The Ministry of Time

Chapter III

Gore lies in his cabin and considers his palm.

Debility, Stanley had said. Well, they all knew what that meant. Scurvy. Men ruptured by melancholy, bleeding from their hairlines. Teeth loose in the head as a blown rose’s petals. Weeping for home—more so than usual. Aching at the joints. The smell of an orange, it’s said, could drive a debilitated man to derangement. The word “Mother” is like a lance to the ribs. Old wounds reopen.

He stretches his fingers wide, as if trying to span an octave on a pianoforte. Hot, dark pain gels the bandages together.

This old wound, formerly healed, he’d received in Australia with Captain Stokes. A gun had exploded in his hands. They were rowing up a river in the captain’s gig, charting its course. The cockatoos they’d spotted on the opposite bank were so dense as to be cloudlike, billowing from tree to tree. He’d taken up his fowling piece and sighted along the barrel.

“Bird for dinner,” said one of the men.

“If Gore doesn’t miss,” said Stokes.

“I don’t miss.”

After that, there’s a gap in his memory. There was a thunderous report. He’s sure he saw a bird drop. Then the sky, hysterically blue. He was on his back in the bottom of the boat. It seemed like his hand hurt, but he wasn’t sure. It felt wet. He sat up. Stokes was blanched, reaching for him with shaking hands.

“Killed the bird,” Gore had remarked quietly.

Stokes had started laughing.

He misses Stokes. He misses Australia. He’d like to feel the amniotic swelter of the continent’s interior. He can’t even summon the memory of what it was like to be comfortably warm, let alone perishingly hot. He misses newness, freshness. He’d like to look at a tree or pick his way through undergrowth. Even accidentally giving himself a digestive complaint by eating the wrong berry seems like a lark from this position. There’s nothing here but the most barren and desolate country imaginable. He supposes he’d like to see his family too, in New South Wales, but he doesn’t dwell on that, the same way he doesn’t examine the wound in his palm.

He shifts on the narrow bunk. He’s thinner these days. His hip bones are real architectural features. His skeleton has become navigable below his skin, which he dislikes, because he doesn’t like to think overmuch about his body, in case it remembers him and begins to make demands. But he has always been thin. No use in lamenting that God did not see fit to build him in the Apollonian mold of James Fitzjames and James Fairholme.

No use, either, in lamenting the day’s poor takings. He’ll go out again tomorrow and find bigger game. The last time he was in the North, he killed a reindeer on his hands and knees. The beast was served at Christmas dinner. He’d been six-and-twenty at the time. Robert McClure had been a mate alongside him. Still handsome then, Robbie. His hairline just beginning its uphill scarper. Those big sad blue eyes when Captain Back raised a glass to give the Sunday toast for absent friends. Robbie, who never wrote, who would have heard the news about the expedition in a months-old newspaper on whatever godforsaken Canadian station he’d been tossed on. Absent friends indeed.

Yes, tomorrow Gore will go out hunting again. One thing God has granted him is an excellent aim. He is very good at killing things. Things, sometimes people. He pulls a trigger and knows himself loved.