//------------------------------// // Chapter XXIX: Accusative // Story: Subjunctive // by Integral Archer //------------------------------// “Aye, there he lieth.” Thus spoke the voice that aroused me from my slumber. It pounded into my temples, setting my jaw stiff. A lantern was thrust through the threshold of my room, burned through the protective darkness, and its light exploded in my head. The light trembled; the room flashed and disappeared, as though it were the light itself that caused this part and now that part of the room to come into existence. The words and flashes served only to aggravate my fatigued mind. I rolled over, pulled the sheets over my head, and hoped that this new disturbance wasn’t for me. The irregular sound of feet trampling on wooden planks punched my head over and over. A much more regular, faint, but ever as angry sound echoed somewhere above and around. But the harder I tried to listen, the more my head throbbed. I felt a hoof on my back. “Art thou still alive?” said a second voice. The hoof was cold, wet, and slimy. I squirmed out of reflex, moaned in discomfort, and tried to bat it away. “Ah,” said the first, “the sucking leech prefereth the humid bedrock to the biting air. Arise, arise! The discomfort will be good for thee.” Two hooves slipped under my shoulders, both wet and clammy. I shrieked a bit louder, doubled up on myself, and hoped that they would go away. Two voices laughed over me, derisively and malignantly, the sneers of hyenas over their prey. They poked me, jabbed me with their studded shoes, in my ribs, my head, my back, and when I cried out, their touches became more firm and the laughs augmented. “The thing’s ticklish!” they jeered. “Enough, enough!” bellowed a third voice from the doorway. “Why do ye frolic around like lovers? Get him, say I; get him, and let us be done with the matter!” This third voice, with its inimical growl and truculent tone, made its owner unmistakable: she was Flask, directing the two who were upon me. The hooves slipped under my shoulders once again—this time, forcefully. My base instincts, the only part of me that was functioning, responded to the assault with panic. Quickly, I lashed out, screaming, and waved my hooves, trying to strike something. Most of my frenzied retaliations missed their marks or only harmlessly skimmed my assailants’ hair. I threw myself in a blind fervor against them; cries and groans erupted amid the sound of wood cracking and heavy objects breaking against the floor. A hoof came under my chin—I bent my neck, found purchase with my teeth, and bit down hard. There was a piercing wail, and one of my assailants withdrew. “Mare drown thee, thou scum-sucker!” she wailed. “Send Her sharks to make out of thee a gelding She!” She raised the bloody hoof and struck me flush in the thorax. I gasped; the world went numb, my limbs limp, and my head burned for want of air. “There, he positively twitches now!” she cackled. “Say, Topgallant,” the other laughed, “red in the face, red in the limbs. I verily like thee in that color.” “If thou let go of him,” Topgallant hissed, “I can get more. Perhaps I can draw enough makeup for the both of us.” “Nay, nay! I can see Ms. Flask is getting ornery with us. We’re coming; we’re coming! See, Topgallant, she wanteth him for herself; thus, we must carry him for her if we be proper folk. And a dead fish squirmeth not along the path to the cook as well as an alive one. Come; let’s carry him as he is.” When they lifted me up, each dragging me by a foreleg while my hind ones trailed limply on the planks, I, still in my foggy and disoriented state, was helpless to resist. I didn’t see their faces, their attitudes, or the damage we had left from the struggle. I felt only their strong grasps on me, my body being hauled toward the painfully harsh lantern; and in its light, I could see only a silhouette in the form of Flask standing in the doorway, her teeth set firm, her posture impeccable, her body tense and posed in resolution. The aura from her horn, as well as that which surrounded the lantern she was levitating, was as black as the rest of her. She turned, and we were shrouded in darkness. Flask walked forward, and the sensation of moving stirred vaguely through me. Down the twists of the indistinguishable decks, up flights of damp stairs, we ascended. Salt filled my nose, darkness my eyes, except for Flask, and the flickering puddle of light that danced around her, as though trying desperately to get out of the way of her inexorable gait. And all the while, the sailors’ argot sounded, alternating between my ears: “I see nothing amusing about this scrawny one, but—who can say?