The Rope Eater Page 6

  “We were just working the boilers. I didn’t see anything else going on.”

  “It’s the first time we’ve run the boilers since we started. What’s he been doing down there?”

  We lapsed into silence as Hume emerged from the deckhouse, and moved off to work.

  By nightfall we were moving through small floes and dark slushy islands of brash ice that made the boat hiss. We were forced to remain more alert on our watches—no more sleeping with the dogs—and we kept a man aloft always to watch for icebergs. Most of the ice was what they called growlers, pieces a few feet in diameter and low in the water; it was gray and dirty looking, and bobbed away wearily as we moved past it.

  We gathered on deck and tucked into a feast prepared by Hunt—a stew of dumplings and salt pork and a cup of rum from the captain, and for dessert, sailor’s duff—a paste of flour and water sweetened by molasses. Aziz emerged from below, to the stunned silence of the crew. As Griffin introduced him, he stood back, most likely to avoid shaking hands—not that anyone offered. He had wrapped himself in a long, loose jacket. When it fell away, the crew caught sight of his extra hand.

  “What the hell is that?” said Pago, pointing.

  “Lovely,” said Adney. “Tell me, Doctor, did you build him yourself? I’d have a closer look at the plans next time.”

  Aziz slid the hand back into his sleeve and regarded them with quiet equanimity. The others said nothing to him and they moved up to the bow singing songs and telling stories. He greeted me quietly but warmly, and settled beside me with his bowl of stew and dumplings, and his cup of rum.

  “Never mind about them,” I said.

  “If that’s the worst they’ve got to say, then they’ll be the kindest crew I’ve ever met. Any introduction that comes without a beating is a good one as far as I’m concerned.” He laughed with surprising lightness.

  After we had eaten and rested, Griffin gathered us around the mast and read a psalm with humility and solemnity. His voice was low and tremulous. He rumbled into silence, and so we all stood, after our amens, our heads bowed, listening to the hissing-past of the brash.

  In the morning, Ash pressed Reinhold and Adney into service in order to repair the boats and the spar, and to prepare the ship for the ice. Hume and Creely were once again rooting through the hold to be sure that nothing vital was damaged or ruined. They brought out boxes of powder and blasting caps, long poles, and a wickedly sharp saw blade fifteen feet long. These were stowed on the deck and lashed down.

  Aziz’s appearance started a new round of speculations about the nature of our expedition, and he was perceived at first as a focus (with his special treatment), then as a necessity (that he held some key piece of information), and eventually as an obstacle—reducing the shares of the men and intruding in some unknown but surely unfavorable way. As the conversations turned, the reflections about Aziz himself turned darker—what else did he have hidden under his robes? What was his relationship with West, with the doctor? Why would a man choose to stay alone in the darkness?

  We spent two days sailing through small chunks of ice, diverting our course only occasionally for a larger floe. We spotted several icebergs, behemoths in the distance, moving sedately along the horizon. Most of the ice was low-lying and gray. As the days passed, it increased in size and frequency, until it bumped against our hull often, thudding dully and scraping past. At night we reduced our speed and kept a careful watch. The sea slowly turned white to match the lengthening of the light.

  On the morning of our third day, we arrived at the great blank face of the ice edge itself. The long bay at the edge was already dotted with several ships, slim and graceful whalers. Beyond them, the ice edge stretched unbroken, white to the horizon. The sky above it glowed with reflected light, promising ice on ice beyond the edge of our sight.

  The whalers had moored to the ice edge; they ran races on the ice, but the appearance of some walrus caused the game into break down and turn to slaughter. They scrambled for their rifles and the air filled with the sharp crack of bullets and the smell of gun-powder. The whalers hauled some of the corpses out onto the ice to hack their tusks free, but most they let sink, or left floating where they had been shot, their ocher bodies hanging in the water as the screeching gulls descended.

