The Terror

⁶⁵ CROZIER

They leave on their long sledge trip shortly after the sun makes its first hesitant, midday, and only-minutes-long appearance on the southern horizon.

But Crozier understands that it is not the return of the sun that has determined their time for action and his own time of decision; it is the violence in the skies the other twenty-three and a half hours each day that has decided Silence that the time has come. As they sledge away from their snow-house forever, shimmering bands of colored light coil and uncoil above them like fingers opening out from a fist. The aurora grows stronger in the dark sky every day and night.

The sledge is a more serious device for this longer trip. Almost twice as long as the jury-rigged fish-runnered six-foot sled Silence had used to transport him when he could not walk, this vehicle has runners made up of small and carefully shaped pieces of scavenged wood interlinked with walrus ivory. It uses shoes of whalebone and flattened ivory rather than just a layer of peat paste on its runners, although Silence and Crozier still reapply a layer of ice to the runners several times a day. The cross sections are made up of antlers and the last bits of wood they had, including the sleeping-shelf slat; the rising rear posts are composed of heavily lashed antlers and walrus ivory.

The leather straps are now rigged for both of them to pull — neither will ride unless there is an injury or illness — but Crozier knows that Silence has built this sledge with great care in the hopes that it may be pulled by a dog team before this year is over.

She is with child. She has not told Crozier this — by the strings or by a glance or by any other visible means — but he knows it and she knows he does. If all goes well, he estimates that the baby will be born in the month he used to think of as July.

The sledge carries all of their robes and skins and cooking gear and tools and skin-sealed Goldner tins to hold water once thawed and a supply of frozen fish, seal, walrus, fox, hare, and ptarmigan. But Crozier knows that some of this food is for a time that may not come — at least for him. And some of it may be for presents, depending upon what he decides and what then happens out on the ice. He knows that, depending upon what he decides, they will both be fasting soon in preparation — although, as he understands it, he is the only one who must fast. Silence will join him in the fast simply because she is his wife now and will not eat when he doesn’t. But if he dies, she will take the food and the sledge and come back to land to live her life and continue her duties here.

For days they travel north along a coastline, skirting cliffs and too-steep hills. A few times the severe topography forces them out onto the ice, but they do not want to be out there for long. Not yet.

The ice is breaking up here and there, but only into small leads. They do not stop to fish at these leads or to pause at polynyas, but press on, pulling ten hours a day or more, moving back to land as soon as they can to continue the hauling there even though it means much more frequent refreshening of the ice on the runners.

On the evening of the eighth night, they pause on a hill and look down at a cluster of lighted snow-domes.

Silence has been careful to approach this little village from the downwind side, but still one of the dogs staked into the ice or earth below begins to bark madly. But the others do not join him.

Crozier stares at the lighted structures — one is a multiple dome made up of at least one large and four small snow-houses connected by common passageways. Just the thought, much less the sight, of such community makes Crozier ache inside.

From far below, muffled by snow blocks and caribou skin, comes the sound of human laughter.

He could go down there now, he knows, and ask this group to help him find his way to Rescue Camp and then to find his men; Crozier knows this is the village of the band belonging to the shaman who escaped the massacre of eight Esquimaux on the other side of King William Island and it is also Silence’s extended family, as were the eight murdered men and women.

He could go down and ask them to help, and he knows that Silence will follow and translate with string-signs. She is his wife. He also knows the odds are great that unless he does what he will be asked to do out on the ice — Silence’s husband or no and whatever their reverence and awe and love for her — these Esquimaux may well greet him with smiles and nods and laughter and then, when he is eating or asleep or unwary, will slip tight thongs over his wrists and a skin bag over his head and then stab him again and again, women stabbing along with the hunters, until he is dead. He has dreamt about his blood flowing red on white snow.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps Silence does not know what will happen. If she has dreamt that particular future, she has not stringed the outcome to him nor shared those dreams.

He doesn’t want to find out now anyway. This village, this night, tomorrow — before he has decided about the other thing — is not his immediate future, whatever else his future and his fate may or may not be.

He nods to her in the darkness and they turn away from the village and drag the sledge north along the coast.

During the days and nights of travel — they rig only a protective caribou skin to hang above them from the sledge-antlers as they huddle together under hides for the few hours they sleep — Crozier has much time to think.

