Goodsir tried to rush forward, but the boy, Golding, held him fast with one hand while holding the shotgun to his head with the other.
Crozier did not move a muscle as the giant lumbered toward him. When Manson’s shadow fell over both the captain and George Thompson holding him, Thompson himself flinched just a bit, Crozier sagged back, lunged forward, freed his left arm, and thrust his hand into the left pocket of his greatcoat.
Golding almost pulled the shotgun’s trigger, thus almost blowing Goodsir’s head off by accident, so startled was he as the captain’s coat pocket burst into flame and the muted double boom of an explosion rolled past them and echoed back from the seracs.
“Ouch,” said Magnus Manson, slowly raising his hands to his belly.
“God-damn it,” Crozier said calmly. He had inadvertently fired both barrels of a two-shot pistol.
“Magnus!” cried Hickey and rushed forward to the giant.
“I think the captain shot me, Cornelius,” said Manson. The big man sounded confused and a little bemused.
“Goodsir,” shouted Crozier amid the confusion. The captain whirled, kneed Thompson in the bollocks and broke free. “Run!”
The surgeon tried. He pulled, shoved, and almost won his freedom before the younger Golding tripped him, knocked him onto his belly, and set the full pressure of his knee on Goodsir’s back and the full force of two shotgun barrels against the back of Goodsir’s skull.
Crozier was loping for the seracs.
Hickey calmly seized a shotgun from Richard Aylmore, aimed, and fired both barrels.
The top of a serac splintered and fell at the same time that Crozier was thrown forward on his face, sliding on the ice and on a film of his own blood.
Hickey handed the shotgun back and unbuttoned Manson’s coats and waistcoasts, ripping open the big man’s shirts and filthy undershirt. “Bring the fucking surgeon over here,” he shouted at Golding.
“It don’t hurt much, Cornelius,” rumbled Magnus Manson. “Tickles, more like.”
Golding shoved, prodded, and dragged Goodsir over. The surgeon put on his glasses and inspected the twin wounds. “I’m not certain, but I don’t believe the small- caliber bullets penetrated Mr. Manson’s subcutaneous fat, much less his muscle layer. It’s little more than two minor punctures, I fear. Now may I go attend to Captain Crozier, Mr. Hickey?”
Hickey laughed.
“Cornelius!” shouted Aylmore.
Crozier, leaving a trail of blood and shredded outer clothing, had gotten to his knees and begun crawling toward the seracs and serac shadows. Now he painfully got to his feet. He staggered drunkenly toward the ice columns.
Golding giggled and raised his shotgun.
“No!” cried Hickey. He pulled Crozier’s big percussion-cap pistol from his coat pocket and took careful aim.
Twenty feet from the seracs, Crozier looked back over his shredded shoulder.
Hickey fired.
The bullet spun Crozier around and dropped him to his knees. His body sagged, but he flailed and thrust one hand down onto the ice in an attempt to rise.
Hickey took five steps forward and fired again.
Crozier was thrown backward and lay on his back with only his knees in the air.
Hickey took two more steps, aimed, and fired again. One of Crozier’s legs was knocked aside and down as the bullet tore through the knee or the muscle just below the knee. The captain made no sound.
“Cornelius, honey.” Magnus Manson’s voice had the tone of an injured child. “My stomach is starting to hurt.”
Hickey wheeled. “Goodsir, give him something for the pain.”
The surgeon nodded. His voice, when he spoke, was very thin and very tight and very flat. “I brought an entire bottle of Dover’s Powder – mostly made from a derivative of the coca plant, sometimes called cocaine. I’ll give him that. All of it, if you like. With a chaser of Mandragora, laudanum, and morphine. That will take away the pain.” He reached into his medical kit.
Hickey raised the pistol and aimed it at the surgeon’s left eye. “If you even make Magnus sick to his stomach, much less if your fucking hand comes out of that bag with a scalpel or other blade, I swear to fucking Christ I’ll shoot you in the balls and keep you alive long enough to make you eat them. Do you understand, Surgeon?”
“I understand,” said Goodsir. “But it is the Hippocratic oath that determines my next actions.” He brought out a bottle and spoon and poured out a tiny bit of liquid morphine. “Sip this,” he said to the giant.
“Thank you, Doctor,” said Magnus Manson. He slurped soundly.
“Cornelius!” cried Thompson, pointing.
Crozier was gone. Bloody smears led into the seracs.
“Oh, fuck me,” said the caulker’s mate with a sigh. “This arsehole is more trouble than he is worth. Dickie, have you reloaded?” Hickey was reloading the pistol as he asked the question.
“Aye,” said Aylmore, lifting the shotgun.
