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James Fitzjames is seated at the right hand of Franklin, and he is watching the story unfold.
Franklin had called it a play. That is generous; in reality it is a series of tableaus, actors in facepaint and costumes performing history’s most glamorous victories and defeats for an audience of hundreds. Their stillness is commendable, but their very breath betrays them. James can see them move, sees their skin drip sweat under the stagelights. “Lord Nelson at the Nile,” says the storyteller, standing at stage left with his book in his hands. “Sir Richard Burton amongst the Arabs. Caesar crossing the Rubicon.”
It had taken a long time for his dress uniform to stop feeling like a costume. Now it fits him like a lover’s embrace, and James has not felt the need to adjust his collar in years. The curtain falls and he applauds with spotless gloves. Feeling bold, he leans across to Franklin and whispers, “Do you suppose he is enjoying it as well?”
Franklin is a large man, just shy of elderly, with a lugubrious face and eyes that shine with good humor despite it. He looks several seats away- doesn’t even attempt to disguise the action as anything other than what it is- to where his niece is sitting, looking a vision in blue. Beside her, his gloved hand resting dangerously close to hers upon the rail, is Francis Crozier.
He too is a vision, resplendent in his dress uniform. His medals- far fewer than he has truly earned- are lined up on his chest like marines in formation. James watches him turn to Miss Cracroft, whispering something to her with his lips curled in a feline smile. They look well together. Lion and lioness. The gap in Francis’ teeth strikes James as odd, frustrating. He ought not to be a handsome man. His features, taken individually, are unremarkable, yet as a whole there is a certain appeal to him that makes James wish dearly to be the recipient of those whispers.
“The poor soul,” says Franklin. His voice is not without sympathy. “He does not look well. I suppose he is sick from what he eats.”
It is a fool’s errand to argue with Franklin. James, feeling somewhat diminished, returns his attention to the stage. Wellington at Waterloo, says the storyteller. Algonquin massacred by Mohawk. Again, the curtains part.
The deck of the Erebus is beautifully recreated on stage, complete with falling snow and glistening ice. Deck hands stand scattered in attitudes of exaggerated action, both literally and figuratively frozen to the planks. At center stage stand two men, one handsome, the other ugly. Both captains. Both standing with mute poise at the end of the world. The audience murmurs in delight.
“Captain James Fitzjames at furthest north,” says the storyteller. He closes the book.
The applause is thunderous. It shakes the ground, the very earth itself. James feels Franklin’s hand on his shoulder, an approving gesture. “Go on, son,” he says. His tone is playful one, as though offering a child a sweet before dinner. “Take a bow.”
Franklin’s hand slips from his shoulder and James looks up, sees him watching him from the box while James smiles at him from the stage. His collar is too tight for his throat, and he is sweating through his uniform under the stagelights, but he is an actor, and these things are only inconveniences. James bows low with a flourish, and when he rises, the audience rises with him in a standing ovation that makes his heart feel full.
“Three cheers for Captain Fitzjames!” someone cries. “Three cheers for the man who found the Northwest Passage! Hip hip!”
“Hurrah!”
“Hip hip!”
“Hurrah!”
They cheer once more, this one the loudest of all. Someone throws a rose on stage; James stoops to pick it up, and scarcely has he straightened when four more follow it in quick succession. He picks them up too, blushing furiously, and holds them to his chest in confused happiness. He looks to that short, ugly man, his co-star, and sees Francis standing solemnly with his jaw clenched and his hands clasped behind his back. No one throws roses at his feet.
“Francis,” James smiles, fond. He holds out his roses. “Are they not beautiful?”
The look in Francis’ eyes makes James’ blood run cold. His voice stammers into silence. Francis swallows grimly and looks away, not speaking. “What’s wrong?” says James, his voice faltering. “Damn you, Francis. Will you not tell me?”
Francis gives him a grim look. “It is only that I know what they will say, in the end,” he says. “When we’re dead and gone.”
James squints at the crowd, but he is having trouble keeping focus. He rubs his eye and squints again, but still, his vision fails him.
“Look at him!” someone cheers. “Can’t even see straight, can he! How blind they all were!”
