Treasures of the Deep

by Andrew McGahan

  Celestine groaned in frustration, turned in plea to the other two men. The first officer now matched the captain’s disapproving stare, but Gabriel – her friend Gabriel – met her gaze more thoughtfully.

  ‘Sir,’ he said to the captain, ‘I know nothing of prophecy. But this channel may not be as open to us as it appears. You suggest that its waters are warmed and kept ice-free by fiery events further within. But as we can see by the clear sky, and by the absence of thunder from the north, whatever event raged when we first arrived in the arctic, it has passed now, and its fires have cooled. So will not the waters in the channel now also begin to cool? And if they do, then ice may return there, and catch us if we are unwary.’

  ‘Then we will be wary!’ retorted Altona. ‘Rest assured, gentlemen, I will not risk this ship rashly. But there are other perils besides rashness, for it’s always easy to imagine difficulties and raise doubts. What’s more important is that we must not let timidity rule us when a once-in-a-half-millennium chance beckons, and we stand on the brink of great discovery!’

  The captain’s tone was reasoned – but Celestine could glimpse a wilder passion in Altona’s eye, a glint that she recognised as an explorer’s madness. After the long voyage and search, a fabulous prize and fame unending awaited him now, if only he braved the channel.

  She made a final effort, daring to address her captain as she had never dared before. ‘Fool. You will lead us all to death!’

  ‘Silence!’ Altona roared. ‘Scapegoat, you will leave the high deck immediately! And if you speak a word of this to the crew, I shall confine you to your cabin for the remainder of the voyage!’

  Celestine bent her head. It was too late. Altona would be deterred by no objection, no matter how valid, nor by any prophecy. Not because he didn’t believe them, but because he would not believe.

  She turned away in defeat, the weight of the long winters ahead already settling on her unready shoulders.

  The future would be what it would be.

  And so they sailed into the chasm.

  In the black mood that now descended upon her, Celestine found nothing of beauty to behold in the great channel. The louring ice cliffs did not impress her, nor did the width and depth of the waters. She could not share in the growing anticipation among the crew as the miles and days passed, and as it seemed that this path, winding ever into the heart of the ice cap, would surely lead them to the pole, and to the discovery of the age.

  She merely waited for the inevitable disaster.

  Three days in, and forty miles from the sea, they came upon the first intimations of such: a small island, set in the middle of the channel, the sight of which filled Celestine with a vast unease. She had never beheld it in any of her visions, but somehow it was loathsome to her.

  The captain, however, was quick to hove to and put a boat ashore, for this was the first land they had sighted since leaving the Kingdoms. But it was soon apparent that the isle was not the fabled North Land for which Altona sought. It was only a narrow spit of stone a hundred or so yards long and no more than fifty wide, quite bare of any life or warmth.

  After a disappointing hour there, they bid the useless isle farewell, raised anchor and sailed on. But only a half day further north their progress was slowed more severely when the weather turned.

  Already, in fact, conditions had become grey and cold, for the arctic autumn was deepening, the light leaching from the sky, and within the great chasm little of it reached the surface of the water in any case. But now the first heralding storm of the coming winter blew up. A gale wind, freezing, came cascading down the cliffs from the heights of the ice cap, and the air turned thick with a blizzard of stinging snow. The Bent Wing was beset, and in the close waters of the channel it was all the crew could do to hold the ship at anchor mid-stream and not be run against one or other of the walls.

  For eleven interminable days the storm blew, with a violence that seemed almost too fantastic to believe – though they would become all too familiar with such storms in the years ahead. By the time it dissipated, leaving behind a battered, icicle-bestrewn ship, and a chastened crew, the last light was gone. The arctic sky had faded from pale pink to a cold, twilight blue, and there was a black sheen on the waters of the channel.

  It was a foretaste of true winter, and warning enough for most on board. Mutters below decks, and even in the Great Cabin, declared that it was surely time to retreat to warmer waters, at least until spring came. But Captain Altona, his mind still afire with the promise of discovery, only raised sail once the storm was gone, and pushed on northwards.

