Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales Novelization

by Elizabeth Rudnick

  The girl let out a frustrated groan. “An astronomer,” she explained through her clenched jaw, “contemplates the sky.” She lifted her head toward the stormy one above.

  “On a donkey?” Scrum asked.

  “There is no donkey!” shouted Carina.

  “Then how do you breed them?” another pirate asked.

  Henry stifled a laugh. He could practically feel the anger radiating from Carina. While he couldn’t see her face, he could almost guarantee that a scowl marked her beautiful features. He had not spent much time with pirates, but he had heard enough stories to be prepared for their illogical thinking—or lack of thinking entirely. Carina, on the other hand, clearly had anticipated finding the map with a few more men of intelligence.

  Growing tired of his crew’s line of questioning and fancying himself a bit brighter than his counterparts, Jack stepped up to Carina. “Allow me to simplify this equation,” he said. “Give me the map, or I’ll kill him.” He drew his gun and aimed it at Henry.

  “Go ahead and kill him,” Carina said nonchalantly. “You’re bluffing.”

  Jack raised an eyebrow. “And you’re blushing.” Sure enough, Carina’s face had turned a becoming shade of pink. He looked to his men. “Throw him over!”

  Several of the pirates immediately untied Henry from the mast. Grabbing him by the arms, they walked him over to the rail of the ship. Then they tied a long rope to his hands.

  “He doesn’t appear to be bluffing!” Henry shouted over his shoulder.

  Jack nodded. “We call this keelhauling,” he explained. “Young Henry will be tossed over and dragged under the ship.” He waited for Carina’s response.

  If he had been expecting begging of some sort, Jack was sadly mistaken. Carina simply shrugged. “Go on,” she said. “What are you waiting for?”

  As Carina watched, the men gagged Henry and unceremoniously tossed him overboard. Carina stifled a cry. She pulled her gaze back to Jack and met his eyes. She tried not to flinch and stayed still as the captain peered over the rail and informed her that Henry was not a very strong swimmer. She even managed not to show any emotion when Gibbs pointed out that Henry would be lucky to drown before the barnacles sliced him open. But when Jack mused that the blood would inevitably attract sharks, Carina finally could no longer stand it. “We’re wasting time!” she said, trying to sound calm despite the panic flooding through her. “Bring him up!”

  “All of him?” Jack asked. “Because that might be a problem in a few moments.”

  “The map is there!” Lifting her arm as far as she could, she pointed up to the sky.

  “On your finger?” Marty asked after a beat.

  Carina held back her scream of frustration. “It’s in the heavens!” she said, not including the “you dimwit” she so badly wanted to add. “That diary will lead me to a map hidden in the stars.”

  Jack walked back to Carina. He leaned forward so his face was mere inches from hers and stared, trying to decide if she was bluffing. “A treasure map written in the stars?” he repeated, to be sure.

  She nodded. “Bring him up and I will find it tonight!”

  “Sorry,” Jack said after a lengthy pause, during which Carina had to feel his rum-scented breath on her face. Then he untied her. “Can’t bring him up. Look for yourself.”

  Rushing to the side of the boat, Carina braced herself for the worst. She expected to see blood. Or body parts. Or both. But to her surprise, she saw a very alive, very unbloody, and all-in-one-piece Henry Turner, albeit still bound and gagged. He was staring up at her from the bow of a rowboat that floated next to the Dying Gull. She whirled around.

  Jack was watching her, a wry expression on his face. “As I said…blushing.”

  Carina’s nostrils flared and her blue eyes narrowed. “You’re confused,” she said, trying to calm her racing heart and hoping against hope Jack couldn’t see the pulse speeding in her neck. “I am here for one reason.”

  “I know how this works,” Jack said. “The stolen glances, beads of sweat on the brow, drips of sweat behind the neck…”

  “That boy is nothing to me,” Carina said, involuntarily checking the back of her neck. “Now give me the diary and stay out of my way!” She snatched the diary from Jack and stalked off.

  Behind her, Jack smiled. “The scent of desire does not lie.” Then he paused and raised his arm. He took a big sniff. “Although, that could be me….”

