CHAPTER EIGHT
The intruder’s face was black with filth, his eyes rimmed with red. His cheekbones protruded above a scraggly beard shot through with grey. He wore a heavy overcoat and dirty box cloth trousers that flapped around stick-thin legs. Tendons stood out like ropes in his neck. Veins laced the backs of his hands like black worms.
Adams sat on the rocky earth, staring up at the man with his shotgun across his lap. In one black-fingered hand, the man grasped a stone. His other hand gripped a knife, its blade encrusted with dirt. The stockinged heel of his foot was visible through a gaping hole in his boot. His back hunched like a nocturnal beast captured suddenly in lamplight. Adams held his tongue, unsure whether a salutation would frighten or mollify. The man’s wild stare flicked from one point on the ground to another before locking on Adams’ knapsack. He launched himself across Adams at the knapsack, scrabbling at the buckles. Adams bent his knees, planted a boot squarely on the man’s chest, and shoved him backward. The dishevelled figure staggered back but appeared possessed of desperate strength. He snarled and raised the knife, slashing at the air between them.
Adams found his voice. “Stop, man!”
The man came at him again. Adams raised the shotgun barrel, but the man’s boot swung around and knocked the weapon from his hand. The gun discharged as it struck the earth, the echo of the explosion reverberating along the cliffs. Adams fell back again, and the man stabbed downward, the point of the knife ripping a gash in his trousers.
“Jimmy!” Adams shouted.
The man reared above Adams and raised his knife again. He seemed to grow larger in the grey light, like a balloon filling with air. Adams glimpsed a face assembled of bony brows and deep sockets, eyes pale blue, skin flaking from the lips. The man’s mouth opened as if to scream, but he made no sound. Adams swung his arm at the man’s wrist, and the knife spun across the stones.
“Jimmy! I need you!”
At last he saw Billings. The big man was crouched on his haunches twenty feet away. He stared at the earth, his hands clamped over his ears.
“Jimmy!”
The intruder’s knee was on Adams’ chest. The stink of his unwashed body was in his nostrils. Hands locked on his throat. Panic churned in him. His body demanded air. Through blood-misted eyes, he looked up at the face of the feral man. Lips, purple like week-old meat, drawn back in a snarl. The world darkened.
Then the man was gone from him. Adams sucked a long, ragged breath. He coughed and spat the stink of the man from his mouth. Billings held the thrashing man from behind, one huge arm circling his neck, the other clinched around his waist. Billings bent one knee, trying to wrestle the man to the ground. The intruder’s ravaged face bulged from the crook of Billings’ arm. He kicked out in panic, arching his back. Adams heard something crack, and then the man was limp in Billings’ hands, like a marionette with its strings suddenly severed. Billings cried out in alarm and released the man as though burned by the touch of his skin. The man’s chin fell to his breast and he slumped, boneless, to the ground.
“What in God’s name have you done?”
Robinson stood trembling fifty yards away, his shotgun in his hands. His breathing was heavy in his skull, sweat freezing on his forehead. Tears streaming down his face, Billings wrung his hands and hopped from one foot to the other.
“I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to.”
Adams sat on the ground near the corpse. Blood ran down his face from a gash between his eyes. He coughed again and put a hand to his throat, feeling for damage.
“Not his fault,” he said to Robinson.
“Then it is yours!” Robinson felt a wave of fury crash over him as he ran to where Adams lay. “He could have taken us to Franklin!”
It was close to midnight. The gashes in the grey clouds had closed up, dimming the light like a veil thrown over a lamp. The cold northerly wind blew stronger. Billings knelt on the ground. He squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his hands to both sides of his head.
“The man was addled,” said Adams. “Starving, I think. He wanted the knapsack.”
“Then why not give it to him?” Robinson demanded.
“He had a knife. He tried to throttle me. If it were not for Jimmy ...”
Robinson marched to where Billings knelt, thinking about how far he had travelled, how correct he had been in his prediction, and how this fool had snatched away his prize.
“Damn you!” he cried, “Can you not restrain a man without killing him?”
Hunched over, Billings howled like a gutshot dog.
If it were not for Jimmy.
