The North Water

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by Ian McGuire


  * * *

  In the morning, the storm has abated. The day is cool and damp with gray clouds overhead and flat bands of fog concealing the floe edge and lying like layered quartz across the dark faces of the distant mountains behind. They pull back the snow-laden tarpaulins and climb out of the whaleboats. The burned and blackened fragments of the second tent and most of what it contained are strewn untidily across the ice in front of them. Some of the spars, half sunk in pools of meltwater, are still smoldering. While the cook boils water and cobbles together a rough version of breakfast, the men pick and poke through the lukewarm embers for anything still usable and worth preserving. Cavendish strolls around amongst them, whistling and making ribald jokes. He carries an enameled mug of steaming beef tea in his left hand. Every now and then, he bends down like a gentleman fossil hunter to pick up a still-warm knife blade or a solitary boot heel. For a man who has just seen his ship crushed, and narrowly survived an iceberg and then a fire in the night, he appears, Sumner thinks, unusually good-humored and carefree.

  After eating, they repack the whaleboats, then raise up the one surviving tent, weigh down its edges with provision casks, and settle inside with playing cards and pipe tobacco to wait for Black, Jones, and the others to return from the Hastings. After an hour or so, as the fog lifts, Cavendish goes outside with his telescope to check for signs of the returning party. After a while, he calls out for Otto, and, after a while longer, Otto calls out for Sumner.

  Cavendish hands Sumner the telescope and points east without speaking. Sumner extends the telescope and looks through it. He is expecting to see, off in the distance, Black, Jones, and the rest of the crew tugging the four empty whaleboats across the ice towards them, but in fact he sees nothing at all. He lowers the telescope, squints into the distant emptiness, then raises the telescope to his eye and looks again.

  “So where are they?”

  Cavendish shakes his head, curses, and starts angrily rubbing the nape of his neck. His previous calmness and good humor has disappeared. He is pale-faced and tight-lipped. His eyes are wide open and he is breathing hard through his nose.

  “The Hastings is gone,” Otto says.

  “Gone where?”

  “Most likely, she ventured out into the pack last night to escape from the bergs,” Cavendish says sharply. “That’s all there is to it. She will find her way back to the floe edge soon enough. Campbell knows just where we are. All we need to do is wait for him here. Show a bit of faith and a bit of fucking patience.”

  Sumner looks through the telescope again, sees, again, nothing but sky and ice, then looks at Otto.

  “Why would a ship unmoor in the midst of a storm?” he asks. “Wouldn’t she be safer remaining where she was?”

  “If a berg is bearing down, the captain does what’s needed to save the ship,” Otto says.

  “Exactly,” Cavendish says. “Whatever you have to do, you do it.”

  “How long might we have to wait here?”

  “That all depends,” Cavendish says. “If she finds open water it could be today. If not…”

  He shrugs.

  “I don’t have my medicine chest,” Sumner says. “It was taken across already.”

  “Is any man here sick?”

  “Not yet, no.”

  “Then I’d say that’s about the least part of our fucking worries.”

  Sumner remembers watching the iceberg through the gray veil of flailing snow: many-storied and immaculate, moving smoothly and unstoppably forwards with the frictionless non-movement of a planet.

  “The Hastings could be sunk,” he realizes. “Is that what you mean?”

  “She int sunk,” Cavendish tells him.

  “Are there other ships that can rescue us?”

  Otto shakes his head.

  “Not near enough. It’s too late in the season and we’re too far north. Most of the fleet have left Pond’s Bay by now.”

  “She int sunk,” Cavendish repeats. “She’s somewhere out there in the sound, that’s all. If we wait here, she’ll come back right enough.”

  “We should go out with the whaleboats to search,” Otto says. “It was a fierce wind last night. She could have been blown miles off to the east. She could be stoved in, nipped, rudderless, anything at all.”