  Night had finally fallen over the Caribbean Sea. Carina stood at the bow of the Dying Gull, her long dark hair blowing gently around her face. Reaching up, she absently pushed a strand out of her eyes, unaware of her beauty in the moonlight.

  It had taken her so long to get to that moment. Years of study. Thousands of pages read by candlelight. Endless torment and mockery by dozens who couldn’t fathom a girl’s wanting to learn things such as astronomy and cartography. And while she’d figured out that more information could be found during a blood moon, she still didn’t know exactly how to find the map.

  She sighed, turning the worn diary over. It had been left to her by the father she had never met, a father who had clearly intended for her to study the stars. A wave of sadness washed over her. Normally she was able to keep it at bay. It had done her no good to be melancholy—not at the orphanage where she had grown up, not in the handful of places she had called home since then. But every once in a while, the thought of what her life could have been crept up and overwhelmed her. What would it have been like if she hadn’t been left at the children’s home as a baby? Would she be standing at the bow of some other ship, staring up at the heavens with her father?

  Carina shook her head. It was not the time to get lost in what-ifs and maybes. She had work to do. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw Henry watching her from across the deck. His handsome face was unreadable in the moonlight, and she couldn’t help wondering what he was thinking—if he was wondering about his own father, the one he believed to be cursed by the sea.

  Henry was not, in fact, thinking of his father at that moment. He was preoccupied by the flashes of lightning in the distance. They were too patterned to be natural, which could mean only one thing….

  Making his way across the deck, he found Jack Sparrow asleep, a bottle of rum held loosely in his hand. Henry nudged him. The man gave a snort but did not wake. He nudged him again, harder. Still, Jack didn’t wake. Looking around, Henry saw a bucket of dirty water left behind by a crew member who had been on cleaning duty. Henry picked it up—and then dumped it over Jack.

  The pirate woke. With a shout, he leapt to his feet. “What are you doing?” he asked, shaking the water off him as though it were poison. “It’s not my week to bathe!”

  “Look out to sea,” Henry said, pointing to the lightning. “Salazar is out there!”

  Jack’s gaze followed Henry’s finger. Then he looked back at the young man and arched an eyebrow. “You woke me for that?” He took a long swig from his bottle and went to lie back down.

  Henry stifled a groan. He was beginning to understand why his father had told him to stay away from Jack Sparrow. From what he could tell, the pirate was nothing but a drunk with a predisposition for rum and an uncanny ability to do a whole lot of nothing and have it benefit him. “The dead are hunting us down and you do nothing!” he finally shouted, not able to hide his frustration any longer.

  “Nothing?” Jack repeated. “You call this nothing?”

  “You’re drunk and sleeping,” Henry pointed out.

  Jack nodded proudly. “Exactly. I’m doing two things at once.”

  Henry had had enough. He needed to get through to Jack somehow, and talking did not seem to be working. He grabbed a sword that had been left on deck, lifted it up, and tried to hold it to Jack’s chest. It shook in his hands, the steel heavier than he had anticipated. “Like it or not,” he said, trying to sound as threatening as possible, “you’re going to help me, Jack. I will break my father’s curse!”

  Expecting a pithy remark, Henry
was surprised when, instead, Jack reached out and adjusted his fingers on the sword. “Lighten your grip,” he advised, turning Henry’s hand slightly. “Square the pommel. Front leg bent.” He waited for Henry to bend his right leg slightly. Then he nodded. “Much better. Now, run me through.”

  “What?” Henry said, startled.

  Jack nodded again. “One quick strike should kill me,” he said. “Or if you’d like, I could get a running start and hop onto the blade.”

  Henry scowled. “Maybe I’m not a pirate,” he said, lifting his sword higher and staring straight into Jack’s eyes, “but you’re wrong if you think I wouldn’t do it.”

  In response, Henry heard the cocking of a gun. Lowering his gaze, he saw that Jack was now holding his pistol. It was aimed up at Henry’s head. “And you’re wrong if you think I’d let you. Next time you raise a sword, be the last to die.”

