The Terror

63 CROZIER

Crozier awakes with one hell of a splitting headache.

He wakes most mornings these days with a splitting headache. One would think that with his back and chest and arms and shoulders peppered by shotgun blasts and with no fewer than three bullet wounds in his body, he’d have other pains to notice upon awakening, and while those agonies descend on him quickly enough, it’s the terrible headaches he notices first.

It reminds Crozier of all the years he drank whiskey every night and regretted it every morning after.

Sometimes he wakes, as he did this morning, with nonsense syllables and strings of meaningless words echoing in his aching skull. The words are all clickety-clack-sounding, like children making up vowel-heavy clucking noises just to find the right number of syllables for a jumping-rope song, but they seem to mean something in those few painful seconds before he comes fully awake. Crozier feels mentally tired all the time these days, as if he’s spent his nights reading Homer in Greek. Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier has never in his life attempted to read Greek. Nor wanted to. He’s always left that to scholars and to poor book-obsessed souls like the old steward, Peglar’s friend, Bridgens.

This dark morning he’s awakened in their snow-house by Silence, who is using the string shapes shifting between her fingers to tell him that it is time to go seal hunting again. She is already dressed in her parka and disappears out the entrance tunnel as soon as she’s finished communicating with him.

Grumpy that there is to be no breakfast – not even some cold seal blubber from last night’s dinner – Crozier dresses himself, pulling on his parka and mittens last, and crawls downhill out through the entrance passage that faces south, away from the wind.

Outside in the dark, Crozier gets carefully to his feet – his left leg still sometimes refuses to accept his weight in the morning – and looks around. Their snow-house glows slightly from the blubber lamp that is left burning to keep the temperature up inside even while they are away. Crozier clearly remembers the long sledge voyage that brought them to this place. He remembers watching, fur-bundled on his sledge and as helpless as he had been those many weeks ago, with something like awe as Silence had spent hours digging out and then constructing this snow-house.

Since then, the mathematician in Crozier had spent hours lying beneath his robes in the snug little space and admiring the catenary curve of the thing and the absolute and seemingly effortless precision that went into the woman’s cutting of the snow blocks – in starlight – and the near perfection of the rising, inward-tilting walls made from those snow blocks.

Even as he watched from beneath his furs that long night or dark day – I’m as useless as tits on a boar, had been his thought – he’d also thought, This thing should fall. The upper blocks were almost horizontal. The last blocks she’d cut had been trapezoidal, and she’d actually shoved that final block – the key block – out from the inside and then trimmed the edges and tugged it into position from within the new snow-house. Finally Silence had come out and climbed onto the catenary-curve almost-dome of snow blocks, scrambled to the top, jumped up and down, and actually slid down its sides.

At first Crozier thought she was just acting like the child she sometimes looked to be, but then he realized that she was testing the strength and stability of their new home.

By the next day – another day without sunlight – the Esquimaux woman had used her oil lamp to melt the inside surface of the snow-house, then let the walls freeze again, coating it with a thin but very hard glaze of ice. She then thawed the sealskins that had been used first for the tent and then for the sledge and rigged them with sinew cords punched through the walls and ceilings of the snow-house, hanging the skins a few inches from the inside walls to provide an inner lining. Crozier had seen immediately that this protected them from dripping even while raising the temperature inside their living space.

Crozier was astonished at how warm their snow-house seemed: always, he guessed, at least fifty degrees warmer than the outside temperature and frequently warm enough that neither of them wore anything but their caribou-skin shorts when out from under the robes. There was a cooking area on the snow ledge to the right of the entrance, and the antler-and-wood frame there not only suspended their various cooking pots over seal-oil flames but was used as a clothes-drying frame as well. As soon as Crozier was able to crawl and go outside with her, Silence explained through her string-language and gestures that it was imperative that they always dry out their outer clothing upon coming back into the snow-house.

Besides the cooking platform to the right of the entrance and a sitting shelf to the left of it, there was the broad sleeping platform at the rear of the snow-house. Edged with what little wood Silence had brought – reused from the tent and then from the sledge – that wood, frozen in place, kept the platform from being worn down. Silence then spread the last of the moss from her canvas bag on the shelf, presumably as an insulating material, and then took great care spreading the various caribou and white-bear skins on the shelf. She then showed him how they should sleep with their heads toward the door and with their now-dry clothing bunched up as pillows. All of their clothing.

