The Terror

⁶¹ CROZIER

My men! he shouts. But he is too weak to shout it. He is too weak to say it out loud. He is too weak even to remember what the two syllables mean. My men! he cries again. It emerges as a moan.

She is torturing him.

Crozier does not awaken all at once but rather comes awake through a series of painful attempts to open his eyes, stitching together separate tatters of attempted awareness stretching over hours and even days, always propelled up out of death-sleep by pain and by the two empty syllables — my men! — until he is, at last, conscious enough to remember who he is and to see where he is and to realize who he is with.

She is torturing him.

The Esquimaux girl-woman he had known as Lady Silence keeps cutting into his chest, arms, side, back, and leg with a sharp, heated knife. The pain is incessant and intolerable.

He is lying near her in a small space — not a snow-house as John Irving had described to Crozier, but some sort of tent made of skins stretched over curved sticks or bones — with flickering light from several small oil lamps illuminating the girl’s bare upper body and, when he looks down, Crozier’s own bare and torn and bleeding chest and arms and belly. He thinks she must be slicing him into small strips.

Crozier tries to scream but finds again that he is too weak to scream. He tries to bat her torturing arm and knife-hand away, but he is too weak to lift his own arm much less stop hers.

Her brown eyes stare into his, acknowledging that he is alive again, and then return to studying the damage her knife is doing as she cuts and slashes and tortures him.

Crozier manages the weakest of moans. Then he falls away into darkness, but not back into dream-listening and the pleasant no-self which he now only half remembers, but only into black wave-surges in a sea of pain.

She feeds him some sort of broth from one of the emptied Goldner tins she must have stolen from Terror. The broth tastes of some sea animal’s blood. She then cuts strips of seal meat and blubber using a strange curved blade with an ivory handle, holding the slab of seal in her teeth and slicing dangerously close to her lips as she cuts downward, then chews the pieces well, finally pressing them between Crozier’s chapped and torn lips. He tries to spit them out — he does not want to be fed like some baby bird — but she retrieves each fatty blob and presses it back into his mouth. Defeated, unable to fight her, he finds the energy to chew and swallow.

Then he falls back to sleep to the lullaby of howling wind but is soon awakened. He realizes that he is naked between furred sleeping robes — his clothes, all his many layers, are not in the little tent space — and that she has rolled him onto his belly now, setting some sort of smooth sealskin beneath him to keep the blood from his lacerated chest from soiling the soft hides and furs that cover the tent floor. She is cutting and probing his back with a long, straight blade.

Too weak to resist or roll over, all Crozier can do is moan. He imagines her slicing him to pieces and then cooking and eating the pieces. He feels her pressing strands of something moist and slimy onto and into the many wounds in his back.

At some point in the torture, he falls asleep again.

My men!

It is only after several days of this pain and of slipping constantly into and out of consciousness and of thinking that Silence is slicing him to pieces that Crozier remembers being shot.

He awakens with the tent dark except for a tiny amount of moonlight or starlight seeping through the tight-stretched hides. The Esquimaux girl is sleeping next to him, sharing his body heat even as he shares hers, and both of them are naked. Crozier feels not the slightest stir of passion or physical interest beyond his animal need for warmth. He is in too much pain.

My men! I must get back to my men! Warn them!

For the first time, he remembers Hickey, the moonlight, the gunshots.

Crozier’s arm is lying across his chest and now he forces his hand to touch higher, where the shotgun pellets had struck his chest and shoulder. His upper left torso is a mass of welts and wounds, but it feels as if the shotgun pellets and any clothing driven into his flesh with them have been carefully dug out. There is something soft like moistened moss or seaweed pressed into the larger wounds, and while Crozier has the impulse to dig it out and throw it away, he does not have the strength.

His upper back hurts even more than his lacerated chest and Crozier remembers the torture as Silence dug there with her knife blade. He also remembers the slight squelching sound after Hickey pulled the trigger but before the shotgun cartridges fired — the powder had been wet and old and both shots had probably ignited with far less than full explosive force — but he can also recall the impact of the outer part of the widening pellet cloud hurling him around and then down onto the ice. He had been shot once from the back with the shotgun at extreme range and once from the front.

Has the Esquimaux girl dug out every pellet? Every shred of filthy clothing driven into me?