  Henry opened his mouth to point out the lack of logic in Jack’s statement, but at that moment, Carina walked by. She didn’t even bother to give the two men a glance. Instead, she remained focused on the diary in her hand. Henry’s eyes followed her for a moment before snapping back to Jack. To his annoyance, the pirate was watching him watch Carina with an amused expression on his face.

  “I suggest you entice her with flattery,” Jack said. “You can start with what I always say: ‘Would you mind washing that?’”

  “I’m not interested in Carina!” Henry insisted.

  Jack clapped his hands together, his rings clinking. “I knew it! She’s all you think of!” He leaned closer to Henry, the gun and sword forgotten, and whispered conspiratorially, “A bit of discretion when courting a redhead—never pursue her sister. But, if you cannot avoid the charms of her sister—kill her brother.” Henry raised an eyebrow. He didn’t want to know how Jack knew so much about something so scandalous. The pirate went on, clearly enjoying himself. “And if she attempts to give you a piece of salted meat, assume it’s poisoned. Unless she’s a twin—in which case, still kill the brother. Savvy?”

  Henry’s head was spinning. “No!” he shouted. “I do not savvy!”

  “Well, that wisdom will cost you five pieces,” Jack said.

  “I’m not paying you for that,” Henry countered.

  Jack smiled and laid a hand on Henry’s shoulder. “Never say that to a woman,” he advised. “They get very upset.” Then, whistling to himself, he turned and swayed back to his spot on the deck, plopped down, took one long swig of rum, and promptly fell asleep.

  Looking down at him, Henry groaned. If Jack Sparrow was really the key to saving his father, Henry was in a lot of trouble.

  The moon had risen still higher in the night sky as Henry stood on the deck of the Dying Gull. A spyglass was raised to his eye as he scanned the horizon. Hearing footfalls, he lowered the spyglass. Carina had come over and was standing next to him.

  “What are you doing?” she asked softly.

  Henry hesitated. There was something very intimate about speaking under the stars to a beautiful woman. His heartbeat quickened ever so slightly as he met Carina’s warm and questioning gaze. Her blue eyes were bright, even in the darkness of night.

  “Looking for him,” Henry finally said. “Even when I know he’s not there.” As soon as the words left his mouth, Henry wished he could take them back. He sounded like a little boy, not the man he hoped Carina saw him as.

  To his surprise, she didn’t laugh at him. Instead, her eyes grew sad. “Just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it’s not there.”

  “Like the map?” Henry guessed.

  She nodded. “I have to find it,” she said, her voice determined.

  “No one has ever found it,” Henry pointed out. “Maybe it doesn’t exist.”

  Carina’s head whipped around as though Henry had hit her, not just said what he assumed many other people had already said to her over the years. She held up the diary and waved it in his face. “This is the only truth I know. I kept it with me each day in that orphanage, studied the heavens when it was forbidden. I swore to know the sky as my father intended me to!” Her voice cracked with emotion and she lowered her eyes. “My mother died as I was born. This diary was all that was left with me.”

  Her words hit Henry like a punch to the gut. They were far more similar than he had ever imagined: both forced to grow up without fathers; both on a journey to somehow right that wrong; both determined never to stop looking for the one thing that might make them feel whole. “Carina,” he said, his voice gentle. She raised her eyes and met his gaze. “You’re always looking to the sky. Perhaps the answer is right here.”

  For one long moment, Carina thought Henry meant he was her answer. She felt an odd pounding in her chest, and her cheeks flushed involuntarily. She was about to open her mouth to say she thought she might feel the same way, but was saved the embarrassment when he pointed to the diary. He hadn’t been talking about himself. He had been talking about what was on the pages of Galileo’s book! Regaining her composure, she opened the book. “Galileo wrote that ‘all truths will be understood once the stars align,’” she read.

  “If stars do not move, how can they align?” Henry asked, confused.

  “He could be referring to the planets,” Carina suggested. She pointed to a few lines on the page. “He wrote the word derectus. So the stars must align,” she translated.