—Ms. Flask always findeth singular ways to play with ’em.” “Maybe she’ll let us join in this time,” Topgallant snickered. “One can only look at ropes and sails so long ere one become lethargic and need some sort of stimulation.” “Ah, thou coddled yearling! Dost not thou find any excitement at the sea, especially if thou get stirred up in the midst of maelstroms such as these?” “Aye, I can feel it in the tendons of his back, but this foreleg is as limp as his senses! Hah, I know what’s in store—only I hope I can be there to see!” “What dost thou think of? Rememberest thou Columbiad? Didn’t that pulley taketh off her hoof entire?” “Nay, just the skin and a bit. But thou wast ill and didst not see the amputation, and then how she was plopped back on the shore, to do naught but sing plaintive shanties on the pier for the rest of her days. This hoof feeleth the same as hers. Pretty soon the necrosis should set in. Then what will he do?” “Should just cut it off now ere the poor thing suffer any discomfort. ’Twould be only common courtesy.” “And replace it with one o’ whalebone! Let him toss his pipe into the water from the cabin where he cloistereth himself up to brood!” “The way thou thinkest is gold! Or, better yet, why not make it we o’ wood, give him an eye patch, and put a parrot on his shoulder?” They erupted into laughter, and their cries racked them such that they slackened their pace. And, at once, as though informed of their falling behind by the difference in the echoes that reached her, Flask turned around. The voices stopped immediately. “What do ye say?” she squalled. “How do ye view me? Think ye I be some sort of sadist?” She got no reply, but she turned and started on her path once again, gesturing to the two to follow her. “I don’t like this,” she continued. “I loathe it with all in me that is able to loathe. And that part of me groweth stronger, festereth, and overwhelmeth the parts once good and gay. I don’t know what I’ve done or what it all signifieth or even what I’ve become. But should I let the ship founder lest a small atrocity be committed? Aye, perhaps. Maybe it’d be better for the repose of my conscience. Maybe it’d be better for all of us. But I’m not strong enough to be moral.” In this last sentence, there was a note almost akin to sorrow. Flask began to ascend one more flight of stairs, at the top of which a door which trembled as though it were battered from the outside by a throng. She raised a hoof as if to knock; but then, with a deep breath, with gritted teeth, with something that was almost trepidation in her stare, she removed the lock. At once, the door flew open with a piercing howl and splitting peal. She stepped through the threshold, and the tempestuous sea wind threw her auburn mane into her face. Flask recoiled, stumbled, squinted as the storm tore into her eyes, and her lantern was torn from her grasp; the feeble flame was extinguished the moment the air touched it; and the lantern, tumbling through the air, plunged into the surrounding blackness and made no sound when it hit the churned waves. Nihil was on the deck, pacing to and fro beneath the thunder and rain. He was wearing a thin poncho, but had not bothered to raise its hood to protect himself. Between his lips was a pipe. Beside him he levitated a packet of phosphoric matches. In a self-flagellating ritual, he would withdraw a match from the water-logged box, strike it against the sandpaper, and the match would spark in the darkness and die just as quickly, but the old stallion would bring it to his pipe anyway and curse when the drenched tobacco failed to light. When Flask was on the deck, the door crashed shut as loudly as it had opened for her. Nihil’s ears perked up; he started, and spun around to greet the newcomers, his eyes flashing green flames. “Here he is,” Flask deadpanned, her voice barely audible over the rain. “Mare drown thee, thou mad jade; here he is; I’ve brought him to thee.” The pipe dropped from his mouth as his lips twisted into a malignant smile. “Thou hast! I praise thee, Ms. Flask, for thy diligence and loyalty.” Then, turning to me, with the same simile, he said: “Aye, Scholar, there thou art! Thou summatest the gamut of Captain Nihil’s courtiers—thus, let the court of Captain Nihil come into session!” In the dark, a line of shivering but otherwise motionless figures stood out in trenchant relief against the whitecaps of the tumultuous waves; when lightning split the clouds, their eyes stood straight, staring, all marked with the common emotion of fear. At the end of the line was Fluttershy; next to her were the deformed traveller and her companion; the rest were bedraggled, bemused, and consternated sailors. Every single voyager on the Star Buck was, at that moment, on the deck beneath the thunder. The sailors who were not in the line were shouting, running, passing buckets of water to each other, trying desperately to furl the sails, each taking the tasks of five onto himself, each calling to his corresponding four comrades in the line to get over and help lest they be swamped and capsized; but the sailors in the line, terrified more of the officers than of the storm, stood still as rain battered their closed eyelids, as they pushed the plaintive cries of their struggling compatriots out of their pained ears and minds. Nihil walked down the length of the line in a slouch, tapping the mouthpiece of his pipe against his teeth, Flask following with languorous footsteps behind. The ship lurched; they but Nihil stumbled; and a wave which stretched to the height of the mizzenmast paused, hovered there as if to emphasize the terror of its anticipation, and then crashed down upon the deck, blinding all with its stinging salt. When the water ran out of the portholes, all were on their knees, choking, sputtering, drowning, even the mate herself—except Nihil, who continued his pace unchecked as before, but now with a grimace, as if to express disconcertment that the ones before him would show deference to the water but not to him. “Do I seem to you pleased?” he spoke at length. “Do I seem to you to enjoy the spectacle of my ship and her crew being thrown unprotected into Mare’s rancor? Ye say: ‘He walketh as though on a summer day,’ ‘he smoketh his pipe,’ and ‘he careth not about the wetness of his face or the dryness of his feet.’ But this is only a facade. Believe me, ye, a storm worse than the one ye see runeth on in my soul as I speak to you now. It’s a storm that can be quelled by that which I have spent my life pursuing: the force that hath selected you as my crew, and the lack of which hath churned me and by extension you up into the midst of the storm overhead. For the clouds, there is too much cold air, and they violently turn themselves over upon us—for Captain Nihil, a lack of warmth hath overturned his soul!” His horn flared; a hook disengaged the flap of a small pouch on the front of his poncho. Out of the pocket, he levitated a long canine tooth, which glistened in the rain and the feeble light from the stern lantern. As he hovered the tooth, brandishing it in the manner of a crown attorney, Nihil made a supercilious sneer, and when his lips parted, they revealed the traces of his own teeth, which shone back in the darkness along with the item of guilt in the same shade. “There is among you someone I’ve thought about, anticipated, seen, and loved just as much as I feared. See here, ye? Doth it appear to be one of a creature who eateth hay and oats? Nay, but all the same, found this I among the scattered ruins of the storeroom! He had no use for what ye eat, but all the same he tooketh so that ye have none!” At this, the sailors stirred. They exchanged worried glances with one another, each trying to see in the darkness if the same thought was on all their minds. It was unmistakable; it was a changeling tooth. They had all heard about changelings, joked about them, yet now here was incontrovertible proof that one lay among them, plundering what they had depended on. The ones still on duty paused, ignored the masts bending and cracking in the wind, the ropes whipping around and hissing like snakes, and the water which was now up to their knees. Yet, the rancor they may have felt and given expression to under normal circumstances was drowned in the rain Nihil had submerged them in. Nihil continued: “I’ll seek him out; he lieth among you. ’Tis why I gathered you here; and through my circumspection, be he revealed to all!” Flask stepped up to the pacing Nihil and reached a hoof out to him. “My captain,” she said, in a singular tone. The crew heard it through the rain, shivered, and squinted as they looked through the darkness at the speaker. The voice couldn’t have been hers; it was soft, almost compassionate, feminine, and beseeching. It had barely any traces of her characteristic phlegmatic throaty growl, nor her sharp enunciations, and now contained a soft sensitivity in place of its usual haughty confidence. The crew strained their eyes, their mouths open in disbelief as a voice not the mate’s own proceeded from her, as though a compassionate, merciful being had taken control of her body. “My captain!” she continued. “Thou hast shown what thou art made of. We, all of us, have been wronged, and thou art correct in thine evaluation that the perpetrator remaineth in our midst. Aye, ’tis true, and we share in thine anger and despair. A betrayal hurteth all. But, my captain, though this way be good for intimidation, though thou have shaken us right to our cores in the method that befiteth thee, ’tis not the way to remedy the problem or to extract justice!” Nihil spun around to see her, his eyes glowing green, his teeth bared into the shape of a smile. “And in what way, my mate, dost thou see a contrary action?” “We’re in the middle of a maelstrom!” she cried. “Dost thou not see that the sails bend at the wind which hammereth at them relentlessly, still unfurled because their attendants have been called away? Dost not hear the crying of the masts as they groan beneath the weight? Dost not feel the water slowly rising above thy knees? We need to our stations, Captain; let not the lowlives take that away from us!” “Those inferiors shall bow down to me, Nihil, captain of the Star Buck!” “But Captain Nihil must bow to her, his ship, as all who walk upon her decks must!” “’Twill not be long now,” he said, as though he hadn’t heard her words. “He’ll want to go scrambling back to his shelter. He’s dying to burst free. And I shall see it; I shall see it in his eyes—the gleam, the gleam! It’s unmistakable!” “My captain” said Flask, her voice choked with rain. “I can’t see thee in the rain and darkness! The lanterns shudder, and the moon showeth not her light. There is not even the incandescent algae. Recognize it, Captain; recognize the conditions Mare hath shown thee! She’s given you no help. She regardeth thee