The Rope Eater

by Ben Jones

  In the afternoon of the third day (Griffin insisted the hours be called, though there was now no change in the darkness—except perhaps the faintest graying of the black at noon), the regular groaning and grinding resumed, and we could hear the metal sheeting squeal under the water. With immense slowness, the deck began heeling to starboard and tilting forward. The dogs whined and scrambled over each other to keep their place. Adney shouted down the hatch to rouse the men and we gathered by the deckhouse as the entire ship rose and canted. Ten degrees, then fifteen. At twenty, Griffin ordered us to lower the boats. Creely stumbled on numbed feet and clung to Reinhold to keep from falling. At about twenty degrees, the heeling stopped and the ice fell silent once more. We stood at the ropes, waiting to drop into the channel, waiting to hear the crack that signaled the end of the Narthex, but it did not come.

  Gradually we relaxed and moved out to inspect the ship. Adney called up from the hold.

  “The water’s draining out the bottom; the hold’s almost dry.”

  We gave a ragged cheer. Ash ordered a pot of tar and set about mounting the stove to burn level. Creely staggered below and took his first real rest since the leaking began. Pago and Reinhold manned the pump and we cheered as we heard the sucking sound that meant the end of the water.

  We coated the walls and floor of the hold with strips of sailcloth and bound them with the tar. Ash expressed some doubt about whether they would hold, but it was the best we could do. Then he rigged an insulating jacket for the pump, fed by a kettle, which kept it from freezing and needed only to be stoked. The ship’s routine returned to some semblance of normal, albeit at a funhouse slant.

  The only lasting change was Creely’s condition. His fingers blistered from the frost and chafing brought on by the prolonged exposure to seawater until they looked like overripe bananas, the skin peeling off in strips. His feet swelled also, though he told no one about them; the doctor discovered them when he tried to help him with his boots and found that he had to cut them off. Creely’s feet were puckered from the dampness and greenish white in color, with black patches where the skin had died. Three of his toes came off in his socks. Despite constant and careful ministrations from Dr. Architeuthis, Creely’s skin peeled away in long sheets reaching almost to his knee. True to form, he insisted that his injuries were not so debilitating, and had to be restrained from rising to take his watch.

  The doctor dismissed me from my work with him, preferring to make the endless rounds himself, and remaining below for long periods in the laboratory. We saw little of West also during this time, except when we were called to the boats. We heard only the Pianola moaning up through the deck.

  The pressure on the bow continued to be very worrisome. We would bolt upright in our bunks at the sound of a rivet firing out of its socket like a bullet; the planks in the hold bent and twisted, and even the mighty king post, which divided our portion of the ship from the officers’, seemed to be warping. Ash did what he could to repair the damage that we could find, but often we were unable to trace the sound of splintering to a beam or board, or to find a missing rivet where we had heard them shooting out for hours. Even those places we could find to repair, we were often unable to; frozen beams that are oozing sap do not readily take new screws. We added braces where we could until the entire hold was a maze of crisscrossing trusses and stanchions.

  The wailing of the Narthex under pressure was a trial for us all; each new set of sounds, we felt, was surely death throes. The unceasing noise of the ice abraded all our nerves and kept us from sleep despite our exhaustion. We filed silently past each other with the ghastly faces of insomniacs, and lay in dreading silence in our bunks as the Narthex was slowly dismembered around us.

  The temperature for the end of November and the start of December fell to an extraordinary mean of minus forty-nine degrees. Outside of a heated cabin, it struck like a sledgehammer. Our breath crackled in the air like firecrackers as it froze. Any brush of bare skin against metal was agonizing. The wind, when it rose, sought out every chink in our patchwork clothing, separated every seam, tugged and tore at our gloves and hats. Inside the cabin, the stove, when fully stoked, kept the air above freezing if you lay close; against the walls, ice formed rapidly from our breathing and soon grew to be several inches thick. There was no respite from it. Even those who lay close to the stove found themselves first drenched as the frost on the outer layers of their clothing melted; then it refroze. Given the choice between sodden and chilled or dry and frozen, some opted for the latter, believing that the frost had insulating qualities that kept them warmer.

