It'll go after those who are running, at first, Captain Crozier had said.
If you run, you'll die, Sergeant Tozer had said.
And so Harry D.S. Goodsir closed his eyes, drew in a slow breath, and kept still.
But not out of courage, or a sense of self-preservation, or any sort of belief - such as the captain clearly still clung to - that they could survive this. Survive, escape, make it to the safety of Fort Resolution, and thus back home to England. He no longer harbored any such illusions. He no longer cared whether he lived or died. Not since Cornelius Hickey's seditious machinations had resulted in Lady Silence's banishment from Terror Camp, and certainly not since being forced into the role of butcher for that murderous little goblin of a man. His optimism, his hope, and his faith: all of it, drained away like so much blood from an opened vein.
He would not begrudge Crozier his will to survive. He would not hinder Crozier's effort's to do so. But Goodsir was certain, now, that he himself would never leave King William Island alive. He would never set foot on British soil again.
(Lieutenant Hodgson had unknowingly sparked the germ of an idea in Goodsir's mind.
If I were a braver man, I'd kill Mr. Hickey, though it would mean my death too.
He had thought: if he must die here, and be consumed, as he surely would and would be… could he not regain a measure of control over his fate by choosing the time and manner of his passing, and ensuring that Hickey and his men would come to regret making a meal of him in the process? Such an act would go against God, of course. But God, if He truly existed at all, did not deign to shine His light here. Good Christian men were struck down, in all manner of ways too horrible to contemplate. Godless malcontents like Hickey flourished. Keeping one's morals and faith offered no salvation. Was taking your own life still a sin if there was no God to judge you for it?
In the end, whatever divine judgment might have been handed down on him didn't matter; Hickey had elected to send his men on this final death march before Goodsir could act, and his window of opportunity was now closed.)
If given a choice, he would prefer not to meet his end at the claws of the Tuunbaq… but he no longer believed there was a God who gave any kind of damn whatsoever about the things he wished for.
At least Lady Silence was with her people now, and safe from the mortal judgment of his fellow countrymen gone mad. Crozier seemed to genuinely believe that. The reassurance hadn't been given as a hollow platitude.
One bright spot in the endless darkness.
Harry Goodsir opened his eyes.
"It's before me!" Private Pilkington shouted.
"Hold, Private!" Cornelius Hickey barked.
But Crozier and the others cuffed to the heavy metal chain with which they'd been hauling the boat sledge were already moving - (a conversation had been conducted in silence and pointed looks while their caulker's mate had been raging at Queen and Country) - they were jerking the boat what precious few feet forward they could, aiming for Thomas Armitage and the keys at the dead man's waist while the Tuunbaq was occupied with Pilkington - but it wasn't enough to reach them - "Run the chain back, run it back!" Crozier gasped - Tozer and he and Goodsir, cuffed to the opposite end of the chain from Hodgson, duly ran towards the boat while Hodgson used the slack to run forward - there was no point they were going to die but Goodsir would not begrudge the captain his hope - Des Voeux ran, Diggle ran - "Don't run, don't run!" - Goodsir pressed his back against the side of the boat and, despite himself, wished he could clamp his hands over his ears to shut out the screaming - "Be still!" - "Stop moving!" - first Hodgson, then Robert Golding, both lost to the monster - the chain was jerked sharply forward, and Goodsir's vision blacked out as momentum sent him face-first into the curved bow of the boat -
I'll just lie here, he thought, looking dizzily up at the pale slate blue of the sky curving above them, the screams now oddly muffled in his ears, hardly feeling the sharp points of the rocks beneath him. Perfectly still. Not moving. If I die now, then I die. At least this nightmare will be at an end. He thought he heard the captain shouting his name.
