Kings of the Sea

by Van Every Frost, Joan

  Without a word she walked over to him and began to undress him. When he stood before her naked, it was all he could do not to try to cover himself with his hands. He was unhappily aware that his aroused penis was standing out awkwardly from his body, seeming in its life of its own to make his nakedness even more unbearable.

  She kissed him on the mouth, her tongue darting against his, her breasts flattened against his chest, his erect flesh pressed into her navel above that hairless cleft. Waves of shame and anger and desire washed over him, and he tentatively pushed back with his tongue. What they were doing was nasty, but exciting, too, he decided.

  She led him to the bed, raised the netting, and lay down on the sheets, which he was startled to find were silk. When he joined her, she took up the brandies, handing him one, and raised her glass.

  “To us and to a glorious night.”

  He knelt facing her, feeling very naked and vulnerable. He gulped the rest of the drink. As he turned and put his glass back on the table, she reached out and took his penis in her hand, doing something just under the head of it that made him shiver with excitement. To his dismay, he suddenly realized that he could hold back no longer and came in a rush, his semen dripping over her fingers.

  “Oh my God,” he gasped in an agony of embarrassment, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean —”

  “Do not worry.” She smiled. “It’s been a long time since you’ve been with a woman, hasn’t it? We’ll have you back straining at the bit in no time.” She reached into a drawer of the table and took out a towel, carefully wiping both of them. “Now, while you are regaining your strength, you can please me for a bit.”

  He sat looking at her helplessly, without the faintest idea of what she wanted. What could she possibly mean, please her? At last he leaned over and kissed her, putting his hand on her breast, which he rubbed clumsily.

  “No, not like that,” she said patiently. “You are new to it all, aren’t you? I thought you said you were married.” She took the nipple in her fingers and teased it erect. “See? Firm but not too hard. You want to excite, not hurt. Of course, some women want to be hurt, but I’m not one of them. Now you try it.”

  When he had mastered that, she pulled his head down to her breast. “No, no. Between your tongue and your teeth. That’s too hard. There, like that. You’re a quick study.”

  He was beginning to enjoy himself now that he saw she was going to guide him along every step of the way. He saw with satisfaction that he was coming erect again. It was with absolute unbelief, however, that he watched her lean down and take him in her mouth. Take that in her mouth! Reflexively he pushed her head away, his mind a tumult of revulsion.

  “What’s the matter, afraid I’ll bite?” She laughed. “Never mind, we’ll go on with me. Plenty of time for you later.”

  She put his hand between her legs, pressed his finger into the cleft. It was warm and wet and slippery inside. She gently moved his finger back and forth. “That’s it. Women like to come erect too, you know.” He felt a small bump come up under his fingers and harden. She began to breathe fast. “Now put your head down here where you can see.” Incredulously he watched her spread herself apart with her fingers and say, “Put your mouth right here and flick with your tongue.” The opened lips looked like a wound, red and wet, with curious engorged ridges of flesh.

  His reaction was instinctive and instantaneous. With a hoarse cry he fought his way through the mosquito netting, grabbed up his clothes, and fled to the drawing room, where he paused only long enough to dress hastily. To his relief, she didn’t follow him. He stumbled out into the dark and somehow found the stable and after much feeling about and swearing, his tack and his horse. Without the light from a nearly full moon, he could never have done it. Oblivious of the danger of falling, he put the surprised pony at a full gallop down the drive, the shadows of the palm trees flickering up and over him as they alternated with bars of moonlight.

  The ride back seemed to take forever, his mind thrashing and convulsing like a trapped thing beating against the memories of the evening. Along with the revulsion and shame came the sickening conviction that in some unknown way his manhood had been utterly compromised. Was that what his father did with his mother? He couldn’t believe it. Did all women really look like that down there? He had always visualized them as having a neat patch of fur and somewhere a hidden hole, like a cat or a rabbit. He shuddered. She must be perverted, a freak of some sort. That was it, she was simply not made like other people. That Spanish general must have done those unspeakable things to her, which made him perverted as well. His mind returned to the word “freak” with relief.

