It's not calendars that are the trouble. Jack won't have an almanac aboard; he's heard they're unlucky, or maybe it's only certain days in them that are unlucky, but it's best to take no chances. Over the side it went long ago, and it's never troubled him since.

It's not calendars, it's days. They add up to years, and he can't help but do the arithmetic in his head, because arithmetic is one of his oldest friends and normally it does not do him wrong. But they add up to years, and of course he's known the years were passing—one more year without the Pearl, love, so pour the rum while we decay—but it's another thing to know twelve years are gone and the thirteenth slipping through his fingers like sand.

It may not mean anything, except that he can do simple mathematics and they're none of them as young as they used to be. He's not sure how much of what he remembers from the night he won the Pearl is real and how much is drugged dreaming. He remembers he woke with a headache like he'd run his head into a board, lying on the quarterdeck of the Pearl while she ran helmless through open sea. Maybe he found her or stole her or bought her, although none of those seems remotely likely, and he will remember the sight of her rising from the water until he dies.

Which is what he is trying to avoid, the dying part. Or, to put a fine point on it, the fate worse than death part. It was easy for a while not to think of it, because there were fine sparkling seas to run through and money to think about getting and think about spending, and for a while there was Anamaria making herself agreeable in his bed, until he sent her to go scout out a pretty smuggler's skiff that didn't look properly guarded at all and she never came back. No hard feelings, and maybe now she won't slap him next time she sees him. It always makes his teeth ache.

When all else failed, there was Norrington and his bloody obsessive pursuit, which was good for some days spent in serious concentration on not being boarded and taken back to Port Royal in irons to be hanged. He has come as close as he wants to being hanged, and while he's willing to entertain the possibility that it is in fact preferable to some alternatives, he doesn't really believe it. It kept the crew happy, because being hanged is something they were generally in unanimous agreement about wanting to avoid.

It's the days when hanging seems a more distant prospect that are the problem, when he can't avoid noticing where the sun is now setting on the horizon and where the moon is rising. He can throw an almanac overboard—and he wishes now that he had one to throw overboard, because he thinks it would be a good gesture—but he can't make himself not see the stars slipping into new places. He's known their slow wheel around the year too long.

He needs cards to play. At least one card. Possibly a whole lot of cards. If he can get all the aces in hand, he'll be on the way toward winning. Which is good, because he's afraid Davy Jones cheats. If Davy Jones exists. He's not sure whether he really sold his soul for the Pearl or whether that's just a very alarming metaphor.

He'd like to consider that from a position of more metaphorical safety, and so it's time to trust to his compass. It's never pointed him wrong whenever he's wanted something. It's pointed him uselessly—it did an excellent job of pointing out the Pearl as she sailed away from him and that bloody island, but it was really a moot point—but it's never steered him wrong.

He can't help noticing, though, that now it seems to be steering him in circles. Here and there, jerking back and forth as if north is moving all around the map. The only thing in this picture that should be moving is the Dutchman, and he doesn't want to find the Dutchman. He is very clear on that. What he wants is to find something that will ensure that if he ever does find the Dutchman, he will not end up seeing any of the things that he thinks he saw the other time he might have seen the Dutchman. If it exists.

Whatever that thing is, it cannot simultaneously be in Port Royal, the Indian Ocean, the Antipodes, and a tavern in Tortuga. He thumps the compass as hard as he dares, but it doesn't seem to help. It's possible that the problem is that while there is usually only one way of getting to a thing, there are usually a lot of different ways of running away from that thing. Still, he would feel better if it would pick one.

It made the crew nervous when, for instance, it led them running straight into the edge of a hurricane. They made it through, is his point, and their pursuers didn't, and so really that's a stroke of luck, even if they did end up making an unexpected detour to the coast of Africa and living on hardtack and stale rainwater. He's not sure they see it that way, though, and the thing about a pirate crew is that it's best if they're happy. He's seen what happens when they're not.

He's tried not to ship any potential mutineers this time, although it's not as if he picked that first crew for a tendency to put the captain over the side at the first opportune moment. He was younger, then, though, and he hadn't learned as much about what men would and wouldn't do. They're all dishonest men, but he likes to think he knows how far they'll go.

He's still got Gibbs for a first mate largely because the man's not greedy for anything but drink; attached to his own skin, yes, and not willing to put himself out without seeing a profit in it, but he'll take his share and be glad of it. He hadn't thought Barbossa was the greedy sort; he'd thought the man's love was for the sword and the cannon, not the things they brought. Clearly he was wrong there. He's willing to admit that now, since Barbossa's not here to hear it.

But he thinks he knows this crew, and the limits of what they'll do for him. Come sailing into the bay to see if he's managed to escape the gallows, yes, and lift him out of the sea and back to his place at the wheel. Come cut him down from the gallows at a risk to their own necks, no. It's good to know these things.

They're not bloody stupid and heroic, which is good, because they wouldn't survive long as pirates if they were. On the other hand, he is glad not to have been hanged. He's still not entirely sure what that was about. He is used to having swords pointed at him—that's practically his natural state—but it is odd to have anyone between him and the swords.

He does not think about that any more than is natural, unavoidable while lying in his bed very aware of the rope that is not around his throat. The boy probably owed it to him, either for saving him or for saving Elizabeth or for some saving sort of thing he did for Bootstrap years ago. There's no obligation there. They're square, and good luck to him, and he's probably well out of all this sort of thing.

He doesn't think of Elizabeth any more than is natural, either, except to wish that there were still a woman aboard—Anamaria having decamped before the hurricane—and to wonder whether Will will survive marrying her. She's clearly the sort of woman who's trouble. He's well rid of her, really. She's got what she wanted, and welcome to it. There's nothing in Port Royal he envies them.

There's no safe harbor there, and that's what he tells the compass when in one of its mad, lazy spins it settles on a bearing that cuts a straight line across his maps back to the gallows he had such trouble leaving. That's only running back to try to catch a wind that's long gone. There's no safe harbor anywhere. It's another sort of answer he's looking for.

The compass sits on the table in front of him, but its needle still jerks round the points. Through the stern windows he can see the stars wheeling in the sky, slow and unstoppable, counting down the days like sand pouring through a glass. He pours out a little rum on the table, knowing it's the wrong sort of offering but not sure what the right one would be.

He watches the needle turn, and hopes it stops before his time runs out.