Choosers of the Slain

53

The British are a people who frequently prize sentiment above cold logic. It is one of the secret strengths of that race. Thus, the final act was played out on a snow-shrouded hill overlooking the last moorage of the motor ketch Skua. The Royal Navy had responded to the pleas of a small group of college students and one grieving woman. They had brought Evan York home.

The grave had been blasted out of the frozen shale with abandoned Argentine explosives, and a marker had been made from a piece of the Skua's mahogany decking that had been found washed ashore along the edge of the bay. That bay was frozen solid now. Out beyond the entrance, the ice-patrol ship Polar Circle stood by in the last lead of open water. She had executed the dash in to restock Signy Island Base and to return the wintering-over team. She had also carried the burial party.

The ceremony itself was brief and small. There were only the scientists from the base, Evan York's crew, and a navy chaplain whose words were torn away by the gusting winds. Then the others moved back and allowed Roberta Eggerston to say good-bye to the man she loved.

She knelt at the grave and carefully placed a flash of color at the base of the marker, a small handful of flowers husbanded from a Port Stanley greenhouse. She pinned the stems to the ground with a small stone, then rose to her feet and walked away. She would never again return south. There would be no more flowers for Evan York's grave.

Nor would any really be necessary. Before they could even begin to wilt, the blossoms had been flash frozen in the searing, dry chill of the polar winter. They would remain fresh and unchanged for as long as there was an Antarctic.

The burial party departed, the ship disappeared into the sea smoke, and the katabatic winds began to scatter snow crystals across the flowers and the bare stones of the grave, slowly sheathing them in ice and eternity.