Crozier’s reason for not immediately evicting the native woman was simple: his men were beginning the slow process of starving to death, and they would not have adequate stores to get through the spring, much less the next year. If Lady Silence was getting fresh food from the ice in the middle of winter — trapping seals perhaps, walrus hopefully — it was a skill that Crozier knew his crews would have to learn in order to survive. There was not a serious hunter or ice fisherman among the hundred-some survivors.
Crozier had discounted Lieutenant Irving’s embarrassed, heavily self-critical account of seeing something that seemed like the creature on the ice making some sort of music with the woman and bringing food offerings to her. The captain simply would never believe that Silence had trained a huge white bear — if such the thing was — to hunt and bring her fish or seal or walrus like a proper English bird dog fetching pheasant for its master. As for the music… well, that was absurd.
But she had chosen this day to go missing again.
“Well,” said Crozier, his lungs aching from the cold air, even filtered as it was through his thick wool comforter, “when you return with the relief watch at eight bells, check her locker again, and if she’s not there… what in the name of Christ Almighty?”
They had passed through the last line of pressure ridges and come out onto the flat sea ice on the last quarter mile to Erebus. The scene that met Crozier’s eyes made his jaw sag under the wool scarf and highpulled jacket collars.
The captain had assumed that the men would be having the Second Grand Venetian Carnivale on the flat sea ice immediately below Erebus, the way Hoppner and Parry had set their masque on the short stretch of ice between the frozenin Hecla and Fury in 1824, but while Erebus sat bow up, dark and desolate-looking on its dirty pedestal of ice, all the light, torches, motion, and commotion came from an area a quarter of a mile away, immediately in front of the largest iceberg.
“Good heavens,” said Lieutenant Irving.
While Erebus looked to be a dark hulk, a new mass of rigging — a veritable city of coloured canvas and flickering torches — had risen on the bare circle of sea ice, forest of seracs, and wide-open area beneath the towering, glowing iceberg. Crozier could only stand and stare.
The riggers had been busy. Some obviously had ascended the berg itself, sinking huge ice screws deep in the ice sixty feet high on its face, pounding in bolt rings and pulley stands, adding enough rigging, running lines, and blocks from the stores to outfit a three-masted man-of-war at full sail.
A spiderweb of a hundred ice-frosted lines ran down from the berg and back toward Erebus, supporting a city of lighted and coloured tent walls. These dyed walls of canvas — some of the mains’l sheets thirty feet high and taller — were staked to sea ice and serac and ice block but pulled taut on their vertical spars with stays running diagonally to the tall berg.
Crozier walked closer, still blinking. The ice in his eyelashes threatened to freeze his eyelids shut, but he continued blinking.
It was as if a series of gigantic coloured tents had been pitched on the ice, but these tents had no roofs. The vertical walls, lighted from within and without by scores of torches, snaked from the open sea ice into the serac forest and continued up to the vertical wall of the iceberg itself. As it was, giant rooms or coloured apartments had been erected almost overnight on the ice. Each chamber stood at an angle to the preceding chamber, a sharp turn in the rigging, staves, and canvas apparent every twenty yards or so.
The first chamber opened eastward onto the ice. The canvas here had been dyed a bright, rich blue — the blue of skies not seen in so many months that the colour made a knot rise in Captain Crozier’s constricted throat — and torches and braziers of flame outside the canvas chamber’s vertical sides made the blue walls glow and pulse.
Crozier walked past Mr. Blanky and his mates, who were staring in open wonder. “Christ,” he heard the ice master mutter.
Crozier walked still closer, actually entering the space defined by the glowing blue walls.
Brightly clad and strangely garbed figures pranced and swooped around him — ragpickers with streaming comet tails of coloured cloth trailing behind them, tall chimney sweeps in death-black tails and sooty top hats doing jigs, exotic birds with long gold beaks stepping lightly, sheikhs of Araby with red turbans and pointed Persian slippers sliding along the dark ice, pirates with blue death masks pursuing a prancing unicorn, generals of Napoleon’s army wearing white masks from some Greek Chorus filing by in solemn procession. Something dressed all in bulky green — a wood sprite? — ran up to Crozier on the unslippery ice and chirped in falsetto, “The trunk of costumes is to your left, Captain. Feel free to mix and match,” and then the apparition was gone, blending back into the shifting crowds of bizarrely dressed figures.
Crozier continued walking deeper into the maze of coloured apartments.
Beyond the blue chamber, turning sharply to the right, was a long purple room. Crozier saw that it was not empty. The men realizing this Carnivale had placed rugs, tapestries, tables, or casks here and there in each apartment, their furnishings and fixtures dyed or painted the same hue as the glowing walls.
Beyond the purple room, bending back sharply to the left here but at such an odd angle that Crozier would have had to look at the stars — had there been any stars visible — to ascertain his exact bearings, was a long green chamber. This long room held the most revelers yet: more exotic birds, a princess with a long horse’s face, creatures so segmented and oddly jointed that they appeared to be giant insects.
Francis Crozier recalled none of these costumes from Parry’s trunks on the Fury and Hecla, but Fitzjames had insisted that Franklin had brought precisely those moldering old artifacts.
The fourth chamber was furnished and lighted with orange. The torchlight through the thin orange-dyed canvas here seemed rich enough to taste. More orange canvas, painted and dyed to resemble tapestries, had been laid out on the sea ice, and there was a huge punch bowl on the orange-sheeted table at the center of the interior space. At least thirty or more wildly costumed figures had converged on the punch bowl, some dipping their beaked or fanged visages to drink deeply.
Crozier realized with a shock that loud music was coming from the fifth segment of the apartment maze. Following another bend to the right, he came into a white chamber. Sheet-covered sea trunks and officers’ messroom chairs had been set along the white canvas walls here, and the almost forgotten mechanical music player from Terror’s Great Cabin was being cranked by a costumed fantastic at the far end of the chamber, the machine pouring out music hall favorites from its large rotating metal disks. The sound somehow seemed much louder out here on the ice.
Revelers were coming out of the sixth chamber and Crozier walked past the music player, took the sharp angle to the left, and entered a violet room.
The captain’s seaman’s eyes admired the rigging that rose from upended spare spars to a tethered spar hanging in midair — webs of rigging came in from the other six chambers there to be tied off — and the master cables that ran up from this center spar to anchors high on the wall of the iceberg. The riggers from Erebus and Terror who had conceived and executed this seven-chamber maze obviously had also exorcised some of the incredible frustration at not being able to pursue their trade due to being ice-bound and static for so many months, their ships’ topmasts, spars, and rigging pulled down and stored on the ice. But this violet room had few costumed crewmen tarrying in it and the light was strangely oppressive. The only furniture here consisted of stacks of empty crates at the center of the room, all draped in violet sheets. The few birds, pirates, and ragmen in this room paused to drink from their crystal goblets carried from the white room, looked around, then quickly returned to the outer chambers again.