In the last few months, perhaps because he has had no one to speak to — or at least no interlocutor who can respond with actual out-loud speech — he has learned how to let different parts of his mind and heart speak within him as if they were different souls with their own arguments. One soul, his older, more-tired soul, knows that he has been a failure in every way a man can be tested. His men — the men who trusted him to lead them to safety — are all dead or scattered. His mind hopes that some have survived, but in his heart, in his soul of his heart, he knows that any men so scattered in the land of the Tuunbaq are already dead, their bones bleaching some unnamed beach or empty ice floe. He has failed them all.

He can, at the very least, follow them.

Crozier does not yet know where he is, although he suspects more each day that they have wintered on the western coast of a large island northeast of King William Island, at a point on almost the same latitude as Terror Camp and Terror herself, although those sites would be a hundred miles or more west from here across the frozen sea. If he wanted to return to Terror he would have to travel west across this sea and perhaps across more islands and then across all of the north of King William Island itself and then twenty-five more miles out onto the ice to reach the ship he abandoned more than ten months earlier.

He does not want to return to Terror.

Crozier has learned enough about survival in the past months that he thinks he can find his way back to Rescue Camp and even to Back’s River given enough time, hunting as he goes, building snow-houses or skin tents when the inevitable storms arise. He can seek out his scattered men this summer, ten months after he abandoned them, and find some trace of them, even it if takes years.

Silence will follow him if he chooses this path — he knows she will — even though it means the death of everything she is and everything she lives for here.

But he wouldn’t ask her to. If he were to go south after his crew, he would go alone because he suspects that, despite all his new knowledge and skills, he would die on such a search. If he doesn’t die on the ice, there will be an injury on the river he would have to follow south. If the river or injury or illness along the way don’t kill him, he might encounter hostile Esquimaux groups or the even more savage Indians farther south. Englishmen — especially the old arctic hands — love to believe that Esquimaux are primitive but peaceful people, slow to anger, always resistant to war and strife. But Crozier has seen the truth in his dreams: they are human beings, as unpredictable as any other race of man, and often descend into warfare and murder and, in hard times, even cannibalism.

A much shorter and surer route to rescue than going south, he knows, would be to head due east from here across the ice before the ice pack opens for the summer — if it opens at all — hunting and trapping as he goes, then crossing the Boothia Peninsula to its eastern coast, traveling north to Fury Beach or the old expedition sites there. Once at Fury Beach he could just wait for a whaler or rescue ship. The chances for his survival and rescue in that direction are excellent.

But what if he makes it to civilization… back to England? Alone. He will always be the captain who let all his men die. The courtmartial will be inevitable, its outcome predetermined. Whatever the court’s punishment might be, the shame will be a lifelong sentence.

But this is not what dissuades him from heading east or south.

The woman next to him is carrying his child.

Of all his failures, it is Francis Crozier’s failures as a man which hurt and haunt him the most.

He is almost fifty-three years old and he has loved only once before this — proposing marriage to a spoiled child, a mean-spirited girl-woman who had teased him and then used him for her pleasure the way his sailors used dockside chippies. No, he thought, the way I used dockside chippies.

Every morning now and often in the night he awakens next to Silence after sharing her dreams, knowing that she has shared his, feeling her warmth against him, feeling himself responding to that warmth. Every day they go out into the cold and fight for life together — using her craft and knowledge to prey on other souls, to eat other souls, so that their two lifespirit souls can live awhile longer.

She is carrying our child. My child.

But that is irrelevant to the decision he must make in the next few days.

He is almost fifty-three years old and he is now being asked to believe in something so preposterous that the very thought of it should make him laugh. He is asked — if he understands the strings and the dreams, and he believes he does at long last — to do something so terrible and so painful that if the experience does not kill him, it may drive him mad.

He has to believe that such counter-intuitive insanity is the right thing to do. He has to believe that his dreams — mere dreams — and that his love for this woman should make him surrender a lifetime of rationality to become…

Become what?

Someone and something else.

Pulling the sledge next to Silence under a sky filled with violent color, he reminds himself that Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier believes in nothing.

Or rather, if he believes in anything, it is in Hobbes’s Leviathan.

Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

This cannot be denied by any rational man. Francis Crozier, in spite of his dreams and headaches and strange new will to believe, remains a rational man.

If a man in a smoking jacket in a coal-fire-heated library in his manor house in London can understand that life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, then how can it be denied by a man pulling a sledge stacked with frozen meat and furs across an unnamed island, through the arctic night under a sky gone mad, toward a frozen sea a thousand miles and more from any civilized hearth?

And toward a fate too frightening to imagine.

