::Change in the House of Flies::
*~Chapter One~*
A Passage of Five Years:
Through the smoky, alcohol-filled haze of the tavern vaguely human shapes jostle and stumble about like pieces in some heathen's game board. Whores dressed in patched taffeta skirts and tight bodices flit about in the manner of cannibalistic butterflies. At a shadowed table pushed back from the noisy and noisome rabble, one of many such tables, a favorite rumor is making the rounds.
"I 'eard they cut off 'is 'ead and sent it in a barrel of good red wine," says one of the disreputable men at the table. The gauntlet is thrown and the others must reveal a rumor of the governor's son-in-law's demise to top that.
"Well, that may be," retorts another, stroking his salt and pepper beard. "But I be havin' it on good, solid evidence that they sent his peeled and pickled skin back in a clay pot." The first man scoffs but the others applaud. The man with the beard leans back in his chair. He looks supremely confident.
"My sister knows a maid workin' in th' guvnor's house," a ginger-haired sailor announces grandly. "She says th' pirates cut off a part of th' lad and sent it every time th' money wussunt paid. Th' fingers and th' toes and so on 'till they'd sent the 'tire body over, piece by piece." The sailor grins and accepts a tankard passed his way. The first two tale-tellers mutter about the improbability of the upstart's account.
"Gentlemen, gentlemen, you all have it wrong." A thin, waspish man shoves his way into the throng of revelers. "The pirates did something far worse." Eager for the macabre, the men angle towards the man like blighted flowers to the sun. "They cut of the boy's—" Here he clears his throat and stares pointedly at the first man's lap. The men sitting about the rickety table pale noticeably and shift to hide their endowments from imagined attackers.
"Ridiculous!" the redhead blusters. The other men take up the chorus of incredulity and drive the stranger from their midst. Feeling like true men, they settle back down to drink and tale.
Only later, when it comes time to pay the bill for this night's depravity, will they realize that their loads have been lightened by the loss of their coin purses.
*~*~*~*
While the Black Pearl is careened[1] under the capable management of the carpenter, Captain Jack Sparrow takes a moment to borrow a nearby fishing boat—it's owners having decided to make a jaunt inland—and investigate the trading possibilities at a nearby harbor town. His main goal, though, is the appropriation of a new cutlass, his other having gone the way of a certain English monarch: beheaded, as it were. The blade and hilt had a disagreement during a flurry of blows and decided to seek their fortunes separately. This was all well and good for them, but Jack had been left in a tight spot, which had only been remedied by the sudden and fortuitous pitching of the merchant sloop's deck. He hates it when the prize fights back.
He lands and strands the boat on a sandbar to the southeast of the town. Humming a jaunty tune where the nonsensical words 'yo-ho-ho' play a key part, he wades to shore. Wet but confidant he promenades into town.
The harbor town, with its jutting wharves, is no great point in the traffic of goods. There are no warships standing guard, no fort battlements bristling with canons and red-coated men, and no appointed governor. A loose affiliate of prominent traders maintains a volunteer militia to keep watch over the transient population of seafarers. Jack learns all of this from the varied and various denizens he manages to charm with his casual and carefree friendliness.
His rolling, seemingly inebriated stride leads him faithfully among the dirt/mud streets and loose plank buildings. Every once and a while he pauses, still swaying and fluttering his elegant hands, to ask some innocent person the location of the local blacksmith to which he adjusts his course accordingly. In such a manner he finds himself before a building smelling of smoke and metal.
For a moment he is transported to years previous and to a similar shop under dissimilar circumstances. Perhaps, if he closes his dark eyes, the matched stomp of soldiers' feet and hysterical cries of confused townsfolk will fill the air; and if he slips inside, hands now manacled, he will only have to wait a little while till a young man with honest hazel eyes enters. Then he could play his hand differently.
Or maybe not.
Young Will Turner had been a right stick at that particular encounter, and for several more after that.
"Bloody stupid idiot," Jack murmurs fondly. The sign above the door says "Gow" and not "Brown." There will be no righteous young Turner awaiting a duel inside.
"So you know Mister Gow as well?" The pirate whirls around, brandishing the broken sword. He finds himself threatening a small, balding man of firm build and only the slightest hint of having let himself go. "You won't be fighting too well with that, son," the man informs him serenely.
