Bager's face darkened, and he glanced sideways at Knud Erik. "I knew it," he muttered. "I told you so. That girl will come to a bad end. But it's a terrible thing all the same."
"What did he say?" Knud Erik asked after they'd left. Bager didn't reply but increased his pace until he was some distance ahead. They didn't speak all the way back to the harbor, where the skipper kept him at a distance.
The blood seeped through the sack of meat and left large dark stains on the gray sackcloth: Knud Erik felt people must be staring, and got it into his head that he looked like a murderer carrying the remains of his mutilated victim through the town in broad daylight.
When they were back on board, Bager asked Knud Erik to come to his cabin.
"Sit down," he said, seating himself opposite. Then he leaned forward, hands folded on the table. "Miss Sophie," he started, and then he stopped. He gazed down at the table and gave a deep sigh. "Miss Sophie," he repeated, "has gone missing." Then he slammed his hand down hard. "Damn it all!"
Knud Erik said nothing. The room didn't grow black in front of his eyes, but in his head, a kind of night began. He could see everything vividly, but he was incapable of thought.
"She's been gone two days now. No one knows where she is. An accident maybe. Or a crime. Personally I think she's eloped with some sailor. That girl's disturbed. I probably shouldn't be saying this, but she's not quite right in the head. Her mother died a long time ago—she probably told you that—and Mr. Smith was too busy to take care of her properly. She always got her own way. That's never healthy in a girl that age. All this nonsense about inviting crewmen to tea. Dressing up like a lady and turning their heads. You weren't the first, I'm afraid." Bager looked directly at Knud Erik. "And dear Lord, you fell for her too. And yes, I blame myself. I shouldn't have let you go. But Mr. Smith charters us, so it's no easy thing to say no. I didn't see the harm in it. But look what it's led to."
Knud Erik didn't speak. Now he knew what had happened to him in his drunkenness. Or did he? He saw Miss Sophie's slender coat-clad figure glide up Signal Hill where Cabot Tower stood, a dark silhouette against the Milky Way. He saw her face and her lips, black in the pale starlight. And he finally traced the source of the helpless, jilted feeling, which had haunted him these past days. He recalled his wild race down Signal Hill and the silent town shrouded in frost. He'd left Miss Sophie up there under the cold stars. Was whatever happened to her afterward his fault, because he'd run off? But she'd told him to go. She'd stamped her foot and called him a dog.
The whole thing seemed like a dream. Could he trust his own memories? What if something completely different had happened? Had he hit her? Suddenly he wasn't sure.
"I'm sorry," the skipper murmured, still looking at the table. It sounded as if he was talking to himself. "I'm sorry you met her. I know it's my fault." Then he looked up and noticed the vacancy in Knud Erik's eyes. "Are you even listening to me, boy?"
When Knud Erik came up on deck, he could tell right away that the others had heard the news too: it must already have made its way from town to deck, via the harbor. They eyed him gravely but said nothing. Only Rikard's mouth twitched, as if he had a stock of malicious remarks he was dying to use.
What was going through their minds? Did they suspect him of anything? What would they think if they knew the truth about his night on Signal Hill?
Well, what did he think?
Did you always know what you did when you got drunk?
The question stumped him. When it came to drunkenness, he had no experience whatsoever. He had no knowledge of himself either. He sensed that something fateful had happened that night on Signal Hill. It wasn't just his confusion that kept him silent: the whole event was too intimate. He couldn't speak about it without revealing his defeat. He desperately needed to confide in somebody, but an instinct for survival made him keep his mouth shut. If he didn't, he knew all too well that the others would fall on him instantly.
That night he climbed into his berth not having exchanged a word with a soul.
By now the temperature was between twelve and fourteen degrees below zero every day, and the next morning the deck was covered in snow. A snowball came flying through the air and turned to powder as it collided with the rigging; soon a full-scale snowball fight had erupted between the ships that lay close together in the narrow port of St. John's.
But Knud Erik didn't join in. He stood with his hands in the pockets of his fleecy moleskin trousers and shuddered in the cold.
