Iron Winter

37

For fisherman Crimm, the morning hadn’t been so bad.

Out on the Northern Ocean, the visibility had been good. There had even been a little warmth in the sun, on this supposedly late-summer day. The crew of the Sabet, all eight of them who had mustered, had been reasonably cheerful, despite the ice-cold spray that soaked its way through the thickest furs, despite the endless labour of pumping water from the bilge, and despite the lousy catch of cod, a longer-term worry that gnawed at their vitals as they thought of the coming winter, and their families back in Northland.

Of course the ice had been their constant companion all day. Scattered floes scraped against the hull, and to the north fleets of bergs sailed on the swell. On the horizon was a band of whitish light that shimmered and glinted: pack ice, solid, unmovable, much further south even than last year, and much earlier in the year too. It wasn’t even the autumn equinox yet! Still, through the morning they had been able to forget about the ice and get on with their work.

But by midday the floes were closing in around them. The men started arguing about when to give up and put into port.

Then the fog rolled in, almost without warning, coming on them with overwhelming speed. That was that. They shipped the nets and made for home.

In a grey cloud they nosed south on a northerly wind. They got close enough to the Northland shore to hear the great steam-powered horns that sounded from the light towers atop the Wall, but they couldn’t see the lights. If Crimm stood high in the prow he could barely make out the big square mainsail, let alone the Wall. You could wreck yourself against the Wall if you came on it blind. They had no choice but to head north again, and wait out the fog. They furled the sails and broke out the oars.

Crimm glanced over his crew. None looked happy to be rowing. One man, Xon, the youngest, looked withdrawn, fearful. Crimm said cheerfully, ‘Call this a fog? Ayto’s breath is thicker than this, most mornings.’ He got grins in response.

They emerged at last into the daylight; the fog was a solid bank behind them. But now the northern horizon was greying too, bubbling into an ominous wall of cloud. At a soft command from Crimm they rested on their oars.

‘Told you so,’ Ayto said to Crimm.

‘Told me what?’

‘Should have put in before the famous fog rolled in. Told you.’

‘Yes, but in the next breath you said-’

‘Anyhow, now we’re stuck out here.’

The wind picked up again. Loose corners of the mainsail flapped and cracked. Though the sails were furled, Crimm felt the Sabet surge, back towards the fog.

Ayto raised his hands. ‘And now comes the wind too. You spoil us, o little mother of the sky.’

The wind gusted, becoming an icy blast in Crimm’s face, hurling particles that stung his skin and eyes, more like frozen sand than water or ice.

And suddenly, in just a few heartbeats, that bank of cloud to the north rushed down on them, towering high into the sky. It was a storm coming out of nowhere, as fast as the fog had come upon them, or faster. The men didn’t need to be told what to do. They lashed down the nets and their barrels of water and dried fish, tried to make fast the day’s catch, a pitiful heap of immature fish glistening in the bilge, and grabbed lines, bracing themselves.

The storm hit with a tremendous howl. The wind was a chill blast that tried to drag Crimm off the boat, and dug deep through his layers of clothing to his skin, and drove more of those stinging ice grains into his face, and snow, big fat flakes of it that slapped his cheeks and forehead. The men, the snow sticking to their furs, were like bears, he thought, lumbering in the grey light through the rushing snow. But the spray was coming up too and freezing where it fell. As the ice formed slick on the deck, you had to take care not to slip.

Ayto shouted something, and pointed upwards. One hand wrapped in the rigging, Crimm leaned back, holding his hood against the wind, and saw that ice was forming in sheets on the main mast, the furled sail, the rigging. The boat could be capsized by a sufficient weight of ice up there.

Crimm bent, dug in a locker to retrieve an axe, then clambered up the main mast by the rigging and began to hack at the ice sheets. Another man, he couldn’t see who, was doing the same at the stern mast. His hands were quickly going numb, and he thought of digging out his mittens, but he wouldn’t be able to hold the rigging firmly enough. The boat rolled in a swell, and the men skidded over the deck. Crimm had to wrap an arm around the main mast and nearly lost his grip on the axe.

