Crozier wished he had his old telescope, but he didn’t need it to identify the masts of his old command.
Puhtoorak had been right – the ice for this last part of the walk was much smoother than the jumbled shore and pack ice between the mainland and the islands. Crozier’s captain’s eye saw why: there lay a string of smaller islands to the east and north, creating a sort of natural seawall sheltering this fifteen- or twenty-nautical-square-mile patch of sea from the prevailing winds out of the northwest.
How Terror could have ended up here, almost two hundred miles south of where she had been frozen fast near Erebus for almost three years, was beyond Crozier’s powers of speculation.
He would not have to speculate much longer.
The Real People, including the God-Walking People, who lived in the shadow of a living monster year in and year out, approached the ship with obvious anxiety. All of Puhtoorak’s talk of haunting ghosts and bad spirits had worked its effect on them – even on Asiajuk, Nauja, and the hunters who’d not been there to hear the old man. 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.