The Voyage of the Unquiet Ice

by Andrew McGahan

  Vincente hove the ship to, then summoned his officers – and Dow – to another council in the Great Cabin.

  This time there was an almost celebratory mood to the assembly. Dow could hear it in the talk and laughter around the table as the men gathered; some marvelling that they had come through the ice so wholly unscathed and found their way so unerringly to their objective; others theorising about the gulf, and about the warm current that flowed from its interior.

  Might this truly be – came the question – the fabled North Way? How far might the gulf extend, and to what might it lead? There was much speculation about the fate of Nadal and his fleet, and whether they might be found within, but others were daring even greater thoughts. If there was warm water, then anything was possible. What if the gulf led all the way to the centre of the Ice – and what if open sea waited there? What if the pole itself was ice free? Did the Chloe stand now upon the brink of an historic discovery, to be the first ship to the top of the world? And what if land existed there?

  Dow breathed it all in eagerly. The pole! In the tales of his childhood it had been merely a mythical place, a make-believe realm forever unknowable, where fancy could create whatever strange peoples and lands it desired. But it was one thing to imagine from afar that some exotic isle might exist at the world’s top; it was altogether different to behold the freezing gloom and immeasurable weight of the northern ice, and to contemplate what might truly lie at the heart of such a wasteland.

  Then Vincente – who’d been listening to all this from the head of the table – called the meeting to order.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he said reprovingly, ‘we have no time for self congratulation. We will stand in greater danger than ever when we enter this passage. Need I remind you that of the five ships that have preceded us to this spot, only one returned unscathed, and three are missing entirely.’ He fixed the younger officers – who’d been the most free with their conjecturing – with a glare. ‘As for talk of the pole, that is not what we’ve come to find.’

  Subdued murmurs of disappointment arose about the table. ‘But surely, sir,’ ventured one of the lieutenants, ‘if the gulf truly does lay open that far, we would not refuse the discovery?’

  ‘We will indeed refuse it,’ said Vincente, ‘if first we come across the survivors of Nadal’s fleet, or their remains. Their location, or at least news of their fate, is all that we’ve been sent by the Sea Lord to discover. I tell you now, if we had the Lord Designate alive and well on board, I would turn back even were the pole in plain sight. This is not the time for raw adventuring, and I will risk no lives for vainglory. Understood?’

  Reluctant nods came, and some sighs too of frustration – a sentiment Dow quite shared. Could Vincente really be so set on the strict intent of his mission that he was blind to the lure and mystery of the great gulf, and incurious as to where it might ultimately lead?

  The captain continued. ‘On the other hand, we will extend the search as far as humanly possible, in effort to save our fellow mariners. We’ve seen no sign yet of the lost fleet, but it was in these waters that the Bent Wing’s boat was found, and thus we will proceed inwards. And as the urgency of our errand has not waned, we will push on no matter the darkness. But we must be sure not to miss any piece of wreckage, and be cautious yet of bergs – to that end, the cutters will again be sent out ahead of the ship, as was done at sea.’

  There were nods of approval around the table, and a few groans also from those lieutenants and midshipmen in command of the boats, faced with yet more endless hours in the freezing night air.

  But then Nell, in her place at Vincente’s side, stirred unexpectedly. ‘Captain,’ she said, ‘when the cutters launch, I request permission to ride with one of them.’

  Vincente frowned in reply. ‘Ride with them, Nell? What in all the great ocean for? It’s hardly your place …’

  The scapegoat’s tone grew stiff and formal. ‘As appointed protector of this vessel – as she who alone is custodian of the Chloe’s fate – there is no corner of the ship from which I am forbidden, be it even a cutter put to sea. The crux of our mission draws near, Captain, and if our good fortune – that so many here have noted – is to continue, then I should be foremost.’

  More mutters came from the assembled officers, and Dow caught many glances that flicked thoughtfully between himself and Nell, as if weighing each against the other. The scapegoat was staking a claim here, he saw. Her request was a declaration that she – she alone, as she’d said, and not some New Island intruder – was the key to the ship’s fate and fortune.