For the first days and weeks, Crozier insisted on wearing his caribou shorts under the sleeping robes even though Lady Silence slept naked every night, but soon he found that so warm as to be uncomfortable. Still weakened by his wounds to the point that passion was not yet a temptation, he soon became accustomed to crawling naked between the sleeping robes and re-donning the perspiration-free shorts and other clothing only when he rose in the morning.

Whenever Crozier awoke naked and warm under his robes next to Silence in the night, he tried to remember all the months aboard Terror when he was always cold, always wet, and when the lower deck was always dark and dripping and ice-rimed and reeking of paraffin and urine. The Holland tents had been even more miserable.

Now outside, he pulls his ruffed hood forward to keep the deep cold away from his face and looks around.

It is dark, of course. It had taken Crozier a long time to accept that somehow he had been unconscious – or dead? – for weeks between the time he was shot and his first conscious awareness of being with Silence, but there had been only the shortest, dimmest glow in the south during their long sledge trip to this place, so there was no doubt that it was now November, at the very least. Crozier had been trying to keep track of the days since they had come to the snow-house, but with the perpetual darkness without and their strange cycles of sleeping and waking within – he guessed that they sometimes slept twelve hours or more at a stretch – he could not be sure how many weeks had passed since they came to this place. And storms outside often kept them inside for unmeasurable days and nights, subsisting on their cold-stored fish and seal.

The constellations wheeling around – the sky is very clear today, and thus the day very cold – are winter constellations, and the air is so cold that the stars dance and shake in the sky just as they have all those years Crozier has watched them from the deck of Terror or some other ship he’d taken to the arctic.

The only difference now is that he is not cold and he does not know where he is.

Crozier follows Silence’s tracks around the snow-house and toward the frozen beach and frozen sea. He doesn’t really have to follow her tracks since he knows that the snow-covered beach is a hundred yards or so to the north of the snow-house and that she always goes to the sea to hunt seals.

But even knowing his basic directions here does not tell him where he is.

From Rescue Camp and his crew’s other camps along the south coast of King William Island, the frozen straits were always to the south. He and Silence could now be on the Adelaide Peninsula south across the straits from King William Island, or even on King William Island itself, but somewhere along its uncharted eastern or northeastern coasts where no white man has ever been.

Crozier has no memory of Silence transporting him to the tent site after he was shot – or of how many times she might have moved the tent before he returned to the world of the living – and has only the haziest recall of how long their journey on the fish-runner sledge was before she built the snow-house.

This place might be anywhere.

They didn’t have to be on King William Island at all, even if she has brought them north; they might be on one of the islands in the James Ross Strait somewhere to the northeast of King William Island or on some uncharted island off either the east or west coast of Boothia. On moonlit nights, Crozier can see hills inland from their snow-house site – not mountains, but hills larger than any the captain has ever seen on King William Island – and their campsite itself is more sheltered from the wind than any place he or his men ever found, including Terror Camp.

As Crozier crunches his way across the snow and gravel of the beach and out onto the jumbled sea ice, he thinks of the hundreds of times in the past few weeks when he has tried to communicate his need for leaving to Silence, for finding his men, for getting back to his men.

She always looks at him without expression.

He has come to believe that she understands him – if not his words in English, then the emotions behind his pleas – but she never answers by either expression or string-sign.

Her understanding of things – and his own growing understanding of the complex ideas behind the dancing designs in the string between her fingers – borders, Crozier thinks, on the uncanny. He sometimes feels so close to the odd little native girl that he awakes in the night not knowing which body is his and which hers. At other times, he can hear her shout to him across the dark ice to come quickly or to bring an extra harpoon or rope or tool… even though she has no tongue and has never made a sound in his presence. She understands much, and sometimes he thinks that it is her dreams he dreams every night and wonders if she also has to share his nightmare of the priest in white vestments looming over him as he awaits Communion.

But she will not lead him back to his men.

