Today I went to see the Thor movie, which I quite liked, and I wrote this:
They killed another of the savages last night, brought it up deck, lashed it tightly to the mast, and took turns with the captain’s whip until the poor frightened beast bled out. This morning, none of three men would claim the killing blow for himself; they hemmed and they hawed and they refused to set their stories straight, though Mr. Murtha and I questioned them each for the better part of an hour, both together and separately. As for the captain, he would claim only the whip, taking it back from the men with half-hearted admonishments I knew were more for my benefit than for theirs. He does not like me, Captain Androse, and I think that would be the case even without Mr. Murtha’s intimidating bulk constantly at my side or the crew’s natural displeasure at having a dead man sailing with them. The captain is as close to another man of science as I am likely to find aboard his ship, less frightened by superstition or believing of rumor, but I know even he would be just as glad to be rid of me. If he could kill me twice, he no doubt would have done so.
If only he knew how little I wish to be here myself.
And yet I go wherever His Majesty sends me, serving at the pleasure of the crown.
The native boy’s death is a distraction — not worthy of our time, the captain says — and what’s worse I know that he is right. What do I care that the men took a little sport with the heathen, took it all too far, and ended his life? As a slave, he would have fetched little profit, and so it is not the destruction of His Majesty’s property that galls me. Nor is it even the principle of the thing… I am bound, not only by royal decree but by the wards the king’s necromancers carved into my skin, to uphold the laws of the realm, but I am free to choose how I do so. We have better things to do than punish these men for spilling a savage’s blood.
And yet why, then, can I not let this go? Is it as a dead man myself that I take offense?
It was, whadyacallit, a Sunday.