The Burning White (16 page)

Come to think of it, perhaps many
had
denounced Gavin for the fraud he was, but his circle of privilege had kept those cries from his ears.

“Kin I touch it?” Gunner asked.

“Probably kill us both if you do. Go ahead.”

What if Grinwoody—traitorous monster that he was—while certainly an asshole, was fundamentally correct? Gavin—nice and charismatic man that he was—had certainly served a monstrous function. All of the empire’s power was predicated on its control of drafters: identifying, training, distributing, and then eliminating them.

Eliminating them? No. Executing them for crimes they
might
commit.

The Chromeria did this by defining morality and medicine for their own ends. They said that like dementia striking an elderly person, breaking the halo has no moral dimension. It’s a sad, natural process that leads to a person acting contrary to their own character, and in ways that are terribly destructive. Gavin had fought wights; he’d seen the destruction they could wreak.
Could.

But the Chromeria coupled this with a moral injunction. It’s not wrong to break the halo, but it’s wrong to run if you do. It’s good, they said, to die right before you do. They said it’s not suicide to volunteer to be killed. It’s serving your community.

They defined Life as one of Orholam’s Great Gifts, but carved out a remarkable exception. To most of the world, a drafter who’d served their community for one or two decades went on a last pilgrimage—Sun Day at the Chromeria—and simply never came back.

Drafters simply only lived to forty or forty-five. That was the way it was.

But Gavin had been the instrument of that brutal reality, ramming the knife through ribs, vomiting empty prayers at black heavens painted white. His conscience revolted at what he did, and he did it anyway.

He was the monstrous fist inside the velvet glove. If an institution requires the monstrous in order to operate—requires, not commits incidentally,
requires
in an essential way—is it not therefore itself fundamentally monstrous?

Can one commit murder and walk away clean?

Gunner huffed some sound between a grunt and a bark, still standing there. He hadn’t touched Gavin’s eye, but he’d been watching him all the while.

“What kinda shit horse is this? I get me a broken Guile?”

If an institution presents itself as uniquely moral but is secretly monstrous, isn’t that proof that its very ideas are corrupt and corrupting, rather than that only some few of its practitioners are corrupt?

The implications were horrifying.

If the Chromeria was fundamentally corrupt, then they were all of them—the Chromeria, the Broken Eye, and the Blood Robes—equally horrific. All committed evil, and all excused their own evil as necessary.

Maybe it was worse than that. It wasn’t that each defined the good differently and thus excused different evils; it was that right and wrong were meaningless concepts: there was only what flavor of power you preferred.

Can good fruit come from a bad tree?

“Blackberries,” Gunner said, moving out of the sun once more, allowing Orholam’s cursed eye to dazzle Gavin.

“What?” Gavin asked, grimacing against the light. “She killed herself with blackberries? How? The brambles?”

“No, that just sorter popped in me eggshelf. Egg bone? Shell. Eggshell.” He rapped on his forehead with his knuckles. “Words, sentences, you know, not my own? Popped in there? Happens to ever’one, right?”

“Yeah, sure, right—no, no. I don’t follow at all. How’d your mom die?” It was the most delicate way Gavin could think of to ask about a suicide. Seemed like Gunner wanted to talk about it, and Gavin probably needed to humor the man. He propped himself up on an elbow, squinting at the man standing over him.

“Wrong question,” Gunner said. “You got it sorter back swords, don’tcha?”

Orholam help him, either Gunner was starting to make more sense, or his madness was contagious, because Gavin understood him perfectly.

He blew a long-suffering sigh. Very well. He sat up. He knew what Gunner meant about the wrong question. He was to ask not, ‘How did she die, Gunner?’ but, ‘How’d she live?’

Oddly, with Gunner, this would actually be the quicker way to get to how she died (and thus, get him to go the hell away) than trying to get a straight answer. Gunner seemed a bit bored being a captain when there was neither ship nor storm to fight. He’d already trained his new crew to some acceptable degree of proficiency on the many cannons that worked in concert, and now even that diversion was denied him, as he’d decided to conserve the rest of their powder for the dangers to come.

“Smart man, y’are, Yer Guileship.” Gunner grinned the big, happy gap-toothed grin of a man who was rarely understood and who prized it when he was.

Gunner took a deep breath, spat in the waves, muttered a curse to Ceres, and made the sign of the seven. “She uz pregnant most ’er time. Not with my pa’s brats, and that was clear as the Atashian shallows, him bein’ a sailor, en’ gone most the time.