and what thou art doing, and She showeth now Her disdain!” And then, the sky burst into flame. From the summit of the three masts, spears of lightning and fire stretched to the blackened firmament, twisting, contorting, splitting and reforming as the clouds churned above. Their blue-red filled the deck, the air, and illuminated in sharp relief the countenances of the awed onlookers. Their heads were thrown back to the sky, their mouths open in fear and awe, their eyes turned up to the sources of the light—one atop each of the three masts, twirling above them like the three necks of a hydra. At the sight of this phenomenon, an old sailor by the foremast, who had been working without stop since the beginning of the storm, dropped his rope and at once fell to his knees. “The corposants appear before us!” he wailed, an old stallion’s gay tears. “Do ye see, lads? There they are, as I’ve always said. The corposants have visited me one last time before my death! I gaze upon Thee, O Mare, and I welcome Thine embrace!” Nihil turned back to Flask, the latter still frozen, struck as she was by this sight as all else. “Dost thou understand now?” he said. “Mare’s here! She giveth her blessing to this ship, to me, and the justice I now am exacting under Her domain! The corposants, Her messengers, give to me Her light by which She ordereth me to prosecute. Now, step aside, Ms. Flask; attend to thy duties while I attend to mine.” Nihil began his walk down the line of sailors, as though in survey. At each frozen, shivering pony, he stopped, scanned him from head to toe; leaned his wrinkled, wizened face into the other’s; and exhaled his humid breath, which smelled distinctly of shellfish. Then, through some unknowable personal metric of his, he would smile, pat the terrified pony on the shoulder with a forehoof, and move on to the next. Every so often, he would shout: “Do not look away from me; open thine eyes; they are how I will know if thy true form is what appeareth before me now.” The pardoned ponies did not dare to look in the direction he moved off in after his inspection, lest he see the turning of their heads and eyes and take it as some mark of guilt. He moved slowly, deliberately, though his crew twitched with an urge to get to their posts and save the Star Buck. But some time had passed now, and he was nearly at the end of the line. The affair seemed almost over, and the ponies who had been first scrutinized let out their long-held breaths. A cry erupted through the air; all heads turned, from the end of the line to the beginning, like a wave propagating from a disturbance in a liquid. A pony was thrown out in front. Nihil laughed as she struggled to regain her feet on the slippery deck. “’Tis thou; ’tis thou; I know it!” he snorted. The pony singled out by Nihil was the deformed traveller. Nihil reared up, intending to strike her again—but before he could land his hit, out of the line jumped the traveller’s companion, head first, his mouth open, and clenched his teeth around the captain’s neck. With a roar and a resulting scream, both fell to the deck. As they rolled, struggled, groaned, and tore at one another, still no one moved. But the young, virile mute quickly got the advantage of the nag. “Help, say I!” Nihil moaned. “Come, ye, and get this rabid stallion off me!” They didn’t move at once. The wave of heads passed from the fight and injunction, and turned toward Flask. At a tentative sign and nod from the latter, three ponies stepped out of the line, grabbed the stallion, and wrestled him back. He lashed out at them, snapped his teeth, and struggled to the utmost of his strength, till at last he relented, panting and wheezing, and the three ponies continued to hold him, subdued. He turned to the deformed pony. She had almost risen to her feet, but with a kick of his forehoof, Nihil toppled her over again. The subdued stallion cried out and struggled against the hooves of the sailors. No matter how they held him, still he moaned in his plaintive way, as though he were trying to say something to the captain. His cries attracted Nihil’s attention. “What dost thou want now?” he said. “He’s mute!” yelled the traveller. “He can’t respond!” Nihil struck her again, and again her companion complained, moaned, and squealed. “Well? I’m listening; out with it!” The stallion stopped and pursed his lips. Nihil, muttering a curse under his breath, turned back to his victim. “Stop!” she wailed. “Stop, please; what have I done?” “Thou art a changeling, here, on my ship, and thou didst not tell me! Why wouldst thou hide from me?” he said, his voice choked with emotion. “I’m not!” “Do not lie to me. I can see it—look, thou canst even effect a proper form!” “I’m not a changeling! I’m not. . . . I’m not . . .” “Hear me!” he sputtered. “Had thou told me what thou wert, I would have embraced thee, kissed thee, asked thee to stay with me forever as one of mine own. Whom did ye attack? Not Fillydelphia, not Ponyville, not Manehattan, nor any other city full of ponies who know what the word honest signifieth—instead, ye attacked the sententious. Ye went to Canterlot, the most affected of all, attacked them who leech off others, attacked