Six hours. Robbed by the snow of anything to relate their progress to, they soon slipped deep inside themselves, and the boredom of simply walking, seeing nothing, saying nothing, began to eat at their sense of time. But their bodies were not so easily tricked. After three hours, at lunchtime, their bellies began to demand food. Ross let it last for as long as he dared, until he genuinely thought he was becoming faint with hunger; after six hours they stopped to eat.
They crouched shoulder to shoulder at a slight angle which protected the food from the wind. They opened the Thermos flask with the soup. This was not an easy task. They had to open one of the knapsacks, select the flask, remove it, close the knapsack, buckle it shut, take the flask, unscrew the cup-top, unscrew the stopper, pour out the soup, drink it, turn-about from the cup, re-seal the stopper, replace the cup, and put it all away. All this they had to do with a wind whose temperature was well below freezing, gusting to seventy miles an hour, without being able to remove their mittens for fear of frostbite, having to ease their balaclavas down from their noses and over their mouths to sip at the soup held uneasily with both hands, being careful, in spite of their shivering, to spill none of it in case it froze on their face-masks and gave the terrible cold access to their mouths, cheeks and chins.
After they had eaten half the soup, they began to move on again. The wind began to slacken now, and the walking became easier. Inch by inch, the whirling white curtain of the snow fell back. They began to make better time. They could make more of a guess as to how they were doing now, and the walking became relatively pleasant. Time slipped by almost unnoticed as they plodded on. The wind died completely within the next three hours, and suddenly the cloud vanished also, revealing an ice-blue sky and the afterglow of sunset.
They decided to eat the meat now. They had stopped anyway to go through the complex procedures of relieving themselves. The meat was slimy and cold, but they ate it with relish. They were tired; they had walked all day, for nearly ten hours.
“Better keep moving,” said Ross, his voice gravelly with fatigue. Jeremiah nodded, pulling his face-mask back up over his nose. His breath rose white on the still air, and hovered in a cloud about his head.
The clear weather was a mixed blessing, for the clear sky sent the temperature a further twenty degrees below zero. The ice on their clothes grated and flaked as they rose and began to move. The sky began to darken slowly, and the two of them followed their hunched shadows into the gathering dusk.
During the next hours, the quiet became almost as great a strain as the wind had been. In the strange twilight which never seemed to fade they shuffled on. Ahead of them, the stars began to twinkle. Ross kept consulting his compass, checking its unreliable readings against the constellations of the southern sky.
Time passed out of time. Each man had withdrawn into himself again; tapping deep sources of will and energy; a primeval urge to survive in spite of all. Ross’s lips moved as he walked, singing old marching songs with a steady relentless rhythm to which he moved his tired legs over and over again. A strange euphoria began to take hold of his mind. Pain receded by degrees until it became a distant thing. He became exultant, high, confident.
He cried out, “Do your worst, you Queen of Bitches. I’m ready for you.” And the Queen of Bitches took him at his word.
Jeremiah, at Ross’s side, saw it clearly coming, now out of the east, luminous, dead grey, reaching its unimaginable head to where the stars had been, tearing the horizons with its claws, galloping over the ice with terrible sinuous ease. He saw its ears flatten back amongst the clouds, he saw the wells of its eyes which were as black as the skies before stars, he saw the great hammock of its belly sweeping aside the snow, he saw the black of its lips writhe back to reveal its lightning teeth, and he heard its thunder-roar in the moment before it gulped them into the chaos of itself. Jeremiah saw all this, and screamed. His fists beat upon Ross’s invisible shoulders.
“It is the Bear,” he cried, again and again. But Ross did not hear. He stood, horrified, dumbfounded by the power of the thing he had summoned out of the icy night.
A great anger welled up in him, tore him inside as the terrible Bear tore him outside; an anger that called upon him to howl at the wind, strike at the snow with his fists, smash all the iron ice with his head, curse with most terrible curses the Queen of Bitches, and God. The wind screamed at him; he took no notice, but walked on. The wind, finding its armament of snow too slight a thing to stop him, tore the frozen crystals from the grasping fingers of the ice, and hurled them into his face, like knives; he took no notice, but walked on. The wind bided its time before unleashing its greatest weapon, and meanwhile folded Jeremiah into its cloak of invisibility; noticing this, Ross stopped, and the two men tied themselves together with a length of rope, then leaning into the full power of the wind, they stumbled forwards, first one in the lead, then the other.
Thus they went through many more hours while three great witches danced around them. The great witch Night covered them with darkness and fatigue; the great witch Winter crept south early to weave her chill spells and lend her weapons to the third – Antarctica, first witch here, whose cold is greater than Winter’s cold, who for more than a month in each year refuses to surrender to Night. And as they wandered among the trains of her frozen skirts, the witch Antarctica looked down over the shoulder of her wild white Bear, and plotted their destruction. If he closed his gravelled eyes, Ross could see her: Antarctica, Ice Maiden, Snow Queen, Queen of Bitches, watching him.
So midnight passed unnoticed. They had been walking for nearly sixteen hours with hardly a break. They had covered less than six miles.
Jeremiah was in the lead when the white Bear played its next great trick. The green ice hid its terrible nakedness under the blankets of snow which made even their legs invisible to the two men. In this way, with deadly cunning, it prepared its weapons.
Ross, his anger cooling now, and thickening to despair, walked in a waking dream, followed only the steady pull of the rope held taut by his friend walking far beyond the limits of his weary vision. Suddenly it jerked him off his feet, and pulled him rolling over the ice. He screamed and spread his four limbs, seeking purchase, trying to stop. The rope pulled him forward relentlessly. He closed his eyes and dug the heels of his hands and the toes of his boots into the slick ice. The movement slowed. The rope was no longer pulling him. He stopped, and lay, breathless, on his face for several minutes before he pulled himself on to his hands and knees and crawled forward. He came to the edge of the crevasse. The rope had worn a deep friction-groove into the green translucent lip, and had frozen fast as soon as the movement had stopped. He looked, stunned, down into the Queen of Bitches’ trap. He could just see Jeremiah, caught between the jaws. “Jeremiah?” he called, but no sound came. Jeremiah did not move.
It was several minutes before he thought of pulling on the rope. When he heaved, however, his friend’s unconscious body moved easily. But moving it and lifting it were two entirely different things. Ross soon found that his arms were unequal to the task, so he carefully untied the end around his waist, took hold of it below the edge of ice, below where it was frozen immovably into the lip, and, using the whole strength of his body, he began to move back. The wind in his face, traitor to the witches, helped him a little; the ice sent enough unevennesses to give him purchase, and inch by inch was Jeremiah raised. But the pressure on the rope made it eat again into the ice-rim, so that after a while Ross could not move back any further. Leaning back, tensing his shoulders, pulling with all his might, hand over hand he went up the rope again to the edge of the crevasse. Jeremiah was hanging almost a foot inside the ice, but the rope was so far into the edge that Ross had to wrap what slack he could around his waist, kneel carefully, and lift the dead-weight into his arms. Then he untied the other end of the rope from around Jeremiah’s waist. Both ends of the rope were now frozen into the ice, far beyond the ability of the exhausted Ross to move them, and so he left it where it was. Through the heavy cold-weather clothes, Ross could make no guess as to how badly Jeremiah was hurt. The only thing he was certain of was that his left leg was broken below the knee. As he tried to straighten this leg, Jeremiah stirred and groaned.