by Ian McGuire
“Over there,” he shouts out to the others, pointing off in different directions, “over there, and over there.”
The cabin boy stays behind to flense the dead seals, and the rest separate. Sumner walks east. Above the constant creak and whine of moving ice, he can hear the occasional crump of distant gunfire. He shoots two more seals and skins them as best he can. He makes eyelets in the skins with his knife, reeves a rope through the eyelets, ties them together, then starts back with the rope over his shoulder.
By noon, he has killed six more seals, and he is a mile from the whaleboat, dragging a hundred pounds of ragged sealskin across a succession of broad, loose ice floes. He is groggy with fatigue. His shoulders are raw and aching from the friction of the rope, and the freezing air is savage in his lungs. When he looks up, he sees Cavendish a hundred yards ahead and, farther off to the right, another man, darkly clad, walking in the same direction and also pulling skins. He calls out, but the wind whips away his voice and neither one stops or looks about. Sumner presses on, thinking, as he trudges, of the warmth and shelter of his cabin and of the five short-necked bottles of laudanum lined up in the medical chest like soldiers on parade. He takes twenty-one grains now every evening after supper. The others believe he is working on his Greek and mock him for it, but really, while they are playing cribbage or discussing the weather, he is lying on his bunk in a state of unstructured and barely describable bliss. At such times he can be anywhere and anyone. His mind slides back and forth through the mingled purlieus of time and space—Galway, Lucknow, Belfast, London, Bombay—a minute lasts an hour, and a decade flows past in barely an instant. Is the opium a lie, he sometimes wonders, or is it the world around us, the world of blood and anguish, tedium and care, that is a lie? He knows, if he knows nothing else, that they cannot both be true.
Arriving at a yard-wide gap between two floes, Sumner stops a moment. He tosses the end of the rope across to the other side, then takes a step backwards and readies himself to make the short leap. It is snowing now, and the snow fills the air all around and whips against his face and chest. It is better, he has learned from experience, to take off from his bad leg and land on his good one. He takes a short step forwards and then a bigger, quicker one. He bends his knee and pushes upwards, but his standing foot slips sideways on the ice: instead of jumping easily across he pitches forwards, clown-like and ludicrous—headforemost, arms spinning—into the black and icy waters.
For a long, bewildering moment, he is submerged and sightless. He thrashes himself upright, then flings one arm out and gains purchase on the ice’s edge. The ferocious drench of coldness has knocked all the breath from his body; he is gasping for air, and the blood is roaring in his ears. He grabs on with the other hand also and tries to heave himself out of the water, but can’t. The ice is too slippery, and his arms are too weak from the morning’s pulling. The water is up to his neck, and the snow is falling more heavily. He hears the ice around him creak and yawn as it shifts about in the low swell. If the floes move together he knows he will be crushed between them. If he stays too long in the water, he will likely lose consciousness and drown.
He retakes his grip and strains to pull himself up a second time. He dangles in motionless agony for a moment, neither fully in nor out, but both his hands slip off the ice and he crashes backwards. Seawater fills his mouth and nostrils; spitting and harrumphing, he kicks himself afloat. The downwards tug of his sodden clothes seems suddenly gigantic. His belly and groin have already begun to throb from the cold, and his feet and legs are going numb. Where the fuck is Cavendish? he thinks. Cavendish must have seen him fall. He calls out for help, then calls again, but no one appears. He is alone. The rope is within reach, but he knows the skins on the end of it are not heavy enough to bear his weight. He must pull himself up by his own power.
He grabs the edge of the ice for a third time and, kicking harder with both legs, tries to urge himself upwards. He hooks his right elbow up onto the surface, then his left palm. He digs the elbow in and, gasping and groaning with the ungodly effort, he forces himself farther up until, first his chin and neck, and then a small section of his upper chest, rise above the floe’s edge. He presses down again as hard as he can with his left hand, using his elbow as a pivot, and gains an extra inch or two. He believes for a brief moment that the balance is shifting in his favor and he is about to succeed, but as soon as he thinks this, the floe he is pressing on jolts sideways, his right elbow slips away, and his jaw slams down hard onto the sharp angle of the ice. For a brief moment, he gazes up at the white and harrowed sky, and then, dazed and helpless, he slumps backwards into the dark water and away.
