Disclaimer: see chapter 1
Author's note: this chapter's a bit of an anomaly, being entirely landlocked. The natives Jack meets are supposed to be the Taino Indians, who were Hispaniola's (now Haiti/the Dominican Republic) indigenous people before the Spanish wiped them all out. By the end of the 17th century, not many of them were left, but they still survived. My logic for them not slaughtering poor Jack at sight is tenuous - he doesn't look like a Spanish soldier, and he doesn't speak Spanish. Please suspend disbelief!
----
It was noon. In the shade of the jungle, Jack Sparrow sat with his back against a tree, weakly fanning himself with his hat. A scrawny mule nibbled leaves nearby, occasionally pausing to look quizzically at Jack before resuming its meal.
Jack had left the girl's cabin in Santo Domingo early, leaving her with a couple of gold coins and creeping out. He had liberated the mule from a paddock, together with a rough blanket hanging over the fence, a wooden saddle, and some rope for a halter. The mule did not seem to mind being kidnapped, to begin with, and had submitted peaceably to being harnessed and mounted before ambling off northwards.
For a while, Jack had rather enjoyed rolling along on the mule's back. The movement was not dissimilar to being aboard ship. The sun was still low in the sky and birds were singing in the trees as Jack and his mount left the town and headed into the jungle beyond. But even in the shade, it soon grew hot and humid; and Jack's backside was quickly sore. The only positive aspect was the abundance of fresh fruit, and he munched as he went along.
Hours had passed, though, with no sign of another person. Finally, Jack stopped the mule and painfully levered himself off his mount to collapse on the ground. Everything ached; he was sweating and thirsty, and wishing that he had chosen another route to Tortuga. It had just seemed so much more reasonable to cut across land rather than find yet another ship and sail all the way around the island.
He hauled himself to his feet, using the tree as a support, and took the mule's halter. It protested with a grunt as Jack remounted.
"Sorry, you miserable bugger," Jack told it. "Gotta get somewhere - can't stay here. Go on." He kicked it with his heels. "Move!"
Slowly the mule moved off, still munching a mouthful of leaves.
The path was fairly clear, and Jack guessed that either traders or the native tribes used it regularly to get to and from Santo Domingo. A fast river rushed along below him at the bottom of the valley, refreshing in sound but frustratingly inaccessible. Jack hung on to the rope bridle, and thought of the sea.
He slept fitfully that night and woke up with his chest and face covered in insect bites. The rest of him had been covered, thankfully, but the parts that had been attacked were painful. He was ravenous, too, for something more solid than fruit, and got back on the mule with a hollow stomach and itchy skin.
That day was worse than the first. By the end of it, Jack's daydreams of the Black Pearl were becoming more like hallucinations, and his hands kept leaping out to grasp invisible shrouds and steer a ship that was not there. He found a couple of small streams and drank; the mule grateful for the liquid also. Some of the insect bites had all but disappeared, but others had swollen up and were smarting terribly.
As darkness fell, Jack rolled off the mule, which snorted and turned about a few times before settling down for the night. Jack himself kicked half-heartedly at a patch of leaves, making a sporadic check for large beetles or snakes, and then lay down and went to sleep.
He was woken for the dawn watch by O'Connell.
"Stir your stumps, you lazy son of an English dog!" the Irishman said, shaking Jack's shoulder.
Jack shook his head. "Not getting up," he mumbled. "Not my watch. Don't have to get up for you."
"But the Pearl's yours, lad," O'Connell said. "Don't you want to rise and take care of her?"
"I reckon I should, then," Jack agreed, getting to his feet. He reached for his coat and realised he had it on. "That's strange. That's very strange."
"We've all got our coats on," O'Connell reassured him, turning and leading the way out on deck.
"Oh. So that's all right then?" Jack asked, hurrying after the mate. O'Connell flashed him an uncharacteristic grin.
"Aye, lad."
Captain Flint was at the helm, steering the Pearl through thick fog. The sea below seemed calm, but the ship was rushing along. "Welcome aboard the Black Pearl, lad."
Jack swept his hat off and bowed flamboyantly at the crew, watching from vantage points in the rigging. "Thank you, cap'n, though I've been aboard for years."
