The Terror

67 TALIRIKTUG

In the spring of the year that their second child was born, a girl, they were visiting Silna’s family in the God-Walking People’s band headed by the old shaman Asiajuk when word came from a visiting hunter named Inupijuk that a band of the Real People far to the south had received aituserk, gifts, of wood, metal, and other precious objects from dead kabloona – white men.

Taliriktug signed to Asiajuk, who translated the signs into questions for Inupijuk. It sounded as if the treasure might be knives, forks, and other artifacts from Erebus’s and Terror’s ship’s boats.

Asiajuk whispered to Taliriktug and Silna that Inupijuk was a qavac – literally, “a man from the south,” but also a term in Inuktitut that denoted stupidity. Taliriktug nodded his understanding but continued to sign questions that the sour shaman passed on to the stupidly grinning hunter. Part of Inupijuk’s social discomfort, Taliriktug knew, was that the hunter from the south had never been in the presence of sixam ieua spirit-governors before and was not quite sure if Taliriktug and Silna were human beings or not.

It sounded as if the artifacts were real. Taliriktug and his wife went back to their guests’ iglu, where she nursed the baby and he thought about it. When he looked up, she was using string to sign.

We should go south, said the strings between her fingers. If you want to.

He nodded.

In the end, Inupijuk agreed to guide them to the southeastern village and Asiajuk decided to come with them – very unusual, since the old shaman rarely traveled far these days. Asiajuk brought his best wife, Seagull – young Nauja of the amooq big tits – who also carried her scars from the band’s lethal encounter with the kabloona three years earlier. She and the shaman were the only survivors of that massacre, but the girl showed no resentment toward Taliriktug. She was curious about the fates of the final kabloona whom everyone knew had headed south across the ice three summers ago.

Six hunters of the God-Walking People’s band also wanted to come along – mostly out of curiosity and to hunt along the way, since the ice was breaking up very early in the strait this spring – so eventually they set out in several boats since leads were opening along the coastline.

Taliriktug, Silna, and their two children chose to travel – as did four of the hunters – in their long double qayaq, but Asiajuk was too old and had too much dignity to paddle a qayaq anymore. He sat with Nauja in the center of a spacious, open umiak as two of the young hunters paddled for him. No one minded waiting for the umiak when there was no wind for its sails since the thirty-foot-long craft carried enough fresh food in it that they rarely had to stop to hunt or fish unless they wanted to. This way they could also bring their own kamatik sledge in case they needed to travel across land. Inupijuk, the southern hunter, rode in the umiak, as did six Qimmiq – dogs.

Although Asiajuk generously offered to let Silna and her children ride in his now-crowded umiak, she string-messaged her preference for the qayaq. Taliriktug knew that his wife would never want any child of hers – certainly not Kanneyuk, the two-month-old – to be so close to the vicious dogs in such a tight space. Their two-year-old son, Tuugaq – “Raven” – had no fear of dogs, but he also had no choice in the matter. He rode in the niche in the qayaq between Taliriktug and Silna. The baby, Kanneyuk (whose secret sixam ieua name was Arnaaluk), rode in Silna’s amoutiq, an oversized babycarrying hood.

The morning they left was cold but clear and as they shoved off from the gravel beach the fifteen remaining members of the God-Walking band chanted their farewell-come-back song:

On their second night, the last before paddling and sailing south through leads from the angilak qikiqtaq, or “biggest island,” that James Ross had named King William Land so long ago, ignoring the fact that the natives who had told him about it had kept calling it qikiqtaq, qikiqtaq, qikiqtak – they camped less than a mile from the site of Rescue Camp.

Taliriktug walked there alone.

He’d been back before. Two summers ago, only weeks after Raven was born, he and Silna had come here. That was only a little less than one year after the man Taliriktug used to be had been betrayed and ambushed and shot down like a dog, but already there was little sign that this had been a major campsite for more than sixty Englishmen. Except for a few tatters of canvas frozen into the gravel, the Holland tents had torn and blown away. All that remained were campfire rings and a few stone tent rings.

