He reads on.
He had been only an arm’s length from me. Nothing to choose between us, except luck. Some would say Fate, or Providence, but I find it more and more difficult to believe …
I have killed forty-nine. As commander of the ship, I have been responsible for many more: though the ones that stay with me are the ones committed by my own hand. I have seen them die only an arm’s length from me, watched as the soul departs. As men who once lived and breathed and loved become nothing, merely so much cloth and inanimate flesh. I know this is not the proper way to look upon such things. These men, these Turks, are godless creatures whose influence must be curbed. Lepanto has been a magnificent victory for Christendom. And yet good Christian knights and Ottoman infidels die in much the same way. I cannot help but remark it. In dying, there is nothing to choose between them. The soul, of course, is the thing. But does it truly endure, after death? Sometimes I find it hard to believe. When I return to Genoa I will go and talk to the priest. I must confess these thoughts, because I know they are dangerously near to heresy.
This speaks to Hal. Now, for the first time, he can imagine a real man sitting down to write, trying to make some order out of the jumble of his thoughts. He recognizes the impulse. He had kept a diary himself, on board Lionheart. He had tried to get it all down: the mundane and the extraordinary. How the ship had smelt – a mixture of canned food and disinfectant; the hours of boredom sailing through still waters and then the sudden nighttime violence of an engagement; the cacophony of the guns, which they could hardly load fast enough. Watching that first enemy ship, the German destroyer – which everyone begrudgingly agreed had fought valiantly, even when the game was up – go down with every member of her crew. Drowned before any could be rescued as POWs.
After the thing that had happened, he had tried to put it down on paper: what he had done, how he felt. And found that he couldn’t. To write it out, even if it were for his eyes only, was too shameful. He reads on.
A strange occurrence this evening, nearing dusk. So strange that I find it hard to put into language: but I must try, in order to make sense of it within my own mind. We found a woman in the water, a mile from shore. It was an experience in no small way affecting. I have not seen a woman in a long while. Nor have many of the men. I must keep her from them, protect her from their lechery. I will watch over her until we reach Genoa, and then …
The handwriting trails away. The captain, apparently having lost his train of thought, goes on to describe her instead:
… her hair like the black ink of a squid [nero di seppia], her eyes too. A mark on her white cheek, tiny, like a drop of the same ink. Her skin with a sheen to it like the inside of a shell. She seems a creature of water, as though it runs inside her veins instead of blood.
Now the writing has life to it. A kind of desperation too. Over the next few pages it becomes less rational, more a meandering stream of consciousness. And yet somehow it makes for easier reading: perhaps because Hal finds himself constructing a narrative from it. The strange thing is that it seems almost to come as much from somewhere inside himself as from the page in front of him.
A LARGE SHIP. The men on board are tired and homesick, some of them nursing injuries or sicknesses, some of them mourning fellows slain. The only man not showing the signs of strain – he hides them well – is their commander. A young man, but a powerful one, scion of one of the Republic’s foremost families.
They are on the homeward straight now. The men can almost taste the cooking of their mothers, see the faces of their beloveds. From here, the rest should be plain sailing. The familiar coast is almost in sight: that fertile rich dark green. It is nearing dusk, and the ship is preparing to drop anchor only a few miles from Genoese waters. The captain finishes his supper, and decides, on a whim, to head up on deck, to look upon his homeland. It has always looked its best to him at this time. That beloved dark line, the same mountains he could see from his bedchamber as a child.