  Before he arrived at the rebel camp, he was soaked through twice by drenching showers, but at least he encountered no bandits. By the time he got his horse unsaddled and picketed with the rest, the camp was already stirring, even though it was still dark. Soon the sky would lighten and another day would begin. He wished there were enough water for bathing, the beach was too far to contemplate going now. As he approached his tent, he ran into Victoriano.

  “What are you doing back, chico? I thought you might be staying for several days at least.”

  “Are you mad? She’s a strange woman … Beautiful, maybe, but —” David broke off and shrugged.

  “But what, chico? What do you mean, strange? Once only when she was still with that cabrón of a general she allowed me into her bed. I’d come to pick up the information she had for us, and she said that she wanted to feel clean again.” Victoriano kissed his fingers and rolled up his eyes, an ecstatic smile on his face. “What a magnificent lay! That body of hers is an absolutely splendid fucking machine.”

  “You mean you actually made love to her?” David demanded. “And there was nothing odd about it?”

  “Hombre, I swear to you that I’ve never had a better lay. She played me like a guitar. I fell half in love with her even though I knew she would never take me seriously. How I envy you last night. I can’t think what you’re doing back so soon.”

  David’s thoughts were in chaos. “Never mind,” he mumbled and left an astonished Victoriano by stumbling into his tent. So it wasn’t her after all, he thought. All along it was me. I am the freak …

  Chapter III

  “Above all, Aguinaldo must continue to think that the Americans will automatically place him in power when the Spaniards are expelled,” Dewey was saying to David on his monthly trip out to the fleet to report in person. In between he sent weekly dispatches.

  “And will the Americans put him in power, sir?” David asked.

  Dewey shrugged. “I don’t know. However, I can’t see the government sending all those troops without some thought of recompense. My guess is that we won’t let Cuba go and we won’t let the Philippines go, either.”

  “That’s nothing but stealing!” David protested. “Everyone said we got into the war to free Cuba, not to take her over. I can’t see where the Philippines are any different.” Dewey sighed. ‘Tell me, David,” he said gently. “Now that you have been living among them for several months, what is your opinion of the Filipinos?”

  David hesitated. “Well, they are intelligent enough, I guess, but quick-tempered and not always able to stick to anything for long. I don’t know how Aguinaldo has held the rebel forces together all this time, especially since he was in exile for so long. He certainly doesn’t trust anyone. Did I tell you he makes all of his officers leave their arms in the anteroom before he will speak with them? Even Luna, his chief general. Men are continually deserting just because they are tired of being there despite the fact that they all look forward to a glorious looting of Manila when it’s taken.”

  “Do you really think from what you’ve just said that they would be capable of ruling wisely? Would a good military man allow his men to think that they could loot the places they captured? They’re no better than barbarians.”

  “Well,” David replied uncomfortably, “perhaps we should, uh, help them to learn how to rule themselves, a
ll right, but I still don’t think it’s right to let Aguinaldo go on thinking that we’re going to just sail away after the Spaniards are thrown out. We don’t care about his aspirations, we are simply using him.”

  “Lieutenant Hand, if everyone told the strict truth, nations couldn’t exist. If we told Aguinaldo, for example, that we were going to hang on to the Philippines, which is what I surmise McKinley is going to do, what do you think his reaction would be?”

  “He would fight,” David replied without hesitation. “In his place I would join the Spaniards in trying to keep us out, because the Spaniards are easier to lick than we are. The rebels almost did it once, and the next time they might make it, but they haven’t a prayer of beating us.”

