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  NEPTUNE’S FORGE

  A Novel

  GEORGE WIER

  Copyright © 2018 by George Wier

  Published by

  Flagstone Books

  Austin, Texas

  NEPTUNE’S FORGE

  First Kindle Edition

  December 2018

  Excerpts from the Book of Common Prayer, 1789 version, are outside of copyright and fall under public domain.

  Excerpts from The Secret Lamentations are fictitious, and are copyrighted by George Wier, July 2018.

  The poem “Pale the moon her light was shedding...” was taken from Romantic Ballads Translated from the Danish and Miscellaneous Pieces, by George Morrow, copyright 2001, translated from a poem by Adam Gottlob Oehlenslaeger, of Denmark (1779-1850).

  Cover design by Elizabeth Mackey

  Image courtesy of bigstockphoto.com

  All Rights Reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes written in connection with reviews written specifically for a magazine or newspaper.

  Also by George Wier

  The Bill Travis Mysteries:

  The Last Call

  Capitol Offense

  Longnecks & Twisted Hearts

  The Devil To Pay

  The Bill Travis Omnibus (Books 1-4)

  Death On The Pedernales

  Slow Falling

  Caddo Cold

  Arrowmoon

  The Bill Travis Omnibus 2 (Books 5-8)

  After The Fire

  Ghost Of The Karankawa

  Desperate Crimes

  Mexico Fever

  The Bill Travis Omnibus 3 (Books 9-12)

  The Lone Star Express

  Trinity Trio

  Buffalo Bayou Blues

  The Elysium Chronicles:

  Murder In Elysium

  Sentinel In Elysium

  Other mysteries:

  Long Fall From Heaven (with Milton T. Burton)

  Errant Knight

  Neptune’s Forge

  Science Fiction/Steampunk:

  The Vindicators: Book One—Last Defense (with Robert A. Taylor)

  Captains Malicious (with T.R. Harris)

  1889: Journey to the Moon (with Billy Kring)

  1899: Journey to Mars (with Billy Kring)

  Jem of Skye: Book 1 of the Factions of Skye

  Anthologies:

  ‘14: A Texanthology

  Lone Star Noir

  Lone Star Lawless

  Unto the Night

  NEPTUNE’S FORGE

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  EXPEDITIONERS

  Jonathan Gleese, American, Explorer’s Club, Expedition Leader

  Ned Kroones, Dane, dog man, former Arctic explorer

  Viktor Tomaroff, Russian, cartographer

  Terry Rath, American, Civil War veteran

  Parker Dunlevy, Irishman

  Peter Bornik, American, Civil War veteran

  Manuel Ortega, Brazilian, driver of sled #3

  Mateo, Brazilian

  Nico, Brazilian

  Alejo, Brazilian

  Gonzalo, Brazilian

  Mauro, Brazilian

  Guillermo Gomez, Brazilian, driver of sled #4

  Juan Tomas, Brazilian

  Francisco, Brazilian

  Jose Luis, Brazilian

  Valentin, Brazilian

  Marcos Brazilian

  Ignacio, Brazilian, driver of sled #5

  Esteban, Brazilian

  Ezequiel, Brazilian

  Santiago, Brazilian

  Pablo, Brazilian

  CREW OF THE U.S.S. INVINCIBLE

  Arthur Kuralt, Captain

  Aubrey Carter, Pilot

  Lannie Davidson, Purser

  Simon Pegg, First Mate

  Nat Brinderman, Galley Captain

  William Coffey, Engineer

  Little Ned Ballister, Bosun’s Mate

  Pear Rogers, Bosun

  CHAPTER 1: INACCESSIBLE

  Would that I might see through the eyes of my brother, that I might

  learn my deficits.

  Would that I might see through the eyes of God, that I might know

  the true direction of my travels.

  —The Secret Lamentations

  W hat do you think of it, Mr. Bornik?” Terry Rath asked the man who stepped up beside him at the gunwale of the U.S.S. Invincible. Rath looked out across the sea to the island past which they sailed.

