The Voyage of the Unquiet Ice

by Andrew McGahan

  Then it was Dow’s turn. He upended the jug – and was spluttering instantly at a foul, sickly-sweet spirit.

  ‘What on all the oceans is that?’ he asked, thrusting the jug away.

  ‘That,’ said Johannes feelingly, ‘is rum.’

  After a long tormenting week of this, the days growing darker and shorter, the squalls abruptly changed – and got worse. They ceased to hurl rain or hail, and instead hurled snow, becoming full-fledged blizzards.

  Again, Dow found that weather he’d known on land was quite different from the same weather at sea. In the highlands a blizzard turned the world a soft and glowing white, but at sea a snowstorm only served to make the world blacker, for the heaving ocean swallowed the flakes whole, and the whirling snow itself blotted out the lowering clouds, so that all was lost, even during the brief hours of daylight, in a grey nothingness.

  The Chloe itself, on the other hand, did indeed turn white; but not with the gentle contours of snowdrifts – for snow merely washed off the deck as it fell – but rather with the hard, brittle gleam of ice. It began to form everywhere now, in sheets underfoot upon the deck, in slippery sheaths about the masts and spars, and in icicles that hung weeping from the frozen rigging.

  Immediately men were put to work breaking it up with picks and axes, for if too much ice grew it could overbalance the ship and capsize it, especially in such heavy seas. Great jagged chunks were sent crashing over the side, but the gangs had to work continually to avert the threat, for the ice thickened remorselessly upon itself. And though the Chloe bore few sails in the storms, those sails still needed tending, and so men were continually aloft too, battling with the wind and frozen spray.

  No one, it seemed, had time to sleep or dry out. The watches were altered so that no man worked more than two hours topside at a stretch, nevertheless, when the sailors came below again they would be nearly prostrate with cold and weariness, their hands red-raw from the axe handles, or stripped of fingernails and useless with cramp from climbing the frozen shrouds. Falls and slips were common on the treacherous decks or from the icy rigging, and sick bay was kept busy with a procession of cracked heads and broken bones.

  Dow too worked at chopping the ice. The cutter crews – on standby now to launch at short notice – had been relieved from regular duties, but Dow’s crew had volunteered even so to take their turn with the axes, under the direction of Lieutenant Samson.

  It was hard labour, but the eight men toiled at it stoically, and as a team, for their landing on Trap Island had forged a bond between them, and even Samson was growing more confident in his role as their commander. Still, there was no shortage of swearing and cursing as they worked, damning the ice and the weather and the dire state of the voyage in general.

  ‘And what would any of you lot know?’ Alfons mocked his fellows one afternoon, in response to such carping. It was a day towards the end of the second week of the storms, and – during a rare break between blizzards – their gang was labouring to clear ice on the forecastle. ‘Things could be far worse than this, take my word for it.’ The poet was one of the few sailors on board who had ventured this far north before. ‘We’ve had an easy passage so far, truth be told – as many a ship before us has not. Our luck is holding.’

  Dow couldn’t help himself. He looked up, red-faced from swinging his pick. ‘An easy passage?’

  ‘Oh aye. These are mild squalls for winter. We’ve lost no masts or spars to the wind, and the ice has grown slower than it might. What – did you think the northern sea could bite no worse than this?’ The old man gave a laugh. ‘No, as I read it, your albatross has arranged a smooth run for us.’

  One of the sailors rolled a worried eye. ‘Maybe, but will his bird clear a path through the Ice as well?’

  Dow did not like this talk of the albatross being his – but nor did he think he should deny it openly. Instead he merely asked Alfons, ‘Is it far, the Ice?’ Privately, he could scarcely believe that it could be so cold, and the days so dark, without any ice even being sighted yet.

  The poet shrugged. ‘I’m no navigator. Only this I know. The one other time I voyaged in these waters – and that in the summer months – the Ice lay well beyond the zone of storms, and even further still, across a sea of mists and drifting fogs. Only then was the first berg was sighted.’

  And so it proved.

