The Still Point (22 page)

‘Edward?’

Edward struggled to master himself, feeling foolish tears rising.

‘It’s lichen. It grows here in the summer. We can eat it. And it means we’re near land.’

‘Captain!’ called Nordahl, breathless, drawing close.

‘I know, Lars. We’ll stop and gather some.’

Edward knew the stuff could sicken them, but it was edible nonetheless, and he would take his chances. They paused for an hour to take their fill, and moved off with their shrunken bellies stretched by this paltry feast, and the strength of renewed hope. He was sure, this time, he heard a bird’s cry on the wind.

 

Within a day their hope was rewarded, and almost thwarted again. A ridge of black basalt burst from the ocean to the south-east, its contours so sharp in the clear air that it could not be a vision. The water roiled around its base as if it had only moments before been raised from the seabed by some wizard, wicked or kind; its crags and columns resembled nothing so much as a long, turreted and forbidding rampart. A tattered cheer went up from the kayaks; Hugh, clutching at Edward’s sleeve, was whispering, ‘A castle, Captain, do you see it?’

‘We’ll reach it in a few hours, Hugh, at this rate!’ exclaimed the doctor; Edward kept silent. The air was too clear to judge distance; he knew it was twice as far off as it seemed, a deception of the cruel light. And he could see no way to breach those walls. As they drew close they were at risk of being wrecked against them. And again, he kept his despair to himself, but while they rallied and devised a route he took the time to record the moment: ‘We are in sight of land; I have been unable to identify the shape of the coast from this vantage, and cannot tell what land it is we are nearing, if indeed it is known. I hope we may rest if we reach it.’

Two days pass before the next entry; it is a stoical Edward that next sets pen to paper, a man who has learned through hard lessons to be glad of small comforts. So he begins:

Fighting the currents that would have smashed the kayaks against the very island they were striving to land on, they had spent long gruelling hours seeking refuge; the ice packed thicker close to the land and it, too, could easily destroy them. The crash of the waves could not quite drown out Hugh’s constant, useless whimper, so that Edward was sorely tempted to tip the boy over the side, knowing his crime would not be condemned in this company, and forever go unpunished. He told himself later he couldn’t bring himself to do it; although perhaps in truth he simply couldn’t risk upsetting the craft and taking the others down with him. In either case they somehow ignored him and pushed on, shouting across to the other boat through the squall, drenched
and exhausted, until at last Edward sighted a low outcrop in the lee of a short promontory, which he thought they might reach with the Devil’s luck — ‘and we are all black as devils after all’. They brought the kayaks round and tacked slowly, painfully, into the foaming current that streamed from the sharp tip of the jutting rock, until they pushed through it into the relative calm of the tiny bay and reached the miraculous shore, a ledge barely five feet wide and four up. Nordahl heaved himself out as they came alongside; Andreev secured ropes to the kayak, tossed them up, and clambered onto the rocks, and together they lifted the craft from the water, cracking the beams horribly as they drew it up and knowing they would struggle to make her seaworthy again. Then they helped Edward, Wilkinson and Compton-Hill through the same process; Hugh refused to stand up in the unstable craft and had to be dragged by both wrists up the rock face (‘squealing as he skinned his knees’, Edward notes unkindly, all patience and pretence gone). As they hauled at the second kayak, they felt the damp wind that had been threatening pick up. All at once, it seemed, the sky and the water darkened, swirling suddenly below them, dizzying; a rope snapped and the kayak crashed back into the sea, shattering as it fell.

They sat on their little ledge, too breathless and tired to speak or to care, or even to think of the earth beneath them at last. And it was barely a perch, besides, which the angering waters threatened to sweep them from. They must ascend. They secured the last of their precious possessions within the well of the remaining, half-ruined kayak, lashing them in like a strange papoose, found a crevice running up the side of the cliff face, and with every muscle a painful knot they winched themselves into it one by one and inched up, their legs braced in the gap and their backs pressed hard against the black rock, each of them praying that the man above would not slip and take the rest in his fall. It
might have been half an hour or more before they reached the top and, without a pause to tend their bruised spines or rest their thighs, turned immediately to hoist the kayak up, every smack of its side an anguish, until at last it was safe, the precious bundles intact, even if the hull was hopelessly broken.

And then they paused. The sun had again broken through while they toiled and was warm through the rags they were clothed in; no hard bright ice shone back to blind them, but a scrubby brown earth covered in sparse furzy growth, through which, incredibly, tiny flowers grew. And they could hear birds, the same that they had heard in the distance a day ago, just catching the sound above the crash of the ocean. High above the churning sea, a flight of eider ducks passed, oblivious to suffering and to the joy they brought the starving, ragged men below them. They cast themselves down on the ground on their backs and felt the certainty of soil below them for the first time in over two years, watching the clouds twist and furl above them, each in his own private retreat–a meadow, a lakeside, a father’s farmland, a garden.

The omelette was a luxury he allowed them only for that first meal, until they could be sure of a source of fuel. They were not yet saved; far from it. It was almost September. Aside from the blessing of the eggs, they had barely enough provisions to feed them for two weeks unless there was more hunting to be done; and there were precious few rounds left for the rifle. Edward didn’t dare waste one to see if it would fire at all, after weeks of drenching in salt water. And they would need shelter and stores if they were to last the winter here. He walked the coastline; the telescope revealed, to the east, what he took to be a smaller island, and another to the north-east which he thought was separate from their own, although a thick frozen channel seemed to cement them together. At the southern end of their long, thin island, a
greenish glacier carved out a path and ended in a sheer wall of ice to the sea. He could not find its likeness on any map; he still could not say if they were at the edge of the archipelago, far to the west, or on the western edge of the northern group.

