The Ice Maiden

by Sara Sheridan

  The going was harder than they expected. Of course it was – the vengeance of the continent would be felt. Don’t they know? Karina followed them onto the ice and tried to mark the time by Birdie, who prayed every morning but what was to say he wasn’t praying every night as well? Their sledges were piled high with supplies and tents. They were tough and determined. But something had gone wrong.

  As the party approached Cape Crozier the ice ridges deepened and there ceased to be either a day or a night. The men kept walking and she could no longer account for the passage of time. On how many occasions could Wilson promise himself dinner with Oriana at Rules restaurant? How often could Cherry berate himself for almost falling asleep on his aching feet? The men were awake but this felt like a nightmare and yet she could not leave them.

  The penguins roosted in the lee of a steep wall of ice that protected them on one side from the weather. Birdie climbed it, digging in his pickaxe and hauling himself over the top like a madman. Wilson and Cherry were not far behind. None of the birds appeared to notice these intruders in the darkness. In the cold, it was impossible to smell the fetid crush of the fishy-fleshed rookery but just the same, the birds could not scent the men either.

  As Birdie dropped onto the ice he was not much taller than the Emperors around him. The crowd shuffled to accommodate its new member and at Birdie’s feet an egg was exposed. He snatched it and handed it up to Wilson. The bereaved penguin raised his beak high and opened his mouth to make a throaty, anguished call. The group shuffled in response and again an egg popped out within reach. This time, though the bird fought back as Birdie tried to grab it. Cherry pulled a gloved hand from his finnesko mitt and pulled Birdie and the pilfered egg out of harm’s way.

  ‘You all right?’

  Birdie nodded. In warmer weather – a balmy minus ten perhaps – the knife-sharp beak might have ripped the material of his gabardine but frozen not only stiff but solid to a depth of two inches, the bird was more likely to chip his beak than breach Birdie’s outer layer. On the safe side of the ice wall Wilson carefully stowed the eggs inside Cherry’s jacket, close to his skin.

  ‘My turn,’ he said for two eggs were not enough – they must have more.

  The surgeon hauled himself over and as he did so the penguins began to rally. A fight broke out as one bird tried to replace his lost egg with the egg of one of the others. Wilson wondered if he ought to wait for the rookery to settle but having hiked for God knows how many days through the worst conditions any of them had known, nothing was going to stop him. He snatched another egg and with astonishing fluidity scaled the wall holding it in the crook of his arm. For safekeeping, he handed it to Cherry, who this time had not removed his hands from the fur mitts. He fumbled, the egg fell to the ice-hard ground and smashed. The embryo steamed for a moment and then froze.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Cherry said. ‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated.

  Wilson couldn’t find any words of comfort. He struggled not to shout. The men huddled together a moment. From above it made a strange sight – the blackness of the birds on one side of the wall and the lightness of the men on the other, both behaving the same with eggs stowed next to their skin to keep the nascent chicks alive. Wilson made Cherry hand over the eggs inside his jacket top and secreted them in his own – they had to be kept safe until they returned to the camp and they could be preserved.

  ‘I’ll go over again,’ Birdie offered. He climbed up and in only a few minutes more they had three eggs and after one more foray, four.

  The men were so elated at their success that they covered the ground more easily on the journey back to the camp they had set up. But after only an hour, Cherry tipped over, tripping on a deep indent. He fell on top of one of the eggs and as it smashed he squirmed at the idea. There was a dead penguin chick too close to his skin, warm and wet. This time when he realized what had happened, Wilson could not contain himself. There was no excuse. They were all exhausted. They were all cold.

  ‘Cherry!’ he shouted. ‘Jesus!’

  Neither of his companions had ever heard Wilson swear. Cherry felt tears welling. He couldn’t even say sorry this time. He reached inside his clothing and pulled out pieces of shell and the gooey mess that it once contained. This was his nightmare. He had let the expedition down. The pieces of shell fell with a click onto the rock-hard snow. He pulled out the surviving egg in his care and Wilson took it from him.

