The Terror

bird people.

For days they sail south toward the land of the Real People, but when the bird-husband’s family and friends find him dead, they are filled with anger and fly south with a beating of wings so loud that it can be heard by the Real People a thousand leagues away.

The sea distance that took Sedna and her father a week to sail is covered by the thousands of flying birds in a few minutes. They descend upon the little boat like a dark and angry cloud made up of beaks and talons and feathers. The beating of their wings calls up a terrible storm that raises the waves and threatens to swamp the little boat.

The father decides to give his daughter back to the birds as an offering and throws her overboard.

Sedna clings to the boat for dear life. Her grip is strong.

The father takes his knife and cuts off the first joints of her fingers. As they fall into the sea, these finger joints are turned into the first whales. The fingernails become the white whalebone found on beaches.

Still Sedna clings. The father cuts off her fingers at the second joint.

These parts of her fingers fall into the sea and become the seals.

Still Sedna clings. When the terrified father cuts off the final stumps of her fingers, these fall onto the passing floes and into the water and become the walruses.

With no fingers left, only curved bone stumps like her dead bird-husband’s talons where her hands had been, Sedna finally falls into the sea and sinks to the bottom of the ocean. She resides there until this day.

It is Sedna who is the mistress of all whales, walruses, and seals. If the Real People please her, she sends the animals to them and tells the seals, walruses, and whales to allow themselves to be caught and killed. If the Real People displease her, she keeps the whales, walruses, and seals with her down in the dark depths and the Real People suffer and starve.

What in the God-damned hell? thinks Francis Crozier. It is his self-voice that interrupts the slow no-self flow of the dream-listening.

As if summoned, the pain rushes in.

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,