Dan Simmons - The Terror

I went outside and Wept instead, making sure that none of the Officers or Men could see me.

Captain Fitzjames died at 8 minutes after 3:00 p.m. this afternoon, Tuesday the Sixth Day of June, in the Year of Our Lord Eighteen Hundred and Forty-Eight.

His shallow grave had already been Dug. The Covering Rocks had been Gathered and Stacked. All of the Men who could stand and dress themselves turned out for the Service. Many of those who had served under Captain Fitzjames the past three years wept. Even though it was warm today – five to ten degrees above Freezing – a cold wind Came Up out of the Relentless Northwest and froze many Tears to beards or cheeks or comforters.

The few Marines left in our Expedition fired a volley into the Air.

Up the hill from the Grave, a Ptarmigan took to the air and flew out toward the Pack Ice.

A great Moan went up from the men. Not for Captain Fitzjames, but for the loss of the Ptarmigan for the evening’s stew. By the time the Marines reloaded their Muskets, the bird was a hundred yards away and far out of Range. (And none of these Marines ever could have hit a bird on the wing at one hundred yards even when they were Well and Warm.)

Later – just a half hour ago – Captain Crozier looked in on the Sick Bay Tent and beckoned me outside into the Cold.

Was it Scurvy that killed Captain Fitzjames? was his only question to me .

I admitted that I did not think it was. It had been something more Deadly.

Captain Fitzjames thought that the steward serving him and the other officers since Hoar’s death was poisoning him, whispered the captain . Is this possible?

Bridgens? I said too Loudly. I was deeply shocked. I had always liked the Bookish old Steward .

Crozier shook his head . Richard Aylmore has been serving the Erebus officers the last two weeks, he said . Could it have been poison, Dr. Goodsir?

I hesitated. To say yes would certainly mean Aylmore would be shot at sunrise. The Gunroom Steward was the man who had been Given fifty Lashes in January for his Improvident participation in the Grand Venetian Carnivale. Aylmore was also a Friend and Frequent Confidant of Terror ’s Diminutive and sometimes Devious caulker’s mate. Aylmore, we all knew, harboured a small and resentful Soul .

It could well have been poison, I told Crozier not half an hour ago . But not necessarily a Deliberately Administered poison.

What does that mean? demanded Crozier. Our remaining captain looked so weary tonight that his white Skin actually glowed in the starlight .

I said , I mean that the Officers have been eating the Largest Portions of the last of the Goldner’s Canned Foods that we have brought along. There sometimes is an Unexplained but Deadly paralytic poison in foods that have gone bad. No one understands it. Perhaps it is some microscopic Animalcule we cannot Perceive with our Lenses.

Crozier whispered , Wouldn’t we have smelled it if the canned foods had gone putrid?

I shook my head and grasped the captain’s greatcoat sleeve to press home my point . No. That is the Terror of this Poison that Paralyzes first the voice and then the entire body. It cannot be Seen or Tested For. It is as invisible as Death itself.

Crozier thought for a long moment . I’ll order everyone to go off the canned foods for three weeks, he said at last . The last of the rotten salted beef and poor biscuits will have to do us for a while. We’ll eat it Cold.

The Men and officers will not be happy about this, I whispered . The canned soups and vegetables are as close as Anything comes to a Hot Meal on the March. They may become Mutinous at such Further Deprivation under such Harsh Conditions.

Crozier smiled then. It was a strangely chilling sight . Then I will not have everyone go off the canned foods, he hissed . Gunroom Steward Aylmore will continue eating it – out of the same cans he served James Fitzjames from. A good night to you, Dr. Goodsir.

I came back into the Sick Bay Tent then, attended to the sleeping sick men, and crawled into my Sleeping Bag with my mahogany Portable Writing Desk on my Knees.

My handwriting is so Difficult to read on the Page because I have been Shaking. And not just from the Cold.

Every time I believe I Know one of these men or Officers, I find that I am wrong. A Million years of Man’s Medicinal Progress will never reveal the secret Condition and sealed Compartments of the Human Soul.

We leave before Dawn tomorrow. I suspect there will be no more stops such as the luxury of the last Two Days at Comfort Cove.

When Tom Blanky’s third and final leg snapped off, he knew it meant the end.

His first new leg had been wondrous to behold. Shaped and whittled by Mr. Honey, Terror ’s capable carpenter, it had been carved out of a single piece of solid English oak. It was a work of art and Blanky enjoyed showing it off. The ice master had peg-legged his way around the ship like a good-humoured pirate, but when Blanky had to go out onto the ice, he attached to the bottom of the peg a perfectly shaped wooden foot that snapped into a socket. The foot had a myriad of nails and screws on the bottom – better for traction on the ice than the hobnails in the men’s winter boots – and the one-legged man, while not able to man-haul, had been more than able to keep up during their transfer to Terror Camp from the abandoned ship and then in the long haul south and now east.

No longer.

His first leg had broken off just below the knee nineteen days after they’d abandoned Terror Camp, not long after they’d buried poor Pilkington and Harry Le Vesconte.

That day, Tom Blanky and Mr. Honey, who’d been excused from man-hauling, both had ridden in a pinnace strapped to a sledge pulled by twenty straining other men while the carpenter carved a new leg and foot for the ice master from wood taken from a spare spar.

Blanky had never been sure whether or not to wear his foot when hobbling along with the procession of boats and sweating, swearing men. When they actually ventured out onto the sea ice – as they had the first days crossing the frozen inlet south of Terror Camp and again at Seal Bay and once more at the broad bay just north of the point where they’d buried Le Vesconte – the screwed and cleated foot worked wonders on the ice. But most of their march south and then west along and around the large cape and now back east again was made on land.

As the snow and ice on the rocks began to melt, and it was melting quickly this summer that was so much warmer than their lost summer of 1847, Tom Blanky’s wooden ovoid of a foot would slide off slick rocks or be pulled off in ice crevices or would snap at the socket with every inopportune twist.

When out on the ice, Blanky tried to show his solidarity with his mates by hiking back and forth with the man-haulers, making both trips alongside the straining, sweating men, carrying small items when he could, occasionally volunteering to slip into the harness of an exhausted man. But everyone knew he could not pull his own weight with the hauling.

By the sixth week and forty-seven miles out, at Comfort Cove where poor Captain Fitzjames had died so hard, Blanky was on his third leg – a poorer, weaker substitute than the second one had been – and he tried manfully to hobble along on his peg through the rocks, streams, and standing water, although he no longer went back for the afternoon’s hated second haul.