He worked his way around the ship, passing out water bags and lumps of dried fish, and quietly counted the men. Seven of them left, one lost. He organised a couple of them to start pumping out the bilge, which was awash with icy water.
‘We lost Xon,’ a man called Aranx murmured.
‘Yes. Only sixteen, wasn’t he?’
‘Seventeen.’
‘I’ll tell his mother when we get back.’
‘I’ll do it,’ Ayto said. ‘I play knuckles with the father. The stern mast’s snapped, by the way. That’s the main damage. That and a hundred leaks.’
‘We can lash the mast,’ Crimm said. When they got back to the Wall the other damage would be straightforward to repair; the boat’s construction was planking laid over a sturdy skeleton, and replacing sections was easy in dry dock.
There was a scraping along the hull, as if they had struck a reef.
Ayto, Crimm and Aranx glanced at each other, and hurried to the rail.
The ice was floating in cakes around them, flat, thick, some of them slushy. The scraping they had heard had been one of the cakes brushing past the stern. The floes looked like lilies on some dismal, colourless pond, Crimm thought.
‘In this cold that lot is going to thicken quickly,’ Ayto said.
‘We can get through it for now.’ The Sabet’s high prow was designed to help it weather heavy seas. It was good at pushing through loose surface ice like this. ‘Break out the oars. If it goes on long enough we’ll rotate the man at the rudder.’
‘All right.’
Soon they had the crew organised, and rowing steadily. Crimm worked the rudder for a time, then tied it up and went to work at the bilge pump.
The grinding of the ice against the hull came more often. Soon it was a continuous scrape, and, labouring in the bilge, Crimm could hear the cracking of floes as the boat rose and fell with the swell, and the prow came down heavy on the ice.
Ayto called, ‘Rest your oars. You might want to take a look, Crimm.’
Crimm straightened up from the bilge and walked the couple of paces to the rail. The floes were colliding with each other now, rising up over each other, pushing up ridges of crushed material that quickly refroze. It was a landscape of ridges and mountains, forming before his eyes. There were still leads, open stretches of water, dark stripes between the floes, but further out icebergs towered, floating hills of ice.
‘We’ve seen this before,’ Ayto said. ‘Further north.’
‘Yes. But never this far south.’
‘No, and not at this time of year. The prow won’t crack stuff as thick as this.’
‘We mustn’t get stuck.’ Crimm glanced around. ‘There are still some decent leads. We can follow that one, to the west, and then maybe there’s a route to the south.’
Ayto squinted and nodded. ‘We can try it. If not that way, another will probably open up.’
‘You call directions, and I’ll take a turn at the oar.’
‘All right. Tell them to go easy. We don’t want any snapped oars.’
So Crimm worked his oar with the rest, cautious, breaking his pull at any sense of solid resistance, any sound of scraping on the ice. Ayto stood at the prow, staring out, calling directions, and the men worked or rested their oars accordingly.
‘Hold it.’ Ayto held his hand up.
The men shipped their oars. The boat came to a halt quickly, with a grinding of ice. Crimm got up and joined Ayto at the prow. The lead ahead was still open, but it was narrowing visibly as he watched.
‘We can’t get any further,’ Ayto said. ‘Sorry. It closed up too fast. I was hoping to make a break for it to that one-’ he pointed to a wider lane further away, ‘-but it just closed in.’
‘Maybe we can go back the way we came.’ They both retreated to the stern to see. The men at the oars sat slumped, still weary from the storm — frost-covered, their clothes, their beards, even their eyebrows. The air was truly, bitterly cold now, Crimm realised, the exercise had kept him warmed against it, even though the sun was still high in a misty sky, even though this was still summer.
When they got to the stern they saw the lead behind the boat was closing up too.
Ayto said, ‘I’m sorry, Cousin, I fouled up, getting us lost in this maze.’
‘There was probably never a way through anyhow.’
‘So what now?’
Crimm was an experienced seaman. His father had brought him up on the ocean; his mother, fond but resentful, said her son had spent more of his boyhood on boats than at home. And at sea, you learned to keep calm. You tried one way. If that failed, you tried another. And if that failed in turn, another yet.
‘We get out on the ice. Fix up ropes. We go on foot, and haul the ship back until we find an open lead.’
‘Hmm,’ Ayto said. ‘Look how quick it’s closing up. We wouldn’t get far.’
‘So your idea is. .’
‘We wait. Overnight if we have to. Maybe the weather will relent a bit tomorrow. If the leads open up again we might make a break.’
Crimm thought about that, looking out to the horizon. Everywhere the ice was solidifying, those great ridges thrusting into the air where the floes collided. Even the drifting bergs were getting frozen into the congealing pack. ‘This stuff doesn’t look as if it’s going to give up any time soon.’
‘Well, it should,’ Ayto said, almost resentful. ‘It’s not even the equinox yet, unless I got too drunk to remember. I say we camp for the night and hope the little mother of the sky looks a bit more kindly on us in the morning.’
So Crimm gave in. They shipped the oars and set up the mainsail as a makeshift shelter suspended from the main mast. They had a small stock of firewood they carried to warm themselves in the nights at sea, and Aranx started building a fire out on the ice. Another man broke out dried fish and biscuits for a meal. Another, a Muslim, rolled out his prayer mat on the ice and knelt, facing east.
Two more of the crew went on a hopeful quest across the ice in search of driftwood for fuel. Ayto called after them, ‘Walk where the ice looks blue. That’s where it’s oldest, thickest. If you fall in through a crack I won’t be coming after you.’
Crimm walked around the ship, looking for damage to the timbers from the ice scrapes. He could hear the ice around him groaning and creaking as it consolidated. It was an eerie sound, laid over the silence of the enclosed, hushed sea, and the surface shuddered and lurched constantly.
And then, he actually saw it begin, the boat’s planking cracked and crumpled inward, under the relentless pressure from the ice, giving way with a snapping, splintering noise. The hull started to tilt.
‘Everybody off,’ he called. ‘Off the ship, now! Grab what you can. .’
They all got off in time, as the hull crumpled like an empty eggshell. The deck tipped over, and the remaining mast gave way with a snap. It all happened quickly, in heartbeats.
‘So, that’s that,’ Ayto said as they surveyed the wreck. ‘The end of the famous Sabet. I’ve heard of this happening. Far to the north, the kind of stories the Coldlanders tell. Not here.’
‘Well, it’s happened.’
‘We should have seen it coming. We might have hauled her out onto the ice before it closed.’
Crimm asked, ‘What good would that have done? We still weren’t going to be sailing her anywhere soon.’
Ayto nodded. ‘So what now?’
‘Now we go in and grab what we can, and see what’s what.’ He glanced around. ‘May as well build a bigger fire.’
‘We’re going to have to walk home,’ Ayto said.
‘Yes.’
‘Or at least to the edge of the ice, where we might get picked up.’
‘They’ll miss us. Send boats looking.’
‘Do we start today?’
Crimm sniffed the chill air. ‘No. The light will be going soon. We’d be better off camping for the night, sorting out the stuff. We need to carry food, the water. We can make up packs from the sails. Tents, maybe.’
‘We shouldn’t have-’