“Magnus Manson,” said Peglar.
“Yes, like Manson,” said Bridgens. “If it were just for Hickey’s pleasure, we need not worry. But the little homunculus is worse than that, Harry… worse than your average would-be mutineer or conniving sea lawyer. Be careful of him. Watch him, Harry. I fear he could do great harm to us all.” Bridgens laughed then. “Listen to me. ‘Do great harm.’ As if we weren’t all doomed anyway. When I see you next, we may all be abandoning the ships and taking to the ice on our last long, cold walk. Take care of yourself, Harry Peglar.”
Peglar did not speak. The captain of the foretop took off his mitten and then his glove, and lifted his frozen fingers until they touched the frozen cheek and brow of subordinate officers’ steward John Bridgens. The touch was very light and neither man could feel it through the incipient frostbite, but it would have to serve.
Bridgens went back up the ramp. Without looking back, Peglar tugged on his glove and started the cold walk back through the rising dark to HMS Terror.
29 IRVING
It was Sunday, and Lieutenant Irving had served two straight watches up on deck in the cold and dark, one of them covering for his friend George Hodgson, who was ill with the symptoms of dysentery, missing his own warm supper in the officers’ mess as a consequence and having only a small ice-hard slab of salt pork and a weevil-filled biscuit instead. But now he had eight blessed straight hours off before he had to go on duty again. He could drag himself belowdecks, crawl under the frozen blankets in the cot in his berth, thaw them some with his body heat, and sleep for the full eight hours.
Instead, Irving told Robert Thomas, the first mate who was taking his place as the officer on deck, that he was going for a walk and would be back presently.
Then Irving went over the side and down the ice ramp and onto the dark pack ice.
He was searching for Lady Silence.
Irving had been shocked weeks ago when Captain Crozier had appeared to be ready to toss the woman to the mob that was building, after crewmen listening to the mutinous whispers of Caulker’s Mate Hickey and others started shouting that the woman was a Jonah and should be killed or cast out. When Crozier had stood there with Lady Silence’s arm gripped in his hand, thrusting her toward the angry men much like an ancient Roman emperor might have tossed a Christian to the lions, Lieutenant Irving had not been sure what to do. As a junior lieutenant, he could only watch his captain, even if it meant Silence’s death. As a young man in love, Irving was ready to step forward and save her even if it cost him his own life.
When Crozier won the majority of the men over with his argument that Silence might be the only soul on board who would know how to hunt and fish on the ice should they have to abandon ship, Irving had let out a silent sigh of relief.
But the Esquimaux woman moved off the ship completely the day after that showdown, coming back at supper time every second or third day for biscuits or the occasional gift of a candle, then disappearing back onto the dark ice. Where she was living or what she was doing out there was a mystery.
The ice was not too dark this night; the aurora danced brightly overhead, and there was enough moonlight to throw ink-black shadows behind the seracs. Third Lieutenant John Irving was not, unlike the first time he had followed Silence, carrying out this search on his own initiative. The captain had again suggested that Irving discover – if he could do so without endangering himself too much – the Esquimaux wench’s secret hiding place on the ice.
“I was serious when I told the men that she might have skills that would keep us alive on the ice,” Crozier had said softly in the privacy of his cabin as Irving leaned closer to hear. “But we can’t wait until we’re on the ice to find out where and how she gets the fresh meat she seems to be finding. Dr. Goodsir tells me that scurvy will take us all if we do not find some source of fresh game before summer.”
“But unless I actually spy her hunting, sir,” Irving had whispered, “how can I get the secret from her? She cannot speak.”
“Use your initiative, Lieutenant Irving,” was all that Crozier had said in response.
This was the first opportunity that Irving had had since that conversation in which he might be able to use his initiative.
In the leather shoulder bag, Irving carried a few enticements should he find Silence and work out a way to communicate with her. There were biscuits far fresher than the weevil-filled one he’d chewed for dinner. Those were wrapped in a napkin, but Irving had also brought a beautiful Oriental silk handkerchief that his rich London girlfriend had given to him as a present shortly before their… unpleasant parting. And his pièce de résistance was wrapped in that attractive handkerchief: a small crock of peach marmalade.
Surgeon Goodsir was hoarding and doling out the marmalade as an antiscorbutic, but Lieutenant Irving knew that the treat was one of the few things the Esquimaux girl had ever shown enthusiasm about when accepting Mr. Diggle’s offerings of food. Irving had seen her dark eyes glint when she got a daub of marmalade on her biscuit. He’d scraped off his own jam treats a dozen times over the past month to get the precious amount he now carried in the tiny porcelain crock that had once been his mother’s.
Irving had come completely around to the port side of the ship and now advanced from the ice plain there into a maze of seracs and minibergs that rose like an icy version of Birnam’s wood come to Dunsinane about two hundred yards south of the ship. He knew that he was running a great risk of becoming the next victim of the thing on the ice, but for the last five weeks there had been no sign of the creature, not even a clear sighting from a distance. No crewmen had been lost to it since the night of Carnivale.
Then again, thought Irving, no one but me has come out here alone, without even a lantern, and gone wandering into the serac forest.
He was very aware that the only weapon he carried was the pistol sunk deep in the pocket of his greatcoat.
Forty minutes of searching through seracs in the dark and −45-degree wind and Irving was close to deciding that he would exercise his initiative another day, preferably in a few weeks, when the sun stayed above the southern horizon for more than a few minutes each day.
And then he saw the light.
It was an eerie sight – an entire snowdrift in an ice gully between several seracs seemed to be glowing goldly from within, as if from some inner faerie light.
Or witch’s light.
Irving walked closer, pausing at each serac shadow to make sure that it was actually not another narrow crevasse in the ice. The wind made a soft whistling sound through the tortured-ice tops of the seracs and ice-boulder columns. Violet light from the aurora danced everywhere.
The snowdrift had been heaped – either by wind or by Silence’s hands – into a low dome thin enough to show a flickering yellow light shining through it.
Irving dropped down into the small ice gully, actually just a depression between two pressure-pushed plates of pack ice rounded over with snow, and approached a small black hole that seemed too low to be associated with the dome set higher in the drift to one side of the gully.
The entrance – if an entrance it was – was barely as wide as Irving’s heavily layered shoulders.
Before crawling in, he wondered if he should extract and cock his pistol. Not a very friendly gesture of greeting, he thought.
Irving wriggled into the hole.
The narrow passage went down for half the length of his body and then angled up for eight feet or more. When Irving’s head and shoulders popped out of the far end of the tunnel and into the light, he blinked, looked around, and his jaw fell slack.