by Dan Simmons
The temperature dropped suddenly on 9 September. The ice on the long thin line of open water behind the trailing Erebus covered over with pancake ice and then froze solid. The sea around them was already a lifting, surging, static white mass of growlers, real icebergs, and sudden pressure ridges.
For six days, Franklin tried every trick in his arctic inventory — spreading black coal powder on the ice ahead of them to melt it more quickly, backing sail, sending out fatigue parties day and night with their giant ice saws to remove the ice in front of them block by block, shifting ballast, having a hundred men at a time hack away with chisels, shovels, picks, and poles, setting kedge anchors far ahead of them in the thickening ice and winching Erebus — which had resumed the lead ahead of Terror on the last day before the ice had suddenly thickened — a yard at a time. Finally Franklin ordered every able man onto the ice, rigged lines for everyone and sledge harnesses for the largest men among them, and tried hauling the ships forward a sweating, cursing, shouting, spirit-killing, gut-wrenching, backbreaking inch at a time. Always, promised Sir John, was the reality of open coastal water just another twenty or thirty or fifty miles ahead of them.
The open water might as well have been on the surface of the moon.
During the lengthening night of 15 September, 1846, the temperature plummeted to below zero and the ice began moaning and scraping against both ships’ hulls. In the morning, everyone who came on deck could see for themselves that in each direction the sea had become a white solid stretching to the horizon. Between sudden snow squalls, both Crozier and Fitzjames were able to get adequate sun sightings to fix their positions. Each captain figured that they were beset at roughly 70 degrees 5 minutes north latitude, 98 degrees, 23 minutes west longitude, some twenty-five miles off the northwest shore of King William Island, or King William Land, whichever the case might be. It was a moot point now.
They were in open sea ice — moving pack ice — and stranded directly in front of the full onslaught of Ice Master Blanky’s “moving glacier,” bearing down on them from polar regions to the northwest from all the way to the unimaginable North Pole. There was not a sheltering harbour, to their knowledge, within one hundred miles and no way to get there if there were one.
At two o’clock that afternoon, Captain Sir John Franklin ordered the boiler fires to be drawn on both Erebus and Terror. Steam was let down in both boilers. Just enough pressure would be kept up to move warmed water through the pipes heating the lower decks of each ship.
Sir John made no announcement to the men. None was required. That night as the men settled into their hammocks on Erebus and as Hartnell whispered his usual prayer for his dead brother, thirty-five-year-old Seaman Abraham Seeley, in the hammock next to him, hissed, “We’re in a world of shit now, Tommy, and not your prayers nor neither Sir John’s is going to get us out of it … not for another ten months at least.”
8
CROZIER
Lat. 70°-05′ N., Long. 98°-23′ W.
11 November, 1847
It has been one year, two months, and eight days since Sir John’s eventful conference aboard Erebus, and both ships are frozen in the ice roughly where they were that September day in 1846. Although the current from the northwest moves the entire mass of ice, over the past year it has rotated ice, icebergs, pressure ridges, and both trapped Royal Navy ships in slow circles so that their position has remained about the same, stranded some twenty-five miles north-northwest of King William Land and slowly revolving like a blotch of rust on one of the metal music disks in the officers’ Great Room.
Captain Crozier has spent this November day — or rather those hours of darkness which once included daylight as a component — searching for his missing crewmen William Strong and Thomas Evans. There is no hope for either man, of course, and there is great risk that others will be taken by the thing on the ice, but they search nonetheless. Neither captain nor crew would have it any other way.
Four teams of five men each, one man to carry two lanterns and four ready with shotguns or muskets, search in four-hour shifts. As one team comes in frozen and shaking, a replacement team waits on deck in cold-weather slops, guns cleaned, loaded, and ready, lanterns filled with oil, and they resume the search in the quadrant the other team has just quit. The four teams are moving out from the ship in ever-widening circles through the ice jumbles, their lanterns now visible to the lookouts on deck through the icy mist and darkness, now obscured by growlers, ice boulders, pressure ridges, or distance. Captain Crozier and a seaman with a red lamp move from quadrant to quadrant, checking with each team and then returning to Terror to look in on the men and conditions there.