  The surface of the ice itself was quite varied; though most was low and level, some pressure ridges ran ragged into the distance, like the tunnels of giant moles beneath the surface. We ventured into a number of small cracks, but each dead-ended quickly, either filled with thick new ice or still joined by older, still-firm ice. We dropped our sails and steamed back to the bay. The pack was unsettlingly flat and calm after the steady roll of the open sea. Waves were swallowed at the edge and my eye could not even see the tremors of the current farther in. It should have been soothing, to see the ocean quiet and calm, but it was not; it was menacing and unnatural—it was not just a simple boundary that marked the edge of the frozen north and the more temperate south, but a barrier where laws as well as customs were unreliable and strange.

  All of us strained for the work of breaking through the ice to begin. Unlike the whalers, who seemed to regard the waiting as an excuse to joke and make merry, we chafed under the enforced idleness. Our tempers became short—especially Griffin’s—and we paced past each other without speaking. Griffin paused before the dynamite many times, but he forbore to use it.

  The rest of the crew was no more usefully occupied than I. Creely sat on the deck with a length of rope, nervously tying and untying knots. Preston, Pago, and some others pulled oakum and stuffed seams, while Dr. Architeuthis released a kite tied to an ink pen that scrawled a map of the patterns of the wind. Adney and Ash worked to repair damaged spars, while Reinhold patched sails.

  We were washing down the decks once more—it was the only steady work that we had—chipping the ice from the lines and scraping and swabbing the deck. I was scraping the frozen excrement from the foredeck. Adney and Reinhold moved behind me with mops and buckets of warm sand. It was not unpleasant work, actually—the process of freezing did much to contain the stench, and the activity kept us warm. Adney was, as usual, chattering away, joking about the smell recalling the stew of the night before, celebrating the work as the zenith of his ambitions. He launched into a congratulatory speech about how lucky he was to have the opportunity.

  “It is indeed an honor, gentlemen, an undreamt-of honor, to have the chance to work with material of such a rare and distinguished quality, borne of specially bred Arctic dogs, fed exclusively on a diet of fine beef and rare Oriental spices. It is not any dog that can produce such a savory, such a succulent bouquet— and such a marvelous consistency! I think you’ll agree, gentlemen, that it equals if not surpasses the pearl of the Alps, Lemerde de Berthillion thirty-eight, long held as the gold standard of rare excrements, possessing as it does the same reticence, the same subtle, savvy front masking a deep and passionate robustness. I believe I am within my rights, am I not?” He surveyed us for confirmation before continuing.

  I nodded gravely.

  Reinhold regarded him scowling, and said, his voice rising, “Will you please shut up!”

  Adney turned on him. “And on my left, you will recognize that triumph of modern science Mandrake Reinhold. An evolutionary dead end from the early Pleistocene, he was frozen in glacial ice aeons ago; the dedicated scientists of the Mittelschmerzhausen Clinic of Vienna managed to revive him using magnetoelectric oscillometers of great power. Having been raised on raw meat in a culture that lacked even the most basic tools, and just learning to walk upright, he can now, after years of rigorous training, affect the nearly flawless, though slightly primitive, imitation of a modern man—albeit one of extremely low intelligence and crude manners. Still, even this must be considered a triumph when we consider the baseness of his origins.”

  Reinhold’s face reddened as we burst into laughter. “Shut up, blast you!”

  “As you can see, he has even mastered the rudiments of l
anguage, though his savage brain takes most naturally to curses and invective. He does understand nearly half of what is said to him, especially when concerning women or food, and has the reasoning capacity of an uncultivated but precocious five-year-old child.”

  Reinhold dropped his mop to the deck and advanced a few steps toward Adney, who continued brazenly: “Being unused to tools, and possessing a brain of frightfully limited capacity, he often forgets himself, and returns to the use of his hands, abandoning his tools, and with them, his carefully constructed veneer of civility.”

  The entire crew was laughing now, and had gathered around the two of them as Reinhold growled and Adney danced behind the mast.

  “Remark, if you will, gentlemen, how quickly the instincts of the savage hunter return to him, even in this civilized setting. You will recall his disastrous meeting with Her Highness Queen Pompula of Bratavia, when he strangled her prize peacock, Prince Zebulon, and proceeded to eat his head on the floor of the ballroom. She was absolutely inconsolable.”