“He’d leave with her pregnant with one, and come back an’ she was already bellyful with the next. Not that he were the subject of any hagioglyphics his ownself. Probably had ’least four other wives in other ports. He was the marrying sort. Gave my mama nothing but baby-batter and beatings, though. Finally died, or got took slave, I guess.

“I got my luck from her, though, cuz she mat a good man after that. Didn’t beat her once, not even when she ast for it. Treated us li’l brats like ’is own, though we were a right handful a hell and hot coals. Arranged apprenticery for me, and afore he put me on a ship he taught me to fight so I wouldn’t be made a buttboy.

“But kin you believe? All that good he done us, and Mama cheated on him, too. Some folk—my mama, me, you—we got the devil in us, Guile. Canna go straight, no gatter how many second chances we met.”

Gatter? Met?

Matter. Get. No matter how many second chances we get.

Ah, Gavin thought. It had been a while since he’d heard the pirate speak at length. It took some getting used to.

Again Gunner spat over the gunwale with a muttered curse at Ceres.

“Papa didn’t learn it out, but I did. I punched her in the face and gave her the raspy side a’ my tongue. But I didn’t hell tim neither. I had little brothers and sisters. What would they do without ’im, if he left ’er? Mama was so keen on makin’ the beast with two backs with any dangerous man what winked at her that she never even noticed she uz setting her own house on fire by doin’ it—with all us kids inside, burnin’. She was pregnant, that’s what for I hit her in the face. She told ’im the black eye was from falling down. Uz a better lie than you’d think. Only thing she was ever good at was gettin’ on her back in a hurry.”

Please don’t tell me you murdered her.

“S’pose the harpies took vengeance on her, since no one else would. Somethin’ broke in ’er after she shat out that last babe. One night after we were all asleep, she cut her arms up good, almost bled dry. Papa patched her up. Never seen a man what done nothin’ wrong look so hunted.

“Mama went on crying and carrying on most every day. Elgin, she named him. Algae, we all said. The baby, right?”

“Right,” Gavin said. He felt sick to his stomach already, and he was worried this was only going to get worse.

“Pa was a smith. One day, when he wouldn’t stop cryin’, Mama quick snatched up Pa’s hammer, and laid li’l Algae down on the workbench, lined him up good—she uz gonna smash his head, we thought. Then she stopped herself, and she smashed her hand instead, smashed it jelly, kept smashing. Wouldn’t stop. That wet, sloppy sound and her screamin’ won’t never come out me ears. Hear the echoes to this day, rattlin’ from cliff to cliff inside my skull. Said she had ta be punished for wantin’ a do such a thing.”

Fuck, Gunner! I am trying to enjoy some goddam sunshine!

“To save her life, Pa had to cut the hand off and burn the stump dry and sizzly, while she cursed him and screamed and asked to die. I hope you never have to hear yer mama beggin’ ta die, Guile.”

No, mine didn’t beg. She asked politely, and I killed her politely. Thanks for the reminder of that, asshole.

“We thought she was gettin’ better, after that. Healin’. I was jus’ ’bout to ship out. Her ‘little man,’ she called me. Made her so proud, she said. Not that it should mean much coming from her, she said. Broken woman, Guile. It ain’t how it s’pos’d ta be. Well, one day she puts on her finest and wanders out to the bog. Lays down and spreads her arms out lick thet. Lick what you done earlier.

“Someone saw her. Threw her a rope, but the whole area was too treach’rous to get close. She wouldnae take the rope, right at her hand. Help, that near. I s’pose she reckoned she’d take different kinder escape. Thatcher—that’s who threw the rope—ran to get help. But when we all come, she was gone. Sunk.”

Gavin had entertained the notion at first that maybe Gunner was making sport of him, that he was going to reveal this was all a tale simply to wind him up and pass a few minutes of boredom at sea. Now he didn’t think so.

Not at all.

The bouncy, ceaselessly grinning and hollering and spitting pirate who, having been raised amid a cacophony of accents himself, veered wildly between all of them and none, who covered his habitual malapropisms and neologisms by purposely creating as many as possible so that he might become larger than life—that legend was suddenly simply a slender Ilytian man, hitting middle age earlier than he ought, his face drawn, eyes haunted by things forever lost.

Gunner said, “I held this mammary like a puzzle box.”

