by Dan Simmons
Crozier decided to change the subject. “You’re not worried about the men conducting this elaborate Venetian Carnivale?”
Fitzjames defied his gentleman’s heritage by shrugging. “Why should I be? I can’t speak for your ship, Francis, but Christmas on Erebus was an exercise in misery. The men need something to raise their morale.”
Crozier couldn’t argue the point about Christmas being an exercise in misery. “But a carnivale masque on the ice during another day of total darkness?” he said. “How many hands will we lose to the thing waiting out there?”
“How many will we lose if we hide in our ships?” asked Fitzjames. Both the small smile and the distracted air remained. “And it worked out all right when you had the first Venetian Carnivale under Hoppner and Parry in ’24.”
Crozier shook his head. “That was only two months after we were first frozen in,” he said softly. “And both Parry and Hoppner were fanatics about discipline. Even with all the frivolity and both captains’ love of theatrics, Edward Parry used to say, ‘masquerades without licentiousness’ and ‘carnivals without excess!’ Our discipline has not been so well maintained on this expedition, James.”
Fitzjames finally lost his distracted air. “Captain Crozier,” he said stiffly, “are you accusing me of allowing discipline to become lax aboard my ship?”
“No, no, no,” said Crozier, not knowing if he was accusing the younger man of that yet or not. “I am just saying that this is our third year in the ice, not our third month as it was with Parry and Hoppner. There’s bound to be some loss of discipline to go along with illness and sagging morale.”
“Would that not be all the more reason for allowing the men to have this diversion?” asked Fitzjames, his voice still brittle. His pale cheeks had coloured at his superior’s implied criticism.
Crozier sighed. It was too late to stop this God-damned masque now, he realized. The men had the bit in their teeth, and those on Erebus who were heading up the Carnivale preparations most enthusiastically were precisely those men who would be the first to foment mutiny should the time come. The trick as captain, Crozier knew, was never to allow that time to come. He honestly did not know whether this carnivale would help or hurt that cause.
“All right,” he said at last. “But the men have to understand that they may not waste even a lump, drop, or drip of coal, lamp oil, pyroligneous fuel, or ether for the spirit stoves.”
“They promise that it will be torches only,” said Fitzjames.
“And there’s no extra spirits or food for that day,” added Crozier. “We’ve just gone on the severely reduced rations today. We’re not changing that on the fifth day for a masque carnivale that neither of us fully endorsed.”
Fitzjames nodded. “Lieutenant Le Vesconte, Lieutenant Fairholme, and some of the men who are better than average rifle shots will go on hunting parties this week before the carnivale in hopes of finding game, but the men understand that it is rations as usual — or rather, the new, reduced fare — should the hunters return empty-handed.”
“As they have every other time in the past three months,” muttered Crozier. In a friendlier voice, he said, “All right, James. I’ll be getting back.” He paused at the doorway of Fitzjames’s tiny cabin. “By the way, why are they dyeing the sails green, black, and those other colours?”
Fitzjames smiled distractedly. “I have no idea, Francis.”
The morning of Friday, 31 December, 1847, dawned cold but still — although of course there was no real dawn. Terror’s morning watch under Mr. Irving registered the temperature as −73 degrees. There was no measurable wind. Clouds had moved in during the night and now concealed the sky from horizon to horizon. It was very dark.
Most of the men seemed eager to head off to Carnivale as soon as breakfast was finished — a faster meal on the new rations, consisting of a single ship’s biscuit with jam and a reduced scoop of Scotch barley mush with a dollop of sugar — but all ship’s duties had to be attended to and Crozier had agreed to liberty for general attendance at the gala only after the day’s work and supper were finished. Still, he’d agreed that those men without specific duties that day — holystoning the lower deck, the usual watches, deicing the rigging, deck shoveling, ship repair, cairn repair, tutoring — could go work on final preparations for the masque, and about a dozen men headed off into the darkness after breakfast, two Marines with muskets accompanying them.
