The Ice Child (13 page)

All hands watched as the enemy closed.

It was eight in the morning when
Erebus
came back into view, ahead of them still, between enormous bergs. Augustus whispered a prayer to himself. They were God’s ships, after all. Surely God would not let them die before they had really begun. But at the same time, even while whispering Christ’s name, his blood raced. This was really living, even if it were only to live before dying in the storm. It was
living
.

On the shore side the ice tables were grinding up together in masses, and they had no choice but to helplessly slip alongside the floes, each mass of ice running at an alarming rate, and depositing ice on deck as they were buffeted. They saw
Erebus
ahead between two enormous banks of ice, and each man waited in silence, expecting at any moment to see their sister ship crushed, as the bergs pushed in opposing directions on a collision course.

Only the appearance of a sudden passage of clear water saved them both; the
Terror
managed to make fast to the sconce of a low water-washed berg, and the ice hauled them forward like a racehorse, the sea crashing over it and the boat, running at high speed down the channel. Augustus thought then of a game he had played in the long steep channel between the houses at home. When he had been five or six, one of his friends’ father had made them a flat plywood trolley with a roller at each end, and they had tied their dog to the front and gone careening down the hill, bouncing from the cobbles and against the alley walls, thrown into mud, battered by falls, trampled upon by the maddened dog, only to carry the cart and rope and dog back to the top of the hill and start again.

Augustus thought of that poor crazed dog now, leaping about, driven by their sticks, as he felt
Terror
, in all her weight and majesty, pulled by the current and a block of ice. And they bounced along the ridges of the sea, just as he had bounced, hundreds of times, along the cobbled alley.

Never had he seen ice come so rapidly.

Only the day before they had been talking of three weeks until they saw the other side of Canada; now they were driven at the mercy of the oncoming winter. It was as if their optimism had been months before; this was another landscape, another world. Quite suddenly, almost at midday, an old floe took them. Honeycombed and yellowed, it had a top that rose out of the water thirty feet high, but it sheered away under the ship at an angle, presenting what looked like a cold white shore of ice. All at once
Terror
was lifted up and pushed forward onto this shelf, just as if she were being forced into dry dock. They held on as the ship lurched, and Augustus wondered if the whole of
Terror
would be lifted up and pushed over the other side of the berg.

But the ice dropped. The ship leaned back again and righted herself, all within the space of five minutes.

Augustus looked at the man alongside him. He seemed not to care at all. “Ice has its relaxations,” the fellow said, and gave a shrug. “Nip and relax, nip and relax. ’Tis all one.”

Gus stared at the berg, with its old man’s face, a complexion full of weathered lines and creases, as it towered alongside them. He surreptitiously pressed his palms together and held them tightly to his chest, to thank God for relaxations.

And for hearing all his other prayers, making him a seaman and not just a whaling man. Making him a part of this expedition, and not merely a hand on a blood-filled deck, cleaning blubber from bone, calf-deep in oil and salt water.

And so it was decided to make back for Beechey Island, to the little bay that would protect them for the winter.

What Sir John and Fitzjames made of the shock of the sea change, the boy did not know. Perhaps they took it philosophically, as the men had to.

Anyhow, nothing more was said of running to the Pacific in three weeks. They turned their faces from any such prospect, and accepted the long, dark wait ahead of them.

When they first berthed in the bay in October, the shoreline of Beechey Island was still visible.

It was a gray place, a beach of shattered limestone, crumbled to shards and fragments, and whitened, near the edge, into something like a silvery gravel. Beechey, and its greater sister, Devon, were the only elevations to be seen in any direction. It was really the edge of the world, where land disappeared and there was nothing for hundreds of miles but flat and open vistas. Some of the men said that Adam saw such a view when God turned him from Eden: no more color, no more soil or flower, or the movement of leaves or grasses. Nothing but a silent vacuum, so that Adam had nothing to look upon, or think about, but his own self, and his shame.

But Gus wondered if Adam had been really so bereft at the edge of paradise. He wondered if Adam might have felt as he felt now, that ahead of him lay a white page, and that anything could be written across it, and had felt his own small soul rising to the challenge.

