Neptune's Forge Page 2

  “Fifteen degrees, Cap’n,” Aubrey Carter confirmed. “Damn this ice.”

  “This is nothing for what’s ta come,” Kuralt stated.

  Out the window to their left there was a sudden upward blast of air and water.

  “Hmph. Seems we have a whale to port. See to it, Mr. Pegg.”

  “Aye,” Simon Pegg, the ship’s first mate said, and lurched for the door.

  With the opening of the door, Captain Kuralt felt the blast of cold air, and rubbed his hands together.

  Pegg was back in an instant. “Aye, Captain. It’s a narwhal.”

  “In the Antarctic? Well damn. See if the boys want to have a go. I’ll confer with Gleese. This trip is on his nickel. Mr. Pegg, go retrieve Mr. Gleese ‘ere you broach with the men.”

  “Aye, Captain, but words already spreading. I thought I saw Gomez running for the harpoon.”

  “I’ll handle Gomez, you fetch Gleese.”

  “Aye.”

  Once more the door flew open and was quickly closed.

  “Mr. Carter,” Kuralt said, “you keep this vessel no less than two hundred yards from that berg, or any of its icy fingers. You hear me?”

  “Aye,” Carter said.

  “I’ll be back.”

  Kuralt buttoned his coat and stepped out into the wind. He pulled his woolen cap down over his ears and stepped to the port railing.

  The animal resurfaced, its orange and blue mottled skin resembling more that of dug-up corpse than a marine animal. And then he saw the tusk broach the surface, a seven-foot long spiked tooth, bluish-black and smooth.

  “A narwhal. In the southern ocean. It’s uncanny.”

  They had passed Elephant and Clarence Islands before spotting the berg, and were therefore very close to Antarctica. Once they were around the berg he would turn the ship due west, until they encountered the long finger of ice and land that had come to be called the Antarctic Peninsula, and there look for anchorage from which to transmit the Gleese expedition to the continent.

  At that moment, Kuralt heard a keening sound. It seemed to reverberate throughout the ship; a mournful call.

  Guillermo Gomez appeared at his elbow, the harpoon already in hand. Gomez looped a length of rope through the steel loop.

  “Belay, Mr. Gomez,” Kuralt stated and placed his hand upon the man’s shoulder. Gomez instantly relaxed. Eyes brimming with zeal seemed to snap a question at the Captain.

  “Bide,” Kuralt said. “Here comes Mr. Gleese. He’ll have a say in this. I’ve never seen a narwhal in the southern ocean. Tell me that this is not some sign.”

  The truth was that Gomez did not understand more than a dozen words of English. Portuguese was his native tongue. The man’s eyebrows arched, beseeching clarification.

  Gleese and Pegg came up beside them and looked over the side.

  Gleese appeared to not have slept. A weariness radiated from the man, if not a melancholy. The sun was no more than a pale disc on the horizon, even at ten o’clock in the morning, and so the men’s faces were crepuscular, their main features there to be plainly discerned, but not their expressions.

  “What is it?” Gleese asked. “What do you want of me?”

  “A narwhal,” Kuralt stated. “The men want a trophy, if not fresh meat on the table tonight.”

  Gleese nodded. “Why call me?”

  “By damned, sir, what was all that arguing about pressing on about, then? We left good supplies behind not a day late to the docks, and you wouldn’t hear of a delay!”

  “My apologies,” Gleese stated. “Let the men have their sport. You’ll soon be rid of me, no doubt. I only ask that you return in December to retrieve the expedition.”

  “Our agreement stands,” Kuralt said. He released Gomez and nodded to the man. His eyes widened and the evil grin returned to his face.

  T he launch contained eleven men, and included Gomez (who would not release the harpoon without a fight), seven from the crew of the Invincible, Ortega, the leader of the Argetinians, Ned Kroones, the Dane, and Gleese himself, although the expedition leader appeared more the unwilling accomplice with his erect spine and his propensity to turn his head neither to the right nor the left. He sat nestled at the stern, more impediment than participant, and said nothing. The men wondered why he had come. Clearly his heart wasn’t in the hunt, if indeed the man contained a beating heart in his cavernous chest. He was known to be a cool one, was Gleese.

