Fic: "The Lost City" (3/5)
Title: The Lost City (3/5)
Author: cassyl
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Jack Sparrow/James Norrington
Summary: Jack’s search for a fabled map leads him on an adventure that may mean more than he ever bargained for.
Warnings: This is AU like whoa. I also want to point out that, although many locations in this story are based on real places, they are all fictionalized versions of themselves. Furthermore, no copyright infringement is intended.
THE LOST CITY
“There is a tide in the affairs of men Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries . . .”
-- Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
PART THREE
The way Jack saw it, anything would’ve done, even the smallest, most battered vessel around, so long as it could get them across the Atlantic in one piece. But James had other ideas, and Jack had to admit that they weren’t entirely without merit.
So instead of buying a ship and hiring a crew, Jack and his geographer, as Jack had taken to referring to James, booked passage on a merchant ship sailing out of Algiers the next week. The Graciana was a Portuguese vessel, handsome even by Jack’s exacting standards, and captained by a sharp-eyed man by the name of Águia. She was headed for Nassau bearing spices and cloth, but the captain had been more than happy to take on two well-to-do brothers on their way to Freeport to do a bit of surveying. Jack had suggested they stick as close to the truth as possible, and, after all, surveying wasn’t entirely unlike hunting for treasure.
During the intermediate week, their main objective was getting Jack to look the part of Mr. John Smith-Jack to his closest friends-respectable gentleman of leisure. They scrounged for European dress in the souks, and Jack was forced to wash more thoroughly than he had since childhood. James forbade him from wearing any more of what he called “that ludicrous eye-black,” and had made him trim the two braids from his beard, though Jack had refused to part with the rest of his facial hair. There were some things, of course, that couldn’t be solved with a bar of soap of a new outfit. He’d have to try and keep his mouth shut to avoid revealing his teeth, and James had warned him not to roll up his sleeves under any circumstances.
But while their afternoons were spent combing the shops, their evenings were what really kept Jack going. After dinner each night, they would sit around in the study, drinking up the contents of James’ wine store, planning their adventure. There were certain elements Jack elected to keep to himself, but overall he found James to be an able, quick-witted co-conspirator. He was well-educated to be sure, fully abreast of all manner of book-learning, though he had only a marginal amount of experience aboard a ship.
It’d been a long time since Jack had fraternized with anyone remotely like him, but as far as upstanding gentlemen went, James Norrington wasn’t half bad. In fact, Jack almost rather liked him. He was young, almost painfully so, still a little naïve, but not without a hard edge and a world-weary cynicism that Jack found surprisingly endearing. And of course, as Ali Basir had told him back in Tripoli, James Norrington was, unflaggingly, a good-hearted, honest man.
John and James Smith didn’t carry much luggage onto the Graciana. They were shown to a small but tidy cabin furnished with two bunks and enough space to stow their trunk. The first mate, a stooped, tough man called de Flores who looked as if he’d been straining against a harsh wind all his life, informed them in halting English that they could join the crew for meals, and that he would thank them to keep out of everyone’s way. The younger Smith agreed to these terms amiably, and soon enough they were left alone.
“Not bad, Jim,” Jack said, settling down on the lower bunk and taking off his hat to rub his head. It’d been years since his hair had been this short, and even after months it still surprised him on occasion.
“Not bad, yourself,” James replied, perching on top of their trunk. “You clean up pretty well for a convict. I’d almost trust you with my money.”
Jack inclined his head and fixed James with a wry look. “Seems to me you already have.”
“I’m not sure ‘trust’ is exactly the right word.”
“I’ve no need to be in your golden graces, Jim, m’lad, just so long as I’m still in the black.”
James nodded slowly, acknowledging Jack’s mercenary sensibility. “So far, so good.”
For the most part, the good brothers Smith did as they were asked and kept to themselves, though both could often be seen standing at the rail, casting admiring gazes out at the bright water. What exactly they did with their time, none of the crew could exactly say, but, then, they weren’t exactly the inquisitive sort, which was exactly what Jack Sparrow had been looking for when he selected the Graciana.