And some bones.

He had found some long bones, bits of chewed vertebrae, only one skull – the lower jaw missing. Holding the skull in his hands two summers ago, he had prayed to God that this was not Dr. Goodsir.

These scattered and nanuq-gnawed bones he had gathered up and interred with the skull in a simple stone tomb, setting a fork he’d found among the stones atop the heap of rocks the way the Real People, even the God-Walking People he’d spent the summer with, liked to do, sending helpful tools and beloved-by-the-dead possessions to the spirit world with the dead.

Even as he did this, he’d realized that the Inuit would have thought this an obscene waste of precious metal.

He’d then tried to think of a silent prayer he could say.

The prayers in Inuktitut he’d heard in the past three months were not appropriate. But in his awkward attempt to learn the language – even though he would never be able to utter a syllable of it aloud – he’d played a game that summer trying to translate the Lord’s Prayer into Inuktitut.

That evening, standing by the cairn holding his crewmates’ bones, he’d tried to think the prayer.

Nâlegauvît kailaule. Pijornajat pinatuale nuname sorlo kilangme…

Our father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

That was as far as he’d been able to get two summers ago, but it felt like enough.

Now, almost two years later, walking back to his wife from a Rescue Camp that was even emptier – the fork was gone and the cairn had been opened and plundered by Real People from the south, even the bones scattered where he could not find them – Taliriktug had to smile at his dawning realization that even if he were granted his biblical threescore and ten years, he was never going to master this language of the Real People.

Every word – even the simple nouns – seemed to have a score of variants, and the subtleties of the syntax were far beyond a middle-aged man who’d gone to sea as a boy and never learned even his Latin. Thank God he would never have to speak this language aloud. Straining to understand the click-clack flow of it gave him the kind of headaches he used to have when Silna first shared her dreams with him.

The Great Bear, for instance. The simple white bear. The God-Walking People and the other Real People he’d encountered in the past two years called it nanuq, which was simple enough, but he also heard variants that might be written down – in English, since the Real People had no written language – as nanoq, nänuvak, nannuraluk, takoaq, pisugtooq, and ayualunaq. And now, from Inupijuk, this hunter from the south (who, he now knew, was not as stupid as Asiajuk insisted), he had learned that the Great Bear was also called Tôrnârssuk by many of the southern bands of the Real People.

For a period of a few painful months – he was still healing then and learning how to eat and swallow all over again – he had been perfectly satisfied to have no name at all. When Asiajuk’s band began calling him Taliriktug – “Strong Arm” – after an incident during a white-bear hunt that first summer when he had single-handedly hauled the carcass of the dead bear out of the water when a team of dogs and three hunters had failed (it had not been his superhuman strength, he knew, just that he’d been the only one to see where they’d snarled their harpoon line on a projection of ice), he hadn’t minded the new name even though he had been happier without one. Asiajuk told him that he now carried the soul-memory of an earlier “Strong Arm” who had died by the hand of the kabloona.

Months earlier, when he and Silence had come to the iglu village so that she could have the help of the women during the birth of Raven, he had not been surprised to learn that the Real People Inuktitut name of his wife was Silna. He could see how she embodied the spirit of both Sila, the goddess of the air, and Sedna, the goddess of the sea. Of her secret sixam ieua spirit-governor name, she would not or could not share it with him through her string-signing or dreams.

He knew his own secret name. On that first night of great misery after the Tuunbaq had taken his tongue and older life away, he had dreamt his secret name. But he would never tell anyone, even Silna, whom he still called Silence in his sent-thoughts during their lovemaking and in their dreams.

The village was named Taloyoak and consisted of about sixty people and a scattering of more tents than snow-houses. There were even some snow-covered sod homes projecting out from the cliffs that would have grassy roofs come summer.

The people here were called Oleekataliks, which he thought meant “Men with Capes,” although the outer skins they wore on their shoulders looked more to him like Englishmen’s woolen comforters than real capes. The head man was about Taliriktug’s age and was handsome enough, although he had no teeth left, which made him look older than his years. The man was named Ikpakhuak, which Asiajuk told him meant “the Dirty One,” although as far as Taliriktug could see and smell, Ikpakhuak was no dirtier than the rest of them and cleaner than some.

