Dan Simmons - The Terror

Both captains are silent and waiting when the soft knock comes on the Common Room’s thin door.

“Enter,” says Commander Fitzjames.

An Erebus crewman leads in two Terrors – Third Lieutenant John Irving and a seaman named Shanks.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, Commander Fitzjames, Captain Crozier,” says Irving through only slightly chattering teeth. His long nose is white from the cold. Shanks is still carrying a musket. “Lieutenant Little sent me to report to Captain Crozier as soon as I could.”

“Go ahead, John,” says Crozier. “You’re not still hunting for Lady Silence, are you?”

Irving looks blank for a second. Then, “We saw her out on the ice when the last search parties were coming in. No, sir, Lieutenant Little asked me to fetch you right away because…” The young lieutenant pauses as if forgetting the reason Little had sent him to report.

“Mr. Couch,” says Fitzjames to the Erebus mate on duty who had led the two Terrors to the Common Room, “be so kind as to step out into the companionway and to close the door please, thank you.”

Crozier has also heard the odd silence as the snoring and hammock creaking has all but ceased. Too many ears in the crew’s forward berthing space were awake and listening.

When the door is shut, Irving says, “It’s William Strong and Tommy Evans, sir. They’re back.”

Crozier blinks. “What the devil do you mean, back ? Alive?” He feels the first surge of hope he’s had for months.

“Oh, no sir,” says Irving. “Just… one body… really. But it was propped against the stern rail when someone saw it as all the search parties were coming in for the day… about an hour ago. The guards on duty hadn’t seen anything. But it was there, sir. On Lieutenant Little’s orders, Shanks and I made the crossing as quickly as we could to inform you, Captain. Shanks Mare as it were.”

“It?” snaps Crozier. “One body? Back on the ship ?” This makes no sense at all to the Terror ’s captain. “I thought you said both Strong and Evans were back.”

Third Lieutenant Irving’s entire face is frostbite white now. “They are, Captain. Or at least half of them. When we went to look at the body propped there at the stern, it fell over and… well… came apart. As best we can tell, it’s Billy Strong from the waist up. Tommy Evans from the waist down.”

Crozier and Fitzjames can only look at each other.

Lieutenant Gore’s cache party arrived at Sir James Ross’s cairn on King William Land late on the evening of 28 May, after five hard days of travel across the ice.

The good news as they approached the island – invisible to them until the last minutes – was that there were pools of salt-free drinking water as they neared the shore. The bad news was that most of these pools had been leached from the base of an almost unbroken series of icebergs – some of them a hundred feet tall and more – that had been swept up against the shallows and shore and now stretched like a parapeted white castle wall as far as the eye could see around the curve of land. It took the men a full day to cross this barrier and even then they had to leave some of the robes, fuel, and provisions cached on the sea ice to lighten the sledge load. To add to their difficulties and discomfort, several of the cans of soup and pork they had opened on the ice had gone putrid and had to be thrown away, leaving them less than five days’ rations for the return – assuming that more of the cans were not bad. On top of all that, they found that even here, at what must be the sea’s edge, the ice was still seven feet thick.

Worst of all – for Goodsir, at least – King William Land, or King William Island as they later learned, was the greatest disappointment of his life.

Devon Island and Beechey Island to the north had been windswept, inhospitable to life at the best of times, and barren except for lichen and low plants, but that was a veritable Garden of Eden compared to what the men now found on King William Land. Beechey had boasted bare ground, some sand and soil, imposing cliffs, and a sort of beach. None of that was to be found on King William Land.

For half an hour after crossing the iceberg barrier, Goodsir did not know if he was on solid ground or not. He had been prepared to celebrate with the others since this would be the first time any of them had set foot on terra firma in more than a year, but the sea ice gave way beyond the bergs to great tumbles of shore ice and it had been impossible to tell where the shore ice left off and the shore began. Everything was ice, dirty snow, more ice, more snow.

Finally they reached a windswept area free of snow and Goodsir and several of the seamen threw themselves forward onto the gravel, going to hands and knees on the solid ground as if in thanksgiving, but even here the small round stones were frozen solid, as firm as London cobblestones in winter and ten times as cold, and this chill traveled up through their trousers and other layers covering their knees, then into their bones and up through their mittens to their palms and fingers like a silent invitation to the frozen infernal circles of the dead far below.

It took them four more hours to find Ross’s cairn. A heap of rocks promised to be six feet high on or near Victory Point should be easy enough to find – Lieutenant Gore had said this to all of them earlier – but on this exposed point the heaps of ice were often at least six feet high and high winds had long since blown off the smaller top stones of the cairn. The late-May sky never darkened into night, but the dim, constant glow made it exceedingly difficult to see anything in three dimensions or to judge distances. The only things that stood out were the bears, and only because of their movement. Half a dozen of the hungry, curious things had been following them off and on all day. Beyond that occasional awkward waddle of movement, everything was lost in a grey-white glow. A serac that looked to be half a mile away and fifty feet high was really only twenty yards away and two feet tall. A bare patch of gravel and stone that seemed a hundred feet away turned out to be a mile away far out on the featureless wind-scoured point.

But they found the cairn finally, at almost 10:00 p.m. by Goodsir’s still-ticking watch, all of the men so exhausted that their arms were hanging like those in sailors’ tales of apes, all speech abandoned in their tiredness, the sledge left half a mile north of where they had first come ashore.

Gore retrieved the first of two messages – he had made a copy of this first one to cache somewhere farther south along the coast as per Sir John’s instructions – filled in the date, and scribbled his name. So did Second Mate Charles des Voeux. They rolled the note, slid it into one of the two airtight brass cylinders they’d hauled with them, and, after dropping the cylinder into the centre of the empty cairn, replaced the rocks they’d removed to gain access.

“Well,” said Gore. “That’s that then, isn’t it?”

The lightning storm began not long after they had trudged back to the sledge for a midnight supper.

To save weight during the iceberg crossing, they had left their heavy wolfskin blanket-robes, ground tarps, and most of the tinned food cached out on the ice. They assumed that since the food was in sealed and soldered tins, it would not attract the white bears that were always sniffing around and that even if it did the bears wouldn’t be able to get into the tins. The plan was to get along on two days’ reduced rations here on land – plus any game they might see and shoot, of course, but that dream was fading with the dismal reality of the place – and to have everyone sleep in the Holland tent.