Modern Chivalry

Slice-of-life/fantasy short. A sea captain asks a question of his attendant aboard ship.

1.5k, rated T, some faint M/M with a ship’s captain and an angel. Set in the late 1700s.

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“How old are you?” asks Captain Haigh, and Aquila does not acknowledge the question, continuing to fold the captain’s shirts in neat, orderly fashion.

He enjoys to be at sea, has developed a true taste for the salt-spray fresh air and the shift and rhythm of the ocean beneath the ship, the continuous even swell of the waves, but he can’t wash a shirt so well at sea as he can on land. He’d spent much of yesterday morning sitting with his feet in a freshwater stream, patiently scrubbing each of the captain’s shirts out and various of his other garments as well, and then had laid them out in the sun to dry.

“Mr Lazaar says he first met you when he first went to sea,” Haigh says, setting his cup down, and glancing over, Aquila walks across the room to take up pot from its tray, walking back to Haigh’s desk to replenish his tea. Black and brewed very strong, to the captain’s preferences.

Haigh is looking up at Aquila very keenly, and what a keen face he has — a keen, strong nose, keen, sharp-carved lips, as those hewn in marble, keen, flinty eyes, a very cold brown. His expression now is unwavering, and Aquila wonders idly what it is he is feeling in this moment — anxiety, nervousness, at having such a creature as Aquila aboard his ship? Seafarers always carry one superstition or another, refuse to carry women, or cats, or those with flat feet, or red hair. Aquila is none of these, but so old as he is, the concentration of time within him, it would be understandable that a sailor should worry he might weigh down their vessel.

If not anxiety, then disdain, disgust, horror, at a thing like him still living, where he ought have died — or wonder, at the idea that his living so long is holy, ascended, more than natural, as opposed to less than? Curiosity? Irritation, anger?

Haigh’s stony expression reveals little, and reveals even less as he takes back his mug, now filled, and goes on, “He was, what, seven, eight? When he first went to sea.”

“Younger than that, sir,” Aquila demurs quietly. “Likely, he recalls his first position at his father’s side at that age — his father was a surgeon on a passenger vessel, and he was a month shy of his seventh birthday when his family travelled aboard with us to join him on his leave. But in fact, Mr Lazaar was born at sea, like one or two of his ancestors before him — Mrs al-Khatib went into labour some four days from port, and gave birth two days before we returned to Agadir. He does not recall our first meeting, but I was one of the first men to meet him in this life. His father sprained his wrist whilst celebrating his birth — leapt into the air with joy at the excitement of a second son, stumbled down a flight of stairs, blessed idiot that he was. I carried Mrs al-Khatib down the gangway and to a waiting cart for her to be brought home.”

“They trusted you? A Christian?”

Aquila considers the question. “I was a servant,” he says, simply because no other reasoning immediately comes to mind — no other reasoning seems so important as this one, and yet he sees from Haigh’s mostly-unchanged expression, his brow slightly furrowed, that he does not understand. “Your surgeon, he is six-and-eighty years old — at that time, the time I served aboard his father’s vessel, there remained a convent in Meknes, one I visited several times, and the crewmen and passengers each knew free Christians, but they knew Christian servants, and perhaps Christian slaves, too.”

“You weren’t a slave?” Haigh asks immediately — demands, really. His emotions here are somewhat easier to read, and less obscure. It is not always within Aquila’s power to dedicate himself only to moral men, but he selects morality where best he can, and there is often a fervent morality in the figure of Captain Emmanuel Haigh.

“No, sir,” Aquila answers plainly. “Only a servant, as I am here.”

He enjoys the wrinkle of Haigh’s nose — he has a strong, Roman nose, prominent nostrils, an arrow-like shape to its tip, and when he makes an expression of obvious distaste like this, it doesn’t only wrinkle the nose itself, but his brow, his cheeks, and his mouth puckers too.

“I wish you wouldn’t say that,” Haigh mutters, sipping at his tea.

“Yes, Captain,” Aquila says with a faint smile and a neat nod of his head. “I know.”