“Thompson, pick up the extra shotgun I brought and stay here with Magnus and the surgeon. If the good doctor does anything at all that you don’t like – even farts – blow his private parts off.”
Thompson nodded. Golding giggled. Hickey with his pistol and Golding and Aylmore with their shotguns advanced slowly across the moonlit ice and then tentatively, single file, into the forest of seracs and shadows.
“He could be hard to find in here,” whispered Aylmore as they stepped into the stripes of moonlight and darkness.
“I don’t think so,” said Hickey, and pointed at the broad smear of blood that led straight ahead between the ice columns like a telegraph code of black dots and dashes between the shadows.
“He still has a little pistol with him,” whispered Aylmore, moving cautiously from serac to serac.
“Fuck him and fuck his pistol,” said Hickey, striding straight ahead, his boots slipping a bit on the blood and ice.
Golding giggled loudly. “Fuck him and fuck his little pistol,” he said in a singsong voice, snickering again.
The blood trail ended forty feet in at the black
“God-damn it to God-damn fucking hell,” cried Hickey, pacing back and forth. “I wanted to put that last bullet into the high-and-mighty king’s fucking face while he watched, God-
“Look, Mr. Hickey, sir,” said Golding, giggling. He pointed to what might be a body floating facedown in the dark water.
“It’s only the fucking coat,” said Aylmore, who had come cautiously out of the shadows with his shotgun raised.
“Only the fucking coat,” repeated Robert Golding.
“So he’s dead down there,” said Aylmore. “Can we get out of here before Des Voeux or someone comes to the sound of all the shooting? It’s two days back to the others and we still have the bodies to cut up before we can leave.”
“No one’s going anywhere yet,” said the caulker’s mate. “Crozier may still be alive.”
“All shot up like that, without his coat?” asked Aylmore. “And look at the greatcoat, Cornelius. The shotgun tore it apart.”
“He may still be alive. We’re going to make sure he’s not. And maybe the body will float to the surface.”
“What are you going to do?” asked Aylmore. “Shoot his dead body?”
Hickey wheeled on the man and glared, making the much-taller Aylmore step back. “Yes,” said Cornelius Hickey. “That’s precisely what I’m going to do.” To Golding he barked, “Go bring Thompson and Magnus and the surgeon. We’ll tie up the doctor tight to one of them seracs while Aylmore and Thompson and me search and you watch over Magnus and cut Lane and Goddard into small enough to haul easylike bits.”
“Me cut ’em up?” cried Golding. “You told me that’s why we were grabbin’ Goodsir, Cornelius. He was s’posed to do all the cutting up, not me.”
“Goodsir will do the carving in the future, Bobby,” said Hickey. “Tonight you have to do it. We can’t trust Dr. Goodsir yet… not until we get him back with our people and many miles away from here. You be a good boy and go get the doctor and tie him up to a serac, tight, use your best knots, and tell Magnus to bring the carcasses over here where you can carve ’em. And get blades from Goodsir’s kit and the big knives and carpenter’s saw I brung that are over in the bag.”
“Oh, all right,” said Golding. “But I’d rather search.” He trudged back out of the serac field.
“The captain must have left half his blood between where you shot him and here, Cornelius,” said Aylmore. “If he didn’t go into the water, he can’t hide anywhere here without leaving a trail.”
“That is precisely correct, Dickie my dear,” said Hickey with a strange smile. “If he’s not in the water he might crawl, but he cannot stop losing blood with wounds like that. We are going to search until we are sure he ain’t under the water nor curled up somewhere here in the seracs where he crawled and hid and bled himself to death. You start over there on the south side of the
Aylmore looked surprised and alarmed. “Do you really think he could be strong enough to do that? With three bullets and all those shotgun pellets in him, I mean? Without his coat, he’d freeze to death in a few minutes anyway. It’s getting much colder and the wind’s getting stronger. Do you really think he’s lying in wait for us, Cornelius?”
Hickey smiled and nodded toward the black pool. “No. I think he’s dead and drowned and down there. But we’re going to make fuckin’ sure. We’re not leaving here until we’re sure, even if we got to search until the God-poxed sun comes up.”
In the end, they searched for three hours under the light of the rising and then descending moon. There were no signs at all near the
It took Robert Golding the full three hours to hack John Lane and William Goddard into the size pieces that Hickey had asked for, and even then the boy made a dreadful mess of it. Ribs, heads, hands, feet, and sections of spinal cord lay around him on all sides as if there had been an explosion in an abattoir. And young Golding himself was so covered with blood that he looked like a player in a minstrel show by the time Hickey and the others got back. Aylmore, Thompson, and even Magnus
