They anchored in a secluded spot, and put to shore in what was obviously some kind of isolated settlement, with an air of the pleasingly disreputable about its shabby construction. The crew dispersed immediately upon securing the long boats, heading off to their various regular ports of call. Jack saw ragged, salt-caked figures disappearing into countless darkened houses and lean-tos, and felt an air of something approaching relief. Nobody had tried to throw him overboard during the short trip away from the ship, but there had been enough ill feeling in the air to make him suspect that it was only the crew's respect for their captain that had kept them from losing their guest en route. Soon only he and Josiah were left, standing on a short wooden jetty that bristled with fishing boats. The rain had stopped, and the sea now seemed almost quiet, though the clouds threatened more turmoil to come. Jack looked about with interest.
"Going to show me around?" he asked. Not that it would take long, by the look of things. This wasn't a town - it wasn't even a village. It looked more like an accidental accumulation of houses and assorted buildings, dropped here as leftovers after the building of a real colony elsewhere. Josiah nodded slowly.
"If you'd like. Are you still hoping to hire a boat, and go in search of that other ship?"
"Somehow I don't think I need to bother anymore." Jack followed the other man's lead, off the jetty and along a decidedly muddy main street. "Is there anybody here who might deliver a message, though? Somebody we could get to warn anyone who lives along the coast?"
"There may be. But I'd doubt that anyone would believe such a warning, at least before it's too late." Josiah pointed the way towards a misshapen building with a large wooden sign hanging above the door. The words Shark's Tooth Inn were painted across it, and an impressive set of jaws stood proudly on the roof. "I know that you want to warn people, Jack, but I don't see how we're to do it."
"I'm not wanted by the authorities," pointed out his companion. Josiah nodded.
"True enough - perhaps. For all I know you're the most wanted man in these islands. I'm somewhat out of touch with such things. But even so, it's a big jump between getting to the people, and getting them to listen to you. Talk of giant green monsters will just get you thrown into jail in the hope that it'll sober you up."
"You think we should forget what happened, and hope that the Kamon will just disappear?"
"No. But I do think that it's best to find a way of dealing with this that won't lead to one or both of us being locked up. It's been a long time since a man in a prison cell saved a town from disaster." He pushed open the door of the Shark's Tooth Inn. "Come on inside. Have a drink, and meet some of the locals. Tomorrow we worry about monsters. For what's left of tonight, we enjoy ourselves. Sound fair?"
"Having fun always sounds fair." Swallowing his concerns for now, Jack followed him inside, his natural exuberance already more than reasserting itself. A wave of warmth hit him as soon as he crossed the threshold, and with it came the scent of strong alcohol, as well as food that would probably best be avoided. He grinned. Now this looked promising. Somewhere nearby a drunken fisherman was attempting to lead three empty chairs and a bemused looking cat in an chorus of a extremely rude sea shanty, and from another direction came the sound of two men arguing enthusiastically about boots. Josiah clapped his new friend on the back.
"What do you think?"
"I think there should probably be a health warning on the door." Jack trailed after him across a wooden floor strewn with straw and sand, towards a rather crooked bar stained with old drinks and what looked suspiciously like blood. There was a woman standing behind it, dressed in a wildly colourful assortment of clothes, her greying hair standing up all over the place, and her ears decorated with rings clearly of her own design. Massive conch shells dangled from her lobes alongside at least one dried starfish and a tiny ship in a bottle. Her throat was festooned with sharks' teeth, and her wrists jangled with bracelets heavy with shells and small pebbles. Her round, almost impossibly jovial face brightened still further at the sight of Josiah.
"Captain Day!" She seized his hands as soon as he reached the bar, and pumped them up and down apparently through sheer excitement. "Captain Day! It's been... months!"
"It's been about three weeks, if that." He forcibly extracted his hands from hers. "Allow me to present my guest for the evening. Jack Harkness. Don't ask me who or what he is, as quite frankly I don't understand a word of what he says. He does, however, seem to be largely trustworthy."
"Somewhere in there there's something that could be a compliment." Jack, who had been in the mood for such theatrics since changing into some of Josiah's spare clothes, dropped into a flourishing bow. "Captain Jack, ma'am. At your service."
"Captain Jack." A woman's voice, throaty, warm and filled with hints of spice. Whoever she was she had come from somewhere behind Jack, though he hadn't been aware of anybody else nearby. The woman behind the bar laughed fruitily.
"Friend of yours, Anne?"
"No." A hand played across Jack's shoulder. "Not yet, anyway."
"Hands off." With an air of cheerful familiarity, Josiah pushed the caressing fingers away. "You're incorrigible. He's not even had his first drink yet."
