by Dan Simmons
She steps closer, almost within reaching distance, but her face remains veiled by darkness within the hood.
Feeling a sudden chill along the back of his neck and down his spine — Crozier is remembering his grandmother Moira’s description of a banshee’s transparent skull face within the folds of its black hood — he raises the lantern between them.
The young woman’s face is human, not banshee, the dark eyes wide as they reflect the light. She has no expression. Crozier realizes that he has never seen an expression on her face, other than perhaps a mildly inquisitive look. Not even on the day they shot and killed her husband or brother or father and she watched the man choke to death on his own blood.
“No wonder the men think you’re a witch and a Jonah,” says Crozier. On the ship, in front of the men, he is always polite and formal to this Esquimaux wench, but he is not on the ship or in front of the men now. It is the first and only time he and the damned woman have been away from the ship at the same time. And he is very cold and very tired.
Lady Silence stares at him. Then she extends a mittened hand, Crozier lowers the lamp toward it, and he sees that she is offering him something — a limp grey offering, like a fish that has been gutted and boned, leaving only the skin.
He realizes that it is a crewman’s woolen stocking.
Crozier takes it, feels the lump at the toe of the sock, and for a second is sure that the lump will be part of a man’s foot, probably the ball of the foot and the toes, still pink and warm.
Crozier has been to France and known men posted to India. He has heard the story of werewolves and were-tigers. In Van Diemen’s Land, where he met Sophia Cracroft, she told him of the locals’ tales of natives who could turn into a monstrous creature there they called the Tasmanian devil — a creature capable of tearing a man limb from limb.
Shaking the stocking, Crozier looks into Lady Silence’s eyes. They are as black as the holes in the ice through which the Terrors lowered their dead until even those holes froze solid.
It is a lump of ice, not part of a foot. But the stocking itself is not frozen hard. The wool has not been out here for long in −60-degree cold. Logic suggests that this woman has brought it with her from the ship, but for some reason Crozier does not think so.
“Strong?” says the captain. “Evans?”
Silence shows no reaction to the names.
Crozier sighs, stuffs the stocking in his coat pocket, and lifts the boat pike. “We’re closer to Erebus than Terror,” he says. “You’ll just have to come with me.”
Crozier turns his back on her, feeling the chill along his neck and spine again in doing so, and crunches off through the rising wind toward the now-visible outline of the Terror’s sister ship. A minute later he can hear her soft footsteps on the ice behind him.
They clamber over a final pressure ridge, and Crozier can see that Erebus is more brightly lit than he’s seen before. A dozen or more lanterns hang from spars just on this visible port side of the icebound, absurdly lifted, and steeply canting vessel. It’s a prodigious waste of lamp oil.
The Erebus, Crozier knows, has suffered more than his Terror. Besides bending the long propeller shaft last summer — the shaft that had been built to be retracted but hadn’t done so in time to avoid damage from the underwater ice during their ice-breaking in July — and losing the screw itself, the flagship had been mauled more than her sister ship during the past two winters. The ice in the comparative shelter of the Beechey Island harbour had warped, splintered, and loosened hull timbers to a greater degree on Erebus than on Terror; the flagship’s rudder was damaged in their past summer’s mad dash for the Passage; the cold has popped more bolts, rivets, and metal brackets in Sir John’s ship; much more of the iron icebreaker cladding on Erebus has been torn free or buckled. And while Terror has also been raised and squeezed by the ice, the last two months of this third winter have seen HMS Erebus lifted on a virtual pedestal of ice even while the pressure from the sea pack splintered a long section of the starboard bow, port stern, and bottom hull amidships.
Sir John Franklin’s flagship, Crozier knows — and its current captain, James Fitzjames, and his crew also know — will never sail again.
Before stepping into the area lit by the ship’s hanging lanterns, Crozier steps behind a ten-foot-tall serac and pulls Silence in behind him.
“Ahoy the ship!” he bellows in his loudest dockyard-commanding voice.
A shotgun roars and a serac five feet from Crozier splinters into a shower of ice chips catching the lantern’s dim glow.
