The North Water (7 page)

When he comes to, Sumner assumes for a moment that he is back in India, that he is lying in his humid hill-tent on the ridge above Delhi and the sounds of ice blocks crashing against the keel of the
Volunteer
are actually the sounds of heavy ordnance being traded back and forth between the bastions and the pickets. It feels for a moment as if nothing terrible or irrevocable has yet happened to him, as if he has been given, incredibly, a second chance. He closes his eyes and falls asleep again. When he opens them an hour later, he sees Black standing by his bed looking down.

“Can you speak?” Black asks him.

Sumner looks back at him for a moment, then shakes his head. Black helps him up into a sitting position and commences to feed him bouillon from a teacup. The taste and heat of the bouillon are overpowering. After two spoonfuls of it, Sumner closes his mouth and lets the liquid dribble over his chin and down onto his chest.

“By rights you should be dead,” Black tells him. “You were in that water for three fucking hours. No normal man survives a dunk like that.”

The tip of Sumner's nose and sections of both cheeks just below the eyes are black with frostbite. Sumner doesn't remember the ice or the cold or the ghoulish green water, but he does remember looking up, before whatever happened to him happened, and seeing the sky above him crammed with a billion snowflakes.

“Laudanum,” he says.

He looks hopefully across at Black.

“Are you trying to say something?” Black asks, tipping his head closer in.

“Laudanum,” Sumner says again, “for the pain.”

Black nods and goes into the medicine chest. He mixes the laudanum with rum and helps him drink it. It burns Sumner's throat, and he thinks for a moment he will vomit it up, but manages not to. He is exhausted by the effort of speaking and doesn't know (since he is definitely not in India) where or who he is. He shudders violently and starts to weep. Black lowers him back down onto the bunk and covers him over with a coarse wool blanket.

In the wardroom that evening, over supper, Black reports that the surgeon is showing signs of improvement.

“Very good,” Brownlee says, “but there will be no more sixth boat from now on. I don't wish another fucker's death to trouble my conscience.”

“Just bad luck, that's all,” Cavendish says offishly. “A man slides off the ice in a snowstorm, could happen to any of us.”

“Ask me, it worked out well for him,” Drax says. “The fucker should rightly have been crushed or drowned. After ten minutes in that kind of water, a man's blood gets claggy and his heart gives out, but the surgeon's still alive somehow. He's fucking blessed.”

“
Blessed
?” Black says.

Brownlee holds up his hand.

“Blessed or not,” he says, “I say there will be no more sixth boat. And while we mariners are busy hunting fish, the surgeon will remain safe in his cabin reading his Homer or pulling on his pizzle, or whatever the fuck it is he does in there.”

Cavendish rolls his eyes.

“Easy enough for some bastards,” he says.

Brownlee glares at him.

“The surgeon has his job on this ship, Cavendish, and you have yours. And let that be the fucking end of it.”

Drax and Cavendish meet again at midnight, when the watch changes. Cavendish pulls the harpooner to one side and glances around before speaking.

“He may yet die, you know,” he says. “Have you seen the way he looks?”

“He looks to me like a cunt who's difficult to finish off,” Drax says.

“He's a leathery fucker, that's for sure.”

“You should have popped a ball into him when you had the chance.”

Cavendish shakes his head and waits for one of the Shetlanders to pass them by.

“That would never have flown,” he says. “Brownlee's fucking sweet on him, and so is Black.”

Drax looks away as he lights his pipe. The sky above them is alive with jiggling stars; a layer of blue-black ice clings to the rigging and coats the deck.

“How much do you think that ring is worth anyway?” Cavendish says. “I'm thinking twenty guineas, even twenty-five.”

Drax shakes his head and sniffs, as if the very question is beneath him.

“It's not your ring,” he says.

“And it's not Sumner's either. I'd say it belongs to whichever cunt has his hands on it at the time.”

Drax turns back to Cavendish and nods.

“That's about the way it is,” he says.

