Dan Simmons - The Terror

Cornelius Hickey believed in luck – his own luck – and he’d always been a lucky man, but when luck failed him, he was always prepared to make his own.

In this case, when they’d come around the huge cape at the southwest corner of King William Land – sailing when they could, rowing hard when the leads grew narrow so close in to shore – and saw the solid pack ice ahead, Hickey had ordered the ship ashore and they’d reloaded the pinnace onto the sledge.

He didn’t need to remind the men about how lucky they were. While Crozier’s men were almost certainly dead or dying back there at Rescue Camp – or dying on the ice pack in the strait south of it – Hickey’s Chosen Few had made it more than two thirds, and possibly as much as three quarters, of the way back to Terror Camp and all the supplies cached there.

Hickey had decided that a leader of his stature – the reigning King of the Franklin Expedition – should not be forced to man-haul. The men were certainly being fed well thanks to him (and thanks only to him) and should have no complaints about illness or lack of energy, so for this final part of the voyage he had decided to sit in the stern of the pinnace atop the sledge and to allow his dozen surviving subjects, excluding only the limping Goodsir, to pull him across the ice, gravel, and snow as they rounded the north curve of the cape.

For the last few days, Magnus Manson had ridden in the pinnace with him, and not simply because everyone now understood that Magnus was the king’s consort as well as Grand Inquisitor and Executioner. Poor Magnus was having stomach pains again.

The primary reason that Goodsir was limping but still alive was that Cornelius Hickey had a deep fear of disease and contagion. The other men’s illnesses back at Rescue Camp and before – the bleeding scurvy especially – had disgusted and terrified the caulker’s mate. He needed a doctor along to attend to him, even though he had not yet shown the slightest sign of illness that so plagued such lesser men.

Hickey’s sledge team – Morfin, Orren, Brown, Dunn, Gibson, Smith, Best, Jerry, Work, Seeley, and Strickland – had also shown no signs of advancing scurvy now that their diet consisted of fresh or almost-fresh meat once again.

Only Goodsir was looking and acting sick, and that was because the fool insisted on eating only the last few ship’s biscuits and water. Hickey knew that he would soon have to step in and insist that the surgeon partake of a healthier antiscorbutic diet – the fleshy parts such as thigh, calf, and fore- and upper arm were the best – so that Goodsir did not die on them because of his own perverse stubbornness. A doctor, after all, should know better. Stale ship’s biscuits and water might sustain a rat if nothing else were available, but it was not a diet for men.

To make sure that Goodsir stayed alive, Hickey had long ago relieved the surgeon of all the medicines in his kit, watching over them himself and allowing Goodsir to dole them out to Magnus or others only under careful supervision. He also made sure that the surgeon had no access to knives, and when they were out at sea, he always had one of his men assigned to watch to make sure Goodsir did not throw himself overboard.

So far, the surgeon had shown no indications of choosing self-murder.

Magnus’s stomachache was now severe enough not only to keep the giant riding in the sledge-raised pinnace with Hickey during the day, but to keep him awake some nights. Hickey had never known his friend to have trouble sleeping.

The two tiny bullet wounds were the cause, of course, and Hickey forced Goodsir to attend to them daily now. The surgeon insisted that the wounds were superficial and that any infection had not spread. He showed both Hickey and the innocently peering Magnus – holding up his shirttails to peek with alarm at his own belly – how the flesh around the stomach was still pink and healthy.

“Then why the pain?” Hickey insisted.

“It’s like any bruise – especially a deep-muscle bruise,” said the surgeon. “It may continue to hurt for weeks. But it’s not serious, much less life-threatening.”

“Can you remove the balls?” asked Hickey.

“Cornelius,” whined Magnus. “I don’t want my balls removed.”

“I mean the bullets, darling,” said Hickey, petting the giant’s huge forearm. “The little bullets that are in your belly.”

“Perhaps,” said Goodsir. “But it would be better if I did not try. At least while we are on the march. The operation would require cutting through muscle that has already largely healed. Mr. Manson might have to lie down for several days of recovery… and there would always be the serious risk of sepsis. If we were to decide to remove the bullets, I would feel much more comfortable doing so at Terror Camp or when we are back at the ship. So the patient could recover in bed for several days or longer.”

“I don’t want my tummy to hurt,” rumbled Magnus.

“No, of course you don’t,” said Hickey, rubbing his partner’s huge chest and shoulders. “Give him some morphine, Goodsir.”

The surgeon nodded and meted out a bit of the painkiller into a spoon.

Magnus always enjoyed his spoonfuls of morphine and would sit in the bow of the pinnace and smile sweetly for an hour or more before falling asleep after getting his doses.

So on this Friday, the eighth day of September, all was right with King Hickey’s world. His eleven dray animals – Morfin, Orren, Brown, Dunn, Gibson, Smith, Best, Jerry, Work, Seeley, and Strickland – were well and free of disease and pulling hard each day. Magnus was happy most of the time – he enjoyed riding in the bow like an officer and looking back at the countryside they’d just crossed – and there was enough morphine and laudanum in the bottles to hold out until they reached Terror Camp or Terror herself. Goodsir was alive and limping along with the caravan and attending to the king and his consort. The weather was good, although growing colder, and there was absolutely no sign of the creature that had preyed on them in previous months.

Even with their vigorous diet, they had enough Aylmore and Thompson food stores left to provide stew over the next few days – they had found that human fat burned as fuel much as did whale blubber, although less efficiently and for shorter periods. Hickey had plans for a lottery after that if they needed one more sacrifice before they reached Terror Camp.

They could go on shorter rations, of course, but Cornelius Hickey knew that a short-straw lottery would instill terror into the hearts of his eleven already-compliant dray animals and reaffirm who was king of this expedition. Hickey was always a light sleeper but now slept with one eye open and his hand on the percussion-cap pistol, but one last public sacrifice – presumably with Magnus then having to dole out the fourth public punishment for noncompliance to Goodsir – should break any last hidden will to resist that might be left in his dray beasts’ treacherous hearts.

Meanwhile, this Friday was beautiful, with temperatures in the pleasant twenties and a blue sky growing bluer to the north along their line of travel. The heavy boat sat high on the sledge while the wooden runners scratched and hissed as they slid across ice and gravel. In the bow, Magnus, recently dosed, was smiling, holding his belly with both hands and humming a soft tune.

It was less than thirty miles to Terror Camp and John Irving’s grave near Victory Point, they all knew, and less than half that to Lieutenant Le Vesconte’s grave along the coast. With the men strong, they were covering two to three miles each day and would probably do better if their diet improved again.

To that end, Hickey had just torn a blank page out of one of the multiple Bibles that Magnus had insisted upon gathering up and loading into the pinnace when they left Rescue Camp – never mind that the gentle idiot did not know how to read – and was now tearing that page into eleven equal little strips of paper.