Treasures of the Deep

by Andrew McGahan

  But at last the light returned with the dawning of spring, and the boats were readied to embark finally on their mission for home. Alas, the sun brought little warmth with its reappearance, and the northern fires still slept, so the channel remained frozen over and tightly jammed. Thus, when the boats set out, they went overland, on rails, across the ice.

  It was a sizeable expedition in its own right, a party of some forty men under command of the first officer, Javier. But even with the boats set on skis, and with twenty men to pull each craft, it would be a fantastically difficult journey just to reach the sea. The ice was no level snow field – it was forty miles of plunging crevasses and jagged pinnacles that rose as high as five hundred feet. And then there would still remain a long voyage at sea, three months at the least, in tiny craft never meant for such a purpose.

  Nevertheless, it was with high spirits that the boats set forth, under the pink sky of the arctic spring. Celestine watched the two teams for an hour as they slowly climbed the first of the ice ridges to finally vanish into the whiteness. She wondered – could there be a chance after all? In the winter darkness she had despaired, but when life remained, when men were willing to struggle so bravely to survive, was it right that she deny hope?

  A summer of impatience and expectation followed, agonising in its slowness and mocking in its brightness, for the light only served to illuminate the wretchedness of their situation: the frozen wreckage of the ship, the pitiless heights of the ice cliffs, the drab camp. It was almost a relief when the light began to fail again, ushering in their third autumn since entering the channel; the darkness at least hid the desolation, and the passage of time meant that the prospect of rescue drew closer. If all had gone well, and the boats had reached open water, then they should be home to the Kingdoms by now. Why, a relief fleet might be in the arctic by the dawning of next spring!

  But had the boats got through? That was the imponderable question. Although Commander Javier had been ordered to send ten of his men back over the ice to report if they’d gained the sea, no such party had appeared, and those in the camp were left to merely wonder: was there truly hope or not? The boats may have met with disaster long before reaching the ocean – or they may have attained the sea and launched successfully, only for the return party to come to grief on its way back across the ice.

  There was no way to know.

  The uncertainty was the worst thing, even among the other horrors of that third trapped winter, and those horrors were many. Rations were at starvation levels now, no more than scraps of powdery biscuit and slivers of rank salt meat. No one, Celestine included, was ever free of the gnawing in their guts, or the aches in their joints, or the deathly lassitude in their limbs, a weariness that was itself like pain. Scurvy was rife, and every face grinned from its wrappings with blackened gums and foul breath.

  And yet here was a strange thing: for all that Celestine was old, and little, and a woman, and cruelly bent by her infirmities, she was aware that she was less debilitated by starvation than were most of the tall, strong sailors that surrounded her. She suffered, oh yes, but somehow a reservoir of strength remained in her, while it steadily failed in all others.

  By late winter, men were dying at the rate of two or three every week, wasted with hunger and disease. A new and loathsome difficulty now arose – for there was nowhere to bury so many corpses on the stony isle. They could only be laid out in an area specially set aside, hard and frozen, until a rare snowfall should come and drift against them in burial.

  Also, nine times that winter, Celestine – and Celestine alone – was woken in the night hours by a lonely wail from the darkness, and nine times the roster revealed another sailor vanished from the isle.

  After the ninth, the captain gave a stern lecture to the survivors, arguing against despair, and against throwing their lives away in suicide or in attempts to cross the ice alone. And in the waking hours, Celestine could almost believe that this was what had really happened to the missing men.

  But in her bed, when all others slept, and the wind howled in the blackness outside, she knew the truth. The men had been stolen away. And she had even come to suspect the reason.

  They were being punished; the missing men, the entire crew, all of them. Punished for their presumption, for the captain’s arrogance in daring the chasm, for their very presence here in the arctic, trespassing where no human was ever intended to exist. The great frozen north had recoiled at their effrontery, and in its anger had summoned from its endless wastes a spirit of retribution, a demon of the ice, a spectre of the winter darkness, to hunt down the intruders and to claim them, one by one, as a price and a penance …

  Thus passed the winter. In all, over fifty men died or disappeared during the months of darkness. Adding that to the forty who had sailed away in the boats, and to those who had died in the previous winter, not much more than half the crew remained alive on the isle to greet the return of the sun. The count on the first day of spring was one hundred and thirty-five souls.

