of his bones are coral made

Hickey stumbles in; the door shuts hard behind him, sick on its hinges from the pitch of the ship’s squeezing in the ice. If the captain is sick, it is in such a way that he does not want his steward to see him. Too much whiskey, Hickey thinks; a pain in his liver, or blood in his piss, some unsettling sudden sign that comes from drinking too much and eating too little.

“I came as quick as I could, sir. I’m at your service. Is there something that wants patching? Another hole?”

“That’s enough, lad. Don’t be coy with me.”

Crozier’s voice is a terrible rattle, thickened and coarse like a dying man. He waxes more Irish when he’s drunk, Hickey has noted; it’s an attractive quality to one who fancies himself a fellow outcast, for they are both men who stand outside the great crowd. Cut-crystal and broken glass underfoot — there is a cutting draft in the room, a sudden swath of polar chill that cuts through the fever-heat of the ship’s heating system. There are charts spread across every flat surface, ringed with damp, and the captain’s stub pencil has rolled down the leather desk-top to rest against an empty decanter on the carpet. There are splinters of red wax on the blotter, and a pen-knife, still open. This is the debris of greatness; as an abstemious man himself, Hickey cannot begin to fathom it. It only speaks of Crozier now, holed up in his cabin, fretting himself to distraction.

The captain is not where he hopes to see him — standing in the doorway, looking prosperous and warm in blue wool, or offering him a seat in some fine polished chair. He is lying in his bunk all in a heap, curled up on his side with his back to the carved curlicue of the bedrail — uniform unbuttoned and all askew. There is a damp smell in the air, a queer moldy perfume when Hickey approaches — he expects the smell of piss, or else the contents of a man’s stomach after a hard night’s discontents, but it’s a smell like the bottom of the ocean. Terror has not sprung a leak, that he knows; Crozier wouldn’t bother calling for the caulker’s mate. It must be some pretense.

Hickey approaches with caution. “Can I help you, sir?”

At once he sees why the captain is so shy — what haunts his nights and unsettles his waking. All their nights together, bellying and moaning on the theme of what Captain Crozier is due, he has seldom seen him with so stiff a prick. Crozier’s tool juts out angry-red and proud as a fist — his shirt is bunched up to disclose it, and the good white linen makes the purple flush of the cock-head look startlingly vivid, like a fresh wound. At close range, Hickey can make out the slick patches of spunk that dirty the bedclothes and Crozier’s good blue uniform alike — the smell of sex is here too, the stink of man’s spunk, but there is something worse, the sweat-stink of desperation.

Crozier’s face is fever-hot, sweating. Even curled up to favor his almost-laughable appendage, he looks supremely miserable. Hickey martials his face into concern.

“How long?”

“Oh, hours.” Crozier sounds perfectly hopeless, perfectly dejected. An hour with a hard prick might as well be a day.

“Shall I call the surgeon?”

“Why not see if he’ll lop it off?”

“I’m sure it’s not as bad as all that,” Hickey says, but he cannot resist craning his head to get a better look — he has never seen a cock look quite so aggrieved as this. Francis Crozier is modestly well hung, not as gifted in that department as some other men aboard Terror but with a fine stout cock whose only deficiency is a reluctance to rise to the occasion; his balls are sweet heavy cherries, plump in their grizzled purse.

At present his cock is so flushed with blood that to look at it gives Hickey an ache, like a sore tooth. How can he keep from laughing? All of Crozier’s wounded dignity, gone in one blow — has he done himself an injury somehow? Strained something, or snapped some bone so small there isn’t a name for it outside of the anatomist’s hall? Hickey has visions of pleasant cruelties, then less-pleasant ones, the sort a guilt-stricken Irishman might inflict on himself in a moment of remorse.

“You’ll have to forgive me.”

Crozier is a broken man, wet-eyed, scarlet-faced. He is angry, too, angry with himself or angry because he hates his own desire — he wouldn’t be the only man ever to curse his own wants. In doing with men, Hickey has some knowledge of how to handle the ones who hate what they hunger for; it gives its own advantage if you only know how to ride it out.

He shouldn’t have laughed. Crozier grasps him by both arms, and Hickey knows. Crozier has called him here because he is the only man he can trust with this ugly duty; Crozier has called him here because he knows a caulker’s mate will not be missed, not even on a Sunday. What can he do but give assent?

Crozier draws him over the bedrail with a lunatic strength, and Hickey hasn’t even enough time to appreciate the feeling of a real mattress before he is pressed into service. Crozier rubs off against him like he is so much dirty linen to be soiled again — like a filthy boy frigging himself against a pillow. He grinds his erect prick against Hickey’s side even as he protests and fumbles to unbutton his jacket.