  Griffin kept us working at a tremendous pace; in addition to the repairs, he had us mending the rigging, though there was no way we were sailing for months, and building shelters on the deck for the dogs. He had planned, when the time came for us to overwinter, to bury the ship in the snow and thus to insulate it. In our present circumstances, we had no snow and no safe harbor, so he kept us ready to sail. We arose every morning to clear the decks and rigging of ice, then cleared them again before lunch, and again before dinner. He drove us like cattle to our tasks, refusing to hear our complaints or excuse us from our duties; he brooked no criticism, heard no reason. It was as if he believed that our suffering could push the ice away, could keep us afloat, and so the more it squeezed, the more he drove us.

  Under the lash of Griffin’s tongue and the nervous exhaustion brought on by the noise of the ship and the looming walls of ice, we began to bicker. I retreated for the calm of Aziz’s boiler room when I could, if only to avoid the others and share a cup of tea. On deck, men blamed others for imaginary offenses, criticized their work or their sloth, quarreled about their food, their bunks, the sound of their footsteps, the irregularity of their breathing.

  It is in each to trace out the history from origin and circumstance, the buffetings of fate and choice, the blindnesses and visions that brought us separately together in that dark and freezing ship. For some, like Creely, it was the next step in a pattern of years of hardship; for others, myself, blind mischance, a leap gone awry, the reaching after a dream that was mired in ice and darkness. With an abler head, I would have noticed that these men, like me, had no clothing, had accumulated no wealth; that, though older, they had no firmer footing in the world than I, wrapped in the same patchwork of scraps, prey to the same mix of unrevealed mystery and vague hopes in the plotting of strangers—I should have judged them criminals or incompetents, fools, ill, insane, a little of each.

  Men divided themselves into camps and used every moment to complain about the members of the others. Pago, Ash, and Preston made up one; Reinhold, Adney, and Hunt another. I spent what time I could down in the hold with Aziz. He was not allowed to fire the boilers, but he had a small stove and his cabin was less cold than the others.

  No songs rolled up in fogs as we worked, no hands joined in without being ordered to do so. With Hume dead and Creely down, Griffin strove to be everywhere at once, castigated each in every moment. Each group drifted within different sets of expectations and assumptions, anchored only by the incessant demands of the captain. If we did not despise each other so fiercely, we would surely have mutinied.

  At the same time, the extraordinary strength that had come in the light began to fade; where we had been lean, we became gaunt; where vigorous, listless; paralyzed as we were by the ice, our sense of our great capabilities withered until it was all we could muster, with a blast of venomous cursing from Griffin, to straggle from our beds.

  My body shrank within my clothes until I had to lash them on with ropes. Old wounds returned to me now, old scars opened, old bruises and sprains received at half-remembered times came welling up, marked my skin, and suppurated, a dream history of all of my scarrings and woundings, all my weaknesses, as if my body were composed of poisons that traced out ghostly tunnels in what remained of my healthy flesh, undermining what little strength I had. My heart, its demonic strength banked by these poisonous floods, pushed them forth into
my extremities; my fingers blistered and burst with pus; my skin turned blue and black where it was not a cadaverous white; it was as thin as paper; my gums bled, and my teeth sat loosely in their sockets. My stomach, formerly so pleased with my food, roiled and rioted, and my bowels ran.