As to what they did, James spent a great deal of his time reading, the Metamorphosis, the Odyssey, a couple of volumes Galland’s Les Milles et une nuits, all the staples of his boyhood, the classics he had been unable to leave at home. Jack read, too, but mostly this consisted of paging through James’ battered copy of Plato’s Timaeus and Critias until he lost interest. Then Jack would wander the ship, keeping to the shadows, listening and pilfering small items just to keep a hand in the game.
Each man had a nightly ritual they observed with fanatical regularity. Jack’s was to clean his pistol, taking the single shot out and weighing it in his hands, marking it for Barbossa’s chest. James’ was to watch Jack do so. This practice of Jack’s both fascinated and unnerved James, for while it was intriguing to see the usually mercurial man so focused, the cold glint in his eye as he fingered that weapon made something in James’ heart go cold.
When they weren’t reading or plotting murder, their primary activity was drinking. And while they drank, they talked. It was not surprising to Jack that the drunker they got, the more relaxed James became, nor was James shocked to see that the more he imbibed, the easier Jack smiled. They roamed wide ranges of topics on their conversations, from their own quest to the mythic journeys of heroes like Odyesseus, from Bacon’s New Atlantis to a fellow named Ed Bacon Jack had known as a boy. They spoke of the sea, which the both loved, Jack passionately so and James from afar. Jack spun his wild tales and found James an excellent audience. James, who’d fed himself on fables as a lad, couldn’t get enough of Jack’s exuberant lies. It didn’t matter to him what was fact and what was fiction. It was the telling that enthralled James, not just the way Jack commanded the story, peopling it with lush and ludicrous detail, but also the way Jack seemed to come alive as he spoke.
But Jack was also curious about James, who seemed to him to be something of an enigma. He was quiet and pleasant and honest, a combination that to Jack’s mind generally spoke of weak-willed complaisance. But James was neither weak-willed nor complaisant. He was goodhearted, to be sure, but he was also cynical. Though he was tall, he was bony. He might even have appeared rather frail, were it not for his proud, correct carriage and the smug way his lips twisted when he knew he was right. He had a toughness, as of someone bearing up under a great weight, but sometimes his face seemed very gentle. The silence he laid around himself was just as intriguing as the outrageous tales Jack told.
One night, Jack was questioning James, trying to wring some information from him, and not having much luck. He knew that Jack had a younger sister and that he’d been born in Portsmouth but raised primarily in London.
“Let me ask you another question,” Jack said, refilling James’ cup.
“By all means.”
“How did you crack the code of the map case?”
James smiled that subtly smug smile of his, with which Jack had now become quite familiar. “It’s quite simple, really,” he said, glancing down into his tankard. “It’s detailed on the lid of the box.”
“What!” Jack cried, slamming the bottle down on the floor.
“There is a small pattern inlaid into the stem of the trident, that corresponds to the correct symbol for each of the eight segments.”
“Damn you,” Jack said, laughing. “And all this time I thought you were some great mastermind.”
“I had to make you believe I was, or else I wouldn’t be here now.”
Jack paused, considering James from across the table. “Why did you want to come along?”
James’ handsome face went still for a moment. Then he smiled another of his smiles, one which Jack found himself thinking, more and more, that he would like to get better acquainted with. “When I was a boy, I dreamed of being a gentleman adventurer, and always, in those dreams, the search for Atlantis was the greatest quest I would take on. When Ali Basir . . . I don’t know if he realized quite how great a present he’d given me. It was almost as if he’d looked inside my heart and given me the perfect gift.”
“And yet you never used the map. Why?”
James sighed, as if he’d asked himself this very question many times before. “I don’t rightly know. I thought . . . Even as I held the map in my hands, I couldn’t believe that Atlantis could be real. I’d dreamed about it too much for it to be a real place.”
And Jack found he had nothing to say in reply, but James offered him a reprieve when he said, “But enough of me. Tell me more about the Maharajah.”
Another evening found Jack tying up a convoluted yarn about a working girl he’d known in Singapore. “And she said, ‘Yes, but never without knocking!’”
James was laughing so hard tears welled in the corners of his eyes. “You’re a bold-faced liar, Jack Sparrow!” he cried.
“On my honor, mate,” Jack said, grinning broadly.
“I hate to tell you, but your honor’s not worth enough to buy me another drink!”