  Cavendish frowns, then nods reluctantly, as if eager to think of some better, easier solution, but utterly unable to do so.

  “We’ll find her soon enough when we go out there,” he says quickly, snapping shut the brass telescope and shoving it into his greatcoat pocket. “She won’t be far off, I’d say.”

  “What if we don’t find her?” Sumner asks. “What then?”

  Cavendish pauses and looks at Otto, who stays silent. Cavendish tugs his earlobe and then answers in a ludicrous music hall brogue.

  “Den I hope you brought your swimming togs along widje, Paddy,” he says. “’Cause it’s an awful long focking way to anywhere else from hereabouts.”

  They spend the rest of the day out in the whaleboats, rowing first east along the edge of the land ice, then turning north towards the center of the sound. The storm has broken up the pack, and they move without difficulty through the irregular fragments of drift and brash ice, steering around them when necessary or poking them aside with the blades of their long oars. Otto commands one boat and Cavendish the other. Sumner, who has been promoted to steersman, imagines every moment that they will sight the Hastings on the horizon—like a single dark stitch against the coarse, gray blanket of the sky—and that the fear that is aching inside him, that he is struggling to contain, will dissolve like mist. He senses amongst the crewmen an anxiety edged with bitterness and anger. They are searching for someone to blame for this perilous string of misfortunes and Cavendish, whose promotion to the captaincy is unearned and tainted with unnaturalness and violence, is the most deserving and obvious candidate.

  They return to the ramshackle and burned-over camp, weary, bone-chilled, and low in spirits, having pulled hard all day and seen no sign of the Hastings nor found any indication of her possible fate. The cook builds a fire from barrel staves and sawed-up sections of the mizzenmast and fashions a sour-tasting stew of salt beef and ancient, woody turnips. After the eating is over, Cavendish taps a cask of brandy and has a ration served to each man. They sullenly drink down their allotted portions and then, without asking further permission, begin taking more until the cask is emptied and the atmosphere inside the tent is liquorous and unstable. Soon, after a period of drunken and cantankerous arguing, a fight breaks out and a knife is drawn. McKendrick, a mere onlooker, is slashed deeply in the forearm, and the blacksmith is knocked senseless. When Cavendish tries to intervene, his head is split open with a belaying pin, and Sumner and Otto have to step in to save him from a worse beating. They pull him outside for safety. Otto goes back to try to calm the men but is himself abused and then threatened with the knife. Cavendish, back on his feet, cursing foully, face gruesomely checkered with his own blood, takes two loaded rifles from the whaleboats, gives a third to Otto, and ventures back inside the tent. He fires once down into the ice to gain their attention and then declares that he will gladly put the second bullet into any cunt who fancies his chances.

  “With Brownlee gone, I’m captain still, and I’ll cheerfully murder any mutinous bastard who dares think otherwise.”

  There is a pause, then Bannon, a loose-eyed Shetlander with silver hoops in his ears, picks up a barrel stave and rushes wildly forwards. Cavendish, without raising the rifle from his hip, tilts the barrel upwards and shoots him through the throat. The top portion of the Shetlander’s skull detaches and flies backwards against the steeply pitched canvas roof, leaving a broad red bull’s-eye and, around it, a fainter aureole of purplish brain matter. There is a guttural roar of dismay from the other men, and then a sudden, leaden silence. Cavendish drops the empty rifle at his feet and takes the loaded one from Otto.

  “You other cunts take heed now,” he tells them. “This pox-arsed f
oolishness has just cost a man his life.”

  He licks his lips, then looks curiously about as though selecting who to shoot next. Blood seeps off his eyebrow and beard, and spatters down onto the ice. The tent is smeared with shadows and smells fiercely of liquor and piss.

  “I’m a loose fucking cannon, I am,” Cavendish tells them quietly. “I do whatever takes my fancy at the time. You best remember that if you ever think of crossing me again.”

