Marooned, 13

In Which Jack Performs Sea-Burial

by

Gloria Mundi

Whatever-it-was had probably been graceful, down there in the dark: its many veiled limbs spreading through the water like the skirts of a lady's dress, its single eye glowing like a gentle lamp, its skin rippling with patterns like the ceiling above his bed, that time in Singapore with the opium-pipe. Cast up on the sand, it was lumpish and grey and ugly. Very dead: Jack had heaved a few rocks at it, ready to turn and run if it moved, but eventually he had conceded that it was out of its element and dead from the weight of the air, if nothing else.

"Marooned like me," he told the stinking, heavy monster as he fastened a precious, much-spliced length of rope around its slippery hide. "Cast ashore with no way home." Self-pity came easily to Jack these days, but since there was no one else around to lavish sympathy on him, he deemed it fair enough.

The brute weighed a ton, and he was weaker than he'd been before the wreck: seaweed and fish and berries were a fine diet, to be sure, but he felt as thin and sinewy as he'd been when the curse took hold of him. No muscle on his bones to move the monster more than a few feet at a time, even with the sweat pouring off him in rivulets. The corpse acquired a thick batter of sand and seaweed as he dragged it behind him, and it left a broad track along the beach. He hoped there was nothing behind him to follow that track. The blood, or whatever it was, that oozed from the creature's wounds was black, and tasted foul. There were circular scars on its skin, like smaller copies of the purple weal on his leg, and its own limbs were lined with little round suckers like an octopus's: but this was no octopus, quite aside from its abnormal size.

By late afternoon he'd got the corpse onto the rocks at the end of the beach. No mermaids today: he hoped they wouldn't be too pissed off at him for using their bathing-place to dispose of carrion. Getting the rope off the creature was a tricky business, and he almost ended up following it into the wicked tidal race; but he braced himself against the sharp-edged reef, and the monster slipped back into the ocean. Back into its element.

Jack was exhausted, and a great deal of the slime and sand had transferred itself to his own skin. He wanted to bathe in fresh water, but the spring was hardly sufficient for drinking: nothing to spare. There were thunderclouds on the horizon: perhaps they'd blow this way and unload their rain on his little kingdom.

He wriggled out of his breeches, or what was left of 'em, and splashed about in the surf for a while, luxuriating (since it was the best he could get) in the sensation of cool water splashing over his sun-scorched skin. A shoal of fry darted in the clear water, quick as any mirage, swimming straight at him like slow, gentle bullets; he played with them for a while, until he saw the sleek curve of a fin, out by the reef, and decided to take himself ashore before anything decided that he was dinner.

The thunderclouds were taller and darker now: there'd be a storm for sure. After the last bit o' weather, Jack'd moved his hut higher up the beach, further from the tideline: he was surely safe from the sea. And maybe the gigantic grey waves, the irresistable gale, would bring him salvation: a fleet, a single ship, even wreckage that might be built into a boat of his own. He'd sail west, for surely that way lay Brazil: or he'd sign whatever Articles, Code, Book was presented to him, and go where he was taken. Anywhere but here. Any company that was not his own.

"Bloody Elizabeth, rescued as easy as kiss your hand," said Jack bitterly to the horizon. "Ain't Captain Jack Sparrow worth two of that girl?"

The horizon, all blurred by the approaching storm, gave him no answers.

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