  This depleted company faced a dour truth as the slow brightening of the season progressed. There was still no sign of any thaw in the channel. The ice reared as high and jagged and solid as ever, so escape remained shut to them, and only rescue could be hoped for. But if rescue did not come, then this would surely be the last spring for everyone on the isle. Helpless, they could only wait. All through the spring months, men watched the ice ridges overlooking the camp, pleading silently for figures to appear there, rescuers bearing food and news of a ship waiting at the mouth of the channel. But no figures appeared. Instead, the dying only continued. Nothing else changed until the early summer – and then it was not in the form of a rescue from the south, but rather a stirring in the north.

  A familiar rumbling awoke there, a deep, guttural rousing of vast force, a thunder that shook icy showers down from the surrounding cliffs. Everyone in the camp understood what it meant. The northern fires were reigniting, their epicentre not far away now, north across the ice cap. Ash climbed into the sky and rained down, draping the camp black.

  And yet in the darkness, hope burned anew. For after some weeks of these continuous eruptions, currents could be heard surging in the channel, beneath the ice pack. Wafts of steam broke forth, then the ice itself began to crack and shift. A desperate expectancy glowed in the eyes of the officers and crew, white amid their ash-blackened faces. After all, they had two boats yet; if the channel should warm and open, then another attempt might be made to escape in search of rescue, even at this late hour …

  And slowly, through the last month of summer, as the northern fires burned without let, a way did indeed open. But in mockery of their hopes. South of the isle, the ice pack settled and fractured somewhat, yet still held firm. It was only northwards that the floes finally split apart, revealing black water beneath, and a clear channel – north, where they did not want to go.

  The Ice was merely taunting them.

  They would never be released.

  Autumn came, and the ash haze grew blacker still, as light faded from the world. By then, a mere eighty-nine of the crew were still alive. All of them knew that there would be no surviving the coming winter. It would be their fourth in the ice, and the final, if rescue did not appear.

  Darkness hid the camp once more. It had become hideous anyway, a ruin of ice and ash and corpses, the tents abandoned and collapsed, the survivors not numerous enough now even to fill the three barracks. Discipline still held among the men, and an ordered routine of duties and watches was still followed, but beneath it a febrile, terminal lethargy threatened. Why suffer and strive, what mattered rank or duty, if all were to die, and die soon?

  In the northern sky, meanwhile, lights danced. Glows flickered above the ice cliffs, sometimes with the sheen of aurora, shaded red or green, sometimes with the sombre orange of fire and burning. Volcanic thunder throbbed ever and anon, and Captain Altona took to staring for hours into the north, watching the dancing lights, a madness rising in his
eyes.

  At midwinter, he surrendered to it.

  ‘I will go north in search of the pole,’ he declared to a meeting of the officers, the few that were left. Sixteen had set sail with the Bent Wing, and their hut had once been uncomfortably crowded. Now only seven remained. Three had gone on the expedition with the boats, and six had died in the last year of starvation, their cots removed one by one. The survivors were themselves little better than skin-clad skeletons, awful to behold.

  Gabriel – one of the living, to Celestine’s gratitude – spoke in bitterness. ‘North, sir? You will throw your life away so?’

  The captain, his eyes bulging from his ghastly face in manic certainty, rebuked his subordinate. ‘No, to stay here would be to throw life away. Rescue will not come, and we will never escape southwards now. North at least we know there is warmth. You’ve all seen the lights. Fire burns there – and where there are fires of the earth there may be dry ground too, and perhaps living things. Perhaps even the great North Land awaits us.’

  Gabriel shook his head. ‘Whatever you find at the pole, should you reach it, it won’t be life. The arctic is a dead world. Have you not felt it over these many winters? Life is hated by the Ice. Your duty lies here with your crew, Captain, not in mad quests for non-existent lands.’

