erinya
in
erinya_fic
The Pirate's Progress (5/5)
Title: The Pirate's Progress, Part V
Fandom: PotC
Disclaimer: Really not mine now. Jack says I'm fired for taking so long.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Part 5 of Jack's adventures in the Underworld, in which Jack achieves his ends--or does he? I kind of went crazy with the mythology in this one.
Note: This story was conceived and written for the wonderful LadyMouse in the Black Pearl Sails Secret Santa exchange...last year. I totally suck. But it's finished! All finished! And the truth is I feel ridiculously proud about that, even though I should feel nothing but shame. Please forgive me, LadyMouse (and anyone else who's still reading.)
Part One: Down Among the Dead Men
Part Two: The River and the Gate
Part Three: The House of Judgment
Part Four: Truth and Consequences
V. Fiddler's Green
"Well, the place is sua sidera norunt, all right," Jack grumbled, casting a distrustful glance upwards at those alien constellations, "but where's its bloody solemque suum, eh?"
No one else in that country seemed much bothered by the missing sun, however, nor expectant of approaching day. Countless lanterns hanging from leafless poplars cast a pale light across the fields, and here and there bonfires flared, though they burned without heat, undying. The long tables were crowded with ghosts, and above the drifting echoes of laughter and conversation, a fiddle skirled high and wild and never stopped, pursued by the notes of a lyre, a sailor's penny-whistle, and now Pip's tambourine. The dancers spun to a tune like a frantic dirge, a cheerful air switched to a minor key. Jack's companions had melted into the crowd; he thought he saw the young surgeon with his arm around a pretty female shade, and glimpsed red-faced Smee in energetic mid-jig.
"Welcome, friend!" A sun-weathered, jovial man, black-haired and clad in tunic and sandals, emerged from the crush of celebrants to wrap Jack in a bear hug.
"Who are you?" Jack demanded, taken aback.
"I'm your host here, sailor." The man grinned broadly, offered his hand. "Ulisse, they call me. Among other names."
Jack blinked; recovered himself. "Ah. Of course they do." He shook the proffered hand. "Captain Jack Sparrow. Of the Black Pearl. Er…formerly."
"So I've heard," the Greek said. "News travels quickly in the Underworld. We don't have much else to do but gossip here."
"I thought you might have heard of me," Jack said, modestly. Maybe the place wasn't so bad, lack of solemque notwithstanding. "From one legend to another, it's an honor, mate."
"The honor's mine," said the other, and threw a friendly arm around Jack's shoulders, guiding him towards the trestle tables. "Come, let me introduce you to our company. They'll wish to have a round with you, and drink to your health."
Which seemed a funny thing to drink to when a man was dead; but, "Far be it from me to deny 'em the pleasure," Jack said happily. "Lead on, me Virgilian friend. Or is that Homeric? Always wondered which version of you ran closer to the truth."
Odysseus glanced at him and laughed. "What do you think, brother Sparrow?"
"All," Jack said. "And none, aye?"
"Aye," said his host. "But the only tales that matter here are those a man tells himself."
"And if he lies?"
"If he lies," Odysseus said, "who then remains, to remember what was true?"
* * *
The toast was made, hearty and loud, and in the midst of it Jack found himself the recipient of a piercing, hawklike gaze from the only man who would not take rum in his cup.
"I knew your father, boy," said this gentleman, gruffly, when the crowd had dispersed somewhat. "Tell me, does he still keep my Code?"
Jack, still recovering from an onslaught of slaps to the back, staggered a little.
"Black Bart," he said. "Well, I'll be."
"That's Captain Roberts to you," Bartholomew said. "I remember you when you were a tarry little rascal in short pants, and I'll take no lip from you. How is Teague, that old profligate? Still ranting and roaring to beat Methuselah?"
"As far as I know," Jack said, evasively, battling the impulse to shift from foot to foot like a small boy.
"Shrugged off your filial ties, have you?" The gentleman pirate pinned him with a shrewd look. "Well, I'm not surprised. He's a good man in his way, but a hard one, and more so since your ma passed this way. Wasn't much he wouldn't trade to the Devil for a dram of rum or opium, after that. For awhile, we all thought he'd follow her down, haunt the Queen's halls with music until She gave him back his Isobel."
