The Voyage of the Unquiet Ice (31 page)

And yet – surely water so warm must be eating away at the base of the ice cliffs? Puzzled, Dow looked hard at the walls, and was astonished to see what he should have seen, no doubt, some time ago. The lower few feet of walls were no longer of ice – they were of stone!

He stared back and forth along the chasm. Yes, on both sides the ice walls rested now upon rocky feet, the stone glistening with frost, so that it still appeared white in the lamp glow. At some point, the ice chasm had become a fissure running through solid bedrock.

‘One hour,' said Nell, and the rowers put up their oars. The boat slid a few last yards in silence. There was, Dow noted, no current flowing outwards any longer.

Faces haggard, the six crewman stared expectantly at Nell –
turn back,
their silence said. But Nell turned to Dow, and in her eyes he read a mix of defiance and pleading. She wanted to go on, but even her nerve was failing now. She couldn't make the choice.

‘The walls,' Dow said to the rowers. ‘Look at them. The ice sits not in the ocean anymore, but upon dry land.'

The men looked about, startled.

‘We must go on,' Dow added, striving to sound calm. ‘At least a little further, to see what this means …'

Nell took a grateful breath. In the bow Alfons gave a doubtful tilt of his head, but nodded finally. ‘Another quarter hour then,' said the poet, his eyes intent upon Dow, as if demanding a promise.

‘Aye,' added Johannes, ‘a little further. And we can row like men possessed if we still have to turn tail for home.'

So Nell tipped the hourglass, and they went on.

On either side, the stone walls rose gradually higher. Ten feet, then twenty above the waterline, and eventually they extended beyond the range of the lamps. And even though Dow could sense the ice still towering on top of the stone, there was at least some comfort in knowing that the whole edifice rested now on a solid base. Stone walls would not suddenly slam shut, the way ice might. Nor would they collapse so easily.

But watching the walls, Dow became aware of another change. The water – ever so slightly – had begun to ripple and undulate once more. But now it was flowing
inwards
. And dragging the boat along with it.

He fought down panic. He knew what this inflow meant – the next wave could not be far off.

But they were almost through, he was sure. The rift was growing wider. At its narrowest it had dwindled to a bare thirty yards across, but slowly it was opening out again. Dow felt as if a band was loosening about his lungs. And as the rowers hurried the boat forward, so did the inflow increase, and time too hastened on. It seemed like only moments before Nell was holding up the hourglass, to show it drained by a third.

But no one suggested stopping, for high, high overhead a thin strip of colour had become visible. A line of red and green. It was the sky. And sight of it again was as welcome as dawn after the blackest of nights, for it confirmed that the end of the chasm must be close – and with it the source of the glow against the clouds, for the green and red shimmers were brighter than ever.

On they plunged, oblivious to the strength of the current now, even though it was sucking them inwards as fast as the men could row. The walls flew by, but at the same time the mists low upon the water were thickening, so that the boat rushed forward into hazy obscurity. Or was there a glow directly ahead now?

Then the chasm walls vanished on either hand, as abruptly as if the boat had just issued through an enormous gateway. Open air was all about them, a giddy freedom from the weight of ice and stone overhead, and the rowers put up their oars again, turning to stare forward into the tantalising mist. Dow knew what they must be thinking, of the rumours of green lands and bright cities that waited beyond the Ice Wall. He too stared.

The boat slid on, drawn now by the current alone, as if on a wide, bank-less river. A low rumbling came from ahead, and indeed from all around. The glow through the mists brightened, and then finally the fog was fragmenting and lifting away in spirals. The boat emerged at last into clear water and open night. The eight of them looked. And looked.

‘Oh,' whispered Nell. ‘Oh no …'

For a first bewildered moment Dow thought he
was
beholding a city – a city of towers and streets, all lit by thousands of red lamps. But then he realised that nothing before him was man-made.

Instead there rose – some four or five miles away across troubled waters – a mountain; a mountain that was on fire; a great, cruel cone of ash and slag, wracked and tormented by forces so mighty they had collapsed half its bulk, leaving a fractured rim that curved about a hollowed-out core, a crater from which a glow leapt constantly, red, then green, then white. And all around this burning, broken titan there spread a vast circle of ocean, ringed on all sides by the soaring cliffs of the inner Ice Wall, which climbed here to even more stupendous heights than the outer ramparts, like a blister upraised about a hot wound, four miles, maybe, from foot to peak.

‘A volcano,' Nell breathed, in a horror so profound that Dow turned from the wonder of the sight to look at her. ‘A cauldron of fire. And we have sailed blindly within its grasp …'

She was not staring at the mountain, Dow saw, but rather at the Ice Wall that circled all around. His gaze followed hers. He knew the word volcano, for he had heard tales told – home in the inn at Stromner – of the fiery hills that existed upon Red Island. Indeed, the mountain ahead looked much as he'd imagined a volcano might, if all the more forbidding in reality.

But he saw now what Nell saw – that the fearsome mount was in fact only the small inner nub of the
true,
and far greater, volcano. For it was not ice that surrounded the inner sea – it was instead a vast rampart of stone, jagged and snow draped, uplifted in a sheer and unbroken wall; a ring four miles high encircling a drowned crater fully fifteen miles across. And all about the surface of that crater, steam was rising from the ocean in great plumes, illuminated by a fire-glow that came from
under
the water; blazes raging in the depths.

They had not sailed within sight of a volcano.

They had sailed
inside
a volcano.

For a time, as the others too absorbed the gravity of their situation, there was a stricken silence in the boat. All the while they were swept further out into the inner sea, but no one took up an oar to fight against the current. Forgotten too was any fear of the imminent wave that had so threatened them in the chasm. All such matters seemed shrunken now; it was everything the mind could do to simply take in the scale of the scene. Mists and smokes choked the sky, and a hot stench hung in the air that reminded Dow of gunpowder.

