Ch. 7.
When I said before there were going to be 8 chapters, that was a lie. There are going to be ten. Ten chapters. So, three more to go from here. Hugs and kisses to my faithful readers whom I adore and dedicate this to… thanks for sharing your thoughts with me, I love the conversations I've had with you all! It's delightful to connect in so many ways. Cheers, and enjoy!
"The treasure of Isle de Muerta?"
Jack had never seen Teague so impressed. But rather than make him feel proud, Teague's reaction made him feel fearful and wicked. Like a grave robber. A half-smoked cigar hung out of Teague's mouth, the smell familiar and comforting, like the room they stood in. A thousand candles hung overhead, and every now and then Jack felt a sting of pain as hot wax dripped down. He had known all this before. His restlessness bred and grew fast here.
"Boy, I know ye're daft and fearless and out drink me to boot, but ye've crossed the line this time, thinking about that place."
Jack didn't believe in lines anymore. He had read Dante.
"It's not what ye think and not what ye want. Haven't ye learned anything in all yer blunders, Jack?"
His blunders? Of course there had been one or two unplanned lapses… but on the whole, he had done well for himself. Teague ought to be proud. Without him, Teague would still be a common drunk on a forgotten coast, chatting with beggar boys. Nothing ventured, nothing gained—wasn't that what Teague had always told him?
"I don't care if Calypso herself made ye a promise, boy. Isle de Muerta is cursed. Forbidden. There are some things ye just don't question."
Were there? Jack questioned everything. And Teague was dishonoring his god, freedom. He had a map and a ship and a crew. His own cleverness had won those. He would go where he bloody pleased. He would love whom he chose and live as he liked. He was a pirate, and he had the brand to prove it.
"I know what yer thinking, boy. Why listen to a dried up old sailor like me? What could I possibly know about it?" Teague shifted in the chair he had grown into since settling at the Cove. "There were a time ye wanted nothing but bread to fill your stomach, lad. Maybe ye were right all along. Wild treasures and risks like this…risks that can't be calculated… that ain't living. Listen to me now, if ye feel an ounce of gratitude."
"This isn't about gratitude." He had already drawn on Calypso's wrath for this treasure. There really was no going back, no matter how Teague might chide him.
Teague was still for a moment, realizing how serious Jack was. There was so little he could say. He had never played this card with Jack before, and he did not want to now.
This was a card played with partners and subordinates, not Jack. And yet, this was his last defense. "If ye go after the treasure, you and I are done. No more runs, no more cargo, no more voyages. Ye understand? I wash me hands of ye, if that be yer choice." Jack would surely recant now. No treasure could be worth that loss, could it? Jack's life had been built out of Teague's hand.
Jack straightened his jacket and adjusted his hat—the hat that named him Captain. "Are ye saying ye want me to bow to ye—obey ye without question—or ye'll toss me back in the gutter where I came from?" Jack's eyes gleamed like a cornered animal's. Teague didn't know how to explain that error of Jack's deduction. He had never known Jack to resent his background before.
"I'm trying to save ye, boy," Teague said at last, quietly.
"Ye were the one who made me believe in freedom!" Jack exploded, overturning the table before them, dispersing its contents to the floor. A candle sputtered and went out. "Ye were the one who told me bread wasn't enough. So it's all right for you but not me, eh, Teague? Too much that the boy's become a man and has plans of his own?" Jack shook his head slowly, and then turned his back on Teague, heading for the door.
"Jack!" Teague brayed after him, imperious and foreboding, "Don't ye dare go!"
Jack kept walking. The last Teague saw was the flickering shadow of the door as it slammed behind him. He was gone. Just like that.
Teague found himself slumped forward, his face tickled by alien wetness. His throat was so tight he could barely make out the few words left to utter, words that were an echo of his failure: "Don't go."