- a terrible burning pain shooting up the length of his arm, rocks pummeling his body - no, not pummeling, he was being dragged -
- this must be it, he was going to be set upon despite not moving, but - no, Captain Crozier was still shouting, hardly audible for the deafening roars of the Tuunbaq - dazed and in quite sudden agony, Goodsir tried to gather his wits back about him but the world kept tumbling, the horizon spinning on an axis that looked very much like a bloodied Cornelius Hickey -
- then the chain jerked at Goodsir's arm again and his vision went black for good.
When he opened his eyes, it was to find Silence peering down at him.
Well. That settled things. He was quite dead. He was dead, and Silence was appearing to him as… his guide across the River Styx, perhaps. A Beatrice to his Dante. Oh, please say he was ascending to Heaven. Or at least - having lost his faith at the end of his life - being left to make his own ascension through Purgatory, because surely he had already made his walk through all the circles of Hell. (This assumed, of course, that his actions performed as Hickey's captive had not damned him to stay there.) Because why else should she be filling his vision, the most unexpected (and unexpectedly beautiful) of sights? Silence was long gone and meant to be far away. Not here. (Wherever here was.)
Then the pain came crashing back in, and - oh.
Oh.
He wasn't dead. He was alive. Still alive, now conscious, and with what felt like a considerable amount of injury to his person.
And with Silence, in the flesh, as real as the stones imprinting their sharp outlines into his back, relief chasing concern across her features as Goodsir focused his wavering gaze on her.
It was the strongest emotion - save for the desperation and grief at her father's deathbed, and her outburst of anger at Captain Crozier - that he had ever seen her display.
"Silna," he tried to say, only it came out as a croaked rasp of breath through parched lips.
(She had gifted him the secret of her real name, during their month of mutual study on the Erebus, once he'd earned her trust and there was a solid rapport between them. He was Harry; she was Silna. Goodsir had never revealed it to anyone else. Her trust, he felt, was too fragile a thing to risk betraying. Their survival might depend on it. And he had been unable to shake the impression that the knowing of her name had been meant for him and him alone.
A flight of fancy, possibly. But then she had cut out her tongue and rendered that particular mental debate moot. Deliberate or not, she wouldn't be sharing her name with anyone now, or ever again.)
Lady Silence - Silna - looked aside for a brief moment; Goodsir could both hear and sense a slight movement next to his head. Then something cold and wet was spattering across his lips. Water. Just enough to enable him to lick them, and swallow without so much difficulty, and speak. Except… what to say?
You're here.
Why are you here?
How did you find me? How did you know to come?
Is there -
Agony exploded in bursts of white and yellow and black in his vision, and it was a moment before he realized that the scream of pain ringing in his ears had just ripped its way out of his own throat. Silna pulled her hand back from his left shoulder, which she had gently prodded in a questioning sort of way, mildly apologetic. The same sort of touch must have been what brought him back to consciousness. Gritting his teeth against the nausea suddenly roiling in his gut, Goodsir gingerly rolled and shifted his head to the right, trying to get as good a look as possible at the offending shoulder without moving the rest of his body. Even that small amount of movement made him feel as if he'd been trampled by a horse.
His arm was stretched outward, away from his side. That was in keeping with what he could remember before -
screams, roars, trying to retrieve the keys to their cuffs, a sound new to his ears and surely dredged from the depths of Hell itself, being jerked off his feet
- before everything went dark. The metal cuff was still encircling his wrist; the cuff was still locked to the metal chain. But something about the angle of his open palm was slightly off. As if his arm had rotated too far in one direction. Yet he felt no resistance in the affected muscles and ligaments, as he would normally in such a position. Only pain.
Dislocation, he thought, the word floating through his still-dazed mind in fits and starts. Anterior. A shoulder reduction will be required.
And nothing for the pain. Oh, God, he was going to pass out again. Wonderful.
Yet Goodsir didn't have it within him to feel even the smallest amount of shame at the impending show of weakness he would be putting on in front of Silna. There was no point to it. (Had there been any point to the manner in which he had been taught to behave, in what was expected of him as a man, in how to comport himself as a proper, British, civilized gentleman... if that civilized behavior, surely drilled into every man on this disaster of an expedition from childhood on, had so easily broken down in the face of adversity and crisis?)
