Authors: John Christopher
‘I want it with me,’ Jones said.
With exasperation, Olsen said: ‘I know the English are sentimental, but are they sentimental over a typewriter? Was this a family heirloom – did Lord Wellington write the news of Waterloo on this machine?’
Jones said: ‘I have – private reasons for wanting to hang on to it. I don’t propose to discuss them.’
‘We need no discussion. If it is not taken on board the
Kreya
, it must be left here.’
‘There is a further alternative.’ Jones spoke stiffly, but as though in embarrassment rather than anger. ‘My wife and I can stay on the ship.’
‘That is impossible. There is no heat nor light now, and little food. And the dangers do not grow less.’
‘We can manage. And there are dangers, I would think, whether one goes or stays. I have had some misgivings over this journey from the beginning. I have more now.’
‘Mr Jones, you have already given your agreement.’
‘And the Englishman never goes back on his word? You don’t know us as well as you think, Captain.’
The others were watching and waiting in silence. The thin, bitter wind keened over the ice, counterpointing the continuous bass grumble of the shifting floes. The scene, in the less than half light, was melancholy. Although the setting was so vastly different, Olsen was reminded, looking at the watchful figures and the one protagonist, of the scene on the
Kreya
when Stövring had defied him. He had resisted, as he had known he must, and all had gone wrong. Now he was being defied again, and over an absurdity. But the crux of the matter was that it was impossible to force the two English to come with the others if they decided not to. There was no lever he could use against them as he had used the threat to take Mouritzen away against Mary Cleary. And he could not leave them: he was not prepared to divide the party for which he had accepted responsibility – still less was he willing to leave others on the
Kreya
.
He said harshly: ‘You are determined in this, Mr Jones?’
The muffled figure of Jones nodded in reply. ‘Quite determined.’
‘A bear,’ Olsen said, ‘and a typewriter. I am becoming a connoisseur of human stupidity. You cannot carry the machine, Mr Jones.’ He waved down an attempt by Jones to say something. ‘If you carry it, you cannot properly do the work I require of you. Put it on the sledge, beside the child.’
‘Thank you, Captain,’ Jones said.
‘In return for this burden which you place on all of us, you will be given more and harder tasks during the journey. Do you accept this?’
‘I accept.’
‘Then, at last, we go, I think. We have wasted too much time already.’
Their route took them almost due west, towards the mountains they had seen two days before. The previous day the mountains had been hidden by the fog and at present, although the sky was clear, there was not enough light to make them visible. There were a few pale stars, and moonlight filtered through the bars of a high bank of cloud.
The going was hard. There was no level surface of ice; in months, even years of jostling, the floes had slid under and over each other to form slanting platforms, separated by hummocks and ridges of ice, and by fissures anything from a few inches to several feet wide. There was a constant jarring motion as the swell lifted the floes and pulled them down again – air hissed in and out of the fissures with each rise and subsidence. But the motion was less pronounced than it had been, and as they moved to the west it became still less noticeable.
As far as possible, they manoeuvred the sledges to take advantage of what favourable contours there were, and after a time Olsen appointed one of the free men as a scout, to go ahead and, climbing an ice hillock to a vantage point, call back the best line to take. All but the smallest fissures had to be avoided; sometimes they widened markedly as they were being crossed. Although it was generally possible to find a gap, or a lower level at which to haul the sledges over, occasionally a ridge several feet high made it necessary for all of them to get under the sledges and manhandle them over the obstacle.
It was a slow business; at the end of two hours they had progressed, Mouritzen guessed, about as many miles. It was his turn out of the harness. He walked beside Olsen, and spoke to him quietly:
‘How far, do you think, to the coast?’
‘Twenty miles. Perhaps a little more.’
‘We can only move during the hours when there is some light – about eight hours each day.’
‘Yes.’
‘So it will be three or four days before we reach the shore even.’
Olsen heaved on his traces. His face was blue with cold and there was a crust of ice on his eyelashes.
‘Maybe. I think it will get better after a time. One would expect the ice to be rougher and more broken up towards the edge of the field.’
‘I hope so. Four days of this will not be amusing.’
