Fic: Metal and Words, 4/16
Tuesday, 3 July 2012 19:40![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aletheiafelineaTitle: Metal and Words, 4/16
Author: Aletheia Felinea
Beta:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
compassrose7577. Thank you so much!
Rating: PG-13 overall
Wordcount: about 2 050, this chapter
Characters: Jack Sparrow
Genre: Gen fic supposed to be a crime story.
Time: Months before CotBP.
Summary: The sweet air of Tortuga can be dangerous sometimes, even for the certain Captain. And curiosity can kill a sparrow. Or... save?
Disclaimer: Not my hunting territory, The Big Black Mouse prowls here.
Previous parts: 1, 2, 3
Note: The fic was translated from Polish. Jeśli wolisz czytać w oryginale, zapraszam.
Shreds of seaweed, the ebb’s leftover, glistened in the sunshine. Gulls screeched, circling over the wet beach, diving at unlucky starfishes and crabs wandering amidst driftwood, washed bone white by briny waves.
One crab went astray beyond the mud to almost the thicket line, where wind-tossed palm leaves cast wavering shadows on the heated, dry sand. It passed the charred remnants of a small campfire and approached a heap of dark rags, which lightly rose and fell with the rhythm of soft snoring.
The crab stopped before a row of silver buttons running the length of the faded fabric’s edge. It examined its find intently, first with the left eyestalk, then the right. Finally, it extended its pincers and tugged at the most enticingly gleaming button. The jagged edges grated against the metal and slipped off. Determined, the crab reached again.
The snoring broke. The cloth and buttons raised, revealing a nose and one half-open eye. The crab, intrigued, put forward both of his eyestalks. The eye slowly focused on them… and widened rapidly.
“Whooaaa!!! Ouch…”
Jack Sparrow winced painfully and rubbed his skull, the victim of a sudden collision with a palm trunk. He looked at the monster, still standing on its stilty limbs next to the coat’s edge. The monster returned the look and waved its pincers. Now it didn’t look so big, Jack noticed. He tried to untangle at least one leg from the coat.
Something creaked up above, and the next moment a ripe coconut thumped onto the sand, barely missing the crab, to Jack’s regret. He followed the hurriedly scampering creature with his eyes, then he recalled Rusty Hans’ yesterday burial and flinched. No frutti di mare for some time. A long time. He untangled one leg, drew his knife from the boot, and got down to peeling the coir off the coconut.
***
The endlessly returning surf hummed and splashed, bringing scraps of old wood and crushed shells on the beach, and then taking them back. The sound corresponded well with the painful buzz under Jack’s skull as he stared at the written sheet, spread on a patch of dry sand. It was the only thing he was sure of – that the sheet was written. That, and that the writing was utterly incomprehensible even before yesterday’s sunset.
The paper was fine, smooth and thick, cream-coloured, unblemished. Under a touch, one could almost feel the coolness of gold, for such a paper would have to be paid in gold, to write about golden sums. Still, no matter how fine it was, it shouldn’t have escaped intact from its encounter with Mandy’s oysters, yet it did, hardly stained, and fresh as from a paper mill.
Jack lifted the sheet to the sun, and examined it closely. He folded a corner, then tore it off.
The paper was oddly stiff, too stiff for its thickness. There were traces of the old folding, but it folded with difficulty in new places. Today, in the bright sunlight, a slight sheen was visible on its surface. Now sun-warmed, it began to emit a barely perceptible, bitter smell. Jack sniffed over the all sheet, then the torn piece, crumpled in his fingers. He wrinkled his nose and abandoned the intention to lick it.
The sheet had been saturated with something. Whoever had written it, hadn’t intend to keep it in the safe shelter of a study or library. Apparently, the strange substance had been intended to protect the writing against any ordeals which might befall it. Verily, it had to be excellent, since the sheet had survived the sojourn under Hans’ shirt and the oysters’ company almost unscathed. The lines on the pale surface were distinct and precise. And utterly unintelligible. Mocking.
Jack huffed, piqued, sending a glare from which should have singed the paper, if it had any sense of decency. It hadn’t. It continued its shameless presentation of its mysterious content.
Jack ground his teeth and stared at the faraway horizon. Where’s the rum when it’s needed?
Alas, no bottle miraculously sprout from the sand. He reluctantly wrenched his eyes away from the far, blue temptation and came back to the annoying enigma under his nose. In its way, it was tempting too. Oddly, it looked strange and familiar as well, and that in and of itself, was the most annoying.