"You just feel like that," Anamaria called down from the top of the mainmast. "It's not true, though, none of it is."
"What's not true?" Jack squinted up at her.
"This!" said Flint. "Fire the cannon!"
"You can't do that!" Jack protested, waving his arms. "You mustn't fire, cap'n!"
A group of pirates hurried up to him, and picked him up, hoisting him above their heads, and calling to each other in a strange language. "Oy!" Jack said, frantic, fighting. "Put me down, lads, put me down!"
"You're ours now," Thornton told him. "We'll never let you go, Jack Sparrow. Never let you go ... never let you go ..."
The rest of the pirates took up the chant, and Jack felt himself drifting off to sleep again.
He floated in a peaceful darkness for a while, rocked in the cradle of unconsciousness. But nobody can stay asleep forever, and Jack woke a second time as somebody stroked something cool and soothing over his forehead. Water was dripping into his mouth - cold, fresh water, and he swallowed reflexively and coughed.
A woman's voice chided him until he settled again, and then the soothing stroking began again. Jack smiled lazily. This was nice. This was something he could get used to. He began to let himself drift off again, before a thought hit his mind. The woman had not been speaking English, nor even Spanish. And hadn't he been on board the Black Pearl? How was he therefore being comforted by a woman, lying on something soft, with the sound of leaves and birdsong around him?
Jack's eyes snapped open. Above his head there was a canopy of green, and faces surrounded him. Unfamiliar, dark faces, but with kindness and worry in their eyes. When Jack tried to sit up, hands pushed him back down again, firmly but not roughly. The woman spoke again, and Jack, flicking his eyes sideways, saw that she was middle-aged and dressed in rather less than he was used to women wearing. Her necklaces and pendants rivalled his own decoration, and she was ordering the rest of the group around with ease Jack recognised. Wherever he was, this woman was the captain, and she was obviously a good one. He relaxed and closed his eyes again.
It was night before he woke again. This time he was alone, in a circular hut with a straw roof, and he sat up slowly. He was sitting on a straw pallet placed directly on the earth floor, and covered with a light but scratchy blanket. His boots, hat, coat, headscarf and sash were piled neatly close by, with his sword belt next to the pile. It was dim in the hut, but sunlight shafted in through the cracks in the roof so Jack knew it was day.
He glanced down at the bites on his chest and to his surprise found they had reduced vastly in size. Some of them seemed to have some sort of brown ointment smeared on them, and when he felt his face with his fingers he found the same ointment there. But the itching was gone, and when he tried standing up he found himself steady on his feet. The nagging headache that had been beating at his temples since noon on the first day out of Santo Domingo had gone, and he was no longer so hungry or thirsty. Most importantly, he remembered where he was going, and why he was going there.
Jack pushed his hair back off his face, the beads clinking in a comforting, familiar way, and slowly bent to put on his boots. Once he was shod, he crossed to the door of the hut and opened it, looking out curiously.
He was in the middle of a small native village. A circle of round huts stood in a clearing in the jungle, the blue sky showing where the trees and vegetation had been felled. There was a fire burning off to one side, and a bustle of women and girls cooking something savoury on it in a vast earthenware dish. There were men also, making and mending and tending to tools and weapons. Most of the people were dressed simply and sparingly, but a few of them had European-style coats or shirts or breeches.
Some of the women looked up as Jack stood in the doorway of his hut and examined the scene, and shortly the middle-aged matriarch he remembered from before - was it earlier that day? The previous day? - came hurrying over to him, and stood hands on hips to survey him. She prodded his bites, felt his forehead, and made him open his mouth so she could look inside. Finally, she nodded, seemingly satisfied.
Jack put his hands together and gave her a little bow of thanks. The woman stared at him for a moment, and then laughed. He laughed with her. She beckoned, and he followed her across the clearing to the cooking fire, where she made him sit down on a log and gave him a wooden bowl full of the stew that was cooking. It proved to be vegetables mixed with some sort of meat. Jack decided he was too famished to concern himself with precisely what sort of meat, and he tucked in with a hearty appetite. Water was produced, also, and he alternated sips of that with mouthfuls of stew and so finished his meal. The women surrounding him nodded in satisfaction, and spoke briskly to each other in their own language. Leaning back on his elbows, Jack let his food digest and watched them as they went about their business. One of the smaller girls came and perched on the log by his side, and tentatively put her hand out to touch his beads before snatching her hand away again. Jack grinned roguishly at her, and she squeaked and ran off to hide behind her mother's legs.
