The Ice Child (20 page)

“I always go, every summer,” she replied, frowning.

“Why?”

She shook her head. “Why?” she said, confused. “To see my father. I’ve seen him every year, every August for ten years.”

“But you wouldn’t take me, would you?”

She stared at him, astonished. “John, you never asked me.”

“But would you?” he demanded.

“I don’t know.…”

He started to walk. “Well, that’s fine, then.”

“John,” she called. She tried to pull on his arm. “You never asked me.…”

“Look,” he said, stopping for a second. “That’s all right. You go and see him. It’s a traditional thing, I understand, I know that. Awkward to take me, I realize. But, like”—he pressed his fist, closed, against his forehead, for a moment—“but when I want to go to Canada, just don’t tell me what my bloody motives are, ail right? Don’t be like her.” And he jerked his finger back to the house.

“It’s because we love you,” she said simply. “Just as your father loves Jo Harper. Just as you love him.”

He stared at her.

There was a silence, a very long silence, while the soft green landscape wept.

Then he walked away, toward the gate to the road.

Fifteen

Panic set in as they entered the strait.

The first thing that Franklin ordered was steam: the locomotive engines below roared, and the ships at first broke through the gathering ice, cracking it like gunshots. The sun was high, the wind strong; the ships plunged through ice and waves alike. A high white light began to beat down on them, as if there were more than one sun in the sky. Gus stood slackjawed, bumped by the men who brushed past him, trying to see where the new light was coming from.

Terror
sailed in
Erebus
’s wake, and barely had
Erebus
found her way through, when they saw the ice re-forming behind her. They plunged into it, each man with a single hope in his heart.

Just through these miles. Just through this strait. There will be free water on the other side
.

The ice did not surrender silently to them. Far from it. It whistled and whined and thundered; sometimes it sounded like animals baying, or like birds screeching. Sometimes it grumbled low, as if there were something under the waves, some sea monster, beating the underside of the ship. It was as if the ice were alive. It snaked and snapped and fell away from them, and as they pushed on from the front, it tugged at the stern, huge cold hands swatting the timber.

As noon passed, Gus realized what the new light was: it was the reflection from ice ahead. There was electric-blue water, and streams of floating pack, but beyond that, far ahead, the whole world was white, and the light was pouring from it and filling the sky, and the decks looked white themselves, bleached almost clean of their color.
Terror
shook like a man in a fever, and rolled as she was pushed. The more she rolled, and the more
Erebus
rolled ahead of them, the more steam was called for, and the belching from the funnel cut a black channel through the light.

At one o’clock Augustus was sent below. They needed more men with the stoking, and he was fly and small, and could dodge quicker and rake harder, pushing the coal forward. It was like Hades down there, in the harsh glow, and so hot that they worked naked to the waist, coal dust and sweat running down them. Gus ran as fast as he was ordered, feeling the dust coating his throat and making his lungs tight.

The man nearest him never stopped swearing. He cursed the heat, the ice, the ship, the captain.

“Never wanted to see no Pacific,” he ranted, as he shoveled. “Never want to see no more ocean. Never no more ocean, never more ocean, ocean.…”

It rolled like a song. They worked relentlessly, until sweat ran into their eyes, and they had to be replaced by others, because they couldn’t breathe anymore in the blazing pit.

As Gus staggered out, he felt the ship wrench.

“Mother of God,” said one man. They froze where they were, feeling the shift under their feet. “She’s going over.”

Terror
lifted up. An enormous boulder of ice had pressed her suddenly and hard. They felt her lose contact with the water and dance along a little. For minutes
Terror
skirted along the ice. No one looked at each other. Instead, they looked up, at the low beams of the deck above, waiting. Then, just as suddenly, the pressure eased, and
Terror
dropped back down. Augustus looked around, searching for the sailor who had told him, not so long ago, about ice relaxations. Although he knew full well that this had not been like the others they had felt. The blow from the ice had felt like the strike of Olympus: massive, implacable.

“Don’t let us be killed,” Gus whispered.

A call went up on deck. Two men came down the ladder.

