Death on the Ice (45 page)

‘We’d best sleep in the igloo tonight,’ said Bill, the words snatched away as they came from his lips, his hood cracking as the wind caught it. ‘I think there’s a blizzard coming. Might be a snorter.’

‘I see it!’ shouted Bowers. ‘Over there.’

As Cherry turned to look, one of his boots went from under him. He spun in the air trying to keep his balance or at least land well, and felt Bill’s hand pluck at his sleeve to try to steady him, but there was too much momentum. Over the thud of his body hitting the ice and the whoosh of breath from his body, he clearly heard the sharp crack and slosh of warm liquid as the two eggs split asunder.

‘For God’s sake, Silas, will you keep still?’

The hut fell silent for a moment, shocked by the vehemence behind the words. The Canadian, who had been pacing the floor, stopped in mid-stride. ‘First you snore all night, now clump, clump, clump.’

Silas Wright looked confused. ‘Sorry, Titus.’

Oates slid off his bunk. ‘Yes. Well.’

‘Just thinking.’

‘Well, think more quietly.’ Oates pulled on a tatty jumper and went outside, back to his horses.

‘Time for some slippers, Silas,’ said Frank Debenham, breaking the tension. It was late afternoon, lunch well behind them, and the day’s quota of sledging preparations had been carried out. They were in the lull before dinner, when the long days seemed at their most interminable. Most people were reading or making repairs, a few were doing laundry and a handful was out taking measurements.

‘Is Soldier all right?’ Scott asked. He had noted him becoming more taciturn as the perpetual night wore on. It always affected a few of the group; he recalled the suicidal young seaman on
Discovery
. He hoped Titus wasn’t heading in that direction.

Tryggve Gran cast his book aside. ‘I’ll go and see.’

‘Good man.’

As Gran left, Silas walked over to Scott’s table. ‘I was just thinking, skipper, that we could make a hole in the hut floor.’

‘Is that what you were doing?’ asked Atch. ‘Trying to wear it away?’

Silas ignored him. ‘My gravitational pendulum in the ice cave is growing. Crystals are forming on it, distorting the results. I think we need a secondary source of information. A control.’

‘Go on,’ said Scott.

‘If we were to make a panel, like a trapdoor, in the floor and drill into the permafrost below it, I could suspend a pendulum down there. We could make the gravitational measurement from within the hut—’

‘In the warmth, is that it, Silas?’ asked Simpson, who didn’t have such a luxury for his meteorological recordings. By definition, outside temperatures had to be taken outside.

‘Well, it’s not a bad idea,’ said Scott. ‘Anything that reduces the tramping around in blizzards has to be considered. It’ll wait till the sun returns, will it?’

‘Yes, skip.’

‘Make it in the floor of Ponting’s darkroom, you’ll be out of everyone’s way. Is that all right, Ponco?’

Ponting looked up from his book. ‘Suppose so. As long as I have priority.’

‘Of course,’ said Scott. ‘You giving the talk tonight, Silas?’

Wright shook his head. ‘Nelson. Biology. On what he found in the D net trawls.’

‘Excellent,’ said Scott with genuine enthusiasm. ‘And Frank?’

Debenham was writing up his geological notes. ‘Skipper?’

‘Volcanoes.’

‘I haven’t forgotten. Have the talk ready in a day or two.’

‘Well done.’ Scott checked the time. An hour remained before preparations for dinner would begin and the gramophone put on. ‘Gentlemen, it is time to exercise your horses.’ And perhaps find out what, exactly, was eating Captain Oates.

Cherry knew that Birdie Bowers was singing, but the roar of wind and swirl of snow filling the igloo meant he couldn’t make out the words to join in. Wilson and Bowers were feet away, but there was a white-out between them. All three lay in their slab-like sleeping bags. Cherry was shivering so hard his ribs hurt. It was as if someone had been playing them like a xylophone, but using lead mallets.

The canvas roof of the igloo had gone, blown away with an almighty crack. Then the snow blocks had collapsed, allowing the wind to invade the main space. And to top it all, the tent, their precious tent, had lifted up its skirts and fled into the night.

Without the tent they simply wouldn’t make it home. No shelter from the storm, no way to cook in a gale. They were going to die. And from the terrible pains wracking his body, it wasn’t going to be an easy death.

Someone loomed over him. It was Bowers, trying to repack snow between the loosened blocks. ‘All right in there?’ Bowers asked. ‘Snug?’ Cherry couldn’t answer. He felt ashamed that he didn’t have the power and fortitude of Birdie. ‘You have to speak, or I won’t know you are alive. How are you?’