CHAPTER SIX
Brownlee dreams he is drinking blood out of an old shoe. It is O’Neill’s blood, but O’Neill is dead now from the cold and from drinking seawater. They pass the shoe around, and each man, trembling, drinks from it in turn. The blood is warm and stains their lips and teeth like wine. What the fuck, Brownlee thinks, what the fuck? A man has to live, another hour, another minute even. What else is there to do? There are casks of bread floating in the hold, he knows, barrels of beer also, but no one has the strength or cunning to reach them. If they had had more time—but in the darkness it was pandemonium. Twelve feet of water in the hold and in a quarter of an hour they were over with nothing but the starboard bow left showing above the rampant waves. O’Neill is dead but his blood is still warm, the last man licks at the insole, rubs his fingers round the inner heel. The color is startling. Everything else in the world is gray or black or brown but not the blood. It is a godsend, Brownlee thinks. He says it out loud: “It is a godsend.” The men look at him. He turns to the surgeon and gives his instructions. He feels O’Neill’s blood in his throat and in his stomach, spreading through him, giving him new life. The surgeon bleeds them all, and then the surgeon bleeds himself. Some men mix their own blood with flour to make a paste, others guzzle it down like drunkards straight from the shoe. It is not a sin, he tells himself, there is no sin left now, there is only the blood and the water and the ice; there is only life and death and the gray-green spaces in between. He will not die, he tells himself, not now, not ever. When he is thirsty, he will drink his own blood; when he is hungry, he will eat his own flesh. He will grow enormous from the feasting, he will expand to fill the empty sky.
CHAPTER SEVEN
When Black finds Sumner, he looks dead already. His body is wedged into the narrow crack between two ice floes; his head and shoulders are above the water, but everything else is below. His face is bone white apart from the lips, which are a dark, unnatural blue. Is he even breathing? Black leans down to check, but he can’t tell—the wind is too loud, and all around the ice is screeching and grating in the swell. Everything about the surgeon appears frozen up and solid. Black takes his sealing rope and secures it around Sumner’s chest. He doubts that he can pull him out on his own, but he tries anyway. He yanks him sideways first to dislodge him from the crevice, then, setting his heels in the snow, hauls upwards with all his might. Sumner’s stiff and motionless body rises with remarkable ease, as though the sea has decided it doesn’t want him after all. Black drops the rope and lunges forwards, grabbing the sodden epaulettes of Sumner’s greatcoat and pulling the rest of him onto the surface of the ice. He turns him over and slaps him twice across the face. Sumner doesn’t respond. Black hits him harder still. One eyelid flickers open.
“Dear God, you’re alive,” Black says.
He fires his rifle in the air twice. After ten minutes, Otto arrives with two other men from the search party. The four men take a limb each and carry him back to the ship as fast as they are able. His wet clothes have frozen solid in the arctic air, and it is more like carrying a heavy piece of furniture across the ice than a human being. When they get to the ship, Sumner is lifted aboard with a block and tackle and laid out on the deck. Brownlee looks down at him.
“Is the poor cunt even breathing?” he says.
Black nods. Brownlee
shakes his head in wonderment.
They carry him down the hatchway into the wardroom and cut off his frozen clothes with shears. Black puts more coal in the stove and tells the cook to boil water. They rub his icy skin with goose fat and wrap him in scalding towels. He doesn’t move or speak; he is still alive but comatose. Black remains by his side; the others come in occasionally to stare or offer advice. Around midnight, his eyes flicker briefly open, and they give him brandy, which he coughs up along with a smear of dark brown blood. No one expects him to live through the night. At dawn, when they find he is still breathing, they move him out of the wardroom and into his own cabin.
