Dan Simmons - The Terror

Gore smiled and shook his head. “A couple of days of fasting won’t harm us, man. But with Hartnell hurt, I’ll send four of you back to the ice cache with him on the sledge. You make the best camp you can there while I take one man to head south as per Sir John’s orders. I need to cache the second letter to the Admiralty, but more important, we need to press as far south as possible to see if there’s any sign of open water. This whole trip will have been for nothing if we don’t do that.”

“I volunteer to go with you, Lieutenant Gore,” said Goodsir and was astonished at the sound of his own voice. For some reason, pressing on with the officer was very important to him.

Gore also looked surprised. “Thank you, Doctor,” he said softly, “but it would make more sense if you stayed with our wounded messmate, would it not?”

Goodsir blushed deeply.

“Best will go with me,” said the lieutenant. “Second Mate Des Voeux will be in command of the ice party until I return.”

“Yes, sir,” both men said in unison.

“Best and I will leave in about three hours and we’ll press as far south as we can, carrying only some salt pork, the message canister, one water bottle apiece, some blankets if we have to bivouac, and one of the shotguns. We’ll turn back sometime around midnight and try to rendezvous with you on the ice by eight bells tomorrow morning. We’ll have a lighter sledge load heading back to the ships – except for Hartnell, I mean – and we know the best places to cross the ridges, so I’ll wager we get home in three days or less, rather than five.

“If Best and I aren’t back to sea camp by midnight of the day after tomorrow, Mr. Des Voeux, take Hartnell and return to the ship.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Private Pilkington, are you especially tired?”

“Yes, sir,” said the thirty-year-old Marine. “I mean no, sir. I’m ready for any duty you ask of me, Lieutenant.”

Gore smiled. “Good. You get the next three hours’ watch. All I can promise you is that you’ll be the first man allowed to sleep when your sledge party reaches the cache camp later in the day. Take the musket there that’s not doing tent pole duty but stay inside the tent – just poke your head out from time to time.”

“Very good, sir.”

“Dr. Goodsir?”

The surgeon’s head came up.

“Would you and Mr. Morfin be so kind as to carry Mr. Hartnell into the tent and get him comfortable? We’ll put Tommy in the centre of our little huddle to try to keep him warm.”

Goodsir nodded and moved to lift his patient by the shoulders without removing him from the sleeping bag. The welt on the unconscious Hartnell’s head was now as large as the surgeon’s small, pale fist.

“All right,” said Gore through chattering teeth, looking at the tattered tent that was going up, “let’s the rest of us get those blankets spread and huddle together like the orphans we are and try to get an hour or two’s sleep.”

Sir John could not quite believe what he was seeing. There were eight figures, just as he had anticipated, but they were… wrong .

Four of the five exhausted, bearded, and goggled men in the sledge harness made sense – seamen Morfin, Ferrier, and Best, with the huge Private Pilkington leading – but the fifth man in harness was Second Mate Des Voeux, whose expression suggested he had been to Hell and back. Seaman Hartnell walked beside the sledge. The thin sailor’s head was heavily bandaged and he was staggering along as if he were part of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. The surgeon, Goodsir, was also walking alongside the sledge and administering to someone – or something – on the sledge itself. Franklin looked for Lieutenant Gore’s distinctive red wool scarf – the comforter was almost six feet long and impossible to miss – but, bizarrely, it seemed that most of the dark, staggering figures were wearing shorter versions of it.

Finally, walking behind the sledge, there came a short, fur-parka-wrapped creature whose face was invisible under a hood but who could only be an Esquimaux.

But it was the sledge itself that made Captain Sir John Franklin cry out, “Dear God!”

This sledge was too narrow for two men to lie on side by side, and Sir John’s telescope had not lied to him. Two bodies lay atop each other. The one on top was another Esquimaux – a sleeping or unconscious old man with a brown, lined face and streaming white hair flowing back on the wolfskin hood that someone had pulled back and propped under his head like a pillow. It was to this figure that Goodsir was attending as the sledge approached Erebus . Beneath the Esquimaux man’s supine body was the blackened, distorted, and too-obviously dead face and form of Lieutenant Graham Gore.

Franklin, Commander Fitzjames, Lieutenant Le Vesconte, First Mate Robert Sergeant, Ice Master Reid, Chief Surgeon Stanley, and such petty officers as Brown, the bosun’s mate; John Sullivan, captain of the maintop; and Mr. Hoar, Sir John’s steward, all rushed to the sledge, as did forty or more of the seamen who had come up on deck upon the sound of the lookout’s hail.

Franklin and the others stopped in their tracks before closing with the sledge party. What had looked through Franklin ’s telescope like a grey spattering of red wool comforters on the men turned out to be great smears of red on their dark greatcoats. The men were smeared with blood.

There was an explosion of babble. Some of the men in harness hugged friends who ran to them. Thomas Hartnell collapsed on the ice and was surrounded by men trying to help. Everyone was talking and shouting at once.

Sir John had eyes only for the corpse of Lieutenant Graham Gore. The body had been covered by a sleeping robe, but this had partially fallen away so that Sir John could see Gore’s handsome face, now absolutely white in places from drained blood, burned black by the arctic sun in other areas. His features were distorted, the eyelids partially raised and the whites visible and glinting with ice, the jaw sagging open, tongue protruding, and the lips already pulling back away from the teeth in what looked to be a snarl or expression of pure horror.

“Get that… savage… off Lieutenant Gore,” commanded Sir John. “ Immediately !”

Several men hurried to comply, lifting the Esquimaux man by his shoulders and feet. The old man moaned and Dr. Goodsir exclaimed, “Careful! Easy with him! He has a musket ball near his heart. Carry him to the sick bay, please.”

The other Esquimaux’s parka hood was thrown back now and Sir John noted with shock that it was a young woman. She moved closer to the wounded old man.

“Wait!” cried Sir John, waving at his ship’s assistant surgeon. “The sick bay? You are seriously suggesting that we allow that… native person… into the sick bay of our ship?”

“This man is my patient,” Goodsir said with a brazen stubbornness that Sir John Franklin never would have guessed could reside in the short little surgeon. “I need to get him to a place where I may be able to operate – remove the ball from his body if that is possible. Stem the bleeding if it is not. Carry him in, please, gentlemen.”

The crewmen holding the Esquimaux looked to their expedition commander for a decision. Sir John was so flummoxed that he could not speak.

“Hurry along now,” commanded Goodsir in a confident voice.

Obviously taking Sir John’s silence as tacit assent, the men carried the grey-haired Esquimaux man up the ramp of snow and onto the ship. Goodsir, the Esquimaux wench, and several crewmen followed, some helping young Hartnell along.