The North Water

by Ian McGuire

  The sun, which never fully set, is beginning to rise again. The ship’s distended shadow spills across the larboard ice. To north and south, the purple tips of distant mountains gleam. Cavendish takes his hat off, scratches his head, and looks over at the men still working on the floe. They are building tents from spars, poles, and stun-sail booms. They are kindling fires on iron cressets.

  “If she don’t sink now, I can always sink her later.”

  Drax nods.

  “True,” he says. “But that won’t look half so good. You built a fucking ice dock.”

  Cavendish smiles.

  “It was a rare stroke of luck the way it broke like that. Don’t happen too often, does it?”

  “No, it don’t. And it appears you’re good and safe here on the fast ice too. Campbell can warp back easy if a lead opens up. With a bit of luck, you won’t need to walk more than a mile or two to get to him. And the rest of them think she’s stoved in already, I expect. They won’t be making any trouble.”

  Cavendish nods.

  “She won’t survive this one,” he says. “She can’t.”

  “She will if you let her, but if you knocked a plank or two out of her arse, she surely wouldn’t. Give me ten minutes down there with an ax, that’s all. Why fuck about?”

  Cavendish sneers.

  “You kill Brownlee with a walking stick, and you honestly think I’m going to gift you a fucking ax?”

  “If you don’t believe me, go look down there for yourself,” he says. “See if I’m lying.”

  Cavendish licks his lips and paces round the deck awhile. The wind has slackened off but the dawn air is stiff and cold around them. Out on the floe men are shouting, and the ship beneath is keeping up its ghoulish groans.

  “Why kill the boy?” Cavendish says to him. “Why kill Joseph Hannah? What’s the benefit in that?”

  “A man don’t always think on the benefits.”

  “So what does he think on?”

  Drax shrugs.

  “I do as I must. Int a great deal of cogitation involved.”

  Cavendish shakes his head, curses abominably, and peers up at the paling sky above. After some moments of silence he walks to the gunwale and calls down to a cabin boy to bring him a lantern and an ax. The two men descend to the tween decks and then, with Drax leading the way, down into the forehold. The air is dank and frigid; the lantern’s yellow light illuminates a stanchion, the hold beams, the ribbed surface of the stacked casks.

  “Dry as a fucking bone,” Drax says.

  “Raise some of them casks up over there,” Cavendish tells him. “I can hear water leaking in, I swear it.”

  “Nowt but a dribble,” Drax says. He squats and heaves up a cask and then another one. The two men lean in and peer downwards at the dark curving of the hull. Water is spraying through a breach where the timbers have separated and the caulking has dropped away, but there is no sign of serious damage.

  “Fuck,” Cavendish whispers. “Fuck. How can that be?”

  “Like I told it,” Drax says. “She bent a good deal, but she didn’t ever break.”

  Cavendish puts down the lantern and the ax, and the two of them together begin moving away more casks until they are standing on the bottommost tier and most of the timbers on the starboard bow are exposed.

  “She won’t sink unless you make her do it, Michael,” Drax says. “That’s how it is.”

  Cavendish shakes his head and reaches for the ax.

  “Nothing’s fucking simple in this world,” he says.

  Drax steps back to give him room to swing. Cavendish pauses and turns to look at him.

  “This don’t put me under any obligation,” he says. “I can’t free you now. Not after Brownlee. A cabin boy is one thing, a cabin boy is plenty bad enough, but not the fucking captain.”

  “And I int asking for it,” Drax says. “I wouldn’t presume.”

  “Then what?”

  Drax shrugs, sniffs, and gathers himself.

  “If the time ever comes,” he says slowly, “all I ask is you don’t hinder me, don’t stand athwart. Allow events to take their natural course.”

  Cavendish nods.

  “I turn the blind eye,” he says. “That’s what you’re asking.”

  “The time may never come. I may hang in England for what I done and rightly so.”

  “But if it ever does come.”

  “Aye, if it ever does.”

  “And what about my fucking nose?” Cavendish says, pointing.

  Drax smiles.

  “You were never no Adonis, Michael,” he says. “I ’spect some would call that an improvement.”

  “You have some fair-sized fucking balls, to say that to a man hefting an ax.”

  “Like a fine big pair of tatties,” Drax confirms lightly, “and I’ll even let you stroke ’em if you like.”

