Isvik (39 page)

He sat, cross-legged like the servant of some god, nursing his offering in a tin mug. ‘The Rubáiyát. Very appropriate,' he mused, his accent broadening. ‘Sin an' forgiveness, death an' what comes after – aye, and Ah hope it's no' too appropriate.
Who is the Potter, pray, an' who the Pot?
' The faraway look was suddenly gone as he leaned across to me and said grimly, ‘Life an' death, good an' evil – ye jus' remember, boy, in the case o' Ángel there is no good, only evil.' And he added, ‘Ah recall a doctor tellin' me once – a country doctor – that inbreedin' could produce progeny that were throw-backs to primeval man, worse still – monsters. Ah can hear him sayin' it now –
Monsters; there's no other word fur it
. An' he then went on t' tell me the terrible story o' a wee laddie that was left an orphan an' adopted by a kindly couple who had no children o' their own. That little bastard grew into a monster that bled them white o' all they had saved in a lifetime o' hard work, an' then he killed them fur no other reason than he wanted the roof their lovin' kindness had put over his head, wanted it all to himsel'.'

He paused there, pouring himself more tea. ‘That's the sort of man whose trail we are followin'. Scrape away the surface charm and underneath the man's all evil.'

I asked him then about the names we had seen scrawled on the walls of those prison huts to the east of Ushuaia. ‘Are you saying he shipped them out in an old square-rigged ship and murdered them?'

‘Ah think so.' He nodded.

‘But why? What was the point?'

‘Ah don't know why. Does there have to be a reason? Ah tell ye, the man's evil.'

‘It doesn't make sense,' I muttered.

‘Does it have to? Not everybody is reasonable like yerself. Some people act on instinct, or on emotion – on the spur of the moment, no reason at all. Killin' for killin's sake. Ah've seen that. And torture, too. Women as well as men. Ah've met a woman, a very beautiful woman …' He paused there. ‘There are also people who are schizophrenic. But Ángel is no schizo. He's just evil, paranoid perhaps, but evil through and through.'

I wondered how he could be so sure, but my eyes wouldn't stay open and I drifted into sleep, to be woken, almost immediately, it seemed, by a seal barking. Anybody who has lived and sailed on the North Norfolk coast of England cannot possibly mistake that sharp, grunting sound. I sat up, the sun blazing like a great balloon low in a cold green sky, the pack reflecting the glare of it in a spill of liquid fire. The seal barked again, and I turned my head to see Iain's body sprawled on a raised platform of ice as he searched the route ahead through his glasses. Behind him a great slab of the pack was raised almost vertically, the surface of it smooth and white like the marble of a grave stone and blinding with reflected light.

‘Any sign of them?' I asked him.

He turned and shook his head. ‘The goin' looks bad, bits of open water full of brash ice and the pack is badly layered right up to the first of the bergs. After that it's not so bad where the bergs have created somethin' of a windbreak.' He handed me the glasses as I climbed up beside him. I could see the blowhole then. It was almost right below us, a small pond of ice slush. But no sign of the seal. ‘Did you see it?'

‘See what?'

‘The seal. It was barking.'

‘Of course Ah saw it. But Ah'd not got my gun so Ah couldn't grab ye a nice juicy steak fur breakfast.' He pulled himself up on to his hands and knees and began lowering himself down to the flat patch where we had laid up for the night. ‘Porridge,' he said. ‘We'll have a big bowl of hot porridge to keep us goin'. Ah've a feelin' in my guts it's goin' to be a long day.'

We were on our way a little after five, up-ended slabs of ice and pools of partly frozen sea causing us endless detours. Mostly we followed the trail blazed by the snowmobile, but as we neared the stranded berg, with its flat top crenellated by constant melting and freezing, the going became so bad it was almost impossible to drag the sledges through the chaos of disintegrating ice slabs. Twice my own sledge turned over on its side and once we were faced with a slush pool so large that it was really a polynya. They had floated their way across it and we did the same. But for us, with the need to unload and inflate our dinghy, it took a great deal more time, so that it was almost noon before we resumed our march on the far side.

