Treasures of the Deep

by Andrew McGahan

  Opening the way south at last.

  Even so, rescue did not immediately appear.

  An entire day went by, according to the hourglass, and no ship drew up, no boats. Patience, men counselled each other. It was a three-day sail from the open ocean to the isle; rescuers could arrive no faster than that, even if they’d been waiting at the mouth of the channel.

  And if they existed at all …

  Celestine had been certain of it when the ice first opened. But as she watched the empty waters, doubts began to gnaw at her. After all, her previous visions had all shown events that had not yet happened, that were weeks or months away in the future. But if her vision of the meeting on the Twelfth Kingdom was the same, if it was a thing of the future, then that would mean the rescue might not even have set out yet, and that meant it would be three months at least before any ship could appear.

  And yet, she argued with herself, that couldn’t be, for no one would be alive here on the isle in three months. Celestine included. But if she was dead, how then could she meet with the scapegoat girl, and tell her whatever it was she was to tell her? It was impossible. No, Celestine must be alive when the girl arrived, and therefore the girl must come soon.

  But the wait was maddening. A second day passed, then a third, and still no vessel appeared, and with every hour others drew closer to death who might yet be saved; already one man had died since the storm. So what was delaying the rescue ship? Perhaps the channel was not yet open all the way to the sea? Perhaps a last mile or so of solid ice still blocked entry, hindering the rescuers? If so, such ice might take weeks yet to melt. Too long!

  When a fourth day passed with no sighting, Celestine was decided. They could wait no longer for their saviours. They must go to meet them – a small party at least – in the last of the boats.

  She went to Gabriel. He had ordered the signal bonfire – long since allowed to go out – to be lit, and was standing by it for warmth, studying the waters of the channel, his face haggard with hope and anxiety.

  Pointing south she said, ‘We cannot wait. We must go.’

  The young commander was an old man to behold now, and turned his rheumy, weary eyes to her. ‘I’ve been thinking the same. I’d hoped that a ship would come – but even if a rescue mission has indeed been sent for us, they may be blocked still by ice at the channel’s mouth, and waiting for us there. But it is forty miles! There are few if any of us left with strength to row so far, or to survive for several days in an open boat in this cold.’ He sighed. ‘Nevertheless, we are lost otherwise. We will attempt it.’

  By then, a second man had died since the storm. Of the forty-five survivors, Gabriel selected the dozen who were the strongest – though the word was laughable when addressed to the crippled, cadaverous shapes assembled on the shore – and launched in the last boat.

  Celestine went with them, even in dread of the cold and discomfort that was certain to lie ahead. She could not stay behind, could not bear the thought that, should this boat disappear like the others, she would be left to linger in ignorance on the isle with the last of the dying.

  South they rowed, following the narrow crevice that had opened amid the ice pack, a lesser channel within the greater chasm. Above, the sky flickered palely green, and the ice cliffs loomed to their cruel peaks. Nothing hindered them, but their progress was painfully slow, for the rowers, their hands ulcerated and clawed, were barely able to hold the oars. Nor was there a wind to raise any sail: the air was still, and yet chill to the uttermost, as sharp as knives on any exposed skin and through their rags of clothing.

  Exposed as they were in the cramped boat, there was no defence, no way to get warm. The cold sank like poison into already wasted limbs. Twelve hours south of the isle, the first rower fell dead at his oar. Voice flat, Gabriel ordered the man thrown overboard. Then they pressed on – for what else was there to do? And after three days of utter misery, including the death of another rower, his body cast into the waters like the first, they at last drew near to the mouth of the channel.

  The rescue ship was there, Celestine assured herself feverishly. And even if the channel was closed at its extremity, she and Gabriel and the others would not be prevented, they would find some narrow way through the ice, or over it if need be, to reach salvation. She searched ahead in the darkness for a glow against the ice cliffs that would mark the ship’s presence, its bright lamps burning, and warmth and hot food waiting below decks …

  But there was no glow. All they met at the last was a rampart of old ice stretched across the channel, the same bergs that had formed here four years ago to trap them, still jammed together in place. Only a mile beyond, it could be seen in the dim aurora light, the cliffs opened out to the sea.

  In an agony of exhaustion and frustration, they rowed back and forth across the face of the ice barrier, searching for any gap. In the gloom, they lit a lamp they had brought with them, burning the very last drops of their precious whale oil, in the hope that its bright glow might either illuminate some concealed passage in the ice, or betray their presence to rescuers beyond. In hoarse, ruined voices they shouted as best they could, in case those same rescuers, waiting on the further side of the rampart, might hear.

  But no answering shout came, and they found no hidden gap in the ice. Instead, Gabriel suddenly gave a dismayed gasp, and rasped an order, ‘The lamp, quick, turn it on the berg there.’

  The sailor with the lamp obeyed, casting the bright beam onto a great flank of rotting ice that rose from the water – and Celestine felt her whole world tilt in horror. For there, encased deep, but emerging now as the ice broke up, were a pair of large, elongated shapes, damningly recognisable.

  Boats. Two boats.

