The Voyage of the Unquiet Ice

by Andrew McGahan

  ‘How many served on the Bent Wing?’ Nell asked.

  ‘Some two hundred and fifty men,’ said Sampson.

  ‘And not a one still alive, by the look,’ said Diego.

  They went slowly, expecting grim sights, and indeed they found the first corpse not thirty feet from the shore. The man was face down in the snow, his shoulders hunched as if frozen in the act of trying to push himself up. And although there was only the barest breath of air oozing now through the fog, at some point since his death strong gales must have blown across the isle, shredding away most of the clothing from the man’s back, leaving the skin there exposed, pale and hard as marble.

  He’d been starvation thin before he died.

  They moved on, the silence broken now by the distant shouts of the sailors in the boats, calling out their ahoys at intervals, like mournful bird cries. Dow and the others passed another body, also face down, and then a third, sitting propped up against a drift of snow, face to the sky, as if merely fallen asleep there – but the face was grey-white, the bearded cheeks hollow, the mouth grimacing open and full of ice. Ice had pooled, too, in the man’s eyes, blinding him whitely in death.

  They came upon a graveyard. There was no soil on the stony spit in which to bury a man, but it seemed that many of the dead had been laid to rest in an orderly fashion. For here were rows of long shapes covered by snow, and marked each with a wooden plank at the head.

  Lamps held high, Dow and the others walked slowly down the lines, Sampson counting under his breath. ‘Near to eighty,’ he said at last.

  Nell was staring beyond the graveyard to the main body of the camp. ‘Barely a third of their full complement – so where are the rest? And where are the other two ships from Nadal’s fleet?’

  No one answered, and they moved on.

  Beyond the graveyard were the shacks and the tents. There seemed little purpose looking in the tents – every canvas sheet had fallen flat under weight of snow and had since frozen solid. But the shacks demanded inspection. There were four. The first three were long and low, and shack by shack the searchers forced the snow-jammed doors open to discover inside a confusion of cots and hammocks and crudely fashioned stoves.

  But the stoves were cold, and there were no sleepers in the cots and hammocks – only dead bodies; some stretched out peacefully, others contorted in horrible parodies of sitting upright, but all of them the same marble colour, and stiff. Maybe another thirty men in all.

  Beyond these buildings the spit began to narrow towards its further point. The last shack waited there, smaller than the others. Before it stood a great circle of blackened ash and wood – a bonfire, by the look. The Bent Wing would no doubt have carried a good supply of firewood and oil, but at some point the men must have begun to burn the ship itself, for the blackened timbers in the circle were clearly planks from the hull. Perhaps the bonfire was for heat, or perhaps it had been meant as a signal fire for a rescue that never came. In either case, the flames were long extinguished.

  They entered the last shack. It held eight cots, a stove, and a finely crafted table and chairs – the kind of table and chairs that might be found in a ship’s Great Cabin, for the use of the captain and his officers. It must have involved great labour to carry them from the wreck. In the corners were littered many charts and navigational instruments, cast aside.

  Two men also were entombed there. The first lay in one of the cots, his body wrapped in blankets, but the second was seated at the table, his corpse frozen there grotesquely, sprawled forward across the polished wood, his arms outstretched before him. He was dressed in the tattered remnants of an officer’s uniform. And just beyond his fingers, as if the dying man had pushed it away from himself with a last revulsion, was a book – a leather bound journal, its pages spread open and held down against wayward winds by a heavy inkpot. The parchment was crowded with handwriting.

  ‘It’s as I thought,’ said Diego. ‘They’re all long past saving; dead before we even set out. This whole ill-considered voyage has been pointless.’

  Samson shook his head. ‘Not entirely. At least the Sea Lord will be granted some certainty now, as to the fate of his son.’

  ‘The old fool has known the truth of that for years; this was merely to stall the inevitable.’ Diego kicked at an empty wine bottle and it rattled coldly across the stony floor. ‘But yes, as you say, at least the search is done now, and we can turn for home. And none too soon.’