  The wind was up and the engines were off, and the ship was propelled by nothing more than her billowing sails.

  “What do I think of what?”

  “The island? There’s not a tree in sight, but it is covered in grasses.”

  “It must be the island Captain Kuralt was talking about last night,” Bornik stated. “See him up there in the pilot house? He’s got his spyglass trained on it.”

  Terry Rath turned to look, briefly, but then fixed his gaze once more upon the land mass jutting from the sea. It had sheer walls most of the way around, but for one narrow place where the land fell off with a gentle grade to a snarl of rocks at its foot. To the right and left of this solitary access point, the cliffs rose like fluted petals to a hundred feet or more above the sea.

  “What was its name?” Rath asked.

  “Inaccessible, I think. And I can see why.”

  Terry Rath seemed to be enthralled by the island for some reason, Peter Bornik noted, and suppressed a smile. Rath seemed a good sort of lad, but he was a damned Yankee from Connecticut.

  Both men had been in the Civil War, though on different sides, and while each of them knew this about the other, neither had broached the subject with the other. All that Bornik knew about Rath was that he’d been a cavalry soldier, like himself, that he lived alone miles away from any town in the New England countryside, and that he was a furniture-maker by trade.

  For Bornik’s own part, he was a shrimper, fisherman, and longshoreman from Louisiana, as his father had been. He had fought the entire four years of the bloody war and returned home on foot, in rags and penniless to go back to the boats and continue where he had left off, as if the insane war had never occurred.

  “I should think that a man could find peace there,” Rath said.

  “Peace?” Bornik asked. “I’ve known people who can find no peace unless the world around them is filled with noise. I’ve known a lot of city people who were that way.”

  Rath chuckled and the wind tousled his wiry hair.

  “I mean the peace where you don’t have to see other people, or talk to them.”

  “What’s wrong with other people? You’re talking to me, ain’t you?”

  Rath turned to regard the Cajun. “My apologies. I meant no offense.” Then he turned back to face the island. “What’s that there? It looks to be a dwelling.”

  “Yes. The Captain told me about it last night. It seems there was once a man shipwrecked there. He was there for months before a ship came along and found him, but he didn’t want to be rescued after all. All he needed was some supplies and enough wood to build a cabin, so they left him with enough food to last for a few months. The castaway gave the Captain who’d found him a hand-written draft on his life savings and came back later on with enough wood and nails and tools to build the place.”

  “It looks well tended. Do you still think he lives there?”

  “Not according to the Captain. Ten years later the original Captain came by to visit him and found only his bones. They buried what the sea birds didn’t pick clean back of his little hut.”

  Rath sighed. “It looks to be a good place to live out one’s days. That’s why I came on this expedition, you know. I figure that the
Antarctic is the remotest place on the Earth.”

  “Oh. You’re looking for peace. Well, to my mind a fellow can’t find peace anywhere until he finds it first in the four-inch space between his own ears. Also, it won’t be just the five of us. Mr. Gleese intends to pick up some people at our next port of call. We’ll need laborers, you know.”

  Rath nodded and met Peter Bornik’s gaze.

  “I expect you’re right about that. What’s the next port of call?”

  “A town called Stanley, in the Falklands. It’s the final launching point for the expedition.”

  “When will we arrive?”

  “Another week, give or take.”

  Rath nodded. He looked back toward Inaccessible Island, but the narrow patch of grass leading up to the cabin and to the headland had disappeared from view.

  CHAPTER 2: THE NARWHAL

  Our lives are never seen by the world as we see them,

  or indeed, as we live them.

  To this extent, our lives are fraught with untruth.

  —The Secret Lamentations.

  From the journal of Jonathan Gleese, E.C.[1], Esq.

  September 14, 1888

  I t is with some amount of unease and, dare I say it, trepidation, that I once again attempt Terra Australis Incognita, as the early explorers once characterized the land.

