The Broken Eye(10)

“Take him to the beakhead,” Gunner said. “Watch him close as Aborneans groats. A Guile in a corner is a sea demon in your washtub.”

Here I didn’t think you bathed. Gavin didn’t say it, though. There was little to be gained by mocking his captor, his master, and much else to be retained. Teeth, for instance.

The sailors pulled him to his feet and pulled to him to the prow. They turned him around, forced him to his knees again. Gunner was forty paces away, at the farthest point astern. He held a gleaming white musket. Or a musket-sword? It had a single blade with twin black whorls crisscrossing up the blade, bracketing shining jewels. The blade had a small musket inset in much of the spine except for the last hand’s breadth, which was pure blade.

Gavin had a dim recollection of the thing, but it slipped away from him. Something about that night, and a clash with his father and Grinwoody and Kip. He had suffered great violence before and lost hours of time to it, and he’d certainly known men in the war who’d lost memories of injuries. But there was something about Gunner fishing him out of the waves, and then beating him with the flat of the blade? It could only be that. Gavin was still recovering from his bruises, but he didn’t have any stab wounds or he probably would be dead by now.

Still, what a terrible idea. To make a musket barrel thick enough to deal with the power of exploding powder was to make a weapon far too thick and heavy to be an effective sword. Was this some sort of odd jest?

“If you’re Dazen, you’ll remember our little demonstration,” Gunner shouted.

It was, of course, the part of Dazen and Gavin’s meeting that Gavin Guile—the real Gavin Guile—would have heard about. ‘Recalling’ the demonstration would prove nothing. But apparently Gunner didn’t realize that.

“The seas were calm that day, and you were only twenty paces back,” Gavin said.

That day, the cabin boy had wet himself, holding an apple in his trembling outstretched hand above his head. Later, Gavin had heard the story that the boy had held the apple on his head. No one explained how a boy would balance an apple on his head on a rocking boat. But it did make a better story.

Twenty paces made a good story. Forty was suicide. Gunner might be the best shot in the world. It didn’t matter. Even with an identical charge of powder, and wadding tamped down to exactly the same pressure, and a perfectly round musket ball with no flaws from its casting—even with no wind, and no lurching deck, a musket was only accurate to within a space maybe as large as Gavin’s head at forty paces. Some men liked to believe differently, but the truth was that if you hit a smaller target at that range, it was purely luck. Gavin knew how good of a shot Gunner was. He didn’t believe the man’s story of killing a sea demon, but if anyone in the world could have done such a thing through accuracy alone, it would have been Gunner.

And there’s the problem with arrogance wed with excellence and insanity—a marriage with three partners is already overfull. Reality’s intrusions were unwelcome. Gunner had spent the last twenty years convincing others that he was unable to miss; now he seemed to have convinced himself, too.

“Gunner got given a gooder gun than, than, than…” The pirate devolved into curses, angry at not coming up with an alliterative way to say ‘than he had twenty years ago.’

It wasn’t full-on rage, merely frustration, but Gavin had seen Gunner shoot a man because he was hungry. Gunner was going to go through with this.

Gavin’s stomach sank. What could he do without drafting? Maybe knock out each of the two sailors next to him—and what? Jump off the ship? There was no shore in sight. They’d simply turn around and pick him up. And trusting his body to be strong enough to take out these two sailors and jump before Gunner could shoot him was optimistic at best. He might not even be able to swim with how much abuse his body had taken recently.

He was overcome with a weariness more than physical. This? This was to be his end?

Gavin had been in too many battles to believe that there was some force that protected the men who should live. One of the greatest swordsmen in the world had been killed next to him, while out of sight of the enemy—a freak ricocheting bullet had caught his kidney. A stallion worth satrapies had stumbled on a body after the battle was done, and broke his leg. A general got dysentery because he’d shared his men’s water and meat, rather than eat at his high table. A thousand indignities, a thousand tales that ended without moral or meaning, merely mortality.

War is cause, all else is effect.

Gavin took a bite of the apple. It was sweet and tart. The best apple he’d tasted in his entire life.