Just for your information:
This chapter may be a little confusing without the wonderful explanation of the whole thing in the next chapter. Please do not get confused. Danny will explain it all, after they dig up the treasure under the school.
The next morning, I sat on a small boat being rowed to the shore of Tortuga. The men so kindly accompanying me were Bootstrap and George, with Pintel and Ragetti rowing. As we approached the island, I noticed that it was hilly, small, and forested. I was having difficulties imagining a bunch of pirates living there, or it being anything like the way Sammuel had described it.
"That's Tortuga?" I asked, just to be sure.
"Yep, an' ain't she beautiful," Ragetti replied, but as he gestured, he dropped his oar in the water. He scrambled to pick it up.
"Where are all the pirates? Are they hiding?"
"No," George laughed, "you just have to make it over the hill first."
"Oh." It was a second before I had another question. "Are you guys going to come with me?"
"No," Bootstrap responded bluntly, and firmly.
"You mean I have to spend a whole entire year in a city overflowing with pirates, all by myself!"
"Come on, it won't be that bad," George comforted. "At least you won't be alone on the island for one year."
I thought about that conversation as I reached the top of the hill. I looked down at the city and repeated, "It doesn't look that bad." It really didn't look bad. Tortuga looked just like any other city during business hours. I walked down towards it, but the closer I got, the more I realized this was not a normal city. First of all, no one was working. They were doing whatever they pleased. Men were drunk on top of roofs. Women were shooting pistols randomly into the air. People were dancing to the weirdest music I'd ever heard. Maybe it was a bit more like what Sammuel had said.
Then, a ragged, skinny, old guy with long hair ran up to me screaming, "We're standing on top of a live volcano that's about to blow! We've got to go!" Then, he ran off, out of the city.
I laughed at him for a second—poor guy—and then pulled out of my pocket the map to the school that Barbossa had given me. I quickly figured out that I was on Rum Avenue. On Ale Street, I would have to turn right, and the school should be on the corner of Ale and Whiskey. I laughed again and kept walking. As I walked further into the crowd, a group of people walking the other direction brushed by me rudely, kind of pushing me to the side. There, a merchant-looking man in a black coat snuck up behind me. He then jumped in front of me, holding his coat open to display dozens of pocket watches.
"May I offer to steal your watch?" He asked mysteriously.
"Uh…I don't have a watch," I replied taking a step to the left. The merchant did also.
"Me thinks ye do."
"No, I don't." I walked past him, but he turned and followed.
"Do you have any other valuables such as a ring, or an earring, or simply gold?"
"No," I looked back at my map to make him go away.
Bad idea, because he then exclaimed, "What is that?...Is that? It is! It's a treasure map!" He stole it from my hand.
Then another man, a fat man with a long black beard and one leg, ran up, stole the map from the merchant, and screamed, "Mwa-ha-ha, a map! Where's ze treasore?" He read the map out loud to himself. "Ze school. Zere is treasore at ze school." He quickly ran off, with four other people following him, and the merchant disappeared.
It was a good thing it wasn't hard to get to the school. I could get to the corner of Ale and Whiskey on my own. I just kept walking as if nothing had happened. As soon as I turned on Ale Street, though, I realized that two men were following me. I didn't think much of it at first. With so many people in the city, there was a good chance someone would be headed in the same direction as me. But the further I went, the less I believed that. This was because, as I maneuvered through the crowd, they always stayed directly behind me. I decided to turn and walk in the other direction just to see if they would follow. They did, and they were closing in on me.
I sped up; so did they. By that time I was so scared that I broke out in a dead run, but they kept advancing. I turned down an alley. When I got to the end, I sat down because they weren't following me anymore. I sighed in relief, but before I could even get comfortable, they came at me from both sides. In the time it took me to realize they had shown up and react to it, they had each grabbed one of my arms and begun leading me somewhere. I didn't want to go with them. I didn't know where they were going, but it didn't seem like a good idea. So I tugged, resisted, and struggled, and then, I started talking French. I didn't even know French, just a few random things that my mother taught me, but I thought it might make them go away.
