“If I get back to England, I swear I’ll look them up and tell them that you were smoking and smiling and sitting as comfortably on a boulder as a lazy squire when last I saw you,” said Crozier. He pulled a pistol from his pocket. “Lieutenant Little’s seen the thing through his glass – it’s been trailing behind us all morning, Thomas. It’ll be along presently. You should take this.”
“No, thank you, Captain.”
“You’re sure about this, Mr. Blanky? Staying behind, I mean?” said Captain Crozier. “Even if you were… with us… for just another week or so, your knowledge of the ice might be very important to us all. Who knows what the conditions will be out on the pack ice twenty miles east of here?”
Blanky smiled. “If Mr. Reid weren’t still with you, I’d take that to heart, Captain. I surely would. But he’s as good an ice master as you could ask for. As a spare, I mean.”
Crozier and Honey shook hands with him. Then they turned and hurried to catch up to the last boat disappearing over a distant ridge to the south.
It was after midnight when it came.
Blanky had been out of tobacco for hours and the water had frozen in the bottle where he’d foolishly left it sitting on the boulder next to him. He was in some pain, but he did not want to sleep.
A few stars had come out in the twilight. The wind from the northwest had come up, as it usually did in the evening, and the temperature had probably dropped forty degrees from its noontime high.
Blanky had kept the broken peg leg and its cup and straps on the boulder next to him. While his gangrenous leg tormented him and his empty stomach clawed at him, the worst pain tonight was from his lower leg and calf and foot – his phantom limb.
Suddenly the thing was just there.
It loomed up on the ice not thirty paces from him.
It must have come up through some invisible hole in the ice, Blanky thought. He was reminded of a tent fair in Tunbridge Wells he had seen as a boy, with a rickety wooden stage and a magician in purple silk with a tall conical hat embroidered with crude planets and stars. That man had appeared just like this, popping up through a trapdoor to the oohs and ahs of the country audience.
“Welcome back,” said Thomas Blanky to the shadowy silhouette on the ice.
The thing reared up on its hind legs, a dark mass of hair and muscle and sunset-tinted claws and a faint gleam of teeth beyond anything, the Ice Master was sure, in mankind’s racial memory of its many predators. Blanky guessed that it was more than twelve feet tall, perhaps fourteen.
Its eyes – a deeper blackness against the black silhouette – did not reflect the dying sun.
“You’re late,” said Blanky. He could not help it that his teeth were chattering. “I’ve been expecting you for a long time.” He threw his peg leg and its rattling harness at the shape.
The thing did not try to dodge the crude missile. The shape towered there for a minute and then rushed forward like a wraith, the legs not even visibly moving to propel it, a monstrous mass sliding rapidly toward him across the rock and ice, the dark and terrible solidity of the shape finally opening arms to fill the ice master’s vision.
Thomas Blanky grinned fiercely and clamped his teeth down hard on the stem of his cold pipe.
46 CROZIER
The only thing keeping Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier moving forward into the tenth week on the boat march was the blue flame in his chest. The more tired and empty and sick and battered his body became, the hotter and fiercer the flame burned. He knew it was not merely some metaphor of his determination. Nor was it optimism, as such. The blue flame in his chest had burrowed toward his heart like some alien entity, lingered like a disease, and centered in him as an almost unwanted core of conviction that he would do whatever he had to do to survive. Anything.
Sometimes Crozier came close to praying that the blue flame would just go out so he could surrender to the inevitable and lie down and pull the frozen tundra up over himself like a child under a blanket settling into his nap.
Today they were stopped – not pulling the sledges and boats for the first time in a month. And they had unpacked and clumsily pitched the large Sick Bay tent, although not the large mess tents. The men were calling this otherwise unremarkable place on a small bay along the southern coast of King William Land “Hospital Camp.”
In the past two weeks they had just crossed the rugged ice of a huge bay that cut into the underside of the cape that seemed for weeks of hauling as if it would continue to bulge out to the southwest forever. But now they were headed southeast again, paralleling the coastline along the underside of that cape and then farther east – the correct direction if they were to get to Back’s River.
Crozier had brought his sextant and theodolite along, and Lieutenant Little also had his sextant, as well as the dead Fitzjames’s instrument as a spare, but neither officer had taken star sightings or sun sightings for weeks. It just wasn’t important. If King William Land was a peninsula, as most of the arctic explorers, including Crozier’s old commander James Clark Ross, had thought, then this coastline would lead them to the mouth of Back’s River. If it was an island – which had been Lieutenant Gore’s guess and Crozier’s hunch as well – then they would soon see the mainland to their south and cross what should be a narrow strait to the mouth of Back’s River.
Either way, Crozier – who had been content to follow the coastline since they had no other real choice and navigate by dead reckoning for the time being – estimated that they were now about ninety miles from the mouth of Back’s River.
On this march, they had been completing only a little better than a mile per day on average. Some days they did three or four miles, reminding Crozier of the fantastic rate of their crossing from the ships to Terror Camp on the ice highway they had laid down, but other days – when there was more rock than ice under the runners, when they had to ford sudden streams or in one case an actual river, when they were forced out onto the tortured sea ice when the coastline became too rocky, when the weather was foul, when more men than usual were too sick to pull and ended up riding in the boat themselves while their mates pulled the extra weight, first the sixteen hours of man-hauling the four whaleboats and a cutter, then back for the other three cutters and two pinnaces – saw them covering only a few hundred yards from their previous night’s camp.
On 1 July, after weeks of warming weather, the cold and snow returned in earnest. A blizzard blew out of the southeast, directly into the eyes of the men hauling their sledges. Slops were pulled out of baled heaps in the boats. Welsh wigs were dug out of valises and packs. The snow added hundreds of pounds to the weight of the sledges and the boats atop them. The men so sick that they were being carried in those boats, lying atop supplies and folded tents, burrowed under the canvas covers for shelter.
The men hauled forward through three days of continuous driving snow out of the east and southeast. At night, lightning crashed and the men cowered low against the canvas floors of their tents.
Today they had stopped because too many of the men were sick and Goodsir wanted to administer to them, and because Crozier wanted to send parties ahead to scout and larger armed parties north into the interior and south out onto the sea ice to hunt.
They needed food badly.
The good news and the bad news was that they had finally finished the last of the Goldner canned foods. When the steward Aylmore, who on captain’s orders had continued to eat and grow fat on the tinned foods, hadn’t died from the terrible symptoms that killed Captain Fitzjames – although two other men who were not supposed to be eating from the cans had – everyone went back on the tinned foods to supplement the little remaining salt pork and cod and biscuits.