  He nods twice in silent, bullish confirmation of this candid self-accounting, sniffs, and draws his hand across his blood-soaked beard.

  “Tomorrow we make a run for Pond’s Bay,” he says. “If we don’t find the Hastings on the way there, we’ll surely find another ship to take us when we arrive.”

  “It’s a hundred mile to Pond’s Bay if it’s an inch,” someone says.

  “Then you bastards best sober up and get some sleep aforetimes.”

  Cavendish looks down at the dead Shetlander and shakes his head.

  “It’s a fucking foolish way to go,” he says to Otto. “Man’s carrying a loaded rifle, you don’t take him on with a barrel stave. That’s simple common sense.”

  Otto nods and then steps forwards and, with a solemn and pontifical air, makes the sign of the cross above the corpse. Two of the men, unbidden, take the Shetlander by the boot heels and drag him out onto the floe. Off in a corner, unnoticed amidst this uproar, Drax in chains sits like an idol—cross-legged, smiling, watching from afar.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The next day, Sumner is too feverish to steer or row. As they pull east through layers of thick fog and showers of freezing rain and sleet, he huddles in the stem covered by a blanket, shivering and stomach sick. Every now and then, Cavendish shouts out an order or Otto commences whistling a Germanic air, but there are no other sounds except the death-rattle creak of the oarlocks and the asynchronous plash of the blades in the water. Each man, it seems, is wrapped up in his own silent forebodings. The day is gloomy, the sky dun-colored and raw. Twice, before noon, Sumner has to pull down his britches and hang his arse over the gunwale to sputter out a pint or so of liquid shit into the sea. When Otto offers him brandy, he swallows it down gratefully, then retches it straight back up. The men watch all this without comment or mockery. Bannon’s murder has flattened their resolve, left them stranded warily between equal but opposing fears.

  At night, they camp on the floe edge, raise the bloodstained tent, attempt to dry and feed themselves. Near midnight, the bluish twilight thickens briefly to a gaudy and stelliferous darkness, then an hour later reasserts itself. Sumner sweats and shivers, dips in and out of an uneasy and dream-afflicted sleep. Around him bundled bodies grumble and gasp like snoozing cattle; the air inside the tent feels iron cold against his cheeks and nose, and has a stewed and crotch-like reek to it. As his flesh yearns, aches, and itches for the absent drug, his mind drifts and circles. He remembers the solitary journey from Delhi, the humiliations of Bombay and then London in April. Peter Lloyd’s Hotel in Charing Cross: the smell of semen and old cigar smoke; the squeals and shrieks of whores and their customers at night; the narrow iron bed, the oil lamp, the threadbare fauteuil spitting horse hair and grimed with bear fat and Makassar oil. He eats pork chops and peas and lives on questionable credit. Every morning for two weeks he goes out to the hospitals with his diplomas and his outdated letters of introduction; he sits in corridors and waits. In the evening, he seeks out acquaintances from Belfast and Galway—not good friends but men who will at least remember him: Callaghan, Fitzgerald, O’Leary, McCall. They reminisce over whiskey and ale. When the time is right, he asks for their help, and they tell him to try America, Mexico, or possibly Brazil, somewhere where the past does not matter so much as it does here, where the people are more free and easy and more likely to forgive a man’s mistakes since they have made a few themselves. England is not the place for him, they tell him, not anymore; it is too rigid and severe; he must give it up. Although they believe his story, they assure him, others never will. Their tone is friendly enough, comradely even, but he can tell that they wish him away. They greet news of his great failure as a reassuring reminder of their own more modest success, but also, more deeply, as a warning of what calamities might overtake them if they ever lose their vigilance, if they ever forget who they are or what they are about. In their worst imaginings they see in his disgrace a garish prophecy of their own.