After a while, Jack stood up and crossed to the woman who had been looking after him. She turned as he approached, and graced him with a brief nod and a quizzical glance.
"I'm looking for my mule," Jack explained. The words were met with a blank look. He thought for a moment, and then bent over, put his hands on the ground and made a good effort at replicating the animal's snorting neigh. He straightened, and was rewarded with howls of laughter from everyone within earshot. But his nurse took his hand and led him around the back of the huts, where the mule proved to be tied up and looking contented.
Jack went up to it, scratched it behind the ears, and had a quick look at the knot, which was not at all seamanlike but seemed to be holding. He turned back to the matriarch.
"I've got to go," he said, feeling the need to say something even though he knew she would not understand him. "Got to get to Tortuga. Tortuga?"
Astonishingly, she nodded.
"You know Tortuga?"
The woman said something quickly in her language and pointed, out of the village and away. Jack glanced up at the sun, did some calculations, and decided that she was pointing northwest and that he had most of the day left for travelling.
Ten minutes later he had the mule saddled, his coat rolled up behind it, and his hat and sword belt on. The matriarch did not seem happy to have her patient vanish so quickly, but had given him a flask of water and a severe glance that Jack interpreted as "drink, and drink often." He gave her another bow, and then, filled suddenly with gratitude that these people had rescued him from a lonely, delirious end on land, gave her a deep kiss. This was met with cheers from the rest of the village, and Jack mounted his mule and rode away to a forest of waves and a chorus of what he presumed to be farewells.
With the flask of water in hand, and his lesson about going too long without water learned, Jack made steady and safer progress, and a week after leaving Santo Domingo came over the brow of a hill to see the turquoise blue of the ocean lying below him. He let out a whoop of pure joy, and the mule, startled out of its wits, careened down the hill towards the water. Jack hung on, laughing all the way, hair streaming, on his way back to home - back to sea.
Author's note: this chapter's a bit of an anomaly, being entirely landlocked. The natives Jack meets are supposed to be the Taino Indians, who were Hispaniola's (now Haiti/the Dominican Republic) indigenous people before the Spanish wiped them all out. By the end of the 17th century, not many of them were left, but they still survived. My logic for them not slaughtering poor Jack at sight is tenuous - he doesn't look like a Spanish soldier, and he doesn't speak Spanish. Please suspend disbelief!
----
It was noon. In the shade of the jungle, Jack Sparrow sat with his back against a tree, weakly fanning himself with his hat. A scrawny mule nibbled leaves nearby, occasionally pausing to look quizzically at Jack before resuming its meal.
Jack had left the girl's cabin in Santo Domingo early, leaving her with a couple of gold coins and creeping out. He had liberated the mule from a paddock, together with a rough blanket hanging over the fence, a wooden saddle, and some rope for a halter. The mule did not seem to mind being kidnapped, to begin with, and had submitted peaceably to being harnessed and mounted before ambling off northwards.
For a while, Jack had rather enjoyed rolling along on the mule's back. The movement was not dissimilar to being aboard ship. The sun was still low in the sky and birds were singing in the trees as Jack and his mount left the town and headed into the jungle beyond. But even in the shade, it soon grew hot and humid; and Jack's backside was quickly sore. The only positive aspect was the abundance of fresh fruit, and he munched as he went along.
Hours had passed, though, with no sign of another person. Finally, Jack stopped the mule and painfully levered himself off his mount to collapse on the ground. Everything ached; he was sweating and thirsty, and wishing that he had chosen another route to Tortuga. It had just seemed so much more reasonable to cut across land rather than find yet another ship and sail all the way around the island.
He hauled himself to his feet, using the tree as a support, and took the mule's halter. It protested with a grunt as Jack remounted.
"Sorry, you miserable bugger," Jack told it. "Gotta get somewhere - can't stay here. Go on." He kicked it with his heels. "Move!"
Slowly the mule moved off, still munching a mouthful of leaves.
