stealthily, moving under cover of the clinging mist. He had the impression that it was on all fours, head close to the ground… sniffing. Was it a wild dog? A wolf? He took a shallow breath and held it. Or could it be one of those unseen creatures that had haunted the campfires in the dead of night? The Turks had a word for them-Kara- kondjiolos. Bloodsuckers.
It was lingering now over the carcass of Ajax, but all he could make out without raising his head was a pair of sharp shoulder blades hovering over the already rotting flesh. His saber was tangled at his side, still in its scabbard, and he knew he could never draw it out, much less wield it successfully, from the ground. He touched his holster, but it was empty; the pistol must have been thrown free in his fall. He reached out instead toward Hatch's corpse, felt for the leather of his riding belt, then traced his fingers along it until he found the sergeant's holster. The pistol, blessedly, was still in it. As silently as he could, Sinclair withdrew it.
The creature made a low gabbling sound, something strangely between the cry of a vulture and a human utterance.
Sinclair cocked the pistol, and the creature stopped. Sinclair glimpsed a sleek skull, with shiny dark eyes, rising from the mist.
It crawled, carefully, over the dead horse… and stopped to inspect Sergeant Hatch's missing features.
Then it came on, and Sinclair felt a hand-or was it a paw? — something with sharp nails in it, anyway, touching his leg. He lay still, as if dead, and felt an eager mouth lapping at the blood that covered his clothes. He knew that he might be able to get off only one shot, and he had to be sure that it counted. The beast followed the trail of blood onto his chest, and now he could smell its breath, like dead fish, and see its pointed ears. A hot tongue scoured the cloth-and even that he could endure-but when the teeth suddenly nibbled at his flesh, drawing his own blood, and the wet mouth suckled at the wound, he flinched.
The creature's head sprang back, and for the first time he could see its face, though he could never have adequately described it. His first thought was that it was human-the eyes were intelligent, the mouth was bowed, the forehead was rounded-but the shape of the skull was oddly elongated, the leathery skin stretched tight over a gaunt, grimacing mask.
He aimed the pistol, his hand wavering, and fired.
The thing screeched and a hand flew up to its torn ear in shock. It looked down on him indignantly, but scuttled backwards. Sinclair struggled to sit up. The creature was still in retreat, moving in a slow crouch, but Sinclair could have sworn that it had draped a fur pelisse around its shoulders, just as a cavalryman would do.
What was this thing?
He rolled onto his side and tried to shout, but his cries were barely audible. The mist swirled around the vanishing marauder, leaving only an empty pocket in the night. Sinclair held tight to the pistol grip and fired another round after it.
And he heard footsteps warily approaching from another direction. “Who's firing there?” a Cockney voice asked.
A lantern swung close to the ground.
“Are you an Englishman?”
And then the yellow light of the lamp fell on his face and he was able to mumble, through his ragged and bloody lips, “Lieutenant Copley Of the Seventeenth Lancers.”
December 16, 6 p.m.
If he had survived all that-the doomed charge of the Light Brigade, the night on the battlefield-Sinclair now reflected, then what could he not survive? Especially with Eleanor at his side.
Driving the sled, he relied entirely upon the dogs’ unerring sense of direction to find his way back to the whaling station. It was all he could do to crouch on the runners, his face buried in his hood and his gloved hands clinging to the bars. The dogs twice made a wide turn around newly opened crevasses that Sinclair doubted he would have spotted on his own, but that the dogs seemed to sense. He would reward them with generous slabs of blubber and meat from the dead seal stored in the sled.
He had gone as far north as he thought safe and wise, searching for any sign of further habitation, but he feared that they had truly been transported to the end of the earth. He remembered that the Coventry, long ago, had been sailing south, driven by the punishing winds, accompanied only by the lonely albatross circling above its yardarms, and from everything he had been able to glean of their present surroundings, he and Eleanor had arrived at a place so remote, so frozen, and so barren that it could only be the Pole itself… that most dreaded destination of all.
