Dan Simmons - The Terror

Blanky was moving slowly, using a well-padded crutch under his right arm since he’d lost the heel on his right foot and still hadn’t quite mastered walking on its wood-and-leather replacement, but seemed in a fine mood.

“Good evenin’ to you, Captain,” said the ice master. “Don’t let me slow you down, sir. My mates here – Fat Wilson and Kenley and Billy Gibson – will see me there.”

“You seem to be moving as fast as we are, Mr. Blanky,” said Crozier. As they passed the torches lit on every fifth cairn, he noticed that there still was no breath of wind; the flames flickered vertically. The path had been well trod out, the pressure ridge gaps shoveled and hacked out to provide an easy passage. The large iceberg still half a mile ahead of them seemed to be lit from within by all the torches burning on the other side of it and now resembled some phantasmagorical siege tower glowing in the night. Crozier recalled going to regional Irish fairs when he was a boy. The air tonight, while a good bit colder than an Irish summer night’s, was filled with a similar excitement. He glanced behind them to make sure that Private Hammond, Private Daly, and Sergeant Tozer were bringing up the rear with their weapons at port arms and their outer mittens off.

“Strange how excited the men are about this Carnivale, ain’t it, Captain?” said Mr. Blanky.

Crozier could only grunt at that. This afternoon he had drunk the last of his self-rationed whiskey. He dreaded the coming days and nights.

Blanky and his mates were moving so quickly – crutch or no – that Crozier let them get ahead. He touched Irving’s arm, and the gangly lieutenant dropped back from where he was walking with Lieutenant Little, surgeons Peddie and McDonald, the carpenter, Honey, and others.

“John,” Crozier said when they were out of earshot of the officers but still far enough ahead of the Marines so as not to be heard, “any news of Lady Silence?”

“No, Captain. I checked the forward locker myself less than an hour ago, but she’d already gone out her little back door.”

When Irving had reported to Crozier on their Esquimaux guest’s extracurricular excursions earlier in December, the captain’s first instinct had been to collapse the narrow ice tunnel, seal and reinforce the ship’s bows, and evict the wench onto the ice once and for all.

But he hadn’t done that. Instead, Crozier had ordered Lieutenant Irving to assign three crewmen to watch Lady Silence whenever that was feasible and for him to follow her out onto the ice again if possible. So far, they’d not seen her go out her back door again, although Irving had spent hours hiding in the ice jumble beyond the ship’s bow, waiting. It was as if the woman had seen the lieutenant during her witchly meeting with the creature on the ice, as if she had wanted him to see and hear her out there, and that had been enough. She appeared to be subsisting on ship’s rations these days and using the forward cable locker only for sleeping.

Crozier’s reason for not immediately evicting the native woman was simple: his men were beginning the slow process of starving to death, and they would not have adequate stores to get through the spring, much less the next year. If Lady Silence was getting fresh food from the ice in the middle of winter – trapping seals perhaps, walrus hopefully – it was a skill that Crozier knew his crews would have to learn in order to survive. There was not a serious hunter or ice fisherman among the hundred-some survivors.

Crozier had discounted Lieutenant Irving’s embarrassed, heavily self-critical account of seeing something that seemed like the creature on the ice making some sort of music with the woman and bringing food offerings to her. The captain simply would never believe that Silence had trained a huge white bear – if such the thing was – to hunt and bring her fish or seal or walrus like a proper English bird dog fetching pheasant for its master. As for the music… well, that was absurd.

But she had chosen this day to go missing again.

“Well,” said Crozier, his lungs aching from the cold air, even filtered as it was through his thick wool comforter, “when you return with the relief watch at eight bells, check her locker again, and if she’s not there… what in the name of Christ Almighty?”

They had passed through the last line of pressure ridges and come out onto the flat sea ice on the last quarter mile to Erebus . The scene that met Crozier’s eyes made his jaw sag under the wool scarf and high-pulled jacket collars.

The captain had assumed that the men would be having the Second Grand Venetian Carnivale on the flat sea ice immediately below Erebus , the way Hoppner and Parry had set their masque on the short stretch of ice between the frozen-in Hecla and Fury in 1824, but while Erebus sat bow up, dark and desolate-looking on its dirty pedestal of ice, all the light, torches, motion, and commotion came from an area a quarter of a mile away, immediately in front of the largest iceberg.

“Good heavens,” said Lieutenant Irving.

While Erebus looked to be a dark hulk, a new mass of rigging – a veritable city of coloured canvas and flickering torches – had risen on the bare circle of sea ice, forest of seracs, and wide-open area beneath the towering, glowing iceberg. Crozier could only stand and stare.

The riggers had been busy. Some obviously had ascended the berg itself, sinking huge ice screws deep in the ice sixty feet high on its face, pounding in bolt rings and pulley stands, adding enough rigging, running lines, and blocks from the stores to outfit a three-masted man-of-war at full sail.

A spiderweb of a hundred ice-frosted lines ran down from the berg and back toward Erebus , supporting a city of lighted and coloured tent walls. These dyed walls of canvas – some of the mains’l sheets thirty feet high and taller – were staked to sea ice and serac and ice block but pulled taut on their vertical spars with stays running diagonally to the tall berg.

Crozier walked closer, still blinking. The ice in his eyelashes threatened to freeze his eyelids shut, but he continued blinking.

It was as if a series of gigantic coloured tents had been pitched on the ice, but these tents had no roofs. The vertical walls, lighted from within and without by scores of torches, snaked from the open sea ice into the serac forest and continued up to the vertical wall of the iceberg itself. As it was, giant rooms or coloured apartments had been erected almost overnight on the ice. Each chamber stood at an angle to the preceding chamber, a sharp turn in the rigging, staves, and canvas apparent every twenty yards or so.

The first chamber opened eastward onto the ice. The canvas here had been dyed a bright, rich blue – the blue of skies not seen in so many months that the colour made a knot rise in Captain Crozier’s constricted throat – and torches and braziers of flame outside the canvas chamber’s vertical sides made the blue walls glow and pulse.

Crozier walked past Mr. Blanky and his mates, who were staring in open wonder. “Christ,” he heard the ice master mutter.

Crozier walked still closer, actually entering the space defined by the glowing blue walls.

Brightly clad and strangely garbed figures pranced and swooped around him – ragpickers with streaming comet tails of coloured cloth trailing behind them, tall chimney sweeps in death-black tails and sooty top hats doing jigs, exotic birds with long gold beaks stepping lightly, sheikhs of Araby with red turbans and pointed Persian slippers sliding along the dark ice, pirates with blue death masks pursuing a prancing unicorn, generals of Napoleon’s army wearing white masks from some Greek Chorus filing by in solemn procession. Something dressed all in bulky green – a wood sprite? – ran up to Crozier on the unslippery ice and chirped in falsetto, “The trunk of costumes is to your left, Captain. Feel free to mix and match,” and then the apparition was gone, blending back into the shifting crowds of bizarrely dressed figures.