The Voyage of the Unquiet Ice

by Andrew McGahan

  She shrugged, matter-of-fact once more. ‘Yes, but what was my accident to be? I didn’t want to cripple myself. It must be disfigurement only. And it must seem a genuine accident; no one could know that I had done it to myself. I thought then of the Caves. You see, not far from Siena, set under the hills of the shoreline, there are a series of great caves that folk from the town often visit to marvel at. One of them is known as the Ribbon Cave. The word Ribbon refers to the formations that have been carved into the cave’s floor by droplets of water, falling over centuries – thousands of curving ripples and ridges in the stone, each one honed to a razor’s edge of sharpness.

  ‘So cruel are these blades that it’s impossible even for booted feet to walk there, and the cave – which otherwise is vast and echoing and magnificent to behold – can only be viewed from narrow ledges set high above the floor, in the walls. I’d visited there many times before with my family, and I’d shivered in delight, as children will, at the tales of unfortunates who had somehow fallen to the floor below and been cut by those terrible Ribbons. It was such tales that I now found myself remembering. I would visit the cave alone, I decided, and contrive somehow to descend to the floor, and then …’

  She faltered, and stabbed a finger at her eye as if to wipe at a tear, but perhaps she was just scraping away ash. ‘I meant only to cut an arm maybe, and perhaps one side of my face. I planned to climb down and press myself against the Ribbons, just enough to draw blood. Later I would claim that I’d fallen and had been lucky to escape so lightly. But as you can see, my own intent betrayed me. While climbing down to the floor I fell for real, not in pretence, and landed full upon the blades …’

  She smiled in response to Dow’s look of horror. ‘It didn’t hurt as much as you might think, there was only the sensation of skin … parting. But it was hideous all the same, and my clothes were no protection, no matter which way I rolled, there were only more Ribbons slicing …

  ‘My screams brought rescuers running – folk who had been visiting one of the other caves nearby. At great risk and even at some injury to themselves they retrieved me finally from the floor, and carried me back to my family. I remember little of what followed, for I had lost so much blood I was barely conscious. I was cut everywhere. Everywhere. I can only be grateful that the Ribbons supported me even as they sliced, and so none of the cuts were fatally deep. I survived, as you see me.’

  There was still no shame in her, only a complete openness, as if she knew that Dow would make no judgement, but would simply understand. And he did understand, for had he not known a similar forbidden hunger for the sea? And had he not learned, just as she had, that there was a price to be paid if such forbidden hungers were to be appeased?

  He coughed, asked raspingly, ‘Was it worth it?’

  Her laugh was breathless, but certain. ‘Of course it was worth it! I’ve seen things from the high deck of the Chloe that would be fair payment for almost any injury. And yet, if you ask me am I content, then the answer is no. I have, in the end, won little. For we scapegoats may go to sea, yes, and we are honoured and consulted by our crews, but it’s not for us to set the course of the ship, or to issue orders to its men, or to fight in its battles.

  ‘Can you imagine the frustration of it? To mix daily with officers no brighter or braver than myself, and yet to forever defer to them – still only a girl, still only an ornament, still useless. I can offer advice, yes, and I can hint and cajole, and sometimes get my way. But I want to command a ship, Dow Amber, not merely adorn it, or play as its charm and mascot.’

  Again, the echo of his own thoughts and feelings in her words amazed Dow. And watching as she spoke, for the first time it seemed that he could see beyond her scars, as if looking through a fine net, to perceive that her face was just an ordinary face, not fierce or beautiful in any particular way, only trapped, and disappointed.

  Which explained, perhaps, the last puzzle about her that Dow had never been able to solve.

  ‘And so,’ he said, ‘Diego.’

  She nodded pensively. ‘We were friends as children, as I said. In a way I was a little sister to him. He’s an only child, you know, and was left on his own much of the time, with just servants for company. I was the one child nearby of a high enough status for him to play with.

