I'm back! After flipping out and vanishing for a month. My profile has the excuses. And I'm starting this off with a big apology to my kind, clever, generous reviewers who haven't received any replies for a month. So to make up for it, I'm plugging them massively, and you'd better believe I'm sincere about it.
East Coastie1500 has been so very supportive for ages and ages, and I still haven't reviewed the latest chapter of Pavlov's Theories of Conditioned Reflex, a Norrington-centered AU with naval intrigue and British stoicism at their finest.
Arquenniel, I owe for her very long, very gracious review of my accursed one-shot which I swore to reply to in poetry. She is brilliant. Go read everything she wrote.
Nytd went and slammed out a review for every single frickin' chapter of my Will Turner story. That's 19 reviews, and she started after the whole thing was published. I freaked out and was hamstrung with gratitude, Nytd. Go read Naught But A Humble Pirate, a Hector Barbossa back-story with heart, wit, and teeth.
Erinya is also my hero, but her review was anonymous, so hah.
KMvancouver writes subtly off-the-wall modern Willabeth comedy that reminds me of a great Ben Stiller movie. Thanks, K! I'll reply some day!
Anyway, on with the show.
Mrs. Murphy's Chowder
Every spoonful made you yodel louder.
1971, the morning after The Day. A river mouth near Zhanjiang, Guangdong Province, People's Republic of China.
Elizabeth was the last on the dock, hunching over a post and gazing at him with that inscrutable soulless appraisal that she had perfected while captaining a xebec sometime between Batavia in 1789 and Gibraltar in 1818. The effect from her sunken eye was withering. As if any woman needed more in her arsenal of pernicious glares.
Jack was in the launch with the last of the crew, a few of the Cambodians who had missed the worst of the action and had hung back that morning to buy souvenirs and fried fish in the nearby village. He held the rope in one hand and the launch's throttle in the other, his back to the hoggish black bulk of Tonga Mars slouching on one wing-float out on the river mouth. He glared back at Elizabeth, stiff with fury.
A good man? A good man! Maybe! If Jack Sparrow is a good man, he's not like to leave you in the clink after risking his life, his men, his reputation, and his captaincy to drag your sorry bones out, now is he? Yes, of course Jack Sparrow is a good man when you're holding a pistol—his own pistol—to his head! Hector Barbossa would be a good man then, you treacherous conniving hypocritical minx. Such a honeyed tongue on you, aye? 'Oh, Jack, of course I'll repay you.' 'Jack, look after my son for me, and keep your slimy paws off my ship.' 'Oh, it must have been terrible for you in the locker! You know it was the only way!' Like hell it was!
Bugger, had he just been shouting that in front of the crew?
The Cambodians were staring at him, but it was a 'when are you going to throw the rope off and ditch the old bag so we can get back to the ship' sort of stare, not the 'on my signal, tie him down and get him a sedative' stare.
"Thank-you, Mr. Sparrow," Jack muttered to a hallucination standing beside him, who was panting after his rant and starting to foam at the mouth. So that was where his voice had come from.
"Captain Sparrow," said the ex-Pirate King. Or perhaps current Pirate King, like for American presidents, who retained the rights to their title long after they turned irrelevant.
"Yes. Captain. Swann," Jack spat.
"If we might discuss my payment in privacy," she said, nodding toward the Tonga.
Jack glared at her, nostrils flaring. Such a proud wench. Delusional governor's brat, barking at pirates and customs-men alike with nought but a knife on her willowy person, driving ships until their stays snapped under the weather, cajoling whole fleets into certain carnage, getting her husband killed. No, she'd never stoop, would she? Never say, 'please, help me, Jack,' not even when her hands are all twisted like bracken roots and her legs barely hold her and she's starved light as a feather. Perverse, idiot woman.
Just how old was she? She must have been spry enough twenty years ago, terrorizing the China Sea as Zhu Hong, but looking at her, after the prison, she could be eighty. She was unlikely to see two more summers.
Jack blinked and sniffed. "Very well, get in."
She tottered to the dock edge and half-stepped, half-rolled into the boat. The crewmen caught her before she could crack her head on the gunwale. Jack had made no move to help her, and she had made none to ask.
He pounded the throttle with extra venom, but relented when a sharp bounce drew a gasp of pain from Elizabeth.
The hole in the side of his leg had tried to rip itself apart on that jolt, too.
Tonga Mars hulked over the water, a sooty chimera of broad airy wings on a frigate's sea-running hull. She was tall as a ship, vertical as a ship, with a plane's incongruous tail sloping up and a plane's round blunt nose; she slouched on one massive float on her starboard wing, the other canting carelessly up at a far-off cloud. It was beneath the starboard wing that her bay doors opened, and here Captain Sparrow ploughed the launch to a stop, washing their wake and knocking their bow against the plane's skin. The black paint scarred shining aluminum where the boats had struck it before, making a haze of white scratches all around the doors.
They clambered into the open bay, hoisted Elizabeth up, hooked pulleys to the launch and hoisted it inside, slammed the sliding doors, and bathed in the dim mildewed darkness dotted by portholes and bare bulbs.
A real ship, Jack mused, was all bones and skin and sinews—simple, honest, and effective. The Tonga was like the inside of a whale, rib-girders running down the bulkheads, a ceiling knotted with pipes stuffed with oily juices, valves, hisses, and gurgles. It didn't feel healthy. The one redeeming thing about the whole affair was that it could jump peninsulas.
