Dan Simmons - The Terror

The tortures of the Long March were increasing. Not only were men slowly dying of starvation and scurvy and exposure, but there had been two other incidences of the terrible poisoning death that had claimed Captain Fitzjames – John Cowie, the stoker who had survived the thing’s invasion of Erebus on 9 March, died screaming in cramps and pain and then silent paralysis on 10 June. On 12 June, Daniel Arthur, Erebus ’s thirty-eight-year-old quartermaster, collapsed with abdominal pains and died from paralyzed lungs a mere eight hours later. Their bodies were not truly buried; the procession had paused only long enough to sew both bodies into the little remaining spare canvas and to pile rocks on them.

Richard Aylmore, the object of much speculation since Captain Fitzjames’s death, showed almost no signs of illness. The scuttlebutt was that while everyone else had been banned from eating warm meals from the canned goods and suffered the scurvy worse for it, Aylmore had been ordered to share portions of his tinned meals with Cowie and Arthur. Other than the obvious answer of active and deliberate poisoning, no one could figure why the Goldner tins would horribly kill three men but leave Aylmore untouched. But while everyone knew that Aylmore hated Captain Fitzjames and Captain Crozier, no one could see a reason for the gunroom steward to poison his mates.

Unless he wanted their shares of food after they were dead.

Henry Lloyd, Dr. Goodsir’s assistant in the sick bay, was one of the men dragged along in the boats these days – sick from scurvy that had him vomiting blood and his own loose teeth – so since Blanky was one of the few men other than Diggle and Wall who stayed with the boats after the morning haul, he tried to help the good doctor.

Oddly enough, now that it was getting tropically warm, there were more cases of frostbite. Sweating men who’d doffed their jackets and gloves would continue man-hauling into the chill of the endless evening – the sun hung in the south until midnight now – and be surprised to find that the air temperature had fallen to fifteen below during their exertions. Goodsir was constantly treating fingers and patches of skin turned white by frostbite or dead black from rot.

Sun blindness or screaming headaches caused by the sun’s glare afflicted half the men. Crozier and Goodsir would move up and down the ranks of man-hauling men during the morning, cajoling them to put on their goggles, but the men hated the wire-mesh monstrosities. Joe Andrews, captain of the hold for Erebus and an old friend of Tom Blanky’s, said that wearing the God-damned wire goggles was as difficult as trying to see through a pair of lady’s black silk drawers but much less fun.

The snow blindness and headaches were becoming serious problems on the march. Some of the men begged Dr. Goodsir for laudanum after the headaches struck, but the surgeon told them that he had none left. Blanky, who was often sent to fetch medicines from the doctor’s locked chest, knew that Goodsir was lying. There was a small vial of laudanum left there, unmarked. The ice master knew that the surgeon was keeping it for some terrible occasion – to ease Captain Crozier’s last hours? Or the surgeon’s own?

Other men suffered the torments of Hell from sunburn. Everyone was blistered red on their hands and faces and necks, but some men who would tug off their shirts for even the shortest periods during the intolerable heat of the midday, when temperatures were above freezing, would that same evening watch their skins, bleached white after three years of darkness and enclosure, burn red and quickly turn to suppurating blisters.

Dr. Goodsir popped the blisters with his lancet and treated the open sores with a salve that smelled to Blanky like axle grease.

By the time the ninety-five survivors were trudging east along the southern coast of the cape in mid-June, almost every man was on the edge of breakdown. As long as some men could man-haul the terribly heavy sledges with boats atop them and the full-packed whaleboats without sledges, others suffering could ride briefly, recover slightly, and rejoin the man-hauling within hours or days. But when there were too many sick and injured to pull, Blanky knew, their escape march would be at an end.

As it was now, the men were always so thirsty that every stream or trickle of water was a reason to stop and throw themselves on all fours to lap at the water like dogs. If it hadn’t been for the sudden thaw, Blanky knew, they would have all died of thirst three weeks earlier. The spirit stoves were almost out of fuel. At first, melting snow in one’s mouth seemed to assuage the thirst, but it actually drained more energy from the body and made one thirstier. Each time they dragged the boats and themselves across a stream – and there were more streams and rivulets running liquid now – everyone would stop to fill water bottles that no longer needed to be carried next to the skin to keep them from freezing.

But while thirst would not kill them soon, Blanky saw that the men were failing in a hundred other ways. Starvation was taking its toll. Hunger kept the exhausted men from sleeping through the four hours of twilight – if they did not have watch duty – which Crozier allowed for their sleeping time.

Setting up and taking down the Holland tents, simple acts that had been performed in twenty minutes two months ago at Terror Camp, now took two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening. Each day it took a little longer as fingers became more swollen and frostbitten and clumsy.

Few of the men’s minds, not even Blanky’s at times, were really clear. Crozier seemed the most alert of all of them most of the time, but sometimes when he thought that no one was looking, the captain’s face became a death mask of fatigue and stupor.

Sailors who had tied off complicated rigging and shroud knots in the roaring darkness fifty feet out on a pitching spar two hundred feet above the deck on a stormy night off the Strait of Magellan during a hurricane blow could no longer tie their shoes in the daylight. Because there was no wood within three hundred miles – other than Blanky’s leg and the boats and masts and sledges they’d hauled along with them and the remains of Erebus and Terror almost a hundred miles to their north – and because the ground was still hard-frozen an inch below the surface, the men had to gather heaps of stones at each stop to weigh down the edges of the tents and to anchor tent ropes against the inevitable nightly winds.

This chore also took forever. Men frequently fell asleep standing in the dimmed sunlight at midnight with a rock in each hand. Sometimes their mates did not even shake them awake.

So it came to pass that late in the afternoon of the eighteenth day of June, 1848, as the men were making their second haul of boats that day, when Blanky’s third leg snapped off just below his bleeding knee stump, he took it as a sign.

Dr. Goodsir had little work for him that afternoon, so Blanky had turned back to peg his way alongside the last boats on the second haul of the endless day, when the foot and peg had caught between two immovable rocks and snapped the peg off high. He took the high break and his unusual presence near the end of the march as a sign from the gods as well.

He found a nearby boulder, made himself as comfortable as he could, dug out his pipe, and tapped in the last bit of tobacco he had been saving for weeks.

When a few of the seamen stopped in their hauling to ask what he was doing, Blanky said, “Just going to sit a spell, I reckon. Give my stump a rest.”

When Sergeant Tozer, who was in charge of the Marine rear guard detail this sunny day stopped to ask tiredly what Blanky was doing allowing the procession to pass him by, Blanky said, “Never you mind, Soloman.” He had always enjoyed irritating the stupid sergeant by using his first name. “You just toddle off now with your remaining lobsterbacks and let me be.”