The Dead Men Stood Together (7 page)

I realised straight away that I was going to be of little use to the captain up there. I would see nothing until we were practically on top of it. Any land I saw, the ship would almost certainly run aground on before the sound of my voice had travelled down to the deck.

But, in any event, I saw nothing. It was so featureless I could hardly tell if the ship was even moving, though I knew she must be because the breeze chilled my face and swelled the sails.

The mist hung about me and soaked me through and through. I stared out on to the greyness, barely able to see the next mast. Suddenly, out of the mist loomed a massive cliff face and the whole crew cried out in terror. We looked set to run aground on some strange frozen island and the helmsman threw the wheel with all his might.

No sooner had we avoided this icy crag than another loomed up to take its place – and another. It was as though we had blundered into an archipelago and were surrounded by islands, each more treacherous than the next.

But these were not islands. Leastwise they weren’t islands of rock; they were floating islands of ice. Some of the crew had seen their like before in the frozen north, though none had ventured this far south and could never have guessed that we might find icebergs here.

I was relieved at first when I heard they were merely huge chunks of ice. My fear had been we would run aground on one of these sharp reefs. But I was a fool of course. These icebergs could crush a ship like tinder. They were mountains that only showed their peaks whilst the great body of them was beneath the surface.

Sure enough, the ship’s hull squealed as it scraped along the ragged edge of one of these monsters. The noise was deafening. It was terrifying too. It sounded like nothing I had ever heard in my life till then. It was like a thousand demons shrieking.

I clamped my hands to my ears to shut it out and saw I wasn’t the only one. Then the mist parted momentarily and we saw, to our horror, that the ocean all about was studded with the peaks of icebergs, drifting in the currents like the deathly fins of giant white sharks.

The captain was the first to come to his senses and ordered every man who was not otherwise occupied to grab a pole of any kind and climb the sides to push at any iceberg that came close.

I climbed down, grabbed a pole and hauled myself over the bulwarks to stand on the mainstays, where the great ropes from the mainmasts fixed themselves to the hull.

With my left arm hooked upon the rigging and my feet fighting for purchase on the slippery, ice-coated wooden board and ropes, I held the pole like a jousting knight and pushed with all my might.

It felt good to be doing something, but in truth we all knew that our lives were in the hands of the fates now. Any one of these ice fangs might rip out the guts of the ship and down we’d go into those freezing waters.

The mist rolled back in again. It was frightening because of what it concealed from our eyes. It made us feel as though we were floating through cloud, flying almost. It was dizzying, not being able to see anything around us at all. Far, far worse, though, were those moments when the mist parted and we could see our icy hell.

Eventually there was more ice than ocean and the very sea froze. I couldn’t believe my eyes. How could the sea freeze? I was sure such a thing was not possible. And yet slowly but surely our ship was becoming surrounded by ice – more and more spikes of ice standing up out of the water as though the sharks were circling us, ready for the kill.

Snow fell through the mist, gently at first but soon steadily. It coated the deck. It coated the sea as well until the sea seemed to be stiffening into a kind of icy porridge.

The dirty white crust rose and fell in the wake of the ship whilst the snowfall got heavier and heavier and the air got colder and colder.

Soon the sea was white, and instead of a thin scum, the ice was now a thick crust that cracked and splintered as the ship forced its way through.

The snow was frosting the ice sheet forming around the ship, until everything: the ship, the sea – was deathly pale in every direction. Never in my worse nightmares had I ever imagined a world so dreadful. It was as though everything was dissolving into this nothing.

Though this was nothing to what lay ahead.

The ice became thicker still and the ship began to slow. This grinding to a halt was made to the sound of more ear-splitting growls and squeals and moans as the ice squeezed in on the timbers of the hull. We knew that at any moment, the ice would win its battle with the wood and the hull would be crushed.

The ship became still. The growling gradually died away and we were encased in ice. The world was almost silent once again, apart from the eerie whistling of a breeze playing among the rigging. Snow and ice had smothered us. Icicles hung from the spars, snow carpeted the deck. Men stood like frozen meat, staring dumbfounded into the white horror, their breath rising up in tiny bursts of steam.

XIII

No sailor alive doesn’t think about his death. I had imagined many kinds of death: some ordinary – drowning at sea like my poor father or being crushed against the rocks of some reef; some more elaborate – cooked by cannibals or butchered by pirates. Not once had I ever imagined that I would simply freeze to a statue in some icy hell.

On the second day in the ice, I came up from the hold to find that the layer of snow on the deck had frozen solid. The snow no longer fell as before, but if anything it was even colder than it had been the previous night when I had lain shivering, trying to sleep.

When I say ‘night’, I should add that this word did not have the same meaning here, because although we could not see the sun through the mist, we could tell that it had never quite set.

Instead of the certainty of night, there was the odd halfway house of twilight – a twilight that lasted for hours and hours without ever slipping into darkness. It all just added to the feeling we had that we had fallen into some frozen netherworld.

A man who had slept near me stood gazing out into the mist so steadily that I walked up to ask him if he had seen something. He made no reply and did not move when I nudged him.

I leaned round to look at his face and saw it was a horrible blueish purple. His eyes were open and tiny icicles hung from his lashes. His very tears were frozen and I could see the veins in the eyeballs where the blood too was doubtless frozen. They had to break his fingers to release the grip he had on the rope he stood beside.

He was the first to die of the cold, but not the last. I thanked God that I had brought warm clothing, for it was those among us who had none who fell victim to the chill. The bodies were taken off the ship and left out on the ice. They were dragged some distance away – just far enough to be, mercifully, shrouded by the fog.

