“Could this be from three years ago?” Nindemann asked.
Tromp was kneeling by the burnt wood and ash, sifting it with his hand. “Barentsz mentioned an encounter in his journal,” said Tromp. “With people, of a sort.”
“People?” said Nindemann. “Living here? Another group of explorers?”
Before Tromp could answer, a storm kicked up suddenly, the wind tearing across their faces, sleet and snow so fierce they could scarcely see one another.
The dogs started barking, pulling at their restraints. Bren knelt next to Caesar, saying, “It’s okay, boy. It’s just a storm. It’ll pass.”
From his knees, Bren could just see to the shoreline, as if he were peeking under a twisting, windblown curtain. The storm was pushing the ice floes toward the island, where they would collide and ricochet away again. The dogs seemed to be barking not at the storm, but at the shore, and as Bren stared out, he saw what could have been a group of men emerge from the frozen sea onto land.
He tried to call out, but the wind beat away his warnings. The snow had grown worse, too, and his brief glimpse of the shoreline vanished. It was all any of them could do to keep from being overwhelmed. Even the dogs had stopped barking, to keep the daggers of ice out of their mouths.
When the storm relented after several minutes, Bren cautiously opened his eyes, and when he did, he saw one of the men jerk backward, as if grabbed from behind. A second man was attacked as well, and this time, Tromp noticed.
“Bears!” he shouted over the wind, and his men immediately went to the sleds for their weapons.
But they weren’t bears. Bren wasn’t sure what they were. They weren’t animals, nor were they fully human. Some had long tusks for canines, others had fins for hands. There was a man with one forward-facing eye and one bulbous eye around the side of his head, where his ear should have been. Another rose up from the ice on a thick, leathery torso that terminated in a tail. Something near the back nursed at least six children on rows of teats along her stomach. All were dressed in skins of walrus, seal, reindeer, polar bear, and muskox, wearing necklaces of stone and white feathers.
Even through the sleet Bren could see that the two men who had been ambushed were already dead. One lay pinned to the ice with a massive spear. The other’s head was barely attached, blood pulsing from his neck.
“There’s only a dozen of them,” said Tromp, though he said it without a hint of confidence. He now had half that number.
This ghastly clan’s weapons were even stranger than the ones Ani had shown Bren. One gripped a long pole that branched into half a dozen spikes. Two appeared to have fashioned whips from barbed arms of jellyfish. Others had long bones, filed into blades and attached to the undersides of their arms. Most brandished daggers, scythes, swords, and spears made of bone and ivory, all of which were pink with old blood. There was one with tusks as large as a walrus’s, and a body to match, massive and shapeless, oozing onto the ice.
There was no time to discuss their strategy. The walrus-sized one opened his blood-stained mouth and let out a cry that shook Bren to his core. It was the same terrible sound that had come from a berserk Otto before he had attacked them in the hold of the Albatross.
The one with the long spiked pole raised it over his head, and by reflex Bren and the others crouched, expecting him to hurl it like a spear. Instead, he spun the weapon around and brought it down, spikes first, into the ice with a thunderous crack, then used the pole to vault himself into the air, covering the distance between the two forces in one motion. He landed before a stunned crew member, who stood there with a pistol in hand, and sliced his neck open with the back of his fin-shaped hand before the hapless victim could fire a shot.
Tromp and the others briefly stood frozen, watching their mate fall to the ground into a puddle of bright-red blood. Bren just stared at it, this sudden, shocking burst of color in the vast whiteness, growing and spreading like a living thing that had just escaped its shell.
What felt like minutes, though, was but a fleeting second. The others attacked; Bren was yanked backward by Lady Barrett, who flung herself into the fray.
Shots were fired. Metal weapons clashed with bone and ivory, filling the empty wastes with an eerie, blunt symphony of battle. The huskies charged, and animal and human guttural cries mixed with the wind and were carried away. The ice was soon slick with blood and fat from bodies that had been cut open.
