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Wi' A Wannion	By : GeorgieFain Category: Pirates of the Caribbean (All) > General Views: 2357 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own the Pirates of the Caribbean movie series, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

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Chapter Two:

The Solemn Mysteries of the Ancient Order of the Deep

When the maps showed they had just passed the coast-town of Mogadishu, on the easterly side of Africa, Jack noticed something happening onboard around him...something he wasn't privy to. All the crew was being especially nice to him and even the Captain excused him from a mistake that should've merited punishment. Barbossa was mum on the subject, when he asked if there was some problem that he hadn't been informed of, simply telling him to get his lazy arse back to work.

He'd taken to the job of cabin boy with ease; not only was he to take care of the Captain's quarters and the Captain's affects, but also those of the Quartermaster, the Boatswain, the Master Gunner, the Sailing Master, the Master Carpenter and the Surgeon. Each one had their own mates and their own men to command and yet, with all the younger sailors, he was still the youngest of them all and the only cabin boy---a rarity, he'd been told, on a ship the size of The Flaming Sword.

But, as Vikrant, the boatswain's mate, told him---the ship would pick up more cabin boys in Cape Town and then again in London. It would, after all, be a month before they put London to their rudder. There were many boys who would jump at the opportunity of escaping the dull life found on land. Of course, that meant, when they had more cabin boys, he would have less work to do in the cabins and more time to spend working on deck. He was pleased with the idea. But, as Vikrant had also pointed out, it would be his duty to help teach the new sprogs; he would be in charge of them, as it were.

Even at this time, when he had nothing to do in the cabins, Captain Bushby let him go with Barbossa to learn how to tie knots and splices and what stitches to use on repairing a sail. He longed for the day when he'd be allowed to climb the rigging with his bare feet and swing from rope to rope and along the masts. The job seemed so difficult and yet required such physical stamina and agility. It was loads more exciting than shining boots and carrying water.

Somehow, he'd expected the journey to be more eventful than it was.

Weren't these waters infested with pirates?

It became a custom with him to go barefoot once he finished within the cabins; he would slip his boots off and toss them to his hammock and run about the deck without boots or a shirt. He was quickly becoming as bronze as the other sailors and he'd learned that he hungered for the feel of the sea's cool spray on his skin. He felt at home on the sea, on the ship. Just as his father had promised he would.

So, when the crew began acting oddly toward him after the flotilla passed Mogadishu of eastern Africa, his senses told him to be wary. Yet, when it came, he was unprepared.

It was close to noon on the second day past Mogadishu and they were making good head under a solid, fresh wind, when the ship's bell tolled and he was jerked up by his arms and legs from the deck, where he sat cross-legged working out a carrick bend knot. To his panicking mind, it seemed like every crewman was yelling and beating on barrels and drums and metal pots. As he was turned over and over, handed from one group to the next, he managed to get his bearings and figure out that the shouting wasn't random---it was a chant. A shanty. One that was sung out when turning the capstan or the windlass.

"Oh, the ships will come and the ships will go. As long as the waves do roll. The sailor lad, likewise his dad, he loves the flowing bowl. A lass ashore we do adore. One that is plump and round, round, round. When the money is gone, tis the same old song. Get up, Jack! John, sit down! Singing Hey, laddie, ho laddie, swing the capstan round, round, round. When the money is gone tis the same old song. Get up, Jack! John, sit down!"

Jack didn't get a chance to wonder at the trouble he was in, though, because just then, he was brought to a stand-still---held in the arms of two strong swabbies with tarred pigtails. Now, he was hoisted on their shoulders as they danced a jig together---he bounced and swayed, heart in his throat. He cast a glance at the quarterdeck rail behind him and saw that Bushby was watching with a bemused smile on his bearded face. The captain didn't seem the slightest bit alarmed.

The sailors holding him aloft set him to the deck, where he was summarily doused with a handful of finely milled flour and then a mugful of rum. He sputtered, swiping at his face and hair as it started to fall loose from its queue, and stared up from his knees. Before him stood the Master Gunner, the Boatswain, and the Sailing Master, shoulder to shoulder, with stern expressions on their weathered faces.

"Pollywog ye be, Jack Sparrow." The Sailing Master announced for all to hear, with a booming voice. "But, today, you face Neptunus Rex. You are to be initiated into The Solemn Mysteries of the Ancient Order of the Deep, as all sea-going men must be."

"You sail on the sacred line, Jack Sparrow. We be at the Equator and you shall become a shellback or die." The Master Gunner intoned.

"Your new life awaits ye, Jack Sparrow, but ye must be baptized anew." With a dark, cruel smile, the Boatswain shouted. "All men to the side, all men to the side, let the pollywog crawl!"