  Henry leaned forward so he could see the page better. Sure enough, there, written in faded ink, was the word derectus. But as he stared at the word, something occurred to him. This was a language that had popped up occasionally in his studies about pirate mythology over the years. “Carina,” he said, growing excited, “Galileo was Italian. But the word derectus is not Italian. It’s Latin.”

  “Latin?”

  Henry nodded. “And derectus does not mean align. It means a straight line.”

  Slowly, Henry’s words sank in. Carina’s eyes grew wide. She looked back down at the book in her hands and then up at the sky. “‘All truths will be understood once the stars are in a straight line,’” she whispered, her mind whirling with the possibilities this new translation brought. Her finger gently rubbed the ruby on the diary’s cover. Then she gasped. The answer had been right in front of her the whole time. “There is a straight line moving from Orion—the son of Poseidon!”

  “How do you follow it?” Henry asked, his excited tone echoing Carina’s.

  “The line begins with the ruby. A straight line from the ruby…” Her voice trailed off as she moved to free the gem from its cover. Holding it up to the sky, she peered through it like a lens in a spyglass. Henry went to her and stood beside her so that he, too, could look through the stone.

  “Do you see that?” Henry asked, gasping as he spotted a red line that burned across the sky.

  Carina nodded. “A straight line starting in Orion—the hunter’s arrow moving straight through Cassiopeia—heading across the sky toward the end of the Southern Cross! It ends there!”

  “So the map is inside the cross?” Henry asked, trying to follow Carina’s line of thinking and failing.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Because it’s not a cross! It’s an X! The Southern Cross is an X hidden in the sky since the beginning of time! This is the Map No Man Can Read!” She grabbed Henry’s hand excitedly.

  “That map will lead us to the Trident!” Henry said, beginning to bounce excitedly on his toes. “We just have to follow the X!”

  The pair’s jubilation was rudely brought to an abrupt halt by the sound of a dozen guns cocking. Slowly, Henry and Carina turned around.

  Standing there, having overheard the majority of their discovery, were Jack and his motley crew. The pirate captain was smiling. Once again, his plans had gone swimmingly; he had done nothing and yet gotten everything he needed. Now he knew just where he was going. X, after all, always marked the spot!

  Barbossa was no stranger to the strange. After all, he had, at one time, been cursed to take skeletal form in the mo
onlight. Yet even that unfortunate period had not prepared him for being aboard the Silent Mary with its ghostly crew.

  Since boarding the Silent Mary, Barbossa and his men had been witness to the futility of the ghost crew’s life. Not only were they cursed to live after death, stuck on a ship with various forms of wounds that would never heal; they were cursed to crew for Captain Salazar. And he was a ruthless captain—as much in death as he had been in life. The mood on the ship was always as dark as its rotten sides.

  Standing at the ship’s helm, Barbossa watched as the ghosts scrubbed the blood-soaked deck, even though no matter how hard they scrubbed, the blood remained. Still, Salazar shouted his orders. “Scrub that deck! The Silent Mary will be the pride of the Spanish fleet!” Turning, Salazar made his way to Barbossa. “Your time is up,” he said.

  Barbossa carefully felt for Jack’s compass in his pocket. He had kept it, his ticket off the ship, hidden. He couldn’t afford to lose it or, worse, have it taken. Then he cleared his throat. “Not to disagree,” he said diplomatically, “but our accord spoke of the sunrise. That be first light—far from a risin’ sun. And you bein’ a man of honor—” His words caught in his throat as Salazar raised his sword to his neck. He gulped. “My own death I can live with, Captain,” he finally said. “But what will haunt me is not knowing the cause of my demise. Surely you would grant me a simple tale as we await the light—to know what Jack Sparrow did to bedevil the dead?”

  The sword in Salazar’s hand did not lower. “The dead man’s tale is never to be told!” he said with a sneer.

  Barbossa nodded. “Aye,” he said in agreement. “Unless spoken to the dead—which I am presently to be.” He waited, hoping his reasoning would not be lost on the ghost captain. The sword lowered a fraction. Taking that as a good sign, Barbossa forged on. “Now I heard stories of a Spanish captain—El Matador del Mar. A man who scourged the sea without equal—who hunted and killed thousands of men—”