"Rum, Celeste." The voice was tantalisingly close to Jack's ear now. He smirked, and using the voice as a guide, brought up one hand to find a face that seemed to be waiting most obligingly to be cupped in his well aimed palm. The innkeeper filled four wooden tankards with rum, and pushed three of them across the bar.
"Rum," she said, as though in indication. Jack felt the still unseen face smile against his hand.
"Thankyou, I will." She almost deserved her own fanfare, as she stalked - prowled might be closer to the word, thought Jack - around from behind him to claim one of the waiting tankards on the bar. His height at least; an ancestry about as varied as was possible in an age when everybody was still one hundred percent human; and dressed in what looked like an extremely well cut, expensive white silk ball gown. She was undeniably gorgeous, and if she, her smile and her impressive dress sense hadn't been quite enough to pique Jack's interest, the bright red sash around her waist, with at least three sizeable knives stuck into it, certainly was. Josiah laughed.
"I suppose I should introduce the pair of you. Jack, this is Anne. She claims to be French, but I'm not convinced. For one thing she doesn't appear to speak any French. Anne, this is Jack. Captain Jack, apparently. So far he's claimed rather a lot of things, but as yet I haven't bothered trying to disprove them."
"My pleasure, Captain Jack." Anne raised her tankard in a toast, then drank the whole lot down in one long, steady draught. "Drink me under the table, and everything is free for the evening. All the rum, all the food and all the girls that you want." She grinned, looking suddenly dangerous. "But if I drink you under the table... well, there'll be forfeits. Probably quite a few of them."
"You don't have a hope, Jack." Josiah picked up another of the tankards, and took a swig from it. "There's not a man on my crew who hasn't agreed to that deal, and not one of them has beaten her yet. I've seen her take on more than one challenge in a night, and still be on her feet at the end of it. The alcohol hasn't yet been brewed that can lay Anne out on the floor."
"Really." It might have been the heady company, or perhaps the sheer feel of the place. It might have been the after effects of the adrenalin burst he had got from seeing the Kamon earlier, or possibly it was just something to do with his new swashbuckling attire, but Jack was in the mood for games. She was more or less his size, and had a reputation for being unbeatable. He, on the other hand, had been decidedly light-headed after just one goblet of rum back onboard the Dragon. It didn't, on the face of it, seem like the most ideal competition. A responsible man would back away, he knew. A responsible man would still be trying to find a way to warn everyone of the danger from the Kamon. A responsible man might do any number of things. Jack, on the other hand, was already reaching for the last tankard of rum; was already drinking it down in one clumsy rush; was already realising that he didn't have a hope in hell of winning the competition. He slammed the empty tankard down on the bar, and grinned winningly at the gorgeous woman in the highly improbable ball gown.
"Deal," he said, and could have sworn that the room was already starting to spin.
A thin grey glow signalling the imminence of dawn broke gently into Jack's consciousness, and he opened one eye cautiously. As far as he could tell he was still in one piece. It took him a moment to stretch successfully, but once he had realised that he wasn't actually paralysed, but just attempting to move somebody else's legs rather than his own, everything seemed to sort itself out. He mumbled indistinct swear words and insults in his own general direction, and made something close to his four hundred and twelfth vow to turn tee-total. His head swam as he tried to sit up, so he lay where he was, on his back, and watched the ceiling spin in idle circles. Flies buzzed sluggishly in a lazy heat, and somewhere nearby, unfamiliar birds were singing their morning songs. He thought that he heard a horse neighing, and possibly the sound of distant sheep. Beyond that there was nothing but the silence of early morning. He could almost have been the only person awake for miles around. Certainly the other people here with him were dead to the world, hopefully just in the metaphorical sense. Waking up in bed with actual dead people was definitely a step too far on the grim side. He frowned. Hang on. Trying to stretch somebody else's legs that he had thought at first were his own... Sprawled in bed with at least one other person... That sounded interesting, and certainly worth investigating. Telling his head to behave itself or risk suffering his wrath - not that he was entirely sure what he would do to it if it did misbehave - he sat up slowly and looked around. Okay, well that was certainly an interesting tableau. Damned if he could remember how it had come about, though. In future, when he showed signs of getting drunk, maybe he should think about taking notes.
He was lying on a large bed that almost completely filled a white-washed room - an upstairs one to judge from the view out of the window. A parrot stood on the room's one other piece of furniture - a hugely ornate, carved oaken chair - and when Jack sat up it glared at him balefully, then burbled something about eternal damnation to the Governor Of Jamaica. A popular toast in these parts, then. Jack flashed it a cheerful grin, then went back to trying to work out how the hell he had wound up wherever exactly he was.
