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I thought I thought, I thought-
Harry’s mouth is a vague-edged empty hole and John has a wild want to stop it up with oakum. They have not seen the ocean-proper in a century but the twenty years of him that prayed over holystones and packed ships’ joints inhabit his simplest instincts in full. John can, is the first thing he’s sure of when he feels Harry a-tremble and alive in his grip, stretch the fabric of his breathing seams and make him seaworthy.
Oakum smells better than smoke or at least more familiar. It sticks to the hands – and oh here, in Harry’s bare neck, strong good tar beneath the fire's flesh-stink. I thought. I know what you thought.
Ships’ boys unpick old rope for oakum to learn patience and the doing blunts their fingers over time. John’s knees and their advancing years have brought him advancement up to steward, no more bending down; tarring and caulking is now the memory that lives in these, his heavy square hands holding Harry fast. Together like a deck.
Oh, Harry whispers. Oh.
The fire roars still. Vomit stabs sharp above the bellow-wash of burning smell. John recognises a shriek and then doesn’t – someone else is calling for help. He is worried, distantly, that if Harry cannot find words or stop stammering he won’t be able to let him go.
Oh, Eternal Lord God. Who alone spreadest out the heavens and rulest the raging of the sea; be pleased to receive.
****
Two bells. Sun blares unnatural through the hatch and catches Erebus’ ribs at queer angles John is sure he’s never seen. Perhaps it's the effect of illumination in a space where there's been none for months, or they’re being crushed just like Terror – she whose crazy-tilted mast was the only thing John could see for a long while out on the ice.
Harry, new-birthed from a Terror to an Erebus, has a berth so temporary it might as well not exist and John’s is so absurdly private behind its curtain that Navy eyes slide right over it. No one has eyes to roll or breath to cough in this deadly light to make comment on where the two of them spend their last night in a ship’s belly. Even Erebus herself has quieted her complaints against the ice, as if she knows tomorrow she’ll be made a grave and no one will be left to fret over her bulwarks or the potential state of her keel.
John’s ear is pressed absent and habitual to the hull; his head is ringing.
Harry’s weight is heavy and uncomfortable on his aching legs. His head is jammed just under John’s ribs and when he jerks up from half-sleep it clashes bone on bone. He does this three times – John, hand in Harry’s hair, doesn’t notice until one start coincides with Erebus gasping out a boomed oak-retort.
Sorry.
You’re here, John wants to say, and doesn’t for what it might imply: if this is the last I have of you, to myself, let it be without an apology, sweetheart. For the love of all that’s holy.
I don’t mind, he whispers instead. Keep trying. Close your eyes.
Harry, mulish, lifts his shaggy head a little, muddy eyes odd and glassy in the sleepless blend of lantern and sunrise.
The slight pout that, Jesus, the state of him to think of this right now – made John fall in love with him; the streak of ash along his ruddy broad cheek where freckles come in summer. John cups Harry’s dark-bearded jaw in his hand and wipes the smudge away with his thumb.
I could read to you, he suggests, and grits his teeth as Harry twitches unbidden like a sudden-boned fish and knocks John’s hip with his shoulder, the only sharp part of him. Easy, Henry. His fingers curl harder in Harry’s greasy hair.
Harry usually snorts at him and gives John a look for using his proper name – like when he says the formal Peglar on deck and everyone smirks down at their boots – but they are well beyond routines of last month or even yesterday. His cleared throat is like rough-cut glass popped in the fire, his hoarse whisper a made-small version of what John remembers from the Gannet when Harry, a maintopman then, captained his own gun and roared raw into blank practice broadsides turned to the open sea.
Would you think it odd of me, John, he says quiet and deliberate, if I said no to the poetry right now. I know it makes sense to but the reading bit of my brain’s full up with your Xenophon and I don’t want to think – to think. Can I touch you?
The prayer, horror-potent in his brackish burnt throat when the sun rose, swims giddy and simple back to John now as if through clear water: until day and night come to an end. He isn’t sure why he resists saying it out loud – it might actually make Harry laugh – but Harry is looking at him with an intense sort of wolfish pleading and they haven’t done this in three years and might never again.
Yes, he murmurs, and lets out his first full exhale of the new day as Harry shifts off his ribs so he can look and look and hold and touch and move and press lips in the hollows of John’s body that hold noise in. Of course you can. Yes, please.
