The Terror

English. But the men believe – more and more every day the thing on the ice stalks them – that the young Esquimaux woman is a witch with secret powers.

“She’s at the port station with Lieutenant Irving,” adds Hickey.

“Lieutenant Irving? His watch should have been over an hour ago.”

“Aye, sir. But wherever Lady Silence is these days, there’s the lieutenant, sir, if you don’t mind me mentioning it. She don’t go below, he don’t go below. Until he has to, I mean… None of us can stay out here as long as that wi-… that woman.”

“Keep your eyes on the ice, and your mind on your job, Mr. Hickey.”

Crozier’s gruff voice makes the caulker’s mate start again, but he shuffles his shrug salute and turns his white nose back toward the darkness beyond the bow.

Crozier strides up the deck toward the port lookout post. The previous month, he prepared the ship for winter after three weeks of false hope of escape in August. Crozier had once again ordered the lower spars to be swung around along the parallel axis of the ship, using them as a ridgepole. Then they had reconstructed the tent pyramid to cover most of the main deck, rebuilding the wooden rafters that had been stowed below during their few weeks of optimism. But even though the men work hours every day shoveling avenues through the foot or so of snow left for insulation on deck, hacking away ice with picks and chisels, clearing out the spindrift that has come under the canvas roof, and finally putting lines of sand down for traction, there always remains a glaze of ice. Crozier’s movement up the tilted and canted deck is sometimes more a graceful half-skating motion than a stride.

The appointed port lookout for this watch, midshipman Tommy Evans – Crozier identifies the youngest man on board by the absurd green stocking cap, obviously made by the boy’s mother, that Evans always pulls down over his bulky Welsh wig – has moved ten paces astern to allow Third Lieutenant Irving and Silence some privacy.

This makes Captain Crozier want to kick someone – everyone – in the arse.

The Esquimaux woman looks like a short round bear in her furry parka, hood, and pants. She has her back half turned to the tall lieutenant. But Irving is crowded close to her along the rail – not quite touching, but closer than an officer and gentleman would stand to a lady at a garden party or on a pleasure yacht.

“Lieutenant Irving.” Crozier didn’t mean to put quite so much bark into the greeting, but he’s not unhappy when the young man levitates as if poked by the point of a sharp blade, almost loses his balance, grabs the iced railing with his left hand, and – as he insists on doing despite now knowing the proper protocol of a ship in the ice – salutes with his right hand.

It’s a pathetic salute, thinks Crozier, and not just because the bulky mittens, Welsh wig, and layers of cold-weather slops make young Irving look something like a saluting walrus, but also because the lad has let his comforter fall away from his clean-shaven face – perhaps to show Silence how handsome he is – and now two long icicles dangle below his nostrils, making him look even more like a walrus.

“As you were,” snaps Crozier. God-damn fool, he mentally adds.

Irving stands rigid, glances at Silence – or at least at the back of her hairy hood – and opens his mouth to speak. Evidently he can think of nothing to say. He closes his mouth. His lips are as white as his frozen skin.

“This isn’t your watch, Lieutenant,” says Crozier, hearing the whip-crack in his voice again.

“Aye, aye, sir. I mean, no, sir. I mean, the captain is correct, sir. I mean…” Irving clamps his mouth shut again, but the effect is ruined somewhat by the chattering of his teeth. In this cold, teeth can shatter after two or three hours – actually explode – sending shrapnel of bone and enamel flying inside the cavern of one’s clenched jaws. Sometimes, Crozier knows from experience, you can hear the enamel cracking just before the teeth explode.

“Why are you still out here, John?”

Irving tries to blink, but his eyelids are literally frozen open. “You ordered me to watch over our guest… to look out for… to take care of Silence, Captain.”

Crozier’s sigh emerges as ice crystals that hang in the air for a second and then fall to the deck like so many minuscule diamonds. “I didn’t mean every minute, Lieutenant. I told you to watch her, report to me on what she does, to keep her out of mischief and harm’s way on the ship, and to see that none of the men do anything to… compromise her. Do you think she’s in danger of being compromised out here on deck, Lieutenant?”

“No, Captain.” Irving ’s sentence sounds more like a question than an answer.

“Do you know how long it takes for exposed flesh to freeze out here, Lieutenant?”

“No, Captain. I mean, yes, Captain. Rather quickly, sir, I think.”

“You should know, Lieutenant Irving. You’ve had frostbite six times already, and it’s not even officially winter yet.”

Lieutenant Irving nods dolefully.

“It takes less than a minute for an exposed finger or thumb – or any fleshy appendage – to freeze solid,” continues Crozier, who knows that this is a load of horse cobblers. It takes much longer than that at a mere fifty below, but he hopes that Irving doesn’t know this. “After that, the exposed member will snap off like an icicle,” adds Crozier.

“Yes, Captain.”

“So do you really think there’s any chance that our visitor might be… compromised… out here on deck, Mr. Irving?”

Irving seems to be thinking about this before replying. It’s possible, Crozier realizes, that the third lieutenant has put far too much thought into this equation already.

“Go below, John,” says Crozier. “And see Dr. McDonald about your face and fingers. I swear to God that if you’ve gotten seriously frostbitten again, I’ll dock you a month’s Discovery Service pay and write your mother to boot.”