  Vincente sighed. ‘Very well then. If you must.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ Nell smiled innocently down the table to meet Dow’s eye, and for a startled moment he thought she would demand a place on his boat. And what should he – what could he – say to that?

  But then she added, ‘I will ride with Lieutenant Diego.’

  And so the voyage resumed, the Chloe’s sails filled by a slight but persistent breeze that now blew – against all experience of weather in the ice realms – directly north into the gulf. A lucky chance, some said – although others pointed out that it would be slow going against such a breeze on their return, and should it strengthen to a full wind or a gale then return might be all but impossible. But for the moment all eyes looked forward.

  North into the maw of the gulf they sailed, leaving the open sky behind. The channel was wide, but so ominously did the ice precipices loom on either hand, it felt instead almost oppressively narrow. The arctic gloom was deeper too, between the walls. Indeed, there would dawn not even a twilight day here, there would be only eternal night, and so the boats would be needed to lead the Chloe at all times. It was decided therefore to split the four cutters into two teams, so as to share the load.

  Dow’s boat, and Diego’s, were selected as the second team, and so for those first miles of exploration it was the other two cutters which set forth, one to the far left of the chasm and the other to the far right. The beams of their ice-lamps could be seen stabbing about in the darkness and glinting on the ice cliffs, while the Chloe itself, a little behind, brought up the centre.

  Dow remained on deck. He was by rights meant to be resting, but still he could not draw himself away from the grandeur of the scene – or from its enigma. That the gulf had been cut by the warm current seemed self evident – but whence did the warm water come, so much of it that it could carve away three miles thickness of ice? And why did it carve a path here, rather than in some other place? Vincente must have been asking the same questions, for the Chloe turned this way and that as it went, probing the gulf’s extremities and sounding the depths with weighted lines. But they learned little, other than that the channel, which had plumbed a mile deep at its mouth, was growing gradually shallower the further north they travelled.

  Midday came and went, marked only by the ship’s bell, for the darkness was unrelieved. But darkness aside, nothing hindered their progress; the gulf ran almost straight north between the ghost gleam of its walls, and was free of any great bergs or other obstructions. Dow went below at last to warm his chilled core, and to sleep briefly, but by eight bells he was on deck again. By then the Chloe had made some twenty miles inwards, and it was time for Dow’s team to take to their boats.

  The two cutters were made ready, and just as they were about to cast off, Nell appeared – all but anonymous within the bulk of her anorak – and clambered down the ladder to take a seat at Diego’s side. Watching on, Dow heard a moment’s laughter between them, and hated it; obviously the two had long since made up any differences. But then he’d known that the moment Nell had declared that she would sail in Diego’s boat.

  Still, what did she really hope to achieve, to come riding out like this? She could be of no particular help to anyone, surely, a girl and not even a sailor. Well, it was Diego’s problem. Dow determined that he would ignore it – and them. Nevertheless, as the two boats veered off on their separate paths into the gloom, Dow�
��s eyes kept straying back to the scapegoat. He could not forget how badly he had hoped, secretly – in that teasing instant, when she’d smiled at him in the Great Cabin – that she would choose him to be her pilot.

  But soon Diego’s boat was lost in the night, and Dow had to focus on steering his own craft. They were bearing close to the left hand side of the chasm now, and to the Ice Wall; the beam of their whale oil lamp, bright as it was, quite unable to reach up more than a fraction of the rampart’s height. From so close the ice seemed to lean out awfully as it rose, giving Dow vertigo, as if he looked down over a titanic precipice, rather than up.

  There followed an uneasy and uncomfortable night. There were none of the immediate dangers of their earlier forays amid the berg fields, perhaps, but the air was still bitingly cold, and the boat was still cramped, and in fact with no bergs to watch for, tedium made the hours pass even more slowly. And yet all the while the overhanging presence of the ice weighed on them, a constant menace, like half-heard thunder from a storm cloud.

