It was a long way and I didn't know where we were going. Obviously, I couldn't talk. So I just trusted Jack and followed him; he seemed to know exactly where he was headed. On the way, I enjoyed the sights. I had been skin diving before, but I was always limited by how much my lungs could hold and how deep I could dive. Normally, as well, being more than six meters down would put painful pressure on my eardrums, but with my lungs and sinuses filled with water, that wasn't a problem. So as I trudged slowly across the sea floor, I was free to look around almost comfortably.
We were deep, deep underwater. Hammerhead sharks swam above us, swarms of them moving in lazy arcs, but always moving. To stop, even in their sleep, was to die. I could sympathize sometimes. Other, smaller fish, more carefree, flitted around the rocks and pits on the sea floor. A needle-nosed speckled green moray eel slithered past my leg, the one long fin on its back rippling. High above us, I could see the shadow of the Perilous, and down on the floor not far from where we walked, the anchor. We walked right past it.
Then we entered a garden of kelp, swaying in the current like grass in the wind, each stalk reaching nearly to the surface. It seemed to go on forever, and it was like walking through a forest sometimes, when the stalks were sparse and we could step between them. Other times it was like a den of snakes, when the leaves tangled and coiled around us and we had to rip our limbs free for every step.
Night fell, and we were still in the forest. Before it got too dark to see, Jack took Anamaria's hand, and I took hers, so that we could find each other in the inky water. I clutched Anamaria's hand as hard as I could without digging my nails into it; I was suddenly terrified of what would happen if I lost her and was left all alone at the bottom of the ocean, in the dark.
I should have wanted to sleep at some point, but not only didn't I want to, I felt like I couldn't have if I'd tried. Water in my lungs was one thing, but the hunger and exhaustion and need of all sorts were beginning to wear on me. But there was nothing I could do about it, so I did nothing. We marched all through the night.
And then, in the morning, we were at the foot of a mountain, or so it seemed. A great rocky slope rose above us, going all the way up to the surface. We started to climb. In a way, it was the best mountain climb I've ever done, because the water made everything easier. If a rock was too big to climb in the normal way, we could simply kick our legs and swim over it. Filled with water, we didn't have the buoyancy to just swim straight up, but we were still far lighter than we would have been on land. If we jumped, we could easily clear twice our height.
The mountain seemed a peak to rival Mount Rainier from underwater, but when we reached the top, it was just a very small island. Standing on the beach looking across, I could see the sea on the other side through the sparse grove of palm trees. Though none of us were standing when we first crawled up out of the water; we ended up on our hands and knees, coughing over and over, vomiting out seawater.
Jack, annoyingly chipper in his off-center way, recovered immediately, while Anamaria and I were still on our bellies in the sand hacking. "There's a fishing village on the other end of this island. I expect they'll have a boat we can commandeer."
"Or buy," Anamaria said, pulling herself up to stand beside him. "The world's not entirely yours for the taking, Jack."
"It is, it is! Or why else are we pirates?"
"So we can take the ill-gotten wealth of the fat and lazy of the colonies. Not the only boat of some poor lonely fisherman. It's not pleasant waking up and finding yourself without a boat you worked for years to afford," Anamaria said with an edge to her voice, and I got the idea there was a history behind that comment.
I caught up with them just in time to see Jack roll his eyes at her. "You didn't work for years to afford that thing, you worked for years to afford rum and trinkets and pretty clothes and the boat as hardly an afterthought."
"Hmph," Anamaria grunted, rubbing her head. I didn't blame her. She'd just tried to win an argument with Jack. After just three days with the man I could see that was a losing game. "The fishermen here didn't. And you still owe me an explanation for all this!"
"In good time," Jack said, and started off down the beach. Anamaria followed him, and I tagged along behind, feeling particularly invisible. At least no one was mad at me.
We rounded a bend in the beach before long, and there they were, five small thatch huts in half a circle. Three short, dark-skinned women sat in the center of the circle chatting, with quite a few chickens and small children running around. Apparently the men were out to sea. There was one boat, barely bigger than a canoe but with a sail, pulled up on the shore. Jack sauntered straight toward the boat as if he owned it, and was nearly stepping in when one of the women stopped him. She shouted something in Spanish.
I don't know much Spanish, but Jack and Anamaria did, and after much yelling and bargaining between the two of them and all three women, Jack took the necklaces off my neck--without asking me, but I wasn't surprised--and handed them out to the women. And with that, we were in the boat, and heading out to sea.
"You think they'll still be at Coral Point?" Anamaria asked Jack, fussing with the sail.
"It's worth a look," he answered "It's on the way to Tortuga anyways."
I wished I knew how to sail. It would've saved me from just sitting in the bottom of the boat trying to stay out of their way while they adjusted ropes and maneuvered the sail as if they did that sort of thing every day. Well, they did do that sort of thing every day. I really wasn't a part of this world, was I? Funny thing was, I was probably better suited for it than the average modern American teenager. I'd lived on a tropical island when my father was in the army, so I was used to the heat and knew my way around a reef. I'd been on boats many times before, so I didn't get seasick or lose my balance from the waves. Hell, I'd even worked at a dock the summer before--well, the summer three hundred years after, but that was too confusing--moving boats and doing basic repairs. Pity none of them had been sailboats.
"So what the blazes just happened, Jack?" Anamaria asked. "You said you'd explain when we had time, and right now, we've got nothing but time."