All the sailors moved back and to the sides and soon he saw that a gauntlet awaited. He sat on his knees at the quarterdeck and there, before him, was a long expanse of deck. All the way to the forecastle and prow...where three figures waited, two of them dressed in outlandish costumes. One seemed to be a king, another was a woman, and the third man was wearing nothing at all.

The naked man was Hector Barbossa.

At the sight of his friend naked before the entire crew, his guts clenched and he felt like he might sink through the deck itself. Jack swallowed hard, his heart thumping hard at the chanting throng of men. The deck before him had been swabbed with oil and all the sailors on either side of the path were holding pieces of rope and belaying pins.

From behind, he was prodded. A harsh voice snarled. "Crawl, ye pollywog! Crawl to redemption!"

This seemed to signal the musicians who stood on the quarterdeck around Captain Bushby. They struck up a lively hornpipe; two fiddles, a banjo, and a piper blasted away at the tune. Through the music, there rose more cries for him to crawl.

He started forward, sliding each time he put his hands down on the slick wood. Soon, he was among those men forming the gauntlet and he was bombarded with blows to his back and legs and shoulders. The belaying pins weren't meant to break skin or bone, but to bruise---and he could feel every blow. The wet ropes snapped and rolled, pulling around his body as they were tugged away---he could smell the rum the hemp had been soaked in, the rum that had been poured on his head. It stung his eyes, burned his nose. Among the blows, he was sure he felt a cat o' nine tails. It seemed to repeatedly come down on his back, as if being passed from sailor to sailor. He bit his lower lip hard, refusing to scream with the pain.

And it was pain. Humiliation.

Onward, he crawled and slid, the deck now as slick as wet glass.

From the quarterdeck to the forecastle, he crawled, falling several times only to rise to his knees and continue on, refusing to give up. He kept his narrowed eyes on the three figures at the prow, flinching and then rebounding from each blow of the rounded wooden pegs. Now, his dark brown hair had fallen completely free of the plaited queue and hung around his face in wet, smelly tendrils, but he found himself unable to care.

At last, he reached his destination. Before him on a pair of crates decorated to look like thrones sat the King, Neptune Himself with his wife, the Queen and Lady of the Sea---a mate dressed in women's clothing. Between them stood naked Barbossa, looking sullen and thin-lipped, with his driftwood blonde hair whipping around his long, freckled face in the breeze. He looked as if he wasn't feeling particularly honored to be naked on deck, playing the Sea Baby in this ritual.

And it certainly was a ritual and one that Jack now recognized---he'd figured it out, on the crawl. This was the Equator Initiation. Every new sailor crossing the equator had to go through this and there were certain parts of the ceremony which could not be ignored. The gauntlet was one. The degradation before Neptune, god of the sea, was another.

He didn't need any more prompting; he remembered hearing the tales from his father.

Up on his knees, soaked in rum and sore from head to toe, Jack reached for the fingers of King Neptune. He closed his eyes and offered his thanks out loud, kissing the elaborate and, no doubt borrowed, ring that sat on the sailor's thumb. From there, he shifted and took the bare, tanned foot of the Queen-Lady between both his hands and lifted it to his lips for a gentle buss. His back was screaming in silent agony; surely, it was a cat o' nine tails that had scoured him so. It felt as if he'd been laid open.

At last, he moved to the center and looked up at his friend. Hector Barbossa stared down at him with dispassionate eyes the color of tide and sky. He wasn't sure of what he needed to do here and it must have shown on his face, for the naked rigger raised one hand and tapped his bare, skinny belly. Ah, so that was the way of it. Steeling himself against the pull and sting of his battered skin, Jack knelt up and, without using either hand, pressed his mouth to the warm, salt-scented flesh.

It was softer than he'd imagined.

Cheers went up. The whole crowd was shouting his name.

But, before he could escape, two sailors grabbed him by the arms while another stripped his trousers away. A rope was tied to his waist---he had a moment to recognize that it was tied in a rolling hitch knot, which would prevent him from getting loose as long as there was tension on the rope. Then, he was lifted and, with two swings, he was tossed naked over the starboard side railing.

On the way down, the world seemed to go strange. White and blue and white and black swirled and he had another second of clarity to hope that the sailors had tied the other end of the rope to the rail. He knew for a sickening certainty when the rope wrapped itself around his right leg and scraped the skin from his naked hip to the knee.

Jack screamed, now, unable to stop himself against the pain. His back was flayed and every inch of his body was beaten, but the worst immediate agony was the sensation of a leg being nearly ripped free of his body. His last thought, as he hit the water, was to wonder if his father was able to see with his spyglass what had happened to him on The Flaming Sword.

