kiss the rod

Crozier is sitting in his bed, in his rooms at the old house again, with that traitorous chest of drawers standing against the wall and the familiar Turkish carpets with the bindings worn raw at every edge. The sweat has dried on him; it has left him cold and rank, but his fever has broken.

The odds of such a vision marking a full recovery seem somewhat slim. The caulker’s mate Mr. Hickey is there in his slops; his waistcoat hangs unbuttoned and his neckcloth untied. He sinks into the bed uneasily, like a seaman struggling to regain his land-legs. Not that you can blame him, the man hasn’t slept in anything plusher than a piss-stained hammock in years. Maybe all his life. Say what you will for the Royal Navy, but some of these fellows likely hadn’t had a bed to themselves before joining up. Crozier would bet a shilling or two that Mr. Hickey is one of them.

“Eight bells, captain,” Hickey says. “You’re wanted.”

“Piss off,” Crozier says. “Come to avenge your whipping, I expect. I suppose you must think I owe you an apology.”

His throat is dry.

At times he sees — figures, as distant and plain as the goings-on in a play. This is one such little scene, and nothing more. It can be safely disregarded. His guilty conscience is plaguing him in the form of an idling, insolent sodomite. Just as well; to see Sir John like this would kill a man stone dead. Crozier has much to indict himself of, but he hasn’t spared a thought for his treatment of a man like Mr. Hickey.

Magnus Manson wept while being beaten — like a child, he wept, he weeps a-nights and most likely still weeps. Thomas Blanky is half a man now thanks to Francis’ bitter pique, and might just have easily perished outright. Crozier owes these men much, but he owes Cornelius Hickey nothing. If God forbid, the Esquimaux woman had come to graver harm, there might have been a hanging to answer for it and not a mere flogging.

Mr. Hickey slithers into Crozier’s lap. His tongue is thrust deep in his cheek, and his knee slips in between Crozier’s legs, hot as a brand.

“I’ve gotten worse than stripes from worse than you,” Hickey says. He places his hand on Crozier’s chest, where the sweat has ringed the collar of his shirt — pressing the wet patch to the skin over his heart. “I should be showing you my gratitude.”

Crozier grins at him sourly. The resentment lends it a certain savor, and the smudged quality of it, fever-blurred and immaterial — an incubus of the ice, come to torment him.

“That’s enough of that, Mr. Hickey. You’ve come to peddle your wares to a sick man.”

Crozier reaches out for him with both hands, and tugs his shirt untucked. Hickey can yank his own trousers down if he’s so inclined; Francis can’t do everything for the insufferable imp, or he’ll come back the night after this, and the night after that. Wanting to be coddled and dandled on his captain’s knee, wanting his pitiable wounds kissed better. A vision passes before his mind like one of those wormlike flecks of dust that sometimes troubles the eye: Mr. Hickey boyish and whiskered, kneeling on an old man’s chest — bent low to caress or throttle. Now it is Crozier who sees him from below.

The lad’s legs are graceful as a runner’s except for the scabbed knees. Crozier’s prick is standing, pressing into the soft backs of Mr. Hickey’s thighs.

“I’ll show you how to make it up to me, shall I? You’ve wanted this long enough.”

“Have I? I hadn’t noticed. That’s a touch conceited of you, if we’re being honest with each other.” Nothing they say to one another matters. He can be as frank as he pleases with this insufferable vision without consequence.

“You know it’s true, or you wouldn’t have summoned me up.” The Hickey of his sickest dreams reaches down to give him a caress that makes him gasp and wince. “Let me relieve you, and I’ll be on my way.”

If this is his slumbering, sickened mind telling him what it is his heart truly desires, it’s too little and too late; the man is dead, and cannot be buggered at all without enlisting Mr. Collins’ diving suit to the purpose. One dead petty officer and his mind turns topsy-turvy on him. Mr. Hickey had walked off onto the ice one night, that’s what the Esquimaux woman had communicated at least, and never returned — nor shown a trace. There are only so many places a man can go in the Arctic — through the ice, perhaps, into the white bear’s belly

Crozier has never done this in his life, he does not know the way of it — not the feeling of raw faint flesh, not the perfume of another man’s body, the odor of fresh salt sweat and unwholesome closeness. He’d lain with Sophia in this bed, he’d taken her weight on himself St. George-fashion, but Sophia had been sweet and soft and slick as the ocean. Hickey must be buggered dry. It can scarcely be pleasant for him but he can’t be faulted on enthusiasm. He guides Crozier’s prick with his hand, working himself apart on his fingers like a wanton. The movement of his hand is unmistakable and lewd — Crozier is faintly aware of his balls tightening, and his erection throbs like the squeeze of a hand.

He is all entangled now — Mr. Hickey’s naked legs straddling him, his arms wreathing Crozier’s neck with their gold-red patina of fine hairs, and that fine slim chest heaving like a bellows with every impossible breath. Crozier can remember the sleek dividing line that traced his body from collarbone to navel, the all-over scarlet flush of the flogging making him look for all the world like a woman truly well-fucked save for the scarlet of his stripes. Lewd, libidinous — or simply insolent, insolent and foolish. Crozier grabs him and forces his hips close, making him squirm — it doesn’t quite chime with the oily, smoky nature of the dream they’re in, but Hickey won’t come easily even in a dream. The young man makes a huff of breath, and Crozier guides him down.

