by Sean Wallace
Before he could let Conor be, though, Icebreaker gave a terrible heave, as if she meant to come clear out of the water. We were thrown backwards to the deck, to find ourselves staring at the bright blue sky above, as one might see lying in one’s own backyard on a summer day. But it wasn’t a backyard we found ourselves in, it was the southernmost sea of this world, a strange place indeed.
Brown’s shouts carried back to us, but I made neither head nor tail of them. Conor’s head had struck the deck and he lay terribly still while all around us the Icebreaker continued to heave and shudder. The very metal around us groaned, like something horrific was ripping into and through it. Had we struck ice? Was Icebreaker sinking?
I clambered to my knees and crawled to Conor’s side, opening my parka to strip the sweater from around my waist and cushion his head. His eyes fluttered open, a glimpse of green behind goggle lenses and then gone, and he moaned my name before falling to silence once more. Still, his cheeks looked better, flushed with color now and not pale as they had been moments before.
A glance upward showed me deck hands running every which way, including Cook, who had been enlisted to grab what looked like the bomb lance. Was it a whale, then, that had hit the Icebreaker? Down here in these icy waters?
“Miss Muriel, look! Look!”
I found Conor at the rail without warning, bouncing back as only a nine-year-old can. His hands flailed, pointing to something in the water. I fisted a hand into my sweater, grabbing it before I joined him there. The boy seemed no worse at present for the knock on his head, unless the thing in the water was a great dream shared by us both – had I hit my head?
It was no whale, this thing in the water. With flesh that was scaled and leathery, and a head that bore a broad scarlet crest, this creature was like nothing I had seen. This was chiefly the reason so many had come on this voyage – to see what they never had, to explore this untamed and icy wilderness, to learn what it contained. And here was a creature, unknown to us, and screaming. How I wished J. J. were here to see it. I clutched his heart in my pocket, and stared at the thing.
What thrashed in the water could not possibly be real, yet Cook hefted the bomb lance to his shoulder and fired, so he saw it, too. The lance wobbled in the air, flipping end over end before its sharp iron head pierced that broad, bright crest. A magnificent cry filled the world – part shriek, part howl – and the beast flung itself wildly away from the Icebreaker, which resulted in it ripping the lance free. Blood as bright as the crest itself spread in the foamed, agitated water as the creature turned and sank, vanishing. Abruptly, all was calm.
We all stood there like fools for a moment, gaping. Surely the scene called for such behavior, and then Brown and Cook and the others scrambled into motion, Brown calling for the nets to be shot in an attempt to catch the lizard. Mr Plenty came out from behind a cask, his linen suit quite rumpled indeed, and set his goggles to rights, before resuming scribbling on his notepad. His hand looked shaky at best, walking stick tucked under his arm.
While the nets did indeed fire, with their customary muffled whomp-thump sound underwater, the men only succeeded in hauling back catches of wriggling fish and a wholly random bioluminescent sea cucumber, which was quickly deemed suspicious and likely poisonous. No lizard beast. Cook kept the cod and tossed the others back, muttering as he went back to the galley. Squid theft, giant sea lizards and an unexpected bounty for supper. Cook’s morning had been busy.
“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh,” he said, and the hatch snapped shut behind him.
“Miss Muriel?”
I looked at Conor and smoothed a hand over his head, fingers seeking the goose egg that was sure to be there. He gave a little wince, but didn’t pull back.
“Ever seen anything like that?” he asked. When he spoke, I could see that he’d bitten his lip. The lower lip was swollen, with a bright blotch of red against the pink.
I shook my head at his question, and looked back out over the waters as Icebreaker continued through them. A little splash here and there against the bergs which huddled off the rail, but there was no sign of the lizard, nor of any such beasts. Against the far horizon, I could see the faint outline of another ship, but at this distance, all seemed calm there, too.
“Can’t say that I have,” I replied, and looked back to the boy beside me.
“You’ve traveled a lot, though,” he said, rummaging in his vest, withdrawing an empty, broken squid skewer. He tossed it over the side of the ship. “Nothing like that?”