  Two days after the poet’s pronouncement, the last of the snow squalls blew shrieking over the Chloe and was gone, and – amazingly – the sun itself peeked out for a time through broken clouds. It was now only a dim white disk sitting low in the southern sky, less than a hand’s-span above the horizon, even though the hour was close to noon. And soon enough it was gone again, leaving only a cold twilight, deepening into long evening.

  But the weather continued to abate and by midnight the gales had dwindled and the great swells too were dying away. By next morning – very suddenly it seemed after fifteen days battened down by the weather – the ship was sailing upon an eerily smooth sea. It was as if they’d entered a tranquil eye at the top of the world, around which the latitude of storms might rage unending, but where within there was only calm.

  The sun, however, was not seen again. The sky grew leaden once more with high cloud, and down upon the ocean, shreds of mist – contorted into strange shapes – rode in slow billows across the water, borne on vagrant breezes. Sometimes these mists sailed at the level of the mastheads, like sombre roofs over the sea, and other times they blanketed the ship entirely, so that all sides were hemmed in by grey, silent walls.

  And the cold!

  Less ice formed on the ship, now that there was no snow or spray from storms, but the air itself – even when motionless – had taken on a new crystalline edge, freezing and sharp as a blade. Breath crackled in men’s lungs, and so penetrating was the chill that the very timbers of the Chloe’s hull seemed to be turning brittle and inflexible, so that instead of creaking and groaning they too now cracked and snapped. And to touch any surface topside with a bare hand was to risk losing skin.

  Nor were things much better below decks. At least in these calmer seas fires could once again be lit, not only in the galley, but in dozens of iron braziers scattered throughout the ship – but the mists clung below decks too, icy and pervasive, and in time they combined with the smoke from the fires to produce a freezing murk that rose from the lowest levels, stinging to the eye and noxious with the stink of bilge water and an unwashed crew.

  On some nights, unable to breathe because of this miasma, Dow would retreat topside, defying the cold for the sake of fresh air. On the main deck he would find a blackness all around that was claustrophobic in its totality – for there were no stars or moon to be seen through the eternal overcast, and Vincente had not yet allowed the ice lamps to be lit, leaving only the ship’s regular lanterns to drive back the darkness, and of that they were incapable. Dow would stare down to the waterline, and sometimes a faint green glow flickered there in the foam of the ship’s wake – but such light illuminated only itself, and often, if the mists were thick, even the sea was invisible, and the Chloe drifted lost in a limitless void.

  If not for the compass it would have been impossible for the ship to steer in such blackness, or in the grey mists of daylight; but the iron needle remained sure of its way, and the captain remained sure of his purpose, for no matter the darkness and the fogs and the errant unreliable breezes, Vincente held the ship steadily to his course, north still, and somewhat to the east.

  For five mournful days they continued this way, at the end of which time twenty days had elapsed since they’d left Trap Island, and forty since departing Haven Diaz. And then, finally, on the forty-first morning, the long awaited call rang out from the crow’s nest.

  ‘Ice ho!’

  Dow rolled quickly from his blanket-piled hammock and climbed to the main deck, and there it was – the Ice.

  But it was not, as he’d been imagining, a collection of white pinncales floating in formation out of
the north. There was only a single berg, dirty blue rather than white, floating forlornly upon the mist-strewn sea. Its visible part was no bigger than a haystack from the farmlands of New Island. Surrounded by small decaying chunks of itself, it passed slowly by at a quarter mile’s distance. And strain his ears though he might, Dow could hear none of the crackling or hissing that he’d been expecting.

  Many others had come topside to see the first ice, and were likewise staring in anticlimax.

  ‘There’s no need to look so disappointed,’ Fidel called from the high deck. ‘It’s a dying berg, is all, wandering south and melting – for the air may be freezing here, yes, but the water is not. Not yet. But only wait a few days more, and you’ll see true ice. Aye, and hear it too.’

