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One of these days, Hickey is going to lose a tooth.
They eat their meat raw to keep the scurvy at bay, but they can’t ward it completely off. Nearly every one of them has bruises that won’t fade, cuts that won’t heal. The raw meat is tough; with the loosening of their teeth, it’s only a matter of time for all of them, no matter how finely they cut their flesh rations.
Tozer watches Hickey chewing. He eats like he’s fascinated by the meat more than he’s hungry for it. Others wolf it down, ravenous, trying not to think about it more than they have to, but Hickey takes his time about it. Acquaints himself thoroughly with every morsel: first between his fingers, then between his teeth.
He doesn’t eat enough. That much is clear. He eats until he’s bored, Tozer guesses, and that must often come before his stomach has been filled, because Hickey’s self-assurance is no longer making up for the fact that that great coat has never fit him. He looks tiny under it now, even despite his ever-surer stride. His lean muscle is giving way to bones as he starves, no different from the rest of them.
One of these days, there will be a bruise. One of these days, a tooth will crunch out of his jaw when he bites down. One day something will happen to him, because one day something must happen to him.
When it does, Tozer will see it.
Hickey savours a thin piece of the flank cut he has on his plate. Tozer watches it go down his throat as he swallows, licks his lips, considering. Then watches him stand up: finished eating before the meat is gone.
What remains on his plate, Hickey gives to Tozer. Tozer takes it with a word of thanks, then watches him waft away to wherever he’s going this time.
He’ll keep the tooth, Tozer muses, whichever it is, when it eventually wriggles free of Hickey’s gums. He’ll find it among the rocks and pick it up if Hickey discards it, or he’ll take it from the table if Hickey leaves it there.
He will ask to be given it, if Hickey puts it into his pocket. If Hickey agrees, he will pop it in his mouth the moment Hickey hands it to him. He will keep it inside his cheek, tucked up beside his own teeth. The Hickey that gives him the tooth will like that, he’d wager.
If Hickey won’t give it to him, though, it’s no great loss. It isn’t as if Tozer needs the tooth. He’ll still get something out of it if Hickey turns him down, because the manner in which Hickey refuses will be informative of what he will be like when he is forced more and more to remember that he is as human as the rest of them. And Tozer isn’t sure what he ought to expect of Hickey then, when that inevitably turns real, so it will be good for him to have this way of testing the waters.
*
Hickey is standing in the middle of camp in his smallclothes again. Staring out at the shale, pleased as anything about God knows what. He stretches his hands over his head, out to the sides.
It’ll be his shoulders he stretches next, Tozer supposes. It usually is. The rest is less predictable, but legs are always last.
Lieutenant Hodgson is sitting watching Hickey from behind at what he must feel is a safe distance. He nods at Tozer politely when he sits down near him, offering a quiet, “Sergeant,” and shifts to the side to give him space to sit — as if there were not endless space for Tozer to sprawl out here.
Tozer worries for Lieutenant Hodgson a little. Doesn’t lose sleep over him, just worries in passing from time to time. Hodgson was alright as an officer — he’s plummy and he hasn’t got much of a spine; Tozer has no particular love for him, but he’s not bad.
Hickey, though, has never had any particular love for Hodgson either, and that means something different with Hickey than it does with Tozer.
Everyone knows, now, the kind of treatment a person who has Hickey’s affection can expect. Affection has never entered into the decisions made here — a tenet Billy Gibson himself had agreed to from the start, but even so, whatever Hickey had felt for Gibson, he feels not even a fraction of it for Hodgson.
Hodgson has a few gaps in his teeth now, and he is looking overall the worse for wear. It doesn’t bode well.
Hodgson obviously understands that it doesn’t bode well, and he seems to have resigned himself to it. Tozer would have thought badly of him for that once, but whether the resignation stems from wisdom or weakness doesn’t much matter anymore.
“Why do you suppose he goes about in his long johns?” Hodgson says, quiet enough that only Tozer will hear. “I’ve wondered if it’s to do with the freedom of movement they afford him. I myself have never found our trousers and shirts to be particularly restrictive, but on a person who prizes his full range of motion, I can imagine that they very well might chafe.”
Tozer has no thoughts about this topic. Hickey wears what he does because Hickey wears what he does. There’s good reason for the coat and the boots; there might be for the long johns too, but Tozer hasn’t worked it out.
He grunts a noncommittal response. Hodgson nods as if he’s made a good point.
“You know, he rather reminds me of a monk, sometimes,” Hodgson goes on. “Or, well, perhaps not a monk, perhaps more of a mystic. Have you ever seen them, Sergeant? I’m terribly sorry, I don’t seem to be able to remember much about your stations before Terror.”
