Dan Simmons - The Terror

Besides the cooking platform to the right of the entrance and a sitting shelf to the left of it, there was the broad sleeping platform at the rear of the snow-house. Edged with what little wood Silence had brought – reused from the tent and then from the sledge – that wood, frozen in place, kept the platform from being worn down. Silence then spread the last of the moss from her canvas bag on the shelf, presumably as an insulating material, and then took great care spreading the various caribou and white-bear skins on the shelf. She then showed him how they should sleep with their heads toward the door and with their now-dry clothing bunched up as pillows. All of their clothing.

For the first days and weeks, Crozier insisted on wearing his caribou shorts under the sleeping robes even though Lady Silence slept naked every night, but soon he found that so warm as to be uncomfortable. Still weakened by his wounds to the point that passion was not yet a temptation, he soon became accustomed to crawling naked between the sleeping robes and re-donning the perspiration-free shorts and other clothing only when he rose in the morning.

Whenever Crozier awoke naked and warm under his robes next to Silence in the night, he tried to remember all the months aboard Terror when he was always cold, always wet, and when the lower deck was always dark and dripping and ice-rimed and reeking of paraffin and urine. The Holland tents had been even more miserable.

Now outside, he pulls his ruffed hood forward to keep the deep cold away from his face and looks around.

It is dark, of course. It had taken Crozier a long time to accept that somehow he had been unconscious – or dead? – for weeks between the time he was shot and his first conscious awareness of being with Silence, but there had been only the shortest, dimmest glow in the south during their long sledge trip to this place, so there was no doubt that it was now November, at the very least. Crozier had been trying to keep track of the days since they had come to the snow-house, but with the perpetual darkness without and their strange cycles of sleeping and waking within – he guessed that they sometimes slept twelve hours or more at a stretch – he could not be sure how many weeks had passed since they came to this place. And storms outside often kept them inside for unmeasurable days and nights, subsisting on their cold-stored fish and seal.

The constellations wheeling around – the sky is very clear today, and thus the day very cold – are winter constellations, and the air is so cold that the stars dance and shake in the sky just as they have all those years Crozier has watched them from the deck of Terror or some other ship he’d taken to the arctic.

The only difference now is that he is not cold and he does not know where he is.

Crozier follows Silence’s tracks around the snow-house and toward the frozen beach and frozen sea. He doesn’t really have to follow her tracks since he knows that the snow-covered beach is a hundred yards or so to the north of the snow-house and that she always goes to the sea to hunt seals.

But even knowing his basic directions here does not tell him where he is.

From Rescue Camp and his crew’s other camps along the south coast of King William Island, the frozen straits were always to the south. He and Silence could now be on the Adelaide Peninsula south across the straits from King William Island, or even on King William Island itself, but somewhere along its uncharted eastern or northeastern coasts where no white man has ever been.

Crozier has no memory of Silence transporting him to the tent site after he was shot – or of how many times she might have moved the tent before he returned to the world of the living – and has only the haziest recall of how long their journey on the fish-runner sledge was before she built the snow-house.

This place might be anywhere.

They didn’t have to be on King William Island at all, even if she has brought them north; they might be on one of the islands in the James Ross Strait somewhere to the northeast of King William Island or on some uncharted island off either the east or west coast of Boothia. On moonlit nights, Crozier can see hills inland from their snow-house site – not mountains, but hills larger than any the captain has ever seen on King William Island – and their campsite itself is more sheltered from the wind than any place he or his men ever found, including Terror Camp.

As Crozier crunches his way across the snow and gravel of the beach and out onto the jumbled sea ice, he thinks of the hundreds of times in the past few weeks when he has tried to communicate his need for leaving to Silence, for finding his men, for getting back to his men.

She always looks at him without expression.

He has come to believe that she understands him – if not his words in English, then the emotions behind his pleas – but she never answers by either expression or string-sign.

Her understanding of things – and his own growing understanding of the complex ideas behind the dancing designs in the string between her fingers – borders, Crozier thinks, on the uncanny. He sometimes feels so close to the odd little native girl that he awakes in the night not knowing which body is his and which hers. At other times, he can hear her shout to him across the dark ice to come quickly or to bring an extra harpoon or rope or tool… even though she has no tongue and has never made a sound in his presence. She understands much, and sometimes he thinks that it is her dreams he dreams every night and wonders if she also has to share his nightmare of the priest in white vestments looming over him as he awaits Communion.

But she will not lead him back to his men.

Three times Crozier has left on his own, crawling out the passage as she sleeps or pretends to sleep, bringing just a bag of seal blubber to sustain him and a knife with which to defend himself, and three times he has become lost – twice in the interior of whatever landmass they are on, once far out onto the sea ice. All three times Crozier has walked until he can walk no more – perhaps for days – and then collapsed, accepting death as his just and proper punishment for abandoning his men to die.

Each time, Silence has found him. Each time, she has bundled him onto a bearskin, set robes over him, and silently pulled him the cold miles back to the snow-house, where she warms his frozen hands and feet against her naked belly under the robes and does not look at him while he weeps.

Now he finds her several hundred yards out onto the ice, bent over a seal’s breathing hole.

Try as he might – and he has tried – Crozier can never find these damned breathing holes. He doubts if he could find them in summer daylight, much less by moonlight, starlight, or in the full dark as Silence does. The stinking seals are so clever and so sly that he does not wonder that he and his men killed only a handful in all their months on the ice and never one through its breathing hole.

Through the talking strings, Crozier has been made to understand that a seal can hold its breath under water for only seven or eight minutes – perhaps fifteen at the most. (Silence explained these units of time in heartbeats, but Crozier thought he had successfully translated them.) Evidently, if he understands Silence’s strings correctly, a seal has territorial boundaries – like a dog or wolf or white bear. Even in the winter, the seal must defend those boundaries, so to make sure that he has enough air within his under-ice kingdom, the seal finds the thinnest ice around and scoops out a dome-shaped breathing hole large enough to hold his entire body, leaving only the tiniest possible actual hole penetrating the thin-shaved ice through which he can breathe. Silence has shown him the sharp scraping claws on a dead seal’s flipper and actually clawed at the ice with them to illustrate how well they work.