  The water, as the launch was lowered from its stanchions, was becalmed, the perfect mirror for a clear sky with a smattering of stars, more the millpond as opposed to the moody and nefarious extreme South Atlantic. As the craft settled onto the glassy surface and sent out its ripples, the narwhal breasted into the air again fifty feet off, and blew a crystalline geyser into the air.

  “Lá! Lá!” Gomez called out, and gripped his harpoon, his face twisted into demonic glee. There! There!

  “We see him, man,” Kroones stated.

  The rope ties were quickly released and oars bit into the water.

  The hunt was on.

  The engines of the ship—the one sound that had been constant, incessant since leaving port—had ceased, and the ship’s wake tracked them to port, its forward momentum dying out. Thus, an eerie silence, almost a deafness but for the digging of the oars, crowded in among them, and none—not even Gomez—spoke.

  The rowers merged into a rhythm of strokes, a wordless communication of strength and motion, forging the separate men into one machine. At the bow, Gomez pointed, attempting to predict where the narwhal would surface.

  Minutes passed in this fashion and the wind died out.

  Gomez abruptly stood, one booted foot upon the forward gunnel, his right arm with the harpoon cocked back for a throw while a sagging loop of rope sat lax between his left thumb and forefinger, and waited. In this manner he resembled more a Greek god of old than a Brazilian with bad teeth and an unwashed and rancid odor.

  The narwhal came, breaking the surface of the water mere feet from the launch. For an instant it was airborne, and the men to the fore nearly fell backwards in surprise. But instead of reeling like his fellows, Gomez threw, even as Gleese bellowed, “No!”

  The steel harpoon, sharpened to a razor’s edge, entered the side of the beast while the rope trailing it danced a sinuous beat for a moment. The instant the narwhal’s tusk struck the surface, Gomez’s fell backwards into the boat, his left leg braced hard against the gunnel while his left hand clamped down on the rope.

  He cried out and the launch shot forward.

  A scream went up an instant later, followed by a gout of blood and air as the animal broke the surface, its tranquility forever arrested.

  It rolled onto its belly, and there for all the men to see was the infant, still halfway inside its mother, half born yet half unborn, its skin the same color as an Anglo-Saxon infant.

  “Good sweet Christ!” Gleese bellowed and then shoved himself forward through the ranks of the rowers, pushing them aside. “What have you done?”

  Gomez was getting to his feet when Gleese attacked him, raining blows about his head and shoulders.

  The water around them burbled and the narwhal thrashed her tail, sending a sheet of icy and bloody water over the men. The freshet of water lent Gleese his senses again rather abruptly, and he stepped to the gunnel and looked even as the water worked its way down his shirt.

  The infant popped free and slipped into the water. It was no more than three feet in length and had no tusk nor mottle to its skin. It could have been an infant human baby, but for a lack of arms and legs.

  “May God forgive us,” Gleese said, then turned to look hard at Kroones, who nodded in agreement.

  The babe took several turns around the dying mother. Gomez’s rope had gone slack, and he stood silent and alone, defeated. He held the rope over the prow, in preparation for dropping it, when Gleese gripped his arm hard.

  “No,” Gleese said. “You have done this deed, and the rest of us are guilty by as
sociation. You bring her back to the ship, and you dress her down. In the weeks and months ahead, her meat and blubber might save your sorry life. God knows you don’t deserve it.”

  Gomez turned around, the rope still in his hand, and looked to his fellows, first for understanding of what had been told to him, and second for support. He found none.

  The launch was turned and they began to make their way back to the Invincible, the carcass in tow, followed by the infant narwhal.

  O n the deck of the Invincible, Guillermo Gomez gutted the narwhal under the sympathetic gaze of Captain Kuralt and Lannie Davidson, the ship’s purser.

  Gomez was covered in the whale’s blood, and bits of blubber and intestines littered the deck. He carefully filleted and packed the meat in salt sacks and called for a hoist so as to get the skeletal remains overboard. When he was done, a pump and hose for cleaning up the mess were thrust into his hands. By the time this operation was complete, four hours had passed, and it was getting on to early afternoon.

