among the glaciers and the rocks

Two to a sack, like orphans. The first time Jopson reaches out for him in the night, Crozier half-thinks he’s dreaming — a drowsy pressing knee, a hand clasping at his shirttail, a face pressed to his shoulder like an embrace. Jopson’s body is a warm bundle in his arms; Crozier can feel the beating of his heart. If Crozier can isolate the sound of Jopson’s breathing, and cut away the whistling of the wind and the creak of waxed canvas, it is almost soothing. Jopson is with him here, at the end of the world, and he is alive. Everything is blurred and indistinct, as if it were worn smooth by wind — the edges of things bleed into each other, fur and wool, limb against limb.

Crozier wakes from his drowsing in a state of stiffness, as men do — as he himself has often done in conditions almost as miserable as these, proving that some base impulses are stronger than all reason. Not for many years. He’s an old man, in a desolate place.

His pleasant state of detachment is broken by one thing that is clear and unambiguous — the sensation of Jopson’s hand finding his hip beneath his smallclothes, the very uppermost crease of his leg. Crozier makes a sleepy sound and stirs his legs. This could be a dream, if not for the pains in his bones, the ache in his right hip at least as insistent as the tug of arousal in his groin. Jopson’s hand is moving in his drawers, painstakingly slow, by centimeters. Warm skin, and cautious touches — the kind of caress Crozier hasn’t felt in upwards of five years now, a lover’s touch. There’s been some sort of mistake.

The gesture is unmistakable, even without words: it is an offer of assistance. Let me help.

“That won’t be necessary, Jopson.” Crozier would never demand such things from him; to press him into service would be like inexcusable. Crozier chuckles faintly, shifting in their wolfskin bed, and that is a mistake.

“It’s nothing, sir. Don’t think of it.” Jopson extricates himself from the blankets, tugging them back into place behind them. Crozier’s very bones ache, and he can’t sit up fast enough to catch him by the sleeve. Silhouetted against the canvas in the mouth of their tent, Jopson looks terribly small.

He has made a terrible mistake — he ought to have said nothing at all. It was only a misguided gesture, only a touch.

“Wait,” Crozier says, “Thomas, wait,” but his voice is diminished by thirst into almost nothing. The canvas parts with a tug and a rattle, and Jopson steps out into the night.

Crozier casts about for his boots and coat, but pain and sleepiness have made him sluggish. The flicker of desire in his groin has been effectively squashed, but none of the other consequences of fitful sleep are so quick to leave him,

The damned fool doesn’t even have his gloves on. It would be comical if it weren’t so dreadful. The cold air stings Crozier’s bare face like a slap — he emerges in time to see Jopson already tramping away over the rocks. His uneven gait betrays him — one of his boots is only half-on. Crozier calls his name, and that unsteady loping breaks into a run.

How had he never seen this? How had he never known? The damned fool will break his neck out here in the cold, he’ll lose his nose to frostbite, all over his stung pride — extremities begin to freeze and blacken in mere moments. He’ll make a fine midnight snack for that thing out there.

The wind whips Crozier’s greatcoat against his legs — without his waxed canvas slops the cold cuts painfully through as if there were great open slashes in the cloth. And Jopson is only in his short jacket, scarcely any more protection in these temperatures than a bare shirt.

Crozier calls his name again. He can only stump after him so quickly. “Come back, you damned fool—”

Jopson’s stride is determined — away from the tents, away from the camp, out into the open.He means to walk to his death. Walk toward the horizon or the water’s edge, whichever comes first. Crozier sucks in a stabbing lungful of cold air, and shouts.

“Thomas Jopson, I am your captain! I order you to stop where you are. I am ordering you now!”

This may have raised the alarm on them both, but it’s impossible to care. Jopson stumbles, landing on his knees in the sharp gravel with his bare hands flung out to catch himself, and Crozier sucks an involuntary breath at that. Kneeling down before him nearly makes Crozier himself topple — there are purple-brown shadows under Jopson’s eyes that are not a trick of the light. Those eyes that were always so keen to note the wash of sweat on the captain’s forehead or a stray thread jutting from a cuff. They are dull now, colorless and inert as marbles. His hair is an unbrushed rat’s nest, already freezing stiff with the moisture from their shared bed.