“Three cheers for Captain Fitzjames! Three cheers for Franklin’s fuck-up!”
“The bastard son! The embarrassment!”
“The man who led his crew to their deaths!”
“A fool!” someone shrieks with laughter. “Look at him! What a ridiculous man!”
James’ hands- pale and mottled with bruises- jump to cover his chest. The dress exposes him horribly. How could he ever have thought he looked well in it? They can see his sunken collarbones, his scars, his pitiful ribs. He stumbles backwards as they fling more roses, these ones rotting but not quite dead. Like him.
“Você deveria estar esfregando o chão como sua mãe!”
“Crew-killer! You’ve murdered them all!”
“The greatest failure in naval history!”
“Three cheers for the failed explorer!”
“You’re no captain! You’re nothing but a liar and a fraud!”
“Quiet!” James roars. He feels his throat begin to bleed. “Leave me be! God, leave me be . . .”
He wants to turn and run. To tear open the curtain behind him for that terrible, final curtain call, and disappear into the backstage of the world. But Francis is standing on the far side of the crowd, loitering by the door as he always does at parties, and he looks desperately in need of a friend.
James hikes up his skirts and walks.
The first step is a hard one. The second is easier. By the tenth he’s forcing his way through the crowd, straining with the effort of pulling the sledge behind him. His boots are wearing thin on the ice as he struggles for purchase. The sun is blindingly bright. Someone is shouting at him still, but he ignores it. Francis is there by the door. Francis needs a friend.
“We’re making camp. You can stop pulling.”
James sways on his feet. He blinks stupidly at the sun, the sky, the vast expanse of desolate terrain. Francis is holding him upright. Around him, men are tearing off their harnesses, collapsing in heaps, emptying the boats of supplies. He looks, dazed, into Francis’ face. The gap in his teeth. The eyes that run him through.
“Where were you, just now?” says Francis. His voice is too quiet to drown out the ringing in James’ head.
James can feel himself dissolving like scar tissue. He wonders vaguely if he’s going to dissipate into the air. “I believe I fell asleep on my feet,” he says. Francis’ arms are around him and it takes him a long moment to realize that it’s because he’s collapsed, and is being slowly lowered to the ground.
“Help me,” James breathes. His voice cracks with the effort of even that. “Help me out of it.”
It is not a great, gilded death, but it is his.
His skin is black with bruises. His hair comes away in clumps. He smells like the grave. But his eyes- one hazel, one bleeding in the socket- are clear for the first time in days, so Francis takes one brittle hand in his own and tries to rub a little warmth back into it. “Are you certain, James?” he asks. He won’t let his voice shake. Not for anything in the world. “Are you certain?”
He has watched, impotent and scared, as James wastes away. He has wasted away with him. James’ tent smells like rot and oozing blood but Francis is there every hour he can be spared, having decided long ago that this sad and pitiful death will not be a lonely one. He will be there, and he will keep James talking, and when he is dead Francis will do whatever he must to ensure his grave is undefiled. Then he will quietly bury the part of himself that died with him and put on a brave face for the men. He has to.
James holds Francis’ gaze and nods.
It is not a great, gilded death, but it is the one that James wants.
Francis’ grip tightens on his hand. He feels hopelessly inadequate to the task. He has never known how to offer comfort to a man in need of it, and now, to offer him that final act of comfort, to deliver him to his rest . . . words fail him. Thought and action fail him. Cowardice settles its teeth into his heart and bites down hard.
“Leave us, Mr. Bridgens,” he says hoarsely. James loved an audience. For this, Francis will grant him his privacy.
Bridgens trembles beside him, head bowed, James’ other hand in his. “Sir, if I may,” he says quietly, reaching across him to produce a small glass bottle. “Use this.”
James’ pupils dilate as the bottle crosses his field of vision. Francis squeezes his hand again, wishes he could do more.
“His reflexes will try to spit it out,” says Bridgens. Francis listens; he has never paid such attention in all his life. “You’ll have to help it down. Like this.”
His hand settles on James’ bare throat and gently palpates it, as though working the poison in. James lies still and endures it. His eyes are damp, but he seems calmer now. His breathing is steady. Readying himself for what is to come.