He hid this from the other crew, because he suspected that such a sentiment might not be Christian, and that, if it ever came to the attention of Sir John, it might offend him.

In sunlight Beechey—at the edge of Eden, or not—could be very striking, arresting in its emptiness, arched over with a brilliant blue sky. A spit of land connected the island to the greater mass of Devon Island, a square block rising from the ocean. A few hundred yards back from the shore, cliffs almost five hundred feet high dominated the bay, their rock pitted and scarred by the freezing storms that beset them for most of the year.

They set to work with a common will.

Very soon the crew had built an observatory, a carpenter’s shop, a forge, washing places, and a large storehouse on the shore, within easy reach of the ships. They unloaded the provisions that they had taken on in the Whalefish Islands into the storehouse, and Sir John allowed the making of a shooting gallery at the eastern end of Beechey, to aid the men in their hunting skills. To be able to shoot was an essential thing, one that Augustus wanted to learn. He hoped that someone would teach him, and Torrington, who had said that he would try, walked out with Augustus on the very first Sunday after the gallery was made and, leaning on the boy’s shoulder, said that they would make fine marksmen, and shoot bears together by the light of the midnight sun next May.

But only two days later Torrington was confined to bed.

No one would say what the matter was, and Gus dared not ask when they sat down to eat. The temperatures fell rapidly outside, and the cold began to seep through the hull, so that ice could be seen in the hairline cracks of the timber. There was unnatural calm outside, as the light dropped and the ships stopped rising and falling with the waves. They were soon in the unbreakable embrace of ice, captured for months to come.

Painted ships on a painted ocean
.

Gus tried to think where he had heard a phrase like that. It was in school, but had been about ships in the tropics, he was sure. Ships caught in a dead calm. The calm here was dead, too, though: nothing to see outside but the ghostly gray rise off Beechey and Devon and, a little way off,
Erebus
, a mirror image of themselves, stripped of her topgallant masts and topmasts so that ice would not weigh them down.

Even out on the island, where Gus was allowed to help the blacksmith build the forge, he couldn’t find the words to ask about Torrington’s absence. There was a conspiracy against the stoker’s illness: like children afraid of the dark, they looked the other way, or shut their eyes, or made more favorable pictures in their mind.

But Gus could hear Torrington in the sick bay. They took food in to him and he refused it, and Gus could hear Torrington’s raised voice, the very sound of which frightened him more than anything else, because it was not John’s tone, but a stranger’s.

Gus was standing outside the bay when Mr. MacDonald came out one evening, almost a week after Torrington was confined.

“Sir,” he ventured.

MacDonald looked at him.

“Is Mr. Torrington well yet?”

MacDonald paused. Augustus dared to look him in the eye. He had summoned the courage to speak only because he knew that MacDonald, like him, had been in the Arctic on a whaling ship. He hoped the tenuous connection, a vague sort of camaraderie, might give him a little leeway: permission to talk where talk was not usually allowed.

“No,” MacDonald said, at last. “He is no better.”

The officer called the galley cook over and spoke softly to him. The cook went back and brought several of the lead-soldered Goldner tins from the stores. MacDonald selected two or three. “Meat,” Gus heard him say. “And make sure he keeps it down.”

Fear gave Gus courage. He stepped forward and called MacDonald’s name.

The men around them fell silent.

MacDonald turned.

“Our neighbor at home had consumption,” Gus said.

MacDonald glanced at the men, then back at Augustus. He frowned. Gus knew his calling out was insubordination—it could be called that, if MacDonald wished—but the boy was desperate to be told the truth. An idea had occurred to him, an idea so terrible that it made him nauseous. It was the memory of the curtains drawn at midday, and of a black handcart pulled up to the house, and a tired pony wreathed in crepe.

MacDonald gave the boy a long look, but eventually said nothing. As he left the deck, Gus turned to the nearest man.

“Is it the consumption?” he asked. The fear was knotted in his stomach now, squeezing the tight space under his ribs. “Is it?”

