by Dan Simmons
Thomas Blanky was no natural philosopher, but he had been a creature of the arctic as both man and boy, working as able-bodied seaman or ice master for American whalers when the Royal Navy had no use for him, and he knew these polar regions as few others on the expedition did. While this area was strange to him — as far as Blanky knew, no ship had ever sailed this far south of Lancaster Sound and so near to King William Land before, nor sailed so far west of Boothia Peninsula — most of the terrible arctic conditions were as familiar to him as a summer in Kent where he was born.
More familiar, actually, Blanky realized. He’d not seen a Kent summer in almost twenty-eight years.
The howling snow this night was familiar, as was the solid surface of ice and seracs and grumbling pressure ridges which were pushing poor Terror higher on its capstan of rising ice even while squeezing the life out of her. Blanky’s ice-master counterpart on Erebus, James Reid, a man Blanky highly respected, had informed him just today after the odd Divine Service that the old flagship hadn’t much longer to last. Besides its coal scuttles being drawn down even farther than the failing Terror’s, the ice had seized Sir John’s ship in a fiercer and less-forgiving grip more than a year ago when they’d first been locked fast into their current positions.
Reid had whispered that since Erebus was stern-down in the encroaching ice — the opposite of Terror’s bow-down position — the unrelenting pressure was squeezing Sir John’s ship more tightly and growing more terrible as it pushed the creaking, groaning ship higher above the surface of the frozen sea. Already the rudder had been splintered and the keel damaged beyond repair outside of a dry dock. Already the stern plates were sprung — there were three feet of frozen water in the stern, which was down by ten degrees, and only sandbags and coffer dams kept the slushy sea out of the boiler room — and the mighty oak beams that had survived decades of war and service were splintering. Worse, the spiderwebs of iron bracings set in place in 1845 to make Erebus impervious to the ice moaned constantly now from the terrible pressure. From time to time, smaller stanchions gave way at the join with the sound of a small cannon being fired. This often happened late at night and the men would snap upright in the hammocks, identify the source of the explosion, and go back to sleep with soft curses. Captain Fitzjames usually went below with some of his officers to investigate. The heavier braces would hold, Reid said, but only by tearing through the contracting oak-and-iron-layered hulls. When that happened, the ship would sink, ice or no ice.
Erebus’s ice master said that their ship’s carpenter, John Weekes, spent every day and half of most nights with a work party of no fewer than ten men down in the hold and orlop deck, shoring everything with every stout plank the ship had brought along — and many quietly borrowed from Terror — but the resulting web of internal wooden structure was a temporary fix, at best. Unless Erebus escaped the ice by April or May, Reid quoted Weekes as saying, it would be crushed like an egg.
Thomas Blanky knew ice. In the early summer of 1846, all the time he was guiding Sir John and his captain south through the long sound and newly discovered strait south of the Barrow Strait — the new strait remained nameless in their logs but some were already calling it “Franklin Strait,” as if naming the channel that had trapped the dead old fool would make his ghost feel better about being carried away by a monster — Blanky had been at his station atop the mainmast, shouting down advice to the helmsman as Terror and Erebus gingerly picked their way through more than 250 miles of changing ice and narrowing leads and dead-end channels.
Thomas Blanky was good at his job. He knew that he was one of the best ice masters and pilots in the world. From his precarious post high atop the mainmast — these old bombardment ships had no crow’s nests like a mere whaler — Blanky could tell the difference of drift ice from brash ice at eight miles’ distance. Asleep in his cubicle, he knew at once when the ship had moved from the glug-glug-glug passage through sludge ice into the metal-file rasp of pancake ice. He knew at a glance which bergy bits were a threat to the ship and which could be taken head-on. Somehow his aging eyes could make out the blue-white submerged growlers in a blue-white sea alive with sun sparkles and even tell which of the growlers would merely grind and groan as they slid along the ship’s hull and which — like an actual berg — would put the ship at risk.