  But his determination was in vain. Not five miles further north, the ship came round a slow bend and found that the black waters ahead had turned white. The chasm itself still ran on, wide and open beyond sight, but at the waterline a jumble of jagged shapes broke the surface; ice chunks, incipient bergs, just beginning to grow. They were only thinly spread at the forefront, but they thickened northwards into a solid pack.

  Altona reluctantly lowered anchor and called a conference of his officers on the high deck. Celestine too attended, although with little hope now that it would make any difference.

  ‘Obviously,’ said the captain, ‘the way ahead is blocked. But that should not surprise us. After all, summer is gone, and winter nears. It is only to be expected that the channel should freeze over.’

  ‘Do we retreat then?’ asked Commander Javier.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Altona mused. ‘One alternative is to wait here through the winter until spring comes and the channel thaws again. It would be cold and dark, no doubt, but we are well provisioned for exactly those conditions. And other ships have survived such trials unscathed.’

  ‘Other ships,’ said Celestine blackly. ‘Not us.’

  The captain bridled – but Gabriel forestalled him quickly. ‘Sir, if the channel is closing over purely because of the season, then you may be right. But as you said yourself – it’s likely these waters were opened only by the volcanic activity we observed earlier, and thus are freezing over now because that activity has died. If so, then the ice will not melt come spring, but only when the volcanic fires rise again. And who can say when that will be? Surely it would be safer to retreat to the sea and spend the winter on open water, then return here in the summer and see what there is to be seen.’

  Altona hesitated. Gabriel’s advice was sound, but Celestine could see that the captain did not welcome it. He did not want to give up the channel, and the pole, no matter the dangers. He was going to refuse, she was sure … but then came a sudden commotion from the waters ahead.

  All eyes swung north. One of the young bergs, already grown to the height of the lower spars on the ship, had overbalanced and was rolling with a great din of groaning and cracking. It sent out waves as it toppled, waves that set the other bergs nearby rolling and cracking too, until suddenly the whole ice field was in motion and tumult. An unearthly roar swelled to fill the chasm, amplifying in echoes back and forth between the cliffs.

  ‘Perhaps,’ shouted the captain, with a nod to Gabriel, ‘the better part of valour may well be to retreat for now. We will return when the sun once again shines here. All hands, prepare to come about!’

  And so the Bent Wing turned away from the ice and back towards the safety of open sea. They went steadily at first, confident that the channel was freezing from the north alone, and that bergs lay only at their stern. They passed by the stony little isle once more – again, a shudder of premonition chilled Celestine’s bones as she studied its naked shores – and pressed south. But a few miles further along, small bergs began to appear. At first there were only a few of them, new-born and slow-growing, floating close by the ice cliffs where the water was coldest. But they increased southwards.

  Alarm gripped the crew. Might ice block their escape? The great chasm, which had seemed so wide and inviting when they had entered, felt narrower now, and darker – and endlessly long. The officers fretted and made calculations of their chances
as they hurried the ship as best they might. The water was only just cold enough, nicre had only just started to grow: if the freezing held off only a day or two more then they could still win free …

  The bergs thickened, but the way was not yet shut, and by the third day of retreat even Celestine dared to hope that despite all she knew they would escape. Indeed, standing on the forecastle amid a crowd of eager watchers, she was sure that in the twilight gloom she could see the towering walls of the chasm opening out to open sky only a few miles ahead.

  But at water level a mist hid the surface – and suddenly the Bent Wing’s bow grated hard against ice. The ship shuddered, moved on, then hit ice again, more heavily this time, and lurched to a stop.

  ‘Let go sail!’ came the cry, and the men aloft hurried to ease canvas before the ship drove itself to ruin against the obstacle.

