Dan Simmons - The Terror

The next few minutes were quite the domestic scene, thought Lieutenant Irving, with him sitting on his white bear robe on his little snow shelf, quickly if not enthusiastically cutting and swallowing strips of seal blubber, while Lady Silence crumbled strips of ship’s biscuit, dunked them in his mother’s crock as quickly as a sailor mopping up gravy with his bread, and devoured the marmalade with satisfied grunts that seemed to come from deep in her throat.

And all this time her bosoms remained bare and visible for Third Lieutenant John Irving’s constant and appreciative, if not relaxed, perusal over his diminishing strip of seal blubber.

What would Mother think if she could see her boy and her crock now ? wondered Irving.

When the two were finished, after Silence had eaten all the biscuits and emptied the marmalade crock and Irving had made a serious dent in the blubber, he tried to mop his chin and lips with his mitten, but the Esquimaux woman reached to the niche once again and presented him with a handful of loose snow. Since the high temperature in the little snow-house felt as if it were actually above freezing, Irving self-consciously mopped the blubber grease off his face, dried his face with his sleeve, and started to hand the remaining strip of sealskin and fat back to the girl. She gestured to the storage niche and he stuffed the piece of blubber as far back into the niche as he could reach.

Now comes the hard part , thought the lieutenant.

How does one communicate just by the use of hands and dumb show that there are more than a hundred hungry men threatened by scurvy who need someone else’s hunting and fishing secrets?

Irving made a game try at it. With Lady Silence’s deep, dark eyes watching unblinkingly, he acted out men walking, rubbing his stomach to show that they were hungry, the three masts of each ship, men getting sick – he stuck his tongue out, crossed his eyes in a way that used to upset his mother, and mimed falling over onto the bearskin robe – and then pointed to Silence and energetically acted out her casting a spear, holding a fishing pole, pulling in a catch. Irving pointed to the blubber he’d just stuffed away, in more ways than one, and pointed vaguely beyond the snow-house, again rubbing his stomach, crossing his eyes and falling, then rubbing his stomach again. He pointed to Lady Silence, floundered a moment on the sign language for “show us how to do it ourselves,” and then repeated the spear-throwing and fish-catching mimes while pausing to point to her, shoot splay-fingered rays out his eyes, and rub his stomach to specify the recipients of her teaching.

When he was finished, sweat dripped from his brow.

Lady Silence looked at him. If she had blinked again, he’d missed it during his antics.

“Oh, well, bloody hell,” said Third Lieutenant Irving.

In the end, he just buttoned up his layers and slops again, stuffed the ship’s napkin and his mother’s crock back in his leather valise, and called it a day. Perhaps he had got his message across after all. He might never know. Perhaps if he returned often enough to the snow-house…

Irving’s speculation veered into the highly personal at that point, and he reined himself in as if he were a coachman with a matched set of willful Arabians.

Perhaps if he returned often… he would be able to go with her during one of her nocturnal seal-hunting expeditions.

But what if the thing on the ice is still giving her these things ? he wondered. After seeing what he had seen so many weeks ago, he had half-convinced himself that he had not seen what he had seen. But the more honest half of Irving’s memory and mind knew that he had seen it. The creature on the ice had brought her chunks of seal or arctic foxes or other game. Lady Silence had left that place among the ice boulders and seracs that night with fresh meat.

And then there was Erebus ’s mate, Charles Frederick Des Voeux, with his stories of men and women in France who transformed themselves into wolves. If that was possible – and many of the officers and all of the crewmen seemed to think it was – why could not a native woman with a talisman of the white bear around her neck turn herself into something like a giant bear with the cunning and evil of a human being?

No, he had seen the two together on the ice. Hadn’t he?

Irving shivered as he finished buttoning his slops. It was very warm in this little snow-house. Ironically, it was giving him the chills. He felt the blubber working at his bowels and decided it was time to go. He would be lucky if he made it back to Terror ’s seat of ease in time as it was and he had no wish to stop out on the ice to see to such functions. It was bad enough when his nose became frostbitten.

Lady Silence had watched while he packed away the old napkin and his mother’s crock – items that he realized much later she might very much have wanted – but now she touched her cheek with the silk handkerchief a final time and tried to hand that back to him.

“No,” said Irving, “that is a gift from me. A token of my friendship and deep esteem. You must keep it. I would be offended if you do not.”

Then he tried to sign and act out what he had just said. The muscles along either side of the young Esquimaux woman’s mouth almost twitched as she watched him.

He pushed her hand holding the handkerchief back, taking care not to touch her naked bosom as he did so. The white stone of the bear amulet between her breasts seemed to glow from its own illumination.

Irving realized that he was much, much too hot. The room seemed to swim a bit in his vision. His insides lurched, calmed, then lurched again.

“Toodaloo,” he said – three syllables he would agonize over for weeks to come, cringing in his bunk out of embarrassment even though she could not have understood the inanity and absurdity and inappropriateness of it. But still…

Irving touched his cap, wrapped his comforter around his face and head, tugged on his gloves and mittens, clutched his valise to his chest, and dove for the exit passageway.

He did not whistle during his walk back to the ship, but he was tempted to. He had all but forgotten about the possibility of some huge man-eater lurking in the moon shadows of the seracs out here so far from the ship, but if there was such a thing watching and listening that night, it would have heard Third Lieutenant John Irving talking to himself and occasionally slapping himself on the head with his mitten.

Gentlemen, it is time we looked at our possible courses of action in the coming months,” said Captain Crozier. “I have decisions to make.”

The officers and some warrant officers and other specialists, such as the two civilian engineers, foretop captains, and ice masters, as well as the last surviving surgeon, had been called to this meeting in Terror ’s Great Cabin. Terror had been chosen by Crozier not to inconvenience Captain Fitzjames and his officers – who had to make the crossing during the brief hour of sunlight and hoped to be back before it grew dark again – nor to emphasize the change of flagship, but only because fewer men on Crozier’s ship were confined to sick bay. It had been easier to move those few to a temporary sick bay in the bow to free up the Great Cabin for the meeting of officers; Erebus had twice the number of men down with symptoms of scurvy, and Dr. Goodsir had indicated that a few of them were too sick to be moved.

Now fifteen of the expedition’s leaders were crowded around the long table that in January had been cut into shorter lengths to serve as operating tables for the surgeon but now was set to rights by Mr. Honey, Terror ’s carpenter. The officers and civilians had left their rainproof slops, mittens, Welsh wigs, and comforters at the base of the main ladder, but they still wore all their other layers. The room smelled of wet wool and unwashed bodies.