  “Just so. It behooves us then in the interests of saving our own lives to allow him to go on thinking we will turn the islands over to him. It’s not an out-and-out lie, lieutenant, because you and I can still only guess what the President will decide.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Somehow it all sounded very logical, but he couldn’t help feeling that there was a fatal moral flaw if he could only put his finger on it. Once again naval battle had not turned out as he had always pictured it. David was conscious of a figurative bad taste in his mouth even though rationally he had to agree with the necessity of deceit.

  He did know that he felt increasingly uncomfortable with Aguinaldo and especially with Victoriano. He was becoming surprisingly fond of this cheerful, irreverent little man with the bright brown eyes and the easy grin. He was finding it harder and harder to maintain his belief in the overwhelming superiority of the American culture and character in the face of what amounted to his countrymen’s duplicity toward this band of men who had fought so long and hard against such great odds. They had taken on not only Spain, but the Catholic Church as well, and gone on fighting even though they knew that their chances of winning were all but nonexistent. Back in July, Aguinaldo had proclaimed himself President of the Revolutionary Philippine Republic, a title that now might well prove to be pathetically empty.

  When the American troops at last arrived, David reported to Dewey that Aguinaldo, for all of his naivete, had the sense to be furious. The rebel general realized too late that far from being a help to his ambitions, the Americans posed a real threat, for they treated him and his forces almost as if they didn’t exist.

  The war had turned into an eternity of waiting. The monsoons made a soup of the American bivouacs, and dysentery was rife among the men. When it wasn’t raining, it was steaming, the air so laden with moisture that it seemed difficult to breathe. Everything was wet, their boots, their clothes, their tents, their bedding, everything. To add to their misery, their soaked feet developed boils and ulcers, and they all itched and burned with prickly heat.

  The insurgents were hardly more comfortable than the Americans, though they at least had the good sense to camp on a rise where they were not up to their knees in mud. David passed his time improving his Spanish by talking to some of the Spanish prisoners of war held by Aguinaldo, and learning Tagalog from Victoriano. Many of the insurrectionists did not even speak Spanish, and most conversations in the camp were held in Tagalog except in the presence of the Ilocano men from the north who had joined Aguinaldo’s forces.

  “What do you know of all this, David?” Victoriano asked him. “Are we being closed out of our own capital city?”

  David shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. It is out of Dewey’s hands now, and I’m certainly not privy to General Merritt’s plans.”

  Victoriano looked at him steadily, the customary gaiety gone from his face. “I hope you don’t know, David. I would hate to think that you of all people betrayed us.”

  David looked Victoriano in the eye as he denied it, but he nevertheless felt an obscure surge of shame.

  When at last the actual storming of Manila began, David found himself with what amounted to a squad of insurrectionists led by Victoriano charging into the outskirts of Malate. There were villas with fine gardens interspersed with crude bamboo native huts, stone walls, all manner of shelter for the now determined Spanish snipers. David had been given a rifle and ammunition taken off a dead young Spanish soldier, and soon he was firing just as furiously as the rest. On either side of them they could see American soldiers running and firing even as they themselves were. Next to him a little insurgent named Manuel, who could imitate hundreds of bird calls, clutched his throat and fell face down in the mud, a rapidly spreading pool of blood sinking into the wet ground.

  When David would have stopped to see to him, Victoriano shouted in Tagalog, “Keep going! He’s too badly wounded to save!”

  They ran on, paused briefly to aim and fire, then ran again. The sweat trickled down into their eyes and made the gunstocks slippery. Several times bullets slithered out from between David’s sweaty fingers and dropped to the ground, where he left them. Thus far all of the houses they had encountered had been vacant, long since evacuated by their inhabitants, who had no intention of being caught in the middle of a firefight. Despite Victoriano’s infuriated orders, now and again some of his men disappeared into the villas looking for loot. In this they were disappointed, for everything of value had been either well hidden or taken away by the owners.

