Apprentice To The Sorcerer

I slept through breakfast and the first shift. When I woke I had a biscuit and salt pork sitting on my non-existent chest. My rum canteen measured half full and my tankard had grog in it. I ate, washed the food down with grog and rum, and then made my way topside. My breasts ached today. I needed to unbind them for awhile, but when?

Losing my self in the rigging came easily. Up in the wind with the sharp snap of sails and remote from noise, one could forget a lot of things. But one could also ruminate, think about problems without hindrance. I found myself thinking of Jack and Will.

He could have died from the wounds Will gave him, but Jack didn’t seem angry at Will. He had scrimshawed my portrait for Will as an apology, and intended to give it to him even though he suspected Will wouldn’t accept it. Such a tiny, perfect thing must have taken days to complete. So the reason Jack hadn’t been wenching and drinking in port? He sat at a table with a sharp needle, scratching and inking my face into a shark’s tooth. He certainly had a lot of patience.

And apologize for what, exactly? Jack wasn’t my guardian. How could my flight from four walls and babies be due to Jack Sparrow? I felt angry over the lessening of my worth. I made my own decisions and survived very well all alone. How dare Will assign blame for his unwedded state to a pirate? And how did Jack dare to assume the blame without a murmur? Men were arrogant creatures, to be sure. How long could I live as one before becoming just as blind and braggardly? I looked forward to seeing Tia Dalma again, if for no other reason than to look at her body and reassure myself I had the same curves somewhere.

My shift passed in a blur of similar thoughts. Soon I had to contend with afternoon sun in my eyes and moderate thirst. I tied off a line and swung down, nearly landing atop Mr. Gibbs. He recovered his stagger with alacrity, handing me a tankard of grog and a wedge of cheese. I drank the grog in seconds, but gave back the cheese. I had to have fruit. All the salt we were eating made me feel like an old piece of leather.

“We’ll be at Tia Dalma’s tonight,” Gibbs said, eating my cheese. Just the sight of that pasty, creamy curd coating his teeth made me desperate for water without rum and a grapefruit or pear. Barbossa’s obsession with green apples suddenly made perfect sense.
“Captain made sure you went land with us,” he went on. “Seemed to think you’d get supplies there. I ain’t so sure you want her kind of supplies.”

“She’ll have leeches if nothing else,” I thought out loud.

Gibbs shivered violently before swilling rum. “Ach, nasty critters.”

“They eat poison,” I reminded him.

“And bleed you out,” he argued. “But I ain’t the doctor.”

“Neither am I,” I pointed out.

“Closer’n me,” he countered swiftly. “I been layin’ flat when I can, like you told me. Me back does feel better.”

“Your spine curves like this,” I said, illustrating my point by waving my hand down in an S pattern. “Too much pressure on the front from a big gut throws it off balance.”

“I do not have a big gut,” Gibbs said severely.

Mokulu laughed as he strolled by. “Den I am emancipated,” he said.

“Emaciated,” Ragetti corrected absently. “Emancipated is for freedom, like liberate.” He slopped the deck with water to scrub a bloodstain out. “Mokulu was a slave, but now he is emancipated,” he said, textbook in intonation.

“I’m emancipated,” Jack chimed in, appearing from nowhere. He did that quite a lot I’d noticed. For hours he would stand at the helm and then I’d blink and he’d be gone. He smiled at us in turn, resting his eyes on Ragetti. “Ragetti was a fat man,” he said, “but he joined on the Black Pearl and became emaciated.”

Ragetti guffawed his appreciation. Gibbs rolled his eyes. I looked at the lemon in Jack’s hand longingly. He saw me. “Tell you what, lad,” he said conversationally. “You mend my clothes and get the bloodstains out and I’ll give you a lemon,” he offered.

“Better take it lad,” Gibbs said in a conspiratorial tone. “We ran out of oranges yesterday.”

I nodded my acquiescence and followed Jack back to his cabin. He shut the hatch behind us and took off his hat. “You’re actually fair skinned,” he said suddenly. “You should wear a bigger hat and consider war paint.”

Confused, I tried to cover my unsteadiness with movement. I took up his soiled, shredded clothes off the chair. I had to dump his lemons again just to get a bowl. I stared at their tempting yellow skins. “All that china you got from Norwood and you’re still using this one bowl,” I complained. If he could bring up just any random subject, so could I.

“Couldn’t break up a set, now could I?” Jack answered coolly, tilting his head upward. Despite his outrageous appearance, he looked so much like a snooty socialite I snickered. At his pleased smile I knew he’d been trying to get me to laugh. “And anyway,” he went on, “what pirate uses fine china? My bumbling fingers would break it.”

I frowned at him, but didn’t challenge his statement. Jack and clumsiness only went together when Jack dwelt in that twilight time between drunkenness and unconsciousness. In the sober-to-drunk stage he had enviable control over his body. Never mind he usually walked on land like a man only in possession of his legs for a day or two. Perhaps he was a merman.

Settling down to wash and mend, I left Jack to his own entertainment. I viewed him out of the very corners of my eyes, enjoying the chance to see him with fair naturalness. He chose a book of maps and settled on the other side of the table. For perhaps thirty minutes we both worked in silence. Suddenly, Jack stabbed the map with his finger. His sleeve fell slack at his delicate-looking wrist, exposing his brand and part of his self-glorifying tattoo.