Bren, to his shame, never got up. He had no weapon but a short dagger, and his useless black jade stone was stashed away among his things onboard the ship. There was nothing to protect him, except his own cowardly desire to run from the battle.
He turned to find Ani, who was on her hands and knees against the pounding winds. He went to help her, but just as he got closer she took off running full speed—toward the battle.
“Ani, no!” Bren cried, but again the wind swept away his voice. She was running directly at the man with the walrus tusks, and when she was perhaps twenty feet away she leaped into the air, stretching her arms out before her like a swimmer diving off a cliff.
The girl Bren knew as Ani plunged headfirst toward the ice, but what landed and sprung up again was a huge grey cat, the size of a panther, lunging at the leader of the beastly clan.
The cat knocked the tusked man to the ground and pinned him there, tearing at his throat with her teeth until he managed to push her away with his staff. She landed on her feet and quickly lunged at another, trying to even the odds.
Tromp and the others seized the advantage. Nindemann was a force, fighting two and three opponents at once with an ice ax in one hand and a pick in the other. The rifles and pistols took too long to reload, so those weapons were quickly tossed aside, forcing the crew to fight close in, which resulted in ghastly wounds. The creatures who had lined the undersides of their arms with sharpened bones sliced open men left and right like windmills. Bren watched as the joint end of a massive femur bone came crashing down on one man’s head, caving in his skull. Others fought more like the animals they resembled, biting and clawing.
Lady Barrett had managed to secret her sword off the ship, and she was thrusting and slicing and parrying, looking as if it were old hat to fight three or four men at a time. But during one flourish as she raised her sword arm, Bren saw that she, too, had been badly wounded, a long lateral gash across her side and back.
It was sheer butchery, but Ani, or the cat, was turning the tide. It took more and more of the clan to battle her, leaving them vulnerable to attack from behind. But then, to Bren’s horror, he saw the nursing woman, who had retreated from the battle, one by one pull her suckling children from her belly and throw them at the cat. Whatever sort of children they were, they clung to Ani, attacking her legs and her neck, trying to disable her.
Finally they pulled her down to the ice, and Bren thought she was finished. The tusked monster, despite bleeding profusely from the wounds Ani had left in his neck, slowly crawled toward her, using his tusks like walking sticks. He was going to finish her.
Bren frantically looked around. Where Ani had transformed, there was a pile of fur on the ground. He fished around until he found them—her chakram bracelets and the bladed whip.
He picked up the chakram and raised an arm to throw them, but his confidence dissolved. What if he hit one of his own men, or Ani? And so he reached for the urumi, the one Ani had not even let him hold. He found the handle and stood up, praying his aim would be true, and he drew his arm up and back, the whip rising up and rearing back like a striking snake. He threw his arm forward, and the whip lashed out into the blur of snow and ice, landing squarely across the back of the tusked leader.
He howled in pain like nothing Bren had ever heard, and a bright-red vein of blood opened from his neck to his waist. Bren was so stunned at his lucky aim that he forgot to draw the whip back, and suddenly his victim turned and grabbed the end of it, his thick, walruslike skin somehow bearing the pain, and pulled Bren toward him.
Bren could hav
e simply dropped the urumi, but fear froze his brain. Before he knew it, he was face-to-face with the half-human, warmed by his putrid breath, about to be devoured.
His dagger. He felt for it . . . if he could place it just right . . . there! He firmly closed his hand around the handle and swung his arm up, stabbing the blade up to the hilt into the roll of fat around the walrus-man’s neck.
He howled again and reached up, grabbing Bren by the hair and tossing him away. Bren hit the ice so hard his lungs emptied. In the frozen air he could see every ounce of breath he had leaving his body like a ghost. Then, to his despair, he saw that the leader, after briefly collapsing to one knee, was up again and advancing on Ani, Bren’s dagger still sticking out of his neck.
And then he stopped again. They all did, when they heard the overpowering roar of the bear.