At first it made sense when I shouted, "Pas la-bas! Pas la-bas! Je ne veux pas aller la-bas!" But they weren't listening—probably because they couldn't understand—so I had to keep talking, with nothing more to say. Next, I managed to get out, "La chatte verte a besoin de le singe de destin, parce que le singe de destin peut mort vous." (In other words—the green cat has need of the monkey of doom because the monkey of doom can dead you.) And everything I said after that was worse.
Then, I stopped. I stopped struggling; I stopped talking, and I just walked along. Slowly, they began to loosen their grips on me, thinking I had given up. Maybe I had, but as soon as they had relaxed just enough—I thought—I turned around and ran in the other direction. I was FREE…for about three seconds. It didn't take long for one of them to turn around and catch me again, this time by my shirt. He glared at me, while the other one opened a secret door in the wall behind me. He pushed me through it, and I rolled down most of the stairs.
I hurried to my feet expecting to charge back up the stairs and…well, I'm not sure what I'd do then. But anyhow, I didn't because they came in, shutting the door behind them, and for the first time, I noticed that I was surrounded by other captured people. I slowly turned around to look at them all. There were three boys, triplets—a very unusual occurrence—a mother, her young daughter and their dog, three regular pirate men, one very pirate-ish young woman, and a boy alone in the corner fiddling with a knife. I stopped. If all of them couldn't get out together, I couldn't get out by myself.
Plopping myself down on the ground discouragedly, near the edge, but closest to the mother and daughter, I thought, I will wait for the opportune moment because with the proper planning, we can escape. I shook my head. I wasn't that smart, and pretending to be was only reminding me of that fact. Anyhow, I wasn't supposed to be talking to these people, much less concocting escape plans with them. Stop it with the big words Wesley. Stop it! But the more I tried to think of small words, the more big words popped into my head, and the stupider I felt. Luckily, the group—that had been whispering about me—eventually decided to talk to me, distracting me from my self torture.
"Do you like my dress? My daddy brought it all the way from Bongalosh in China," the little girl asked me as quietly as a girl her age could. I just smiled. Bongalosh?
Her mother—a very young mother with a very calm voice—stood up and kindly grabbed her daughter saying, "Natalie don't bother him." Then, she turned toward me, "I'm sorry, don't pay any attention to her. She's just too friendly sometimes." She paused for a moment and then inquired, "So why are you here?"
I shrugged.
"Where are your parents?" I shrugged again. At least it was true both times. I really didn't know.
"Is that why you're so quiet? Do you miss them?"
She was already assuming I was quiet, and I did NOT miss my parents. I gave her a look that asked, "Are you crazy?"
"So you don't miss them then?...Are you feeling all right? You seem awfully quiet."
I felt like shouting, "Everyone else in this bloody room is silent too. Why are you picking on me?" But of course, I couldn't say that.
Before I got the chance to give her another strange look, one of the guys stated, "I bet 'e's mute." The other two chuckled at the joke. I was perfectly fine with that. If they believed it, I wouldn't have to say anything.
The mother wasn't so happy about that. She turned to the three men and commanded, "Don't talk like that, you'll scare him." She acted like I was her puppy or something.
"Aww, we're scaring him," the man replied sarcastically. She glared at him, I glared at him, and he looked back like, "Can't ye come up with somethin' better?"
The young pirate-ish woman broke the silence saying, "Can't we all just get along for a minute?" Then, everyone turned to glare at her, and I just tried not to laugh. "Come on, as Brethren we're supposed to get along. We have everything we need."
Brethren, I wondered, brethren of what? And didn't that generally mean they were all men?
She continued gesturing to her side, "They left us a giant pile of food." We all looked, and that pile had recently become a pile of trash—bones, banana peels, bread crusts…and just next to the pile were the triplets, all with guilty faces and messy mouths. One held the last half of the last banana, another a chicken leg, and the third hurriedly stuffed the last slice of bread in his mouth.