  Nell had been examining the corpses. ‘Done?’ she said. ‘The search is not done. See – here lie a commander and a lieutenant, to judge by their uniforms. But what of the other senior officers? What of the captain? What of the rest of the crew? And what of the other two ships? They’re not here. Nor is Nadal. The search is far from over – we must keep going.’

  Diego snorted. ‘Keep going? Where – deeper into the darkness and the ice? And to find what? More corpses and wrecks, all the while chancing becoming wrecked ourselves in this frozen hell?’

  ‘It would be an insult to these men,’ Nell replied, ‘to not press on and discover the fate of their companions.’

  ‘Ha. It’s not the fate of their companions you want to discover – it’s the pole. All this mad talk of the North Way has infected you too.’

  ‘Why not seek for both men and pole?’

  Diego smiled at her in his superior way. ‘I’d follow you to many places, Nell – but to the ends of the earth? Or to our destruction in seeking for it? No. I’ve said it before – you read too much. All those old tales make for fine stories, and to play explorer is tempting, I’m sure. But for once I agree with our captain – this is no time or place for reckless adventuring.’

  Nell might not have heard him. She had leant over the book on the table and was scanning its final lines in the lamplight. What she read there made her frown in deep perplexity, then glance up to the lieutenants.

  ‘You should see this,’ she said.

  Together, Diego and Samson bent over the pages, while Dow, reminded once again of his ignorance, waited silently by.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Diego, suddenly angry.

  But Nell was already squeezing back through the half-open door, her lamp in hand. The others followed her out into the darkness again, caught up in her urgency. ‘Boats,’ she demanded, ‘can you see any boats?’

  Dow stared about in the fog, remembering that the Bent Wing had carried four. One, certainly, was already accounted for – its wreckage, found at sea, had inspired this very voyage. But of the other three nothing was known.

  The fog swirled, thinner than before, it seemed to Dow. Yes, it was lifting. And then …

  ‘There,’ he said.

  A single boat lay drawn up beyond the dead bonfire. It was tipped to one side and full of snow. But although the fog was lifting rapidly now – Dow could see as far back as the graveyard – there was no sign of any others.

  ‘Only one boat left,’ said Nell hollowly. ‘So they never came back.’

  She didn’t explain herself. Instead, with Dow and the others following still, she circled round the officers’ shack to come to the north end of the little island. Here the spit of rock narrowed to a last sliver, beyond which lay only the ice-strewn surface of the gulf. And the fog.

  But the fog was mere shreds now, and in the clear airs they could see fairly a mile across the water. Great pale shadows were striding forward to rear up on either hand, fantastically high and forbidding, the ice walls, louring beneath a sky that was moonless and starless still and veiled with high cloud, but which somehow glowed a distant and icy emerald.

  A shiver not of the cold ran through Dow. Such a lonely place to die, there in the dark and under the watch of those pitiless walls – and yet, the isle and the cliffs above possessed a terrible beauty as well.

  And there was the dilemma. For a part of Dow agreed with Diego – there was no chance of survivors further ahead, and they knew enough now surely to return to the Sea Lord, to flee these icy jaws while they w
ere still able. And yet the great gulf seemed to continue on forever, still two miles wide at least, clear and unbending, and the greater part of him scorned the idea of turning back, lured by the mystery of the darkness ahead.

  But without some sign of hope – some reason to risk his own crew – would Vincente dare to go on?

  From away beyond the southern end of the isle the Chloe’s bell could suddenly be heard ringing, and in reply came distant shouts of recognition. The boats and the ship must have sighted each other at last.

  But Dow’s gaze was on Nell, who had walked to the very northern point of the spit to examine a small shape there, and who was now staring back at them, horror and vindication battling in her eyes.