Bridgens stands. He is on the verge of tears, and some part of Francis is grateful for that; tears ought to be shed, but his own won’t fall. Perhaps he is beyond tears.
“It was an honor serving you, sir,” says Bridgens. His voice is shaking. “You’re a good man. There will be poems.”
He releases James’ hand- a lingering touch- and takes his leave, letting the tent fall closed behind him. They are alone, now. No audience. No vanity.
It is not a great, gilded death, but it is the one that Francis gives him.
It is said, among the natives, that the body retains sensation after death.
The flickering flame within himself- the candle in the dark window of every human soul- is extinguished with a loving hand, leaving only a curling wisp of smoke.
James Fitzjames gets up.
He is the curling smoke, the last breath of the candle, yet he retains just enough sensation to feel Francis’ hand on his throat. His other hand, shaking, brushes James’ lank hair off his brow. James watches this and feels a wild, desperate desire to scream. To take Francis by the shoulders and shake him, as he had once been shaken. To tell him, I am here. I am with you.
He can do neither of those things. Instead he watches Francis lower his head to James’ chest and sob. It is a small, wretched thing, half-strangled in his throat so the men won’t hear. Francis’ body trembles with the effort of silencing himself. After a moment he lifts his head, and James sees that his face is very pale, and his mouth is set in a thin line. He raises one of James’ hands to his lips and kisses his cold fingers.
James stands, unseen in death as in life, and watches Francis pray. He touches his hand to Francis’ shoulder, hoping perhaps that he might reach out from beyond death and comfort him, but Francis flinches as though from a cold wind, and James lets his hand drop. He listens, heart in his throat, as Francis chokes his way through a service. His words are clumsy, awkward, as they always are.
“Go on, brother,” he croaks, at the end of it all, when his words fail him and the service staggers bleakly into silence. “Go on ahead of me and find your rest. I’ll follow. I'll follow.”
James looks into his face and wishes dearly that he could hold him. How it would devastate him to know that James had not gone on.
He wants to go on.
He doesn’t go on.
He stays.
He stays when Hickey defiles his body. He doesn’t know why he’s watching. Maybe Hell is watching.
When it’s over, Goodsir kneels by his grave. He looks cold and colorless. He’s shivering. He takes off his coat anyway and spreads it over the ruin of James’ decency. So shines a good deed in a weary world, thinks James, as gloved hands drag Goodsir back to the sledges.
He stays when the Tuunbaq is dying, sick from what it eats, choking on Hickey’s corpse and Francis’ chains and Goodsir’s concoction of sacred poisons. He lends his strength to Francis’ hands and heaves on the chain with him, screaming and snarling as the Tuunbaq groans, wet and guttural, before it expires. He guards Francis until Silna can find him- he paces the ice, eyes wide and staring, a scurvy-stricken ghoul. He thinks of a watchdog, which makes him think of a dog watch, which makes him think of the men, all dead and eaten and shat out and forgotten, and he lets out a laugh that shrieks across the ice like a frigid wind.
He stays when Francis loses his hand. He touches the flat stump and hopes that the chill of his touch will dull the pain.
Francis’ eyes are clouded from fever rather than drink; he is delirious, and raving. He shouts in his sleep. He mutters, rambles. He cries out for James once, just once, and James is there, as he is always there.
He is there when Francis sleeps, and when he wakes, a flickering light at the edge of his vision.
He is there when Aglooka catches his first seal. It takes him months to master it, one-handed and unfamiliar with the act, but when he drags the beast up onto the ice his fellow hunters encourage him and smile.
He is there when Sir James Ross loses all hope. Aglooka sits just outside the tent where Ross is lied to, yet a thousand miles stand between them. James would be enraged if he didn’t know that Aglooka is a ghost himself, dead to the world and condemned to wander, like James, at the ends of the earth. So he blesses Ross’ retreating back, and presides over Aglooka’s sleep until he stops muttering his name.
It is a comfort to ascribe the little mundanities in his life to the acts of ghosts.
Aglooka cuts himself deep on the edge of a spear and sews it closed with a cold bone needle. It hurts, but something holds his hand steady as the needle slides home. That is McDonald, he thinks dimly. Or Stanley. There is a horde of ghosts at his back and his mind conjures each to their purpose.