“Let me see to you, sir. I’ll have you right again soon enough. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before.”

Sitting up as much as the space will allow him, he fumbles Crozier’s trousers down to his knees and takes a moment to inspect the damage up close before beginning, in situ against his white hairy thighs and handsome belly. For all of the captain’s heaving and panting, it’s not such an extraordinary specimen, shining purple-red at the tip and bruise-blue at the root. He sucks him and frigs him until his fingers ache, punching into him with two fingers slick with Crozier’s own spendings — the taste of spunk is in his mouth, bitter as the ocean, but there is no final flood of it to relieve the great pressure of blood. Crozier’s balls cleave close to the warmth of his body, tight and heavy, but there is none of the buck and jerk that might mean a finish, even as Hickey’s jaw grows sore.

Just when he thinks he has done all he can, Crozier sighs like his heart is breaking, and gives him a shove.

“Roll over, lad.”

It does not matter what he, Hickey, wants. Crozier has never had enough mettle in him to be the one who does the buggering — on a fine day he can manage no more than half-mast, and when the captain has a finger or two up him, his prick goes soft as a snail. Under ordinary circumstances, it is one of his more endearing characteristics. Hickey obliges in taking his trousers down, but Crozier can hardly wait to enter him, so abandoned is he to the animal wants of his body. Animals feel no shame for what they do; dogs couple in the street if you let them, rats are coupling beneath the decks of Terror even now, in infinite combinations of furry pricks and holes. There can be no more natural thing than appetite.

Hickey takes shivering breaths and wills the muscles of his legs to lie slack and loose. Crozier weighs against him like a warm slab — he has a beautiful body, heavy and white and tender, but his delirium has given him a sudden untoward strength. He moves Hickey into place with clumsy roughness, as if he is a boy again. This is Hickey’s saving grace — he will never be a boy again, he will never again be caught in surprise by what a man wants from him.

Crozier spits and seethes, moving against his backside, he utters oaths and apologies — fucking him until he cries out, until the tears are standing in his eyes. The captain’s heavy prick moves inside him stiff as iron, wet as a seal’s cunt — there’s a nautical image for him among all these damned sailors, Hickey has come to hate sailors even as he has come to love the icy wastes that swaddle them like a blanket. Their coupling must stretch on for an impossibly long time, for an infinity, and then it is through — Crozier spills his stuff in him like a hot misery, like a slick injection that overflows its bounds and paints Hickey’s tortured arsehole besides. The captain’s last cry at the climax is like a death-rattle, it is like the wet hollow groan of a man who’s been stuck through.

They adhere together in their tangle of limbs — in his repulsion and unsettlement Hickey makes himself small. Back before all this business, before Regent’s Canal and the Irish lad with the roses in his cheeks, he had made a fine career for himself out of fucking and frigging; it wasn’t that he didn’t know how to be buggered, only that it wasn’t his idea of a profitable enterprise. To be paid to fuck seemed like the better part of the deal. Now his sterling record is stained, with heaven knowing what, and his captain knows that he can be had.

Crozier still grips him in his arms, like a lover. What if Billy were to find them like this — Billy with his fine white gloves on, and his sweetly curling hair, bursting in on a scene of filth like the last days of Sodom? They lie together, in that narrow bed like a coffin, in those bedsheets smelling of spunk and seawater. Crozier is winded, regretful, solemn again. Hickey is somewhere outside his body — out on the ice, wherever dead men’s spirits go.

The captain clears his throat.

“It was one of the bottles. It wasn’t whiskey — or not anymore. Something else, from under the ice.” Crozier is sorry now, all sorriness, all sorrow; there are tears on his cheeks, wetting the nape of Hickey’s neck. “I hadn’t even drank it, just broken the wax seal when it happened to me.”

“Where is it now?”

“Tossed it down the seat of ease,” Crozier says. “Wouldn’t put this on my worst enemy.”

“That’s quick thinking, sir. You wouldn’t want anyone else to come upon it.”

Contamination spreads easily, in the close quarters of a ship — from man to man, from shared plates and common drinking-glasses. Crozier tries to bestow him with a limp kiss, but Hickey turns away, fumbling to cover himself.

“You’re a good boy, Mr. Hickey. You’ve helped me very much.”

This is feeble praise, and the captain knows it, settling back in his shame with a limp tool and no doubt a splitting headache. Hickey is no man’s boy, not even the captain’s.