The Ice Child (41 page)

“It’s not so hard to survive here,” Crozier said. He watched Gus’s swaying, veering gait. “Think forward. Think what you’ll do when you get home.”

The boy was silent.

“Men have lived through worse than this,” Crozier said. “Three hundred and fifty men walked over the ice off Greenland in 1777, Gus. They were off a whaler that was shipwrecked. They reached the Danish villages on the west coast.”

There was no reply, but Gus stumbled and went forward on his hands, righting himself only with difficulty.

“Ten years ago British ships were beset in Baffin Bay,” Crozier continued. He reasoned to himself that his continual voice could keep Augustus upright and moving. “The ice held them just as it held us.”

Gus was brushing snow from himself. His movements were slow, as lethargic as an old man’s.

Crozier touched his shoulder. “Every single ship of that group reached England,” he said. “Three years before that the
Shannon
out of Hull—”

Gus looked at him wearily. “I knew the mate of the
Shannon
,” he said.

“There you are. You see? It is possible to survive.”

“Sixteen men and three boys were swept away,” Gus said. “And when the two Danish brigs found the rest, there was no water and no food.” He stared into Crozier’s face. “I knew that man, in the public houses,” he said. “He never went out on the boats again. He drank. He said it was his thirst. He had … a thirst.”

Crozier pulled Gus’s drooping head back up. “But he lived,” he insisted.

“Aye,” Gus muttered. “There was a life.”

Crozier shook him hard. “What a man does with his life is his own affair,” he said. “God returned his life to him. We all have choices, then, what we do. Whether we live out our days drowning the memory. Whether we stand up to fight again. That is God’s gift to us. The choices in our lives. Our freedom to chose.”

He turned Gus to look at the struggling crew ahead of them.

“Look hard at those men, Gus,” he said. “God will not give life back to every one of them. Perhaps He will not give life at all again. But we must live out that life to its last breath. We don’t let it go, Gus. We don’t despair of a gift like that.”

Gus’s mouth trembled. He was struggling not to cry.

Crozier lowered his voice. “Are you very cold?” he asked gently.

“Not so very cold,” Gus mumbled. “Not now.”

“Can you walk on?”

“Yes,” Gus said.

“We’ll walk on to Backs River,” Crozier told him. “All the way.”

“Yes,” Gus whispered. “The way that …” The lad paused and frowned, as if puzzled. “Thirty-one,” he said softly to himself. “There are thirty-one men in my team.”

Crozier patted his back. “That’s right, Gus,” he said. “That’s right. Good lad.”

During that night, the tenth away from the ships, there was no snow and no storm. A perfect silence fell upon the camp.

Gus lay with the sick. He closed his eyes, and put his hands to his ears so he couldn’t hear their keening breaths. Goodsir had put him here, at Crozier’s instruction, but he tried not to think that he could be as bad as those men around him. His teeth ached, and his mouth was sore, but he was not like Kinningthwaite, who had been laid on his side and stared at Gus’s face. Kinningthwaite could not breathe. His chest rattled. A bruise blackened one side of his face. The man lay with his eyes open, glassily staring. He looked like a puppet with a waxy face, splashed with dye. His eyebrows and beard were full of crystallized ice, adding to the effect that he was not real, but painted.

“Kinningthwaite,” Gus whispered, “can you hear me?”

The man’s gaze flickered.

“Are they back?” Gus asked.

Kinningthwaite had told him, when Gus had been given the task of feeding him, that there were people at Gus’s shoulder.

“What people?” Gus had asked.

“Dead,” Kinningthwaite said. He had given a horrible smile.

Gus had weaved back from him, spoon and cup hovering in his astonished grasp.

“There,” Kinningthwaite said. “Count them.”

Gus’s reply had been immediate. “Thirty-one,” he told Kinningthwaite. “They’re not dead, Michael,” he said. “They are us. We are alive. We’ll be fifty miles south of Point Victory tomorrow,” he added, regaining his grip on the cup and clutching it to his chest. “We have come sixty-five miles, Michael.”

“Count them,” Kinningthwaite said.

