by Rebecca Hunt
Millet-Bass didn’t answer. The visible portion of his face was indignant. He knew Napps was fine. And before his injury, Millet-Bass would have also been fine. They’d both worked in lower temperatures than this before, and for hours longer without being anywhere near ‘done in’.
‘And Dinners! We’ve been gone so long he’ll think we’ve abandoned him.’
Dinners. Millet-Bass pursed his lips.
Getting within earshot of the tent, they started yelling their traditionally crass greetings to Dinners. Getting no response, Napps shouted that he honestly wasn’t above slighting Elizabeth Dinners to provoke an answer.
‘So you’d best reply before I lose my sense of humour,’ Napps said. ‘Dinners?’
The entrance to the tent was untied and flapping open. Dinners had cast off his sleeping bag and blankets, leaving them half strewn around the tent. A trail of clothing led towards the cliffside as Dinners had thrown down one glove, then his jumper; the other glove lay discarded further along, and then his hat.
He was crawling on his knees in a gully when they found him. He said he didn’t feel well and looked at Napps with the drugged vacancy of hypothermia.
Napps skidded as he lifted the deadweight man. ‘God, what happened?’
Dinners wasn’t sure. He said he couldn’t describe it. From the moment they’d left him, he said he’d heard his name being called. It sounded like Castle, or sometimes Lawrence, or other men he didn’t know, and they kept telling him to leave the tent. So he’d done it, and something awful had come towards him.
‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about,’ Napps said as they dragged him inside the tent and put him in his sleeping bag. ‘How could Lawrence have called you? He isn’t here, Dinners. No one is but us, you know this.’
Dinners responded in semi-conscious mumblings, already half asleep.
‘Dinners? Who would have called you?’ Napps said, and then turned to Millet-Bass. ‘Can you make sense of it?’
Millet-Bass’s answer was so unexpected Napps had to repeat it. ‘. . . You could hit him?’
‘Weeks of tending him, and for what? To have it wasted. I could kill him.’
Napps stared at him. ‘I’m ashamed on your behalf.’
‘I’d save your disapproval for our little friend here.’
‘And I’d be careful before I said anything else,’ Napps said. ‘I’d think hard before I said another word.’
‘Imagine the many benefits of being Joseph Evelyn’s nephew,’ Millet-Bass said with curious intent. ‘All that money, all that influence. Say you were hungry for adventure, well, what’s stopping you? It’s simple, you just buy your way on to an expedition.’
Napps face showed the start of several reactions.
‘As being rich negates the need for qualification, you can buy yourself a place on any voyage you choose,’ Millet-Bass continued. ‘You could go to Everland, for example. You don’t care about legitimate concerns; you want to go to Everland. You’re a reasonable enough scientist and Everland has scientific promise. The Captain is powerless to stop you, since Uncle Joe is the Captain’s great benefactor. And the First Mate is powerless to stop you, since the Captain has authority over him.’
Napps finally trusted himself to speak. ‘How do you know this?’
‘ . . . Except there’s one problem to which you can’t buy a solution,’ Millet-Bass said. ‘Because although ambition is free, experience has a cost. Ability has a cost. Talent has a cost. But they don’t have a price.’
‘Answer me. How do you know?’
Millet-Bass looked at him guiltily. ‘The way you very nearly knew yourself that night during the blizzard. You just didn’t know what you’d overheard. And then I lied and said I’d been speaking to myself.’
‘And why didn’t you tell me before?’
‘For the same reason I’m admitting it to you now. I thought it was in everyone’s interest to keep quiet. Except I’ve learnt that it wasn’t in my interest, and it wasn’t in your interest, Napps. We’ve been sold as part of one man’s trophy hunt.’
Millet-Bass remembered Napps saying, the weak aren’t buoyed by the strong, the weak sink them. He remembered Napps leaning forward, saying, tell me that it wouldn’t be easier if he’d died in the dinghy.
‘So ask me to imagine that the Kismet didn’t come,’ Millet-Bass said. ‘Ask me again what I’d be willing to do.’
