leobrat asked for the commentary track for my Pirates of the Caribbean story Gods and Heroes, part of the Outlaws and Inlaws series. It's one of my favorites in the series because it involved a lot of mythology, and I got to write Calypso, which I love!



It had been dark for a very long time. He had thought it might stay that way forever. Had hoped.

Their voices came through the darkness, and at first they made no sense, just disembodied voices in the darkness discussing nothing in particular.

“No, I tell you, mon, I saw him move.”

“He live live then? Come on. We got no business with him. He white man.”

“Him Creole, café au lait. Mon, there only be one reason why a man got stripes like that on him back. He runaway, is all.”

Our story begins with Jack in a very dark place. He's terribly injured, lost in the mountains of Jamaica, and found by the Maroons. They're mistaking him for a runaway slave, which is a good thing.

I've only been to Jamaica once, but those mountains are searingly beautiful, unbelievably green.

The darkness was rather green. He thought he might have opened his eyes, but there was nothing but green and dark. And far away some distant pain.

“Him done for then. Lookit where dem flies settled. Him flesh be black and putrid.”

A movement, a sound, as though someone had knelt beside him in the loam, a touch from far away that made him want to curve in on himself, but no muscles answered.

“Got a fresh brand on him arm. P. Wonder if that be Pettijohn over near Applegate?”

“Pettijohn don’t flog like that. Somebody else maybe.”

This is the real world of the 18th century, with slavery and all that entails.

Grounding the fantastical in the real. I keep coming back to that as necessary to believable fiction. It has to have feet. It has to stand on something. You can't build a soaring edifice from the top down.

The first voice again, decisive this time. “We take him to the healer woman. She know how to fix him up, way she fix up Willie when he fall. She young but she got de voice, I tell you.”

There was a croak. For a moment he couldn’t figure out where it came from.

A hand touched his face, lifted his head gently, as though trying to decide how best to carry him. “You hang on there, mon. We take you to the obeh woman. You gonna be all right.”

Green and dark. It was the movement of leaves over the sun. Light and pain. Dark and quiet.

“Not so far now, mon. You hang on.”

And then a voice like cream and honey, a voice he knew. “Well, what you bring me? I require payment, you know.” The rustle of cloth, and a catch in her voice. “I know dis mon. This be Captain Jack Sparrow.”

Tia Dalma, of course. Who has a debt of her own to Jack.


Jack wrenched awake without a sound.

The room was quiet, moonlight coming in through the pale green glass of the window, as though they were half underwater. Flipper slept in his cradle. Elizabeth slept beside him in the bed, as she had every night for months. Every night except last night. She had spent last night on Orpheus, with Will.

This directly follows the story The Ferryman's Bride in which Will and Elizabeth are together for the first time since the end of AWE.

He got up and padded quietly to the window, clad in breeches only, feet bare on the weathered floor. Outside, the sea whispered its endless song, and the moon made a path of light across the water, rising over the silvered crags of the outer island. Masts and yards stood out stark against it.

The Black Pearl wasn’t there, of course.

She was his no more than Elizabeth was. He had seen the expression on her face as she rushed to Will.

How many times does a fool have to be told no before he believes it?

In the back of his mind, one of the Jacks aped Will nastily. At least once more, Miss Swann.

Jack still has the multiple Jacks rolling around in his mad brain though it's gotten better than it was. I like 'em damaged. What can I say?

At least once more, Miss Swann -- Will's line from CotBP, and that he wants/needs Elizabeth to tell him once more she chooses Will so that he can go. Not that he wants to go. But he's jealous. He wants her to love him, and that's a thing she hasn't said.

Elizabeth is pushing him away too hard, thinking Jack is tougher than he is, or maybe thinking his feelings for her are less deep. She's used to men declaring themselves madly and gushing at her. Jack only does that in ways that are unbelievable. So she doesn't believe him.

At least once more then.

Jack set about dressing rather loudly. It had the desired effect.

Elizabeth turned over. “Jack?” she said sleepily, half raising her head.

“Going to look for me Pearl, love,” he said, shrugging his battered baldric over his head.

Elizabeth sat up, her hair falling over her shoulders in the loose man’s shirt she wore to sleep in. “In the middle of the night?”

“When a madman steers, tis no surprise the course is strange.” Sash just so, knotted loosely at his waist.