THEY SAILED four days after the frost set in. A tugboat led them out through the Black Hole. A brisk wind was blowing from the north, and the Labrador Current was with them. They sailed through pancake ice but made good speed nonetheless. Around eleven in the morning the skipper ordered Knud Erik up the foremast to look for open water. He climbed the rigging until he reached the topgallant yard. Below him the sails were rigid with frost. To the south the ice extended as far as the horizon. The vast unbroken surface gleaming white in the sun gave him a mild feeling of nausea, which stayed with him back on deck.
There was pot roast for lunch, but Knud Erik thought of the butcher's chopping block and the dark patches on the sack where blood from the meat had seeped through. He had no appetite but didn't want to leave his plate untouched either. He put a piece of meat in his mouth and left it there. It seemed to swell. Then he rushed onto the deck and puked over the rail.
On the second day they spied open water. The wind was rising and the sea began to shift. With the temperature still low, the Kristina had started to freeze over. During the night and the following day the ship became encased in a thick armor of ice. The halyards froze together in lumps. The bulwark became a frigid wall, and on the main deck the ice stood a foot deep. The bowsprit was a single compact block that reached as far as the martingale.
The fully laden ship now lay even lower in the water, her weight increased by several tons. The bow was already dangerously sunken, and the deck was level with the sea on the other side of the frozen bulwark. The sails looked like heavy sheets of wood that for inscrutable reasons had been hoisted from the mast.
It was like being on board a giant block of ice that a sculptor was trying his best to carve into a ship. But he was hampered by the block's continual growth, which returned the shapes he carved to formlessness: the elegant rigging, the beautifully curved lines of bulwark and bowsprit—everything that gives a ship her definition and her advantage over the sea had become a jumble of lumps and cubes. No longer a ship, nor even a reasonable imitation of a ship, the Kristina became a death sentence signed by the frost, stripped of her last remnant of seaworthiness, transformed into a dead weight of ice and salt cod doomed to sink.
The crew knew their lives depended on a successful battle against the relentless freeze. Opening up the tool chest, each man grabbed a maul and attacked the glittering castle that was building itself around them. Ice chunks clattered brightly down from the rigging and the halyards before hitting the deck. But the deck itself resisted all their efforts. They hammered themselves sweaty and red-faced, producing a crack here and a crack there, but the heavy sheet of ice wouldn't shift, and the slope of the bulwark remained imprisoned inside. They couldn't even get close to the frozen lump that was the bowsprit. You risked your life venturing onto it.
At first the challenge excited them, and they yelled out to one another. But after a while they fell silent. In the end their hammer strokes stopped too. Bager was the first to give up. He put a hand to his chest and his eyes turned glassy as he gasped for breath. Then Dreymann called it a day. They slumped, exhausted, where they'd stopped, each wrapped in his own loneliness, as though absorbed by the growing masses of ice all around.
Icicles hung from Dreymann's mustache. He had hoarfrost in his eyebrows and under his nostrils. On Rikard's and Algot's cheeks, where day-old stubble grew, the frost was sprinkled like white powder, giving the men's faces a deathly pallor.
Would their lashes freeze their eyes shut too? Would that
be the cold's last gesture, to close their lids so they didn't freeze to death staring up at the gray sky?
BUT IN THE END, the ice that threatened to kill them was their salvation. They'd reached new subzero waters: not pancake ice this time, but a compact layer that in the course of a few hours enclosed them, lifting the Kristina's laden hull half out of the water. For the moment the danger of sinking had passed. The ship's heavy timbers groaned in the ice's powerful grip. If the Kristina had been steel, the hull would have cracked from the pressure and they'd have been doomed. Now, while the ice toyed with them, they were granted a stay of execution.
For days they'd been so caught up in struggling to survive that they'd barely glanced at the horizon. Now they spotted another ship far off, also stuck in the ice: a badly damaged schooner with a broken mainmast and sagging rigging.
Dreymann fetched his binoculars and directed them at the distressed ship, trying to read the name on her bow. "Damn it to hell. It's the Ane Marie."