  ‘You speak of what you cannot know, Gabriel. I have seen it in my dreams, and smelled it in the air. There is solid ground to the north, and I will go there, and take all who think likewise, as many as the boats can carry.’

  ‘Both boats, sir? Surely you must leave us at least one – for what if the channel should open after you have gone?’

  The argument raged weakly for some time, Gabriel striving to make the captain see reason. But Altona’s mind was fixed; in despair he had seized on the old promise of a secret land at the pole. Celestine listened on, scarcely caring. Let the captain go if he wanted, let them all go, everyone was going to die anyway, whether on the isle, or lost in the ice northwards.

  In the end, it was decided that Altona and two lieutenants would take a crew and one of the boats north, leaving the last boat behind. ‘But understand,’ added the captain to Gabriel, ‘I do not consider that I am abandoning the crew or our mission; rather I am fulfilling our mission, and it is you who are standing aside. To that end, I will take the ship’s log with me, as is fitting. Celestine too, as the voyage’s scapegoat, will sail with us.’

  Celestine started in surprise; this she hadn’t expected.

  Gabriel too was taken aback. ‘You would want Celestine at your side? After all but disowning her these last years?’

  Altona glanced at Celestine with studied coolness. ‘She has a duty to perform like any other of my crew. Her place is with the captain. And at least she has held her tongue since our imprisonment here.’

  ‘An imprisonment she predicted,’ Gabriel reminded.

  ‘Guessed at,’ replied the captain. ‘No more.’

  Both men were looking at Celestine enquiringly now, Gabriel as if he was silently urging her to refuse the voyage, the captain as if he was daring her to do so. Almost she did refuse, if only to annoy Altona. And yet … why not go? The captain was deluded in his quest, she felt sure, but he was her commander after all, it was indeed her duty to be at his side. And if everyone was to die in any case, then why not seek out the last mystery of the pole before death came, or hurry death along in the attempt?

  She shrugged, and was about to nod, when—

  In an eye blink the officers and the hut vanished from around her, and she found herself somewhere else entirely, somewhere cavernous and dim, and – most incredibly of all – somewhere warm.

  She stared, shocked, but at the same time surreally calm, knowing what was happening. A vision had gripped her, her first in four years, even more instantaneous and complete than those that had come before. The time, past or future, she did not know; but the place – a huge domed chamber – was revealed to her with vision certainty: she was no longer in the Ice, but upon the languid waters of the Golden Millpond, on board the Twelfth Kingdom, in the uppermost audience hall of the Sea Lord, Ibanez the Third.

  Before her, seated in couches set about a low table, were six people. One of them – an old man Celestine had never seen before, but who exuded authority – was surely the Sea Lord himself. Four of the others – two naval officers, a girl with a scarred face, and a nondescript boy – were strangers, and even her vision sight told her nothing of who they might be. But the sixth Celestine knew in person, and she shuddered, recognising the wheeled chair and the black gauze curtain, and knowing what lay beneath.

  Axay.

  The Twelfth Kingdom’s scapegoat sat slightly apart from the others, who were bent forward, staring at an object on the table. In the dreamlike manner of the vision, the object itself remained hidden from Celestine, but fragments of debate came to her, talk of lost ships and sons, and fleets searching. Then the Sea Lord rose to argue some point more forcefully.

  ‘A vital discovery …’ he seemed to insist, his words fading in and out of Celestine’s hearing, ‘… force to my hope … trapped in the ice … rescue … a swift ship … a great gulf in the Ice Wall … alive within it.’

  The others did not seem to share his certainty, but at length, after further debate, one of the naval officers, a short and somewhat stout man with a stern face, bowed his head and said, ‘I will go then.’

  Hope, long abandoned, flared in Celestine. A rescue! These men were discussing a rescue of the Bent Wing! And they knew exactly where the ship was, trapped in the chasm in the Ice. They knew. So the boats that had set off from the camp over a year ago must have made it after all, first to the open sea, and then all the way home to the Kingdoms, delivering the news of the wreck to the Sea Lord. And now Ibanez was sending a swift rescue ship!

