Dan Simmons - The Terror

It knows we’ve abandoned the ships , thought Crozier, staring through his brass telescope that had become scuffed and scarred from so many years’ use at both poles. It knows where we’re going. It’s planning to get there first .

They pulled on through the day, stopping only at the midafternoon sunset to eat frozen chunks out of cold cans. Their rations of salt pork and stale biscuits had been used up. The ice walls separating King William Land from the pack ice glowed like a city with ten thousand burning gas lamps in the minutes before darkness spread across the sky like spilled ink.

They still had four miles to go. Eight men were on sledges now, three of the seamen unconscious.

They crossed the Great Ice Barrier separating the pack ice from land sometime after 1:00 a.m. The wind stayed low but the temperature continued to drop. During one pause to rerig ropes for the lifting of the sledges over a thirty-foot wall of ice, made not at all easier by the passage of sledges in weeks past since the movement of the ice had tumbled a thousand new ice blocks into their path from the towering bergs on either side, Lieutenant Little took another temperature reading. It was −82 degrees.

Crozier had been working and giving commands from within a deep trench of exhaustion for many hours. At sunset, when he’d last looked to the south at the distant creature loping ahead of them now – it was already crossing the sea ice barrier in easy leaps – he had made the mistake of taking his mittens and gloves off for a moment so as to write some position notes in his log. He had forgotten to don the gloves before lifting the telescope again and his fingertips and one palm had instantly frozen to the metal. In pulling his hands away quickly, he had ripped a layer of skin and some flesh off his right thumb and three fingers on that hand, and lifted a swath off his left palm.

Such wounds did not heal up here in the arctic, especially not after the early symptoms of scurvy had set in. Crozier had turned away from the others and vomited from the pain. The sickening burning in his ravaged fingers and left palm only grew worse through the long night of hauling, tugging, lifting, and pushing. His arm and shoulder muscles bruised and bled internally under the pressure of the harness straps.

For a while on the last barrier, around one thirty in the morning, with the stars and planets shimmering and shifting in the endless clear but murderously cold sky overhead, Crozier stupidly considered leaving all the sledges behind and making a dash for Terror Camp, still a full mile away across the frozen gravel and drifted snow. Other men could come back with them tomorrow and help fetch these impossibly heavy burdens the last mile or so.

Enough of Francis Crozier’s mind and command instincts remained for him to reject this thought at once. He could do just that, of course, abandon the sledges – the first party in weeks to do so – and ensure their survival by staggering across the ice to the safety of Terror Camp without their burdens, but he would lose all leadership forever in the eyes of his 104 surviving men and officers.

Even though the pain from his torn hands caused him to vomit frequently and silently onto the ice wall as they pulled and pushed the sledges over – a distant part of Crozier’s mind noticed that the vomitus was liquid and red in the lantern light – he continued giving orders and lending a hand as the thirty-eight men well enough to continue the struggle managed to get the sledges and themselves over the Barrier and onto the ice and runner-scraping gravel of the shoreline.

If he hadn’t been sure that the cold would rip the skin of his lips off, Crozier might have fallen to his knees in the dark and kissed the solid ground as they heard that new sound of gravel and stone protesting under the sledge runners for the final mile.

There were torches burning at Terror Camp. Crozier was in the lead harness of the lead sledge as they approached. Everyone tried to stand tall – or at least stagger in an upright position – as they pulled the dead-weight sledges and the unconscious men on them the last hundred yards into camp.

There were men fully dressed in slops and outside the tents waiting for them. At first Crozier was touched by their concern, sure that the two dozen or so men he saw in the torchlight had been on the verge of sending out a rescue party in search of their overdue captain and comrades.

As Crozier leaned into the harness, pulling the last sixty feet or so into the light from the torches, his hands and bruises aflame with pain, he prepared a little joke for their arrival – something along the lines of declaring it Christmas again and announcing that everyone would sleep the next week through – but then Captain Fitzjames and some of the other officers stepped closer to greet them.

Crozier saw their eyes then: Fitzjames’s eyes and Le Vesconte’s and Des Voeux’s and Couch’s and Hodgson’s and Goodsir’s and the others’ there. And he knew – through Memo Moira’s Second Sight or his demonstrated captain’s sense or just through the clear, unfiltered-by-thought perception of a completely exhausted man – he knew that something had happened and that nothing would now be as he had planned or hoped and might never be again.

There were ten Esquimaux standing there: six men of indeterminate age, one very old man with no teeth, one boy, and two women. One woman was old, with a collapsed mouth and a face that was a mass of wrinkles, and one was very young. Perhaps , Irving thought, they are mother and daughter .

The men were uniformly short; the top of the tallest man’s head barely came up to the tall third lieutenant’s chin. Two had their hoods back, showing wild thatches of black hair and unlined faces, but the other men stared at him from the depths of their hoods, some with their faces shrouded and surrounded by a luxuriant white fur that Irving believed might be from the arctic fox. Other hood ruffs were darker and more bristly and Irving guessed that the fur might be from wolverines.

Every male except the boy carried a weapon, either a harpoon or short spear with a bone or stone point, but after Irving had approached and shown his empty hands, none of the spears were now raised or pointed at him. The Esquimaux men – hunters, Irving assumed – stood easily, legs apart, hands on their weapons, with their sled being held back by the oldest man, who kept the boy close. There were six dogs harnessed to the sled, a vehicle much shorter and lighter than even the smallest folding sledges on Terror . The dogs barked and snarled, showing vicious canines, until the old man beat them into silence with a carved stick he carried.

Even while trying to think of a way to communicate with these strange people, Irving continued to marvel at their dress. The men’s parkas were shorter and darker than Lady Silence’s or her deceased male companion’s, but just as furry. Irving thought that the dark hair or fur might be from caribou or foxes, but the knee-length white trousers were definitely from the white bears. Some of the long, hairy boots seemed to be from caribou skins, but others were more supple and pliable. Sealskin? Or some sort of caribou hide turned inside out?

The mittens were visibly sealskin and looked both warmer and more supple than Irving’s own.

The lieutenant had looked to the six younger men to see who was the leader, but it wasn’t clear. Other than the old man and the boy, only one of the males stood out, and that was one of the older bareheaded men who wore a complicated white caribou fur headband, a thin belt from which many odd things dangled, and some sort of pouch around his neck. It was not, however, a simple talisman such as Lady Silence’s white stone bear amulet.