Marooned, 7

In Which Jack Burns Driftwood

by

Gloria Mundi

There were never any bodies. Eaten or dragged to the depths or drifted away. "And I alone survived," he told the black wood. Truth be told, he was getting tired of the sound of his own voice: getting tired of constant sobriety: tired of the ache in his leg and the emptiness to which he always spoke.

Someone had been here once. He—conceivably, she—had built a hut at the back of the beach, though all that remained were some flattish grey stones piled in a shape that once might have been walls. Jack busied himself with palm-fronds and green wood for a while, until he had something that gave him an indoors to crawl into at night. His hearth was outside the doorway, which meant that the tiny space within was often full of smoke: but that kept the spiders away. He promised himself that when the weather turned bad, he'd build a better shack, but after a while he realised that the weather here was too big, too much, to build against. All he could hope for was shade from the sun, something to keep off the worst of the rain, a roof that wasn't any great loss when the wind whipped it away in the middle of the night.

Some days, the wind brought the scent of growing things, and occasionally even the sounds of other people; voices and drumbeats and screams and songs. Even from the highest point on the hunchbacked cliffs that almost ringed the island, Jack couldn't see land, though there was a faint cloudline on the western rim of the world that might mark the coast of Brazil. He suspected that the voices were not real, but still he listened for them when the wind blew from the west.

At least there was food. He'd read of men surviving for years on desert islands, but in novels the heroes were always fortunate enough to be marooned on islands where, long ago, ship's crews had sent ashore breeding pairs of goats or sheep, for the succour of shipwrecked sailors. There weren't even rats here; were it not for the half-walled hut, anonymous as a solitary skull, he'd have thought that no ship (no European ship) had ever dropped anchor in the bay.

Jack cursed Fortuna, roundly and jovially, and made his own luck. He found shellfish on the rocks, and after a few extremely unpleasant days he learnt to distinguish the ones that didn't make him sick. There were coconuts on the trees—hard work, but a pleasing diversion—and fish in the sea. (Jack had never feared drowning, but he remembered being pulled down, and was afraid of being drowned. He forced himself to swim every day.) He chewed doggedly at kelp and wrack, and made himself a sling with which, once a week or so, he managed to bring down an especially dim-witted gull.

From the beach where he'd woken, he could see no more than sixty degrees of grey-green ocean, out of which the round red sun popped when the weather was fine. It shone straight through the doorway of his little house, rousing him to a new day full of discovery and adventure. More often than not, after his first few lucid days, Jack swore drowsily, turned over and went back to sleep until the sun was high in the sky. There was nothing to occupy or distract him, except for the daily business of keeping himself alive: not even any laws to break, only the inescapable laws of nature that dictated he must live or die by his own efforts.

He had explored the island thoroughly once his injuries had healed, and he'd sat in the shade and sketched out a little map of it in the gritty sand. It looked like nothing as much as an apple with a bite taken out of it. (How Jack craved apples!) The land was high and rocky, except for this scooped-out eastern beach, and it was a steep climb to the lookout point. Jack made the climb most days anyway, for lack of any other pressing business. From time to time he saw a distant sail, which made him heap green wood on the signal-fire and jump up and down, screaming his throat raw; but none of the ships ever turned towards the island. The lookout point was marked, on his map, by a sprig of white coral. Between that and the coconut shell he called home, there was a round medallion of mother-of-pearl; the brackish spring that rose somewhere in the heart of the island and wound sluggishly across the beach. Jack dragged his fingers through the sand to mark its course, but his heart wasn't in it.

If he'd been a man who gave up easily, his nameless bones would be whitening on that little spit of land where Barbossa, twice, had left him. It would be Barbossa's victory, still, if Jack stopped fighting and let himself be swallowed by hunger, or cold, or the dizzying view from the cliff.

When he was afraid, which was most nights, he'd burn the black wood a piece at a time, and talk to the Black Pearl's ghost. She told him stories and comforted him, and never spoke a word of blame for what had come out of the depths to claim her. Each morning after, waking and remembering her, he wept: but he saved the black wood for when night fell.

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