their government, and their military which hath harassed us since we first learned to swim! Ye went and tried to kill the plague of this land, and I should have been there, joined you as a brother, helped you to defeat them, and maybe then we could live in peace with the ponies, and I wouldn’t have to travel with this kind. But thou . . . thou hadst to come and betray me—betray me, after the warmth I showed thee? After I asked thee no questions, asked thee not the point of thy voyage? Dost thou not see the hurt thou hast inflicted? ’Tis not that thou art a changeling; ’tis that thou tookest advantage of my hospitality to hurt me!” “I’m not a changeling!” “My sister, tell me no more lies! I will show thee leniency if thou admit the thing. If I can’t trust my travellers, whom can I trust? How can I live?” “Please, sir, please, show mercy . . .” Nihil raised his hoof again. “Avast!” Nihil fell. The storm muted around them in the echo of Flask’s voice. The crew blinked and rubbed their eyes. Their minds raced, but not one dared to speak: to check or interrupt the mate meant certain pain and suffering; but to do so to the captain . . . that was unthinkable for all, even for Flask. Nihil turned and saw who had grabbed his tail, his anger seething once again. “Thou, Ms. Flask?” he vociferated. “Thy caprice and eccentricity,” said Flask, the phonemes of her words punctuated behind thunderclaps, as if in deliberate emphasis, “have gotten thee this far. ’Tis the mystery we all rally behind. But now—nay, nag, now thou evincest not the caprice thou hast the power to indulge, nor the eccentricity that distinguisheth thee; thou showest now only madness, the simple, pure madness within thee!” What may have been any trace amount of clemency in the captain vanished at the moment Flask spoke these words. He stepped forward; his face was red. She stepped back; her face was white. “Thou, Flask . . .” he stuttered, unable in his rage, the apex of which now directed toward her, to speak clearly, “thou . . . how dost thou dare to speak to me like that? I’m captain, I, Nihil; and thou shalt stay in thy place! Do not speak; thou shalt never speak again. Thou wilt never touch this ship, its crew, or me ever again, nor wilt thou ever see its hull. I should throw thee overboard, slit thy throat, disembowel thee, and feed what cometh out to the sharks that trail us for our waste! Avast, thou sayest? Nay, I turn the avast on thee, insolent jade!” The crack from the blow he dealt her across the muzzle was indistinguishable from the lightning above. There was a spark from his hoof, and part of his shoe split and tumbled away. Flask fell limp to the deck without a further sound. When Nihil turned away, at once a sailor leaped from the line to the unconscious Flask, bent down, and turned her nose and mouth away from the layer of water running through the deck. Nihil faced the deformed pony, his mouth pulled back into a grin, and his eyes pulsing, now intoxicated as he was by the old blood on his face, and the newly drawn blood on his hooves. He had tasted it, had forgotten how good it was, and now approached her, with the lust visible in the veins that pumped through his eyes. His pretenses were gone now; he no longer cried for justice and honesty—it was blood now that he wished for, blood, suffering, subjugation at his hoof; and he wanted to start with the first victim his commanding whim had selected. The mute pony, seeing the captain’s intent, cried out again, and groaned in that throaty way, flailing his limbs against the hooves of the sailors holding him back. “Don’t,” whimpered his companion. “It’s no use.” Her words were in vain. Still he struggled, complained, and the wind sucked his howls up to the masts and over the sea. This echo was enough to stop Nihil in body if not in his rage. He turned to face the lamenter, as if the latter were not one to look down upon but rather a contender for power. Even though three of his sailors held the stallion down, still Nihil felt a tinge of an affront to his power, exacerbated by its potency despite its being held back. “Thou insolent!” said Nihil. “This is now the second time thou hast interrupted me with thine inanities. Well, dost thou have something to say? If so, out with it, or thy punishment will be the same as hers!” “You can’t help me . . .” the traveller said again. “Please, my love, don’t kill the both of us. There’s nothing you can do . . .” The stallion paused, relaxed, and went still. He looked at his companion, thrown prostrate on the watery deck. Tears of sorrow and compassion welled up in his eyes; his lips quivered out of helplessness. He sighed, as though a painful resolution had been made in his mind, and whispered something unintelligible under his breath. He closed his eyes and strained the muscles in his body. There was a bright flash, a spinning of magic—and when it cleared, the stallion was gone. The sailors were now holding on to a changeling. When he stood up, the sailors jumped away with a collective cry. The changeling leaped, his wings buzzing, but the rain pouring down in torrents waterlogged them, making them too hard to flap, making him too heavy to fly. Nihil