Blood And Ice Part 18

What little ice was still supporting them began to give way, and Sinclair's boots searched for the bottom of the tank ... and found it.

He stumbled, swaying like a drunkard, to his feet, and quickly took hold of Eleanor's cold hand. Dripping wet, he raised her up from the chunks of floating ice. Her eyes were dull and unfocused, her long brown hair plastered to her cheek and forehead.

Where, he wondered, are we?

They were standing in a vat of some kind, filled with salt water up to their knees, in a place he could find no words for. No one else was there; the only living things he could see were strange creatures swimming in gla.s.s jars-jars that gave off a pale purple light and a soft hissing sound.

He looked at Eleanor. She raised her hand slowly, as if she had never done so before, and her fingers instinctively went to touch the ivory brooch on her bosom.

He sloshed to the rim of the tank, then over it. He helped her down onto the floor, water sluicing down all around them.

"What is this place?" she asked, trembling, as he gathered her into his arms.

Sinclair didn't know. For her sake, he hoped it was Heaven. But from his own experience, he feared it was h.e.l.l.

PART III.

THE NEW WORLD.

"They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose, Nor spake, nor moved their eyes; It had been strange, even in a dream, To have seen those dead men rise."

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR.

December 13, 4:20 p.m.

MICHAEL WAS STANDING in the bow of the scuttled whale catcher when he picked up an ice-covered life preserver and, despite a couple of now-illegible letters, read the name of the ship off it; it had once been the Albatros, and it had sailed out of Oslo. But there were no albatrosses effortlessly soaring overhead now-only skuas and pretrels and squat, white sheathbills, all lured by the arrival of the dogsled and looking for handouts.

From his vantage point, right behind the harpoon gun, Michael could gaze down at the beach, where the elephant seals had cooperated nicely for their photo op, and up the icy hill, past the warehouses and boiling rooms and flensing yards, to the uppermost structure in the station. It was an old wooden church, with patches of white paint still clinging to the walls and a cross, knocked askew, high atop its steeple. He used the zoom to take some long-distance shots, but it would be worth a closer visit later on.

He'd already explored the bowels of the ship, which in some ways looked like it had been abandoned for years-rusted panels, broken windows, warped stairs-but in other ways looked as if it had been tenanted the day before. On a galley table, a fork and knife were still neatly crossed on a tin plate. A bunk bed was made up with a striped woolen blanket and a white sheet, folded back at the top. In the wheelhouse, a frozen cigar b.u.t.t rested on a win-dowsill. Even the harpoon gun, mounted on a raised steel platform like a machine-gun turret, looked as if it could still go about its deadly work-if it could be aimed. Michael had tried to make it swivel, and tried again, but the entire a.s.sembly was frozen solid.

"Hey, watch where you point that thing," he heard Danzig call out from the beach below. He was standing in the petrified jaws of a blue whale.

"It's not loaded," Michael replied.

"That's what they all say." Danzig, walrus teeth hanging down around his neck, his beard blowing in the wind, stepped out of the jaws like some Norse G.o.d choosing to walk among men. "You get what you came for?" he asked.

"Some of it. Why?"

"Because I need to get back."

Michael was on board with that. For the past few hours, no matter how hard he had tried to forget the block of ice in Darryl's lab, it had never been far from his thoughts. Was he missing some great shot?

"I'm expecting a call from my wife," Danzig added.

Danzig had a wife? It struck Michael as funny in a way-so ba.n.a.l, so ordinary-coming from such an original specimen as Danzig.

Danzig must have guessed as much from Michael's hesitation, because he said, "It's not impossible, you know."

"But when do you see her?" Michael called back, even as he gathered up his equipment and stored it all in the bag. "I thought you lived here."

"Not all the time," Danzig replied.

"Where is she?" Michael asked, then said, "Wait. Tell me when I get down there."

When he joined Danzig among the bones on the beach, Danzig said, "Miami Beach," and Michael inadvertently laughed.

"What's wrong with that?"

"It's not that. It's just not what you'd expect."

"Which would be?" Danzig said, as they turned back toward the dogsled.

Michael only had to think for a second before replying, "Valhalla."

For the first few minutes, Sinclair and Eleanor simply accustomed themselves to breathing again. And then to moving. And finally to being alive ... though where-and when-they had no idea.

It was Eleanor who discovered the source of the heat in the room, a metal grate of some kind, glowing orange along the baseboards. She bent down in her wet clothes, trying to see the fire inside or smell the burning of tinder or gas, but she heard only a distant humming and smelled nothing at all. Still, she huddled close and whispered urgently for Sinclair to come near.

Instinctively, they had both been whispering.

"It's a fire," she said. "We can dry our clothes."