“Yes, Captain. Thank you, sir.” Irving starts to salute again, thinks better of it, and ducks under the canvas toward the main ladderway with one hand still half raised. He does not look back at Silence.

Crozier sighs again. He likes John Irving. The lad had volunteered – along with two of his mates from the HMS Excellent, Second Lieutenant Hodgson and First Mate Hornby – but the Excellent was a damned three-decker that was old before Noah had fuzz around his dongle. The ship had been mastless and permanently moored in Portsmouth, Crozier knew, for more than fifteen years, serving as a training vessel for the Royal Navy’s most promising gunners. Unfortunately, gentlemen, Crozier had told the boys during their first day aboard – the captain had been more than usually drunk that day – if you look around, you’ll notice that while Terror and Erebus were both built as bombardment ships, gentlemen, neither has a single gun between them. We are, young volunteers from Excellent – unless one counts the Marines’ muskets and the shotguns secured in the Spirit Room – as gunless as a newborn babe. As gunless as fucking Adam in his fucking birthday suit. In other words, gentlemen, you gunnery experts are about as useful to this expedition as teats would be on a boar.

Crozier’s sarcasm that day hadn’t dampened the young gunnery officers’ enthusiasm – Irving and the other two remained more eager than ever to go get frozen in the ice for several winters. Of course, that had been on a warm May day in England in 1845.

“And now the poor young pup is in love with an Esquimaux witch,” Crozier mutters aloud.

As if understanding his words, Silence turns slowly toward him.

Usually her face is invisible down the deep tunnel of her hood, or her features are masked by the wide ruff of wolf hair, but tonight Crozier can see her tiny nose, large eyes, and full mouth. The pulse of the aurora is reflected in those black eyes.

She’s not attractive to Captain Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier; she has too much of the savage about her to be seen as fully human, much less as physically attractive – even to a Presbyterian Irishman – and besides that, his mind and lower regions are still filled with clear memories of Sophia Cracroft. But Crozier can see why Irving, far from home and family and any sweetheart of his own, might fall in love with this heathen woman. Her strangeness alone – and perhaps even the grim circumstances of her arrival and the death of her male companion, so strangely intertwined with the first attacks from that monstrous entity out there in the dark – must be like a flame to the fluttering moth of so hopeless a young romantic as Third Lieutenant John Irving.

Crozier, on the other hand, as he discovered both in Van Diemen’s Land in 1840 and again for the final time in England in the months before this expedition sailed, is too old for romance. And too Irish. And too common.

Right now he just wishes this young woman would take a walk out onto the dark ice and not return.

Crozier remembers the day four months earlier when Dr. McDonald had reported to Franklin and him after examining her, on the same afternoon the Esquimaux man with her had died choking in his own blood. McDonald said, in his medical opinion, the Esquimaux girl appeared to be between fifteen and twenty years old – it was so hard to tell with native peoples – had experienced menarche, but was, by all indications, virgo intacta. Also, Dr. McDonald reported, the reason that the girl had not spoken or made a sound – even after her father or husband had been shot and lay dying – was because she had no tongue. In Dr. McDonald’s opinion, her tongue had not been sliced off but had been chewed off near its root, either by Silence herself or by someone or something else.

Crozier had been astonished – not so much by the fact of the missing tongue, but from hearing that the Esquimaux wench was a virgin. He’d spent enough time in the northern arctic – especially during Parry’s expedition, which wintered near an Esquimaux village – to know that the local natives took sexual intercourse so lightly that men would offer their wives and daughters to whalers or Discovery Service explorers in exchange for the cheapest trinket. Sometimes, Crozier knew, the women just offered themselves up for the fun of it, giggling and chatting with other women or children even as the sailors strained and puffed and moaned between the laughing women’s legs. They were like animals. The furs and hairy hides they wore might as well be their own beastlike skins as far as Francis Crozier was concerned.

The captain raises his gloved hand to the bill of his cap, secured under two wraps of heavy comforter and therefore impossible to doff or tip, and says, “My compliments to you, madam, and I would suggest you consider going below to your quarters soon. It’s getting a bit nippy out here.”

Silence stares at him. She does not blink, although somehow her long lashes are free of ice. She does not, of course, speak. She watches him.

Crozier symbolically tips his hat again and continues his tour around the deck, climbing to the ice-raised stern and then down the starboard side, pausing to speak to the other two men on watch, giving Irving time to get below and out of his cold-weather slops so that the captain doesn’t seem to be following hard on his lieutenant’s heels.

He’s finishing his chat with the last shivering lookout, Able Seaman Shanks, when Private Wilkes, the youngest of the Marines aboard, comes rushing out from under the canvas. Wilkes has thrown on only two loose layers over his uniform, and his teeth begin chattering even before he delivers his message.

“Mr. Thompson’s compliments to the captain, sir, and the engineer says that the captain should come down to the hold as quick as you might.”

“Why?” If the boiler has finally broken down, Crozier knows, they are all dead.

“Begging the captain’s pardon, sir, but Mr. Thompson says that the captain is needed because Seaman Manson is near to mutiny, sir.”

Crozier stands up straight. “Mutiny?”

“‘Near to it’ were Mr. Thompson’s words, sir.”