The black clouds boiled overhead. The hushed sound of the oars pulling our two small whaleboats through the ever-thickening sludge of grease ice was completely lost to the howl of the ferocious westerly wind.
The boat jerked, knocking me forward as our bow bumped heavily into the sheer blue-white cliff that rose around us, the ice grinding on the bottom of our hull.
“For Christ’s sake!” Jens’ gruff voice thundered from where he stood at the front. “Hold her steady, otherwise you’ll put the lot of us in the water.”
Reaching up and over the ledge, the big man slammed the iron point of his long, ash boathook into the top of the sheet.
Clutching the shaft of the hook, Jens heaved himself up. His feet kicked violently, the ice-spurs strapped to his sea-boots bit into the slick, frozen wall, showering the boat with frozen chips, before he managed to hook a woollen clad leg over the lip and haul himself up.
Moments later, a length of thick, knotted hemp rope tumbled over the edge.
“Come on up then, Captain,” Jens shouted to me.
“Christian,” I called to the second whaleboat. “Your men hold on here with the boats.”
Wrapping my numb fingers around the rope, I turned to the rest of my own crew. “You lot come with me.”
My old joints gave a dull ache of complaint as I pulled myself up the rope, my own ice-spurs finding little purchase as I climbed. Jens’ strong grip clamped around my hand and heaved me over the ridge.
Standing, I turned to watch the rest of my men clamber over.
“Would you look at that,” Henrik muttered in his Southern Oslo accent, an accent that always seemed too soft, too warm for this rugged, frozen environment.
His eyes were fixed on the huge hulk before us.
The English whaler hadn’t just been stranded in the ice; it had been pulverised by the unimaginable force of two monstrous ice floes coming together. Her bow was totally demolished; nothing remained fore of the mainmast but splinters and smashed wood.
Her stern had been thrown up into the air at an impossible angle. Her rudder, which must have been a full twenty-five feet above my head, swung back and forth in the wind with a deep groan.
“She’s huge, Captain,” Henrik said, his eyes still fixed on the gargantuan ship.
“A Hull-man,” Jens said, stepping up beside us. “You don’t usually see one of those getting caught out like this. English captains are normally a cautious bunch.”
The scene around me was one of chaos. Massive boulders of smashed ice piled high around the ship. Her bowsprit, which had been driven into the ice and snapped like a twig, now stood fifty feet away. Between the buckled ridges, treacherous crevasses plunged into an azure darkness. The rhythmic sound of seawater sloshed lazily from their inky depths.
“Move,” I ordered. “We can’t climb her stern. We’ll get aboard through the bow.”
We began the scramble up the mass of broken ice. Henrik took the lead, his slight, nimble frame darting agilely between the fissures. Jens grunted beside me, while behind I could hear the muttering voices of the twins, Johan and Erik Larson. The sixth oarsman, Bjorn Kristensen, had agreed to remain on the ice.
The bitter wind cut through my woollens as I climbed. My fingers were numb as I desperately clung to the handle of my pick, while jamming the ice-spurs home with every step. Looming above darkly was the mass of the Hull-man, its masts toppled, its broken, tangled rigging slapping loudly.
My foot slipped!
Scrabbling for purchase on the slick cliff face, I sent ice splinters cascading onto those below me. My pick creaked, shifting in the small notch it was rammed.
Then, with a sharp crack, it came loose!
Toppling backwards, the abyssal void of a crevasse opened beneath me like the gaping mouth of a whale. My feet slipped, losing their hold, and I fell.
Suddenly a powerful hand grabbed the shoulder of my thick fearnought, swinging me back onto the ice face with a thud that left me gasping.
“Easy, Torstein!” Jens fixed his stare on me. “I might not like what you’re doing here, but I’d rather see you safely back to Tromsø than have to explain to Freja that you’d cracked your skull in a foolhardy attempt to steal from a dead man’s ship.”
Leaning my forehead against the blue ice, I sucked the freezing air back into my burning lungs. Jens’ grip lingered for a moment, ensuring that I was stable.
Foolhardy, he’d called it. Maybe he was right, but without those barrels, what sort of life would await Freja and the children, anyway?
“Thank you—” I began to speak, but my words were cut off by a single, deep metallic clang which resonated through the very ice and timbers themselves. A clang that hung in the air like the early morning mist.
A cold, icy ripple surged through my body.
“The bell,” Johan’s voice quivered from somewhere below. “This is an ice-grave, Captain. It’s warning us we shouldn’t be here.”
“Superstitious nonsense! It’s just the wind swinging the ship’s bell,” I barked back. “The ship’s dead, Johan. Wood doesn’t have a soul or a spirit.”
“The ice does,” Erik replied in the same shaking voice as his brother.
“Then we’d better be quick,” I retorted. “Climb!”
Henrik was the first to reach the top. Twisting his body between the jagged timbers, he stood, his back to us, looking across the deck from the remnants of what had once been the forecastle.
“God preserve us!” the blonde man’s voice wheezed in the frigid air.
The brisk westerly wind suddenly dropped, the rigging fell silent, and for a moment the whole world seemed to halt, holding its breath. Even the continual sighing of the sea muted to a subdued hush.
Suddenly a sharp crack split the air from above. A rigging line, tangled in the stump of the mainmast snapped. One of the heavy, ironbound pulleys came loose, swinging through the air like a cannonball.
There was no time to call out. I could only watch as it struck Henrik clean in the face with a sickening crack. A crimson mist filled the air as his lifeless body was thrown backwards.
With my muscles screaming and the blood pounding against my eardrums, I pressed myself into the cold, hard wall of ice. Bracing myself for an impact that never came.
Seconds stretched into hours as Henrik’s body hurtled past me. Lifeless eyes stared from an unrecognisable, battered mass of meat, blood and bone. His jaw had been smashed away entirely, but as he passed, I could have sworn that I heard him whispering my name.
A trick of the wind, surely?
Then he collided with Jens, the force of the impact ripped my first mate from the ice face. My arm snapped out instinctively, my hand reaching for my old friend. Rough wool brushed against my mittens as I lunged for him. But Jens didn’t stop.
I watched in horror as the two men vanished into the blackness of the ravine below, Jens’ cap held firmly in my grip.
“Jens!” I screamed, my throat raw.
But what answered me didn’t come from that ravine. A low, guttural groan rose from deep within the belly of that old ship.
“Draugen!” Johan and Erik both hollered in unison. “Draugen, guard this ship!”
With an aching heart and a hollow gnawing in my stomach, I listened. It was a song; the words were in a language I didn’t know, but the voices that sang them were of this world.
“Survivors!” I snarled back, forcing the tremor out of my voice before calling down to Bjorn below. “Tell Christian to bring his boat around. That crevasse opens to the sea. He’ll get to them long before we’re able to.”
Turning back to the ice wall, I thrust my pick upwards and gestured the terrified twins on.
“Move!” I growled. “There are men inside this thing and they’re going to need our help.”
The ship’s bell began to toll once again. Not a single clang this time, but a constant, monotonous din that reverberated in the still air.