I had traveled a lot, much more than most women in my time. But then, most women didn’t have a husband like J. J. Brennan, a man who agreed that women should climb mountains, fly airships and explore the world if they so wanted. I looked out over the cold waters again, suddenly lonely for that big, old man. The rest of my days without him? That idea often hit me at the strangest times. Most other times, it seemed he was just in the other room, out of sight. I slid my hand back into my pocket, fingers curling around his clockwork heart.
“No, nothing like that.”
Conor held the silence a moment, then piped up. “Never seen anything like me before, either, huh?”
I grinned, sharp and bright as Icebreaker slid out of the shadow of a berg and into clearer water. “Nothing like you in all my years,” I had to admit, for it was true.
The adults on board Icebreaker had a propensity to treat me more like a child, owing to my size, whereas Conor, an actual child, treated me as the adult I was. He and I walked into the mess hall for dinner that evening, Conor’s arm outstretched for my gloved hand to rest upon, and while he wore a jacket, it had seen better days, and too many mice in recent weeks, so we made for a curious enough pair.
Mr Plenty’s eyes snapped to me, assessing, looking for any crack he might widen into a complete story. I stayed close to him, though, focused on my young escort.
“It rather smells like fried cod in here, Mr Westerfield,” I said, looking at the collection of men gathered round the table. Fried cod, yes, but I saw bowls of golden soup scattered about the table as well.
“It rather smells like unwashed men, Missus Brennan,” he confided in a whisper that could have been a dozen times softer, truth be told.
I cleared my throat and sat on the first empty stretch of bench I came to, next to one Mr Herbert, who was an illustrator and thus usually covered in ink. Tonight was no exception. It looked as though he had been wrestling with the squid from that morning.
He had a sketch pad in his lap and a glance down showed me he had been hard at work capturing the beast we had seen in the waters. He had yet to color in the crest, though, and as Conor slid onto the bench beside me, Herbert looked up at us with watery blue eyes. He managed a tentative smile for us.
“Wasn’t it perfectly terrible?” he asked in a whisper. Thin, inked hands latched onto his sketch book, bringing it up to the table where he placed it over his bowl of soup. His fingers traced a path above the ink drawing, from the beast’s crest down its scaled belly, into fuming water. Herbert had a good way with his pencils and inks; the image was excellent indeed.
“Have you seen its like before?”
Herbert cleared his throat at my question, a man clearly more comfortable with drawing what he thought than speaking it.
“No,” he eventually said as other conversations around the table came to a close, making ours the chief form of entertainment. He cleared his throat again, fingers stroking his bow tie before he added, “It may well be an entirely new discovery.” He looked up, at those others at the table, seeming to challenge them to disagree.
No one did, not even Mr Plenty, who seemed as animated as the others when it came to discussing the creature.
“Entirely new!”
“Wholly discovered by … us!”
“Brown’s Lizard!”
“Brown’s Arctic Beast!”
“The Terror from the Icy Deep!”
Mr Herbert drew his sketch pad back onto his lap and returned
to his soup as the conversation went on around us. I smiled thanks to Cook when he brought me soup and cod both, then looked at Conor.
“Wish Mr J. J. could have seen it,” Conor said around a hot hank of cod in his mouth.
My gloved fingers touched the lump of J. J.’s heart in my pocket.
“Oh, I think he did,” I said, and dipped a spoon into the golden soup before me.
After the meal, I slipped away largely unnoticed, being that the men were once more occupied with Mr Herbert’s drawings, and I being small and a woman, could easily vanish. Belowdecks, the conversation faded, consumed by the endless chug of the triple expansion engines. I was short enough that overhead pipes didn’t worry me, but at every hatch, I had to pause and take a large step up and over the lip which rose out of the floor. Captain Brown said that every compartment could be sealed in case of flooding, but I was of the idea that I wanted to be on the top deck in that instance. Getting the hell off the ship.
J. J.’s casket awaited me in an aft compartment, perched atop a collection of crates, lit by the flicker of one gaslamp above. Strange, Mr Plenty had written, how a man so beloved and wealthy would end up in a simple pine box. Natural, I said to him, for in life J. J. had not seen himself as being above anyone. Death would claim us all in the end.