But the seal might help. He had seen Eleanor failing, and he knew that what the bottles contained was old, and foul, and not nearly so potent as it had once been. He was surprised, given its origins, that it had any efficacy at all; on their journeys through Europe, he had been reduced to siphoning the blood from the dead he came across on battlefields and charnel houses. He had gone in search of fresh meat, fresh blood, even if it was only animal, and he had found it down among the bleached skeletons and wind-blasted rocks along the shoreline. There, the seals liked to bask in the cold glare of the sun, sprawled among the millions of broken bones, like so many bathers at Brighton Beach. He had avoided the larger ones, no doubt the bulls, one of whom had waddled toward him, trumpeting, and instead picked what was probably a female, with sleek brown fur and long black whiskers. She was off by herself, lying under the vast arc of a whale's backbone, and as he approached her, she showed no fear. Indeed, she showed little reaction at all, watching impassively as he shook his sword free of its scabbard. He stood above her, planting his boots to either side. She looked up at him with bulging, liquid eyes as he tried to judge where her heart might lie. He wanted the wound to be as small and precise as possible, so that the blood would remain inside the carcass rather than pooling across the ground. He touched the point of the blade to the spot he'd chosen-and only then did the seal look down at it, slightly curious-before he put all his weight into it and pressed down. The blade entered smoothly, and the animal buckled from both ends as the sword went clean through and struck the permafrost below. He did not withdraw it, but let it stand in order to stanch the flow, and within a minute, the seal had ended its contortions and lay still.
While the other seals had looked on, still unalarmed-indeed unconcerned, about what had just befallen their compatriot-he wiped his sword clean on the snow, then dragged his prize back to the sled. There would be provisions for some time to come… though what he and Eleanor would do in the longer term was as dire a prospect as it had ever been.
Sinclair was no sailor, but as someone who had been on the run for well over two years after Balaclava, he had learned to read the weather signs as well as anyone. He could tell that the temperature, brutal to begin with, was falling even more, and the sky on the far horizon was growing darker and more ominous by the minute. Under normal circumstances, Sinclair had a fine sense of direction- more than once he had advised his fellow cavalry officers on the proper course to follow-but in this accursed place it was well-nigh impossible. There was no night, so there were no stars, and there was no day-not day as one would commonly know it; how could one gauge the movement of a constant sun, or track shadows that barely changed? And as for landmarks, at times he could make out-though inland, and too distant to be reached-a black ridge of mountains, snaking through the otherwise flat expanse, like a jagged scar on a smooth white cheek. But that was about all.
Once he had gotten under way again, the weather changed even more rapidly, the wind buffeting the sled, the dogs often having to pull straight into it. He was fortunate to be wearing, atop his own uniform coat, the new red coat, with the white crosses on the back and sleeves, that he had salvaged from the shed-and to huddle behind the windbreak provided by the sled itself. His knees ached from crouching there, but to stand up was to risk being blown clear of the sled altogether. He worried, too, about Eleanor and what condition he would find her in. He had not liked to lock her in the rectory, but he feared for what she might do. Whether she was in possession of her wits, or temporarily out of them, he could not be sure.
From experience, he knew that the fever could come and go, like the bouts of malaria that Sergeant Hatch had endured, but he also knew that the terrible craving never went away. It was always there, sometimes running like an underground stream, at other times bursting forth and demanding gratification, and he wondered how Eleanor-slim as a reed at the best of times, and so young- continued to survive its relentless pull. Their affliction was at once their salvation, preserving them from a hundred mortal frailties, and the curse that held them forever in its own dark power. Liberator and jailer, simultaneously. There were times when he doubted Eleanor's will, and even her desire, to go on under such circumstances. But the force of his own will, he felt sure, was strong enough for them both. Whether she wished it so or not, she needed what he was bringing to her-and, above all, she needed him. He shouted at the dogs, urging them on, but the wind seemed to gather his words and fling them back into his