This goes on for twelve hours.
At two bells in the first dogwatch — 6:00 p.m. — the last search parties all come in, none having found the missing men but several seamen shamefaced at having fired their weapons at wind shrieking among the jagged ice or at the ice itself, thinking some serac a looming white bear. Crozier is the last one in and follows them down to the lower deck.
Most of the crewmen have stored their wet slops and boots and gone forward to their mess at tables that have all been cranked down on chains and the officers gone aft for their meal by the time Crozier comes down the ladder. His steward, Jopson, and first lieutenant, Little, hurry over to help him out of his ice-rimmed outer layers.
“You’re frozen, Captain,” says Jopson. “Your skin is white with frostbite. Come back aft to the officers’ mess for supper, sir.”
Crozier shakes his head. “I need to go talk to Commander Fitzjames. Edward, has there been a messenger from his ship while I was out?”
“No, sir,” says Lieutenant Little.
“Please eat, Captain,” persists Jopson. For a steward he’s a large man, and his deep voice becomes more of a growl than a whine when he’s imploring his captain.
Crozier shakes his head. “Be so kind as to wrap up a couple of biscuits for me, Thomas. I’ll chew on them as I walk to Erebus.”
Jopson shows his displeasure at this foolish decision but hurries forward to where Mr. Diggle is busy at his huge stove. Just now, at dinnertime, the lower deck is as toasty warm as it’s going to be in any twenty-four-hour period — the temperature rising as high as the mid-forties. Very little coal is being burned for heat these days.
“How many men do you want to go with you, Captain?” asks Little.
“None, Edward. After the men have eaten, I want you to get at least eight parties on the ice for a final four hours of searching.”
“But, sir, is it advisable for you to … ,” begins Little but then stops.
Crozier knows what he was going to say. The distance between Terror and Erebus is only a little more than a mile, but it is a lonely, dangerous mile and sometimes takes several hours to cross. If a storm comes up or the wind simply starts blowing the snow, men can become lost or no longer make progress into the gale. Crozier himself has forbidden men to make the crossing alone and when messages have to be sent, he dispatches at least two men along with orders to turn back at the first bad weather. Besides the two-hundred-foot-high iceberg now rising between the two ships, often blocking views even of flares and fires, the pathway — although worked at being kept shoveled open and relatively flat almost every day — is really a maze of constantly shifting seracs, ice-stepped pressure ridges, upturned growlers, and ice jumble mazes.
“It’s all right, Edward,” says Crozier. “I’ll take my compass.”
Lieutenant Little smiles even though the joke is wearing thin after three years in the area. The ships are beset, as far as their instruments can measure, almost directly over the north magnetic pole. A compass is about as useful here as a divining rod.
Lieutenant Irving sidles up. The young man’s cheeks glisten from applied salve where frostbite has left white patches and caused the skin to die and peel back. “Captain,” begins Irving in a rush, “have you seen Silence out on the ice?”
Crozier has taken his cap and muffler off and i
s rubbing the ice out of his sweat- and mist-dampened hair. “You mean she’s not in her little hidey-hole behind the sick bay?”
“No, sir.”
“Did you look elsewhere on the lower deck?” Crozier is mostly worried that with most of the men gone on watch and out in search parties, the Esquimaux witch has gotten into something she shouldn’t have.
“Aye, sir. No sign of her. I’ve asked around and no one remembers seeing her since yesterday evening. Since before … the attack.”
“Was she on deck when the thing attacked Private Heather and Seaman Strong?”
“No one knows, Captain. She might have been. Only Heather and Strong were on deck then.”
Crozier lets out a breath. It would be ironic, he thinks, if their mystery guest, who first appeared on the day this nightmare began six months ago, has finally been carried off by the creature so linked with her appearance.
