by Dan Simmons
Of course, Puhtoorak had not used the term “miles” nor “ship” nor even “point.” What the old man had said was that the three-stick kabloona house with an umiak’s hull was a certain number of hours’ walk west of tikerqat, which means “Two Fingers,” which the Real People called two narrow points along this stretch of the Utjulik coastline, and then somewhere close to the north end of a large island there.
Crozier and his band of ten people — the hunter from the south, Inupijuk, was sticking with them to the bitter end — had walked due west across rough ice from the Two Fingers and crossed two small islands before reaching a much larger one. They found a cliff dropping almost a hundred feet to the ice pack at the north end of that large island.
Two or three miles out in the ice, the three masts of HMS Terror rose at a raked angle toward the low clouds.
Crozier wished he had his old telescope, but he didn’t need it to identify the masts of his old command.
Puhtoorak had been right — the ice for this last part of the walk was much smoother than the jumbled shore and pack ice between the mainland and the islands. Crozier’s captain’s eye saw why: there lay a string of smaller islands to the east and north, creating a sort of natural seawall sheltering this fifteen- or twenty-nautical-square-mile patch of sea from the prevailing winds out of the northwest.
How Terror could have ended up here, almost two hundred miles south of where she had been frozen fast near Erebus for almost three years, was beyond Crozier’s powers of speculation.
He would not have to speculate much longer.
The Real People, including the God-Walking People, who lived in the shadow of a living monster year in and year out, approached the ship with obvious anxiety. All of Puhtoorak’s talk of haunting ghosts and bad spirits had worked its effect on them — even on Asiajuk, Nauja, and the hunters who’d not been there to hear the old man. Asiajuk himself was muttering incantations, ghost-chasing chants, and keeping-safe prayers all during their walk out onto the ice, which added to no one’s sense of security. When a shaman gets nervous, Crozier knew, everyone gets nervous.
The only one who would walk next to Crozier at the lead of the procession was Silence, carrying both the children.
Terror was listing about twenty degrees to port, her bow aimed toward the northeast and her masts raking to the northwest, with too much of her starboard-side hull showing above the ice. Surprisingly, there was one anchor deployed — the port-side bow anchor — its hawser disappearing into the thick ice. Crozier was surprised because he guessed the bottom to be at least twenty fathoms deep here — perhaps much more — and because there were little inlets all along the northern curves of the islands behind him. At the very least — unless there was a storm — a prudent captain seeking safe harbour would have brought the ship into the strait on the east side of the large island he’d just walked from, dropping anchor between the big island — whose cliffs would have blocked the wind — and the three smaller islands, none more than about two miles long, east of there.
But Terror was here, about two and a half miles out from the north end of that large island, with her anchor dropped into deep water and all of her exposed to the inevitable storms from the northwest.
One walk around the ship and a look up at her canted deck from the lower northwest side solved the mystery of why Puhtoorak’s hunting band had been forced to chop their way through the hull on the raised starboard side, probably a splintered and battered and already near-breached hull, in order to gain entry: all the top-deck hatches were battened and sealed.
Crozier returned to the man-sized hole the band had smashed into the exposed and weathered hull. He thought he could squeeze through. He remembered Puhtoorak saying that his young hunters had used their star-shit axes to force their way in here, and he had to smile to himself despite the surge of painful emotions he was feeling.
“Star shit” was what the Real People called falling stars and the metal they used from the falling stars they found lying on the ice. Crozier had heard Asiajuk talk about uluriak anoktok — “star shit falling from the sky.”
Crozier wished he had a star-shit blade or axe with him right now. The only weapon he carried was a basic work knife with a blade made from walrus ivory. There were harpoons on the kamatik but they weren’t his — he and Silence had left theirs with their qayaq a week ago — and he didn’t want to ask to borrow one just to go into the ship with it.