The path was fairly clear, and Jack guessed that either traders or the native tribes used it regularly to get to and from Santo Domingo. A fast river rushed along below him at the bottom of the valley, refreshing in sound but frustratingly inaccessible. Jack hung on to the rope bridle, and thought of the sea.
He slept fitfully that night and woke up with his chest and face covered in insect bites. The rest of him had been covered, thankfully, but the parts that had been attacked were painful. He was ravenous, too, for something more solid than fruit, and got back on the mule with a hollow stomach and itchy skin.
That day was worse than the first. By the end of it, Jack's daydreams of the Black Pearl were becoming more like hallucinations, and his hands kept leaping out to grasp invisible shrouds and steer a ship that was not there. He found a couple of small streams and drank; the mule grateful for the liquid also. Some of the insect bites had all but disappeared, but others had swollen up and were smarting terribly.
As darkness fell, Jack rolled off the mule, which snorted and turned about a few times before settling down for the night. Jack himself kicked half-heartedly at a patch of leaves, making a sporadic check for large beetles or snakes, and then lay down and went to sleep.
He was woken for the dawn watch by O'Connell.
"Stir your stumps, you lazy son of an English dog!" the Irishman said, shaking Jack's shoulder.
Jack shook his head. "Not getting up," he mumbled. "Not my watch. Don't have to get up for you."
"But the Pearl's yours, lad," O'Connell said. "Don't you want to rise and take care of her?"
"I reckon I should, then," Jack agreed, getting to his feet. He reached for his coat and realised he had it on. "That's strange. That's very strange."
"We've all got our coats on," O'Connell reassured him, turning and leading the way out on deck.
"Oh. So that's all right then?" Jack asked, hurrying after the mate. O'Connell flashed him an uncharacteristic grin.
"Aye, lad."
Captain Flint was at the helm, steering the Pearl through thick fog. The sea below seemed calm, but the ship was rushing along. "Welcome aboard the Black Pearl, lad."
Jack swept his hat off and bowed flamboyantly at the crew, watching from vantage points in the rigging. "Thank you, cap'n, though I've been aboard for years."
"You just feel like that," Anamaria called down from the top of the mainmast. "It's not true, though, none of it is."
"What's not true?" Jack squinted up at her.
"This!" said Flint. "Fire the cannon!"
"You can't do that!" Jack protested, waving his arms. "You mustn't fire, cap'n!"
A group of pirates hurried up to him, and picked him up, hoisting him above their heads, and calling to each other in a strange language. "Oy!" Jack said, frantic, fighting. "Put me down, lads, put me down!"
"You're ours now," Thornton told him. "We'll never let you go, Jack Sparrow. Never let you go ... never let you go ..."
The rest of the pirates took up the chant, and Jack felt himself drifting off to sleep again.
He floated in a peaceful darkness for a while, rocked in the cradle of unconsciousness. But nobody can stay asleep forever, and Jack woke a second time as somebody stroked something cool and soothing over his forehead. Water was dripping into his mouth - cold, fresh water, and he swallowed reflexively and coughed.
A woman's voice chided him until he settled again, and then the soothing stroking began again. Jack smiled lazily. This was nice. This was something he could get used to. He began to let himself drift off again, before a thought hit his mind. The woman had not been speaking English, nor even Spanish. And hadn't he been on board the Black Pearl? How was he therefore being comforted by a woman, lying on something soft, with the sound of leaves and birdsong around him?
Jack's eyes snapped open. Above his head there was a canopy of green, and faces surrounded him. Unfamiliar, dark faces, but with kindness and worry in their eyes. When Jack tried to sit up, hands pushed him back down again, firmly but not roughly. The woman spoke again, and Jack, flicking his eyes sideways, saw that she was middle-aged and dressed in rather less than he was used to women wearing. Her necklaces and pendants rivalled his own decoration, and she was ordering the rest of the group around with ease Jack recognised. Wherever he was, this woman was the captain, and she was obviously a good one. He relaxed and closed his eyes again.
It was night before he woke again. This time he was alone, in a circular hut with a straw roof, and he sat up slowly. He was sitting on a straw pallet placed directly on the earth floor, and covered with a light but scratchy blanket. His boots, hat, coat, headscarf and sash were piled neatly close by, with his sword belt next to the pile. It was dim in the hut, but sunlight shafted in through the cracks in the roof so Jack knew it was day.