These are the fantasies of a deluded mind, and Aglooka is not so old and senile as to forget this. Still, he is just old and senile enough to see no point in refusing to indulge them. The years drip by like melting ice, and these almost-ghosts that shimmer in the sundogs and move at the edges of his vision are all he has.
Aglooka, the children say, when they see he has been staring at the ice for too long. Tell us a story. That’s how it’s done in this part of the world. Stories are passed down from generation to generation, plaited into the children’s minds like braids in a woman’s hair.
Aglooka is no good at telling stories. He hasn’t the talent for it. When he speaks- if he speaks- he does so with blunt, halting words. Their language is ugly in his mouth, but serviceable. If James were there, he thinks, he would fill their heads with the finest foreigner’s tales they’d ever heard, and he would do the voices. But James is not here, and in all Aglooka’s pantheon of ghosts, his is the only spirit he cannot bear to conjure up.
James has not gone far from Aglooka for fifteen years. It is the closest thing he has found to a purpose.
The in-between places of the world are cruel, lonely places. Time feels thin here. There is no rest, no sleep, no adventures. Only waiting, and a sense of being both part of the world and not of it. If James were to close his eyes and allow himself to listen, he believes he could hear a woman whistling in London, or a child’s heartbeat in India. This would frighten him, if he weren’t dead and beyond fear. As it stands, there is only one heartbeat he cares to hear, and he intends to listen until it stops.
So he stands vigil at Aglooka’s tent, and grants him peaceful sleep. When nightmares trouble him, as they often do, James tangles his fingers in his dreams and smooths out their edges. They become dreams of hearth and home, or, more often, dreamless sleeps that rest the body and rejuvenate the mind.
In time, Aglooka forgets Sophia’s face. James does his best to keep her alive in his dreams, to paint a portrait of her as best he can, but his attempts fall pitifully short, and it seems cruel to go on trying. Aglooka is old, now. Very old. It is better to let him forget things, and let him forget the forgetting.
He has not forgotten James yet. James holds onto that, and cherishes it like the last sunrise before a long arctic winter.
Aglooka is dying.
The other elders know this and ensure that he is cared for. Food is brought to him in his tent. Extra furs to warm him. The children only know that he doesn’t come out as much as he once did, so they come and pester him instead, and he endures it with good grace. In the end, it doesn’t matter. He is still dying.
The ghosts, as he calls them- these afterimages, faded ideas and memories of old friends- linger in his mind. They’re intimately familiar to him now. He hopes that wherever Bridgens is, he has been reunited with his love. That Jopson is with his mother. That Stanley, poor bastard, has finally fallen asleep.
He sees James once. Only once. At the end.
Aglooka knows him by the shape of his silhouette against the gap in the tent. The sight of him makes a throb of bleak despair threaten to break his heart. There had been a part of him that had hoped James would never come to him. That he, out of all of them, had been given a rest so deep and so absolute that nothing could stir him. Yet there he is, unmistakable, stooped slightly in the entrance to Aglooka’s tent as though asking if he might intrude.
“James,” says Francis. Then, “James.”
James stills. His eyes grow wide. Slowly he enters the tent, still stooped, and sits down beside him like he’d known there’d be a place for him there. Francis tries to sit up, but the effort exhausts him, so he scoots aside and allows James a little room to rest himself on the furs. Not that a ghost needs rest, he thinks in dazed wonder. James is here. James has come back for him, at what must surely be the end of his days.
James’ looks down at him with his lips slightly parted in surprise. There is an immaterial look to him, as though Francis’ hand might simply pass through without touching, yet when he reaches out and touches his fingers to the ruined stump of Francis’ wrist, he feels it.
“Lost your joy, have you?” says James. His voice is hoarse from dying.
It has been a long, long time since Francis has heard English. He feels something feeble clench in his heart at the sound. “Stay,” he croaks. “Sit with me.”
A fierce look crosses James’ face as he nods. With the utmost care, he brushes the thinning gray hair back from Francis’ forehead. “I never left,” he says. “Though I wonder why you are only seeing me now.”
