Dan Simmons - The Terror

Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves! Britons never, never, never shall be slaves!

Behind the headless admiral, who obviously was meant to be the late Sir John Franklin even though it had not been Sir John decapitated that day at the bear blind, ambled a monster ten or twelve feet tall.

It had the body and fur and black paws and long claws and triangular head and black eyes of a white arctic bear, but it was walking on its hind legs and was twice the height of a bear and with twice the arms’ length. It walked stiffly, almost blindly, swinging its upper body to and fro, the small black eyes staring at each man it approached. The swinging paws – the arms hanging loose as bell pulls – were larger than the costumed crewmen’s heads.

“That’s your giant, Manson, on the bottom,” laughed Erebus ’s second mate, Charles Frederick Des Voeux, next to Crozier, raising his voice to be heard over the next stanza. “It’s your little caulker’s mate – Hickey? – riding on his shoulders. It took the men all night to sew up the two hides into a single costume.”

Thee haughty tyrants ne’er shall tame, All their attempts to bend thee down

Will but arouse thy generous flame, But work their woe, and thy renown.

As the giant bear ambled past, dozens of men from the blue, green, and orange rooms followed it in procession through the white room and into the violet room. Crozier stood as if literally frozen to his spot near the white banquet table. Finally he turned his head to look at Fitzjames.

“I swear I did not know, Francis,” said Fitzjames. The other captain’s lips were pale and very thin.

The white room began emptying of costumed figures as the scores there followed the headless admiral and the swinging, towering, slowly ambling bipedal bear-giant into and through the relative gloom of the long violet room. The drunken singing roared around Crozier.

RULE, BRITANNIA! BRITANNIA, RULE THE WAVES!

BRITONS NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER

SHALL BE SLAVES!

Crozier began following the procession into the violet chamber and Fitzjames followed him. The captain of HMS Terror had never felt this way in all of his years of command; he knew that he had to stop this travesty of a lampoon – no Naval discipline could tolerate a farce in which the death of the expedition’s former commander became a source of humour. But at the same time he knew that it had already proceeded to a point where simply shouting down the singing, ordering Manson and Hickey out of their obscene monster suit, ordering everyone out of their costumes and back to their berths on the ships would be almost as absurd and useless as the pagan ritual Crozier was watching with growing anger.

TO THEE BELONGS THE RURAL REIGN, THY CITIES SHALL WITH COMMERCE SHINE;

ALL THINE SHALL BE THE SUBJECT MAIN, AND EVERY SHORE IT CIRCLES THINE!

The headless admiral, ambling bear-thing, and the following procession of a hundred costumed men or more had not paused long in the violet room. As Crozier entered the violet-coloured space – the torches and outside tripod fires were whipping on the north side of the violet-dyed canvas wall and the sails themselves were rippling and cracking in the rising wind – he arrived just in time to see Manson and Hickey and their singing mob pause at the entrance to the ebony room.

Crozier resisted the impulse to shout out “No!” It was an obscenity for the effigy of Sir John and the towering bear-thing to play this out in any forum, but unthinkably vile in that black, oppressive ebony room with its polar bear head and ticking clock. Whatever final dumb show the men had in mind, at least it would soon be finished. This had to be the finale of this ill-thought-out mistake of a Second Grand Venetian Carnivale. He would let the singing end of its own, the pagan mime close to drunken cheers from the men, and then he would order the mobs out of their costumes, send the frozen and drunken seamen back to their ships, but order the riggers and orga-nizers to strike the canvas and rigging immediately – tonight – whether that meant frostbite or no. He would then deal with Hickey, Manson, Aylmore, and his officers.

The swaying, much-cheered headless admiral and swaying bear-monster entered the ebony compartment.

Sir John’s black clock within began striking midnight.

The mob of bizarrely costumed sailors at the rear of the procession began pressing forward, the rear ranks eager to get into the ebony compartment to see the fun, even while the ragmen, rats, unicorns, dustmen, one-legged pirates, Arab princes and Egyptian princesses, gladiators, faeries, and other creatures at the front of the mob, already making the turn and crossing the threshold into the black room, began resisting the advance, pushing back, no longer sure they wanted to be in that soot-floored and black-walled darkness.

Crozier elbowed his way forward through the mob – the mass surging forward and then back as those in the front thought twice about actually entering the ebony gloom – certain now that if he couldn’t end this farce before the finale, at least he could shorten this final act.

He’d no sooner entered the darkness with twenty or thirty men at the front of the procession who’d also halted upon stepping in – his eyes had to adapt in here, and the black soot on the ice gave him a terrible sense of falling into a black void – when he felt the blast of cold air against his face. It was as if someone had opened a door in the wall of the iceberg that loomed over everything. Even the costumed figures here in the dark were still singing, but the real volume came from the pushing mobs still back in the violet room.

RULE, BRITANNIA! BRITANNIA, RULE THE WAVES;

BRITONS NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER

SHALL BE SLAVES!

Crozier could only just make out the white of the disembodied bear’s head emerging from the ice over the ebony clock – the chimes had struck six now and seemed terribly loud in the darkened space – and he could see that under the taller, swaying, white bear-monster’s form, Manson and Hickey were finding it difficult to keep their balance on the sooty ice, in the icy blackness with the north canvas walls flapping and rippling wildly with the wind.

Crozier saw that there was a second large white shape in the room. It also stood on its hind legs. It was farther back in the darkness than Manson and Hickey’s bearhide-white glow. And it was much larger. And taller.

As the men fell silent and the clock was striking its last four chimes, something in the room roared.

THE MUSES, STILL WITH FREEDOM FOUND, SHALL TO THY HAPPY COAST REPAIR;

BLEST ISLE! WITH MATCHLESS BEAUTY CROWNED, AND MANLY HEARTS TO GUIDE THE FAIR!

Suddenly the men in the ebony room were shoving backward against the still-pushing throng of seamen trying to get in.

“What in God’s name?”asked Dr. McDonald. The four surgeons, all in Harlequin costumes but with their masks hanging down now, were recognizable to Crozier in the brighter violet glow coming around the canvased curve between the rooms.

A man in the ebony room screamed in terror. There came a second roar, unlike anything that Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier had ever heard; it was something more at home in a thick jungle of some previous Hyborian Age than in the Arctic of the nineteenth century. The sound ground so low into the bass regions, grew so reverberating, and emerged so ferocious that it made the captain of HMS Terror want to piss his pants right there in front of his men.

The larger of the two white shapes in the gloom charged forward.

Costumed men screamed, tried to push backward against the wave of the forward-pushing curious, and then ran to the left and right in the darkness, colliding with the nearly invisible black-dyed canvas walls.