The North Water (6 page)

“Hindoo loot from Delhi,” Cavendish says. “The lying bastard. But why not sell it on?”

“Just in case,” Drax explains, as if the answer is obvious. “He thinks it makes him safer.”

Cavendish laughs and shakes his head in amazement at the folly of such a notion.

“A whaling voyage is full of dangers,” he says. “A few unfortunates amongst us will not get home alive. That's a simple fact.”

Drax nods and Cavendish continues: “And if ever a man perishes while on board, of course, it is the appointed task of the first mate to auction off his possessions for the sake of the poor widow. Am I wrong?”

Drax shakes his head.

“You're right,” he says. “But not yet. Not in Lerwick.”

“Fuck no. Not yet. I don't mean yet.”

Drax puts the ring and the discharge papers back in the envelope. He puts the envelope back into the bottom of the trunk and arranges the rest of the contents over it just as before. He closes the padlock with a click and pushes the trunk back under the bed.

“Don't forget the keys,” Cavendish tells him.

Drax returns the keys to Sumner's waistcoat pocket and the two men step out of the cabin into the companionway. They pause a moment before parting.

“Do you think Brownlee knows?” Cavendish says.

Drax shakes his head.

“No one knows but us,” he says. “Just thee and me.”

 

CHAPTER FIVE

They sail north from Lerwick through long days of fog and sleet and bitter wind, days without ease or letup, when the sea and sky meld together into a damp weft of roiling and impermeable grayness. Sumner stays in his cabin puking incessantly, unable to read or write, wondering what he has done to himself. Twice they are hit by gales from the east. The cables screech, and the ship slumps and pitches amidst the seething hillocks of an adamantine sea. On the eleventh day the weather settles and they encounter sea ice: shallow, disconnected blocks of it several yards across rising and falling on the moderated swell. The air is newly cold, but the sky is clearing and they can make out in the far distance the white volcanic nub of Jan Mayen Island. The slop bags are heaved on deck and gunpowder, percussion caps, and rifles are given out. The crew begin molding bullets and sharpening their knives in preparation for the sealing. Two days later, they see the main seal pack for the first time, and at dawn the next day the boats are lowered.

Out on the ice, Drax works alone, moving back and forth, patient and relentless, from one group to the next, shooting and clubbing as he goes. The young ones shriek at him and try to waddle away but are too slow and stupid to escape. The older ones he puts a bullet in. When he has killed a seal, he turns it over, cuts round the hind flippers, then slashes it open from the neck to the genitals. He pushes the edge of his knife into the gap between the meat and the blubber and begins to cut and prize away the outer layers. When he is finished, he hooks the severed skin onto a line for dragging and leaves the blood-sodden and meat-streaked krang, like a gruesome afterbirth on the snow, to be pecked at by gulls or eaten by bear cubs. After hours of this, the ice pack is as spattered and filthy as a butcher's apron, and each of the five whaleboats is laden with a reeking pile of sealskins. Brownlee signals the men back. Drax hauls his last load, stretches himself, then leans and dips his flensing knife and club in the salt water to rinse off the accumulated gobs of blood and brain matter.

As they are winched on board in dripping bunches, Brownlee counts the sealskins and calculates their value. Four hundred skins will yield up nine tons of oil, he estimates, and each ton at market will bring in, with luck, some forty pounds. They have made a good beginning but must press on. The seal pack is beginning to divide and scatter, and there is a small flotilla of other whaling ships, Dutch, Norwegian, Scotch, and English, gathered at wide intervals along the floe edge, all competing for pieces of the same prize. Before the light fails, he ascends the crow's nest with a telescope and decides on the most promising spot for the next day's hunt. The pack is unusually large this year and the ice, though uneven and thin in places, is still navigable. Fifty tons would be within his grasp if he had a passable crew and, even with the slender bunch of shitwicks he has been given by Baxter, he believes he can net thirty easily, possibly thirty-five. He will send another boat out tomorrow, he decides, a sixth boat. Any cunt who's breathing and can hold a rifle will be out there killing seals.

