The Ministry of Time

Chapter IV

It is cold the next day. Of course it is cold the next day. They are in the Arctic. But they sometimes have days of glorious sunshine. The stewards hang the laundry on ropes outstretched from the rigging. At least one man aboard Erebus has red flannel underwear. (Gore, taking McClure’s decade-old advice, wears leather breeches beneath wool.)

The sunny days also induce snow blindness, as the summer rays bounce up from the ice like a tossed knife. The broad emptiness of the landscape (seascape rather—they are locked in pack ice) makes sound and movement travel weirdly. Taking a daily constitutional around the ship is to risk hallucination, to see hoards of assassins and phantom guests where a tin or a boot lies lumpen.

Today the weather is overcast and grumbling. Gore sets out over the frozen sea for King William Land by himself. He prefers this to hunting in company. He becomes, along the hallowing earth, a moving point of muscle and sinew, quite clean of thought. If he sees a quarry, he does not reenter his body. He bends all his thoughts to the bullet. If there was someone with him, he’d have to remember he was fully inhabited by Graham Gore.

On the 1836 Frozen Strait expedition he’d once spent ten hours on the ice, hoping to bag a seal (they had an unsporting habit of sinking once killed). This crazed feat of endurance had rendered him snow-blind, which was the only thing that persuaded him back to the ship. That was ten years ago, of course. He’s older now. He’s been behind cannons at sieges; he’s had dysentery; his back aches in the mornings. He tends to return to Erebus when his body reminds him that they’re the same person.

On land, he shoots two brace of partridges, slack feathered pouches that will barely thicken a soup. He keeps walking, intending to meet the next hillock, which always promises to be the highest until he attains it. No caribou, no musk oxen. Not even wolves enliven his natural history studies. He can’t feel his feet. Each step has the unnatural pressure of blows in dreams. Perverse to admit it but he rather enjoys this. He’ll pay for it later, swelling like a waterlogged corpse when the frostnip kicks in.

It’s thirst that sends him homeward. He runs out of water within a couple of hours. When he takes a pull of brandy from the flask, the freezing metal skims off a haze of skin. It is summer, he is lucky. If he’d tried drinking from a metal container in January, he’d have a divot in his lip.

The frozen waves are piled against the shore of King William Land like the walls of a collapsing temple. He has to use the pick to let himself down the other side, scrambling for footholds with his numb feet. He’s seen etchings of the Arctic in the Illustrated London News. Flat. A washed-sheet landscape beneath a gray sky. But the northern seas are full of teeth. They’re crazy with pressure ridges and treacherous drifts. It will take him more than an hour to reach the ships, though the distance would take perhaps twenty minutes at a brisk walk across a lawn.

The sky lowers itself to the earth as he toils across the floes. A storm is coming, squeezing the visibility out of the air.

Gore notes this dispassionately. Either he’ll make it back to the ship or he won’t. He would like to survive until he can have a cup of cocoa, but he takes care not to visualize the cocoa too indulgently. Fitzjames had once asked him how he could approach life-threatening peril and minor annoyances with the same mildness, and he’d shrugged.

“It doesn’t improve my mood to catastrophize, so I don’t.”

“And what about hope? Have you ever been in love, Graham?” Fitzjames had asked. “Ever lived for the bestowment of a fair smile?”

“Ah, love, life’s greatest catastrophe.”

The wind picks up. The gelid light hurts his eyes. He pulls back even from thinking about his cup of cocoa and sets his mind exactly on top of his head. One foot in front of the other. Swing, push. Swing, push.

He is in this frame of mind—mindlessness rather—when he sees a dark shape crouching by a black disk. A seal hole in the ice. The dark shape moves very slightly. A stretch, perhaps—the energy is languid—though his eyes are too far gone to be sure. He is aiming his gun before his mind knows he is aiming.

The gun lets go its bullet with a sonorous bark. There’s a cry across the ice. A broken noise. Terribly, terribly human.