Sinclair helped her remove her sodden shawl, and they draped it across a stool he drew close. Then she took off her shoes and laid them in front of the grill.

"You, too," she said. "Before something happens ..." What that something could be defied the powers of her imagination altogether. She did not know if they were among friends or foe, in Turkey or Russia or, for that matter, Tasmania. She could hardly be sure, even now, that they were actually alive.

But there wasn't time to dwell on any of it.

"Take off your jacket," she said, "and your boots."

He shrugged the uniform jacket off, and Eleanor spread it out. She put his boots beside her shoes. He unfastened his sword and, though keeping it close at hand, let it rest with the wet clothing.

Then, they huddled close in front of the heat, staring into each other's eyes, and silently wondering what the other knew or understood ... or remembered.

Eleanor feared that she could remember too much. For so long-how long?-it was all that she had done ... just dreamt and drifted and remembered everything.

Over and over again.

But what she was thinking of, with the clothes drying and her arms gathered tight around her own knees, was the night she had sat before the hearth, just like this, with Moira, in their cold room at the top floor of the boardinghouse in London ... on the night that Miss Nightingale had announced her intention to travel, with a small company of willing nurses, to the Crimean battlefront.

Sinclair coughed, his cold white hand raised to his mouth, and Eleanor stroked his brow with her own stiff fingers. It was second nature to her at that point-she remembered doing this for so many of the wounded soldiers, lying in agony at the hospital barracks in Scutari and Balaclava. Sinclair looked up at her now, his eyes red-rimmed and wild, and said, "But you? Are you ..." and then, for want of a better word, "well?"

"I am ..." she said, not knowing what else she could say. She was alive, apparently. Beyond that, she wasn't sure of anything. She was as lost as he was, chilled to the bone, in spite of the remarkably consistent heat from the grate. And weak, too-from ordinary hunger, as well as the unspeakable need.

It crossed her mind that she could die again ... and soon ... and she wondered if it would feel any different this time.

It could not be worse.

Sinclair's gaze swept around the room, and she followed it. A thing that looked like an enormous spider was trying to clamber out of a square jar, filled with water and a pale purple illumination. There were long counters, like trestle tables, with basins, like flower sinks, in them. A black metal apparatus, with a white box beside it, sat before a stool, and next to that, she saw, just as Sinclair must have done, a wine bottle. He was already springing to his feet.

He picked up the bottle, rubbed the label against the billowing sleeve of his white shirt, then examined it more closely.

"Is it?" she asked.

"I can't be sure," he said, twisting the cork out. He put his nose to the top, then recoiled.

And so she knew it must be.

In his stockinged feet, he padded back to her and placed the open bottle between them, like a papa bird bringing an offering to the nest. He was waiting for her to take it, but she couldn't. It was too horrible to have awakened, after how long, from a dream-a nightmare-only to be plunged right back into it once you'd been restored to life. The bottle stood before her as a grim reminder, a memento mori. It represented death, but at the same time-if she was desperate enough to want it-life. She could smell the vile odor of its contents, and she wondered: Was that the very bottle he had raised to her lips on board the Coventry? If it was, then how had it come to be here, in this strange place, now? Had one of the sailors thrown it, too, into the heaving sea, after she had been chained to Sinclair? After ...

Her mind stopped dead, like a team of horses suddenly reined to an abrupt halt. She could not think of it; she could not allow herself to. She had governed her thoughts for so long, she could not stop doing it now. She had to guide them, control them, even chastise them, like unruly children, if they went too far astray. To do anything else would be an invitation to madness.

If, that is, she had not already gone mad.

"You have to," Sinclair said, urging the bottle on her.

But Eleanor was not so sure. "What if," she ventured, "after all this time ..."

"What?" he snapped, his eyelids drooping, then snapping open again. "What if, after all this time, everything has changed?"

"It's possible, is it not, that-"

"That what? G.o.d's in his heaven again, and we're safe as houses, and Britannia rules the waves?"

There was a fire in his eyes again now. All that time, in the ocean, in the ice-no, her mind said, do not think of it, do not let it in- had done nothing to dampen his ardor, or his anger. That wicked flame, lighted in the Crimea, still burned. He was not the Lieutenant Copley who had sailed off for glory. He was the Lieutenant Copley who had been found, covered with mud and blood, lying among the dead and dying on a moonlit battlefield.

"Shall I try it first?" he said, his face ruddy in the orange glow of the grate, and when she didn't answer, he raised the bottle, tilted his head back, and took a swig. His Adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed, then bobbed again as the liquid tried to come back up again. He sputtered, gasped, then put the bottle to his lips again and forced some more of it down. When he dropped the bottle back into his lap, his light brown moustache was stained the color of a bruise.

