Frostland

“Captain?”

How many more days can I ask this of them? The children have ceased their crying, which is worse by far. The women clutch empty shawls to hollow breasts, and the men, those poor devils still possessed of strength enough to drag the sledges, cast their glances toward me as though I kept some hidden loaf beneath my coat. Two thousand souls, and every one of them tied now to the frail thread of my judgement.

“Captain!”

God forgive me, I do not know if I am leading them to salvation or merely choosing a slower road to the grave. I have watched good mothers bury babes beneath cairns of snow. I have seen fathers give up their own rations with the solemnity of communion, only to drop dead in harness the next morning. Yet still they rise when I bid them rise. Still they march when I point into the white and say onward.

“Captain! For God’s sake, sir!”

Why? What do they see when they look upon me? I am no prophet. No saviour. Only a man too stubborn to lie down and die, and too proud, perhaps too damned, to confess that I no longer know where this road ends. And yet they call for me, as if I were equal to the task. As if one tired man might bargain with the cold. I have led them from the carcass of Old London, from the last red glow of civilisation, into this soon to be white tomb of ours. I feel their faith thinning. I feel it in every silence that follows my commands. They do not yet hate me, but hunger is a patient tutor, and soon enough it will teach them.

“Captain!”

I was shaken from my stupor by one of the sergeants.

“Sir, we need to get off this shelf, sir! The blizzard is picking up ahead of schedule.”

I turned at last, the wind flaying at my greatcoat. Sergeant Wilkes stood half-blind in the snow, one gloved arm raised across his face, his beard thick with rime.

“I know it, man,” I snapped, more sharply than he deserved.

He flinched, though whether from my tone or the cold, I could not tell. Behind him, the column stretched in a broken black line across the wastes: men bowed beneath harnesses, women bent over shivering children, the old lashed atop sledges with what pitiful blankets remained to them. The gale tore at them all alike.

I cast my eyes along the ridge upon which we had halted. Wilkes was right, it was no more than a long shoulder of ice, exposed on both sides, with the drifts piling treacherously beneath its lip. Another hour in such a place and the weaker among us would be blown clean from their feet, or frozen where they stood.

“Have the line close up,” I said. “No more than three abreast. Keep the children in the centre. Double the rope on the rear sledges.”

Wilkes nodded, but did not move. A hesitation?

“Well?”

“Sir,” he said, and leaned nearer to be heard above the gale. “Pritchard’s come back.”

For one absurd moment I could not place the name, nor face. My thoughts had grown so long accustomed to death that every absent man seemed already buried.

Finally I recalled the scouting party we had sent ahead days back when the blizzard was first noticed.

“And?”

Wilkes swallowed. His eyes, red-rimmed and streaming, did not meet mine directly.

“He says he’s found something.”

The wind shrieked over the shelf, whipping snow between us in hard white sheets.

“What sort of something?”

“A train, sir.”

For a moment I thought I had misheard him.

“A what?”

“A train, sir. Frozen fast not half a mile ahead by his reckoning. He swears it on his life.”

A train.

It was true that in the waning days of the empire, they had sent ice breakers to deliver supplies to those northern cities, before they had been cut off. Great steel dreadnought..

“A whole train?” I said.

“So Pritchard says.”

“Intact?”

“He could not tell in the snow, sir. Only that there are carriages, and a coal engine besides.”

I looked past him into the whirling white. I could see nothing. No shape. No shadow. No sign that Providence had laid so much as a broken wheel in our path. Yet even as reason cautioned me, imagination had already done its cruel work. Carriages meant walls, however thin. Wood to burn, metal to salvage, perhaps stores overlooked by whatever poor devils had last ridden her. Perhaps even coal in the tender, if God had not quite exhausted His appetite for mockery.

“Who else knows?” I asked.

“Only Pritchard, myself, and the two lads he brought back.”

“Then keep it that way.”

His brow furrowed. “Sir?”

“If this gets into the line before I’ve seen it with my own eyes, we shall have panic instead of order. Men stampede quicker toward salvation than away from death. You know that as well as I.”

He did know it. I saw the understanding settle upon him with reluctance. It was one thing to endure misery under command; another to be denied even the rumour of deliverance.

“Yes, sir.”

~ ~ ~

By the time we reached it, the storm had slackened just enough to permit us the sight of its enormity.

It lay half-entombed in the ice like some slain mechanical beast, its great black bulk rising from the white wastes in a long, frozen curve of metal. Snow had banked high against its flanks, and the drifts had swallowed its wheels entirely. Its engine sat foremost, a monstrous coal-bellied leviathan, with its smokestack bent slightly askew and its brass work turned dull and green beneath the rime. Behind it stretched carriage after carriage, many of which lay at odd angles, suggesting some bygone derailment.