“He’s sending out a boat crew,” they said.

Six men from each ship were sent down onto the floes ahead. Here, for two hours, they hacked at the ice. It was a deadly business. At any moment each man risked being thrown into the water, for no one could tell whether the grinding ice was inches or feet thick—it changed with every moment. The men slithered and slipped at their task, working like black demons under the very prow of each ship with axes. From time to time both
Erebus
and
Terror
backed up and rammed, backed up and rammed.

Gus sat in misery below, while the
Terror
groaned and jolted.

They were going to be stuck. They were going to be here another winter. They would surely starve.

He had heard it said that if they were stopped here, the rations would be reduced. A winter in the strait would bring them into the third year, and in truth, after expending so much coal already, and not having shot as much game as they had anticipated on Beechey, they did not have enough food to see them through safely for another twelve months. And not enough coal to cook it. The rations would be cut to four-upon-six. That meant that every six men were issued with the allowance for four, and it would be a case of tightening their belts and putting up with it, right through the worst of the coming weather. And they would depend, from now on, entirely upon the tins and hard tack, and salt pork.

Gus hated the tins. They never saw meat, but they had plenty of the soups—parsnip, carrot, potato. He had never much liked vegetables, and he had to hold his breath to swallow it. He had grown to hate the Goldner name too. Every single pack had the familiar scripted letters upon it, and Gus wished he could meet the supplier, to force his own sickly, bland bouilli down the man’s throat. The idea that he would probably have to eat most of his reduced meals cold, to save on heat, made him want to vomit.

But of all their rations the situation with the coal was probably worst of all. When he had been at the fires, Gus saw that there was not much left. Steaming, especially the ramming, took vast quantities, guzzling up far more than they were able to shovel. Today they had gone through over three tons. He knew that they needed that coal. They needed it in the winter, for heating the lower deck, so that they did not freeze in their beds. They needed it for heating up the food and for melting ice for water. If they tried to break through the ice at this same pace for very much longer, the coal would be exhausted entirely, and such a prospect was unthinkable. It would be a signed death warrant.

He put his head in his hands, covering his eyes.

They would be without color again. They would be in the dark.

He tried to summon up the colors he remembered. He tried to think of what London had been like on the day he was brought down to the ship. He thought of the red-and-green awnings over the stores; he thought of the trees coming into leaf, the bright acid-green of new leaves in sunshine. He thought of the acres and acres of apple blossom in Kent, where his mother had lodged for three days with her sister before taking him to Greenhithe. All those hundreds of trees, their branches waving like frothy petticoats.

He thought of the colors of clothes—not sealskin or fur or moleskin leggings, but soft, thin clothes: pale cream breeches, tan jackets, blue coats. He thought of the blazing scarlet of a woman’s dress as she had stepped down from a carriage: such brilliant, gently folding fabric. He could visualize it exactly now: exactly how it fell to the ground. Exactly how the petals of flowers drifted quickly under the dress and reappeared as she turned on the pavement. He saw the polished brass of the door knockers on the houses. He saw the lemon-sprigged muslin across the window in his aunt’s little house. The sunlight in the kitchen.

“Franklin is out,” a man said.

Gus opened his eyes. “On deck?”

“You can hear him shouting.”

Gus crept up the long ladder. Skittering around the starboard side, he saw the officers, Blanky among them.
Erebus
was perilously close. So close that half a dozen men, hands linked and legs astride, could have bridged the gap between them. The ice was screaming, grinding, keening. And it was true: Franklin himself was on the deck of
Erebus
, and he was shouting, his voice as wild as the ice, high pitched. Gus froze in shock: Franklin had never raised his voice, never shown any prolonged temper. The noise coming from his throat now did not belong to him. It was the voice of a man defying the elements. Pitting himself against an impossible foe. It was the kind of noise a man would make in the throes of a last despair, and the blood rushed to Gus’s face and his heart squeezed.

There was a sudden flurry on the
Terror
.

“He is down,” Blanky called.

Who was down? One of the men on the ice?

Who was down?