Bowers leaned closer to catch his reply. Birdie’s face and beard were completely frosted, as if he had fallen into icing sugar. Cherry wasn’t sure where to start. The feeling that icicles were being shoved into his thighs, the sickening ache in his balls, the fire consuming his feet or the rodents tearing away at his insides. ‘I … feel … like … I am … going to crack in half.’

‘Get up too smartish and you might. I took a reading. Minus seventy-six and over seventy miles an hour. Bill was right. It’s a snorter. There.’ He finished packing the snow into some of the cracks between the rocks. ‘Think that’ll hold?’

Cherry was aware that the gale battering his head had lessened. ‘Yes. Thank you, Birdie.’

‘You want my bag lining?’

‘You need it.’

Birdie came close once more. He checked the young man for frostbite, but there was none. ‘Haven’t used it yet.’

‘Oh God,’ said Cherry. ‘What are you made of?’

Birdie laughed. ‘Want a sweet? I brought them in case we felt a bit low. And for Bill’s birthday.’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘Yes, it is. You can have one now.’

Cherry heard a rustle of paper and felt something popped into his mouth and the flavour of mint flooded through him. ‘That’s delicious.’

‘We’ll be all right, don’t you worry. I’d best go and thump Bill, make sure he is alive. Can’t freeze to death on the day before your birthday.’

Cherry must have dozed off. When he awoke, the howling gale had subsided slightly, but it was still as black as the depths of hell around them. No star shone in the sky, and snow had drifted up inside the igloo. But it was certainly quieter. He could even hear Bill breathing and Bowers, damn the man, snoring.

‘Bill.’

‘Yes, Cherry?’

‘Are you awake?’

‘No, I’m talking in my sleep.’

‘Sorry. I meant to ask. You have morphine?’

‘I do. Are you hurt?’

Cherry just wanted to sob in reply. ‘All over. I’ve had enough. We’ve no tent. My feet were burning but now I can’t feel my toes. My head hurts. I’m ready. I’ll only hold you up. If you are to have a chance—’

‘Stop it.’

‘Please, Bill.’

‘The storm is abating.’

Yes, he wanted to say, but we have no tent. WE HAVE NO TENT. And God alone knew what else had been tossed away into the night. It would be nineteen or twenty days back, at least. Sleeping in the open. At the mercy of elements that didn’t know the meaning of the word. It was going to be a terrible demise. ‘Please, Bill. I’m the weak one. Birdie could carry you on his back if need be. I can’t even see where I am going. I would just drift off, wouldn’t I? With the morphine, I might even feel warm. That would be worth it. I’m not worried about dying, Bill. It’s the pain. Everything aches.’

Wilson barked his reply. ‘No.’

‘Why not?’ Petulant now, like a child at the seaside denied a stick of rock.

‘I haven’t stopped praying yet.’

There was pause while they listened to Bowers snore, no doubt deep in one of his food dreams.

‘Bill?’

‘Cherry?’

‘Sorry about the eggs.’

For some reason, Wilson found this immensely funny. The richly ironic sound sent an even deeper shiver through Cherry. He knew now that Bill, too, reckoned they weren’t going to make it back.

Scott ascended the ladder to the top of the hut very slowly, one cautious rung at a time, bracing his body against the wind each time it gusted. The anemometer had jammed again and needed to be freed. This was the night watchman’s job and it was his turn on duty. He consoled himself that he could have his sardines on toast when he got back down.

There had been a two-day storm. The meteorological records had been frightening, with precariously low temperatures and high winds. Then the anemometer blade had jammed. Atkinson had gone out to make some readings with the portable machine, become disorientated, and was lost for hours. His face and hands were badly frostbitten, but, mercifully, he recalled little about his ordeal.

Scott made it to the apex of the roof and leaned on to it, stretching his arm to reach the damaged instrument. His face was beginning to tingle, so he knew he had little time before he was frost-nipped.

Above him the sky had cleared and there was the first shifting green curtain of the Aurora. He grabbed the blade in his mitten and gave it a shake. It made a squeaking sound and began to turn, picking up speed till it was clacking away.

Gingerly he descended the ladder and hurried back towards the entrance of the hut. As he did so, Bill Wilson’s words came back to him: ‘The Good Lord alone knows why the penguins have chosen the most windswept place on the planet to make their rookery.’