Three times Crozier has left on his own, crawling out the passage as she sleeps or pretends to sleep, bringing just a bag of seal blubber to sustain him and a knife with which to defend himself, and three times he has become lost – twice in the interior of whatever landmass they are on, once far out onto the sea ice. All three times Crozier has walked until he can walk no more – perhaps for days – and then collapsed, accepting death as his just and proper punishment for abandoning his men to die.

Each time, Silence has found him. Each time, she has bundled him onto a bearskin, set robes over him, and silently pulled him the cold miles back to the snow-house, where she warms his frozen hands and feet against her naked belly under the robes and does not look at him while he weeps.

Now he finds her several hundred yards out onto the ice, bent over a seal’s breathing hole.

Try as he might – and he has tried – Crozier can never find these damned breathing holes. He doubts if he could find them in summer daylight, much less by moonlight, starlight, or in the full dark as Silence does. The stinking seals are so clever and so sly that he does not wonder that he and his men killed only a handful in all their months on the ice and never one through its breathing hole.

Through the talking strings, Crozier has been made to understand that a seal can hold its breath under water for only seven or eight minutes – perhaps fifteen at the most. (Silence explained these units of time in heartbeats, but Crozier thought he had successfully translated them.) Evidently, if he understands Silence’s strings correctly, a seal has territorial boundaries – like a dog or wolf or white bear. Even in the winter, the seal must defend those boundaries, so to make sure that he has enough air within his under-ice kingdom, the seal finds the thinnest ice around and scoops out a dome-shaped breathing hole large enough to hold his entire body, leaving only the tiniest possible actual hole penetrating the thin-shaved ice through which he can breathe. Silence has shown him the sharp scraping claws on a dead seal’s flipper and actually clawed at the ice with them to illustrate how well they work.

Crozier believes Silence when she strings that there are dozens of such breathing-hole domes within a single seal’s territory, but he’s damned if he can find them. The domes she shows so clearly in her strings and which she finds so easily out here in the ice jumble are all but invisible amid the seracs, pressure ridges, ice blocks, little bergs, and crevasses. He’s sure he’s stumbled over a hundred of the damned things and never noticed one except as an irregularity in the ice.

Silence is squatting near one now. When Crozier is a dozen yards away, she gestures for him to be quiet.

To hear Silence tell of it with the string patterns making pictures between her hands, the seal is one of the most cautious and wary creatures alive, so silence and stealth are the essence of hunting seal. Here Lady Silence earns her name.

Before approaching a breathing hole – how does she know they’re there? – Silence sets down small squares of caribou skin that she retrieves after each step, setting her thick-booted feet carefully onto them so as not to make the slightest crunch on the snow and ice. Once next to the breathing-hole dome in the dark, moving in slow motion, she softly pushes several forked antlers into the snow and sets her knife, harpoon, lines, and other hunting bric-a-brac on them so that she can retrieve them without making a noise.

Before leaving the snow-house, Crozier has tied sinew thongs around his arms and legs the way Silence has shown him, in an attempt to keep his clothes from rustling. But he knows that if he walks closer to the hole now, he’ll sound, in his white-man clumsiness, like a collapsing tower of tin cans to the seal below – if there is a seal below – so he strains to see the ice surface beneath him, makes out the inevitable two-foot-by-two-foot-thick caribou skin that Silence leaves for him, and slowly, carefully, goes to his knees on it.

Crozier knows that before he arrived, after Silence found the breathing hole, she carefully and slowly removed the snow over that hole with her knife and widened the hole itself with a bone pick set into the butt of her harpoon shaft. She then inspected the hole to confirm that it was directly above a deep channel in the ice – if not, the chances of a good harpoon thrust were low, he understood now – and then she built the tiny mound up again. Since the snow was blowing, she put a narrow gauze of skin over the hole to prevent it from being filled in. Then she took a very thin point of bone fastened by a long piece of gut string to the tip of another bone and slid this indicator down into the hole, setting the other end on one of her antler twigs.

Now she waits. Crozier watches.

Hours pass.

The wind comes up. Clouds begin to obscure the stars, and snow blows across the ice from the land behind them. Silence stands there, hunched over the breathing hole, her parka and hood slowly being covered with a film of snow, her harpoon with its ivory tip in her right hand, its weight being supported at the rear by the forked antler in the snow.

