the butcher's bill

Jack stood at the window and drank his coffee. Stephen was announced by a click of the door but no knock, arriving just as the last man left empty-handed. There was just enough glare from the afternoon sun for Jack to see his reflection.

"So give me the bill," Jack said, and turned. This was the cost of surviving.

Stephen shook his head. His hair was matted with sweat and there was a smudge of blood at his temple. "Seven dead. Twelve wounded, thirteen if you count Richardson's shoulder."

"What's wrong with his shoulder?"

"Nothing now," Stephen shrugged. "It had come out of the joint."

"I wasn't so lucky this time," Jack said.

"It could have been far worse. We could have --"

"I could have given the order to come about earlier." Jack set his cup and saucer on the table and pinched the bridge of his nose. His own shoulder felt near to coming loose, and he slid out of his coat to stretch his arm.

"Oh, Jack, you've been got." Stephen reached out and pushed Jack's collar open. His other hand lay on Jack's shoulder as he guided him to sit on the cushioned locker. "That makes fourteen."

Jack was glad to have a flat surface beneath him. He'd worried for a moment during the fight that Stephen had let too much blood that morning and left him unduly lightheaded. "Fourteen what?" he asked when he felt more steady.

"Wounded," Stephen said, and his fingers were cool and gentle against Jack's neck, unbuttoning his vest and pushing it off. His palms pressed against Jack's ribs, under his shirt where it had come untucked and was, Jack saw now, torn and bloodied. He never noticed such things as they were happening, only after, when there was time to consider beyond whether he was simply alive or dead. He wasn't alone: on long, dry stretches between action the men had been known to manufacture ailments of all kinds out of some desire to warrant the doctor's gentle care.

He looked up from his own chest to Stephen's. A long scratch with crimson pearls like a dashed line on a chart ran from his neck down between the buttons of his shirt. "Fifteen," Jack said, touching his thumb to the northern end.

"It's nothing." Stephen shook off his hand and continued to survey Jack's torso for damage. "I can't find it," he muttered, tilting his head to peer over Jack's shoulder and down his back. He stood between Jack's legs, knees braced against the wood. "There's so much blood, there must be a -- ah. There. Hold on." Jack put his hand on Stephen's waist and held on. Stephen's nails were sharp against his spine, ready-made instruments that needed no forging to work their miracles. A bright flare of pain as the splinter was freed, and then Stephen's hand soft on his skin, soothing him.

Jack pressed his forehead to Stephen's chest and breathed out. Stephen's heart thudded beneath his cheek, steady and fast like a broadside assault, and one hand smoothed over Jack's hair until they both inhaled and exhaled at an even pace. The ship was settling beneath them. The crew had finished cleaning up and started in on repairs; still lower, the smell of supper in the galley was thicker now than the stench of war.

Stephen leaned back and Jack's arm slipped down and away. Blood from the scratch was blotted against Stephen's fair skin, and he used the tail of his shirt to wipe a smear from Jack's forehead. "That could have been far worse," Stephen said, calmly.

Jack was dizzy all over again, but differently than before, as if his legs had been suddenly cut out from under him. Stephen remained close and when Jack clung again to his solid form, Stephen's shoulders drew inward. His shirt fell from his shoulders, pooling and catching on his wrist, and he stood, almost posing, preening like one of his damned shiny birds, expecting attention. There was a constellation of freckles on his stomach, patterned in bright contrast to pale skin as if meant to navigate some great journey, and Jack pushed him away, feeling confused and foolish. He did not need to be mocked for a momentary weakness of injury.

Jack stood and strode to the starboard windows. They were still pretty well south. The sun would soon set. "Why do you do this to me, good man?"

"What have I done now," Stephen said softly, turning away to stare at their wake, one shoulder dipped low and off-balance. He was too easy a man to break with unkindness, and when Jack's ears weren't ringing, he remembered that. If anyone were to preen it would not be Stephen. What good was luck if he was forever second-guessing his decisions?

