Chase the Morning

‘– seems we’ve woken them –’ I heard her say in my ear, and then our guns erupted in answer, no longer in a salvo but a savage raking drumroll, firing the moment they were ready. I hardly realized what she meant. Crouched there behind the rail, juddering with every detonation, I felt strangely detached from the whole pandemonium. Half deafened, half blinded, scared stiff, but detached. Accidentally or deliberately, Mall had triggered off a worse turmoil in me.

Just why the hell was I so hot after Clare now? To rescue her, yes; but I’d hired a whole shipload of fighters who could all do the job better. Why was it so important to me to go along? I didn’t want to hang back, to seem a coward in this tough company – but they wouldn’t thank me for slowing them up, either. So why? What was I trying to prove? That I really could care for somebody?

I didn’t drop her … The hell I didn’t. It gets hard to live a lie when you’re looking down a cannon-mouth. You could say it strips you. Fear flicked away my masks, peeled back the varnish. Slowly, thoroughly, neatly, I’d ditched Jacquie – and about as coldly and cruelly as it could be done. I’d kept up appearances, let her down gently – for her sake, I’d liked to think; but mainly for mine. Sheer bloody windowdressing … had I always known that? I couldn’t tell. But for the first time I realized she must have known; I couldn’t have fooled her for a moment – any more than I’d fooled Mall. Then why on earth had Jacquie gone along with it, that pretence of a fading affair, of drifting apart?

For my sake. She’d gone on loving me, enough at least to let me keep my dignity when she could have destroyed it completely. To let me go on playing my part; because she saw how much I needed to, how empty I’d be without it. She’d loved me, all right. I’d betrayed her – and maybe also myself.

It was the past I saw glimmer through the gun-smoke, myself of the last few years. That disillusion, that creeping dishonesty I’d kept finding in my relationships, more and more often, poisoning them from within; when had I first begun to notice it? Not long after. Somehow nothing else had been the same, ever again, nothing – or no one. Till I’d shut away women in a separate compartment of my life, nice and safe and shallow. Why? Because I’d been too damn full of myself to realize what I held in the palm of my hand? Because I’d been idiot enough to cheat myself of it, to trade it away against some unspecified golden future? Dishonesty – some laugh. It’d been there all right; but it was in me.

Mall’s hand on my shoulder fetched me up, crouching with the others behind the rail. Still lost in myself, I hardly noticed the heavy mist-strands entwining with the smoke, the spreading grey in the sky above the rail. High sails, shot-torn and smouldering, swelled up against it, and below them a blacker bulk that seemed to swing towards us with frightening, inexorable speed. On its high stern transom tall lanterns grinned, for they were carved in the shape of huge fantastical skulls, utterly unhuman – carved, or real? And as the black flanks towered above us I saw the huge smoking snouts of the cannon thrust out, and begin to tilt downward. From our own deck a wild chorus of yells arose and from the shadow above a fearful guttural howling – Wolves right enough. It would have scared anybody; it terrified me. But I knew what I was doing now, and it was horribly simple.

‘It’s all I’ve got left!’ I yelled to Mall, and she seemed to understand. ‘Not much – you’re right – but I’ve got to defend it! I’ve got to fight –’

A chance to care about someone else. If I lost that …

No. Not that. Clare!

Then the flanks of the two ships came together, and all human sounds foundered in a squeal of tortured wood and a long-drawn-out grinding crash. The Defiance stood right in under the Chorazin’s tumblehome, and the swell of the merchantman’s much higher side bulged right against our rail, clattering and splintering, a looming cliff in the dawn light. Sailors sprang up, swinging many-toothed iron hooks on long lines, and flung them out to catch through rail and gunport, grappling us to the looming cliff above.

‘Come, then!’ yelled Mall, and sprang up onto the rail. Then memory, remorse, everything dissolved in the thunder that shook the universe.