Tozer doesn’t know which mystics Hodgson is talking about, nor does he care. If it were somebody else that Hodgson were talking to, Tozer might stand happily enough near them so he could listen in for a while, but there’s no one else here, and he’s not in a mood to be the direct target of one of Hodgson’s winding lectures at the minute.
Luckily, Hodgson falls into silence when he receives no response, as he has taken to doing lately. That doesn’t bode well either, but Tozer is glad of it nonetheless.
In the distance, Hickey’s shoulders rise as he takes a deep, luxurious breath.
*
He has keen eyes, Hickey does. His eyes were one of the things Tozer used not to like about him, and one of the things that had most bewitched him later. Weasely and hypnotic both, depending on how willing a person is to be taken in by them. Clear and expressive — although Hickey’s eyes can play-act as competently as the rest of him.
Kneeling while Hickey sits, Tozer stares up into the centers of Hickey’s eyes, huge in the dim tent lighting. Black, uncanny holes in his colourless face, staring back. They’ve been at this a while, too long, but Tozer takes some solace in the lengthening seconds he waits for Hickey to break the stare.
Suddenly, Hickey smiles, like he’s just found whatever it is he’s been searching for.
It isn’t a good smile, but it doesn’t matter. Whatever he thinks he does or doesn’t see in Tozer is Hickey’s own business, and not much to do with anything real. There’s something wrong in Hickey, Tozer sees now. Something newly warped that used not to be that reminds Tozer of a rabid animal before the snarling starts.
Hickey’s smile shutters to something more normal, blinking. Some day soon, he might blink hard enough that he breaks a vein in his eye. The leaking blood will stain the white of it around the blue: an eerie flaw to his eerie perfection.
He will make a fine picture then, Tozer thinks. He looks forward to seeing it.
Clapping Tozer on the shoulder, Hickey raises himself to his feet like he does not weigh anything at all — which, Tozer supposes, he very nearly doesn’t.
*
The first couple of times they’d gotten into each other’s flies on the ship had been pleasant enough. Tozer remembers it fondly sometimes. He’d not thought too well of Hickey when that had started, but it had been casual enough that he hadn’t needed to. Hickey had been discreet, adept with his hand and neither skittish nor soppy in his demeanor, which were the important things about a friendly frigg. Too chatty maybe, but Tozer didn’t mind that much; he liked a bit of talk sometimes.
He remembers appreciating the natural way Hickey passed the cigarette he’d rolled afterwards to him. Damp from his mouth where Tozer took it between his lips. Easy, like it didn’t mean anything. At the time, it hadn’t.
Their third go, the sweaty pink of Hickey’s face had stuck in Tozer’s mind for whatever reason. It was not so remarkable for any of them to be ruddy from the cold or dripping from work, so why that detail would have impressed itself on him made little sense. From that image, though, he can reconstruct the rest of the scene in his head whenever he likes: the groaning of the hull, the force of his own hand, Hickey’s shoulders curling inward from how he was pinned back against the wall, mouth open, brows knit, all but lost in Tozer’s grip.
Again, Tozer had thought on rhythm, an echo of Crozier’s command. Again. Again. He’d liked the effect his strokes had on Mr Hickey more than the effects of the captain’s lashes.
They don’t touch each other like that anymore, of course. When there is skin on skin now, it is limited to Hickey’s hands on his hands, on his neck. More augur than lover.
It should seem like a loss, but it doesn’t. They were never really lovers.
Even if Tozer did miss what they used to do, though, it wouldn’t make sense anymore for them to keep on as they had been. Hickey is different from how he was, now in his new weird sterility. Where most men’s faces have turned rough and mottled, all of Hickey’s pink has gone, leaving his pallor as flat as the rock stretching endlessly on around them.
Their bloodless saint. A supernal thing Lieutenant Irving could only ever have dreamed of being.
Tozer wishes he’d asked Hickey to fuck him, back when that might have been an option. He’d wanted it, badly, though he hadn’t known he’d wanted it until he was too wrapped in Hickey’s thrall to say as much. He doubts Hickey would have turned him down. It might be a good memory to have — if a harder one than that of Hickey’s quiet gasps and flushed cheeks.
He could ask for it yet, he knows. But there would be no point anymore, for more reasons than one.
*
He takes his gun apart, for want of anything else to do. Cleans it, puts it back together. Takes it apart again. It’s boring, but he can’t just sit here any longer, so he keeps doing it.
Morfin had had the right idea, Tozer supposes. If a man is that ill, of no use to himself or anyone else, in pain, he might as well take a bullet to ease his suffering. The captains hadn’t wanted Tozer to shoot him, but Tozer himself doesn’t regret doing it.
The gun disassembled again, he starts again on reassembling it.
