Pirate Latitudes

He had only a moment to reflect before she threw her arms around him, and kissed him on the mouth, hard. He returned her embrace. When they broke, she said, “I am so frightened. Everything is strange here.”

“Madam,” he said, “I am obliged to return you safely to your uncle and my friend, Governor Sir James Almont.”

“There is no need to be pompous. Are you a Puritan?”

“Only by birth,” he said, and kissed her again.

“Perhaps I will see you later,” she said.

“Perhaps.”

She went below, with a final glance at him in the darkness. Hunter leaned on one of the cannon, and watched her go.

“Spicy one, isn’t she.”

He turned. It was Enders. He grinned.

“Get a well-born one across the line, and they start to itch, eh?”

“So it appears,” Hunter said.

Enders looked down the row of cannon, and slapped one with his hand. It rang dully. “Maddening, isn’t it,” he said. “All these guns, and we can’t use ’em for lack of men.”

“You’d best get sleep,” Hunter said shortly, and walked off.

But it was true, what Enders had said. As he continued pacing the decks, the woman was forgotten, and his thoughts returned to the cannon. Some restless part of his brain churned over the problem, again and again, looking for a solution. Somehow he was convinced there was a way to use these guns. Something he had forgotten, something he knew long ago.

The woman obviously thought he was a barbarian - or, worse, a Puritan. He smiled in the darkness at the thought. In fact, Hunter was an educated man. He had been taught all the main categories of knowledge, as they had been defined since medieval days. He knew classical history, Latin and Greek, natural philosophy, religion, and music. At the time, none of it had interested him.

Even as a young man, he was far more concerned with practical, empirical knowledge than he was in the opinions of some long-dead thinker. Every schoolboy knew that the world was much larger than Aristotle had ever dreamt. Hunter himself had been born on land that the Greeks did not know existed.

Yet now, certain elements of his formal training tugged at his mind. He kept thinking of Greece - something about Greece, or the Greeks - but he did not know what, or why.

Then he thought of the oil painting in Cazalla’s cabin, aboard the Spanish warship. Hunter had hardly noticed it at the time. Nor did he remember it clearly now. But there was something about a painting aboard a warship that intrigued him. In some way, it was important.

What did it matter? He knew nothing of painting; he regarded it as a very minor talent, suitable only for decoration, and of interest only to those vain and wealthy noblemen who would pay to have their portraits done, with flattering improvements. The painters themselves were, he knew, trivial souls who wandered like gypsies from one country to another in search of some patron who would support their efforts. They were homeless, rootless, frivolous men who lacked the solid attachment of strong feeling for the nation of their birth. Hunter, despite the fact that his parents had fled England for Massachusetts, considered himself wholly English and passionately Protestant. He was at war with a Spanish and Catholic enemy and did not comprehend anyone who was not equally patriotic. To care only for painting: that was a pale allegiance indeed.

And yet the painters wandered. There were Frenchmen in London, Greeks in Spain, and Italians everywhere. Even in times of war, the painters came and went freely, especially the Italians. There were so many Italians.

Why did he care?

He walked along the dark ship, passing from cannon to cannon. He touched one. Stamped on its postern was a motto:

SEMPER VINCIT

The words mocked him. Not always, he thought. Not without men to load and aim and fire. He touched the lettering, running his fingers over the grooves, feeling the fine, smooth curve of the S, the clean lines of the E.

SEMPER VINCIT

There was strength in the crispness of Latin, two tight words, military and hard. The Italians had lost all that; Italians were soft and flowery, and their tongue had changed to reflect the softness. It had been a long time since Caesar had bluntly said: Veni, vidi, vici.

VINCIT

That one word seemed to suggest something. He looked at the clean lines of the letters, and then in his mind he saw more lines, lines and angles, and he was back to the Greeks, to his Euclidean geometry, which had been so agonizing to him as a boy. He had never been able to understand why it mattered that two angles were equal to another, or that two lines intersected at one point or another. What difference did it make?

VINCIT

He remembered Cazalla’s painting, a work of art on a warship, out of place, serving no purpose. That was the trouble with art, it was not practical. Art conquered nothing.

VINCIT

It conquers. Hunter smiled at the irony of the motto, stamped into a cannon that would conquer nothing. This weapon was as worthless to him as Cazalla’s painting. It was as worthless to him as Euclid ’s postulates. He rubbed his tired eyes.