So Jack explained. He told her everything I already knew about what had happened, and talked about a curse that I hadn't known about, and wouldn't have believed if I hadn't just walked thirty miles underwater without drowning. And then I asked where the curse had come from, and I got quite a story about what had happened two years before. Two stories, actually, because Jack kept going too far with tales of his heroism, and Anamaria kept reining him in and insisting that she knew the way things had really happened.
"So Mr. Turner and Miss Swann are now Mr. and Mrs. Turner, and I am now once again captain of the Black Pearl," Jack finished. "So everything went right in the end, really."
"Biskin's crew still knows where the Isla de Muerta is," I blurted out. "Won't you lose all the treasure?" Yeah, I'm slow on the uptake sometimes, I know.
Jack and Anamaria both laughed. "They know where the Isla de Muerta was."
"Was?" I asked, being slow again.
Jack took a little compass from his pocket. It wasn't pointing north, and it wasn't pointing the direction we came from, either. "The Isla is where ever it pleases to be," he said, sounding a little distant himself. "There's only two of these compasses in the world, and the Turners hold the other for safekeeping."
"Which is damned stupid if you ask me," Anamaria said.
"Which is why I didn't," Jack snapped back. Bitchy, bitchy. Not that I blamed him, or her for that matter. If I weren't still a little bit terrified of them I'd be doing plenty of bitching myself, considering the situation.
They just glared at each other for a moment, and I interrupted awkwardly, "So, we just find the Black Pearl and go back to the Isla de Muerta and bleed on the treasure and everything's cool then, right?" Jack raised his eyebrow just enough to remind me that I'd said something stupid. "I mean, everything will be okay?" Shit, shit, shit, no comprehension. It was probably hard enough for them to understand me through my thick American accent, and there I was babbling slang at them that wouldn't be invented for another two hundred years. "Good, everything will be good, that's what I mean. No more curse?"
"Aye, no more curse," Anamaria said. "We'll be free people, free to eat and drink and all those lovely things." Her voice softened for the first time since she'd woken up from her coma.
"Lovely things," Jack echoed, and his eye caught hers for just half a second, but I noticed. Ah. That explained why they were so comfortable bickering with each other.
For a while we just sailed. The wind was wonderful--fast enough that we were moving at a good pace, but not so rough that we had to deal with big swells. Now and then Jack and Anamaria would do something with the sail and the ropes. I just lay on my back in the stern, soaking in the sun, trailing my good hand in the water, wishing I could actually feel either of these things.
I didn't feel my right hand either, but that was for the best. I thought of unwrapping it, but best to leave well enough alone. Clearly I wasn't going to have the use of the hand anyway, so what was the use of stressing myself by looking at the horrible mess of bone and tendon and probably gangrene under the bandanna? It was going to end up needing to be amputated anyway. Yuck. I'd have been more upset, but I was still in a bit of shock over being in 1726 and under a magic curse. Anyway, what did I use two hands for? Touch typing and tying my shoes. Well, I was wearing sandals, and if I happened to run into a computer terminal here in the eighteenth century, I'd just have to hunt and peck.
"It'll be alright," Anamaria said, noticing me staring at my hand. "You'll learn to get along."
"It's not that," I said. "Well, it is, but... I was just thinking that something like this happened to me once in my own time and they had it stitched back together in a few minutes. I was using my hand again in two weeks."
"Your time?" Jack asked, never afraid to butt in to someone else's conversation. "You were going on about that a bit when you first got on the Pearl, but we just reckoned you were mad with hunger and thirst. Is it true?"
"It's true, I'm from the year two thousand and four. It's a very different time. We have so many things that just don't exist now. And most of the stuff that exists now, won't then. Like pirates," I said with a smile. No piracy in the twenty-first century." Well, technically there was MP3 piracy, of which I was practically Captain Kidd, but I didn't feel like going completely over their heads yet again.
"Then I'm happy to have been born when I was," Jack said, plopping down on the deck next to me. "But what do you have that we don't?"
I hadn't realised that was going to be such a difficult question to answer. How do you explain a world of Internet porn and reality television and international terrorism to a man in knee breeches who's never had so much as a drink of Coca-Cola? Well, come to think of it, he was an international terrorist, so he might understand that part. But still.
"Well, we have machines that do almost anything people can, and a lot of things people can't. We have machines that let people fly from place to place, that can take pictures instantly and then send them all around the world, that..." Shit. What did the twenty-first century have? I'd taken so much of it for granted. "We have lights that work without oil or gas, and boats that don't need the wind to run, and carriages that don't need horses." I went on, trying to keep everything in some sort of frame of reference for them, which was extremely difficult. Especially since every time they asked me why or how something worked, all I could do was shrug and say I didn't know, it just did. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," Arthur C. Clarke would say two hundred and fifty years later. I was starting to understand that from my point of view, almost everything in the year 2004 was magic. Shame on me for just skipping to the wooly mammoth stories in The Way Things Work.
Fortunately, Jack and Anamaria didn't really care if I could explain cathode ray tubes or semiconductors. They were much more interested by my mention of motorboats. Specifically, they wanted to know how to build a motor for the Black Pearl. Which left me stuck, because I didn't know, of course. I knew how to oil boat motors and gas them and do minor repairs and scrub duckweed out of their crevices, but make one? They might as well have asked me to build a computer out of bubblegum and paperclips. Except, of course, that the 1700s didn't even have bubblegum or paperclips.
The conversation went nowhere, but fortunately, the boat went somewhere. We were, according to Jack, only a few hours from Coral Point, when the sun set and the moon came out.