The Tern Schooner (Privateers & Gentlemen) by Walter Jon Williams

Author:Walter Jon Williams [Williams, Walter Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: War of 1812, privateers, sea stories, sailing ships, mutiny, war of 1812, sea adventure, privateer, schooner, napoleonic war, markham family, privateers and gentlemen, jean laffite, age of sail, creek war, alabama history
Publisher: Walter Jon Williams
Published: 2018-11-21T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

THE CHOCTAW PASS

Gideon brushed a mosquito from his forehead; he felt the hot sun on his naked eyelids, and before he opened them, he turned his head into shadow. His first sight was of Maria-Anna asleep on her back, her eyes closed, a few sprigs of grass rising through her tangled hair. Her mouth was parted slightly to show an pale tooth reflecting the sun. Gideon watched her for a moment, content, ineluctably happy, feeling beneath their anonymous clothing the warmth of her legs still tangled with his. He felt the impulse to reach out and tenderly to touch her cheek.

Jupiter! he thought, stunned, as he remembered where and what he was. He drew back his hand and for a moment fought panic, an impulse of terror as strong as any he had battled in war, urging him to flee from the clutches of the monster he’d created back to the unencumbered solitude of the forest.

Lord help me! He remembered that impulse he had felt to touch her cheek, the innocent, human warmth of the gesture, the sense of freedom and the utter absence of any knowledge of iniquity. God preserve her.

He had almost, with his polluting hand, defiled her once more and had not felt shame. Forgive me my sin, he tried to pray, but his insincerity was bitterness to him and ultimately paralyzing. In his memory of the night before, the acts of love performed on the darkening bank, the half-coherent recollection of textures and pleasures and the cries of some distant bird, he could detect no grain of remorse nor any true repentance; instead there was only the lingering reminiscence of the act’s unjustifiable fitness. He had sinned, and he was not sorry.

To sin was understandable, and the lot of fallen mankind. Not to repent was hideously wrong.

He closed his eyes and tried furiously to pray, with no success. A few days before, he remembered, he had wondered idly (and viciously, as he now thought) if Maria-Anna possessed a moral sense, if she was capable of feeling remorse for the suffering and death her actions had caused. Now Gideon was demonstrating himself to be a creature apart from humanity, incapable of contrition, condemned to blackness. The utter, devastating irony of it overwhelmed him. Now he knew why he had never truly known his God, despite his prayerful appeals and hypocritical anguish, his outward show of piety: the Almighty had known what Gideon in his presumption had not, that Gideon Markham was not a moral being. Was instead depraved, unnatural. Damned. And Gideon knew why God had taken from him his wife and son, the one divine act that Gideon, in his heart of hearts, had not been able to forgive. Gideon understood now that Betsy and Jos had been taken in order that he, Gideon, not corrupt them with his own iniquity; they had to die while still capable of salvation, and they rested in their coffins only because they had chosen to love Gideon.

No! Lord,

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