Dan Simmons - The Terror

During the first hours he’d been awake in the tent, Crozier had wondered at the profusion of robes, parkas, furs, caribou hides, pots, sinew, the seal-oil lamps made of what looked to be soapstone, the curved cutting knife and other tools, but then he realized the obvious: it had been Lady Silence who had looted the bodies and packs of the eight dead Esquimaux killed by Lieutenants Hodgson and Farr. The rest of the material – Goldner tins, spoons, extra knives, marine mammals’ ribs, pieces of wood, ivory, even what looked to be old barrel staves now used as part of the tent framework – must have been scavenged from Terror or the abandoned Terror Camp or during Silence’s months alone on the ice.

When he is dressed, Crozier collapses onto one elbow and pants. “Are you taking me back to my people now?” he asks.

Silence pulls mittens over his hands, flips his hood with its white-bear fur trim up over his head, firmly grips the bearskin beneath him, and drags him outside through the tent flaps.

The cold air hits Crozier’s lungs and makes him cough, but after a moment he realizes how warm the rest of his body feels. He can feel his own body heat flowing up and around him within the roomy confines of this obviously nonporous garment. Silence bustles around him for a minute – pulling him up into a sitting position on a pile of folded furs. He guesses that she does not want him lying on the ice, even on the bearskin, since it feels warmer in these strange Esquimaux clothes when one sits up and lets air warmed by one’s own body heat circulate against the skin.

As if to confirm this theory, Silence whisks away the bearskin on the ice and folds it, adding it to the stack next to the one he’s sitting on. Astonishingly – Crozier’s feet have been cold every time he has ever gone up on deck or out onto the ice in the past three years, and have been wet and cold for every minute since he left Terror – neither the cold of the ice here nor moisture seems to penetrate the thick hide-soles and grass booties he’s wearing now.

As Silence begins taking down the tent with a few sure movements, Crozier looks around him.

It is night. Why has she brought me out here at night? Is there some emergency ? The caribou tent quickly being dismantled is, as he guessed from the noises, out on the pack ice, set amid seracs and icebergs and pressure ridges that reflect the little starlight thrown by the few stars peeking between low clouds. Crozier sees the dark water of a polynya not thirty feet from where he’d been lying in the tent, and his heart beats faster. We’ve not left the area where Hickey ambushed us, not two miles from Rescue Camp. I know the way back from here .

Then he realizes that this polynya is far smaller than the one Robert Golding had led them to – this patch of open, black water is less than eight feet long and only half that wide. Nor do the surrounding icebergs frozen into the pack ice here look right. They are much taller and more numerous than those near Hickey’s ambush site. And the pressure ridges are taller.

Crozier squints at the sky, catching only glimpses of stars. If the clouds would part and if he had his sextant and tables and a chart, he might be able to fix his position.

If… if… might.

The only recognizable patch of stars he catches sight of look more like a winter constellation than one that should be in that part of the arctic sky in mid- or late August. He knows that he was shot on the night of 17 August – he had already made his daily log entry before Robert Golding had come running into camp – and he cannot imagine that more than a few days have passed since the ambush.

He looks wildly around the ice-jumbled horizons, trying to find a twilight glow that would hint of a recent sunset or imminent sunrise in the south. There is only the night and the howling wind and the clouds and a few trembling stars.

Dear Christ… where is the sun?

Crozier is still not cold, but he is trembling and shaking so badly that he has to use what little strength he has to grip the pile of folded furs to keep from toppling over.

Lady Silence is doing a very strange thing.

She has collapsed the hide-and-bone tent in a few efficient motions – even in the dim light, Crozier can see that the outer tent covers are made of sealskins – and now kneels on one of the sealskin tent covers and uses her half-moon blade to slice it down the middle.

Then she hauls the two halves of the sealskin to the polynya and, using a curved stick to lower the pieces into the water, thoroughly wets them. Returning to the site where the tent stood only moments ago, she pulls frozen fish from the storage area that had been cut into the ice in her half of the tent and briskly lays a line of fish, head to tail, along one side of each half of the quickly freezing tent cover.

Crozier has not the slightest clue as to what the wench is up to. It is as if she is performing some insane heathenish religious ritual out here in the rising night wind under the stars. But the problem is, Crozier sees, she has cut up their sealskin tent cover . Even if she rebuilds the tent from hides stretched over the scattered curved sticks and ribs and bones, it will no longer hold out the wind and cold.

Ignoring him, Silence rolls both halves of the sealskin tent cover tightly around the two lines of fish, pulling and tugging the wet sealskin to make it even tighter. It amuses Crozier that she has left half of one fish protuding from one end of both lengths of rolled sealskin, and now she concentrates on bending upward the head end of each fish ever so slightly.

In two minutes she can lift the two seven-foot-long lengths of sealskin-wrapped fish – each now frozen as solidly as a long, narrow piece of oak with a rising fish head at its tip – and she lays them parallel on the ice.

Now she sets a small hide under her knees and kneels to use bits of sinew and hide thongs to lash short lengths of caribou antlers and ivory – the former frame to the tent – to connect the two seven-foot-long wrapped-fish lengths.

“Mother of God,” rasps Francis Crozier. The frozen lengths of fish wrapped in wet sealskin are runners. The antlers are crosspieces . “You’re building a fucking sledge,” he whispers.

His breath hangs as crystals in the night air as his bemusement turns to a sort of panic. It wasn’t this cold on 17 August and before – nowhere near this cold, even in the middle of the night .

Crozier guesses that it has taken Silence half an hour or less to make the fish-runner, caribou-antler sledge, but now he sits on his stack of furs for another hour and a half or more – gauging the passage of time is difficult without his pocket watch and because he keeps drifting off into a light sleep even while sitting – as the woman works on the runners of the sledge.

First she removes something that looks like a mixture of mud and moss from a canvas bag that had come from Terror . Carrying Goldner cans of water from the polynya , she shapes this mud-moss into fist-sized balls and then lays these daubs the length of the ad hoc runners, patting and spreading them evenly with her bare hands. Crozier has no clue why her hands do not freeze solid despite her frequent breaks to stick her hands under her parka against her own bare belly.

Silence smooths the frozen mud with her knife, trimming it as a sculptor might cut his clay maquette. Then she brings more water from the polynya and pours it over the frozen layer of mud, creating an ice shoeing. Finally, she sprays mouthfuls of water onto a strip of bearskin and rubs that wet fur up and down the frozen mud along the length of each runner until the coating of ice there is absolutely smooth. In the starlight, it looks to Crozier as if the runners along the inverted sledge – just fish and strips of sealskin two hours earlier – are lined with glass.