Crozier has seen her catch seals in other ways. In one, she hews two holes in the ice and – with Crozier’s help using one of two harpoons – literally beguiles the seal to her. She has taught him that while the seal may be the animal kingdom’s soul of caution, its Achilles’ heel is its curiosity. If Crozier gets the head of his specially prepared harpoon near Silence’s hole under the ice, he moves the harpoon up and down ever so slightly, causing two small bones rigged with split-feather shafts near the head of the harpoon to vibrate. Eventually, the seal cannot resist its curiosity and pops up to investigate.

In the full moonlight, Crozier has gaped as Silence has moved across the ice on her belly, pretending to be a seal herself, moving her arms like flippers. On those times he can’t even see the seal’s head protruding from a hole in the ice until there is a sudden, impossibly fast motion of her arm, and then she is pulling back the harpoon attached to her wrist by a long cord. More often than not, there is a dead seal on the other end.

But this dark night-day there is only the seal’s breathing hole to watch and Crozier stays on his skin pad for hours, watching Silence standing bent over the almost indiscernible dome. Every half hour or so, she reaches back slowly to her antler-twigs and removes a strange little instrument – a curved bit of driftwood about ten inches long with three bird claws attached – and scratches so lightly at the ice over the breathing hole that he can’t hear the noise even from a few feet away. But the seal must hear it clearly enough. Even if the animal is at another breathing hole, perhaps hundreds of yards away, it seems – eventually – to be overcome by the curiosity that will doom it.

On the other hand, Crozier has no idea how Silence can see the seal to harpoon it. Perhaps in the sunlight of summer, late spring, or autumn its shadow might be visible under the ice, its nose visible beneath the tiny breathing-hole opening… but in starlight? By the time her warning device vibrates, the seal could have turned and dived deep again. Can she smell its presence as it rises? Can she sense it in some other way?

He is half frozen – a symptom of lying on the caribou pad rather than sitting upright – and dozing when Silence’s little bone-and-feather indicator must have vibrated.

He comes awake in an instant as she blurs into action. She lifts the harpoon from its butt rest and flings it straight down through the breathing hole in less time than it takes for Crozier to blink awake. Then she is leaning back, pulling hard on the thick cord disappearing through the ice.

Crozier struggles to his feet – his left leg aches abominably and does not want to support any weight – and hobbles to her side as quickly as he can. He knows that this is one of the trickiest parts of the seal hunt – pulling the thing up before it can writhe off the barbed ivory harpoon head if it is only injured, or just tangle in ice or slip away to the depths if it is dead. Speed, as the Royal Navy had never tired of telling him, is of the essence.

Together they wrestle the heavy animal up through the hole, Silence pulling at the cord with one surprisingly strong arm and hacking away at the ice with her knife in the other hand, enlarging the hole.

The seal is dead but more slippery than anything Crozier has ever encountered. He gets his mittened hand under the base of a flipper, taking care to avoid the razor-sharp claws at the end, and heaves to leverage the dead animal up onto the ice. All the while, he is gasping and cursing and laughing – relieved from his duty to remain silent – and Silence is, of course, silent except for the occasional soft hiss of breath.

When the seal is safe on the ice, he stands back, knowing what will come next.

The seal, barely visible in the little starlight that’s made its way between the low-scudding clouds, lies with its black eyes unblinking and looking vaguely censorious, its open mouth leaking only a trace of black-looking blood onto the blue-white snow.

Panting a bit from the exertion, Silence goes to her knees on the ice, then to all fours, and then she lies on her belly with her face next to the dead seal’s.

Crozier takes another silent step back. Strangely, he feels now much the same way he did when he was a boy in Memo Moira’s church.

Reaching under her parka, Silence pulls out the tiniest stopped flask made of ivory and fills her mouth with water from it. She has kept the flask next to her bare breasts under the fur so as to keep the water liquid.

She leans forward and sets her lips to the seal’s in a strange parody of a kiss, even opening her mouth the way Crozier has seen whores do with men on at least four continents.

But she has no tongue, he reminds himself.

She passes the liquid water from her mouth to the seal’s mouth.

