They were frozen.
All these men would die frozen.
Celestine reeled in terror from face to face, but at every turn only more corpses greeted her; she rode on a ship manned entirely by the dead. Every single soul on the Bent Wing was going to die. It was a fact. It had been decided the moment the fleet had separated, and could not be altered now.
A wailing was escaping from her throat. Hands reached for her in concern, but she shrugged them aside. Lifting her own hands she saw them bent and coated in ice, the nails and fingertips worn down to bone. As dead as all the others.
Now she was screaming. Not words, she could find no words. Just screams. The crew had backed away from her in alarm, and someone was yelling at her angrily, but she couldn’t stop.
Her fingers – how had her fingers become so torn and broken? It wasn’t the ice that had done that, it was as if she had been digging in solid stone for something, wearing the flesh away –
Her head rocked. Someone was slapping her across the face, shouting.
She stopped screaming, stared. It was Commander Gabriel. Her friend. He was gazing at her wild-eyed, while behind him the crew gathered, muttering uneasily at her display.
‘Celestine!’ he demanded. ‘What in all the deeps is the matter with you?’
For a moment she couldn’t answer. Gabriel’s corpse face was frozen too, and somehow it was the worst. It wasn’t as ice-covered as the others, but its rigid expression was one of such frustration and bitterness that she knew he would die betrayed and thwarted and despairing.
‘You,’ she whispered, voice too sure to be her own; a vision voice. ‘You will be one of the last alive. And I with you. No rescue will come.’
Gabriel paused, taken aback, and Celestine turned to the waiting crew.
She said, ‘The Ice will eat us all.’
Then she fainted dead away.
THE WRECK OF THE BENT WING
PART TWO
In the midnight darkness – the months-long midnight darkness of winter in the arctic – Celestine of the Misthrown came awake to a distant cry from outside the hut. The sound was faint and all but drowned out by the drone of the storm – but it was a human cry nonetheless, a wail of loss and loneliness and despair, cut off even as Celestine opened her eyes.
She knew immediately what it meant; somewhere out in the dark a man was dying – indeed, was by now already dead.
In a hope she already knew to be vain she glanced about the hut, her eyes just above the blankets, peering through the slit between the scarf wrapped about her head and the collar of her jacket. But it was just as she had known it would be: she alone had heard the cry. The other sleepers were undisturbed, their shapes – barely visible in the glow from the stove – curled into frigid balls beneath their bedding: Commander Gabriel in one bunk, Lieutenant Holaz in another, and Lieutenant Manchez in a third. The remaining cots were empty, now that the captain and the others had sailed away.
Celestine listened for any further human sound from outside, but there was only the wind to be heard now, its constant moan and hum scaling maddeningly up and down across the same range of notes. No, the poor soul, whoever he had been, was gone. Nor was there any point in waking the sleepers, or venturing out to search in the darkness. She had learned that lesson long ago. They could search all they wanted, but not even the man’s body would be found. He had been snatched away to oblivion, like so many before him.
And the thing that had snatched him – the demon of the winter darkness – would be gone too, leaving no trace of itself.
Still her ears strained. The wind wailed on, monotonous, so eternal a sound there on the isle that it was rare to even notice it anymore. This storm alone had been blowing for seven days without let, and while it was the longest of the winter so far, there had been many others before it, gale after gale after gale. It was as if each winter became only worse than the one preceding it, year after year, four of them now, in this hellish place.
Celestine sighed, shifting her misshapen limbs and her bent spine beneath the blankets in a useless quest for comfort. There was nothing to be done, not about the lost man, not about the darkness, not about any of it. Her only recourse was to seek escape in the forgetfulness of sleep, like everyone else, until the winter should wear away, and spring arrive, and with it come the gradual easing of the gales and the slow return of light to the sky …
She froze, for now another sound did come.
It was not the wind, or a cry – it was a distant clatter, as if something wooden was being tossed over. A crate or a barrel maybe. The noise repeated, unmistakable, the splinter of wood on stone.
Celestine shrank away, staring at the far wall of the hut. Her mind’s eye was out in the storm-black night, in the endlessly battering wind. There was only one place such a sound could come from. Beyond the shacks and tents, and alongside the humped graveyard, lay the storage dump, where the crates and barrels that had once held the Bent Wing’s supplies of food were piled, all empty now and waiting to be burned in the stoves.
She heard it again, wood shattering. But that shouldn’t be. The barrels and crates were firmly lashed down, secure against the wind – the crew had been taught that much during their first winter on the isle.
Which could only mean that someone was out there, roaming the dump, engaged in deliberate destruction.
Someone …
Or something.
Celestine moaned softly to herself. It was not one of the crew out there. No crewman would venture out during a storm like this, into the howling darkness and deadly cold, just to wreak havoc among the crates. None of the survivors, starved and dying, had such strength to waste.
No, not one of the crew … it was the creature that hunted the crew, stealing men away by darkness.
The demon of the ice.
It was still in the camp! Never before, after luring its victim away into the void, had the unseen thing lingered in the vicinity. But for some reason tonight was different. Tonight, it was out there still.