43
December 2012
The intensity of the low atmospheric pressure now felt at once nosebleed-inducing and strangely dreamlike to Brix as they drove to the glacier. Everland’s cyber-white sunshine added to the sense of unreality, causing the landscape to simmer with refraction and the Joseph Evelyn to appear in the distance as a hovering black scorch mark.
The cove’s accumulation of flotsam had thawed into view as the snow dissolved. Brittle strings of seaweed and old animal bones had emerged, along with an assortment of nightmarishly decrepit toys. These, Brix discovered, were the remains of mummified seal pups, their bodies so desiccated they sounded hollow when tapped. Lengths of ancient rope still holding their complicated sailors’ knots lay tangled among the stones, beside fragmented wooden slats that had once boxed food. Brix turned one of the slats over with her boot. Some were emblazoned with incomplete words, such as ‘Huntley & P’, ‘Bov’, ‘Kidney S’.
Wandering about in the distracted manner of someone whose thoughts are engaged elsewhere, Decker had said it was interesting and then continued on, either unaware or untroubled that Brix and Jess weren’t following.
‘Forgot to give me your keys,’ Jess said to Brix.
Although Brix and Decker were only carrying what they could fit in their pockets, the limping Jess was stuck with her cumbersome blue field assistant’s rucksack. It was an idiocy which overshadowed even the ridiculous keys ceremony. A better idea, Brix suggested, would be for her to take this burden off Jess, or at least help out.
Jess’s response was a predictable grimace of refusal.
Brix passed over the keys. ‘For a little while. Just until we reach the glacier.’
Jess zipped them into the front pocket of her rucksack. She was partly thinking that this proposal was beyond ironic, since the only purpose of her storing the keys was to prevent Brix from losing them, a meaningless exercise if she then gave her the bag. She was also thinking that Decker wasn’t around to disapprove, which allowed her to relax the boundaries of her own disapproval, and consider Brix’s offer seriously. Perhaps even accept it.
‘You could almost be a field assistant,’ Jess said finally, handing her the rucksack.
‘That could almost be flattering,’ Brix said.
‘Well, maybe Aegeus didn’t make such a bad choice when they selected you,’ Jess said. ‘Maybe I’m quite glad you’re here.’
Jess wasn’t around to hear if Brix answered. Her pace had rapidly accelerated.
She’d been complimenting Brix, and complimenting people wasn’t something Jess could do without embarrassment. More painful to her than the impact of fast walking on an injury was the black hole of vulnerability which followed an expression of gratitude. There was always the chance her appreciation wouldn’t be welcomed in the right way, or that she’d see it returned to her as pity. The cure was to put some physical space between herself and Brix.
If Decker’s headache was a poison, then idle thoughts of home were an antidote. Because he knew Viv as well as he knew himself, he could hold entire conversations with her in his head. He’d say something to her, and without him consciously trying he could generate such a spontaneous reply. His imagined Viv was so fluent and responsive it occasionally surprised him. Checking on the whereabouts of Brix and Jess, he saw they were only three or four minutes behind him, so he went on, his daydream carrying him another quarter of a mile further along the beach and into the glacial bay.
The plastic process of deformation and shift which drove a glacier forward also churned clay and grit into its layers. Newly forged glacial ice started as an ectoplasmic blue at the summit and became dirtier as it progressed to the base, eventually arriving at the shoreline as stained as an underpass blackened by decades of traffic fumes. The recent volcanic activity had sped up the process of crumbling and advancement, causing huge sootily marbled chunks of ice to collapse down over the narrow beach at the foot of Everland’s glacier. In sizes comparable to shipping containers and meteorites, pieces balanced at slanting, improbable degrees, or had collided together and split. Sections with vehicle-like dimensions were smashed in a colossal pile-up, as furrowed and dented as crushed cars. To cross the beach meant navigating a path past megaliths the colour of smoke damage and wreckage which lay piled in dumper truck quantities.
‘All right over there?’ Decker called.
‘Fine.’ Jess waved him on with both hands, the briskness of her gesture interpretable as either assurance or impatience. Whichever it was, she seemed keen he keep going. ‘We’ll follow,’ she said, her voice travelling faintly.