He could swear that he held the product of a royal chancellery, providing this chancellery was set with a task of properly impressing foreign diplomats, that the best scribe got utterly drunk and bet he could cram onto a single sheet more than the all other scribes together, and that he got down to it before he sobered up. However, it didn’t look like drunken calligraphy. It looked… just different.
The lines flowed and twisted, broadened then narrowed to a hair’s breadth, crossed and joined, split again, turned back… Together they made a tangled thick, and yet kept some order. One could make out condensed rows, like verses, sprouting single tendrils reaching across empty spaces. Here and there, recognizable fragments of familiar letters stood out, yet not in any recognizable entirety. All this flickered on the verge of understanding, yet evaded one’s mind. Narrow gaps seemed to divide words, bigger elements stood out like majuscules, and at the very top there was a tremendous whirl of tangled curves. It could have appeared to be the main initial, had it not been placed on the right side. There, it ended the line instead of starting it.
At the right side.
Jack Sparrow tilted his head like his feathery namesake, but with the intense concentration of a sneaking cat. Then he slowly moved his gaze down the page, searching for a less dense place in the tangle of lines. A gap in a ‘verse’, then a short row of ‘letters’ drawn with a single stroke of the pen, and then another gap. The ‘word’ was a series of tiny loops and aslant sticks, one ellipse, and one sinuous line, everything wreathed in tiny coils and whorls misleading an eye. On the second glance, it looked like a familiar alley, where houses were switched back to front, facades to courtyards. Sticks, an ellipse, a sinusoid. Perhaps the way lead through the courtyards, then?
Jack took his eyes from the paper and looked at the sand. He drew ‘s’, hesitated for a moment, and draw the same shape, turned left. Then he drew a painstakingly calligraphed ‘n’ with slanting lines and looped ends, and next to it the same shape again, reversed. He looked back at the sheet and found the place again. Indeed, it seemed more recognizable once one knew how to look. He tried to read right to left.
son
Was it English? Spanish? French? Was it ‘sound’? Or ‘his’? ‘Her’? ‘Are’?
Too little.
He eyed the florid maze of letters. One had to fish them out sign by sign from between meandering ornaments, unraveling the text like a dense fabric, reeling in the essence like the weft off the warp. He felt dizzy at the mere thought. There had to be some other way. If only the reversed writing could be reversed once more…
Jack looked at the other side of the sheet. It was unwritten. He touched the surface, trying to feel dents made by the pen, but the paper was too thick, or the mysterious scribe’s hand been to light. Jack raised the sheet to the sun, but it remained opaque. He looked around, in a quandary, then leaped to his feet and ran up to the surf licking the sand. He dipped the sheet in the water, though not really in hope for success. Indeed, water didn’t soak through the paper, didn’t make it transparent, only dripped down like oil from a metal plate. Water swirling around his boot tops, Jack bit his lip, eyes fixed on falling droplets.
He walked back to his coat abandoned on the sand and the remains of the fire. He picked up a half of the emptied coconut, went into the surf and scooped a shellful of water. Holding it still, he glanced at the sky’s reflection and brought the sheet over the shell. He squinted, trying to catch sight of the reflected writing, but didn’t see a single letter, the margin being as broad as the shell. Under his breath, Jack sent a volley of colorful regards aimed at the wasteful scribe, fleetingly envied crabs their stalky eyes, and tried to raise the sheet while tilting the shell. A few letters flickered on the surface near the shell’s brim, Jack moved it a bit more, and more… The water trickled down his fingers, the reflection shattered. He hissed in anger, and flung the shell aside.
He rummaged through his pockets, produced a shilling, examined it, and pocketed it. Then he pulled out a few tarnished pences, half of a Portugal ten reis coin, some mother-of-pearl baubles, a single dice of polished wood, a broken bone button, a shark tooth… Everything was too small, too dim, too rough.
He went back to camp and picked up the kettle. At a distance, its brass shined, but a closer inspection revealed scratches from the long-year scrupulous scouring. He put it back, and looked around. Finally, his gaze settled on his cutlass, abandoned next to his coat.
He grabbed it quickly. The blade rasped against the scabbard’s locket and shined… or rather it was supposed to shine. Jack examined a few revealed inches of the blade, then pulled it entirely out. Last summer had been rainy, and the guard, to tell the truth, had earned some dents of recent, some a year ago. Maybe year and a half. All right, for at least two years it hadn’t been leakproof. Actually, it was wonder the blade hadn’t been yet reduced to a handful of rusty dust. Brought into the light, the blade looked like a guilty conscience, presenting the tarnished flat, spotted with black speckles. Jack tried to swab it, first with a tuft of coconut coir, then with the end of his sash. The only result was a new tear in the latter. Despondent, he threw the cutlass on the sand.