“Blast and damn,” he muttered. Jack flipped through his charts. Laying his own down beside the atlas, he scrutinized them carefully. I couldn’t suppress a gasp when he grabbed his atlas and tore the offending page right out. He flattened his own sheet and wedged it in place of the missing page. “It was wrong,” he said, not looking at me. “They frequently are, you see. We didn’t used to have accurate clocks, which made a problem.”

“I expected you to navigate, but I didn’t know you were a cartographer,” I said cautiously, dabbing his shirt dry. I couldn’t get anymore blood out of it.

“Not many people do know,” Jack answered flippantly.

“But why don’t you brag about it?” I asked, starting the mending. “It’s really something to boast over.”

“So is medcin’,” Jack said. “I don’t hear you boasting.”

“My level of medicine is far less accomplished than your grasp of map making,” I said firmly.

Jack pulled his lips back into a wry grin. “How can you argue with me about this when you can’t chart a map and I can’t sew up a wound?”

I stared at him. “Well, I suppose I can’t, sir,” I admitted.

“S’what I thought,” he said, grinning.

My heart fluttered strangely as I looked at him. My fingers stilled upon his ragged shirt. Unbidden, I could hear myself that day, telling him he was a good man. I could see his eyes searching the horizon for an argument. “All evidence to the contrary,” he’d said.

“You don’t ‘ave to look so stricken, lad,” Jack said, interpreting my frozen stance as insight to his words. I had my insight, yes, but not to Jack’s words. I had insight into his heart. He didn’t fear being made a fool of, or of failing. He felt comfortable with his body and his position in life. Some self-depreciating force made him restless for stimulation, and right now I was the most interesting thing on his ship. He didn’t know me. The offer to give me a lemon in exchange for doing menial labor served as a ruse to watch me and hear what I might say.

Jack was bored.

“We don’ go out to become really bad eggs just to stink by ourselves,” I said aloud.

Vague as my citation seemed, Jack still understood me instantly. He grinned widely, settled back in his chair, folded his arms across his flat stomach, and waited, eyes twinkling.

“I can juggle,” I said, only half-insulted. “There’s no need to make me do your mending when I can entertain you with more visual stimulus.”

Jack chuckled. “Measured the length of me already, have you?” He looked upward. “Visual stimulus,” he repeated. “Sounds medical.”

“Do you want me to do this or not?” I went to put his mending down. He belayed me with a wave of his hand.

“Our deal stands,” he said soothingly. “I rarely have the patience to sew and I normally wouldn’t mind losing a shirt, but I do like that shirt.”

I looked down at it. It didn’t look any different than any shirt he owned.

“I met my first mermaid while wearing that shirt,” Jack continued. “See where the seam is loose at the shoulder? She bit me there.”

Believing in everything else, could I not believe in mermaids? I went back to sewing.

“Later on I wore it when I met Davy Jones,” Jack said, winding up to his tale. “I wore it again the day the kraken swallowed me. I can’t give up that shirt.”

“It’s a rag, sir,” I said as respectfully as possible. “And the man under the shirt is what means something.”

“I didn’t know you felt that way about me, Lei,” Jack drawled. I looked down to hide my blush.

“That’s not what I mean and you know it,” I defended.

“Don’t get your knickers, er, trousers twisted,” Jack said mildly. “But I have noticed you carry a healthy respect for me. A lot of lads your age would be more challenging to my ‘thority. I’ve been a pirate long enough to know.”

“I grew up hearing tales about you,” I confessed, moving on to reinforce the broken seam at the shirt’s shoulder.

“Some of them might not be true,” he said. “For instance, somebody decided I took Nassau without firing a shot. T’isn’t true.”

“It isn’t?” I felt disappointed.

“No. I fired one shot into the air to get everyone’s attention.” Jack smiled. “I did well, I can’t deny it, but I did fire a shot. I can’t help it if the sound got covered by a building collapsing.”

I bent over my sewing to hide my smile. “Whatever you say, captain,” I murmured.

“Now that’s what I like to hear,” Jack announced. “Go ahead and take your lemon. I’ll fix the breeches meself.”

He asked me to eat it in his cabin so as not to upset anyone else. I watched his nimble fingers dance back and forth over the fabric. He had to be lying about not being able to sew someone up.

The lemon tasted surprisingly good after all. I felt strange inside after it hit my gullet, but Jack offered me rum and it washed the feeling away. He bit off his thread, returned my needle, and put his clothes on the far end of the table. “After we see Tia,” he said, casting a careful eye over me, “I have something I want you to learn.”

“What?” I stood up.

“You throw like a girl,” he said. “I watched you try to throw Masters his pouch today. It took you seven tries to get it anywhere near him.”

I bit my lip and looked away. Of course I threw like a girl!

“I’ll put a target up and you’ll practice,” Jack went on. “After we get you able to hit your target we’ll move on to knives. You need to be able to keep the enemy as far away from you as possible. You don’t have the reach to fend off a surge of attackers.”

I knew the truth of this, but it still hurt to hear.

“And stop mooning over it,” Jack said, standing up. “You can’t fail at being a pirate. Pirates make their own rules. Think about how you want to attack and defend. Talk to Marty.”

“Marty is a midget,” I complained. “I’m lots taller than he is.”

“Marty is shorter than needed, as you are. There is no difference.” Jack put his hat back on with a flourish. “Dismissed, Lei.”

Somewhat irritated, I stalked back onto the deck. Knowing Jack told the truth made it even worse. I wasn’t that bad at throwing.