He was twenty feet up now, approaching the level of the second spar — this one still set at the proper right angle to the length of the ship — when the thing below hit the base of the manline rigging again, tearing wood and dowels and pins and ice and iron blocks completely free of the railing.
The web of climbing rope swung inward toward the mainmast. Blanky knew that the impact would knock him off and send him hurtling down into the thing’s arms and jaws. Still not able to see anything more than five feet away in the blowing dark, the Ice Master leapt for the shrouds.
His freezing fingers found the spar and its lines under them at the same instant one of his flailing feet caught a foot line. This shroud-line scuttle was best done barefoot, Blanky knew, but not tonight.
He heaved himself up over the second spar, more than twenty-five feet above the deck, and clung to the icy oak with legs and arms both, the way a terrified rider would cling to the body of a horse, wildly sliding his feet along the ice-hard shroud to find more purchase on the slippery shroud lines.
Normally, even in the darkness, wind, snow, and hail, any decent sailor could scramble another sixty feet higher into the upperworks and rigging here until he reached the main-mast crosstrees, from which point he could hurl down insults at his stymied pursuer like a chimpanzee in a tall tree throwing down fruit or feces from a point of perfect safety. But there were no upperworks or high rigging on HMS Terror this December night. There was no point of perfect safety up here when fleeing from something so powerful it could smash a main spar. And there was no upperworks rigging to which a man could flee.
A year ago September, Blanky had helped Crozier and Harry Peglar, Captain of the Foretop, as they prepared Terror for her wintering-over for the second time this expedition. It was not an easy job, nor one without danger. The yards and running rigging were struck down and stored below. Then the topgallant masts and topmasts were carefully struck down — carefully because a slip with winch or block or sudden tangle of tackle could have sent the heavy masts hurtling down through the top deck, lower deck, orlop deck, and hull bottom like a massive spear piercing wicker armour. Ships had sunk from such missteps while striking down upper masts. But if they’d remained up, too many tons of ice would accumulate during the endless winter. The ice would have provided a constant barrage of missiles for the men on watch or other duty on the deck and rigging below, but the weight of it also could capsize a ship.
With only the three stumps of the lower masts remaining — a sight as ugly to a seaman as a triple-amputee human being might be to a painter of pictures — Blanky had helped supervise the loosening of all remaining shrouds and standing rigging; overly taut canvas and ropes simply could not bear the weight of so much snow and ice. Even Terror’s boats — the two large whaleboats and two smaller cutters, as well as the captain’s skiff, pinnaces, jolly boats, and dinghies, ten in all — had been taken down, inverted, lashed, covered, and stored on the ice.
Now Thomas Blanky was on the mainmast’s second-spar shrouds twenty-five feet above the deck and had only one level higher to go, and any man lines leading up to that third and last level would be more ice than rope or wood. The mainmast itself was a column of ice with an extra coating of snow on its forward curve. The ice master straddled the second spar and tried to peer down through the darkness and snow. It was pitch black below. Either Handford had extinguished the lantern Blanky had given him or it had been extinguished for him. Blanky assumed that the man was either cowering in the dark or dead; either way he would be no help. Spreadeagled over the spar shrouds, Blanky looked to his left and saw that there still was no light forward in the bow where David Leys had been on watch.
Blanky strained to see the thing directly below him but there was too much movement — the torn canvas flapping in the dark, kegs rolling on the tilted deck, loose crates sliding — and all he could make out was a dark mass shuffling toward the mainmast, batting aside two- and three-hundred-pound kegs of sand as if they were so many china vases.
It can’t climb the mainmast, thought Blanky. He could feel the cold of the spar through his straddling legs and chest and crotch. His fingers were beginning to freeze through the thin undergloves. Somewhere he had lost his Welsh wig and wool-scarf comforter. He strained to hear the sound of the forward hatch being unbattened and flung free, to hear shouts and to see lanterns as the rescue party came up in force, but the bow of the ship remained a silent darkness hidden by hurtling snow. Has it somehow blocked the forward hatch as well? At least it can’t climb the mainmast. Nothing that size can climb. No white bear — if it is a white bear — has experience climbing.
The thing began climbing the attenuated mainmast.
Blanky felt the vibration as it slammed claws into the wood. He heard the smack and scrape and grunting… a thick, bass grunting… as it climbed.
It climbed.
The thing had most probably reached the snapped-off stubs of the first spar just by raising its forearms over its head. Blanky strained to see in the darkness and was sure he could make out the haired and muscled mass hauling itself up headfirst, gigantic forelegs — or arms — as big as a man already flung over the first spar and clawing higher for leverage even while powerful rear legs and more claws there found support on the splintered oak of the spars.
Blanky inched out farther along the icy second spar, his arms and legs wrapped around the wind-thrummed ten-inch-round horizontal spar in a sort of frenzied lover’s embrace. There were two inches of new snow lining the bow-facing outer curve of the everthinning spar and then ice under that. He used the shroud lines for purchase when he could.
The huge thing on the mainmast had reached the level of Blanky’s spar. The Ice Master could see the bulk of it only by craning to look over his own shoulder and arse and even then could make it out only as a giant, pale absence where the subliminal vertical slash of the mainmast should be.
Something struck the spar with so much force that Blanky flew up into the air, dropping two feet back onto the spar to land hard on his balls and belly, the impact on the spar and folds of frozen shroud knocking the wind out of him. He would have fallen then if both freezing hands and his right boot hadn’t been firmly entangled in the shroud lines just below the icy underside of the spar. As it was, it felt like a horse made of cold iron had bucked him two feet into the air.
The blow came again and would have launched Blanky out into the darkness thirty feet above the deck, but he was prepared for this second smash and clung with all his might. Even ready as he was, the vibration was so forceful that Blanky slipped off and swung helplessly under the icy spar, numb fingers and kicking boot still mixed in with the shroud lines there. He managed to leverage himself back on top of the spar just as the third and most violent blow struck. The Ice Master heard the cracking, felt the solid spar begin to sag, and realized that he had only seconds before he and the spar, the shroud, the shroud lines, the ratlines, and the wildly swinging man lines all fell more than twenty-five feet to the pitched deck and tumbled debris below.
Blanky did the impossible. On the pitching, cracking, tilted and icy spar, he got to his knees, then to his feet, standing with both arms waving comically and absurdly for balance in the howling wind, boots slipping on the snow and ice, and then he hurled himself into space with arms and hands extended, seeking one of the invisible hanging ratlines that should be — might be — could be — somewhere there, allowing for the ship’s down-at-the-bow attitude, for the howling wind, for the impact of the blowing snow on the thin lines, and for the possible effects of the vibration from the thing’s ongoing shattering of the main-mast’s second level of spars.