“You’re going looking for your ship in the middle of the night? After four months it can’t wait until dawn?” She sounded fuzzy with sleep.

“Aye, four months is long enough, is it not? Who knows what mischief she’s gotten up to without me hand upon her.” Her hair was not gold in the moonlight, but silver, like fish’s mail, Death’s bride, old and odd as time.

Jack knows his old stories too. There's very little in the way of how the metaphysical world works that escapes him. Dream logic is very logical to him.

“Four months is a long time.” Elizabeth folded her legs beneath her. “This isn’t about the Pearl, is it? It’s about Will.”

“Has Will my Pearl in his keeping? I doubt that, knowing the lady in question. Rather more independent than that. And floaty.” Headscarf next, raveling tails behind him.

She got up, went around the bedpost to him. “Jack, it’s complicated. You know it is.”

“That I do, me darlin’,” he said. She was almost as tall as he was, without his boots on yet, and he thought he might spend several years trying to forget her face. But any face could be forgotten in the end. He could hardly remember old what’s his name, yes? Same height as Elizabeth, same hair, same upper crust accent. He’d forgotten completely.

Oh Jack. Any face can be forgotten in the end. Except that it's not. He hasn't forgotten Beckett, has he? Those wounds will never heal entirely.

She closed her hands on his forearms, and he wondered how he should make a dramatic exit without his boots. Should he stop and put them on? Carry them with him? Hop up and down putting them on as he went?

And that's vintage Jack. How to manage the logistics of a dramatic exit?

“Jack, whatever happens, I can’t forget Will. Do you understand? He’s my husband and my first love, and no matter what….”

“Know all that, love,” he said, deciding on the boots beforehand. He sat down on the side of the bed, which had the advantage of hiding his face as his hair swung forward. “Never thought you’d give up the whelp.”

“Jack, I don’t know how to do this.” Her voice sounded pleading. Did she expect sympathy for turning him down yet again? “These are uncharted waters for me. You…. This is not a way I ever expected to live. Like this.” She might have gestured to the room, to his sparse things tangled with hers like the sheet and blanket, to the green light from the window, or to the whole of Shipwreck City and the wide world.

She's not saying the thing he thinks she's saying. Elizabeth's saying that she'd almost accepted that she would not see Will again in the more than a year since AWE. And now he was here, and then he was gone again. She can't just forget about him, but she has to go on with the life she's constructed. It's a strange life in Shipwreck Cove, but she's not about to just sit and wait for Will to show up every year or two. But she has no idea how to do this. She wants Jack as a lover, but she doesn't want to cheat on Will. It's so complicated. And she's trying.

“You’re the Pirate King, and that’s the shape of it.” He stood up, boots on now. “I’ve an overdue appointment with a faithful lady of some tonnage. And you’ve a husband, of a certain fishy kind.”

“Jack, I don’t….”

He would not kiss her. All these months he’d refrained. No sense in drinking poison at the end.

She let go of his arms. Only her eyes held his, her mouth set around whatever she’d been trying to say. “Why are you leaving?”

Which deserved an honest answer. “Can’t stay.”

An honest answer was never believed. “You could.”

If there was some promise there it was phantom. No and no and no. Had she not just said she would never leave Will? He knew better than to go on and on, reinterpreting everything in light of his hopes, stuck on seducing the unseducable. Unseductable. Unseductive. No, that was something else entirely.

Actually, he's reinterpreting everything in light of his fears. He's taking "it's complicated" as no.

Jack shook his head.

Her eyes dropped to his mouth, then rose. She was nothing but pride. “Kiss me goodbye?”

She had offered before, on her way to her wedding bed. Er, sand. And he had demurred. But why not, to take the poison from it? To let go. She was not a snare.

Jack bent and felt her head tilt back, brushing his lips against hers, warm and so vital, her breath against his, slow and shallow and gentle as the soft tug of the tide. Nothing like that fatal passion that had pinned him to the mast, nothing like that flow of unreason that had bound him. This was balm.

He let his cheek rest against hers, breathing in the scent of her, milk and sweat and warm Elizabeth. “Goodbye, Lizzie.”

“Goodbye, Jack,” she said. Her hand swept along his face, gentle as wind, but did not bind.

