under the sun

“You’ll be looking to replace Mr. Gibson, then.”

Hickey smiles at him, placidly pink-cheeked and empty-eyed. It must be quite the coincidence that he expresses mild inconvenience in the same way as frank flirtation, with a glib smile and a tip of the head and a slight inclination of the body. “You’re not half the man he was. Not half as useful. But you’ll have your uses.”

“And you are going to tell me what those uses are, aren’t you, Mr. Hickey.”

“Whatever I do to you is a thing I won’t do to Lieutenant Hodgson. He’s a civilized man, our lieutenant, soft. I’d very much enjoy taking my pleasure with him,

Harry is beyond decorum now, beyond whatever shred of pity he might have felt for this man once, he is all hate and no sense of wonder. “I don’t give a damn about Lieutenant Hodgson. He can starve with the rest of you.”

“But you do, Mr. Goodsir, I’ve seen it in you. You pity our Hodgson, you pity Mr. Manson, he’s a good lad who only ever wanted a friend. Someone who wouldn’t laugh at him. Now I wouldn’t look twice at Magnus Manson, sweet though he may be, if I had better odds somewhere else. I bet he’d do whatever I told him to, no matter how degrading. He’d do it to you, if I asked him. Now do you see how things stand?”

Goodsir is staunch, but a bitter taste is in his throat. “I won’t do your torturing for you.”

Hickey cocks his head, almost amused. “Don’t be a fool, Harry. I want you to fuck me.”

He uses Goodsir’s Christian name, which can signify nothing good. Goodsir shakes his head, dully. The motion makes his skull ache. “I don’t understand.”

“But you do, Mr. Goodsir, you understand me very well.

Goodsir is incredulous. “Not here, surely.”

Here, in the open — where the men might see them, and while they are a parcel of half-mad misled brutes they have not forgotten common morality. Hickey tosses his shoulders as if Harry has proposed waiting for candlelight and a feather-bed.

“Yes, exactly here. Get your prick out, Mr. Goodsir. I mean to ride it.”

Mr. Hickey strips down to his skin, casting aside coat and drawers as simply as a man would doff a pair of gloves. His body is starkly clean and without a mark, not even the deep bruises that herald scurvy. The cool air ceases even to raise gooseflesh on him, though his pink nipples are standing. For Goodsir it is not the same. Even undoing his flies seems to let in a kind of cunning chill, despite the mild weather, and his prick is reluctant to rise from its torpor, preferring to cleave close to the heat of his body.

Hickey watches him frig himself, though only with difficulty. No man could stir easily under such circumstances, bitten by starvation and cold, even with a more agreeable partner. That smooth wiry body is waiting for him, featureless as a Greek statue — the only hair on his body is beneath the arms and thatching the cock and balls, which are small but well-proportioned. Mr. Hickey is circumcised, Harry realizes, which makes a puzzling development. The little mutineer has given no indication of belonging to the Hebrew faith or indeed to any church in particular.

Eventually Harry achieves a half-hearted erection, and Hickey comes to him, settling astride his lap — the weight of him is curiously slight, like a figure in a dream. It is all a dream.

“I have oil of castors,” Goodsir says, suddenly doubtful.

“You won’t hurt me,” Hickey says flatly; his face is without expression, as if he is worlds away. “I know my way.”

He cups Harry in his hands, as if discovering him for the first time — the shape of him and the weight of his stones. There can be no questioning that he and Billy Gibson were more than messmates; if Hickey were an ordinary man, a saner man, it would have never come to Harry’s attention. He might have winked at it all, at what men do together when too lonely or depraved to master their appetites — but Goodsir is no moralist, and neither is he made of stone. Those small neat hands are clever, and it has been a very long time.

When Goodsir goes to grasp the man’s hips, he makes a discovery. The red weals of his flogging have reopened in places, where the knots of scar tissue cross one another. Henry traces them with his fingers. He is wholly dispassionate concerning what he finds, until Hickey cocks his head, transparently pleased with himself, and asks, “What’s the matter, lost your mettle?

