The Terror

Asiajuk himself was muttering incantations, ghost-chasing chants, and keeping-safe prayers all during their walk out onto the ice, which added to no one’s sense of security. When a shaman gets nervous, Crozier knew, everyone gets nervous.

The only one who would walk next to Crozier at the lead of the procession was Silence, carrying both the children.

Terror was listing about twenty degrees to port, her bow aimed toward the northeast and her masts raking to the northwest, with too much of her starboard-side hull showing above the ice. Surprisingly, there was one anchor deployed – the port-side bow anchor – its hawser disappearing into the thick ice. Crozier was surprised because he guessed the bottom to be at least twenty fathoms deep here – perhaps much more – and because there were little inlets all along the northern curves of the islands behind him. At the very least – unless there was a storm – a prudent captain seeking safe harbour would have brought the ship into the strait on the east side of the large island he’d just walked from, dropping anchor between the big island – whose cliffs would have blocked the wind – and the three smaller islands, none more than about two miles long, east of there.

But Terror was here, about two and a half miles out from the north end of that large island, with her anchor dropped into deep water and all of her exposed to the inevitable storms from the northwest.

One walk around the ship and a look up at her canted deck from the lower northwest side solved the mystery of why Puhtoorak’s hunting band had been forced to chop their way through the hull on the raised starboard side, probably a splintered and battered and already near-breached hull, in order to gain entry: all the top-deck hatches were battened and sealed.

Crozier returned to the man-sized hole the band had smashed into the exposed and weathered hull. He thought he could squeeze through. He remembered Puhtoorak saying that his young hunters had used their star-shit axes to force their way in here, and he had to smile to himself despite the surge of painful emotions he was feeling.

“Star shit” was what the Real People called falling stars and the metal they used from the falling stars they found lying on the ice. Crozier had heard Asiajuk talk about uluriak anoktok – “star shit falling from the sky.”

Crozier wished he had a star-shit blade or axe with him right now. The only weapon he carried was a basic work knife with a blade made from walrus ivory. There were harpoons on the kamatik but they weren’t his – he and Silence had left theirs with their qayaq a week ago – and he didn’t want to ask to borrow one just to go into the ship with it.

Back at that sledge, forty feet behind them, the Qimmiq – the large dogs with their uncanny blue and yellow eyes and souls they shared with their masters – were barking and growling and howling and snapping at one another and at anyone who came close to them. They did not like this place.

Crozier signed to Silence, Sign Asiajuk to ask them if anyone wants to come in with me.

She did so quickly, using just her fingers without string. Even so, the old shaman always understood her much more quickly than he could make out Crozier’s clumsy signs.

None of the Real People wanted to go through that hole.

I will see you in a few minutes, Crozier signed to Silence.

She actually smiled. Do not be stupid, she signed. Your children and I are coming with you.

He squeezed in and Silence followed a second later, carrying Raven in her arms and Kanneyuk in the soft-hide baby-holder she sometimes carried on straps against her chest. Both children were sleeping.

It was very dark.

Crozier realized that Puhtoorak’s young hunters had hacked their way in to the orlop deck. This was lucky for them since if they’d tried a bit lower amidships here, they would have run into the iron of the coal bins and the water-storage tanks on the hold deck and never could have chopped their way through, even with star-shit heads on their axes.

Ten feet in from the hole in the hull it was too dark to see, so Crozier found his way by memory, holding Silence’s hand as they walked ahead down the canted deck and then turned aft.

As his eyes adapted to the dark, there was just enough light filtering in for Crozier to make out that the heavy padlocked door to the Spirit Room and to the Gunner’s Storeroom farther aft had been smashed open. He had no idea whether this had been the work of Puhtoorak’s men, but he doubted it. Those doors had been left padlocked for a reason and they were the first place any white men returning to Terror would want to go.

The rum casks – they’d actually had so much rum they’d had to leave casks of it behind when they took to the ice – were empty. But casks of gunpowder remained, as well as boxes and barrels of shot, canvas bags of cartridges, almost two bulkheads’ lengths of muskets still set in their grooved places – they’d had too many to carry – and two hundred bayonets still hanging from their fittings along the rafters and beams.

The metal in this room alone would make Asiajuk’s band of Real People the richest men in their world.

The remaining gunpowder and shot would feed a dozen large bands of the Real People for twenty years and make them undisputed lords of the arctic.

Silence touched his bare wrist. It was too dark to sign, so she thought-sent. Do you feel it?

