Dan Simmons - The Terror

Several times Irving had tried to follow the Esquimaux in her furtive movements around the ship at night, but – not wanting her to know that he was following her – he had lost her. Tonight he knew that Lady Silence was in her locker. He had followed her down the main ladder more than three hours ago, after the men’s supper and then after she had quietly and almost invisibly received her portion of “Poor John” cod and a biscuit and glass of water from Mr. Diggle and gone below with it. Irving posted a man at the forward hatch just forward of the huge stove and another curious sailor to watch the main ladderway. He arranged for these watches to trade off every four hours. If the Esquimaux woman climbed either ladder tonight – it was already past 10:00 p.m. – Irving would know where she went and when.

But for three hours now the cable locker doors had been tightly shut. The only illumination in this forward part of the hold had been the slightest leakage of light around the edges of those low, wide locker doors. The woman still had some source of illumination in there – either a candle or other open flame. This fact alone would cause Captain Crozier to have her plucked out of the cable locker in a minute and returned to her little den in the storage area forward of the lower-deck sick bay… or thrown out onto the ice. The captain feared fire in the ship as much as any other veteran sailor and he seemed to harbour no sentimental feelings toward their Esquimaux guest.

Suddenly the dim rectangle of light around the ill-fitted locker doors disappeared.

She’s gone to sleep , thought Irving. He could imagine her – naked, just as he’d seen her, pulling her cocoon of furs around her in there. Irving also could imagine one of the other officers hunting for him in the morning and finding his lifeless body curled here on a crate above the slush-flooded hull, obviously an ungentlemanly cad who had frozen to death while trying to sneak a peek at the only woman on board. It would not be an heroic death report for Lieutenant John Irving’s poor parents to read.

At that moment a veritable breeze of icy air moved through the already frigid hold. It was as if a malevolent spirit had brushed past him in the darkness. For a second, Irving felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise up, but then a simple thought struck him – it’s just a draft. As if someone has opened a door or window .

He knew then how Lady Silence magically came and went from the Terror .

Irving lit his own lantern, jumped off the crate, splashed through the sludge-slush, and tugged at the doors of the cable locker. They were secured from the inside. Irving knew that there was no lock inside the forward cable locker – there wasn’t even a lock on the outside since no one had any reason to attempt to steal cable hawsers – so therefore the native woman herself had found a way to secure it.

Irving had prepared for this contingency. He carried a thirty-inch pry bar in his right hand. Knowing that he would have to explain any damage to Lieutenant Little and possibly to Captain Crozier, he jammed the narrow end of the bar in the crack between the three-foot-high doors and leveraged hard. There came a creaking and groaning but the doors opened only an inch or two. Still holding the pry bar in place with one hand, Irving reached under his slops, greatcoat, undercoat, and waistcoat and pulled his boat knife from his belt.

Lady Silence had somehow driven nails into the backsides of the cable locker doors and run some sort of elastic rawhide material – gut? sinew? – back and forth until the doors were secured as if by a white spiderweb. There was no way that Irving could enter now without leaving a clear trace that he’d been there – the pry bar had already seen to that – so he used the knife to slash through the cat’s cradle of sinew. It was not easy. The strands of sinew were more resistant to the sharp blade than rawhide or ship’s rope.

When the strands finally fell away, Irving extended the hissing lantern into the low space.

The little cave-den he’d seen four weeks earlier was, except for the absence of any flame now other than his lantern’s, just as he remembered – the coiled hawsers pushed back and pulled almost overhead to create a sort of cave within the raised locker area – and there were the same signs that she’d been eating meals there: one of Terror ’s pewter plates with only a few crumbs of Poor John remaining on it, a pewter grog mug, and some sort of storage bag that looked as if Silence had stitched it together from scraps of discarded sail canvas. Also on the locker deck was one of the ship’s small oil lanterns – the kind with just enough oil in it for the men to use when going above to one of the seats of ease at night. Its flue was still very warm to the touch when Irving removed his mitten and glove.

But no Lady Silence.

Irving could have tugged and jerked the heavy hawsers this way and that to look behind them, but he knew from experience that the rest of the triangular cable-locker space was crammed tight with the anchor ropes. Two and a half years since they had sailed and they still carried the stink of the Thames on them.

But Lady Silence was gone. There was no way up through the deck and beams above or out through the hull. So were the superstitious seamen correct? Was she was an Esquimaux witch? A she-shaman? A pagan sorcerer?

Third Lieutenant John Irving did not believe it. He noticed that the active breeze was no longer flowing around him. Yet the flame of his lantern still danced to some smaller draft.

Irving moved the lantern around at arm’s length – that was all the free space there was in the crowded and cramped hawser locker – and stopped when the lamp flame danced the most: forward just starboard of the apex of the bow.

He set the lantern down and began moving hawser aside. Immediately Irving saw how cleverly she had arranged the massive anchor line here – what appeared to be another huge coil of hawser was merely a curled section of another coil set into an empty space to simulate a stack of hawser, easy to pull aside into her den-space. Behind the faux hawser coil was the curve of wide hull timbers.

Once again she had chosen carefully. Above and beneath the cable locker ran a complex webbing of wood and iron beams set in place during HMS Terror ’s refitting for ice service some months before the expedition sailed. Up here by the bow there were iron vertical beams, oak crossbeams, triple-thick support struts, iron triangular supports, and huge oak diagonal beams – many as thick as primary hull timbers – lacing back and forth as part of the ship’s modern-design reinforcement for the polar ice. One London reporter, Lieutenant Irving knew, had described all the tons of iron and oak internal reinforcements, as well as the addition of African oak, Canadian elm, and more African oak to the English oak on the sides of the hull, as being enough to make “a mass of timber about eight feet thick.”

That was almost literally true for the actual bow and for the sides of the hull, Irving knew, but here where the last five feet or so of hull timber met at the bow in and above the cable locker, there were only the original six inches of stout English oak for the hull boards rather than the ten inches of layered hardwoods found elsewhere along both sides of the hull. It was thought that the areas a few feet to the immediate port and starboard of the heavily reinforced bow stem would have to be of fewer layers in order to flex during the terrible stresses of ice-breaking.

And so they had. The five belts of lumber at the sides of the hull, combined with the iron-and-oak-reinforced bow and internal areas, had produced a marvel of modern ice-breaking technology that no other Navy or civilian expedition service in the world could match. Terror and Erebus had gone places where no other ice ship on earth could hope to survive.