Robinson felt the fury take hold of him, the blood hot in his cheeks, his fists clenching. Had the simpleton done it on purpose so they would turn back? Rage boiled up within him, swallowing him, spilling as a wave over a dam.
If it were not for Jimmy. It seemed to Robinson that the hands raising the shotgun were not his own. He did not feel the weapon’s weight or his finger curl on the trigger. He wanted only to hear the explosion, see the idiot’s blood and brains splashed on the stones. The muzzle trembled in the cold air, inches from the top of Billings’ head. Oblivious, the seaman remained on his knees, bawling. The ocean to the east was as black as old blood.
Elizabeth’s voice was in his head. You do yourself no favours when you are overly impassioned.
His heart tolled in his chest. He closed his eyes, dropped his chin, and exhaled, a long, slow release of breath. He took his finger from the trigger and lowered the shotgun. He put the weapon on the ground, then slowly removed his gloves and put his face in his hands. Allowing Adams to bring the simpleton along had been a gamble. But Robinson needed only one gamble to pay off. An image of his father was in his head, watching him with arms folded, malicious glee on his face. He knew what he would say.
Now what will you do, boy?
Billings had stopped crying. He looked up at Adams with red-rimmed eyes.
“I’m sorry, Mister Adams,” he whispered. “I didn’t mean to.”
“I know, Jimmy.” Adams patted his shoulder. “It’s not your fault.” Nor was it. It was his own. He had thought only to use Billings’ great strength, and the young giant had merely done as he was told.
“I want my ma.” Billings hung his head. “I want a pie.”
“I know, Jimmy.”
Adams felt a wave of helplessness. He had never been adept at easing pain that was not physical. He could tell Billings all would be well, and the young man would believe him. He could tell him they would find Franklin tomorrow.
“Pray with me, Jimmy.” He knelt beside Billings and touched his forehead to the stones. Billings copied him. “Help us, Lord. We have now taken a life. How can this be part of it?”
Adams rolled the dead man onto his back. The stink of urine made him turn his head. Robinson stood behind him, saying nothing. Billings stood with his back to them, staring at the ice pack.
With the tip of his pocketknife, Adams lifted the corpse’s lip. But for two molars on either side, all the man’s teeth were missing. His blue eyes were half-open, the eyelashes filmed with ice. He was clad in a mismatched selection of Royal Navy–issue slops. Beneath his tattered coat, he wore a dirty sweater and two flannel shirts. They found an iron water flask in one pocket but no identifying papers.
“My God, there is no flesh on him at all,” said Adams. “If we piled up his clothes, they would weigh more than he does.” He pulled off the dead man’s boots and tapped his frost-blackened toes. They did not yield as flesh should. “Like wood. I would have had to amputate.”
He and Robinson turned and looked down the coast of Boothia Felix, snaking away to the south. A bank of mist clung to a small promontory a few miles farther down the beach. The haze obscured their view beyond the bluff. Adams raised the telescope and scanned the horizon for a wisp of smoke from a signal fire, a lonely flagstaff planted on a barren headland, a glint of sunlight off a telescope lens.
“You were correct, then,” Adams said. “They went south.”
Robinson chewed his lip and stared off at the distant haze. They buried the man in a shallow depression Billings scraped out of the iron-hard ground. Flecks of snow appeared in the air as they covered the grave with flat rocks. They stood over it as the sky took on the colour of lead. Robinson tossed a handful of gravel into the grave. The pebbles bounced out and skittered away across the ground. Adams said a prayer as Billings bowed his head. Robinson watched in silence.
“I heard a story once,” said Adams, “from a whaler who saw a grave opened at Upernavik. A shipmate of his had died there the year before. The grave was only three feet deep. They couldn’t dig any further down. The dead man was frozen solid, he said. Looked the same as the day he was buried. Skin, eyes—everything the same, like a man asleep. He said if you thawed him out, he would sit up and ask for his supper.”
Robinson stared at the ground.
“This place permits us nothing,” said Adams. “No food. No shelter. No warmth.” He looked at the sky. “Should you die here, it even begrudges you a grave.”
