Still more majestic shalt thou rise, More dreadful from each foreign stroke;
As the loud blast that tears the skies, Serves but to root thy native oak.
Someone led the procession in the theatrical costume version of an admiral’s uniform. The epaulettes were so absurdly broad that they hung out eight inches beyond the little man’s shoulders. He was very fat. The gold buttons on his old-fashioned Naval jacket would never have buttoned. He was also headless. The figure carried its papier-mâché head under the crook of his left arm, his moldering plumed admiral’s hat under his right.
Crozier quit singing. The other men did not.
Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves! Britons never, never, never shall be slaves!
Behind the headless admiral, who obviously was meant to be the late Sir John Franklin even though it had not been Sir John decapitated that day at the bear blind, ambled a monster ten or twelve feet tall.
It had the body and fur and black paws and long claws and triangular head and black eyes of a white arctic bear, but it was walking on its hind legs and was twice the height of a bear and with twice the arms’ length. It walked stiffly, almost blindly, swinging its upper body to and fro, the small black eyes staring at each man it approached. The swinging paws — the arms hanging loose as bell pulls — were larger than the costumed crewmen’s heads.
“That’s your giant, Manson, on the bottom,” laughed Erebus’s second mate, Charles Frederick Des Voeux, next to Crozier, raising his voice to be heard over the next stanza. “It’s your little caulker’s mate — Hickey? — riding on his shoulders. It took the men all night to sew up the two hides into a single costume.”
Thee haughty tyrants ne’er shall tame, All their attempts to bend thee down
Will but arouse thy generous flame, But work their woe, and thy renown.
As the giant bear ambled past, dozens of men from the blue, green, and orange rooms followed it in procession through the white room and into the violet room. Crozier stood as if literally frozen to his spot near the white banquet table. Finally he turned his head to look at Fitzjames.
“I swear I did not know, Francis,” said Fitzjames. The other captain’s lips were pale and very thin.
The white room began emptying of costumed figures as the scores there followed the headless admiral and the swinging, towering, slowly ambling bipedal bear-giant into and through the relative gloom of the long violet room. The drunken singing roared around Crozier.
RULE, BRITANNIA! BRITANNIA, RULE THE WAVES!
BRITONS NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER
SHALL BE SLAVES!
Crozier began following the procession into the violet chamber and Fitzjames followed him. The captain of HMS Terror had never felt this way in all of his years of command; he knew that he had to stop this travesty of a lampoon — no Naval discipline could tolerate a farce in which the death of the expedition’s former commander became a source of humour. But at the same time he knew that it had already proceeded to a point where simply shouting down the singing, ordering Manson and Hickey out of their obscene monster suit, ordering everyone out of their costumes and back to their berths on the ships would be almost as absurd and useless as the pagan ritual Crozier was watching with growing anger.
TO THEE BELONGS THE RURAL REIGN, THY CITIES SHALL WITH COMMERCE SHINE;
ALL THINE SHALL BE THE SUBJECT MAIN, AND EVERY SHORE IT CIRCLES THINE!
The headless admiral, ambling bear-thing, and the following procession of a hundred costumed men or more had not paused long in the violet room. As Crozier entered the violet-coloured space — the torches and outside tripod fires were whipping on the north side of the violet-dyed canvas wall and the sails themselves were rippling and cracking in the rising wind — he arrived just in time to see Manson and Hickey and their singing mob pause at the entrance to the ebony room.
Crozier resisted the impulse to shout out “No!” It was an obscenity for the effigy of Sir John and the towering bear-thing to play this out in any forum, but unthinkably vile in that black, oppressive ebony room with its polar bear head and ticking clock. Whatever final dumb show the men had in mind, at least it would soon be finished. This had to be the finale of this ill-thought-out mistake of a Second Grand Venetian Carnivale. He would let the singing end of its own, the pagan mime close to drunken cheers from the men, and then he would order the mobs out of their costumes, send the frozen and drunken seamen back to their ships, but order the riggers and orga-nizers to strike the canvas and rigging immediately — tonight — whether that meant frostbite or no. He would then deal with Hickey, Manson, Aylmore, and his officers.