He can feel the runnels of Hickey’s scars between his fingers — the tautness of his buttocks offsets the only softness on Hickey’s body, the slick resilience of young muscle. Whatever is devouring Crozier’s crew has left Hickey untouched — here in a dream, he has all the freshness of a young athlete, and while Crozier is as raddled and weak as he ever is, he is furiously in need of satisfaction.

Their bodies join in a place of delirious heat — pressing past the tight ring of him, Crozier feels some of his frustrated desire begin to slake. Hickey does not quail at being buggered, though admittedly not in any fashion whose practice among men Crozier had been aware of prior to this vivid vignette playing out. The motions of his body are plain as a doxy’s — smooth and quick and squirming, alive with elastic and slippery muscle. Crozier gropes at his slippery hip and tries not to notice the stirring of Hickey’s erection.

Another fragment, then: Mr. Hickey on his knees in a fenced park, serving a man like a flash dockside judy, with his lips. When he turns aside to spit into the dirt and cuff at his mouth, his face is crossed with anger. He is nothing more than a boy, beardless and furious, and the man who’s used his mouth so cannot care.

“You were a whore, then, in another life,” Crozier says, confounded. He feels no disgust — knowing what sailors do when money is thin or other entertainment scarce — but only confusion.

“You’re no monk yourself. Got caught having it up Sir John’s niece, is how I heard it. And I know a punter when I see one. Those sad eyes of yours, and you pouring me a lovely drink.” Hickey’s eyes are luminous and lovely; he is grinning at him, grinning away. “Neither of us was the first choice, were we, Captain?”

Crozier grimaces.

So Crozier is not the first man to have this insolent rosy-cheeked chiseller bouncing on his prick — that will make this considerably easier, for both of them. Crozier grips him tighter as he slinks and bobs, and does not think of Sophia, only of completion of the deed. Hickey steadies himself with a hand on Crozier’s belly — his other hand clasps the side of his neck, stirring up fresh hot sweat with every insolent slide.

Spite makes an excellent sweetener. Crozier fumbles at the wetness of his mouth, penetrating with a finger past those crooked teeth; Hickey’s tongue teases the tip of his index finger, obscenely. He can think of Sophia in all her wanton slick wetness, but it’s Hickey’s insinuating touches that bring him off, and his insolence.

“Close your eyes,” Hickey whispers. His hand slides down to work his own prick wetly, and Crozier complies.

He is being pressed almost beyond bearing. Hickey will drag Crozier to the edge if he’ll let him. Crozier is seething with more than desire, he is on the brink of a cataclysmic release of anger and nausea and frustration — three winters’ worth of resentments, hammered out in a nightmare of a conjunction that can never happen and a tryst he’d never wanted. Three damned winters’ worth of stifled hunger and God knows how long stretching out ahead of him, spent in grinding sobriety — men have died for Crozier’s drink-sodden temper, and more may still pay for it with their lives.

His balls hitch, he’s coming dangerously close to spending — he won’t spend inside this man, even in a dream.

“Get off me,” Crozier mutters, “I’m close.”

Hickey’s voice is soft as a lover, his touch is no longer stern and dutiful but soft, sweetly soft. He could have made this man his darling, after all, taken him for a cherished favorite from the ranks of lesser men — if it would mean hearing some note of unvarnished admiration, feeling some kindly touch. “What do you see, Crozier, when you sleep? Do you see what might be? Or do you see ghosts?”

He slips him loose, his still-hard prick already streaming seed, and the sensation is so exquisite that it sets Crozier to crying out, to blasphemies —

Crozier opens his eyes and sees.

There are great red claw marks that span Hickey’s breast. His insides are all hanging out, the wet orifice of his belly hollowed out to unspool over Crozier’s lap — Crozier makes a sickened noise and twists away. It is impossible to mistake what has rent him open like this, like a paper envelope, what has rummaged in his guts and torn his man-parts clear away — the white bear, with all the cruel intelligence of a man.

Crozier makes fists in the bedsheets, recoiling — all his pleasure is spoiled now, sprung back on him like a misfired weapon, and his erection ruined. He scrambles back against the headboard, guts seizing with immediate horror — blood is springing up between Francis’ fingers, hot and red. Blood from Hickey’s mouth and blood in the sheets, cold blackened blood freezing the cloth into points as sharp as broken bergs, as sharp as teeth

“I serve one greater than yourself, now. Are you not ashamed?” He speaks, but his mouth does not move.

Hickey is dressed in gore. He guides Crozier’s fingers back to his mouth, to the sinew-stump of his tongue — the little portals there are still pressing out spurts of blood, like the veins in a cut of pork. The unmistakable wetness is too much to bear. Three years, three years and more, but this isn’t real — he’d be a frozen corpse, not a mess of hot blood. A corpse in the ice. His cold fingers stroke Crozier’s wrist and set him shuddering, the new hideous coolness of congealed blood is too much to stand, and the leather glove-fingers of a corpse gone mummified.

Crozier wakes shivering and sweat-soaked — a pair of furnace-warm hands are caressing his face, turning his head to one side. It’s Jopson, wiping the spittle from his mouth.