Ikpakhuak’s much-younger wife was named Higilak, which Asiajuk smirkingly explained meant “the Ice House.” But Higilak’s manner was not in any way cold toward the strangers; she helped her husband welcome Taliriktug’s band with warmth and an outpouring of hot food and gifts.

He realized that he would never understand these people.

Ikpakhuak and Higilak and their family served them umingmak, musk ox steak, as their feast meal, which Taliriktug enjoyed well enough but which Silna, Asiajuk, Nauja, and the rest of his band had to choke down, since they were Netsilik, “People of the Seal.” After all the meeting ceremonies and meals were over, he managed through his interpreted signs to move the conversation to the kabloona gifts.

Ikpakhuak acknowledged that the People of the Cape had such treasures, but before showing his guests, he asked that Silna and Taliriktug show everyone in the village their magic. The Oleekataliks had not met any sixam ieua in the lifetimes of most of the villagers – although Ikpakhuak had known Silna’s father, Aja, decades ago – and Ikpakhuak politely asked if Silna and Taliriktug would fly around the village a little bit and perhaps turn themselves into seals, not bears, please.

Silna explained – through her string-signs interpreted by Asiajuk – that the two spirit-governors-of-the-sky chose not to do that, but that they would both show the hospitable Oleekataliks where the Tuunbaqs had taken their tongues, and that her kabloona sixam ieua husband would give them the rare treat of seeing his scars… scars inflicted in a terrible battle with evil spirits years ago.

This completely satisfied Ikpakhuak and his people.

After this dog-and-pony cum scar show was over, Taliriktug managed to get Asiajuk to bring the subject back to the kabloona gifts.

Ikpakhuak instantly nodded, clapped his hands, and sent boys to gather the treasures. They were handed around the circle.

There were various pieces of wood, one of them split from a well-handled marlin’s spike.

There were gold buttons bearing the Naval anchor motif of the Discovery Service.

There was a fragment of a lovingly embroidered man’s undervest.

There was a gold watch, the chain it may have hung from, and a handful of coins. The initials on the back of the watch, CF^DV – Charles Des Voeux.

There was a silver pencil case with the initals EC on the inside.

There was a gold-medal citation once presented to Sir John Franklin from the Admiralty.

There were silver forks and spoons bearing the crests of Franklin ’s various officers.

There was a small china plate with the name SIR JOHN FRANKLIN written out on it in colored enamel.

There was a surgeon’s knife.

There was a mahogany portable lap writing desk that the man now holding it recognized because it had been his own.

Did we really haul all this shit hundreds of miles in our boats? thought Crozier. And before that, thousands of miles from England? What were we thinking? He felt that he might throw up and had to close his eyes until the nausea passed.

Silence touched his wrist. She had sensed the tilt and shift in him. He looked into her eyes to assure her that he was still there, although he wasn’t. Not really. Not completely.

They paddled along the coast to the west, toward the mouth of Back’s River.

Ikpakhuak’s Oleekataliks had been vague, even evasive, about where they had found their kabloona treasures – some said they were from a place called Keenuna, which sounded like one of a series of islets in the strait just south of King William Island – but the majority of hunters said they had come across the riches west of Taloyoak at a place called Kugluktuk, which Asiajuk translated as “Place of Falling Waters.”

To Crozier, it sounded like the first small waterfall he’d read about that Back had said was just upriver from the mouth of Back’s Great Fish River.

They spent a week searching there. Asiajuk and his wife and three of the hunters stayed with the umiak at the mouth of the river, but Crozier and Silence with their children, the still-curious hunter Inupijuk, and the other hunters paddled their qayaqs upriver the three miles or so to the first low falls.

He found some barrel staves there. A leather boot sole with holes where screws had been driven through. Buried in the sand and mud of the riverbank, he uncovered an eight-foot length of curved and once-polished oak that might have been from the gunwale of one of the cutters. (It would have been pure treasure to the Oleekataliks.) Nothing else.