“Hey-ho, big man,” I whispered and leaned back against the door to close it. It latched with a soft rasp of rubber against steel, and I didn’t turn the wheel to seal it tight, figuring we weren’t in imminent danger of flooding.
At some point, I knew this would get easier. Everyone told me it was so. People died every day. I was not the first to lose a loved one. All true, but I’d never had a husband before. Had never had a husband die. So amid what everyone else likely labeled “natural”, in this case I labeled “strange”. I also slotted it into the “never want to do again” category.
Here, in the privacy of the room, I tugged my gloves off and placed my hands against the smooth pine. I could feel the vibration of the engines clean through the wood, and pictured J. J. inside, wriggling.
I stood there for a long time. Simply standing. A thing I hadn’t done in years, being willingly still. Eventually, I took J. J.’s heart from my pocket and placed it atop the casket. It rolled a little with the motion of the ship, then finally settled into a place near his feet. Time seemed to slow here as Icebreaker moved further south. Time alone with J. J. and memory.
“Missus Brennan.”
I jerked at the sound of Mr Plenty’s voice behind me. My eye fell to the clockwork heart atop the casket, thrown into shadow as Mr Plenty moved deeper into the room. I wanted to reach for it, but it was too late. He had seen.
“That is … remarkable.”
My eyes met Mr Plenty’s over the foot of the casket, walking stick in hand. J. J.’s heart seemed to wink as the gaslight fell over it again. The gears were still, but for a moment, they seemed to move again. Wishful thinking.
When Mr Plenty moved toward the heart, I lunged for it. My hand closed around it before his could, and I drew the heart firmly away, leaving a long scratch across the pine lid. I half expected Plenty to leap over the casket in an effort to claim it.
“A golden egg?” he asked. “A creation of yours?” His eyes narrowed. “Something Brennan was working on?” He took a step forward and I took one back, a strange and silent dance around the casket.
“I think you need to review the privacy laws, Mr Plenty.” My voice sounded much more steady than I felt. I shoved the heart into my pocket, aware of little bits of casket lid sprinkling out of it as I did so.
“An orphan invention?” Plenty asked. He stepped forward again, and I stepped back yet again, now on the far side of the casket. J. J. rested between me and Mr Plenty, a silent shield. The hatch lay beyond Plenty.
I found Plenty’s question curious, that he should liken the heart to a child. J. J. and I had been cautious lovers, neither one of us wanting to risk a pregnancy. Physicians could not tell us if a child born to us would be J. J.’s size or my own, but they could tell me that carrying a normal-sized child would likely place me in great peril. J. J. refused to risk me that way – even if he later parachuted with me out of Neil Lundwood’s zeppelin over Mount Kilimanjaro. “I’m holding your hand either way, Murrie,” he said, “but won’t let you risk that kind of death.” For J. J. Brennan, there was a good death and a bad death. Killed while leaping from a zeppelin was acceptable. Dying in a hospital, of all places one might choose, was frowned upon.
Still, I knew the shadow in his eye, for I saw it within my own each morning as I dressed. The longing for a child, for an heir to leave his fortunes to and the world besides. It was how I first came upon the mention of Doctor Varley. A small note in a medical journal I picked up at Tock’s Books, no more than three lines. A brief mention of reconfiguring the human body to withstand the Increasing Perils of the World in Which We Lived.
At the time, I had wondered. How might one be reconfigured? What might be possible? J. J. wondered, too.
Doctor Varley thought the idea a fascinating one. Might he reconfigure me into a normal-sized woman? But J. J. had grown ill before we could consider such things in depth, and Varley’s attentions turned toward a heart instead, that he might at least prolong J. J.’s life. The prototype was shown at the World’s Fair some years prior; the public gaped, the outcry was tremendous. Most did not want to hear of the frailty of human flesh.
“None of your concern,” I told Plenty, and moved again as he did. Around the foot of the casket now as Plenty rounded the head.