By noon and the issuing of the further-diluted grog, the excitement of the remaining ship’s company was a palpable thing. Crozier released six more men who’d finished their day’s duties and sent Second Lieutenant Hodgson along with them.
That afternoon, while pacing the stern deck in the dark, Crozier could already see the bright glow of torches just beyond the largest iceberg rising between the two ships. There still was no wind or starlight.
By supper time, the remaining men were as fidgety as young children on Christmas Eve. They finished their meal in record time, although with the reduced rations — since this Friday was not a “flour day” with baking, they were eating little more than Poor John, some Goldner canned vegetables, and two fingers of Burton’s ale — and Crozier didn’t have the heart to hold them in the ship while the officers finished their more leisurely mess. Besides, the remaining officers on board were as eager as the seamen to go to Carnivale. Even the engineer, James Thompson, who rarely showed interest in anything outside the machinery in the hold and who had lost so much weight he resembled an ambulatory skeleton, was on the lower deck and dressed and ready to go.
So by 7:00 p.m., Captain Crozier found himself bundled in every layer he could add on, making the final inspection of the eight men left to watch the ship — First Mate Hornby had the duty but would be relieved before midnight by young Irving, who would return with three seamen so that Hornby and his watch could attend the gala — and then they were descending the ice ramp to the frozen sea and walking briskly through −80-degree air toward Erebus. The crowd of thirty-some men soon strung out into a long line in the dark, and Crozier found himself walking with Lieutenant Irving, Ice Master Blanky, and a few petty officers.
Blanky was moving slowly, using a well-padded crutch under his right arm since he’d lost the heel on his right foot and still hadn’t quite mastered walking on its wood-and-leather replacement, but seemed in a fine mood.
“Good evenin’ to you, Captain,” said the ice master. “Don’t let me slow you down, sir. My mates here — Fat Wilson and Kenley and Billy Gibson — will see me there.”
“You seem to be moving as fast as we are, Mr. Blanky,” said Crozier. As they passed the torches lit on every fifth cairn, he noticed that there still was no breath of wind; the flames flickered vertically. The path had been well trod out, the pressure ridge gaps shoveled and hacked out to provide an easy passage. The large iceberg still half a mile ahead of them seemed to be lit from within by all the torches burning on the other side of it and now resembled some phantasmagorical siege tower glowing in the night. Crozier recalled going to regional Irish fairs when he was a boy. The air tonight, while a good bit colder than an Irish summer night’s, was filled with a similar excitement. He glanced behind them to make sure that Private Hammond, Private Daly, and Sergeant Tozer were bringing up the rear with their weapons at port arms and their outer mittens off.
“Strange how excited the men are about this Carnivale, ain’t it, Captain?” said Mr. Blanky.
Crozier could only grunt at that. This afternoon he had drunk the last of his self-rationed whiskey. He dreaded the coming days and nights.
Blanky and his mates were moving so quickly — crutch or no — that Crozier let them get ahead. He touched Irving’s arm, and the gangly lieutenant dropped back from where he was walking with Lieutenant Little, surgeons Peddie and McDonald, the carpenter, Honey, and others.
“John,” Crozier said when they were out of earshot of the officers but still far enough ahead of the Marines so as not to be heard, “any news of Lady Silenc
e?”
“No, Captain. I checked the forward locker myself less than an hour ago, but she’d already gone out her little back door.”
When Irving had reported to Crozier on their Esquimaux guest’s extracurricular excursions earlier in December, the captain’s first instinct had been to collapse the narrow ice tunnel, seal and reinforce the ship’s bows, and evict the wench onto the ice once and for all.
But he hadn’t done that. Instead, Crozier had ordered Lieutenant Irving to assign three crewmen to watch Lady Silence whenever that was feasible and for him to follow her out onto the ice again if possible. So far, they’d not seen her go out her back door again, although Irving had spent hours hiding in the ice jumble beyond the ship’s bow, waiting. It was as if the woman had seen the lieutenant during her witchly meeting with the creature on the ice, as if she had wanted him to see and hear her out there, and that had been enough. She appeared to be subsisting on ship’s rations these days and using the forward cable locker only for sleeping.