  ‘Three is enough, isn’t it?’ Birdie stepped in, optimistic as ever.

  Wilson was hard-eyed but he wasn’t going to make them go back. He stepped out in the direction of the camp. Three eggs were enough if it came to it but there was no further leeway.

  ‘Be careful,’ he said to Birdie.

  And at that, the men pulled together and walked through the relentless darkness, heading northwards – towards the base they’d built. Towards home. This expedition, Karina realized, was an act of bravery – a dedication to their messy, foolish lives.

  When she blinked, she appeared again in a makeshift hut. Wilson, Bowers and Cherry were crowded together. Birdie heated a pan of hoosh as Wilson preserved the eggs in alcohol, the three prizes bobbing about in long glass jars. When he had finished, the men ate and settled down to sleep, Wilson allowed himself to feel a sense of achievement.

  Three eggs, he thought contentedly. Three of them.

  Karina shuddered. The minute a fellow relaxed like that the weather would strike. Don’t they know? Don’t they know? Sure enough, a storm was not long coming. It whipped down the slopes of the mountain, the bastard offspring of a blizzard and a gale. The temperature plummeted. From forty below it went to fifty and then sixty under. It whistled as if it was taunting them. Wilson turned in his sleep and then there was the sound of a whip-cracking as the canvas roof of the hut blew off. Karina watched the material fly high into the darkness. Seconds later, Wilson woke to snow flurrying around his face. The wind had scooped up an earlier fall and scattered it over them. He sat up.

  Cherry, beside him did the same and nudged Birdie. Bowers moved quickly, jumping out of his sleeping bag and reaching to feel around like a blind man, he quickly ascertained that the roof was not torn or damaged, but was simply gone. In its absence, the wind played eerie music around the walls. It was a strange kind of symphony and that alone made Karina shiver, for in all the years she had never heard a sound like it. It was too high a tone for the mountain to make, too thin for the wind.

  ‘We’ll never find it in this,’ Birdie shouted peering into the gloom after the disappeared canvas.

  He was right, she realized. Even if an unexpected dawn broke over them and the sky became light, the thick snow would mask any hope of recovering the missing six-feet strip. They’d be lucky to see that far in front of themselves. The others got out of their bags and scrambled to pick up the little stove and their scattering of possessions – cups and plates. Then they pushed out of the hut and stowed themselves in the tent beside it, uncomfortably perched on their unloaded supplies – the crates and jars they had carefully piled up inside and to which they had added the precious penguin eggs only a few hours before.

  ‘Blizzard,’ Wilson said.

  She tried to call off the weather but the storm was too frantic. She could manage a nudge here and a flutter there but a storm of this magnitude was beyond her. The most she could do was to ride the weather, not change it. The wind started with an adagio scoop of snow but soon it whipped the drifts into a shower of frantic all-encompassing staccato, each frozen flake like a chip of arrow sharp-flint. The wind pulled at the ropes and pegs secured in the ice and quickly it won. When they made camp the men were dog tired and now they would pay a deadly price for that. Within minutes, there was a sharp crack as the tent strained as if it was trying to cling on, but it was no use and the storm claimed it. The pegs gave way and the second canvas whipped into the darkness.

  Cherry jumped up as if he might catch the retreating material but the wind was too quick and their only remaining shelter d
isappeared into the white and black night.

  ‘Oh,’ said Wilson, and fell heavily into a seated position.

  The others couldn’t hear him over the wind – this little sound of realization and defeat. They couldn’t see his heart sink in his chest. Each man thought, We will die out here without shelter. And strangely, they made peace with that. This, she thought, is even more desperate than I was on Deception Island. At least I had some kind of hope. Without the tent it was not only that they would have no shelter. If this weather continued, they wouldn’t be able to light the stove. They wouldn’t be able to eat or drink. The men knew it but they didn’t say so.

  Cherry and Birdie sat in the snow next to the surgeon and pulled their frozen sleeping bags around them as the weather continued. It took a minute or two until Birdie spoke.

  ‘We can’t lie here just waiting,’ he said.