Crozier blinks in the dimness. He remembers visiting Dr. Goodsir’s sick bay and the surgeon’s patient explanations of how, in Naval warfare as well as with most of the wounds suffered on their expedition, it was usually not the initial wound that killed but the sepsis from the contaminated wounds that set in later.

He moves his hand slowly from his chest to his shoulder. He remembers now that after the shotgun blasts, Hickey then shot him several times with Crozier’s own pistol and the first bullet had struck… here. Crozier gasps as his fingers find a deep groove in the flesh of his upper biceps. It is packed with the moldy, slimy stuff. The pain of touching it makes him dizzy and ill.

There is another groove from a bullet along his left rib. Touching that — just moving his hand that far exhausts him — makes him gasp aloud and black out for a moment.

When some consciousness returns, Crozier realizes that Silence has dug a bullet out of his flesh there in his side and also dressed this wound with whatever heathenish poultice she had applied elsewhere on his body. Guessing from the pain when he breathes and from the soreness and swelling in his back, he thinks that this bullet broke at least one rib on his left side, was deflected, and lodged under the skin near his left shoulder blade. Silence must have extracted it from there.

It takes endless minutes and the rest of his meager energy for him to lower his hand to touch his most painful wound.

Crozier does not remember being shot in the left leg, but the pain from the muscle there, just above and under his knee, convinces him that a third bullet must have passed through at that point. He can feel both the entrance and exit holes under his shaking fingers. Two inches higher and the bullet would have taken his knee, the knee would have cost him his leg, and his leg would almost certainly have meant his life. Again there is a poultice-bandage there, and although he can feel scabs, there seems to be no fresh flow of blood.

No wonder I’m burning up from fever. I’m dying of sepsis.

Then he realizes that the heat he feels may not be fever. These robes insulate so well and Lady Silence’s naked body next to his is pouring out so much heat that he is completely warm for the first time in… how long? Months? Years?

With great effort, Crozier pushes back the top of the robe that covers both of them, allowing a little cooler air in.

Silence stirs but does not waken. Staring at her in the dim light in the tent, he thinks she looks like a child — perhaps like one of his cousin Albert’s younger teenaged daughters.

With this thought in mind — remembering playing croquet on a green lawn in Dublin — Crozier falls asleep again.

She is in her parka and kneeling in front of him, hands about a foot apart, string made of animal sinew or gut dancing between her splayed fingers and thumbs. She is using her fingers to play a cat’s cradle child’s game with sinew as string.

Crozier watches dully.

The same two patterns keep appearing out of the complicated crisscross of sinew string. The first comprises three bands of strings creating two triangles at the top, just in from her thumbs, but with a double loop of string in the lower center of the pattern showing a peaked dome. The second pattern — her right hand pulled far away with just two bare strings running almost to her left hand where the string loops around just her thumb and little finger — shows a complex little loop of doubled string that looks like a cartoon figure with four oval legs or flippers and and a string-loop head.

Crozier has no idea what the forms mean. He shakes his head slowly to let her know that he does not want to play.

Silence stares at him for a silent moment, her dark eyes looking into his. Then she undoes the pattern with a graceful collapse of her small hands and sets the string in the ivory bowl he drinks his broth from. A second later she crawls out through the multiple tent flaps.

Shocked by the cold air blowing in for those seconds, Crozier tries to crawl to the opening. He needs to see where he is. Background groans and crackings have suggested that they are still on the ice — perhaps very near where he was shot. Crozier has no sense of how long it has been since Hickey ambushed the four of them — himself, Goodsir, poor Lane and Goddard — but he has hopes that it has been only a few hours, a day or two at most. If he leaves now, he might still be able to get his warning to the men at Rescue Camp before Hickey, Manson, Thompson, and Aylmore show up there to do more damage.

Crozier is able to lift his head and shoulders a few inches but is far too weak to slither out from under the robes, much less to crawl to look out through the caribou-hide tent flaps. He sleeps again.

Sometime later — he is not even sure if it is the same day or if Silence has come and gone several times since he fell asleep — Silence wakes him. The dim light through the hides is the same; the interior of the tent is illuminated by the same blubber lamps. There is a fresh slab of seal lying in the snowy niche in the floor she uses for storage, and Crozier sees that she has just pulled off her heavy outer parka and is wearing only some sort of short pants with the fur side turned inward. The soft outer hide is lighter in color than Silence’s brown skin. Her breasts bobble as she kneels in front of Crozier again.

