Kings of the Sea

by Van Every Frost, Joan

  One end of the stable was broken and scorched, he saw, but the rest miraculously stood, though the orange orchard surrounding it was a ruin of shattered trees, the ground littered with fallen golden fruit. Not a soul was in sight. There was no sign of the previous occupants of the stable nor of the victorious army, either, which had no doubt passed through here on its way to completing the pincers movement on the emptiness of Malolos. He dismounted and slowly walked toward the stables.

  As David approached the building she appeared suddenly in the doorway, her once white shift blackened and bloodied, with actual holes burned in it by live embers. She seemed pale and calm at first, but when she saw who it was, her smudged face began to melt and run, the tears dropping unheeded through the smears of soot on her cheeks. Without thinking, he dropped his pony’s reins and went to her in several long running steps, putting his arms around her and rocking her gently. As much as anyone he could appreciate what she must be feeling: the lovely house a stinking smoking ruin, and all their work and sleeplessness and caring and yes, even love, all that they gave to treating those poor broken bodies, come to naught.

  “They killed them all except for those in the stable,” she was saying brokenly against his chest. “The shells came smashing in, and those who weren’t killed outright were burned to death. I shall hear them screaming until I die. Maria and I and some others tried to get in to rescue at least some, but the heat drove us back. If I hadn’t been sleeping in the stable, if I hadn’t moved all my things out of my bedroom in the house to make room for more wounded, I would be in there with the rest of them. Oh, David, why did they do it?”

  He held her tighter without answering. Had they really thought that a houseful of women and men so wounded they couldn’t walk would offer any significant resistance? Or had it been revenge pure and simple? They would never know.

  “There now,” he said finally, “let’s get in out of the sun. No need to add sunstroke to your other troubles.”

  He led her firmly inside, where he found the familiar smell of putrefying flesh, excrement, and the sweetish odor of the cane alcohol. As he looked at the wounded he had to wonder if the ones who had died in the house weren’t perhaps the fortunate ones. Their almost starvation diet in the field, rice with occasionally a bit of water-buffalo meat, left them with little resistance. They infected easily and seemed to put up no fight against dying. What would become of these men now?

  “I’m sorry,” Valerie told him. “I didn’t mean to break down, it’s just that after all of that effort and care, to have them blown to bits, it didn’t seem right. But then war never is right, is it?”

  “Let me get you some help,” he said.

  She looked at him sadly. “Do you really think they are going to send help for a stableful of dying Filipinos?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered honestly, “but I can try.”

  In the end he went to MacArthur and explained what had happened.

  “You know that I wouldn’t have had that happen for anything, lieutenant? Perhaps they offered some resistance. In any case, I’ll send two hospital corpsmen with you. I’ll need them back eventually, but I’ll let them stay for a couple of days, anyway. I don’t think we’ll be seeing much of Aguinaldo’s men for some time. Send Mrs. Pryce my regrets, and tell her that if she wishes she may have a house in town here until she can rebuild hers. I wouldn’t be surprised if through the British consul in Manila she could obtain recompense from our military government here.”

  He couldn’t ask for fairer than that. “When do you want me back, sir?”

  “Tomorrow will do. I want to find out from our prisoners what they know of Aguinaldo’s plans. You were no doubt right to begin with that he is going to skirmish with us clear up to Calumpit and possibly beyond. My God, how I wish we could have a real crack at his assembled force instead of this hit-and-run affair.”

  David privately thought that Aguinaldo was doing brilliantly with what he had. If they got better with practice, MacArthur and Otis and the others would really have something to worry about.

  When he returned with the corpsmen, Valerie and Maria were just serving tea, though they had nothing to go with it. He and the corpsmen used his little horse to pull a cart loaded with food and medical supplies.

  “Allow me to introduce you to hardtack and bacon,” he said with a grin.

  That night after Valerie had retired to her bed in the tack room, David tapped on the door.