  The Bent Wing drifted backwards, and in the sudden quiet a soft hissing sound rose, like falling rain. Ahead, the mist seemed to swirl upon itself in the gloom, as if driven by interior winds, but then the shadows resolved themselves to the watchers on the foredeck: they were not swirls of mist at all, but hulking shapes of ice, grey as stone in the twilight, rising as high as the upper spars already, and growing, always growing.

  They formed a wall across the channel, already so closely packed that they could not topple, but only grow higher.

  ‘Launch the boats!’ was the dispirited command from the high deck. ‘Prepare the lines! We must go back!’

  And so they retreated, towing themselves laboriously away from the ice blockade, north again along the channel until they had sea room enough to raise canvas once more. It was soon accomplished – but what was the use of it? Where was there left for them to sail now?

  ‘We must hope that some portion of the channel remains unfrozen through the winter,’ said Altona when the officers were gathered again, his jaw set hard against any admission of error. ‘We can survive for many months, as long as the ship itself is not crushed by ice pressing too close.’

  To Gabriel he made no apology, and his only acknowledgement of Celestine was a warning glare that said no talk of wrecksor death. And indeed she held silent, for what was the use of warnings now?

  Grimly, the Bent Wing sailed north for three days, and so returned to the vicinity of the little isle, where they dropped anchor, for the waters there – seemingly warmer than elsewhere in the channel – were clear yet of bergs. Also, the presence of land, however bare, was some comfort. At least to the rest of the crew. Celestine now considered the isle with open dread.

  Long, terrible months followed. Autumn darkened to the full night of winter and the cold became brutal. Even in the most sheltered corner of the ship it was inescapable; topside it was unendurable. Storm followed storm, howling gales avalanching down the great cliffs. The ship was soon reduced to a ragged apparition of icy decks and tattered rigging. The crew looked no better, wrapped stiffly in ever-thicker bundles of clothing, and yet frost-nipped every man, faces drawn and black from the smoke of the fires below.

  But the worse danger came from the waters of the channel. The icebergs advanced steadily upon the isle from both the north and the south. By the approach of spring, only a few miles of clear water remained. As light returned to the narrow sky high above, men watched the icebergs eagerly for any sign of thaw. But as the spring advanced, week by week, their hopes were ground away to nothing. The ice did not thaw or retreat.

  Instead, it kept advancing. The advent of summer slowed its progress somewhat, but even so, by summer’s end, and by the approach of their first anniversary since entering the channel, the open water extended no more than half a mile about the island. That they faced another winter in their prison could not be denied – but worse, there was little doubt now that the bergs would soon fill the remaining gap, threatening to crush the ship.

  ‘We shall ground ourselves on the isle,’ said Altona to his officers, their expressions already gaunt and hungry after a year of short rations. ‘And hope that we rest high enough to escape the ice’s grip.’

  So the Bent Wing was brought in to sit upon the gently shoaling shore of the island. But all precautions proved futile. By mid-autumn, the channel was a mass of ice all about them, and the ship’s hull was firmly gripped. That grip alone the hull might have withstood, but over the following weeks the whole ice sheet itself began to move, and in doing so slowly shoved the ship hard against the isle’s ungiving spine. Over a period of two helpless months, the crew could only watch and listen in horror as the hull’s timbers groaned and grated against stone, flexing terribly, arching further and further –

  Until the Bent Wing’s back broke.

  A great rent opened in the keel – and that was only the beginning. The ice sheet shifted direction, and then did so again and again repeatedly through that long, awful winter, gradually grinding the ship into ruins.

  The crew lingered on board for as long as the vessel provided them shelter, but when at last the whole right flank split away, exposing all decks to the open air, Captain Altona gave the long-dreaded order.

  ‘Abandon ship.’

  In darkness and savage cold, the two hundred and fifty crew – for there had been no deaths as yet, although there was much misery and sickness – set about building a camp on the northern half of the isle, which still rose clear of the ice. Some of the men were housed in tents, heaped about with snow, others were accommodated in three dormitory barracks, fashioned by the carpenters from spare timbers. A fourth, smaller hut became home to the officers, furnished in mock finery with relics from the Great Cabin.

