We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [53]
Calmly the first mate got up. Standing next to his victim, he fixed the men hard with his eyes. Then, without even looking down, he raised his foot and stomped his boot down on Giovanni's injured hand. They heard the sound of his fingers break.
When O'Connor walked away from the mess, the men stepped aside for him. But if they'd had one of Giovanni's sharp kitchen knives, they'd have buried it in his back, deep enough to prick his rotten heart and extinguish the hellfire that burned inside.
They flocked around Giovanni and helped him to his feet. He was still clutching his ruined hand, and the tears rolled down his cheeks. It wasn't the pain that made him weep, but the loss of his ability. They looked at his broken fingers, which stuck out at unnatural angles. They'd seen enough accidents on board to know that he'd never use that hand again. Minutes earlier, he'd been an artist. Now he was barely a man.
The men took him to Captain Eagleton, who had the hand bandaged. Much good that would do. Even a doctor couldn't have saved it. And when they protested about what had happened to Giovanni, Captain Eagleton looked the other way, as if it had nothing to do with him.
"O'Connor," he said, "has his reasons."
And that was all he'd say on the matter.
Giovanni had turned the men into a united crew. But O'Connor wanted the opposite of solidarity: he wanted each one of them to face him alone. Not because he lacked the strength to beat up more than one of them at a time, but because he knew they feared him most when they had no one to share their fear with.
The captain had lied when he said that O'Connor always had his reasons. And the lie was a huge one. Nothing O'Connor did had a reason. He hit and punched and broke men's bones for the pleasure of it, rather than as punishment for anything they'd done. He toyed with them as a god toys with his worshipers, leaving them to reason their own suffering. It was this unpredictability that turned him into a monster. Whatever his dark motivation was, expressed in his hatred of everything that stirred on board, it lay deep within him. The men ducked, or tried to make themselves small and invisible, in order to escape his motiveless malice—but that wasn't always enough. His eye worked like a falcon's, searching for mice in the wheat.
They had nowhere to hide. What place of safety is there for those who live under the thumb of an all-powerful ruler? What choice but to do everything correctly and second-guess his slightest whim?
"What did Giovanni do wrong, apart from being the best cook who ever sailed, the best juggler who ever wasted his talent on a drunken and thick-headed crew? Apart from making each of us a better man than the Lord ever planned? What did he do to deserve a broken hand? What offense was he being punished for?" Albert asked.
***
A boy by the name of Isaiah had to take charge of the galley. He was from America and fourteen years old, with black skin that was so shiny and smooth, it looked permanently wet. When he lit the fire in the morning, his dark cheeks reflected the oven's glowing embers. He did his best. But gone were the fresh-baked bread, pies, and cakes.
Giovanni had been sitting in the fo'c'sle for some days, staring at his bandages in the half-light. Despite all that had happened, he'd not been broken. Soon he reappeared on deck, entered the galley, and started bossing Isaiah around. Then his left hand woke up. It was, after all, the hand of a performer, and was just as deft as his right. He might be only half a man, but he was still more capable than