  ‘Vincente should recall us and turn the ship back,’ muttered Antonio finally, shivering in the bow. ‘We’re of no use here. We could sail right past Nadal and his lost fleet in this dark, and never know it.’

  Alfons gave a laugh. ‘Go on. It’s not Nadal and his fleet you’re worried about, it’s your own skin! And I don’t blame you. A man can hardly breathe between so much ice – there’s no air here.’

  It was true. The night felt suffocating, despite its chill. The gulf itself was the cause. It did not, for all its staggering scale, have the air of permanence. There was a tension quivering in the mighty walls, a silent pressure pushing them inwards, so that it felt as if – should the warm current falter for only a few days in its flow, or even a few hours – the Ice might snap shut again.

  ‘But you’re fearless, I suppose?’ Antonio challenged Alfons.

  ‘Fearless? Not me. But why be faint hearted either, when maybe great discoveries await us only a little further on?’

  ‘Nadal’s fleet, you mean? Or your precious pole?’

  ‘And why not the pole?’

  ‘Ha! There won’t be anything there but ice and more ice. And why would we want to discover that?’

  The poet shook his hooded head. ‘There is something other than ice at the pole, of that I am certain.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Dow.

  ‘Because all the old tales say so. Think; if the mariners of ages past had found naught but ice in the north they would have reported it and been done – why would they lie? But their logs speak ever of passages through the ice, passages that open and close without warning; and of lights glimpsed from beyond the northern horizon. Their ships circled the Wall right around, in search of those lights, and always they remained to the north, somewhere across the Ice – at its heart, in other words, at the pole. Something lies there, sure enough, something potent and bright. But what it is I cannot say.’

  ‘Aye,’ grumbled Antonio. ‘And nor can you say if it’s something that man is meant to behold, or can return from alive.’

  ‘Show some courage, man! Do you think Dow here leads us to our deaths?

  ‘Dow does not lead us anywhere,’ Samson corrected in his good natured way. ‘Captain Vincente has that honour.’ The lieutenant was gazing off towards the shifting beams of light in the darkness, marking the Chloe in the centre of the channel, and further away, in the lee of the opposite wall, Diego’s boat. ‘Our scapegoat too would dispute your point, I think – why else would she be out on such a night, by choice? What do you say, Alfons?’

  The old man was cautious in reply. ‘What would I know of the thoughts of such a one as her? You officers know her better.’

  ‘Maybe. Though I’d suggest that Ignella is not easy for anyone to know. And yet poets and scapegoats share a certain affinity, do they not, for matters of forecasting and fate? So again – what would you say of her?’

  Alfons straightened. ‘I say, mark her well. She is unhappy with our captain, and impatient with her lot. A rebellion brews in her, I feel it.’

  Samson nodded, and eyed Dow briefly in the glow of the ice lamp, as if to confirm some private thought, but said no more.

  And so they crept on through the darkness.

  Later, the fog returned, creeping low upon the water, and the lights of the ship and the other boat faded away to only hazy smudges in the distance, if they were visible at all. The night turned colder still, and dreary flurries of ice drifted down from the sails whenever they shifted. There was nothing to see in the lamp beam now apart from curling fog and black water; and nothing to do, other than hunch upon their seats and wait for the interminable hours of their allotted shift to pass.

  At last a bell could be heard clanging faintly from the Chloe, the signal for recall. In far off parts of the world it would be dawn now, but there in the gulf night held fast – and here was a new problem, for the fog was presently so thick that the lights of the Chloe could not be seen, and even the sound of the bell seemed to come from no direction in particular. Samson ordered the sail loosened, so that the boat slowed, drifting in the mist, but all was grey in the beams of their lamp, backed by deeper shadows just beyond vision.

  They were lost.

  ‘Ahoy there,’ came an equally lost and plaintive call from far off, perhaps to their right, but whether it was the ship or the other cutter, and whether it was ahead of them or behind, it was impossible to say.

  ‘Ahoy,’ Samson called in return, to no avail.

