Kate was more or less asleep. The shock made her mind blank, but snatches of memory flashed up before her tightly closed eyes like the trailer in a cinema for some coming attraction. Her mother’s funeral, the pages from Time, from the London Sunday Times, the airport at Anchorage as her father had given that great whoop of joy. Silently she began to cry.
Quietly at first, the wind sang in the tent-ropes, stirring the orange net, blowing sparks in clouds from the smouldering fire on its steel tray. The waves began to break on the edges of the floe as the grey ocean became more choppy. Flashes of white broke the water’s monotony as white horses formed and foamed. The floe, small enough now to answer to the ocean’s dictates, began to rock gently as the long combers following the outskirts of the storm moved regularly under it. In the supply tent, tins began to chime against each other, the silver harpoons rolled from side to side. The clouds seemed to graze the tops of the floes. The day assumed all the dark claustrophobic solidity of a cave.
One or two heavy drops of warm rain dashed themselves against the coldly glowing ice.
“Have we any aspirin?” asked Kate suddenly.
“Aspirin?” Ross was jerked out of his thoughts. He shook his head to clear it.
“I have a bitch of a headache.” The word made the small hairs on Ross’s back and neck stir.
“I don’t know,” he said. “We should have some in the supply tent. There was a first aid box . . . Simon? Simon!”
“Yes?” Dully.
“Simon, have we any aspirin?”
“Aspirin? For Christ’s sake! Yes, I suppose so. In the first aid box. It’s in the supply tent.” Glad of something to do, he began to move stiffly. “I’ll get some.” He stood up and staggered slightly as the floe moved. “What the hell . . . ?”
Very slowly they began to realise that the weather had undergone a radical change. Simon pushed the tent-flap open and went out, his eyes automatically screwed up against the light; but it was almost as dark outside as it had been in the tent. The wind freshened against his face, warm and wet. He began to walk to the supply tent, his progress slowed by the restless movement of the orange net. He looked up quickly at the swirling clouds, and a volley of raindrops fell into his eyes. He hunched his shoulders without thinking any more about it and went after the aspirin for Kate.
In the tent, Ross asked Kate, “How do you feel?”
“A bit better . . .” She was surprised to discover it was true.
“Just the headache?”
“A bit queasy.” She sounded a little preoccupied.
“I hope it’s nothing you ate . . .”
She realised that some of her panic had been caused by the fact that she had really expected to come to pieces herself now that her father was no longer there. But she wasn’t. She was OK. She was going to be OK. “Hey! No aspersions against my cooking!”
Ross began to laugh. It wasn’t much as witty repartee went, but it meant she was going to be OK. She sketched a smile in reply.
The floe gave a little lurch as two waves passed too close.
Job looked up, blinking his long eyes, disturbed more by the movement than the laughter. He glanced around the dark tent and frowned. After Ross’s laugh there came a little silence broken by the sinister song of the wind, the restless lapping of the waves, the fading roar of the blown fire. One section of the tent flapped and strained like a sail. The two men glanced at each other, and seemed to realise the danger as their eyes met. Then they were scrambling for the opening, bursting out on hands and knees into the black cavernous day as the first serious shower of warm rain slashed out of the sky.
The floe was still the size of Wembley stadium; large enough to make their camp on the lower half look small; still large enough to make anyone feel safe. But Ross and Job knew well enough that no matter how long and wide it was, the important questions were how thick was it and how stable? If there was any serious rough weather, this seemingly solid refuge would shatter like a car-windscreen in a crash. And even if it held together against the waves, the current and the rain would both be melting it until it was unsafe to walk anywhere – and when Sedna’s knucklebones returned, thought Job, there would be nothing to stop them coming through. His eyes automatically swept over the all-too-close ocean, but there was nothing to see through the rain except the black clouds, the black and white sea and the restless floes with their ghostly cold blue light shining steadily.
“The wood!” yelled Ross over the first serious gust of wind. “We must keep it dry!” Job nodded. Without fire they could not cook; they couldn’t even melt the ice for water. They could be in bad trouble without fire. Bad trouble! That’s what we’re in now, he thought. If the wind freshened, if the waves rose, if the rain lasted for any length of time they were dead.
The squall eased slightly. Ross had a bundle of wood under his arm and was stumbling back to the tent. Simon Quick came out of the supply tent with the aspirin. They collided. The wood went all over the place. Colin swung round, eyes blazing. “You clumsy sod! For Christ’s sake . . .”
But Quick just pushed past him and crawled into the tent, Kate’s aspirins held safe. Job helped Ross pick up the wood again, but he took it himself this time, and shoved his way into the tent with it. Quick was kneeling beside Kate, giving her the tablets.
“Time enough for that later,” snapped the Eskimo. “We’ve got to get all this stuff in out of the wet.”
The supply tent was by no means waterproof. If everything in it got wet, and the temperature dropped again after the storm, most of it would become covered in ice, unusable. Not just the food, but the first aid equipment, the guns, everything. Job’s mind refused to start an exact catalogue: there simply wasn’t time. He grabbed Simon by the shoulder and bundled him out into the rain. After a few moments Kate, who had caught the urgency of Job’s words if not the exact tenor of his thoughts, also came out.
Suddenly there was a sound like the high registers in thunder. Ross was thrown down as the ice heaved. Inches below him was a crack in the ice, running straight through the camp. There was a brief silence, and then the cracking began in earnest. Like a cube brought out of the freezer and plunged into a warm drink, the floe was cracking apart. Beneath the camp the orange net flexed, tautened, twisted. The edges of the crack beneath him ground together quietly like teeth. The roaring quickened.
For half an hour they moved the articles most at risk out of the supply tent into the nearest of the undamaged tents: the latrine tent.
The wind continued to rise until a good deal of spray was mixed with the heavy rain. The waves began to break over the floe and wash across the ice towards the camp. The edges of the crack beneath the net ground restlessly, growling like an angry lion. The sides of the tents billowed and flapped until it seemed as though they would split. The tents themselves bent and flexed as the gusts swirled. The ropes tautened, loosened, howled through whole octaves and keys. Ripples of water washed about their ankles, broke against the reinforced canvas, froze in smooth blisters over the pegs holding tents, nets. The fire tray shifted, began to tilt.
Water slicked Ross’s oily hair to his head and face. It ran into his collar, into his cuffs, into his boots. It got in his eyes and his mouth. It dripped from his chin. He looked, half blind, around the camp, searching for anything else that should be moved out of the wet. The others were already stumbling back to the tent. He bent his head, hunched his shoulders, and began to follow them. Then a movement caught his eye. He looked up. What was it? Everything was still – straining to burst into a frenzy of movement – but still. His eyes swept over the camp, checking. The four tents, the net, the fire tray. His eyes swept on, then jerked back. The fire tray! He began to run.