Suddenly the string dances between her fingers again. This time the little animal design near her left hand is shown first, the string is loosened, retwisted, and the design of the peaked oval dome in the center comes next.

Crozier shakes his head. He does not understand.

Silence tosses the string into the bowl, takes her short, semicircular blade with the ivory handle looking like the handle of a stevedore’s hook, and begins slicing up the slab of seal meat.

“I have to go find my men,” whispers Crozier. “You have to help me find my men.”

Silence watches him.

The captain does not know how many days may have elapsed since his first awakening. He sleeps much. His few waking hours are spent with him eating his broth, eating the seal meat and blubber that Silence no longer has to prechew for him but which she still lifts to his lips, and with her changing his poultices and cleaning him. Crozier is mortified beyond words that his basic elimination needs must be attended to him using another Goldner’s can set into the snow, reachable through a gap between the sleeping robes beneath him, and that it is this girl who regularly must carry the can out to empty it somewhere out there on the ice floes. It does not make Crozier feel any better that the contents of the can freeze quickly and that there is almost no smell from it in the little tent that already smells so strongly of fish and seal and their own human sweat and presence.

“I need you to help me get back to my men,” he rasps again. He feels that the odds are great that they are still close to the polynya where Hickey ambushed them — no more than two miles out on the ice from Rescue Camp.

He needs to warn the others.

It confuses him that every time he awakens, the dim light through the tent’s hide walls seems the same. Perhaps, for some reason that only Dr. Goodsir could explain, he awakens only at night. Perhaps Silence is drugging him with her seal-blood soup to keep him sleeping during the day. To keep him from escaping.

“Please,” he whispers. He can only hope that despite her muteness, the savage has learned a little English during her months aboard HMS Terror. Goodsir had confirmed that Lady Silence could hear, even if she had no tongue with which to speak, and Crozier himself had seen her start at some sudden loud noise when she was a guest on their ship.

Silence continues staring at him.

She’s an idiot as well as a savage, thinks Crozier. He would be God-damned if he’d beg this heathen native again. He would have to keep eating, keep recovering, build up his strength, shove her aside one day, and walk back to camp himself.

Silence blinks and turns to cook the slab of seal meat over her little blubber stove.

He awakes on another day — or, rather, another night, since the light is as dim as always — to find Silence kneeling over him and playing her string game again.

The first pattern between her fingers shows the little peaked-dome shape again. Her fingers dance. Two vertical looped shapes appear, but with two legs or flippers now rather than four. She pulls her hands farther apart, and somehow the designs actually move — sliding farther from her right hand and toward her left hand, the balloon-leg loops moving. She undoes that design, her fingers fly, and the oval-dome shape appears in the center again, but — Crozier slowly realizes — it is not quite the same shape. The peak of the dome is gone and now it is a pure catenary curve such as he studied as a midshipman poring over geometry and trigonometry illustrations.

He shakes his head. “I don’t understand,” he rasps. “This game doesn’t make any God-damned sense.”

Silence looks at him, blinks, tosses the string into an animal-hide pack, and begins to pull him out of his sleeping furs.

Crozier still does not have the strength to resist, but neither does he use what little strength he has regained to help. Silence props him up and tugs a light caribou under-jacket and then a thick fur parka over his upper body. Crozier is shocked to feel how light the two layers are — the cotton and wool layers he’s worn for outside work the past three years weighed more than thirty pounds before they inevitably became soaked with sweat and ice, but he doubts if this upper outfit of Esquimaux clothing weighs more than eight pounds. He feels how loose both layers are on his upper body but how snugly everything fits at the neck and wrists — tight anywhere that heat might escape.

Embarrassed, Crozier does try to help pull on the light caribou pants over his nakedness — these are larger versions of the short pants that are all that Silence wears in the tent — and then the high caribou stockings, but his fingers get in the way more than not. Silence pushes his hands away and finishes dressing him with an impersonal economy of effort known only to mothers and nurses.

Crozier watches as Silence pulls liners that look to be made of woven grass onto his feet and pulls them tight over his feet and ankles. Presumably these are for insulation, and he has trouble even imagining how long it had taken her — or some woman — to weave the grass into such high, tight socks. Fur boots, when tugged on over his grass socks by Silence, overlap his fur stocking-pants, and he notices that the soles of these boots are made of the thickest hides of any of their clothing.