"Anyone on board?" Bager sounded hopeful. Knud Erik's heart started pounding. He was thinking about Vilhjelm.
"Not that I can see."
"Let me take a look." Bager snatched the binoculars and began scanning the ice. "Am I seeing things or what?" he exclaimed. "Penguins live at the South Pole, don't they?"
"Yes," Dreymann said. "Penguins live at the South Pole. There aren't any around here."
"That's what I thought. Call me crazy or whatever you want. But there's an emperor penguin out there on the ice, right in front of the Ane Marie."
The binoculars were passed around. Sure enough, an emperor penguin was rocking back and forth on the vast icy plain in front of the battered schooner.
"It's coming this way," Knud Erik said.
They crowded together by the rail. The penguin approached them slowly, with that unique waddle, dragging and swaying as though pulling a heavy burden across the ice.
"Poor little bastard, you're going to be disappointed," Dreymann said. "What grub we've got left we'll be keeping for ourselves. You won't get a crumb."
Knud Erik stood completely silent, not listening to the others. He was squinting. "That's not a penguin," he said.
Dreymann raised the binoculars again. "Boy's right. If that's a penguin, it's grown old and gray." He scratched his head under his cap. "God only knows what it is then."
"Penguins have a white chest," Algot said. He'd once visited the Zoological Gardens in Copenhagen.
"It's a human being!" shouted Knud Erik. He leapt over the rail and landed with a thud on the ice below, then started racing in the direction of the strange creature, which continued its awkward waddle toward the ship without seeming to notice him. Bager shouted for him to come back, but he didn't hear. He ran like the wind. He could see that what they'd taken for a penguin was a man wearing a winter coat that reached all the way to his feet, completely concealing his legs. He must have been wearing several layers of clothing underneath because the buttons barely held. The sleeves stuck out on the sides like two flippers. A scarf was wrapped around his head, and an oversize flat cap was pulled deep down over his wool Elsinore hood so the brim almost hid his face. From a distance it had looked like a beak.
Knud Erik was closer now, and the man in the coat made an attempt to wave his arms up and down, just like a penguin. Then the two men stood in front of each other. Knud Erik couldn't make out the face; it was buried in clothing. The man had stopped moving and stood as if he had a key in his back and was waiting to be wound up. Knud Erik's hand shook as he removed the flat cap, whether from impatience or fear of what he might find, he barely knew. A small face with sunken cheeks and deep-set eyes appeared. The skin, red-veined from the cold, was marked by frostbite. On the chin grew a fine blanket of down—not a big manly brush, but enough to be called a beard. The hoarfrost hung from it just as it hung from everything else.
"Knud Erik," the face said.
"You've grown a beard."
Tears rushed to Knud Erik's eyes, and he began to sob at a volume that surprised him. Vilhjelm's smile was careful: his lips were badly cracked. Then he rolled his eyes, and his penguin-like shape collapsed on the ice. Behind him Knud Erik could hear Rikard and Algot approaching. They'd finally caught up.
They were sitting in Bager's cabin, staring at the small figure wrapped in blankets and eiderdown, and lying in the berth. Vilhjelm slept peacefully, his sunken face resting on the white pillowcase. They were waiting for him to wake up.
Rikard and Algot had gone on to the Ane Marie, where they'd discovered the skipper, Ejvind Hansen, and the first mate, Peter Eriksen, both from Marstal, lying dead in their separate cabins, both looking as if they'd died in their sleep. There was no sign of the crew, and they assumed the men must have been washed overboard in the storm before the ice trapped the ship. The waves had cleared the deck and taken both foremast and mainmast. The crew had tried to rig an emergency mast, lashing the ship's derrick to the stump of the foremast. Through the layer of clear ice that covered the deck of the Ane Marie, they could make out a tangle of rigging, spars, and sails. More wreckage was frozen to the side of the ship.
When Rikard and Algot had delivered this account, they both fell silent. They kept shivering as though they were cold, though the narrow cabin was well heated.