And the man at the stern dropped from the mast, slid over the slick deck, fell into the surging water, and was gone in an eye blink.

The storm blew over as quickly as it had come upon them. The crew slumped on the deck, exhausted, their breath billowing before their faces. The air felt much colder than before the storm had passed, and Crimm could see the residual wet on the deck frosting up. Suddenly they had sailed into winter.

He worked his way around the ship, passing out water bags and lumps of dried fish, and quietly counted the men. Seven of them left, one lost. He organised a couple of them to start pumping out the bilge, which was awash with icy water.

‘We lost Xon,’ a man called Aranx murmured.

‘Yes. Only sixteen, wasn’t he?’

‘Seventeen.’

‘I’ll tell his mother when we get back.’

‘I’ll do it,’ Ayto said. ‘I play knuckles with the father. The stern mast’s snapped, by the way. That’s the main damage. That and a hundred leaks.’

‘We can lash the mast,’ Crimm said. When they got back to the Wall the other damage would be straightforward to repair; the boat’s construction was planking laid over a sturdy skeleton, and replacing sections was easy in dry dock.

There was a scraping along the hull, as if they had struck a reef.

Ayto, Crimm and Aranx glanced at each other, and hurried to the rail.

The ice was floating in cakes around them, flat, thick, some of them slushy. The scraping they had heard had been one of the cakes brushing past the stern. The floes looked like lilies on some dismal, colourless pond, Crimm thought.

‘In this cold that lot is going to thicken quickly,’ Ayto said.

‘We can get through it for now.’ The Sabet’s high prow was designed to help it weather heavy seas. It was good at pushing through loose surface ice like this. ‘Break out the oars. If it goes on long enough we’ll rotate the man at the rudder.’

‘All right.’

Soon they had the crew organised, and rowing steadily. Crimm worked the rudder for a time, then tied it up and went to work at the bilge pump.

The grinding of the ice against the hull came more often. Soon it was a continuous scrape, and, labouring in the bilge, Crimm could hear the cracking of floes as the boat rose and fell with the swell, and the prow came down heavy on the ice.

Ayto called, ‘Rest your oars. You might want to take a look, Crimm.’

Crimm straightened up from the bilge and walked the couple of paces to the rail. The floes were colliding with each other now, rising up over each other, pushing up ridges of crushed material that quickly refroze. It was a landscape of ridges and mountains, forming before his eyes. There were still leads, open stretches of water, dark stripes between the floes, but further out icebergs towered, floating hills of ice.

‘We’ve seen this before,’ Ayto said. ‘Further north.’

‘Yes. But never this far south.’

‘No, and not at this time of year. The prow won’t crack stuff as thick as this.’

‘We mustn’t get stuck.’ Crimm glanced around. ‘There are still some decent leads. We can follow that one, to the west, and then maybe there’s a route to the south.’

Ayto squinted and nodded. ‘We can try it. If not that way, another will probably open up.’

‘You call directions, and I’ll take a turn at the oar.’

‘All right. Tell them to go easy. We don’t want any snapped oars.’

So Crimm worked his oar with the rest, cautious, breaking his pull at any sense of solid resistance, any sound of scraping on the ice. Ayto stood at the prow, staring out, calling directions, and the men worked or rested their oars accordingly.

‘Hold it.’ Ayto held his hand up.

The men shipped their oars. The boat came to a halt quickly, with a grinding of ice. Crimm got up and joined Ayto at the prow. The lead ahead was still open, but it was narrowing visibly as he watched.

‘We can’t get any further,’ Ayto said. ‘Sorry. It closed up too fast. I was hoping to make a break for it to that one-’ he pointed to a wider lane further away, ‘-but it just closed in.’

‘Maybe we can go back the way we came.’ They both retreated to the stern to see. The men at the oars sat slumped, still weary from the storm — frost-covered, their clothes, their beards, even their eyebrows. The air was truly, bitterly cold now, Crimm realised, the exercise had kept him warmed against it, even though the sun was still high in a misty sky, even though this was still summer.