Winter had come to the bayou, winter more determined than any Calypso had known since making this place her home. The serpentine arms of the trees waved naked and feeble above, black against the white drear sky. Wrapped in a blanket, Calypso sat on the porch and paid homage to the sky for matching her mood. Blank linen clouds skittered by every so often, eager to vanish beyond the horizon. Calypso was grimly satisfied, watching them. They would pass over his head. They would shade his inhuman eyes and disrupt his endeavors. Abruptly, Calypso stood and went to her fire inside, scraping coals out under a pot for coffee. She licked one finger and laid it against an ember, listening for the wisping shriek of her skin. Ah, there it was. Too faint to get proper news from. Sucking her burn, she retreated to the marked table, upon which a basket of bleached crab shells sat. They looked forlorn, silent. No voice left in them, probably. She hadn't touched them since returning to the bayou months before… but now, as a cold wind shivered through the wide cracks of the walls and the coffee smell grew stronger around her, she was interested.
First she laid them out in proper shapes, claws to bodies. Then she scattered them on the wood. She liked the noise they made striking her table. She liked the smell they carried. Again she cast them, like dice this time. Her lips formed the word 'Jack' unconsciously. Dice and cards, coffee and ale, the swamp on a warm day or the laughter of her people: all of these things reminded her of Jack.
The pot began to shake and she made her slow way to it, swirling the liquid. She was so thirsty. A pile of culled Salvia stood near the door; it had kept her trapped in hallucinations and visions for days without respite. Her teeth were stained from beetle nuts and tobacco; her hair was matted and unkempt. She had begun to crave human death. Too few hours of freedom had been followed by weeks of dizzying despair; she had never known before how wretched it was to be trapped here, she had forgotten both ocean and land once, and the forgetting had been her savior. Now she remembered, and suffered.
She reached for the shells again, reverent as though they were the coins of betrayal, and scattered them. Looked at them. Bit her lip, unsure. Pondered them. Sipped her coffee, too hot. Too much to hope for, too much to believe it was. A few seconds ago the shells had meant nothing to her. Now they meant everything—now they told her a secret she couldn't quite grasp. Coincidence? Mistake? Trick?
The moments ticked by, bringing clarity. Her existence hinged on belief, and believe she would. The shells had spoken true.
He was coming back.
He came alone, no boat, barefoot, a careworn, cast-aside doll of a man. Her eyes alone would not have recognized him. Triumph died on her lips, the bitterness she had been chewing as cud vanished from her mouth. She was mother, aunt, she was Tia Dalma. He was her child and he had returned. Almost dead, he fell against the ladder and stayed there, immobile. The swamp was very quiet, and Calypso thought it right, though the swamp had never, never been quiet before.
She tripped down her own ladder, training her heart to be steady and her hands to be gentle as she pulled him into her lap, afraid he would fall to pieces in her arms. Yes, he still breathed. Gods above, he was broken. She held him blindly, feeling his warmth too faint and his soul too still. His face and shoulders were blistered with deep burns; his back, a smattering of whip-lashes and other, more gruesome injuries; bits of glass and wood still clung there in the mess. Around both eyes, blue-green marks showed from a beating and his face was tinged yellow. "Oh Jack," she whispered without thinking. "Oh…"
"Dalma?" he was awake, in some sense or another. "I lost it. They took me ship."
"Shh… Jack, hush chil', hush dear one."
"They took me treasure… left me…"
"Don' think about dat now, Jack, jus' rest…"
"A ship came… saved me."
"Aye, Jack de Sparrow, a ship always come."
"I made a deal… for passage." His mouth was parched, his voice, a grim shadow of itself. And his chest heaved as he spoke those last words, he began to shake deeply, weeping, though his face remained dry.
"It's all right, Jack," Calypso said again, wanting to envelope him, wanting to surround him completely like the velvet black soil of the bayou. "What be da bargain dis time?"
He didn't answer now, just continued to shudder, drawing his knees up toward his chest like a tortured child might. He flinched when she caressed his face. And Calypso thought, there were some bargains no man should have to make. Some bargains that eclipsed even the loss of one's soul.
Calypso lifted him easily in her arms with the strength of the sea. With only her toes she gripped the ladder and carried Jack up, up to the wooden floor, up to her house where burnt coffee sat on old coals and bleached crab bones adorned the aging table.
He survived.
