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The party hadn’t been walking for very long but all the same Crozier allowed the rest. At this point in the trek it was less that the exhaustion slipped in quicker and more that it just never left their bones. Blanky wondered what they all looked like from the inside, these skeletons lumbering across the ice. Like old brittle cheese, most likely. Riddled with holes and their veins lined with salty crystals.
They all slumped around the boat now, the men who had been pulling swaying where they stood and leaning against each other. No one spoke asides from a few terse words while negotiating a sip of tepid water, or easing a leather harness off the shoulders of a sailor too weak to do it himself. Blanky for his part let himself sit heavily on the ground, his good leg folded underneath him and the other flung out in a stretch.
His stump ached, a dull throb that hadn’t gone away for some time now. How long would it be before the thing began to stink strong enough to cut through the sweat and filth that clung to all of them, and would even the smell of rotting meat be mouth-watering by now? Crozier had surely noticed him slowing down these past days. The captain had stubbornly ignored it but even he wouldn’t be able to deny when Blanky started to reek like a dog’s breakfast left too long in the sun.
And a dog’s breakfast he certainly was. Blanky chuckled to himself and took out his pipe to pack in a little more of the meagre tobacco he still had left. He was wrestling to light a half-frozen match when Crozier came over to him.
Blanky looked up. “Captain.” He patted the patch of rocky ground next to him. “Join me at my table.”
“A gracious host.” Crozier quirked his lip dryly, the closest he got to a grin these days. But he sat down. He was still moving smoothly enough, Blanky was pleased to see. Having been through quite enough already, it was only fair that Crozier’s joints had not yet begun to fill with glass and gravel.
“What can I offer you?” Blanky spread an expansive arm to indicate the wide open landscape. “Fine rocks? Ice? Some dirt if the cook can scrape some up?”
Another quirk and even an exasperated huff that might have been the start of a laugh, or the strangled death of one. “You’ll have to invite me back when the larder has more variety.”
“Might be a while, that.”
They sat in companionable silence. There was some soft murmuring from the men a little ways away but otherwise the world was quiet. Without the noise of the sledges scraping over the ground and the heavy clumping of boots, this place was always quiet. It wasn’t all that bad, really. Peace and quiet could be hard to come by in this day and age. Best to enjoy it when you had it. When he thought about their circumstances, really thought about them, it was almost nice being here. With Francis, of course. He hadn’t been half as content during that miserable march with John Ross. But it wasn’t so bad, marching step by step to his death with Francis Crozier. It felt good. It felt poetic. Proper. At the very least Francis would outlive him, by how long he couldn’t say, but he would have hated to bury the man. That, Blanky thought, might have killed him in itself. Even at his most miserable, soaked in and blinded by whiskey, sick to his heart and ruined in his blood, Francis had been a constant in Blanky’s life and a force only for the better. Even losing his leg- well, it hadn’t been as bad as it might have been. And if it had been he’d have forgiven Francis all the same at the moment when the great beast might have torn out his insides, spilled his guts all across the foretop. It hadn’t been a particularly good night. But he’d never have let his final thoughts of Francis be anything but warm ones.
So perhaps Blanky was a little bit in love. Perhaps he had been for years. He didn’t feel the need to beg God or anyone’s forgiveness for that. If God had ever had the good fortune to sail with Francis Crozier surely He would have been equally enamoured.
“You said to me once you’d like to open a tavern again, back home,” said Crozier abruptly, and Blanky turned his head to look at him. Crozier was gazing ahead, out across the stretch of grey and white before them. “Perhaps I’ll visit you there one day.”
“Ay,” said Blanky calmly. “I would. But I’m too wed to the sea to stay on land for any stretch of time. Any tavern of mine can only be a distraction for so long.”
“Then you’ll sail with me again,” decided Crozier. “We’ll demand as much money from the Admiralty as can be squeezed from those old misers, for services rendered, and we’ll go again. Anywhere you like. What do you think?”
A pause while Blanky inhaled a long, slow pull from his pipe and breathed out the cloud of smoke. Tobacco still tasted the same, even here. Even now. It tasted solid and earthy, and warm in way he wasn’t anymore. “I think I’m sick of the bloody Passage is what,” he said finally around the pipe stem. “Even if we found the damn thing now I’d just give it a piece of me mind, ‘what took you so long’, and turn right around. It don’t deserve my getting ‘cross it.”
“So now you start getting particular?”
Blanky patted his wooden leg. “This new leg of mine is a work of art, Francis. I won’t be letting just any old Passage have the pleasure of meeting it.”
The throbbing in his stump could be felt all the way to the join of his thigh and Blanky wondered how long the rot had been in his blood by now. Funny that his heartbeat, which still felt so strong and reliable, was now the thing actively working against him. Driving that sickly grey-green all through his body.
“East then,” Crozier said with conviction. “We’ll sail east. Far as we can and keep going. Far from this place. I’ll count on having you there.”
The world’s round, Francis, Blanky thought but didn’t say. He just nodded and puffed smoke into the air, watching it vanish against the white landscape.