Crozier’s reason for not immediately evicting the native woman was simple: his men were beginning the slow process of starving to death, and they would not have adequate stores to get through the spring, much less the next year. If Lady Silence was getting fresh food from the ice in the middle of winter — trapping seals perhaps, walrus hopefully — it was a skill that Crozier knew his crews would have to learn in order to survive. There was not a serious hunter or ice fisherman among the hundred-some survivors.
Crozier had discounted Lieutenant Irving’s embarrassed, heavily self-critical account of seeing something that seemed like the creature on the ice making some sort of music with the woman and bringing food offerings to her. The captain simply would never believe that Silence had trained a huge white bear — if such the thing was — to hunt and bring her fish or seal or walrus like a proper English bird dog fetching pheasant for its master. As for the music … well, that was absurd.
But she had chosen this day to go missing again.
“Well,” said Crozier, his lungs aching from the cold air, even filtered as it was through his thick wool comforter, “when you return with the relief watch at eight bells, check her locker again, and if she’s not there … what in the name of Christ Almighty?”
They had passed through the last line of pressure ridges and come out onto the flat sea ice on the last quarter mile to Erebus. The scene that met Crozier’s eyes made his jaw sag under the wool scarf and high-pulled jacket collars.
The captain had assumed that the men would be having the Second Grand Venetian Carnivale on the flat sea ice immediately below Erebus, the way Hoppner and Parry had set their masque on the short stretch of ice between the frozen-in Hecla and Fury in 1824, but while Erebus sat bow up, dark and desolate-looking on its dirty pedestal of ice, all the light, torches, motion, and commotion came from an area a quarter of a mile away, immediately in front of the largest iceberg.
“Good heavens,” said Lieutenant Irving.
While Erebus looked to be a dark hulk, a new mass of rigging — a veritable city of coloured canvas and flickering torches — had risen on the bare circle of sea ice, forest of seracs, and wide-open area beneath the towering, glowing iceberg. Crozier could only stand and stare.
The riggers had been busy. Some obviously had ascended the berg itself, sinking huge ice screws deep in the ice sixty feet high on its face, pounding in bolt rings and pulley stands, adding enough rigging, running lines, and blocks from the stores to outfit a three-masted man-of-war at full sail.
A spiderweb of a hundred ice-frosted lines ran down from the berg and back toward Erebus, supporting a city of lighted and coloured tent walls. These dyed walls of canvas — some of the mains’l sheets thirty feet high and taller — were staked to sea ice and serac and ice block but pulled taut on their vertical spars with stays running diagonally to the tall berg.
Crozier walked closer, still blinking. The ice in his eyelashes threatened to freeze his eyelids shut, but he continued blinking.
It was as if a series of gigantic coloured tents had been pitched on the ice, but these tents had no roofs. The vertical walls, lighted from within and without by scores of torches, snaked from the open sea ice into the serac forest and continued up to the vertical wall of the iceberg itself. As it was, giant rooms or coloured apartments had been erected almost overnight on the ice. Each chamber stood at an angle to the preceding chamber, a sharp turn in the rigging, staves, and canvas apparent every twenty yards or so.
The first chamber opened eastward onto the ice. The canvas here had been dyed a bright, rich blue — the blue of skies not seen in so many months that the colour made a knot rise in Captain Crozier’s constricted throat — and torches and braziers of flame outside the canvas chamber’s vertical sides made the blue walls glow and pulse.
Crozier walked past Mr. Blanky and his mates, who were staring in open wonder. “Christ,” he heard the ice master mutter.
Crozier walked still closer, actually entering the space defined by the glowing blue walls.
Brightly clad and strangely garbed figures pranced and swooped around him — ragpickers with streaming comet tails of coloured cloth trailing behind them, tall chimney sweeps in death-black tails and sooty top hats doing jigs, exotic birds with long gold beaks stepping lightly, sheikhs of Araby with red turbans and pointed Persian slippers sliding along the dark ice, pirates with blue death masks pursuing a prancing unicorn, generals of Napoleon’s army wearing white masks from some Greek Chorus filing by in solemn procession. Something dressed all in bulky green — a wood sprite? — ran up to Crozier on the unslippery ice and chirped in falsetto, “The trunk of costumes is to your left, Captain. Feel free to mix and match,” and then the apparition was gone, blending back into the shifting crowds of bizarrely dressed figures.