  The wind had picked up once again and the ship was now past the broken borough-sized ice sheet. The ship was headed due west with a smallish, pale sun low on the horizon to port.

  CHAPTER 3: THE SHELF

  Pray for your self, that your enemy not shoot his arrow,

  until you have perfected your wisdom, and have not

  the need for enemies.

  —The Secret Lamentations

  The Antarctic

  September 16, 1888

  T he Invincible lay at anchor before the blue and white cliffs. The first rope, attached to Gomez’s harpoon, was fired up and over the ice shelf by the twelve-pounder prow cannon—which equipment was the last vestige of her fighting past, but which the navy could not easily remove from the prow emplacement before her auction—and the breathless spectacle of watching Manuel Ortega shinny up the rope with three other rope bundles and an additional forty pounds of steel spikes bound about his form made for the single-most riveting moment for the passengers and crew during their brief voyage from The Falklands, apart from the bloody taking of the narwhal the previous day. If the harpoon, embedded somewhere above in the implacable ice, were to give way, then Ortega’s fifty-foot climb would be his last, this everyone knew.

  When he disappeared over the cliff’s edge, a cheer went up.

  “Hurrah! Ortega!”

  “Mr. Gleese,” Captain Kuralt stated, “you and your men may now disembark, and with my compliments.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” Gleese said, and shook Kuralt’s hand. No wind blew here beneath the cliffs of ice, and as the cheering about them ceased a silence stole like death across the deck as the men returned to their work.

  The cargo hold was thrown open and the supplies were hoisted forth.

  Mr. Kroones—Gleese’s Danish dogman—led the pack up from the stern stairs and onto the deck. The pack was composed of a mix of grey Huskies, white Lapps, and black Alsatians—and it was a marvel that Kroones somehow kept them all from tearing one another to pieces. At night the man sang them to sleep, his melodious and nearly falsetto voice reverberating off the interior of the hold as if he were in some grand Opera house. Kroones waved to Gleese, and Gleese nodded. Kroones and the dogs would be first up onto the ice after Ortega.

  “You’ve marked the coordinates well, then, Captain?” Gleese asked.

  “Yes. Hmph. We’ll see you here on December fifteenth, sixty-nine degrees, fifty-four minutes, forty-nine seconds south by sixty degrees, twenty-nine minutes, fifty-five seconds west. And Godspeed, Mr. Gleese.”

  “Godspeed, Captain. I shall reach the pole and return.”

  Kuralt nodded, but did not speak further. He had meant to say, “See that you do,” but he could not bring himself to tempt the Fates, or otherwise put to voice what he felt in his chest—a disquieting foreboding, much like the coming onset of some malady that might prove a challenge to the doctor, if not to the clinging hand of life itself. Instead, he turned his eyes from the already tired explorer, placed his hand on the railing and gazed down upon the men at work.

  T wenty-three men and thirty-six dogs watched as the Invincible belched steam. Her whistle blew a shrill goodbye as two sets of men who had been intimately intermingled for the past week waved to each other across the Antarctic air.

  “Let’s move a bit towards land, shall we?” Gleese stated. “I wish to be away from these cliffs before we make camp for the night. Mr. Tomaroff, how far off is the land mass, would you say?”

  “Fifty kilometers, no less,” Viktor Tomaroff said. Tomaroff opened his pocket watch, then glanced up at the southern stars, as if confirming his calculations—a nod to the seemingly arcane science of celestial navigation. The sun was on the horizon, and would not quite disappear below it for several months to come, or at least not until the Antarctic fall, which would commence sometime in February, long after they were scheduled to depart this desolate and forbidding land.

  “Very good. Mr. Kroones, please prepare the sleds for travel.”

  “Sehr gut, Herr Gleese.”