"My shoulder," he ground out, looking towards Silna again. She nodded, once. It was evident enough what he was saying. "I - I'll need -"
And, squeezing his eyes shut, Goodsir started worming sideways across the rocks, closing the right angle of his arm and torso inch by torturous inch, so that he might push himself up into a sitting position with his arm already held against his side.
Or, alternatively, have Silna assist him in the endeavour. He had scarcely shifted to press his weight into his right hand, once in position, before he felt her hands grasping at his uninjured shoulder - tugging up, placing a palm flat between his shoulder blades, then leapfrogging both palms down his spine in support until he was, at last, upright. Sweating, trembling in pain, gasping out half-sobs for want of breath, propped against Silna's chest with his head lolling back weakly onto her shoulder, but… upright. She bore his weight with no indication of complaint or impatience, a firm hand at his good elbow, waiting with perfect stillness at his back until his breathing steadied itself.
The shame never manifested itself. There was only gratitude, the faintest sense of comfort, and an underlying joy - you're here, how can you be here - that might have chipped its way through the cracks in his deadened heart to shine in his eyes and on his face if only he weren't so tired.
Silna squeezed his good elbow, then the bad - the first had been a warning, evidently, that still failed to prepare him for the next - and began to palpate her way up towards his shoulder. He allowed her to do so without protest, despite feeling perilously close to losing consciousness again. She seemed to understand both the nature of his injury and how to go about alleviating it, which was... not as surprising as it might have been, once. Her people needed to know how to get by on their own, or in small numbers, here in this harsh and unforgiving environment. Of course that would extend to treating injury and illness.
(Why had they ever thought they could come to the Arctic, a land so foreign to their British sensibilities that it may as well have been the surface of the moon, and conquer it - bend it to their will - without emerging unscathed?)
A dislocated joint might even be as relatively mundane to her as it was to him. At the very least, she certainly didn't seem to be fazed at all. Her calm demeanor was strangely reassuring. But it was still impossible not to go utterly rigid with pain once Silna's questing fingertips reached his shoulder. Goodsir breathed through his nose, and tasted bile on his tongue while spots danced in his vision.
"On - on the count… of three?" he asked. He had taught her numbers in English, through ten. She squeezed his right elbow again, let go, and shifted to lightly grasp his upper left arm with both hands. Good - she understood. (Brava, he could remember saying to her, what felt so long ago, when she would correctly interpret his English into her own Inuktitut. Simpler times. Happier times.) He squeezed his eyes tightly shut once more, girding himself, and said: "One, two, thr-"
She executed a motion that seemed to both turn and pull his arm all at once. Sickly white flashed against the insides of Goodsir's eyelids before fading to darkest black again.
Only seconds could have passed in the waking world this time around; he was still sitting up (albeit barely so) when his eyes snapped back open. As before, Silna's face was filling his vision, less obviously concerned now but still quite solemn. She had just slapped him about the cheeks to wake him.
Goodsir drew in a deep, ragged breath and tentatively made to rotate his shoulder. The pain - which was still very much present - flared sharply, then eased into a milder sort of burn, throbbing in time with the beat of his heart. It was difficult, but he managed it. Good. Good. The joint had reset properly, then. He would need to be gentle with it for some time, of course. A sling to rest his arm in would be ideal. (No, something for the pain would be ideal, but there was nothing to be done for it. Not now, not here.) (Which then begged the question…
...what next? What happened now?)
"Thank you," he gasped, hugging his arm against his side, and attempted a smile. The expression felt strangely foreign in the way it pulled at his mouth, cobwebbed and rusty. He had not smiled - truly smiled - in a very long time.
Silna looked at him for a moment longer before nodding. Then she got back to her feet. And that was when Goodsir finally saw the prone body of Captain Crozier a few feet away, likewise still cuffed to the metal chain, its length leading to half of Cornelius Hickey and a very dead Tuunbaq.