Crozier continued walking deeper into the maze of coloured apartments.
Beyond the blue chamber, turning sharply to the right, was a long purple room. Crozier saw that it was not empty. The men realizing this Carnivale had placed rugs, tapestries, tables, or casks here and there in each apartment, their furnishings and fixtures dyed or painted the same hue as the glowing walls.
Beyond the purple room, bending back sharply to the left here but at such an odd angle that Crozier would have had to look at the stars — had there been any stars visible — to ascertain his exact bearings, was a long green chamber. This long room held the most revelers yet: more exotic birds, a princess with a long horse’s face, creatures so segmented and oddly jointed that they appeared to be giant insects.
Francis Crozier recalled none of these costumes from Parry’s trunks on the Fury and Hecla, but Fitzjames had insisted that Franklin had brought precisely those moldering old artifacts.
The fourth chamber was furnished and lighted with orange. The torchlight through the thin orange-dyed canvas here seemed rich enough to taste. More orange canvas, painted and dyed to resemble tapestries, had been laid out on the sea ice, and there was a huge punch bowl on the orange-sheeted table at the center of the interior space. At least thirty or more wildly costumed figures had converged on the punch bowl, some dipping their beaked or fanged visages to drink deeply.
Crozier realized with a shock that loud music was coming from the fifth segment of the apartment maze. Following another bend to the right, he came into a white chamber. Sheet-covered sea trunks and officers’ mess-room chairs had been set along the white canvas walls here, and the almost forgotten mechanical music player from Terror’s Great Cabin was being cranked by a costumed fantastic at the far end of the chamber, the machine pouring out music hall favorites from its large rotating metal disks. The sound somehow seemed much louder out here on the ice.
Revelers were coming out of the sixth chamber and Crozier walked past the music player, took the sharp angle to the left, and entered a violet room.
The captain’s seaman’s eyes admired the rigging that rose from upended spare spars to a tethered spar hanging in midair — webs of riggin
g came in from the other six chambers there to be tied off — and the master cables that ran up from this center spar to anchors high on the wall of the iceberg. The riggers from Erebus and Terror who had conceived and executed this seven-chamber maze obviously had also exorcised some of the incredible frustration at not being able to pursue their trade due to being icebound and static for so many months, their ships’ topmasts, spars, and rigging pulled down and stored on the ice. But this violet room had few costumed crewmen tarrying in it and the light was strangely oppressive. The only furniture here consisted of stacks of empty crates at the center of the room, all draped in violet sheets. The few birds, pirates, and ragmen in this room paused to drink from their crystal goblets carried from the white room, looked around, then quickly returned to the outer chambers again.
The final room beyond the violet room seemed to have no light at all coming from it.
Crozier followed the sharp angle to the right from the violet chamber and found himself in a chamber of almost absoluteblackness.
No, that was not true, he realized. Torches burned outside the black-dyed sail walls here just as they did beyond all the other chambers, but the effect was only of a subdued glow through ebony air. Crozier had to stop to allow his eyes to adapt, and when they did, he took two startled steps backward.
The ice underfoot was gone. It was as if he were walking above the black water of the arctic sea.
It took only seconds for the captain to realize the trick. The seamen had taken soot from the boiler and coal sack holds and spread it across the sea ice here — an old seaman’s trick when wanting to melt the sea ice more quickly in late spring or recalcitrant summer, but there was no melting tonight with the sunless days and temperatures dropping toward −100 degrees. Instead, the soot and carbon made the ice underfoot invisible in the ebony gloom of this final, terrible compartment.
As Crozier’s eyes adapted further, he saw that there was only one piece of furniture in the long black compartment, but his jaws clenched with anger when he saw what it was.