Olsen put up a gloved hand to his nose.
‘No feeling,’ he commented. ‘There is always something one forgets. Tonight, if there is the material, the women must make nose protectors for us.’
‘And tomorrow,’ Mouritzen said, ‘I think I will have one less vest and only two pairs of trousers.’
‘Better too hot than too cold,’ Olsen warned him. ‘And we cannot stop by day if you want to put another pair of trousers on.’
Away to their left the sky reddened and the sun made its short climb towards the shrunken zenith of its course. They could see the mountains ahead, as white and unbelievable as ever against the dark blue sky.
‘We are nearer, Mama,’ Josef shouted.
‘Nearer to what? To Heaven?’
‘To the mountains!’
‘That is something,’ she said. ‘The mountains are nearer to Heaven, and we are nearer to the mountains.’ She gasped. ‘I am sweating and freezing together.’
Nadya said to her father: ‘They look farther away to me.’
‘That is because you saw them before from the deck of a ship, high above the ice.’
‘Then why do you say they are nearer?’
Josef laughed. ‘Not they – we! They are farther, but we are nearer. We have come so far that we must be nearer.’
With the red ball of the sun standing clear of the southern ice, Mama Simanyi brought round packets of chocolate and biscuits, drawn from a haversack which had been left easily accessible on the second sledge. After that she went round with a water bottle. Drinking from it, in his turn, Mouritzen observed:
‘The water is almost warm!’
Mama Simanyi pointed to the front of her voluminous wrappings.
‘I have a place for it, in there. To keep it from freezing.’
Mouritzen laughed. ‘It keeps well there, Mama.’
They struggled on. By the time the sun dipped below the horizon again it had become, as Olsen had prophesied, a little easier: there were stretches of as much as a hundred yards where the sledges could be pulled without having to be lifted or coaxed up or down slopes. But it was hard enough; their muscles were unaccustomed to the tasks they now had, and as the day wore on they were tiring.
Stefan at last said to Olsen: ‘It is time to make camp, surely, Captain? It is too dark to see where we go.’
The glow had long faded from the south. Overhead the stars were beginning to wink into vision. The ice all round them was grey, featureless.
‘We see well enough,’ Olsen said. ‘When it is time, I will order the halt.’
Stefan made a sound of melancholy disgust.
‘It will be too dark to see what we do. We will pitch tent over a fissure in the ice, and in the night …’
He made a grating noise in his throat.
‘What of it?’ Olsen asked. ‘You can swim?’
‘No. It is hard to learn to swim when one lives always in a circus.’
‘I have seen seals in a circus,’ Olsen said. ‘They swim.’
But it was true, he reflected, that some care would be needed in selecting their night’s resting place, and although they had four torches between them it would be better not to leave the decision until darkness had set in. He called Jones, who had recently been relieved, to take his place in the harness, and went ahead of the party to where Mouritzen was reconnoitring the way. He joined him at the top of a mound of ice, formed by accident into a round hump that reminded one of an igloo.
Guessing his purpose, Mouritzen said: ‘What I would like now is a hollow somewhere in the woods above Aarhus. A little stream, and perhaps a fawn drinking. That is where I would like to pitch a tent.’
‘You do not like this land?’
‘Land! If it were land, I would be happier.’
Olsen pointed. ‘Over there. Under the lee of that ridge; the wind is from the north and there will be some shelter. How do you like it?’
‘Is it solid, do you think?’
‘We must go and see.’
The ridge marked a point of junction, some time in the past, of two fairly large floes. It gave every sign of solidity. Mouritzen jumped up and down on the surface of the ice, but there was no new or nearer note in the distant creaking and groaning.
‘This will do,’ Olsen said. ‘Tell them we pitch our tents here tonight.’
Unloading the sledges took a long time, to start with. All their fingers were numb to varying degrees, and grew more numb as they wrestled with the knotted ropes. The problems of tent erection followed hard on this. Places for the pegs had to be marked out on the ice, and outward-slanting holes chiselled out. The pegs were then set, the chipped fragments of ice packed round them, and water poured round to freeze them in. Full night had fallen long before this was completed; the women stood round with torches, flashing them to different points as directed.
