And he heard footsteps warily approaching from another direction. “Who’s firing there?” a Cockney voice asked.
A lantern swung close to the ground.
“Are you an Englishman?”
And then the yellow light of the lamp fell on his face and he was able to mumble, through his ragged and bloody lips, “Lieutenant Copley. Of the Seventeenth Lancers.”
December 16, 6 p.m.
If he had survived all that—the doomed charge of the Light Brigade, the night on the battlefield—Sinclair now reflected, then what could he not survive? Especially with Eleanor at his side.
Driving the sled, he relied entirely upon the dogs’ unerring sense of direction to find his way back to the whaling station. It was all he could do to crouch on the runners, his face buried in his hood and his gloved hands clinging to the bars. The dogs twice made a wide turn around newly opened crevasses that Sinclair doubted he would have spotted on his own, but that the dogs seemed to sense. He would reward them with generous slabs of blubber and meat from the dead seal stored in the sled.
He had gone as far north as he thought safe and wise, searching for any sign of further habitation, but he feared that they had truly been transported to the end of the earth. He remembered that the Coventry, long ago, had been sailing south, driven by the punishing winds, accompanied only by the lonely albatross circling above its yardarms, and from everything he had been able to glean of their present surroundings, he and Eleanor had arrived at a place so remote, so frozen, and so barren that it could only be the Pole itself…that most dreaded destination of all.
But the seal might help. He had seen Eleanor failing, and he knew that what the bottles contained was old, and foul, and not nearly so potent as it had once been. He was surprised, given its origins, that it had any efficacy at all; on their journeys through Europe, he had been reduced to siphoning the blood from the dead he came across on battlefields and charnel houses. He had gone in search of fresh meat, fresh blood, even if it was only animal, and he had found it down among the bleached skeletons and wind-blasted rocks along the shoreline. There, the seals liked to bask in the cold glare of the sun, sprawled among the millions of broken bones, like so many bathers at Brighton Beach. He had avoided the larger ones, no doubt the bulls, one of whom had waddled toward him, trumpeting, and instead picked what was probably a female, with sleek brown fur and long black whiskers. She was off by herself, lying under the vast arc of a whale’s backbone, and as he approached her, she showed no fear. Indeed, she showed little reaction at all, watching impassively as he shook his sword free of its scabbard. He stood above her, planting his boots to either side. She looked up at him with bulging, liquid eyes as he tried to judge where her heart might lie. He wanted the wound to be as small and precise as possible, so that the blood would remain inside the carcass rather than pooling across the ground. He touched the point of the blade to the spot he’d chosen—and only then did the seal look down at it, slightly curious—before he put all his weight into it and pressed down. The blade entered smoothly, and the animal buckled from both ends as the sword went clean through and struck the permafrost below. He did not withdraw it, but let it stand in order to stanch the flow, and within a minute, the seal had ended its contortions and lay still.
While the other seals had looked on, still unalarmed—indeed unconcerned, about what had just befallen their compatriot—he wiped his sword clean on the snow, then dragged his prize back to the sled. There would be provisions for some time to come…though what he and Eleanor would do in the longer term was as dire a prospect as it had ever been.