by Dan Simmons
Tom Blanky realized that he had become just so much more dead weight for the exhausted and ill survivors — ninety-five of them now, not including Blanky — to haul south with them.
What kept Blanky going even when his third leg began to splinter — there were no more extra spars from which to whittle a fourth — was his rising hope that his skills as an ice master would be needed when they took to the boats.
But while the scrim of ice on the rocks and barren coastline melted during the day — sometimes the temperature rose as high as 40 degrees according to Lieutenant Little — the pack ice beyond the coastal bergs showed no sign of breaking up. Blanky tried to be patient. He knew better than any other man on the expedition that sea ice at these latitudes might not show open leads — even on a “more normal” summer such as this one — until mid-July or later.
Still, it was not only his usefulness that was being decided by the ice, but his survival. If they took to the boats soon, he might live. He did not need his leg to travel by boat. Crozier had long since designated Thomas Blanky as skipper of his own pinnace — commanding eight men — and once the ice master was at sea again, he would survive. With any luck at all, they could sail their fleet of ten little splintered and gouged boats right to the mouth of Back’s Great Fish River, pause at the mouth to rerig for river running, and — with only the slightest help from northwest winds and men at the oars — head briskly upstream. The portages, Blanky knew, would be hard, especially hard for him since he could carry so little weight on his flimsy third peg, but a piece of cake after the man-hauling nightmare of the last eight weeks.
If he could last until they took to the boats, Thomas Blanky would live.
But Blanky knew a secret that made even his sanguine personality wane: the Thing on the Ice, the Terror itself, was after him.
It had been sighted every day or two as the straining procession of men had rounded the large cape and turned back east again along the shoreline, every day in the early afternoon when they turned back to haul the five boats they’d left behind, every twilight at around 11:00 p.m. as they collapsed into their wet Holland tents for a few hours’ sleep.
The thing was still stalking them. Sometimes the officers saw it through their telescopes as they looked out to sea. Neither Crozier nor Little nor Hodgson nor any of the other few officers remaining ever told the man-hauling men that they’d seen the beast, but Blanky — who had more time than most to watch and think — saw them conferring and knew.
At other times, those hauling the last boats could see the beast clearly with their own unaided eyes. Sometimes it was behind them, trailing by a mile or less, a black speck against white ice or a white speck against black rock.
It’s just one of them polar white bears, had said James Reid, the red-bearded ice master from Erebus and one of Blanky’s closest friends now. They’ll eat you if they can, but mostly they’re harmless enough. Bullets kill them. Let’s hope it comes closer. We need some fresh meat.
But Blanky knew at the time that it wasn’t one of the white bears they shot for food from time to time. This was it, and while all men on the Long March feared it — especially at night or, rather, during the two hours of dimness that now passed for night — only Thomas Blanky knew that it was coming for him first.
The march had taken a toll on everyone, but Blanky was in constant agony: not from scurvy, which seemed to be affecting him less than most, but from the pain in the stump of the leg that the thing had taken. Walking on the ice and rock of the shore was so difficult for him that by midmorning of each day’s sixteen- or eighteen-hour march, his stump would be streaming blood down over the wooden cup and leather harness that held it in place. The blood soaked through his thick canvas trousers and ran down his wooden peg, leaving a trail of blood behind. It soaked upward through his long underwear, trousers, and shirt.
During the first weeks of the march, while it was still cold, it was a blessing that the blood had frozen. But now, with the tropical warmth of days above zero, some above freezing, Blanky was bleeding like a stuck pig.
The long slops and greatcoats also had been a blessing — they hid the worst evidence of Blanky’s bleeding from the captain and others — but by mid-June, it was too warm to wear the greatcoats while hauling, so tons of sweat-soaked slops and wool layers were piled in the boats they were hauling. The men often hauled in shirtsleeves through the warmest parts of the day, pulling on more layers as the afternoons cooled toward zero degrees. Blanky had joked with them when they asked him why he continued to wear his long coats. I’m cold-blooded, boys, he’d said with a laugh. My wooden leg brings the chill of the ground up into me. I don’t want you to see me shiver.