The half-humans knew it well—they lived among polar bears. But what they didn’t expect, what none of them expected, was what they saw next. The bear was stalking toward them, and walking by its side was a person, dressed head to toe in thick black fur.
It was Shveta, and when she raised her hand the bear charged.
From his back, dizzy with pain, all Bren could see at first was a confusion of legs and white fur, and then the mauled figure of one of the clan skidded to the ground right next to him. Bren pushed himself half upright and saw that the grey cat, despite her wounds, had shaken off the savage children and was ferociously dragging men down in tandem with the bear. The nursing creature gathered her children back to her and retreated. A few others did as well, leaving their wounded to die. The last to give up was the tusked leader, who rose up one last time and attacked the bear from behind, plunging both his tusks into the bear’s back. He hung there, burying his face into the bear’s blood-stained back, trying to use his weight to force the bear down, but just when it seemed he might succeed, the cat sunk her front claws into his shoulders, pulling him away, and then finished tearing out his throat.
The victors looked anything but victorious. Nindemann was on one knee, propping himself with his ice ax. Tromp was on both knees, eyeing the white bear and the woman now standing over it, running her hands over its wounds. Only two of the remaining crew were still alive, and Bren was relieved to see that Lady Barrett was still among the living. But for how long? Everyone’s wounds looked terrible. The carnage was unlike anything he had ever seen, even at Cape Colony.
The cat approached Shveta cautiously, and the wounded bear took in her scent. The two remaining dogs, including Caesar, bristled and growled, but the cat and bear followed Shveta as she left the scene of battle, walking across the white landscape in the direction of the ship.
Bren expected Tromp and his wounded men to do the same, but instead the captain hoisted himself up and pointed in the direction of the retreating enemy. “Strip the dead, rend their clothes, bandage your wounds as best you can,” he ordered. “We follow them now. It’s our best chance to find what happened to Barentsz.”
CHAPTER
23
SKULLS, BONES, AND LIVER
They discovered that the clan had arrived on a pair of leather canoes, but had retreated in just one. To follow them, Tromp and Nindemann had to paddle the abandoned canoe through shifting floes, which proved treacherous. Fortunately it was a short trip to the next island, where they did find the remains of Barentsz, at last.
The surviving clan members had already gathered up their most vital possessions from their camp and retreated again. When they were out of sight, even by spyglass, Tromp led them to the campsite, where they found several skulls (some human, some animal) and piles of bones that may have been intended for weapons. The only real proof that Barentsz was among them was another leather journal, one the doomed navigator must have started after sending the other half of his crew back to Nova Zembla with his old one.
“So which skull is his?” said Nindemann. “What do we carry back?”
Tromp walked among the bones, scattering them with his foot. “Leave all these,” he said. “Pick one of the skulls. Doesn’t matter which. King Max, the Company, and Barentsz’s family will just be happy to have something to bury.”
They hiked back to the canoe, paddled across, and then loaded their own dead onto the two sleds and began pulling them back to the Sea Lion. All Bren could think about as the midnight sun rolled along the horizon without setting was, When would Tromp make his move? Would Lady Barrett, as badly wounded as she was, be able to thwart him? Bren now knew Barentsz’s nightmares had been all too real. The thought of being stranded in such a remote, lonely place made him ill with fear.
But if the captain had a plan, it must have been buried under his fear and anger over what he had witnessed in Ani and Shveta. As they all reboarded the ship, Tromp barked an order: “Find the queen, her freak orphan, the two goons, and throw ’em in the brig.”
To his surprise, the answer he got was: “Captain, they’re already there. In the hold, anyway. With a white bear. They went down there on their own, through the cargo hatch. No one dared come near ’em.”
Bren ran as fast as he could to the hold before Tromp could gather himself. Sure enough, there was the bear, on its side, with Shveta and Ani—human Ani—kneeling next to it, stroking its fur.