He’ll shoot Hickey some day, maybe. Hickey won’t demand it like Morfin did, but Tozer will do that for him, same as he did for Morfin.
It will be at closer range with Hickey, he imagines. There won’t be so many people around, and he doubts that Hickey will be moving so much.
The gun is back together. He begins to take it back apart.
Between the eyes, maybe. That would be best. Hickey, watching him like a dare. Tozer would prefer that Hickey was watching him; he doesn’t like the idea of waiting until Hickey is so sick that he can’t focus. Doesn’t like the idea that shooting him would be more like putting down a dog than killing a man.
No, they won’t wait that long, if they can help it. Between the eyes. It will be between the eyes, or under the chin. Probably not in the mouth — although the image of that does flash through Tozer’s mind as he turns the gun’s barrel in his hands.
But no, no. Between the eyes. It will be between the eyes. Tozer wants to see whatever’s in Hickey’s thoughts just before he pulls the trigger.
*
It won’t be pretty when Hickey finally falls ill. Whatever warmth Hickey might have started with seems to have frozen away like so many blackened toes. The worse things are for him, the colder he gets under his knowing smiles.
Not so long ago, Tozer had nurtured some half-strategic hope that the loss of Gibson might soften Hickey a bit, make him need some comfort. That had not turned out to be the case. Hickey has seemed, since Gibson’s death, to have hardened himself beyond the idea of comfort. He provides it to others now like it is a need that he understands, but which he himself cannot recall ever having shared.
When he falls ill, even that pretended softness will shrivel up. There will be only cruelty left in him.
…For a while, anyway. While he is still able to do most of what he can do now, he will be a real monster. But after that, when he can hardly hold himself upright, then there might be some different changes.
Tozer has begun to take more comfort in what he imagines will happen then. When Hickey has been as mean as he is able, when he has screamed and bitten and clawed his way through the last scraps of hope…there will be something good in that. It will be bleak, watching Hickey fade. If things were different, Tozer would hate the thought of it. But, things are not different.
He doesn’t often think about it, but sometimes at night, lying in Hickey’s tent, his mind wanders to the fantasy. Hickey, beside him, where he is now, unable to do much for himself anymore. Weak, skeletal, ashen, mottled with grey bruises, his gums bleeding…Tozer will sit by him and do things for him. Rake his hair off his face. Clean the grime from under his fingernails. Share the warmth of his own body with him, if he’ll have it. Talk to him, keep his mind occupied.
A bit like it was with Bill Heather, really, except Hickey will talk back.
Hickey will appreciate it all, because he’ll have no choice. Hickey is not the kind of man who will ever wish for death; he’ll be fighting it to his last breath. Anything Tozer does for him will buy him that many more minutes for his miserable life, and he will appreciate it.
He’ll complain anyway. Hickey does that: it’s part of him to complain. Still, Tozer occasionally imagines that he won’t. He imagines that Hickey’s abject ruination might sweeten him enough to fall gratefully into his care.
It’s only a fantasy, of course, and a far-fetched one at that. But a man has got to hope for something, and it’s a lovelier notion than any others Tozer has been able to think up for a long while now. He sees no harm in indulging it.
*
Of the two of them, Tozer could be the one who falls ill first.
He is ill — they all are — but so far Tozer does not feel that he is too much at risk. He has some sores that won’t heal properly; his guts are off and his mind is slow; he can’t haul as much or for as long as he used to be able to; and most of him hurts when he pays attention — but he isn’t really ill. He has all his teeth. His joints are alright. His body hasn’t withered away as much as some others’ have. He’ll be able to keep going for a while yet, he guesses.
Guessing is dangerous though. Things don’t go to plan. Sickness might come on suddenly, or he might be injured somehow, or there might be some new poison that does him quicker harm than what’s in the tins. He’d prefer to be alright one minute and dead the next than to drag it out, but there’s no knowing what might happen, and if he falls ill, there won’t be much that he can do about it.
If it happens sooner than he expects, he won’t have much to worry about. A quick knife to the back or the chest or the throat, no fuss, over and done with.
The throat would likely be quickest. He hopes Hickey will go for the chest, though, if it comes to that.
If it happens a long time from now, he’s less sure how things will proceed. Depends if others are sick, and if so, how many. Depends if others are alive , and if so, how many. He expects when they’ve lost enough of their number, the figuring might change around whether a man or his meat has more value. Especially if Hickey is sick by then too — which he ought to be; how could he not be? — company might take higher priority for him than a last meal he would hardly be able to get down his throat anyway.