“Search the whole ship, Lieutenant Irving,” he says. “Every nook, cranny, cupboard, and cable locker. We’ll use Occam’s razor and assume that if she isn’t on board that she’s … been taken.”
“Very well, sir. Shall I choose three or four men to help me in the search?”
Crozier shakes his head. “Just you, John. I want everyone else back out on the ice searching for Strong and Evans in the hours before lamps-out, and if you don’t find Silence, assign yourself to a party and join them.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Reminded of his casualty, Crozier goes forward through the men’s mess to the sick bay. Usually at supper time, even in these dark days, there is the morale-lifting sound of conversation and laughter from the men at their mess tables, but tonight there is silence broken only by the scrape of spoons on metal and the occasional belch. The men are exhausted, slumped on their sea chests they use as chairs, and only tired, slack faces look up at their captain as he squeezes past.
Crozier knocks on the wooden post to the right of the sick bay curtain and passes through.
Surgeon Peddie looks up from some sewing he is doing on Able Seaman George Cann’s left forearm at a table in the centre of the space. “Good evening, Captain,” says the surgeon. Cann knuckles his forehead with his good hand.
“What happened, Cann?”
The young sailor grunts. “Fucking shotgun barrel slides up me sleeve and touches me fucking bare arm when I was climbing a fucking ice ridge, Captain, pardon the language. I pull the shotgun out and six inches o’ fucking flesh comes with it.”
Crozier nods and looks around. The sick bay is small, but six cots are crammed into it now. One is empty. Three men, down with what Peddie and McDonald tell him is probably scurvy, are sleeping. A fourth man, Davey Leys, is staring at the ceiling — he has been conscious but strangely unresponsive for almost a week now. The fifth cot holds Marine Private William Heather.
Crozier lifts a second lamp from its hook on the starboard partition and holds the light over Heather. The man’s eyes glisten but he does not blink as Crozier brings the lamp closer. His pupils seem permanently dilated. His skull has been wrapped with a bandage but blood and grey matter are already seeping through.
“Is he alive?” Crozier asks softly.
Peddie comes over, wiping his bloody hands with a rag. “He is, strangely enough.”
“But we could see his brains on deck. I can see them now.”
Peddie nods tiredly. “That happens. In other circumstances, he might even recover. He would be an idiot, of course, but I could screw in a metal covering where his skull is missing and his family, if he has any, could take care of him. Keep him as a sort of pet. But here …” Peddie shrugs. “Pneumonia or scurvy or starvation will carry him away.”
“How soon?” asks Crozier. Seaman Cann has gone out through the curtain.
“Only God knows,” says Peddie. “Is there to be more searching for Evans and Strong, Captain?”
“Yes.” Crozier sets the lantern back in place on the partition near the entrance. Shadows flow back over Marine Private Heather.
“You are aware, I am sure,” says the exhausted surgeon, “that there is no chance for young Evans or Strong but every probability that each search will bring more wounds, more frostbite, a greater chance of amputation — many men have already lost one or more toes — and the inevitability that someone will shoot someone else in their panic.”
Crozier looks steadily at the surgeon. If one of his officers or men had spoken to Crozier like this, he would have the man flogged. The captain makes allowance for the man’s civilian status and exhausted state. Dr. McDonald has been in his hammock with the influenza for three days and nights and Peddie has been very busy. “Please let me worry about the risks of continued searching, Mr. Peddie. You worry about stitching up the men stupid enough to set bare metal against their skin when it’s sixty below zero. Besides, if that thing out there carried you off into the night, wouldn’t you want us to search for you?”
Peddie laughs hollowly. “If this particular specimen of Ursus maritimus carries me off, Captain, I can only hope that I have my scalpel with me. So I can put it through my own eye.”
“Then keep your scalpel close, Mr. Peddie,” says Crozier and goes out through the curtain into the odd silence of the crewmen’s mess area.
Jopson is waiting in the galley glow with a kerchief of hot biscuits.