Another countdown to departure. Another hourglass running out of sand too quickly for Calypso. He would live; thus, he would leave. He would leave her again. She should not have tended his wounds with such diligence—should not have employed those spells and herbs and charms with such fervor. She should not have put forth the old strength or given up the carefully staved magic for him. She did not want to watch him leave again.
There was a bed in the hut now.
Lovemaking did not teach you a person's body the way tending them in long illness did. Calypso thought, that was the real consummation of love. She knew his body like her own now, and the places on it that still gave him pain. The places that had been the longest to heal. Even his mind was laid open to her briefly.
"Ye've wandered a long time, witty Jack," she said to his blank stare.
In all his time in her care, he had remained more or less silent. Now he spoke, his voice human again, though deeper, huskier than it had been once. "And now I've decided to forget it all."
"Not even I have de power to grant ye dat request."
He smiled. The smile was brittle and enigmatic, unforgiving. Calypso felt herself shiver a little. "I don't need magic to leave the past in its place."
She couldn't resist. She wanted him to need her. "Maybe ye need magic to remedy de past, aye?"
"Remedy the past?" his tone turned unsteady. "Nothing to be done, I expect… except to start over." And she saw, for all the marks across his skin, he was still smooth. Clouding fear and regret, shame and perhaps despair; none of these destroyed him as they should have. It wasn't quite fair… wasn't quite right. He had mingled too much with magic and legends, with things best left in the storybooks. She wanted to pull him further into her world, keep him there. He had come so far already.
"Der is a way…" she was whispering, sliding against him on the bed she had made for him. "A way for revenge, a way to get back dat which belong to ye…"
"How?" he asked curiously. His head was tilted to one side, and the entrancing grace of his movements had changed, stiffened slightly with his wounds, made him awkward and almost comical.
"Wit magic of course," she said, leaning closer. She wanted to kiss him now, though he seemed afraid of her lips. Pride stung, she brushed his mouth lightly before pulling away. "De men dat betrayed ye—how will ye pay dem back? Should dey get away wit what dey did? De marks dey left on ye?"
Jack's eyes sank to the floor.
"De legendary Jack Sparrow always triumphs, aye? Ye're not afraid, are ye, Jack?"
"No," he said, almost a question.
She reached into the folds of her skirt for the object she trusted to draw them back together. The object that would remind Jack all she had done for him, all she had made him. The object that might make him stay. Another gamble, but magic was her strength and would be on her side.
"A compass?" he looked disappointed. "I've got one, or did have, thanks."
"Not jus' any compass, Jack," she said sharply. Oh the bitterness of faded belief! "Dis compass is magic." Unable to resist, she neared his mouth again. He did not flinch this time, but bent toward her slightly.
"Magic?"
They were sharing a breath. There was only a sliver between them… golden and irreversible, the sliver of enchantment and the turning wheel of destiny, the third risk. Calypso felt the fine slender hairs on her neck rise; he was new, reborn on her lips, tentative and inexperienced as a youth. He was desperate to believe, desperate to repaint the past, erase the pain. Such it was to be human. Calypso forgot sometimes that they couldn't appreciate the bad the same way they did the good. Just as well, for her anyway. "Magic. What secrets lie in yer heart, Jack de Sparrow… what yearnings are der?"
He swallowed deep, swallowing back an ocean of answers.
"Can ye sort de tangle and pursue it clear, Jack? Dis compass give ye what no man has—de truth. What ye want most, what yer heart believes. Points de way, de path before yer feet."
"It sounds too grand a thing for me…"
"Calypso gives gifts to that whom she chooses."
"And what would ye ask in return?"
"Does it matter? I offer ye de world! Yer heart's desire, Jack…"
He laid his head back against the loose cotton that her people had woven for him, unaware of the hours they had gathered round the hut, mournful and waiting, crying out to their gods in strange tongues, begging for his life. He ran his hand along the threaded texture of the blanket, dyed indigo by the swamp's harvest. "I've bargained away me body and me soul," he finally whispered. "Nothing could be worse than that, could it?"
More to come soon...
