The Voyage of the Unquiet Ice

by Andrew McGahan

  Dow’s skin crawled in trepidation. His gaze returned to the hourglass in Nell’s hand, and then met her eyes, to read the despair there. They knew that the upheavals came as little as two hours apart. And the timepiece showed a bare third remaining of their second hour.

  He stared back the way they’d come. They must row for their very lives – but before he could give the order, he saw how hopeless it would be. For they’d been driven a full mile now from the crater wall. Even if they could row against the current, and reach the chasm again, what then? It must be another five miles back through the ice. Could they make it that far – against the flow – before the surge came thundering through behind them?

  No, little hope lay that way. What then could they do? Where could they go? The only safe course was to get out of the water – but there was no way to scale the sheer crater walls. Which left only …

  Dow turned full about. There it stood, still three miles at least across the inner sea, the central mount of the greater volcano – not truly central, but in fact set much closer to their own side of the crater. Luckily so! Barren and stony and riven with fire, it was dry land nevertheless.

  ‘Row,’ he said, pointing. ‘Row hard.’

  The oarsmen did not need it explained – they had all seen exactly what Dow had seen. They set to in a frenzy, heaving on the oars. Too fast, Dow knew, and too frantic. They would never last. But he said nothing, only stared forward doggedly as he steered.

  Nobody spoke. There was nothing to say. A throbbing undertone was building around them, but whether it came from beneath the water, or was a pulse in the air itself, Dow couldn’t tell. He knew only that as the throb rose, so did the expectation of disaster in his heart.

  Nell was hunched over her hourglass, eyes fixed upon it. The sand ran down to empty, and wordlessly she flipped it over. Two hours gone, and the third hour begun. This very moment, perhaps, vast chambers far below were filling with unbearable volumes of steam.

  On they rowed, the oarsmen gasping and straining. The mount rose steadily before them; Dow could see small waves breaking upon its shores. But – though surely it was only his imagination – it seemed, too, he could feel the water actually dropping away beneath the boat, the basin hurrying to its catastrophe. The upheaval was possible at any instant, but if it could just hold off a little longer, only a quarter hour more, then they—

  Dow felt it happen before any sound came; an almighty push from deep below, an impact of pressure so profound that the air and the water and the sky all seemed to compress from the shock of it, silent.

  Then everything un-compressed, and moved.

  Thunder boomed, long and rolling. The mountain ahead of them shook, and the towered cliffs all about the sea shuddered, and great clouds of ice and stone rained in slow avalanches down their sides. The whole crater jolted and lurched, across all of its fifteen mile width.

  But Dow’s gaze was fixed upon the water. Beyond the inner mount, at the crater’s very centre, the surface writhed and flexed in a way that no water ever should. It might have been one solid mass, like jelly almost, shaken upon a gargantuan dinner table. And then, with a slowness that was in seeming only, it began to rise in an immense bulge, a mound of blackly swollen water that built and built upon itself until it grew into a vast shadow looming behind – and indeed overtopping – the mount that now stood shrunken before it.

  Dow stared in stark disbelief. He could only imagine a great bubble of steam rising from some hellish abyss, a bubble so huge and hot that for a moment the ocean must rise bodily above it. But all bubbles must burst. The great bulge of water suddenly seethed white, and with a thunder that drowned all previous thunders, a storm-cloud of steam and ash heaved roaring from the depths and climbed titanically into the sky, raining down hot spray and shedding bolts of lightning from its flanks.

  ‘Hold fast,’ Dow cried. ‘A wave will come.’

  Beneath the thunderhead, the bulge in the sea was collapsing as he spoke – engendering, as it did so, a great rolling wave of unguessable height, already cresting and crashing in white fury. It raced out from the eruption like an enormous ripple from a stone thrown in a pond, broke effortlessly around the shores of the mountain, smashing and battering the cone’s lower slopes as it went, then regathered itself into one front, and came on.