Back at that sledge, forty feet behind them, the Qimmiq — the large dogs with their uncanny blue and yellow eyes and souls they shared with their masters — were barking and growling and howling and snapping at one another and at anyone who came close to them. They did not like this place.
Crozier signed to Silence, Sign Asiajuk to ask them if anyone wants to come in with me.
She did so quickly, using just her fingers without string. Even so, the old shaman always understood her much more quickly than he could make out Crozier’s clumsy signs.
None of the Real People wanted to go through that hole.
I will see you in a few minutes, Crozier signed to Silence.
She actually smiled. Do not be stupid, she signed. Your children and I are coming with you.
He squeezed in and Silence followed a second later, carrying Raven in her arms and Kanneyuk in the soft-hide baby-holder she sometimes carried on straps against her chest. Both children were sleeping.
It was very dark.
Crozier realized that Puhtoorak’s young hunters had hacked their way in to the orlop deck. This was lucky for them since if they’d tried a bit lower amidships here, they would have run into the iron of the coal bins and the water-storage tanks on the hold deck and never could have chopped their way through, even with star-shit heads on their axes.
Ten feet in from the hole in the hull it was too dark to see, so Crozier found his way by memory, holding Silence’s hand as they walked ahead down the canted deck and then turned aft.
As his eyes adapted to the dark, there was just enough light filtering in for Crozier to make out that the heavy padlocked door to the Spirit Room and to the Gunner’s Storeroom farther aft had been smashed open. He had no idea whether this had been the work of Puhtoorak’s men, but he doubted it. Those doors had been left padlocked for a reason and they were the first place any white men returning to Terror would want to go.
The rum casks — they’d actually had so much rum they’d had to leave casks of it behind when they took to the ice — were empty. But casks of gunpowder remained, as well as boxes and barrels of shot, canvas bags of cartridges, almost two bulkheads’ lengths of muskets still set in their grooved places — they’d had too many to carry — and two hundred bayonets still hanging from their fittings along the rafters and beams.
The metal in this room alone would make Asiajuk’s band of Real People the richest men in their world.
The remaining gunpowder and shot would feed a dozen large bands of the Real People for twenty years and make them undisputed lords of the arctic.
Silence touched his bare wrist. It was too dark to sign, so she thought-sent. Do you feel it?
Crozier was astonished to hear that — for the first time — her shared thoughts were in English. She had either dreamt his dreams even more deeply than he’d imagined, or she had been very attentive during her months aboard this very ship. It was the first time they’d shared thoughts in words while awake.
Ii, he thought back to her. Yes.
This place was bad. Memories haunted it like a bad smell.
To lighten the tension, he led her forward again, pointed toward the bow, and thought-sent her an image of the forward cable locker on the deck below.
I was always waiting for you, she sent. The words were so clear that he thought they might have been spoken aloud in the darkness, except for the fact that neither of the children awoke.
His body began to shake with emotion at the thought of what she had just told him.
They went up the main ladder to the lower
deck.
It was much brighter up here. Crozier realized that — finally — daylight was actually coming through the Preston Patent Illuminators that punctuated the deck above them. The curved glass was opaque with ice, but — for once — not covered with snow or tarps.
The deck looked empty. All of the men’s hammocks had been carefully folded and stowed away, their mess tables cranked up between the beams to the overhead deck, and their sea chests pushed aside and carefully stowed. The huge Frazer’s Patent Stove in the center of the forward berthing area was dark and cold.
Crozier tried to recall if Mr. Diggle was still alive when he, the captain, had been lured onto the ice and shot. It was the first time he’d thought of that name — Mr. Diggle — in a long time.
It’s the first time I’ve thought in my own tongue for a long time.
Crozier had to smile at that. “In my own tongue.” If there really was a goddess like Sedna who ruled the world, her real name was Bitch Irony.
Silence tugged him aft.
The first officers’ cabins and mess rooms they looked into were empty.
Crozier found himself wondering which men could have possibly reached Terror and sailed her south.
