Dan Simmons - The Terror

Crozier watches dully.

The same two patterns keep appearing out of the complicated crisscross of sinew string. The first comprises three bands of strings creating two triangles at the top, just in from her thumbs, but with a double loop of string in the lower center of the pattern showing a peaked dome. The second pattern – her right hand pulled far away with just two bare strings running almost to her left hand where the string loops around just her thumb and little finger – shows a complex little loop of doubled string that looks like a cartoon figure with four oval legs or flippers and and a string-loop head.

Crozier has no idea what the forms mean. He shakes his head slowly to let her know that he does not want to play.

Silence stares at him for a silent moment, her dark eyes looking into his. Then she undoes the pattern with a graceful collapse of her small hands and sets the string in the ivory bowl he drinks his broth from. A second later she crawls out through the multiple tent flaps.

Shocked by the cold air blowing in for those seconds, Crozier tries to crawl to the opening. He needs to see where he is. Background groans and crackings have suggested that they are still on the ice – perhaps very near where he was shot. Crozier has no sense of how long it has been since Hickey ambushed the four of them – himself, Goodsir, poor Lane and Goddard – but he has hopes that it has been only a few hours, a day or two at most. If he leaves now, he might still be able to get his warning to the men at Rescue Camp before Hickey, Manson, Thompson, and Aylmore show up there to do more damage.

Crozier is able to lift his head and shoulders a few inches but is far too weak to slither out from under the robes, much less to crawl to look out through the caribou-hide tent flaps. He sleeps again.

Sometime later – he is not even sure if it is the same day or if Silence has come and gone several times since he fell asleep – Silence wakes him. The dim light through the hides is the same; the interior of the tent is illuminated by the same blubber lamps. There is a fresh slab of seal lying in the snowy niche in the floor she uses for storage, and Crozier sees that she has just pulled off her heavy outer parka and is wearing only some sort of short pants with the fur side turned inward. The soft outer hide is lighter in color than Silence’s brown skin. Her breasts bobble as she kneels in front of Crozier again.

Suddenly the string dances between her fingers again. This time the little animal design near her left hand is shown first, the string is loosened, retwisted, and the design of the peaked oval dome in the center comes next.

Crozier shakes his head. He does not understand.

Silence tosses the string into the bowl, takes her short, semicircular blade with the ivory handle looking like the handle of a stevedore’s hook, and begins slicing up the slab of seal meat.

“I have to go find my men,” whispers Crozier. “You have to help me find my men.”

Silence watches him.

The captain does not know how many days may have elapsed since his first awakening. He sleeps much. His few waking hours are spent with him eating his broth, eating the seal meat and blubber that Silence no longer has to prechew for him but which she still lifts to his lips, and with her changing his poultices and cleaning him. Crozier is mortified beyond words that his basic elimination needs must be attended to him using another Goldner’s can set into the snow, reachable through a gap between the sleeping robes beneath him, and that it is this girl who regularly must carry the can out to empty it somewhere out there on the ice floes. It does not make Crozier feel any better that the contents of the can freeze quickly and that there is almost no smell from it in the little tent that already smells so strongly of fish and seal and their own human sweat and presence.

“I need you to help me get back to my men,” he rasps again. He feels that the odds are great that they are still close to the polynya where Hickey ambushed them – no more than two miles out on the ice from Rescue Camp.

He needs to warn the others.

It confuses him that every time he awakens, the dim light through the tent’s hide walls seems the same. Perhaps, for some reason that only Dr. Goodsir could explain, he awakens only at night. Perhaps Silence is drugging him with her seal-blood soup to keep him sleeping during the day. To keep him from escaping.

“Please,” he whispers. He can only hope that despite her muteness, the savage has learned a little English during her months aboard HMS Terror . Goodsir had confirmed that Lady Silence could hear, even if she had no tongue with which to speak, and Crozier himself had seen her start at some sudden loud noise when she was a guest on their ship.

Silence continues staring at him.

She’s an idiot as well as a savage , thinks Crozier. He would be God-damned if he’d beg this heathen native again. He would have to keep eating, keep recovering, build up his strength, shove her aside one day, and walk back to camp himself.

Silence blinks and turns to cook the slab of seal meat over her little blubber stove.

He awakes on another day – or, rather, another night, since the light is as dim as always – to find Silence kneeling over him and playing her string game again.

The first pattern between her fingers shows the little peaked-dome shape again. Her fingers dance. Two vertical looped shapes appear, but with two legs or flippers now rather than four. She pulls her hands farther apart, and somehow the designs actually move – sliding farther from her right hand and toward her left hand, the balloon-leg loops moving. She undoes that design, her fingers fly, and the oval-dome shape appears in the center again, but – Crozier slowly realizes – it is not quite the same shape. The peak of the dome is gone and now it is a pure catenary curve such as he studied as a midshipman poring over geometry and trigonometry illustrations.

He shakes his head. “I don’t understand,” he rasps. “This game doesn’t make any God-damned sense.”

Silence looks at him, blinks, tosses the string into an animal-hide pack, and begins to pull him out of his sleeping furs.

Crozier still does not have the strength to resist, but neither does he use what little strength he has regained to help. Silence props him up and tugs a light caribou underjacket and then a thick fur parka over his upper body. Crozier is shocked to feel how light the two layers are – the cotton and wool layers he’s worn for outside work the past three years weighed more than thirty pounds before they inevitably became soaked with sweat and ice, but he doubts if this upper outfit of Esquimaux clothing weighs more than eight pounds. He feels how loose both layers are on his upper body but how snugly everything fits at the neck and wrists – tight anywhere that heat might escape.

Embarrassed, Crozier does try to help pull on the light caribou pants over his nakedness – these are larger versions of the short pants that are all that Silence wears in the tent – and then the high caribou stockings, but his fingers get in the way more than not. Silence pushes his hands away and finishes dressing him with an impersonal economy of effort known only to mothers and nurses.

Crozier watches as Silence pulls liners that look to be made of woven grass onto his feet and pulls them tight over his feet and ankles. Presumably these are for insulation, and he has trouble even imagining how long it had taken her – or some woman – to weave the grass into such high, tight socks. Fur boots, when tugged on over his grass socks by Silence, overlap his fur stocking-pants, and he notices that the soles of these boots are made of the thickest hides of any of their clothing.