  We were then a population of loss—lost to each other, to our work, to our purpose. The questions that had compelled us thus far—what was to come, what glory, what destiny, what wonder, what money even?—these dropped away, and we were left with a ceaseless round of small hungers and melancholic lusts. The food did not satisfy, yet we demanded more, begrudged it of our companions—our enemies—ate our fill, and hoarded the rest to eat without satisfaction later. Sleep, too, did not bring rest but dreams of small irritations—we dreamt even of cold—yet Griffin had to pull us forcefully from our bunks. We measured our lives in raisins, in the uneven lumps of biscuits, strings of fat, scraps of fur; in our lethargy, we had only the energy to covet and loathe. We rose mechanically to our duties, to black walls of ice and frigid, squally snows. Pago and Creely complained of pain in their joints and crushing headaches; we suspected them of malingering. Biting into a biscuit at dinner, Adney pulled free a tooth in a gush of blood. He reported to Dr. Architeuthis, who diagnosed scurvy in all three and ordered us on scurvy rations: stew of scurvy grass and plates of sauerkraut, lime juice, and raw potatoes. Such was the state of our spirits that some believed—myself in that number—that none of them were actually sick, but had contrived the entire spectacle, first the joint pain and headaches, then the hoax of the tooth, in order to deprive us of our hoosh and cocoa. With each spoonful of soggy sauerkraut and the bitter grass stew, each gnaw of potato, we grew to detest them more and more—if it was not intentional, then they were weak, and making the rest of us suffer for it. We had sunk so low that we did not hope for change but merely endured, merely rose to face each day. We had months to wait in the darkness before the sun returned.

  twelve

  Jawoke, panicked, and cast about me for a mooring. Alien piles and boxes surrounded me, distorted by the weak light of a lantern. My heart raced and I cried out as I jerked my head up. I looked blankly at a tiny room, and the hunched form of a man, his face turned grinning to me. My nose stung with the metallic smell of burned coal; I clutched a thin blanket. But then the seep of cold, deep cold, asserted itself in me, brought me back to myself, to my senses, to the ship and the ice and our lost mooring in it.

  Aziz leaned toward me, a smile playing over his lips.

  “We’re here,” he said, “unfortunately.” He handed me a cup of steaming tea and resettled against a pile of bags, drawing them up around himself for warmth. He watched my face with amusement as I found my way back. The sharp sweet bite of tea cleared my head and I smiled ruefully.

  “Slept well?” he asked.

  I nodded. “A little too well, I guess. Forgot I was here.”

  He turned to me intently, still smiling. “It is odd to think that we have ended up here together,” he said, “locked in this dank, freezing ship a thousand miles from anywhere. Each of us, each step to another.”

  “How did you end up here?” I asked. “You’ve never told me.”

  “This place is as good as any other,” he said.

  “Other than the freezing cold, the starvation rations, and the distinct possibility we’ll all die.”

  He laughed.

  “Honestly. Did you stumble into it like I did? How did you come to translate the journal?”

  He looked off into the lantern for a while, and when he turned back to me his eyes were bright and eager.

  “I was born in a small village, high in a mountain range at the edge of a vast black desert. The people of the village, my people (though I shudder to think of them as such) had lived in this village for generations. Long before I was born, we had lived in the valley below, on fertile land by a river. But we were pushed out by another people, up the mountain and into the black sands of the desert. The valley people regarded us as animals, and saw it as their duty to purge the land of us. They began by taking from us, stealing, and daring us to respond; then they threatened us, and finally they simply herded us like animals up into this wasteland and forced us to scrabble out our living among the rocks and sand. They retreated to the valley and destroyed the passage up. They told their children that we were beast men, demons, that we had been spawned by the desert, that we would kidnap them and devour them in our desert caves if they ever left the valley.

  “Life was extremely difficult for us, because little would grow in the thin, dry soil of the mountains; the wind howled out from the desert and stripped our fields of what little we had cultivated. Plants baked and shriveled without bearing fruit under the heat of the desert sun. The few animals we brought with us did not survive—cows tumbled off the cliffs or wandered into the desert; horses went mad in the blinding sandstorms; both gradually weakened on the sparse forage, gave no milk, did no work, and finally starved to death. Our chickens, searching for food, filled themselves with gravel and eventually suffocated, their full gullets choking off their throats. We were forced to range very far along the ridge of the mountains to find mountain goats, and to subsist on foul stews made from lichen and moss.

