an ill-sheathed knife
by skazka

an ill-sheathed knife

skazka

Summary

Scenes from the private affairs of one Cornelius Hickey.

Notes

Imported from Archive of Our Own. Original work id: 16945071.

Chapter 1

He'd make a rather poor Irishman if this is how they carry on. He'd known an Irishman once, a clever and discontented good-for-nothing, so perhaps he is carrying on the tradition after all. Captain Crozier is an odd creature, with little natural dignity about him, none of the qualities that make men follow. His breath smells like whiskey, and he's never happier than when his prick is in Cornelius' hand. Hickey eases him off gently, slowly, like handling something very precious; Crozier weeps against his shoulder afterward, begs his forgiveness, and Hickey grants it. In the morning he will grant him more than that, then be off to the usual drudgery.

Hickey studies his manners, the way he holds a glass or tugs the stopper from a decanter. He can't stand the taste of whiskey, but he'll drink what Crozier rations for him and be grateful for the gesture. It's once the generous gestures dry up that he'll be in trouble.

(There are no more prim interventions from Irving after that, no offers of succor and cure. When he brings him the woman, the witch in her skin coats, Crozier does not have him thrown down and flogged before the entire crew like a great mock-rape — he excuses him. How good it tastes, that sly sneaking swallow of recognition before officers and AB's alike — a man could grow addicted to that taste.)

"What news from below?"

He'd taken him for a sour, buttoned-up sort of man, but drink has turned him florid and merry and forgiving — easily charmed, easily delighted. Hickey closes the door behind him with a nudge of his body, and tugs at his neckcloth.

"They've left the witch alone, for the most part, if that's what you're asking. She's sleeping."

Crozier wants it both ways, to be both brute and hero. "Remind them that she's a free woman, and not to be harmed."

"I'll do my best, sir.

Crozier brushes the hair back from his forehead, and presses a kiss there, like a lump of burning coal.

He has a wonderful, soft body beneath all his clothes — not worked into ropiness by exercise, from clambering about in the rigging, but softened and abstract, dimples in his haunches and a soft throat. What a pleasure to milk him dry, to bugger him until his cock goes soft and draw it back to standing with his mouth. In return, he will take Crozier's preferments and Crozier will keep mum about it all, the late-night summons and the trifling excuses; he will eat up the substance of him, gladly. If they were two men on dry land, it would be easier than ever. Crozier's weaknesses stand out like a birthmark on his face.

The balance is perilous. No able seaman, no matter how simple, could fail to recognize the significance of their relative numbers — and the significance of a half-dozen Royal Marines bristling with rifles and shot, there to maintain the earnest division between mere men and their betters. Hickey can go where Crozier cannot — more than he is hated, he is simply ignored. He can undertake experiments of his own to measure moods and tempers — Hickey is like a doctor in that, a scholar of human hearts.

*

Crozier likes a little chat before getting down to their business, and sometimes after. Lesser men make do with the alcoves and alleys the ships' stores provide them — a fierce frigging backed up against a bale of slops, a stolen moment between watches, trysts in the coal hole or the dead room. The captain has a narrow bed with its richly carved rail — perfect for a questing hand to seize on,

Hickey rests pleasantly against him, with his jacket unbuttoned and his neckcloth askew. Crozier's arm is hooked over his side — he's taken Hickey's cock in his hand and plays with it idly, more for distraction than pleasure. Hickey hums a church tune; Crozier presses his nose to his buzzing throat and breathes spiritous breaths.

The drink has made him pleasant company tonight,

"Where will you go, when all this is over and done with?"

"I'll take my pay and be off, I suspect." Is Crozier the sort of man who likes to think himself only tolerated? A man could turn a cozy profit, tolerating men of Crozier's caliber.

"You don't have an aged mother to look after, I take it. No wife?"

"No, I haven't, sir."

"What sort of people were they, your mother and father?"

What does Crozier think of him? What manner of man does Crozier think he's doing with? Perhaps he has romantic notions of displaced orphans, poor waifs schooled up to sail in Her Majesty's Navy. Does he think it's some grand story that's sent Hickey off to sea? The man who is Hickey possesses a private romance of his own, a compass-needle in his heart that is always jostling toward warmer climes, but telling Crozier the truth of that will only get him lashed.

Hickey allows himself to grow guarded and pained, and lets his eyes grow tragic. "Poor ones, sir."

Crozier's eyebrow has a way of hopping up when Hickey has said the wrong thing.

"I understand. You're a young man yet. You'll do well for yourself, with three years' double pay and no wife."

He's probing him for the sake of his own vanity. Crozier may be Irish, but at least he isn't poor. He can feel superior in that.

"I'm sure you have a great many stories to tell yourself, sir. You grew up in Ireland properly, not like me."