  He cleared his throat and began to sing ‘Abide With Me’. It was his mother’s favourite hymn. Wilson and Cherry joined him. At first she could barely hear them against the dark music of the storm. They sang for an hour or maybe it was two. Or more. ‘Nearer My God to Thee’. ‘When I Survey the Wondrous Cross’. Singing there on the mountain, in the face of death. Karina couldn’t take her eyes off them. So this was what she had seen – a trip through time she had not fully understood. A horror story.

  As the weather got colder they gamely dredged up more hymns from their repertoire and something at the heart of her melted. At first, she restrained herself – trying to shelter them would only prolong their flesh freezing. But in the end she couldn’t help it. She lay over the three men like a blanket and shielded them as the wind cut a chill path across her back. It wasn’t much but it was the most she could do. A degree or two warmer. A degree or two more hope. She wondered, would she do this for Hooker? Would she do it for Scott? No matter. There was something extraordinary about Wilson, Cherry and Bowers. They deserved to be saved.

  Wilson almost fell asleep. He’d have sworn he felt warm and that angels were lulling him into some kind of heavenly slumber but Birdie snatched him back, hauling him unwillingly back into the cold. ‘Praise my Soul, the King of Heaven,’ he sang, right into Wilson’s ear. It was one of his favourites. Wilson imagined himself in his usual pew, the stained-glass window of an angel to his right, throwing its warm light over his morning coat and Oriana, sitting beside him.

  ‘I’m not ready for heaven yet,’ he mumbled.

  Heaven? Karina thought. What on earth does he mean? And quietly she began to sing with them.

  After the storm, the men stood up. It would take days to get back to Scott’s base. In England you’d walk it in a day or two and sleep in the open, but not here. Not in this. So with a long march before them and weak and frozen through as they were, they knew they would never survive for days on end without shelter. The cold would take them. It was inevitable. Karina felt their hearts drop, but again, they didn’t say anything until Birdie piped up.

  ‘It must have blown to the east,’ he started and then paused, staring forlornly across the landscape, which was barely visible in the darkness, now the snow had stopped. He had not given up, exactly, but he knew the odds were long. If they were going to die they’d have to make the best of it, he thought. If.

  Karina was not ready to let them.

  ‘We should fan out,’ said Wilson, as she whipped around Birdie’s frame and led him as surely as if he was a puppy on a lead. Cherry and Wilson made a show of collecting the supplies as Karina’s spectre pulled Bowers in the right direction. The frozen canvas had landed on the ice, some way off. She guided him, stumbling towards it. When he realized what it was, Birdie cast his eyes heavenwards and whispered, ‘Thank you,’ and it took her a moment to realize that he thought some deity had shown him the way. There at Cape Crozier, she stared, finding it difficult to accept that the men couldn’t see her. She wanted them to. Death made her aware of the fault lines at the edges and they had slipped so close that she wondered that if she reached out, perhaps she could touch them, or speak to them, or even be seen. It amazed her that after all this time she wanted to.

  Wilson was praying silently. He intoned under his breath, ‘If it is my time, Lord, I trust myself to you.’ Cherry and Bowers packed up the eggs, the supplies and the tent.

  This way, she whispered, eager to get them safely onto the right path.

  But Cherry had set up the stove. They’d have to eat before they could start. Of course they would. She had forgotten the needs of a body. Such an ordinary thing. Bowers broke some biscuits to boil and they scooped the porridge into their mouths like men who had thought they would never eat again.

  Come with me, she whispered once they had finished.

  And they did.

  The men were barely alive as they tumbled over the threshold of the hut. Everyone jumped to help, trying to hide their horror at the apparitions, filthy and frozen as they stumbled in from the cold.

  ‘Cherry looks thirty years older,’ one man hissed, as he fetched shears with which to cut the uniforms from the three almost unrecognizable frozen forms. At first, they could hardly speak. Wilson tried to restrain himself from crying tears of sheer relief. He did not entirely succeed. Cherry fell asleep on his feet. Birdie brushed up the easiest. ‘I wasn’t much of a specimen to start with,’ he managed to joke.