“I forgot myself, sir. Seems to be a lot of that about these days.”

Well, he isn’t wrong about that. This sickness that gnaws at them all takes the faculty of remembering almost before anything else. At first one could mistake it for a gentle absent-mindedness, an excusable oversight in the hurry and bustle of abandoning the ships. The men of Erebus and Terror are devouring themselves from the inside. They can remember their mothers’ names, but not when they last ate, or where they put their snow goggles. But Jopson has not forgotten that Crozier is his captain and his master, any more than Crozier can forget that this is the man who followed him since he was a youth scarcely older than a ship’s boy, the man who followed him to Antarctica and back.

“It doesn’t matter, Jopson. It was only surprise.”

Jopson shakes his head as if blinking away tears, but no tears come to his eyes.

“Come back inside,” Crozier says — he wants to wrap his unbuttoned coat around him, to draw him in against his side, but the fear that Jopson would refuse it rides high in his throat.

“I won’t trouble you again.”

“Don’t be a fool, Jopson. I need you with all your parts attached.”

“You don’t need me now at all.”

Jopson’s body is racked with shivering, as his bare white hands contract into fists — the knuckles and fingertips are already turning a queer ashen color, and it’s enough to make Crozier’s heart leap in his throat. There is wariness in his eyes, and pain, and a hardness like a stone.

What a wreckage of himself Jopson is — dark with beard, red-rimmed and blue-ringed. Francis can’t protect this man. He can’t protect his own men from their own folly, not even the least of them, the folly of coming here under the command of men like Crozier himself. This man has seen Crozier at his undisputed worst — not only in the grip of the horrors but in the grip of his vices, at his cruelest. No wonder he’s petrified. He’s seen Crozier order a man flogged with dirtiness as the finishing touch, the final and most pungent charge. Every man present that day knew what dirtiness entailed, and what manner of man practiced it. And now his Jopson, a man who sees everything, hears everything, lets nothing slip — who’d sat by his bedside listening to him rave and sponged the piss from the bedsheets. Crozier’s a debilitated old man, and Jopson is so young — not even thirty-one, in the prime of his useful years, as handsome as he’ll ever be and devoted to a vindictive old drunkard. Why? Why any of it?

The damned wind is howling in their ears, howling like its own beast. Arctic stillness is cruel enough, but the wind carries away any comforting slip of warmth that might be cherished close to the body, and brings frostbite. They’ll both get frostbite, standing out in the cold like this hallooing at each other.

Crozier presses his wrist to his forehead, squeezing shut his eyes and feeling the prickle of ice crystals. “Come back inside. I’ll tell you about the Hecla.”

Fitzjames would be proud of him, stalling a difficult conversation with hoary old anecdotes about his travels. Jopson surrenders himself to Crozier’s handling — how many times has Crozier relied on Jopson to guide him back against a pillow, to straighten a seam?

Crozier lifts Jopson up with an arm around his back. The blood from his gashed hands is already freezing solid. It’s as if Crozier can still feel the pounding of his heart.

*

Past the tent-flaps he pulls Jopson down onto the blankets, drawing him down onto his knees and then back against a rolled-up coat. It’s not the softest pillow ever slept on, but it should serve their purposes. What little warmth was left in their bed before the bedclothes were torn back is shrinking away like water.

Jopson moans faintly, flexing his hands in front of his chest. There’s frost on his beard, frost on his cheeks. Crozier chafes his fingers between his gloved palms, trying to coax a little warmth in past the chapped surface. His own hands begin to smart from contact with the cold.

Jopson might yet lose those fingers. He’ll never feel his way around a clothes-brush or turn the pages of a newspaper. Even if he survives, even if by some miracle they all survive, he’ll sail back to England a maimed man. All the gallant gestures in the world won’t be enough to make him whole. Crozier kisses his hands — kisses his pale bloodless fingers, and lets them linger against his splitting lips. Jopson makes a faint sound of discomfort, and swallows audibly.

“This is going to hurt, you know.” No use lying about it. When frozen flesh begins to thaw, it burns worse than being held to the surface of a stove. Like being pricked with a hundred thousand needles, and each one heated in Dr. Stanley’s cauterizing flame. “It’ll hurt like hellfire. In the morning I’ll have Mr. Bridgens see to you. I won’t leave you.”