  For a moment, they hold each other’s gaze, and then Cavendish turns away in disgust, swings the ax, and lets its ground steel edge bite down hard into the ship’s already dampened timbers eight, nine, ten times, until the doubled planking creaks, swells, and begins to splinter inwards.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Within two hours, the ship has pitched forwards so far that its bowsprit is lying flat against the ice and the foremast has snapped clean in two. Cavendish sends Black aboard with a team of men to salvage the booms, spars, and rigging and cut down the other masts before they break off also. De-masted and with only its stern poking above the piled-up ice around it, the ship appears rumpish and ludicrous, an emasculated mockery of what it was, and Sumner wonders how he could ever have believed such a fragile conglomeration of wood, nails, and rope could protect or keep him safe.

  The Hastings, their means of escape, is four miles to the east, moored to the edge of the land floe. Cavendish fills a small canvas knapsack with biscuits, tobacco, and rum, shoulders it, and sets off walking across the ice. He comes back several hours later looking drained and footsore but well satisfied and announces that they have been offered refuge and hospitality by Captain Campbell and should begin transferring men and supplies without delay. They will work in three gangs of twelve, he explains, using the whaleboats as sledges. The first two gangs, one led by Black and the other by Jones-the-whale, will leave immediately, while the third will stay by the wreck until they return.

  Sumner spends the afternoon asleep on a mattress in one of the jury-rigged tents covered over with rugs and a blanket. When he wakes, he sees that Drax is sitting close by, guarded by the blacksmith, with his wrists manacled together and each leg chained to a triple sheave block. Sumner has not seen Drax since the murderous assault in Brownlee’s cabin and is surprised by the immediacy and force of his revulsion.

  “Don’t be afeared, Doctor,” Drax calls to him. “I int about to do anything too desperate with these wooden baubles dangling off me.”

  Sumner pushes back the rugs and blanket, gets to his feet, and walks over.

  “How’s your arm?” he asks him.

  “And which arm would that be?”

  “The right one, the one that had Joseph Hannah’s tooth embedded in it.”

  Drax dismisses the question with a shake of the head.

  “Just a nick,” he says. “I’m a quick healer. But, you know, how that tooth got in there is still beyond me. I can’t explain it at all.”

  “So you have no remorse for your actions? No guilt for what you’ve done?”

  Drax’s mouth lolls half open; he wrinkles up his nose and sniffs.

  “Did you think I was going to murder you down in the cabin?” he asks. “Split open your skull like I did Brownlee. Is that what you were thinking?”

  “What else were you intending?”

  “Oh, I don’t intend too much. I’m a doer, not a thinker, me. I follow my inclination.”

  “You have no conscience then?”

  “One thing happens, then another comes after it. Why is the first thing more important than the second? Why is the second more impo
rtant than the third? Tell me that.”

  “Because each action is separate and distinct; some are good and some are evil.”

  Drax sniffs again and scratches himself.

  “Them’s just words. If they hang me, they will hang me ’cause they can, and ’cause they wish to do it. They will be following their own inclination as I follow mine.”

  “You recognize no authority at all then, no right or wrong beyond yourself?”

  Drax shrugs and bares his upper teeth in something like a grin.

  “Men like you ask such questions to satisfy themselves,” he says. “To make them feel cleverer or cleaner than the rest. But they int.”

  “You truly believe we are all like you? How is that possible? Am I a murderer like you are? Is that what you accuse me of?”

  “I seen enough killing to suspect I int the only one to do it. I’m a man like any other, give or take.”

  Sumner shakes his head.

  “No,” he says. “That I won’t accept.”

  “You please yourself, as I please myself. You accept what suits you and you reject what don’t. The law is just a name they give to what a certain kind of men prefer.”

  Sumner feels a pain growing behind his eyeballs, a sour sickness curdling in his stomach. Talking to Drax is like shouting into the blackness and expecting the blackness to answer back in kind.

  “There is no reasoning with a man like you,” he says.

  Drax shrugs again and looks away. Outside the tent the men are playing a comical game of cricket on the snow using staves for bats and a ball made of sealskin and sawdust.

  “Why do you keep that gold ring?” he asks. “Why not sell it on?”

  “I keep it for remembrance.”

  Drax nods and rolls his tongue around his mouth before answering.

  “A man who is scared of hisself int much of a man in my book.”

  “You think I’m scared? Why would I be scared?”