  “Come in, David.”

  As he entered he saw that she had a sheet pulled modestly up to her neck, and that her dark-blond hair lay loose on her shoulders.

  “I — I wanted to say goodnight,” he offered lamely.

  She smiled then. “Come to bed, my dear,” she said calmly. “I need you as much as you need me.”

  Chapter V

  When he woke the next morning, at first he couldn’t think where he was. There was only a dim light coming from the crack under the door, and the air seemed heavy and stale in the windowless room. He saw a pile of English jumping saddles in the corner where they had been moved to make room for her bed and a chest of drawers. The saddle racks had been removed, and on one wall was a full-length mirror, its glass slightly wavy with imperfections.

  He realized that a warm body was lying along his back, and he turned to look at her. Her hair spilled over the sheet and the pillow and across his back. Her eyelashes lay dark on her cheeks, her mouth was relaxed into a half-smile. He didn’t know what had driven him last night, but he had felt no hesitation, no shame. They had made love simply and fiercely, secure in the knowledge of their mutual need. The honest act of sharing had erased somewhat the memory of the blood and the horror and the fear, had dimmed the shrieks and groans. Their coupling had been a striving for life in the midst of death and gratitude for their having been spared. They were alive, and for the time being that was enough.

  He sighed and smoothed her hair back from her brow with one hand. It was one of the few uncalculated acts of tenderness he could ever remember having made, and he regarded himself with surprise. Was he still the same man who had stood on the deck of the Olympia, disappointed because the naval engagement with the Spaniards had been so one-sided? Was he still the man who could make love to his wife only from behind because that committed him to nothing? Last night they had left the oil lamp on in their urgency, and he could see every fleeting expression on her face, could note how excitement and pain seemed incongruously close together, was aware that she was small-boned and delicate next to Janice, though she didn’t seem so when she was rolling a hurt man over with an easy competence to change his bedding. It was her confidence that made her seem larger; not until she had broken down yesterday had he noticed her smallness. But instead of making him seem over-large and clumsy as did the Filipinos, he felt powerful, protective. What was happening to him?

  She opened her eyes and smiled at him. “Good morning, my love. I like you with your hair mussed. You always look so — so very perfect and untouchable, it’s nice to see you human.”

  He grinned back at her. “But I’m not untouchable at all, now am I?”

  She gave him a playful push. “Far from it. In fact, you are one of the most touchable people I know.”

  “No more than you, my sweet,” and he kissed her, for once not caring if teeth were brushed. It was no surprise to him that she tasted good even in the morning.

  Sleep-warm and relaxed, they came together as gently that morning as they had fiercely the night before. He felt as if he were reaching into her welcoming body a mile, and he closed his eyes and let himself be carried along with the gentle tide that became a long deep surge of blessed release. With her for the first time he felt that he was giving, not that someone was taking from him. There were no demands implied or explicit that he felt incapable of meeting, no silent disapproval, no reluctant acquiescence. He floated in a sea of pleasure that he had never known before, still faintly desirous but above all content.

  “I have
to get up,” he murmured at last.

  “Now?” she asked sleepily. “Surely not now.”

  “Yes, now. The general gave us last night and now I’ve got to give him this morning. I promised.”

  The American forces waited there at Malolos while small gunboats were commissioned to go up the Rio Grande de Pampanga, and an armored train was prepared to reinforce the troops. Already they had word of skirmishes behind them just to the north of Manila, and they began to realize that they were likely to be harried from now on by small groups of guerrillas who could spring up anywhere.

  As the list of casualties grew, the anti-annexation forces in the United States gained power, led by Senator Hoar, who proclaimed that it was against the Constitution to impose a government upon a people against its will. The volunteer regiments, prodded by critical letters from home, were becoming restive, and their morale was a problem. Drunkenness was common, and there were a number of instances of brutality, murder, and rape in the villages.