"Fine, at least we have shelter from any rain that might come." Outside we heard it thunder, and it started pouring rain outside and leaking through the roof everywhere. As everyone repositioned themselves to compensate for the leaks, the three guys—who just happened to be in the one place it wasn't leaking—laughed and mocked amongst themselves. She just slumped to the floor, not even caring about the rain.
"Anamaria," the same man laughed out at her, "don't—" and then he had to stop because he was laughing too hard.
The mother looked at Anamaria and felt pity on her. Once again, she picked up Natalie, and this time went to go comfort Anamaria, closely followed by the dog. "Don't mind them," she said, sitting down and hugging Anamaria, "they're just immature jerks."
The guys heard that, and, being offended, they stopped laughing. Anamaria smiled a little. At least until it stopped raining everyone was relatively quiet. The first thing we heard after it stopped was, "We're cold," a complaint coming from one of the triplets. At first I just rolled my eyes, but then I noticed that it was getting chilly because the sun was going down.
"Really?" The mother asked, just to be sure.
"Yes!" The three replied urgently.
She got up and walked over to the three men, who were all now sleeping. "Get up Joe," she ordered. When Joe didn't move, she slapped the talkative one—I guess that was Joe—and repeated, "Joseph Raymond Parker, get up!" He scrambled to his feet in a hurry, and the other two sat up as well. She continued, "Build a fire for these poor boys, now."
"But—" He protested, still half asleep.
"Now!"
"With what?"
"I don't know. Maybe you can finally put your head to some sort of good use for a change and actually think of something."
Joe obeyed, reluctantly. He wandered over to the trash pile and kicked it into the middle of the room. He stared at it for a while before asking, "Now what?"
"Do you expect that to just spontaneously combust, and burn for you? Huh?"
"Well, what am I supposed to start it with? It's not like your dog is some sort of fire breathing dragon." That sure put a funny picture in my head—of it blowing all Joe's hair off.
"I'm sure someone here has something you can use."
He waited for a moment and then said, "You heard the lady. Everyone's gotta give me somethin' for this fire, an' one of 'em better be able to start it." He turned to me and added, "You hear that mute boy?"
"He's mute," triplet 1 said.
"Not deaf," triplet 2 interrupted.
"There's a difference," the third finished.
"How would you know that?" 1 and 2 asked 3.
"We knew someone who was mute once," he replied.
"Who?" 1 inquired.
"Oh yeah, that guy with the weird nose," 2 explained.
"Right! And he wasn't deaf," 1 remembered finally.
"All right, all right," Joe complained, "I'm sorry if I offended Mute Boy." He hadn't offended me. So far, this was really all just amusing. Joe started gathering flammable materials for the fire. He quickly gathered a book—which was good, if the person didn't like the book. It would burn well enough, anyhow. Right then, he was over by the other young boy. I wondered why they never asked him if he were mute; he didn't talk either.
"Mommy, what does mute mean?" The little girl asked.
"It means they can't talk, honey," the mother answered.
"Can you really not talk?" The little girl stood right in front of me, her head turned to the side curiously. "How sad."
"Natalie…" Her mother began.
"No, no," Anamaria interrupted, "No, it's a good question. You see everyone's just assumed he couldn't talk, but no one's asked him yet…Are you mute?" She asked me.
I didn't know what to do. I didn't want to lie and say yes, but if I said no, they would go back to asking me why I don't talk. I just looked at them, trying to come up with an answer.
Joe walked over to us, leaned on Anamaria's shoulder, and whispered, "I think he's deaf too." She made that funny teenage girl attitude noise and pushed him away. I stood up in protest. I could hear just fine. "Okay, Mute Boy, calm down. It was only meant as a joke, but if ye took it further, I stand corrected. You can hear just fine…Oh and by the way, I need something to burn."
