Robert Masello - Blood and Ice

But he did not get up, nor could he. He lay there, listening to the night and wondering what had happened. And how it had all ended. And whether or not, if he called out, a friend would come to help him, or an enemy appear to finish him off. His eyes burned and his throat was parched, and he groped at his belt in the hopes of finding a canteen there. Then he searched in the dirt around him, and found a spur, then the boot to which it was attached. He rolled onto his side, and saw that it was a corpse. Using the leg as an anchor, he pulled himself up the length of the body. His bones ached, and he could barely move, but he felt inside the jacket-a British jacket-and discovered a flask. He managed to open it, then took a long swig. Of gin.

Sergeant Hatch's favorite libation.

He rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes and leaned up to study the corpse's face, but the features were all gone, taken off by the blast of the cannon. He groped around the neck, and found a chain, and though the moonlight was not bright enough to read by, he knew that the medal dangling from it would commemorate the Punjab Campaign. He let go of the medal, drained the flask, and lay back again.

He wondered how many of the brigade had survived the charge.

A cold mist was coming up, spreading itself across the ground. In the distance he could occasionally hear the crack of a pistol shot. Perhaps it was only the farriers, putting the mutilated horses out of their misery. Or wounded soldiers, doing the same for themselves. An uncontrollable shudder ran down his frame, but despite the coldness of the ground, his skin was warm and clammy beneath his uniform.

Before he heard any sound of the thing's approach, he felt a tiny vibration in the earth and forced himself to lie still. It was all he could do to keep his limbs from shivering. But whatever it was, it was coming toward him stealthily, moving under cover of the clinging mist. He had the impression that it was on all fours, head close to the ground… sniffing. Was it a wild dog? A wolf? He took a shallow breath and held it. Or could it be one of those unseen creatures that had haunted the campfires in the dead of night? The Turks had a word for them-Kara-kondjiolos. Bloodsuckers.

It was lingering now over the carcass of Ajax, but all he could make out without raising his head was a pair of sharp shoulder blades hovering over the already rotting flesh. His saber was tangled at his side, still in its scabbard, and he knew he could never draw it out, much less wield it successfully, from the ground. He touched his holster, but it was empty; the pistol must have been thrown free in his fall. He reached out instead toward Hatch's corpse, felt for the leather of his riding belt, then traced his fingers along it until he found the sergeant's holster. The pistol, blessedly, was still in it. As silently as he could, Sinclair withdrew it.

The creature made a low gabbling sound, something strangely between the cry of a vulture and a human utterance.

Sinclair cocked the pistol, and the creature stopped. Sinclair glimpsed a sleek skull, with shiny dark eyes, rising from the mist.

It crawled, carefully, over the dead horse… and stopped to inspect Sergeant Hatch's missing features.

Then it came on, and Sinclair felt a hand-or was it a paw? — something with sharp nails in it, anyway, touching his leg. He lay still, as if dead, and felt an eager mouth lapping at the blood that covered his clothes. He knew that he might be able to get off only one shot, and he had to be sure that it counted. The beast followed the trail of blood onto his chest, and now he could smell its breath, like dead fish, and see its pointed ears. A hot tongue scoured the cloth-and even that he could endure-but when the teeth suddenly nibbled at his flesh, drawing his own blood, and the wet mouth suckled at the wound, he flinched.

The creature's head sprang back, and for the first time he could see its face, though he could never have adequately described it. His first thought was that it was human-the eyes were intelligent, the mouth was bowed, the forehead was rounded-but the shape of the skull was oddly elongated, the leathery skin stretched tight over a gaunt, grimacing mask.

He aimed the pistol, his hand wavering, and fired.

The thing screeched and a hand flew up to its torn ear in shock. It looked down on him indignantly, but scuttled backwards. Sinclair struggled to sit up. The creature was still in retreat, moving in a slow crouch, but Sinclair could have sworn that it had draped a fur pelisse around its shoulders, just as a cavalryman would do.

What was this thing?

He rolled onto his side and tried to shout, but his cries were barely audible. The mist swirled around the vanishing marauder, leaving only an empty pocket in the night. Sinclair held tight to the pistol grip and fired another round after it.

And he heard footsteps warily approaching from another direction. “Who's firing there?” a Cockney voice asked.

A lantern swung close to the ground.

“Are you an Englishman?”

And then the yellow light of the lamp fell on his face and he was able to mumble, through his ragged and bloody lips, “Lieutenant Copley Of the Seventeenth Lancers.”

December 16, 6 p.m.

If he had survived all that-the doomed charge of the Light Brigade, the night on the battlefield-Sinclair now reflected, then what could he not survive? Especially with Eleanor at his side.

Driving the sled, he relied entirely upon the dogs’ unerring sense of direction to find his way back to the whaling station. It was all he could do to crouch on the runners, his face buried in his hood and his gloved hands clinging to the bars. The dogs twice made a wide turn around newly opened crevasses that Sinclair doubted he would have spotted on his own, but that the dogs seemed to sense. He would reward them with generous slabs of blubber and meat from the dead seal stored in the sled.

He had gone as far north as he thought safe and wise, searching for any sign of further habitation, but he feared that they had truly been transported to the end of the earth. He remembered that the Coventry, long ago, had been sailing south, driven by the punishing winds, accompanied only by the lonely albatross circling above its yardarms, and from everything he had been able to glean of their present surroundings, he and Eleanor had arrived at a place so remote, so frozen, and so barren that it could only be the Pole itself… that most dreaded destination of all.

But the seal might help. He had seen Eleanor failing, and he knew that what the bottles contained was old, and foul, and not nearly so potent as it had once been. He was surprised, given its origins, that it had any efficacy at all; on their journeys through Europe, he had been reduced to siphoning the blood from the dead he came across on battlefields and charnel houses. He had gone in search of fresh meat, fresh blood, even if it was only animal, and he had found it down among the bleached skeletons and wind-blasted rocks along the shoreline. There, the seals liked to bask in the cold glare of the sun, sprawled among the millions of broken bones, like so many bathers at Brighton Beach. He had avoided the larger ones, no doubt the bulls, one of whom had waddled toward him, trumpeting, and instead picked what was probably a female, with sleek brown fur and long black whiskers. She was off by herself, lying under the vast arc of a whale's backbone, and as he approached her, she showed no fear. Indeed, she showed little reaction at all, watching impassively as he shook his sword free of its scabbard. He stood above her, planting his boots to either side. She looked up at him with bulging, liquid eyes as he tried to judge where her heart might lie. He wanted the wound to be as small and precise as possible, so that the blood would remain inside the carcass rather than pooling across the ground. He touched the point of the blade to the spot he'd chosen-and only then did the seal look down at it, slightly curious-before he put all his weight into it and pressed down. The blade entered smoothly, and the animal buckled from both ends as the sword went clean through and struck the permafrost below. He did not withdraw it, but let it stand in order to stanch the flow, and within a minute, the seal had ended its contortions and lay still.