The cabin was not so big that Jack had put much distance between them. One long pace and Jack was flush to Stephen's back, and it was as if the battle had just ended, his mind hazy and lungs flushed but in the best of all possible confusion, twilight covering them like smoke and bodies moving where they did, where they needed to, before there was time to think how or why.

Stephen raised one knee to the bench, lifted an arm to hold himself against the window frame and Jack as they rocked together. Jack tilted his face to the curve of Stephen's neck, to the short hair and delicate skin at its borders. Stephen always smelled of lye, and also faintly of mint, and Jack thought that he breathed better, more cleanly, at these moments. It was a poultice for all the shaky, unsettling moments of the fight that stayed slick on his skin long after the swords had been put away.

Stephen reached back and dug his thumb and finger into Jack's waist, down low near the edge of his trousers. He made a noise like a hurt sparrow and Jack wrapped his arms around Stephen's chest, one over his breastbone, the other lower, sliding down between fabric and damp skin. Stephen groaned and pressed back, unyielding even to Jack's strongest thrusts until Jack shuddered and doubled over Stephen's back, biting at the first flesh his hungry teeth could find, the scruff of Stephen's neck.

Stephen gasped and Jack wished to heal where he had brought blood to the surface of ivory skin. He wanted to cover Stephen's throat with the yards of fabric he always wore, to wrap him up like a piece of fine glass. His thoughts were nearly as bizarre as his behavior and instead he brushed his lips against the mark, eliciting a sigh.

Jack untangled his legs and arms from Stephen's and reclined with his elbows on the wooden riser. The light grew still weaker. Stephen squared his shoulders to the windows and sat flat-backed on the planks against the angled beams, his knees just behind Jack's head. Jack waited and stared at his hands and wondered, not at all for the first or likely the last time, how he had the fortune to find as good a friend as this man.

Finally Stephen cleared his throat and asked, "Why is it that men scream as they raise their swords?"

Jack shrugged. Stephen was always philosophical after a fray. "Because it is the only way to bear what we are about to do?"

"I wonder," Stephen said drowsily, "whether all animals have battle cries or only the ones that have made whole occupations around it."

Jack was weary and tired and sore of questions with circular answers that seemed made for him to stumble over. "Perhaps only if they understand what will be left behind."

"But a boy, a child who has never been to sea or to war -- he too will scream before he fires, before he aims steady. I've watched this now in every engagement."

"Find me a boy without a father who knows, who is scarred and quiet except for when he's drunk, and then he's scarred and loud. And even if there is such a boy, surely he has read the stories, seen the drawings, played with his toy soldiers. War is England's great occupation, Stephen. All boys play at it. Didn't you?"

"No," Stephen said, and for his life Jack could not doubt it. "What do you think about at those moments? When you raise your hand against an enemy, what then?"

Jack leaned his head back until it met Stephen's silk-clad calf. "I don't. Or if anything it is only the struggle, the angle and parry, the movement around me that could be friend or enemy. If I scream then, I never know it."

"But before that --"

"Before that you yell so your men can find you, so they can follow. There's no great science to it, I don't think." How Stephen did like to argue sometimes, around and around like a fugue.

"Men and their behaviors may be the greatest science of all," Stephen said. "If we could understand, if we could predict what another may do in any given moment --"

"Never," Jack said.

"But we know this much already -- men scream as they run to."

"But if even they do not know why, how can it matter? They bellow because what they feel is too great for their hearts -- if it could be bled out at that precise moment, perhaps they would go silently. But even then -- all that you truly know at that moment, dear Stephen, is that very little of what is to come will be within your control. That you may be slain from behind by a man whose face you'll never know, that the man whose gut you have just pierced may have twelve starving children and a wife with eyes like a young doe. You will make a fine woman cry with every thrust of your sword, and if you stopped to consider that, if you stopped and thought rather than screamed and ran to, you would never raise your weapon at all."

"So perhaps that is the means of stopping wars."

"And why would you want to do a thing like that," Jack laughed, turning and covering Stephen's knee with his hand.