By then the sun was virtually at its zenith, still shining out of a clear sky, and with hardly any wind, it was hot work dragging the sledges through the broken-up pack ice. We were so close to the berg now that, though I doubt whether it was more than sixty or seventy metres high, it seemed to tower above us, a cliff of ice that varied in colour from cold, translucent blue, through white, to a dirty yellow, the face of it pock-marked by the black of cave holes. And near its base the degraded ice had formed arches in which the salt sea water gurgled noisily, slapping large chunks of ice around.

It was here that we found the snowmobile abandoned. They had gone on, dragging the sledge between them, manoeuvring it by brute force through the built-up tangle of ice slabs until, close under the berg's western side, they had finally been forced to leave it behind, taking only what they could carry.

Shortly afterwards we were forced to do the same. Progress with the sledges had become too slow, too exhausting.

‘Ah think we're gettin' close,' Iain said. ‘Why else would he risk leavin' everything behind?'

That was his explanation for deciding that we, too, should travel light. We had two shoulder haversacks with us. We loaded these with the bare essentials, and he took his gun. Then, before leaving the sledges, he took compass bearings on various parts of the berg, calling them out for me to write down with a description for identification. He was using one of those little French plastic compasses you hold to your eye. It was hung by a cord round his neck and he took it off and handed it to me so that I could check his bearings. ‘We can't take those sleepin' bags along with us. Too heavy. But Ah'm takin' no chances of our not findin' them again when we need them.'

It was exactly 14.17 when we set off once more. I noted it down in the pocket diary where I had entered the bearings. Even without the sledges, it was tiring work clambering over the disordered entanglement of layered ice. Dangerous, too, in places, for it was very slippery and there were black crevices where it would be easy to twist an ankle or even break a leg.

Then, just after four, we reached the lee of the berg's western side and gradually the chaos subsided until there came a point where we could look ahead to relatively undisturbed floe ice. And there were their footprints stretching away ahead until they lost themselves round the flank of the berg where it protruded in the convoluted shape of a frozen waterfall, the face of it glistening with moisture. Iain went round this ice-smooth shoulder, keeping to the flat. He was in a hurry now. I decided to try a short cut, having seen a way I could clamber over the lower part of it. My boots had small studs in them and I made it quite easily to within a few feet of the top, but the last part was in full sun and had melted smooth as glass. It was a hands and knees job, clawing my way upwards till suddenly I was there, looking across to a vista of bergs huddled in a semi-circle. And within the shelter of that glittering wall the floe ice, ribbed by old layering, had melted and frozen again into a smooth pattern of mounds, so that it looked like an area of white desert full of wind-eroded tumuli, and in the middle of them was the ship.

I yelled to Iain, but he was still fighting his way through the jumbled ice off the north-western tip of the berg I was on and could not hear me. I could see the footprints we had been following stretching all the way to the frozen outline of the ship's bulwarks, but not in a straight line, for they had had to work their way around numerous pools of brash ice.

I must have been sprawled a good fifty feet up, so that I had a grandstand view of the whole spread of the grounded bergs. It was a staggering sight, an almost complete wall that glittered like sugar icing in the bright sunlight and was topped by fairy ice castles carved by the action of sun and wind out of the solid berg tops. And almost dead centre, in the middle of that harbour of ice, the whited sepulchre shape of the sunken ship lay embalmed in ice.

That we had found it in the middle of this infinity of frozen water seemed almost unbelievable, and the beauty of the scene, the strange deadliness of it, held me spellbound for a while, so that I didn't call to Iain again until he finally came into my field of vision. Even then I felt reluctant, lying there thinking about what we might find, wondering where the poor devils were being taken, why their ship had landed up in this extraordinary situation.

‘Ye all right, Pete?' Iain's voice floated up to me, strangely disembodied in the still air. Looking down at him, I realised the ship was so buried in ice and snow he hadn't seen it yet. I slithered down and joined him, the description of what I had seen pouring out of me: ‘It's unbelievable. Those bergs are like a harbour wall, and there it is, frozen in, yet from up on the berg she looks almost like she's anchored there in the middle of that ice harbour.'

He didn't say anything, just quickened his pace until he was near enough to see the outline of her. He stopped then, standing suddenly very still and sniffing the air. ‘There's a smell.'