Hickey does not have the makings of a good nursemaid. As it stands, he does his best to provide for his men, but Tozer struggles to picture him taking care of any of them for any duration. No doubt he can wear that attitude if he wants to, but it will be unpracticed, and any moments of gentleness he musters will be scrambled with horrible meanness. Should Hickey ever need to take care of him, Tozer is sure he will hear a lot about how pathetic he is and how stupid, how he isn’t good for anything without his brawn, how he isn’t good for anything if he can’t shoot. How Hickey would always have preferred to have Bryant as his sergeant than Tozer, what a poor substitute Tozer has been. How much better Gibson always was than Tozer is, how much cleverer, how much he’d liked Billy and how much he never did care anything at all about Sol. How the lot of them would still be alive and well if it had been David Bryant who had survived, how much he’d rather it was William Gibson he was dying beside, how Solomon Tozer is nothing, nothing, nothing…
Hickey might kiss him sometimes if they both fall ill at once, Tozer suspects. Especially if they are the only ones left. It’s nice to imagine that he might, even if Tozer doesn’t particularly want him to.
Hickey will sleep bundled together with him, not apart like how they sleep now. There is no question about that; if they make it long enough for them to be as unwell as Tozer is imagining, they will also have made it long enough to feel the winter coming. They will not be able to afford to waste body heat.
Maybe one day they will fall asleep together — shivering, breathing in each other’s rank and rotting air — and Tozer won’t ever wake up. He wonders what Hickey will do, then. Diminished as he will surely be, will he attempt to carry on alone? Or will he give up at last, stay where he is until he’s finished too?
Some day the Admiralty might send a search party out and find their bodies, huddled close enough that Hickey’s lank hair is blowing across what’s left of Tozer’s face. Tozer wraps his fingers around his own wrist, imagining that the hand is his own dead hand and the wrist is Hickey’s dead wrist.
What will the search party make of them? he wonders.
A sick, premature sense of pride bleeds through his guilt at the thought of it. His fingers tighten until the bones in his captive wrist ache.
*
“What's he doing?”
“Listening to his thoughts,” Tozer replies, not half skeptical. The rock under his elbow is liable to bruise it the way he’s lying, he thinks. Apathetic.
Armitage and Pilkington are more than half skeptical about what Hickey’s doing up there. A man can’t wander off to stare into the sky for hours on end without having something wrong with him; they all know it. For a while Hickey’s odd, clear-cutting way had spellbound them, but it’s crossed too much into madness recently to keep passing for magic.
Even if Hickey were different than he is, his leadership would be sitting uneasy with them by now thanks to the direness of their situation. Tozer can’t blame Armitage and Pilkington and anyone else who agrees with them. He doesn’t want to hear it, but he can hardly blame them for being tired of Hickey’s shit. By now, he reckons, it’s only because Tozer still sticks by him that they haven’t turned on him yet.
The men would follow Tozer, if he so much as said the word. He’s nearly certain of that now, but it’s a precarious certainty. If he’s going to do it, he ought to get a move on. The more he dallies, the less sure the men will be of him. So, better sooner than later.
“Are we waiting for his permission?” Armitage asks, just shy of demanding, as if to underscore his unspoken point.
“No,” Tozer spits. It’s for pure practicality that they haven’t gone yet, he explains, sounding barkish but not particularly persuasive to his own ear. “This needn’t be a second mutiny.”
It will, of course, need to be a second mutiny. Not only that, but they will have to kill Hickey if they turn against him; they can’t just leave him behind or make a subordinate of him again. He’d cause too many problems if they tried. It would have to be done.
Tozer could go fetch his gun and do it right now. That would be a clean end to it. He could shoot Hickey through the head from here then turn to the rest of them to say, “Right, that’s enough of that. Pack up and head out,” and they would do it.
It would not be long before they turned on him too, of course, but there might be enough time to rejoin with the other group if they wanted to, or to return to the ships, or to try something else Tozer hasn’t thought of yet that might improve their conditions a little.
He doubts he would make a worse mess of things than they’re already in, in any case. Hickey had effective ideas for a while, but Tozer isn’t sure anymore that they were ever good. They certainly aren’t now. Hickey’s as good as gone already.
“He'll see reason,” Tozer lies anyway, getting up in Armitage’s face as if that will make the falsehood true. “We'll do what we have to do, Tommy, but we'll do it tomorrow.”
If either Armitage or Pilkington is disappointed, they shouldn’t be. Tomorrow’s not so long to wait; Tozer’ll do right by them soon enough. He’ll just hold off a couple of days; everyone can be patient.
In the distance, Hickey starts to pick his way back down his hill. The three of them turn to watch, waiting for him to slip or stumble.
Tozer holds his breath until Hickey makes it to even ground without incident. Exhales. Sinks back down onto the rock.
He just needs to give it a few more days.