  And hunched upright in the craft, or splayed in hideous poses nearby, were the men who had crewed them. Hollow faces stared back in the lamplight, eyes blankly white, mouths yawning silently.

  Dead, long dead.

  Celestine gazed in incomprehension. It was the two cutters that had set out from the camp nearly two years ago, the Bent Wing 3 clearly identified by the name still visible on its prow, the Bent Wing 4 less so, as its bow had been sheared off at some point and lost.

  But both boats? She didn’t understand. Her vision had shown her that a message had reached the Sea Lord! How could that be if at least one of the boats hadn’t made it home to the Kingdoms?

  And yet here they both were, along with their dead crews. How had it happened? Had some bridge of ice collapsed as the boats struggled towards the sea, plunging both craft and all forty men bodily into an icy fissure, there to freeze and die, and be held in place until now?

  It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that no message had ever reached the Sea Lord. Celestine’s vision had lied. No ship had been sent, no one knew where they were, and there would be no rescue.

  Gabriel, unbent and dauntless through all the years of suffering and starvation that had gone before, now lowered his head. ‘Turn out the light,’ he said. ‘Turn it out. It’s no use to anyone here.’

  In darkness thus they turned and began the slow journey back to their hateful home on the isle. But if the journey south had been hard, the retreat north was torment unending. The aurora light in the sky died, and they rowed in a blackness relieved only by the palest of starlight, and the cold was crueller then ever, now that all hope was gone.

  Death rode in the boat with them. Another rower fell lifeless over his oar within an hour of turning back; two others, too weak even to sit at the oars now, quietly expired while curled up in the bow. In all, by the time they spied the black sliver of land ahead in the channel, crowned by the wreck of the Bent Wing, only five of the original crew of twelve yet lived.

  ‘Not a word of what we found,’ croaked Gabriel to the rowers. ‘Not a word of it to those in the camp. I will not even record it in my journal, lest the other officers read of it there. I will simply say that we found no sign in the south, good or bad. We cannot destroy the last hope of those still alive
here. After all, we can’t be sure, even now, that rescue won’t come.’

  The rowers nodded in abject obedience.

  But it made no difference. Celestine did not know who spread the news, but upon their return a final, irrecoverable despair settled over the camp. Everyone understood that they existed without purpose now, that they fought against cold and hunger and pain for no good reason.

  And hence began the final round of dying.

  They had left thirty-one men on the island when they’d rowed away south. Only twenty-five still lived when they returned, in addition to those from the boat. They were so reduced now, and spread so thinly through the camp, that already the isle felt empty of life, that their own pale shapes, shambling wretchedly about the ruins, were no more than ghosts. All official duties and routines were now abandoned, no watch was kept looking north or south, and each man was left to prepare for the end as he might.

  Commander Gabriel did so by taking up his pen. Bent over the table in the officers’ hut, he laboured day by day at his journal, recording almost all that had occurred since the ship had become trapped in the ice, so that if rescuers ever came, at least they would know what had happened here – but he had no hope anymore that he would meet those rescuers himself.

  Celestine felt the same for her own part, but in anger more than in despair. She had been betrayed. Her visions had lied to her. Misused her. What had been the point of any of it, the warnings of death and then of rescue, and of the coming of the other scapegoat, if in the end she was only to starve anyway? Why had Axay given her these accursed powers, if they were only to torture her with doomed foreknowledge and vain hopes?

  Well, she had been misused enough. She would endure no more. Whatever Axay’s purpose had been for her, she rejected it now. Indeed, she rejected her entire function as scapegoat, as seer of death, and as defender of the crew’s fortune. She would be none of those things any longer, she would be plain Celestine when she died. Weary and old, but herself.

  And yet she did not die. Life continued to beat in her frail, aching limbs, burdensome though life had become.

  Instead, around her, one by one, the others passed.

  In the officers’ hut, where the air was freezing now, as no one had the strength to keep the stove fully stoked, the first to go was Lieutenant Holaz. He expired in his sleep and had frozen solid before the others even realised. It was only by great effort that Gabriel and Manchez managed to move his body outside, to prop it obscenely in the graveyard. But when Manchez died the same way four days later, it was beyond Gabriel to move him alone – Celestine was too weak to help – and so the corpse was left to lie in the cot, a silent companion, as Celestine huddled in her bed, and Gabriel wrote on.

  Then, some two weeks after they’d returned from their doomed voyage to the mouth of the channel, with barely a dozen of the crew still living throughout the camp, Celestine woke from a thin sleep to find Gabriel sprawled stiffly across the table, his journal and his final words thrust away from him in seeming disgust. Dead, she knew, even before she went to feel for a pulse in his outstretched wrist. Dead of disappointment.

  So she was alone. Oh, yes, a few still lived, curled in their beds in the other cabins, but her last true friend was gone. And she could do nothing but let him freeze in his position, her second silent companion.

  And what did it matter anyway, if the dead kept her company? She would be dead herself soon. In fact, she longed for it now. There was still wood available to burn in the stove, and scraps of food to be hunted out around the camp maybe, but she made no effort to move from her bed. Let the cold and hunger take her quickly; living was the worse fear. There was a time when such a surrender would have shamed her. She had never been one to yield to difficulty. But she knew, in her anger, that she had no cause for shame. She had given her all. The voyage was finished, all the lies had been told, there was nothing more that anyone or anything could ask of her now.