On their fifth day pulling along the coast, they come to the end of the island and Silence leads them northeast out onto the ice. The going is slower here — there are the inevitable pressure ridges and shifting floes — and they have to work much harder. They also travel more slowly so as not to break the sledge. They use their blubber stove to melt snow for drinking water but do not pause to catch fresh meat, despite the many breathing-hole domes Silence points out in the ice.

The sun now rises for thirty minutes or so each day. Crozier cannot be sure of the time. His watch disappeared with his clothing after Hickey shot him and after Silence rescued him… however she did that. She has never told him.

That was the first time I died, he thinks.

Now he is being asked to die again — to die as what he was in order to become something else.

But how many men get such a second chance? How many captains who have watched one hundred twenty-five men in their expedition die or disappear would want it?

I could disappear.

Crozier has seen the mass of scars on his arm, chest, belly, and leg each night when he strips to crawl beneath the sleeping robes, and he can feel and imagine how terrible the bullet and shotgun-pellet scars are on his back. They could be an explanation and excuse for a lifetime of silence about his past.

He can hike east across Boothia, hunt and fish in the rich, warming waters off the east coast there, hide from Royal Navy and other English rescue ships, and wait for an American whaling ship. If it takes two or three years there before one comes, he can survive that long. He is sure of it now.

And then, instead of going home to England — has England ever been home for him? — he can tell his American rescuers that he has no memory of what has happened to him or what ship he belonged to — he can show his terrible wounds as evidence — and go to America with them at the end of the whaling season. There he can start a new life.

How many men get a chance to start such a new life at his age? Many men would want to.

Would Silence go with him? Would Silence bear the stares and laughter of sailors and the harsher stares and whispers of “civilized” Americans in some New England city or New York? Would she trade her furs in for calico dresses and whalebone corsets, knowing that she would always be the ultimate stranger in the ultimate strange land?

She would.

Crozier knows this as surely as he knows anything.

She would follow him there. And she would die there — and die soon. Of misery and of the strangeness and of all the vicious, petty, alien, and unbridled thoughts that would pour into her like the poison from the Goldner tins poured into Fitzjames — unseen, vile, deadly.

He knows this as well.

But Crozier could raise his son in America and have a new life in that almost-civilized country, perhaps captain a private sailing ship there. He has been a total failure as a Royal Navy and Discovery Service captain and as an officer and as a gentleman — well, he was never a gentleman — but no one in America would ever need to know that.

No, no, a serious sailing ship would take him to places and ports where he might be known. If he is recognized by any English Naval officer, he would be hanged as a deserter. But a small fishing ship… fishing out of some small New England harbour village, perhaps, with an American wife waiting in port to raise his child with him after Silence dies.

An American wife?

Crozier glances at Silence straining in the sledge harness to his right, pulling with him. The crimson and red and purple and white light from the aurora overhead paints her furred hood and shoulders. She does not look at him. But he is sure that she knows what he is thinking. Or if she does not know now, she will when they curl up together later in the night and dream.

He cannot go home to England. He cannot go to America.

But the alternative…

He shivers and pulls his hood forward so that the polar-bear fur on either side of his face can better capture the warmth of his breath and body.

Francis Crozier believes in nothing. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It has no plan, no point, no hidden mysteries that make up for the oh-so-obvious miseries and banalities. Nothing he has learned in the last six months has persuaded him otherwise.

Has it?

Together, they pull the sledge farther out onto the pack ice.

On the eighth day they stop.

This place looks no different than most of the other pack ice they have crossed in the previous week — a bit flatter, perhaps, fewer large ice blocks and pressure ridges, perhaps, but essentially just pack ice. Crozier can see a few small polynyas in the distance — their dark water like blemishes in the white ice — and the ice has broken up here and there into several small, impermanent going-nowhere leads. If the spring breakup is not actually coming two months earlier this year, it is doing a good impersonation of it. But Crozier has seen such false spring thaws many times before in his arctic experience and knows that the real breakup of pack ice will not begin until late April or later.

In the meantime, they have patches of open water and seal breathing holes galore, perhaps even the chance to hunt walrus or narwhal should they appear, but Silence is not interested in hunting.

Both of them get out of their harness and look around. They have stopped hauling in the brief interlude of midday southern twilight that passes for daytime.

Silence steps in front of Crozier, removes his mittens, and then removes her own. The wind is very cold and their hands should not be exposed for more than a minute, but in that minute she holds his hands in hers and looks at him. She moves her gaze to the east, then looks south, and then looks back at him.

The question is clear.