  They lost two more men as they rushed from side to side of the broad straight thoroughfare that Victoriano told him was called the Camino Real, shooting with little seeming effect at the impractically white-clad Spanish soldiers whose glaring uniforms stood out like targets. Here and there on the roadway lay a limp shabby bundle of white, interspersed only rarely with the brown of the American infantry.

  The American foot soldiers and bands of insurrectionists were finally brought to a confused halt at the bridge over the moat surrounding the walled inner city. To make the confusion worse, there was a whole column of captured Spanish infantry retreating unarmed from Santa Ana milling about in the throng before the bridge. When Greene ordered the disarmed Spanish troops into Manila, David took advantage of the movement to slip across the bridge with Victoriano and his men. He found out only later that immediately upon Greene’s acceptance of the Spanish surrender he had sent a battalion down the Paco Road to prevent any insurgents from entering the city. The main body of insurrectionists had meanwhile gathered outside waiting to march into Manila proper and raise their own flag.

  The streets of Manila were all but deserted, though David was amused to discover that in the Chinese section the inhabitants had hung out a forest of British flags and claimed to be under the protection of Her Royal Majesty Queen Victoria. The Filipinos soon lost their awe of the capital, and Victoriano had his hands full trying to keep them from looting.

  “Don’t you see, that’s why the Americans distrust us,” Victoriano admonished them. “No wonder they don’t allow us in their councils and look upon us as an undisciplined gang of bandits.”

  The men were not to be denied, however, for it wasn’t long before one of them found some rum, and from then on they were uncontrollable. By twos and threes they slipped away until David and Victoriano were left by themselves in the deserted streets. Though the Spanish authorities had already surrendered hastily and thankfully to the Americans, deeming them preferable to the insurgents, there was still a desultory exchange of shots from the walls.

  Before long they met an American captain with a company of troops coming the other way. “Halt!” the captain said nervously. “You must vacate the city.”

  “What do you mean?” David demanded.

  “I don’t know about you, but that there is an insurgent, and I have orders to clear the inner city of them. Since you’re with him and dressed like him, I reckon you’re included in the order, whoever you are.”

  “My dear captain,” David said at his haughtiest, “I am Lieutenant David Hand of the United States Navy, personal envoy of Admiral Dewey to General Emilio Aguinaldo. This is my aide, Capitan Victoriano Marquez Basan. I am on urgent business to seek an immediate interview with Ad
miral Dewey and General Merritt.”

  The captain’s demeanor changed rapidly. “Very well, lieutenant. I’ll send Sergeant Lawton here to guide you. You haven’t seen any other insurgent troops, have you?” With a flicker of guilt, David thought of Victoriano’s men lightheartedly engaged in looting whatever they could find, but shook his head firmly. They would have to take their chances.

  Merritt, Greene, MacArthur, and several others were conferring in the plaza when Sergeant Lawton brought David and Victoriano up to the staff aide standing nearby. When the sergeant explained who David was, the aide looked at him closely and then turned to the generals, whose attention had already been arrested by the appearance of Victoriano.

  “That’s not Aguinaldo, is it?” General Otis asked. “Damned Filipinos all look alike to me.”

  “No sir,” David answered. “This is one of his staff officers. Is Admiral Dewey ashore, may I ask? I am Lieutenant David Hand, the admiral’s envoy to Aguinaldo.”

  Merritt, a short man with an elfish face and twinkling eyes that could go cold and flat when he was displeased, exclaimed, “Are you indeed! I’ve been looking forward to meeting you, young man. George tells me you’ve made yourself right at home with the insurgents. Ah, does this one with you understand English?”

  “No sir,” David replied, surprised by Merritt’s enthusiastic greeting.

  “Good. The admiral won’t be here until just before the dinner the Spanish are giving us, or I’d let him tell you himself. Your official orders will be given you tomorrow, but you’re being seconded to my staff for an indefinite period of time, not to exceed your normal tour of duty here. We need a liaison with the insurgents, and you’re already in place. How are they taking being kept out of Manila?”