Jack glanced up quickly. "Is she-"
"Here?" Captain Roberts shook his head. "Not in the Green, lad, though I've looked for her meself. But there be many Fields here, and many souls, and you might find her yet."
Jack thought of the dreadful relics Teague wore on his person, and grimaced. "No," he said. "I expect I won't, actually." He offered his hand to Roberts. "Delightful talking to you, Captain. I can assure you my father keeps the Code." Among other things.
He made his escape, and went to find more rum. The first cup hadn't had much effect, and after that interview he found he devoutly wished himself far drunker. There were some things a man really didn't want to know about one's dearly beloved parents, and once you knew them, you couldn't unknow them. Unless you had enough rum, which he didn't. But in the back of his mind, an as yet amorphous idea had started to form, something to do with the old, dark myth Captain Roberts had touched upon.
Something about things that come back.
* * *
"Your heart's not here in the dance with us, me lad," said Granuaile.
"Sorry, love," Jack said, and spun her round until she laughed, breathless as a girl even though she was a queen and a shade, and begged him to stop.
"I'm not so easily distracted, Jackie-boy. I didn't die yesterday, you know. Now, where have you left that black and wicked heart of yours? Not back in the cruel world above, I hope?"
.
"I wish I knew," he said. "If a ship had a soul, Lady Grace, where might I find her in this country?"
"Ah," she said, and stood still; he saw sadness and understanding in her eyes. "Perhaps that is a question for a different Lady. I am only an old warrior, agrah."
"Not only," Jack said, "and certainly not old," but when the dance was over and he had bowed and thanked her, his rogue's grin slipped and he grew grave. She watched him thoughtfully as he walked away.
"There goes one whose story is not over," she said to Erik the Red.
The Viking grunted into his mead. "There goes a fool," he said. "What more could he want from Death than this?"
* * *
In the center of Death's garden grew an ancient tree, the only green and living thing in that whole wide shadowland; its roots were watered by two pools, dark and still and deep, that lay on either side, and its gnarled branches reached up towards the otherworldly sky, its crown lost in the mists. Jack found the Lady walking there, a rosy-husked fruit from the tree in her white hand. When she turned to him, her half-smile was sad and sweet and a little wry, and he knew it was not meant for him but for whatever strange, unguessed-at memory or knowledge might preoccupy the Queen of Shadows.
"I did not think you would be back to visit me so soon, Captain Sparrow," she said, voice gay enough despite the private sorrow he'd glimpsed in her face. "Is your Fiddler's Green not all you hoped for, then?"
"'S'not that," Jack said. "It's more than I'd hoped for, really. But I think mayhaps I wasn't hoping for the right things, if you know what I mean," and he hoped she did, because he hardly knew what he meant himself.
"You miss the sea," she said softly. "But you wanted peace. You wanted to stop running. It's a kind of freedom."
"Not without her, it isn't."
She frowned. "You know that you are asking the impossible," she said. "It is not her time, and I cannot send you back to the other side."
"Not that her. My her," Jack said, abandoning grammar altogether.
"Your vessel?" the Lady said, bemused. "You have left her behind as surely as the other. Ships have no spirits."
"This one does," Jack said. "If she had none of her own, she at least had part of mine."
"Even so." She beckoned him to follow her to the edge of the right-hand pool, where she bent and skimmed her fingers across the surface, and said, "Look."
The ripples moved outward, and left behind a shimmering image, like a reflection, like a memory. Black sails hanging limp in still air, hull aground and listing in grey-white sand.
"There," said Jack, breathless, although that didn't much matter here, he supposed. "You see, she's not gone. That's my beauty, sound and whole as she ever was." He turned to the Lady. "Can I go there?"
She seemed startled. "You wish to return to the Locker? For that is where your Pearl lies: the outermost border of that place and of my country, where neither ghost goes nor man, between the worlds. You'll find only a madness there that would wear the strongest spirit into sand, into the waste." Her voice softened, tempered with regret. "And it would be a waste indeed for one like yourself to pass away that way, lost forever beyond even my power to save."
