by Dan Simmons
“How many shooters do you envision in this … bear blind?” asked Sir John.
“Six, sir,” answered Sergeant Bryant. “It’s volley fire that will bring this beast down, sir. Just as it brought down Napoleon’s minions by the thousands at Waterloo.”
“But what if the bear has a better sense of smell than Napoleon did at Waterloo?” asked Sir John.
The men chuckled but Sergeant Tozer said, “We thought of that, Sir John. Mostly these days the wind is out of the nor’-nor’west. If we built the blind against the low pressure ridge near where poor Lieutenant Gore was laid to rest, sir, well, we’d have that nice great expanse of open ice to the nor’west as a killing zone. Almost a hunded yards of open space. Odds are great that it would come down off the higher ridges from upwind, Sir John. And when it gets where we want it, quick volleys of Minié balls into its heart and lungs, sir.”
Sir John thought about this.
“But we’ll have to call off the men, sir,” said Edward Couch, the mate. “With all the men crashing around out there on the ice, them and lookouts firing off their shotguns at every ice serac and gust of wind, no self-respecting bear would come within five miles o’ the ship, sir.”
Sir John nodded. “And what is going to lure our bear into this killing zone, gentlemen? Have you thought about bait?”
“Aye, sir,” said Sergeant Bryant, smiling now. “It’s fresh meat that draws these killers in.”
“We have no fresh meat,” said Sir John. “Not so much as a ring seal.”
“No, sir,” said the craggy Marine sergeant. “But we have that little bear. Once the blind is built and set in place, we’ll butcher that little thing, not sparing the blood, sir, and leave the meat out there on the ice not twenty-five yards from our shooting position.”
Sir John said, “So you think our animal is a cannibal?”
“Oh, aye, sir,” said Sergeant Tozer, his face flushing under the purple birthmark. “We think this thing will eat anything that bleeds or smells of meat. And when it does, we’ll pour the volleys of fire into it, sir, and then it’s ten sovereigns per man and then winter and then triumph and then home.”
Sir John nodded judiciously. “Make it so,” he said.
On Friday afternoon, the eleventh of June, Sir John went out with Lieutenant Le Vesconte to inspect the bear blind.
The two officers had to admit that even from thirty feet away the blind was all but invisible, its floor and back built into the low ridge of snow and ice where Sir John had given the eulogy. The white sails blended almost perfectly and the firing slit had tatters of canvas hanging at irregular intervals to break up the solid horizontal line. The sailmaker and armourer had attached the canvas so cleverly to the iron rods and ribs that even in the rising wind now blowing snow across the open ice, there was not the slightest flap of canvas.
Le Vesconte led Sir John down the icy path behind the pressure ridge — out of sight of the shooting zone — and then over the low wall of ice and in through a slit at the back of the tent. Sergeant Bryant was there with the Erebus Marines — Corporal Pearson and Privates Healey, Reed, Hopcraft, and Pilkington — and the men started to rise as their expedition commander entered.
“Oh, no, no, gentlemen, keep your seats,” whispered Sir John. Aromatic wooden planks had been set in high iron stirrups curled into the iron support bars at either side of the long, narrow tent, allowing the Marines to sit at shooting height when not standing by the narrow firing slit. Another layer of planking kept their feet off the ice. Their muskets were at the ready in front of them. The crowded space smelled of fresh wood, wet wool, and gun oil.
“How long have you been waiting?” whispered Sir John.
“Not quite five hours, Sir John,” whispered Sergeant Bryant.
“You must be cold.”
“Not a bit, sir,” said Bryant in low tones. “The blind is large enough to allow us to move around from time to time and the planks keep our feet from freezing. The Terror Marines under Sergeant Tozer will relieve us at two bells.”
“Have you seen anything?” whispered Lieutenant Le Vesconte.
“Not yet, sir,” answered Bryant. The sergeant and the two officers leaned forward until their faces were in the cold air of the firing slit.