"There," he said, "right as rain." He smiled, and his teeth, too, were stained. He pushed the bottle toward her.

"What we need," she said, her eyes nonetheless drawn to the bottle, "is food. And water. Clean water, fresh food."

Sinclair scoffed. "Spoken like a true Nightingale. And we shall have those things. But you know, as well as I do, that right now you need something more."

In her heart, she knew he was right ... or at least that he had been right. But wasn't it possible that this curse had been lifted? Wasn't it possible that, in addition to whatever strange miracle had released them from their bondage, another one had been performed, too? That this dreadful sustenance, sitting before her, was no longer necessary?

"We don't know where we are," Sinclair said, softly. "And we don't know what awaits us out there." He was speaking in his most reasonable voice, but Eleanor had become used to such sharp changes. Even in his letters home, she had detected them.

"I believe we must take our opportunities when and where we find them," he said, pointedly glancing down at the bottle.

Eleanor had to shift her position on the floor, so as to warm and dry a different section of her dress. She worried about how long they would be able to stay there without being discovered. "Couldn't we just take it with us, wherever we have to go?"

"Yes," he replied, his temper, she could tell, mounting. "But it was taken away from us once, was it not? It could be taken away again."

He was right, of course ... and she recognized as much. But still her spirit rebelled.

Either to prove his point, or because he craved another draught, Sinclair grabbed the bottle and drank again. This time, he was able to manage several swallows before slamming the bottle back to the floor and letting a dark rivulet run from the corner of his mouth.

She found herself transfixed by the deep crimson line touching his chin. He had done that, she knew, deliberately. Her throat, parched already, felt as rough as a dusty road, and she could feel the muscles in her neck straining. Her palms, which she had just gotten dry, were damp again with perspiration, and so, she feared, was her brow. Her temples began to throb, like a distant drumbeat.

"The least you can do," he said, "after all this time, is to kiss me."

His blond hair, though wild and twisted on his head, gleamed with a fiery light in the glow of the strange heater. The collar of his white shirt lay open at the neck, and a drop from the bottle had landed there, too. G.o.d help her, but she wanted to lick the spot away. Her tongue involuntarily pressed at the back of her teeth.

"As your friend Moira might have said," he pressed, "will you not do it for auld lang syne?"

"I will not do it for that," Eleanor finally answered. "But I will do it ... for love."

She leaned forward, as did Sinclair, and with the bottle between them, their lips met-at first chastely, but then, when his parted, she could taste it, the blood, in his mouth.

He put his hand to the back of her head, wound his fingers through her long, tangled hair, and held her there. And she let him-let him hold her, let him ensnare her. She knew that was what he was doing. She let him unite them again as they had been united so long before. She let him do all of it, because it had been so long since she had felt something like this ... so long, truly, since she had felt anything at all.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE.

December 13, 6 p.m.

ON THE TRIP BACK, Michael begged, and Danzig agreed, to let him drive the dogsled. After a few rudimentary pointers, Danzig clambered into the cargo sh.e.l.l-it was even a tighter squeeze than it had been for Michael-and said, "Ready?"

"Ready" Michael replied, adjusting his goggles and pulling his furred hood tighter around his face. Then, gripping the handlebars and making sure his feet were planted on snow and not ice, he shouted the order-"Hike!"-that Danzig always used. The dogs, perhaps unaccustomed to his voice, at first didn't move; Kodiak actually turned around and looked at him questioningly "You've got to do it with some authority," Danzig said. "Like you mean it."

Michael cleared his throat-now he felt like he was auditioning for the dogs-and shouted, "Hike!" while giving a sharp jerk on the mainline.

Kodiak, in the lead position, whipped around and jumped forward; the other dogs, taking their cue, started to pull, as Michael ran behind, pushing the handlebars.

"Jump on!" Danzig warned him, and just as Michael got his boots onto the wooden runners, the sled gathered momentum and took off across the snow and ice. Danzig had taken the trouble to point it in the right direction, so Michael didn't have to worry about making a turn, but the task was already harder than he had imagined. As smooth as the surface might look, it was filled with b.u.mps and cracks and stones, and he could feel the shock of each one radiating up his legs. It was all he could do to keep his balance and stay on the runners.

"Loosen up!" Danzig cried over his own shoulder, and Michael thought, Easier said than done.

Still, he tried to let his shoulders fall and his arms bend a bit, and he willed his knees to unlock.

"If you want 'em to go straight ahead," Danzig advised, though Michael had a hard time hearing him over the wind battering at his hood, "shout 'Straight ahead!' "

Okay, that one wouldn't be hard to remember.

"And if you want 'em to go slower, pull back on the lines and shout, 'Easy!' "