Dan Simmons - The Terror

“Oh, aye, yes, sir, Sir John,” said Best. “Only there weren’t no wind. But the ice… could’ve been that, m’lord. Always could be that.” His tone explained that it could not have been.

Shifting as if he was feeling irritation, Sir John said, “You said at the outlet that Lieutenant Gore died… was killed… after you rejoined the other six men on the ice. Please proceed to that point in the narrative.”

“Yes, sir. Well, it must’ve been close to midnight when we reached as far south as we could go. The sun was gone from the sky ahead of us but the sky had that gold glow… you know how it is around midnight up here, Sir John. The fog had lifted well enough for a short while that when we climbed a little rocky nub of a hill… not a hill, really, but a high spit maybe fifteen feet above the rest of the flat, frozen gravel there… we could see the shore twisting away farther to the south to the blurry horizon with glimpses of bergs poking up from over the horizon from where they’d piled up along the shoreline. No water. Everything frozen solid all the way down. So we turned around and started walking back. We didn’t have no tent, no sleeping bags, just cold food to chew on. I broke a good tooth on it. We were both very thirsty, Sir John. We didn’t have a stove to melt snow or ice, and we’d started with only a little bit of water in a bottle that Lieutenant Gore kept under his coats and waistcoat.

“So we walked through the night – through the hour or two of sort of twilight that passes for night here, sirs, and then on for more hours – and I fell asleep walking half a dozen times and would’ve walked in circles until I dropped, but Lieutenant Gore would grab me by the arm and shake me a bit and lead me the right way. We passed the new cairn and then crossed the inlet, and sometime around six bells, when the sun was full up high again, we reached the spot where we’d camped the night before near the first cairn, Sir James Ross’s cairn I mean – actually it’d been two nights before, during the first lightning storm – and we just kept trudging on, following the sledge tracks out to the heaped shore bergs and then out onto the sea ice.”

“You said ‘during the first lightning storm,’” interrupted Crozier. “Were there more? We had several here while you were gone, but the worst seemed to be to the south.”

“Oh, yes, sir,” said Best. “Every few hours, even with the fog so heavy, the thunder would start rumblin’ again and then our hair would start flying about, trying to lift off our heads, and anything metal we had – belt buckles, the shotgun, Lieutenant Gore’s pistol – would start glowing blue, and we’d find a place to hunker down in the gravel and we’d just lie there trying to disappear into the ground while the world exploded around us like cannon fire at Trafalgar, sirs.”

“Were you at Trafalgar, Seaman Best?” Sir John asked icily.

Best blinked. “No, sir. Of course not, sir. I’m only twenty-five, m’lord.”

“ I was at Trafalgar, Seaman Best,” Sir John said stiffly. “As signals officer on HMS Bellerophon , where thirty-three of the forty officers were killed in that single engagement. Please restrain from using metaphors or similes from beyond your experience for the remainder of your report.”

“Aye, aye, s-sir,” stammered Best, weaving now not only from exhaustion and grief but with terror at making such a faux pas. “I apologize, Sir John. I didn’t mean… I mean… I shouldn’t… that is…”

“Continue with your narrative, seaman,” said Sir John. “But tell us about the last hours of Lieutenant Gore.”

“Yes, sir. Well… I couldn’t’ve climbed the iceberg barrier without Lieutenant Gore helping me – God bless him – but we did, eventually, and then got out onto the ice itself to where it was just a mile or two to sea camp, where Mr. Des Voeux and the others were waiting for us, but then we got lost.”

“How could you possibly get lost,” asked Commander Fitzjames, “if you were following the sledge tracks?”

“I don’t know, sir,” said Best, his voice flattened by exhaustion and grief. “It was foggy. It was very foggy. Mostly we couldn’t see ten feet in any direction. The sunlight made everything glow and made everything flat. I think we climbed the same ice ridge three or four times, and every time we did our sense of direction got more distorted. And out on the sea ice, there were long patches where the snow had blown away and the sledge’s runners hadn’t left no marks. But the truth is, sirs, I think we were both, Lieutenant Gore and me, marching along while asleep and just lost the tracks without knowing it.”

“Very well,” said Sir John. “Continue.”

“Well, then we heard the shots…,” began Best.

“Shots?” said Commander Fitzjames.

“Aye, sir. Both musket and shotgun they were. In the fog, with the sound bouncin’ back from the bergs and ice ridges all around, it sounded like the shots were coming from everywhere at once, but they were close. We started hallooing into the fog and pretty soon we hear Mr. Des Voeux hallooing back and thirty minutes later – it took that long for the fog to lift a bit – we stumbled into the sea camp. The boys had got the tent patched in the thirty-six hours or so we were gone – more or less patched – and it was set up next to the sledge.”

“Were the shots to guide you in?” asked Crozier.

“No, sir,” said Best. “They was shooting bears. And the old Esquimaux man.”

“Explain,” said Sir John.

Charles Best licked his torn and ragged lips. “Mr. Des Voeux can explain better than me, sirs, but basically they got back to sea camp the day before to find the tins of food all broken into and scattered and spoiled – by the bears, they reckoned – so Mr. Des Voeux and Dr. Goodsir decided to shoot some of the white bears that kept sniffing around the camp. They’d shot a sow and her two cubs just before we got there and had been dressing the meat. But they heard movement around them – more of that coughin’, breathin’ in the fog I described, sirs – and then, I guess, the two Esquimaux – the old man and his woman – came over a pressure ridge in the fog, just all more white fur, and Private Pilkington fired his musket and Bobby Ferrier fired his shotgun. Ferrier missed both targets, but Pilkington brought down the man with a ball to the chest.

“When we got there, they’d brought the shot Esquimaux and the woman and some of the white bear meat back to the sea camp – leaving bloody swaths on the ice, sirs, which is what we followed in for the last hundred yards or so – and Dr. Goodsir was trying to save the life of the old Esquimaux man.”

“Why?” asked Sir John.

Best had no answer to that. No one else spoke.

“Very well,” said Sir John at last. “How long was it after you were reunited with Second Mate Des Voeux and the others at this sea camp when Lieutenant Gore was attacked?”

“No more than thirty minutes, Sir John. Probably less.”

“And what provoked the attack?”

“Provoked it?” repeated Best. His eyes no longer seemed focused. “You mean, like shooting them white bears?”

“I mean, what were the exact circumstances of the attack, Seaman Best?” said Sir John.

Best rubbed his forehead. His mouth was open for a long moment before he spoke.

“Nothing provoked it. I was talking to Tommy Hartnell – he was in the tent with his head all bandaged, but awake again – he couldn’t remember nothing from until sometime before the first lightning storm – and Mr. Des Voeux was supervising Morfin and Ferrier getting two of the spirit stoves working so we could heat some of that bear meat, and Dr. Goodsir had the old Esquimaux’s parka off and was probing a nasty hole in the old man’s chest. The woman had been standing there watching, but I didn’t see where she was right then because the fog had gotten thicker, and Private Pilkington was standing guard with the musket, when suddenly Lieutenant Gore, he shouts – ‘Quiet, everyone! Quiet!’ – and we all hushed up and quit what we were saying and doing. The only sound was the hiss of the two spirit stoves and the bubbling of the snow we’d melted to water in the big pans – we were going to make some sort of white bear stew, I guess – and then Lieutenant Gore took out his pistol and primed it and cocked it and took a few steps away from the tent and…”