"I'll risk it," Jack said. "I've been mad before. Maybe I still am. Let me go to her, good Lady. After all, the Locker's where your law would have me, dead at sea and soul owed still to Davy Jones. I'm only here at all upon your very great kindness; surely you could do me the very small kindness-the cruelty, really-of putting me back where I belong?"
"A passionate argument," she said, "from one who has been recently reprieved, begging to be condemned again." And she looked at him with a shadow of the look she'd given him when he'd stood before her the first time; the gaze from which no truth, no matter how shameful, could be hidden. "What do you really ask of me, Jack Sparrow?"
He hesitated; fidgeted; and decided there was nothing for it. "I met an old blind gentleman on the road," he said, "who led me to believe my citizenship in your kingdom-lovely as it is," he added hastily, "would not be permanent. That the glass would be turned for me, so to speak. Or at least, so he spoke, in his funny way. Seemed like he knew me, and I thought I should know him, only I didn't."
"Tiresias spoke to you?" she said sharply.
Jack snapped his fingers. "That's it!" he cried. "I knew he seemed familiar. Out of some epic or other. Of course. Tiresias it was, and he most certainly did. He said there would be white wings on the horizon for me. Told me to keep an eye out."
She frowned. "Then there is some thread in the weft which is not known to me," she said, "for the Seer is never wrong, though he sounds mad to some and strange to most."
Turning from him, she bent as she had before to trouble the deep well of memory. Jack tried to peer over her shoulder, but the images playing on the water's surface flashed too quickly for his mind to comprehend, light and darkness twining together in intricate patterns like the delicate tracings of frost on a windowpane in winter, or unwinding in spirals through the helices of a great, labyrinthine conch.
The Lady said, "Ah," and the pool was still again, but a face lingered there for a fraction of a moment; Jack thought he knew it, or half-knew it, but before he could name it, it too was gone. "It seems," she said, "that there is indeed a pattern left unfinished, Captain Sparrow. A great wrong that must be unraveled and made right, a part that only you can play, for gods and mortals too. And so they come for you, all the way to the end of the world." She straightened. "I will send you back, if you are willing. But there will be a price of sorts."
"Naturally," said Jack, and tried to think what she might want of him. "There always is. What is it, then?"
"Just this," said the Queen of the Underworld, and smiled. Jack did not entirely like that smile; he had forgotten, perhaps--and now remembered--that it was a goddess he dealt with, and the most powerful of her ilk, keeper of all things dark. Her next words did not reassure him in the least. "You are still mine, Jack Sparrow. I will let you cross the river; I will allow those who seek your help to cross the last bar and find you on the shore. But only with the knowledge that you will return to me."
She seemed to have grown taller, and her voice rang with the force of geäs, of prophecy. He could feel it take hold, as if she'd reached out and wrapped fingers of ice and steel around his soul; he felt afraid, truly afraid in new and different ways than he'd ever felt before, and yet he could not move.
"The opportunity will present itself," she said, "and you will be tempted by the thought that you might cheat me of what is mine. Oh, do not shake your head. Do you think I do not know you? But as long as you seek to defy me by gaining immortality in the world, you will find yourself bereft of all else that you hold dear, and betrayed by Fate, even as She has often favored you; until you turn from your defiance, and content yourself with the time allotted to you."
Jack swallowed. "And may I ask how long might that be, my Lady?"
"One man's lifetime, and one only," she answered. "Time enough to live more stories; many more, I hope, for when you are done you shall sit in my hall and tell them all to me."
Her aspect changed as she said it, and she was a young girl once more, eagerly delighted at the prospect of hearing new tales of adventure, of the sea, of freedom. He looked into her lovely face and thought of what he knew of this half of her nature: eternal youth eternally bound to a dark place, able to walk only a few short months in the light.
Clearing his throat, he said, "We have an accord."
Persephone clapped her hands in joy; and then she leaned forward and kissed him full on the mouth. He tasted for a long moment the tart, aching sweetness of pomegranates, bright as the first afternoon of spring, sharp as the last morning of autumn.
Then true night fell, and he tasted nothing at all.
* * *
It wasn't so bad, being brought from death to life. Simple, really. Nothing to it.