It wasn’t James’ advanced wit that made Jack laugh, but the loose way he gestured as he spoke, impassioned and comfortable, as if they had been arguing like this all their lives. “Fine then,” Jack replied, “tell me something true.”
James paused, considering this challenge. “I don’t know,” he said finally.
“You! Clever James, the great geographer? Your head is filled with facts and figures, mate. Just pick one out.”
In the silence that ensued, Jack realized that James was no longer smiling. He was staring down at his cup and, after some time, he shook his head sharply and said, “I hate the truth, Jack. I wish I were a liar, like you.”
After this, Jack decided he’d had enough to drink for one night and soon they were settling awkwardly into their bunks.
It was some time before Jack dared to broach the subject with James. They’d made port in Casa Branca for a couple of days to make some minor repairs before the Graciana met with the open ocean. The brothers Smith had taken the opportunity to have one last meal on land.
They’d departed from the docks around sunset and found themselves a couple of overprices plates of food and a large bottle of strong, dark local wine. Fortified by his dinner, and, of course, by the drink, Jack finally brought up the subject that’d been gnawing at him for days.
“What did you mean by it?” he asked, lowering his voice despite himself.
“What?” James asked, blinking at Jack in the dim room.
“It’s my experience that a man doesn’t want to lie unless he’s got something worth lying about.” This wasn’t actually Jack’s opinion, but it served to jog James’ memory sure enough.
“It’s no great secret,” he replied with a sigh. Jack waited, sipping his wine and watching James’ face as he decided what to say. “I was taken ill with scarlatina as a young boy. It weakened my heart and confined me to my bed for much of my childhood. It was a great blow to my father. He’s a military man, you see, very well respected amongst the Admiralty. As his only son, it was always expected that I would follow in his footsteps. When it became clear that I was unfit for the Navy, he was . . . Let us say he excelled at impressing upon me the gravity of the disappointment I had become.”
Jack thought that would be the end of the discussion, but it seemed that this was something James had been wanting to get off his chest, for, after a moment’s contemplation, he went on. “I suppose it always seemed that the facts of my situation were to blame. I read books to escape, dreamed about places like Troy and Atlantis.”
“And eventually you did escape.”
“I didn’t think I could lower myself in his estimation any further. After all,” James said with a dry sneer, “I didn’t want to disabuse him of his opinion of me. I wanted to leave, to go as far away as I possibly could. I knew I wasn’t fit for any of the real adventuring I’d dreamed of as a lad, but I’d become a passable artist during my convalescence, and I’m not completely useless otherwise. So I found a cartographer who was shipping off for the Levant and offered my services to him. He trained me there and, after a time, we parted ways, he North to Russia, and I West, through Egypt, until I came to Algiers.”
“What is it that made you stay?”
“In England, there was too much history.” His lips twitched towards a rueful smile. “Here, there’s plenty history, but none of it’s mine.”
Jack chuckled, pleased with this explanation. Much as Jack liked the prestige of infamy, he could appreciate the need to erase one’s past. They were both men who preferred to make their histories blank slates. For Jack, this was done by obscuring the past with wild fabrications, but it seemed that all James wanted was quiet anonymity, a place where he could dream in peace.
That night, drunk and pleased with their complicity, Jack and James drifted back through Casa Branca and wandered slowly aboard the Graciana. They retired to their cabin, this much Jack knew, but the next few moments were somewhat indistinct. Later he would distinctly remember watching the geographer undo his cravat. The next moment, it seemed, Jack was undoing the ribbon tying back James’ queue and insinuating his tongue into the man’s hot mouth.
James yielded to him, knocking Jack’s hat off to run his palms over his bristly hair. Even better, he let himself be pushed back onto Jack’s bunk, and soon he was pushing his slim hips against Jack’s own. He shuddered as Jack shoved at his clothes and he kissed Jack with a passion that Jack never could have anticipated. He wrapped one arm around Jack and slipped a hand inside his trousers, even as he ground his own cock against Jack’s side. When James brought him off, it felt as if he were pulling Jack to him and begging him never to leave. It left Jack sweating and dazed, only half aware that James was still thrusting against him, although the choked groan he released as he came managed to stick in Jack’s mind rather clearly for days afterwards.