The dead man’s sledge lay half a mile down the beach, with a blanket and a filthy piece of rolled-up canvas. One of the wooden sledge runners was missing. Adams found a small bag of musket balls wrapped in the blanket, but no gun.
Adams bent down and collected two pieces of fabric pinned within the canvas. One was a pair of linen drawers, once white but now grey with dirt, slit at the knee and hip with long gashes, along which the fabric was stained dark brown. The other was a shirt. One sleeve had been torn off at the shoulder. The same brown stains were visible along the edge of the cloth.
Something dropped from the sledge. Adams bent down to investigate and stood again, holding a tattered boot. The other, its sole flapping, was wrapped in the blanket.
“It seems he may have had a companion for at least part of his journey.”
He watched the ice move in the ocean to the west, the broken pieces colliding in the current.
They broke up the man’s sledge and made a fire. Frost smoke rose from the water. The moving floes chittered in the channel. Adams rummaged in the knapsack and lifted out six lumps of salt pork and a few pieces of biscuit, then put all but three pieces of pork and a single piece of biscuit back in the bag.
“Enough for one more day,” said Adams. “Perhaps two.”
He broke the biscuit into three pieces and gave one each to Robinson and Billings, then placed the pork on a stone at the fire’s edge until it began to steam. Chewing his biscuit, Billings sat transfixed, staring at the lumps of salt meat.
Robinson sighed. “I wish we had brought more tea.” It was the first time he had spoken since the visitor was buried.
Adams studied him across the fire. Robinson’s features bent and flickered in the flames, as if he were two men locked in an argument. If Adams and Billings had managed to subdue the intruder, would they now be leading Franklin’s man home with news of the lost explorer’s location? The path had once seemed so clear. Now it seemed to wind away and disappear into the fog drifting in from the ice pack to the south.
Robinson tossed a pebble into the fire. “I tell you now, I shall not go back with nothing. I will not return to Captain Ross and say, ‘Beg your pardon, sir, we found one of Franklin’s men but broke his neck, then turned around and came home.’”
Adams sat with his Bible in his lap. He stuck the tip of his knife into a piece of pork and blew on it. “But if we find more like him ?” He pointed with his chin at the grave.
“Deserters?”
“If that is what he was,” said Adams.
“This is your doing,” said Robinson. “And his.” He jerked his thumb at Billings. “You wanted him along. I will have you accept the consequences. We must go on.”
Adams was quiet. He passed the salt pork skewered on his knife to Billings. “Be careful, Jimmy. It’s hot.” Billings sat blowing on his meat and gazing into the flames.
“Do you waver?” Robinson asked.
God forgive me, I do, Adams thought, but shook his head. “This is the path the Lord has put me on. I must follow it.”
“You volunteered for this mission, did you not?”
“I did.”
“Then it is your choice to be here, not God’s.”
Adams stared into the dying fire, watching the glowing red coals fade to black. “Everything is as God wills it. If He did not choose me, He would have chosen a different man, and that man would be here. I know this: if we are to proceed, we must find more meat.”
“Then we agree.” Robinson stood, his shotgun in his hand. “Before we search further, we must finish our hunt. Bring the telescope, would you?”
They left Billings with the sledge and tent and took their shotguns, shot bags, and canteens, walking east across an ice-scarred plain. The sun was a fiery badge emblazoned on the sky. They stepped carefully over ground free of snow. Patches of red and orange lichen were splashed over the earth. Bear tracks in a patch of dried mud could have been an hour old or a thousand years, preserved by the cold like a fossil.
After two hours of walking, Robinson sank to his knees beside a cluster of small boulders and waved Adams down with his hand. He raised his telescope and looked up a sweeping slope at a collection of six brown shapes ambling along the ridge above them. The reindeer dropped their heads and nuzzled the lichen. When they raised their gaze and scanned the surrounding land, their antlers were silhouetted against the sky like misshapen candlesticks. The two men dropped flat and crawled slowly up the slope toward the herd. When they approached within sixty yards, Robinson put his mouth to Adams’ ear and whispered, “The big one.”
Adams nodded.
