Dan Simmons - The Terror

“What had Lieutenant Irving ever done to you, Mr. Hickey? Why did you tell other men from both Erebus and Terror that Irving was a whoremaster and a liar?”

“I swear to you, Captain… pardon my teeth chattering, Captain, but Jesus Christ the night is cold against the bare skin. I swear to you, I didn’t say no such thing. A lot of us looked on poor Lieutenant Irving sorta like a son, Captain. A son. It was only my worry for him out there today that made me go check on him. Good thing I did, too, sir, or we would’ve never caught the murdering bastards who…”

“Put your layers on, Mr. Hickey.”

“Aye, sir.”

“No. Do it outside. Get out of my sight.”

“ ‘Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery,’ ” intoned Fitzjames. “ ‘He cometh up and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.’ ”

Hodgson and the other pallbearers were using great care in lowering the pallet with Irving’s canvas-wrapped body to the ropes held in place above the shallow hole by some of the healthier seamen. Crozier knew that Hodgson and Irving’s other friends had gone into the postmortem tent one at a time to pay their respects before the lieutenant had been sewn into his sail shroud by Old Murray. The visitors had set several tokens of their affection next to the lieutenant’s body – the recovered brass telescope, its lenses shattered in the shooting, that the boy had so esteemed, a gold medal with his name engraved on it that he had won in competitions on the gunnery ship HMS Excellent , and at least one five-pound note, as if some old wager had been paid at last. For some reason – optimism? youthful naïveté? – Irving had packed his dress uniform in his small bag of personal belongings, and he was being buried in it now. Crozier wondered idly if the gilt buttons on the uniform – each bearing the image of an anchor surrounded by a crown – would be there when nothing else but the boy’s bleached bones and the gold gunnery medal survived the long process of decay.

“ ‘In the midst of life we are in death,’ ” Fitzjames recited from memory, his voice sounding tired but properly resonant, “ ‘of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, O Lord, who for our sin art justly displeased?’ ”

Captain Crozier knew that there was one other item sewn into the sail-shroud with Irving, one that no one else knew about. It lay under his head like a pillow.

It was a gold, green, red, and blue silk Oriental handkerchief, and Crozier had surprised the giver by coming into the postmortem tent after Goodsir, Lloyd, Hodgson, and the others had departed, just before Old Murray the sailmaker was to enter and sew up the shroud he had prepared and upon which Irving already lay in state.

Lady Silence had been there, bending over the corpse, setting something beneath Irving’s head.

Crozier’s first impulse had been to reach for his pistol in his greatcoat pocket, but he’d frozen in place as he saw the Esquimaux girl’s eyes and face. If there were no tears in those dark, hardly human eyes, there was something else luminous there with some emotion he could not identify. Grief? The captain did not think so. It was more some kind of complicit recognition at seeing Crozier. The captain felt the same strange stirring in his head that he had so often felt around his Memo Moira.

But the girl obviously had set the Oriental handkerchief carefully in place under the dead boy’s head as some sort of gesture. Crozier knew the handkerchief had been Irving’s – he’d seen it on special occasions as far back as the day they’d sailed in May of 1845.

Had the Esquimaux wench stolen it? Plundered it from his dead body just yesterday?

Silence had followed Irving’s sledge party from Terror to Terror Camp more than a week ago and then had just disappeared, never joining the men in the camp. Almost everyone, excluding Crozier, who still held hopes she might lead them to food, had considered this good riddance. But all during this terrible morning, part of Crozier had wondered if somehow Silence had been responsible for his officer’s murder out there on the windswept gravel ridge.

Had she led her Esquimaux hunter friends back here to raid the camp and run into Irving on the way, first giving a fete to the starving man with meat and then murdering him in cold blood to keep him from telling the others here of his encounter? Had Silence been the “possibly a young woman” that Farr and Hodgson and the others had caught a glimpse of, fleeing with an Esquimaux man with a headband? She could have changed her parka if she had returned to her village in the past week, and who could tell young Esquimaux wenches apart at a glance?

Crozier considered all of these things, but now in a time-stopped moment – both he and the young woman were startled into immobility for long seconds – the captain looked into her face and knew, whether in his heart or in what Memo Moira insisted was his second sight, that she wept inside for John Irving and was returning a gift of the silk handkerchief to the dead man.

Crozier guessed that the handkerchief had been presented to her during the February visit to the Esquimaux’s snow-house that Irving had dutifully reported to the captain… but had reported with few details. Now Crozier wondered if the two had been lovers.

And then Lady Silence was gone. She’d slipped under the tent flap and was gone without a sound. When Crozier later queried the men in the camp and those on guard if they had seen anything, none had.

At that moment in the tent, the captain had gone over to Irving’s body, looked down at the pale, dead face made even whiter with the small pillow of the brightly covered handkerchief behind it, and then he had pulled the canvas over the lieutenant’s face and body, shouting for Old Murray to come in and do the sewing.

“ ‘Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and most merciful Saviour,’ ” Fitzjames was saying, “ ‘deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death.’

“ ‘Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts; shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer; but spare us, Lord most holy, O God most mighty, O holy and merciful Saviour, thou most worthy Judge eternal, suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.’”

Fitzjames’s voice fell silent. He stepped back from the grave. Crozier, lost in reverie, stood for a long moment until a shuffling of feet made him realize that his part of the service had arrived.

He walked to the head of the grave.

“ ‘We therefore commit the body of our friend and officer John Irving to the deep,’ ” he rasped, also reciting from memory that remained all too clear from many repetitions despite the pall of fatigue in his mind, “‘to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body, when the Sea and the Earth shall give up their dead.’” The body was lowered the three feet, and Crozier tossed a handful of frozen soil onto it. The gravel made a strangely moving rasping sound as it landed on the canvas above Irving’s face and slid to the sides. “‘And the life of the world to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ, who at his coming shall change our vile body, that it may be like his glorious body, according to the mighty working, whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.’ ”

The service was over. The ropes had been retrieved.

Men stamped cold feet, tugged on their Welsh wigs and caps, rewrapped their comforters, and filed back through the fog to Terror Camp for their hot dinner.

Hodgson, Little, Thomas, Des Voeux, Le Vesconte, Blanky, Peglar, and a few of the other officers stayed behind, dismissing the seamen’s detail that had been waiting to bury the body. The officers shoveled soil and began setting in the first layer of stones together. They wanted Irving buried as best he could be under the circumstances.