Too weak to resist or roll over, all Crozier can do is moan. He imagines her slicing him to pieces and then cooking and eating the pieces. He feels her pressing strands of something moist and slimy onto and into the many wounds in his back.
At some point in the torture, he falls asleep again.
My men!
It is only after several days of this pain and of slipping constantly into and out of consciousness and of thinking that Silence is slicing him to pieces that Crozier remembers being shot.
He awakens with the tent dark except for a tiny amount of moonlight or starlight seeping through the tight-stretched hides. The Esquimaux girl is sleeping next to him, sharing his body heat even as he shares hers, and both of them are naked. Crozier feels not the slightest stir of passion or physical interest beyond his animal need for warmth. He is in too much pain.
My men! I must get back to my men! Warn them!
For the first time, he remembers Hickey, the moonlight, the gunshots.
Crozier’s arm is lying across his chest and now he forces his hand to touch higher, where the shotgun pellets had struck his chest and shoulder. His upper left torso is a mass of welts and wounds, but it feels as if the shotgun pellets and any clothing driven into his flesh with them have been carefully dug out. There is something soft like moistened moss or seaweed pressed into the larger wounds, and while Crozier has the impulse to dig it out and throw it away, he does not have the strength.
His upper back hurts even more than his lacerated chest and Crozier remembers the torture as Silence dug there with her knife blade. He also remembers the slight squelching sound after Hickey pulled the trigger but before the shotgun cartridges fired — the powder had been wet and old and both shots had probably ignited with far less than full explosive force — but he can also recall the impact of the outer part of the widening pellet cloud hurling him around and then down onto the ice. He had been shot once from the back with the shotgun at extreme range and once from the front.
Has the Esquimaux girl dug out every pellet? Every shred of filthy clothing driven into me?
Crozier blinks in the dimness. He remembers visiting Dr. Goodsir’s sick bay and the surgeon’s patient explanations of how, in Naval warfare as well as with most of the wounds suffered on their expedition, it was usually not the initial wound that killed but the sepsis from the contaminated wounds that set in later.
He moves his hand slowly from his chest to his shoulder. He remembers now that after the shotgun blasts, Hickey then shot him several times with Crozier’s own pistol and the first bullet had struck… here. Crozier gasps as his fingers find a deep groove in the flesh of his upper biceps. It is packed with the moldy, slimy stuff. The pain of touching it makes him dizzy and ill.
There is another groove from a bullet along his left rib. Touching that — just moving his hand that far exhausts him — makes him gasp aloud and black out for a moment.
When some consciousness returns, Crozier realizes that Silence has dug a bullet out of his flesh there in his side and also dressed this wound with whatever heathenish poultice she had applied elsewhere on his body. Guessing from the pain when he breathes and from the soreness and swelling in his back, he thinks that this bullet broke at least one rib on his left side, was deflected, and lodged under the skin near his left shoulder blade. Silence must have extracted it from there.
It takes endless minutes and the rest of his meager energy for him to lower his hand to touch his most painful wound.
Crozier does not remember being shot in the left leg, but the pain from the muscle there, just above and under his knee, convinces him that a third bullet must have passed through at that point. He can feel both the entrance and exit holes under his shaking fingers. Two inches higher and the bullet would have taken his knee, the knee would have cost him his leg, and his leg would almost certainly have meant his life. Again there is a poultice-bandage there, and although he can feel scabs, there seems to be no fresh flow of blood.
No wonder I’m burning up from fever. I’m dying of sepsis.
Then he realizes that the heat he feels may not be fever. These robes insulate so well and Lady Silence’s naked body next to his is pouring out so much heat that he is completely warm for the first time in… how long? Months? Years?
With great effort, Crozier pushes back the top of the robe that covers both of them, allowing a little cooler air in.
Silence stirs but does not waken. Staring at her in the dim light in the tent, he thinks she looks like a child — perhaps like one of his cousin Albert’s younger teenaged daughters.
With this thought in mind — remembering playing croquet on a green lawn in Dublin — Crozier falls asleep again.
She is in her parka and kneeling in front of him, hands about a foot apart, string made of animal sinew or gut dancing between her splayed fingers and thumbs. She is using her fingers to play a cat’s cradle child’s game with sinew as string.
Crozier watches dully.
The same two patterns keep appearing out of the complicated crisscross of sinew string. The first comprises three bands of strings creating two triangles at the top, just in from her thumbs, but with a double loop of string in the lower center of the pattern showing a peaked dome. The second pattern — her right hand pulled far away with just two bare strings running almost to her left hand where the string loops around just her thumb and little finger — shows a complex little loop of doubled string that looks like a cartoon figure with four oval legs or flippers and and a string-loop head.
Crozier has no idea what the forms mean. He shakes his head slowly to let her know that he does not want to play.
Silence stares at him for a silent moment, her dark eyes looking into his. Then she undoes the pattern with a graceful collapse of her small hands and sets the string in the ivory bowl he drinks his broth from. A second later she crawls out through the multiple tent flaps.
Shocked by the cold air blowing in for those seconds, Crozier tries to crawl to the opening. He needs to see where he is. Background groans and crackings have suggested that they are still on the ice — perhaps very near where he was shot. Crozier has no sense of how long it has been since Hickey ambushed the four of them — himself, Goodsir, poor Lane and Goddard — but he has hopes that it has been only a few hours, a day or two at most. If he leaves now, he might still be able to get his warning to the men at Rescue Camp before Hickey, Manson, Thompson, and Aylmore show up there to do more damage.
Crozier is able to lift his head and shoulders a few inches but is far too weak to slither out from under the robes, much less to crawl to look out through the caribou-hide tent flaps. He sleeps again.
Sometime later — he is not even sure if it is the same day or if Silence has come and gone several times since he fell asleep — Silence wakes him. The dim light through the hides is the same; the interior of the tent is illuminated by the same blubber lamps. There is a fresh slab of seal lying in the snowy niche in the floor she uses for storage, and Crozier sees that she has just pulled off her heavy outer parka and is wearing only some sort of short pants with the fur side turned inward. The soft outer hide is lighter in color than Silence’s brown skin. Her breasts bobble as she kneels in front of Crozier again.
Suddenly the string dances between her fingers again. This time the little animal design near her left hand is shown first, the string is loosened, retwisted, and the design of the peaked oval dome in the center comes next.