No, that was utterly a lie. It was bad: pure agony like lightning, and the sick crack of bones setting themselves beneath torn flesh, while his brain sparked into consciousness in cold flashes of panic. It lasted for as long as he could remember, and he missed the darkness that had come before, where there had been no more running, only rest...
* * *
He woke with a groan, his cheek pressed against cool, black boards, the grip of his pistol digging painfully into his hip. The light was searing, the air breathless as a tomb, the deck steady as a rock under his prostrate body.
He'd had, he thought, a very long, interesting but convoluted dream, of which the details were rapidly disappearing. Something about pomegranates and a blind man on the road who needed directions. Or no, the blind man had given him directions, though to what and whence he had no idea anymore....But that made no sense at all. Only a fool would ask a blind man to show them the way, and he wasn't a fool, now, was he?
He lifted his head. Nothing moved. He was completely alone.
"Well, I don't feel dead," he said, experimentally. No one answered, which was more or less what he had expected. He looked around him.
Everything was just as it ought to be; except it wasn't. The Kraken had broken that masthead, had plunged its tentacles through his cabin door and out the long windows at the stern, had ripped the rigging and sails to shreds and left broken bodies in its wake along the deck. But the Black Pearl bore not a trace of the destruction Davy Jones' beast had wrought. She lay serene, dark and shining in the merciless white light that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.
For that matter, he was whole and alive, not drowned or eaten. He took a quick inventory; the evidence indicated he was definitely alive. His breath poured in and out of his lungs, the only air that seemed to move at all; the blood beat in his ears; he felt a headache niggling behind his left eye from the unholy glare. Just to be sure, he reached down; yes, his bits were still there. Always a relief. He stood up, slowly, stiff from lying for so long (how long?) on the unyielding boards, hearing a crack or two as his joints grudgingly accepted his weight.
"Hello?" he said. "Oi! Anyone there?"
Nothing. Not even a creak from the Pearl's boards.
With a growing sense of apprehension, he wandered over to the rail.
An expanse of blinding white sand stretched out to meet the blinding horizon in all directions, featureless and flat. No water to be seen, not even a mirage of waves, not a bird or a creature of any kind, anywhere.
"Oh, bugger," said Captain Jack Sparrow.
Fandom: PotC
Disclaimer: Really not mine now. Jack says I'm fired for taking so long.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Part 5 of Jack's adventures in the Underworld, in which Jack achieves his ends--or does he? I kind of went crazy with the mythology in this one.
Note: This story was conceived and written for the wonderful LadyMouse in the Black Pearl Sails Secret Santa exchange...last year. I totally suck. But it's finished! All finished! And the truth is I feel ridiculously proud about that, even though I should feel nothing but shame. Please forgive me, LadyMouse (and anyone else who's still reading.)
Part One: Down Among the Dead Men
Part Two: The River and the Gate
Part Three: The House of Judgment
Part Four: Truth and Consequences
V. Fiddler's Green
"Well, the place is sua sidera norunt, all right," Jack grumbled, casting a distrustful glance upwards at those alien constellations, "but where's its bloody solemque suum, eh?"
No one else in that country seemed much bothered by the missing sun, however, nor expectant of approaching day. Countless lanterns hanging from leafless poplars cast a pale light across the fields, and here and there bonfires flared, though they burned without heat, undying. The long tables were crowded with ghosts, and above the drifting echoes of laughter and conversation, a fiddle skirled high and wild and never stopped, pursued by the notes of a lyre, a sailor's penny-whistle, and now Pip's tambourine. The dancers spun to a tune like a frantic dirge, a cheerful air switched to a minor key. Jack's companions had melted into the crowd; he thought he saw the young surgeon with his arm around a pretty female shade, and glimpsed red-faced Smee in energetic mid-jig.
"Welcome, friend!" A sun-weathered, jovial man, black-haired and clad in tunic and sandals, emerged from the crush of celebrants to wrap Jack in a bear hug.
"Who are you?" Jack demanded, taken aback.
"I'm your host here, sailor." The man grinned broadly, offered his hand. "Ulisse, they call me. Among other names."
Jack blinked; recovered himself. "Ah. Of course they do." He shook the proffered hand. "Captain Jack Sparrow. Of the Black Pearl. Er…formerly."