Gus couldn’t look at him anymore. He turned away, heart pinching a painful little thread in his throat. He counted too. He counted all day. Was it a sign of this sickness? he wondered. He couldn’t help the numbering. Faces merged in front of his face. Sometimes the team looked like five men, and sometimes they looked like fifty, and sometimes one man had more than one face. He had been thinking all day of the mate from the
Shannon
. He used to count too.

He had counted the dead and the living.

Even if they didn’t count out loud, their brain counted for them, over and over again.

How many were left?

How many were walking with them?

He knew what Kinningthwaite meant. After you stopped being pierced by the cold, wrung through to the bone, you began dreaming while you walked. Watching your feet as they plunged into snow, slithered over ice, slipped on ridges, you often thought that there were other feet walking alongside you. You heard voices. Women, sometimes. He heard the voices of the women that his mother knew, as they hung washing on lines between houses, or cleaned their doorsteps, or sat outside, gossiping, cursing, calling.

He heard his mother singing. Country songs from when she was a girl. He heard her singing his name. She became his mother again, and he became her child again, with all the long-forgotten softness of her at night, in the last flames of the fire, cradled in her arm in the fireside chair. He would remember being two or three years old, and warm in his mother’s lap, while heat or rain or sleet hammered in the Hull street, and the wind or the summer evening brought the noise of the sea straight up from the docks and beaches.

And he would count all the people gathered beyond her chair, and look down, and find he was counting his own footprints in the snow.

He lay down in the tent in the dark now, and put his face into the blanket, and cried. Thirty-one. One hundred and three. Eight. Eighteen. One.

But it didn’t really matter about the numbers now.

They were all alone, each man cast adrift, each man singly pursuing his Maker.

They reached Terror Bay by June.

In the six weeks that it had taken them to get there, they had lost twenty-eight of the original 104. Of the officers, John Irving—the man who had rescued Gus on the day they met the Eskimos—died six days after James Fitzjames.

As Crozier buried Irving, he wondered why Irving had left the navy eight years ago and emigrated to New South Wales, only to return six years later. He had always meant to ask him what had caused that particular about-face. Whatever quirk of fate it had been, it had now brought him here, a thirty-year-old man who had never really had the sea in his blood. Before committing him to the ice, Crozier took a medal from his coat to send home with his belongings: the second mathematical prize, awarded to John Irving by the Royal Naval College in 1830.

Richard Aylmore, the gun-room steward, was the next. He fell while pulling the last sledge, and had lain on the ice for some minutes before he could be made to stand. He never recovered, seemingly, from the fall, dying in less than twenty-four hours. Thomas Work and Josephus Geator and William Mark, all able seamen from the
Erebus
, were next; John Weekes, the carpenter who had made the oak runners for the sledges; Solomon Tozer, the sergeant of the royal marines for the
Terror
.

William Hedges, his corporal, and the cook John Diggle, who had been so afraid at Franklin’s death, died in the very tracks of the boats they were following. Magnus Manson and William Shanks and David Sims, and John Handford, and Alexander Berry and Samuel Crispe, all seamen from the
Terror
, passed within three days of each other.

As they neared the southwest corner of King William, they could not bury the last that died. A fierce northwesterly wind was blowing. Those that remained had no strength. Instead, they wrapped poor Berry and Handford and Crispe in blankets, and scraped snow and stones over them. It was horrible, but it was not so bad as they had imagined. The bodies were already frozen as they said the last words over them, and so thin from disease and starvation that they were as light as tinderwood.

Crozier had almost lost sense of where they were, even of what they were doing, by the time they pitched camp fifty miles south of Point Victory. Ten more had died where they fell—in one morning, four within the space of an hour. Turning over one of the bodies, Crozier had seen the bloated, blackened mask of the scurvy. Exertion brought the blood to the face, hands, chest, and legs. And there it coagulated and filled the flesh. There was nowhere for it to go, it seemed. The circulation simply broke down within minutes. Sometimes—it was too awful, Crozier thought afterward, it was shameful—they were too tired to care about the dead. Cold and lethargy had atrophied their emotions; they had no grief left. Nothing to mourn with. Nothing to cry with. Nothing to feel.