Sir John could see the carcass of the bear cub, its muscles a shocking red against the ice. They had skinned everything except the small white head, bled it out, captured the blood in pails, and spread the blood all around the carcass. The wind was blowing snow across the wide expanse of ice, and the red blood against all the white, grey, and pale blue was disconcerting.
“We have still to see whether our foe is a cannibal,” whispered Sir John.
“Aye, sir,” said Sergeant Bryant. “Would Sir John join us on the bench, sir? There’s ample room.”
There wasn’t ample room, especially with Sir John’s broad beam added to those beefy posteriors already lined up along the plank. But with Lieutenant Le Vesconte remaining standing and all the Marines scooted down as far as they could go, it was just manageable to have the seven men crowded onto the piece of timber. Sir John realized that he could see out onto the ice quite well from this raised position.
At this moment, Captain Sir John Franklin was as happy as he had ever been in the company of other men. It had taken Sir John years to realize that he was far more comfortable in the presence of women — including artistic, high-strung women such as his first wife, Eleanor, and powerful, indomitable women such as his current wife, Jane — than in the company of men. But since his Divine Service the previous Sunday, he had received more smiles, nods, and sincere looks of approbation from his officers and seamen than at any time in his forty-year career.
It was true that the promise of ten gold sovereigns per man — not to mention the doubling of the advance pay, equal to five months’ regular salary for a sailor — had been made in a most unusual burst of good feeling and improvisation. But Sir John had ample financial resources, and should those suffer during his three years and more away, he was quite certain that Lady Jane’s private fortune would be available to cover these new debts of honor.
All in all, Sir John reasoned, the financial offers and his surprise allowance of grog rations aboard his teetotaling ship had been strokes of brilliance. Like all others, Sir John had been deeply cast down by the sudden death of Graham Gore, one of the most promising young officers in the fleet. The bad news of no open ways in the ice and the terrible certainty of another dark winter here had weighed heavily upon everyone, but with a promise of ten gold sovereigns per man and a single feast day aboard two ships, he had surmounted that problem for the time being.
Of course, there was the other problem, brought to him by the four medicos only last week: the fact that more and more of the canned foodstuffs were being found to be putrid, possibly as a result of improper soldering of the cans. But Sir John had set that aside for now.
The wind blew snow across the wide expanse of ice, obscuring then revealing the tiny carcass in its congealing and freezing X of blood on the blue ice. Nothing moved from the surrounding pressure ridges and ice pinnacles. The men to Sir John’s right sat easily, one chewing tobacco, the others resting their mittened hands on the upraised muzzles of their muskets. Sir John knew that those mittens would be off in a flash should their nemesis appear on the ice.
He smiled to himself as he realized that he was memorizing this scene, this moment, as a future anecdote for Jane and his daughter, Eleanor, and his lovely niece Sophia. He did that a lot these days, observing their predicament on the ice as a series of anecdotes and even setting them into words — not too many words, just enough to hold rapt attention — for future use with his lovely ladies and during evenings dining out. This day — the absurd shooting blind, the men crowded in, the good feeling, the smell of gun oil and wool and tobacco, even the lowering grey clouds and blowing snow and mild tension as they awaited their prey — should stand him in good stead in the years to come.
Sudde
nly Sir John’s gaze turned far to the left, past Lieutenant Le Vesconte’s shoulder, to the burial pit not twenty feet from the south end of the blind. The opening to the black sea had long frozen over and much of the crater itself had filled with blowing snow since the burial day, but even the sight of the depression in the ice made Sir John’s now-sentimental heart hurt in memory of young Gore. But it had been a fine burial service. He had conducted it with dignity and proud military bearing.
Sir John noticed two black objects lying close together in the lowest part of the icy depression — dark stones perhaps? Buttons or coins left behind as remembrance of Lieutenant Gore by some seaman filing by the burial site precisely a week ago? And in the dim, shifting light of the snowstorm the tiny black circles, all but invisible unless one knew exactly where to look, seemed to stare back at Sir John with something like sad reproach. He wondered if by some fluke of climate two tiny openings to the sea itself had remained open during all the intervening freeze and snow, thus revealing these two tiny circles of black water against the grey ice.