But eventually he had to take off the greatcoat. Because Blanky was working so hard hobbling just to keep up, and because the pain of his tortured stump caused him to sweat even when he was standing still, he could no longer stand the freeze-and-thaw, freeze-and-thaw of all his layers of clothes.
When the men saw the blood pouring, they said nothing. They had their own problems. Most of them were bleeding from scurvy.
Crozier and Little often would pull Blanky and James Reid aside, asking the two ice masters their professional opinion about the ice just beyond the berg barrier of the shoreline. Once they’d come around to the east again, along the southern coast of this cape that had bulged out miles to the west and south of Comfort Cove — probably adding twenty miles to their haul south — Reid was of the opinion that the ice between this part of King William Land and the mainland, whether King William Land was connected to the mainland or not, would be slower breaking up than the pack ice to the northwest, where conditions were more dynamic come the summer thaw.
Blanky was more optimistic. He pointed out that the bergs piled here along this southern coast were becoming smaller and smaller. Once a serious barrier separating the shore from the sea ice, this wall of bergs was no more a hindrance now than a cluster of low seracs. The reason, Blanky told Crozier, and Reid had agreed, was that this cape of King William Land was sheltering this stretch of sea and coast, or perhaps of gulf and coast, from the glacierlike river of ice that had poured down so relentlessly from the northwest onto Erebus and Terror and even upon the coast near Terror Camp. That endless press of ice, Blanky pointed out, had been flowing down from the North Pole itself. Things were more sheltered here south of the King William Land southwestern cape. Perhaps the ice would break up sooner here.
Reid had looked at him strangely when Blanky delivered that opinion. Blanky knew what the other ice master was thinking. Whether this is a gulf or a strait leading to Chantrey Inlet and the mouth of Back’s River, ice usually breaks up last in a confined space.
Reid would have been correct if he’d stated that opinion aloud to Captain Crozier — he hadn’t, obviously not wanting to contradict his friend and fellow ice master — but Blanky was still optimistic. In truth, Thomas Blanky had been optimistic in his heart and soul every day since that dark night of 5 December of the previous winter when he’d considered himself a dead man as the Thing on the Ice chased him from Terror and into the forest of seracs.
Twice the creature had tried to kill him. And twice all that Thomas Blanky had lost had been parts of one leg.
He hobbled on, bringing cheer and jokes and the occasional shred of extra tobacco or sliver of frozen beef to exhausted, drained men. His tent mates, he knew, valued his presence. He took his turn at watch in the ever-shorter nights and carried a shotgun while painfully stumping alongside the morning boat procession as a guard, although Thomas Blanky knew better than any living man that no mere shotgun would stop the Terror Beast when it finally came in close to claim its next victims.
The tortures of the Long March were increasing. Not only were men slowly dying of starvation and scurvy and exposure, but there had been two other incidences of the terrible poisoning death that had claimed Captain Fitzjames — John Cowie, the stoker who had survived the thing’s invasion of Erebus on 9 March, died screamin
g in cramps and pain and then silent paralysis on 10 June. On 12 June, Daniel Arthur, Erebus’s thirty-eight-year-old quartermaster, collapsed with abdominal pains and died from paralyzed lungs a mere eight hours later. Their bodies were not truly buried; the procession had paused only long enough to sew both bodies into the little remaining spare canvas and to pile rocks on them.
Richard Aylmore, the object of much speculation since Captain Fitzjames’s death, showed almost no signs of illness. The scuttlebutt was that while everyone else had been banned from eating warm meals from the canned goods and suffered the scurvy worse for it, Aylmore had been ordered to share portions of his tinned meals with Cowie and Arthur. Other than the obvious answer of active and deliberate poisoning, no one could figure why the Goldner tins would horribly kill three men but leave Aylmore untouched. But while everyone knew that Aylmore hated Captain Fitzjames and Captain Crozier, no one could see a reason for the gunroom steward to poison his mates.
Unless he wanted their shares of food after they were dead.