They didn’t discuss what had happened that night in Casa Branca. Instead, they spoke of the ocean, which was a foreign country to James and home to Jack. Their silence on the subject, however, didn’t stop them from indulging again, a fact of which Jack was infinitely glad. James Norrington had the most amazing mouth, among other remarkable organs, and he was more than willing to put them to good use. Such a discovery wasn’t an entirely unusual one for Jack, but typically he lost interest in such boys after a few weeks. This wasn’t the case with James, and he was perpetually surprised as they progressed across the Atlantic that he still had things to say to the man, that they could still tolerate each other. James seemed to take his blackheartedness with a grain of salt, smiling wryly as he lied and tricked his way around the crew of the Graciana.
Sometimes it seemed to Jack that his fortunes were greatly improved already. He’d sought to find some money, and on the way he’d found adventure and companionship that was, though he could hardly believe it, both personally and physically satisfying. But Jack wasn’t a fool. He knew that this dalliance with James, pleasant though it was, couldn’t possibly end well. He’d made sure of that almost the moment he met James. However, Jack was determined not to let this knowledge impede his enjoyment of the situation while it lasted, and so he said nothing, drinking and laughing and fucking as if nothing would ever change.
But things did change, of course. They changed quite suddenly one evening when the Graciana was only a few days away from Nassau. The good brothers Smith were on their way to supper when they met a knot of crewmembers amidships. One of them nodded curtly, and before James had finished nodding in return, the burliest of the lot and knocked James cold with the hilt of a heavy dagger.
“Oh, bugger,” Jack muttered, shoulders slumping. “And this was going so well.”
NOTES:
Águia means “eagle” in Portuguese.
Some notes on James’ books: Obviously, that’s Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and “Galland’s Les Milles et une nuits” would be the first European edition of “Arabian Nights” or the “The Book of the Thousand and One Nights.” Plato’s Temaeus and Critias are the dialogues in which Atlantis is mentioned. In my imagination, James’ convalescence gave him the time to feed his imagination and to form epic-level dreams of adventure.
As far as I can tell, Casa Branca was the Portuguese name for the city of Casablanca, Morocco, at the time this story takes place.
On to Chapter Four
Back to Chapter Two
Author: cassyl
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Jack Sparrow/James Norrington
Summary: Jack’s search for a fabled map leads him on an adventure that may mean more than he ever bargained for.
Warnings: This is AU like whoa. I also want to point out that, although many locations in this story are based on real places, they are all fictionalized versions of themselves. Furthermore, no copyright infringement is intended.
THE LOST CITY
“There is a tide in the affairs of men Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries . . .”
-- Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
PART THREE
The way Jack saw it, anything would’ve done, even the smallest, most battered vessel around, so long as it could get them across the Atlantic in one piece. But James had other ideas, and Jack had to admit that they weren’t entirely without merit.
So instead of buying a ship and hiring a crew, Jack and his geographer, as Jack had taken to referring to James, booked passage on a merchant ship sailing out of Algiers the next week. The Graciana was a Portuguese vessel, handsome even by Jack’s exacting standards, and captained by a sharp-eyed man by the name of Águia. She was headed for Nassau bearing spices and cloth, but the captain had been more than happy to take on two well-to-do brothers on their way to Freeport to do a bit of surveying. Jack had suggested they stick as close to the truth as possible, and, after all, surveying wasn’t entirely unlike hunting for treasure.
During the intermediate week, their main objective was getting Jack to look the part of Mr. John Smith-Jack to his closest friends-respectable gentleman of leisure. They scrounged for European dress in the souks, and Jack was forced to wash more thoroughly than he had since childhood. James forbade him from wearing any more of what he called “that ludicrous eye-black,” and had made him trim the two braids from his beard, though Jack had refused to part with the rest of his facial hair. There were some things, of course, that couldn’t be solved with a bar of soap of a new outfit. He’d have to try and keep his mouth shut to avoid revealing his teeth, and James had warned him not to roll up his sleeves under any circumstances.
But while their afternoons were spent combing the shops, their evenings were what really kept Jack going. After dinner each night, they would sit around in the study, drinking up the contents of James’ wine store, planning their adventure. There were certain elements Jack elected to keep to himself, but overall he found James to be an able, quick-witted co-conspirator. He was well-educated to be sure, fully abreast of all manner of book-learning, though he had only a marginal amount of experience aboard a ship.