"I went to sea at ten." To hear him tell it, at ten Francis Crozier had been a stripling boy fresh from the nursery, still sucking his thumb — and the Navy had made a man of him. At ten the man who is Hickey had been sweating as a piecer for nearly a year. "As a midshipman, with the Briton, we went round Cape Horn, docked in Valparaiso, then went off again hunting down wayward Americans. The Galapagos, the Marquesas."

"You saw the Marquesas?" Hickey cannot help betraying his interest, and it gives Crozier pleasure to catch that glint of earnestness.

"We docked at Nukuheva and met the locals. I brought back a few articles of interest." Crozier licks his lips. "We came across the last of the Bounty mutineers. It wasn't on our charts, but they sent some men out in a wooden canoe to say hello. No more than fifty men and women — a wretched collection. Sons and daughters of the mutineers, and one old man — no older than I am now, though, I reckon. I shook the hand of Thursday October Christian."

Hickey is gratified by this, too. "Did he take after his father?"

"More like his mother, I should say, and brown as a nut. He made a perfect savage." Crozier seems uncomfortably tickled by the recollection — oh, to be privy to whatever it is he's remembering now. "They invited us ashore to eat with them, there on the beach. I burned my fingers on a roast yam."

Hickey takes Crozier's hand to his mouth. "It sounds like a charmed place. I'd always meant to go there, only I wound up here instead."

The matter of the Bounty had been the great romance of his imaginings — for if the well-run factory is like a ship, a ship is like a world entire, with every man in his rank and placement. There's not a single scene nor set-piece that hasn't been played out in front of the hungry eyes and hot imaginings of the man who is now Cornelius Hickey — crystal caverns and Otaheitian plantations, duty and pleasure, liberty and service. You only had to turn the stories inside-out to find their true meaning — the thrill of power, of armed insurrection, of turned tables. Captain Bligh with his arms bound behind him, paraded in his nightshirt, utterly subjected.

Cornelius Hickey, the original bearer of his papers, had spoken only of beautiful sands and beautiful women. He was a simpler man, with simpler pleasures.

Crozier wiggles his fingers. "The elder Christian must have lived out his last days like a prince, surrounded in breadfruit and black-haired women."

"So you take Christian's part. That's a dangerous stance, for a captain yourself." Hickey can't help but tease him. The man is meant to be teased; he's made for it. He's like a painted cherub, slightly rumpled.

"How can I? Yet I see a caution in it."

"Very wise."

"Meat and women aren't everything. He was shot in the back, you know, afterward."

Crozier must have felt him stir, even if he can scarcely know why. He obliges to suck him off, as payment for his tolerance. It is still a novel pleasure, having Crozier down between his legs — Hickey presses his thumb between Crozier's lips, nicking the gap between his front teeth with a fingernail, and Crozier sucks his finger with unmistakable and faintly absurd lewdness.

Crozier does things that no man would ever do sober, and Hickey dotes on him for it. The captain thinks that what passes between them is something Hickey merely tolerates — that he permits it, with gritted teeth. It's impossible to be flattered by that, but nevertheless, it's amusing — he's painted him in as long-suffering, but no man could suffer here in a snug and toasty cabin with a basin and a mattress and a carpet on the floor. Hickey shuts his eyes and settles into the pleasures of a wet mouth and a soft hand.

The surrounding ice grinds out a sudden dreadful note, like a broken hand-organ — the ship settles back with a violent lurch, and the pair of them shift uneasily on the bed. Crozier raises his head with a guilty look as if nature itself has discovered them in a clinch.

"Are we to walk for it, then?" Hickey asks the question softly as if he is uneasier than he feels.

Crozier breathes a maudlin exhale. "Very likely."

"We'd better go sooner, rather than later."

Crozier lays his head upon Hickey's thigh, and Hickey strokes the warm flushed skin of his nape.

*

Later they can only meet by frantic chance, Crozier storming around belowdecks like a terror and Hickey darting from task to task taking his own small reckoning of supplies and gear. Hickey corners his captain on the orlop deck, and if Crozier had a closer eye he'd have noticed the wood-shavings on his sleeves, the red mark of the knife's handle pressed into his palm. Something is wrong, and Hickey means to determine what that is.

"The men have found a great cache of cylinders. Brass cylinders. It was my understanding that we were meant to be leaving them behind, not keeping them for a rainy day."

"If we were all limited by the extent of your understanding, Mr. Hickey, I daresay we wouldn't be here. Sir John was not in the habit of leaving them behind," Crozier says, stiffly careless. "He thought it too much like surrender."

Hickey cannot repress his own flaring temper. "To who, sir?"