When he comes to, Sumner assumes for a moment that he is back in India, that he is lying in his humid hill-tent on the ridge above Delhi and the sounds of ice blocks crashing against the keel of the Volunteer are actually the sounds of heavy ordnance being traded back and forth between the bastions and the pickets. It feels for a moment as if nothing terrible or irrevocable has yet happened to him, as if he has been given, incredibly, a second chance. He closes his eyes and falls asleep again. When he opens them an hour later, he sees Black standing by his bed looking down.
“Can you speak?” Black asks him.
Sumner looks back at him for a moment, then shakes his head. Black helps him up into a sitting position and commences to feed him bouillon from a teacup. The taste and heat of the bouillon are overpowering. After two spoonfuls of it, Sumner closes his mouth and lets the liquid dribble over his chin and down onto his chest.
“By rights you should be dead,” Black tells him. “You were in that water for three fucking hours. No normal man survives a dunk like that.”
The tip of Sumner’s nose and sections of both cheeks just below the eyes are black with frostbite. Sumner doesn’t remember the ice or the cold or the ghoulish green water, but he does remember looking up, before whatever happened to him happened, and seeing the sky above him crammed with a billion snowflakes.
“Laudanum,” he says.
He looks hopefully across at Black.
“Are you trying to say something?” Black asks, tipping his head closer in.
“Laudanum,” Sumner says again, “for the pain.”
Black nods and goes into the medicine chest. He mixes the laudanum with rum and helps him drink it. It burns Sumner’s throat, and he thinks for a moment he will vomit it up, but manages not to. He is exhausted by the effort of speaking and doesn’t know (since he is definitely not in India) where or who he is. He shudders violently and starts to weep. Black lowers him back down onto the bunk and covers him over with a coarse wool blanket.
In the wardroom that evening, over supper, Black reports that the surgeon is showing signs of improvement.
“Very good,” Brownlee says, “but there will be no more sixth boat from now on. I don’t wish another fucker’s death to trouble my conscience.”
“Just bad luck, that’s all,” Cavendish says offishly. “A man slides off the ice in a snowstorm, could happen to any of us.”
“Ask me, it worked out well for him,” Drax says. “The fucker should rightly have been crushed or drowned. After ten minutes in that kind of water, a man’s blood gets claggy and his heart gives out, but the surgeon’s still alive somehow. He’s fucking blessed.”
“Blessed?” Black says.
Brownlee holds up his hand.
“Blessed or not,” he says, “I say there will be no more sixth boat. And while we mariners are busy hunting fish, the surgeon will remain safe in his cabin reading his Homer or pulling on his pizzle, or whatever the fuck it is he does in there.”
Cavendish rolls his eyes.
“Easy enough for some bastards,” he says.
Brownlee glares at him.
“The surgeon has his job on this ship, Cavendish, and you have yours. And let that be the fucking end of it.”
Drax and Cavendish meet again at midnight, when the watch changes. Cavendish pulls the harpooner to one side and glances around before speaking.
“He may yet die, you know,” he says. “Have you seen the way he looks?”
“He looks to me like a cunt who’s difficult to finish off,” Drax says.
“He’s a leathery fucker, that’s for sure.”
“You should have popped a ball into him when you had the chance.”
Cavendish shakes his head and waits for one of the Shetlanders to pass them by.
“That would never have flown,” he says. “Brownlee’s fucking sweet on him, and so is Black.”
Drax looks away as he lights his pipe. The sky above them is alive with jiggling stars; a layer of blue-black ice clings to the rigging and coats the deck.
“How much do you think that ring is worth anyway?” Cavendish says. “I’m thinking twenty guineas, even twenty-five.”
Drax shakes his head and sniffs, as if the very question is beneath him.
“It’s not your ring,” he says.
“And it’s not Sumner’s either. I’d say it belongs to whichever cunt has his hands on it at the time.”
