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Author: Guede Mazaka
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Will/Jack/Elizabeth
Feedback: Good lines, bad ones, etc.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Notes: Thanks to penm for the editing suggestion, and to Delph for the title help (title is Latin for ‘our ship’).
Summary: Three meditations on the Black Pearl.
***
I. Jack
The oldest beams of the Black Pearl are oak. Strong, well-seasoned, scented with sea-salt and sweat-salt and rum and, if you press your cheek hard to the grain and breathes deep, the ice of ancient winter forests. They make up the heart of her, and they’re why she’s always had a steady streak beneath her wicked temper.
The rest of her is a patchwork of her travels and captains, her wood tracing the whole circumference of the globe. Some of the planking in the captain’s cabin is teak, left over from one old seadog’s vanity trip into the Far East. Barbossa left behind cheap pine to cover the many scars from his ravaging years, with the occasional better piece of wood—he couldn’t die or be harmed and he got used to the idea, forgot that it were men and not ships who took curses. Whenever the soft stuff rots, swells with the damp air or splinters into a gun-crew, it’s a memory of the morass into which he almost sunk everything. They are what lies at fault for the tremble in the Pearl that sometimes rises with the storm-winds, the new creakiness in her murmuring. She suffered those nine years.
Ships carry men, men raise ships. They don’t make them, no. Not in the way of the shaping of the ribs, the laying of the keep and the fitting of the joints. That only makes a boat, and pardon to the commodore, but it would be the truth. When the blood has run red over the decks and the black powder has ground darker the lines of the grain, when the captain has woken at least once and averted danger because of what was told him by no man…then that’s a ship. Then that is something that can be hurt and healed, just like any living thing. It’s no crime to wreck a boat, but it is murder to break a ship.
So that, young children, is why I don’t ground her ashore and rip out all the traces of Barbossa. I would raise her, my old wild lady, from the sullen hag he left her. Raise her and not raze her to her death. Seeing his marks still lingering make me grit my teeth, aye, but so does this…
lifts one hand, callused and broad
…and this…
lifts another, slender and white
…and yet you’d not have me cut out your scars, would you? Your thin lines that mark blood spilled because of him?
kisses palms
* * *
II. Elizabeth
It’s an exhilarating language of wind and sea, so different from ashore that I have to remind myself to hold on, lest I crash to the deck below. Nothing holds still, everything is under tension and it sings.
I learned the ropes the quickest Anamaria had ever seen. Granted, I had read something of rigging before, and the easiest way to handle Commodore Norrington’s stiffness was to ask after his ships, but nevertheless there was so much more than I’d expected. But I learned it all, and it was easy, whether you find that believable or not. Each one trembles a little differently, each has a different hum, and once you learn those it all comes neatly together. The foremast and all its rigging sing one harmony, the mainmast the melody, and so on until it bids fair to match any of the wild new compositions from Europe.
And there are broken chords, too—the wood is not the only part of the Pearl that remembers Barbossa’s rough hand. When the canvas swells full and every rope strains, I can hear tiny dissonances, mismatched notes that grate upon the ears. It is not so awful then, but when the wind truly howls then the Pearl howls with it. She breaks against the ear, hard and shrieking like the weeping ghosts that the sailors from the Mexican coast speak of, and it tears through the whole body. I can never understand why neither Will nor Jack can hear it.
Perhaps it is a woman’s gift. For she sounds like a woman in terrible labor, straining with all her might to push out the monstrous seed that Barbossa tried to leave in her. She wants desperately to birth into her new-old life, to rip out all that was dark and awful. And I, when I hear her, I cannot but climb to her aid.
I’ll not fall, though the ropes be slick and whipping in the wind. Not while I hear her screaming. Trust me.
* * *
III. Will
It doesn’t surprise me that Jack takes to the wood, for trees grow and grow by wrapping a new layer around their old selves. Nor does it surprise me that Elizabeth loves to venture where the seagulls go so my heart catches in my throat, for even while she was on land, she was set high above the earth. Her father never let a speck touch her. They’ve never left their loves and their places in the world.
I miss the heat of the furnace, the slow change of metal from red to orange to white within it. Yes, it was hard work and ill-paying, but there was something glorious in shaping steel and iron to my imagination, turning at least a few of my dreams into solid cold reality. On the Pearl I have had my deepest wishes fulfilled, and I’ve had fulfilled some wishes that I didn’t even realize I was wanting, but nevertheless, it isn’t the same. It is all breeze and light and foam here, free as the wind. But likewise, it is as passing as the wind without the substance to reassure me, to give me security.
The ship is timeless, but the forge has something ancient and dark around it. The wringing of metal needs relentless force, and the softening of it requires hot fire and so always includes the spark of destruction caged within it. No forging comes easy—there is no coaxing of the wood, no easy sway of a rope’s end. Which is why in the end, both wood and rope rely on metal to fasten them.
Jack sees scars in the planking, and Elizabeth hears echoes in the rigging, but I touch the rivets and you and I feel pain. Smell blood. Hear the bark of fiery terror. It’s not the wood and the rope—those Barbossa could mark, yes, and wound, but the metal is what he used and made and loved. And it still loves him. You still love him.
I’m ridding this ship of him one rivet at a time when we’re at sea. It’s slow going, but I could tolerate it if not for the black murderous gleam of you and your kind. You cannons are what hiss the loudest in the night, when I’ve stolen from the warm bodies knotting round me in Jack’s bed, and you I can’t remove until I find some replacements. But I will. Because I will not see you turned against any of us again.
I give you warning.
***