  But she was wrong about that.

  It was a cry, once again, that woke her – from a sleep she had hoped would be eternal. But no, life pumped dimly in her yet, and with a groan she opened her eyes to the darkness and cold of the hut.

  The cry … it had been no more than a strangled moan, a frightened, solitary sob from somewhere outside, but she knew what it meant. The demon had returned and had claimed one of the last survivors, the victim, whoever he was, too weak even to give full voice to his terror.

  It was amazing she had heard the sound at all over the wind, which was beating about the hut. A storm must have blown up while she slept; maybe it had been blowing for days, and she’d slumbered all that while, for it felt that her dreams had been haunted by gales, and that from time to time she had opened her eyes to see the shadow of Gabriel hunched over the table, never moving, before falling into uneasy sleep again.

  Footsteps crunched in the ice outside the door.

  She was too tired for fear now; the ice spectre had called for her finally, and she would welcome its embrace.

  A single knock, gentle, came on the door.

  Come out, said a voice that was no voice.

  She was imagining it. It was just the wind, shifting the door. She had no foresight, saw no visions, heard no voice. There was no such thing as the demon. She could stay in bed and die and suffer no more …

  But she had to know. She peeled the icy blankets back and with a grimace forced her stiffened legs to move, her back to straighten. She stood, swaying, her breath a mist in the dark – although it wasn’t so dark in the hut now, she realised, even though all the lamps had gone out. A light seemed to be shining around the edges of the door. She went to it, unfastened the latch, and pulled the door open to greet her summoner face to face at last.

  There was nothing there. Only daylight, nearly blinding after three months of night. She squinted out at the world, tears starting in her eyes and freezing on her cheek. In the sky, shredded cloud was hastening away on the wind, the last of the storm, and through the rents in the overcast the fundament was a pale, distant shade of salmon.

  It was the approach of dawn, of spring. Somewhere far beyond the ice and the black sea, the sun was rising once again.

  Come, beckoned the voice.

  But come where? Didn’t the thing realise? She was weak, near death. She couldn’t go searching through the camp.

  Come. Not far now.

  Celestine gave a sigh. But the call was irresistible, so she hobbled forth into the wind. Then she faltered, for in the approaching dawn the ice cliffs to either hand were palely illuminated, and though they had always been there as shadows in the winter dark, to behold those four-mile-high walls of ice by cold daylight was another matter. A weight of loneliness crushed her, and she stared about at the camp, cowed. Was anyone else still alive?

  Anyone at all?

  Come, commanded the voice, remorseless.

  The demon seemed to be behind her. Shuffling slowly, the wind buffeting her at every step, Celestine rounded the hut and looked. And there it was, waiting for her at the very northern tip of the isle.

  Even now, she could not quite tell what shape it was. Shreds of chill fog were scudding low across the waters of the channel, sweeping over the isle, and the thing might have been only a temporary thickening of that mist into a figure, ethereal, fading and returning with each gust of wind. Or was it just that her dying eyes refused to focus? Celestine blinked and for a sane, stunning moment, the spectre was gone. Then it was there again.

  Come, little one.

  She limped towards it, feeling ever more diminished as the thing loomed taller and taller, inhumanly so. Empty holes in the mist might have been eyes, and they gazed down at her with immortal detachment. I have your task ready.

  For all her fear, Celestine frowned with resentment. Task? No. She was too tired. She wanted only to sleep now, forever. And anyway, why should she do the bidding of this creature of the ice? It was her enemy. It hated all mankind. She had listened to it murder her shipmates, one by on
e.

  They came to me in the darkness, yes. But I did not kill them.

  Oh? Then what had killed them?

  Their lives they took themselves, venturing in their despair or delusion into the frozen wastes, where their bodies lie even now.

  No. She had heard their cries …

  Is it not proper that the cries of those who die alone be heard by one who herself is loneliest? It has always been your gift, little one.

  Celestine shook her head stubbornly, not meeting the demon’s empty eyes. It was trying to trick her, trying to deny what it had done.

  I am not what you think I am.

  For some reason this shook Celestine profoundly. She looked up in dread at the tall shape. What then? What?

  I am that which all scapegoats serve. They are my special concern, for they are my instruments. But you in particular – you I have guided all your life, to bring you to this point, for it is necessary.

  Necessary? Awful guesses rose in her, tantalising …

  You know my name, Celestine.

  Understanding took her then, a chill deeper than any wind, and she gaped that she could have been so blind. Now she saw the truth.

  This was no mere spirit of the ice sent to torment her. This was the master tormentor of the whole world.

  The voice that was no voice might have been smiling, but the mist face was blank. You must hurry now. The other scapegoat comes, and you must prepare the message that she is to receive from you.

  Hurry? Despite everything, a last flicker of hope flared in Celestine. Was the girl with the scars nearby then?

  No, dear Celestine. Nine months will pass before she stands where you now stand. You will not be rescued.