"The suffering -- Jack, the death, the boys who never reach manhood, the --"

"We did not make this game, Stephen. And would you rather be counting your last coins in a ragged room in Minorca than saving whoever you can from that enlightened suffering that pains you so? The most honorable death a boy or a man for that matter can have is to be slain in battle. Here we have the good fortune to be buried at sea as well. Find me a man who would ask for more."

"I want more," Stephen said, his chin turned as he watched the water intently. "You are no good to me, dead and honorable."

"You are no good to me making me think of such things when I must fight to save England."

"You're not fighting for England. You're playing your game, Jack, because it is better fun than a life ashore."

"Ha, that it is. But also for England. She is a fun country." Jack slid his hand from Stephen's leg up across his thigh. Here was a man who could make him think, and feel, and yet still have fun.

Stephen lounged back, let Jack's hand have its way. "You don't want to talk about this anymore," he said, barely smiling.

"See how you can predict a man's thoughts, dear joy. You are already a great scientist of men."

"You will do whatever you want, as usual."

Jack stilled. "I will think about nothing but this, my friend, until the next round, and then the cannon will cry and there will be splinters in the air and I shall think of nothing but how to survive. And that, that, Stephen, is what will do you good."

"It does me no good when you are bloodied and broken." Stephen spit the words as if they were a rotten egg, and Jack boiled with frustration.

"Would you rather play the grieving widow? Stitch me up and throw me over --"

"I would not."

"What would you do, then? Throw cheers to the wind, huzzah Lucky Jack, and find yourself a new mate?" Jack wanted it back almost immediately.

"I would never. I would -- Jack, this is so macabre."

"You started this conversation," he said, quite deliberately aloud, where before he'd meant merely to consider the matter with himself. "Tell me."

"I wouldn't be able to watch. I wouldn't be able to wash the smock with your blood or stop thinking of the ways I should have saved you and couldn't. I wouldn't go on deck for fear I would do great harm to any man who necessarily had taken your place. I would hate every wave, every swell, every breath of air that filled the sails until we put in. And then I would never go near the ocean again."

"It is not your station to save me," Jack said, and spread his fingers wide over Stephen's chest.

"Yes it is, as a matter of fact. It is my job to save all the men who would fight any battle you led them into."

"I will never understand why you insist on acting as if I don't realize how war works."

Stephen pursed his lips and said, tightly, "I keep waiting for evidence that it will in any way change your behavior."

"'Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind,'" Jack quoted, standing and beginning to pace. They knew only so many songs between them.

"This is not a poem," Stephen said.

Jack spun around. "Yes, I goddamned well know, it's a bloody war."

"And I keep your ledgers for you, Jack. Seven dead and fourteen wounded today, and do you want to know the totals for this cruise? For this ship? For all the ships we have taken or burned or chased onto the rocks?"

"Fifteen," Jack said, putting his mouth to his knuckles and shaking his head. He borrowed the table to keep him upright.

"Far, far more." Stephen stood and buttoned his shirt high as it could go without his missing neckcloth, straightened his glasses.

There was a sharp knock on the door and Jack called, "A moment!"

"I think I shall take my meal in the sick-bay," Stephen said. "There are still two or three who could slip away in the night."

"All right." Jack sighed. "Go, go tend to your flock and leave me to the vultures below. There are many men who do not keep the books balanced near as carefully as I, my dear doctor, but I see no reward for that." He lit the small lamp by the door; it was dark now in the cabin, nearly pitch black over the sea. He tried to smile at his friend. "Go," he said.

Stephen put his hand on the door. "I wasn't asking your permission," he said. He left and Jack took a step out to follow but stopped at the guard stationed in the anteroom.

"Sir, First Lieutenant Pullings," the Marine announced. His lieutenant rose from the chair in which he had waited admission.

"Yes, of course, Mr. Pullings," Jack said, showing him in. "You bring a different kind of bill than Dr. Maturin. Tell me, what cost to ship and sail must we also pay?"

END.

Credits: Title by Lord Nelson. Summary and Jack's poetry reading by Donne. Soundtrack by Bach, Yo-Yo Ma and the key of G Major. Extra shares of rum to Punk, Sinead and Glace.