  Danish, Russian, and Portuguese were three languages that Gleese had never mastered, or at least not well enough to carry on a conversation beyond an exchange of idiotic pleasantry. He could, however, read Latin, some Greek, Gaelic, Chinese and Nipponese, and could speak some pidgin of the two Asian dialects—which was necessary in the far away Arctic. English was his native language, and while the language of Tennyson—if not of Chaucer and Mallory—was his favorite reading, he was forever mentally tethered to the American dialect of New England; that of Washington Irving and Henry David Thoreau, of Thomas Paine if not Thomas Jefferson, was how he best thought. That few enough of his own expeditionary party were able to converse with him intelligently could ultimately prove costly if luck refused to hold, as Kuralt had pointed out to him when the Brazilians had signed on en masse, lured as they were by the legendary weight of Gleese’s purse. He had largely and single-handedly depopulated the Falklands of male Brazilians, and all for filthy lucre. Some might die during the expedition, particularly if they did not heed the regulations—no wandering away from camp solo, even to relieve themselves, and not without rope, no fires upon the ice shelf, and no rations beyond that which was parceled out.

  The most dangerous foe, if it were not the ice and the wind itself, was the stealthiest, most hidden quarry imaginable; that of crevasse. He had personally witnessed a man swallowed whole by an opening in the ice that had not existed a moment before. Swallowed so utterly and completely that it was as if the man had never existed. And it did so more abruptly than a cry could escape the lips.

  No. He would not allow this to be. While Kroones, the Dane, and Tomaroff, the Russian, were each conversant in English, he would have to rely upon Ortega and his limited understanding of English to speak to the other Brazilians on his behalf. It was with Ortega, after all, that he had struck the original bargain on behalf of his fellow countrymen, and Gleese suspected the man had likely cheated every one of them by taking a cut of the pay of each.

  T he train of sleds moved across the frozen desert waste as if they were dust mites making their way across a perfectly smooth porcelain china plate. The seemingly endless plain was blinding white, although the sun had taken up its place on the western horizon where it slowly began to retrograde south, and would, after midnight, track back around to take up station again in the east for the new day—which was little more than a continuation of the previous day. Thus the lead driver, Tomaroff, was the only one with his eyes fully uncovered. To a man, those following in the sleds behind covered their eyes until the sun was far enough south, and thus flew blind into oblivion. The dogs knew when to stop.

  It was here, on the shelf, and despite the cold, that something kindled in Gleese’s chest. A heavy thump of air breathed into his lungs and he expelled it again into the open air.

  This, he thought, taking in the great expanse, this is how I live. This is not dying. This is life!

  By his pocketwatch it was gett
ing on to midnight. An abrupt cry went up from Tomaroff, and Gleese brought his sled alongside. Tomaroff remained on the sled, but Kroones quitted it and began to examine the fleece and the paws of his animals as Gleese came up even with them.

  “What is it?”

  Tomaroff pointed. “Gory!”

  Gleese peered toward the horizon. “Gory? What is ‘gory’?”

  “It means ‘look’, Gospodin Gleese! Look,” Tomaroff insisted. “Mountain!”

  Gleese peered forward again, and there he saw a distant, rugged brown finger against the sky.

  “Should we push on, or camp here?”

  Tomaroff gestured toward Kroones, and Gleese took his meaning: only Kroones could advise as to the well-being of the dogs.

  “How are the dogs?” Gleese called out to him.

  “Good! They good. But let us not kill the dogs the first night.”

  “Agreed, then. We camp here on the ice.”

  N o fires were to be lit upon the ice. This was well understood by Gleese, by Tomaroff, and Kroones, but a few of the Brazilians started a fire and this nearly unhinged Kroones, who cursed them and made a show of stamping it out. The language barrier was thus overcome by example.

  The encampment was put together under Gleese’s careful instruction. Two sleds, Tomaroff’s and Gleese’s own, were brought side by side and lashed together while Kroones unbuckled the dogs from the traces. Then two steel poles were spiked down into the ice and a canvas tarpaulin was stretched over them and spiked down into the ice at the corners. Then pack supplies were placed upon the ice around the periphery and furs and linens thrown across the beds of the sleds, making for a not uncomfortable but firm mattress, well above the ice. The dogs were brought inside and permitted to sleep on the makeshift bedding along with the men. In this way, half a dozen men and dogs could sleep on one bed and remain warm through the transmission of body heat. This worked up to the point where the Brazilians began to realize they had to share their beds with the dogs, at which point an argument ensued.