It is light at four, and they lower the boats again. Sumner is sitting in the sixth boat with Cavendish, the steward, the cabin boy, and several of the more persistent malingerers. There is eighteen degrees of frost outside, it is blowing a light breeze, and the sea is the color and consistency of London slush. Sumner, who fears frostbite, is wearing his Ulan cap and a knitted muffler. He is holding his rifle clamped between his knees. After rowing southeast for a half hour, they see a dark patch of seals off in the middle distance. They anchor the boat to the ice and disembark. Cavendish, whistling “The Lass of Richmond Hill,” leads the way and the rest follow after him in a straggly single file. When they get within sixty yards of the seals, they spread out and commence shooting. They kill three adult seals and club to death six infants, but the rest escape unharmed. Cavendish spits and reloads his rifle, then climbs to the top of a pressure ridge and looks around.

“Over there,” he shouts out to the others, pointing off in different directions, “over there, and over there.”

The cabin boy stays behind to flense the dead seals, and the rest separate. Sumner walks east. Above the constant creak and whine of moving ice, he can hear the occasional crump of distant gunfire. He shoots two more seals and skins them as best he can. He makes eyelets in the skins with his knife, reeves a rope through the eyelets, ties them together, then starts back with the rope over his shoulder.

By noon, he has killed six more seals, and he is a mile from the whaleboat, dragging a hundred pounds of ragged sealskin across a succession of broad, loose ice floes. He is groggy with fatigue. His shoulders are raw and aching from the friction of the rope, and the freezing air is savage in his lungs. When he looks up, he sees Cavendish a hundred yards ahead and, farther off to the right, another man, darkly clad, walking in the same direction and also pulling skins. He calls out, but the wind whips away his voice and neither one stops or looks about. Sumner presses on, thinking, as he trudges, of the warmth and shelter of his cabin and of the five short-necked bottles of laudanum lined up in the medical chest like soldiers on parade. He takes twenty-one grains now every evening after supper. The others believe he is working on his Greek and mock him for it, but really, while they are playing cribbage or discussing the weather, he is lying on his bunk in a state of unstructured and barely describable bliss. At such times he can be anywhere and anyone. His mind slides back and forth through the mingled purlieus of time and space—Galway, Lucknow, Belfast, London, Bombay—a minute lasts an hour, and a decade flows past in barely an instant. Is the opium a lie, he sometimes wonders, or is it the world around us, the world of blood and anguish, tedium and care, that is a lie? He knows, if he knows nothing else, that they cannot both be true.

Arriving at a yard-wide gap between two floes, Sumner stops a moment. He tosses the end of the rope across to the other side, then takes a step backwards and readies himself to make the short leap. It is snowing now, and the snow fills the air all around and whips against his face and chest. It is better, he has learned from experience, to take off from his bad leg and land on his good one. He takes a short step forwards and then a bigger, quicker one. He bends his knee and pushes upwards, but his standing foot slips sideways on the ice: instead of jumping easily across he pitches forwards, clown-like and ludicrous—headforemost, arms spinning—into the black and icy waters.

For a long, bewildering moment, he is submerged and sightless. He thrashes himself upright, then flings one arm out and gains purchase on the ice's edge. The ferocious drench of coldness has knocked all the breath from his body; he is gasping for air, and the blood is roaring in his ears. He grabs on with the other hand also and tries to heave himself out of the water, but can't. The ice is too slippery, and his arms are too weak from the morning's pulling. The water is up to his neck, and the snow is falling more heavily. He hears the ice around him creak and yawn as it shifts about in the low swell. If the floes move together he knows he will be crushed between them. If he stays too long in the water, he will likely lose consciousness and drown.

He retakes his grip and strains to pull himself up a second time. He dangles in motionless agony for a moment, neither fully in nor out, but both his hands slip off the ice and he crashes backwards. Seawater fills his mouth and nostrils; spitting and harrumphing, he kicks himself afloat. The downwards tug of his sodden clothes seems suddenly gigantic. His belly and groin have already begun to throb from the cold, and his feet and legs are going numb. Where the fuck is Cavendish? he thinks. Cavendish must have seen him fall. He calls out for help, then calls again, but no one appears. He is alone. The rope is within reach, but he knows the skins on the end of it are not heavy enough to bear his weight. He must pull himself up by his own power.