  Karina sank onto the floor, relieved that they had made it. The last few days she had doubted they would, wrapping herself around their shoulders and whispering words of encouragement. Wilson would see his Oriana again. Birdie’s mother would be proud. And Cherry mustn’t let the others down. Keep going, she had cooed. They had been frozen and starving and sick but they had made it.

  Slowly as the story came out they were heroes among heroes. The men listened rapturous as Wilson talked about cooking that first pot of hoosh after the storm.

  ‘Cherry cracked out double rations, lads,’ he said, and the table laughed. They showed the eggs they’d brought. They admitted to singing the hymns on the hill, to thinking that they were dead men. They said it was down to sheer luck, finding the canvas that allowed them to get home in the end.

  ‘Well …’ Scott’s voice trailed, and he couldn’t continue. It wasn’t often that he was speechless.

  As the cook served tea and thick slabs of bread with dripping – proper blings, Karina thought – Birdie hummed under his breath. She smiled. She had missed his humming. He was happy now. Who could blame him? It was warm and there was food. He’d sleep forty-eight hours and wake only with difficulty. She saw him soften and his legs relax at the thought of the luxury of a clean dry bunk – the glory of being alive. From his box he took out a green, woollen hat his sister had knitted. It was the same colour as her scarf had been all those years ago – the only green on the continent. As he pulled it on, he relished being alive.

  Wilson too had backed away from the edge of death. The hard-won penguin eggs in their jars were stowed in the makeshift scientific laboratory at one side of the low hut. When the doctor thought about the specimens a sense of satisfaction pervaded his being. But Cherry was quieter than usual. Even cleaned up and dressed in a regulation naval woollen sweater and trousers with a dressing gown over the top, it was clear he had left part of himself on the ice.

  ‘It was the worst journey in the world,’ he admitted quietly.

  The truth was that Bowers and Wilson had faced death and had not been afraid. Cherry would never recover because he had been terrified and he could not forgive himself for that. She wondered when Cherry died where his soul would reside, for he never seemed fully at ease. She peered into his childhood, as if she was pulling back a curtain. His father, long dead, had been an adventurer. ‘Daddy is in the jungle, he could die any minute and you aren’t eating your lunch,’ a plump, rather unpleasant nanny said, as she stood over the little boy. ‘No one will like you, you know, if you’re selfish.’

  At the mess table, Cherry hardly tasted the hot sweet tea as an uneasy cocktail of pride and shame
rendered him aware of Scott’s eyes upon him. He need not have worried. This kind of derring-do was exactly what the skipper required of his men, and if Scott was looking at Cherry it was because he was the one who had physically changed the most. The poor man had not yet caught sight of himself in a mirror but there was no question that his nanny would not be best pleased.

  ‘Good show,’ said the skipper, who found himself in awe of the bravery of these men and what they had achieved. He hoped one day to be able to match it. At the pole, she remembered. Ah. That.

  Karina felt the scene begin to dim. Nothing would happen now till the light returned but still, she wanted to stay. There was no point in fighting it though – the blackness at the edges of her world, the visions that appeared and disappeared again. The way time folded. She was in the grip of the world and what it wanted to show her. It was time to go. Unwillingly, she left the men to their recovery and slipped onto the glacier. The wind had dropped and everything was still on the sound as she took the snow once more as her mantle. She told herself that she could not save every foolish hero who lost his way on the ice. It was only them. Something had touched her, almost as if she was alive again. It had been a long time.

  Behind her the hut was festooned with lamps that cast shadows as the men went about their business. Back and forth, in and out, the shadows mingled as they passed one another. She was put in mind of a beehive that one of her mother’s neighbours kept on Ven. Suddenly the presence of the camp seemed overwhelming. The world is right, she thought and she turned her back, walking straight into the mountain ahead. It was one way to disappear. She spread herself through the dark basalt, through its fissures and cracks and deep into the heart of the rock where the light, when it came, wouldn’t find her. And she slept.

  TWENTY-THREE