Yes, ask me again why I love the sea, and I will tell you that warm nights below deck, my voice raised in the tradition of the fine actors of our day, with Bren’s eyes bright with interest—these are the things that make sailing with a pirate vessel sublime.
I must admit, I find no romance in the dirty work that we do. The Bandit is as its name suggests: not a bloodthirsty band of blackguards but merely robbers, assaulting vessels for their gold and not for their lives. For that reason, we board ships masked, and though we must shoot to kill to protect our livelihoods, we don’t take any joy in it. I myself hang back at the wheel during our raids, ready to steer us away should calamity befall us.
From our quarry we sail then to the outcast island of a group of aborigines, among whom lives the wealthy M. Gaulle. He’s a Frenchman, a fence, and he pays well for the trinkets we supply him. With coin in hand, we sail back to port, enter town, and buy up the supplies and all else we need for our next journey. Sometimes, when we’ve done well, I’ll have the extra funds to take in a play or buy a new book or two before we set sail again.
I convinced Bren, one time, to join me at a play. It was Shakespeare, a comedic romp with mistaken identities, forlorn lovers, and singing clowns, and Bren was bored to tears. I must admit I was surprised. He’d always been so enthralled by the readings I did for him. I’d thought he might have the taste for theater without knowing it, without being able to read the books himself. But he yawned, rolled his eyes, and leaned over at me to whisper in my ear, “Tom, this is foolishness.” Perhaps I should have taken him to see a tragedy instead.
I asked him later why it was he enjoyed my readings but not those of professional actors who had honed their craft. He rolled his eyes and reddened, blowing air out the side of his mouth. “That is—” he said before breaking off, his eyes wandering to the spire of a church we were passing by. When I pressed again, he remained evasive.
So unlike Bren was this—so counter to the blunt, fresh honesty that made him such a joy—that I resolved to test him. On the sly, just before we set out again, I bought a copy of that play, tucking it into my satchel along with the other purchases I’d made as we boarded in preparation for our next voyage.
For the first several nights, I did nothing, waiting for the memory of the play to disappear from his mind. And indeed, in those days he too seemed to be avoiding my presence. His feet slipped easily through the rungs of the ladder, his eyes remained fixed on the horizon, and the wind tousled his dirty hair like the caress of a loved one. The West Wind, I thought, caressing his son. The thought made me laugh, and it eased the sudden, poignant ache in my stomach I’d begun to feel in Bren’s presence.
When had it started, this peculiar feeling? I thought perhaps I’d always lived with it, but lately it was intensifying, making my chest ache and my fingers burn with untold want whenever I saw him. I found my eyes following the line of his muscles as he worked a rope or repaired a sail, each ripple of the tight, tanned flesh hurting me deeper and deeper inside, until I thought I might double over and need to be taken below.
I turned away, looked out to sea, and tried to inhale the cleansing air of the ocean, to concentrate on the sky and the waves and anything that wasn’t the movement of Bren’s body, the way his teeth grazed along his lower lip when he concentrated.
Something had been born in me, I thought then, that could not be quelled. Like a layer of honey, it lay thick along my insides, slowing me, making every step acutely painful. At every step Bren’s image dogged me until I was afraid of that moment of testing him, afraid that I might find myself the one tested. I prayed that the winds not leave us room for long nights together deep in the bunks, where the other crewmen could not see. Where I might be tempted to reach out and do something for which there was no precedent, no excuse.
But the winds have their own master, and they do not listen to my prayers. And that, again, is a reason I love the sea. It takes me into these moments when I cannot turn back, but simply must sail out the storms with the fierce resolve of a warrior. I’ve learned well from my pirate brethren. And when that moment came, I faced it.
We sighted a vessel on our fifth night out to sea and resolved to board it. As was usual, I stayed behind on the deck as our ship’s band armed and masked themselves and prepared to loot the ship. Bren had donned a mask and hood through which only his eyes gleamed and a few strands of wild dark hair protruded. He had a cutlass by his side, the blade curving silver and dangerous through the twilight dimness.