  On they sailed, the cold clutching ever tighter. The mists pulled back at times, but the sky was perpetually grey, as if all blue had leached from it forever, and from the ocean beneath it too. Occasionally they sighted other melting bergs, floating as still as gravestones upon the sea, but none was very large, and all were silent. The world felt so empty and quiet that Dow found himself wishing almost for the squalls to return.

  Nevertheless, the Unquiet Ice drew near; and as Fidel had foretold, it was a sound, rather than a sighting, that first heralded its advent. Late upon the fourth morning after the first berg, Dow – huddled in a doze by the forge in the smithy – was brought suddenly awake by a din that sent him stumbling upright, thinking the ship was breaking apart; a terrible ripping, shattering sound, following by a roaring splash that seemed to go on for an age. And when it was all done, there arose a rush and crackling like that from a freshly lit fireplace, but far vaster.

  Knowing what it must be, Dow once again rushed topside. A pre-dawn gloom greeted him – even though ten bells had already sounded, for at their present latitude the winter daylight lasted a mere hour or two either side of noon – and in that gloom he saw, rolling and rumbling still from having just toppled over, his first true iceberg.

  It stood a bare two hundred yards off the rail, white amid the froth of its own upheaval, and shadowed with crevices and crags; a mountain of ice, so solid and massive that Dow found it near impossible to accept it was ice at all, and not a hill of stone somehow afloat, no matter how he’d prepared himself for this moment. Its peak loomed higher than the tip of the Chloe’s mainmast, and its girth and bulk dwarfed the battleship many times over – and this was but a tiny fraction, Dow knew, of its underwater whole.

  And it was growing. The last water from the capsize was still streaming off the berg’s flanks, but already there was a seething white sheen rising up from the waterline: nicre, just as Dow had witnessed in Fidel’s experiment in Haven Diaz. But here the growth was on a huge scale – happening not in a glass jar, but upon a freezing sea in an icy dawn, and the sheer mass and energy of the process was frightening. And the sound! It was a fire raging, hail battering a roof, the groan of a tree as it fell, the snap of canvas, the roar of a waterfall – it was all of those sounds and none of them, greater than each.

  But already the berg was slipping away aft in the darkness, and the din too was receding. Dow looked about the ship. Hundreds of observers were huddled at viewpoints here and there, wrapped in hoods and scarves, only their eyes visible, staring numbly at the first real ice of the voyage. In the new quiet, officers could be heard ordering the reduction of sail, and giving fresh warnings to the lookouts – already doubled in any case – to be ever more vigilant, now that the realm of the great bergs had been reached.

  Day proved the point. A greenish light grew through the cloud to illuminate an ocean littered with white behemoths. They were still widely spaced, but they receded away into the mists on all sides save southward, and there was nothing forlorn or dishevelled about them now, they were clean and fresh and blazing white against the grey sea, as if lit from within. Of those nearby, the greatest rose to near twice the height of the Chloe’s masts – some five hundred feet – while further north there appeared to be even greater and taller peaks rearing, their pinnacles lost in cloud.

  And the Unquiet was all encompassing now. Even when no berg was close at hand, there lay over the ocean a profound hiss and crackle that came from everywhere and nowhere, a tone unnerving to the ear, and which bore into a listener’s skull to throb there like a headache. And as a discordant counterpoint to the sound, every now and then some distant berg, towered to an unsustainable height and leaning dangerously, would rotate around itself and plunge, shrieking and thundering, into the sea.

  The perils of such collapses were obvious. By the brief daylight at least the Chloe could steer a safe path through the bergs, but what – Dow wondered, staring out from the main deck, his eyes smarting from the cold – about the long blind night that must follow?

  How would the ship progress then?

  The answer came within the hour; for Captain Vincente called all the officers to a meeting in the Great Cabin – and as the acting second-in-command of the Chloe 4, Dow was summoned as well.

  It was a much larger meeting than the last he’d attended, and more formal. Every chair at the table was filled, and others were spread around it in a second ring, for the midshipmen. Vincente sat at the table’s head, with Fidel on his left. And on the captain’s right – her official place as scapegoat, seemingly – sat Nell.