Then I had to think some more. Something to burn? I used to have a map, but all I had now was the clothes on my back. I shrugged and turned my pockets inside out hoping he would get the point. He gestured his two friends over.
When they got to us, he said, "This boy claims to have nothing at all. Now, we pirates know better than that. Search him 'til ye find something."
I think that was meant mostly as a threat, to make me admit that I really did have something to give him, but I really didn't have anything to give him. The friends started searching. One of them started at the bottom. He took my boots off and emptied them, hoping to find more than the pile of sand that was in them, and then worked up from there. The other started at the top.
"Open up," he said, pointing at my mouth. He stuck this weird little mirror thing inside my mouth. I think he was looking for gold teeth, which wouldn't help with the fire, but he didn't find anything. He moved on to my shirt and didn't find anything there either. This was boring. I think picking my nose would be more interesting.
The two guys met in the middle, after having found nothing of use, just as I said—or implied. They both stood back up, and the guy who had searched the top just happened to notice a leather string tied around my neck. I clutched it to my chest in a last second effort to keep him from taking it. I had forgotten about my necklace…it wasn't worthwhile for burning, though. Nonetheless, he grabbed the black leather, ripped it off of me, and revealed the key tied onto it.
"Nothing but this," he concluded, tossing the necklace to Joe.
Joe examined it for a while before walking up to me and placing it back in my hand. Everyone was shocked that he would do that, including me.
The guy who had searched the bottom asked, "What'd'ya do that for?"
"We can't take that from him."
"Why not?" The other one questioned dumbly.
"It is a sign of great accomplishment on the Black Pearl. He's an honored pirate of theirs. No one else has them…unless he's a thief good enough to steal it from them, and that, Sirs, is an accomplishment. For someone his size, who can't talk, and owns nothing, God he's a good pirate, and I'll respect him for that."
So he did have a heart! A black one, which could only possibly be nice to a really good pirate. It was a bit ironic, though, considering that I didn't have to do anything at all to get the key in the first place.
"But now we have nothing to take from him."
Ooh, big problem. There was still nothing to light the fire. Nothing I had was going to change that, and that was supposed to be the only reason they were taking things from people.
"That's not entirely true," the mother commented, finally offering her assistance again. She grabbed my shirt and explained, "This shirt will burn."
I looked down. Bootstrap had given me one of Will's old jackets to hide my ragged shirt underneath it. It was kind of like, sack-clothy, and sure it would burn, but I couldn't take it off. They didn't want to see my back. I could only imagine how they would react. Of course, it would probably be something similar to the way I reacted when I first looked at myself in a mirror like this. I glanced at Anamaria nervously, hoping she would try to stop this too.
"Don't be scared boy," Joe stated, "Ye ain't got nothing to hide."
I wanted to say, "Yes I do, and you don't want to see it!" but instead, I just turned towards him and took the shirt off. My other shirt came up a little with it. Anamaria—who happened to be behind me at that moment—saw my whole back and gasped and fell to the ground about to puke. I turned around to see if she was okay, thus showing the part of my back that showed through the holes in my shirt to everyone else. Joe put his hand on his head and turned away.
The mother covered Natalie's eyes and exclaimed, "Well, no wonder he doesn't want to talk. I wouldn't want to talk if I'd just gone through that either."
I turned toward her, frowning. That wasn't why I wasn't talking.
Anamaria stood up, dizzily, only slightly recovered and asked, "How did that happen?"
I looked to her, but before I could even decide whether or not I would answer the question, the mother blurted out, "That explains why he doesn't miss his parents."
My parents! I thought, turning back to the mother with a larger frown. Father hadn't done it—this time. He at least gave me a new shirt afterwards. I really wish they would stop assuming. This would all be so much easier if I could just tell them everything they wanted to know. They kept talking. Everyone had voiced their opinion of my new surprise except for the young boy and Joe. Oddly enough, I felt like the only one who cared at all, or slightly understood me, was Joe, and I just wanted to hide behind him.