“Perhaps it is because I am dying,” says Francis. It is a longer sentence than he can comfortably manage at this stage. He coughs wetly and feels James’ hand continue stroking his hair, cold, yet comfortably real.
“I’ll stay,” James promises him. “I’ll stay, as you once did for me, and I’ll ease you into it. It’s not so bad, you know.”
They sit together, not talking, and watch the firelight lick the air through the gaps in the tent. Francis can smell the sweet scent of cooking meat. There is plenty of food to go around. The children are playing among the tents, laughing, singing songs. They do not know he is dying.
James’ fingertips prickle along his scalp like drops of water. “I don’t suppose you can feel that,” James says softly.
“I feel it,” says Francis. His breathing is slow, labored. Every breath is a struggle. It won’t be long now, he realizes. Not long now before he joins James in death. At least they’ll be together.
He prays to God that they’ll be together.
James’ breath is cold against his forehead, but the kiss he leaves there is the warmest thing Francis has felt in years. “Did I ever tell you,” he murmurs, settling himself into a more comfortable position, as though preparing to be there for a while, “about when I was alone in our camp, with the Tuunbaq fast approaching, and all I had to hand were a few Congreve rockets . . .”
Francis can feel something rising in him as big and bright as the arctic sun. He laughs himself weak, laughs until the hot tears that sting his eyes might come from joy as much as grief. “Is this your unfinished business?” he croaks, wiping the moisture from his eyelashes before it can freeze. “To bore me to death?”
“Is it working?” says James, which only makes Francis laugh harder. James is smiling now. To think, Francis had almost forgotten the shape of that smile. “Mind yourself- I’m just getting to the good part.”
James tells Francis stories.
He tells him new ones at first- stories of the Tuunbaq, and of the doings on Erebus while Francis had been indisposed. Stories of Rumb and Rose Hill and the secret, golden summers of James’ childhood. Then he tells him the stories that he already knows, the ones that James had worn thin in life and now wore thinner in death. Francis listens, really listens to him, and he laughs in all the right places. At some point, James is not sure when, their hands find each other, and lay laced together atop Francis’ fur blankets.
The last story James tells is a tired old favorite- the tale of the Chinese sniper. It takes half an hour longer to tell. He lifts his arm for dramatic effect and shows Francis the places where the bullet pierced him, and later, where the scar tissue dissolved and hastened his death. The wounds are open, but painless and clean, and Francis can look through them. “What a strange thing your body has become,” he muses aloud, as he inspects the marks with all the thoroughness of a Doubting Thomas. “I swear, you look as healthy and youthful as I remember you, yet when the light catches you just so, I see the scurvy, and the blood in your eye.”
“Death is still a mystery to me,” James admits. “Even after so long inhabiting it.”
Francis’ hand is warm and solid against James’ side. He looks up at him, and James remembers all at once what it is like to be flayed open by those eyes. “Are you in any pain?” asks Francis. There’s not an ounce of pity in his voice, but there’s something like worry.
“Only sometimes,” says James, honestly. “Are you?”
Francis hesitates. “Do you know,” he says, “I don’t believe I am.”
James holds out his hand. Francis takes it, and, with great care, James lifts him up out of himself.
“My God,” Francis says, looking down at the body. He trembles, and James finally- finally- gets his arms around him and holds him up, able at last to do physically what he has only done in dreams for the past fifteen years. “I did not even feel it. When do you suppose it happened?”
“About halfway through my time on the Euphrates, I should think,” says James gently. “I thought it best to simply carry on with the tale.”
One of James’ hands is resting over Francis’ heart. Francis folds his hand over it, squeezing it as though to steady himself. Then his other hand, pearlescent and shimmering, does the same. He sinks to his knees and James follows him, and they hold each other.
“Thank you,” says Francis, after a while. James rests his forehead against Francis’ neck and doesn’t speak.
The real Northwest Passage- illusive, unattainable, brimming with possibility- must surely be the passage between this place and the undiscovered country. “What do you suppose is beyond it?” Francis asks, on another of his long, long walks with James. Two ghosts, flickering in and out of the world, yet real enough to find comfort in each other’s presence.