At last the tents were got up and it was possible to prepare the interiors. Each tent had a tarpaulin as a ground-sheet and Olsen had loaded a bag of hay on each sledge. Josef had commented on this: ‘So we sleep on mattresses out there, Captain? If so, they will be thin, I think.’ Olsen had smiled, without answering. Now his purpose was made clear: he had them spread the hay over the tarpaulins, and then lay blankets on top of the hay.
Stefan objected: ‘I would rather have my blankets on me than the floor.’
‘You have a lot to learn,’ his father said. He added, to Olsen: ‘The hay is even thinner this way.’
‘It will give some insulation – enough, I hope. We could not have carried more.’
The tents were set up side by side; the one which had belonged to the Simanyis had an extra flap at one end, and it was possible to use this to form a small covered tunnel between them.
Mouritzen carried Annabel inside as soon as there was a place for her.
‘I’m cold,’ she said.
‘And brave,’ he told her. ‘A most brave little girl; you have hardly complained all day. Soon you will be warm. See, Mama Simanyi is lighting the Primus stove.’
‘I wish we had a proper fire.’
‘You will be surprised how quickly it will get warm.’
She looked up at him. Her eyes were like Mary’s, but a deeper, smokier blue; as a woman she would be even lovelier, he thought.
‘Will we be there tomorrow?’
‘Or soon after. Rest now. Then there will be hot stew. That will warm you also.’
Outside, Nadya took the pack off Katerina’s back, and gave her some of the food from it.
‘It is not much,’ she said, ‘for a big bear like you, but there is still a long way to go. If we eat all at once, there is no more left. See, a little honey on the biscuits. And then we take a little walk to the ridge here. No water for a bear, but this is snow, which turns into water in your mouth. And here the snow is deep where it has drifted with the wind. You must make your bed here, Katerina. It is not a good bed, but it is better than the hard ice. Sleep here until morning.’
She rubbed the bear’s head with her gloved hands.
‘If you grow tired of such a supper and such a bed, and leave us in the night, I will not blame you. But if you go, my Katerina, take care of yourself. This is a bad place, for bears as well as men.’
At last, all were inside the tents. A stove had been set going in each tent, and already there was some warmth from them. They took off their outer clothes and their boots. The insoles which the women had made showed a covering of frost underneath, which they brushed off. Socks were taken off and fresh pairs put on. There were tapes running across the top of the tent. Olsen had had these sewn in, and he now instructed them to hang the socks and insoles over them.
‘As the heat from the Primus rises, they will dry,’ he explained. ‘It is important to have dry socks.’
Jones said: ‘I’m glad to get those boots off. That sole rucked up underneath – it’s been like walking over ribbed rock.’
‘Tomorrow,’ Olsen said, ‘you must take greater care in putting your feet in the boots. I will help you. We cannot afford to have a cripple with us.’
‘Tomorrow,’ Stefan asked, ‘we get off the ice?’
Olsen shrugged. ‘Maybe.’
‘Last night,’ Stefan observed wistfully, ‘we slept on bunks, with spring mattresses, as many blankets as one wanted, sheets …’
Josef grunted. ‘We are doing well, I think. No trouble, no accidents, and we are snug for the night. All we need is food.’ He lifted the flap and called through to the other tent. ‘Mama! How long before the stew comes?’
She called back: ‘In a few minutes we send you the pot in, ready to put on your stove. After that, it is up to you.’
Josef let the flap fall again. He made a smacking noise with his lips.
‘I think I could eat it raw; he said.
Olsen awoke during the night; his watch told him it was nearly three o’clock. About him there was the sound of steady breathing. He found his boots, slipped them on, and quietly made his way outside.
When he had relieved himself, he stood for a while looking around. There was no moon yet, but the stars were sharp and heavy in the sky. Across the northern hemisphere a broad, pale, luminescent band moved slowly – brightening, dimming, always passing across the heavens, always transient and always renewed. The air was intensely bright: the light from stars and Northern Light reflected everywhere from the ice-field – although the field of visibility was quite small, objects shone within it, and it gave the impression of being larger than it was.