He read the answer in their faces.

Two weeks after coming to Beechey, Gus helped lay the road to the
Erebus
. The two ships were barely a hundred yards apart.

It had been marked with stones, but they took these up and drove rows of posts into the sea ice, so that anyone passing between the ships, even in the depths of a storm, would be able to see the way. On one side, the posts were strung with rope; on the other they left the lumps of limestone in a line. Gus would see the officers walking along the road, sometimes holding to the rope, and feel proud of the long hours he had spent sharpening the posts and holding them for the men as they were slammed into the ice with sledgehammers. After the road they made fire holes—hard, backbreaking work and one that, once finished, needed constant attention to stop the holes from freezing. Seawater must be available to put out fires, and the holes could not be allowed to close again.

The sun slowly went down.

The snow began.

Although he had seen plenty of snowstorms, Gus had never been on land for long to witness their smothering hold. Occasionally, at home, snow could envelop the fishing port; but it soon turned to slush and was kept swept from the doors of the houses. Here, they used snow on the decks, packing it down hard for insulation and scattering sand over the top to get a foothold. Snow, sometimes creeping in on them during the night without a sound, formed drifts right up to the ship’s rails and over the top. The snow that fell in storms was almost horizontal, leaving blinding traces on the eye; but by far the most insidious and threatening were the silent snowstorms that dumped huge quantities on them in the darkness, stealthily, silently. Gus soon tired of running about in it as he passed, working, from ship to the island. He spent less than a day whooping up and down the shore, making balls to throw. It lost its glamour and became something to be mastered and fought, clogging his footsteps, crusting his clothes.

The surgeons were brought across from
Erebus
to look at John Torrington.

It was decided that Torrington should be walked on deck four times a day, to relieve the congestion of his chest, made worse by the stuffy conditions belowdeck. Gus was the first to volunteer to help him, and was pleased to see Torrington smile at him as he slowly negotiated the steps.

Torrington leaned on
Terror
’s rail and gazed at the island cliffs, now just white ghosts in the deep twilight.

“We are at the ends of the earth, Gus,” Torrington said.

Gus tried to think of something to cheer him. But he couldn’t. He wanted to ask about the shooting gallery, if John would walk there again with him, and at the same time, he knew that Torrington could probably not even descend from the ship.

John turned to look at him. “Aren’t you afraid of me, Gus?” he asked.

“No,” Gus said. “Why should I be?”

Torrington sighed, the sound tugged away at once by the wind. “Not afraid to be next to me?”

“No,” Gus told him.

Torrington nodded. Gus thought there were tears in his eyes, but it was hard to see in the lowness of the light.

“I shall not breathe on you,” John murmured.

Christmas came.

For the week before the season Augustus had been engaged in ferrying stores from storehouse to the ships, but on December 21 the captain, upon making for the shoreline observatory, asked Gus to go with him. Nothing was said between man and boy while they traversed the ice road; nothing was said on entering the house. Crozier simply indicated the stove, glimmering with its dwindling supply, and Gus set to, shoveling anthracite to feed the blaze.

There was barely light enough to see, although it was approaching noon. Crozier, clothed in sealskin pants and coat, and a dogskin cap, sat down on a box and prepared to take his readings; the thermometer read ten degrees below.

“We are warm in here, Augustus,” Crozier murmured.

“Aye, sir,” he said, watching the reading.

The magnetometer was perched on a pedestal of frozen gravel; stretching out from it was a telescope. Every six minutes Crozier made a note of the arc and recorded the reading in his memorandum.

After a while he glanced up. “You must move about a little, Gus,” he said kindly. “Do not stand to attention. You will freeze to the floor.”

Obediently, Gus marched on the spot.

“I have taken readings of the temperatures,” Crozier said abstractedly, transferring his fox-fur mitten from one hand to another and shifting the chronometer. “There may be as much as thirty degrees difference between the point next to the stove, and the floor. Even our approach will alter the readings of the thermometer, for it picks up the heat of our bodies.” He glanced at the stove. “At home they are filling the churches as well as the fires,” he murmured.