KRRouse

The sun was setting when Pintel finally returned to the campsite. He had two more fish by then, and Ragetti finally had a fire going. There must’ve been flint in some of the island’s rocks, because the younger man said he’d given up on his sticks hours ago and gotten the blaze he needed by scraping one of those stones against his sword blade to make sparks. It was hard to tell by firelight if his eyes were still red from crying, but he sounded composed, and he seemed to be in much better spirits. Pintel decided to play along. They salted the two smaller fish to make jerky. The largest one, they staked on a long stick to roast over the fire. Pintel held that wooden limb like another fishing rod while he sat in the sand by the flames. Poochie lounged off to his right, gnawing on the mango’s pit like it was an oddly shaped ham bone. Ragetti sat to his left with the remaining half of the fruit in his lap. He’d offered it to his older friend earlier, but Pintel had insisted that the

The sky was a deep, late evening blue when Pintel returned above deck. He hoped it was only because he’d gone to the crew’s quarters right at the cusp of evening, and not because he’d been wallowing down there for hours on end when he should’ve been working. The last thing he wanted to do was mark himself as a problem alongside Ragetti in Higgins’s mind. Fortunately, there were no scoldings waiting for him on deck. Most of the crew seemed to be winding down for the night, including Higgins, and they all seemed content just to be done with the hardest part of the day. The men who weren’t trimming the sails or tying off the last tack lines were already lazing beside the rails with smatters of laughter as they talked amongst themselves. He didn’t see Ragetti anywhere. That probably meant his comrade was on night watch up in the crow’s nest. Or maybe the kid was just avoiding him again. Pintel sidled up to a pair of deckhands who were coiling ropes and set to work helping them. Maybe he

They crossed Jamaica faster than expected. Pintel only allowed their party the briefest of stops on their trek through the jungle, even after their lantern burned out, and by sunset the following evening, they found themselves on the sands of the island’s northern coast. They found Port Antonio the night after that, and Ocho Rios late the next evening. The Black Pearl was at neither port. The only information Pintel or Ragetti could gather was from a serving wench in Ocho Rios, who claimed to have spoken with Jack Sparrow mere days before their arrival. According to her, the Pearl’s eccentric new captain had bragged about knowing the course to a mysterious island in the northeast that was said to be bursting with treasure, and that he’d promised to bring her a string of pearls from said island upon his next visit to her tavern as proof that he wasn’t daft. If there was any truth in the plans he’d divulged to her, then he and his black-sailed ship were currently on the way to that

Pintel said nothing to Ragetti for the next two days. That was only mostly deliberate. The rest of his reason was because he was too furious to think of anything cutting enough to spew at that backstabbing little sneak. He’d turned over a few ideas in his head while they’d gathered their belongings for the Meriweather’s voyage. Jabs about Ragetti’s missing eye, his illiteracy, his inability to speak to anyone but his fellow fugitive without coming across like a nervous idiot. Maybe even a remark about his father. The closest Pintel had come to saying something was when they had found that Bible in their boat, and he’d realized that the divine entity described on its pages couldn’t possibly exist because he and Ragetti had just spent a decade as un-living proof that the Aztec gods were real. He just wanted to sting that little runt the same way Ragetti had stung him. To snipe him with a piercing bite and then slither off to let the venom eat away at him. He wanted that…and yet no

Just like last time, collecting the information they needed was a synch. Getting to Baracoa, however, was a slog. The closest the duo could get to it without rowing themselves was Santa Lucrecia, a slightly more civilized but still pirate-friendly port just southeast of their destination. They managed to talk their way, prison dog and all, onto the crew of a brigantine ship called the Biesht Kione — named after a deeply-feared Irish sea serpent, according to Ragetti. And so it was that the morning after their arrival in Monte Cristi, they abandoned their longboat in the harbor and set sail under their first new pirate captain in ten years. Pintel didn’t bother to remember the man’s name, except that it was just as aggressively Irish-sounding as his vessel’s. The only thing he cared to remember was that the ruddy-faced bastard put him and Rags on deck-swabbing duty the entire voyage. Fortunately, that voyage only lasted about a day, and once they made port in Santa Lucrecia, the