Please, God. Oh please, God. Oh, oh, oh, please.
****
On the Gannet. On Erebus. On the Beagle. In Portsmouth. In Camden.
Harry remembers: this their ancient history, their own Thucydides, their bastard-Xenophon. The parts lost between the Greek lettering that, John explained once, formed their English own – these are the unutterables and the not written down that Harry remembers.
He has plenty of imagination but no proper historian’s mind like John. And John does have a point, saying wryly once: God help them if future generations need to read Harry Peglar’s hand.
There's no way to write down exactly how John sounded the first time Harry touched him. A little noise in a big man’s lungs, swallowed by a ship’s hold. Harry rearranges himself awkwardly in line with John’s snoring bulk – his leg’s fallen asleep on the hard slab of bunk – and tries a phrase in his mind: the pearl held on slick and full of expectation on an oyster’s tongue, the oyster and all her parts being Her Majesty’s Ship Gannet, eighteen guns and home.
E-x-p-e-c-k-t-a-s-h-u-n. Shun, to banish and avoid. Thion, tee haitch. T-i-o-n. Harry presses the sounds to murmurs between tongue-tip and top teeth, decides he can write poetry. England expects.
On Erebus, the last night on Erebus. In Portsmouth, their first room alone.
These bits of history come so easy:
John’s grey-streaked hair comb-kissed after the third day Harry told him off for it. How Leys and Manson take the foretop (they are matched exactly in shoulder and height, the last men on the crew Harry remembers struggling to tell apart; it charms him something awful). And observe the sight at starboard: right whale spouts behind the long side of the foresail and Leys singing a whaleboat song. How backstays feel when there’s wind in them – tension and motion under his boots, his arse, his thighs, the peculiar wild brace between rigging and mast when she’s cracking on. John in the attic room of a Portsmouth tavern, heavy-lidded, heavy-shuffle, bare to the soft broad waist, his smile slow. The grog shop that stood opposite.
The argument in London that parted them before the expedition tugged their circle-edges closed again: you stand in the gunroom and say bugger all, counting the inches between your shoes so well you wear yourself out. You leave no room for me. Between my legs? Between your legs and in your fucking heart, John. I may be young but (he forgets exactly what he said; at sea you could outlive me is the gist but deferred in a way that makes John’s lips twitch and his bad humour go, he who’s never bored of the gap between them and the differences it brings).
John snores and then the nasal rasp breaks in two. He snuffles. He sounds old. Harry strokes his hip, warm under the blanket like a body and not a fire.
I thought you’d gone, he whispers. John is fast asleep, his arms heavy crooked tight around Harry’s neck and his big mittened hands clasped loose against Harry's own bare collarbone. Harry feels a little silly but panic is still too close to his throat to say this in proper waking – he won't stand what being sentimental now might do to John’s eyes – so he murmurs it low so John's grizzled big body, his own tired good love, will take it in as a lullaby rather than a secret.
I know you thought I’d gone. Without a word, John. Did you think I’d go without saying something grand? You’ll make a hoplite poet of me before our march is through.
He adds, silent to himself: I’ve read your Xenophon and your Herodotus; I can spin dry history to something good. Well enough to make you grin and wonder at me. Like when you taught me to read or when we got alone onshore and I did those things I said I would, the first time.
What feels like the creature's claw and he realises a beat later is fear curls abrupt in his guts, piercing his navel and the little quiet space behind John's curtain. Harry squeezes his eyes shut and listens determinedly to the ice and John’s breath, the lazy thump of his heart within the hull of his ribs.
He searches and finds a line to make him coherent again: from Herodotus, of Tellus the happiest man in Athens. A very splendid end to his life came upon him. Harry makes himself breathe in time with John’s sleep-breath and lets his body weigh heavier on the little corner of bunk to find the rest, spelling out each word with a light finger on John’s belly as it rises and falls:
For when the Athenians waged war against their neighbours in Eleusis, E-l-e-u-s-i-s, coming to the rescue and making a rout of the enemy, he died very beautifully. A nd the Athenians buried him publicly right where he fell, and honoured him greatly.
It will be a very splendid end, Harry decides to himself. John smells nothing like the fire but of all the places they have been, the sea asleep beneath the ice. He murmurs in his sleep.
Don’t you worry, love. A Greek I am, yes, and splendid too.
On Erebus. In Portsmouth, their first room alone.