Then, struck by a thought, he reached for the knife hidden in his boot. In Jack’s firm opinion, the best use for a weapon was to not. Therefore, the cutlass had spent most of its time at its owner side, successfully unused. No wonder it had somewhat lost its glamour. Yet the knife was another matter. Its life was quite hard-working, even if spent crushing of crab shells and penetrating locks, instead of threatening human skin. There had been no time to grow rusty.
Jack turned the knife in fingers, examining it as if seeing it for the first time. The blade was narrow and not very long, for the knife, many years ago and many miles away, had begun its career as a gentleman’s dagger. Considering the size of an average lock, it was its shape which had won it’s the place in a pirate boot top and a job in the pirate trade.
Alas, not dealing with a lock or shell, the knife failed this time. Jack scowled at the dim shadows, barely looming on the flat of the blade when brought to the paper. He sighed and stared sadly at the sand. It was all for nothing. Even if he tried to polish the blade to a glassy shine, the reflection would be still misshapen. He needed something wider and flatter.
Glassy shine… Glass…
He looked at the sea, recalling the bottle he had thrown into waves last evening, but gave up the thought immediately. The bottle’s curved surface would be hardly better than the blade.
He absentmindedly raked the sand with the knife, drawing circles.
Glass…
Suddenly he fixed his gaze at the sand, and drew a circle again. Then he grinned.
He sprang to his feet, tucked away the knife, and pocketed the paper. He picked up his coat, hurriedly brushed sand off it, and pulled it on. Then he snatched up his cutlass and tricorn, and set a quick pace down the beach. He stopped only for a moment, to tear a blooming branch from a bougainvillea twined around a palm trunk.
----------------------
And if you're curious, this is how ten reis looked like. I much doubt if Jack's one was cleaner...
The next part
Your thoughts most welcomed, as always. :)
Author: Aletheia Felinea
Beta:
compassrose7577. Thank you so much!Rating: PG-13 overall
Wordcount: about 2 050, this chapter
Characters: Jack Sparrow
Genre: Gen fic supposed to be a crime story.
Time: Months before CotBP.
Summary: The sweet air of Tortuga can be dangerous sometimes, even for the certain Captain. And curiosity can kill a sparrow. Or... save?
Disclaimer: Not my hunting territory, The Big Black Mouse prowls here.
Previous parts: 1, 2, 3
Note: The fic was translated from Polish. Jeśli wolisz czytać w oryginale, zapraszam.
Shreds of seaweed, the ebb’s leftover, glistened in the sunshine. Gulls screeched, circling over the wet beach, diving at unlucky starfishes and crabs wandering amidst driftwood, washed bone white by briny waves.
One crab went astray beyond the mud to almost the thicket line, where wind-tossed palm leaves cast wavering shadows on the heated, dry sand. It passed the charred remnants of a small campfire and approached a heap of dark rags, which lightly rose and fell with the rhythm of soft snoring.
The crab stopped before a row of silver buttons running the length of the faded fabric’s edge. It examined its find intently, first with the left eyestalk, then the right. Finally, it extended its pincers and tugged at the most enticingly gleaming button. The jagged edges grated against the metal and slipped off. Determined, the crab reached again.
The snoring broke. The cloth and buttons raised, revealing a nose and one half-open eye. The crab, intrigued, put forward both of his eyestalks. The eye slowly focused on them… and widened rapidly.
“Whooaaa!!! Ouch…”
Jack Sparrow winced painfully and rubbed his skull, the victim of a sudden collision with a palm trunk. He looked at the monster, still standing on its stilty limbs next to the coat’s edge. The monster returned the look and waved its pincers. Now it didn’t look so big, Jack noticed. He tried to untangle at least one leg from the coat.
Something creaked up above, and the next moment a ripe coconut thumped onto the sand, barely missing the crab, to Jack’s regret. He followed the hurriedly scampering creature with his eyes, then he recalled Rusty Hans’ yesterday burial and flinched. No frutti di mare for some time. A long time. He untangled one leg, drew his knife from the boot, and got down to peeling the coir off the coconut.