The black circles blinked.
“Ah … Sergeant … ,” began Sir John.
The entire floor of the burial crater seemed to erupt into motion. Something huge, white and grey and powerful exploded toward them, rising and rushing at the blind and then disappearing on the south side of the canvas, out of sight of the firing slit.
The Marines, obviously not sure of what they had just seen, had no time to react.
A powerful force struck the south side of the blind not three feet from Le Vesconte and Sir John, collapsing the iron and rending the canvas.
The Marines and Sir John leapt to their feet as the canvas ripped above them and behind them and to the side of them, black claws the length of Bowie knives tearing through thick sail. Everyone was shouting at once. There came a terrible carrion reek.
Sergeant Bryant raised his musket — the thing was inside, it was inside, with them, among them, surrounding them with the circumference of inhuman arms — but before he could fire there was a rush of air through the reek of predator breath. The sergeant’s head flew off his shoulders and out through the firing slit and skittered across the ice.
Le Vesconte screamed, someone fired a musket — the ball striking only the Marine next to him. The top of the canvas blind was gone, something huge blocked the opening where the sky should be, and just as Sir John turned to throw himself forward out of the ripping sail canvas, he was struck by a terrible pain just below both knees.
Then things became blurred and absurd. He seemed to be upside down, watching men being scattered like tenpins across the ice, men being thrown from the destroyed blind. Another musket fired but only as the Marine threw the weapon down and tried to scramble away across the ice on all fours. Sir John saw all this — impossibly, absurdly — from an inverted and swinging position. The pain in his legs grew intolerable, there came the sound of saplings snapping, and then he was thrown forward, down into the burial crater, toward the new circle of black awaiting. His head smashed through the thin scrim of ice like a cricket ball through a windowpane.
The water’s cold temporarily stopped Sir John’s wildly pumping heart. He tried to scream but inhaled salt water.
I am in the sea. For the first time in my life, I am in the sea itself. How extraordinary.
Then he was flailing, turning over and over, feeling the torn fragments and rags of his shredded greatcoat peeling away, feeling nothing from his legs now and getting no purchase against the freezing water with his feet. Sir John used his arms and hands to pull and paddle, not knowing in the terrible darkness if he was fighting toward the surface or merely propelling himself deeper into the black water.
I am drowning. Jane, I am drowning. Of all the fates I had considered these long years in the Service, never once, my darling, did I contemplate drowning.
Sir John’s head struck something solid, almost knocking him unconscious, forcing his face beneath the water again, filling his mouth and lungs with salt water again.
And then, my Dears, Providence led me to the surface — or at least to the thin inch of breathable air between the sea and fifteen feet of ice above.
Sir John’s arms flailed wildly as he rotated onto his back, his legs still not working, fingers scrabbling at ice above. He forced himself to calm his heart and limbs, forced discipline so that his nose could find that tiniest fraction of air between ice and freezing cold water. He breathed. Raising his chin, he coughed out seawater and breathed through his mouth.
Thank you, dear Jesus, Lord… .
Fighting down the temptation to scream, Sir John scrabbled along the underside of the ice as if he were climbing a wall. The bottom of the pack ice here was irregular, sometimes protruding down into the water and giving him no fraction of an inch of air to breathe, sometimes rising five or six inches or more and almost allowing him to lift his full face out of the water.
Despite the fifteen feet of ice above him, there was a dim glow of light — blue light, the Lord’s light — refracted through the rough facets of ice just inches from his eyes. Some daylight was coming in via the hole — Gore’s burial hole — through which he had just been thrown.
All I had to do, my dear ladies, my darling Jane, was to find my way back to that narrow hole in the ice — get my bearings, as it were — but I knew that I had only minutes… .
Not minutes, seconds. Sir John could feel the cold water freezing the life out of him. And there was something terribly wrong with his legs. Not only could he not feel them, but he could feel an absolute absence there. And the seawater tasted of his own blood.
And then, ladies, the Lord God Almighty shewed me the light… .
