The ice was not too dark this night; the aurora danced brightly overhead, and there was enough moonlight to throw ink-black shadows behind the seracs. Third Lieutenant John Irving was not, unlike the first time he had followed Silence, carrying out this search on his own initiative. The captain had again suggested that Irving discover – if he could do so without endangering himself too much – the Esquimaux wench’s secret hiding place on the ice.
“I was serious when I told the men that she might have skills that would keep us alive on the ice,” Crozier had said softly in the privacy of his cabin as Irving leaned closer to hear. “But we can’t wait until we’re on the ice to find out where and how she gets the fresh meat she seems to be finding. Dr. Goodsir tells me that scurvy will take us all if we do not find some source of fresh game before summer.”
“But unless I actually spy her hunting, sir,” Irving had whispered, “how can I get the secret from her? She cannot speak.”
“Use your initiative, Lieutenant Irving,” was all that Crozier had said in response.
This was the first opportunity that Irving had had since that conversation in which he might be able to use his initiative.
In the leather shoulder bag, Irving carried a few enticements should he find Silence and work out a way to communicate with her. There were biscuits far fresher than the weevil-filled one he’d chewed for dinner. Those were wrapped in a napkin, but Irving had also brought a beautiful Oriental silk handkerchief that his rich London girlfriend had given to him as a present shortly before their… unpleasant parting. And his pièce de résistance was wrapped in that attractive handkerchief: a small crock of peach marmalade.
Surgeon Goodsir was hoarding and doling out the marmalade as an antiscorbutic, but Lieutenant Irving knew that the treat was one of the few things the Esquimaux girl had ever shown enthusiasm about when accepting Mr. Diggle’s offerings of food. Irving had seen her dark eyes glint when she got a daub of marmalade on her biscuit. He’d scraped off his own jam treats a dozen times over the past month to get the precious amount he now carried in the tiny porcelain crock that had once been his mother’s.
Irving had come completely around to the port side of the ship and now advanced from the ice plain there into a maze of seracs and minibergs that rose like an icy version of Birnam’s wood come to Dunsinane about two hundred yards south of the ship. He knew that he was running a great risk of becoming the next victim of the thing on the ice, but for the last five weeks there had been no sign of the creature, not even a clear sighting from a distance. No crewmen had been lost to it since the night of Carnivale.
Then again, thought Irving, no one but me has come out here alone, without even a lantern, and gone wandering into the serac forest.
He was very aware that the only weapon he carried was the pistol sunk deep in the pocket of his greatcoat.
Forty minutes of searching through seracs in the dark and −45-degree wind and Irving was close to deciding that he would exercise his initiative another day, preferably in a few weeks, when the sun stayed above the southern horizon for more than a few minutes each day.
And then he saw the light.
It was an eerie sight – an entire snowdrift in an ice gully between several seracs seemed to be glowing goldly from within, as if from some inner faerie light.
Or witch’s light.
Irving walked closer, pausing at each serac shadow to make sure that it was actually not another narrow crevasse in the ice. The wind made a soft whistling sound through the tortured-ice tops of the seracs and ice-boulder columns. Violet light from the aurora danced everywhere.
The snowdrift had been heaped – either by wind or by Silence’s hands – into a low dome thin enough to show a flickering yellow light shining through it.
Irving dropped down into the small ice gully, actually just a depression between two pressure-pushed plates of pack ice rounded over with snow, and approached a small black hole that seemed too low to be associated with the dome set higher in the drift to one side of the gully.
The entrance – if an entrance it was – was barely as wide as Irving’s heavily layered shoulders.
Before crawling in, he wondered if he should extract and cock his pistol. Not a very friendly gesture of greeting, he thought.
Irving wriggled into the hole.
The narrow passage went down for half the length of his body and then angled up for eight feet or more. When Irving’s head and shoulders popped out of the far end of the tunnel and into the light, he blinked, looked around, and his jaw fell slack.
The first thing he noticed was that Lady Silence was naked under her open robes. She was lying on a platform carved out of the snow about four feet from Lieutenant Irving and almost three feet higher. Her bosoms were quite visible and quite bare – he could see the small stone talisman of the white bear she had taken from her dead companion dangling on a thong between her breasts – and she made no effort to cover them as she stared unblinkingly at him. She had not been startled. Obviously she had heard him coming long before he squeezed himself into the snow-dome’s entry passage. In her hand was that short but very sharp stone knife he had first seen in the forward cable locker.
“I beg your pardon, miss,” said Irving. He was at a loss of what to do next. Good manners demanded that he wriggle backward out of this lady’s boudoir, as awkward and ungainly as that motion must be, but he reminded himself that he was here on a mission.
It did not escape Irving’s attention that wedged in the opening to the snow-house as he was, Silence could easily lean over and cut his throat with that knife while there would be very little he could do about it.
Irving finished extricating himself from the entry passage, pulled his leather bag in behind him, got to his knees, and then to his feet. Because the floor of the snow-house had been dug out lower than the surface of the snow and ice outside, Irving had enough room to stand in the center of the dome with several inches to spare. He realized that while the snow-house had seemed like nothing more than a glowing snowdrift from the outside, it had actually been constructed of carved blocks or slabs of snow angling and arching inward in a most clever design.
Irving, trained at the Royal Navy’s best gunnery school and always good at mathematics, immediately noticed the upward spiral of the blocks and how each block leaned in just slightly more than the previous one until a final capping key block had been pushed down through the apex of the dome and then tugged into position. He saw the tiny smoke hole, or chimney – no more than two inches across – just to one side of the key block.
The mathematician in Irving knew at once that the dome was not a true hemisphere – a dome built upon the principle of a circle would collapse – but rather was a catenary: that is, the shape of a chain held in both hands. The gentleman in John Irving knew that he was studying the ceiling, the blocks, and the geometric structure of this clever dwelling so as not to stare at Lady Silence’s naked breasts and bare shoulders. He assumed he had given her enough time to draw the fur robes up over herself, and he looked back in her direction.
Her bosoms were still bared. The polar white bear amulet made her brown skin look all the more brown. Her dark eyes, intent and curious but not necessarily hostile, still watched him unblinkingly. The knife was still in her hand.
Irving let out a breath and sat on the robe-covered platform across the small central space from her sleeping platform.
For the first time he realized that it was warm in the snow-house. Not just warmer than the freezing night outside, nor just warmer than the freezing lower deck of HMS Terror, but warm. He had actually started to sweat under his many stiff and filthy layers. He saw perspiration on the soft brown bosom of the woman only a few feet from him.