Why? wondered Celestine in her fear. What did it want? Was it unsated? Did it seek yet another soul to add to its count?
As if the tally wasn’t already dreadful enough! Eleven men this winter, by her reckoning. And nine the winter before that, and three even earlier, during their very first winter shipwrecked. The demon’s appetite only grew more terrible, it seemed, as the crew dwindled.
Yet even worse, in a way, was the fact that only Celestine knew it was happening. Oh, the disappearances were noted – but everyone else assumed that the missing men had simply wandered off into the night out of despair or madness, to die in the ice. And amid all the other deaths in the camp – the everyday deaths of starvation and disease – what were twenty more? After all, of the Bent Wing’s original complement of over two hundred and fifty crew, only forty-eight skeletal survivors now remained, clinging to life.
Celestine alone could not explain away the disappearances so easily. She alone had heard the cries in the darkness, so terrified, so hopeless. Something was carrying the men away as they died, she was sure. She had never beheld the creature, so could describe neither its shape nor manner of being, but she believed in it all the same: the embodiment of winter, and of night and cold; a demon that worked the will of the great white north; a spectre that was both indictment and executioner to the crew of the Bent Wing, for the crime of daring to come to this dreadful place, where no man should ever intrude.
A new sound came, closer now.
It was a ripping, tearing noise, followed by the wild flap of canvas, blowing loose suddenly in the gale.
Terror awoke anew in Celestine. It was one of the tents. But that too should have been impossible. The tents were abandoned and had long since been allowed to collapse, weighed down with snow. Indeed, they were frozen solid into the ground. To make such a sound, the canvas would have to be torn free from the ice, an act of superhuman strength.
But there – the ripping and wild flapping came again,
as if a giant bird was taking wing in the darkness! It was the creature! It had come closer, into the main body of the camp. Closer to Celestine’s own hut.
Wake up, she willed the three sleeping officers. Wake up!
If only so they could hear the noises too, and prove that she was not mad, and that the thing was real, stalking out there in the dark.
For Celestine was still sane enough to doubt her own sanity. Starvation had afflicted her like everyone else, and she’d had her moments of fever and waking delirium. It was quite possible, she could not deny, that she was imagining the phantom even now, and always had imagined it, and that all those men who’d vanished really had merely wandered away.
But she could not be sure.
So – wake up, please!
But the three men slept on, and she dared not speak aloud to rouse them, lest the demon out there hear her too.
Silence again, above the wind.
Then – the worst sound of all.
From close by, just outside the hut, came the crackle of ice, sharp through the thrum of the storm. A distinctive noise. Much of the isle’s stony ground was bare of snow, swept clean by the constant gales, but every inch of rock was rimed with a thin, black frost – frost that cracked underfoot.
Especially if the tread was a heavy one.
Celestine listened in appalled fascination. The sound repeated. And again. Slow steps. Deliberate. Weighted.
She shrank further still into her bed. The thing was right outside the hut! The wind rose for a moment as if to greet it, lifting from a moan to a shriek, before falling away again. More steps came, passing along one wall, and then along the next, Celestine’s wide eyes following their progress helplessly. Now they passed directly by her bed against the rear wall, only inches away through the thin timbers, making her skin crawl, though she dared not move. The spectre paused, and her heart stopped – then the steps moved on. It was stalking a circle about the cabin. Slowly, purposely, as if determined to alert those inside to its presence with the sound of its icy footsteps.
What was it out there? What manner of apparition? It was an upright creature by the sound, walking on two legs, but the tread was too long, and too heavy, to be human. In Celestine’s mind it was purely inhuman. Taller than a man, stronger, and faceless in the dark …
It had circled the hut entire now, and had arrived at the door. There it stopped, and the wind roared again, then eased away. Wake up, she willed desperately of the sleepers around her, wake up! As if the mere fact of their consciousness would dispel the thing.
But the three men slumbered on.
The door creaked, pressing inwards.
It was latched, and firmly wedged to stop it knocking in the wind – but now a weight was pressed against it from the outside, and the timbers groaned as they bowed against the hinges. The pressure eased, and then returned, heavier than before, the wood groaning louder.
Celestine couldn’t breathe. It was going to come inside. It was coming for someone inside the cabin. Not her – of that she was sure, at least – but one of the officers, one of the heedlessly sleeping men. Maybe even Commander Gabriel. And no, she was not ready to lose dear Gabriel …
The groaning ceased. The door stood unyielding. Celestine dared a single intake of air to her starving lungs – then a thudding knock rattled the wood. Muffled, and yet immensely profound.
Once. Twice. A third time.
I have come.
It was a voice that was no voice. It whispered hollow, only in her mind. She shook her head witlessly. Go away. Take some other poor soul. But leave this hut alone, leave Gabriel alone.
He will be dead soon.
No. Not him. They would be lost without Gabriel.
All on this isle will be dead soon. Except for you.
No, it wasn’t real, it wasn’t real …
I will have a task for you then.
Celestine gave a choked cry of refusal – and in reply a furious hammering broke out, the brutal pounding of immense fists on the door. At the same time the wind rose to a thunder, and the timbers were shuddering, the wedges flying free, and then Celestine was screaming.
