by Dan Simmons
The carpenter came up with a moldy biscuit and a sliver of something more green than tan that might have been beef.
“No, thank you, John,” said Blanky. “I am truthfully not hungry. But, Captain, would you do me a huge favor?”
“What is that, Mr. Blanky?”
“My people are in Kent, sir. Near Ightham Mote north of Tonbridge Wells. Or at least my Betty and Michael and old mum were when I set sail, sir. I was wondering, Captain, I mean if you have luck on your side and have the time later …”
“If I get back to England, I swear I’ll look them up and tell them that you were smoking and smiling and sitting as comfortably on a boulder as a lazy squire when last I saw you,” said Crozier. He pulled a pistol from his pocket. “Lieutenant Little’s seen the thing through his glass — it’s been trailing behind us all morning, Thomas. It’ll be along presently. You should take this.”
“No, thank you, Captain.”
“You’re sure about this, Mr. Blanky? Staying behind, I mean?” said Captain Crozier. “Even if you were … with us … for just another week or so, your knowledge of the ice might be very important to us all. Who knows what the conditions will be out on the pack ice twenty miles east of here?”
Blanky smiled. “If Mr. Reid weren’t still with you, I’d take that to heart, Captain. I surely would. But he’s as good an ice master as you could ask for. As a spare, I mean.”
Crozier and Honey shook hands with him. Then they turned and hurried to catch up to the last boat disappearing over a distant ridge to the south.
It was after midnight when it came.
Blanky had been out of tobacco for hours and the water had frozen in the bottle where he’d foolishly left it sitting on the boulder next to him. He was in some pain, but he did not want to sleep.
A few stars had come out in the twilight. The wind from the northwest had come up, as it usually did in the evening, and the temperature had probably dropped forty degrees from its noontime high.
Blanky had kept the broken peg leg and its cup and straps on the boulder next to him. While his gangrenous leg tormented him and his empty stomach clawed at him, the worst pain tonight was from his lower leg and calf and foot — his phantom limb.
Suddenly the thing was just there.
It loomed up on the ice not thirty paces from him.
It must have come up through some invisible hole in the ice, Blanky thought. He was reminded of a tent fair in Tunbridge Wells he had seen as a boy, with a rickety wooden stage and a magician in purple silk with a tall conical hat embroidered with crude planets and stars. That man had appeared just like this, popping up through a trapdoor to the oohs and ahs of the country audience.
“Welcome back,” said Thomas Blanky to the shadowy silhouette on the ice.
The thing reared up on its hind legs, a dark mass of hair and muscle and sunset-tinted claws and a faint gleam of teeth beyond anything, the Ice Master was sure, in mankind’s racial memory of its many predators. Blanky guessed that it was more than twelve feet tall, perhaps fourteen.
Its eyes — a deeper blackness against the black silhouette — did not reflect the dying sun.
“You’re late,” said Blanky. He could not help it that his teeth were chattering. “I’ve been expecting you for a long time.” He threw his peg leg and its rattling harness at the shape.
The thing did not try to dodge the crude missile. The shape towered there for a minute and then rushed forward like a wraith, the legs not even visibly moving to propel it, a monstrous mass sliding rapidly toward him across the rock and ice, the dark and terrible solidity of the shape finally opening arms to fill the ice master’s vision.
Thomas Blanky grinned fiercely and clamped his teeth down hard on the stem of his cold pipe.
46
CROZIER
Lat. unknown, Long. unknown
4 July, 1848
The only thing keeping Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier moving forward into the tenth week on the boat march was the blue flame in his chest. The more tired and empty and sick and battered his body became, the hotter and fiercer the flame burned. He knew it was not merely some metaphor of his determination. Nor was it optimism, as such. The blue flame in his chest had burrowed toward his heart like some alien entity, lingered like a disease, and centered in him as an almost unwanted core of conviction that he would do whatever he had to do to survive. Anything.