Drax turns back to Cavendish and nods.
“That’s about the way it is,” he says.
* * *
In the darkened cabin, swaddled beneath a thick pile of bear hides and blankets, Sumner, feverish and as weak as a newborn, sleeps, wakes, then sleeps again. As the ship sails north and west through fog and drizzle, under a heavy swell with two feet of ice cladding the hull, and the men chipping it off the deck and gunwales with marlin spikes and mallets, Sumner’s opiated mind slips its moorings and drifts backwards, sideways, through fluid dreamscapes as fearsome and as thick with unnameable life as the green arctic waters which press and crash only twelve wooden inches from his head. He could be anywhere at any time, but his thoughts, like iron rushing to a magnet, return to one place only:
A large yellow building beyond the racquet court, the astonishing noise and the slaughterhouse stench of meat and excrement, like a scene out of hell. Thirty or more doolies arriving every hour carrying in, three or four at a time, the dead and the wounded. Young men’s mangled and exploded corpses tossed into a miasmic outbuilding. The flailing of the wounded and the screams of the dying. Amputated limbs clattering into metal troughs. The incessant sound, as in a workshop or a sawmill, of steel gnawing through bone. The floor wet and sticky with spilled blood, the unstoppable heat, the thud and shake of artillery fire, and the clouds of black flies settling everywhere, on everything, without pause or discrimination—in eyes and ears and mouths, in open wounds. The incredible filth of it all, the howls and the pleading, the blood and shit, and the endless, endless pain.
Sumner works all morning, probing, sawing, suturing, until he is light-headed from the chloroform and nauseous from the generalized butchery. It is far worse than anything he has ever known or imagined. Men who, hours before, he saw boasting and laughing on the ridge are brought to him in pieces. He must do his duty, he tells himself, he must labor diligently. That is all that is possible now, all that any man could do. Like him, the other assistant surgeons—Wilkie and O’Dowd—are drenched with sweat and sunk in blood up to their elbows. As soon as one surgery is over, another one begins. Price, the orderly, checks the doolies as they arrive, discards the already dead, and moves the maimed to a place in the queue. Corbyn, the staff surgeon, decides which limbs must be amputated immediately and which might be saved. He was with the Coldstream Guards at Inkerman, a rifle in one hand, a scalpel in the other, two thousand dead in ten hours. He has specks of blood in his mustaches. He chews arrowroot against the stench. This is nothing, he tells the others; this is small fucking beer. They slice and saw and probe for musket balls. They sweat and curse and feel like vomiting from the heat. The wounded men scream constantly for water, but there is never enough to slake their thirst. Their thirst is obscene, their needs are intolerable, but Sumner must bear them anyway, he must continue doing what he does for as long as he is able. He has no time for anger or disgust or fear, no time or energy for anyth
ing but the work itself.
By late afternoon, three or four o’clock, the fighting slows and the flow of casualties diminishes at first, then stops completely. Rumor has it that the British troops have stumbled upon a great store of liquor near the Lahore Gate and have drunk themselves into a communal stupor. Whatever the reason, the advance is halted, at least for now, and for the first time in many hours Corbyn and his assistants are able to break from their labors. Baskets of food and carboys of water are brought in, and a number of the wounded are moved back to their regimental hospitals up on the ridge. Sumner, after washing the blood off himself and eating a plate of bread and cold meat, lies down on a charpoy and falls asleep. He is woken by the sounds of fierce argument. A turbaned man has appeared at the door of the field hospital carrying a wounded child; he is asking for assistance, and O’Dowd and Wilkie are loudly refusing.
“Get him out of here,” Wilkie says, “before I put a ball in him myself.”
O’Dowd picks up a saber from the corner of the room and makes a show of unsheathing it. The man doesn’t move. Corbyn comes over and tells O’Dowd to settle down. He examines the child briefly and shakes his head.
“The wound is too severe,” he says. “The bone is shattered. He can’t live long.”