So Blanky was proud of the job he and Reid had done leading both ships more than 250 miles south and then west of their first wintering spot at Beechey and Devon Islands. But Thomas Blanky also cursed himself for a fool and a villain for helping lead the two ships and their 126 souls 250 miles south and then west of their wintering spot at Beechey and Devon.
The ships could have retreated from Devon Island, back through Lancaster Sound and then down Baffin Bay, even if they’d had to wait two cold summers, or even three, to escape the ice. The little bay there at Beechey would have protected the ships from this open-sea ice abuse. And sooner or later the ice along Lancaster Sound would have relented. Thomas Blanky knew that ice. It behaved the way arctic ice was meant to behave — treacherous, deadly, ready to destroy you after a single wrong decision or moment’s lapse, but predictable.
But this ice, thought Blanky as he stomped about the dark stern to keep his feet from freezing, seeing the lanterns glowing port and starboard where Berry and Handford paced with their shotguns, this ice was like no ice in his experience.
He and Reid had warned Sir John and the two captains fifteen months ago, right before the ships became frozen in place. Go for broke, Blanky had advised, agreeing with Captain Crozier that they needed to turn tail while there were still the slightest open leads, needed to seek out open water as close to the Boothia Peninsula as fast as they could steam that long-ago September. The water there close to a known coast — at least the east side of it was known to old Discovery Service and whaler veterans such as Blanky — almost certainly would have stayed liquid for another week, perhaps two, into that lost-opportunity September. Even if they hadn’t been able to steam north along the coast again because of hummocky floes and old pack ice — Reid called it screw pack ice — they would have been infinitely safer behind the shelter of what they now were certain, after the dead Lieutenant Gore’s sledge expedition last summer, was James Ross’s King William Land. That landmass, as low, frozen, windswept, and lightning-ravaged as they now knew it to be, would have sheltered the ships from this Devil-sent constant northwest blast of arctic wind, blizzards, cold, and endless assaulting sea ice.
Blanky had never seen ice like this. One of the few advantages of pack ice, even when your ship was frozen in like a musket ball blasted into an iceberg, was that the pack ice drifted. The ships, while seemingly motionless, moved. When Blanky had been ice master on the American whaler Pluribus in ’36, winter had roared in on the twenty-seventh of August, taking everyone including the experienced one-eyed American captain by surprise and freezing them into Baffin Bay hundreds of miles north of Disko Bay.
The next arctic summer had been bad — almost as cold as this last summer, 1847, during which there had been no summer ice melt, air warmth, or return of birds or other wildlife here — but the whaler Pluribus was in more predictable pack ice and drifted more than seven hundred miles south until, late that next summer, they’d reached the ice line and been able to sail their way south through sludge-ice seas and narrow leads and what the Russians called polynyas, cracks in the ice that opened up as you watched, until the American whaler reached open water and could sail southeast to a Greenland port for refitting.
But not here, Blanky knew. Not in this truly godforsaken white hell. This pack ice was, as he’d described to the captains a year and three months ago, more like an endless glacier being pushed down from the north pole. And with the mostly uncharted bulk of arctic Canada to their south, King William Land to their southwest, and Boothia Peninsula beyond their reach to the east and nor’east, there was no real ice drift here — as Crozier’s and Fitzjames’s and Reid’s and Blanky’s repeated sun and star sext
ant readings kept telling them — just a sickening pivot around a fifteen-mile circumference. It was as if they were flies pinned to one of the metal music disks no longer used by the men in the Great Room below. Going nowhere. Always returning to the same spot again and again.
And this open pack ice was more like the coastal fast ice of Blanky’s experience, only here at sea the ice was twenty to twenty-five feet thick around the ships rather than the three-foot depth of regular fast ice. So thick that the captains couldn’t keep open the usual fire holes that all ships locked in the ice kept free all winter.
This ice didn’t even allow them to bury their dead.
Thomas Blanky wondered if he had been an instrument of evil — or perhaps just of folly — when he had used his more than three decades of ice-master skills to get 126 men the impossible 250 miles through ice to this place where all they could do was die.
Suddenly there came a shout. Then a shotgun blast. Another shout.
