The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation (Volume 2): Part VII

Several of the women of the Dunluce were rowed to our ship this day to call for our laundry, which they propose to beat and boil in the galley of their ship, that it might be rid of the grease and smoke of battle, which contribute not a little to the oppressive fumes of our dark hold.

I took my leave of them, my breast a welter of shame, longing, and pique; before I was three steps away, I perceived, Bono was already well on his way to introducing a relation of his heroism during the late assault.

I took my leave of them, my breast a welter of shame, longing, and pique; before I was three steps away, I perceived, Bono was already well on his way to introducing a relation of his heroism during the late assault.

“Our clothes,” he said, “got somewhat fusty in the rebels' little New Year's callithump. They're rowdy boys, and I reckon they knocked down a candle during their celebrations.”

I narrated its events, not stinting Pro Bono’s actions therein.

Pro Bono, however, mocked us when he came down from his exercise on deck, and jested—I recall not what raillery—at our bookishness, that we were fine gentlemen to be studying at such a time—this, when he himself and Dr. Trefusis, but a few weeks hence, were waggish in confederation like smirking schoolboys as I looked on.

The agent’s in jail and the rebels has published the whole plan as an example of, you know, perfidy.

My faculties could not encompass the news; for though I was not insensible of our perilous condition, I must own that my thoughts gnawed primarily on Bono’s pride in relating disaster, his satisfaction always in knowing.

I reckon they’re hanging me in effigy right now just so as they can have my face around town more.

I just reckoned you might like to be apprised that we’s alone in this battle with no aid coming and the rebels all around us.

I have lain in my hammock for some hours, my arm within striking distance of Pro Bono, and revolved thoughts of that most provocative of mentors, and how he urges me onwards with leading-strings, and how he tugs me back so I should not toddle too far beyond his ken; and at once, my soul moves its several ways...

Several men, Charles among them, are taken with a fever and a vomit which appear perilous; most so, as they require water at all hours, and we have not as much potable of that necessary element as we might wish, though surrounded by its lapping.

...I could no longer bear to hear them without tears; which I shed not simply out of my sensibility of the pain, but at the thought that men could inflict such calculated agony upon each other blithely, with sport and fascination...

...and that it should be done for the continuance of nugatory pleasures, so that they might enjoy luxuries: a finer metal in the instruments of their table, or a room in which to half recline separate from the room where they reclined fully.

“I had to wake him up. ‘For my mercy endureth forever,’” said Bono, and he loosened one hand to slap at my head in play; but there was no play in his eyes, only fury. I saw Nsia watching us, bemused, and could not abide her gaze.

(A childish shriek—awful to recall—the petulant—never again—)

I hated him; I despised myself more, my pettish voice squealing its misery—I hated the ship, the shore, the river—I wished nothing more than an end of thought—I cannot describe it—I cannot.

With sharp exclamation the master-at-arms and two midshipmen began to beat us with truncheons, crying, “Heave to, heave to!” and “Cease, you Negro brutes, or we’ll hurl ye both in the river!”

The pilot is a Negro man reputed to know the river well, which circumstance delights us all, and we spent a pleasant hour in hearing his tales of the river and his account of his master’s wrath when he absconded with a boat some months ago—the pilot drifting away from the dock, the white man stranded, shouting after him that the pilot should not steer so clear of shoals, scudding on the burning lakes of Hell.

“Private Nothing, he’s our pugilist, as you might say.” To me, he nodded. “Strike him,” he said.

I asked Olakunde to describe the country of Oyo, as I had begged my mother when she lay upon her sickbed; and he replied with some confusion that he did not know what I wished him to recount; to which I replied that I wished to know any fact of its solidity: the nature of its cities, the smell of its dirt, the diurnal round of its people, any small chore my mother might have engaged in.

He observed that my gaze was fixed absently upon the stanchions, and after a time grew tired of waiting, and asked me what I thought of.

This evening, I related to Olakunde the full dimensions of her tale, or I should rather say, the story she told me: not simply the tender prince, the cruel rival, the battle, but also the residence among the Collegians and their cages, charts, and paraphernalia.

I said to Bono, “You will perhaps accept my apologies for my deception.”
Bono nodded; then shook his head. He offered no absolution, nor any rancor.

He offered no absolution, nor any rancor.

“It would,” admitted Dr. Trefusis, “perhaps be salutary for you to recount it.”

I own that such is not known; but that indeed, the scholars of the College believed the disease was caused by the inhalation of truculent animalcula.

I wonder now at these prayers: for mayhap in the course of that voyage he interrupted the indignities practiced upon her person; or—and this I fear to name—mayhap he was captain of her woes, and she bade me pray for him, that the villain might be scathed by her kindness, that he might be reformed by her sardonic benisons, cast at him night after night from a distance of leagues and years.

I see the years draw on, and she gains in fortitude and dignity; learns to cast off any memory of that past, with its perilous glimpses of nightmare (the stone of the basalt crypts, the shrieking of lamentation); either thinks not upon the years before her abduction, or plays them out upon a stage so buried in the ventricles of the brain that it never can be detected; and her attentions are drawn to fine gowns and the addresses of people of the first quality.

Perhaps I shall never know whether she felt the tenderest of affections for Lord Cheldthorpe, or simply dissembled; and perhaps she knew not herself, for acquisition and station are delightful; offered riches and ease, who would not love?

“Recall,” she would say to me, “that you are a prince”; and I began to doubt her reiterations and resent her impostures—the tales of orchid thrones and panther steeds.

But I see now how sedulously she labored to create her illusion; for she knew it should protect me only so long as I believed it.

He hath been sold at eight from his mother's side, and now must daily watch another boy enjoy coddling, plaudits, and idleness.

He must serve the tot at table; he must rise and see the princeling is dressed in finery; he must listen to the mother's fatuous tales of Africk royalty, knowing that all that debars him from these pleasures is a story likely knit out of fancy; keenly aware that the darling of all eyes is no more or less than he.

I owned, “For some years, growing sensible that some part or whole of her narration was not founded upon the firmest bedrock of veracity—”

“Now, that is a fate worse than death. If that be true, you should consign yourself to the waves this same moment.”

“We know not what transpired while she was immured in the slave castle.”

Then recall that you enjoy the fiddle and Scots tunes and them Italian trumperies and you enjoy treacle tarts and, when it rains, books where men in fine dresses throw spears at each other’s feet.

Miss Nsia turned with nice discretion as Bono and I lifted off their smocks.

...the head of each household greets his patriarch by prostrating himself, touching cheeks right and left to the dirt, as women recline on their elbows.

Olakunde informs me that my people name smallpox Sonponna; and that this most fearsome god hath his own votaries; but that none call him by his name, rather naming him by indirection, as “Hot Ground,” “Cold Ground,” or “Sweetly, Softly”; hoping by refusing to call upon him that he might pass them by and spare them his attentions.

When she was dying, wracked with her irruptions, in the slave quarters of that house in Canaan, this libation sat by her, untouched.

It shall not stand as a record of the rebels’ inhumanity; it shall not raise indignation in the breast of the righteous; none shall commend us for our efforts; but instead, it shall be noised abroad that these crimes were ours; and we shall be reviled for what our enemies have done.

We are left, our fleet, the last vestige of royal power in this benighted Colony, guarding a town that is ash entire, under siege from none, delectable to none, strategic for none; and we sit at anchor, uncertain.

We are left, our fleet, the last vestige of royal power in this benighted Colony, guarding a town that is ash entire, under siege from none, delectable to none, strategic for none; and we sit at anchor, uncertain.