“Avast that, God-damn your blind eyes, you fucking lubbing idle-brained shit-for-wits idiot!” roars Crozier.
There is a commotion on Erebus’s deck as some officer wrestles the shotgun away from the shit-for-wits idiot sentinel.
“All right,” Crozier says to the cowering Esquimaux girl. “We can go now.”
He stops, and not just because Lady Silence is not following him out into the light. He can see her face by the reflected glow, and she is smiling. Those full lips that never move are curling up ever so slightly. Smiling. As if she had understood and enjoyed his outburst.
But before Crozier can confirm that the smile is real, Silence backs into the shadows of the ice jumble and is gone.
Crozier shakes his head. If the crazy woman wants to freeze out here, let her. He has business with Captain Fitzjames and then a long walk home in the dark before he can sleep.
Tiredly, realizing that he’s not felt his feet for the past half hour at least, Crozier stumps his way up the ramp of dirty ice and snow toward the deck of the dead Sir John’s broken flagship.
9
FRANKLIN
Lat. 70°-05′ N., Long. 98°-23′ W.
May, 1847
Captain Sir John Franklin may have been the only man aboard either ship who remained outwardly serene when spring and summer simply did not arrive in April, May, and June of 1847.
At first, Sir John had not formally announced that they were stuck for at least another year; he didn’t have to. The previous spring, up at Beechey Island, the crew and officers had watched with eager anticipation not only as the sun returned but as the close pack broke up into discrete floes and slushy brash ice, open leads appeared, and the ice gave up its grip. By late May of 1846 they had been sailing again. Not so this year.
The previous spring crew and officers had observed the return of the many birds, whales, fish, foxes, seals, walruses, and other animals, not to mention the greening of the lichen and low heather on the islands they were sailing toward by early June. Not this year. No open water meant no whales, no walruses, almost no seals — the few ring seals they spied were as hard to catch or shoot now as they had been in early winter — and nothing but dirty snow and grey ice as far as the eye could see.
The temperature stayed cold despite the longer hours of sun each day. Although Franklin had the masts fully stepped, the spars reset, the rigging redone, and fresh canvas on both ships brought up by mid-April, there was no purpose to it. The steam boilers remained unfired except to move warm water through the heating pipes. Lookouts reported a solid table of white extending in all directions. Icebergs stayed in place where they had been frozen in place the previous September. Fitzjames and Lieutenant Gore, working with Captain Crozier from Terror, had confirmed from their star sightings that the current was pushing the ice flow south at a pitiful one and a half miles per month, but this mass of ice on which they were pinned had rotated counterclockwise all winter, returning them to where they had begun. Pressure ridges continued to pop up like white gopher burrows. The ice was thinning — fire-hole teams could saw through it now — but it was still more than ten feet thick.
Captain Sir John Franklin remained serene through all of this because of two things: his faith and his wife. Sir John’s devout Christianity buoyed him up even when the press of responsibility and frustration collaborated to press him down. Everything that happened was, he knew and fervently believed, God’s will. Wha
t seemed inevitable to the others need not be in a universe administered by an interested and merciful God. The ice might suddenly break up in midsummer, now less than six weeks away, and even a few weeks of sailing and steaming time would bring them triumphantly to the North-West Passage. They would steam west along the coast as long as they had coal, then sail the rest of the way to the Pacific, escaping the far northern latitudes sometime in mid-September just before the pack ice solidified again. Franklin had experienced greater miracles in his lifetime. Just being appointed commander of this expedition — at age sixty, after the humiliation of Van Diemen’s Land — had been a greater miracle.
As deep and sincere as Sir John’s faith in God was, his faith in his wife was even deeper and sometimes more frightening. Lady Jane Franklin was an indomitable woman … indomitable was the only word for her. Her will knew no bounds and in almost every instance, Lady Jane Franklin would bend the errant and arbitrary ways of the world to the iron command of her will. Already, he imagined, after being out of touch for two full winters, his wife had mobilized her very impressive private fortune, public contacts, and apparently limitless force of will to cajole the Admiralty, the Parliament, and God alone knew what other agencies into searching for him.
