Dan Simmons - The Terror

She had seized one of the bloody scalpels from our worktable and was stepping closer, lifting the weapon. It was obvious to me at once that she was paying no attention to me – her fixed gaze was on the Dead Face and chest of the man who might have been her husband or father or brother. In those few seconds, not knowing anything of the customs of her Heathen tribe, a Myriad of wild images came to my mind – the girl cutting out the man’s heart, perhaps devouring it in some terrible ritual, or removing the dead man’s eyes or slicing off one of his fingers or perhaps adding to the webwork of old scars that covered his body like a sailor’s tattoos.

She did none of that. Before Stanley could seize her and while I could think of nothing but to cower protectively over the dead man, the Esquimaux girl flicked the scalpel forward with a surgeon’s dexterity – she obviously had used razor-sharp knives for most of her life – and she severed the rawhide cord that held the old man’s amulet in place.

Catching up the flat, white, blood-spattered bear-shaped stone and its severed cord, she secreted it somewhere on her person under her parka and returned the scalpel to its table.

Stanley and I stared at each other. Then Erebus ’s chief surgeon went to wake the young sailor who served as the Sick Bay mate, sending him to inform the officer on watch and thence the Captain that the old Esquimaux was dead .

4 June, continued…

We buried the Esquimaux man sometime around one-thirty in the morning – three bells – shoving his canvas-wrapped body down the narrow fire hole in the ice only twenty yards from the ship. This single fire hole giving access to open water fifteen feet below the ice was the only one the men have managed to keep open this cold summer – as I have mentioned before, sailors are afraid of nothing so much as fire – and Sir John’s instructions were to dispose of the body there. Even as Stanley and I struggled to press the body down the narrow funnel, using boat pikes, we could hear the chopping and occasional swearing from several hundred yards east on the ice where a party of twenty men was working through the night to hack out a more decorous hole for Lieutenant Gore’s burial service the next day – or later the same day, actually.

Here, in the middle of the night, it was still light enough to read a Bible verse by – if anyone had brought a Bible out here on the ice to read a verse from, which no one had – and the dim light aided us, the two surgeons and two crewmen ordered to help us, as we poked, prodded, shoved, slid, and finally slammed the Esquimaux man’s body deeper and deeper into the blue ice and thence into the Black Water beneath.

The Esquimaux woman stood silently, watching, still showing no expression. There was a wind from the west-northwest and her black hair lifted from her stained parka hood and moved across her face like a ruffle of raven feathers.

We were the only members of the Burial Party – Surgeon Stanley, the two panting, softly cursing crewmen, the native woman, and me – until Captain Crozier and a tall, lanky lieutenant appeared in the blowing snow and watched the final moment or two of struggle. Finally the Esquimaux man’s body slid the last five feet and disappeared into the black currents fifteen feet below the ice.

Sir John ordered that the woman not spend the night aboard Erebus, Captain Crozier said softly . We’ve come to take her back to Terror. To the tall lieutenant whose name I now remembered as Irving, Crozier said , John, she will be in your charge. Find a place for her out of sight of the men – probably forward of the sick bay in the stacks – and make sure no harm comes to her.

Aye, sir.

Excuse me, Captain, I said . But why not let her go back to her people?

Crozier smiled at this . Normally I would agree with that course of action, Doctor. But there are no known Esquimaux settlements – not the smallest village – within three hundred miles of here. They are a nomadic people – especially those we call the Northern Highlanders – but what brought this old man and young girl out onto the pack ice so far north in a summer where there are no whales, no walruses, no seals, no caribou, no animals of any sort abroad except our white bears and the murderous things on the ice?

I had no answer to this, but it hardly seemed pertinent to my question.

It may come to the point, continued Crozier , where our lives might depend upon finding and befriending these native Esquimaux. Shall we let her go then before we’ve befriended her?

We shot her husband or father, said Surgeon Stanley, glancing at the mute young woman who still stared at the now empty fire hole . Our Lady Silence here might not have the most charitable of feelings toward us.

Precisely, said Captain Crozier . And we have enough problems right now without this lass leading a war party of angry Esquimaux back to our ships to murder us as we sleep. No, I think Captain Sir John is right… she should stay with us until we decide what to do… not only with her, but with ourselves. Crozier smiled at Stanley. In two years, this was the first time that I could remember seeing Captain Crozier smile . Lady Silence. That is good, Stanley. Very good. Come, John. Come, m’lady.

They walked west through the blowing snow toward the first pressure ridge. I went back up the ramp of snow to Erebus, to my tiny little cabin which seemed like pure heaven to me now, and to the first solid night’s sleep I had had since Lieutenant Gore led us south-southeast onto the ice more than ten days earlier .

By the day that he was to die, Sir John had almost recovered from the shock of seeing the Esquimaux wench naked.

It was the same young woman, the same teenaged harlot Copper squaw whom the Devil had sent to tempt him during his first ill-fated expedition in 1819, the wanton Robert Hood’s fifteen-year-old bedmate named Greenstockings. Sir John was sure of that. This temptress had the same coffee-brown skin that seemed to glow even in the dark, the same high, round girl’s breasts, the same brown areolae, and the same raven-feather slash of dark escutcheon above her sex.

It was the same succubus.

The shock to Captain Sir John Franklin of seeing her naked on surgeon McDonald’s table in the sick bay – on his ship – had been profound, but Sir John was sure that he had been able to hide his reaction from the surgeons and from the other captains during the rest of that endless, disconcerting day.

Lieutenant Gore’s burial service took place late on Friday, the fourth of June. It had taken a large work party more than twenty-four hours to get through the ice to allow for the burial at sea, and before they were done they had to use black powder to blow away the top ten feet of rock-hard ice, then use picks and shovels to excavate a broad crater to open the last five feet or so. When they were finished around midday, Mr. Weekes, the carpenter from Erebus , and Mr. Honey, the carpenter from Terror , had constructed a clever and elegant wooden scaffolding over the ten-foot-long and five-foot-wide opening into the dark sea. Work parties with long pikes were stationed at the crater to keep the ice from congealing beneath the platform.

Lieutenant Gore’s body had begun to decay quickly in the relative heat of the ship, so the carpenters first constructed a most solid coffin of mahogany lined with an inner box of sweet-smelling cedar. Between the two enclosures of wood was set a layer of lead in lieu of the traditional two rounds of shot set in the usual canvas burial bag to ensure that the body would sink. Mr. Smith, the blacksmith, had forged, hammered, and engraved a beautiful memorial plate in copper, which was affixed to the top of the mahogany coffin by screws. Because the burial service was a mixture of shoreside burial and the more common burial at sea, Sir John had specified that the coffin be made heavy enough to sink at once.