The surgeon nodded. His voice, when he spoke, was very thin and very tight and very flat. “I brought an entire bottle of Dover’s Powder — mostly made from a derivative of the coca plant, sometimes called cocaine. I’ll give him that. All of it, if you like. With a chaser of Mandragora, laudanum, and morphine. That will take away the pain.” He reached into his medical kit.
Hickey raised the pistol and aimed it at the surgeon’s left eye. “If you even make Magnus sick to his stomach, much less if your fucking hand comes out of that bag with a scalpel or other blade, I swear to fucking Christ I’ll shoot you in the balls and keep you alive long enough to make you eat them. Do you understand, Surgeon?”
“I understand,” said Goodsir. “But it is the Hippocratic oath that determines my next actions.” He brought out a bottle and spoon and poured out a tiny bit of liquid morphine. “Sip this,” he said to the giant.
“Thank you, Doctor,” said Magnus Manson. He slurped soundly.
“Cornelius!” cried Thompson, pointing.
Crozier was gone. Bloody smears led into the seracs.
“Oh, fuck me,” said the caulker’s mate with a sigh. “This arsehole is more trouble than he is worth. Dickie, have you reloaded?” Hickey was reloading the pistol as he asked the question.
“Aye,” said Aylmore, lifting the shotgun.
“Thompson, pick up the extra shotgun I brought and stay here with Magnus and the surgeon. If the good doctor does anything at all that you don’t like — even farts — blow his private parts off.”
Thompson nodded. Golding giggled. Hickey with his pistol and Golding and Aylmore with their shotguns advanced slowly across the moonlit ice and then tentatively, single file, into the forest of seracs and shadows.
“He could be hard to find in here,” whispered Aylmore as they stepped into the stripes of moonlight and darkness.
“I don’t think so,” said Hickey, and pointed at the broad smear of blood that led straight ahead between the ice columns like a telegraph code of black dots and dashes between the shadows.
“He still has a little pistol with him,” whispered Aylmore, moving cautiously from serac to serac.
“Fuck him and fuck his pistol,” said Hickey, striding straight ahead, his boots slipping a bit on the blood and ice.
Golding giggled loudly. “Fuck him and fuck his little pistol,” he said in a singsong voice, snickering again.
The blood trail ended forty feet in at the black polynya. Hickey rushed forward and stared down at where the horizontal smears became vertical smears on the side of the eight-foot ice slab. Something had gone into the water here.
“God-damn it to God-damn fucking hell,” cried Hickey, pacing back and forth. “I wanted to put that last bullet into the high-and-mighty king’s fucking face while he watched, God-damn him. He robbed me.”
“Look, Mr. Hickey, sir,” said Golding, giggling. He pointed to what might be a body floating facedown in the dark water.
“It’s only the fucking coat,” said Aylmore, who had come cautiously out of the shadows with his shotgun raised.
“Only the fucking coat,” repeated Robert Golding.
“So he’s dead down there,” said Aylmore. “Can we get out of here before Des Voeux or someone comes to the sound of all the shooting? It’s two days back to the others and we still have the bodies to cut up before we can leave.”
“No one’s going anywhere yet,” said the caulker’s mate. “Crozier may still be alive.”
“All shot up like that, without his coat?” asked Aylmore. “And look at the greatcoat, Cornelius. The shotgun tore it apart.”
“He may still be alive. We’re going to make sure he’s not. And maybe the body will float to the surface.”
“What are you going to do?” asked Aylmore. “Shoot his dead body?”
Hickey wheeled on the man and glared, making the much-taller Aylmore step back. “Yes,” said Cornelius Hickey. “That’s precisely what I’m going to do.” To Golding he barked, “Go bring Thompson and Magnus and the surgeon. We’ll tie up the doctor tight to one of them seracs while Aylmore and Thompson and me search and you watch over Magnus and cut Lane and Goddard into small enough to haul easy-like bits.”
“Me cut ’em up?” cried Golding. “You told me that’s why we were grabbin’ Goodsir, Cornelius. He was s’posed to do all the cutting up, not me.”
“Goodsir will do the carving in the future, Bobby,” said Hickey. “Tonight you have to do it. We can’t trust Dr. Goodsir yet… not until we get him back with our people and many miles away from here. You be a good boy and go get the doctor and tie him up to a serac, tight, use your best knots, and tell Magnus to bring the carcasses over here where you can carve ’em. And get blades from Goodsir’s kit and the big knives and carpenter’s saw I brung that are over in the bag.”
“Oh, all right,” said Golding. “But I’d rather search.” He trudged back out of the serac field.
“The captain must have left half his blood between where you shot him and here, Cornelius,” said Aylmore. “If he didn’t go into the water, he can’t hide anywhere here without leaving a trail.”
“That is precisely correct, Dickie my dear,” said Hickey with a strange smile. “If he’s not in the water he might crawl, but he cannot stop losing blood with wounds like that. We are going to search until we are sure he ain’t under the water nor curled up somewhere here in the seracs where he crawled and hid and bled himself to death. You start over there on the south side of the polynya, I’ll look to the north. We’ll go clockwise. If you see any wee sign, even a drop of blood, even a scuff in the snow, shout and stop. I’ll join you. And be careful. We don’t want the dying fucker jumping out of the shadows and grabbing one of our guns now, do we?”
Aylmore looked surprised and alarmed. “Do you really think he could be strong enough to do that? With three bullets and all those shotgun pellets in him, I mean? Without his coat, he’d freeze to death in a few minutes anyway. It’s getting much colder and the wind’s getting stronger. Do you really think he’s lying in wait for us, Cornelius?”
Hickey smiled and nodded toward the black pool. “No. I think he’s dead and drowned and down there. But we’re going to make fuckin’ sure. We’re not leaving here until we’re sure, even if we got to search until the God-poxed sun comes up.”
In the end, they searched for three hours under the light of the rising and then descending moon. There were no signs at all near the polynya nor amid the seracs nor on the open ice fields beyond the seracs in all directions nor on the high pressure ridges to the north and south and east: no blood trails, no footprints, no drag marks.
It took Robert Golding the full three hours to hack John Lane and William Goddard into the size pieces that Hickey had asked for, and even then the boy made a dreadful mess of it. Ribs, heads, hands, feet, and sections of spinal cord lay around him on all sides as if there had been an explosion in an abattoir. And young Golding himself was so covered with blood that he looked like a player in a minstrel show by the time Hickey and the others got back. Aylmore, Thompson, and even Magnus Manson were taken aback by their young apprentice’s appearance, but Hickey laughed long and hard.
The gunnysacks and burlap bags were filled with meat wrapped in oilcloths they’d brought. Yet still the bags leaked.
They untied Goodsir, who was shaking from the cold or shock.
“Time to go, Surgeon,” said Hickey. “The other chaps are waiting ten miles west of here on the ice to welcome you home.”
Goodsir said, “Mr. Des Voeux and the others will come after you.”
“No,” said Cornelius Hickey, his voice showing his absolute certainty, “they won’t. Not with them knowing that now we got at least three shotguns and a pistol. And that’s if they ever find out we was here, which I think they won’t.” To Golding, he said, “Give our new crewmate a sack of meat to carry, Bobby.”