Des Voeux and his men from Rescue Camp?
He felt almost certain that Mr. Des Voeux and the others would have continued south in the boats toward Big Fish River.
Hickey and his men?
For Dr. Goodsir’s sake, he hoped so, but he did not believe it. Except for Lieutenant Hodgson, and Crozier suspected he had not lived for very long in that company of cutthroats, there was hardly a man in that pack who could sail, much less navigate, Terror. He doubted if they had been able to sail and navigate the one small boat he’d given them.
That left the three men who had left Rescue Camp to hike overland — Reuben Male, Robert Sinclair, and Samuel Honey. Could a captain of the fo’c’sle, a captain of the foretop, and a blacksmith sail HMS Terror almost two hundred miles south through a maze of leads?
Crozier felt dizzy and a little nauseated from thinking about the men’s names and faces again. He could almost hear their voices. He could hear their voices.
Puhtoorak had been correct: this place was now home to piifixaaq — resentful ghosts that stayed behind to haunt the living.
There was a corpse in Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier’s bunk.
As far as they could tell without lighting lamps and going down into the hold and orlop deck, this was the only dead body on board.
Why did he decide to die in my bunk? wondered Crozier.
He had been a man about Crozier’s height. His clothes — he’d died under blankets in a peacoat and watch cap and wool trousers, which was odd since they must have been sailing in full summer — gave no clue to his identity. Crozier had no wish at all to go through his pockets.
The man’s hands, exposed wrists, and neck were brown and mummified, shriveled, but it was his face that made Crozier wish that the Preston Patent Illuminator overhead was not allowing in as much light as it did.
The dead man’s eyes were brown marbles. His hair and beard were so long and wild that it seemed quite possible that they had continued growing for months after the man’s death. His lips had shriveled away to nothing and been pulled back far from the teeth and gums by tendons stretching and contracting.
It was the teeth that were so upsetting. Rather than having fallen out from scurvy, the front teeth were all there and very broad and an ivory yellow and impossibly long — three inches long, at least — as if they had grown the way a rabbit’s or rat’s teeth continue growing until, unless worn down by gnawing something solid, they curve in and cut the creature’s own throat.
These dead man’s rodent teeth were impossible, but Crozier was looking at them in the clear, grey evening light coming down through the domed skylight of his old cabin. It was not, he realized, the first impossible thing he had seen or experienced in the last few years. He suspected it might not be his last.
Let’s go, he signed to Silence. He did not want to thought-send here where things were listening.
He had to use a fire axe to hack his way up through the sealed and nailed-shut main hatch. Rather than ask himself who had sealed it and why — or if the corpse below had been a living man when the hatch had been sealed so tightly above him — he threw the axe aside, clambered up, and helped Silence up the ladder.
Raven was fussing himself awake, but Silence rocked him and he began to snore softly again.
Wait here, he signed and went below again.
First he brought the heavy theodolite and several of his old manuals up, took a quick reading of the sun, and jotted his bearings in the margin of the salt-stained book. Then he carried theodolite and books below and tossed them aside, knowing that fixing this ship’s position one last time was perhaps the most useless thing he’d ever done in a long life of doing useless things. But he also knew he’d had to do it.
Just as he had to do what he did next.
In the dark Gunner’s Storeroom on the orlop deck he split open three successive kegs of gunpowder — pouring the contents of the first on the orlop deck and down the ladder into the hold deck (he would not go down there), the contents of the second keg everywhere on the lower deck (and especially inside the open door of his own cabin), and the contents of the third keg in black trails along the canted upper deck where Silence waited with his children. Asiajuk and the others on the ice had come around to the port side and now watched from thirty yards away. The dogs continued to howl and strain to get away, but Asiajuk or one of the hunters had staked them to the ice.
Crozier wanted to stay in the open air, even with the afternoon light waning, but he made himself go below to the orlop deck again.