  Valerie had meanwhile set herself up in a house in Malolos with a large garden and a deep cool veranda. She became a familiar figure in her large straw hat as she trotted back and forth between Malolos and the plantation on a native pony. David would spend his mornings from first light interrogating prisoners and writing up reports, then retire to Valerie’s house in the heat of the day. From six to nine at night he would go back to work again.

  During the long golden afternoons, somnolent with heat that stilled even the butterflies and the birds, David and Valerie made love on the big brass bed of the master bedroom. They would lie naked on the smooth sheets, sweating slightly from their exertions, only their fingers touching. Bathed in the golden-green light through the bamboo blinds, Valerie seemed to him to be an Undine, a gold-green water sylph, and he her faithless knight. They never spoke of a future, but he knew that he would one day have to leave her, no matter that now they were in a timeless enchanted garden. Just as they never spoke of the future, they never spoke of love, either.

  She ran her fingers lightly down his naked chest as he looked down at her, at the narrow green-gold face, the still perfectly formed breasts with their greenish-rose nipples, the pucker of her deep navel, the curving mound of her belly that flattened between the smooth knobs of her pelvis bones, the triangle of dark-blond hair between her rounded thighs. Desire welled up in him suddenly like a sheet of flame, and he bent over and put his mouth on her belly, tracing with his tongue down over the all but imperceptible line of dark-blond hairs to that magic triangle that had unlocked all of the closed prisons of his body. His tongue in that lemon-tasting moistness was an act of faith for him, to do willingly, joyfully, that which before he had known her had sickened him with disgust even thinking of it. He grasped her thighs in his arms and buried his head between her legs. She held his head in her hands and caressed it; he was finally hers.

  “David,” she said one day, “do you suppose that I could have some of the prisoners to harvest the abaca fibers?”

  “I don’t see why not. The exercise will be good for them — they are beginning to squabble with each other. I’ll ask Captain Luce.”

  The captain unpredictably refused. “You’ve got a nerve, Hand, I must say, asking for free labor for your — your paramour. How long do you think it would be before they sneaked off and went back to killing white men again?”

  David gaped at him, a tide of red despite himself washing over his face. It had simply never occurred to him to wonder what the company of American infantry left to guard the prisoners thought of his relationship with Valerie. He had been so immersed in her, his thoughts and feelings so fastened upon the physical miracles that had been happening to him, that he had forgotten the real world entirely. Yet Captain Luce, a bluff, hearty man in his early thirties who had already fought in the Cuban campaign, was hardly a prude. He had, in fact, a perfectly splendid repertoire of very dirty and at the same time very funny verse. The strange thing was that Luce would have said nothing had David taken up with a Filipino girl, as had Lieutenant Bishop and a number of the men. A supply line from Manila had been set up, and the Malolos girls were delighted with the giant hairy Americans in their midst who seemed to have such an endless source of good things to eat.

  No, it was the fact that he had taken up with a white woman that brought to mind ugly words like adultery. Bedding down a native girl didn’t mean anything, was really not being unfaithful to one’s wife at all, merely a physical release healthier than masturbating. A man had to do something, after all. But it was cheating to take up with a woman of one’s own kind. All sorts of nasty complications could ensue: desertion, illicit romantic love, even divorce. Luce would have cheered him on had it been Ofelia naked in the green-gold light of all those hot afternoons. Without trusting himself to reply, he turned and left.

  Charles Luce had accomplished with just a few words what time and desire and Valerie herself never could have. It was Luce’s vision of what they were doing that made David realize that unknowingly his stake in their affair had become perilously high. He could no longer view their relationship as simply a delightful meaningless idyll, for had it been he could have imagined giving it up with no more than a twinge of regret. Instead, the prospect of a world without Valerie was so unbearable that it frightened him. He could no longer conceive of returning to the cold gray loneliness that he knew now had been his lot before Valerie. It had taken the terrifying impersonal violence of the war to make him vulnerable to a woman at all, but once the barrier had been breeched, he was helpless to shut down his feelings once more.

