Chapter 282: A Jar of Dirt Keeps the Devil Aboard

The jungle kept its promise.

No undead nor tangle of vines bothered the merry band on the way out, and the Fortune waited them with sailors scared out their mind.

Every person who went into that jungle came back out, some with gains, some with losses.

The Fortune made for Tortuga and docked enough to take on supplies and pick up the sibyl’s belongings. Three chests, a bundle of gourds, a basin, and a lamp that burned cold and white came aboard on lines, hauled up by sailors who trembled every step of the way.

James considered the next key, but some brown river and a jungle was no help to even narrow down the possible location. Thus, couple days out of Tortuga, Cuba lay off larboard, Concordia was three days ahead, and the crew had taken leave of its senses.

James stood at the quarterdeck with one boot on the bulwark, looking down into the waist, which now looked like a trinkets shop after a church fair.

Horseshoes covered the bulwarks and the mainmast, enough iron to keep a smith in Basse-Terre busy until Easter, while the main hatch was surrounded by a circle of chalk and salt thick enough to cover a baker’s floor, and not a bloody soul walked across the lee side.

At the taffrail, Crick had been knocking in threes ever since Tortuga. His knuckles were raw as beef, so he had taken to use a belaying pin instead.

Around the mainmast, three men were fighting over three horseshoes nailed in three different ways.

"Points up! Up, thee daft bugger, up! Luck’s a cup, an’ if that tips her she’ll slop over t’side an’ there’ll be nowt left in her come tomorrow!"

"Down! Down, ye pillock! The ill wants art, dun’t it? Art the bottom, same as bilge! Point ’er up an’ ye’ve gone an’ corked the wrong end o’ the bleedin’ bottle!"

"Sideways, aye. An’ dinnae fash yersels, lads. The luck an’ the ill’ll both be wanderin’ the deck lookin’ for the door, an’ neither’ll find it. Bewildered, see? A bewildered ill’s near as guid as a blessed one."

Crick brought the pin down on the fife rail, rap, rap, rap, with weary patience. "Up on the mast, three great lummoxes, ’cause ’tis luck we be a-keepin’! Down on the hatch, ’cause ’tis ill we be a-pourin’ out! And as for sideways lad can go nail himself to the bowsprit, and we’ll see which way he be pointin’ when the gulls begin."

When the galley called noon, the crew repeated the same ceremony for the sixth time since Tortuga. No one aboard dared to say the sibyl’s name, she was the cargo, or the lady below, and any sailor who forgot himself clapped a hand over his mouth and spat to leeward.

Whoever drew the short rope-yarn had to carry her dinner. Today it fell to a big sailor, white as lard, who held a covered plate in both fists. A boy rang a handbell ahead of him, the crew crossed themselves and grabbed hold of iron, and the boy shrilled.

"Make way! Make way fer the cargo, ye lubbers!"

The big sailor spoke to the planks, the only party aboard that couldn’t take offence, while beads of sweat dripped down his nose.

"Beggin’ yer pardon, ma’am. Salt fish, an’ nothin’ else, an’ no one’s to be takin’ it personal."

When he reached the chalk, he set down the plate and backed away, bumping into every sailor along the way. Nearby, some fellow called her a witch and spat to windward, and the wind promptly returned the favor into his face.

The plate came back on the end of a boathook, scraped clean.

The big sailor staggered past the foremast, where the three sailors who had gone ashore sat on a quarantine inside a rope cordon. The shunners wouldn’t come within an oar’s length of them.

Some sailors stood in line to rub Nub’s green fingers and Pike’s bare brow for luck, while some watered the buds with a dipper.

Pike batted at the reaching fingers, then squeaked. "Hands orf me brow, ye pack o’ sods! It’s burnt, I tell yer, burnt orf! What am I, a bleedin’ relic? Why’s it allus bleedin’ me?"

"Mind them budsh, lad. Gentle, gentle!"

Nub told the man with the dipper. The watch had corked the gap in his teeth to put an end to the hornpipe, so his words came out round. "They shulk, they do. Shulk till Michaelmash if ye shtartle ’em, an’ then it’sh me that hearsh about it."

No one walked behind Dunk, whose boots had taken to accompany him about at night. He clamped his hat down when a sailor offered him two shillings and tobacco for it. "Betsy stitched that band, ye thievin’ bastard! With her own two hands, by candle, and ye’ll have it off me when I’m at the bottom o’ the sea and not a breath afore. And ye’ll have to dive for it!"

Half the ship had taken to copying them for fortune, be the sailors who painted their fingers green with verdigris, shaved off an eyebrow, or drew one on with burnt cork. That made perfect sense to them, as in, if the sibyl had already taken your eyebrows, she wouldn’t need to take them again.

Pewter cups clinked in breeches fore and aft, for no one knew how far her reach went.

James laughed into his hand until his eyes watered.

He looked aloft. Every brace had a round turn and a seizing where a hitch ought to be, because Crick had warned them that winds were sold in knots, breeze in the first, a gale in the second, and a tempest in the third.

From aloft, strung along the mainyard, came a voice cracked at the hinges by indignation and altitude.