  We are two days south of Stanley—which is little more than a whaling and sealing village among the Falklands—and less than a week’s sail from Antarctica. I believe I am the last of the explorers from my time to undertake the lost continent. This shall be my final expedition, I am afraid, for I am beginning to feel if not my age, then the illimitable miles.

  The wind is already gusty and cold and the bergs abundant, a presage, I have little doubt, of what is to come, even though I have carefully selected the Antarctic spring for this last trip. And God alone in his majesty and infinite wisdom knows what I shall find.

  Perhaps I shall find my resting place.

  Here aboard the Invincible, we have an unimpeachable Captain—Captain Kuralt—of great ability and middling diction, a First Officer who favors colored drinks (and in immeasurable quantity), twelve able seamen, and an unkempt purser (God save me from the company of seamen). My own Expeditionary contingent consists of twenty-three men, composed as they are of three Americans (I count myself in this number), an Irishman, a Dane, a Russian cartographer, and seventeen Brazilians.

  First there is Ned Kroones, the Dane, whom I have employed off and on these last fifteen years. He is an iron ramrod, my pillar of strength, and would see anything through to the end. Ned, much like the climate we both embrace, is a desolate man, alone, aloof, enured like hammered steel. Ned runs the dogs, which for my part is a thankless task; the man must have some dog in him—they seem to know his mind before he expresses his commands. In my travels I have seen few men more attuned to animals than their own race, but Ned is certainly one. Additionally, he is a sledder, and worth his weight in gold in that department. Once we are upon the ice, he is expected to train the rest of the men.

  Then there is Viktor Tomaroff, the calm Russian, my navigator and map-maker. His English has improved over the past two years, and this will be our first expedition together, for I have been dormant since the death of Kitty. I reached out to him through correspondence twelve years ago, and we stayed in almost uninterrupted contact until I decided upon this current foray, once again, into the Antarctic. I believe he was and is my most excellent choice for the role, and seems to be at ease with both sextant and theodolite, with transit and compass. Additionally, he recalls small bits of data, particularly with regard to geography, and is a wealth of knowledge on the subject. I wish, though, that he were more personable; he keeps the world at arm’s length, and thus seems more British, in nature, than Russian.

  The two Americans are Terry Rath and Peter Bornik. Rath is from Maine, a young country squire, of no great education but of inquisitive mind. He, like Bornik, is a veteran of the War of Brother Against Brother, what they are calling the Civil War, although Bornik (from Louisiana) fought for the South. I’ve seen no trouble yet between these two, nor any discussion between them, for that matter, on the subject. Of the two, Bornik is the taciturn one, although they are of the same age. Rath is the gentler one, while Bornik is rough and brash—he substitutes immediate action for thoughtfulness, a tendency I have come to respect in the wild places of the world, where the luxury of contemplation must accede to the necessity to survive and Frontier Rules apply, which is to say that there are no rules apart from quick wit and reflexes. Still, I should prefer not to cross Rath. One day he will explode, and the day he does, someone is likely to meet their maker.

  Parker Dunlevy is our Irishman. He is an old hand for applying steel against ice, and can lay a spike faster than a Kentucky railsplitter can halve a knotty pine. His one failing is that he speaks overly much—and compulsively so—about petty matters.

  And then there are the Braziles, itinerant workers to the Falklands. They are a rough bunch. Pay them, give them enough grog, feed them a couple of times a day, and they will do all of the heavy work. For the most part they are stevedores and gutting-house crew, and the smell of fish blood is deeply embedded in the pores of their skin. There are three leaders among them: Manuel Ortega, Guillermo Gomez, and Ignacio Vega. Of the three, Ortega is the chief. He is all arms and barrel chest and commands them with but a grunt and a gesture. Gomez, likewise, is strong and able, though not nearly as intelligent as Ortega. He is prone, however, to become angry when not instantly obeyed; a man of murderous temperament, but for the most part he keeps it well in check. The last, Vega, defers to the other two much the way the men defer to him. Thus, a query of the orders is rapidly barked up the chain of command from the other Brazilians, through Vega, and thence to Gomez or Ortega, at which point the matter is instantly settled, either with a word or a nod (Ortega) or a growl and a curse (Gomez). I note all this from simply watching them load the ship with supplies. They hail, for the most part, from Buenos Aries by way of Patagonia, and although they therefore understand ice well enough it seems, none have been to Antarctica. In fact, they seem to find it unbelievable that we are going there. In a way, I agree with them.