“Lazaar is sixty-eight,” Haigh says as Aquila unties the captain’s new books from their paper and slots them into the correct place on their shelf. “You were there when he was born, you say, but I’d be hard-pressed to believe you were older than fifty. I’d be pressed a little to think you were older than me.”

“You look very well for forty, sir.”

“And even better for forty-four, though I appreciate the charity. Are you going to dodge my question all night?”

“I’ve forgotten your question, sir.”

“I don’t know that you’ve ever forgotten anything, Aquila.”

“I’ve forgotten things, here and there,” Aquila says, folding up the brown paper and coiling the string about his fingers.

“Older than sixty-eight,” Haigh says. “Older than a century.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Older than that?”

“Oh, yes, sir.”

Captain Haigh gets to his feet, easing himself up and out of his chair, and Aquila takes up a comb from the desk and approaches him, automatically toeing forward the stool so that he can stand atop it and reach the captain’s hair as he tidies it into its proper state again.

“The first time I attended a captain, he wore armour,” Aquila says quietly. “He had lovely hair — it had a beautiful curl to it, black as ebony, although the hair on his neck and the back of his hands was just as dark, and he was often terribly insecure about that. He worried that pretty girls would laugh at him, when he was dressed in clothes instead of armour, would laugh at the hair on his body, remark him to be a wolf in fine clothing, or some manner of ape. He was almost embarrassed to be acknowledged as a knight when his head wasn’t covered, or his body couldn’t be draped under his banner. He was a Lazarite himself — by order, rather than by name.”

Haigh has stopped breathing. He’s holding his breath, his keen eyes wide as dinnerplates now as he looks down into Aquila’s face, his lips parted. Aquila steps down from the stool and Haigh remembers himself, gasping in a breath, and as Aquila steps across the room to set the paper and string aside, Haigh follows him.

Haigh’s hand grasping about his upper arm is warm and very strong, and Aquila looks back at him, up at him.

Haigh asks, with all the wonder of a boy of five rather than five-and-forty, “You served a knight? You were — you were a squire?”

“A squire?” Aquila repeats, and he can’t help his soft laugh. “No, Captain, I was a servant then, as I am now.”

“To a knight?” Haigh asks breathlessly, and for all his hand is strong, its grip is very tender. Aquila bruises very easily, what with his light flesh and lighter bones, but he doesn’t think that Captain Haigh’s grip here will leave any mark at all, and that’s almost a disappointment. “A holy knight, a, in armour, and with a horse, and…?”

“He had horses, yes,” Aquila answers, his lips twitching with fondness he cannot disguise. At another time, perhaps, he will talk more on this — he will talk of how d’Amboise returned from each bloody pillage a more damaged and fractured man, how ugly was his rhetoric and his hatred, how for all his purported chivalry, how cruel and brutal his crusade was, as every part of the Crusades was. For now, as moral a man as Haigh may be, he is struck with the admiration, the fascination, he had for such legendary figures as that when he was but a boy himself.

To Captain Haigh, a captain in the merchant navy, the knights of old must seem as mythical as angels.

“You’re as old as that?” Haigh asks. “Six centuries beneath your wings, or seven?”

“Beneath my wings,” Aquila repeats, and laughs softly. “Captain, you must release me. I have duties to attend to outside of your quarters.”

The innuendo was not posed with intent, but he sees it strike Haigh immediately, sees the softening of his keen eyes and the further part of his lips, sees the adorably wrinkled and puckered skin caused by his soft surprise go smooth at the same time as his hand slackens.

“Right,” Haigh says, huffing out an embarrassed breath, turning his head.

Aquila doesn’t get the stool this time — he stands up on the very tips of his toes, and has to steady himself on Haigh’s shoulder — as he leans in and brushes his lips against the side of Haigh’s carefully-shaved cheek. Haigh’s intake of breath is very soft.

“You smell like — ” Haigh starts, and then apparently decides there is no proper or dignified end to this comment, and stops himself from going on.

“I’ll see you this evening, Captain,” Aquila says as he makes his departure, feeling Haigh’s gaze on his back as he goes. “See that you drink that tea before it’s cold.”