Terror
lurched. Ice sheered upward between the two ships, a great white solid fountain. Particles showered the deck, landed on Gus’s shoulders and face. He was so close to
Erebus
, he could hear the squeaking of the ropes as they strained. He could see the flakes of paint coming from her keel.

Then came the giant.

As Gus listened to the mixture of shouting voices from
Erebus
, he heard another cry go up from his own ship.

“Dear Mother of God and all the angels!”

He turned to look.

They all did.

About a quarter of a mile to stern they saw the pack behind them suddenly pile up, as if the enormous weight of the ice was nothing more than paper cards. It crumbled and fell, rose up again and fell, reached upward and fell, and with every falling and climbing, greater layers of floe lay tumbled in huge blocks at the feet of the newly forming berg, pushing it ever higher after each temporary destruction. Something massive was pushing it from behind, something grotesque. It was as if God himself had come down into Victoria Strait on invisible ships and, with an energy that made the mountains and seas and continents, was making a new sea now, a new vast plate of tumbled ice. It was Genesis in the making, the creation of a world.

And it was coming straight for them.

“Our Father,” Gus stammered, “who art in heaven …”

He was not in heaven, though. He was here. He was charging them down with His great white hands. He was stampeding His oceans, whipping them into frenzy, freezing them where they once boiled and flew. And the result—the house-high, thousand-ton wedges of berg—were ramming their way forward, as if everything in their way were nothing at all, carried no weight, occupied no space.
Terror
was merely a shadow, a breath that would soon be snuffed out.

It was two hundred yards away.

It was one hundred yards away.

It was taller than the ship, a white rock wall, a fortress, flying.

“Thy Kingdom come, Thy …”

Gus stopped. Was this His will, to extinguish them? Was he to pray for that, for the end? To be blasted away, to be drowned? The thought flashed with utmost clarity in his head: he did not want to be drowned. He did not want to go into that sea. He did not want to feel the heel of God on his neck.

He closed his eyes. “Thy will be done,” he breathed.

He gave himself up to his Maker, wished for a quick death.

Waited.

“Dear Jesus,” a man said at his side.

Gus opened his eyes. The grinding, crashing, whining, of the approaching ice wall had abruptly stopped. There was, again, the unearthly silence of pressure meeting pressure. Between
Erebus
and
Terror
a broken landscape of ice had appeared, and both ships, tilting in opposite directions, lay skewered on its surface. And overhanging them both was the mountain that had done the impossible, and found its feet, and run: it towered eighty feet high in their wake, not more than fifty yards away. It had stopped.

“Captain, sir!”

The voice broke the silence. Every living soul on both ships could be heard to breathe suddenly out, a gasp of relief and disbelief. They were still alive.

“Captain Crozier, sir!”

Crozier was at the rail.

The first mate of
Erebus
was barely twenty feet away.

“What is it?” Crozier shouted.

“Mr. Franklin, sir! Sir John, sir!” the man babbled.

“What is the matter?” Crozier demanded.

There was no reply. Gus could still hear the steam engine whining belowdeck. Crozier turned. “Shut off the steam, for God’s sake,” he yelled.

The moments that followed were eerie. The ice hung above and between them. The ships did not make a sound.

“God save our souls,” someone murmured.

“What is the matter?” Crozier repeated.

“Sir John is taken,” came the reply.

They waited aboard
Terror
for a half hour.

“He is dead,” the crew muttered, “and so are we.”

It was six in the evening before Crozier at last called the crew together. The wind had risen a little by then, but the ice seemed to have stopped. They could feel that they were being carried very slowly by fits and starts. The bergs were blue in the glowering sky.

“Sir John has suffered an apoplexy,” Crozier said, raising his voice against the wind. “He is recovered. There is nothing at all to worry about.”

They heard him, and they heard the difference in him. They looked at each other, and back at the captain ahead of them, who had predicted this day: that they would meet the huge ice currents flowing down the strait—that there would be no getting through them. That they would not have the strength, with all the damned engines sitting impotently now under their feet, to take more than a few hours’ grace from the deadly pressure of the freezing sea.