  ‘Then when we were older it was more than friendship, at least on his part. He always said he wanted us to marry, but I never took that very seriously, for all that I was fond of him. I had no interest by then in being a wife, his or anyone’s. I only wanted to sail. And so … the accident. But he surprised me. I expected he’d want nothing to do with me after that, but he was as attentive as ever, as if nothing had changed. He was very caring.’

  Dow could not help but frown in doubt at this, but Nell, watching his expression, only gave a wise laugh.

  ‘You don’t know him at all,’ she said. ‘He’s proud, yes, and too sensitive to insult – but he can be very faithful, and dogged too, when he wants something. After I became a scapegoat he followed me still, even though it meant serving on a Valignano ship, under a captain he hates.’

  ‘He still means to marry you,’ Dow said flatly.

  ‘He does. Even though it would cost his reputation dearly, for it’s not approved that scapegoats should wed.’

  ‘Do you mean to marry him?’

  ‘I didn’t – not at first. I was grateful for his friendship after the accident, but I still had no desire to be a wife. I hoped that being a scapegoat might be enough for me. But it isn’t, and he knows it isn’t.

  ‘Which is why he’s promised – when he has his own ship – that he’ll further defy custom, and take me on board both as scapegoat and wife. He intends that we should share his ship between us, scandal though it would be. He’s that devoted.’ She shook her head in wonder, and perhaps in shame too. ‘I don’t know why – I certainly don’t deserve it. It’s the big brother inside him, I suppose, or some boyhood idea of love or loyalty. But it only proves that there’s more to him than pride and bluster.’

  Her tone went wistful. ‘And I’ve been tempted. I haven’t said yes or no to him yet – but I’ve been tempted. Oh I don’t love him, but he knows that, and it doesn’t seem to bother him. He’s also too cautious a sailor for my liking – I’d have to push and urge him on. Still, together we would have a ship to command. And that’s something no other man can offer …’

  Dow sat nonplussed. No other man?

  Nell was watching him again. ‘You see? I told you, you don’t know him. But then you two have disliked each other from the first, and I don’t think either can judge the other clearly. All you see is an arrogant and overbearing Ship Kings officer, and all he sees is an upstart peasant who doesn’t know his place. I know – I used to see you the same way. At first, at least.’

  She was staring at the thickening sky now, speaking dreamily, almost as if falling asleep. ‘How I hated you, when we first met. Do you remember? The day you were caught trespassing on the Chloe, in search of the compass?

  I saw in you the same doomed desires as my own – chasing after what you could never have – and I didn’t want to be reminded of that. And then, when you rode the maelstrom, I hated you all the more furiously, because you’d done something so wonderful, so daring, something that I could never hope to do ...

  ‘But then when Vincente said we were to turn back from the chasm, I thought, why shouldn’t I do it? What was stopping me? You didn’t ask permission to face the whirlpool, so why should I? This was my chance to do something real, on my own.’ She laughed at herself. ‘But of course then I had to ask for your help anyway. I’m sorry. You deserve better than to end up marooned upon a burning rock …’ She focussed on him a moment, searching. ‘Why did you come, Dow Amber?’

  Startled, Dow did not know how to answer. He had come – well, for many reasons. One of them being, she had asked him to.

  But he’d misunderstood her question, or perhaps she sensed the answer he might give, and so, before he co
uld reply, she deflected him by adding, ‘I mean, why did you come aboard the Chloe that night? Why was it so important to you? What made you think that you, and you especially, were somehow meant for the sea?’

  And Dow, faced with trying to sum up the vast emotions that had dwelt within him since his first sight of the ocean, found himself unable to do it, having just heard such a similar tale from her. Instead, thoughtlessly almost, knowing that death loomed, he revealed the great secret of his life; the secret that must never be told to the Ship Kings – to her, a Ship King. Even though it wasn’t – not nearly – the answer to her question.

  He said, ‘I’m the heir of Admiral Honous Tombs.’

  Her eyes widened. But before she could respond, the mountain rocked tremendously beneath them. A great roar thundered from above, and small stones came cascading over the lip of their hollow. They crouched down together against the avalanche, and somehow their hands were clasped now, their faces close. The convulsion eased, but they remained huddled the same way, and Dow could see his own fear reflected back in her pale gaze.