"So I've heard," the Greek said. "News travels quickly in the Underworld. We don't have much else to do but gossip here."
"I thought you might have heard of me," Jack said, modestly. Maybe the place wasn't so bad, lack of solemque notwithstanding. "From one legend to another, it's an honor, mate."
"The honor's mine," said the other, and threw a friendly arm around Jack's shoulders, guiding him towards the trestle tables. "Come, let me introduce you to our company. They'll wish to have a round with you, and drink to your health."
Which seemed a funny thing to drink to when a man was dead; but, "Far be it from me to deny 'em the pleasure," Jack said happily. "Lead on, me Virgilian friend. Or is that Homeric? Always wondered which version of you ran closer to the truth."
Odysseus glanced at him and laughed. "What do you think, brother Sparrow?"
"All," Jack said. "And none, aye?"
"Aye," said his host. "But the only tales that matter here are those a man tells himself."
"And if he lies?"
"If he lies," Odysseus said, "who then remains, to remember what was true?"
* * *
The toast was made, hearty and loud, and in the midst of it Jack found himself the recipient of a piercing, hawklike gaze from the only man who would not take rum in his cup.
"I knew your father, boy," said this gentleman, gruffly, when the crowd had dispersed somewhat. "Tell me, does he still keep my Code?"
Jack, still recovering from an onslaught of slaps to the back, staggered a little.
"Black Bart," he said. "Well, I'll be."
"That's Captain Roberts to you," Bartholomew said. "I remember you when you were a tarry little rascal in short pants, and I'll take no lip from you. How is Teague, that old profligate? Still ranting and roaring to beat Methuselah?"
"As far as I know," Jack said, evasively, battling the impulse to shift from foot to foot like a small boy.
"Shrugged off your filial ties, have you?" The gentleman pirate pinned him with a shrewd look. "Well, I'm not surprised. He's a good man in his way, but a hard one, and more so since your ma passed this way. Wasn't much he wouldn't trade to the Devil for a dram of rum or opium, after that. For awhile, we all thought he'd follow her down, haunt the Queen's halls with music until She gave him back his Isobel."
Jack glanced up quickly. "Is she-"
"Here?" Captain Roberts shook his head. "Not in the Green, lad, though I've looked for her meself. But there be many Fields here, and many souls, and you might find her yet."
Jack thought of the dreadful relics Teague wore on his person, and grimaced. "No," he said. "I expect I won't, actually." He offered his hand to Roberts. "Delightful talking to you, Captain. I can assure you my father keeps the Code." Among other things.
He made his escape, and went to find more rum. The first cup hadn't had much effect, and after that interview he found he devoutly wished himself far drunker. There were some things a man really didn't want to know about one's dearly beloved parents, and once you knew them, you couldn't unknow them. Unless you had enough rum, which he didn't. But in the back of his mind, an as yet amorphous idea had started to form, something to do with the old, dark myth Captain Roberts had touched upon.
Something about things that come back.
* * *
"Your heart's not here in the dance with us, me lad," said Granuaile.
"Sorry, love," Jack said, and spun her round until she laughed, breathless as a girl even though she was a queen and a shade, and begged him to stop.
"I'm not so easily distracted, Jackie-boy. I didn't die yesterday, you know. Now, where have you left that black and wicked heart of yours? Not back in the cruel world above, I hope?"
.
"I wish I knew," he said. "If a ship had a soul, Lady Grace, where might I find her in this country?"
"Ah," she said, and stood still; he saw sadness and understanding in her eyes. "Perhaps that is a question for a different Lady. I am only an old warrior, agrah."
"Not only," Jack said, "and certainly not old," but when the dance was over and he had bowed and thanked her, his rogue's grin slipped and he grew grave. She watched him thoughtfully as he walked away.
"There goes one whose story is not over," she said to Erik the Red.
The Viking grunted into his mead. "There goes a fool," he said. "What more could he want from Death than this?"
* * *
In the center of Death's garden grew an ancient tree, the only green and living thing in that whole wide shadowland; its roots were watered by two pools, dark and still and deep, that lay on either side, and its gnarled branches reached up towards the otherworldly sky, its crown lost in the mists. Jack found the Lady walking there, a rosy-husked fruit from the tree in her white hand. When she turned to him, her half-smile was sad and sweet and a little wry, and he knew it was not meant for him but for whatever strange, unguessed-at memory or knowledge might preoccupy the Queen of Shadows.