No one spoke at first. Two thousand souls stood in the shadow of that dead beast and stared as peasants might once have gawked upon the bones of a dragon.

Pritchard had not exaggerated. She was whole, near enough. A ruin, certainly, but an intact one.

For one shameful instant, hope rose in me with such violence that it was almost pain.

“Get the line halted,” I ordered. “No one is to approach until we’ve investigated. Wilkes, armed brigadiers at every entrance. Let's see what we’re working with.”

I took Wilkes, Pritchard, Doctor Vale, and four of the steadier lads and went first to the engine. The hatch had frozen hard in its frame, and it took crowbars, rifle butts, and the efforts of three men swearing themselves hoarse before the seal broke with a shriek. I had expected the foul smell of rot to meet us but mercifully it did not.

The furnace was dead, of course, its mouth choked with old ash and clinker. The gauges were cracked, the pipes white with frost. Yet the engine itself was sound, dry by most standards.

Doctor Vale found the first body.

An engineer, or what remained of him, slumped beside the furnace with one hand still resting upon a shovel. His beard was a yellow-grey mat upon his chest. His flesh had shrunk back from the bone in places, yet the cold had preserved him so well that he seemed at first only asleep.

“Poor bastard,” murmured Wilkes.

And we found more. All of them diminished, all of them still as though they had simply sat down one by one and permitted the frost to finish its work. I had seen plenty of the dead by then, but there was something particularly dreadful in the obedience of these souls. They had died at their posts. Died hoping the engine might yet save them.

We searched the tender next.

Coal.

The train would never move, only God knew where the rails even lay, but more than enough to heat the majority of the carriages, if husbanded with care. Though, enough for two thousand?

“How much?” I asked.

Pritchard climbed halfway into the tender, stamping at the frozen black mounds with his boots. “Hard to say exact, sir. But a fair stick remains. Could keep the generator fed for some while.

“Long enough to wait out the storm?”

Nobody had that answer.

The first true blow fell when we opened the provisions car.

It took all my discipline not to sag against the doorframe at the sight of it. Shelving. Crates. Preserved meat in tins gone green with age but sealed. Hard biscuit. Barrels of lamp oil. Medical stores. Wool blankets. Bags of coal briquettes. Not abundance, by the standards of the old world. Not luxury. But to us, in that hour, it might as well have been the treasure vault of some northern king.

Behind me, Wilkes stared at the food as though he feared it would vanish if he blinked. Even I, who had long since learned to mistrust every seeming mercy, felt the world tilt beneath me.

Here was food, heat, shelter. A chance, perhaps the last we should ever be given.

And then, because Providence is never so kind as first appearances suggest, I began to count.

I counted the crates.

I counted the sacks.

I counted the number of enclosed carriages not wholly ruined by exposure, and the number of bodies I had left shivering out in the snow.

By the time I had done the arithmetic, hope had gone from me again, and left only its crueller brother.

Doctor Vale must have read something in my expression. “Captain?”

I did not answer at one. I walked the length of the provisions car in silence, my gloved hand trailing across the frost-coated wood of the shelves. I could hear the wind moaning outside, and beyond that, faintly, the sound of the people beginning to stir. Word was spreading despite my orders.

“How long?” I said at last.

Vale frowned. “Sir?”

“If rationed to the strictest measure. Food, fuel, blankets. How long?”

I watched as each man in front of me dawned on the same conclusion.

“For all of us, sir?”

“Yes.”

Vale took longer than I liked. When he replied, his voice was quiet.

“A few days more than we have now.”

“How long is the storm estimated?”

“It’s class four. Could see up to two weeks of whiteout at minus seventy with wind speeds of one-hundred and fifty knots.”

“How many could we support for that length of time?”

“Little over half,” Wilkes interrupted as if having a sudden realisation.

No man spoke after that.

For one mad instant, I considered simply lying to the two thousand waiting souls. Telling them the stores were spoiled, coal damp, the carriages unsafe. Better, perhaps, they should curse chance, than curse me.

But the lie would not hold for an hour. There was too much here. Too much shelter. Too much food. Men with empty bellies can scent salvation as wolves scent blood.

Doctor Vale removed his spectacles, wiped them with trembling, frostbitten fingers, and set the back upon his nose. “If we pack them tightly,” he said, almost apologetically, “if we heat only the sound carriages, if the rations are cut to the bone… perhaps eleven hundred. Twelve, at the utmost. Not more.”

“Twelve hundred,” I repeated.

Pritchard looked from Vale to me, then back again. “And the others?”

There was only one answer, but there was not a man in the room brave enough to speak it.

“Captain,” Vale said quietly, “you must consider the children.”