"Four hours, Crick! Four bloody hours, mun, to bend the one sheet wi’ no knot in ’er!"

A pause to breathe, and then, piteously.

"Me hands is bleedin’ like a martyr’s, look you!"

Crick called back, rapping with his pin. "Bleed, then, ’ee soft-handed lummox, bleed! A hand do mend, but a hurricane do take the lot of thee, ship an’ all. Better a hand than a hurricane, I say, an’ better a martyr than a drowned man!"

The Fortune sailed as well as ever, which the crew took as proof that the missing knots were actually doing their work.

As if that wasn’t enough, a row of sailors accompanied some superstitious sailor, ducklings after a goose, while he carried a stoppered jar in hands as carefully as a baby.

He hadn’t put it down once since Tortuga, and at the foot of the quarterdeck ladder, he looked up at James and nodded before setting a boot on the first step.

He drew the first line out over four notes of a cracked, devout tenor.

"I have a ja-ar... o’ di-irt..."

Then one step higher, the tune rose with him, a pilgrim on the stairs to heaven.

"I have a ja-ar... o’ di-i-irt!"

The third step snapped under him with a crack like a pistol. He toppled over backward, jar held high, and finished the verse flat on his back with dignity.

"An’ fa-a-allin’ dow-wn."

The sailor knelt as at an altar, turning the farthing over and over in his fist, so hungry for a miracle he’d have accepted a small one.

"What’s in it, jar-man? Go on, tell a poor sinner, what’s he got in his jar?"

"Dirt, brother."

"Aye, but why dirt? Why not salt, or a drop o’ holy water, or a lock o’ granny’s hair?"

The jar man smiled up at him, serene, with the face of a saint, never once been troubled by a follow-up question.

"I have a jar o’ dirt~!"

The sailor nodded slowly, as one who had been told everything.

Crick glanced at the jar and kept his mouth shut, too. It was the one charm he hadn’t prescribed.

Then the main hatch grated open, and the deck emptied as fast as if the ship had been called to quarters. The coils dropped, and every hand scrambled aloft, the jar man lifted his jar toward the sky, and inside their cordon, Dunk, Pike, and Nub exchanged one flat look.

Crick rapped three times.

A bodice laced to the last eyelet appeared from below, followed by a patched skirt and a bare leg with bells at the ankle. Zephy walked through the empty planks, chin up, her freshly wrapped palm bound in white linen.

Along the bulwarks, the men pressed themselves into the wood like barnacles.

Zephy climbed to the quarterdeck and looked down amidships at the sailors creeping back to their stations. "Chéri! Chéri, regardez-moi ?a! Forty leagues the sibyl has sailed with salt across her door, salt, ma foi, like a slug in a cabbage patch!"

She clapped three times, mocking the pin. "And every noon, ding, ding, a little bell, and some great brute sets down her dinner and crawls out backward like a crab at a funeral. Mais the crab at least is dressed for it!"

Then, with gusto, she pressed the back of her wrist to her brow and swayed. "And this morning, Mon Dieu, on her door, a jar of dirt! With a prayer over it, in Latin, oui, left by a fool whose Latin was so bad a priest would weep into his collar!"

Zephy straightened, one finger raised, and held the pause just enough. "A queen is feared with trembling, with knocking knees, with proper dread. But the sibyl?"

She spread her hands, a wounded diva.

"The sibyl is feared like a bad oyster."

"Eleven hundred years at it, lass, and you’ve still not learned to put the wind up a sailor."

"Or thirty-four! What, you think the sibyl is a tyrant about her age?"

James chuckled. "Thirty-four, then. Grand, I’ll teach you proper terror, if you’ve a mind to. First lesson, stop jinglin’, some lass with bells sounds like a fair-day market, and no pirate ever shook in his boots at a market."

She laughed despite herself and smacked his arm. "Mon Dieu, the Scourge gives lessons in dread! To me! The sibyl frightened bishops, mon chou, when your people were still painting themselves blue and praying to a rock!"

Her palm cracked against his sleeve for emphasis.

James shook his head with a smile. "Folk in Concordia’ll go skittish as colts with a witch about the place, lass, so you’ll bide at me estate till the talk dies down."

Three men at the mainmast spat to leeward when he said the word.

"Sibyl."

Zephy corrected.

"Witch is what the crew calls her, tsk! And a house?"

The word came out soft, almost tender. "Eh bien. The sibyl accepts, mon capitaine, on one condition only, no salt on my door, and the sibyl decides when things are calm."

"Aye. Right you are, lass."

Her eyes narrowed to a cat’s, and one finger rose and drew a slow circle in the air between his nose and the horizon. "Ah, non. Non, non, that was a no, chéri, a no wearing a yes like a borrowed hat! I know a no in costume when I see one, voyons!"

"’Tis the finest aye I’ve got, lass. Took me years to polish it, and I’ll not hear it insulted."

Beyond the bow, the sea spread empty to the sky. Three days ahead, a bay lay hidden behind reefs, with a stone house on the ridge that had never held a sibyl.