"I did not think you would be back to visit me so soon, Captain Sparrow," she said, voice gay enough despite the private sorrow he'd glimpsed in her face. "Is your Fiddler's Green not all you hoped for, then?"
"'S'not that," Jack said. "It's more than I'd hoped for, really. But I think mayhaps I wasn't hoping for the right things, if you know what I mean," and he hoped she did, because he hardly knew what he meant himself.
"You miss the sea," she said softly. "But you wanted peace. You wanted to stop running. It's a kind of freedom."
"Not without her, it isn't."
She frowned. "You know that you are asking the impossible," she said. "It is not her time, and I cannot send you back to the other side."
"Not that her. My her," Jack said, abandoning grammar altogether.
"Your vessel?" the Lady said, bemused. "You have left her behind as surely as the other. Ships have no spirits."
"This one does," Jack said. "If she had none of her own, she at least had part of mine."
"Even so." She beckoned him to follow her to the edge of the right-hand pool, where she bent and skimmed her fingers across the surface, and said, "Look."
The ripples moved outward, and left behind a shimmering image, like a reflection, like a memory. Black sails hanging limp in still air, hull aground and listing in grey-white sand.
"There," said Jack, breathless, although that didn't much matter here, he supposed. "You see, she's not gone. That's my beauty, sound and whole as she ever was." He turned to the Lady. "Can I go there?"
She seemed startled. "You wish to return to the Locker? For that is where your Pearl lies: the outermost border of that place and of my country, where neither ghost goes nor man, between the worlds. You'll find only a madness there that would wear the strongest spirit into sand, into the waste." Her voice softened, tempered with regret. "And it would be a waste indeed for one like yourself to pass away that way, lost forever beyond even my power to save."
"I'll risk it," Jack said. "I've been mad before. Maybe I still am. Let me go to her, good Lady. After all, the Locker's where your law would have me, dead at sea and soul owed still to Davy Jones. I'm only here at all upon your very great kindness; surely you could do me the very small kindness-the cruelty, really-of putting me back where I belong?"
"A passionate argument," she said, "from one who has been recently reprieved, begging to be condemned again." And she looked at him with a shadow of the look she'd given him when he'd stood before her the first time; the gaze from which no truth, no matter how shameful, could be hidden. "What do you really ask of me, Jack Sparrow?"
He hesitated; fidgeted; and decided there was nothing for it. "I met an old blind gentleman on the road," he said, "who led me to believe my citizenship in your kingdom-lovely as it is," he added hastily, "would not be permanent. That the glass would be turned for me, so to speak. Or at least, so he spoke, in his funny way. Seemed like he knew me, and I thought I should know him, only I didn't."
"Tiresias spoke to you?" she said sharply.
Jack snapped his fingers. "That's it!" he cried. "I knew he seemed familiar. Out of some epic or other. Of course. Tiresias it was, and he most certainly did. He said there would be white wings on the horizon for me. Told me to keep an eye out."
She frowned. "Then there is some thread in the weft which is not known to me," she said, "for the Seer is never wrong, though he sounds mad to some and strange to most."
Turning from him, she bent as she had before to trouble the deep well of memory. Jack tried to peer over her shoulder, but the images playing on the water's surface flashed too quickly for his mind to comprehend, light and darkness twining together in intricate patterns like the delicate tracings of frost on a windowpane in winter, or unwinding in spirals through the helices of a great, labyrinthine conch.
The Lady said, "Ah," and the pool was still again, but a face lingered there for a fraction of a moment; Jack thought he knew it, or half-knew it, but before he could name it, it too was gone. "It seems," she said, "that there is indeed a pattern left unfinished, Captain Sparrow. A great wrong that must be unraveled and made right, a part that only you can play, for gods and mortals too. And so they come for you, all the way to the end of the world." She straightened. "I will send you back, if you are willing. But there will be a price of sorts."
"Naturally," said Jack, and tried to think what she might want of him. "There always is. What is it, then?"