  They went to her once more. A final dead figure was crouched there by the water, clothes stripped away by the gales, naked and as small as a child. But in fact it was a woman. Her limbs and face were cruelly misshapen and contorted, though not – as with all the other corpses – by starvation. It was clear that even in life she had been a crippled and shrunken creature.

  Dow understood. This was the Bent Wing’s scapegoat – Nell’s own counterpart. And there, on the last few feet of land, the woman had fashioned a sign. From all across the spit – despite her lameness and infirmities – she must have gathered the meagre stones that lay free, and brought them to this spot. Then she had formed them into a large arrow upon the ground, mutely indicating a way, a direction. There was no message or warning to accompany it, but nevertheless the arrow’s intent was clear.

  It pointed north, further into the gulf.

  9. THE SCAPEGOAT’S PROPOSAL

  The Chloe remained anchored by the isle all throughout that lightless day, its crew bearing uneasy witness to a dreadful landscape: the wrecked and broken ship, the wretched flattened tents, the humped graveyard, and the ice walls looming stark on either hand, rising to a narrow strip of greenish sky. Those walls grew only more intimidating the longer one gazed up at them, crueller and more forbidding than any stone precipice, for on stone at least some plants might cling, or birds nest, or lizards creep. But the ice was devoid of plants or nests or lizards. It was lifeless, and unscaleable.

  On the isle itself, work parties attended to the dead. Their task was to pry up those bodies frozen in the open, and to collect those who lay in the shacks, and to bury them as best could be achieved in the ice and snow of the graveyard. It was a slow, morbid duty. In all, one hundred and forty men – and one woman – had died there upon the spit of stone.

  But the Bent Wing had sailed with a crew near to two hundred and fifty. So where were the others? Furthermore – as Nell had asked – what of the other two ships in the fleet, including the Lord Designate’s great battleship, the Tempest, with its crew of six hundred?

  What of Nadal himself?

  In search of answers to these questions, Vincente spent the day studying the journal that had been found with the dead officers. By nightfall, reports of what he’d read in its pages had begun to filter down to the crew below deck. And what strange reports they were.

  It had been hoped at first that the journal was the Bent Wing’s official log, an account of its entire voyage kept by its captain. But it was not so. Instead, the journal was merely an account of the last months of those left alive on the island, making only brief mention of earlier events. And it had been written not by the captain, but by the ship’s second officer, for both the first officer and the captain had by then left the isle and the crew behind.

  The limited tale that could be gathered was this:

  Some six months into its journey of exploration – four and a half years ago, for those on the Chloe – the Bent Wing had discovered, and begun to map, the gulf in the Ice. The channel had not appeared then as it did now, for according to the journal it was crowded with bergs, and the warm current was cooling even as the Bent Wing sailed inwards. Indeed, somewhat to the north of the stone spit on which it would later be wrecked, the ship found the gulf blocked with jumbled ice. But when the explorers turned back they found that in the interval a collection of bergs had jammed together and likewise closed the gulf several miles to the south of the island.

  Thus were they trapped.

  The crew was not overly alarmed at first, for they carried ample supplies against just such an eventuality – the Bent Wing was a merchantman, its decks laden with cargo, not guns. They had reckoned on travelling as long as two years amid the ice, and were prepared in the extremity to last even for three. And so they settled in to wait for the water to warm again and the bergs to break down and the channel to open once more.

  Instead the entire gulf began to freeze over. The current had failed completely. By the end of their first year of entrapment, the ice had closed in from north and south and the Bent Wing was confined to a tiny reach of open water around the isle. By the end of their second year, even that space was gone. Ice gripped the ship and forced it up against the island, eventually breaking its back upon the stone. And so the crew had abandoned their vessel and made a home as best they could in the camp.

  They did not yet despair, however. They had food for one more year, if doled out carefully, and even the loss of the ship did not mean final disaster – they still had the ship’s boats. Two of them were now converted into sledded craft, and with thirty men to pull each boat, and under command of the first officer, they set off southwards down the frozen channel to try to reach open water again. It would be an arduous enterprise – but the hope was that perhaps rescue ships from home would already be at the mouth of the gulf. And if not, then as a last resort the boats could themselves attempt the voyage back to Great Island, and so fetch aid for those left behind.