During the first hours he’d been awake in the tent, Crozier had wondered at the profusion of robes, parkas, furs, caribou hides, pots, sinew, the seal-oil lamps made of what looked to be soapstone, the curved cutting knife and other tools, but then he realized the obvious: it had been Lady Silence who had looted the bodies and packs of the eight dead Esquimaux killed by Lieutenants Hodgson and Farr. The rest of the material — Goldner tins, spoons, extra knives, marine mammals’ ribs, pieces of wood, ivory, even what looked to be old barrel staves now used as part of the tent framework — must have been scavenged from Terror or the abandoned Terror Camp or during Silence’s months alone on the ice.

When he is dressed, Crozier collapses onto one elbow and pants. “Are you taking me back to my people now?” he asks.

Silence pulls mittens over his hands, flips his hood with its white-bear fur trim up over his head, firmly grips the bearskin beneath him, and drags him outside through the tent flaps.

The cold air hits Crozier’s lungs and makes him cough, but after a moment he realizes how warm the rest of his body feels. He can feel his own body heat flowing up and around him within the roomy confines of this obviously non-porous garment. Silence bustles around him for a minute — pulling him up into a sitting position on a pile of folded furs. He guesses that she does not want him lying on the ice, even on the bearskin, since it feels warmer in these strange Esquimaux clothes when one sits up and lets air warmed by one’s own body heat circulate against the skin.

As if to confirm this theory, Silence whisks away the bearskin on the ice and folds it, adding it to the stack next to the one he’s sitting on. Astonishingly — Crozier’s feet have been cold every time he has ever gone up on deck or out onto the ice in the past three years, and have been wet and cold for every minute since he left Terror — neither the cold of the ice here nor moisture seems to penetrate the thick hide-soles and grass booties he’s wearing now.

As Silence begins taking down the tent with a few sure movements, Crozier looks around him.

It is night. Why has she brought me out here at night? Is there some emergency? The caribou tent quickly being dismantled is, as he guessed from the noises, out on the pack ice, set amid seracs and icebergs and pressure ridges that reflect the little starlight thrown by the few stars peeking between low clouds. Crozier sees the dark water of a polynya not thirty feet from where he’d been lying in the tent, and his heart beats faster. We’ve not left the area where Hickey ambushed us, not two miles from Rescue Camp. I know the way back from here.

Then he realizes that this polynya is far smaller than the one Robert Golding had led them to — this patch of open, black water is less than eight feet long and only half that wide. Nor do the surrounding icebergs frozen into the pack ice here look right. They are much taller and more numerous than those near Hickey’s ambush site. And the pressure ridges are taller.

Crozier squints at the sky, catching only glimpses of stars. If the clouds would part and if he had his sextant and tables and a chart, he might be able to fix his position.

If… if… might.

The only recognizable patch of stars he catches sight of look more like a winter constellation than one that should be in that part of the arctic sky in mid or late August. He knows that he was shot on the night of 17 August — he had already made his daily log entry before Robert Golding had come running into camp — and he cannot imagine that more than a few days have passed since the ambush.

He looks wildly around the ice-jumbled horizons, trying to find a twilight glow that would hint of a recent sunset or imminent sunrise in the south. There is only the night and the howling wind and the clouds and a few trembling stars.

Dear Christ… where is the sun?

Crozier is still not cold, but he is trembling and shaking so badly that he has to use what little strength he has to grip the pile of folded furs to keep from toppling over.

Lady Silence is doing a very strange thing.

She has collapsed the hide-and-bone tent in a few efficient motions — even in the dim light, Crozier can see that the outer tent covers are made of sealskins — and now kneels on one of the sealskin tent covers and uses her halfmoon blade to slice it down the middle.

Then she hauls the two halves of the sealskin to the polynya and, using a curved stick to lower the pieces into the water, thoroughly wets them. Returning to the site where the tent stood only moments ago, she pulls frozen fish from the storage area that had been cut into the ice in her half of the tent and briskly lays a line of fish, head to tail, along one side of each half of the quickly freezing tent cover.

Crozier has not the slightest clue as to what the wench is up to. It is as if she is performing some insane heathenish religious ritual out here in the rising night wind under the stars. But the problem is, Crozier sees, she has cut up their sealskin tent cover. Even if she rebuilds the tent from hides stretched over the scattered curved sticks and ribs and bones, it will no longer hold out the wind and cold.