It’d been a long time since Jack had fraternized with anyone remotely like him, but as far as upstanding gentlemen went, James Norrington wasn’t half bad. In fact, Jack almost rather liked him. He was young, almost painfully so, still a little naïve, but not without a hard edge and a world-weary cynicism that Jack found surprisingly endearing. And of course, as Ali Basir had told him back in Tripoli, James Norrington was, unflaggingly, a good-hearted, honest man.
John and James Smith didn’t carry much luggage onto the Graciana. They were shown to a small but tidy cabin furnished with two bunks and enough space to stow their trunk. The first mate, a stooped, tough man called de Flores who looked as if he’d been straining against a harsh wind all his life, informed them in halting English that they could join the crew for meals, and that he would thank them to keep out of everyone’s way. The younger Smith agreed to these terms amiably, and soon enough they were left alone.
“Not bad, Jim,” Jack said, settling down on the lower bunk and taking off his hat to rub his head. It’d been years since his hair had been this short, and even after months it still surprised him on occasion.
“Not bad, yourself,” James replied, perching on top of their trunk. “You clean up pretty well for a convict. I’d almost trust you with my money.”
Jack inclined his head and fixed James with a wry look. “Seems to me you already have.”
“I’m not sure ‘trust’ is exactly the right word.”
“I’ve no need to be in your golden graces, Jim, m’lad, just so long as I’m still in the black.”
James nodded slowly, acknowledging Jack’s mercenary sensibility. “So far, so good.”
For the most part, the good brothers Smith did as they were asked and kept to themselves, though both could often be seen standing at the rail, casting admiring gazes out at the bright water. What exactly they did with their time, none of the crew could exactly say, but, then, they weren’t exactly the inquisitive sort, which was exactly what Jack Sparrow had been looking for when he selected the Graciana.
As to what they did, James spent a great deal of his time reading, the Metamorphosis, the Odyssey, a couple of volumes Galland’s Les Milles et une nuits, all the staples of his boyhood, the classics he had been unable to leave at home. Jack read, too, but mostly this consisted of paging through James’ battered copy of Plato’s Timaeus and Critias until he lost interest. Then Jack would wander the ship, keeping to the shadows, listening and pilfering small items just to keep a hand in the game.
Each man had a nightly ritual they observed with fanatical regularity. Jack’s was to clean his pistol, taking the single shot out and weighing it in his hands, marking it for Barbossa’s chest. James’ was to watch Jack do so. This practice of Jack’s both fascinated and unnerved James, for while it was intriguing to see the usually mercurial man so focused, the cold glint in his eye as he fingered that weapon made something in James’ heart go cold.
When they weren’t reading or plotting murder, their primary activity was drinking. And while they drank, they talked. It was not surprising to Jack that the drunker they got, the more relaxed James became, nor was James shocked to see that the more he imbibed, the easier Jack smiled. They roamed wide ranges of topics on their conversations, from their own quest to the mythic journeys of heroes like Odyesseus, from Bacon’s New Atlantis to a fellow named Ed Bacon Jack had known as a boy. They spoke of the sea, which the both loved, Jack passionately so and James from afar. Jack spun his wild tales and found James an excellent audience. James, who’d fed himself on fables as a lad, couldn’t get enough of Jack’s exuberant lies. It didn’t matter to him what was fact and what was fiction. It was the telling that enthralled James, not just the way Jack commanded the story, peopling it with lush and ludicrous detail, but also the way Jack seemed to come alive as he spoke.
But Jack was also curious about James, who seemed to him to be something of an enigma. He was quiet and pleasant and honest, a combination that to Jack’s mind generally spoke of weak-willed complaisance. But James was neither weak-willed nor complaisant. He was goodhearted, to be sure, but he was also cynical. Though he was tall, he was bony. He might even have appeared rather frail, were it not for his proud, correct carriage and the smug way his lips twisted when he knew he was right. He had a toughness, as of someone bearing up under a great weight, but sometimes his face seemed very gentle. The silence he laid around himself was just as intriguing as the outrageous tales Jack told.