21
BLANKY
Lat. 70°-05′ N., Long. 98°-23′ W.
5 December, 1847
Blanky tugged his right overmitten off with his teeth, let it drop to the deck, and raised his own shotgun. Tradition was for the officers on watch not to be armed, but Captain Crozier had ended that tradition with a single order. Every man on deck was to be armed at all times. Now, with his mitten off, Blanky’s thin wool underglove allowed his finger to crook through the trigger guard of the shotgun, but his hand immediately felt the biting cold of the wind.
It was Seaman Berry’s lantern — the port watch — whose glow had disappeared. The shotgun blast had sounded as if it had come from the left of the midship winter canvas rigging, but the Ice Master knew that wind and snow distorted sounds. Blanky could still see the glow of the starboard-side lantern, but it was bobbing and moving.
“Berry?” he shouted toward the dark port side. He could almost feel the two syllables hurled astern by the howling wind. “Handford?”
The starboard lantern glow disappeared. At the bow, Davey Leys’s lantern would have been visible beyond the midship tent on a clear night, but this was no longer a clear night.
“Handford?” Mr. Blanky began moving forward to the port side of the long tent covering, carrying his shotgun in his right hand and the lantern he’d lifted off the sternpost in his left. He had three more shotgun shells in his right greatcoat pocket, but he knew from experience how long it took to fumble them out and load them in this cold.
“Berry!” he bellowed. “Handford! Leys!” One of the dangers now was that the three men would shoot each other in the dark and storm on the tilted, icy deck, although it had sounded as if Alex Berry had already discharged his weapon. There had not been a second blast. But Blanky knew that if he moved to the port side of the frozen tent pyramid and Handford or Leys suddenly came around to investigate, the nervous men might fire at anything, even a moving lantern.
He moved forward anyway.
“Berry?” he shouted, coming within ten yards of the port watch station.
He caught a blur of movement amid the driving snow, something far too large to be Alex Berry, and then there came a crash louder than any shotgun. A second explosion. Blanky staggered back ten paces toward the stern as casks, wooden kegs, boxes, and other ship’s stores flew through the air. It took him a few seconds to realize what had happened; the permanent pyramid of frozen canvas running fore and aft along the centre of the deck had suddenly collapsed, throwing thousands of pounds of accumulated snow and ice in each direction even while flinging wide the deck stores beneath — mostly flammable pitch, caulkers’ materials, and sand to put down for traction atop the snow deliberately shoveled onto the deck — and also sending the mainmast’s lower spars, which had been rotated fore and aft more than a year ago to act as ridgepoles for the tent, crashing down onto the main hatch and ladderway.
There was no way for Blanky and the other three men on watch to get to the lower deck now, and no way that the men down there could get up to investigate the explosions on deck, not with the main spars and all that weight of canvas and snow blocking the hatch. The Ice Master knew that the men below would soon run to the forward hatch and begin unbattening its nailed-down winter seals, but that would take time.
Will we be alive when they get up here? wondered Blanky.
Moving as carefully as he could on the sand-covered packed snow of the tilted deck, Blanky made his way around the debris pile at the rear of the collapsed tent area and started down the narrow aisle on the starboard side of the heap.
A shape rose before him.
Still holding the lantern high in his left hand, Blanky lifted the shotgun, finger on the trigger, ready to fire. “Handford!” he said when he saw the pale blob of a face amid the black mass of coats and comforters. The man’s Welsh wig was in disarray. “Where’s your lantern?”
“I dropped it,” said the seaman. The man was shaking violently, his hands bare. He huddled close to Thomas Blanky as if the Ice Master were a source of heat. “I dropped it when the thing knocked the spar down. The flame went out in the snow.”
“What do you mean, ‘when the thing knocked the spar down’?” demanded Blanky. “No living thing could knock the mainmast spar down.”
“It did!” said Handford. “I heard Berry’s shotgun fire. Then he shouted something. Then his lantern went out. Then I saw something … large, something very large … leap up on the spar and that’s when everything collapsed. I tried to fire at the thing on the spar, but my shotgun misfired. I left it at the rail.”