They were leaving in defeat, paddling downstream to the coast, when they came upon an older man, his three wives, and their four runny-nosed children. Their tent and caribou skins were on the wives’ backs and they had come to the river, so the man said, to fish. He had never seen a kabloona before, much less two sixam ieua spirit-governors without tongues and was very frightened, but one of the hunters with Crozier calmed his fears. The old man was named Puhtoorak and was a member of the Qikiqtarqjuaq band of the Real People.

After food and pleasantries had been exchanged, the old man asked what they were doing so far from the God-Walking People’s northern lands, and when one of the hunters explained that they were looking for living or dead kabloona who might have come this way – or their treasures – Puhtoorak said that he hadn’t heard of kabloona on this river but mentioned between large bites of their gift of seal meat, “Last winter I saw a big kabloona boat – as large as an iceberg – with three sticks coming up out of it, stuck in the ice just off Utjulik. I think there were dead kabloona in its stomach. Some of our younger men went into the thing – they had to use their star-shit stone axes to chop a hole in its side – but they left all the wood and metal treasures where they were because they said the three-sticks house was haunted.”

Crozier looked at Silence. Did I understand him correctly?

Yes. She nodded. Kanneyuk began to cry, and Silna parted her summer parka and gave the baby her breast.

Crozier stood on a cliff and looked out at the ship in the ice. It was HMS Terror.

It had taken them eight days of travel from the mouth of the Back River west to this part of the coast of Utjulik. Through the God-Walking People hunters who understood his signs, Crozier had offered bribes to Puhtoorak if the old man would agree to bring his family with him and come along to show them the way to the kabloona boat with the three sticks rising from its roof, but the old Qikiqtarqjuaq wanted nothing more to do with the haunted kabloona three-stick house. Even though he had not gone in with the young men last winter, he had seen that the thing was tainted with piifixaaq – the kind of unhealthy ghost-spirits that haunted a bad place.

Utjulik was an Inuit name for what Crozier had known from maps as the west coast of the Adelaide Peninsula. The open-water leads had ended not very far west of the inlet leading south to Back’s River – the narrowing strait there was solid ice pack – so they’d had to beach and hide the qayaqs and Asiajuk’s umiak and continue on with the six dogs pulling the heavily solid thirteen-foot kamatik. Using the kind of inland dead reckoning that Crozier knew he would never master, Silence led them the twenty-five miles or so straight across the interior neck of the peninsula to the area of the west coast where Puhtoorak had said he’d seen the ship… even, he confessed, stood on its deck.

Asiajuk had not wanted to leave his comfortable boat when it came time to head cross-country. If Silna, one of the God-Walking People’s most revered spirit-governors, had not signed her sincere request that he join them – a request from a sixam ieua was a command to even the surliest of shamans – Asiajuk would have ordered his hunters to take him home. As it was, he rode in style under furs in the kamatik and even helped from time to time by throwing pebbles at the straining dogs and shouting, “Haw! Haw! Haw!” when he wanted them to go left and “Gee! Gee! Gee!” when he wanted them to go right. Crozier wondered if the old shaman was rediscovering the youthful pleasures of sledge travel by dog team.

Now it was late afternoon of their eighth day and they were looking down at HMS Terror. Even Asiajuk seemed intimidated and subdued.

Puhtoorak’s best description of the precise location had been that the three-stick house “was frozen in the ice near an island about five miles due west” of a certain point and that he and his hunting party “then had to walk about three miles north across smooth ice to reach the ship after crossing several islands on their walk from the point. They could see the ship from a cliff at the north end of the large island.”

Of course, Puhtoorak had not used the term “miles” nor “ship” nor even “point.” What the old man had said was that the three-stick kabloona house with an umiak’s hull was a certain number of hours’ walk west of tikerqat, which means “Two Fingers,” which the Real People called two narrow points along this stretch of the Utjulik coastline, and then somewhere close to the north end of a large island there.