***

When he came to, he was laying under a rough, wool blanket in the surgeon's quarters.

There was a lantern lit and it seemed, from the view he got of the room's two portholes, that the world outside the ship was dark. He was back on ship and feeling very little of anything. He was laying on a narrow, hard bed, but it didn't matter. The pain that he remembered feeling, from before, was gone. For that, he was willing to pay any price.

"You did better than the men expected."

The voice was like brown velvet and slow, seemingly distorted. He flicked his eyes sideways to the other side of the bed, to find a wall and Hector. His friend was leaning against said wall while sitting on a low stool by him, holding a reddish-yellow apple in one hand.

Dressed in trousers and a weathered brown linsey-woolsey shirt half-open to his breakfast, the young rigger looked exhausted. His sun-bleached hair was lank and loose, laying in lazy waves, but Jack could also see the dark circles under both of Barbossa's eyes, and a new cut on his cheek---running from under his right eye down for four or five centimeters. It wasn't bleeding, but still seemed nasty against the pie-bald freckles and tan.

The world seemed lop-sided and blurry.

"The surgeon gave you something. To help you with the pain. You've been sleeping for six hours, maybe a bit more." Hector commented, turning the apple back and forth in his hand. Those pale green-blue eyes never left his face. "I was watching when you hit the water, Jack. I saw what happened, what with your leg. I had to fight the swabbies when I said I was going in after you. It's against the rules for the Equator Baptism, you see. Every man must swim the starboard side and then climb back up to the deck under his own power. But, I knew you wouldn't be doing that."

He didn't even have the ability to nod or say thanks.

"Surgeon says your leg should be fine. It's just scraped and a little wrenched. It was your back that worried the good doctor." Hector tightened his mouth and it changed his appearance, made him look ten years older than his fifteen years and much angrier. "We found barnacles tied to every strand on the cat o'nine tails. No one's come forward and admitted to that bit of nasty work." The rigger's expression darkened further and Jack felt like his blood could run cold at the sheer viciousness he saw there, in Barbossa's eyes. "Don't you be worrying none about that, lad. I'll find the manjack who thought it be a lark."

He swallowed and, perhaps it was the sound he made, but Barbossa helped him sit up just enough to take sips of watered brandy---brandy from the surgeon's stores, no doubt. His back gave a protest, but it was bearable. He was only vaguely aware that he was naked under the blanket; it didn't matter at this minute.

As he settled down on the bed once more, his head on the pillow, Barbossa said it again.

"You did better than the men expected." Hector's smile was sour and yet honest. "Most of them, they mean you no harm. They like you well enough. But, there are the ones who think you're too saucy and soft in the head. All those books of yours, perhaps. The main of them all said you wouldn't make the whole deck. Of the rest, maybe two thirds said you wouldn't kiss the Court. There was bets taken on you, Jack. Bets taken against you. There wasn't but a few who bet in your favor."

He whispered, his voice cracking as he protested. "No betting allowed, Captain's orders."

"Was allowed this time. Captain bet in your favor." Hector's smile went from sour to sly and it changed his friend into the fallen angel once again. The young rigger's voice dipped down into a growly purr as the apple was tossed once, twice in the air and caught in those same dexterous fingers. "I bet in your favor, Jack. I made a pretty penny. Thank ye."

Swallowing the taste of watery liquor, he mumbled, feeling light-headed. "Has anyone told my father?"

Hector nodded. "A boat was sent over, to carry the news, to let Captain Sparrow know that his son is now a right trusty shellback."

He was starting to fade a little and wondered if the medicine was in the brandy that Barbossa had fed him. But, a question floated to the surface of the sea in his brain. He breathed it, half-whisper, his mouth dried out. "Why you? Why'd you come out as the Sea Baby? Did the crew make you---"

"Make me?" Barbossa's face was dimmed in his sight as he started to slip back under the waves. His friend chuckled, finally taking a bite of the apple. The sound was deliciously crisp and he watched helplessly as the blonde rigger chewed with his strong, white teeth. "There's no call to be thinking these men made me do anything. I had to win that honor, Jack. I played dice with all the deck hands, there was more than a handful of us that wanted to be Sea Baby."

"You played the hands at dice for..." His eyes were now nothing but mere slits and wandering with drowsiness. "How'd you...you won?"

"I won. It wasn't easy, Jack, but I was deadly earnest that it would be me or nobody at all. I wanted to have you kneel at my feet and kiss my belly." Hector leaned close and hissed it at him. "So, I cheated."
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Wi' A Wannion