Henry Lloyd, Dr. Goodsir’s assistant in the sick bay, was one of the men dragged along in the boats these days — sick from scurvy that had him vomiting blood and his own loose teeth — so since Blanky was one of the few men other than Diggle and Wall who stayed with the boats after the morning haul, he tried to help the good doctor.
Oddly enough, now that it was getting tropically warm, there were more cases of frostbite. Sweating men who’d doffed their jackets and gloves would continue man-hauling into the chill of the endless evening — the sun hung in the south until midnight now — and be surprised to find that the air temperature had fallen to fifteen below during their exertions. Goodsir was constantly treating fingers and patches of skin turned white by frostbite or dead black from rot.
Sun blindness or screaming headaches caused by the sun’s glare afflicted half the men. Crozier and Goodsir would move up and down the ranks of man-hauling men during the morning, cajoling them to put on their goggles, but the men hated the wire-mesh monstrosities. Joe Andrews, captain of the hold for Erebus and an old friend of Tom Blanky’s, said that wearing the God-damned wire goggles was as difficult as trying to see through a pair of lady’s black silk drawers but much less fun.
The snow blindness and headaches were becoming serious problems on the march. Some of the men begged Dr. Goodsir for laudanum after the headaches struck, but the surgeon told them that he had none left. Blanky, who was often sent to fetch medicines from the doctor’s locked chest, knew that Goodsir was lying. There was a small vial of laudanum left there, unmarked. The ice master knew that the surgeon was keeping it for some terrible occasion — to ease Captain Crozier’s last hours? Or the surgeon’s own?
Other men suffered the torments of Hell from sunburn. Everyone was blistered red on their hands and faces and necks, but some men who would tug off their shirts for even the shortest periods during the intolerable heat of the midday, when temperatures were above freezing, would that same evening watch their skins, bleached white after three years of darkness and enclosure, burn red and quickly turn to suppurating blisters.
Dr. Goodsir popped the blisters with his lancet and treated the open sores with a salve that smelled to Blanky like axle grease.
By the time the ninety-five survivors were trudging east along the southern coast of the cape in mid-June, almost every man was on the edge of breakdown. As long as some men could man-haul the terribly heavy sledges with boats atop them and the full-packed whaleboats without sledges, others suffering could ride briefly, recover slightly, and rejoin the man-hauling within hours or days. But when there were too many sick and injured to pull, Blanky knew, their escape march would be at an end.
As it was now, the men were always so thirsty that every stream or trickle of water was a reason to stop and throw themselves on all fours to lap at the water like dogs. If it hadn’t been for the sudden thaw, Blanky knew, they would have all died of thirst three weeks earlier. The spirit stoves were almost out of fuel. At first, melting snow in one’s mouth seemed to assuage the thirst, but it actually drained more energy from the body and made one thirstier. Each time they dragged the boats and themselves across a stream — and there were more streams and rivulets running liquid now — everyone would stop to fill water bottles that no longer needed to be carried next to the skin to keep them from freezing.
But while thirst would not kill them soon, Blanky saw that the men were failing in a hundred other ways. Starvation was taking its toll. Hunger kept the exhausted men from sleeping through the four hours of twilight — if they did not have watch duty — which Crozier allowed for their sleeping time.
Setting up and taking down the Holland tents, simple acts that had been performed in twenty minutes two months ago at Terror Camp, now took two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening. Each day it took a little longer as fingers became more swollen and frostbitten and clumsy.
Few of the men’s minds, not even Blanky’s at times, were really clear. Crozier seemed the most alert of all of them most of the time, but sometimes when he thought that no one was looking, the captain’s face became a death mask of fatigue and stupor.
Sailors who had tied off complicated rigging and shroud knots in the roaring darkness fifty feet out on a pitching spar two hundred feet above the deck on a stormy night off the Strait of Magellan during a hurricane blow could no longer tie their shoes in the daylight. Because there was no wood within three hundred miles — other than Blanky’s leg and the boats and masts and sledges they’d hauled along with them and the remains of Erebus and Terror almost a hundred miles to their north — and because the ground was still hard-frozen an inch below the surface, the men had to gather heaps of stones at each stop to weigh down the edges of the tents and to anchor tent ropes against the inevitable nightly winds.