Crozier and his band of ten people – the hunter from the south, Inupijuk, was sticking with them to the bitter end – had walked due west across rough ice from the Two Fingers and crossed two small islands before reaching a much larger one. They found a cliff dropping almost a hundred feet to the ice pack at the north end of that large island.

Two or three miles out in the ice, the three masts of HMS Terror rose at a raked angle toward the low clouds.

Crozier wished he had his old telescope, but he didn’t need it to identify the masts of his old command.

Puhtoorak had been right – the ice for this last part of the walk was much smoother than the jumbled shore and pack ice between the mainland and the islands. Crozier’s captain’s eye saw why: there lay a string of smaller islands to the east and north, creating a sort of natural seawall sheltering this fifteen- or twenty-nautical-square-mile patch of sea from the prevailing winds out of the northwest.

How Terror could have ended up here, almost two hundred miles south of where she had been frozen fast near Erebus for almost three years, was beyond Crozier’s powers of speculation.

He would not have to speculate much longer.

The Real People, including the God-Walking People, who lived in the shadow of a living monster year in and year out, approached the ship with obvious anxiety. All of Puhtoorak’s talk of haunting ghosts and bad spirits had worked its effect on them – even on Asiajuk, Nauja, and the hunters who’d not been there to hear the old man. Asiajuk himself was muttering incantations, ghost-chasing chants, and keeping-safe prayers all during their walk out onto the ice, which added to no one’s sense of security. When a shaman gets nervous, Crozier knew, everyone gets nervous.

The only one who would walk next to Crozier at the lead of the procession was Silence, carrying both the children.

Terror was listing about twenty degrees to port, her bow aimed toward the northeast and her masts raking to the northwest, with too much of her starboard-side hull showing above the ice. Surprisingly, there was one anchor deployed – the port-side bow anchor – its hawser disappearing into the thick ice. Crozier was surprised because he guessed the bottom to be at least twenty fathoms deep here – perhaps much more – and because there were little inlets all along the northern curves of the islands behind him. At the very least – unless there was a storm – a prudent captain seeking safe harbour would have brought the ship into the strait on the east side of the large island he’d just walked from, dropping anchor between the big island – whose cliffs would have blocked the wind – and the three smaller islands, none more than about two miles long, east of there.

But Terror was here, about two and a half miles out from the north end of that large island, with her anchor dropped into deep water and all of her exposed to the inevitable storms from the northwest.

One walk around the ship and a look up at her canted deck from the lower northwest side solved the mystery of why Puhtoorak’s hunting band had been forced to chop their way through the hull on the raised starboard side, probably a splintered and battered and already near-breached hull, in order to gain entry: all the top-deck hatches were battened and sealed.

Crozier returned to the man-sized hole the band had smashed into the exposed and weathered hull. He thought he could squeeze through. He remembered Puhtoorak saying that his young hunters had used their star-shit axes to force their way in here, and he had to smile to himself despite the surge of painful emotions he was feeling.

“Star shit” was what the Real People called falling stars and the metal they used from the falling stars they found lying on the ice. Crozier had heard Asiajuk talk about uluriak anoktok – “star shit falling from the sky.”

Crozier wished he had a star-shit blade or axe with him right now. The only weapon he carried was a basic work knife with a blade made from walrus ivory. There were harpoons on the kamatik but they weren’t his – he and Silence had left theirs with their qayaq a week ago – and he didn’t want to ask to borrow one just to go into the ship with it.

Back at that sledge, forty feet behind them, the Qimmiq – the large dogs with their uncanny blue and yellow eyes and souls they shared with their masters – were barking and growling and howling and snapping at one another and at anyone who came close to them. They did not like this place.

Crozier signed to Silence, Sign Asiajuk to ask them if anyone wants to come in with me.

She did so quickly, using just her fingers without string. Even so, the old shaman always understood her much more quickly than he could make out Crozier’s clumsy signs.

None of the Real People wanted to go through that hole.

I will see you in a few minutes, Crozier signed to Silence.

She actually smiled. Do not be stupid, she signed. Your children and I are coming with you.