Carrying the last keg of lamp oil left on the ship, he spilled a trail of it on all three decks, taking care to douse the door and bulkhead of his own cabin. His only hesitation was at the entrance to the Great Room where hundreds upon hundreds of spines of books stared back at him.
Dear God, would it hurt if I took just a few of those to help get through the dark winters ahead?
But they now carried the dark inua of the death-ship in them. Almost weeping, he dashed lamp oil across them.
When he was finished pouring the last of the fuel on the upper deck, he flung the empty cask far out over the ice.
One last trip below, he promised Silence with his fingers. Go on to the ice now with the children, my beloved.
The Lucifer matches were where he had left them in the drawer of his desk three years earlier.
For a second he was sure that he could hear the bunk creak and the nest of frozen blankets stir as the mummified thing behind him reached for him. He could hear the dry tendons in the dead arm stretching and snapping as the brown hand with its long brown fingers and too-long yellow nails slowly rose.
Crozier did not turn to look. He did not run. He did not look back. Carrying the matches, he left his cabin slowly, stepping over the lines of black gunpowder and deck boards stained by the whale oil.
He had to go down the main ladder to throw the first match. The air was so bad here that the match almost refused to light. Then the gunpowder lit with a whump, ignited a bulkhead he’d soaked with oil, and raced forward and aft in the dark along its own trail of fire.
Knowing that the orlop deck fire alone would have been enough — these timbers were dried to tinder after six years in this arctic desert — he still took time to light the lines of powder on the lower deck and open upper deck.
Then he jumped the ten feet to the ramp of ice on the west side of the ship and cursed as his never fully recovered left leg announced its pain. He should have clambered down the rigged rope ladders here as Silence obviously had had the sense to do.
Limping like the old man he was sure he would soon be, Crozier walked out onto the ice to join the others.
The ship burned for almost an hour and a half before it sank.
It was an incredible conflagration. Guy Fawk
es Day above the Arctic Circle.
He definitely wouldn’t have needed the gunpowder or lamp oil, he realized while watching. The timbers and canvas and boards were so leached of moisture that the entire ship went up like one of the incendiary mortar bombs it had been designed to launch so many decades ago.
Terror would have sunk anyway, as soon as the ice thawed here in a few weeks or months. The axe-hole in its side had been its death wound.
But that is not why he burned it. If asked — which he never would be — he could not have explained why it had to be burned. He knew that he did not want “rescuers” from British ships poring over the abandoned ship, carrying tales of it home to frighten the ghoulish citizens of England and to spur Mr. Dickens or Mr. Tennyson on to new heights of maudlin eloquence. He also knew that it wouldn’t have been only tales these rescuers would have brought back to England with them. Whatever had taken possession of the ship was as virulent as the plague. He had seen that with the eyes of his soul and smelled it with all his human and sixam ieua senses.
The Real People cheered when the burning masts collapsed.
They’d all been forced to move back a hundred yards. Terror burned its own death-hole in the ice, and shortly after the flaming masts and rigging fell, the burning ship began hissing and bubbling its way to the depths.
The noise from the fire woke the children and the flames so heated the air out here on the ice that all of them — his wife, scowling Asiajuk, big-titted Nauja, the hunters, happily grinning Inupijuk, even Taliriktug — took off their outer parkas and piled them onto the kamatik.
When the show was over and the ship was sunk and the sun was also sinking toward the south so that their shadows leapt long across the greying ice, still they stayed to point and enjoy the steam rising and celebrate the bits of burning debris still scattered here and there on the ice.
Then the band finally turned back toward the big island and then the smaller islands, planning to cross the ice to the mainland before they would make camp for the night. The sunlight shining until after midnight helped their march. All of them wanted to be off the ice and away from this place before the few hours of dimness and full darkness came. Even the dogs quit barking and snarling and seemed to pull harder when they passed the smaller island on their way back in to the land. Asiajuk was asleep and snoring under his robes on the sledge, but both the babies were wide awake and ready to play.