  There was nowhere in all the crater that the Bent Wing 2 could run to escape it. Dow and the others merely grabbed hold of whatever they could, and waited in the silent stupidity of utter fear. The wave grew, and the pounding of its approach made the timbers hum under their hands. A chill wind blasted in their faces, spray stinging. Then it was upon them.

  For Dow, the world exploded into warm water and white hot pain. His hands were ripped from the tiller, and the boat vanished from beneath him. Salt burned, first in his mouth, and then deep in his throat. He was hurled down and thrown up in uncountable cycles, and in a blackness that was more profound than any night.

  He was drowning, he knew, and had only just begun to wonder if he should struggle against it, or whether he’d been plunged too deep now to even bother, when suddenly he found himself on the surface, coughing up a horrible froth, and sucking in cold air.

  White foam seethed everywhere and for a time his eyes were too stinging and blurred to see. He called out names – ‘Johannes! Nicky!’ – but no one answered, at least not that he could hear over the thunder that still reverberated about the crater. Where was everyone?

  His vision cleared, but all around there was only black water, and above, the dissipating storm cloud. He was alone upon the sea. Great swells were marching back and forth, echoes of the first great wave, and Dow noted fleetingly that a portion of that wave must even now be charging out through the chasm, to burst forth eventually into the gulf. The surge would set the Chloe rocking at anchor, disturbing the sleepers aboard the ship, otherwise so unaware of the tumult occurring less than ten miles away from them …

  A swell lifted him briefly and he stared out from its crest. There was still no sign of the boat or of his companions – Were they all drowned then? – but the shore of the inner mount was close now, barely a mile away. The last retreating waters from the flood were still streaming from its lower shores, but the greater part of the cone had stood clear from the surge, and from its crater there yet rose fountains of fire and smoke. It looked a shore unwelcoming and precarious, but there was no other. Dow bent his head and began to swim.

  It was a long way, and the water sapped his strength, for it was not really warm, it had only felt warm compared to the arctic air. In time, it chilled him through. But he laboured on, and after some interminable period, his stomach heaving with the saltwater he’d swallowed, he felt rock beneath his feet, and looked up to see fire-riven slopes rising above him.

  He waded onto a shelf of ragged stone, its sharp edges cutting his bare feet; he had lost his shoes. Indeed, all his winter gear was gone; only his pants and shirt remained. If he’d been anywhere else in the arctic, he’d have frozen to death within an hour. But only a hundred yards away there was a slow-moving river of liquid stone that ran down from the crater, glowing red hot, to reach the sea amid gushes of steam, and the heat from it was like standing before the fires of the Barrel House back home.

  He would not freeze – but there were other, slower ways to die. Dow gazed about bleakly. He could see no other survivors from the boat, either on land, or out at sea. He was alone. Then the mount rumbled severely beneath his feet, and he knew that he could not linger so close to the water. If another of the tremendous geysers should rise while he was near the shore …

  He turned from the ocean and began to climb. The mountain’s flanks were black and steep and cruel to his bare soles, and foul smokes leaked from crevices that gaped here and there. But he had not gone far when a shape tottered up from the shore away to his left – another survivor after all – and a voice came piercingly across the stones towards him.

  A girl’s voice.

  They stumbled to eac
h other in exhaustion. Nell also had lost her winter gear, and was draped only in a drenched officer’s shirt and trousers – although she at least still had her shoes. Her face was bruised and her scars gleamed lividly in the red light; she seemed, for the first time in Dow’s knowing her, a fragile figure, strained almost to the breaking point.

  ‘Is there anyone else?’ she asked. ‘The boat?’

  Dow shook his head, the enormity hitting him again, like a nausea, weakening and cold. His friends, Johannes and Nicky. They were gone. And the poet Alfons, who had followed him so faithfully …

  Nell wavered were she stood, as if something vital had indeed snapped inside her. ‘All of them dead?’ Her head bent. ‘It’s my fault. I brought you all to this awful place. It’s my fault.’

  A bitter part of Dow wanted to agree – but he knew that the blame was his as much as it was hers. They had wrought this terrible thing between them.