They would look back and realize a man was down. They would stop and watch. Someone might go back to him, slipping and stumbling over the ice. But it was hopeless. Once down, they were dead. Crippled, asphyxiated. Empty hulks.

At Point Victory, Crozier felt more than tired; a huge sense of weariness had invaded him, seeping into his bones. His whole body felt enormously heavy.

Around him he could see that the rest of the men were fading. Of the sixty-six remaining, only perhaps three or four did not move with the same clumsy slow motion that he felt in himself. Their efforts at pitching tents, securing lines, and setting up sleeping quarters was terrible to witness. It took twice the time that it had when they had set off from the ships. It was now at least an hour and a half before the whole party could move off every morning; it was twice that, in the evening, to set up camp.

He sat down and tried to calculate how many days it would take to get to Backs Fish.

He could hardly figure in his head. Thirty days, perhaps. Forty, fifty. At one and a half miles a day, now that they were so slow.

The ridges of the open sea had gone, but the whole landscape was still one long sheet of ice. Hard to conceive it, but it was summer. The gneiss and limestone of the land should not only be showing through the ice, but in full view. He ought to have been able to distinguish the pockets of water, pools and rivulets, that Ross had claimed made up the body of King William. He ought to have been able to feed the men on the lichens that were supposed to cover most of the ground. They should have had hunting parties bringing down the deer that were reputed to move across this peninsula.

But there was nothing.

No ground, no lichen, no deer. No thaw at all, though this was the kindliest of all the Arctic months.

God had forgotten the summer above the Barren Grounds.

He brought out his charts and had them laid, with difficulty, on the single narrow chest that he had brought with him.

At a mile or so a day, they might reach Backs Fish in a month. August. He plunged his head into his hands at the very thought. Sir John had told him that, when he made his expedition in the 1820s, he, too, had reached the northern coast near the Coppermine in August, and that, contrary to what weather had been anticipated, ice drove in by the end of the month, and by September the Coppermine was choked with snow.

He stared at the map. No man knew what lay to the west of the Backs Fish, except that it was a strait of some kind. If they were lucky, the strait might lead directly to the point where Franklin had stood more than twenty years before. It could be hundreds of miles west, but that in itself was not a problem. If they were still able to launch boats, they might take advantage of what sea currents there were and sail directly toward the Pacific.

It might be a better option than trying to get up the endless rapids of Backs Fish.

With a little luck—and God surely owed them that, just a small fraction of the ordinary luck that any expedition leader before him had counted as normal—they would find enough fresh fish and game at the mouth of the river to sustain them. Enough to sail west or, perhaps a small party of them, to ascend the river.

A small party of them
.

He stared out of the tent and considered.

Finally he called in Goodsir. Standing in the half-light of the evening, he thought that, of any of them, Harry Goodsir was the worst. He shuffled with a broken gait, bent over at the waist.

“How many are sick?” he asked him. “How many can travel on?”

Goodsir didn’t reply for some time. “How many can walk to Backs Fish?” he asked eventually.

“Yes.”

“None.”

Crozier leaned forward. “Harry …” he said gently, “we must go on. An estimate.”

Goodsir shrugged. “Twenty.”

“How many are we now?”

“As of this evening, sixty-four.”

They contemplated each other. Forty-four sick. Goodsir raised a hand to his face, to rub ice from his beard. His hand trembled too much to achieve the task. He fumbled at it for a few seconds, like a small child trying to master his coordination. Through the beard his mouth showed blue. His tongue rested on the swollen bottom lip.

“I’ve never seen scurvy like this before,” Crozier murmured.

“Nor I,” Goodsir said. He paused, trying to force coherence into his words.

Goodsir wanted to explain something of importance, something that had been occupying him all day. It was a stroke of insight, an answer to a puzzle that had bothered him for weeks. So many men fell dead as they worked, and the bruising …

The bruising under the skin meant a breakdown of the blood vessels, he realized. Perhaps the sudden deaths during exertion meant that the scurvy was in the heart. If vessels under the skin were failing, then the heart itself …

But the train of logic eluded him. He sat with his hands hanging between his knees, the perception swiftly fading.