Read Online The North Water by Ian McGuire - Free Book Online

in.
    â€œLaudanum,” Sumner says again, “for the pain.”
    Black nods and goes into the medicine chest. He mixes the laudanum with rum and helps him drink it. It burns Sumner’s throat, and he thinks for a moment he will vomit it up, but manages not to. He is exhausted by the effort of speaking and doesn’t know (since he is definitely not in India) where or who he is. He shudders violently and starts to weep. Black lowers him back down onto the bunk and covers him over with a coarse wool blanket.
    In the wardroom that evening, over supper, Black reports that the surgeon is showing signs of improvement.
    â€œVery good,” Brownlee says, “but there will be no more sixth boat from now on. I don’t wish another fucker’s death to trouble my conscience.”
    â€œJust bad luck, that’s all,” Cavendish says offishly. “A man slides off the ice in a snowstorm, could happen to any of us.”
    â€œAsk me, it worked out well for him,” Drax says. “The fucker should rightly have been crushed or drowned. After ten minutes in that kind of water, a man’s blood gets claggy and his heart gives out, but the surgeon’s still alive somehow. He’s fucking blessed.”
    â€œ Blessed ?” Black says.
    Brownlee holds up his hand.
    â€œBlessed or not,” he says, “I say there will be no more sixth boat. And while we mariners are busy hunting fish, the surgeon will remain safe in his cabin reading his Homer or pulling on his pizzle, or whatever the fuck it is he does in there.”
    Cavendish rolls his eyes.
    â€œEasy enough for some bastards,” he says.
    Brownlee glares at him.
    â€œThe surgeon has his job on this ship, Cavendish, and you have yours. And let that be the fucking end of it.”
    Drax and Cavendish meet again at midnight, when the watch changes. Cavendish pulls the harpooner to one side and glances around before speaking.
    â€œHe may yet die, you know,” he says. “Have you seen the way he looks?”
    â€œHe looks to me like a cunt who’s difficult to finish off,” Drax says.
    â€œHe’s a leathery fucker, that’s for sure.”
    â€œYou should have popped a ball into him when you had the chance.”
    Cavendish shakes his head and waits for one of the Shetlanders to pass them by.
    â€œThat would never have flown,” he says. “Brownlee’s fucking sweet on him, and so is Black.”
    Drax looks away as he lights his pipe. The sky above them is alive with jiggling stars; a layer of blue-black ice clings to the rigging and coats the deck.
    â€œHow much do you think that ring is worth anyway?” Cavendish says. “I’m thinking twenty guineas, even twenty-five.”
    Drax shakes his head and sniffs, as if the very question is beneath him.
    â€œIt’s not your ring,” he says.
    â€œAnd it’s not Sumner’s either. I’d say it belongs to whichever cunt has his hands on it at the time.”
    Drax turns back to Cavendish and nods.
    â€œThat’s about the way it is,” he says.
    *   *   *
    In the darkened cabin, swaddled beneath a thick pile of bear hides and blankets, Sumner, feverish and as weak as a newborn, sleeps, wakes, then sleeps again. As the ship sails north and west through fog and drizzle, under a heavy swell with two feet of ice cladding the hull, and the men chipping it off the deck and gunwales with marlin spikes and mallets, Sumner’s opiated mind slips its moorings and drifts backwards, sideways, through fluid dreamscapes as fearsome and as thick with unnameable life as the green arctic waters which press and crash only twelve wooden inches from his head. He could be anywhere at any time, but his thoughts, like iron rushing to a magnet, return to one place only:
    A large yellow building beyond the racquet court, the astonishing noise and the slaughterhouse stench of meat and excrement, like a scene out of