"To the elements. Or to Barrow, or Ross. I could never be sure. I shouldn't talk about him to you, not like this. I know how the men felt about him."

"Do you ever pause to think how the men feel about you? How they will feel if they learn of this?"

"I'll have less jaw from you, Mr. Hickey. The cylinders are only useful if they are found, and we have no assurance that they will be. I've taken enough on that theme from Commander Fitzjames." Fitzjames will brook no contradiction — he is young and dignified, and the men admire him, so Crozier can only hate him and Hickey makes as if to hate him accordingly. Crozier slouches sulkishly in the narrow passage, pressing his hands through his hair, and lowers his voice. "There's the matter of Irving."

Their discoverer. Hickey lowers his voice and squares his body against anyone else who might creep along in the corridor to hear.

"Has he said something?"

"Not to his fellow officers, no. But he'll want a full accounting before we set out."

To raise a hand against an officer is to contravene the Articles, whether to strike or to caress. Francis' hair hasn't Billy's astonishing curls, its gilt-edged radiance by lamplight, but it is soft and damp with sweat and when Hickey places his hand on the back of Crozier's head it sends him still and quiet as if astonished by touch. Billy must be spittingly jealous. He has been saved one flogging, and now Hickey may spare him another.

"You'll have to tell him what I was doing in your rooms," he says. Surely Crozier hasn't forgotten how to lie.

Crozier's expression is opaque.

"There's a seam come unstuck along the window-frame, in the great cabin. It ought to be sealed up before we depart. Come back tomorrow night, after watch."

Hickey's whole heart tightens like a fist, with something like love and something like apprehension. He will be cut loose if the situation calls for it; it is urgent, deeply urgent that all Crozier's officers back him now, and that there are no reservations, no hold-outs. If it comes between saving Hickey's skin and saving his damned self-murdering march to Back River, he'll make the broader, grander choice — and Hickey will be left whimpering

*

They've walked for it, after all, and the mutiny has followed them all this way. The Esqui girl and her mad high priest are out there wandering the ice. Hickey can be no closer to the wilderness than he is here and now.

The ugly split across Crozier's nose lends him the look of a prizefighter; Hickey settles in next to him, perching atop a chest of shot. Crozier is bound at the wrists, though from the looks of his fingers he needn't be. His hands will blacken and freeze, left as they are.

Hickey tugs a pair of mitts over those stiff and bluing fingers and straightens the bindings on Crozier's wrists. Which of the men tied them? Which of the men had dared? He will feed him and dress him and then they will reckon with this infinite space in which they find themselves, this emptiness. Crozier's eyes are shut when he finishes, not with the nearness of death but with queer resignation. Perhaps he recognizes the fur and canvas that furnish his newest blanket, tucked in nicely around the neck, and cannot bear it. Hickey smooths the hairy edge of Commander Fitzjames' coat and feels the burr of whiskers on Crozier's chin.

"My own Fletcher Christian," Crozier says, with rueful affection. He has fewer teeth than he once did, and the scurvy has bitten him sorely.

"How could I leave you?"

"You'll have to hang me. You can't risk a division; even you know that. Your men's hearts must be yours alone."

Now he's playing sober and contrite — just as they always do, these men, Irish or English, married or bachelor. He will profess his innocence and bawl like a lamb but he will pay, like all men pay.

"I own more than their hearts, Francis."

This is not quite an unalloyed act of kindness. Mr. Goodsir has gone from this earth, but he has left all his wonderful tools behind — Hickey wipes away the veil of blood and grime from Crozier's features, and sets to work on what he has brought with him, tucked away in a boot or a tin cup for greater portability.

Crozier's eyes open when Hickey's fingers brush his lips, but he does not resist what is placed between his lips.

Hickey nurses him on little slivers of meat, little parcels of yellow fat — shockingly yellow, though there is scant little of it. Hickey brings him brains to eat, and red raw flesh; he cracks the bones for him and gouges out the shining brown marrow. Hickey sucks the sweetness off his fingertips, and kisses it away from Crozier's lips. What is this, but love? They know one another for what they are.

"You've killed me," Crozier says, against his mouth. "As sure as if you'd blown a bullet through my head. Damn you, you've killed us all."

"No, no. I've spared you. We'll go together someplace, someplace no one knows us. The Canadas, or Mexico."

Crozier laughs ruefully, puffing ghostly breath. "Splendid. We'll work the land together."

"Don't be bitter with me." Hickey flosses his fingers through Crozier's frozen hair and wipes the fresh-crusted blood from the bridge of his nose with his frozen cuff. "Tell me again about the Marquesas, Francis. I want to hear it."

End Notes

Nothing is more festive than imperialism and sad blowjobs -- thank you so much for your stellar letter this year, and happy Yuletide.