*   *   *

In the darkened cabin, swaddled beneath a thick pile of bear hides and blankets, Sumner, feverish and as weak as a newborn, sleeps, wakes, then sleeps again. As the ship sails north and west through fog and drizzle, under a heavy swell with two feet of ice cladding the hull, and the men chipping it off the deck and gunwales with marlin spikes and mallets, Sumner's opiated mind slips its moorings and drifts backwards, sideways, through fluid dreamscapes as fearsome and as thick with unnameable life as the green arctic waters which press and crash only twelve wooden inches from his head. He could be anywhere at any time, but his thoughts, like iron rushing to a magnet, return to one place only:

A large yellow building beyond the racquet court, the astonishing noise and the slaughterhouse stench of meat and excrement, like a scene out of hell. Thirty or more doolies arriving every hour carrying in, three or four at a time, the dead and the wounded. Young men's mangled and exploded corpses tossed into a miasmic outbuilding. The flailing of the wounded and the screams of the dying. Amputated limbs clattering into metal troughs. The incessant sound, as in a workshop or a sawmill, of steel gnawing through bone. The floor wet and sticky with spilled blood, the unstoppable heat, the thud and shake of artillery fire, and the clouds of black flies settling everywhere, on everything, without pause or discrimination—in eyes and ears and mouths, in open wounds. The incredible filth of it all, the howls and the pleading, the blood and shit, and the endless, endless pain.

Sumner works all morning, probing, sawing, suturing, until he is light-headed from the chloroform and nauseous from the generalized butchery. It is far worse than anything he has ever known or imagined. Men who, hours before, he saw boasting and laughing on the ridge are brought to him in pieces. He must do his duty, he tells himself, he must labor diligently. That is all that is possible now, all that any man could do. Like him, the other assistant surgeons—Wilkie and O'Dowd—are drenched with sweat and sunk in blood up to their elbows. As soon as one surgery is over, another one begins. Price, the orderly, checks the doolies as they arrive, discards the already dead, and moves the maimed to a place in the queue. Corbyn, the staff surgeon, decides which limbs must be amputated immediately and which might be saved. He was with the Coldstream Guards at Inkerman, a rifle in one hand, a scalpel in the other, two thousand dead in ten hours. He has specks of blood in his mustaches. He chews arrowroot against the stench. This is nothing, he tells the others; this is small fucking beer. They slice and saw and probe for musket balls. They sweat and curse and feel like vomiting from the heat. The wounded men scream constantly for water, but there is never enough to slake their thirst. Their thirst is obscene, their needs are intolerable, but Sumner must bear them anyway, he must continue doing what he does for as long as he is able. He has no time for anger or disgust or fear, no time or energy for anything but the work itself.

By late afternoon, three or four o'clock, the fighting slows and the flow of casualties diminishes at first, then stops completely. Rumor has it that the British troops have stumbled upon a great store of liquor near the Lahore Gate and have drunk themselves into a communal stupor. Whatever the reason, the advance is halted, at least for now, and for the first time in many hours Corbyn and his assistants are able to break from their labors. Baskets of food and carboys of water are brought in, and a number of the wounded are moved back to their regimental hospitals up on the ridge. Sumner, after washing the blood off himself and eating a plate of bread and cold meat, lies down on a charpoy and falls asleep. He is woken by the sounds of fierce argument. A turbaned man has appeared at the door of the field hospital carrying a wounded child; he is asking for assistance, and O'Dowd and Wilkie are loudly refusing.

“Get him out of here,” Wilkie says, “before I put a ball in him myself.”

O'Dowd picks up a saber from the corner of the room and makes a show of unsheathing it. The man doesn't move. Corbyn comes over and tells O'Dowd to settle down. He examines the child briefly and shakes his head.

“The wound is too severe,” he says. “The bone is shattered. He can't live long.”

“You can cut it off,” the man insists.

“You want a son with only one leg?” Wilkie asks.

The man doesn't answer. Corbyn shakes his head again.

“We can't help you,” he says. “This hospital is for soldiers.”

“British soldiers,” Wilkie says.

The man doesn't move. Blood is dripping from the child's shattered leg onto the newly mopped floor. Clouds of flies are still buzzing around their heads, and every now and then one of the wounded soldiers groans or calls out for help.