He squeezed in and Silence followed a second later, carrying Raven in her arms and Kanneyuk in the soft-hide baby-holder she sometimes carried on straps against her chest. Both children were sleeping.

It was very dark.

Crozier realized that Puhtoorak’s young hunters had hacked their way in to the orlop deck. This was lucky for them since if they’d tried a bit lower amidships here, they would have run into the iron of the coal bins and the water-storage tanks on the hold deck and never could have chopped their way through, even with star-shit heads on their axes.

Ten feet in from the hole in the hull it was too dark to see, so Crozier found his way by memory, holding Silence’s hand as they walked ahead down the canted deck and then turned aft.

As his eyes adapted to the dark, there was just enough light filtering in for Crozier to make out that the heavy padlocked door to the Spirit Room and to the Gunner’s Storeroom farther aft had been smashed open. He had no idea whether this had been the work of Puhtoorak’s men, but he doubted it. Those doors had been left padlocked for a reason and they were the first place any white men returning to Terror would want to go.

The rum casks – they’d actually had so much rum they’d had to leave casks of it behind when they took to the ice – were empty. But casks of gunpowder remained, as well as boxes and barrels of shot, canvas bags of cartridges, almost two bulkheads’ lengths of muskets still set in their grooved places – they’d had too many to carry – and two hundred bayonets still hanging from their fittings along the rafters and beams.

The metal in this room alone would make Asiajuk’s band of Real People the richest men in their world.

The remaining gunpowder and shot would feed a dozen large bands of the Real People for twenty years and make them undisputed lords of the arctic.

Silence touched his bare wrist. It was too dark to sign, so she thought-sent. Do you feel it?

Crozier was astonished to hear that – for the first time – her shared thoughts were in English. She had either dreamt his dreams even more deeply than he’d imagined, or she had been very attentive during her months aboard this very ship. It was the first time they’d shared thoughts in words while awake.

Ii, he thought back to her. Yes.

This place was bad. Memories haunted it like a bad smell.

To lighten the tension, he led her forward again, pointed toward the bow, and thought-sent her an image of the forward cable locker on the deck below.

I was always waiting for you, she sent. The words were so clear that he thought they might have been spoken aloud in the darkness, except for the fact that neither of the children awoke.

His body began to shake with emotion at the thought of what she had just told him.

They went up the main ladder to the lower deck.

It was much brighter up here. Crozier realized that – finally – daylight was actually coming through the Preston Patent Illuminators that punctuated the deck above them. The curved glass was opaque with ice, but – for once – not covered with snow or tarps.

The deck looked empty. All of the men’s hammocks had been carefully folded and stowed away, their mess tables cranked up between the beams to the overhead deck, and their sea chests pushed aside and carefully stowed. The huge Frazer’s Patent Stove in the center of the forward berthing area was dark and cold.

Crozier tried to recall if Mr. Diggle was still alive when he, the captain, had been lured onto the ice and shot. It was the first time he’d thought of that name – Mr. Diggle – in a long time.

It’s the first time I’ve thought in my own tongue for a long time.

Crozier had to smile at that. “In my own tongue.” If there really was a goddess like Sedna who ruled the world, her real name was Bitch Irony.

Silence tugged him aft.

The first officers’ cabins and mess rooms they looked into were empty.

Crozier found himself wondering which men could have possibly reached Terror and sailed her south.

Des Voeux and his men from Rescue Camp?

He felt almost certain that Mr. Des Voeux and the others would have continued south in the boats toward Big Fish River.

Hickey and his men?

For Dr. Goodsir’s sake, he hoped so, but he did not believe it. Except for Lieutenant Hodgson, and Crozier suspected he had not lived for very long in that company of cutthroats, there was hardly a man in that pack who could sail, much less navigate, Terror. He doubted if they had been able to sail and navigate the one small boat he’d given them.

That left the three men who had left Rescue Camp to hike overland – Reuben Male, Robert Sinclair, and Samuel Honey. Could a captain of the fo’c’sle, a captain of the foretop, and a blacksmith sail HMS Terror almost two hundred miles south through a maze of leads?