Crozier was astonished to hear that – for the first time – her shared thoughts were in English. She had either dreamt his dreams even more deeply than he’d imagined, or she had been very attentive during her months aboard this very ship. It was the first time they’d shared thoughts in words while awake.

Ii, he thought back to her. Yes.

This place was bad. Memories haunted it like a bad smell.

To lighten the tension, he led her forward again, pointed toward the bow, and thought-sent her an image of the forward cable locker on the deck below.

I was always waiting for you, she sent. The words were so clear that he thought they might have been spoken aloud in the darkness, except for the fact that neither of the children awoke.

His body began to shake with emotion at the thought of what she had just told him.

They went up the main ladder to the lower deck.

It was much brighter up here. Crozier realized that – finally – daylight was actually coming through the Preston Patent Illuminators that punctuated the deck above them. The curved glass was opaque with ice, but – for once – not covered with snow or tarps.

The deck looked empty. All of the men’s hammocks had been carefully folded and stowed away, their mess tables cranked up between the beams to the overhead deck, and their sea chests pushed aside and carefully stowed. The huge Frazer’s Patent Stove in the center of the forward berthing area was dark and cold.

Crozier tried to recall if Mr. Diggle was still alive when he, the captain, had been lured onto the ice and shot. It was the first time he’d thought of that name – Mr. Diggle – in a long time.

It’s the first time I’ve thought in my own tongue for a long time.

Crozier had to smile at that. “In my own tongue.” If there really was a goddess like Sedna who ruled the world, her real name was Bitch Irony.

Silence tugged him aft.

The first officers’ cabins and mess rooms they looked into were empty.

Crozier found himself wondering which men could have possibly reached Terror and sailed her south.

Des Voeux and his men from Rescue Camp?

He felt almost certain that Mr. Des Voeux and the others would have continued south in the boats toward Big Fish River.

Hickey and his men?

For Dr. Goodsir’s sake, he hoped so, but he did not believe it. Except for Lieutenant Hodgson, and Crozier suspected he had not lived for very long in that company of cutthroats, there was hardly a man in that pack who could sail, much less navigate, Terror. He doubted if they had been able to sail and navigate the one small boat he’d given them.

That left the three men who had left Rescue Camp to hike overland – Reuben Male, Robert Sinclair, and Samuel Honey. Could a captain of the fo’c’sle, a captain of the foretop, and a blacksmith sail HMS Terror almost two hundred miles south through a maze of leads?

Crozier felt dizzy and a little nauseated from thinking about the men’s names and faces again. He could almost hear their voices. He could hear their voices.

Puhtoorak had been correct: this place was now home to piifixaaq – resentful ghosts that stayed behind to haunt the living.

There was a corpse in Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier’s bunk.

As far as they could tell without lighting lamps and going down into the hold and orlop deck, this was the only dead body on board.

Why did he decide to die in my bunk? wondered Crozier.

He had been a man about Crozier’s height. His clothes – he’d died under blankets in a peacoat and watch cap and wool trousers, which was odd since they must have been sailing in full summer – gave no clue to his identity. Crozier had no wish at all to go through his pockets.

The man’s hands, exposed wrists, and neck were brown and mummified, shriveled, but it was his face that made Crozier wish that the Preston Patent Illuminator overhead was not allowing in as much light as it did.

The dead man’s eyes were brown marbles. His hair and beard were so long and wild that it seemed quite possible that they had continued growing for months after the man’s death. His lips had shriveled away to nothing and been pulled back far from the teeth and gums by tendons stretching and contracting.

It was the teeth that were so upsetting. Rather than having fallen out from scurvy, the front teeth were all there and very broad and an ivory yellow and impossibly long – three inches long, at least – as if they had grown the way a rabbit’s or rat’s teeth continue growing until, unless worn down by gnawing something solid, they curve in and cut the creature’s own throat.

These dead man’s rodent teeth were impossible, but Crozier was looking at them in the clear, grey evening light coming down through the domed skylight of his old cabin. It was not, he realized, the first impossible thing he had seen or experienced in the last few years. He suspected it might not be his last.

Let’s go, he signed to Silence. He did not want to thought-send here where things were listening.

He had to use a fire axe to hack his way up through the sealed and nailed-shut main hatch. Rather than ask himself who had sealed it and why – or if the corpse below had been a living man when the hatch had been sealed so tightly above him – he threw the axe aside, clambered up, and helped Silence up the ladder.

Raven was fussing himself awake, but Silence rocked him and he began to snore softly again.