“Shall I bring you back a pocket watch?” he said, his voice muffled beneath the mask. “Or perhaps a pretty jewel for your neck?” He winked at me, kneeling to wind a cord of rope round his waist.
“Bring yourself back to me,” I replied, “in one piece. That’s all I ask.”
Bren laughed. Even from beneath the mask, his smile stretched wide and pleased. “I’m grateful,” he said. “Thanks to you, even being an orphan, I know what it is to have a mother.”
“Bren!” I laid a fist into his arm, light but solid. He winced.
“Good blow,” he said. “That’ll bruise.”
I glowered at him. “I’m not, I won’t be, your mother.”
“It’s a good thing, too.” He rubbed his arm. “I’d break your heart.”
His gloved fingers landed atop my head, patting it gently, and for a moment his eyes just bored into mine. He was breaking my heart already.
The vessel tried to outrun us, but we had a good wind at our backs, and before long we’d brought the Bandit alongside her. On deck along with the sailors and crew were a number of well-dressed passengers, men decorated with military insignias, some even with muskets at their sides. I bit my lip, watching warily from my post behind the wheel. It was the moment of uncertainty that always came—what if we boarded a ship that was a match for us? What if we took losses? It had happened before—poor Bones, a scrappy fighter who’d caught a bullet meant for the captain, and Silvio, who’d been tossed over the railing by a mountain of a guard—but not often. I still wasn’t used to it, and I never wanted to see it happen again. I raised my spyglass to follow the battle, trying to keep my hands from trembling.
The captain and his deputies kept the men on deck busy in a clash of swords and shouts, as Bren and the others let down their ropes and shimmied down the side of the boat into the portholes. Screams came up from the cabins where they entered, and I lowered the aim of my glass, trying to see into the tiny windows, but it was futile. Once the crew above deck had been disarmed, our band began to emerge from within the ship, laden with gold and jewels, one with a lady’s tiara perched atop his head. I laughed aloud to see him, then again when he nearly lost it to the ocean as he leaped between their deck and ours.
Then came Bren.
He was clutching his arm, staggering, his eyes thin slits beneath his hood. His shoulder hung slack, and from his fingertips dripped a steady trail of blood behind him. I gave a cry, and my heart sped up into my throat. Bren was hurt. Bren. Bren was hurt, and there wasn’t a thing I could do. My fingers clutched the brass of my spyglass, and the words whirled endlessly in my mind.
That fool. He couldn’t even come back in one piece as I’d asked of him.
And as I watched, as my horror and my aching heart drowned out all my good sense, I saw a man behind him peek out from behind a mast. And aim a musket. I felt the scream rip from my throat before I even heard it.
A flash—a noise—and why had I not gone aboard, why was I not there to leap in front of him, to be the one to protect him? I could do nothing, I could only stand here and watch through my foolish spyglass as a musket ball whirred through the air at point-blank range and—
Bren was still standing. The captain had grabbed the man’s arm, forcing it down. The musket had shot through the planks of the deck. I could tell through my spyglass that the captain was speaking, but beneath his mask it was unclear just what he was saying. Whatever it was, though, it made the passenger who’d taken aim at Bren tremble. Bren
himself found his bearings and began to retreat toward our boat.
I ran down from the wheel to greet him. We locked eyes, and he tore off his mask to call my name. His face was white, and I could see as he stumbled into my arms how badly his arm had been wrenched, how deep was the cut of the knife that had let loose the flow of blood still dripping onto the deck between our shoes.
“You should have heard it, Tom,” he said weakly. “Captain… he said to ’im, ‘Don’t touch my son…’.”
And then his eyes rolled up into his head, and he was falling, limp, into my arms.
