Gene Wolfe - Pirate Freedom

People today can hardly bear to think of punishing anybody for anything. A kid can kill his mother, and if he cries a little and says he is sorry, they want to let him walk. (Fr. Phil is like that.) Back when I was Captain Chris, people got the merda beat out of them for petty little stuff and nobody thought much about it. But on a man-of-war, the officers knew they were going to be out in front when it came to fighting, and their men were going to be following them with cutlasses and pistols. It made a big difference.

Also the money was better on a man-of-war, at least when there was a war. If they captured an enemy ship, they paid out shares pretty much like we did. (If we had been privateers, we would have had to split with the Crown like they did.) The main difference was that we pirates did not need a war.

Here I ought to say that there were Spanish pirates, too. There were not as many because there was not as much English, French, and Dutch shipping as there was Spanish. But there were some, and they had more ports to operate out of.

I ought to say, too, that both kinds of pirates would turn on their own flag sometimes. An English or French ship was not always safe with us, especially if there was something we needed bad and yesterday. A Spanish ship was not necessarily safe with them, either. The thing was, we never got together much. Mostly we would take Frenchmen, Dutch, and so forth, and of course Scotch, Irish, Welsh, and guys from Africa. The Spanish pirates would take black guys, too, and had a lot of them. (And pretty often they had a dozen Native Americans to keep things interesting.) But that was it. Nothing else. It was a funny setup, when you come to think of it. Ihave just come back from way out in the country. Fr. Wahl is retiring and will stay on as pastor emeritus. I will be the new pastor, so two of us for as long as he lives. (May it be long!) After that, just me.

Yet the time is coming, and when it comes I am going. I did not tell Fr. Wahl that. I have not told anyone else, either. If I have to betray one age or the other, I would sooner betray this one.

There will be a fete on Saturday. At two, I am to arrive, fetched by Fr. Wahl. We will eat and drink and socialize, and that is all I know. Eventually I will unpack in a new bedroom. I will say mass at seven that night, and at seven and nine Sunday morning. Fr. Wahl will take the last mass, at eleven. I have prayed to be a good priest for as long as I remain. Suppose I do not finish this here. Am I supposed to take it to Our Lady of Bethlehem? No way! I have to write more and better, and hurry.

I had made Ben Benson our bosun. That sounds like a joke, but it was the job he wanted. We found his body outside the sail locker. He had been strangled. There was a man on board who said he had been a hangman for a while, and I got him to take a look at Ben.

"We al'ays tries to break the necks, Cap'n. Heavy enough and drop far enough is what does it, but you can't. Not al'ays. So I'd jump up and grab the feet and swing till they died. They'd look like him when I took the cap off. A cap is what we call it, so they can't see the face. But I'd take it off, after, to use again. Then I'd see 'em. So he's choked, but no rope. I'd see the marks."

Pete and I carried Ben's body out on deck. We did that because I thought the sunlight might show us rope marks we had missed. There were none, but we did see finger marks. He had been strangled by somebody with big, strong hands.

We buried him at sea, sewn in his hammock and weighted with a nine-pound round shot. After that I talked to a lot of the men, looking at hands and trying to learn who his enemies were. Just about everybody's hands were bigger than mine and looked stronger, but I could not find anybody who did not like Ben. Most of them had not known him until he came on board. Red Jack had been his friend. Big Ned and Mahu had been his friends, too-not as close as Red Jack, but friends. All three said they wanted to kill the man who had killed him, and it sounded like they meant it.

I made it clear to everybody that on my ship, fighting was one thing but killing was something else. Tell me and I would put them ashore, each with his cutlass. Other than that, I wanted to know who did it and why. That was fine with everybody, but it did not get me anywhere. Somebody had killed Ben. It had not been Mahu or Novia, and it sure as heck had not been me. After that it was up for grabs.

When I had talked to just about everybody and gotten no leads at all, I went into my cabin, closed the door, and prayed. Novia was out on deck sketching, and I guess she knew I did not want to be bothered.

In the beginning I prayed for Ben's soul. After that I prayed for mine. I told God I knew I was a pirate and no better than Ben. Any punishment He gave me would be just. I knew that, and I told Him so. Maybe I would yell and cry and beg and squeal, but I would never say what He had done was not fair. I promised I would never be any worse than I had to be, and begged Him to forgive me for everything wrong I had done and was going to do.

That was the only time in my life that I have heard the voice of God. He answered me, not in my mind or my heart, or in my soul. He spoke out loud, and His voice was wonderful in a way that there are no words for. What he said was "Love Me, Chris, and all else will follow."

When I went out on deck again, everybody was talking about the noise they had heard. Even though there was not a cloud anywhere, Novia said it had been thunder. Bouton said no, it had been guns. The Magdelena stood north-northwest of us just then, two or two and a half miles away. He thought she had fired her larboard battery. I told them I knew what it was, it had been for me, and they could forget about it.

Before I write about the galleon, there is one more thing I ought to cover-in fact, I should have written about this sooner. You know that when I had turned Estrellita over to Capt. Ojeda, I found Novia waiting for me in my cabin. It was dark, of course, and she was in the bed I had made on the cabin floor (it is a deck, really), hidden under the blanket. We had made love and had not talked much while we were doing it, just things like "Now," and "Do that again."

We did not talk in the morning, either. We were both afraid that one of us would say something that would break us up again, so we were both pretty quiet. When she got dressed, it was the blue shirt and the sailor's pants, and I was afraid she was going to leave like before.

She did not. But after that she dressed like a man a lot more often than like a woman. At first I thought it was so she could go anytime if there was another blowup, but she kept doing it after we put out. Sometimes she wore her gowns. More often, she just dressed like everybody else on board.

Part of it was size, I know. When we first met, she had told me she wanted to be round again, to be womanly. With us she did not have to work nearly as hard and got better food, when we were in port particularly. Some of the gowns she and Azuka had made would not fit at all, and the rest were tight.

The other part was something else. I think I know, but I am not sure I can make it clear. When she wore gowns all the time, and stayed in that tiny little cabin mostly, she had not really been one of us. When I had made her get out, and she-proud as she was, because Novia was always very, very proud-had turned around and come back, she had changed. I was a pirate, so she would be a pirate, too. Right about the time we were running from the Santa Lucia, something clicked with me that I had not seen before.

Bouton was first mate, but Novia was really number two on the ship. If one of those shots from the Santa Lucia had killed me, Novia would have been captain with Bouton as her first mate. Pages and pages ago I wrote about reading about those women who had been pirate captains. That would surprise a lot of people, but it had not surprised me. It could have happened on the Castillo Blanco.