  She laughed unsteadily. ‘What a fine pair we make. Such terrible secrets we hide. And what do they matter now?’

  He laughed too, despairing, and then the mountain lurched again, and more stones rained down, and suddenly nothing mattered except the grip of her hand in his. Their cheeks were together, the touch of skin hot and compelling, and their lips were meeting, dry and cracked and awful, yet searching insistently, grasping for life in one frantic, devouring instant.

  They snapped apart, staring in disbelief at one another.

  Then a sound came, faint and thin.

  ‘Ignella! Dow!’

  A voice! They scrambled madly up out of the hollow – into a world of raining ash and swirling clouds and red glowing rivers to either hand. Had the call been real? Where had it come from?

  ‘Dow! Ignella!’

  There, below, a figure was labouring up the slope towards them. Two figures. The ash swirled clearer a moment. Dow croaked a cry of elation. It was Johannes and Nicky! And beyond them, down at the waterline, waited the boat, the Bent Wing 2, intact after all.

  Joyously, Dow and Nell went reeling down the mountainside, but the blacksmith’s expression was grim. ‘Hurry,’ he declared as the four came together, ‘this eruption may yet be the ruin of us all.’

  ‘But where have you been?’ Dow demanded.

  Johannes was shoving them downhill. ‘I could ask you the same question. We’ve been searching for you two ever since we righted the boat – we were about to give up, but then we spied you ducking into a hole just as the mountain went into these new throes. Hurry now.’

  ‘And the others? You have them all?’

  ‘Just hurry!’

  Down the mountain they fled, the volcano roaring its anger at their escape. The boat waited, drawn up on the shore. Four shapes were hunched within, ready at the oars. Dow’s spirits rose further. They were all alive! He knew then that everything was going to be okay, that they would cross the inner sea and make their way safely back through the chasm, and that the Chloe would still be there, waiting for them. There would be no price to pay for their foolishness. It might, perhaps, even be a triumph.

  But then they were clambering into the boat, and Johannes was shoving off, and Dow was staring into the faces of the rowers. They were not joyous, but silent and stern, and he realised that only three were looking back. The fourth rower was bent in his seat, but merely propped there, so that his body would not block the others. His face was half hidden, his jaw slack, but one eye was visible, gazing lifelessly at the boat’s floor.

  It was a drowned face. A dead face.

  It was the poet, Alfons.

  But Dow was right, at least, about their escape.

  Four hours later the Bent Wing 2 emerged from the outer mouth of the chasm to find the Chloe waiting. The seven survivors, having lost most of their winter gear, were by then frozen close to the final extremity, and the corpse they carried was stiffened in its crouch, never to unbend again. The boat itself was near sunk with ice, for snow had rained down eternally in the rift, the walls shaking and shuddering from the great eruption, which was growing behind them still in the inner sea.

  But no wave came, and they lived to see the open sky once more – except that it was thick with smoke and ash now, even on this far side of the chasm. Thunder roared from beyond the ice walls. The Chloe indeed was on the point of raising sail to flee as the Bent Wing 2 slid the last few strokes to the ship’s side. Amazed faces stared down from the rail, but the glad calls faded as the survivors were hoisted aboard, each crippled and painful, and then lastly Alfons, frozen and staring and still dead.

  For Dow everything was a haze now of cold and grief. He slumped on the deck, beyond even shivering. Carers fussed around him and blankets were thrown about his shoulders, and a cup of steaming liquid was put to his lips, but nothing warmed him. The cold was in his heart. Someone nearby was issuing orders about Alfons’s body; Vincente, his tones angry and taut.

  Then a different voice began railing at Dow himself, and he looked up to see Diego’s furious face close to his. But he couldn’t understand the words, and soon the lieutenant was gone again. The next Dow saw of him, Diego had his arm around Nell and was leading her off to the stern castle. Dow willed dimly that the scapegoat should at least turn to look back at him – to acknowledge something of all that had just happened – but he caught only a glimpse of her wan, white face, her eyes red as if with weeping, then she too was gone.