No doubt Bridgens had seen what he himself hadn’t — being wise beyond his years and one of the great Miss Nancys of the service. Harmless, harmless, utterly harmless, what great crime could there be in that?

“Tell me about the Hecla,” Jopson says firmly.

Crozier clears his throat.

“As you might know, Parry fancied himself a musical sort of man, and he brought along an old violin with him, for practice. He and a few fellows would put on concerts for the rest of us. He was as accomplished a musician as he claimed, but his repertory was limited — between the same six tunes and the sound of that infernal barrel organ, the sound of the ice would have been preferable. A herd of squealing pigs would be preferable.”

“I still hear it at night.” Jopson’s voice is so quiet this time that Crozier thinks he imagined it, if not for the parting of those faint bloodless lips. “The groaning of the ice.”

Crozier pauses, stumbling in mid-anecdote. “You never told me that.”

“What would it have helped?”

The moisture of their breath has frozen to a thin rime on the canvas roof, and flecks of it jostle free as the two of them draw inside.

Crozier knows himself to be a difficult man to love. He hasn’t made much of a lover, either, in all his years — pressing tedious suits, making fumbling love in a bed too narrow for a man and woman to lie beside each other, offering such thin consolations as he can. If he could make Jopson happy, it would be perhaps the last good thing he does — will ever do. Crozier draws Jopson in snug against himself, covering him with his body. He can’t keep out the cold, but he’ll lend him whatever he can. He’ll hide him.

“That’s enough about the Hecla. Let’s thaw you out, my good man.” It’s cruel to tease him in such a state, but the necessity of putting him at ease feels as pressing as a third person in the room. There must be some means of proving that there’s been no offense caused. An impertinent touch and an impertinent suggestion, and what harm? What harm could there possibly be in Thomas Jopson? This man loves him. This man followed him to this Godforsaken place out of love.

They are face to face and knee to knee. Jopson is practically in his lap, with the fur blankets arrayed over him like a ragged cloak. It seems like a terrible long while before Jopson speaks again, though his faculties are returning him drop by drop. Crozier makes himself busy straightening cuffs and tugging gloves onto Jopson’s hands.

“The men will talk of us,” Jopson finally says, through chattering teeth.

“Bugger the men,” Crozier says.

Jopson laughs, shoulders jerking convulsively. His face is still blanched and frost-eaten, the dark shadow of his beard standing out darker than ever.

“I’ll have to be the one shaving you, these days.” Crozier draws the backs of two fingers down Jopson’s cheek, feeling the roughened skin as well as the blunt snag of new whiskers.

“It’s a lost cause, that. No use in staying decent.”

Here in the open air a man might shave and towel the grease from his face and comb his hair and still make an ugly corpse. So much damned work went into keeping up appearances of good order, and now those appearances have failed them.

“Have you allotted anything back in England? To your family.” Not his mother. Crozier understands that well enough despite Jopson’s delicacy. All the double pay in the world can’t help a dead woman.

Jopson swallows weakly. “My father. He lives at Gee Street, in London.”

The man is a valet at some finer house, or an ancient footman, or something else Crozier can’t remember. Another one of those insidious domestic roles, easily forgotten. That would have been Thomas Jopson’s fate, if he’d never adhered himself to Crozier — gloved hands, and £35 a year, and a lonely backstairs room. Gray hairs, and creaking knees, and a pension. Jopson deserves these things for a lifetime of service, and Crozier can’t give them to him.

Crozier can’t look at him without an awful swelling of sentiment in his throat — a surge of love that threatens to choke him. He swallows it back, like a bitter draught. “I’ll look after that for you. I’ll tell him how you made lieutenant.”

“Only a third lieutenant, sir.”

“And a better man than the whole host of them.”

This journey should have been the making of him — instead it has killed all the hope in his eyes. Jopson looks down, overcome or ashamed, and Crozier presses two kisses to his bruised blue eyelids — breathing the warmth against Jopson’s face, and feeling Jopson’s hands flex in his shirtfront like an old man’s rheumatic appendages. He’s come to love him as well, to love him like a well-worn familiar thing, and only too late.