This last fact bothered Sir John somewhat. Above all else, he did not want to be “rescued” — approached either overland or by sea during the brief summer thaw by hastily assembled expeditions under the command of whiskey-breath Sir John Ross or the young Sir James Ross (who would be forced out of his arctic retirement, Sir John was sure, by Lady Jane’s demands). That way lay shame and ignominy.
But Sir John remained serene because he knew that the Admiralty was not moved quickly on any matter, not even by such a forceful fulcrum and lever as his wife Jane. Sir John Barrow and the other members of the mythical Arctic Council, not to mention Sir John’s official superiors in the Royal Navy Discovery Service, knew quite well that HMS Erebus and HMS Terror had provisions for three years, longer if severe rations were imposed, not to mention the capability of fishing and hunting game should they ever come in sight of any. Sir John knew that his wife — his indomitable wife — would force a rescue should it come to that, but the terrible and wonderful inertia of the Royal Navy would almost certainly ensure that such a rescue attempt would not be outfitted until the spring and summer of 1848, if not later.
Accordingly, in late May of 1847, Sir John prepared five sledge parties to look over the horizons in each direction, including one instructed to sledge back the way they had come, searching for any open water. They departed on May 21, 23, and 24, with Lieutenant Gore’s party — the crucial one — departing last and sledging toward King William Land to the southeast.
Besides reconnoitering, First Lieutenant Graham Gore had a second important responsibility — leaving Sir John’s first written message cached ashore since the beginning of the expedition.
Here Captain Sir John Franklin had come as close to disobeying orders as he ever had in his Naval lifetime. His instructions from the Admiralty had been to erect cairns and to leave messages in caches for the length of his exploration — should the ships not appear beyond the Bering Strait on schedule, this would be the only way for Royal Navy rescue ships to know in which direction Franklin had headed and what might have caused their delay. But Sir John had not left such a message at Beechey Island, even though he had almost nine months to prepare one. In truth, Sir John had hated that first cold anchorage — had been ashamed of the deaths of the three crewmen by consumption and pneumonia that winter — so he had privately decided to leave the graves behind as the only message he needed to send. With any luck, no one would find the graves for years after his victory of forcing the North-West Passage had been bannered everywhere in the world.
But it had now been almost two years since his last dispatch to his superiors, so Franklin dictated an update to Gore and set it in an airtight brass cylinder — one of two hundred he’d been supplied with.
He personally instructed Lieutenant Gore and Second Mate Charles Des Voeux on where to put the message — into the six-foot-high cairn left on King William Land by Sir James Ross some seventeen years earlier at the westernmost point of his own explorations. It would be, Franklin knew, the first place the Navy would look for word of his expedition, since it was the last landmark on everyone’s maps.
Looking at the lone squiggle of that last landmark on his own map in the privacy of his cabin on the morning before Gore, Des Voeux, and six crewmen set out, Sir John had to smile. In an act of respect seventeen years ago — not to mention an act now generating some minor irony — Ross had named the westernmost promontory along the shore Victory Point and then named the nearby highlands Cape Jane Franklin and Franklin Point. It was as if, Sir John thought, looking down at the weathered sepia map with its black lines and large unfilled spaces to the west of the carefully marked Victory Point, Destiny or God had brought him and these men here.
His dictated message — it was in Gore’s handwriting — was, Sir John thought, succinct and businesslike:
_____ of May 1847. HM Ships Erebus and Terror … Wintered in the Ice in Lat. 70°05′ N. Long. 98°23′ W. Having wintered in 1846–7 at Beechey Island in Lat. 74°43′28″ N Long. 90°39′15″ W after having ascended Wellington Channel to Lat. 77° — and returned by the west side of Cornwallis Island. Sir John Franklin commanding the Expedition. All well. Party consisting of 2 officers and 6 Men left the ships on Monday 24th. May 1847. Gm. Gore, Lieut. Chas. F. Des Voeux, mate.
Franklin instructed Gore and Des Voeux to sign the note and fill in the date before sealing the canister and setting it deep inside James Ross’s cairn.