  “Because of whatever happened over there. Whatever it was you did or didn’t do. You say you keep it for remembrance, but that int it at all. It can’t be.”

  Sumner steps forwards and Drax rises to confront him.

  “Whoa there now,” the blacksmith says. “Sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up. Show some respect to Mr. Sumner.”

  “You don’t know me at all,” Sumner tells him. “You have no idea who I am.”

  Drax sits back down and smiles at him.

  “There int too terribly much to know,” he says. “You int as complicated as you think. But what little there is to know, I’d say I know it well enough.”

  Sumner leaves the tent and walks across to one of the whaleboats to check that his medicines and sea chest have been safely stowed for the next day’s journey across the ice. He unfixes the tarpaulin and scans the casks, boxes, and rolled-up bedding squeezed inside. Even after shifting things about and peering into the gaps, he can’t see what he is looking for. He replaces the tarpaulin and is about to go over to the other boat to check there when Cavendish calls to him. He is standing by a pile of rigging and the two severed masts. The bear, asleep in his cask, is lying next to him.

  “You need to shoot that fucking bear,” he says, pointing down. “If you do it now you’ll have time enough to skin him before we leave in the morrow.”

  “Why not take him with us? There’ll be room enough on the Hastings surely.”

  Cavendish shakes his head.

  “Too many mouths to feed already,” he says. “And I int about to ask the men to drag that fucker four miles across the ice. They have enough to haul as it is. Here”—he gives him a rifle—“I’d gladly do it myself except I hear you’ve grown fond of the beast.”

  Sumner takes the rifle and crouches down to look into the cask.

  “I won’t shoot him when he’s sleeping like that. I’ll take him over yonder and let him wander about a little first.”

  “Do it howsoever you like,” Cavendish says. “Just so long as he’s gone by morning.”

  Sumner attaches a rope to the metal grille, and, with Otto’s assistance, begins to move the cask. When he estimates they are far enough from the edge of the makeshift camp, they stop and Sumner unhooks the latch, kicks the grille open, and retreats. The bear ambles out onto the ice. He is almost twice as large now as when they caught him. He has grown plump from Sumner’s regular morning feedings, and his previously grubby fur is bright and clean. They watch him ambling about, heavy pawed, phlegmatic, sniffing the cask, then nudging it twice with his snout.

  “He can’t survive on his own even if we let him go,” Sumner says to Otto. “I’ve spoiled him with feeding. He wouldn’t know how to hunt.”

  “Better to shoot him now,” Otto agrees. “I know a furrier in Hull will give you a fair price for the skin.”

  Sumner loads the rifle and takes his aim. The bear stops moving and turns sideways, exposing his broad flank, as if offering himself to Sumner as the easiest possible target.

  “Just behind the ear is quickest,” Otto says.

  Sumner nods, tightens his grip on the stock, and lines up the shot. The bear turns calmly to look at him. His thick white neck, his garnet eye. Sumner wonders for a moment what the bear must be thinking and immediately wishes he hadn’t. He lowers the rifle and hands it to Otto. Otto nods.

  “An animal has no soul,” he says. “But some love is possible nonetheless. Not the highest form of love, but still love.”

  “Just fucking shoot him,” Sumner says.

  Otto checks the rifle, then lowers onto one knee to set himself. Before he can take aim, however, the bear, as if sensing something important has altered, stiffens suddenly, then wheels heavily around and starts running, his broad columnar legs thudding against the ice and his claws kicking up brief clods of loose snow. Otto fires quickly at his retreating hindquarters but misses, and by the time he reloads the bear has disappeared behind a pressure ridge. The two men chase after him but they cannot match the bear’s speed across the ice. They get to the top of the ridge and fire off another hopeful shot, but the distance is already too large and the bear is moving too rapidly. They stand where they are, with the wreck behind them and the snow-clad cordillera ahead, and watch his galloping, rhythmical, whiteness fade gradually into the broader and more static whiteness of the floe.

  That night the wind veers from north to west, and a violent storm blows up. One of the makeshift tents is ripped from its moorings, the framework of spars and booms that holds it up collapses, and the men inside, exposed suddenly to frigid blasts of wind and snow, are forced to chase the loose and cartwheeling canvas out across the ice. Eventually, when it snags on a hummock, they wrestle it down and drag it, writhing and flapping, back to the camp. The gale makes repairs impossible, so instead they secure what they can with ropes and ice anchors, and seek shelter in the second tent. Sumner, who cannot sleep because he has no laudanum, helps them drag inside what remains of their dampened bedding and make space on the floor. The noise outside is enormous. The ice is moving again, and Sumner can hear, below the shrill descant of the wind and the rattling and straining of the canvas, an occasional dull and vast concussion as the pack roves and breaches.