  Dow studied her for a time from his position in the outer ring. He had, during these last weeks of storms and mists, caught sight of her occasionally upon the high deck, huddled there against the cold. Several times she had been in the company of Diego, but it had been difficult to judge – with both of them wrapped in winter gear – the manner of their companionship. Had Diego forgiven her for not supporting his complaint against Sampson? Had she wanted to be forgiven? Why had she done it at all?

  Dow had no answers. For now she merely looked impatient, her fingers – gloved against the chill, for the Great Cabin was not warm – drumming impatiently on the arm of her chair as she waited.

  His officers all seated at last, Vincente rose.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘the first stage of our voyage is over. We have reached the Ice, and without mishap. But now our real work begins. We are, by our best reckoning, still some distance to the south and west of our goal – the gulf that has been reported in the Ice Wall. To reach it we must cross through a berg-crowded and dangerous sea. Nor can we lie-to at night, for time does not permit; we’ve taken a full week longer than I’d hoped to reach this point. We must press on even in darkness, despite the dangers of collision. To that end, from tonight, every night, we will launch the boats.’

  He sat down again, and nodded to Fidel.

  ‘This is the plan,’ said the first officer. ‘The four cutters will take up positions as far ahead of the Chloe as visibility permits; hopefully at least a mile. Each will be fitted with a smaller version of the ice lamps that have been fixed already to the Chloe. The boats will arrange themselves line abreast, and scan the ocean ahead for any berg coming near in the darkness. Every few minutes they will signal back to the ship with a green or red lantern. If the right hand boat, for instance, spies a berg ahead, it will signal red. The others, if they see nothing, will signal green. And thus the Chloe will know to turn left, and will have sea room enough to make the turn in time.’

  The lieutenants were all nodding, and Dow too grasped the strategy. This way the ship would be able to ‘see’ as far as two miles ahead, even in the dark.

  ‘It will be a cold and miserable duty for those in the boats. And dangerous too. The bergs will crowd more closely the further north we go – and worse awaits us as we near our destination. For if the reports are true, and there is indeed a warm current emanating from this mysterious gulf, then its warmth will undermine the bergs for miles around and make them overbalance all the more often. It was in a field of such unstable ice that the Thorn – during the mission preceding ours – was struck by a rolling berg and near to sunk. If ever we’ll need luck on our side, gentlemen, we wil
l need it then.’

  There was a pause as the gathering considered this, then one of the senior officers – a lieutenant-commander named Paulo – addressed the table. ‘Speaking of luck, I have a request. It’s been clear sailing to date no doubt, and the men are in good spirits, thinking that fortune is with us – but we should never push good luck too far, not, at least, without giving fate its fair due.’ He glanced to the captain. ‘To that end, sir – though I know it’s not done often upon this ship, by your own preference – should we not have Nell pronounce a benediction before we go further? Is she’s willing, that is?’

  Fidel looked uncertainly to Vincente. The captain appeared to hesitate, then merely nodded.

  ‘Nell?’ asked Fidel.

  For a moment the girl only considered Paulo expressionlessly, but at length – suppressing an inner reluctance, it seemed to Dow – she bowed her head in assent, and then stood. Dow leaned forward in fascination. He had no idea what a benediction might be, but the scapegoat’s pose suggested a ritual of some kind, for Nell stood very straight, with her arms slightly extended from her sides and her hands spread, palms facing outwards.

  She glanced once about the table, and Dow was sure that her eyes briefly met his, and that he read in them something more even than reluctance for what she was about to do – was it embarrassment?

  Then her eyes closed, and as if reciting a solemn oath, she intoned, ‘I, Ignella of the Cave, stricken down by cruel misfortune, remind the whims of fate that I am here now upon this vessel, the Chloe, and implore that they not visit such cruelty upon me again – nor upon any of my companions. I place this ship under my protection, and shield it by my suffering.’

  Paulo nodded sombrely, his eyes downcast, as were the eyes of many of the officers, and Dow felt strangely moved by the invocation, even though he suspected it was spoken with unwillingness.