Blood and Ice

Sinclair had laughed. How could the enemy not be aware of their movements? There were sixty thousand men on the march, raising a cloud of dust into the sky, and ever since disembarking, they had been crawling slowly across the vast plains and the thorn and bramble-covered thickets of the Crimea. They had met the enemy at the banks of the River Alma, and the infantry had gallantly scaled mountains in the face of withering fire from the Russian batteries, capturing redoubts and sending the defenders fleeing.

 

But the cavalry—the 17th Lancers among them—had done nothing. By orders of Lord Raglan, the Commander in Chief, the cavalry was to be “kept in a bandbox”—those very words had circulated through the ranks—guarded and preserved so that they might protect the cannons and perhaps one day, if the army ever arrived there, help in the conquest of the Russian fortress of Sebastopol. For Sinclair, the entire campaign had so far been one long series of humiliations and delays. And at night, when they bivouacked in some mosquito-infested glade, he hardly had to speak to Rutherford or Frenchie; they all knew what the others were thinking, and they were usually too weary to do much more than swallow their rum, choke down their uncooked salt pork, and search desperately for some spring or pond where they could water their horses and fill their canteens.

 

In the morning, the men who had fallen sick in the night were loaded onto transport wagons, while the dead were quickly consigned to shallow mass graves. The stench of death traveled with the British army wherever it went, and Sinclair had despaired of ever scrubbing it off of his own skin.

 

“Sinclair,” Eleanor said, her head turned toward him now from the sled, “I see something ahead. Do you see it?” She raised an arm and pointed feebly to the northwest.

 

He could see it, too, a clutter of black buildings, and a ship—a steamer, from the looks of it—beached on the shoreline. But was this place inhabited? And if so, by whom? Friend or foe?

 

He reined in the dogs and approached more slowly. But the closer he got, the more confident he became. There was no smoke from a chimney, no lanternlight shining in a window, no clatter of pots or pans. There was no sign of life whatsoever. The dogs, however, seemed well acquainted with the place and trotted into the labyrinth of frozen alleyways and dark, abandoned buildings with complete aplomb, bringing the sled to a halt in the middle of a wide and utterly desolate yard. The new lead dog—a gray beast with a broad white stripe, like a scarf, around his neck—turned and watched Sinclair for further instructions.

 

Sinclair dismounted, and seeing a clawed device between the runners, he stomped on it, hard, and felt its teeth dig into the ice and frozen soil. A bolt of pain shot up his leg, reminding him of the bite he’d received; the dog had torn right through his riding boot, leaving a flap of blood-tinged leather hanging loose.

 

Eleanor stirred in the sled, and said, in a voice as bleak as the surroundings, “Where have we come to?”

 

Sinclair looked around, at the warehouses and massive, abandoned machines—in one open shed, he could see huge iron vats, big enough to boil a team of oxen in, and a web of rusted chains and pulleys. There were train tracks, barely visible here and there, crisscrossing the yard, and iron wheelbarrows even more enormous than the ones he had once seen at the coal mines in Newcastle. Everything had been built with a purpose in mind—a plainly utilitarian one—and that purpose had been the making of money. The only way to do that, in a place so remote and forbidding, was by fishing or sealing or whaling. And on a grand scale. A black locomotive engine, covered with ice like a thin glaze of marzipan, sat at the end of a rusted track. There must have been twenty or thirty buildings scattered across the frozen plain, their windows cracked, their doors hanging off the hinges, and rising atop the hill at the rear Sinclair could see a spire, with a toppled cross.

 

For a second, it gave him pause…then it kindled a spark of defiance.

 

He stomped with his uninjured leg on the brake lever, and after a couple of tries he could feel it release.

 

“Onward!” he cried to the dogs, and at first they hesitated, but when he shouted again and shook the reins, they pulled at their harness and moved forward.

 

“Where are we going?” Eleanor asked.

 

“Up the hill.”

 

“Why?” she asked, in an uncertain tone.

 

He knew what she was thinking. “Because it’s the high ground,” he offered, “and affords the best vantage point.”

 

He knew that she suspected another reason.

 

The dogs threaded their way past what looked like a deserted blacksmith’s shop—there were forges and anvils and lances almost as long as the one he had carried into battle—and a mess hall with long trestle tables, some with frozen candles still sitting on tin dishes. The candles, he thought, he might want to come back for.