Old Mars

Of course, we were overwhelmed. The cost to the enemy, I credit myself and my crew, was great, but at last the sheer force of numbers swamped us all. I was struck to the ground, then bound ankle and wrist, and roughly hauled to a prison chamber with the rest. There we lay, almost a hundred of our mixed crew. A quarter, perhaps, of my own men had perished, and their bodies were stacked against one wall with the bodies of Carina’s people. These were men whose dreams I had come to know, whose fates had been bound to my own. Many of them were not good men, not kind or merciful or gentle, but they were mine and they were lost. Captain Meer lay bound beside me. A wide bruise covered her exposed shoulder and her lip had been cut by an enemy blow. I called out to Mister Kopler and Mister Darrow and was reassured to hear their voices.

“You should have accepted his offer,” Carina Meer said.

Young Carter’s voice said, What offer was that? but I ignored him.

“When you surrendered to me aboard the Vargud, I promised that you would come to no harm,” I said. “I am fairly certain that Governor Smith would not have respected that. I had no choice.”

She turned to me as best she could. Her eloquent smile carried sorrow and amusement, admiration and despair.

“And if you had made no such promise?” she asked. “If your somewhat tarnished sense of honor had not restrained you, would you then have betrayed me?”

I was silent for a time. I understood then only by my vague animal unease the dexterity with which the astonishing woman could unmake me as I knew myself and resurrect a different man in my place. Young Carter muttered: Because if there was an offer, it might have been nice to hear what the terms were, before Doctor Koch hushed him. I heaved a great sigh.

“I would not have,” I confessed. “Though it would have saved my men their lives and me my own, I would not give anyone into the power of Governor Smith and his new allies.”

“Consider, then, that though you have lost your honor, something must still constrain you,” she said. “Honor is a burden that may be shifted or forgone. From goodness, I think, there is no escape.”

What can I say, Majesty? I had that day suffered blows to my body and my soul. I had faced the charging mandibles of vast spider-beasts and said silent farewell to men as near to me as family. How strange, then, that the thing to destroy Alexander Lawton, Scourge of the Caribbean Sea, should be delivered so gently, so kindly. I lay in our crowded prison, my eyes to heaven, and confronted for the first time the proposition that the loss of my honor might not also be the loss of my soul. For so many years as a youth, I strove to protect and celebrate my honor, that in the end it became my weakness. My love for my good name was the vulnerability that Governor Smith had used to shatter me. My years upon the seas, my flaunting of law and decency, all of it became a pettiness. Would you expect the thought to bring joy? That the light of goodness might spill over me like some abstract and spiritual dawn? It did not. On the contrary, it stung. Like Achilles, I had gone to my tent to sulk, and with a gentle rebuke, Carina Meer suggested that the choice had been beneath me.

“Madam,” I said, “your optimism is misplaced.”

In my worst moments, Majesty, I can still see the surprise and the hurt in Carina Meer’s expression at my gruffness. I think she might have gone on, pressed me to better explain myself, but I rolled my back to her and kept my own counsel instead. For a time I lay thus, pouting for my wounded masculine pride and regretting bitterly that I had ever come across the Vargud van Haarlem. Nor would I report this to you now had not this conversation had some bearing on the issue that has prompted me to deliver this account to you. Indeed, even so, I was sorely tempted to omit it. Whatever sins may remain marked against my soul, I can at least claim that a lack of candor is not among them.

“Captain Lawton, sir?” Mister Kopler said, his voice pulling me back to myself. I was astonished to find there were tears in my eyes. I coughed and wiped them away as best I could against my shoulder.

“Mister Kopler,” I said. “You’ve freed your hands, then?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You win this time,” Mister Darrow said, grudgingly. “I got a cramp in one thumb, or I’d have beat him, sir.”

“Let us hope there will be no call for a rematch in our immediate future,” I said. “For now, make haste. We have a ship to recapture.”