I hoisted him over my shoulder and brought him below deck. I was no doctor, but I could tell he wouldn’t be using that arm for a good time. I set it as best I could, then returned above deck. I had a post to maintain and mates to support. As much as my heart remained with Bren in the cabin, I had a place to be. But as we reboarded and broke away from the vessel, soaring soft and swift into the night, I saw in my mind’s eye only that broken stagger, the apology in his eyes, and the lurch of my heart into my gut at the momentary thought I would lose him. Bren had taken hold of my heart and clenched it deep within his fist, and I knew irrevocably then that what I felt was greater and deeper than the horizon.
In the morning, when we were alone again on a glassy sea and the sun was furnace bright above us, Bren related to me the tale. A bit of hard luck, he said, and bad timing—the man had gotten to the knife before Bren could draw his sword, and before Bren struck him, he’d managed to drive the knife into the heart of the bruise I’d given him. He had hauled the man’s body to the side, head spinning with fear and pain, and it was then that he felt the sick grinding of bone and known he’d wrenched it out of place. Between the pain and the excitement, he said, he’d misjudged his own strength, and paid dearly for it.
“I’m sorry for my part in it,” I told him, “but it serves you right, saying such to me. I don’t slit men’s throats, Bren, but I’m still a man, and I’m certainly not your mother.”
“Right,” he said, his voice rueful. “I’ll not forget that again.”
There was something drained in his speech that jarred me. “Bren? You’re not feverish, are you?”
He shook his head. “I’m going to lift the sail.”
“You can’t use that arm!” I protested, but he had sprinted across the deck, and if he could hear me, he showed no sign of it.
I could have told him what came next: one mighty haul and he was reeling, grabbing his wounded arm, green with pain and crying out, staggering. He fell back against the deck, cursing, and forced himself up to give it another go. This time, the others wouldn’t allow him, and they pushed him back to the railing. Discouraged, surly, he curled up there, bad arm clutched to his chest, good one curled about his knees, watching and glaring at the activity that surrounded him.
My task at that moment was toting the last bit of our take down to the cargo bays. We would be sailing now for M. Gaulle’s island palace, where he would sort it and give us our coin. On the way up, I found a length of sturdy cloth and thought to make a sling for Bren’s injured arm. Back on deck, I came to crouch before him and bid him stay still while I wrapped the cloth around his torso.
“I feel like a weakling,” he said.
I tied the corners of the cloth tight behind his neck. “Fear not, Bren; you’re many things, but a weakling is not one of them.”
He lowered his eyes.
“Why so glum?” I asked. “Tis hardly the first time you’ve been wounded.”
“The first in a long time, though,” he said. I reflected on it, and he was right—he’d told me of the times he’d broken bones as a child, when he’d been laid out in bad shape in the captain’s cabin, forced to lie in bed for weeks on end. But I wasn’t there, still a prisoner of my mother’s house, and he often said that had I been there, he’d have forced me to sit by his bedside and read him every book in my possession. Somehow the image of Bren, young and laid up in the captain’s chambers, had become as much a part of my memory as my own dreary upbringing. But as long as I’d known him, he’d been untouchable, spry and strong. The cut of this seafarer’s knife must have gone deeper than merely nicking his bone.
“I envy you, Tom,” he said abruptly.
My brow furrowed. “How’s that?”
“Well.” Bren’s foot had started to waggle, sliding under a piece of rope that lay limp on the deck and lifting it. It was an oddly mesmerizing motion. “I’ve only ever known this boat. But you were born and raised on land. You had an education. You can pick up a book and ride all those letters into another world. I can’t do that. My mind is too filled with practical things. Without the use of my arms and legs, all I have is this endless sea to look on. But you can see Greek soldiers and ancient gods on a page that’s only white and black scratchings to me.” He smiled sadly. “D’you know just how enviable that is, Thomas Bay? I wonder.”
I was surprised he remembered my surname. My mother was Delilah Bay, the woman who’d kept me locked up until I’d grown old and rebellious enough to run away to the harbor and stow away on a little ship whose name was the Bandit.