He was at sea long before dawn.


And back to the flashback, to how he got here.

Light and shadow.

He was lying on his stomach on something soft and yielding. There was something cold on his back that seemed to draw the pain. Somewhere far away a voice was singing tunelessly, the same words over and over, words he didn’t quite know. It sounded like the waves on the sand, or muttering along the hull of a ship.

The light and shadow was a fire flickering, candles on the table. The light played across the tattooed cheekbones of a face he knew. Dalma? He tried to say her name, but it came out as a croak.

She moved, and he heard the rustle of her skirt, and then she knelt beside him, a pottery cup in her hand. “You drink this, Jack Sparrow,” she said.

It was nothing but cold water.

He tried to clear his throat again, and this time her name came out. “Dalma. I see you found the Maroons.”

“That I did, Jack Sparrow,” she said in her lilting voice. “Me and all those souls you freed. They think you little less than a god, Jack Sparrow. They think you a hero.”

I love writing Calypso! Tia Dalma, Calypso, is the face she wears here and now, but she is all the other visions of her as well, the Lady of the Sea.

Jack freed the people on a slave ship, including her when she was bound in her bones and had no more power than anyone else.

For a long moment he couldn’t think what she was talking about. It was somewhere back there, beyond the pain.

Her hand was gentle on his matted hair, gathering it up into a short tail at his neck. “Who do this to you? That man who own dem? Beckett?”

He could not answer. He just closed his eyes and nodded in assent.

She dipped a cloth in cool water and sponged his face, the stubble on his chin rasping at the cloth. “He rich man, Beckett. But cruel.”

He opened his eyes into hers, dark and unfathomable. There was still hesitancy to her movements, but not pain, as though every joint ached, as though her hips shrieked with each step. She avoided his eyes, but there was not fear in it. “You look better,” he said.

Tia Dalma tossed her head. “I am better. You be better too, soon. But the thing I be wanting to know is why.”

“I don’t know,” Jack said. He had forgotten already. Whatever it was that he had felt, whatever it was he had done on the decks of the slave ship was lost, somewhere back in the distant past.

He didn’t need to tell her. She brushed the hair back from his brow with one slender hand. “I have forgotten things too,” she said. “Many, many things. Sometimes I think I be mad, just a woman who has taken leave of herself when too many things happen, that I make up some big story because otherwise I die. I cannot die, you see. I think I make that as some big story, and I cannot remember his face. I cannot remember any of their faces, de lords who bind me.”

Is it real or not? That's part of the binding, to forget that she is a goddess. And there's power in that analogy. Is the final step to losing your power to forget that you are worthy of it? That you are a luminous being? I think so. I think the final step to losing your self worth, to losing your power as a woman, as a human being, is reducing yourself to clay. Because then how can you even remember the things you might have been or imagine yourself worthy of them?

Chains, and the dock at Accra. Chains, two hundred and thirteen people in chains, dragged aboard his ship. This woman, three quarters down the line, her naked body scored with blood….

“I am wearing a woman’s body, and I have no defense. I am like any other woman, Jack Sparrow. Sometimes I be mad, and I think that dis body a dream, and I am a goddess.” She dropped her head, and he saw her hands working together on the edge of the blanket he lay on, smoothing cloth already smooth.

“Maybe we’re all gods, love,” he said. “Gods and heroes. Whatever works.”

She looked up at him, and for a moment there was a flash of something in her eyes. “You be a god for me, Jack Sparrow?”

She doesn't remember the Brethren Court except in flashes. She can't do anything about freeing herself because she is just a woman, unable to even remember how she might set about freeing herself.

But Jack. Jack believes mad things, and from there comes her salvation. Sometimes what we need is for someone else to truly see us.


Dreams come at sea, and at first Jack thought he was still dreaming. The sea sang to him with all her voices, dark and sweet. She cradled him like a child. No, like a lover. Only a lover’s hands moved like that, caressing the tight muscles of his back, kneading his neck.

Jack opened his eyes. She lay beside him facing him on the foredeck of a Spanish smuggling ship, three days out of St. Augustine. He slept on bare boards, and behind her the moon was full again, rising out of the sea. Gibbs snored softly three feet away, oblivious.

“Aren’t you afraid someone will wonder how you got here?” Jack whispered. He should have been more surprised.