  At night, he takes opium and walks about the city until he is tired enough to sleep. One evening as he scuffs lopsidedly along Fleet Street, then past Temple Bar and the Courts of Justice, his ferule tapping the pavement as he goes along, he is astonished to see Corbyn coming straight towards him. He is wearing his campaign medals and red dress uniform; his tar-black boots are polished to a mirrored sheen, and he is in conversation with another, younger officer, mustachioed and similarly attired. They are both smoking cheroots and laughing. Sumner stands where he is in the shadow of a castellated doorway and waits for them to reach him. As he waits, he remembers Corbyn’s manner at the court-martial—casual, unconcerned, natural, as if, even as he lied, the truth was in his gift, as if he could make or unmake it exactly as he chose. As Sumner remembers the scene, he feels an avalanche of rage beginning to gather inside his chest; the muscles tighten in his throat and legs; he begins to shudder. The two officers draw closer, and he feels for a ghoulish moment excarnated, transcendent even, as if his body is much too small and slight to contain his furious thoughts. As they pass him, smoking and laughing, Sumner steps out from the doorway. He taps Corbyn on the brass-buttoned epaulette and, when he turns around to see who it is, strikes him across the face. Corbyn topples sideways. The younger officer drops his cheroot and stares.

  “What the fuck?” he says. “What?”

  Sumner doesn’t respond. He looks at the man he has just hit and realizes with a jolt that it is not Corbyn at all. They are roughly similar in age and height certainly, but apart from that, there is little true resemblance—the hair, the whiskers, the shape and features of the face, even the uniform is wrong. Sumner’s rage dissolves, he returns to himself, to his own body, to the deep humiliations of the real.

  “I thought you were someone else,” he tells the man. “Corbyn.”

  “Who the fuck is Corbyn?”

  “A regimental surgeon.”

  “Which regiment?”

  “The Lancers.”

  The man shakes his head.

  “I should find a constable and have you jailed,” he says. “I swear to God I should.”

  Sumner tries to help him, but the man pushes him away. He touches his cheek again, winces, then looks carefully at Sumner. The cheek is reddening, but there is no blood.

  “Who are you?” he says. “I recognize that face.”

  “I’m no one,” Sumner tells him.

  “Who are you?” he says again. “Don’t fucking lie to me.”

  “I’m no one,” he says. “No one at all.”

  The man nods.

  “Come here then,” he says.

  Sumner steps closer. The man places his hand on Sumner’s shoulder. Sumner smells the port wine on his breath, the bandoline in his hair.

  “If you’re really no one,” he says, “I don’t suppose you’ll object too much to this.”

  He leans in six inches and drives his knee high up into Sumner’s balls. The pain ricochets through Sumner’s stomach and out into his chest and face. He drops to his knees on the wet pavement, groaning and wordless.

  The man, who he thought was Corbyn but isn’t, leans down and whispers gently into his ear.

  “The Hastings is gone,” he says. “Sunk. Smashed to little pieces by a berg, and every fucker in her bar none is drowned, for sure.”

  * * *

  The next afternoon, they find a capsized whaleboat and then, a little while later, an intermittent half-mile-long slew of empty blubber casks and shattered timbers. They row about in slow circles, picking up pieces of the debris, examining them, conferri
ng, then dropping them helplessly back into the water. Cavendish for once is pale and silent, his normal piss and windiness crushed by the weight of unlooked-for catastrophe. He scans the nearby ice floes with the telescope but sees nothing and no one. He spits, curses, turns aside. Sumner, through the green and melancholic haze of his sickness, realizes that their best hope of rescue is now gone. Some of the men begin to weep and others start clumsily praying. Otto checks the charts and takes a reading with the sextant.

  “We’re past Cape Hay,” he calls across to Cavendish. “We can reach Pond’s Bay before night. When we get there we’ll find another ship, God willing.”

  “If we don’t, we’ll have to winter o’er,” Cavendish says. “That’s been done afore.”

  Drax, who is chained to the rearmost rowing bench and is thus the closest man to Cavendish, who is at the steering oar, snorts at this.

 

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