I hadn't noticed it before, but now that he mentioned it I could smell it, too. Something bad. ‘What is it?'

‘Putrefaction.' He had his glasses to his eyes, sweeping either side of the ship. ‘A carcase. Or carcases.' He dropped the glasses on to their neck strap and took the gun from off his shoulder. ‘Ye wait here.' And he started forward, moving cautiously, his head thrust out, his eyes searching.

Had Ángel really got a gun? I thought it unlikely. There was no wind, and the sun blazing down from the north out of a picture-postcard sky was literally quite hot, warm at any rate, the whole icescape so sparklingly brilliant it hurt the eyes. It was very, very beautiful, very peaceful. But there was an underlying coldness that gave it a brittle quality, so that at any moment I felt the whole wonderful panorama might shatter into the howling blackness of an Antarctic blizzard.

I stayed there until Iain had reached the icing-sugar outline of the vessel's bulwarks. When she had struck that underwater reef or bank, whatever it was the bergs had grounded on, she had been swung round, her bows towards the distant glimmer of the Ice Shelf. The stern was turned towards the north-east, so that the current had piled the floe ice so high against her port side she was almost invisible from where I was now standing. The bulwarks, and whole section of her topsides, seemed to have been ripped out of her, the deck line so jagged and humped that it was difficult to tell what was heaped-up plates of ice and what the iced-up side of the ship itself.

While I was trying to sort this out, there was a sudden sharp sound, like the cracking of ice. I glanced quickly round, but nothing seemed to have changed, no gap opening up. Then it came again and I saw Iain start forward, struggling through broken ice till he was almost at the stern, where he grabbed hold of what looked like a rope ladder and hauled himself up with one hand till he was on the quarterdeck. For a moment he stood, quite still, only his head turning slightly as he searched the deck and the ice on the far side.

Nothing moved. There was no sound. Nothing had happened, the whole world seeming to stand still. Then suddenly he was gone, the icebound deck swallowing him up as he disappeared below.

I picked up my haversack and followed him, the ship's side gradually growing higher as I neared it. From a distance, the hull had seemed just about buried in the ice, but close-to the tops of the bulwarks were at least ten feet above me and I wondered how Ángel and Carlos had got on board; or had the rope ladder already been there when they arrived? There were nine rungs of it hanging vertically above me, all of them encrusted with smooth ice. It made for a slippery climb, and the deck itself was like a skating rink.

I called to Iain that I was on board, but there was no answer, the silence and the frozen state of the vessel very eerie.

I didn't follow him below. Not then. Our interests were different. It was the ship itself that attracted me, the hull and the bits and pieces of rigging buried under layers of old ice, the carbon-fibre blocks, the broken spars, the barrels that had been stove in, and up in the bows the remains of the great bowsprit lying in a tangle of heavy rope with the flukes of a massive anchor sticking up in the middle of it.

It took me several minutes to work my way the full length of the ship. Not only was it difficult walking, but I was stopping all the time, fascinated by the things I was seeing. I guessed her date of building as quite early in the 1800s, the first half of that century at any rate. She had an almost flush deck, and in clambering on board I had seen the outline of a gun port. She was either a naval frigate or an East Indiaman built on similar lines, in which case the National Maritime Director was probably right in thinking it was one of the ships John Company had had built at Blackwall close by the naval yard.

The bows confirmed it, for the 1830s had been a period when both naval and commercial interests, and not only in our own country, were going for speed and manoeuvrability. That meant more sail, particularly fore and aft sails, and the place to hang them was up for'ard, right out beyond the bows. The bowsprit on this vessel had been massive. With its jib-boom it must have been almost as long as one of the masts, and it had been cocked up at a sharp angle, the weight of it held by thick rope rigging to the foremast. The crans irons were still lying there under a coating of snow and ice, but when I kicked them free, I found they were not iron, but some form of plastic. Even the flukes of the anchor were not the original iron, and when I leaned over the side to see if anything had been left attached to the dolphin striker, I could just see through the glazed ice covering that this, and the martingale stays, which acted as braces against the upward pull of the jibs when under sail, had also been converted to a man-made fibre.