  And thus we come to myself, and to my own doubts.

  At one time I was a young man, hale and strong. I feared no thing except the sea—and any man who does not respect the sea is an utter fool, and will come a cropper for it—no beast, no duel, no barroom brawl could stymie me. At one time I could crack Brazil nuts in my bare hands as well as I could crack skulls in a free-for-all. Those days, however, are no more. They have fled.

  This is one final, great adventure for an aging explorer, the last of his kind. A little over eleven years ahead lies a new century and a new age. I shall not see it. And so this expedition begins...differently, if not diffidently.

  Missing, this time, is the sense of expansiveness I remember, of impending greatness; the discovery of far lands, inhospitable climes, the soul-ache of adventure. Instead, in its place is a void, a vacuum, if you will, that knows no embankment, no island in which the soul might take refuge. Instead, doubt encroaches, crowds in to fill the empty space, and therefore I have had nightmares these past few nights of such great intensity and depravity and disturbance that I have awakened myself by crying out in the night. Perhaps the men think me mad.

  My thoughts inevitably turn back to the streets, the homes, the taverns of New London. A normal man should return whence he was born for his dissolution, but this is for other men. For my part, I wish to die in lands unseen. And even now, as the hour grows late and the coal oil lantern flickers, I feel the heart pumping in my chest more slowly, sedately, as if biding its time and measuring out its own beats against the inevitable.

  Gah!

  I shall put out the light and attempt to get some sleep. I have starved myself from an evening meal in the hopes that I shall not dream. We shall see.

  In the South Atlantic

 
September 15, 1888

  T he ship was a hybrid, a four-hundred and seventy ton sailing ship converted to a screw-driven steamship with twin fifty-horsepower engines and renamed Invincible by her new owner from its original service name, Donny Blake, whose namesake was one of the first American casualties of the Battle of Bunker Hill back during the Revolution. That the investor had bought the aging sailing ship at all was something of a wonder, but the Navy auction price had been set far too low to pass over, and despite her decrepit condition she had looked fine while sitting at anchor at the New London docks on the icy January day of the auction, twenty years before. Her prow, once a thing of beauty when she was under sail, had since been fitted with ugly steel for ice-breaking duty in the Arctic, where the market for seal and whale was too tempting for her shrewd investors—in this instance, Artemis Collins of Boston, the noted former pugilist, attorney and U.S. Congressman, and Jonathan Gleese, the not nearly as famous Arctic explorer—to pass up. Invincible, in her latest incarnation, was anything but pretty.

  When she was not carrying cargo, she tended to list toward the prow, as if she might take it in her mind to make a bold plunge for the ocean depths without notice. Thus, she resembled a narwhal, with an oblate head and the original bowsprit emerging from a jacket of rusted steel and jutting proudly forth.

  Her engines were at one-quarter speed as her captain negotiated past the tremendous iceberg; a low and flat expanse of thick ice nearly the size of the Island of Manhattan that had broken away from some ice shelf and had drifted north. The thing would play hell with shipping in the region for some months as it drifted north to the lanes that led to Cape Horn.

  From the bridge of the ship, Arthur Kuralt ordered left standard rudder by fifteen degrees so as to skirt the narrow finger of ice stretching away from the main berg. He looked ahead and past the bare masts and rigging to see open sea beyond, and the conceivable end of the island-like mass of ice blocking their passage. While the Invincible was a converted steamship, she had full rigging and sails tucked away in her hold against some improbable disaster with the engines.