The most windswept place on the planet.

The wind was forty to fifty miles at sheltered Cape Evans, peaking at eighty-two mph some days. On the hills it was twenty per cent higher. What must the Crozier party be experiencing? Scott wondered as he stepped inside into the fug of the hut’s enveloping warmth. Five weeks they had been gone. At what point did you begin to think the worst?

O
ATES TOOK THE WARMED
blanket off Anton and laid it over the prostrate form of Jimmy Pigg. The horse was in bad way; he’d been racked with a colic and fever since the morning.

‘Will he be all right?’ asked Crean. He had taken him for his daily walk, but had had to bring the animal back. Jimmy was walking with legs of rubber and making the most alarming noises. That had continued throughout the day till, in the evening, he had lain down. It was Oates’s job to ensure he got up again.

‘Nothing you can do here, Tom,’ said Oates. ‘Go back inside. Have something to eat.’

‘Aye.’

But he didn’t move, just kept staring at the downed animal.

Strangely, Oates welcomed the crisis. Without such incidents the days seemed interminable and he could feel the long dark sucking away his resolve and confidence. He had bucked up for the midwinter party, had even got tipsy and danced with a bemused Anton. But later, when the three men had departed for Cape Crozier—he had even envied them, having a goal to strive towards—Oates had felt despair calling again.

Why? He wasn’t normally prone to gloomy episodes. It could only be the lack of sun, something he had thought he wouldn’t miss. Moonlight football usually cheered him, as any physical competition did, but the last few times the intense cold had drilled into his old wound and he had limped from the field.

‘Off you go, Tom,’ Oates prompted him. ‘You can have a turn later.’

Crean left and Oates began to rub at the horse with a second hot blanket. When they were seriously ill, the animals stopped whinnying or snorting. Instead, there was an ominous silence and stillness, punctuated only by the spasms that shot through the flanks.

‘Make up some mash, can you, Anton,’ he said. ‘I’ll try and feed him.’

‘I get you some food, too,’ said Anton.

‘Very well, thank you. There you are, fella, how does that feel?’ He spoke softly to the horse as he rubbed him from head to tail. ‘And Anton, ask Atch for an opium tablet or two, would you?’

‘Opium?’

‘For the horse. Not me.’

Another six hours passed of hot blankets and small feeds laced with drugs. Crean returned with bread for toasting and sat with them, taking turns with Meares to relieve Oates now and then. It was a bedside vigil worthy of any human, thought Oates as he went outside.

He crunched over the fresh snow for a hundred yards and urinated under the stars. At least the weather had improved; he hoped the Croziers were experiencing the same calm after the storm. Oates had just adjusted his clothes when he became aware of a figure to his right. A match flared. Scott. Oates walked over to him.

‘Hello, skipper.’

Scott puffed on his pipe. ‘How’s Jimmy?’

‘The same. Well, his ears are pricking to some sounds, which is usually a good sign.’

It sounded like precious little to Scott. ‘Will we lose him?’

‘Not if I can help it.’

Scott grunted. ‘We can’t afford to lose even one, Soldier. I’ve overstepped the margin of safety.’

Oates said nothing.

‘You all right? In yourself, I mean.’

‘Bearing up.’

‘Home run, now. Sun will be back soon enough. What a difference that makes. You’ll see.’

I hope so, Oates thought.

‘Titus!’ It was Meares. ‘Come quick.’

Oates and Scott trotted towards the stables, both apprehensive about what they would find. They bustled in to find Jimmy Pigg on his feet, head held high.

‘Drank a bucket of water, sir,’ said Tom Crean proudly.

‘And he’s feeding,’ added Meares.

‘Well done, everyone,’ said Scott with feeling. He looked at his watch. ‘It’s two-thirty in the morning. I think we deserve some rest. You too, Titus.’

‘Sir.’

The other trudged off to bed, but Oates stayed at the stove with his pipe, listening to the soft breathing of the horses, content to enjoy the transient feeling of mild elation while it lasted.

‘S
PREAD OUT,’ CROAKED WILSON,
‘so they will be able to see there are three men.’

Bowers and Cherry moved apart, their painful feet almost giving up as they came within sight of the hut, its brooding silhouette punctured by the glow of the acetylene lights leaking through the windows. The smoke from the chimney was clearly visible in the pale moonlight that illuminated the island to all but Cherry. He squinted through his ice-coated glasses, trying to make sense of the blurred image.