The endlessly returning surf hummed and splashed, bringing scraps of old wood and crushed shells on the beach, and then taking them back. The sound corresponded well with the painful buzz under Jack’s skull as he stared at the written sheet, spread on a patch of dry sand. It was the only thing he was sure of – that the sheet was written. That, and that the writing was utterly incomprehensible even before yesterday’s sunset.
The paper was fine, smooth and thick, cream-coloured, unblemished. Under a touch, one could almost feel the coolness of gold, for such a paper would have to be paid in gold, to write about golden sums. Still, no matter how fine it was, it shouldn’t have escaped intact from its encounter with Mandy’s oysters, yet it did, hardly stained, and fresh as from a paper mill.
Jack lifted the sheet to the sun, and examined it closely. He folded a corner, then tore it off.
The paper was oddly stiff, too stiff for its thickness. There were traces of the old folding, but it folded with difficulty in new places. Today, in the bright sunlight, a slight sheen was visible on its surface. Now sun-warmed, it began to emit a barely perceptible, bitter smell. Jack sniffed over the all sheet, then the torn piece, crumpled in his fingers. He wrinkled his nose and abandoned the intention to lick it.
The sheet had been saturated with something. Whoever had written it, hadn’t intend to keep it in the safe shelter of a study or library. Apparently, the strange substance had been intended to protect the writing against any ordeals which might befall it. Verily, it had to be excellent, since the sheet had survived the sojourn under Hans’ shirt and the oysters’ company almost unscathed. The lines on the pale surface were distinct and precise. And utterly unintelligible. Mocking.
Jack huffed, piqued, sending a glare from which should have singed the paper, if it had any sense of decency. It hadn’t. It continued its shameless presentation of its mysterious content.
Jack ground his teeth and stared at the faraway horizon. Where’s the rum when it’s needed?
Alas, no bottle miraculously sprout from the sand. He reluctantly wrenched his eyes away from the far, blue temptation and came back to the annoying enigma under his nose. In its way, it was tempting too. Oddly, it looked strange and familiar as well, and that in and of itself, was the most annoying.
He could swear that he held the product of a royal chancellery, providing this chancellery was set with a task of properly impressing foreign diplomats, that the best scribe got utterly drunk and bet he could cram onto a single sheet more than the all other scribes together, and that he got down to it before he sobered up. However, it didn’t look like drunken calligraphy. It looked… just different.
The lines flowed and twisted, broadened then narrowed to a hair’s breadth, crossed and joined, split again, turned back… Together they made a tangled thick, and yet kept some order. One could make out condensed rows, like verses, sprouting single tendrils reaching across empty spaces. Here and there, recognizable fragments of familiar letters stood out, yet not in any recognizable entirety. All this flickered on the verge of understanding, yet evaded one’s mind. Narrow gaps seemed to divide words, bigger elements stood out like majuscules, and at the very top there was a tremendous whirl of tangled curves. It could have appeared to be the main initial, had it not been placed on the right side. There, it ended the line instead of starting it.
At the right side.
Jack Sparrow tilted his head like his feathery namesake, but with the intense concentration of a sneaking cat. Then he slowly moved his gaze down the page, searching for a less dense place in the tangle of lines. A gap in a ‘verse’, then a short row of ‘letters’ drawn with a single stroke of the pen, and then another gap. The ‘word’ was a series of tiny loops and aslant sticks, one ellipse, and one sinuous line, everything wreathed in tiny coils and whorls misleading an eye. On the second glance, it looked like a familiar alley, where houses were switched back to front, facades to courtyards. Sticks, an ellipse, a sinusoid. Perhaps the way lead through the courtyards, then?
Jack took his eyes from the paper and looked at the sand. He drew ‘s’, hesitated for a moment, and draw the same shape, turned left. Then he drew a painstakingly calligraphed ‘n’ with slanting lines and looped ends, and next to it the same shape again, reversed. He looked back at the sheet and found the place again. Indeed, it seemed more recognizable once one knew how to look. He tried to read right to left.
son
Was it English? Spanish? French? Was it ‘sound’? Or ‘his’? ‘Her’? ‘Are’?
Too little.
He eyed the florid maze of letters. One had to fish them out sign by sign from between meandering ornaments, unraveling the text like a dense fabric, reeling in the essence like the weft off the warp. He felt dizzy at the mere thought. There had to be some other way. If only the reversed writing could be reversed once more…
Jack looked at the other side of the sheet. It was unwritten. He touched the surface, trying to feel dents made by the pen, but the paper was too thick, or the mysterious scribe’s hand been to light. Jack raised the sheet to the sun, but it remained opaque. He looked around, in a quandary, then leaped to his feet and ran up to the surf licking the sand. He dipped the sheet in the water, though not really in hope for success. Indeed, water didn’t soak through the paper, didn’t make it transparent, only dripped down like oil from a metal plate. Water swirling around his boot tops, Jack bit his lip, eyes fixed on falling droplets.