had fallen to his knees, as though struck by lightning. His eyes had lost their fervid redness, and were now completely white, white like the rest of him. And despite the screams of his crew, his gaze fixated on a spot on the deck, as though he were contemplating the nature of that small area’s existence: trod countless times by scores of hooves, washed indifferently in the sweep of mops, a point from which one could view the masts, the storms, the swaying of the sky, the central point of the ship, which no one ever payed attention to, even though it was what pulled them together. Flask rose to her hooves with the help of two sailors, spat out a tooth, wiped the blood from her nose, and looked to the general scene. Every eye except those of the lost captain’s met hers. “Overboard,” she hissed. Whether she was referring to the captain or the changeling, it was unclear. The sailors, trying to resolve this enigma, looked alternately at the two. At first, they gazed at the captain, still catatonic, old, frail, broken in spirit. Perhaps they did think that the mate had indicated him; the white carcass, the titan reduced, was now little more than refuse, certainly unfit now to command, leaving her who had just spoken the new captain, whose command they were now at, and if the ship’s captain said to clean the deck, then be it done. But when they looked at the old stallion, who had an appearance now no different than those old retired souls who sit on park benches contemplating the earth in a distant, detached way, there seemed something inappropriate about casting him over the side; a combination of the indignity of doing so and how much it wouldn’t be worth it now that he had been thrown into this abject state prevented their doing so. By process of elimination, that meant she had spoken against the changeling. They came at him with harpoons, top-mauls, and daggers; but the agile changeling, though waterlogged, was still more nimble than them all. He dodged, kicked, bit; sailors fell around him, slipped on their own tails, hurt themselves, each other. The changeling’s skin was too dark to see, even in the light of the corposants. He moved as a blur between the sailors, and despite their best efforts, their reaction times were too slow, their movements too sluggish to be a match for him. A sailor emerged with a fishing net, waited, watched; and then, at the right moment, he flung it into the air. It descended to the deck in the familiar parabola with which all objects fall under the influence of gravity—and then, all at once, it caught against a pivot, and whipped around as it absorbed the captured creature’s inertia. He screamed, struggled, and lashed out more, which served only to ensnare him further. Seeing the motions, convinced as they were that it was nothing more than a big fish, the sailors leaped upon the net, dodged the fangs, put all the knots in, deliberately, familiarly, without emotion, as though they were distancing themselves from the event lest they feel compunction. They hauled him, still screaming and snapping, to the stern of the ship. Behind the procession, a sailor carried a four-pound cannonball. When they reached the stern, another rope was put in at the end of the net, and the cannonball was knotted in its extremity. With no further ceremony, the cannonball was tossed over the gunwale; and the changeling, unable to find purchase with his hooves anywhere on the ship’s deck, trailed helplessly after the weight, and then disappeared into the ocean with a splash that could not even be heard among the breaking of the waves. * And I did nothing. I watched this entire scene play out before my eyes. I watched my tooth being presented as evidence. I watched Flask unwittingly defend me, take a blow for me; and I watched my brother be accused for my crime. I did nothing when he revealed himself to all, did not join him in the fight, did not struggle with him to be free, and let him be subdued, tied, and drowned. Why? I was afraid. After they were rid of him, the sailors hastened away. I hurried to the stern. There, in the distance, was a small pool of white, a tremulous eruption in the middle of the ocean, as though there were an undersea geyser spouting its rage to the surface. And I could see, beneath that foam, the face of my brother, desperate, straining with the last effort of his life to pierce the surface. Over the sea, I called out to him, hopeless, empty words: “But why, brother?” He stopped struggling when my words came to him. A powerful wave lifted him closer to the surface, giving him some more time above. He looked at me, and, for a moment, said nothing, the recognition and significance of the scene that had just occurred coming to him in those seconds of silence. “Why should the innocent have to suffer for our shortcomings, Brother Commander?” Thus speaking, he leaned back on the water and closed his eyes. The wave rushed over him, and he vanished underneath; the ship pressed on; the corposants and their light died and left everything in darkness. But imprinted on my mind was his last expression, his face before he had been submerged beneath the water—a look that was almost one of peace.