Then he realizes that this polynya is far smaller than the one Robert Golding had led them to — this patch of open, black water is less than eight feet long and only half that wide. Nor do the surrounding icebergs frozen into the pack ice here look right. They are much taller and more numerous than those near Hickey’s ambush site. And the pressure ridges are taller.
Crozier squints at the sky, catching only glimpses of stars. If the clouds would part and if he had his sextant and tables and a chart, he might be able to fix his position.
If… if… might.
The only recognizable patch of stars he catches sight of look more like a winter constellation than one that should be in that part of the arctic sky in mid or late August. He knows that he was shot on the night of 17 August — he had already made his daily log entry before Robert Golding had come running into camp — and he cannot imagine that more than a few days have passed since the ambush.
He looks wildly around the ice-jumbled horizons, trying to find a twilight glow that would hint of a recent sunset or imminent sunrise in the south. There is only the night and the howling wind and the clouds and a few trembling stars.
Dear Christ… where is the sun?
Crozier is still not cold, but he is trembling and shaking so badly that he has to use what little strength he has to grip the pile of folded furs to keep from toppling over.
Lady Silence is doing a very strange thing.
She has collapsed the hide-and-bone tent in a few efficient motions — even in the dim light, Crozier can see that the outer tent covers are made of sealskins — and now kneels on one of the sealskin tent covers and uses her halfmoon blade to slice it down the middle.
Then she hauls the two halves of the sealskin to the polynya and, using a curved stick to lower the pieces into the water, thoroughly wets them. Returning to the site where the tent stood only moments ago, she pulls frozen fish from the storage area that had been cut into the ice in her half of the tent and briskly lays a line of fish, head to tail, along one side of each half of the quickly freezing tent cover.
Crozier has not the slightest clue as to what the wench is up to. It is as if she is performing some insane heathenish religious ritual out here in the rising night wind under the stars. But the problem is, Crozier sees, she has cut up their sealskin tent cover. Even if she rebuilds the tent from hides stretched over the scattered curved sticks and ribs and bones, it will no longer hold out the wind and cold.
Ignoring him, Silence rolls both halves of the sealskin tent cover tightly around the two lines of fish, pulling and tugging the wet sealskin to make it even tighter. It amuses Crozier that she has left half of one fish protuding from one end of both lengths of rolled sealskin, and now she concentrates on bending upward the head end of each fish ever so slightly.
In two minutes she can lift the two seven-foot-long lengths of sealskin-wrapped fish — each now frozen as solidly as a long, narrow piece of oak with a rising fish head at its tip — and she lays them parallel on the ice.
Now she sets a small hide under her knees and kneels to use bits of sinew and hide thongs to lash short lengths of caribou antlers and ivory — the former frame to the tent — to connect the two seven-foot-long wrapped-fish lengths.
“Mother of God,” rasps Francis Crozier. The frozen lengths of fish wrapped in wet sealskin are runners. The antlers are cross-pieces. “You’re building a fucking sledge,” he whispers.
His breath hangs as crystals in the night air as his bemusement turns to a sort of panic. It wasn’t this cold on 17 August and before — nowhere near this cold, even in the middle of the night.
Crozier guesses that it has taken Silence half an hour or less to make the fish-runner, caribou-antler sledge, but now he sits on his stack of furs for another hour and a half or more — gauging the passage of time is difficult without his pocket watch and because he keeps drifting off into a light sleep even while sitting — as the woman works on the runners of the sledge.
First she removes something that looks like a mixture of mud and moss from a canvas bag that had come from Terror. Carrying Goldner cans of water from the polynya, she shapes this mud-moss into fist-sized balls and then lays these daubs the length of the ad hoc runners, patting and spreading them evenly with her bare hands. Crozier has no clue why her hands do not freeze solid despite her frequent breaks to stick her hands under her parka against her own bare belly.
Silence smooths the frozen mud with her knife, trimming it as a sculptor might cut his clay maquette. Then she brings more water from the polynya and pours it over the frozen layer of mud, creating an ice shoeing. Finally, she sprays mouthfuls of water onto a strip of bearskin and rubs that wet fur up and down the frozen mud along the length of each runner until the coating of ice there is absolutely smooth. In the starlight, it looks to Crozier as if the runners along the inverted sledge — just fish and strips of sealskin two hours earlier — are lined with glass.
Silence rights the sledge, tests the thongs and knots, puts her weight on the firmly lashed caribou antlers and short pieces of wood, and lashes the remaining antlers — two longer curved ones that had been the primary tent supports — up from the rear of the sledge to make rudimentary handles.
Then she lays several layers of sealskins and bearskins across the cross-antlers and comes to lift Crozier to his feet and help him over to the sledge.
He shakes off her arm and tries to walk to it by himself.
He has no memory of collapsing face-first into the snow, but his vision and hearing return as Silence is lifting him onto the sledge, straightening his legs, setting his back firmly against piled furs stacked against the rear antler handles, and setting several thick robes over him.
He sees that she has tied long strips of leather to the front of the sledge and woven the ends into a sort of harness that goes around her middle. He thinks of her finger-string games and sees what she had been saying — the tent (peaked oval) taken down, the two of them leaving (the walking figures in the sliding bits of string, although Crozier certainly was not walking this night), to another oval dome with no peak. (Another tent in the shape of a dome? A snow-house?)
With everything packed — the extra furs and canvas bags and hide-wrapped pots and seal-oil lamps all lying atop and around Crozier — Silence slips into harness and begins pulling them across the ice.
The runners glide with a glassy efficiency, far more silently and smoothly than the boatsledges from Terror and Erebus. Crozier is shocked to discover that he is still warm; two hours or more of just sitting still out on the ice floe has not chilled him, except for the tip of his nose.
The clouds are solid overhead. There is no hint of sunrise on the horizon in any direction. Francis Crozier has absolutely no hint as to where the woman is taking him — back to King William Island? South to the Adelaide Peninsula? Toward Back’s River? Farther out onto the ice?
“My men,” he rasps at her. He strains to raise his voice and be heard over the wind sigh, snow hiss, and the groaning of the thick ice beneath them. “I need to get back to my men. They’re looking for me. Miss… ma’am… Lady Silence, please. For the love of God, please take me back to Rescue Camp.”
Silence does not turn. He can see only the back of her hood and the white bear ruff gleaming in the faint starlight. He has no idea how she can see to proceed in this darkness or how such a small girl can pull his weight and the sledge’s weight so easily.