  She listened eagerly to learn more, but around the Sea Lord’s table the discussion had moved on to other matters. It seemed to be in regard to the boy, and whether or not he would sail with the ship. Why such a trivial matter should concern the Sea Lord, Celestine couldn’t guess. The boy himself seemed of humble stock, and quite undistinguished.

  Then apparently everything was settled, and the officers and the girl and boy rose to depart. But at last Axay stirred and spoke, and the words cut through to Celestine clearer than all the rest.

  ‘One last thing, my Lord. A word with my fellow scapegoat.’

  Everyone turned to look at the girl with the scarred face. Celestine stared too, understanding. Of course. A scapegoat!

  Axay addressed the girl coldly. ‘It takes no seer to divine the truth about you, it is evident in your every pose and gesture. Nevertheless, I will not shame you with it now, for indeed it no longer matters. You have been caught up in a greater fate than you bargained for. You have not the gift of foretelling, I know, but even so, a true scapegoat you will become.’

  The girl herself – she was very proud in her manner – seemed repelled by this speech, but to Celestine it was a revelation, as if Axay had been speaking to her directly from across time and distance. This was the other scapegoat whom Celestine was one day to influence. The girl. And she was coming north, to the Ice, and to the camp, on a rescue ship.

  Hope flared brighter. What else could this mean other than that Celestine herself would survive to meet the girl? Indeed, in the grip of her vision foresight, Celestine felt it as a surety; she and the girl would come face to face here on the isle – and the boy would be there too, whoever he was.

  She was going to live!

  And with that, in another heartbeat, the vision was gone. Celestine found herself hungry and cold again, back upon the freezing isle, in the dank little hut with the officers, her body bent with a thousand pains. The seven men were staring at her, their faces shockingly thin, as if she’d never seen them before, compared to the full-fed faces she had just beheld.

  ‘Well?’ demanded the captain in impatience.

  Only an instant had passed in her vision state, Celestine realis
ed. The captain was still waiting for an answer regarding his trip north to the pole, as to whether she would go with him. But no, not now, she couldn’t go with him now, not when she knew she was going to live to be rescued after all.

  Indeed, maybe they all would live to be rescued.

  She shook her head in sudden earnestness at Altona. ‘No, Captain, please. I won’t go. And you must not go either.’

  He sighed in irritation. ‘If you’re about to produce another prophecy of disaster, save your breath. The worst that can happen is that we die in the attempt – and death is certain anyway, if we remain here.’

  ‘No. No. Rescue is coming.’

  Altona became suspicious. ‘Rescue? Now you’re telling me that we are not all doomed after all? You’ve changed your mind?’

  She nodded again, putting all the belief she could into her eyes, to convince him. ‘The Sea Lord is sending a ship! I saw him.’

  ‘You saw him.’ The captain’s tone was scornful. ‘It doesn’t matter what I decide, does it? You are bent on thwarting me from the pole. First you say we will all die if I do not turn back: now suddenly we are all to live, but only if I stay here. What is it that has made you hate me so?’

  Celestine could only shake her head helplessly. Hate him? She was trying to save him – but once again, he had shut his ears to her. In a flash of memory she saw, as she had seen four years earlier, the grey cast upon his face, his skin withered and dead, parched as if from desert heat.

  He was a dead man. It was too late. She drew herself up formally. ‘Go, if you must, and die there. But I will not.’

  Something glittered in Altona’s eye. Anger yes, but deeper than that, a doubt, a fear. Then he shrugged sharply. ‘Have it your way. I won’t force you. But your own hope will fail; that much I foretell for myself!’

  So it was that when Altona and his twelve crew finally set off northwards in their little boat, Celestine stayed behind with the last sixty-four survivors. And just four weeks later – though those same four weeks meant the deaths of seventeen more men – the greatest storm of the winter rose. It blew for nine days, and as it blew the demon of the ice claimed another soul, seaman Erneste. But when the storm passed, the ice pack lay fractured.