  But another year passed on the islet, and the boats never returned. Doubtless they and their crews were lost, caught and crushed somewhere in the ice; and only long afterwards would the crucial piece of wreckage melt free to drift in the ocean, and so be found too late by the searchers sent north by the Sea Lord.

  It was now three and a half years since the Bent Wing had first set out, and supplies were all but exhausted, for there were no animals or birds to hunt on the isle, and few fish to be caught through holes dug in the ice. Already malnutrition and the cold had carried off many of the men, and others, never counted, had simply wandered from the camp – in delirium or in hopelessness or in crazed attempts to escape – and vanished.

  But then came a new development – for the gulf started to open again. The warm current, after three year’s absence, was at last beginning to flow once more, and the ice to melt. But in a final and terrible irony, the gulf was opening not to the south, the way they needed to flee, but at first only to the north. There, gaps were once more appearing between the floes.

  At which point the captain, surrendering to despair at last, or perhaps to madness borne of long captivity, took one of the last two boats, and a dozen men, and set off northwards. He went – he told his second officer, who was left in command – to discover the pole.

  But like the previous parties that had been sent out, he and his crew were never seen again.

  The second officer was alone now, with some eighty surviving men – and one woman – in his charge. The captain had taken the official log with him, so after some weeks the second officer began his own journal. He briefly summarised their predicament, and then declared that the survivors had only one hope left: that the southern regions of the gulf would clear in time for them to send the last boat out in search of help.

  But although the thawing did continue, it was too slow. Through sixty agonising days, the second officer recorded only a steady roster of deaths, his men dwindling to some fifty frozen and starving creatures, then to thirty, and then to a bare dozen, all by then much too weak to launch a boat anyway, even if the ice had cleared.

  It was then that the journal ceased – presumably with the death of the second officer himself. It was unknown thus how long the last few men lingered, but even if the final clinging survivor had somehow held out f
or several weeks more, relief and rescue, in the form of the Chloe, had still been an impossible nine months away.

  All this the Chloe’s crew learned to their horror as they floated in a gulf now clear completely of floe or berg.

  But it was an account that, for all the details of its despair, left the greater questions infuriatingly unanswered, for the journal made no mention, at any time, of the other two ships in the fleet, neither as fellow prisoners in the gulf, nor as rescuers who might be searching nearby. It was as if the Bent Wing had sailed into the gulf alone and become trapped there alone – as if, indeed, it had ventured unaccompanied to the whole region of the Unquiet Ice, and could expect no immediate help from anyone.

  What could that mean?

  The work of burial was completed at last, but the Chloe remained anchored by the shore of the island – Camp Island, the men had begun to call it – for fog had descended once more, making the night thick and blind, and Vincente gave no orders to light the ice lamps or to send out the cutters. Those same mists hid from sight the broken ship and the long rows of graves, but the presence of the dead was felt by the Chloe’s crew even if the dead were unseen. Was the cold more penetrating than ever, here by the isle? Or did it just seem worse, given the knowledge that those hundred and forty marooned souls had endured it, night after hopeless night, for nearly four years.

  Below decks, the off-watch sailors clustered around the fires and muttered in disquiet about their position. For if the Bent Wing had been caught here unexpectedly, then could not the Chloe be in its turn? There was no ice in the channel at present, maybe, but how quickly might that change? After all, it was by now forty long, slow miles back to the open sea. Maybe Vincente should turn them around and retreat, rather than risk disaster.

  But at this others shook their heads disgustedly. They were Ship Kings, were they not, not fearful landsmen? And there was open water ahead yet to be explored, and the fate of their comrades in the other two ships had yet to be learned. They must go on, following the mute exhortation of the arrow built by the dead scapegoat, stone by thankless stone.