  Dow was staring watchfully over the bow. They had turned inwards towards the centre of the channel, the boat still drifting forward – and was something looming there, ahead of them, in the pearl glow of the lamp? A berg? They had encountered none all evening, only small ice and slush. But no, the shape wasn’t as large as a berg. It was a smaller focus of darkness, taking on a more definite outline now, tall and angled and — ‘Lieutenant!’ Dow warned, shoving the tiller hard over. For advancing from the mist dead ahead was the bowsprit of a ship, and behind it the dark curve of a bow rearing up. Dow, in his alarm, couldn’t understand. Had they somehow turned completely about in the fog? Or had the Chloe somehow got ahead of them, and itself turned back?

  Samson too stared in astonishment. ‘Come left – hard!’ he cried, unnecessarily, for the boat was already turning. ‘Come …’

  The order died in his throat, for the ship was emerging more fully now from the mist. It wasn’t the Chloe, nor was there any risk of it running them down. The ship was not in motion. Indeed, just one clear glance was enough to reveal that the ship would never move again.

  It was a wreck.

  The beam of the ice lamp lit it hauntingly. Partially encased in ice and snow, the vessel was not even afloat, but rather lay beached upon a long spit of rock that here rose a few feet above the water’s surface, a narrow isle in the heart of the channel. The ship’s back was broken where it rested, so that its bow leaned in one direction, and its stern in the other, while in between there was only a ragged mass of collapsed, snow-drifted decking. A solitary mast still rose near the bow, but the ruins of the other two hung askew at awful angles, tangled in frozen rigging.

  Dow and Samson and their crew stared in silence. They did not call out, for it was obvious that the ship was deserted; every deck had long been wrenched open to the elements, and within was all ice and ruin. Their boat slipped noiselessly along the islet’s shore to pass by the vessel’s stern. There, on the panels of the high deck rail, were faded symbols in gold paint that represented its name. Dow looked to Samson.

  ‘It’s them,’ the lieutenant breathed. ‘It’s the Bent Wing.’ And then he did call. ‘Ahoy there! Anyone aboard!’

  No answer came. The derelict ship was falling behind now, an enigma in the gloom. But already new shapes were emerging ahead. The spit of rock grew no wider, but it continued on for some distance, and arranged upon it, picked out by the lamp beam, were humps in the ice and snow that resolved themselves into collapsed tents, and stack
s of kegs and boxes, and even a few leaning shacks, cobbled together seemingly from wreckage.

  Here was where the Bent Wing’s crew must have gone. ‘Ahoy there,’ Samson called, more hopefully now. But again, no answer came. No one emerged from the shacks or the tents. Indeed, so abandoned did they look, they might have been a hundred years old.

  ‘Take us in,’ Samson ordered sombrely.

  The shoreline of the spit was of hard stone but gently sloping, and it was no difficulty for Dow to run the cutter lightly aground.

  ‘Alfons,’ said Samson, climbing out, ‘there’s a danger the Chloe might beach itself here if not warned. Take the boat and assume a station well upwind of the wreck. Use the lamp and shout ahoys for all you’re worth until the Chloe finds you, then tell them what lies ahead. Understood? Dow and I will search the camp in case there might yet be survivors.’

  ‘Aye, Excellency.’ The poet’s gaze was roving the spit in awed dread. ‘But there is no one living here …’

  ‘I agree. Nevertheless.’

  Alfons and the others shoved off and vanished into the fog. But even as they went, another cutter emerged from the mist, its lamp beam probing the wreck as its crew stared, white faced beneath their hoods.

  ‘Diego!’ Samson called.

  The second boat joined them on the shore, and the two lieutenants held a hurried conference, after which Diego too sent his boat – under command of his midshipman – back to help warn the Chloe.

  So now there were four left behind to search the frozen camp, Samson and Dow, Diego – and Nell. The scapegoat had stepped ashore without a word, and had already moved a few yards off towards the collapsed tents, her head tilted, as if she was listening. For light, they had only the small signal lanterns from the boats, red and green in colour, and the fog swirled weirdly in the illumination they cast. From somewhere far off a bell rang again: the Chloe, out upon the gulf. But all else was silent.