The unvarying battering force of the cold dry wind, surging northwards in a river a thousand metres deep, battered across the vertical surfaces of the iceberg, making them tremble like great drumskins and sound a note too deep for hearing but one which could be felt like the onset of an earthquake. Every hole and imperfection in the ice from pocks the size of pin heads to caverns larger than cathedrals set up their own hollow booming resonances. Air which had been stirred to the occasional whisper by the movement of the water through the internal chambers of the ice mountains went snarling and thundering now. And water which had been held solid by that chill stillness began to melt and murmur deep within the glacial heart of Manhattan.
The forecastle head watch pulled themselves grimly further and further out from the unutterably sinister sounds of the monster they were trying to control. Only one man, once in a while, according to the schedule agreed between the captains and Colin Ross, ran underneath the foul, sludgy waterfall and eased the howling black line which tightened again inexorably as the berg continued to rise up out of the water.
The wind had come suddenly, unexpectedly. The worried weather man at Tamanrasset had contacted his colleagues with questions; no one had contacted ships with warnings. Even Yves Maille had failed to see what was happening ahead. The great desert wind had brought with it a whole range of problems and disasters. There was no real chance even for a sailor as widely experienced as John to take full account of what it was capable of doing. John, in any case, was suddenly submerged beneath a pile of procedural demands which arose out of his hopefully temporary assumption of Richard’s overall command while at the same time he tried to find the current Richard had been describing moments before the disaster. Sally Bell, likewise, had her work cut out for her. Captains Walcott and Odate had more than enough on their plates trying to ensure the safe passage of their ships under these new and dangerous conditions this near to their lethal charge. Bob Stark and Anna Borodin had to recalculate all their propulsion figures to meet the new situation. They were still in dead water, after all, and would not pick up the current until after dark even if John could find it under these conditions, and now they suddenly had an enormously powerful headwind pushing them unremittingly straight back along the way they had just come. Small wonder, then, that no one had any time to spare for the complaints of Psyche’s forecastle head line watch.
The line watch was led by a Greek called Nikos Lykiardropolous who shipped aboard at Piraeus but who originated from Lamia. Lamia he was called, therefore. Lamia was a square man with thick, twisted arms and short, bowed legs. These, with his stooped back, overhanging brow and underhung jaw gave him a darkly simian appearance. With his solid ball of a belly protruding from beneath his scrawny, tubercular chest, he looked like a black-haired orangutan, a one-man argument in support of Darwin’s theories as to the origins of the species. He had massive, scarred hands, a temper soured by a decade of severe dyspepsia relieved by nothing but Keo brandy, and a reputation among his peers as a vicious, unforgiving fighter to whom the concept of Queensberry rules was as foreign as cheerful laughter.
The others scurried under the filthy waterfall to ease the line as directed by the chart Lamia held, but he never did. Of all of them, he, the least careful of his personal appearance, was the only one who remained clean and dry. He slouched beside the starboard rail, turning his head into and out of the solid blast of the wind as dictated by his desire to roll, light and smoke a series of cigarettes unobserved by any officer. He more than most, therefore, stood erect, facing like a cut-rate figurehead into the full brunt of the wind, often when the others were huddled glumly round his legs, whenever he felt that the officers on watch might be observing him from the bridge. He was on the first officer’s discipline roster already and any further infringements of standing orders would result in the loss of several days’ pay. The time he spent like this was acutely and increasingly uncomfortable, and only the combination of extreme nicotine addiction and the threatened loss of earnings would have prompted him to do it at all.
But do it he did, made intrepid by his weaknesses. And as he stood there, filling his lungs with the bitter smoke they craved, he was uniquely placed to observe, if not to appreciate, the gathering of the darkness. The sun was falling westwards through a sandstorm many thousands of metres high. As the great orb settled towards the western horizon, it slowly lost both power and heat; it seemed to shrink, collapse, and its blinding gold became a lurid carbuncular red. The scene was one of gathering threat. The starboard quadrant of the sky seemed to be running with slowly coagulating gore. Shadows gathered and fled as the sand clouds thickened and thinned above, and the crimson stain leaked down out of the air and spread across the sea like some dreadful curse from Biblical times.
But if the starboard was filled with sanguine gloom, the port was even worse. The high flank of Manhattan, suddenly filthy and running with thin, sandy mud, took and darkened the thickest of the light beams until, horribly, the whole cliff acquired the dully gleaming aspect of a mountainous pile of offal awash with thickening, almost black clots of blood. Thick streams of the dark red foulness came pulsing downwards in titanic arterial rhythms as though Manhattan had been stabbed a hundred times and was slowly bleeding to death upon them, and the whole ship seemed to be sinking inevitably in an ocean of blood. The almost human howling of the wind across the hollows, caverns and caves took on an eerie, agonised, other-worldly nature, which even the unimaginative Lamia found almost impossible to endure.
By sunset, Lamia had had enough and, quite ready for a confrontation with the first officer — or even with the captain if need be — he led the bedraggled, filthy watch into the red-caked bridgehouse. But there was no trouble. The watch officer nodded dully when they reported in and sent them down to shower. The line watch had seen and heard the most, but the weird, haunting atmosphere emanating from the strange, screaming, blood-red mountain beside them infected everybody aboard.
John Higgins stood up on the bridge of Niobe and looked forward into the thickening haze. He was a well-educated man of literary bent and his mind was full of images from Shakespeare’s Macbeth which threatened to distract him from the many demanding tasks with which he was being overcome. The first one was to calm Peter Walcott. ‘Yes,’ he was saying into the phone with an assurance he was far from feeling, ‘it is only to be expected. The weight of sand on the ice is bound to have slowed the rate at which the ice is rising. We will try and work out new tables as soon as possible. In the meantime, I suggest you try and ensure that the weight of sand on your decks does not begin to pull you down too fast either… Yes. Of course, I will send you the information as soon as Colin has completed the calculations. And yes, I shall report Richard’s condition as soon as Asha gives me an update.’ He broke off, frowning, as his command shuddered suddenly. Dear God, what now? he wondered. ‘Yes, I guarantee it. As soon as I can,’ he snapped and broke contact. At once the handset was buzzing again. He pushed the button. ‘Wait!’ he snapped, and let the importunate machine drop to arm’s length. ‘Helm, what’s going on?’ he barked irately.