  But all he said was, ‘We have to climb higher.’

  She nodded numbly, and he led the way, creeping as best he could upwards through the rocks and ravines. The mount throbbed beneath them, jets of fire spitting from its crater high above, and smoke rising thickly into an ever darkening sky. It was hard to breathe.

  Enough. They were surely high enough now. And in any case, they were both too spent to go on. If they could just find some smooth and level spot between the biting rocks, where they might sit down…

  Then Dow saw it. Not fifty yards from them – the boat, lodged on a high ridge. A mad elation filled him. Somehow they were saved, their craft thrown all the way up upon the mountainside.

  But then the elation vanished. They were not saved. The boat was not their boat, and anyway, it was wholly smashed and ruinous. Understanding came to Dow in a wave of new despair.

  At his side Nell gave a hopeful cry, quickly stifled when she too saw the truth. Together they limped across to the wreck. Bodies lay there – long since rotted and dried to husks – amid the remains of a wretched camp, half buried by ash. One figure, hunched against the boat’s shattered hull, bore the tarnished remains of a captain’s insignia on its shoulders.

  The boat’s name too was still visible on the bow; and Dow did not need to ask Nell what was written there. He knew. So another of the mysteries was solved. The captain of the Bent Wing had made it this far after all. And here he and his last few men had perished.

  Dow and Nell considered the scene for a long silent time. It was what they had come to discover, but what was the use of such discoveries, when no one, other than themselves, would ever now know? They sank at last to the cruel ground, and hid their eyes from the sight.

  11. MANY CONFESSIONS

  The night had no end. It was doubtful that any sun would ever rise high enough, even in an arctic summer, to clear the crater walls and gaze into the great basin of the volcano. In winter, it was impossible to even imagine sunlight in such a place. Amid the twisting smokes and steams and palls of cloud, the only fitting illumination was the sullen false dawn of fire.

  So Dow beheld, when he opened his eyes from a sleep he had no memory of taking. He’d been woken by a particularly loud rumble and throb in the rock beneath him, a reminder, even as he came numbly awake, that nothing had changed or improved; he was trapped still upon the slopes of a volcanic mount that was in continuous eruption, in the middle of a sea that was itself the crater of a vaster volcano, surrounded by insurmountable cliffs and beyond them, a wasteland of impassable ice …

  He yawned bleakly, and then sat up, stiff, wincing at the aches of his cuts and bruises, and at the dryness of his throat. He was very thirsty. But they hadn’t brought water with them in the boat – they’d expected to be away only a short while. And what did that matter anyway, their boat was gone. Dow scanned the shoreline below, but no, there was still no sign of it, and the ocean beyond was black, empty of survivors or wreckage.

  A scrabbling sound came, and Dow turned. Nell was there, hunting through the dismal camp of the Bent Wing’s last expedition, stooping among the corpses. Had she slept at all? What was she after? Did she hope to find water, or food? Surely there would be none.

  Dow studied the dead men briefly – there were six, aside from the captain. They were not, like the bodies back on Camp Island, frozen and preserved in the positions of their dying. Here in the warmth of the volcano’s fumes and fires they had decayed and withered away to bone. Only the captain remained near to upright, slumped against his wrecked boat. Hollowed eye sockets, lined with shreds of flesh, studied Dow in return.

  How long had they lived here, these seven men, after becoming marooned? And in what state? They would have known that no rescue could ever come for them, for they had left behind a ship that was itself already wrecked. Their despair must have been very final.

  Dow and Nell, on the other hand, had set out from a ship that was fully hale and intact – so was there a chance that rescue might come for them? Dow did not think so. Captain Vincente had been right to forbid entry to the chasm, and even having lost eight of his crew, he would surely hold to that wisdom, and not risk further losses in recovery attempts. The Chloe might linger at the chasm’s mouth for a day, or even two, but then Vincente would accept that no one was coming back, and so turn sadly for home.