James takes a long moment before he answers. “Perhaps it varies,” he says slowly. “Perhaps for some it is the eternal rest. Perhaps for others, it is . . . well, the rest. The rest of one’s life.”
A laugh sputters out of Francis then, unexpected and not wholly joyful. “Is there more life, then? Beyond the Passage? Must it go on and on?”
“I do not believe it must, but . . .” James’ gaze turns hopefully toward the sky. “I believe it may.”
Francis touches James’ shoulder as they walk, just rests his hand lightly on the back of his neck. He is long past wondering why they can touch, immaterial beings though they are. Perhaps it is because they are made of the same material. They are the same soulstuff, he and James.
Francis knows him well, and can imagine the agonies he’s endured these long years alone. A ghost with little more than an old man to haunt, and not even that anymore. No adventures. The undiscovered country lay before him, waiting for James to explore it, but even that seemed to be barred to him until he finished whatever he was left on this earth to do.
God willing, whatever lies beyond the Passage, they will share it. Francis clings to that with a kind of selfish fury. He hopes against hope that their unfinished business- whatever it may be- will be finished in unison, that they might walk into the undiscovered country as brothers, and explore it for themselves.
Fate is rarely so kind.
“Do you know,” says James, idly. “I believe this is the belly of the Tuunbaq.”
They are watching the northern lights curl like silk ribbons above them, bright enough to bathe the ice in fractals of cool green light. James’ heart could crack in half for the beauty of it, and for one shining moment, he imagines the sky opening up, revealing the Passage that leads from this world to the next.
Francis hums noncommittally, a noise that means, convince me. James is intimately familiar with that noise. He has spent the last hundred years or so listening to it.
“Not this,” he clarifies, touching his hand to Francis’ chest. “Not us. Not the in-between places. But the ice, and the sea beneath, and this,” he gestures wide at the vast expanse of ice, which stretches out and away in every direction. “I believe that what the Tuunbaq consumes, it . . . well, it consumes. Giving back what was taken, in a way.”
Francis hesitates, his expression uncertain. “Do you suppose . . .” he says, and his voice trails off.
James nods mutely and looks back at the sky. It is why the black waters lapping at the bottom of the fishing holes remind him of Collins’ sigh, and why the wind whistling across the ice sounds like Tozer, his voice raised in careless singing.
“No rest for them, then,” says Francis, in a quiet, devastated voice. “No heaven, nor hell. Nor any in-between.”
“But it means that their souls remain, in one form or another,” says James. “Reborn in the sea, or the sky. They are the world, now. In it and of it.”
A long silence. Then another weak laugh from Francis. James looks over to see him smiling, with a distant look on his face, as though thinking back to that very brief chapter in their lives when they had not been dead. “You know,” he says, “I think Thomas would actually have liked that.”
James smiles too. “I think he would.”
“Sometimes when the ice begins to crack, I hear him laughing.”
“The old madman.”
“Yes,” says Francis. “A madman.”
They sit and watch the sky for a few years more. Then they get up and take a walk.
They are lying in each other’s arms, or something close to it- enjoying whatever strange union of the souls occurs when two spirits mingle themselves in the air- when James asks him. Francis is silent for a long moment, considering.
“Don’t hold out on me,” says James, stooping slightly to rest his chin upon Francis’ shoulder. “I must know. Did you hate me as I hated you, before?”
Before meaning before we were dead, though it could just as easily mean before we left England. These days, Francis can’t help but wonder if there was any such place as England. Perhaps he dreamed it. Some storybook country to lend some meaning to his death. Some significance.
“I did, in part,” Francis admits finally. James’ ghost fades a little in his arms, grows hazy at the edges. Francis has the decency to pretend he doesn’t notice. “You must understand . . . you were so young. And there we were, sailing into what must certainly be our deaths. I hated your youth, and your beauty, and what I thought were the privileges of your birth, and I hated that I could not protect you from the death that would come for us all,” He chuckles weakly and holds James a little tighter, nuzzling his face into the idea of his hair. “Death and the maiden. He always gets his due.”
James smiles wistfully and doesn’t meet Francis’ eye. “Funny, isn’t it,” he says, without much conviction, “how there is no word for her counterpart. Death and the lad, perhaps? Death and the skipper?”