  Otto and Cavendish venture out to check the safety of the whaleboats and come back shivering and wreathed in snow. The men wrap themselves in blankets and cluster round the feeble heat of a small iron stove up on bricks in the middle of the tent. Sumner, on the fringes, curls up on himself, pulls his cap down over his eyes, and tries to sleep but can’t. He is sure now that the medicine chest containing his supply of opium has been transferred to the Hastings already, that it was included in error, along with his sea chest, in the supplies carried by the first party. One night without opium, he thinks, is easy enough, but if this storm persists and they are forced to stay on the ice a second night, he will begin to sicken. He curses himself for not paying closer attention to his necessaries, and he curses Jones for not being more careful about what was packed in the boats. He closes his
eyes and tries to imagine he is elsewhere, not Delhi this time but Belfast, sitting in Kennedy’s drinking whiskey, rowing on the Lagan, or in the dissecting rooms with Sweeney and Mulcaire, smoking cheap shag and gabbing about the girls. He falls, after a while, into a murky restless kind of drowse, not fully asleep but not awake either. The rest of the men coagulate into a dark and snoring heap beside him, the collective warmth of their pressed-together bodies clinging to them briefly, then dissipating upwards in the chill and swirling air.

  After a few more hours, the storm appears to have steadied itself, to have reached an equilibrium which may presage its end, when, with a fearsome crash, the floe itself, the very surface they are sleeping on, jolts upwards. One pole of the tent collapses and the iron stove topples over, sending red-hot coals spilling out and setting blankets and peacoats alight. Sumner, bewildered, chest tight with alarm, pulls on his boots and dashes outside into the gloom. Through a stuttering veil of snow he sees at the floe edge a bluish iceberg, immense, chimneyed, wind-gouged, sliding eastwards like an albinistic butte unmoored from the desert floor. The berg is moving at a brisk walking pace, and as it moves its nearest edge grinds against the floe and spits up house-size rafts of ice like swarf from the jaws of a lathe. The floe shudders beneath Sumner’s feet; twenty yards away a jagged crack appears, and he wonders for a moment if the entire plateau might crumble under the strain and everything, tents, whaleboats, men, be pitched into the sea. No one now remains in the second tent. The men that were inside it are either standing transfixed like Sumner or are busy pushing and dragging the whaleboats farther away from the edge in a desperate effort to keep them safe. Sumner feels, as he watches, that he is seeing something he shouldn’t rightly see, that he is being made an unwilling party to a horrifying but elemental truth-telling.

  As quickly as the chaos began, however, it ceases. The berg loses contact with the edge of the ice, and the shuddering cacophony of impact gives way to the remnant howling of the wind and the oaths and curses of the men. Sumner notices for the first time that snow is pelting against the left side of his face and gathering in his beard. He feels for a moment wrapped up, cocooned, made strangely private, by the fierceness of the weather, as if the world beyond, the real world, is separate and forgettable, and he alone inside the whirl of snow exists. Someone tugs his arm and points him backwards. He sees that the second tent is now ablaze. Mattresses, rugs, and sea chests are burning fiercely; what remains of the canvas is whipping about in the high wind and flaming like a tar barrel. The rump of the crew stare aghast, their helpless faces brightened by the high dancing flames. Cavendish, after kicking at the embers and bewailing his ill luck, yells for them to take refuge in the remaining whaleboats. Working rapidly but without method, they empty out the two boats, pack themselves inside like cargo, then pull the tarpaulins taut across the top. The resultant spaces are fetid and coffin-like. The air inside is sparse and pungent, and there is no light at all. Sumner is lying on bare, cold timbers, and the men arrayed around him are talking loudly and bitterly about the incompetence of Cavendish, the astonishing ill luck of Brownlee, and their desire above all and despite everything to get home alive. Exhausted but sleepless, his muscles and inner organs beginning to itch and agitate with the unmet need for opium, he tries again to forget where he is, to imagine he is somewhere better, happier, but he can’t succeed.