If they could attempt to repair the kayak, they might scout the outlying islands. But without wood and tar, barely any tools, and only their own ruined and essential clothing to act as canvas, he doubted it would be possible. And if the party was to be split, how could he split them? He would need Nordahl’s strength and know-how; but could he leave the silent Russian and the stupefied boy in the doctor’s care? The island had saved them, and now they were trapped. They would have to wait out the winter, make what repairs and preparations they could, and set out on the ice again on foot, as soon as it would bear them in the spring.

So he reasoned it out as he wandered the clifftops, his telescope fixed on the hopeless horizon, a king made captive in his own castle.

In England, Emily’s hope was fading as the leaves turned brown; she saw the willow yellow and pall and resign, by scraps and tatters, its glory. She knew,
as the first frosts came, that he would not return that year; the gunpowder crispness of the autumn air that she had always relished had no joy in it, for though the bonfires burned and the fireworks burst and dazzled, she knew that he would not return until the earth turned green again. The north wind that reached her in England, blowing the sky clear so that the stars shone brighter with the chill of it, had on its breath the ice that now must be closing about him, and at night she left her window open to feel it on her skin. He must by now be snug in his cabin below decks, and would have to wait all winter, storing up his triumph to tell her when he returned (yes, his triumph, because he could not have failed to reach it). So, he would not come this year, he had been detained by the sea; but he would be free of it in the spring and come back to her, and she had waited this long, she would wait. She could not allow herself to believe anything otherwise; for all his black mouth gaped at her in her dreams, it had no words to tell her that she would care to hear.

 

They spent the first day choosing a campsite, then set about salvaging the remains of what they carried. With oil and a knife, like Romans bathing, they scraped their skins of blackness as much as they could, laughing at the stripes of white left behind by the blade. Cleaner than they had been in months, with tea and the most delectable brown, rubbery omelettes they had ever tasted, they stretched themselves out on the hard, solid earth and toasted the discovery of Mackley’s Land. Edward raised his tin cup to their tribute and inwardly prayed that the island was already named, because if this Utopia was truly a new-found no-place, he might never know where it lay or find his way back from it, and it would remain for ever unmarked on the map.

In the days that followed, they began to build a rough stone shelter, tipping
raw eggs down their throats whenever they felt hungry. The eiders’ nests were to be found in every crevice, their long white eggs abundant. Edward tested the rifle on a roosting hen he came upon while egg-hunting; it worked. He would not risk trying to shoot them out of the air (despite Nordahl’s well-meant jibes — ‘You call yourself an English gent, Captain? Are you waiting for the season?’), but when he found such easy shooting he took what he could. Twice he came upon a mother carrying her brood one at a time to the water in her beak, while the others waited patiently for their turn; it needed only one shot, for it was easy to wring the little ones’ helpless necks when they were left undefended, for all they pecked and flapped. They skinned and dried his kills and rendered the fat, salivating, scrimping out small portions of fresh meat, knowing they must lay away provisions; and in the meantime threw another egg down their gullets, garnished for breakfast and supper with the red lichen that clung to the rock. After such privation, the glut was too much for them; they could not control their glee, feeling the dark yellow yolks slip down like oysters. Within a few days, this diet had its inevitable effect.

Dr Wilkinson did his best to stave off treating their condition with laudanum, the panacea of the age; he feared wasting their only anaesthetic, he said,
although he hoped they would not have need of it. But as the men grew daily weaker, Edward at last insisted that he open the chest and dose them, to soothe their suffering guts. The doctor hesitated, relented, fetched the case from the shelter.

‘Very well, Captain,’ he said, and without taking his eyes from Edward’s he unlatched his store, and lifted out first one then another empty jar, and another half full, which he handed to Edward. There was a single full one left in the case. A pitiful wail drew Andreev and Nordahl from their work to see their captain and the doctor, eyes locked in understanding, and, a little way off, Compton-Hill crouched on the ground clutching his knees, his gaze wide and watery, chewing and chewing at his dirty nails.

‘I see.’

‘He must have been taking the key while I slept. I should have seen it. I thought he was merely exhausted, and frightened. I didn’t think to check the chest until two days ago and… Look at him. It’s a shame, that’s all, a damn shame. I thought to keep it from his father. I’m sorry, Edward.’

Edward turned to the boy, whose eyes remarkably widened further, and welled with tears.

‘Yes, I see. Thank you, Doctor. Hugh, fetch yourself a blanket, I think you will need it. We will watch over you until it’s out of your system; if you can’t stand it, you will have to learn to do so. And, so help me, you had better pray that none of us has greater need of what you’ve taken.’

Ignoring the grizzling, penitent heap at his feet, he turned to the others. ‘Anton, you suffer worst; ask the doctor to give you a drop. For the rest, we must be more careful, and curb our greed.’

They pegged out a smaller shelter to the side of their stone hut for Hugh
to sweat and shiver in, so that their own already troubled rest might not be further disturbed. Edward heard him moaning, bleating, sometimes shouting in his fever; Wilkinson tended him with water and the cleanest cloth they could muster, under strict instruction to feel no pity. His bowels, so long stopped by the remedy the others needed, were let loose, and although his appetite did not recover he was fed only on precious bouillon, unable to digest anything more substantial, taking mournful choking sips from the spoon the doctor held for him between whining apologies. Edward knew the disgust the others felt; but when Nordahl came to him to ask why the boy should have this privilege while Anton must endure, he could only reply, ‘Would you let him die, Lars?’ He did not press for an answer, uncertain of his own.