  “The desert was especially malicious. Its wells would rise up only to disappear, or turn foul overnight no matter how carefully we tended them. We spent days on end searching for new water, digging huge pits in hopes of finding some. Water was hoarded and guarded jealously.

  “The black sand of the desert seeped in everywhere, under doors and through windows, into water and food, ears, noses, mouths; it invaded our bodies, flooded and filled us. The grind of sand in our teeth and its arid taste became, to us, as the air. The grimness of our lives brought forth an answering grimness in us: we became petty and violent, savage, greedy, thoughtless, bitter—poor thieves of nothing.

  “After a while the traders ceased to come because we had nothing to trade and the route in was very dangerous; our tools became broken and makeshift. Metal became scarce and we resorted to bone and wood. Starvation moved through us, withering a face, swelling a belly, drawing away a child, a neighbor, a family blown into dust.

  “We passed a dark time before we learned to find the wells as they shifted, and to drink the brackish water, to catch and milk the goats, and to cultivate what frail plants we could. We scraped the lichen to make the foul stews, and so we learned to cling to life on the plateau.

  “One day strangers came into the village along an unknown route. We met them with fear, revulsion, and greed, and I am sure, but for the weakness of our men, we would have killed them on the spot. They treated us with kindness—gave us chickens to eat, a luxury which we had all but forgotten. The strangers waited and watched in silence until we had eaten all of their chickens, and every person in the village was drowsing over their full stomachs. They explained that they worked for the circus and that they were looking for children to join them. They spoke about the beauty and excitement of the circus, of the spectacle of lights and music, the cheering of the crowds. They talked about always traveling, always seeing new towns and cities, new wonders, always being admired and treated like royalty. They described huge banquets thrown in their honor, of fantastical, succulent dishes brought on silver trays. They did not need to tempt us with wealth—for us, food was sufficient, and they knew it. We were bewildered at first; we had forgotten that there was a life in the valleys, that there was a world that was not the desert and the shifting wells, the black sand, and the bone tools. We listened to the stories of the circus men, dazzled, and rushed to offer our children. The men selected five and vanished into the mountains.

  “In two years time they returned full of stories about our children’s success, about the lives of extravagance and splendor they led, about visiting with kings and princes. They said that our children had responded so well to the training that they had achieved great renown. Their parents swelled with pride, and others rushed to offer their children
to the circus men. The parents of the original group begged the men to bring the children back with them the next time so that they could see for themselves, and hear the stories from their lips. The traders promised not for that year, but for the following year, as the circus would be touring in the north then, and they could come without missing too much.

  “And so the traders returned with three of the children on horseback. The villagers rushed to greet them, but recoiled in horror. The children had become terribly deformed: one had both eyes on one side of his head and the mouth on the other; another had no jaw and a long, flickering tongue; the third had no arms, but could bend his legs as if they were rubber and use his toes with marvelous dexterity. The traders had done their work well; the children were not merely mutilated but changed more profoundly, more horribly, for you could see in their deformities the awful persistence of the body to adapt, to be distorted and still to grow, to press into the world despite its wounding weight, despite its confinements, its scarrings.

  “The children waited silently on their horses while the men spoke to their horrified parents. They seemed otherwise strong and healthy, and undisturbed by the alterations in their bodies. These were still their children, the circus men said insistently, externally different but internally the same, the same children they had loved and allowed to leave.

  “The circus had given the children a chance to see the world, to live a life that none of them had ever dreamed of. There had been a cost, but had it been so much? Ask the children, they said, and see if you have chosen wrongly.

  “Gradually the parents crept forward again, reached out tentatively, looked into the bright eyes of their children. After long quiet moments, they burst into tears and embraced their changeling children, and the children burst into tears.