Sometimes Crozier came close to praying that the blue flame would just go out so he could surrender to the inevitable and lie down and pull the frozen tundra up over himself like a child under a blanket settling into his nap.
Today they were stopped — not pulling the sledges and boats for the first time in a month. And they had unpacked and clumsily pitched the large Sick Bay tent, although not the large mess tents. The men were calling this otherwise unremarkable place on a small bay along the southern coast of King William Land “Hospital Camp.”
In the past two weeks they had just crossed the rugged ice of a huge bay that cut into the underside of the cape that seemed for weeks of hauling as if it would continue to bulge out to the southwest forever. But now they were headed southeast again, paralleling the coastline along the underside of that cape and then farther east — the correct direction if they were to get to Back’s River.
Crozier had brought his sextant and theodolite along, and Lieutenant Little also had his sextant, as well as the dead Fitzjames’s instrument as a spare, but neither officer had taken star sightings or sun sightings for weeks. It just wasn’t important. If King William Land was a peninsula, as most of the arctic explorers, including Crozier’s old commander James Clark Ross, had thought, then this coastline would lead them to the mouth of Back’s River. If it was an island — which had been Lieutenant Gore’s guess and Crozier’s hunch as well — then they would soon see the mainland to their south and cross what should be a narrow strait to the mouth of Back’s River.
Either way, Crozier — who had been content to follow the coastline since they had no other real choice and navigate by dead reckoning for the time being — estimated that they were now about ninety miles from the mouth of Back’s River.
On this march, they had been completing only a little better than a mile per day on average. Some days they did three or four miles, reminding Crozier of the fantastic rate of their crossing from the ships to Terror Camp on the ice highway they had laid down, but other days — when there was more rock than ice under the runners, when they had to ford sudden streams or in one case an actual river, when they were forced out onto the tortured sea ice when the coastline became too rocky, when the weather was foul, when more men than usual were too sick to pull and ended up riding in the boat themselves while their mates pulled the extra weight, first the sixteen hours of man-hauling the four whaleboats and a cutter, then back for the other three cutters and two pinnaces — saw them covering only a few hundred yards from their previous night’s camp.
On 1 July, after weeks of warming weather, the cold and snow returned in earnest. A blizzard blew out of the southeast, directly into the eyes of the men hauling their sledges. Slops were pulled out of baled heaps in the boats. Welsh wigs were dug out of valises and packs. The snow added hundreds of pounds to the weight of the sledges and the boats atop them. The men so sick that they were being carried in those boats, lying atop supplies and folded tents, burrowed under the canvas covers for shelter.
The men hauled forward through three days of continuous driving snow out of the east and southeast. At night, lightning crashed and the men cowered low against the canvas floors of their tents.
Today they had stopped because too many of the men were sick and Goodsir wanted to administer to them, and because Crozier wanted to send parties ahead to scout and larger armed parties north into the interior and south out onto the sea ice to hunt.
They needed food badly.
The good news and the bad news was that they had finally finished the last of the Goldner canned foods. When the steward Aylm
ore, who on captain’s orders had continued to eat and grow fat on the tinned foods, hadn’t died from the terrible symptoms that killed Captain Fitzjames — although two other men who were not supposed to be eating from the cans had — everyone went back on the tinned foods to supplement the little remaining salt pork and cod and biscuits.
The 28-year-old seaman Bill Closson died screaming silently and convulsing from gut pains and paralysis, but Dr. Goodsir had no clue what might have poisoned him until one of his mates, Tom McConvey, confessed that the dead man had stolen and eaten a Goldner can of peaches that no one else had shared.
In the very brief burial service for Closson — his body lying without even a canvas shroud under the loose pile of rocks because Old Murray, the sailmaker, had died of scurvy and there was no extra canvas left anyway — Captain Crozier had quoted not from the Bible the men knew but from his fabled Book of Leviathan.
“Life is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,’” the captain had intoned. “It seems it is shorter for those who steal from their mates.”