  ‘Get him below decks,’ came Fidel’s voice, less angry than all the others. ‘The captain will decide his punishment later.’

  Yes, thought Dow. There would be punishment. Then hands were lifting him upright, and he staggered down into the darkness.

  The Chloe did not flee even then, although the thunder of the eruption grew ever louder, and ash rained harder, and ice fell in deadlier shards from the surrounding cliffs, splashing perilously all about the ship.

  Vincente, in his fury, delayed for one final task.

  A burial.

  Alfons – huddled in his crouch still, for there was no time to thaw him – was wrapped and sewn into a canvas shroud, his seaman’s disk, by tradition, removed from around his neck and placed upon his lips. Then he was returned to the boat that had already borne his corpse, the Bent Wing 2, and bound there, sitting upright at the tiller. Perhaps Vincente had decided that the orphaned craft was cursed after all, and should be left behind. In any case, he commanded it to be holed, and with the poet’s shrouded figure steering in its stern, it sank slowly beneath the black waters and was seen no more.

  The world groaned and shook, and from the chasm there came a great roaring of collapsing ice, and the watchers guessed that its narrow walls had finally cracked and fallen, and that the Way was shut.

  It was enough. As ash fell in grey mourning, the Chloe raised sail at last, and made for home.

  12. VINCENTE’S GIFT

  It was no easy matter, even then, to escape the north. The Chloe spent a full week retreating down the gulf – beating against a strengthening wind and threatened all the while by avalanches from the ice cliffs, and tumultuous surges in the channel, all caused by the tremors and quakes of the great volcano’s eruption, roaring constantly behind them. And that was only the beginning of the ordeal. Once they reached the open ocean they had to contend again with the rolling bergs of the Unquiet Ice, made all the more unstable and treacherous now by disturbed seas, and by black rains of ash and pumice that fell even there, a hundred miles and more from the pole. It seemed all the world was plunging into ruin.

  But at length the Chloe won through to an ocean that was free of ice, and which was beyond the ash falls, and where even a hint of daylight crept again into the midday sky – only for the northern squalls to strike once more, sweeping west to east with their monstrous waves and freezing gales. The weary crew could only batten down yet again, and claw their way southwards, mile by bitte
r mile. Many miserable days later they at last gained through to the calmer seas beyond the storm latitudes – but even then the weather remained grey and wet and cold, as if winter was unending, and following after them.

  In truth though, winter was almost gone, at least according to the calendar, for by then over four weeks had passed since they’d fled the pole, and nearly three months in all since their departure from Haven Diaz. It would be spring by the time they arrived home – now only a fortnight’s sail ahead. But no sign or warmth of that spring came yet to the long suffering Chloe.

  Until, that was, the day of the fight between Dow and Diego.

  The morning of that day gave no hint of the trouble to come – indeed, it dawned gloriously blue, the sun shining brightly for the first time since anyone on board could remember. The crew blinked at its glare, then promptly threw open the hatches to release the fetid airs of below decks, and hauled up all their clothes and blankets – still damp from repeated drenching – to hang in the rigging to dry. After which they stretched themselves out upon the deck and proceeded to bathe, half naked, in the sunshine.

  Seeing this, Dow – after four weeks of labouring in the darkest corner of the forecastle sail room – pleaded with the sail-master for permission to likewise work out on deck, in the sun. A request to which the sail-master, not an unreasonable man, assented, with just one proviso. ‘A sailor always craves the sunlight,’ he warned, ‘but remember, Mr Amber – it’s the brightest day that brings the sharks to the surface.’

  But Dow didn’t care about sharks. He gathered up the tools of his current hateful trade – an armful of old rope from the bottomless pile, and his bucket – and climbed onto the sail room roof, which doubled as the Chloe’s foredeck. From there, sitting atop a hatch cover, he could gaze back over the entire ship as he worked.

  And what a change the sun had made. Gone was the bedraggled, ice-rimed, battened-down vessel that had fought its way to and from the North Sea. Now, with the ice melted and the decks dry and the shrouds festooned with coloured laundry, the Chloe was like a tree blossoming again at spring’s approach.