  We were howling by this time, as Adney had turned to us to demonstrate the queen’s distress, when Reinhold sprang on him. His huge fists crashed into Adney’s face with astonishing speed, peppering his face with blows. Blood gushed onto Adney’s shirt and spattered the deck. By the time we managed to pull Reinhold back, Adney was swaying on his feet, his face a pulpy mess of red and purple. Reinhold pulled free and struck Adney again in the face, and he crumpled to the deck.

  “How do you like that, you prize peacock?” spat Reinhold, standing over him, his shoulders quaking. Pago backed Reinhold away, and Preston and I moved to help Adney. His face was mashed; blood flowed freely from his nose and from a cut under his chin. Both eyes were swelling rapidly and his breathing was shallow and ragged. The doctor and West arrived, and we backed away from him, ashamed of ourselves. Dr. Architeuthis bent over Adney and pressed at the bones of his face; West regarded us all contemptuously.

  “Like children, the lot of you. Like pathetic, beastly little children.” He clipped his words, as if to avoid wasting more breath on us than was absolutely necessary.

  “Nothing broken,” said the doctor, “but that eye will take some stitches and he’ll have quite a headache when he comes around. Let’s get him below.”

  Adney remained unconscious overnight. The second watch was eating a glum breakfast when we heard him call out weakly: “Hunt! Hunt! I believe you have neglected my crumpets!”

  I ran into his bunk, laughing with relief. His face was very discolored and his right eye was swollen shut. He gave me a wan smile and struggled to sit up. I managed to get him to drink some broth, and he fell back asleep. Reinhold took his dinner on the deck and remained glowering there through the evening watch. I was in the galley helping Hunt when Reinhold finally lowered himself down and made his way to Adney’s berth. I peered in with trepidation; Pago moved protectively to Adney’s side, but stepped back as Reinhold drew close.

  Adney sat up and looked Reinhold defiantly in the eye. Both were silent, until Reinhold dropped his head. Adney spoke first.

  “Prince Zebulon raised quite a racket, didn’t he?”

  Reinhold shifted on his feet. “Sorry about your face,” he said.

  “Sorry about yours,” replied Adney.

  In the days that followed, Griffin doubled our work shifts: scraping the anchor chain, greasing fittings, repairing and adjusting rigs. Every piece of metal on the ship shone, every plank was clean enough to eat off, every coil tight, every seam stuffed, and still he kept us at it.

  On the evening of our seventh day, the wind finally shifted around to the north, and we could hear the ice start to rumble and creak. By midnight the wind had increased, and we could hear cracks like gunshots where the ice was starting to splinter. I awoke to the clank of the anchor being raised, and the slow thud of ice against the copper sheeting of the hull. When I emerged in the morning, slim black leads threaded into the interior, a vast labyrinth of crisscrossing lines, all in sluggish motion. Adney was bounding through the shrouds, singing out. Captain Griffin sat in the crow’s nest peering through his glass, trying to plot our route. Finally, at eight, we nosed into a lead barely wider than our hull, and commenced the next stage of our journey.

  At first we made good progress, moving several miles due north through a lead that seemed to open as we advanced. It spread to almost a mile in width before narrowing again to two hundred yards or so. It ended abruptly in an iceberg that had, no doubt, carved the lead itself, in the grip of a submarine current. Thus I learned one of the first essential lessons of ice navigation: that the pack is driven by the whim of the wind, shifting as the wind shifts, but the mighty bergs, extending into the deeper and more secret depths, move through the pack like great souls through the world—obedient to their own deep currents, which are invisible to those of us who battle and fracture our way on the surface. And so these seeming allies are often in deadly clash, and it is the bergs that wend their steady way, shattering the shallow pack as they move, making visible, for a moment, the deep patterns of the ocean. Eventually, worn by wind and waves and the grinding erosion of the pack, some icebergs lose their deep hold, fracture, and skitter over the surface, wind-driven and lost. Others move placidly south, dwindling at last into the great vastness of the sea.

  This iceberg was made up of layers of pitted gray curves building to a rounded peak perhaps a hundred feet above the water. The floes had piled against it as they moved past, creating a zone of densely packed ice fragments that shifted occasionally with a squeal, like tearing metal. The clashing of the iceberg in the pack had created a soup of slushy pieces that was not solid enough to support the weight of a man, nor would it permit the passage of the ship. So moored, we resumed our waiting; but the wind rose, and with it the temperature, and we were away again.