In the Tonga's abdominal region, in a big echoing cubical pen like the other big echoing cubical pens that composed the lower deck, the men had slung hammocks and built their home: a hybrid of army barracks and frat house, with the slightest dash of forecastle. The injured were pillowed on blankets on the floor. Yuri was sitting up, massaging a bloody yellow sweatshirt bound around his thigh and sharing a fuming mug of clear spirits with Collins, the first man to fall to the guards. Dmitri lay flat on his back, hands folded over his chest, legs flopped haphazardly over the floor. His ankles were limp and his eyes were squeezed shut in concentration; his lips moved as if in a chant. He grunted as Sparrow and the Cambodians clomped in, but did nothing more. Maxine, gut-shot, was curled on her side, sweating and shivering. Drool pooled under her bared teeth.
Other Tongas filled the room, crouching on the floor and leaning on their hammocks. The mood was bitter. Gung Ngau kept his eyes to the ceiling, but other men looked from the Captain to his old woman and back, scowling. Jack glared back, ignoring Elizabeth, and glanced down at the wounded. "You'll be wanting the tonic, aye?"
Yuri shuddered and nodded.
"You?" Jack asked, pointing at Jules, who had bandaged his shin, but seemed to have no trouble standing on it. "Care to brave the scoriac unguents of Mary Ulubambe?"
Jules shook his head. "Pass," he muttered.
The Captain swished to the pantry, his stride even more erratic to hide a limp from the ragged bullet-score in his thigh.
A half-hour later, he reemerged, walking in a somewhat straighter line, bearing a forty-ounce bottle of mahogany sludge and a peculiar tense grin. The crew withdrew from his path, opening a cringing gauntlet to the patients, and stared at Yuri and Collins with desperate sympathy. The Captain shook the big bottle until it foamed, and poured a full tot into Yuri's tin mug. Yuri steeled himself, cocking his head back and forth as though a different angle would make the mixture less gut-ripping, and finally plugged his nose and tipped back a mouthful. He choked, panted open-mouthed, and stared down at the cup, which was still nearly full. The Captain topped it off, and the big Russian gave him a pleading look that no one could recall seeing on his face before.
"Drink up," admonished the Captain, wagging a finger at him. Yuri nodded and forced himself to obey.
The Tonic was an abomination to science and physiology.
Its formula was one of the Captain's many guarded secrets—he claimed to have gotten the recipe from a healer on the Ivory Coast, but they doubted a traditional medicine-woman could concoct such a thing. Pepper, hot crushed red pepper, was a major ingredient. Another was a hundred-year-old egg, which they could get in Japan, but if none could be bought, a rotten one would do. The base was sea-water, they theorized, with extra salt thrown in, and soda powder on top of that. A second, raw, egg emulsified some sort of oil that reeked of gasoline into the mix—could it be gasoline?—and on top of it all, the men with sensitive noses swore, was a liberal splash of pure acetone.
This fiery cocktail purportedly hid an infusion of mystical African herbs. Though the pepper seared their throats and the solvents bore the burn all through the bloodstream, though the fumes made the brain turn to Jello, the egg reeked of sulfur, and the salt desiccated them from within, the Tonic worked. Yuri and Collins, choking down their mugs, were contemplating death, but the Tonic had never yet killed anyone. Mugs were fetched for Dmitri and Maxine, and their mates hauled them upright and forced the stuff past their lips, Maxine needing her throat stroked before she would swallow, her teeth clamped tight shut with pain and fever.
Yuri slammed his empty mug to the steel floor, gasping, eyes wide and streaming. The burn had begun to spread, and his hands shook.
"Give 'em the rest at sundown," the Captain announced, and Yuri, jaws gaping, slammed his fist down and gave an animal growl. Sparrow cringed and danced backward. "I leave you to it!"
With the injured stabilized, Jack told the crew to strap their things down, rounded up his flight engineer, and seated himself alone in the two-man cockpit. Gauges and switches and levers glared up at him, and he wondered how many of them actually did or said what the little black-and-white labels said they did.
Duplicitous bird. Oh, for spars and ropes and canvas that the eye could sweep at an instant, and trim and balance at will…perhaps a nuclear war would knock the world back a century or two. Wasn't unlikely.
He surveyed the water between the struts of the canopy, leaning to see over the plane's flanks, and gunned the throttles with a sigh. Tonga sputtered awake, a great gale pluming behind her as she dragged herself over the water, gradually speeding and rising until, with a drunken tilt, she clambered onto a plane, cutting walls of spray, and at last she broke from the sea as though popping her lips from a hickey.
Zhangzhiang sunk at last behind the Southern horizon.
Yes, the Tonic is probably poisonous. A fist-full of pepper and a spoonful of industrial chemicals keeps the pirates deathly afraid of the medicine.
'Scoriac' is a word invented by Edgar Alan Poe to describe lava floes. Poe was fun that way.
Tonga Mars is a fictional plane, but the JRM Mars series of giant sea-going transport planes produced toward the close of WWII is real. Only six were built. Four were variously burned, wrecked, and destroyed by winds, and the last two, Philippine and Hawaii Mars, now work as water-bombers to fight isolated fires in Canada. A Mars can hold seven jeeps or hundreds of troops, and can fly from California to Hawaii and back on a single enormous fill-up of high-octane gasoline.