Crozier feels his heart pounding. He cannot remember any time in his adult life — certainly not the night that Hickey ambushed him — when he has felt so frightened.

“Yes,” he says.

Silence puts her mittens back on and begins unpacking the sledge.

As Crozier helps her unpack things onto the ice and then break down parts of the sledge itself, he wonders again how she has found this place. He has learned that while she sometimes uses the stars or moon to navigate by, more often than not she just pays great attention to the landscape. Even on seemingly barren snowy terrain, she is counting the mathematically precise snow ridges and snow mounds created by the wind, even while noting which way these ridges run. Like Silence, Crozier has begun measuring time not so much in days as in sleepings — how many times they have stopped to sleep, whatever time of day or night that might have been.

Out here on the ice, he has been more aware than ever — that is, he has shared some of Silence’s awareness — of the subtleties of hummocked ice and old winter ice and new pressure ridges and thick pack ice and dangerous new ice. He now can see a lead many miles away just by the slight darkening of clouds above it. He now avoids dangerous but almost invisible fissures and rotten ice without actively noticing that he is doing so.

But why this place? How did she know to come here for what they are about to do?

I am about to do it, he realizes and his heart pounds more wildly.

But not yet.

In the quickly dimming light, they connect some of the slats on the sledge and the unlashed vertical posts to build a crude framework for a small tent. They will be here only a few days — unless Crozier remains here forever — so they do not try to find a drift in which to construct a snow-house, nor do they spend energy on making the tent fancy. It will serve as shelter.

Some of the skins are set in place for the outer wall of the tent, most go inside.

While Crozier is arranging their floor furs and sleeping furs, Silence is outside, quickly and efficiently cutting blocks of ice from some nearby jumble block and building a low wall on the windward side of the tent. That will help some.

Once inside, she helps Crozier rig the blubber-flame cooking lamp and antler frame in the caribou-skin vestibule of the tent and they begin melting snow for drinking. They will also use the frame and flame for drying their outer clothes. The wind blows snow around the abandoned and empty sledge, which is little more than runners now.

For three days they both fast. They eat nothing, drinking water in an attempt to quell their belly’s rumblings; they leave the tent for long hours each day, even when the snow comes, to exercise and relieve tension.

Crozier takes turns throwing both harpoons and both lances at a large snow-and-ice block; Silence had recovered them from her dead family members at the massacre site and prepared one heavy harpoon with its long cord and one lighter throwing lance for each of them months ago.

Now he throws the harpoon with such force that it buries itself ten inches into the block of ice.

Silence walks closer and removes her hood, peering at him in the shifting light from the aurora.

He shakes his head and tries to smile.

He has no signs for Isn’t this what you do to your enemy? Instead, he reassures her with a clumsy hug that he is not leaving or planning to use the harpoon on anything or anyone anytime soon.

He has never seen the aurora like this.

All day and night the cascading curtains of color dance from horizon to horizon with the center of the displays directly overhead. Not in all of his years of expedition near the north or south poles has Crozier seen anything remotely resembling this explosion of light. The hour or so of wan daylight does almost nothing to lessen the intensity of the aerial display.

And there is ample acoustical accompaniment to the visual fireworks.

All around them, the ice groans, cracks, moans, and grinds from pressure, while long series of explosions under the ice begin like scattered artillery fire and quickly move to an unceasing cannonade.

Already unnerved by anticipation, Crozier is more deeply shaken by the noise and movement of the ice pack under them. He sleeps now in his parka — perspiration be damned — and is out of the tent and onto the ice a half dozen times each sleeping period, sure that their broad floe is breaking up.

It never does, although cracks open here and there within fifty yards of their tent and send fissures racing faster than a man could run through seemingly solid ice. Then the cracks close and disappear. But the explosions continue, as does the violence in the sky.

In his last night in this life, Crozier sleeps fitfully — his fasting-hunger makes him cold in a way that even Silence’s body heat cannot compensate for — and he dreams that Silence is singing.

The ice explosions resolve themselves into steady drum-beats that serve as background for her high, sweet, sad, lost voice:

Crozier awakes trembling. He sees that Silence is already awake, staring at him with her dark, unblinking eyes, and in a moment of pure terror deeper than terror, he realizes that it was not her voice that he has just heard singing this dead man’s song to him — literally a song from a dead man to his previous living self — but the voice of his unborn son.

Crozier and his wife rise and dress in mutual ceremonial silence. Outside, though perhaps morning, it is still night, but a night of a thousand thrusting colors laid over the shaking stars.

The shattering ice still sounds like a drumbeat.