Dan Simmons - The Terror

The paraffin container was not the only interesting artifact in the snow-house. Above and to one side of the lamp was an elaborate frame consisting of what appeared to be four ribs from what might have been seals – how had Lady Silence caught and killed those seals ? wondered Irving – thrust upright in the snow of the shelf and connected by a complex web of sinew. Hanging from the bone frame was one of the larger rectangular Goldner food cans – also obviously scavenged from Terror ’s garbage dump – with holes punched in the four corners. Irving saw at once that it would make a perfect cooking pot or teakettle hanging low over the seal-oil flame.

Lady Silence’s bosoms were still uncovered. The white bear amulet moved up and down with her breathing. Her gaze never left his face.

Lieutenant Irving cleared his throat.

“Good evening, Miss… ah… Silence. I apologize for bursting in on you this way… uninvited as it were.” He stopped.

Didn’t the woman ever blink?

“Captain Crozier sends his compliments. He asked me to look in on you to see… ah… how you were getting along.”

Irving had rarely felt more the fool. He was sure that despite her months on the ship, the girl understood not one word of English. Her nipples, he could not help noticing, had risen in the brief blast of cold air that he had brought into the snow-house with him.

The lieutenant rubbed the sweat off his forehead. Then he removed his mittens and undergloves, bobbing his head as if to ask permission of the lady of the house as he did so. Then he mopped his forehead again. It was incredible how warm this little space under a cantenary dome made out of snow could get just from the heat of a single lamp burning dripping blubber.

“The captain would like…,” he began, and stopped. “Oh, bugger it.” Irving reached into his leather valise and brought out the biscuits wrapped in an old napkin and the crock of marmalade wrapped in his finest Oriental silk handkerchief.

He offered the two bundles across the central space to her with hands that were slightly trembling.

The Esquimaux woman made no attempt to take the bundles.

“Please,” said Irving.

Silence blinked twice, slipped the knife under her robe, and took the small, lumpy packages, setting them next to her where she reclined on the platform. As she lay on her side, the tip of her right bosom was almost touching his Chinese handkerchief.

Irving looked down and realized that he was also sitting on a thick animal fur set onto this narrow platform. Where did she get this second animal skin ? he wondered before remembering that more than seven months earlier she had been given the outer parka of the old Esquimaux man. The grey-haired old one who had died on the ship after being shot by one of Graham Gore’s men.

She untied the old galley napkin first, showing no response to the five ship’s biscuits wrapped in it. Irving had spent a serious bit of time finding the least weevil-infested biscuits possible. He felt a little piqued at her lack of recognition of his labours. When she unwrapped his mother’s little porcelain crock, sealed with wax on top, she paused to lift the Chinese silk handkerchief – its elaborate designs were in bright red, green, and blue – and to set it against her cheek for a moment. Then she laid it aside.

Women are the same everywhere was John Irving’s giddy thought. He realized that while he had enjoyed sexual congress with more than one young woman, he had never felt such a strong sense of… intimacy … as he did at this moment sitting chastely in the seal-oil lamplight with this half-naked young native woman.

When she pried open the wax and saw the marmalade, Lady Silence’s gaze snapped up to Irving’s face again. She seemed to be studying him.

He made a rough pantomime of her spreading the marmalade on the biscuits and eating them.

She did not move. Her gaze did not shift.

Finally she leaned out and extended her right arm as if reaching for him across the blubber fire, and Irving flinched a bit before realizing that she was reaching to a niche – just a small recess in the ice block – at the head of his robe-covered platform. He feigned not noticing that her own robe had slipped lower and that both her bosoms were bobbing free as she reached.

She offered him something white and red and reeking like a dead and decaying fish. He realized that it was another slab of seal or other-animal blubber that had been stored in the snowy niche to be kept cold.

He accepted it, nodded, and held it in his hands above his knees. He had no clue what to do with it. Was he supposed to bring it home to serve as part of his own seal-oil blubber lamp?

Silence’s lips twitched then, and for an instant, Irving almost thought she had smiled. She took out her short, sharp knife and gestured, drawing the blade quickly and repeatedly right up to and against her lower lip as if she were going to cut that full, pink lip off.

Irving stared and continued holding the soft mass of blubber and skin.

Sighing, Silence reached over, took the blubber from him, held it to her own mouth, and cut several slices off with her knife, pulling the short blade actually into her mouth between her white teeth with each morsel. She paused to chew a moment and then handed the blubber and rubbery sealskin – he was almost certain it was seal now – back to him.

Irving had to fumble down through six layers of slops, greatcoat, jacket, sweaters, and waistcoat to get to his boat knife that was sheathed on his belt. He held the blade up to show her, feeling like a child seeking approbation during a lesson.

She nodded ever so slightly.

Irving set the reeking, stinking, dripping blubber next to his open mouth and pulled the sharp edge of his knife back quickly the way she had.

He almost cut his nose off. He would have sliced his lower lip off if the knife had not caught in the sealskin – if sealskin it was – and soft meat and white blubber and jerked upward slightly. As it was, a single drop of blood dripped from his sliced septum.

Silence ignored the blood, shook her head ever so slightly, and handed him her knife.

He tried it again, feeling the strange weight of her knife in his palm, slicing confidently toward his lip even as a drop of blood dripped from his nose onto the blubber.

The blade went through effortlessly. Her little stone knife was – somehow, incredibly – many times sharper than his own.

The strip of blubber filled his mouth. He chewed, trying to idiot-mime and nod his appreciation toward the woman from behind his upraised strip of blubber and poised knife.

It tasted like a ten-week-dead carp dredged from the floor of the Thames beneath the Woolwich sewer outlets.

Irving felt a great urge to vomit, started to spit the wad of half-chewed blubber on the floor of the snow-house instead, decided that this would not further the goals of his delicate diplomatic mission, and swallowed.

Grinning his appreciation for the delicacy while trying to force down his continued nausea – all the while surreptitiously mopping at his barely sliced but vigorously bleeding nose with a bunched-up frozen mitten serving as handkerchief – Irving was horrified to see the Esquimaux woman clearly gesture for him to cut and eat more of the blubber.

Still smiling, he sliced and swallowed another piece. It was, he thought, precisely what it must feel like to be filling one’s mouth with a giant glob of some other creature’s nasal mucus.

Amazingly, his empty stomach rumbled, cramped, and demanded more. Something in the reeking blubber seemed to be satisfying some deep craving he had not even known he felt. His body, if not his mind, wanted more of it.