When they undressed the unconscious Vilhjelm they'd counted four layers of clothing. He'd probably been the smallest person on board the Ane Marie: he must have taken outfits of different sizes from the sea chests of the lost men and put one on top of the other.
"How did he manage to take a shit?" Algot asked.
"I don't think shitting was his biggest problem. It was more getting something down the other way." Dreymann lifted the covers gently and pointed to the boy's emaciated ribs. "Taking his clothes off was like opening a can of sardines and finding nothing but fish bones."
They'd rubbed his naked body with rum, then dressed him in clean clothes, wrapped a blanket around him, and settled him in the berth. Over the thirty-six hours he slept, they took turns watching over him. Knud Erik sat with him the whole time, and Bager let him. Rikard and Algot went to the front to turn in, and Bager and Dreymann swapped shifts sleeping in the first mate's cabin. All rules were ignored. The frost had brought them together, and the Ane Marie's broken silhouette against the gray sky was a fixed reminder of the fate they'd all share unless luck was on their side.
It was in the middle of the second night that Vilhjelm opened his eyes. The only light in the cabin came from the petroleum lamp that was bolted to the bulkhead.
"I'm hungry" was all he said. He sounded like a small child.
Bager, who'd been snoozing next to Knud Erik, bolted up from his sofa. "Damn it," he said drowsily. "The sand digger's boy is awake."
He stumbled toward the berth with a bottle of rum in his hand. Supporting Vilhjelm's head with his other hand, he lifted the bottle to his lips. "That's it, boy, have a swig. It'll do you good." Vilhjelm drank but began to splutter when the acrid taste of undiluted rum filled his mouth.
Bager straightened up. "Dreymann!" he roared, so his voice could be heard across the whole of the rear of the ship. "The boy's awake. Let's have roast beef." The first mate came stumbling into the cabin.
"Aye, aye, Captain." He stood at attention and made a mock salute.
"Dreymann will cook you a Sunday roast you'll never forget." He winked at Vilhjelm, who gave him a pale smile in return.
"But I think the boy needs a few biscuits to start with, Captain."
Bager found the biscuit tin and handed a couple of biscuits to Vilhjelm. He munched them with stiff jaws, as though the movement of chewing had become unfamiliar. Bager, Dreymann, and Knud Erik all watched him as if they'd never seen anyone eat before. "What did you eat before we found you?" Knud Erik asked.
Vilhjelm had survived on sea biscuits, but they'd run out some days before. During the storm a freak wave had cleared the deck and the galley and taken the rest of the provisions with it. The galley boy was alre
ady dead: the lifeboat had torn itself loose and crushed him against the bulwark. He didn't know what had happened to the other seamen. He assumed they'd been washed overboard. He had no concept of time anymore and no idea how long the Ane Marie had been trapped in the ice.
He spoke in a very weak voice and there were long pauses between the sentences. He didn't sound like Vilhjelm at all.
"The sea biscuits were disgusting," he said. "They were frozen solid and I had to keep them in my mouth for ages to thaw them. I was really scared that the maggots would start wriggling in my mouth when they warmed up. But they'd died from the cold. So I ate them too."
"You probably owe your life to those maggots," Dreymann remarked dryly.
Knud Erik stared at Vilhjelm. He realized suddenly why the emaciated boy in the skipper's berth didn't sound like his friend from Marstal.
"You're not stammering anymore!" he exclaimed.
"Aren't I?"
Rikard and Algot had arrived. They all stared at Vilhjelm as if he were the most wondrous sight they'd ever clapped eyes on. Here lay a boy who couldn't just munch a biscuit: he could articulate properly too.
"Well, would you believe it," Dreymann said. "Seems that keeping your mouth shut can cure a stammer."
"I didn't keep it shut," Vilhjelm said with his new voice.
"So who did you talk to, if I may ask?"
"I read the Merchant Navy's Book of Sermons that the skipper had. Every day for hours. I walked up and down the deck and read it aloud. Everyone else was dead. And it was so quiet."
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