"Just this," said the Queen of the Underworld, and smiled. Jack did not entirely like that smile; he had forgotten, perhaps--and now remembered--that it was a goddess he dealt with, and the most powerful of her ilk, keeper of all things dark. Her next words did not reassure him in the least. "You are still mine, Jack Sparrow. I will let you cross the river; I will allow those who seek your help to cross the last bar and find you on the shore. But only with the knowledge that you will return to me."
She seemed to have grown taller, and her voice rang with the force of geäs, of prophecy. He could feel it take hold, as if she'd reached out and wrapped fingers of ice and steel around his soul; he felt afraid, truly afraid in new and different ways than he'd ever felt before, and yet he could not move.
"The opportunity will present itself," she said, "and you will be tempted by the thought that you might cheat me of what is mine. Oh, do not shake your head. Do you think I do not know you? But as long as you seek to defy me by gaining immortality in the world, you will find yourself bereft of all else that you hold dear, and betrayed by Fate, even as She has often favored you; until you turn from your defiance, and content yourself with the time allotted to you."
Jack swallowed. "And may I ask how long might that be, my Lady?"
"One man's lifetime, and one only," she answered. "Time enough to live more stories; many more, I hope, for when you are done you shall sit in my hall and tell them all to me."
Her aspect changed as she said it, and she was a young girl once more, eagerly delighted at the prospect of hearing new tales of adventure, of the sea, of freedom. He looked into her lovely face and thought of what he knew of this half of her nature: eternal youth eternally bound to a dark place, able to walk only a few short months in the light.
Clearing his throat, he said, "We have an accord."
Persephone clapped her hands in joy; and then she leaned forward and kissed him full on the mouth. He tasted for a long moment the tart, aching sweetness of pomegranates, bright as the first afternoon of spring, sharp as the last morning of autumn.
Then true night fell, and he tasted nothing at all.
* * *
It wasn't so bad, being brought from death to life. Simple, really. Nothing to it.
No, that was utterly a lie. It was bad: pure agony like lightning, and the sick crack of bones setting themselves beneath torn flesh, while his brain sparked into consciousness in cold flashes of panic. It lasted for as long as he could remember, and he missed the darkness that had come before, where there had been no more running, only rest...
* * *
He woke with a groan, his cheek pressed against cool, black boards, the grip of his pistol digging painfully into his hip. The light was searing, the air breathless as a tomb, the deck steady as a rock under his prostrate body.
He'd had, he thought, a very long, interesting but convoluted dream, of which the details were rapidly disappearing. Something about pomegranates and a blind man on the road who needed directions. Or no, the blind man had given him directions, though to what and whence he had no idea anymore....But that made no sense at all. Only a fool would ask a blind man to show them the way, and he wasn't a fool, now, was he?
He lifted his head. Nothing moved. He was completely alone.
"Well, I don't feel dead," he said, experimentally. No one answered, which was more or less what he had expected. He looked around him.
Everything was just as it ought to be; except it wasn't. The Kraken had broken that masthead, had plunged its tentacles through his cabin door and out the long windows at the stern, had ripped the rigging and sails to shreds and left broken bodies in its wake along the deck. But the Black Pearl bore not a trace of the destruction Davy Jones' beast had wrought. She lay serene, dark and shining in the merciless white light that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.
For that matter, he was whole and alive, not drowned or eaten. He took a quick inventory; the evidence indicated he was definitely alive. His breath poured in and out of his lungs, the only air that seemed to move at all; the blood beat in his ears; he felt a headache niggling behind his left eye from the unholy glare. Just to be sure, he reached down; yes, his bits were still there. Always a relief. He stood up, slowly, stiff from lying for so long (how long?) on the unyielding boards, hearing a crack or two as his joints grudgingly accepted his weight.
"Hello?" he said. "Oi! Anyone there?"
Nothing. Not even a creak from the Pearl's boards.
With a growing sense of apprehension, he wandered over to the rail.
An expanse of blinding white sand stretched out to meet the blinding horizon in all directions, featureless and flat. No water to be seen, not even a mirage of waves, not a bird or a creature of any kind, anywhere.
"Oh, bugger," said Captain Jack Sparrow.