“Maiden, I think, is just as well.”
He feels James smile against his neck. “When all our business is set to rights, and we are finally through with this terrible place, I believe I will wear as many dresses as I like.”
“A dress for every hour of eternity,” Francis agrees, smiling too. “Silk and brocade in every color.”
“Oh, why settle for that?” There’s amusement in James’ voice now. “I’ll have dresses made of spidersilk and seawater. The foaming crests of waves.”
“Pearls still wet from the oyster.”
“Just so. The night sky itself, with those damnable lights for a sash.”
“I should like to see that,” says Francis. He brushes a kiss against the curl of dark hair at James’ temple.
James sighs. A heavy, weary thing. “Why are we still here, Francis?”
“I’ve no answers for you, brother.”
“Is it because our names are still spoken?”
“James,” Francis murmurs, feeling very tired. “It has been more than a century. No one cares who we were or what happened to us.”
James says nothing. He knows the truth of Francis’ words as much as Francis does. Together they sway on the spot, lost in each other and in the interminable silence of the years, and soon grow so relaxed that they forget to hold themselves together, and begin to refract through the mist. Conscious, still mingling, but as immaterial as sunbeams.
Something is different today.
James produces himself fully-formed from the air and staggers off across the ice, his arms wrapped around himself as strange new sensations shiver through him. “Francis,” he hisses, in a faded voice just beginning to bloom with new life. “Francis.”
Francis rises dripping from a fissure in the ice and follows him, walking briskly to catch up with James’ longer strides. “What is it?” he says urgently. “What do you feel?”
“I feel,” James stammers. “I feel.”
He feels like a weight is lifting. Like the sun is rising. Like he’s breaking the surface of an icy pool when he hadn’t even known he’d been drowning.
“Oh,” he breathes. “Oh, Francis. They’ve found her.”
“Found who?” Francis stammers, grabbing his shoulder and turning him to face him. He gives him a look of great concern. “Found what?”
“Her,” says James, and Francis’ eyes go wide.
Erebus.
Her.
They’ve not dredged her up, not right away, but they’ve found her. Erebus lies below, still claimed by the sea. But they have found her. Explorers and scientists like they once were have found her, and James is going home. He can feel it in the air.
Francis sways on the spot, his hands still on James’ shoulders. James holds him, steadies him, and together they kneel on the ground. James doesn’t dare look up. Some private, interior part of himself knows that the sky is opening. That the rest- the rest- is just beyond it.
His ship is found. He hasn’t been forgotten.
He’s done.
“No,” James says weakly. “No, I’m . . . I’m not done. I can’t be done.”
“James,” Francis clasps his hand in both of his own. “Don’t.”
“Not again. I’m not leaving again,” James is finding it difficult to breathe. It wasn’t enough. Nearly two centuries wasn’t enough. “Not without you.”
“You have to.”
“I won’t.”
“James,” Francis’ voice cracks at that, and James falls silent.
Francis bows his head and presses his lips to James’ fingers. He is silent for a long moment, just kneeling with James’ hand in his. They are running out of time. James can feel the moments melting in his hands.
“Go on,” Francis says at last. He looks up at James and squeezes his hand, as he had done at James’ deathbed so many years before. “You go on ahead. One more time,” He laughs, a quiet, mirthless thing. “I'll follow. I will follow.”
James kisses him. It is a small thing of little consequence, but he hopes that it will keep him warm in this awful place. At least until he follows James wherever he is going.
And he will follow. James is sure of that.
When he opens his eyes, Francis is gone, and that is the end of it. James has already gone on ahead. The sky has opened to him. All he needs to do is walk.
So he pushes himself to his feet. He sets his cap at a rakish angle and looks at the sky, to the place where Here meets There. The Northwest Passage. Francis will meet him there, in his time.
James takes a deep breath, lets it out.
He starts walking.
The wreck of the Erebus was discovered by a Parks Canada team in September, 2014, after one hundred sixty-six years of searching.
A mere two years later, the wreck of the Terror was found off the coast of King William Island.
Their precise locations remain a secret to this day.