I left the ship myself on one of these ‘burials’, helping to dispose of the corpse of a one-eyed man from the north country. He was a big man with a booming laugh – or had been in life – and it took three of us to carry him down the side of the ship and drag him across the ice.

Whilst the other two untied the rope we had bound about him to pull him along, I stood and marvelled at the fact that we were standing on water turned to rock. In harsh winters, I had seen ice form on puddles and horse-troughs and buckets, but the notion that it could be this thick and over such a distance – it was as though the whole world was frozen. At that moment I had no way of knowing that it wasn’t.

This thought seemed to seep into my bones as an extra layer of chill and I stood staring into the mist as the others left the body and returned to the ship.

The only sound was the crunch of the retreating footsteps on the ice, but as that died away I was sure that there were other sounds – sounds so faint that I could hardly hear them.

They were muffled even further by the fleece hat I wore. If I moved my head even slightly, the sounds disappeared. I strained to make sense of them as my uncle walked up to me.

‘What is it?’ he said.

‘Shhh,’ I said, pointing into the mist. ‘Don’t you hear that?’

My uncle peered into the blankness and leaned forward, tilting his head like a bird. He nodded.

‘Aye,’ he said.

‘What do you think it –’

‘Whispering . . .’

As soon as he said it, I knew it was true. The sound was of many voices whispering – whether quietly or far away, it was impossible to tell. My stomach lurched as I had the impression of a great horde of unseen spirits standing just beyond the curtain of the mist, watching us and whispering to each other.

I couldn’t hear anything of what they said, only the sound of the breath on their lips. My uncle took a step forward, leaning out and cocking his head like a bird again, but checked himself. I could see the fear in his face that must have shown in mine. And I had never seen fear in his face before. Not once.

‘Let’s get back,’ he said, suddenly turning round and heading off towards the ship.

I could not have stayed a moment more alone there on the ice. As I walked away, the voices seemed to get a little louder, although still they never reached anything but a low murmur, like the wind playing in the dry leaves of a far away forest.

As chilling as it had been to face these hidden voices, it was a hundred times more frightening to turn our backs on them. I lowered my eyes to the ice and concentrated on following my uncle’s footsteps.

XIV

Back at the ship, that whispering was always there, behind all the other sounds. Once heard, it seemed to latch itself on and not let go.

And the others heard it too. During the working part of the day it was easier to block it out. As I lay trying to sleep through the bitter cold, the sound would come creeping back into my head from out of the silence.

I thought of the hermit and the pilot’s boy and the demons he said that he saw swimming in the air around my uncle. Was it those demons I could hear? Or were we going as crazy as the pilot’s boy?

I thought too of the hermit and his story about the man who thought we lived a dream and wondered if this was what this was. Were we all living in a dream, a nightmare? Were we all actors in a world of my uncle’s making?

The despair of the crew was intense. It was far worse than the fear in the storm. Fear is something you can fight. Despair is like a vampire, draining your energy.

It was horrible to see. Some of those men must have witnessed terrible things. Some had been shipwrecked, I knew. And if only a tiny part of my uncle’s tales were true, then he had seen things that would have sent me running and screaming. And yet this whispering mist had defeated the crew. They had given up. You could see it in their eyes.

And then it came. Out of the mist like a dove, like the Holy Spirit from a church painting. It glowed like it was lit by some light it carried with it – white and pure against the dull and dismal mist.

But this bird was no dove. It was huge. It soared on wings wider than the span of a man’s arms. It soared with barely a flap of those wings, though hardly a breath of a breeze blew. It wheeled about the ship with scarcely a wingbeat.

One by one, each man stopped and watched. You could have traced the flight path by the movement of their faces. They were like flowers following the sun.

We called to it – more and more of us, until the whole crew shouted out. It was good to break that wretched stillness. We were so cheered to see some kind of life in that barren place. Grown men’s eyes filled with tears and those tears froze on their cheeks.

This place – this dreadful, desolate place we had become trapped in – was empty of life and of the sense that any living creature had ever been there or could ever live there. And yet here was this bird.

We had seen nothing but each other since the onset of the storm that chased us to this hell. And we were no comfort at all. The cold and boredom were making madmen of us all and we had, day by day, become less and less human. We shuffled about slowly, scarcely uttering a word.

The bird sweeping in like that was like a peal of church bells or the sun bursting through clouds or a great roar of laughter. Life. That’s what it was. Something was alive in this world and it lifted our hearts and took our minds away from the creeping horror of the ice and the mist.

Every frozen, gaunt and beaten face I could see smiled on that bird and I looked to my uncle to see whether even he might wear a grin, but my view of him was blocked.

‘Albatross,’ said a man nearby.

‘Aye,’ said another. ‘I’ve seen them before. They can fly for days and never land.’

The man turned to me to explain.

‘They fly over the waves,’ he said. ‘Skimming them with their wing tips. They are a beautiful sight to see and that’s for sure.’

The albatross seemed to hear the man and down it came, skimming the frozen waters and then rising up again to swoop across the deck and through the rigging and up to the tops of the masts.

We cheered as heartily as though we were at the theatre or the bear-baiting pit. Men turned to each other and pointed and clapped. The bird was putting on a show for us and we loved it.

Then, to everyone’s amazement, the albatross’s circling of the ship got lower and tighter and all at once it swept in and landed on the deck, the men clearing a space for it as it skidded to a halt.