One night, Jack was questioning James, trying to wring some information from him, and not having much luck. He knew that Jack had a younger sister and that he’d been born in Portsmouth but raised primarily in London.
“Let me ask you another question,” Jack said, refilling James’ cup.
“By all means.”
“How did you crack the code of the map case?”
James smiled that subtly smug smile of his, with which Jack had now become quite familiar. “It’s quite simple, really,” he said, glancing down into his tankard. “It’s detailed on the lid of the box.”
“What!” Jack cried, slamming the bottle down on the floor.
“There is a small pattern inlaid into the stem of the trident, that corresponds to the correct symbol for each of the eight segments.”
“Damn you,” Jack said, laughing. “And all this time I thought you were some great mastermind.”
“I had to make you believe I was, or else I wouldn’t be here now.”
Jack paused, considering James from across the table. “Why did you want to come along?”
James’ handsome face went still for a moment. Then he smiled another of his smiles, one which Jack found himself thinking, more and more, that he would like to get better acquainted with. “When I was a boy, I dreamed of being a gentleman adventurer, and always, in those dreams, the search for Atlantis was the greatest quest I would take on. When Ali Basir . . . I don’t know if he realized quite how great a present he’d given me. It was almost as if he’d looked inside my heart and given me the perfect gift.”
“And yet you never used the map. Why?”
James sighed, as if he’d asked himself this very question many times before. “I don’t rightly know. I thought . . . Even as I held the map in my hands, I couldn’t believe that Atlantis could be real. I’d dreamed about it too much for it to be a real place.”
And Jack found he had nothing to say in reply, but James offered him a reprieve when he said, “But enough of me. Tell me more about the Maharajah.”
Another evening found Jack tying up a convoluted yarn about a working girl he’d known in Singapore. “And she said, ‘Yes, but never without knocking!’”
James was laughing so hard tears welled in the corners of his eyes. “You’re a bold-faced liar, Jack Sparrow!” he cried.
“On my honor, mate,” Jack said, grinning broadly.
“I hate to tell you, but your honor’s not worth enough to buy me another drink!”
It wasn’t James’ advanced wit that made Jack laugh, but the loose way he gestured as he spoke, impassioned and comfortable, as if they had been arguing like this all their lives. “Fine then,” Jack replied, “tell me something true.”
James paused, considering this challenge. “I don’t know,” he said finally.
“You! Clever James, the great geographer? Your head is filled with facts and figures, mate. Just pick one out.”
In the silence that ensued, Jack realized that James was no longer smiling. He was staring down at his cup and, after some time, he shook his head sharply and said, “I hate the truth, Jack. I wish I were a liar, like you.”
After this, Jack decided he’d had enough to drink for one night and soon they were settling awkwardly into their bunks.
It was some time before Jack dared to broach the subject with James. They’d made port in Casa Branca for a couple of days to make some minor repairs before the Graciana met with the open ocean. The brothers Smith had taken the opportunity to have one last meal on land.
They’d departed from the docks around sunset and found themselves a couple of overprices plates of food and a large bottle of strong, dark local wine. Fortified by his dinner, and, of course, by the drink, Jack finally brought up the subject that’d been gnawing at him for days.
“What did you mean by it?” he asked, lowering his voice despite himself.
“What?” James asked, blinking at Jack in the dim room.
“It’s my experience that a man doesn’t want to lie unless he’s got something worth lying about.” This wasn’t actually Jack’s opinion, but it served to jog James’ memory sure enough.
“It’s no great secret,” he replied with a sigh. Jack waited, sipping his wine and watching James’ face as he decided what to say. “I was taken ill with scarlatina as a young boy. It weakened my heart and confined me to my bed for much of my childhood. It was a great blow to my father. He’s a military man, you see, very well respected amongst the Admiralty. As his only son, it was always expected that I would follow in his footsteps. When it became clear that I was unfit for the Navy, he was . . . Let us say he excelled at impressing upon me the gravity of the disappointment I had become.”
Jack thought that would be the end of the discussion, but it seemed that this was something James had been wanting to get off his chest, for, after a moment’s contemplation, he went on. “I suppose it always seemed that the facts of my situation were to blame. I read books to escape, dreamed about places like Troy and Atlantis.”
“And eventually you did escape.”