“An invention of Brennan’s that you mean to claim as your own?”
My eyes narrowed at the very idea. “You dare—”
But whatever insult I might have hurled at the reporter was cut short. Icebreaker, for lack of a better word, stopped. The waters around us seemed suddenly solid, and Mr Plenty and I were flung bodily to the floor. J. J.’s casket would have followed and landed atop us, but for Plenty’s walking stick coming up to jab the box in its side and keep it barely balanced. I stared at the casket in horror, paying little mind to the ache in my shoulder and hip as I scrambled back to my feet, to plant both hands against the casket and attempt to push it back onto the crates. Plenty’s efforts were met with more success than my own.
For a moment, all was quiet and then Icebreaker shuddered. I could then hear noise from above and outside both. Strange cracking sounds and a new vibration that made the floor feel like jelly under my feet.
“Another time then, Mrs Brennan,” Plenty murmured, and shuffled himself out of the room, vanishing down the length of the corridor with only the tap-tap-tap of his walking stick sounding in his wake.
Another time. He would not be far. My fingers tightened against the casket and I bent to press my lips against the pine.
“Missus.”
Cook was there then, and I simply looked at him, too shocked and confused to do much else. Cook nodded and moved forward, finding the necessary lines to secure the casket to the wall.
“What’s happening up there?” My voice was not at all steady, nor were my hands as they latched onto a line and helped tug it firm.
“Come see,” Cook said, and nodded me toward the hatch. “Captain woulda warned folk, but it came up on us quicker than he thought.”
Coats, goggles and gloves were retrieved before we reached the final hatch, and we stepped through bundled up. Breath fogged in the bright air. Though it was well past seven in the evening, daylight still reigned, and would so long as we were down here. Summer tipped the world in such a way, J. J. had told me, that the sun never set. The light was disconcerting, bouncing off the icebergs as it did, making them light and shadowed by turns.
As Cook and I came up, the deck was sliced with long shadows from that towering ice, while around us the sea seemed to have vanished. Swallowed by ice. Everywhere I looked, there was only ice. Cook tugged me toward the rail where Mr Plenty already lingered, and pointed.
Icebreaker’s prow was
doing its hard work. The grand metal dagger bit into the sea ice, shattering it and allowing the ship to pass through. Icebreaker groaned under the strain, yet still seemed to move without complication through the cleaved ice. I could see the angel and her tattered wings, crusted with ice that gleamed in the bright-but-cold sunlight. Could see, too, the cogs of her heart, turning.
If this were not enough wholly to capture my attention, the dark figures on the unbroken ice field ahead were. I squinted against the bright sun, but when that same sunlight caught one of the figures and illuminated the scarlet crest atop its head, my eyes flew wide open.
There were dozens of them and the ice beneath their massive clawed feet was bright with blood. Even now, some penguins tried to escape the slaughter, but the terrible lizards were faster than anything I’d seen before. One massive head bent to the ice, snatched a round penguin in its sharp jaws and devoured it the way Conor had his squid. Bite, bite, bite.
And then, they saw us. Perhaps they felt the vibration Icebreaker made as she churned through the ice. Perhaps they heard the increasing growl of the engine as more power was applied and steam bellowed into the cold, bright air. The lizards looked up, heads snapping around to stare at Icebreaker.
It seemed they waited a heartbeat and then surged. Cook and Plenty took a step backward with me and as the lizards streaked across the frozen landscape, my only thought was of Conor. Where was the boy?
“Captain!”
I screamed for Brown, even though he was nowhere to be seen, either. As the lizards scrambled ever closer, Icebreaker rammed something she could not break. I heard hollered curses rising for a moment above the whine of the straining engines, and then there was only the awful sound of the engines, trying to press the ship forward though she could not be budged.
Closer now, I could hear the lizards hissing and shrieking. To each other? Communication? J. J. would marvel, but the sounds sent more than a shiver through me, and I moved away, toward the starboard rail. I could hear their curled claws gaining purchase on the ice, like little picks – how swift they were, agile over the ice, bodies low and sleek, necks stretched out, nearly like birds in low flight!