Then, the young boy stood up, threw his knife at the floor, and shouted, "Hey! Did you ever think that the reason he's not talking to you is because he's shy and doesn't want to answer all your dumb, poking, prodding, annoying question?"
"Yeah!" I agreed, not able to hold it in anymore, and I threw Will's shirt on the floor.
Everyone gasped, and then it grew all quiet and still, as if that was their whole entire goal, to make me talk, and now that they had, they had nothing left to do. At that point, I figured they just all felt bad for annoying me, so they stopped asking questions. Just when I was about to start talking because the silence was annoying me more than their questions, the door at the top of the stairs opened. Another man, kind of short, with hair cut short that was almost white, walked in the door. He was wearing a cloak to protect himself from the rain, and he threw the hood off as he started down the stairs.
"I suppose you all know who I am," he stated, very self-absorbedly. It was obvious he thought a lot of himself, but maybe he had reason. Everyone was afraid of him. The triplet huddled together in a corner. Natalie climbed into her mother's lap. Even the dog whimpered. I just stared at him, trying to figure out what made him so…scarey. It didn't take long.
He walked up to me and in a commanding voice, he asked, "Are you afraid of me Wesley?"
I was about to shout out "no!" or maybe just shake my head. I had only said one word—except for when I was talking to the watch guy. But then, he said my name. That was frightening. My eyes opened wide, and I slowly backed myself up against the wall. He wasn't supposed to know my name; I never told him.
"You are, aren't you?" He noted. I bumped into the wall, suddenly realizing that putting myself there hadn't been a good idea. Now I was trapped.
"Leave him alone, would ya?" Joe broke in. The man turned around to look at Joe, who continued, a little hushed, "He's but a boy, and he belongs to the Pearl."
The old guy faced me again, beginning to ask if that was true, but he stopped because he noticed that I was now holding a sword. "Where did you get that?" He questioned, thinking maybe I was deserving of the legendary ship.
I pointed at his sheath. He looked down, and for only a second he freaked out, perhaps thinking I was magical or something. Then, though, he realized I was the freaked out one, and I had just taken his sword when he was facing Joe. I smiled.
"Are you sure you wanted to do that?" He asked, grabbing Anamaria's, despite her fighting back. I nodded, but quickly changed to shaking my head no when everything connected. He wanted to fight me.
As soon as I thought that, he charged at me. I held the sword handle in one hand, and since it was too heavy for me, I propped the blade up lat against my other hand. I looked at Joe, begging him to help me. Surprisingly, that deflected his first strike. However, the second came more at a downward angle, driving the sword into my hand. I screamed, dropping the sword, and squeezed myself as close to the wall as I could. He put his sword up against the side of my neck. Then, he clicked his tongue, and was about to say something when a sword came flying. It landed in the wall just above my head. I glanced over to see who had thrown it and noticed that Joe had, and everyone else was being released.
The old man also looked back when he heard Joe exclaim, "I told you to leave the kid alone!" The old man took a few steps away from the wall to discuss with and threaten Joe.
I looked around for an escape route he wouldn't notice, and all I could come up with was up. You see, there was no ceiling—just a bunch of rafters—and the walls were very short. Therefore, I took a short running head start, to get me two steps up the wall. From there, I bounced on the sword, which launched me up just enough to grab the edge of the wall. I pulled myself up and climbed onto a rafter.
However, just as soon as I stood up, I fell back off again. That was because the rain made it slippery, and I heard a shot! Luckily, I caught myself between two rafters, but I wouldn't be able to hold on for very long because of my hand—and I'd never done this before. I was up there just long enough to see Joe limping off with the help of his friends. He must have been shot in the leg. The old man was looking around for me; I saw him too. My hand hurt. I picked it up to look at it, but then I started slipping. Scary, huh? It wasn't near as scary as what happened next.
Someone grabbed me from behind, covered my mouth, and commanded, "Don't say a word."