“I didn’t think I could lower myself in his estimation any further. After all,” James said with a dry sneer, “I didn’t want to disabuse him of his opinion of me. I wanted to leave, to go as far away as I possibly could. I knew I wasn’t fit for any of the real adventuring I’d dreamed of as a lad, but I’d become a passable artist during my convalescence, and I’m not completely useless otherwise. So I found a cartographer who was shipping off for the Levant and offered my services to him. He trained me there and, after a time, we parted ways, he North to Russia, and I West, through Egypt, until I came to Algiers.”
“What is it that made you stay?”
“In England, there was too much history.” His lips twitched towards a rueful smile. “Here, there’s plenty history, but none of it’s mine.”
Jack chuckled, pleased with this explanation. Much as Jack liked the prestige of infamy, he could appreciate the need to erase one’s past. They were both men who preferred to make their histories blank slates. For Jack, this was done by obscuring the past with wild fabrications, but it seemed that all James wanted was quiet anonymity, a place where he could dream in peace.
That night, drunk and pleased with their complicity, Jack and James drifted back through Casa Branca and wandered slowly aboard the Graciana. They retired to their cabin, this much Jack knew, but the next few moments were somewhat indistinct. Later he would distinctly remember watching the geographer undo his cravat. The next moment, it seemed, Jack was undoing the ribbon tying back James’ queue and insinuating his tongue into the man’s hot mouth.
James yielded to him, knocking Jack’s hat off to run his palms over his bristly hair. Even better, he let himself be pushed back onto Jack’s bunk, and soon he was pushing his slim hips against Jack’s own. He shuddered as Jack shoved at his clothes and he kissed Jack with a passion that Jack never could have anticipated. He wrapped one arm around Jack and slipped a hand inside his trousers, even as he ground his own cock against Jack’s side. When James brought him off, it felt as if he were pulling Jack to him and begging him never to leave. It left Jack sweating and dazed, only half aware that James was still thrusting against him, although the choked groan he released as he came managed to stick in Jack’s mind rather clearly for days afterwards.
They didn’t discuss what had happened that night in Casa Branca. Instead, they spoke of the ocean, which was a foreign country to James and home to Jack. Their silence on the subject, however, didn’t stop them from indulging again, a fact of which Jack was infinitely glad. James Norrington had the most amazing mouth, among other remarkable organs, and he was more than willing to put them to good use. Such a discovery wasn’t an entirely unusual one for Jack, but typically he lost interest in such boys after a few weeks. This wasn’t the case with James, and he was perpetually surprised as they progressed across the Atlantic that he still had things to say to the man, that they could still tolerate each other. James seemed to take his blackheartedness with a grain of salt, smiling wryly as he lied and tricked his way around the crew of the Graciana.
Sometimes it seemed to Jack that his fortunes were greatly improved already. He’d sought to find some money, and on the way he’d found adventure and companionship that was, though he could hardly believe it, both personally and physically satisfying. But Jack wasn’t a fool. He knew that this dalliance with James, pleasant though it was, couldn’t possibly end well. He’d made sure of that almost the moment he met James. However, Jack was determined not to let this knowledge impede his enjoyment of the situation while it lasted, and so he said nothing, drinking and laughing and fucking as if nothing would ever change.
But things did change, of course. They changed quite suddenly one evening when the Graciana was only a few days away from Nassau. The good brothers Smith were on their way to supper when they met a knot of crewmembers amidships. One of them nodded curtly, and before James had finished nodding in return, the burliest of the lot and knocked James cold with the hilt of a heavy dagger.
“Oh, bugger,” Jack muttered, shoulders slumping. “And this was going so well.”
NOTES:
Águia means “eagle” in Portuguese.
Some notes on James’ books: Obviously, that’s Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and “Galland’s Les Milles et une nuits” would be the first European edition of “Arabian Nights” or the “The Book of the Thousand and One Nights.” Plato’s Temaeus and Critias are the dialogues in which Atlantis is mentioned. In my imagination, James’ convalescence gave him the time to feed his imagination and to form epic-level dreams of adventure.
As far as I can tell, Casa Branca was the Portuguese name for the city of Casablanca, Morocco, at the time this story takes place.
On to Chapter Four
Back to Chapter Two