Crozier felt dizzy and a little nauseated from thinking about the men’s names and faces again. He could almost hear their voices. He could hear their voices.

Puhtoorak had been correct: this place was now home to piifixaaq – resentful ghosts that stayed behind to haunt the living.

There was a corpse in Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier’s bunk.

As far as they could tell without lighting lamps and going down into the hold and orlop deck, this was the only dead body on board.

Why did he decide to die in my bunk? wondered Crozier.

He had been a man about Crozier’s height. His clothes – he’d died under blankets in a peacoat and watch cap and wool trousers, which was odd since they must have been sailing in full summer – gave no clue to his identity. Crozier had no wish at all to go through his pockets.

The man’s hands, exposed wrists, and neck were brown and mummified, shriveled, but it was his face that made Crozier wish that the Preston Patent Illuminator overhead was not allowing in as much light as it did.

The dead man’s eyes were brown marbles. His hair and beard were so long and wild that it seemed quite possible that they had continued growing for months after the man’s death. His lips had shriveled away to nothing and been pulled back far from the teeth and gums by tendons stretching and contracting.

It was the teeth that were so upsetting. Rather than having fallen out from scurvy, the front teeth were all there and very broad and an ivory yellow and impossibly long – three inches long, at least – as if they had grown the way a rabbit’s or rat’s teeth continue growing until, unless worn down by gnawing something solid, they curve in and cut the creature’s own throat.

These dead man’s rodent teeth were impossible, but Crozier was looking at them in the clear, grey evening light coming down through the domed skylight of his old cabin. It was not, he realized, the first impossible thing he had seen or experienced in the last few years. He suspected it might not be his last.

Let’s go, he signed to Silence. He did not want to thought-send here where things were listening.

He had to use a fire axe to hack his way up through the sealed and nailed-shut main hatch. Rather than ask himself who had sealed it and why – or if the corpse below had been a living man when the hatch had been sealed so tightly above him – he threw the axe aside, clambered up, and helped Silence up the ladder.

Raven was fussing himself awake, but Silence rocked him and he began to snore softly again.

Wait here, he signed and went below again.

First he brought the heavy theodolite and several of his old manuals up, took a quick reading of the sun, and jotted his bearings in the margin of the salt-stained book. Then he carried theodolite and books below and tossed them aside, knowing that fixing this ship’s position one last time was perhaps the most useless thing he’d ever done in a long life of doing useless things. But he also knew he’d had to do it.

Just as he had to do what he did next.

In the dark Gunner’s Storeroom on the orlop deck he split open three successive kegs of gunpowder – pouring the contents of the first on the orlop deck and down the ladder into the hold deck (he would not go down there), the contents of the second keg everywhere on the lower deck (and especially inside the open door of his own cabin), and the contents of the third keg in black trails along the canted upper deck where Silence waited with his children. Asiajuk and the others on the ice had come around to the port side and now watched from thirty yards away. The dogs continued to howl and strain to get away, but Asiajuk or one of the hunters had staked them to the ice.

Crozier wanted to stay in the open air, even with the afternoon light waning, but he made himself go below to the orlop deck again.

Carrying the last keg of lamp oil left on the ship, he spilled a trail of it on all three decks, taking care to douse the door and bulkhead of his own cabin. His only hesitation was at the entrance to the Great Room where hundreds upon hundreds of spines of books stared back at him.

Dear God, would it hurt if I took just a few of those to help get through the dark winters ahead?

But they now carried the dark inua of the death-ship in them. Almost weeping, he dashed lamp oil across them.

When he was finished pouring the last of the fuel on the upper deck, he flung the empty cask far out over the ice.

One last trip below, he promised Silence with his fingers. Go on to the ice now with the children, my beloved.

The Lucifer matches were where he had left them in the drawer of his desk three years earlier.

For a second he was sure that he could hear the bunk creak and the nest of frozen blankets stir as the mummified thing behind him reached for him. He could hear the dry tendons in the dead arm stretching and snapping as the brown hand with its long brown fingers and too-long yellow nails slowly rose.