But then again, Bren’d always known me best, out of everyone on that ship, the captain and the bosun and the dozen or so sea rats who ran the day-to-day, the cooks and the launderer and the old man whose sole job it was to put out the lanterns at night—out of everyone, for me it all stopped and started with Bren. He was the ship itself, the spirit of it, and the wind that moved it. And I loved him as I did the ship, as I did the ocean. More than that, even. I loved him in a way I was just starting to understand.
“’S not so great, books,” I said, my voice starting with a bit of a tremble. “Thing about books is, you go into those worlds, then you come back wanting them to be real. You want things you can’t have, like to fight a dragon, or to… to find a princess in a tower, or to be blessed with the powers of the old gods, and you can’t, because they aren’t real.”
Bren watched my face carefully, and when I stopped speaking, when my lip turned down despite me, he lifted up his fingertips to tuck it up again.
“Some things you can have,” he said. “Some things are real, and you just think you can’t have ’em. What’s a dragon but a big lizard? Bet you could find one and spike it through if we sailed south. Then we could eat it for dinner.”
I laughed. He had a way of making everything seem possible.
“And who needs a princess in a tower? You’ve got all the time in the world when we’re on shore to win the favor of any girl who catches your eye.”
It had never occurred to me to look for a girl whose favor I’d want to win. Embarrassed, I finished up the sling and tightened it, avoiding his eyes. “And the powers of the old gods?”
Bren smiled in a way that made the world feel full of sunshine. “Why, Tom,” he said, “just because it’s never happened before doesn’t mean it could never be.”
I stared at the round lips, watching the mystifying words take shape, and at once I was brought in as though an anchor pulled from the depths. My mouth tingled with a touch I had yet to feel, and my vision was blurring beneath a flutter of eyelashes. I very nearly thought I saw Bren’s eyes close; I know I felt his hand land on my shoulder and hold there, a leaden weight. There was neither air nor time between us. I was under a spell.
“Bluebeard’s bones!”
A call from above. A skinny pirate with a weathered face, a man we knew as Exeter, was letting down the sails. Bren jumped to his feet. “What is it, Ex?”
“Blasted wind’s died! Can’t you feel it? Nary a motion in the air.”
Bren lifted his face to the side, frowned, turned the other way. “Blast!” he declared, then hurried to the rigging to help Exeter with the sail, pulling away the sling I’d so carefully fitted to him. In another moment, he was crying out in pain, and he reeled and turned away, clutching his arm. I should have stopped him, should have shouted at him for disregarding the sling, but I too had forgotten myself in shock. Ho
w very near we’d come to the kiss of lovers! In full view of Exeter and the others on deck! How could I have forgotten myself so completely?
I wandered back to the bunk in a dizzy haze of uselessness. Had they called for my help, I might not have noticed, but what could I do, row the ship as though it were a Viking longboat? Not on my best day, and today I was thoroughly distracted. The kiss of lovers. Had I even before considered that it was possible to have desire for a man the way the poets of old did for their women? And yet, it was the best explanation for the distraction that had been pulling at me for Lord knew how long.
And it explained, too, the tight, poignant feeling that lingered in my gut lately, the stiffness that had beset me. I knew what that organ was for, but aside from easing the tension and helping me to sleep on a hot night, I’d found no use for it. I’d never before tied that feeling to the desire for another person. Now, I thought, I knew at last what I wanted.
I had no idea, though, if Bren wanted it too. I now had more than one test to give him.
The wind remained dead throughout the day, and even from the depths of the crew quarters, the stillness touched my bones. I was warm now with the anticipation as well as the dead seas. Bren was above deck, despite his injury, doubtless trying to find some way to help. I imagined Bren, the foundling son of the West Wind, pleading in vain with his invisible father to breathe, if only once, and send us on our way. With every moment the boat did not rock to life, I knew, the odds became greater and greater that Bren would come below exhausted and frustrated. He took the losses of the ship as his own losses, and my heart hurt for him.
When he returned, though, there was a wistfulness in his eyes, and instead of collapsing on his own bunk, he came to mine and clasped my hands. He looked possessed, desperate.
“Read to me, Tom,” he said. “Take me to one of your worlds.”
Cross Bones Page 5