  And yet …

  The mount trembled again, and Dow studied the sea, wondering. For here was both a mystery and a terrible irony. Seven or eight hours must have passed since the monstrous geyser had capsized them, but there had been no repeat of the awful eruption since then. Unless Dow had dozed through it. And he doubted that.

  And yet such cataclysms, according to Nell’s observations, were meant to occur every two or three hours. So what had happened? Had the great volcano fallen asleep after its last fatal upheaval?

  Dow doubted that, too. The fires that leapt and roared from the crater high above him were, if anything, slowly intensifying – and all across the inner sea the plumes of steam were rising in ever greater thickness and numbers, as if the underwater blazes were being stoked to new ferocity. So heavily did smoke swirl now that even the towering walls of the outer crater were all but lost in the murk, and a throb was constant in the air.

  No, the volcano did not sleep; to Dow’s eye it had in fact entered a new stage of waking, its fires burning hotter than ever, but more steadily, without the convulsions that had marked its previous mood.

  How and why that should be, he could not say – Johannes might have known, had he lived – but one thing was apparent; the inner sea had remained essentially calm throughout those last eight hours, and in that time a rescue boat could easily have come safely through the chasm and across the flooded crater to find them, if Vincente had dared to send one.

  Even worse to consider, if the geysers had indeed ceased for the time being, then Dow and Nell and their crew could have made their own journey through the chasm and back, free of disaster and in untroubled seas, if they’d only waited a few more hours before departing from the Chloe. That was the unbearable thought, that they had hurried, with such cruel ill-timing, at exactly the wrong moment, to their own doom. To Dow it hinted darkly that fortune – supposedly his friend, and guardian of the entire voyage – had not merely abandoned them now, but that perhaps it had misled them all along, just to lure them to this final mocking end.

  ‘Ah-ha!’ said Nell.

  The scapegoat was kneeling by the dead captain, searching about beneath the ruined boat. Now she drew forth an object wrapped in rags. Unpeeling it, she revealed a book; a large, leather-bound journal. Dow had seen one just like it only days ago, by the outstretched hand of the dead officer, back on Camp Island.

  Nell hobbled over with her prize to sit at Dow’s side. Again, he was struck by how slight she really was, robbed of her coat and other gear. But her face, belying that, was intent with its old fierceness.

  She said, ‘I’ve found it. The captain’s log. It can tell us everything that happened from the moment Nadal’s fleet set sail.’

  D
ow regarded the book. Did he even care about that anymore? ‘We can’t eat paper. Or drink it.’

  Her glance was hurt. But then, ignoring him, she opened the journal to its first page. The fire-glow was barely sufficient for Dow to make out the dark squiggles inscribed there, but the girl, her head bent low to the paper, studied the lines raptly. She turned one page over, then a second. And slowly, as Dow watched on, her expression became one of horror.

  ‘What?’ Dow demanded, unnerved.

  At first she only shook her head silently – either in disbelief at what she read, or to tell Dow to wait – and read another page. At last, however, she looked up to gaze wide-eyed across the inner sea.

  ‘They never even came here,’ she breathed.

  ‘Who didn’t?’

  ‘The rest of the fleet!’ She studied the pages once more, rearing back as if appalled by them. ‘The Lord Designate and the other two ships. They never came north at all. The Bent Wing sailed here alone. ’

  Dow stared in bafflement. ‘But …’

  ‘It’s written here! The whole expedition to the Ice – it was a lie from the beginning. Nadal never came north.’

  ‘Then where is he?’

  ‘South. The other two ships went south; they …’ But then the dreadfulness of it seemed to overcome her in a rush, and her words were lost in a bout of retching, hiccupping laughter. Her hands flew to her mouth, but the horrible gasping went on. ‘They never came …’

  Dow clutched her hands, pressed them flat against the book. ‘Stop it! Tell me what it says here!’

  Her mouth snapped shut, and for a moment both of them stared down at his hands clenched tightly over hers. Her fingers were much smaller and finer than his, but Dow could feel the distinct ridges of the scars on the back of her hand, and on the ball of her thumb …