He was naked, except for the wrist computer - and, he soon realised, a silk cravat tied ostentatiously around his neck. He was fairly certain that he hadn't put it there, but then given how little he remembered, that didn't really mean a lot. Josiah was sprawled face down next to him, in a similar state of undress, though for some reason he was still wearing his boots. Since this had presumably required him to take his clothes off and then put his boots back on, Jack could only begin to guess at what they had been doing. On the other side, annoyingly fully dressed, was Anne, one hand still closed around the neck of a bottle of rum. At the bottom of the bed, dressed in a pair of sky blue trousers and nothing else, was a man that Jack didn't recognise, locked in the enthusiastic embrace of a very pretty blonde girl in a rather crumpled green dress and a large feathered hat. Jack had no idea who she was either, though the parrot hopped onto her head in a merry enough fashion, and pecked thoughtfully at the feathers in her hat. Either he knew her, then, or he had known the source of the feathers. For his sake, Jack hoped it was the former.
"Excuse me." Clambering as carefully as he could over Josiah, Jack managed not to fall out of the window, then padded unsteadily around the bed. His head had ceased to swim, and the nausea had turned now into a sense of faint regret. Either he and Josiah had been too drunk to do anything last night, or they had done something, but he had been too drunk to remember it. Either way, it seemed a hell of a waste of a good bed and a lack of clothing. Trying not to wake anybody up, he successfully hunted out his shirt - hanging half out of the window - his trousers - hanging over the banister just outside the door - and his waistcoat, which for some reason was hanging over a painting on the landing. His boots were nowhere in sight, but his belt, with his laser pistol fortunately nearby, lay at the top of a set of shiny wooden stairs that he guessed led down to the bar where Celeste had served him so much rum the previous night. He strapped the belt on, stuck the pistol into his shirt, and, more or less fully dressed set off in search of his boots. The silk scarf refused to be unknotted, so he left it where it was, and hoped that it looked rakish. He couldn't find anything at all mirror-like, but then that was probably just as well. The way he felt just now, if he looked in a mirror his reflection would like as not run off in a fit of dismay.
"Well well well. Captain Jack." Celeste greeted him as he came down the stairs. She was busy clearing up the bar, energetically scrubbing tables that remained as stubbornly stained as they had been before she had attacked them. "I didn't think I'd be seeing you before noon."
"What I lack in rum-drinking abilities, I make up for in speed of recovery." He smiled ruefully. "I remember coming in here, and I remember a challenge. Everything after that is a total blur. There were forfeits, right?"
"One or two, yes. Are the others conscious yet?"
"Only the parrot. It looked like it was trying to eat a blonde girl. Should I have stopped that?"
"No, I shouldn't worry about it. That's Kate, and she claims that the parrot is tame. So if it eats her she only has herself to blame." Celeste beamed at him. "Can I get you anything?"
"I don't think so thanks." He had a burning desire for a bowl of Rice Krispies, which aside from making no sense whatsoever, was about as unobtainable in 1735 as a replacement power pack for his laser pistol. "You haven't seen my boots, have you?"
"Boots?" She peered at his feet, obviously only just realising that they were bare. "Oh. They're yours then?"
"Mine...?" He must have been frowning stupidly, for she took pity on him, and smiled rather like a mother looking fondly at her son.
"Outside. On the roof. And no, I don't know how they got there. It's not uncommon, though, so like as not it's one of Anne's forfeits. One of the few that don't involve songs and swapping clothes. You have a good voice, by the way."
He smiled. "Thanks."
"Not so sure about your choice of song, but it was clean, which is rare around here." She frowned. "At least, I think it was clean. What exactly is a... Drashig?"
"It's an animal. Quite a rare one." He flashed her a bright smile, and hoped that she didn't ask any further questions. "I'm going to see about getting my boots back. I guess I'll see you in a bit."
"Be careful. And don't fall, or Josiah may never speak to me again." She waved a bottle of rum. "I'll have a drink waiting for you when you get back."
"Thanks." Did these people drink nothing else but rum! If he stayed in 1735 much longer he was going to be needing a new liver. Smiling noncommittally, he wandered out of the front door, and surveyed the roof of the bar. Celeste had been right; those were definitely his boots. They were standing inside the huge jaws that stood atop the building, and as he gazed up at them some small part of the previous evening's festivities came back to him. He remembered taking the boots off, and trying to throw abandoned corks into them; although how they had gone from there to the mouth of a decapitated shark was anybody's guess. Rum - the great mystifier. Now all he had to do was work out how to get the blasted things down.
"I don't suppose you feel inclined to jump?" he asked the boots. They didn't answer. Neither did the decapitated shark, although it did look faintly smug. Jack would have glared at it if he could have been bothered. Instead he turned around, and wandered disconsolately down to the little wooden jetty where they had come ashore the previous evening. It had been crowded with fishing boats then, he remembered, though now it was all but empty. The fishermen were all out at sea, he supposed. He cupped his hands over his eyes and scanned the water looking for them, wishing for his binoculars. Somewhere out there, for all he knew, was a vicious creature that wanted nothing more than to kill and eat as many humans as it could. He could only hope that it was still out there, and hadn't yet come to shore. If it had, nobody was safe.