Mammary? Oh no. Memory. Don’t laugh, Gavin. For the sake of all that is holy, do
not
laugh right now when Gunner’s feeling this vulnerable.

“Puzzle box?” Gavin said. He cleared his throat. He deliberately looked up at the burning white of a celestial eye as bleached of all color as his own eye was. The pain braced him.

“Aye. The mam’ry. I squeeze it, palpate it, grab it with both hands, twist it round, pinch at it, trya sink my teeth in t’ it . . .”

Don’t. Even. Grin.

Gunner had to be putting him on. But Gavin looked at the man, and he gave no indication of levity.

“And here’s thing,” Gunner said. “I kin understand it when a man throws back a few too many drinks on a lonesome night, gets sour inside, and sucks at the teat of a musket for jus’ long enough so that big ole ‘fuck you’ we scream at the world bounces back as ‘fuck me’ and he pulls the trigger. I kin understand when a girl climbs a tree and tries on a noose necklace for size and once she got it on thinkin’, ‘I come this far, why not?’ and takin’ that hop. Prob’ly e’ryone who looks oft a cliff thinks a taking the sharp drop with a sudden stop. E’ery sailor has thought of takin’ that swim what fattens sharks. We all got the black moment when the evil eye of the barrel dares a starin’ contest. And we’re all a hair trigger’s pull from the musket’s dare. It’s the devil’s gift, ain’t it? It’s the heritage o’ man, aye?”

Gavin’s moment of humor had dried to a desert.

Though surely some folk lived who’d never known what it was like to only just barely hold on to life by your bloody fingernails, Gavin certainly did.

“Aye,” he said quietly.

“But lyin’ in a bog? Lettin’ yourself sink slow? That requires real dedication.” He snorted suddenly. “Heh. What’s a real commitment to dying, Guile?”

“Huh?”

“
Dead
ication. Eh? Eh?”

But the flare of amusement faded faster than a flintlock’s flash. Gunner squatted down close to him and in a low and somber tone, he said, “Tell me, Guile, do you reckon, at the better end, as the bog muck closed slow o’er her face, as she sucked it in and coughed on that first lungful . . . you reckon she fought to live?”

It was a question as dangerously loaded as the pistols at the quicksilver pirate’s hips.

“I hope so,” Gavin said quietly.

But it seemed Gunner wasn’t even listening. He stood and looked away.

“Thatcher said afore he run to get help, Mama was muttering about Ceres, calling her goddess of crops, fertility, or some such . . . He said my mama was begging Ceres for sumpin’. Odd, what? Everyone knows Ceres is the bitch of the sea.” Gunner spat overboard.

He went on. “Hungry goddess, either way, I s’pose. She who gives so much takes all she wants, too. As if it’s right. But I don’t think ennyun should go out like thet, stretched out like an offering afore god or goddess or man. I reckon I’d ruther go to the roar of the cannon.” He jumped up on the barrel of a huge cannon that dominated the forecastle. He obviously had feelings for it, as other men adore their horse or a sword. “Maybe double or triple load and let rip. If I can’t have it, no one can, eh?”

“I . . . suppose,” Gavin said, frowning. It sounded like a damnable waste to him.

“Just like magic for you, then, eh?” Gunner turned and watched Gavin’s expression sharply, while he still stood on the cannon, nearly over the water, arms not even extended for balance.

“I . . . What?”

“You can’t have it, no one can?” Gunner pressed.

“Uh . . .”

“That’s what you’re doing. Ain’t it? Killin’ magic.
All
of it. For everyone. I was there. I heard the old man. Be a different world without magic, sure as a sailor on shore leave is on the look for tipples and nipples.”

By Orholam’s unseeing eye. Gunner was a sly old dog, wasn’t he?

It was all a setup. Not the cruel kind Gavin suspected to make fun of him, but a vulnerable kind that was far more clever. ‘Look, I’ve opened up with you. Why don’t you open up with me?’

But Gunner was no Andross Guile. Having committed to telling his story to get Gavin to open up in turn, Gunner had told his own tale fully and truly. Now, feeling overexposed, he’d barely remembered his initial purpose in telling Gavin at all.

Gunner now only wanted to distract Gavin from the wound he’d unwittingly revealed.

“Oh, I see,” Gavin said.

“You hafta!”

“Uh. Right. And I do.”

“
Half
ta. Cuz you only got the one eye,” Gunner said. “Instead a two? Never mind. Not very bright sometimes, are ya, Guile? Go on.”