Dan Simmons - The Terror

And Crozier is naked as he kneels, sets his head back, closes his eyes, and extends his tongue for the Sacrament.

The priest looming and dripping over him has no Wafer in his hand. He has no hands. Instead, the dripping apparition leans over the altar rail, leans far too close, and opens its own inhuman maw as if Crozier is the Bread to be devoured.

“Dear Jesus Christ God Almighty,” whispers this watching M’Clintock-Hobson form.

“Dear Jesus Christ God Almighty,” whispers Captain Francis Crozier.

“He’s back with us,” Dr. Goodsir says to Mr. Jopson.

Crozier moans.

“Sir,” the surgeon says to Crozier, “can you sit up? Are you able to open your eyes and sit up? That’s a good captain.”

“What day is it?” croaks Crozier. The dull light from the open door and the even duller light from his oil lamp turned low are like explosions of painful sunshine against his sensitive eyes.

“It’s Tuesday, the eleventh day of January, Captain,” says his steward. And then Jopson adds, “The year of our Lord eighteen hundred and forty-eight.”

“You were very ill for a week,” says the surgeon. “Several times in the last few days I was sure that we had lost you.” Goodsir gives him some water to sip.

“I was dreaming,” manages Crozier after drinking the ice-cold water. He can smell his own stink in the nest of frozen bedclothes around him.

“You were moaning very loudly the last few hours,” says Goodsir. “Do you remember any of your malarial dreams?”

Crozier remembers only the sense-of-flying weightlessness of his dreams, yet at the same time the weight and horror and humour of visions that had already fled like wisps of fog before a strong wind.

“No,” he says. “Mr. Jopson, please be so kind as to fetch me hot water for my toilet. You may have to help me shave. Dr. Goodsir…”

“Yes, Captain?”

“Would you be so kind as to go forward and tell Mr. Diggle that his captain wants a very large breakfast this morning.”

“It is six bells in the evening, Captain,” says the surgeon.

“Nonetheless, I want a very large breakfast. Biscuits. What’s left of our potatoes. Coffee. Pork of some sort – bacon if he has it.”

“Aye, sir.”

“And, Dr. Goodsir,” Crozier says to the departing surgeon. “Would you also be so kind as to ask Lieutenant Little to come aft with a report on the week I have missed and also ask him to bring my… property.”

Harry Peglar had planned it so that he received the duty to carry a message to Erebus on the day the sun returned. He wanted to celebrate it – as much as anything could be celebrated these days – with someone he loved. And somebody he’d once been in love with.

Chief Petty Officer Harry Peglar was captain of the foretop on Terror , chosen leader of the carefully picked topmen who worked the highest rigging, topsail, and topgallant yards in blaze of day or dark of night as well as in the highest seas and worst weather the world could throw at a wooden ship. This was a position that required strength, experience, leadership, and, most of all, courage, and Harry Peglar was respected for all of these traits. Now almost forty-one years old, he had proved himself hundreds of times not only in front of the crew of HMS Terror but on a dozen other ships on which he’d served over his long career.

It had been only mildly ironic then that Harry Peglar had been illiterate until he was a twenty-five-year-old midshipman. Reading was now his secret pleasure, and he had already devoured more than half of the 1,000 volumes in Terror ’s Great Cabin on this voyage. It had been a mere officers’ steward on the survey bark HMS Beagle who had transformed Peglar into a literate man, and it was the same steward who had made Harry Peglar ponder what it meant to be a man.

John Bridgens was that steward. He was now the oldest man on the expedition, by far. When they had sailed from England, the joke in both Erebus ’s and Terror ’s fo’c’sles had been that John Bridgens, lowly subordinate officers’ steward, was the same age as the elderly Sir John Franklin but twenty times as wise. Harry Peglar, for one, knew that this was true.

Old men below the rank of captain or admiral rarely were allowed on Discovery Service expeditions, so it was with some good humour that both crews learned that John Bridgens’s age on the official ship’s muster had been reversed – either by accident or by a purser with a sense of irony – and listed as “ 26.” There had been many jokes made to the grey-haired Bridgens about his youth and callowness and presumed sexual prowess. The quiet steward had smiled and said nothing.

It had been Harry Peglar who had sought out a younger steward Bridgens on the HMS Beagle during their five-year round-the-world scientific survey voyage under Captain FitzRoy from December of 1831 to October of 1836. Peglar had followed an officer he’d served under on HMS Prince Regent , a lieutenant named John Lort Stokes, from the first-rate 120-gun ship of the line to the lowly Beagle . The Beagle was only a Cherokee class 10-gun brig adapted as a survey bark – hardly the kind of ship that an ambitious topman like young Peglar would normally pick – but even then Harry had been interested in scientific survey work and exploration, and the voyage of the little Beagle under FitzRoy had been an education for him in more ways than one.

Steward Bridgens had been about eight years older then than Peglar was now – in his late forties – but already known as the wisest and most widely read warrant officer in the fleet. He was also known as a sodomite, a fact that hadn’t bothered twenty-five-year-old Peglar much at the time. There were two types of sodomites in the Royal Navy: those who sought their satisfaction only on shore and never brought their activities to sea, and those who continued their habits at sea, often by seducing the young boys almost always present on Royal Navy ships. Bridgens, everyone in the Beagle fo’c’sle and in the Navy knew, was the former – a man who liked men when ashore but who never bragged of it nor brought his inclinations to sea. And, unlike the caulker’s mate on Peglar’s current ship, Bridgens was no pederast. Most of his crewmates thought that a boy at sea was safer with subordinate officers’ steward John Bridgens than he would have been with his village vicar at home.

Besides that, Harry Peglar was living with Rose Murray when he sailed in 1831. Although never formally married – she was a Catholic and would not marry Harry unless he converted, which he could not bring himself to do – they were a happy couple when Peglar was ashore, although Rose’s own illiteracy and lack of curiosity about the world reflected the younger Peglar’s life and not the man he would later become. Perhaps they would have married if Rose could have had children, but she could not – a condition she referred to as “God’s punishment.” Rose died while Peglar was at sea on the long Beagle voyage. He had loved her, in his way.

But he had also loved John Bridgens.

Before the five-year mission of the survey ship HMS Beagle had ended, Bridgens – at first accepting his role of mentor with reluctance but finally bending under the young topsail midshipman’s eager insistence – had taught Harry to read and write not only in English but also in Greek and Latin and German. He had taught him philosophy and history and natural history. More than that, Bridgens had taught the intelligent young man to think.