Crozier enjoys his walk in spite of the creeping cold that has made his face, fingers, legs, and feet feel like they are on fire. He knows that this is preferable to them being numb. And he enjoys the walk in spite of the fact that between the slow moanings and sudden shrieks of the ice moving under and around him in the dark and the constant moan of the wind, he is certain that he is being stalked.
Twenty minutes into his two-hour walk — more a climb, scuttle, and ass-sliding descent, up, over, and down pressure ridges for much of the way tonight than a walk — the clouds part and a three-quarters moon appears and illuminates the phantasmagoric landscape. The moon is bright enough to have an ice-crystalled lunar halo around it, actually two concentric halos, he notices, the diameter of the larger one sufficient to cover a third of the eastern night sky. There are no stars. Crozier dims his lamp to save oil and walks on, using the boat pike he’s brought along to test every fold of black ahead of him to make sure it’s a shadow and not a crack or crevasse. He has reached the area on the east side of the iceberg now where the moon is blocked, the berg throwing a black and twisted shadow for a quarter of a mile of ice. Jopson and Little insisted he take a shotgun, but he told them he did not want to carry the weight on the walk. More to the point, he doesn’t really believe a shotgun will be of any use against the foe they had in mind.
In a particular moment of rare calm, everything strangely quiet except for his laboured breathing, Crozier suddenly recalls a resonant instance from when he was a young boy returning home late one winter evening from an afternoon in the wintry hills with his friends. At first he rushed headlong alone across the frost-rimed heather, but then he paused half a mile or so from his house. He remembers standing there watching the lighted windows in the village as the last of the winter twilight faded from the sky and the surrounding hills became vague, black, featureless shapes, unfamiliar to a boy so young, until even his own house, visible at the edge of town, lost all definition and three-dimensionality in the dying light. Crozier remembers the snow beginning to fall and himself standing there alone in the darkness beyond the stone sheep pens, knowing that he would be cuffed for his tardiness, knowing that arriving later would only make the cuffing worse, but having no will nor want to walk toward the light of home yet. He enjoyed the soft sound of night wind and the knowledge that he was the only boy — perhaps the only human being — out there in the dark on the windy, frozen-grass meadows on this night that smelled of coming snow, alienated from the lighted windows and the warm hearths, very aware that he was of the village but not part of it at that moment. It was a thrilling, almost erotic feeling — an illicit discovery of self separated from everyone and
everything else in the cold and dark — and he feels it again now, as he has more than a few times during his years of arctic service at opposite poles of the earth.
Something is coming down the high ridge behind him.
Crozier turns the oil lantern up and sets it on the ice. The circle of golden light reaches barely fifteen feet and makes the darkness beyond all the worse. Using his teeth, he pulls off his heavy mitten, lets it drop to the ice, leaving only a thin glove on that hand, shifts the boat pike to his left hand, and pulls his pistol from his coat pocket. Crozier cocks the weapon as the rustle of sliding ice and snow on the pressure ridge becomes louder. The line of shadow from the iceberg blocks the moonlight here and the captain can make out only the huge shapes of ice blocks seeming to move and shift in the flickering light.
Then something furry and indistinct moves along the ice ledge he has just descended, some ten feet above him and less than fifteen feet to the west, well within leaping distance.
“Halt,” Crozier says, extending the heavy pistol. “Identify yourself.”
The shape makes no sound. It moves again.
Crozier holds his fire. Dropping the long boat pike, he grabs up the lantern and thrusts it forward.
He sees the rippling fur moving and almost fires, but checks himself at the last instant. The shape slides lower, moving quickly and surely down onto the ice. Crozier lowers the hammer on his pistol and sets it back in his pocket, crouching to retrieve his mitten even while keeping the lantern extended.
Lady Silence walks into the light, her fur parka and sealskin pants making her look like some short, rounded beast. The hood is pulled forward against the wind and Crozier cannot see her face.
“God-damn it, woman,” he says softly. “You came a horny seaman’s second from being shot. Where the hell have you been, anyway?”