Robert Masello - Blood and Ice

“I am…” she said, not knowing what else she could say. She was alive, apparently. Beyond that, she wasn't sure of anything. She was as lost as he was, chilled to the bone, in spite of the remarkably consistent heat from the grate. And weak, too-from ordinary hunger, as well as the unspeakable need.

It crossed her mind that she could die again… and soon… and she wondered if it would feel any different this time.

It could not be worse.

Sinclair's gaze swept around the room, and she followed it. A thing that looked like an enormous spider was trying to clamber out of a square jar, filled with water and a pale purple illumination. There were long counters, like trestle tables, with basins, like flower sinks, in them. A black metal apparatus, with a white box beside it, sat before a stool, and next to that, she saw, just as Sinclair must have done, a wine bottle. He was already springing to his feet.

He picked up the bottle, rubbed the label against the billowing sleeve of his white shirt, then examined it more closely.

“Is it?” she asked.

“I can't be sure,” he said, twisting the cork out. He put his nose to the top, then recoiled.

And so she knew it must be.

In his stockinged feet, he padded back to her and placed the open bottle between them, like a papa bird bringing an offering to the nest. He was waiting for her to take it, but she couldn't. It was too horrible to have awakened, after how long, from a dream-a nightmare-only to be plunged right back into it once you'd been restored to life. The bottle stood before her as a grim reminder, a memento mori. It represented death, but at the same time-if she was desperate enough to want it-life. She could smell the vile odor of its contents, and she wondered: Was that the very bottle he had raised to her lips on board the Coventry? If it was, then how had it come to be here, in this strange place, now? Had one of the sailors thrown it, too, into the heaving sea, after she had been chained to Sinclair? After…

Her mind stopped dead, like a team of horses suddenly reined to an abrupt halt. She could not think of it; she could not allow herself to. She had governed her thoughts for so long, she could not stop doing it now. She had to guide them, control them, even chastise them, like unruly children, if they went too far astray. To do anything else would be an invitation to madness.

If, that is, she had not already gone mad.

“You have to,” Sinclair said, urging the bottle on her.

But Eleanor was not so sure. “What if,” she ventured, “after all this time…”

“What?” he snapped, his eyelids drooping, then snapping open again. “What if, after all this time, everything has changed?”

“It's possible, is it not, that-”

“That what? God's in his heaven again, and we're safe as houses, and Britannia rules the waves?”

There was a fire in his eyes again now. All that time, in the ocean, in the ice- no, her mind said, do not think of it, do not let it in — had done nothing to dampen his ardor, or his anger. That wicked flame, lighted in the Crimea, still burned. He was not the Lieutenant Copley who had sailed off for glory. He was the Lieutenant Copley who had been found, covered with mud and blood, lying among the dead and dying on a moonlit battlefield.

“Shall I try it first?” he said, his face ruddy in the orange glow of the grate, and when she didn't answer, he raised the bottle, tilted his head back, and took a swig. His Adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed, then bobbed again as the liquid tried to come back up again. He sputtered, gasped, then put the bottle to his lips again and forced some more of it down. When he dropped the bottle back into his lap, his light brown moustache was stained the color of a bruise.

“There,” he said, “right as rain.” He smiled, and his teeth, too, were stained. He pushed the bottle toward her.

“What we need,” she said, her eyes nonetheless drawn to the bottle, “is food. And water. Clean water, fresh food.”

Sinclair scoffed. “Spoken like a true Nightingale. And we shall have those things. But you know, as well as I do, that right now you need something more.”

In her heart, she knew he was right… or at least that he had been right. But wasn't it possible that this curse had been lifted? Wasn't it possible that, in addition to whatever strange miracle had released them from their bondage, another one had been performed, too? That this dreadful sustenance, sitting before her, was no longer necessary?

“We don't know where we are,” Sinclair said, softly. “And we don't know what awaits us out there.” He was speaking in his most reasonable voice, but Eleanor had become used to such sharp changes. Even in his letters home, she had detected them.

“I believe we must take our opportunities when and where we find them,” he said, pointedly glancing down at the bottle.

Eleanor had to shift her position on the floor, so as to warm and dry a different section of her dress. She worried about how long they would be able to stay there without being discovered. “Couldn't we just take it with us, wherever we have to go?”

“Yes,” he replied, his temper, she could tell, mounting. “But it was taken away from us once, was it not? It could be taken away again.”

He was right, of course… and she recognized as much. But still her spirit rebelled.

Either to prove his point, or because he craved another draught, Sinclair grabbed the bottle and drank again. This time, he was able to manage several swallows before slamming the bottle back to the floor and letting a dark rivulet run from the corner of his mouth.

She found herself transfixed by the deep crimson line touching his chin. He had done that, she knew, deliberately. Her throat, parched already, felt as rough as a dusty road, and she could feel the muscles in her neck straining. Her palms, which she had just gotten dry, were damp again with perspiration, and so, she feared, was her brow. Her temples began to throb, like a distant drumbeat.

“The least you can do,” he said, “after all this time, is to kiss me.”

His blond hair, though wild and twisted on his head, gleamed with a fiery light in the glow of the strange heater. The collar of his white shirt lay open at the neck, and a drop from the bottle had landed there, too. God help her, but she wanted to lick the spot away. Her tongue involuntarily pressed at the back of her teeth.

“As your friend Moira might have said,” he pressed, “will you not do it for auld lang syne?”

“I will not do it for that,” Eleanor finally answered. “But I will do it… for love.”

She leaned forward, as did Sinclair, and with the bottle between them, their lips met-at first chastely, but then, when his parted, she could taste it, the blood, in his mouth.

He put his hand to the back of her head, wound his fingers through her long, tangled hair, and held her there. And she let him-let him hold her, let him ensnare her. She knew that was what he was doing. She let him unite them again as they had been united so long before. She let him do all of it, because it had been so long since she had felt something like this… so long, truly, since she had felt anything at all.

December 13, 6 p.m.

On the trip back, Michael begged, and Danzig agreed, to let him drive the dogsled. After a few rudimentary pointers, Danzig clambered into the cargo shell-it was even a tighter squeeze than it had been for Michael-and said, “Ready?”

“Ready” Michael replied, adjusting his goggles and pulling his furred hood tighter around his face. Then, gripping the handlebars and making sure his feet were planted on snow and not ice, he shouted the order-”Hike!”-that Danzig always used. The dogs, perhaps unaccustomed to his voice, at first didn't move; Kodiak actually turned around and looked at him questioningly