Good. It was an answer which enabled Decker to continue his discussion with Viv. She’d mentioned that as this was his final expedition, this might also be the final time he saw an Antarctic glacier. Quite a momentous event, after having seen them every few months for the last twenty years. It was an interesting point he hadn’t considered before.
Everland’s glacier had bulldozed a deep, highway-wide gorge through the island. As the weight of countless tons of compacted snow chewed into the bedrock, the loose debris which piled at its edges had amassed into thirty-metre-high moraine walls. These moraines acted as a benchmark, showing how much the glacier had receded in modern times. The ice that would have once filled the gorge was now a thinner, lower flow which had shrunk back from its former margins, like a drought-stricken river. And as the ice’s edges retreated, borders of dry ground between the moraine and each side of the glacier were exposed, inviting the curious to enter.
Decker stood at the entrance to the moraine and considered his options. He’d first seen a glacier at the age of twenty-five, when he signed up for a tour of the Franz Josef glacier during a holiday in New Zealand. Visitors queued to join guided ice treks at tourism bureaus which were styled as Swiss-style wooden chalets, and helicopters flew above it hourly, carrying the wealthier sightseers. Hundreds of people were visible on the surface, following rope-fenced trails. The Franz Josef glacier was somewhere between a celebrity and a zoo exhibit, with its own merchandise of printed mugs and tea towels, postcards and calendars. It was tame and primped, unlike the glacier on Everland, which Decker classified as wild, and therefore more authentic. And if this really was to be his final encounter with a proper glacier, then he felt the moment deserved some respect, some solitary contemplation. Which he could afford to give it, since Brix and Jess were lagging behind. Just five minutes, he said to himself, starting into the dry channel which ran alongside the moraine.
‘Jess? Hello, Decker?’ Brix said, splashing through streams of silt. Shallow rapids of melted glacial ice had flooded over the beach, and the sound of rushing water was everywhere. She’d been no more than twenty seconds behind Jess, but in the time it took her to round the same corner, past the same five-ton glacial block to the moraine, Jess had managed to vanish. ‘Hello?’ Brix said again, her calls rebounding from the ice.
‘Yeah?’ Jess said absently from somewhere hidden. Although the puddled recess she’d found in the cliff face was only ten metres away from Brix, the oblique angle of its entrance meant it was partially concealed. And obviously, once Jess spotted it, she was compelled to investigate, which led to further investigations once she saw the tapering, three-metre-wide fissure inside the recess. Its person-accommodating dimensions and mysteriousness, along with the thrilling promise of menace inherent to any cave, was enough to coax Jess into side-stepping her way up the gravel bank to take a look.
‘I lost you there for a second,’ Brix said from directly behind her.
In turning at Brix’s unexpected closeness, Jess’s centre of gravity shifted, which led to a grinding and sudden resettling of loose pebbles, a scattering and sinking, followed by an almost slow-motion buckling.
Brix heard a pop, or a crack. The sound of a rope snapping. And then Jess was sitting in several inches of grey, sediment-filled water, unable to register anything except the compulsive need to sway. Her wet, silt-plastered hands relayed from clutching at her ankle to clutching at her head, her face streaked with handprints of dirt.
Jess was conscious of being sick, which happened quickly, and then kept happening. Although Brix filled her field of vision, Jess was unable to see her, and the high, insistent pitch of Brix’s voice tuned in and out of audibility. She deciphered the application of upward pressure around her waist as Brix’s attempts to lift her. The heavy thud beside the fissure was her field assistant’s rucksack landing as Brix took it off and threw it. Jess wanted to keep the rucksack with her, but not enough to say the words. Similarly, she wanted to be on drier ground, but not enough to move from the muddy pool. She would have stayed in the water, in her private realm of agony, except Brix pulled her, and wouldn’t leave her alone, repeating that she needed to stand, and finally succeeded in dragging her to her feet.
With Jess propped at a tilt to transfer as much of her weight as possible on to Brix, they travelled in centimetres at a time the sixty metres to a less sodden patch of beach to the right of the moraine. Brix strained and encouraged, trying to find strength she didn’t possess in order to support Jess, who slumped and cramped, tortured by every minuscule hop.