A large male picked its way along the ridge. A pouch of skin hung from its throat. Patches of white adorned its chest. Adams rose to his knees and aimed. For an instant, the reindeer stared at the odd creature that had risen from the earth, then turned to flee and, for the briefest moment, stood in profile.
The two men fired their weapons, and the small herd scattered. Both balls struck the large male. The animal lurched, and Robinson and Adams leaped to their feet, prepared to give chase, but the reindeer staggered once and fell.
When they reached it, the reindeer was not moving. The animal was sprawled awkwardly, its legs unbending and black eyes dull. One ball had destroyed its foreleg joint, attached now only by a piece of sinew. The other had struck the reindeer in the neck. Shiny blood coated its shoulder and ran onto the ground, pooling in the stony earth.
The two men sat on boulders under a darkening sky and sharpened their knives on stones.
Adams ran his knife down the backbone and peeled off the skin. He cut out the stomach and threw it on the ground. They took the haunches and shoulders and ribs and put them into the canvas bags that had held their salt pork. Robinson stood behind the dead creature’s head with a leg on either side of the carcass. He grasped the antlers and twisted with all his strength. The spine snapped, and the head broke off. He cracked the spine and leg bones across a boulder and pulled out the marrow. Adams cut out the dark-red liver and wrapped the dripping organ in a piece of linen.
The two men sat with their backs to a boulder and ate with blood running down their chins. It was salty and metallic in their throats as they sighed and lay back on the gravel, their bellies rising and falling. They put as much meat as they could carry into their knapsacks and walked away, leaving the remains of the reindeer. The antlers stood up from the earth like a pair of skeletal hands cupped in worship. They walked west to the coast, where Billings waited with the sledge and tent. At the sight of the bags of meat, Billings clapped his hands in delight for the first time in days.
Fragments of fog drifted around them like wraiths. Ancient whale bones, pitted with holes, crumbled to ash beneath their boots. They approached a small glacier uncurling like a smooth white tongue down a ravine. Minutes later they trudged across it, finding it pitted with dirt-streaked holes and riven with fissures.
They descended from the hills to the beach and travelled south along the shingle. Two days later they approached a sandy promontory. Beyond it lay a frozen bay three miles across. The bay ice was solid and smooth, so they hauled the sledge across and walked to the far shore. A cluster of enormous boulders huddled halfway up a long, low slope above the beach.
Adams discovered an ancient piece of driftwood pressed flat into the earth. He prised it out of the soil with his knife, lit a fire, and cooked the reindeer flesh. They dug a hole at the foot of the largest boulder and deposited fifty pounds of meat wrapped in canvas. They covered the cache with a layer of sand, smoothed the earth over with the shovel, then stood and continued down the beach.
“We must cross the ice to King William Land,” said Robinson. “There is nowhere else they could be.”
They stood on the beach at Cape Adelaide and looked out across the strait. The ice was closely packed, the ocean sealed beneath it. Broken chunks of ice were thrust up against each other, fresh snow in the depressions between them despite the lateness of the season. Hummocks rising from the pack seemed afire, and the clouds glowed red at midnight. Robinson pointed to the southwest.
“Our visitor can only have walked across the ice from the west. There is nothing to the east but Prince Regent Inlet, and Sir John Ross proved there is no Passage there. Cape Felix is thirty-five miles that way, Victory Point only twenty miles beyond.”
He stood close to Adams, his manner convivial. He moved to clap Adams on the shoulder but let his arm drop. For a moment, there was silence between them.
“Victory Point is just over two hundred miles to Point Turnagain,” he added, “and Franklin had been there in ’21. If the ships sailed south from Cape Walker, that is where he would have headed.” Robinson fell silent as the significance of his own words dawned upon him. “He would have assumed that was the North-West Passage.”
The fog thickened. The silhouettes of bergs shifted in the mist. Shapes loomed within them, like the shadows of unknown creatures entombed in the ice. They struck southwest toward King William Land, hauling enough reindeer meat for nine days. Free of cracks, the surface of the ice grunted and squeaked beneath their boots. The sun crackled in the sky, painting ribbons on the pack. They filled their canteens from meltwater puddles. A wolf followed them for two days, lingering out of range of their guns as if it knew how far their balls would carry. It watched them, its long snout dipping to the ice.