He grabs the edge of the ice for a third time and, kicking harder with both legs, tries to urge himself upwards. He hooks his right elbow up onto the surface, then his left palm. He digs the elbow in and, gasping and groaning with the ungodly effort, he forces himself farther up until, first his chin and neck, and then a small section of his upper chest, rise above the floe's edge. He presses down again as hard as he can with his left hand, using his elbow as a pivot, and gains an extra inch or two. He believes for a brief moment that the balance is shifting in his favor and he is about to succeed, but as soon as he thinks this, the floe he is pressing on jolts sideways, his right elbow slips away, and his jaw slams down hard onto the sharp angle of the ice. For a brief moment, he gazes up at the white and harrowed sky, and then, dazed and helpless, he slumps backwards into the dark water and away.

 

CHAPTER SIX

Brownlee dreams he is drinking blood out of an old shoe. It is O'Neill's blood, but O'Neill is dead now from the cold and from drinking seawater. They pass the shoe around, and each man, trembling, drinks from it in turn. The blood is warm and stains their lips and teeth like wine. What the fuck, Brownlee thinks, what the fuck? A man has to live, another hour, another minute even. What else is there to do? There are casks of bread floating in the hold, he knows, barrels of beer also, but no one has the strength or cunning to reach them. If they had had more time—but in the darkness it was pandemonium. Twelve feet of water in the hold and in a quarter of an hour they were over with nothing but the starboard bow left showing above the rampant waves. O'Neill is dead but his blood is still warm, the last man licks at the insole, rubs his fingers round the inner heel. The color is startling. Everything else in the world is gray or black or brown but not the blood. It is a godsend, Brownlee thinks. He says it out loud:
“It is a godsend.”
The men look at him. He turns to the surgeon and gives his instructions. He feels O'Neill's blood in his throat and in his stomach, spreading through him, giving him new life. The surgeon bleeds them all, and then the surgeon bleeds himself. Some men mix their own blood with flour to make a paste, others guzzle it down like drunkards straight from the shoe. It is not a sin, he tells himself, there is no sin left now, there is only the blood and the water and the ice; there is only life and death and the gray-green spaces in between. He will not die, he tells himself, not now, not ever. When he is thirsty, he will drink his own blood; when he is hungry, he will eat his own flesh. He will grow enormous from the feasting, he will expand to fill the empty sky.

 

CHAPTER SEVEN

When Black finds Sumner, he looks dead already. His body is wedged into the narrow crack between two ice floes; his head and shoulders are above the water, but everything else is below. His face is bone white apart from the lips, which are a dark, unnatural blue. Is he even breathing? Black leans down to check, but he can't tell—the wind is too loud, and all around the ice is screeching and grating in the swell. Everything about the surgeon appears frozen up and solid. Black takes his sealing rope and secures it around Sumner's chest. He doubts that he can pull him out on his own, but he tries anyway. He yanks him sideways first to dislodge him from the crevice, then, setting his heels in the snow, hauls upwards with all his might. Sumner's stiff and motionless body rises with remarkable ease, as though the sea has decided it doesn't want him after all. Black drops the rope and lunges forwards, grabbing the sodden epaulettes of Sumner's greatcoat and pulling the rest of him onto the surface of the ice. He turns him over and slaps him twice across the face. Sumner doesn't respond. Black hits him harder still. One eyelid flickers open.

“Dear God, you're alive,” Black says.

He fires his rifle in the air twice. After ten minutes, Otto arrives with two other men from the search party. The four men take a limb each and carry him back to the ship as fast as they are able. His wet clothes have frozen solid in the arctic air, and it is more like carrying a heavy piece of furniture across the ice than a human being. When they get to the ship, Sumner is lifted aboard with a block and tackle and laid out on the deck. Brownlee looks down at him.

“Is the poor cunt even breathing?” he says.

Black nods. Brownlee shakes his head in wonderment.

They carry him down the hatchway into the wardroom and cut off his frozen clothes with shears. Black puts more coal in the stove and tells the cook to boil water. They rub his icy skin with goose fat and wrap him in scalding towels. He doesn't move or speak; he is still alive but comatose. Black remains by his side; the others come in occasionally to stare or offer advice. Around midnight, his eyes flicker briefly open, and they give him brandy, which he coughs up along with a smear of dark brown blood. No one expects him to live through the night. At dawn, when they find he is still breathing, they move him out of the wardroom and into his own cabin.