It was Johannes, native of Red Island, who broke the awed hush. His tone was deceptively calm, as if he viewed the setting only from a distance, and stood in no danger. ‘Many are the fiery craters and hot pools of my homeland – but there is nothing to approach this.'

‘Aye,' uttered Alfons, with a similar dazed detachment. ‘And here lies the answer to many a mystery of old. The sea is warmed by the fires beneath us, and then through the cracks that open in these great walls it can flow to melt a passage though the ice to the outer world.'

‘Just such a passage as we followed to come here,' agreed Johannes. ‘But never the same passage twice – for different cracks must open and close over the years as the earth shifts and quakes, and the fires below too must ebb and surge in their heat, and so in turn the warm currents will flow or fail, and the channels they cut will freeze or thaw. All exactly as the legends say. No wonder the mariners of old were so confounded.'

‘And yet we have not been!' rejoined Alfons. ‘Behold; these fires have raged hotly enough, and enduringly enough, to clear
our
way even in the dead of winter. We are favoured by fortune still, it seems.'

But Nell – Dow saw – did not agree. She was shaking her head wordlessly, as if too appalled to speak.

‘What?' he asked her.

‘Fools,' she whispered. ‘We must turn back.'

Turn back? Dow looked behind them. By now, the current had carried them some distance inwards from the crater wall. Above the fogs towered unspeakable bastions of stone, red in the fire glow. The rift through which they'd come was a great dark breach torn in those bastions, wide and crumbling at its peak, but narrower at its base. White froth foamed there at sea level, where the flow from the chasm came rushing in.

Johannes said, ‘But what of survivors? Could not there be men here from the lost fleet? Should we not search for them?'

‘Fools,' grated Nell again. ‘There is no one here. If they came, they are dead. And so will we be soon if we stay.'

‘Why?' demanded Dow. ‘What's wrong?'

‘Don't you see?' She thrust the hour-glass at him – until now wrapped tightly in her hand. ‘It will soon be two full hours since we set out. Two hours since the last wave ran through the chasm.'

Dow could only frown in perplexity. What did that matter, when they were no longer
in
the chasm?

Her breath was exasperated. ‘Where do you think the waves come from? They don't begin in the chasm. They begin here! The water is sinking for now, but it will rise again, violently, and soon!'

Sinking?

Dow stared back again at the water rushing in through the rift – and slowly the realisation dawned. On a vast scale the level of the inner sea must indeed be dropping, and so drawing in the outer ocean. Dow couldn't begin to guess what might cause such massive drainage, but what disturbed Nell he knew was not the inflow itself, but the knowledge that very soon it must all be reversed. Had they not seen it from the deck of the
Chloe,
at the mouth of the rift; the waves howling
out
of the chasm.

Johannes, wise in the way of volcanos, was nodding in dread and wonder. ‘Yes. I see how it must be. In my homeland there are geysers among the hot pools – caverns beneath the surface that will draw water into them, bubbling and steaming, until, at regular intervals, be it an hour, or a day, some crucial pressure is reached in the depths below, or some chamber is filled beyond bearing with steam, and then with a great gush the geysers will explode, expelling all the water they've absorbed in scalding jets and fountains. So it must be here – but of a magnitude beyond all reason, enormous enough to lift this entire sea, and so send waves rushing out through the chasm.'

Dow's skin crawled in trepidation. His gaze returned to the hourglass in Nell's hand, and then met her eyes, to read the despair there. They knew that the upheavals came as little as two hours apart. And the timepiece showed a bare third remaining of their second hour.

He stared back the way they'd come. They must row for their very lives – but before he could give the order, he saw how hopeless it would be. For they'd been driven a full mile now from the crater wall. Even if they could row against the current, and reach the chasm again, what then? It must be another five miles back through the ice. Could they make it that far – against the flow – before the surge came thundering through behind them?

No, little hope lay that way. What then could they do? Where could they go? The only safe course was to get out of the water – but there was no way to scale the sheer crater walls. Which left only …

Dow turned full about. There it stood, still three miles at least across the inner sea, the central mount of the greater volcano – not truly central, but in fact set much closer to their own side of the crater. Luckily so! Barren and stony and riven with fire, it was dry land nevertheless.

‘Row,' he said, pointing. ‘Row hard.'

The oarsmen did not need it explained – they had all seen exactly what Dow had seen. They set to in a frenzy, heaving on the oars. Too fast, Dow knew, and too frantic. They would never last. But he said nothing, only stared forward doggedly as he steered.

Nobody spoke. There was nothing to say. A throbbing undertone was building around them, but whether it came from beneath the water, or was a pulse in the air itself, Dow couldn't tell. He knew only that as the throb rose, so did the expectation of disaster in his heart.

Nell was hunched over her hourglass, eyes fixed upon it. The sand ran down to empty, and wordlessly she flipped it over. Two hours gone, and the third hour begun. This very moment, perhaps, vast chambers far below were filling with unbearable volumes of steam.

On they rowed, the oarsmen gasping and straining. The mount rose steadily before them; Dow could see small waves breaking upon its shores. But – though surely it was only his imagination – it seemed, too, he could feel the water actually dropping away beneath the boat, the basin hurrying to its catastrophe. The upheaval was possible at any instant, but if it could just hold off a little longer, only a quarter hour more, then they—

Dow felt it happen before any sound came; an almighty
push
from deep below, an impact of pressure so profound that the air and the water and the sky all seemed to compress from the shock of it, silent.