The three men threaded their way through the hummocks and ice crags, traversing leads that wound along the floes like veins across skin. Pools of water were few, and little more than ankle deep. Robinson felt no warmth on his palm when he held it up to the midnight sun. They suffered much from the glare and marched with scarves wrapped high on their faces.
Shoulders raw from the sledge harness, they stopped and pitched the tent on the ice. They rubbed their frozen feet and rolled out the floorcloth and blankets. The canvas tent shuddered as if gossamer. Robinson lay down and eased himself into his blanket, groaning. Gnawing on pieces of reindeer meat, he rolled onto his side and tucked his legs, nursing tiny pockets of body heat. The wind was like icy fingers stroking his bones.
In the evening, they walked on. With no visible landmarks, they were unsure of their location; each mile was indistinguishable from the last. Bludgeoned by the unrelenting sun, Robinson brushed rime from his eyebrows and squeezed the bridge of his nose between his fingers, but the white shapes around him remained blurred and ghostly. The horizon was a white line beneath an iron sky. Hummocks of ice reared up in places like misshapen sea monsters. Carried on the wind, long fingers of vapour ran across the ice and curled around their ankles.
The cold drove them on.
“There,” said Robinson, pointing. “That is the coast of King William Land, I am sure of it.”
Adams squinted through his goggles. The sky was blotchy with clouds. Curtains of light ran across their feet as clouds shuffled in front of the sun. Nearly blind from the glare, he could just make out a thin brown line atop the ice on the horizon. It seemed a long way off, but he realised the shoreline barely rose above the level of the sea ice and was probably no more than a mile away. Nothing lay beyond it; no cliffs rose above the water, no glaciers wound their way down ravines. The land had been flattened by the ice of aeons past, squashed by massive glaciers that had scoured all features from it.
We walk into oblivion, Adams thought. Never have I seen so much of nothing.
As he journeyed north the past year, Adams had imagined an invisible thread tethering him to England. Each time he reached a place more remote than the last—Disko Bay, Upernavik, Possession Bay—he thought, surely there could be nothing beyond this, surely the spool cannot pay out any more line. When Enterprise and Investigator were trapped in the ice at Port Leopold, the thread binding him to England seemed to have stretched as far as possible. The little bay at the tip of North Somerset seemed like the most isolated place in the world, the final citadel beyond which all was wilderness.
But then at Fury Beach, the thread unspooled even farther, and Port Leopold suddenly seemed a metropolis in his memory: two ships, years of provisions, warming stoves, mattresses, double bulkheads, a fully stocked medicine chest, the company of a hundred men. Now, here on the frozen sea, the Fury Beach campsite, the weathered timbers of Somerset House, its casks and barrels of twenty-five-year-old vegetables and soup, represented the height of civilisation.
Wherever they went next, Franklin would surely be waiting, a smile on his lips.
Just keep going into the nothingness, Adams thought. We whittle down our existence a little more with each step away from what we know. Perhaps if we keep walking, we will simply wink out and disappear. And there he will be.
He stared at the beach ahead, not looking where he put his feet. He felt the surface of the ice through the sole of his boot, just as he had thousands of times, and then his foot lurched downward as the ice gave way. Panic thrust a fist up from beneath his ribs, and suddenly he was waist deep in freezing water. The cold gripped him and pulled him lower. His legs would not move. The water was up to his armpits now. He tried to kick, but there was nothing beneath his feet to push against. In another moment the water was at his neck. The cold water stabbed at his throat, found its way beneath his clothes, scraped his back, curled around his ribs. The pain was like a burn, sucking the air from his lungs.
O blessed Lord, he thought, forgive me my sins. Bestow Thy mercy upon me.
He arched his back. Soaked, his heavy clothes weighed upon his limbs like armour. He stared up at the ice from the level of the water. It was only four feet thick but looked like the side of an iceberg, a hundred feet high. Blood roared in his ears. He forgot why he was there, could not imagine what he was doing. Then a tranquillity settled upon him, and his terror left him. He accepted it, this sense of astonishment. Before the water closed over his head, he thought, How odd, this is how a seal must see the world.