The Voyage of the Unquiet Ice (23 page)

They launched the boats at the third bell after midday.

Already the winter darkness was nearly full. Shreds of mist drifted across the sea, and deeper banks of cloud lay in wait northwards. Dow's crew settled their cutter into the icy waters, raised sail and struck out into the gloom. By the time they'd reached their station – with the ship no more than a half-guessed shadow behind – the night around them was complete.

But then they lit their whale-oil lamp.

It was fixed to a pivot on the bow, and was shaped like a squat tube with a single glass lens at its foreward end. The reservoir for its precious oil was surprisingly small, but as the refined fluid hissed to life inside the chamber, a beam burst forth of such brightness and clarity that it seemed to extend for hundreds of yards ahead, lighting up both sea and mist in stark relief.

Three similar flares burst into existence off to their right, for Dow's boat was on the far left of the line, with the other three spread away east. Their echelon established, the four now sailed forward in unison, beams probing to either hand, and dead ahead.

There followed a night that was, for Dow, an unimaginably strange experience. The sea was preternaturally calm about their boat, and the hissing of the lamp was so loud that it smothered all smaller sounds around them, creating an odd sensation of quiet. Ahead stretched a half-lit world of glowing mists and dancing shadows, backed by an impenetrable black wall, and to either side was a vast nothingness out of which the cold seemed to flow like the antithesis of sunlight, burning upon any unprotected skin; while behind them followed a great bright-eyed beast of sail and rope and wood – the
Chloe,
creeping along in their wake, its own ice lamps burning fiercely .

And all about them the mountainous bergs sailed. Most remained hidden in the dark, but now and then a terrible crack and groan would pierce the night, or there would come a long avalanche of sound that meant one of the monstrous things was rolling over. Few came close, but four times throughout the evening the probing beams of the boats picked up bergs directly ahead – cliffs of ice rising up, sparkling wickedly in the light. The nearest boat, left or right, would signal back to the
Chloe,
and in convoy the boats and the ship would steer about the giant obstruction, and then begin again.

Thus they endured – unharmed, through eighteen hours of interminable winter night – until the grey gloaming returned, and the mists drew back, and the boats at last could go home. And thus they endured throughout the next four nights as well, plotting their cautious path between the ever more crowded bergs, amid the never-ending hiss and thunder of ice growing and collapsing. Although these were not really
nights
anymore, and nor could they be called days, for neither word had meaning in the arctic winter. There was only darkness now. The
Chloe
had passed north of all sunrises or blue skies, into a realm where even the brightest day was no more than a passing twilight at noon.

And all the while the cold intensified. It was not merely a temperature now, but a force that seemed to beat upon the ship and everyone on board, grinding at their will. Away from the fires, wet clothes froze solid. So did coils of rope, or folds of canvas. The frosted rigging burnt the hands of those aloft, and a fine ice rained in constant showers from the sails, and every crewman was pinched-faced and exhausted and tense.

It was worst of all for those on board the cutters, hunched in the open air for long tedious hours at a stretch, with not even movement to warm them, and with only the short twilight day in which to rest in the refuge of the ship, before they must set out again.

‘But this is still a lucky voyage,' Alfons insisted through his chattering teeth, late during their fourth night in the boat. ‘Not a man lost yet, and not a single scratch on the ship so far from any ice.'

‘Aye,' growled another of the seamen, Antonio, though he was scarcely identifiable under his hood, ‘but I hear that the captain don't like to call it luck. He put Nell in her place the other day in front of everyone, when she did her blessing. He said it's seamanship that's the thing.'

The poet hitched a shoulder doubtfully. ‘I've little time for scapegoats, as you know – living so high and mighty as they do with the officers, and never mind that they don't know a thing about sailing – so I won't argue with the captain on Nell's account. But as fine a navigator as he is, I doubt Vincente alone could con so smooth a path through the ice as we've seen. No, a special fortune is guarding us – but it's Dow's fortune, not Nell's.'

‘I'll have no criticism of the captain,' warned Samson, from his position next to Dow in the stern seat.

‘None intended, Excellency. I'm only saying it takes more than good planning to get through ice like this.' He glanced austerely about the boat in the hissing lamplight. ‘In fact, I'll tell you a story that was told to me by the poet of the very first ship on which I served, as a boy, over fifty years ago.
He
heard it when he himself was a boy, from a poet who had gone exploring in the Ice, before the Great War even, on a ship called the
Radiant.

‘Now, the
Radiant
was a vessel well prepared, like us, and like us they sent out boats to find their way through the ice fields – but their caution and cunning weren't enough. For they happened upon a great berg – the greatest berg ever beheld; a full three thousand feet it rose – and even as they came upon it, it began to topple slowly, and one of the boats was caught beneath it. But the horror of the thing was that the boat was not broken or smashed, but rather captured within a huge cave-like cavity in the berg's side, and so was borne gently down into the deeps, its crew living yet as they went under.

‘None expected to see that crew ever again, nevertheless, the captain halted the ship, and for a day they searched the icy waters for survivors. And all that same day the great berg floated there – until evening, when the monstrous beast rolled slowly once more. And lo, as it revolved back to its old position, there was the boat again, still held within the cavity and now free to float forth. Men rushed to it, hoping against hope, but of course no one was alive, as they could never have been, after so long.

‘But that wasn't the awful thing. The awful thing was the state of the bodies. For they were quite dry – having been held secure it seemed within a pocket of air inside the great berg. And yet even within that pocket of air they had been crushed by the terrible pressures of the deep, their skulls pressed flat, their chests reduced to a pulp like mashed up paper.