Calypso smiled, and looked back toward the man at the wheel. “They see nothing but moonlight, Jack Sparrow. Unless I want them to see more.”

The Lady of the Sea can manifest herself where She wills on the sea.

“Ah.” Jack leaned back, his arms behind his head. “Just as I thought. You’re delusion.”

Calypso stretched, long slender hands familiar and beautiful as ever. “I’m a goddess,” she said. “I no want men to see me, they don’t see me.”

“Just me, talking to myself. Do wonders for me reputation, love.”

“They not see you either,” she said. “Anyhow, they know you mad to start with.”

“Suppose they do,” Jack said. “Been quite mad lately. I blame Jack and Jack. They won’t shut up. And of course sometimes it’s Jack, but he’s around less and less. The brainless one. Not so much of him anymore, which is a mercy, really.”

Calypso blinked. “Brainless Jack?”

“The one who’s part of the Dutchman,” Jack clarified. “His brain falls out sometimes.”

“Oh.” She reached for him again, twining her arms around his neck and putting her head against his shoulder. “He be going away, Jack. You not part of the Dutchman.”

Jack's in a bad way. But healing will come.

“No thanks to you,” Jack said. “I’d have been Captain of the Dutchman, and Will Turner and his bride would live happily ever after.”

Calypso raised herself on one elbow, looked in his face. “Why you do it, Jack? You could have stabbed the heart yourself.”

Jack shrugged. Her dark eyes were inscrutable in the moonlight, and fairly unavoidable. “Dunno. Just did.”

Jack's done a lot of avoiding thinking about that. But the thing was the expression on Elizabeth's face. He could not stand to watch her see Will die.

“Oh,” she said again, settling back against his chest. There was something very pleasant and warm about the way she curved into him, something that reminded him too sharply that it had been six long months since any convenient opportunity for dalliance had presented itself, or at least any convenient opportunity not in the immediate vicinity of Elizabeth. Elizabeth wouldn’t have taken kindly to that, and it’s a foolish bird who fouls his own nest. Not that it was his nest, actually.

“All the time Elizabeth,” Calypso said. “You think bout anything else?” There was a vaguely petulant sound in her voice, more woman than goddess. He thought he knew why.

Jack smiled. “Trouble with your Ferryman, love? I can see it would be a bit awkward, taking as consort the only faithful sailor on the seven seas. Thought of nothing but Elizabeth since he was a child.”

Calypso sighed. “Really?”

“Really. Tiresomely true.” She did feel nice and warm in his arms. “Tortuga whore practically dropped her breasts in his lap, and William Turner just went right on talking about Elizabeth.”

“He supposed to be mine.”

The Ferryman is one of the Consorts of the Lady of the Sea. He is supposed to be hers. And Will Turner never will be. He never loved the sea that way. Neither does Barbossa. Jack does, but he's unsuitable in a bunch of other ways. The person who would actually suit best is James.

“Well, yes. But he doesn’t particularly see it that way.” He angled his head to see her face. “Can’t you make him love you?”

“No.” She cooperated, lifting her face to him. He’d forgotten that she was small and fit against him so well. Or perhaps she was small with him. “Could make him burn with desire, but he hate me after.”

“I can see it would be a bit unpleasant to be tied to someone for a long time who hated you,” Jack said contemplatively. “You just did that.”

“Davy Jones never hated me,” she said. “He thought he did, but it was back side of love. Hate and desire can live together. But not indifference. William have nothing but indifference for me. He do his duty. He do his job. All his compassion be for them, the souls in his charge. Not be making mess of that, not now.” She tilted her head to the side, dark eyes speculative. “How be your love and hate, Jack Sparrow? You and me, we both kill the men who love and hate us.”

“Wouldn’t know your meaning,” he said lightly. “Dead and buried, ancient history.”

“If you saying so.”

Beckett, of course. And Jack did kill him, with the Pearl's guns.

She slid her arms more tightly around him, one hand stroking the fall of hair down his back. He closed his eyes against her. He had not seen, did not remember. Not a glimpse of that compact form through the chaos of battle, still and composed, as the Pearl and the Dutchman turned the Dauntless into splinters. He was old enough to have forgotten hate, and fear too. And desire was nothing but a snare, a way to cut a deal.