“You're not busy,” the man says, looking around. “You have time now.”

“We can't help you,” Corbyn says again. “You should go.”

“I am not a sepoy,” the man says. “My name is Hamid. I am a servant. I work for Farook the moneylender.”

“Why are you still in the city? Why didn't you flee with all the others before the assault began?”

“I must protect my master's house and its contents.”

O'Dowd shakes his head and laughs.

“He's a shameless liar,” he says. “Any man left in this city is a traitor by definition and deserves only hanging.”

“What about the child?” Sumner asks.

The others turn to look at him.

“The child is a casualty of war,” Corbyn says. “And we are certainly not under orders to assist the offspring of the enemy.”

“I am not your enemy,” the man says.

“So you say.”

The man turns to Sumner hopefully. Sumner sits down again and lights his pipe. The child's blood drips steadily onto the floor.

“I can show you treasure,” the man says. “If you help me now, I can show you treasure.”

“What treasure?” Wilkie asks. “How much?”

“Two lakhs,” he says. “Gold and jewels. See here.”

He lays the child down carefully on a trestle table and removes a small kidskin pouch from his tunic. He offers the pouch to Corbyn, and Corbyn takes and opens it. He tips the coins into his palm, looks at them for a moment, pushes them around with his forefinger, then passes them to Wilkie.

“Many more like that,” the man says. “Many more.”

“Where is this treasure?” Corbyn asks. “How far away?”

“Not far. Very close. I can show you now.”

Wilkie passes the coins to O'Dowd, and O'Dowd passes them to Sumner. The coins are warm and faintly greasy to the touch. The edges are unmilled and the surfaces are marked with elegant ribbons of Arabic script.

“You don't really believe him?” Wilkie says.

“How many more like this?” Corbyn asks. “A hundred? Two hundred?”

“Two thousand,” the man says. “My master is a famous moneylender. I buried them myself before he fled.”

Corbyn walks over to the boy and peels the blood-soaked wrapping from his leg. He peers down and sniffs the gaping wound.

“We could remove it from the hip,” he says. “But he will probably die anyway.”

“Will you do it now?”

“Not now. When you get back here with all that treasure.”

The man looks unhappy, nods, then leans down and whispers something to the boy.

“You three go with him,” Corbyn says, “and take Price. Arm yourselves, and if you don't like the way something looks, shoot this bastard and come straight back. I'll stay here with the boy.”

For a moment no one moves. Corbyn looks at them steadily.

“Four equal shares and a tithe each for Price,” he says. “And what the prize agents don't ever learn about can't hurt them.”

*   *   *

They leave the field hospital and enter the city proper through the smoking wreckage of the Cashmere Gate. They clamber over hillocks of shattered masonry, past piles of smoldering corpses being sniffed at and nibbled by pariah dogs. Above them, tatter-winged vultures flap and complain, mortars fizzle and thump. There is a stench of cordite and scorched flesh, a distant sound of musketry. They wend their way through narrow, blasted streets clogged with broken furniture, eviscerated animals, and abandoned weaponry. Sumner imagines behind every barricade and loophole a crouching sepoy ready to shoot. He thinks that the risk they are taking is too great and that the treasure itself is probably a lie, but he knows it would be foolish to refuse a man like Corbyn. The British army is built on influence, and if a man wishes to rise he must be careful who he knows. Corbyn has friends on the Army Medical Board, and his brother-in-law is an inspector of hospitals. The man himself is boastful and dull, to be sure, but to be connected to him by this shared secret, this pile of illegal loot, would not be a bad thing for Sumner at all. It might even, he thinks, be his path out of the Sixty-First Foot and into a more respectable regiment. But only, of course, if the loot is real.

They turn a corner and come across a gun emplacement and a gaggle of drunken infantrymen. One of them is playing the squeeze-box, another has his britches down and is evacuating into a wooden bucket; empty brandy bottles are scattered around.

“Who goes there?” one of them shouts.

“Surgeons,” Wilkie says. “Does any man here require treatment?”

The soldiers look at one another and laugh.

“Cotteslow over there needs his fucking head examined,” one of them says.