He walked back to his coat abandoned on the sand and the remains of the fire. He picked up a half of the emptied coconut, went into the surf and scooped a shellful of water. Holding it still, he glanced at the sky’s reflection and brought the sheet over the shell. He squinted, trying to catch sight of the reflected writing, but didn’t see a single letter, the margin being as broad as the shell. Under his breath, Jack sent a volley of colorful regards aimed at the wasteful scribe, fleetingly envied crabs their stalky eyes, and tried to raise the sheet while tilting the shell. A few letters flickered on the surface near the shell’s brim, Jack moved it a bit more, and more… The water trickled down his fingers, the reflection shattered. He hissed in anger, and flung the shell aside.
He rummaged through his pockets, produced a shilling, examined it, and pocketed it. Then he pulled out a few tarnished pences, half of a Portugal ten reis coin, some mother-of-pearl baubles, a single dice of polished wood, a broken bone button, a shark tooth… Everything was too small, too dim, too rough.
He went back to camp and picked up the kettle. At a distance, its brass shined, but a closer inspection revealed scratches from the long-year scrupulous scouring. He put it back, and looked around. Finally, his gaze settled on his cutlass, abandoned next to his coat.
He grabbed it quickly. The blade rasped against the scabbard’s locket and shined… or rather it was supposed to shine. Jack examined a few revealed inches of the blade, then pulled it entirely out. Last summer had been rainy, and the guard, to tell the truth, had earned some dents of recent, some a year ago. Maybe year and a half. All right, for at least two years it hadn’t been leakproof. Actually, it was wonder the blade hadn’t been yet reduced to a handful of rusty dust. Brought into the light, the blade looked like a guilty conscience, presenting the tarnished flat, spotted with black speckles. Jack tried to swab it, first with a tuft of coconut coir, then with the end of his sash. The only result was a new tear in the latter. Despondent, he threw the cutlass on the sand.
Then, struck by a thought, he reached for the knife hidden in his boot. In Jack’s firm opinion, the best use for a weapon was to not. Therefore, the cutlass had spent most of its time at its owner side, successfully unused. No wonder it had somewhat lost its glamour. Yet the knife was another matter. Its life was quite hard-working, even if spent crushing of crab shells and penetrating locks, instead of threatening human skin. There had been no time to grow rusty.
Jack turned the knife in fingers, examining it as if seeing it for the first time. The blade was narrow and not very long, for the knife, many years ago and many miles away, had begun its career as a gentleman’s dagger. Considering the size of an average lock, it was its shape which had won it’s the place in a pirate boot top and a job in the pirate trade.
Alas, not dealing with a lock or shell, the knife failed this time. Jack scowled at the dim shadows, barely looming on the flat of the blade when brought to the paper. He sighed and stared sadly at the sand. It was all for nothing. Even if he tried to polish the blade to a glassy shine, the reflection would be still misshapen. He needed something wider and flatter.
Glassy shine… Glass…
He looked at the sea, recalling the bottle he had thrown into waves last evening, but gave up the thought immediately. The bottle’s curved surface would be hardly better than the blade.
He absentmindedly raked the sand with the knife, drawing circles.
Glass…
Suddenly he fixed his gaze at the sand, and drew a circle again. Then he grinned.
He sprang to his feet, tucked away the knife, and pocketed the paper. He picked up his coat, hurriedly brushed sand off it, and pulled it on. Then he snatched up his cutlass and tricorn, and set a quick pace down the beach. He stopped only for a moment, to tear a blooming branch from a bougainvillea twined around a palm trunk.
----------------------
And if you're curious, this is how ten reis looked like. I much doubt if Jack's one was cleaner...
The next part
Your thoughts most welcomed, as always. :)
Comment
Date: 2012-07-04 15:09 (UTC)Aye, Jack, knows several ladies of pleasure- surely one of them must own a looking glass! (I suspect Jack keeps at least one in his cabin on the Pearl, too- he's obviously vain enough.)
I must say, you're making this story more intriguing with every chapter. However did a laminated paper turn up in this time and place?
Looking forward to chapter five. And Happy Fourth Of July!
Re: Comment
From:no subject
Date: 2012-07-08 04:11 (UTC)(no subject)
From: