Seize the Fire (58 page)

Rage and grief seemed to press with a physical pain in his chest. "I wanted to keep you from that," he whispered. "I never wanted you to know." He reached for her, to cradle her in his arms and stroke her hair and comfort and protect her and make his own sweet princess whole again, make that terrible dull shadow go away—but she wouldn't let him touch her; she moved back, sitting anxiously up on her heels, like a deer ready to take flight.

"Please," she said. "I don't—I can't…I can't bear it."

He stared at her, feeling himself crumbling. There was something crushing him, forcing its way through the spreading cracks in his reason, like an ocean slipping and pouring and surging over a dike as it gave way.

He lifted his hand toward her, palm open, an offering—a plea—and she did not take it. He held it there until it began to shake. Until he could not see it for the blur in his eyes—he couldn't see anything at all; he couldn't hear; there was only a noise like a giant confusion in his head, splinters and twisted metal flying, his balance gone as the world pitched. He felt himself falling, hurled forward with faces in a tumbling mayhem around him, their features set in contorted screams. He curled into himself, and he had to get up, but he couldn't, he couldn't, he could hear his men shrieking but he couldn't help. The eruption of noise lasted on and on. He moaned and begged and buried his head, wanting the end of it—and then he somehow made his feet, still surrounded by the noise and confusion and torn bits of human beings. Sons and fathers and husbands and friends. He walked the streets of a desert town; angry, furious, his surviving crew like enraged wolves in a pack behind him, taking anything, anyone—they shook a frightened, dark-eyed woman, their dirks in her unveiled face:
Who mans the shore battery? Where do you hide them?
He cut her hair with savage strokes while they held her, chopped it off in blue-black hunks. He was crying as he did it. He was stalking through the dark, a predator with a personal grudge against his prey, a killer to his soul. When he found them, there was no quarter, only the sound of gunfire and the flash of bayonets. He was on his knees, his fists curled against the baked desert walls…

He heard himself. He sounded like a madman, yelling and sobbing and swearing. His hands were bleeding, torn by the rough granite of his father's house. He pressed his forehead to the wet stone, hiccuping, still whimpering curses under his breath.

She sat unmoving while he leaned against the wall on his knees. Her eyes were squeezed shut, her arms tight around herself. It made him cry to see her; he could not seem to stop crying.

He bent his head, his palms flat against the granite. "I don't know why," he said. "I don't know—why." He swallowed, trying to take control of his voice and failing. "Why?" He turned, slumped against the wall, tilting his head back. "I need you, Princess. Oh, Jesus Christ, I need you. What can I do to bring you back? What can I do?" The tears got in his mouth, filling it with salt, making the world swim around him in a shapeless blur. "I don't know what you saw back there…outside the cathedral—" He spoke blindly, to the muddy colors that sparkled before his eyes. "I know it must have been bad. I know you want to hide from it. But please—" He turned toward her, reached toward the dark wavering patch, blinking to make it into a human shape, and then let his hand fall back when she didn't move. "I don't have any right to ask, but come back to me. Can you come?"

She did not answer. He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them, wiped with his fist to clear them. When he could see her, the pinched and set expression on her face was answer enough. He lowered his head, held it between his hands.

"I'll tell you," he said to the ground. "I'll tell you something I've never told anyone." He took a choked breath. "I've tried not to think about it…I never could stand to think about it, but it keeps coming to get me now—I haven't got control of it anymore." A shudder seemed to take him, catching in his throat. "I've got all these commendations…a damned knighthood—and I shouldn't. I shouldn't. I should have been court-martialed." He squeezed his eyes shut, leaking tears. "I've lied to you. I told you I lost my men to a lucky shot—a corsair—do you remember what I told you? It's a lie. I made it up." He hesitated. He was shaking deep inside. "I've lied about it so long I've got to where I believe it myself. It gets all mixed up in my head. But it wasn't a lucky shot. It wasn't even a goddamned battle."

He chewed his lip, tasting blood and tears, concentrating on what he needed to say. She had not opened her eyes. He didn't know if she was listening, but he had to tell her. He had to make her understand that she wasn't alone in that wilderness, that he was there; he knew what it was like. He wiped at his face, wiped it again and then gave up as the blur kept coming.

"The town was called…Salah," he began carefully. That was true. That detail was true. He searched for another, feeling around the memory as if it were a festered wound. "Coast of Algiers." Another small truth. He tried to work up to larger ones. "It was supposed to be simple. I had orders to land a pair of diplomats. They were going to be diplomatic, y'see, and get a—" He attempted again to press the tears from his eyes with the heel of his hand. "A promise from the local bey to release his slaves and stop the trade. If that didn't work, and nobody was fool enough to think it would, my orders said I was to knock out the shore battery."

He stopped, searching for her again amid the blur. She seemed to be a small, motionless shape, a darkness with a pale oval above it.

"But you know," he said to her in a voice that held a tremor, "I was like you. I thought I knew best. Maybe I wasn't so naive as you, Princess—I knew what it would be like to go in under those shore guns—and I was bloody sick of guns. It just seemed to me those orders would get us all killed for no good reason. And it wasn't as if it was a real war; we weren't up against line-of-battle ships, where you could use some tactics. Where your brains might be good for something besides a target. But that was the way it was—we didn't have an enemy—you couldn't tell a pirate from a fishing boat out there, so they sent us against whatever they could see, and that was the shore batteries. Who cared if we sat there like a duck in the water until we were blown away? There were too damned many of us left over anyway after the French war. We were just a pin on some admiral's map so he could say he was fighting the Barbary pirates on his way to a peerage and a house in the country."

He chewed his knuckle and took a deep breath, staring into space, seeing memories in the shadows. He could hear the bitterness building in his voice, but that was only fear—only a way to protect himself, to make excuses.

"We went ahead, though," he said "What else are you going to do?" He shook his head blindly. "Argue? I wish I'd had the sense. I wish I'd resigned my commission right there. But I had a good crew; my second command, been with 'em at Baltimore and Lake Erie—I doubt the thought even crossed my mind. That's the worst of fighting—you hate what you're doing, you hate what it makes of you…and you love the men beside you. You don't want to leave them. You think about who might be put over them in your place, and whether he'd be a gentleman fool and sacrifice your men for nothing; whether he'd see that they got fed properly and kept onions against the scurvy and smoked the hold for rats." He stared silently into space. "You think a lot on a ship. Day and night, sitting there by yourself in the captain's cabin and trying to plot some way to carry out your orders and keep your bloody crew and yourself alive."

He bit his lip. The tears rose again, and for a few moments speaking was beyond him. He was ashamed; he ought to have some semblance of manhood left, but the mask was just more than he could summon.

"I failed," he said explosively. Another truth. "I lost them. Two hundred out of three. I made a mistake. I went ashore with the delegation, to translate. I shouldn't have; it's against regulations, but I thought I could move things forward. And I did. We came off with an agreement and an invitation to anchor in the harbor and oversee the release of the Christian slaves personally." He bent his head. "I was pretty proud of myself. I'd done it: I knew how to talk to those orientals, y'see; I knew how to put the fear of God in 'em. I'm such an expert," he said bitterly. "So I bring her in…right under the gun battery like a deuced fool. I know we can take it out at that range, the battery and the whole town, too. I'm not worried they'll fire on us."

He looked up at the dark bulk of the house, seeing another place. The scene began to pour in on him: the heat rising from the water and shore in pale waves; the little city itself, mud-colored, huddled on the bank above the harbor.

"It's dawn," he mumbled. "I'm not quite asleep; it's too hot to sleep. The first shot sounds like pistol-fire." He stopped. "That's what I thought: pistol-fire."

He shivered suddenly, wetting his lips and staring.

"It's not. There's another, and a whump and a splash, and that's a sound I know—that's a ball hitting water. And them I'm on deck—I'm not even dressed; I've got on breeches and boots and everything's chaos; they're clearing the decks and rolling out the guns—I think I gave that order; I must have—and the watch officer keeps shouting at me and pointing at the shore—but I know that; I know they're firing, does he think I'm deaf and blind? I want him to run out the guns on the seaward side for ballast, to raise the angle of fire, but he's not listening, he's just pointing; and finally I take the glass and look…and I see it…"

He swallowed. His vision clouded.

"…what they've done. In the night, they've brought the slaves and staked them out under the gun battery. Like dogs. There are hundreds of 'em—women…children…chained along the bank: oh, Jesus, some of 'em trying to pull away, some of 'em trying to dig trenches with their hands, some of 'em just sitting there with their heads on their knees, and those guns a yard above them, so I can't open fire."

He stared at nothing.

"I used to be a slave." The shivering in him had become a shudder. "I used to wear that crescent…that filthy damned crescent…" He locked his hands against the tremor. "God help me, I used to be one of them."

He could feel himself cracking, the boundary between remembrance and reality wavering, letting in the nightmare.

"We have to turn back," he moaned. "We have to get out of here. Can't fire. Can't fire." He took a trembling breath. "I just can't. But they've got the range; they're walking in on us from both sides, sighting all those guns together—spray all around…while we drift down on the anchor they hit the foremast and take out half the men at the capstan. And the bos'n's just got another crew heaving on it, we've got the stuns'l set, but she won't turn; she won't turn; there's no breeze—we've got no way on…and they hit us. Everything at once. Everything; every gun in the battery."

He put his hands over his ears, feeling again the lunge and stagger of the ship as it hurled him down in an explosion of splintering sound. He fought to keep himself anchored in reality instead of that hallucination. He had to hang on. This time he had to keep a grip on the present, the place he wanted to be. Had to be. But he could see his men as they died, and he cried again and swore a little and saw himself trying to count who was still standing amid the wreckage…one, two; six; nine—fumbling, like a child trying to reclaim scattered marbles.

The trembling numbness twisted into something else. "Goddamned bloody cowards." He swallowed a sob. "I'll kill 'em all." In his mind he was screaming it. He lifted his arm and wiped his face. "I didn't care then. Didn't give a damn for the slaves or the ship or anything—I just wanted to pound that battery to ribbons. We did it—put her back in position, and opened fire with everything we had left. I couldn't see anything for the smoke; I don't think we even had a gunner—we didn't aim; we just fired and kept firing; three men at each gun, and I carried powder until we ran out of ready cartridges."

He fell silent. Tears ran down over his hands as he held them, fists against his mouth.

"Two hundred killed," he said at length. His voice cracked. "My men." He groaned softly. "But we'd dismounted every gun in that battery, and the slaves…oh, God." He closed his eyes. "There were a few left. Maybe ten. I don't know; I didn't care. When we went ashore I was looking for the Algerian gunners, but there weren't any. Not a single corpse at those guns. They'd all run when we started to fire back. And the townspeople hid them." His jaw grew tight with anguish. "But we found 'em." He gulped a sobbing breath. "I wouldn't leave until we found them."

He laid his head on his arms, rocking gently, grieving. He couldn't see anything; the tears made a shimmer of dark and light in his eyes, wet his lips and his hands and his sleeves. His body ached. His chest seemed full. Every breath was a jerky effort to push past the jam in his throat.

But he made himself stand up. She still sat huddled in the same place, her head bowed—not looking at him. He fell on his knees in front of her and took her face between his hands.

She lifted dull, dry eyes.

"Princess." His voice had a plea in it. "Do you understand? I don't know why the world is like this; I don't know why we go out to fight something that's wrong—something so much bigger than we are, something that ought to be fought—and end up creating a thousand little horrors to stop a huge one. Slavery's wrong. Tyranny's wrong. You weren't stupid or naive or trivial to believe that. You're right. Maybe your revolution was right. You just…didn't understand how real it would be."

He pressed her skin, spread his wet fingers against her delicate cheekbones and looked up into her eyes with his face close to hers. He wanted her to listen, to hear him through the wall.

"You can be a coward like me, Princess. For thirteen years I've been running from this; I've been hiding from what I did. From myself. I wish I could say it wasn't my fault…that it would have happened anyway; any other ship and captain would have done the same. And maybe that's even true." He swallowed. "But it was me, Princess. I gave those orders; I made those choices, the same way you made yours. People died for it—and I did. I wished I had. I couldn't see why I'd been allowed to live after that." His voice fractured and failed. He took a breath, straining for control of it. "Then you came—and our island—and I started to feel again. I started to think there was a reason I'd survived—that you were my reason. I thought it was to protect you. But nothing's so simple, is it? I didn't protect you. Here you are hurting so bad, living like this, and I can't even help. l'm just here, and I need you. That's all it comes to. I need you to be brave when I haven't been. I know how hard it is. Look at me. Look at what's happened to me, facing this and telling you—I'm a shambles; Jesus, I feel like I'll be crying for the next century." He bent his head, pressed his tear-wet cheek to her dry, cold skin. "But I'm here. I'm not hiding anymore. Princess—I'm asking you. Come back to me. You're my life."