Swordsmanship
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There are no trees as green and lush as those of the Caribbean in cloudy, stormy England. Their leaves are a darker green, a shade that draws in more light when it can get it, while these are the green of jades and peridot, decked with vines, bejeweled by vibrantly red and pink flowers.
The trees concern Will Turner only for the cover they afford him as he crouches on the wall of the military training ground, a low lying stretch of land off the barracks, near the edge of the fort. His palms sting from shimmying up the overhanging tree. He flexes his fingers absently, testingly, but his gaze is turned elsewhere. It's on the practice field he spies through the foliage that holds all the focus of those narrowed, brown eyes. It's the cadets clumsily wielding unfamiliar steel, some of them little older than Will himself, but more it's on the men instructing them, their measured movements and careful steps, their even more careful explanations. Will's brows are knit in concentration as he picks out the distant words. He's growing decent at matching sound with lip movement. At reading lips.
These cadets are local boys from plantation families, second sons rising to the defense of their lands and the water their family's goods will be shipped over. Will was not considered as a military recruit. He slept in the servant's quarters of the governor's mansion until they found a place to place him in the city. It was an apprenticeship the servants said he should be very grateful for with thin smiles and apologies in their eyes. He didn't understand why, at first, though it put an apprehension in him. He knows now that it is because James Brown, as fine a craftsman as his past fame has painted him, is becoming a habitual drunkard.
Master Brown is sleeping, now, so Will comes to the training ground, and he watches.
If Master Brown is still sleeping when Will returns to the shop, he will practice what he's learned.
Will isn't aspiring to be a soldier. He came to the New World to find his father, and there isn't any searching to be done once he's been signed to a military vessel. He might even be taken back across the ocean. It's something different that drives his determination to learning swordplay. Something personal.
It's the Captain Adam Swett of the merchant vessel Britannia, who let him work his passage over as a cabin boy he'd be letting off after only one ocean crossing, who smoked a pipe carved in the shape of a wicked dragon and had a patterned tattoo circling his wrist. It's Tremaine Cooper, who taught him his duties and his way around the ship, and pushed Will aboard some splintered fragment of the hull before sinking to his death. It's Rudy Smith, a freckled fourteen year old who'd been on the water since he was ten and clambered through the riggings with infinite grace and told him stories of ports he'd never see late in the evenings when they found some corner of the ship to curl up in and catch their sleep. It's the mother and her two daughters that sunned on the deck, who were crossing on the Britannia to join the men of their family in Port Royal. All dead. All killed by pirates, down to the women. It's a wonder Tremaine managed to hide Will from the pirates' sight. Rudy had died already. Will's last memory of Tremaine is the ocean about them stained dark by his blood for the bit of shrapnel that caught in his stomach when the powder magazine exploded.
He thinks of these people he knew only briefly as he watches the play of steel on steel bellow, and he thinks of the rest of that crew, dead all. He thinks of his father, a merchant marine himself, and wonders if his father is already dead at the blade of some crude, rusted cutlass as he asks each incoming ship if they know of a William Turner sailing these waters, as his insistent querying goes on fruitlessly.
Will Turner is learning swordsmanship for the day he meets a pirate.