He glanced down at the bites on his chest and to his surprise found they had reduced vastly in size. Some of them seemed to have some sort of brown ointment smeared on them, and when he felt his face with his fingers he found the same ointment there. But the itching was gone, and when he tried standing up he found himself steady on his feet. The nagging headache that had been beating at his temples since noon on the first day out of Santo Domingo had gone, and he was no longer so hungry or thirsty. Most importantly, he remembered where he was going, and why he was going there.
Jack pushed his hair back off his face, the beads clinking in a comforting, familiar way, and slowly bent to put on his boots. Once he was shod, he crossed to the door of the hut and opened it, looking out curiously.
He was in the middle of a small native village. A circle of round huts stood in a clearing in the jungle, the blue sky showing where the trees and vegetation had been felled. There was a fire burning off to one side, and a bustle of women and girls cooking something savoury on it in a vast earthenware dish. There were men also, making and mending and tending to tools and weapons. Most of the people were dressed simply and sparingly, but a few of them had European-style coats or shirts or breeches.
Some of the women looked up as Jack stood in the doorway of his hut and examined the scene, and shortly the middle-aged matriarch he remembered from before - was it earlier that day? The previous day? - came hurrying over to him, and stood hands on hips to survey him. She prodded his bites, felt his forehead, and made him open his mouth so she could look inside. Finally, she nodded, seemingly satisfied.
Jack put his hands together and gave her a little bow of thanks. The woman stared at him for a moment, and then laughed. He laughed with her. She beckoned, and he followed her across the clearing to the cooking fire, where she made him sit down on a log and gave him a wooden bowl full of the stew that was cooking. It proved to be vegetables mixed with some sort of meat. Jack decided he was too famished to concern himself with precisely what sort of meat, and he tucked in with a hearty appetite. Water was produced, also, and he alternated sips of that with mouthfuls of stew and so finished his meal. The women surrounding him nodded in satisfaction, and spoke briskly to each other in their own language. Leaning back on his elbows, Jack let his food digest and watched them as they went about their business. One of the smaller girls came and perched on the log by his side, and tentatively put her hand out to touch his beads before snatching her hand away again. Jack grinned roguishly at her, and she squeaked and ran off to hide behind her mother's legs.
After a while, Jack stood up and crossed to the woman who had been looking after him. She turned as he approached, and graced him with a brief nod and a quizzical glance.
"I'm looking for my mule," Jack explained. The words were met with a blank look. He thought for a moment, and then bent over, put his hands on the ground and made a good effort at replicating the animal's snorting neigh. He straightened, and was rewarded with howls of laughter from everyone within earshot. But his nurse took his hand and led him around the back of the huts, where the mule proved to be tied up and looking contented.
Jack went up to it, scratched it behind the ears, and had a quick look at the knot, which was not at all seamanlike but seemed to be holding. He turned back to the matriarch.
"I've got to go," he said, feeling the need to say something even though he knew she would not understand him. "Got to get to Tortuga. Tortuga?"
Astonishingly, she nodded.
"You know Tortuga?"
The woman said something quickly in her language and pointed, out of the village and away. Jack glanced up at the sun, did some calculations, and decided that she was pointing northwest and that he had most of the day left for travelling.
Ten minutes later he had the mule saddled, his coat rolled up behind it, and his hat and sword belt on. The matriarch did not seem happy to have her patient vanish so quickly, but had given him a flask of water and a severe glance that Jack interpreted as "drink, and drink often." He gave her another bow, and then, filled suddenly with gratitude that these people had rescued him from a lonely, delirious end on land, gave her a deep kiss. This was met with cheers from the rest of the village, and Jack mounted his mule and rode away to a forest of waves and a chorus of what he presumed to be farewells.
With the flask of water in hand, and his lesson about going too long without water learned, Jack made steady and safer progress, and a week after leaving Santo Domingo came over the brow of a hill to see the turquoise blue of the ocean lying below him. He let out a whoop of pure joy, and the mule, startled out of its wits, careened down the hill towards the water. Jack hung on, laughing all the way, hair streaming, on his way back to home - back to sea.