"I'm here"—Jack nods at the blacksmith's door—"to remedy that."
"Splendid!"
"Indeed, mate." He sheathes his blade and turns to enter said shop of armaments. However, the curious and knowing gaze of the stout, little man stalls him. He spins back to find the man regarding him in the manner of a person in possession of a critical piece of intelligence but does not know if he should share it.
Jack decides to haste the deliberation.
"You look like a man who knows something that maybe I should be wanting to know as well."
"Are you, then, a man who might find great need of a reliable and trustworthy blade?" The pirate flashes a gold-toothed grin.
"Aye, that be me."
The little man nods and makes a noise of apparent satisfaction. "Then I doubt Mister Gow's offerings would please you. To be fair, he is an excellent smith of common goods, but his blades are merely serviceable."
"Then I suspect you know of a place, mate, where I might find an edge more than 'serviceable'?" Jack enjoys the dance of words as much as that of combat or sex. He might have added rum to the list, but he finds, more often than not, rum is the cause of dance and not a dance in itself.
"True, but a man who does disservice to his weapon"—pointed look at Jack's—"only needs a serviceable one." Jack nods solemnly.
"But you see, sir, this sword has served me faithfully since I first lifted it as a whelp, and only now has it gone to seek its eternal reward." He winks gamely and performs a little bow. The little man smiles ever so slightly.
"Excellent. Follow me." With an amused grin and a quick glance around, Jack does what he is told for the second or third time in his life. He matches the man's choppy gait with his own rolling stride.
As they wend their way up through the maze of streets and dingy buildings, a sudden thought strikes the cheerful rogue. "You wouldn't happen to be a rival blacksmith, now would you? Perhaps pilfering a bit of business?" He highly doubts this, taking in the lack of grime and forge residue on the man's clothing, but he is curious.
"Goodness, no," the man laughs. "I make my trade as a chirurgeon[2], physician and dentist hereabouts."
"A sort of jack-of-all-trades, only less trades and more medicine orientated, then?"
"Yes, but I prefer being a chirurgeon." Jack gives his companion a strange look, which goes unnoticed as the little man is puffing along quite contentedly.
"So what be your name, goodly butcher?" The stout, little man quirks an eyebrow at Jack and smiles genially.
"Smith." The pirate blinks twice in mild surprise but never loses his stride.
"'Smith'?"
"Aye, Arthur J. Smith."
"Fancy that," Jack drawls as he curls one end of his moustache. "I be a Smith here, too." The little man's smile broadens into a smile of indulgent amusement.
"Many here are Smiths, but I was born to my last name."
"Interesting."
As if to emphasize this statement, a sudden gust of mephitic harbor wind runs past them. Loose cloth flaps as the scents of low tide, salt and human and animal refuse swirl up and then recede. These smells, fragrances to Jack, all speak of familiarity. No matter where he anchors, whether it be in the sultry Caribbean or the boreal waters up north, these towns, perched precariously upon curvatures of land and washed in the amniotic fluids of the Earth, are the same. People might wear different coifs and speak languages unfamiliar, but they all smell the same. Jack likes that.
Soon the loose-board houses of the common rabble give way to the brick and plaster of the well-to-do traders and men of greater means. Mr. Smith lives upon the threshold, or, perhaps, the cusp, of these two walks of life. A neatly painted sign proclaims the little man's collective practices from atop an especially tall fence post of pale wood. The house itself possesses many airy windows to catch the redolent ocean breezes and two stories. Behind the house a tracery of smoke rises into the cloudless sky and vigorous hammering of metal against metal abuses the air.
"So you weren't lying. You are what you say. And I do believe that be the sound of a blacksmith." The man's gives a halcyon smile, neither smug nor aggrieved at the pirate's apparent lack of confidence.
"I have a young man in my employ (how he came to be that is quite a tale, though for another day) and he crafts—or perhaps I should say 'gives birth to'—weapons of most extraordinary quality. All edges are custom and seem to more of an extension of the hand, than some strange implement or tool."
"Apart from extolling this pup's virtues, have you any experience with blade?" Jack asks wryly. He doesn't say so, but he knows—or rather knew—one of the greatest swordsmiths of the Caribbean. The techniques of young Turner know no equal in the pirate's eyes. Everyone else will always find second ranking in his mind.