The swaying, much-cheered headless admiral and swaying bear-monster entered the ebony compartment.
Sir John’s black clock within began striking midnight.
The mob of bizarrely costumed sailors at the rear of the procession began pressing forward, the rear ranks eager to get into the ebony compartment to see the fun, even while the ragmen, rats, unicorns, dustmen, one-legged pirates, Arab princes and Egyptian princesses, gladiators, faeries, and other creatures at the front of the mob, already making the turn and crossing the threshold into the black room, began resisting the advance, pushing back, no longer sure they wanted to be in that soot-floored and black-walled darkness.
Crozier elbowed his way forward through the mob — the mass surging forward and then back as those in the front thought twice about actually entering the ebony gloom — certain now that if he couldn’t end this farce before the finale, at least he could shorten this final act.
He’d no sooner entered the darkness with twenty or thirty men at the front of the procession who’d also halted upon stepping in — his eyes had to adapt in here, and the black soot on the ice gave him a terrible sense of falling into a black void — when he felt the blast of cold air against his face. It was as if someone had opened a door in the wall of the iceberg that loomed over everything. Even the costumed figures here in the dark were still singing, but the real volume came from the pushing mobs still back in the violet room.
RULE, BRITANNIA! BRITANNIA, RULE THE WAVES;
BRITONS NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER,
NEVER
SHALL BE SLAVES!
Crozier could only just make out the white of the disembodied bear’s head emerging from the ice over the ebony clock — the chimes had struck six now and seemed terribly loud in the darkened space — and he could see that under the taller, swaying, white bear-monster’s form, Manson and Hickey were finding it difficult to keep their balance on the sooty ice, in the icy blackness with the north canvas walls flapping and rippling wildly with the wind.
Crozier saw that there was a second large white shape in the room. It also stood on its hind legs. It was farther back in the darkness than Manson and Hickey’s bearhide-white glow. And it was much larger. And taller.
As the men fell silent and the clock was striking its last four chimes, something in the room roared.
THE MUSES, STILL WITH FREEDOM FOUND, SHALL TO THY HAPPY COAST REPAIR;
BLEST ISLE! WITH MATCHLESS BEAUTY CROWNED, AND MANLY HEARTS TO GUIDE THE FAIR!
Suddenly the men in the ebony room were shoving backward against the still-pushing throng of seamen trying to get in.
“What in God’s name?”asked Dr. McDonald. The four surgeons, all in Harlequin costumes but with their masks hanging down now, were recognizable to Crozier in the brighter violet glow coming around the canvased curve between the rooms.
A man in the ebony room screamed in terror. There came a second roar, unlike anything that Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier had ever heard; it was something more at home in a thick jungle of some previous Hyborian Age than in the Arctic of the nineteenth century. The sound ground so low into the bass regions, grew so reverberating, and emerged so ferocious that it made the captain of HMS Terror want to piss his pants right there in front of his men.
The larger of the two white shapes in the gloom charged forward.
Costumed m
en screamed, tried to push backward against the wave of the forward-pushing curious, and then ran to the left and right in the darkness, colliding with the nearly invisible black-dyed canvas walls.
Crozier, unarmed, stood where he was. He felt the mass of the thing brush past him in the darkness. He sensed it with his mind … felt it in his head. There was a sudden stench as of old blood, then the reek of a carrion pit.
Princesses and faeries were throwing off costumes and cold-weather slops in the darkness, clawing at the black walls and fumbling for their boat knives on their buried belts.
Crozier heard a meaty, sickening slap as huge plate-sized paws or knife-sized claws slammed into a man’s body. Something crunched sickeningly as teeth longer than bayonet blades bit through skull or bone. In the outer rooms, men still sang.
RULE, BRITANNIA! BRITANNIA, RULE THE WAVES!
BRITONS NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER
SHALL BE SLAVES!!
The ebony clock concluded its striking. It was midnight. It was 1848.
Men used their knives to slash through the black-dyed walls and strips of wind-tormented canvas were immediately whipped into the flames of torches and tripods out on the ice. Flames leapt skyward and almost immediately engaged the rigging.