Leap up onto the spar? thought Blanky. The swiveled mainmast spar was twelve feet above the deck. Nothing could leap onto it. With the mainmast sheathed in ice, nothing could climb to it either. Aloud, he said, “We have to find Berry.”
“There is no way in God’s universe that I’m going over there to the port side, Mr. Blanky. You can write me up and have Bosun’s Mate Johnson give me fifty with the cat, but there’s no way in God’s universe that I’m going over there, Mr. Blanky.” Handford’s teeth were chattering so wildly that he was barely understandable.
“Calm down,” snapped Blanky. “No one’s being written up. Where’s Leys?”
From this vantage point on the starboard-watch side, Blanky should have been able to see David Leys’s lantern glowing at the bow. The bow was dark.
“His went out the same time I dropped mine,” said Handford through his clattering teeth.
“Get your shotgun.”
“I can’t go back there where … ,” began Handford.
“God-damn your eyes!” roared Thomas Blanky. “If you don’t retrieve that weapon this gob-fucking minute, a flogging of fifty from the cat will be the least bugger-fucking thing you have to worry about, John Handford. Now move!”
Handford moved. Blanky followed him, never turning his back on the collapsed heap of canvas at the centre of the ship. Because of the driving snow, the lantern created a sphere of light ten feet or less across. The Ice Master kept both the lantern and the shotgun raised. His arms were very tired.
Handford was attempting to retrieve his weapon in the snow with fingers that had obviously gone numb with cold.
“Where the hell are your mittens and gloves, man?” snapped Blanky.
Handford’s teeth were chattering too wildly for him to respond.
Blanky set his own weapon down, brushed the seaman’s arms aside, and lifted the man’s shotgun. He made sure the single barrel was not blocked with snow, then broke the breech and handed the weapon back to Handford. Blanky finally had to tuck it under the other man’s arm so he could cradle it with his two frozen hands. Setting his own shotgun under his left arm where he could shift it quickly, Blanky fumbled a shell out of his greatcoat pocket, loaded Handford’s shotgun, and clicked it shut for the man. “If anything larger than Leys or me comes out of that pile,” he said, almost shouting into Handford’s ear because of the wind roar, “aim and pull that trigger if you have to use your fucking teeth to do it.”
Handford managed a nod.
“I’m going forward to find Leys and help him open the forward hatch,” said Blanky. Nothing seemed to be moving downhill toward the bow amid the dark jumble of frozen canvas, dislodged snow, broken spars, and tumbled crates.
“I can’t … ,” began Handford.
“Just stay where you are,” snapped Blanky. He set the lantern down next to the terrified man. “Don’t shoot me when I come back with Leys or I swear to God my ghost will haunt you ’til you die, John Handford.”
Handford’s pale blob of a face nodded again.
Blanky started toward the bow. After a dozen steps, he was beyond the glow of the lantern but his night vision did not return. The hard particles of snow struck his face like pellets. Above him, the rising wind howled in what little rigging and shrouds they’d left in place during the endless winter. It was so dark here that Blanky had to carry the shotgun in his left hand — his still-mittened hand — while feeling along the ice-encrusted railing with his right hand. As far as he could tell, the mainmast spar here on the forward side of the mast had also collapsed.
“Leys!” he shouted.
Something very large and vaguely white in the hurtling snow lumbered out of the heap of debris and stopped him in his tracks. The Ice Master couldn’t tell if the thing was a white bear or a tattooed demon or if it was ten feet in front of him or thirty feet away in the dark, but he knew that it had completely blocked his progress toward the bow.
Then the thing reared up on its hind legs.
Blanky could see only the mass of it — he sensed the dark bulk of it mostly through the amount of blowing snow it blocked — but he knew it was huge. The tiny triangular head, if that was a head up there in the darkness, rose higher than the space where the spars had been. There seemed to be two holes punched into that pale triangle of a head — eyes? — but they were at least fourteen feet above the deck.