The North Water(16)
Brownlee glares at him.
“The surgeon has his job on this ship, Cavendish, and you have yours. And let that be the fucking end of it.”
Drax and Cavendish meet again at midnight, when the watch changes. Cavendish pulls the harpooner to one side and glances around before speaking.
“He may yet die, you know,” he says. “Have you seen the way he looks?”
“He looks to me like a cunt who’s difficult to finish off,” Drax says.
“He’s a leathery fucker, that’s for sure.”
“You should have popped a ball into him when you had the chance.”
Cavendish shakes his head and waits for one of the Shetlanders to pass them by.
“That would never have flown,” he says. “Brownlee’s fucking sweet on him, and so is Black.”
Drax looks away as he lights his pipe. The sky above them is alive with jiggling stars; a layer of blue-black ice clings to the rigging and coats the deck.
“How much do you think that ring is worth anyway?” Cavendish says. “I’m thinking twenty guineas, even twenty-five.”
Drax shakes his head and sniffs, as if the very question is beneath him.
“It’s not your ring,” he says.
“And it’s not Sumner’s either. I’d say it belongs to whichever cunt has his hands on it at the time.”
Drax turns back to Cavendish and nods.
“That’s about the way it is,” he says.
*
In the darkened cabin, swaddled beneath a thick pile of bear hides and blankets, Sumner, feverish and as weak as a newborn, sleeps, wakes, then sleeps again. As the ship sails north and west through fog and drizzle, under a heavy swell with two feet of ice cladding the hull, and the men chipping it off the deck and gunwales with marlin spikes and mallets, Sumner’s opiated mind slips its moorings and drifts backwards, sideways, through fluid dreamscapes as fearsome and as thick with unnameable life as the green arctic waters which press and crash only twelve wooden inches from his head. He could be anywhere at any time, but his thoughts, like iron rushing to a magnet, return to one place only: A large yellow building beyond the racquet court, the astonishing noise and the slaughterhouse stench of meat and excrement, like a scene out of hell. Thirty or more doolies arriving every hour carrying in, three or four at a time, the dead and the wounded. Young men’s mangled and exploded corpses tossed into a miasmic outbuilding. The flailing of the wounded and the screams of the dying. Amputated limbs clattering into metal troughs. The incessant sound, as in a workshop or a sawmill, of steel gnawing through bone. The floor wet and sticky with spilled blood, the unstoppable heat, the thud and shake of artillery fire, and the clouds of black flies settling everywhere, on everything, without pause or discrimination—in eyes and ears and mouths, in open wounds. The incredible filth of it all, the howls and the pleading, the blood and shit, and the endless, endless pain.
Sumner works all morning, probing, sawing, suturing, until he is light-headed from the chloroform and nauseous from the generalized butchery. It is far worse than anything he has ever known or imagined. Men who, hours before, he saw boasting and laughing on the ridge are brought to him in pieces. He must do his duty, he tells himself, he must labor diligently. That is all that is possible now, all that any man could do. Like him, the other assistant surgeons—Wilkie and O’Dowd—are drenched with sweat and sunk in blood up to their elbows. As soon as one surgery is over, another one begins. Price, the orderly, checks the doolies as they arrive, discards the already dead, and moves the maimed to a place in the queue. Corbyn, the staff surgeon, decides which limbs must be amputated immediately and which might be saved. He was with the Coldstream Guards at Inkerman, a rifle in one hand, a scalpel in the other, two thousand dead in ten hours. He has specks of blood in his mustaches. He chews arrowroot against the stench. This is nothing, he tells the others; this is small fucking beer. They slice and saw and probe for musket balls. They sweat and curse and feel like vomiting from the heat. The wounded men scream constantly for water, but there is never enough to slake their thirst. Their thirst is obscene, their needs are intolerable, but Sumner must bear them anyway, he must continue doing what he does for as long as he is able. He has no time for anger or disgust or fear, no time or energy for anything but the work itself.
By late afternoon, three or four o’clock, the fighting slows and the flow of casualties diminishes at first, then stops completely. Rumor has it that the British troops have stumbled upon a great store of liquor near the Lahore Gate and have drunk themselves into a communal stupor. Whatever the reason, the advance is halted, at least for now, and for the first time in many hours Corbyn and his assistants are able to break from their labors. Baskets of food and carboys of water are brought in, and a number of the wounded are moved back to their regimental hospitals up on the ridge. Sumner, after washing the blood off himself and eating a plate of bread and cold meat, lies down on a charpoy and falls asleep. He is woken by the sounds of fierce argument. A turbaned man has appeared at the door of the field hospital carrying a wounded child; he is asking for assistance, and O’Dowd and Wilkie are loudly refusing.
“Get him out of here,” Wilkie says, “before I put a ball in him myself.”
O’Dowd picks up a saber from the corner of the room and makes a show of unsheathing it. The man doesn’t move. Corbyn comes over and tells O’Dowd to settle down. He examines the child briefly and shakes his head.