The North Water(14)
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.