Ignoring him, Silence rolls both halves of the sealskin tent cover tightly around the two lines of fish, pulling and tugging the wet sealskin to make it even tighter. It amuses Crozier that she has left half of one fish protuding from one end of both lengths of rolled sealskin, and now she concentrates on bending upward the head end of each fish ever so slightly.

In two minutes she can lift the two seven-foot-long lengths of sealskin-wrapped fish — each now frozen as solidly as a long, narrow piece of oak with a rising fish head at its tip — and she lays them parallel on the ice.

Now she sets a small hide under her knees and kneels to use bits of sinew and hide thongs to lash short lengths of caribou antlers and ivory — the former frame to the tent — to connect the two seven-foot-long wrapped-fish lengths.

“Mother of God,” rasps Francis Crozier. The frozen lengths of fish wrapped in wet sealskin are runners. The antlers are cross-pieces. “You’re building a fucking sledge,” he whispers.

His breath hangs as crystals in the night air as his bemusement turns to a sort of panic. It wasn’t this cold on 17 August and before — nowhere near this cold, even in the middle of the night.

Crozier guesses that it has taken Silence half an hour or less to make the fish-runner, caribou-antler sledge, but now he sits on his stack of furs for another hour and a half or more — gauging the passage of time is difficult without his pocket watch and because he keeps drifting off into a light sleep even while sitting — as the woman works on the runners of the sledge.

First she removes something that looks like a mixture of mud and moss from a canvas bag that had come from Terror. Carrying Goldner cans of water from the polynya, she shapes this mud-moss into fist-sized balls and then lays these daubs the length of the ad hoc runners, patting and spreading them evenly with her bare hands. Crozier has no clue why her hands do not freeze solid despite her frequent breaks to stick her hands under her parka against her own bare belly.

Silence smooths the frozen mud with her knife, trimming it as a sculptor might cut his clay maquette. Then she brings more water from the polynya and pours it over the frozen layer of mud, creating an ice shoeing. Finally, she sprays mouthfuls of water onto a strip of bearskin and rubs that wet fur up and down the frozen mud along the length of each runner until the coating of ice there is absolutely smooth. In the starlight, it looks to Crozier as if the runners along the inverted sledge — just fish and strips of sealskin two hours earlier — are lined with glass.

Silence rights the sledge, tests the thongs and knots, puts her weight on the firmly lashed caribou antlers and short pieces of wood, and lashes the remaining antlers — two longer curved ones that had been the primary tent supports — up from the rear of the sledge to make rudimentary handles.

Then she lays several layers of sealskins and bearskins across the cross-antlers and comes to lift Crozier to his feet and help him over to the sledge.

He shakes off her arm and tries to walk to it by himself.

He has no memory of collapsing face-first into the snow, but his vision and hearing return as Silence is lifting him onto the sledge, straightening his legs, setting his back firmly against piled furs stacked against the rear antler handles, and setting several thick robes over him.

He sees that she has tied long strips of leather to the front of the sledge and woven the ends into a sort of harness that goes around her middle. He thinks of her finger-string games and sees what she had been saying — the tent (peaked oval) taken down, the two of them leaving (the walking figures in the sliding bits of string, although Crozier certainly was not walking this night), to another oval dome with no peak. (Another tent in the shape of a dome? A snow-house?)

With everything packed — the extra furs and canvas bags and hide-wrapped pots and seal-oil lamps all lying atop and around Crozier — Silence slips into harness and begins pulling them across the ice.

The runners glide with a glassy efficiency, far more silently and smoothly than the boatsledges from Terror and Erebus. Crozier is shocked to discover that he is still warm; two hours or more of just sitting still out on the ice floe has not chilled him, except for the tip of his nose.

The clouds are solid overhead. There is no hint of sunrise on the horizon in any direction. Francis Crozier has absolutely no hint as to where the woman is taking him — back to King William Island? South to the Adelaide Peninsula? Toward Back’s River? Farther out onto the ice?

“My men,” he rasps at her. He strains to raise his voice and be heard over the wind sigh, snow hiss, and the groaning of the thick ice beneath them. “I need to get back to my men. They’re looking for me. Miss… ma’am… Lady Silence, please. For the love of God, please take me back to Rescue Camp.”

Silence does not turn. He can see only the back of her hood and the white bear ruff gleaming in the faint starlight. He has no idea how she can see to proceed in this darkness or how such a small girl can pull his weight and the sledge’s weight so easily.

They glide silently into the darkness of the ice jumble ahead.