This chore also took forever. Men frequently fell asleep standing in the dimmed sunlight at midnight with a rock in each hand. Sometimes their mates did not even shake them awake.
So it came to pass that late in the afternoon of the eighteenth day of June, 1848, as the men were making their second haul of boats that day, when Blanky’s third leg snapped off just below his bleeding knee stump, he took it as a sign.
Dr. Goodsir had little work for him that afternoon, so Blanky had turned back to peg his way alongside the last boats on the second haul of the endless day, when the foot and peg had caught between two immovable rocks and snapped the peg off high. He took the high break and his unusual presence near the end of the march as a sign from the gods as well.
He found a nearby boulder, made himself as comfortable as he could, dug out his pipe, and tapped in the last bit of tobacco he had been saving for weeks.
When a few of the seamen stopped in their hauling to ask what he was doing, Blanky said, “Just going to sit a spell, I reckon. Give my stump a rest.”
When Sergeant Tozer, who was in charge of the Marine rear guard detail this sunny day stopped to ask tiredly what Blanky was doing allowing the procession to pass him by, Blanky said, “Never you mind, Soloman.” He had always enjoyed irritating the stupid sergeant by using his first name. “You just toddle off now with your remaining lobsterbacks and let me be.”
Half an hour later, when the last boats were hundreds of yards to the south of him, Captain Crozier had come back with Mr. Honey, the carpenter.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Mr. Blanky?” snapped Crozier.
“Just giving it a rest, Captain. I thought I might spend the night here.”
“Don’t be an ass,” said Crozier. He looked at the snapped-off peg leg and turned to the carpenter. “Can you fix this, Mr. Honey? Make a new one by tomorrow afternoon if Mr. Blanky rides in one of the boats until then?”
“Oh, aye, sir,” said Honey, squinting at the broken peg with an artisan’s scowl at the failure — or mistreatment — of one of his creations. “We ain’t got much spare wood left, but there’s one extra jolly boat rudder we brought along as a spare for
the pinnaces that I can turn into a new leg as easy as you like.”
“D’you hear that, Blanky?” asked Crozier. “Now get off your ass and let Mr. Honey help you hobble to catch up to Mr. Hodgson’s last boat there. Quickly now. We’ll have you fixed up by tomorrow noon.”
Blanky smiled. “Can Mr. Honey fix this, Captain?” He tugged off the wooden cup of the leg and detached the clumsy leather-and-brass harness.
“Oh, Christ damn it,” said Crozier. He started to look more closely at the bleeding raw stump with the black flesh surrounding the white nub of bone but quickly pulled back his face from the smell.
“Aye, sir,” said Blanky. “I’m surprised Dr. Goodsir ain’t sniffed it out before this. I try to stay downwind of him when I’m helpin’ him out in the sick bay. The boys in my tent know what’s up, sir. There’s nothing to be done for it.”
“Nonsense,” said Crozier. “Goodsir will …” He stopped.
Blanky smiled. It was not a sarcastic or sad smile but an easy one, filled with some real humour. “Will what, Captain? Take my leg off at the hip? The black bits and red lines run all the way up to my ass and private parts, sir, with apologies for being so picturesque about it. And if he did operate, how many days would I be lyin’ in the boat like old Private Heather — God rest the poor bugger’s soul — being hauled along by men who are as tired as I am?”
Crozier said nothing.
“No,” continued Blanky, puffing contentedly on his pipe, “I think it’d be best if I rested here awhile on my own and just relaxed and thought some thoughts about this and that. My life has been a good one. I’d like to think about it some before the pain and stink get so bad I’m distracted.”
Crozier sighed, looked at his carpenter and then at his ice master, and sighed again. He took a water bottle from the pocket of his greatcoat. “Take this.”
“Thank you, sir. I will. With gratitude,” said Blanky.
Crozier felt in his other pockets. “I have no food with me. Mr. Honey?”