“Tromp will be down here any minute,” said Bren. “He was ranting the whole time about what happened. You’re going to have to explain it to him. And then of course there’s the small matter of him planning to kill you, Aadesh, and Aadarsh, and leaving Ani and me here to die.”
Shveta didn’t seem concerned. “And you don’t need an explanation of what happened, Bren?”
He hesitated. “I had a friend . . . she could do some extraordinary things.”
“Mouse?” said Ani.
Bren nodded. The thunder of footsteps shook the hold as Tromp, Nindemann, and four others came looking for Shveta. Tromp was so angry he forgot to switch from Dutch to English.
“You translate, boy,” he ordered Bren, when he realized what he’d done.
“Pretty much just what I said before,” said Bren. “He wants answers.”
Shveta stood up and walked slowly toward Tromp, who stood his ground but clearly seemed afraid. She was taller than he was, too, and let that fact sink in as she stood face-to-face with him, her chin angled down slightly to meet his beady eyes.
“You want answers?” she said. “Pay me for them.” She pointed to her forehead, where she had replaced the ruby bindi with a vermilion dot, some sort of chalk Ani had made for her.
Tromp smirked. “I’ll pay you if what you tell me means anything. Not before. And that bear can’t stay here.”
“He’s dying,” said Shveta, returning to its side. “The tusks punctured his lungs.”
Tromp had no sympathy. “Until then, we chain him here. And you and the freak are confined to the brig. If either of your two large friends tries to do anything about it, I’ll execute them on the spot.”
No one moved. No one wanted to be near the bear if it suddenly revived. Tromp, furious, grabbed two men at a time by the neck and pushed them forward until he had four “volunteers.”
“And for being such cowards, you better hope the bear mauls you compared to what you’ve got coming from me.”
The men chaining the bear survived, except for one, and it wasn’t the bear that killed him. Tromp lashed all four publicly until they bled, and one, already weak with dysentery, died on the spot. Because he had been punished for cowardice, Tromp had him dumped overboard without a proper burial.
The men killed in battle he did bury with ceremony, but apparently that act exhausted his humanity; he sent everyone to work or to bed without supper. An exhausted Bren collapsed into his cot, looking at Ani’s empty cot before snuffing the candle. In the darkness, some hours later, he heard the bear awake. A great moan came from the bowels of the ship, followed by the terrible rattling of chains.
Bren slept maybe an hour, leaving his room before the fifth bell to find Lady Barrett. He went to
where the ordinary seamen slept, looking for “Speler,” fearing they would say he had died during the night or was in the surgeon’s ward. But he was told Speler was above, on his regular watch.
Bren almost ran to her when he saw her on deck, but Lady Barrett put a hand out, reminding him they were in plain view. When he got within earshot, she said, “I’m fine. I’ll live, for now.” She took a deep breath, which seemed to cost her dearly. “I guess I underestimated Queen Shveta,” she said. “If you knew half of what we all know now, I can’t blame you for wanting to see what she’s after. But we still need a plan, and soon.”
Bren ran to the hold, where he found Shveta and Ani sitting in their meditative poses in the small iron cage. Aadesh and Aadarsh were both leaning against the cage, asleep, having apparently kept guard all night. The bear lay still, making no sound.
“He’s dead,” said Shveta without opening her eyes.
“It’s me,” said Bren.
“I figured,” said Shveta, opening her eyes but remaining in her pose.
“Are you two all right?”
“I’m fine,” said Shveta. “Ani is weak. Transformation is taxing.”
They were interrupted by the pounding of boots coming down the ladder and across the hold. Aadesh and Aadarsh awoke and stood, but Tromp walked past them to the bear, nudging its head with his foot.
“Did you bring my jewels?” said Shveta.
“You first,” said Tromp. “That’s the deal I gave you last night.”
“We need to eat,” she said.
“Mess isn’t for another hour.”
“No, we need to eat the bear,” said Shveta. “The organs.”
The Sea of the Dead Page 16