Now the others woke. Commander Gabriel was the first, flinging off his blankets to stare blearily at the juddering door, the blows continuing to rain upon it. Then Holaz and Manchez were sitting up bewildered in their cots. Gabriel, banishing sleep, lurched erect and crossed to the door, and even as Celestine cried out to warn him, No, he threw it back.
The wind screamed high, and freezing air blasted in through the opening – but beyond was only empty darkness.
There was nothing there.
Gabriel thrust his head out into the blackness for an instant, then withdrew it and slammed the door shut again.
‘How did this come loose?’ he demanded irritably of the others as he fastened the latch once more, then re-seated the wedges around the doorframe. ‘Was someone fool enough to go outside?’
Holaz and Manchez only shook their heads blankly. Gabriel looked to Celestine, but she, bathed in a cold sweat of relief, could only likewise plead ignorance. The wind. It had just been the wind, rising suddenly and catching the door in just the right way to unseat it.
And the other, earlier sounds? The tents ripping away, the crates falling? Had they too been caused only by the wind, by some unusual and powerful vortex whirling within the greater storm?
It was possible, yes …
The two lieutenants had already rolled over to return to sleep, and Commander Gabriel, his face skull-thin in the dimness, took a moment to feed the stove before he too climbed painfully back into his cot and wrapped himself in his blankets. Outside, the gale boomed loud again, shaking the whole hut, but the door held firm, and the gust passed.
But the cry in the darkness that had first woken her? And the silent voice in her mind? Had they too been illusions?
Of that Celestine was less sure.
She heaved a sigh at last. The incident was over, and now that the horror of it had passed, the starvation fatigue was claiming her once more. She dug herself back beneath her blankets, and slept.
When she awoke the storm had blown itself out and silence reigned over the isle. Unusually, besides her, the hut was empty; the others were up and abroad in the night. Celestine ventured warily outdoors and found men gathered here and there in the stillness, all staring at the sky – for the clouds were gone, and green curls of aurora were beginning to glow above the ice cliffs. It was the first natural light any of them had beheld in months.
Taking advantage of the illumination and the calm, Commander Gabriel now summoned a muster of the crew, and so the last sleepers were roused and all gathered in lines under the spectral sky to hear the roster called. Names were shouted and answered – but then came a name that was greeted first by silence, and then by the grim hardening of faces.
Celestine bowed her head. The missing man was a sailor named Erneste. She had not known him well; she remembered only a round face, once fat but now sagging with empty flesh, and a balding head. He had been sleeping with nine others in one of the barracks. None of his companions knew what had happened to him. He had simply vanished in the night.
‘Lost in storm,’ pronounced Gabriel, inscribing this on the roster, and Celestine knew there was no point in trying to argue otherwise.
Now they were only forty-seven.
But even as they all stood there, the aurora slowly flared to a new brightness in the sky, bathing the ice all about in a cold green light, and another result of the storm was revealed, a momentous one.
To the south, great ice floes had blocked the channel for the past three years, always packed into a solid, frowning mass. Now they had changed. Heaved and shoved about by the gale, they had cracked apart down the channel’s centre, opening a narrow crevice that extended south beyond view. Clear water glistened within, green in reflection of the sky.
Men ran tottering to the shore of the isle, crying aloud in feeble rasps of celebration and hope. At last, a
t last, the grip of the ice had relented. At last, the way south was opening again, the path back to the sea and to freedom. At last, escape might be possible, or rescue might come.
Celestine too stared in wonder, all thoughts of the winter demon banished. Open water! After three long years!
For the first time, she dared truly to believe it.
Against all fortune and expectation, her vision of four years past – the horrifying glimpse of the Bent Wing’s entire crew dead and frozen, herself included – might yet be proven wrong.
That vision had baffled her from the very beginning.
Celestine had always been able to predict death, of course. It was her one gift, and burden, as a scapegoat. But it had always been a gentle power, a hint of death only, a sad foreknowledge. The terror she beheld at the moment the Bent Wing separated from the other two ships of the Lord Designate’s fleet, and set out alone, was something far more immediate and brutal. A madness had come upon her, and she had fallen to the deck in a fit.
Of the rest of that day she remembered nothing. But she later learned that as the crew held back, watching her writhe upon the timbers, unnerved by their scapegoat’s display – such a terrible omen at the start of a voyage! – and as Captain Altona shouted at her in fury, it was Commander Gabriel who lifted her gently and took her away to her cabin, muttering soft words of comfort that she did not hear, lost as she was in her vision. And it was Gabriel who fed her sips of warm brandy until she passed from fevered seizure to the relaxation of proper sleep. But even then her dreams were haunted by ice-covered faces and blank frozen eyes and mouths filled with snow.
And yet, confusingly, when Celestine rose the next day and climbed fearfully to the main deck she found that the morning was bright and clear, that the Bent Wing was sailing north untroubled, and that there was no sign of icy death of any of the crew’s faces. Everyone from the captain down to the lowest seaman was quite normal and themselves again.
Treasures of the Deep Page 9