The eulogy, such as it was, was a hit with the men. Although the ten boats they had been dragging and hauling on sledges for more than two months all had old names assigned to them from when Erebus and Terror still sailed the seas, the man-hauling teams of seamen immediately renamed the three cutters and two pinnaces always hauled during the afternoon and evening stint of hauling — the part of the day they hated the most since it meant regaining ground already won through the sweat of the long morning. The five boats were now officially named Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish, and Short.
Crozier had grinned at this. It meant the men were not so far gone into hunger and despair that their English sailors’ black humour did not still hold a cutting edge.
The mutiny, when it came, was made vocal by the last man on earth that Francis Crozier would have imagined opposing his command.
It was the middle of the day and the captain was trying to get a few minutes’ sleep while most of the men were out of camp doing reconnaissance or hunting. He heard the slow shuffle of many screw-heeled boots in the snow outside his tent, and he knew immediately that there was trouble outside the usual range of daily emergencies. The furtive sound of the footsteps as he came up from his light sleep warned him of the defiance to come.
Crozier pulled on his greatcoat. He always carried a loaded pistol in the right pocket of this coat, but recently he had begun carrying a smaller two-shot pistol in his left pocket as well.
There were about twenty-five men assembled in the open area between Crozier’s tent and the large Sick Bay tent. The blowing snow, thick scarves, and filthy Welsh wigs made some of them hard to identify at first glance, but Crozier was not surprised to see Cornelius Hickey, Magnus Manson, Richard Aylmore, and a half dozen of the more vocal resenters in the second row.
It was the first row facing him that surprised him.
Most of the officers were off commanding the scattered hunting and scouting parties Crozier had sent out that morning — Crozier realized his mistake too late, sending away all of his most loyal officers, including Lieutenant Little and his second mate Robert Thomas, Tom Johnson, his faithful bosun’s mate, Harry Peglar and some others, all at once, leaving the weaker men congregated here at Hospital Camp — but standing in front of this group was young Lieutenant Hodgson. Crozier was also shocked to see Reuben Male, captain of the forecastle, and Erebus’s captain of the foretop, Robert Sinclair, here. Male and Sinclair had always been good men.
Crozier strode toward the gathering so quickly that Hodgson actually took two steps back and collided with the giant idiot, Manson.
“What do you men want?” rasped Crozier. Wishing that his voice was not such a hoarse croak, he put as much volume and authority into it as he could. “What the hell is going on here?”
“We need to talk to you, Captain,” said Hodgson. The young man’s voice was trembling with tension.
“About what?” Crozier kept his right hand in his pocket. He saw Dr. Goodsir come to the opening of the Sick Bay tent and look out in surprise at the mob. Crozier counted twenty-three men in the group, and, despite the wigs pulled low and scarves pulled high, he noted who each man was. He would not forget.
“About going back,” said Hodgson. The men behind him began muttering assent with the crowd murmur that was always the hive-mind sound of mutineers.
Crozier did not react at once. One piece of good news here was that if it was an active mutiny, if all the men including Hodgson and Male and Sinclair had already agreed to take control of the expedition by force, Crozier would be dead by now. They would have acted in the twilight dimness at midnight.
And the only other piece of good news was that while two or three of the seamen here were carrying shotguns, all the other weapons were out with the sixty-six men hunting today.
Crozier made a mental note never to allow all of the Marines to leave the camp again at the same time. Tozer and the others had been eager to hunt. The captain had been so tired that he had not thought twice about giving them permission to go.
The captain looked from face to face. Some of the weaker ones in the crowd looked down immediately, ashamed to meet his gaze. The stronger ones like Male and Sinclair stared back. Hickey looked at him with eyes so hooded and cold they could have belonged to one of the white bears they’d encountered — or perhaps to the thing on the ice itself.
“Go back to where?” snapped Crozier.
“To T-terror Camp,” stuttered Hodgson. “There’s canned food and some coal and the stoves there. And the other boats we left.”
“Don’t be a fool,” said Crozier. “We’re at least sixty-five miles from Terror Camp. It would be October — solid winter — before you reached it, if you ever did.”
