortably on his mountain of pillows, wincing and irritable. "The fellow's holding a ball to celebrate his ten years in power. It really is most inconvenient. It is a social occasion, of course - no politics. But it will look political, you see, if I don't go. It will be interpreted as our not wanting to celebrate his being in power. And they say he does have a most uncertain temper... I shouldn't be at all surprised if the fellow took offence, and refused to sign the Treaty. But he must see I can't travel with this leg. Quite out of the question."
"Treaty?" Elizabeth's eyes flashed dangerously. "You mean you're actually signing a treaty with El Juez? I should have thought we'd do better to declare war on him!"
"Elizabeth, don't be childish. You're a grown woman, now. It is hardly ladylike to express an opinion on such a subject. Especially when your opinions, my dear, really are most exceedingly ill-informed." He waggled a finger at her. "I don't deny that El Juez has something of a - I think we might call it, a ruthless reputation. But he is one of the most powerful men in the Caribbean - the richest, too - and we need him on our side, you see, to stamp out the pirates."
Will had laid a hand warningly on his wife's sleeve. Now he spoke in his most reasonable voice. "Sir, many people believe El Juez is a pirate himself."
"Now, really, William!" The Governor looked huffy, pink as one of the newly-discovered American turkey-birds in his ruffled night-shirt. Then he made an effort, crumpling his face into something he possibly thought of as a fatherly smile.
The real problem was Will.
Little though he had liked the idea of his daughter marrying the blacksmith - even one who was also the finest swordsmith in the Americas - Elizabeth's father did, in fact, love her very much; and he had agreed to the match in the light of her radiant happiness. The boy was honest, brave and, usually, well-mannered. And, of course, for all that fear had clouded the Governor's memory of the details - there was that simply dreadful business of his having rescued Elizabeth from horrible death at the hands of those accursed villains aboard the Black Pearl.
He was at home in any company, too. Since his marriage to the Governor's daughter, most of Port Royal's upper classes seemed happy to forget that this same, handsome man had once been a starveling boy, fished from the sea in rags, that he had been brought up the bond-servant of their drunken smith, and that his father had been a notorious pirate, famous all over the Caribbean for having been dragged to his death in a thousand fathoms with a cannon tied to his boots.
At least, they pretended to have forgotten. El Juez would not even pretend.
"You really should take care whom you call a pirate, William," the Governor scolded kindly. "You haven't always been so careful in your own dealings with those sea-scum. I intend to send you and Elizabeth to El Juez' ball in my place. But you must understand this: Your - oh dear, please don't take offence, William - your humble background may itself be taken as an insult by El Juez. I really must insist you do not insult him further with ill-advised remarks. This Treaty is exceedingly important - "
"You can't do that!" Will was on his feet. Beside him, a furious Elizabeth was drawing breath for a shrill explosion on her husband's behalf. But Will himself looked almost afraid.
"Sir - please. I'll go if you order it. But you can't send Elizabeth. Quatre-collines is dangerous. If you had heard one quarter the stories I have... ship-wrecked sailors hanged for daring to be washed ashore there... little children thrown to the sharks because their mothers did not work hard enough in El Juez' slave mines... voodoo magic." Will lowered his voice. "Sir, some people on the waterfront claim El Juez is a vampire."
"Mr Turner, that is enough!" The Governor was angry now. He tugged impatiently at the curtains around his bed, cutting short the conversation by shutting Will out. "I'll - yes, I'll be damned if I listen to more of this nonsense. Of course Elizabeth's going. She is my daughter, it would look most odd if I sent you without her!" He paused, glaring at them both through the gap in the curtains. "People on the waterfront! Those drunkards and fools will believe anything! But it hardly becomes you to do so, William - not in your position. No, indeed it doesn't!"
The Governor drew himself up like someone having the last word. "I'm sure I needn't remind you that "people on the waterfront" believed the crew of the Black Pearl were deathless skeletons, and only showed their true forms by the light of the moon! That's the value of your tavern ghost stories, boy!"
"That was true," Will said bleakly as the curtain whipped into place.
oOo
Darkness was falling as a small boat shoved off from the side of His Majesty's Ship Dauntless and rowed steadily across the ink-dark harbour of Quatre-collines.
Above the western horizon, the sky still showed green with the last of the short-lived tropic sunset. But inland, a sickly yellow moon was rising over the shoulder of the heavily forested hill behind the town. Its pale light only made the shadows seem darker. In the harbour, masts and yard-arms threw bars of deeper black across the water.
Elizabeth sat quietly in the stern-sheets, batting at the clouds of night insects which descended on the boat's lantern as they neared the shore. Rich, heady perfumes crowded across the anchorage from the steep-wooded cliffs, and with the sea-breeze gone the heat was oppressive. All the same, Elizabeth shivered.
"What do you think?" Will asked her, his voice low.
"I don't know."
There was something wrong, something unnatural, yet it was hard to say what. Riding lights glittered like fire-flies on the assembled shipping: ramshackle fishing boats, island traders tied up alongside the stone quay, further out the fat merchantmen which had brought El Juez' other guests to the Ball, with here and there the lithe form of a warship like a dragon dozing in the moonlight. There was even a three-decked galleon. Torches showed, too, on the grim fort which dominated the cliff above the harbour entrance, its row of gun-ports grinning like blackened teeth in the bone-white walls. And inland, on the slopes of the hill which formed the head of the long inlet, El Juez' magnificent palace beamed golden at every window.
On the quay itself, a handful of bowed figures were still at work by lantern-light: slaves unloading barrels and crates from a small schooner tied up alongside. Elizabeth watched them with a tightness in her throat. There were slaves in Port Royal too, of course - black and white, sold or kidnapped or, sometimes, sentenced by the law in punishment for some petty crime, to do the back-breaking work no free man could be hired to do, on the plantations. Yet Elizabeth had never seen any human beings as pitiable as these stooped and shuffling wretches. Even the young soldier standing guard on the quayside looked gaunt and hungry in his ghost-white uniform. But the slaves were like skeletons.
Beyond them, at the edge of the pool of light, a coach was standing: a black coach, with black horses wearing black plumes to pull it - and she realised with another touch of cold air on the nape of her neck that this was waiting to carry her and Will to the palace.
But... that was all.
In Tortuga, or even in Port Royal, the whole town would have been ablaze with lights, the glow from open tavern doorways spilling out across the cobbed streets made crowded with cooking smells and drunken laughter. Even the slaves would have been singing, sad and low, to help the rhythm of their work. Here in Quatre-collines the houses stood shuttered and still. The only sound was the ripple of the boat's oars, and the silence waited.
Elizabeth wanted to whisper. So, being Elizabeth, she spoke boldly, her voice clear and unnaturally loud in that pressing stillness. "It's too quiet," she said.
Then the screaming started.