"H-he... help... help me..." The words were so faint that at first they didn't filter into Jack's consciousness. He stared out to sea, still looking for far off fishing boats, and thinking about his own ship. Sooner or later he should go back aboard, and see for himself that the auto-repair system was doing its job, so that he might stand a chance in hell of getting away from the eighteenth century and back to some semblance of normality. He might not have a home, nor really even a Time of his own anymore, but the Caribbean in 1735 was not a place that he wanted to stay in forever. The voice called out again, a little louder this time, a little more plaintive; and he frowned.
"Is there somebody there?" He couldn't see anybody. A bird flew low overhead; something crab-like wandered about in the sand nearby; small waves splashed against the support struts of the jetty. "Hello?"
"Help..." A cough; the splutter of somebody with a mouth full of water. Jack dropped onto his hands and knees and looked over the edge of the jetty. A dark shape loomed there, and for a second all that he could think about was huge teeth and razor-sharp claws - then the shape resolved itself into a feeble, struggling man. Jack leaned over as far as he could, caught the man by his shoulder, and dragged him out from under the jetty.
"You okay? Hello? Hey!" The man was hanging limp in his grasp, his head almost under the water. With a mighty effort, Jack hauled him up onto dry land. "Hello? Come on, wake up. Last time I gave CPR to one of you historical types, I got arrested for indecent behaviour." He shook the sprawled figure as roughly as he dared. "Wake up!"
"Help me!" The man's eyes opened wide, and for a second he stared wildly at Jack - then abruptly he began to fight. Like a cornered beast he attacked, fists and feet and teeth all turned against his imagined foe. Jack backed off quickly, and waited for the terrified man to calm down.
"Hey! Take it easy, okay? I'm not going to hurt you. Name's Jack. You want to tell me what's wrong?"
"What?" The man's struggles eased and he took several long, deep breaths, then sat up and looked around. "What's... Get away from the water! We have to get away from the water!"
"We do?" Jack watched, confused, as the man stumbled and staggered off the jetty, clearly desperate to put some distance between himself and the sea. "What's wrong?"
"Wrong..." Some sort of sanity seemed to return to the wild, wide eyes, and the man blinked several times. "Wrong. Jack, you said your name was? If you have a family, Jack, you'll get them away from here. My name is David, I'm a fisherman. We were attacked. My boat, my friends. A beast... a huge, green beast, that came out of the waves and tore the others limb from limb. It took my brother away in its mouth, already ripped in half. I think it attacked several of the other boats, but I didn't see what happened. I swam as fast as I could. There were sharks... the blood..." He shook his head slowly. "A monster. A great, green sea monster. Oh, I know how that must sound to you. I would never have believed it myself, if I hadn't seen it. If I hadn't watched it kill my friends and pound my boat to dust. Some of the other boats were heading for the town, to warn the people there. I don't know if they made it." He slumped to the ground suddenly, as though the only strength he had possessed had been kept in reserve just long enough to tell his tale. "All that blood..."
"Take it easy." Jack slung one of the man's arms over his shoulder, and half dragged him into the inn. Celeste let out a little shriek.
"David!"
"Look after him. Get him to tell his story to Josiah as soon as they're both able." Jack lowered David into a chair, hesitated, frowned at him momentarily, then shrugged and pulled off the fisherman's boots. "Sorry. I'll explain later." David no longer seemed at all lucid, so he left it at that.
"Jack...?" Celeste was coming over with a bottle of brandy. "What is it? What's been happening?"
"Trouble. Like I said, just make sure he speaks to Josiah." He ran for the door, struggling to pull on the borrowed boots as he did so. "Do I owe you anything for last night?"
"I'll make Josiah pay." She followed him to the door. "What is it, Jack? Where are you going?"
"I don't know yet. To fight a monster, possibly. Or hopefully not. I'll have to see how it goes." He smiled rather hesitantly. "I had a great time last night, Celeste. Thanks. You throw a good party."
"Jack...?" Clearly it sounded to her like a goodbye. It had sounded that way to him, too, and he was even less happy about it than she was. He grinned.
"Bye."
"Jack!" But he was running away now, down the street, past the buildings that the pirate crew had variously vanished into, past the jetty, past the place where they had pulled up the long boats. Past a beach-side paddock where a pair of horses grazed, past a flock of scruffy looking sheep wandering at the edge of the sand. He had the charts back in Josiah's cabin to thank for knowing which direction would take him towards town, and instinct alone told him that that was the place to head for. What he was going to do when he got there was a different question; he just knew that it was where he had to go. Everything else would have to be guesswork.