"I cut people open, sir. My swords might not be as long as some, but they are far more accurate." The layers of innuendo permeating the chirurgeon's words are enough to asphyxiate a man. The pirate settles on a feral smirk and a noncommittal noise.
"The door is around back. It's likely Black, that's the youth's name, won't hear you, so just shout or something when you enter."
Jack tips and imaginary hat and sashays through the gate and makes his swaying way to the back of the house. The banging, previously shielded by the bulk of the house, becomes more pronounced and quite annoyingly repetitive. Bang. Bang. Bang.
This is why Jack loathes the land. On the ocean the sounds are lyrical and full of subtle melodies and chords. The land rips harmony away in bloody tears and leaves behind discordant and flat tones. Water moves in unbounded beauty. Earth squats in its own rigidity. Unfortunately for Jack, most people cannot seem to realize or see this and spend altogether too much time and effort on land. In his mind he imagines huge floating communities held together by the melodic call of waves, no more permanently placed than flotsam. Everything one now finds on land, blacksmiths, kingdoms, et cetera, would bob up and down upon oceans and currents. Jack fully subscribes to the idea of the possession of land being the origination of all inequality and unhappiness; though, he concedes, without all those fools beholden to bits of dirt, there wouldn't be much in the way of piracy as he knows it. Gold and other bits of shiny metals that cause men to bloody their hands in their neighbor's intestines wouldn't hold value.
Shaking his head, careful of not setting the ornaments in his hair to pendulous movements, he dismisses the rather bad Natural Philosopher in his soul and approaches the source of such obstreperous ejaculations. The forge proves to be of expensive red brick of decent proportions. Jack is put in mind of a large oven designed by overenthusiastic cannibals. Yet the banging continues unremittingly, so one must safely assume that there is no baking of persons taking place inside—at least not the kind intended for Titus Andronicus.
Jack soon revises his previous revision of the forge not being an oven upon opening the door. The air outside is hot and sticky in a way only places of this latitude can be; the inside of the forge is a furnace of boiling air and metallic fumes. For a moment the pirate feels as if his skin is issuing one prolonged shriek, then he adjusts and steps inside.
The noise is that much louder; the heat that much hotter. The smell of fire, sweat and metal burns his nose and settles thickly in the back of his throat. The progenitor of all this hammers busily and obliviously away in front of a contained inferno while one foot works steadfastly and rhythmically upon a cleverly constructed bellows to keep the flame intensity. Taking the little man's advice in mind he issues a bellow that only one accustomed to such vocalizations can make. The consistent banging ends in an odd note and then stops. The foot ceases its motions and the blacksmith, Black (how quaint, Jack thinks silently), turns around as he wipes his hands upon his leather apron.
Fire at his back and only the dimmest slices of light wheedling their way in through the ceiling, this paragon of smiths (not Smiths) is in sharp shadow. However (and there is always one of those in Jack's fluttering existence), he knows this person standing before him, asking him his business. The words 'have I held you up before?' are on the tip of his tongue like a rehashed line in a bad whorehouse comedy—or mayhaps a tragedy.
The light is on his face. He knows it must be casting his charcoal lined eyes into demonic shadows and giving him a right villainous appearance; otherwise, why would the young smith tense so. Unless…
"What do you want here, pirate?"
*&*&*&*&*&*
[1] To careen a ship is to beach it, tip it over and then scrap off all the accumulated barnacles, seaweed, etc. on the hull. All ships sailing the seas did this, as all the extra organic matter slowed the vessel down. As one can imagine, speed was very important to pirates and so careening was also very important.
[2] 'Chirurgeon' is an archaic form of the world 'surgeon'.
Notes: I am unrepentant about the sudden ending of this chapter. It hit the sixth page, and I needed a break. I'm sure you all know who the smith is, so this isn't some puerile ploy at clever guesswork. The inspiration fount needs recharging. I hope this, though truncated as it may seem, meets with approval and perhaps approbation.
*
I would like to extend my sincerest thanks to jacklover, npetrenko and Sam who so graciously reviewed with kind encouragement for the continuation of this complex story.
pendragginink, a 'novel'? That review is more like a doctorate thesis! So full of helpful information and knowledge, not to mention the opinions! I must say that I am humbled to have elicited such a stream of insight. Thank you for taking so much time out to write such an enlightening piece for a mere review!