The white shape had moved out into the violet room. Men there were screaming and scattering, cursing and shoving, some already slashing at the walls there rather than trying to make the long run out through the compartment maze, and Crozier shoved seamen aside as he tried to follow. Both walls of the ebony room were ablaze now. More men screamed and one man ran past Crozier, his Harlequin costume, Welsh wig, and hair shooting flames behind him like yellow silk streamers.
By the time Crozier shoved himself free of the surging mob of fleeing, costumed forms, the violet compartment was also burning and the thing from the ice had moved on to the white room. The captain could hear the shouts from scores of men as they ran ahead of the white apparition in a wave of waving arms and shed costumes. The web of beautifully rigged ropes attaching the canvas and spar struts to the overhanging iceberg was burning now, the patterns of flame slashing like scribbled runes of fire against the black slate of sky. The hundred-foot wall of ice reflected the flames in its thousand facets.
The spars themselves that rose like exposed ribs along the burning walls of the ebony room, the violet room, and now the white room, were also on fire. Years of storage in the virtual desert of the arctic dryness had leached all moisture from the wood. They fed the flames like thousand-pound pieces of tinder.
Crozier gave up all hope of mastering the situation and ran with the others. He had to get out of the burning maze.
The white room was fully engaged. Flames shot up from the white walls, from the canvas carpets on the ice, from the former sheet-draped banquet tables and casks and chairs and from Mr. Diggle’s metal cooking grill. Someone had knocked over the mechanical disk player in their panicked flight and the oak-and-bronze instrument reflected the flames from all of its beautifully crafted faces and curves.
Crozier saw Captain Fitzjames standing in the white room, the only figure not costumed and not running. He grabbed the motionless man by his slops’ sleeve. “Come, James! We have to go.”
The commander of HMS Erebus slowly turned his head and looked at his superior officer as if they had never met. Fitzjames had that small, absent, maddening smile on his face again.
Crozier slapped him. “Come on!”
Pulling and tugging the sleepwalking Fitzjames, Crozier stumbled through the burning white room, out through the fourth room, whose walls were more orange with flames than with dye now, and into the burning green room. The maze seemed to go on and on. Costumed figures lay on the ice here and there — some moaning and with ripped and mauled vestments, one man naked and burned — but other seamen were stopping to help them up, shoving them onward and outward. The sea ice underfoot, where there were no burning canvas carpets, was littered with shreds of costumes and abandoned cold-weather gear. Most of these tatters and fabrics were either ablaze or the about to burn.
“Come on!” repeated Crozier, still tugging a stumbling Fitzjames in his wake. A seaman lay unconscious on the ice — young George Chambers from Erebus, Crozier saw, one of the ship’s boys, although twenty-one now, one of the drummers in their early burials on the ice — and no one seemed to be taking notice of him. Crozier released Fitzjames just long enough to lift Chambers over his shoulder, and then he grabbed the other captain’s sleeve again and began running just as flames on either side exploded to the rigging above.
Crozier heard a monstrous hissing behind him.
Certain that the thing had circled behind him in the confusion, perhaps crashing up through the impenetrable ice, he swung to confront it with only his one mittened fist free.
The entire iceberg was steaming and popping from the heat. Huge chunks and heavy overhangs were breaking off and crashing down to the ice, hissing like snakes as they fell into the cauldron of flame that had been the tent maze. The sight held Crozier in motionless rapture for a minute — the berg’s countless facets reflecting the flames made him think of a hundred-storey fairy-tale castle tower ablaze with light. He knew at that instant that as long as he lived he would never again see anything like this.
“Francis,” lisped Captain James Fitzjames. “We have to go.”
The green room’s walls were falling away but there were only more flames on the ice beyond. The rapidly advancing fissures and tendrils and fingers of fire had spread to the final two compartments.
Shielding his face with his free hand, Crozier charged forward through the flames, herding the last of the fleeing revelers on ahead of him.