Crozier knows that if the seal’s living soul, not quite departed from this body, is pleased with the beauty and workmanship of the harpoon and barbed ivory spearhead that killed it, is pleased with Silence’s stealth and patience and her other hunting methods, and especially if it enjoys the water from her mouth, it will go tell the other seal-souls that they should come to this hunter for the chance to drink such fresh, clear water.

Crozier does not know how he knows this – Silence has never signed it to him with strings or suggested as much through any other gestures – but he knows it is true. It’s as if the knowledge comes from the headaches that plague him every morning.

The ritual over, Silence gets to her feet, brushes the snow from her pants and parka, gathers up her precious instruments and harpoon, and together they drag the dead seal the two hundred yards or so to their snow-house.

They eat all evening. It seems that Crozier can never get his fill of fat and blubber. Their faces are both as greasy as a greased pig’s arse by the end of the evening, and he points to his face, points to Silence’s equally greasy face, and bursts into laughter.

Silence never laughs, of course, but Crozier thinks he sees the slightest hint of a smile before she scrambles down the entrance passage and returns – naked except for her caribou shorts – with fresh handfuls of snow for them to wipe their faces with before wiping them again with soft caribou skins.

They drink icy water, heat and eat more seal, drink again, go outside to separate places to relieve themselves, drape their damp clothing over the drying rack above the low-burning blubber flame, wash their hands and faces again, brush their teeth with fingers and string-wrapped twigs, and crawl naked under the sleeping robes.

Crozier has just dozed off when he awakens to the feel of Silence’s small hand on his thigh and private parts.

He reacts immediately, stiffening and rising. He has not forgotten his previous physical pain and scruples about having relations with the Esquimaux girl: these details simply are not in his mind as her small but urgent fingers close around his penis.

They are both breathing hard. She flings her leg over his thigh and rubs up and down. He cups her breasts – so warm – and reaches down behind her to fiercely grab her round behind and pulls her crotch tighter against his leg. His cock is almost absurdly hard and pulsating, its swollen tip vibrating like the seal-indicator feathers at every fleeting contact with her warm skin. His body is like the curious seal, rising quickly toward the surface of sensations in spite of its wiser instincts.

Silence throws aside the top sleeping robe and straddles him, reaching down in a motion as quick as her harpoon-throwing movement to seize him, position him, and slide him inside her.

“Ah, Jesus…,” he gasps as they begin to become one person. He feels the resistance against his straining cock, feels it surrender to their motion, and knows – with deep shock – that he is bedding a virgin. Or that a virgin is bedding him. “Oh, God,” he manages as they start moving more wildly.

He pulls her shoulders down and tries to kiss her, but she turns her face away, setting it against his cheek, against his neck. Crozier has forgotten that Esquimaux women do not know how to kiss… the first thing any English arctic explorer is told by the old veterans.

It does not matter.

He explodes within her in a minute or less. It has been so long.

Silence lies still on him for a while, her small breasts flattened and sweaty against his equally sweaty chest. He can feel her rapid heartbeat and knows she can feel his.

When he can think, he wonders if there is blood. He does not want to soil the beautiful white sleeping robes.

But Silence is moving her hips again. She sits straight up now, still straddling him, her dark gaze holding his. Her dark nipples seem to be another pair of unblinking eyes watching him. He is still hard inside her, and her motions, impossibly – this has never happened in Francis Crozier’s encounters with doxies in England, Australia, New Zealand, South America, and elsewhere – are making him come alive again, grow harder, begin to move his own hips in response to her slow grinding against him.

She throws her head back and sets her strong hand against his chest.

They make love like this for hours. Once, she leaves the sleeping shelf, but only long enough to return with water for them to drink – snowmelt from the small Goldner’s tin they leave suspended over the clothes-drying flame – and she matter-of-factly cleans the small smears of blood from her thighs when they’ve finished drinking.

Then she lies on her back, opens her legs, and pulls him over her with her hand strong on his shoulder.

There is no sunrise, so Crozier will never know if they have made love all that long arctic night – perhaps it has been entire days and nights without sleeping or stopping (it feels this way to him by the time they sleep) – but sleep they eventually do. Moisture from their sweat and breathing drips from the exposed parts of the snow-house walls and it is so warm in their home that for the first half hour or so after they fall off into sleep, they leave the top sleeping robe off.