  Griffin remained in the crow’s nest without respite, straining his eyes. He did not seem to sleep, and ordered endless cups of coffee brought.

  Pools of bright blue meltwater formed on the grayish ice. The ice seemed softer and we moved more swiftly, covering perhaps ten miles by noon. The sky was cloudy but the wind fresh, as if the spring were finally catching us from behind. By midnight we were moving due north again, deviating only occasionally for a large floe or iceberg. I turned in, expecting the sea to be wholly open by the morning.

  I was not entirely wrong, as it had stayed open, but with the heat had come a deep white fog, and we had been forced to slow again to a crawl. The fog was extremely dense, enshrouding sections of the deck so thickly that the rest of the ship would disappear, and I had only my feet beneath me to assure me that I had not floated free.

  Griffin ordered the boilers fired, and we picked our way ahead with great caution. The low, dense pack had given way to a loose conglomeration of larger floes and more frequent bergs. The crashing and squealing of the pack was gone now, and the fog swallowed the clank of our boilers. It wracked my nerves, after the bright clashing of the days before, to creep ahead thus; monstrous shapes loomed up out of the fog and disappeared. Griffin ordered soundings every hour. In our blindness, I suppose any measure was a comfort. The white fog grayed, and night fell. Griffin was anxious to take advantage of the open water but was fearful of moving in fog and darkness, and ordered us moored to a floe.

  In the morning the nature of the fog had changed; it was no longer deep white, but a jaundiced yellow-gray. We could see sunless corridors open before us of a desolate sea; icebergs drifted past, no longer white but sickly yellow. The effect was as if we had sailed into a land dissipated by pestilence, a land where the last quiver of life had rotted into emptiness and not the stench but the gloom of death remained, and the silence that follows the demise of the final mourners. We found ourselves talking in whispers. Even Adney could not pull himself into good cheer. There was nothing to mark progress or movement; the floes slipped past us or we past them; the exhalation of our wake was soon swallowed by the obscurity that trailed us. We picked our way among floes as am
ong bodies, and slunk to our beds at the end of an interminable day.

  In the morning the gloom had lifted, and we could see the ocean once more. Light flitted on the water like a swallow, and the wind played in the sails. We had two days of fine sailing and made excellent progress. The days were getting longer as we moved north with the seasons; the sun rested above the horizon until past midnight, and had bobbed up again before we arose at five. We began to see walrus on the floes and once, in the distance, the sleek deep blue of a whale. Birds rested in our rigging and circled in our wake, igniting frenzies among the dogs. Adney shot four fat geese one afternoon and we feasted. Hunt, for all his worrying, was a magnificent cook, and we toasted him with our tea deep into the Arctic twilight.

  We were treated to a steady diet of Arctic atmospherics—rainbows and pillars of light and sundogs—the phenomena where glimmering hints of other suns and soft arcs of light surround our one sun. It is not the vulgar dazzle that some sailors recount, but the insistent, wavering suggestion that the world you knew is not so firmly rooted as you believed, and that other possible worlds hover nearby.

  Two days of steady progress were as much as we could expect at that time of year. On June 1, the winds shifted back to the south and the temperature dropped. The ice ceased to be an obstacle course and became a vast and shifting labyrinth. We stopped battering through the floes and were often forced to pick our way through leads, or wait interminable hours for them to open, or to backtrack and backtrack again.

  Despite the clumsiness of her handling, I began to see the merits of the Narthex’s peculiar design. The bowl-shaped edge let us slide easily up onto the floes, where the weight of the hull could crack them. The hull took a terrific battering but did not spring the smallest leak. Other methods of passage, we quickly discovered, were more difficult.

  In narrow leads where new ice had formed but was not thick, we sent a boat forward with our ice anchor aboard. Once the anchor was placed, four men would gather around the massive windlass and warp the ship forward, pulling her onto the new ice and splitting it open. This was Sisyphean work for those on deck, as the anchor frequently broke free and the ship slid back, or seemed only to drag the floe toward us. I took my turn at the winch as we all did, straining my shoulders and back against the dull weight of the ice.