Out through the burning purple room staggered the survivors as Crozier led them into the blazing blue room. The wind from the northwest was howling now, joining with screams and roars and hisses that might have been only in Francis Crozier’s head for all he knew at that moment, and the flames were blowing across the blue compartment’s wide opening, creating a barrier of fire.
A cluster of about a dozen men, some still wearing shreds of their costume finery, had slid to a stop before those flames.
“MOVE!” roared Crozier, bellowing in his most commanding typhoon voice. A lookout in the crosstrees at the top of a mainmast two hundred feet above the deck could have heard the command clearly in an eighty-knot wind with forty-foot waves crashing around them. And he would have obeyed. These men also obeyed, jumping, screaming, and running through the flames with Crozier right behind them, still carrying Chambers along on his right shoulder and tugging Fitzjames along with his left hand.
Once outside, his slops steaming, Crozier continued running, catching and passing some of the dozens of men who were spreading out in every direction in the night. The captain did not immediately see the white creature among the men, but everything was very confused out here — even with the flames throwing light and shadows five hundred feet in every direction — and then he was busy shouting for his officers and trying to find an ice boulder on which to lay the still-unconscious George Chambers.
Suddenly there came the pop-pop-pop of musket fire.
Incredibly, unbelievably, obscenely, a line of four Marines just outside the circle of light from the flames had taken their knees on the ice and were firing into the clumps and mobs of running men. Here and there a figure — still sadly and absurdly in costume — fell to the ice.
Releasing Fitzjames, Crozier ran forward, stepping into the line of volley fire and waving his arms. Musket balls whizzed past his ears.
“CEASE FIRE! GOD-DAMN YOUR EYES, SERGEANT TOZER, I’LL BREAK YOU TO A PRIVATE FOR THIS AND HAVE YOU HANGED IF YOU DON’T CEASE THAT FUCKING FIRE IMMEDIATELY!”
The firing popped and stopped.
The Marines snapped to a standing salute, Sergeant Tozer shouting that the white thing was out there among the men. They’d seen it backlit by the flames. It was carrying a man in its jaws.
Crozier ignored him. Shout
ing and shoving both Terrors and Erebuses into clumps around him on the ice, sending obviously mauled or burned men back to Fitzjames’s nearby ship, the captain was hunting for his officers — or Erebus officers — or anyone he could give an order to and have it relayed to the clusters of terrified men still running out through seracs and across pressure ridges into the howling arctic darkness.
If those men didn’t come back, they’d freeze to death out there. Or the thing would find them. Crozier decided that no one was going the mile back to Terror until they had warmed up on the lower deck of Erebus.
But first Crozier had to get his men calmed, organized, and busy pulling the wounded and the bodies of the dead from what was left of the burning Carnivale compartments.
In the first moments he found only the Erebus mate Couch and Second Lieutenant Hodgson, but then Lieutenant Little came up through the smoke and steam — the top few inches of ice were melting in an irregular radius around the flames and sending a thick fog out across the sea ice and into the serac forest — saluted clumsily, his right arm was burned, and reported for duty.
With Little at his side, Crozier found it easier to gain control of the men, get them back toward Erebus, and start taking roll. He ordered the Marines to reload and set them in a defensive skirmish line between the accumulating mass of staggering men near Erebus’s ice ramp and the still roaring inferno.
“My God,” said Dr. Harry D. S. Goodsir, who had just come out of Erebus and was standing nearby, tugging off his slops and greatcoat. “It’s actually warm out here with the flames.”
“So it is,” said Crozier, feeling the sweat on his face and body. The fire had brought the temperature up a hundred degrees or more. He wondered idly if the ice would melt and they’d all drown. To Goodsir he barked, “Go over there to Lieutenant Hodgson and tell him to begin to assess the numbers of dead and wounded and to get them to you. Find the other surgeons and get Erebus’s sick bay fitted out in Sir John’s Great Room — set it up as they trained you surgeons to do for a combat engagement at sea. I don’t want the dead laid out on the ice — that thing is still out here somewhere — so tell your seamen to carry them to the forepeak on the lower deck. I’ll check in on you in forty minutes — have a complete butcher’s bill ready for me.”