  But when this hut was complete, Celestine received a rude shock. Altona announced that he did not want her to reside there, even though it was customary for a ship’s scapegoat to always share accommodation with the officers. ‘Room can be made for her in one of the barracks,’ he declared at the final meeting of the officers to be held on board the Bent Wing, not even looking at Celestine. ‘I won’t have her pestering me with her predictions of doom and disaster all through the confines of winter.’

  This provoked an uneasy silence and many worried glances among the officers, but as ever, it was only Gabriel who would challenge Altona directly. ‘Sir, what has Celestine done to deserve such exile, other than report as her heart has urged her to report? Perhaps she is foresighted, perhaps not, but surely you yourself are now risking fate’s condemnation, to banish your own scapegoat from your company. A corner can easily be made for her in our hut, and a strung blanket will keep her from your sight, if you so insist.’

  The captain fumed a moment, but the alarm on all his officers’ faces could not be ignored. ‘Very well,’ he snapped at last. ‘But a single word of prophecy from her and she goes, fate or no fate! Unless, that is, she wants to speak of brighter times, when we will be free again.’

  Celestine nodded stiffly to Altona. There was little danger that she would speak to him ever again of any foretelling anyway, when he would only ignore her. But in truth no visions had come to her through all the year previous, and she had begun to wonder if they would ever return. Maybe the power was lost, seeing that she had failed to make any use of it.

  If so, it was one mercy at least.

  She’d had enough of the future.

  With the camp now complete, and everyone installed, there was little to be done throughout the rest of that second winter other than to wait for the coming of spring – and meanwhile attend to the boats.

  For this was their last hope now. The ship’s four boats had been saved from the wreck, and the two largest, each of them fourteen-man cutters, were handed to the carpenters to be decked over and given half-cabins and masts, so that they would be ready for voyaging on the open sea. They could never carry all the Bent Wing’s crew, of course, but they could at least bear a smaller party home to the Kingdoms to summon a rescue mission.

  ‘We have supplies to survive another year at least,’ said Altona to his officers in their little hut, a fire crackling in t
he stove as a gale blew in the darkness outside. ‘And maybe longer, if stretched to the limit. Time enough for messengers to reach home, and for a fleet to come after us in reply. So take hope! The boats will set forth at the first light of spring; going by water if the channel should clear, but if not, then we shall fit rails to the craft, so that they may be dragged over the ice by their crews to the sea.’

  The officers nodded determinedly. But Celestine only hunched in gloom in her corner, staring at the wood burning in the fire, the bones of the very ship that had brought them there. She saw little hope in those flames, only false trails, leading nowhere. And that very same night – night according to the hourglass, at least, for all was eternal darkness – as the gale wailed to itself, and everyone slept, death made a first visit to the camp.

  Celestine alone heard it, a forlorn cry over the wind, the sound of a man lost to some mortal enemy. She struggled from her bed and woke the others. But when the men ventured out into the moaning blackness they found nothing, only returned in puzzlement, annoyed that Celestine had disturbed their sleep. The captain muttered at her balefully, shaking his head, and she subsided, abashed. She must have merely dreamt the sound.

  But when the roster was called the next day, one man was missing, though no one knew where he had gone, or when.

  It marked a turning point. The dying had begun, and would never really cease now amid the tribulations of hunger and cold and overcrowding in the tents and barracks. In all, twelve men would expire that winter. Nine of them would do so in their beds, but twice more before spring came Celestine heard the despairing cries in the darkness, and twice more at muster a man would be reported unaccountably vanished.

  Lost wandering from the camp, wrote the captain of these men in the ship’s log. But Celestine was not so sure. The cries she’d heard in the winter night had sounded so haunted, so unwilling, the cries of men taken from all warmth and hope, as if dragged away by something that left no trace.