Then the spite seizes him, and Goodsir digs in with his fingers and twists until the blood runs. Hickey makes a thin sound, arching against him, but does not withdraw. The wounds are not deep, but the spongy tissue yields for him; he works his fingers into the wounds, cutting with his ragged nails until the blood runs, and Hickey grunts against his shoulder as if they are grappling there and not cleaving together like beasts.

Hickey’s narrow hips drive down with mechanical regularity — Goodsir hooks into him with his blood-wet fingers, thrusting in alongside his cock to stretch that blood-hot narrow hole. He has decided that he does not care if such roughness hurts — he owes Hickey nothing, and if Hickey thinks being buggered sore on an Arctic plain will bring him to some higher consciousness of the spiritual world then he deserves every ounce of pain he receives.

For it is some rite, to appease the creature or to spur it on — whether it is inspired by pure perversity of mind or some deep-cherished need cast up to the surface by disease and deterioration, it is certainly inspired. The driving of his narrow hips brings Goodsir onward despite himself, but his smooth trunk remains fiercely upright, and the set of his shoulders is almost martial. His erection jostles against his stomach, pink and pretty, but he does not frig at himself — the swelling drops of seed at the head of his prick go undisturbed. Goodsir regrets looking.

His hair has fallen in his face, all in a tangle — Harry looks out into Hickey’s cold sterile face, and searches for some sign of animation, but the master-mind of this loathsome mutiny can only be miles away, charting some other unknown continent of the mind. It is some rite, to appease the creature or to spur it on — whether it is inspired by pure perversity of spirit or some deep-cherished need cast up to the surface by disease and deterioration, it is certainly inspired.

There is scarcely any softness to find in this awful forbidding place. Harry palms at Hickey’s smooth breast, catching at the small pink nipples there between his fingers. A sharp pinch makes them stiffen and flush. The blood leaves dirty smudges there, like a whore’s cheek.

Hickey touches his face, his shoulders, his beard and the hollow of his throat — his beard having long since joined up with the rest of his facial hair in an undifferentiated mass, though Hickey’s is as satanic as ever. He does not kiss him. This is a mercy. Hickey is the one who spurs himself on, riding hard against Goodsir’s aching lap as if he is fucking himself on some inanimate object — if only he were, like a draggle-tail putting on a performance in some bawd’s drawing-room.

When he is satisfied Hickey’s spendings jet forth all at once in a hard gush, cast onto Goodsir’s already filthy linen— all his muscles shudder around him, like a woman in her climax, but he continues on as if it never happened. It cannot be for simple pleasure that he does this, then, or he’d roll off Harry’s lap and stuff himself a pipe-bowl’s worth of tobacco and pretend it never happened. Or would he goad him for it, needle him for acquiescing to what he had so forcefully imposed? The parent is him who mounts, Goodsir remembers from some murky Classics lesson — the Greeks did have a succinct approach to such things, who was permitted to do what to whom and with what implement.

Hickey’s body is slim and erect, straight and martyred and without a blemish — the sun shines from behind his head, making the bedraggled auburn hair shine. In this awful place such smooth unblemished terrain seems impossible, unreal. In Italy, where the schools are not so enlightened as in Edinburgh, they teach their pupils anatomy not on dead flesh but upon wax — Hickey is like a man of wax, lacking only a hewn-open belly to display his parts. This is only a body before him, a thing of flesh and blood and bone, both butcher and meat in one. He cannot pity it, he cannot hate it.

Hickey’s cheeks are bathed with silent tears. Harry does not notice it until he is at the brink of his own climax, until he has wrung pleasure out of himself through rutting against this loathsome man. Hickey’s face is wet and shining, not with sweat but with hot salt tears, and his cheeks are pink as garden peonies. The sight is frightful, as inhuman as one of those creatures dredged up from the sea-floor. It is all too human.

Goodsir hesitates, only for a moment; Hickey must perceive it. All at once he begins to laugh.

A full-throated laugh is not a sound Goodsir has ever heard him make, for all his sneers and smiles, and the sound is something unearthly here in this desolate place. Goodsir spills inside him and the world goes white — white skies and white shale.