To his left. The opening was some ten yards or less to his left. The ice was high enough above the black water here that Sir John could raise his head, set the top of his bald and freezing pate against rough ice, gasp in air, blink water and blood out of his eyes, and actually see the glow of the Saviour’s light not ten yards away… .
Something huge and wet rose between him and the light. The darkness was absolute. His inches of breathable air were suddenly taken away, filled with the rankest of carrion breath against his face.
“Please … ,” began Sir John, sputtering and coughing.
Then the moist reek enveloped him and huge teeth closed on either side of his face, crunching through bone and skull just forward of his ears on both sides of his head.
16
CROZIER
Lat. 70°-05′ N., Long. 98°-23′ W.
10 November, 1847
It was five bells, 2:30 a.m., and Captain Crozier was back from Erebus, had inspected the corpses — or half-corpses — of William Strong and Thomas Evans where the thing on the ice had left them propped up near the stern rail on the quarterdeck, had seen to their stowage in the Dead Room below, and now he sat in his cabin contemplating the two objects on his desk — a new bottle of whiskey and a pistol.
Almost half Crozier’s small cabin was taken up by the built-in bunk set against the starboard hull. The bunk looked like a child’s cradle with carved, raised sides, built-in cupboards below, and a lumpy horsehair mattress set almost chest-high. Crozier had never slept well on real beds and often wished for the swinging hammocks he’d spent so many years in as a midshipman, young officer, and when he served before the mast as a boy. Set against the outer hull as this bunk was, it was one of the coldest sleeping places aboard the ship — chillier than the bunks of the warrant officers with their cubbies in the centre of the lower deck aft, and much colder than the sleeping hammocks of the lucky seamen forward, strung as they were on the mess deck near the still-glowing Frazer’s Patent Stove that Mr. Diggle cooked on twenty hours out of the day.
Books set into built-in shelves along the rising, inward-sloping hull helped insulate Crozier’s sleeping area a little but not much. More books ran under the ceiling for the five-foot width of the cabin, filling a shelf that hung under curving ship’s timbers three feet above t
he foldout desk connecting Crozier’s bunk to the hall partition. Directly overhead was the black circle of the Preston Patent Illuminator, its convex opaque glass piercing a deck now dark beneath three feet of snow and protective canvas. Cold air constantly flowed down from the Illuminator like the freezing exhalations of something long dead but still labouring to breathe.
Opposite Crozier’s desk was a narrow shelf holding his bathing basin. No water was kept in the basin since it would freeze; Crozier’s steward, Jopson, brought his captain hot water from the stove each morning. The space between desk and basin left just enough room in the tiny cabin for Crozier to stand, or — as now — sit at his desk on a backless stool that slid under the basin shelf when not in use.
He continued staring at the pistol and bottle of whiskey.
The captain of HMS Terror often thought that he knew nothing about the future — other than that his ship and Erebus would never again steam or sail — but then he reminded himself of one certainty: when his store of whiskey was gone, Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier was going to blow his brains out.
The late Sir John Franklin had filled his storeroom with expensive china — all bearing Sir John’s initials and family crest, of course — as well as cut crystal, forty-eight beef tongues, fancy silver also engraved with his crest, barrels of smoked Westphalia hams, towers of double Gloucestershire cheeses, bag upon bag of specially imported tea from a relative’s plantation in Darjeeling, and crocks of his favorite raspberry jam.
And while Crozier had packed some special foods for the occasional officers’ dinners he had to host, most of his money and allocated hold space had been dedicated to three hundred and twenty-four bottles of whiskey. It was not fine Scotch whiskey, but it would suffice. Crozier knew that he had long since reached that point of being the kind of drunkard where quantity always trumped quality. Sometimes here, as in the summer when he was especially busy, a bottle might last him two weeks or more. Other times — as during this past week — he might go through a bottle a night. The truth was, he had quit counting the empty bottles when he passed two hundred the previous winter, but he knew that he must be nearing the end of his supply. On the night he drinks the last of the last and his steward tells him there are no more — Crozier knew it would be at night — he firmly planned to cock the pistol, set the muzzle to his temple, and pull the trigger.