Hodgson wilted, but the captain of Erebus’s foretop said, “We’re a hell of a lot closer to the camp than we are to this river we’re killing ourselves to haul the boats to.”
“That’s not true, Mr. Sinclair,” rasped Crozier. “Lieutenant Little and I estimate that the inlet to the river is less than fifty miles from here.”
“The inlet,” sneered a seaman named George Thompson. The man was known for drunkenness and laziness. Crozier could not cast the first stone at him for the drinking, but he despised laziness.
“The mouth of Back’s River is fifty miles south down the inlet,” continued Thompson. “More than a hundred miles from here.”
“Watch your tone, Thompson,” warned Crozier in a tone so low and deadly that even that lout blinked and looked down. Crozier looked around the crowd again. He spoke to all the men. “It doesn’t matter if it’s forty miles down the inlet to the mouth of Back’s River or fifty miles, odds are good that it will be open water … we’ll be sailing the boats, not dragging them. Now go back to your duties and forget this nonsense.”
Some men shuffled, but Magnus Manson stood like a broad dam holding the lake of their defiance in place. Reuben Male said, “We want to go back to the ship, Captain. We think we’ll have a better chance there.”
It was Crozier’s turn to blink. “Go back to Terror? Good Christ, Reuben, it must be more than ninety miles back to the ship, across pack ice as well as back through all that rough territory we’ve come through. The boats and sledges would never make it.”
“We’ll just take one boat,” said Hodgson. The men murmured agreement behind him.
“What the hell are you talking about, one boat?”
“One boat,” insisted Hodgson. “One boat on one sledge.”
“We’re sick of this man-hauling shite,” said John Morfin, a seaman who had been seriously injured during the Carnivale.
Crozier ignored Morfin and said to Hodgson, “Lieutenant, how do you plan to get twenty-three men into one boat? Even if you steal one of the whaleboats, that will only hold ten or twelve of you, with minimal supplies. Or are you planning on having ten or more of your party die before you get back to the camp? They will, you know. More than that.”
“There are the small boats at Terror Camp,” said Sinclair, stepping closer and taking an aggressive stance. “We take one whaleboat back and use it and the jolly boats and ship’s boats to ferry us out to Terror.”
Crozier stared a moment and then actually laughed. “Do you think the ice has broken up there northwest of King William Land? Is that what you fools think?”
“We do,” said Lieutenant Hodgson. “There’s food on the ship. Lots of the canned food left. And we could sail for …”
Crozier laughed again. “You’d bet your lives that the ice has opened up enough this summer that Terror is afloat and just waiting for you to row your dinghies out to her? And that leads have opened up the entire way we came south? Three hundred miles of open water? In winter when you get there, if any of you do?”
“It’s a better gamble than this, we think,” shouted the gunroom steward, Richard Aylmore. The dark little man’s face was contorted with rage, fear, resentment, and something like exhilaration now that his hour had come round at last.
“I’d almost like to go with you … ,” began Crozier.
Hodgson blinked rapidly. Several of the men looked at one another.
“Just to see your faces when that gamble pays off with you walking across the ice and pressure ridges to find that Terror has been broken up by the ice just as Erebus was in March.”
He let the effect of that image sink in for a few seconds before he said softly, “For Christ’s sake, ask Mr. Honey or Mr. Wilson or Mr. Goddard or Lieutenant Little about what shape her knees were in. What shape her rudder was in. Ask First Mate Thomas about how badly her seams had started way back in April … it is July now, you fools. If the ice has melted around her even a wee bit, odds are greater that the old ship has sunk than floated. And if she hasn’t, can twenty-three of you honestly tell me that you can man the pumps while sailing her through the maze of leads — if you get back in half the time it took you to get here just from Terror Camp, the winter freeze will already be setting in again. And how are you going to find your way through the ice if the ship can float, if it hasn’t sunk, if you don’t die manning the pumps day and night?”