When they got to the stern they saw the lead behind the boat was closing up too.

Ayto said, ‘I’m sorry, Cousin, I fouled up, getting us lost in this maze.’

‘There was probably never a way through anyhow.’

‘So what now?’

Crimm was an experienced seaman. His father had brought him up on the ocean; his mother, fond but resentful, said her son had spent more of his boyhood on boats than at home. And at sea, you learned to keep calm. You tried one way. If that failed, you tried another. And if that failed in turn, another yet.

‘We get out on the ice. Fix up ropes. We go on foot, and haul the ship back until we find an open lead.’

‘Hmm,’ Ayto said. ‘Look how quick it’s closing up. We wouldn’t get far.’

‘So your idea is. .’

‘We wait. Overnight if we have to. Maybe the weather will relent a bit tomorrow. If the leads open up again we might make a break.’

Crimm thought about that, looking out to the horizon. Everywhere the ice was solidifying, those great ridges thrusting into the air where the floes collided. Even the drifting bergs were getting frozen into the congealing pack. ‘This stuff doesn’t look as if it’s going to give up any time soon.’

‘Well, it should,’ Ayto said, almost resentful. ‘It’s not even the equinox yet, unless I got too drunk to remember. I say we camp for the night and hope the little mother of the sky looks a bit more kindly on us in the morning.’

So Crimm gave in. They shipped the oars and set up the mainsail as a makeshift shelter suspended from the main mast. They had a small stock of firewood they carried to warm themselves in the nights at sea, and Aranx started building a fire out on the ice. Another man broke out dried fish and biscuits for a meal. Another, a Muslim, rolled out his prayer mat on the ice and knelt, facing east.

Two more of the crew went on a hopeful quest across the ice in search of driftwood for fuel. Ayto called after them, ‘Walk where the ice looks blue. That’s where it’s oldest, thickest. If you fall in through a crack I won’t be coming after you.’

Crimm walked around the ship, looking for damage to the timbers from the ice scrapes. He could hear the ice around him groaning and creaking as it consolidated. It was an eerie sound, laid over the silence of the enclosed, hushed sea, and the surface shuddered and lurched constantly.

And then, he actually saw it begin, the boat’s planking cracked and crumpled inward, under the relentless pressure from the ice, giving way with a snapping, splintering noise. The hull started to tilt.

‘Everybody off,’ he called. ‘Off the ship, now! Grab what you can. .’

They all got off in time, as the hull crumpled like an empty eggshell. The deck tipped over, and the remaining mast gave way with a snap. It all happened quickly, in heartbeats.

‘So, that’s that,’ Ayto said as they surveyed the wreck. ‘The end of the famous Sabet. I’ve heard of this happening. Far to the north, the kind of stories the Coldlanders tell. Not here.’

‘Well, it’s happened.’

‘We should have seen it coming. We might have hauled her out onto the ice before it closed.’

Crimm asked, ‘What good would that have done? We still weren’t going to be sailing her anywhere soon.’

Ayto nodded. ‘So what now?’

‘Now we go in and grab what we can, and see what’s what.’ He glanced around. ‘May as well build a bigger fire.’

‘We’re going to have to walk home,’ Ayto said.

‘Yes.’

‘Or at least to the edge of the ice, where we might get picked up.’

‘They’ll miss us. Send boats looking.’

‘Do we start today?’

Crimm sniffed the chill air. ‘No. The light will be going soon. We’d be better off camping for the night, sorting out the stuff. We need to carry food, the water. We can make up packs from the sails. Tents, maybe.’

‘We shouldn’t have-’

‘We shouldn’t have got stuck in the first place. We shouldn’t have been born in a time when this happens. There’s no warmth in shouldn’t haves.’

‘True enough.’ Ayto aimed a kick at the splintered wreck. ‘Poor old girl. Come on, let’s get set up before it gets any colder.’