Pintel woke the next morning with a splitting headache and a pig in his face. He let out a hog-like grunt himself and pushed the animal away. A whole chorus of grunts and oinks sounded up around him as he rolled onto his back in the mud. It wasn’t until he heard flies buzzing and discovered a brown mass that wasn’t mud right next to his head that he realized where he was. The pirate sat up and clutched his head with a groan. The blazing sunlight beyond the edges of the pig sty’s nice, shady roof only compounded his agony. What had happened last night? The last thing he remembered was being in the Twelve Daggers cantina, downing his third pint of rum — or had it been his fourth? — with a gaggle of cheering onlookers huddled around his table. He’d been having some sort of silly contest with Ragetti… “Rags?” he pushed out weakly. Even that made him feel like someone was pressing a sea urchin into his brain. “Rags?” He heard something shuffle overhead. Next came a loud, tumbling sound

Tortuga was alive and kicking as ever when the duo arrived that evening. Every sailor who’d ever made port at the infamous pirate haven knew that sundown was when it truly came awake, and the vulgar festivities for that night were in full swing by the time Pintel and Ragetti laid eyes on it. The only part of the harbor that wasn’t draped in wallowing drunkards or cackling wenches was the air itself, which was thick with smoke and the sounds of any and all chaos. It was so chaotic that no one on the docks even seemed to notice the two men with a dog who came rowing ashore in a longboat nearly bursting with bottles of rum. Nor did anyone hassle them when those same two men proceeded to unload their cargo and haul it into town in a “borrowed” hand cart. The pair stopped at the first tavern they happened across, the Rusty Cutlass. A steady enough crowd seemed to be trickling in and out of it, so they quickly set themselves up next to its front entrance — but out of sight of any of its

Six hours later, Pintel was standing on a beach in his own clothes with a long, sharpened stick in his hands. He squinted down at the incoming sea wave for signs of life. It was getting harder to see anything in the growing darkness, but he was the last person who’d ever admit to wasting a whole evening on anything, let alone something a brain-dead pelican could pull off in one try. As soon as he spied a flicker of motion beneath the water’s surface, he snarled and stabbed at it. All he got was a pathetic little splash and a bark of excitement from the prison dog behind him. “Give it up, Pin,” Ragetti droned from the same direction. “All the good fish’ve probably gone teh sleep for the night.” Pintel whirled around in a fury. “Oi, did I ‘give it up’ the first time Poochie there wouldn’t eat me rations in jail?” “No, but yeh did go a full week wifout a ‘alf-decent meal ‘cause of it.” The shorter pirate had to lift a hand to shield his eyes from their campfire. Rags and the dog

Port Royal wasn’t the first time Pintel had plotted an escape from the British Navy. He couldn’t even remember how many years ago the first time had been. Enough that Ragetti had only barely been the taller one of them. The youngster had truly still been a youngster back then, and neither of them had been a pirate yet. They hadn’t been prisoners of the Navy back then either, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. They had been soldiers. The memory of it all still twisted Pintel’s face in ghoulish ways. If two hapless drunks who’d been nabbed off the street and forced into service could be called recruits, then any man who was Catholic and bossy could be called a priest. One bad night at his favorite tavern in Kingston had turned into a year-long nightmare aboard a Naval vessel, and poor Rags had been dragged through every second of it with him. Endless training and labor. Moldy, worm-riddled food. A list of rules twice the length of his arm and ten times as many

It had taken a week to get the keys to their cell from that dog. That had been the easy part. Abner Pintel crouched in the shadows and listened. He heard footsteps around the corner, the sharp, leathery clip-clop of Naval boots on stone that he’d grown sickeningly familiar with over the course of that week. There were two sets of them, made all the more clear by the twin shadows creeping up the stone wall at the end of the hallway, and they were steadily growing louder as the pair of night guards they belonged to drew near. Those footsteps had already grown to mean death to Pintel. He’d heard them the first morning of his imprisonment in Port Royal, when the guards had come around this very corner to fetch Jack Sparrow for the noose. And Twigg the morning after. Then Scratch. Then Simbakka. Then Hawksmoore and Dog Ear and Ketchum. Every sunrise had brought the sound of those footsteps to this dim, dank hall where he and his crew mates sat caged in their cells, and each time, he’d