Crozier did not turn to look. He did not run. He did not look back. Carrying the matches, he left his cabin slowly, stepping over the lines of black gunpowder and deck boards stained by the whale oil.

He had to go down the main ladder to throw the first match. The air was so bad here that the match almost refused to light. Then the gunpowder lit with a whump, ignited a bulkhead he’d soaked with oil, and raced forward and aft in the dark along its own trail of fire.

Knowing that the orlop deck fire alone would have been enough – these timbers were dried to tinder after six years in this arctic desert – he still took time to light the lines of powder on the lower deck and open upper deck.

Then he jumped the ten feet to the ramp of ice on the west side of the ship and cursed as his never fully recovered left leg announced its pain. He should have clambered down the rigged rope ladders here as Silence obviously had had the sense to do.

Limping like the old man he was sure he would soon be, Crozier walked out onto the ice to join the others.

The ship burned for almost an hour and a half before it sank.

It was an incredible conflagration. Guy Fawkes Day above the Arctic Circle.

He definitely wouldn’t have needed the gunpowder or lamp oil, he realized while watching. The timbers and canvas and boards were so leached of moisture that the entire ship went up like one of the incendiary mortar bombs it had been designed to launch so many decades ago.

Terror would have sunk anyway, as soon as the ice thawed here in a few weeks or months. The axe-hole in its side had been its death wound.

But that is not why he burned it. If asked – which he never would be – he could not have explained why it had to be burned. He knew that he did not want “rescuers” from British ships poring over the abandoned ship, carrying tales of it home to frighten the ghoulish citizens of England and to spur Mr. Dickens or Mr. Tennyson on to new heights of maudlin eloquence. He also knew that it wouldn’t have been only tales these rescuers would have brought back to England with them. Whatever had taken possession of the ship was as virulent as the plague. He had seen that with the eyes of his soul and smelled it with all his human and sixam ieua senses.

The Real People cheered when the burning masts collapsed.

They’d all been forced to move back a hundred yards. Terror burned its own death-hole in the ice, and shortly after the flaming masts and rigging fell, the burning ship began hissing and bubbling its way to the depths.

The noise from the fire woke the children and the flames so heated the air out here on the ice that all of them – his wife, scowling Asiajuk, big-titted Nauja, the hunters, happily grinning Inupijuk, even Taliriktug – took off their outer parkas and piled them onto the kamatik.

When the show was over and the ship was sunk and the sun was also sinking toward the south so that their shadows leapt long across the greying ice, still they stayed to point and enjoy the steam rising and celebrate the bits of burning debris still scattered here and there on the ice.

Then the band finally turned back toward the big island and then the smaller islands, planning to cross the ice to the mainland before they would make camp for the night. The sunlight shining until after midnight helped their march. All of them wanted to be off the ice and away from this place before the few hours of dimness and full darkness came. Even the dogs quit barking and snarling and seemed to pull harder when they passed the smaller island on their way back in to the land. Asiajuk was asleep and snoring under his robes on the sledge, but both the babies were wide awake and ready to play.

Taliriktug took the squirming Kanneyuk in his left arm and put his right arm around Silna-Silence. Raven, still being carried by his mother, was petulantly trying to slap her arms away and force her to put him down so he could try to walk on his own.

Taliriktug wondered, not for the first time, how a father and mother without tongues were going to discipline a headstrong boy. Then he remembered, not for the first time, that he now belonged to one of the few cultures in the world that did not bother to discipline their headstrong boys or girls. Raven already had an inua of some worthy adult in him. His father would just have to wait to see just how worthy it was.

The Francis Crozier inua still alive and well in Taliriktug had no illusions about life being anything but poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

But perhaps it did not have to be solitary.

His arm around Silna, trying to ignore the raucous snores from the shaman and the fact that baby Kanneyuk had just pissed on her father’s best summer parka, while also ignoring the petulant swats and mewling noises from his squirming son, Taliriktug and Crozier continued walking east across the ice toward solid ground.