The North Water Read Free

body has its tedious patterns, its regularities: the feeding, the cleaning, the emptying of the bowels.
    The boy touches him quickly on the elbow and indicates again the way he wants them both to go. The boatyard. The trap. Drax hears a seagull squawking above his head, notices the solid smell of bitumen and oil paint, the sidereal sprawl of the Great Bear. He grabs the nigger boy by the hair and punches him, then punches him again and again—two, three, four times, fast, without hesitation or compunction—until Drax’s knuckles are warm and dark with blood, and the boy is slumped, limp and unconscious. He is thin and bony and weighs no more than a terrier. Drax turns him over and pulls down his britches. There is no pleasure in the act and no relief, a fact which only increases its ferocity. He has been cheated of something living, something nameless but also real.
    Lead and pewter clouds obscure the fullish moon; there is the clatter of iron-rimmed cartwheels, the infantile whine of a cat in heat. Drax goes swiftly through the motions: one action following the next, passionless and precise, machinelike, but not mechanical. He grasps on to the world like a dog biting into bone—nothing is obscure to him, nothing is separate from his fierce and sullen appetites. What the nigger boy used to be has now disappeared. He is gone completely, and something else, something wholly different, has appeared instead. This courtyard has become a place of vile magic, of blood-soaked transmutations, and Henry Drax is its wild, unholy engineer.

 
    CHAPTER TWO
    Brownlee considers himself, after thirty years pacing the quarterdeck, to be a fair judge of the human character, but this new fellow Sumner, this Paddy surgeon fresh from the riotous Punjab, is a complex case indeed. He is short and narrow-featured, his expression is displeasingly quizzical, he has an unfortunate limp and speaks some barbarously twisted bogland version of the English language; yet, despite these obvious and manifold disadvantages, Brownlee senses that he will do. There is something in the young man’s very awkwardness and indifference, his capacity and willingness not to please, that Brownlee, perhaps because it reminds him of himself at a younger and more carefree stage of life, finds oddly appealing.
    â€œSo what’s the story with the leg?” Brownlee asks, waggling his own ankle by way of encouragement. They are sitting in the captain’s cabin on the Volunteer drinking brandy and reviewing the voyage to come.
    â€œSepoy musket ball,” Sumner explains. “My shinbone bore the brunt.”
    â€œIn Delhi this is? After the siege?”
    Sumner nods.
    â€œFirst day of the assault, near the Cashmere Gate.”
    Brownlee rolls his eyes and whistles low in appreciation.
    â€œDid you see Nicholson killed?”
    â€œNo, but I saw his body afterwards when he was dead. Up on the ridge.”
    â€œAn extraordinary man, Nicholson. A great hero. They do say the niggers worshipped him like a god.”
    Sumner shrugs.
    â€œHe had a Pashtun bodyguard. Enormous sod named Khan. Slept outside his tent to protect him. The rumor was the two of them were sweethearts.”
    Brownlee shakes his head and smiles. He has read all about John Nicholson in the Times of London: the way he marched his men through the most savage heat without ever once breaking sweat or asking for water, about the time he sliced a mutinous sepoy clean in two with one blow of his mighty sword. Without men like Nicholson—unyielding, severe, vicious when necessary—Brownlee believes the empire would have been lost entirely long ago. And without the empire who would buy the oil, who would buy the whalebone?
    â€œJealousy,” he says. “Bitterness only. Nicholson’s a great hero, a little bit savage sometimes from what I heard, but what do you expect?”
    â€œI saw him hang a man just for smiling at him, and the poor bugger