resignation and cheerfulness

“What’s become of the captain’s man, do you think?” Hickey asks, pressing a cup to Goodsir’s lips.

“You mean Captain Crozier’s steward?” The theme of Captain Crozier has been a tedious hobbyhorse of the past days – Mr. Hickey’s skills as a conversationalist are sorely lacking, but then, he is no gentleman. “Thomas Jopson.”

Goodsir lies. “I haven’t seen him.”

“Shame. Do you know what he said to me, when he had me penned up? Before they brought me to the gallows? He said, I’ve shot smaller hawks than you.” Hickey’s eyes are shining like a man recounting an especially good jest. “I think that man would die for Captain Crozier. Captain Crozier would let him do it.”

“Do you think so?”

“I could work wonders, with a man like that.”

“You’d have to aim higher, Mr. Hickey. He’s only a steward.”

Hickey smiles down at him with beatific cruelty. “Lieutenant, now. Time for your medicine.”

Hickey tips watered vinegar into Goodsir’s mouth, and watches him drink – it smarts his cracked lips terribly, and the smell is too bright to bear, too strangely-sweet. Men in the worst throes of scurvy not only hear things too keenly, but smell and taste – the perfume of tropical flowers might kill a man.

Goodsir swallows with difficulty. Hickey claps a hand on his shoulder.

“Do you believe in a man’s soul, Mr. Goodsir?”

Hickey has seduced simpletons to his cause and Royal Marines, but he has no other surgeon. He may have Goodsir’s medicine chest, but not Goodsir himself. Goodsir can only do his best to breathe and breathe – not to make a study of where Mr. Hickey obtained his supplies, or what it is he believes he is doing. He’d drunk his measure of squeezed lemon as dutifully as any other crewman, no doubt, and is now doing the best he can for substitutes.

“I decline to say.” Goodsir straightens up, wiping at his mouth irritably. He doesn’t take well to being nursed, not like this, and all of Mr. Hickey’s tending is only a thin varnish on his role as a jailer. “I hope you haven’t grown sentimental, Mr. Hickey. Billy Gibson’s soul is well beyond your reach.”

Not rotting in some seaman’s belly but far, far away from here – flown away or vanished, blinked out like a puff of powder with no residue left behind. Hickey’s face is impassive, unmoved by this feint at cruelty, but his mind is clicking away like a pocketwatch.

“Do you know what they say about you, Harry Goodsir, the common men you care so much for? When they’re on watch at night? On deck in the cold? They say you’re a lovely mary-anne, that you know you way around a prick or two. I’m surprised no one’s tried to spit you yet, you’ve got a thicker rump than any man ‘round here. Have you been holding out? Some secret reserve you’ve got.”

Goodsir says nothing. Hickey’s knee is propped up, his hand resting almost carelessly by his cock – Goodsir can’t look away from it, now that he’s seen it, the outline of a stirring prick

Hickey’s voice drops low and confidential. “Do you like the look of that?”

Goodsir lifts his head – he can feel his features roiling with contempt, but he can’t stop it. Hickey strikes him, fast and hard, and knocks him down.

He kneels on Goodsir’s chest, sharp knees pressing the breath from him. This exerts a tremendous amount of force, for a small man, and surprise is his advantage. Hickey’s knife gashes up his belly, slicing open his trousers – if it does more than split cloth, Goodsir scarcely feels it, gone cold and stiff with dread. He will make quick work of him, like a surgeon amputating a leg. If there will be blood soon, Harry won’t know until it’s nearly over. Had it been like this with Irving? The ambush?

Hickey’s slim neat hand is groping between his legs – squeezing his testicles in one hand.

“I could cut off bits of you. You won’t need your prick out here, do you think? I could take your left bollock, leave you one for old times’ sake.” He twists, and Goodsir cries out, as much from annoyance at the crudeness of the gesture as at the sudden sharpness of the pain. “You should be begging me to fuck you.”

Goodsir is breathless with pain, and the tears are standing in his eyes. Hickey jerks him off with merciless strokes, each one sharp and severe – and Goodsir’s body answers to it, to every harsh tug of the hand.

Goodsir twists uselessly, pinned down and seething. It was like this for Irving, wasn’t it, to the very last. Strange, to be so thoroughly discomfited by pain after such a long and intimate acquaintance with it – he’s turned into a fumbling fool here, with the breath knocked from his guts. “For God’s sake, please–”

God has nothing to do with the pair of them, or with this place.

“Please, sir,” Hickey says, in a queer imitation – it takes Goodsir a moment to realize it is Hickey’s mimicry of his own voice. “Please what, sir?”

Goodsir lets his legs part, his hips jerk. “For the love of God, you know what to do.”

Hickey bends his knee forward, brutally far, and lets his mouth do the work, brutalizing the last untouched places on Goodsir’s body with his hard wet tongue – he holds Goodsir’s cock in his fist the whole time, too punishing-tight for satisfaction, and only when his own cock can be induced to fit into that raw and slicked hole does he relinquish a little, perhaps a millimeter’s ease.

Spittle or no, he will be bleeding after this – he is not accustomed to this, not like some men are when other men use them for their purposes, and scurvy makes all the delicate parts of the body fragile and easily torn, the inner cheek or the whites of the eyes. But the consequence of Hickey’s tight grip on his member easing and Hickey’s own cock pressing into him is a cruel cascade of pleasure – unwanted and scarcely desired,

Hickey moves in him like a woman, with quick and muscular thrusts undimmed by exhaustion nor starvation nor cold – Goodsir cries out with each press, as each slap of flesh seems to pierce him deeper, and seizes with his hands whatever poor purchase he can. Hickey sucks a black bite from the side of Goodsir’s neck, a monstrous gesture – the blood seems as though it will break through and run freely, or swell up in an awful hot carbuncle.

His fist tugs in Goodsir’s hair so hard that it seems it must come out at the roots, and yet not so hard that the resemblance to a lover cannot be noted. Under all this bludgeoning Goodsir climaxes brutally hard, like a gun-shot – spilling all over his belly and the cold ground, all over Hickey’s cruel hand with a profusion and intensity he would scarcely have believed possible if it had been one of the men relating it to him secondhand. Hickey thumbs a smear of seed from the head of his prick, and reaches up to wipe it on Harry’s shirt. If he’s spilled his own shot, he’s done it deep inside, and he is buried in him still.

Goodsir’s body is a wreckage; he is cold and alone in himself, inert as luggage. He wishes he were anywhere but here – sealing up specimens back in Edinburgh, safe in his bed on Erebus, anywhere, anywhere. Something is withdrawn from him, almost unnoticeably, almost unnoticed. All there is is a throbbing in his head, and a dull cold emptiness where his seed has splashed and settled, where it has already begun to grow scummy with cold.

When Hickey has recovered his breath, he straightens up and draws back, giving the small of Goodsir’s back a steadying touch.

“Have I knocked the smartness out of you? Or should I call in our friend Solomon to give it a try?”

Goodsir shakes his head, and lets Hickey go from him. His breath has not returned, nor have the very corners of his vision, blitzed into nonexistence. The taste of vinegar is in his mouth; the smell of sweat and seed fill every indrawn breath.