What Franklin hadn’t noticed during his dictation — nor Lieutenant Gore corrected — was that he had given the wrong dates for their winter at Beechey Island. It had been the first winter of 1845–46 in their sheltered ice harbour at Beechey; this year’s terrible time in the open pack ice had been the winter of 1846–47.
No matter. Sir John was convinced that he was leaving a minor message to posterity — possibly to some Royal Navy historian who wished to add an artifact to Sir John’s future report on the expedition (Sir John fully planned to write another book, the proceeds of which would bring his private fortune almost up to that of his wife’s) — and not dictating a report that would be read by anyone in the immediate future.
On the morning that Gore’s sledge party set out, Sir John bundled up and went down onto the ice to wish them Godspeed.
“Do you have everything you need, gentlemen?” asked Sir John.
First Lieutenant Gore — fourth in overall command behind Sir John, Captain Crozier, and Commander Fitzjames — nodded, as did his subordinate, Second Mate Des Voeux, the mate flashing a smile. The sun was very bright and the men were already wearing the wire-mesh goggles that Mr. Osmer, Erebus’s purser, had issued them to prevent blindness from the sun’s glare.
“Yes, Sir John. Thank you, sir,” said Gore.
“Plenty of woollies?” joked Sir John.
“Aye, sir,” said Gore. “Eight layers of well-woven good Northumberland sheep shearings, Sir John, nine if one counts the woolen drawers.”
The five crewmen laughed to hear their officers banter so. The men, Sir John knew, loved him.
“Prepared for camping out on the ice?” Sir John asked one of the men, Charles Best.
“Oh, aye, Sir John,” said the short but stocky young seaman. “We have the Holland tent, sir, and them eight wolfskin blanket robes what we sleep on and under. And twenty-four sleeping bags, Sir John, which purser sewn up for us from the fine Hudson’s Bay blankets. We’ll be toastier on the ice than aboard the ship, m’lord.”
“Good, good,” Sir John said absently. He looked to the southeast where King William Land — or Island, if Francis Crozier’s wild theory was to be believed — was visible only as a slight darkening of the sky over the horizon. Sir John prayed to God, quite literally, that Gore and his men would find open water near th
e coast, either before or after caching the expedition’s message. Sir John was prepared to do everything in his power — and beyond — to force the two ships, as beaten up as Erebus was, across and through the softening ice, if only it would soften, and into the comparative protection of coastal waters and the potential salvation of land. There they might find a calm harbour or gravel spit where the carpenters and engineers could make repairs enough to Erebus — straightening the propeller shaft, replacing the screw, shoring up the twisted internal iron reinforcements and perhaps replacing some of the missing iron cladding — to allow them to press on. If not, Sir John thought — but had not yet shared the thought with any of his officers — they would follow Crozier’s distressing plan from the previous year and anchor Erebus, transfer its diminishing coal reserves and crew to Terror, and sail west along the coast in that crowded (but jubilant, Sir John was sure, jubilant) remaining ship.
At the last moment, the assistant surgeon on Erebus, Goodsir, had implored Sir John to allow him to accompany the Gore party, and although neither Lieutenant Gore nor Second Mate Des Voeux were enthusiastic about the idea — Goodsir was not popular with the officers or men — Sir John had allowed it. The assistant surgeon’s argument for going was that he needed to gain more information on edible forms of wildlife to use against the scurvy that was the primary fear of all arctic expeditions. He was particularly interested in the behavior of the only animal present this odd non-summer arctic summer, the white bear.
Now, as Sir John watched the men finish lashing their gear to the heavy sledge, the diminutive surgeon — he was a small man, pale, weak-looking, with a receding chin, absurd side whiskers, and a strangely effeminate gaze that put off even the usually universally affable Sir John — sidled up to start a conversation.
“Thank you again for allowing me to accompany Lieutenant Gore’s party, Sir John,” said the little medico. “The outing could be of inestimable importance in our medical evaluation of the antiscorbutic properties of a wide variety of flora and fauna, including the lichens invariably present on the terra firma of King William Land.”