  David had been experiencing the military mind for some years now, and he knew what was bound to happen — in fact, he was only surprised that it hadn’t happened already. In the normal course of events he would have been transferred to a post on the other side of the world, the Atlantic Fleet perhaps, but as it was he had something the army wanted desperately, a knowledge of Spanish and Tagalog both. Even this might not have mattered except that he really didn’t belong to the army, so as long as they needed him they weren’t forced to judge him as they would one of their own. Should word of his liaison reach Dewey, however, he would be snatched back army or no army. There was only one thing for it, he would somehow have to legitimize their relationship. Would Janice give him a divorce? He rather thought she might, for his new knowledge allowed him at last to see that he really hadn’t treated her very well. He would write her tonight after seeing Valerie. His career would be compromised, but he was beginning to think it was compromised anyway.

  “What do you mean, you want to marry me? It’s impossible, for any number of reasons. First of all, you’re already married and have children — you can’t just walk off and leave them. Second, I’m the better part of ten years older than you. David, David, what’s got into you? I trusted you not to force a discussion of this kind upon us.”

  “Janice will give me a divorce, I know she will,” he argued. “And the children will be better off by far with a full-time father anyway. They don’t even know who I am, and I certainly don’t know who they are. As for being older than I, so what? I love you, Valerie, I don’t care how old you are.”

  It might have been funny if it hadn’t been so serious. They were both naked and sitting up cross-legged facing each other. There was a sheen of green-gold on their lightly perspiring bodies, their faces were intent on each other.

  “Have you really thought of Janice? Don’t you realize the position in which a divorce puts a woman? Nice women don’t get divorces, you know. I don’t understand how you can contemplate it. David, you mustn’t romanticize me, either, any more than you romanticize divorce. If I had had any idea of what you were coming to feel, I’d have broken off our relationship long since. It’s been what? Three months now? You have no idea of who I am, nor do you want to know. Well, now I’ll tell you.

  “I was giving my favors, as they say, to Harry Rowe before Richard broke his back, and I think Richard may have known it. God knows he threw it up to me
often enough afterward, but then he accused me of bedding a number of other men as well during that period, even the Filipino houseboy. Let’s see, after Richard died there was the nice Spanish colonel who used to quote Alarcon and Cervantes to me, the German naturalist who prolonged his study of bird life here by some months, the British ship captain who used to ride upcountry to see me every time he docked in Manila, and finally the Filipino patriot who became a captain in the insurgents. I tell you this not to brag or to hurt you, but to save you. You say now that you don’t care, but you would. Give you time, and you would.”

  David stared at her. He had never considered how she had spent those years since her husband died. Common sense and the responsiveness of her body might have warned him that she wouldn’t have passed all of those years alone, but his very inexperience had left him incapable of visualizing any life for her beyond the one with him. “You waited until now to tell me all that?” he demanded.

  “I wouldn’t have told you at all except that you’ve forced me to. Delight in my body as I do in yours, and even love me if you will, but this talk of marriage and forever is idiocy. Now you are twenty-six and I am thirty-five, which is feasible, but when you are forty I shall be fifty, and that’s not so feasible. A man is considered still young and a woman old even at forty.” She made her characteristic impatient gesture with her hands. “Beyond that, I don’t love you.”

  David knew that there was something wrong with what she was saying, but he didn’t know what it was. She had shocked him by parading her lovers past him, all right, and hurt him when she said she didn’t love him, but he still wasn’t ready to give it all up. For months he had floated on a glorious sensual sea of desire: colors were brighter, smells more evocative, he was aware as never before of the early sun on his back, the flight of a bird, the feel of the soft warm evening breeze. He could close his eyes at any time and recreate the feel of her skin under his hand, the shape of a breast, the quicksilver of her laughter. Even now he wanted nothing more than to pull her to him and drown in her.