“Yes.”

“And the women with infants.”

“Yes.”

“The engineers, stockers, mechanics—”

“Yes,” I said again.

Wilkes stared at me. “Sir?”

I turned on him at last. “Do you think I do not understand what is being suggested? Do you think I have not already begun the count in my own head? Children. Nursing mothers. The strongest workers. Anyone capable of repairing the generator. Anyone who can keep order when the storm breaks. We preserve the body of the column, Sergeant, or else all of it perishes.”

I watched him take a moment to resolve himself. “The body,” he said with a nod.

“Grab your best men and start loading the children and all women of child bearing age. Then key workers, and put the rest to a lottery.”

He nodded again.

As Wilkes left, a sudden cry then a clatter of boots on metal came from outside.

One of the brigadiers shouted, “Back! Get back, you fools!”

Then another voice rose, desperate and ragged. “There’s food in there, I seen it! They got food in there! They’re gonna keep it for themselves!”

That was the beginning of it.

The murmuring swelled at once into a hundred voices. Boot crunched forward against the snowbanks. Some were hammering at the outer plating with mittened fists.

I crossed to the door and looked out.

The front ranks had broken formation and pressed up against the train despite the brigadiers’ rifles and warnings.

“Captain!”

God knew I only had room for some of them.

“Can you hear us Captain!”

A woman in a torn blue shawl lifted a little girl above the crowd, as though by raising her physically she might elevate her in Providence’s sight as well. “Captain!” she cried. “Captain, please!”

There are moments in a man’s life when all avenues close at once and only one path remains. One may spend years dreading the cruelty of necessity. When it arrives, it is often strangely calm.

I stepped down from the carriage.

“Stand fast!” I roared.

The mob quieted, though not entirely.

“There is food,” I said. “There is fuel, there is shelter, there is medicine.”

A sound went up then, but I was careful not to let hope grab hold. I raised my hand. “It is not enough.”

I could see the incomprehension first. Then refusal. Then dawning, hideous understanding.

“There are stores enough to preserve a portion of us through the coming storm. But there is not enough for all.”

For a heartbeat the world seemed to pause. Then the shouting began.

The woman in the blue shawl still held up her child. She did not shout. She only stared at me with such naked terror that I thought I should remember her face in Hell.

The first stone struck the side of the carriage with a ridiculous little tap, so small a sound for the end of all order. Then another man surged forward, and another, and the brigadiers lowered their rifles in earnest.

I raised my arms, though I knew even as I did so that command had already become theatre.

“Hear me!” I shouted. “Hear me, damn you! Children first. Mothers with infants. The engine crew, the doctors, the labourers required to keep the generator alive. The remainder will be chosen by lot. That is the only justice left to us.”

Some fell to begging. Some to curses. Men who had marched at my back from London through all the wasted miles now bared their teeth at me as if I had put the frost there myself. A woman dropped to her knees, still clutching her child, and screamed that I could not do this. An old man laughed and laughed until blood ran from his lips. One fellow tried to force the line and was clubbed down by Wilkes, whereupon the crowd recoiled a pace as though suddenly recollecting that rifles were still rifles even at the end of the world.

Then the lottery began.

We tore the slips from an engineer’s ledger and marked them by lantern-light, some with charcoal crosses, some left cruelly blank. Men and women came forward as though to the altar, their hands shaking so violently they could scarcely unfold the paper they had drawn. Those chosen were hurried toward the sound carriages. Those refused were turned away to the lee of the train, where snow trenches were already being hacked beneath the broken wagons.

The woman in the blue shawl drew a blank.

For a moment she only stared at it. Then, with a movement so swift I scarcely saw it, she thrust the child into my arms.

“She is small,” she said. Not weeping. Not pleading. Only speaking with the dreadful politeness of the desperate. “She will take little room.”

The girl clutched at my coat with stiff red hands. I looked from mother to child and found that whatever words had once lived in me had frozen long ago.

Wilkes took the child. The woman did not follow.

By dusk the chosen were packed into the heated cars, shoulder to shoulder, breath steaming the glass. Outside, the rest huddled in pits and under tarpaulins, pressed against the iron flank of the Dreadnaught as if proximity alone might persuade it to mercy. The generator coughed, shuddered, and at last began to thrum beneath our feet like some giant heart reluctantly woken.

“We are your people, Captain!”

And the winds returned.

“Do you hear us, Captain?”

It came down upon us out of the white north with a voice like God’s own wrath, smothering cries, lanterns, commands. Snow swept over us in great ghostly sheets. Doors slammed. Men vanished three paces from where they stood.

“What about us, Captain?”

And through it all from the delicate warmth, above the rising storm, I could hear each and every one.

“Captain!”