“My sweet boy,” she said, and her voice was a caress. “You a handsome man now, but I miss my sweet boy. You called me back to myself. You set it all in motion.”

“Did nothing of the kind, I assure you,” Jack said. “Pure accident, if that.”

Calypso laughed. “What you think it do, when the son of a Pirate Lord have the intention to free me? You come to me on the deck, and you unlock the chain from my neck, the one that fasten my neck to my ankles so I not stand up, and you lay it aside and raise me up, and you say, ‘you free now.’ What you think it do?”

Intention. Like Ragetti, saying the words right. He wanted her to be free, and in doing so unravelled the first thread of the snare, enough to let her begin to remember. Enough for her to begin to use her power in small ways, to plot her escape.

“I thought you were a woman,” he said. He had not forgotten. He remembered, remembered his anger, the faces of all of them, all the slaves. “I didn’t know you were a goddess.” Jack hunted for the words, down the long paths of memory. It was accident, not cleverness. He could not claim cleverness in this, not like Barbossa and his bargain. “I didn’t expect anything for it.”

He felt her smile against him. “That why it work, Jack Sparrow. It not be the words but the intention. Remember Ragetti?” She twined her fingers in the hair at his temple. “I thought you be my champion, my trickster boy with your pretty face and clever hands.”

He didn't know she was a goddess. His mercy was for the woman. And that in itself is magic.

“It was a fairly impressive duel with Davy Jones,” Jack said complacently. “Extraordinarily impressive, if I do say so meself. Hoping you saw it. All the hopping around on the yardarm.”

“I saw,” she said, and a laugh was in her voice. “You were very good. And you give me my Ferryman, like I want. Now what you want?”

He pressed a kiss against the top of her head. “Make Lizzie love me?”

Calypso laughed. “Jack Sparrow, you ask me for any woman in the world, I say sure, I get her for you. I give her to you, and she be your love forever. Any woman but that woman. She worn my name, and my hand is on her. No.”

Elizabeth deliberately and knowingly claimed her name, became the avatar of the Lady of the Sea, when Sao Feng sought her. You don't screw around with your own avatars.

“Didn’t think so, but it was worth a try,” Jack said. He shrugged. “Well, then.”

“You not win her, way out here, on your way to Florida. You know where she be. You want Lizzie, you go to her.”

“Been to her. Same as William. Your wonderful idea, I understand. Thank you so very much.”

Calypso sighed. “I thought he see them, he get it out of his heart. He see his Elizabeth doing all right, being the Pirate King, he let go, say goodbye. He say to her, go, be happy. And then he come do what he supposed to do, come be who he supposed to be.”

“They’re tighter than ticks. Bad plan, love.” He looked up, at the starry skies overhead. “Lizzie never gives up on anything.” Beneath him, the deck was unyielding, but the sea wind blew about them softly. “Sometimes,” he said quietly, “I wake up, thinkin’ I hear Flip. Course he’s not here. But I come awake, ready to go get him for Lizzie. Deck’s harder than it used to be. Swill is worse. Find meself thinkin’ of a good bottle of rum and a warm woman beside me, good fire and a soft bed. And the way Flip kind of snuggles into ye, like you’re god on earth.”

“You gettin’ old, Jack Sparrow,” she said, smiling. “You forty now, and you start seeing that freedom is coming and going, but that the coming part can be just as sweet as the going. You love your boy, just like you love your woman. You always been better than you want to be.”

“Calumny,” Jack said, and laid his face against her hair.

He is better than he wants to be. And it's not easy getting older. He's not a boy trickster, and he's going to have to move closer to Teague to get older.

She sighed again.

“Must be terribly frustrating, being a love goddess who can’t get any,” Jack observed, feeling it was about time to be on the offensive again, before he made any further unfortunate slips.

She looked up at him then, grinding her hips gratifyingly against his side. “That what you think?”

“Could do something about that, given a bit of incentive.” Jack leered at her theatrically. “Solve our mutual problem, so to speak.”

“Could be that it would,” she said, drawing him closer against her, pressing oh god just there. “You still a handsome man, even if you not my sweet boy anymore.”

“I think I can manage,” he said.

No, not a sweet boy. But better for his maturity. Time to change again, but then the trickster is always changing. It's not jarring. Of course he will become. That's what he does.