Ian McGuire - The North Water

“This don’t put me under any obligation,” he says. “I can’t free you now. Not after Brownlee. A cabin boy is one thing, a cabin boy is plenty bad enough, but not the fucking captain.”

“And I int asking for it,” Drax says. “I wouldn’t presume.”

“Then what?”

Drax shrugs, sniffs, and gathers himself.

“If the time ever comes,” he says slowly, “all I ask is you don’t hinder me, don’t stand athwart. Allow events to take their natural course.”

Cavendish nods.

“I turn the blind eye,” he says. “That’s what you’re asking.”

“The time may never come. I may hang in England for what I done and rightly so.”

“But if it ever does come.”

“Aye, if it ever does.”

“And what about my fucking nose?” Cavendish says, pointing.

Drax smiles.

“You were never no Adonis, Michael,” he says. “I ’spect some would call that an improvement.”

“You have some fair-sized fucking balls, to say that to a man hefting an ax.”

“Like a fine big pair of tatties,” Drax confirms lightly, “and I’ll even let you stroke ’em if you like.”

For a moment, they hold each other’s gaze, and then Cavendish turns away in disgust, swings the ax, and lets its ground steel edge bite down hard into the ship’s already dampened timbers eight, nine, ten times, until the doubled planking creaks, swells, and begins to splinter inwards.

Within two hours, the ship has pitched forwards so far that its bowsprit is lying flat against the ice and the foremast has snapped clean in two. Cavendish sends Black aboard with a team of men to salvage the booms, spars, and rigging and cut down the other masts before they break off also. De-masted and with only its stern poking above the piled-up ice around it, the ship appears rumpish and ludicrous, an emasculated mockery of what it was, and Sumner wonders how he could ever have believed such a fragile conglomeration of wood, nails, and rope could protect or keep him safe.

The Hastings , their means of escape, is four miles to the east, moored to the edge of the land floe. Cavendish fills a small canvas knapsack with biscuits, tobacco, and rum, shoulders it, and sets off walking across the ice. He comes back several hours later looking drained and footsore but well satisfied and announces that they have been offered refuge and hospitality by Captain Campbell and should begin transferring men and supplies without delay. They will work in three gangs of twelve, he explains, using the whaleboats as sledges. The first two gangs, one led by Black and the other by Jones-the-whale, will leave immediately, while the third will stay by the wreck until they return.

Sumner spends the afternoon asleep on a mattress in one of the jury-rigged tents covered over with rugs and a blanket. When he wakes, he sees that Drax is sitting close by, guarded by the blacksmith, with his wrists manacled together and each leg chained to a triple sheave block. Sumner has not seen Drax since the murderous assault in Brownlee’s cabin and is surprised by the immediacy and force of his revulsion.

“Don’t be afeared, Doctor,” Drax calls to him. “I int about to do anything too desperate with these wooden baubles dangling off me.”

Sumner pushes back the rugs and blanket, gets to his feet, and walks over.

“How’s your arm?” he asks him.

“And which arm would that be?”

“The right one, the one that had Joseph Hannah’s tooth embedded in it.”

Drax dismisses the question with a shake of the head.

“Just a nick,” he says. “I’m a quick healer. But, you know, how that tooth got in there is still beyond me. I can’t explain it at all.”

“So you have no remorse for your actions? No guilt for what you’ve done?”

Drax’s mouth lolls half open; he wrinkles up his nose and sniffs.

“Did you think I was going to murder you down in the cabin?” he asks. “Split open your skull like I did Brownlee. Is that what you were thinking?”

“What else were you intending?”

“Oh, I don’t intend too much. I’m a doer, not a thinker, me. I follow my inclination.”

“You have no conscience then?”

“One thing happens, then another comes after it. Why is the first thing more important than the second? Why is the second more important than the third? Tell me that.”

“Because each action is separate and distinct; some are good and some are evil.”

Drax sniffs again and scratches himself.

“Them’s just words. If they hang me, they will hang me ’cause they can, and ’cause they wish to do it. They will be following their own inclination as I follow mine.”

“You recognize no authority at all then, no right or wrong beyond yourself?”

Drax shrugs and bares his upper teeth in something like a grin.

“Men like you ask such questions to satisfy themselves,” he says. “To make them feel cleverer or cleaner than the rest. But they int.”

“You truly believe we are all like you? How is that possible? Am I a murderer like you are? Is that what you accuse me of?”

“I seen enough killing to suspect I int the only one to do it. I’m a man like any other, give or take.”

Sumner shakes his head.

“No,” he says. “That I won’t accept.”

“You please yourself, as I please myself. You accept what suits you and you reject what don’t. The law is just a name they give to what a certain kind of men prefer.”

Sumner feels a pain growing behind his eyeballs, a sour sickness curdling in his stomach. Talking to Drax is like shouting into the blackness and expecting the blackness to answer back in kind.

“There is no reasoning with a man like you,” he says.

Drax shrugs again and looks away. Outside the tent the men are playing a comical game of cricket on the snow using staves for bats and a ball made of sealskin and sawdust.

“Why do you keep that gold ring?” he asks. “Why not sell it on?”

“I keep it for remembrance.”

Drax nods and rolls his tongue around his mouth before answering.

“A man who is scared of hisself int much of a man in my book.”

“You think I’m scared? Why would I be scared?”

“Because of whatever happened over there. Whatever it was you did or didn’t do. You say you keep it for remembrance, but that int it at all. It can’t be.”

Sumner steps forwards and Drax rises to confront him.

“Whoa there now,” the blacksmith says. “Sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up. Show some respect to Mr. Sumner.”

“You don’t know me at all,” Sumner tells him. “You have no idea who I am.”

Drax sits back down and smiles at him.

“There int too terribly much to know,” he says. “You int as complicated as you think. But what little there is to know, I’d say I know it well enough.”

Sumner leaves the tent and walks across to one of the whaleboats to check that his medicines and sea chest have been safely stowed for the next day’s journey across the ice. He unfixes the tarpaulin and scans the casks, boxes, and rolled-up bedding squeezed inside. Even after shifting things about and peering into the gaps, he can’t see what he is looking for. He replaces the tarpaulin and is about to go over to the other boat to check there when Cavendish calls to him. He is standing by a pile of rigging and the two severed masts. The bear, asleep in his cask, is lying next to him.

“You need to shoot that fucking bear,” he says, pointing down. “If you do it now you’ll have time enough to skin him before we leave in the morrow.”

“Why not take him with us? There’ll be room enough on the Hastings surely.”

Cavendish shakes his head.