‘For consider; if the great berg rose three thousand feet above the surface, then it must have extended ten times that distance below – that's five miles or more. Think of it! Five miles down those poor men were carried, alive. Five miles down into the cold darkness, screaming in their black prison. And all the while the pressure would have built, squeezing their air pocket smaller and smaller, until the air itself – mere air – crushed them.

‘A hideous death. But such was their fate – and the point of their tale is this. Not all the seamanship in the world, nor the finest captain in the fleet, will save us from the Ice, if we are fated to die likewise.'

The men all shuddered in dread, but Samson, signalling with the green lantern back to the
Chloe,
only smiled. ‘No berg of such size has ever been sighted, and is quite impossible, even in theory.'

‘Oh?' queried the poet, unimpressed.

‘I may have seen less of the Ice than you, Alfons, but I've made long study of it, and soundings taken by the old explorers tell us that nowhere in the arctic does the sea floor go below three miles deep. A berg therefore, if it is to remain afloat, cannot ever extend more than three miles down, and hence not more than a tenth of that above the water – fifteen hundred feet at most. Only half the height of your great berg. In truth, bergs seldom reach even a thousand feet, for they are constantly broken and rebuilt by their incessant rolling.'

‘Ah,' objected Alfons, ‘but what of the Ice Wall, to which we draw ever nearer. I've glimpsed it only from afar, but it was no mere thousand feet tall. It was ten times that height, and more. So how is that possible?'

The lieutenant replied, ‘It's possible because the ocean grows shallower as it approaches the furthest north, as if the world bulges up around the pole. Depths fall to little more than a mile, and hence the largest bergs ground themselves upon the ocean floor and come to rest. After that, they no longer roll or topple. They become fixed bases upon which immense spires can rise – and rise they do, between nicre climbing from below, and snow falling from above. And thence they grow together to form the unbroken shield and barrier that is the Ice Wall.'

‘And beyond that?' Dow asked, as Alfons looked away, neither conceding or arguing the point.

‘Beyond that, Mr Amber,' said Samson, ‘no one knows.'

On their fifth day among the bergs a towering wall did come marching out of the north, not of ice, but rather of fog, a solid mass of it, swallowing sea and sky alike as it advanced. It swept over the
Chloe
in a silent tide, and encased them in a vault of dead, dank grey.

This was a telling moment. Measuring devices were lowered over the side to confirm what the fog already betrayed: the presence of warmer water.

It was not
warm
water, of course, but it was, by a fraction, above freezing – and it was flowing from the north. It was indeed precisely the warm current they had been sent to find, located exactly where it was supposed to be. Somewhere tantalisingly close now must lie the fabled gulf in the Ice Wall, into which Nadal and his fleet had seemingly vanished.

But the current, as Fidel had warned, brought new dangers too. The fog it produced was thicker and heavier than any previous mist, blinding the
Chloe
even in the fleeting twilight of day, reduced in any case to a single hour now, so far north had they come. And in the following darkness, as the boats launched out once more, the fog rendered the ice lamps all but useless, reflecting much of their brightness back as white glare to the crews.

For Dow and his companions that fifth night was a nightmarish and sightless ordeal. The water may have warmed, but the fog remained freezing, sinking clammily into every crevice of their clothing and chilling them through. And though few bergs were visible in the void, the fog magnified every sound, so that the white darkness was doubly alive with their groans and shrieks.

Once, to judge by the hellish din, one icy giant toppled into another, which then toppled and crashed into a third, all of it monstrous and slow and stupefyingly noisy, as if the world itself was being smashed by some deranged hand, but all of it unseen, save for the waves that came surging out of the fog, seething under the cutters' hulls.

‘Is
this
our good luck,' moaned the seaman Luca to Alfons, as their boat bucked and heaved in the wash.

And still the poet was undaunted. ‘Is any one of us sunk? No, four boats go on, and the
Chloe
too. Remember lads – five miles deep and crushed. We're far better off than
those
poor souls.'

But his faith was about to be sorely tested.

Halfway between the dead of night and the far off dawn, when everyone's eyes and ears were dulled by the endless trial, a cliff of ice came striding out of the fog, too wide and tall to be defined by the lamps.

Even as the berg appeared, no more than fifty yards from their bow, it began, awfully and ponderously, to tilt. Through his shock, Dow thought for an instant that they might yet be saved, because the wall was tilting
away
from them – but then abruptly the sea began to boil all about the cutter and he realised the horrible truth. As the berg upended itself, its entire submerged bulk, a mountain of ice far more massive than its upper part, was now swimming up from the deeps – and they were right on top of it.

There was a terrible sensation of the ocean all around them rising, and of a white massiveness looming through the black water beneath, and Dow just had time to consider the irony that they would be killed not by being plunged
under
by a berg, but by being thrown too high …

Then, with a roaring like a great waterfall, the sea began to stream off the berg as it rose. Thunder filled the night, and a ragged new cliff ascended into the air, but the cutter was swept away and down over the cataracts, back to the safety of sea level, where it merely tossed back and forth in the conflicting surges, the berg rolling and roaring, searching for its new equilibrium as nicre clawed hungrily up its freshly exposed face.

By now even Alfons had his head buried between his knees, moaning to himself in fear. ‘Five miles deep, five miles deep. The great ocean preserve us and see us through this hideous night.'

‘And grant us light,' Samson added fervently, ‘even where light cannot shine.'