‘You’ll be fine,’ Brix told her, visions of a ripped belt-like tendon flashing through her mind as she set Jess down beside a large boulder of ice. ‘Jess? You’re okay,’ she said, thinking of a slack rudderless foot, the plaster casts and surgery, the months of rehabilitation. ‘It’s all okay, all okay,’ she said over and over again, before shouting for Decker, who seemed to have disappeared, and never replied.
44
April 1913
Think about it, Millet-Bass,’ Napps said as they slogged along the beach on another Kismet-scouting trek. ‘If I’d genuinely wanted him dead, why wouldn’t I have just kicked him to death? What logic is there in risking my own life to save the man I want to kill?’
‘I’m only telling you what Matthews told me,’ Millet-Bass replied. ‘You apparently said it would have been better if McValley had died.’
‘Well.’ In his annoyance, Napps directed his comments up at the universe. ‘Matthews should learn to differentiate between what’s said in sincerity and what’s said when mad with exhaustion.’
Since Millet-Bass’s hands had degraded to the stage where it was now difficult for him to grip anything, Napps was in ownership of the one oil lamp they had between them. His angry marching made it swing on its handle, spokes of light veering across the snow in an erratic pattern.
It was Millet-Bass who’d instigated the conversation about the infamous trip where McValley nearly died of scurvy, unaware or seemingly unaware that a tactless comparison could be made between McValley and their situation with Dinners. He said there was one aspect of the Ross Barrier journey he’d never understood.
Millet-Bass remembered the yells of surprise as two haggard men were spotted approaching the Cape Athena hut. Despite Addison’s arguments that the battered and frostbitten Napps remain behind and rest, Napps had stubbornly insisted on accompanying the rescue party. Matthews had done the opposite. He’d complied with Addison’s demands entirely, letting himself get put to bed where he lay in a state of deathly hibernation for a week.
‘Which is my question,’ Millet-Bass said. ‘Why did you go back with Addison?’
Suspecting an underlying reason to Millet-Bass’s interest, Napps raised the oil lamp to study his hairy, blackened face.
�
��Why are you so curious about the incident?’
‘Why?’ Millet-Bass’s eyes were strikingly white and expressive in the mask of his soot-grimed skin. ‘Because it means nothing to McValley. He isn’t grateful to you, he’s as derisive as ever. Makes me wonder if another man’s life is always worth endangering yourself for.’ Attempting to sound indifferent, he added, ‘It could be claimed there are times when it isn’t.’
‘It was my duty to go back for McValley,’ Napps said. Millet-Bass had a habit of leading a conversation into dangerous territory with his insinuations. The subject of Dinners would often infiltrate into non-related matters to tempt Napps towards dishonourable thoughts. He needed to crush this line of conversation before either of them had the chance to pursue it further. ‘As leader of the expedition, I was obliged to go with Addison. You don’t have to like a man in order to honour your obligation to him.’
‘Very noble,’ Millet-Bass said with a trace of mockery.
‘I‘m not sure about that. I do know that our decisions eventually come to define us.’
‘I’ve an idea of how McValley defines you.’
Napps directed his attention to more important matters than the idiotic McValley. In the dark, he sensed the depth of the landscape rather than saw it, and was aware of a vast space surrounding them. They were at the northern end of the island, which meant the Joseph Evelyn was nearby, but Napps felt the beach was much wider than normal in some perplexing way. Although he judged they must be close to the shoreline, there was no sound of breaking waves. Napps walked a few paces and then walked back. ‘Why can’t we hear it?’ he asked. He opened his arms in a gesture of exasperation and said, ‘Where’s the sea?’
Millet-Bass stood in silence, his head turned. He remained quiet for so long that Napps was about to interrupt whatever reverie he’d fallen into when Millet-Bass let out a long, whistling breath. ‘The sea?’ he said, chipping at the ground with his heel. ‘Napps, we’re on it. This isn’t the beach, it’s sea ice.’
