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When he was young and still in school, Edward had read many books, enough that they blended together in waves and ebbs between the channels of his mind. He loved to read, devoured page after page like a drunkard who couldn’t get enough. He remembers snippets of some stories and tales that spark familiarity in his head, “Enough: no more:, ‘Tis not so sweet now as it was before.” and “It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world.” The crossdressing had confused and delighted him, but he had liked Viola; the man-made monster had not horrified him, but entranced him in its solitude and aching desire for personhood. He wanted more–he always wanted more, and thus he kept reading.
He does not have as much time for reading save for books on tying knots and dull biographies as he grows into an adult, but Edward still remembers tales of lovers and thieves, of heroes, of kings and saints. They keep him company through the long, dark nights abed in his quarters, mind spinning and heaving with nausea. Joan of Arc side-eyes him as he keeps his eyes open while John Irving prays aloud and tries to smite him with a blasphemous glare. Achilles with his golden locks chases after his hauling men, a beacon of gold among gray and white; his feet drag bright blood with each leap. Cassandra’s eyes are full of tears and she babbles in a foreign tongue next to Lady Silence, who remains mute and drawn into herself, covered in the protective shell of seal fur. She reminds him of a selkie, from another story. He wondered if she, too, would disappear into the endless horizon of the sea, black hair whipping in the wind.
Disembodied hands of hunters and princesses pull at his clothes impatiently and incessantly, dragging him from one task to the next like a marionette doll, like the ones his sisters used to play with and put on pretend shows. He feels like strings are the only thing that hold him up some days, when the fog in his brain gets too deep to traverse and buzzing fills his skull, and he feels tears beading up at the back of his eyes the whole day long.
Edward is a good lieutenant, now that he must be.
He was once a good son, when he could be.
He is not a good man any longer, but he tries to be. He tries to do the best job he can, and not ask for anything, and disappears into the shadows when he is not needed. He pours out his captain’s whiskey stores and doesn’t lick the droplets from his fingers, just watches the amber hiss and freeze in the ice. He says, “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir,” and tries not to say, “I don’t know, sir” or “I’m sorry, sir,” but they slip out anyway. He does everything he is asked to do and doesn’t cry when another man dies or another tin turns up rotten, just dry heaves in his cabin and wipes away the sweat and bile until he looks like the competent man he is meant to be. He stands with his feet apart and his arms behind his back and doesn’t take off his overcoat so he looks more than he is, taller, stronger, infallible.
His men don’t dislike him, but they don’t care for him, either. Hodgson thinks he’s too quiet; Irving thinks he’s too brooding; his superiors are caught up in themselves and their jobs, and the men below him don’t talk to him. Long hours pass where Edward does not say a word to man nor beast; only the sound of wind blowing across the ice interrupts perfect silence. Sometimes he convinces himself his vocal cords have frozen, dropped and shattered like icicles on the roof corner. Men ask him where the captain is, or what order they are meant to be following, and he has no words for them.
As a child, Edward’s mother had been afraid he was mute, that there was something wrong with him that made him so silent. He never cried, never complained in a high, whining voice for this treat or that toy, but occupied himself with the undulating world inside his head and stayed quiet, gazing out the window or wandering the moors that surrounded their estate. At dinner one night he had asked for another roll, the first thing he had said that day and his older sister had gasped, so unused she was to his voice.
He doesn’t feel like a man, most of the time. Doesn’t feel like something with a mouth and a tongue and words, just sort of like a void, a shape of something that isn’t permanent enough to exist. A vacuum made of orders and services, of soft, lulling waves and freezing Arctic catacombs. He doesn’t mind it mostly, the emptiness, the passivity he takes to his own life; but sometimes feeling hits him all at once like a tidal wave and he will drown in the sorrow and desperation he’s forced himself not to reckon with.
It happens when Henry Peglar dies, when John Bridgens refuses all help and carries the man like a bride over the threshold of the boat, onto Charon’s ferry. A good man dies, and then another, and then countless others, and Edward finds himself in a tent with a hand over his mouth, breath coming fast and ragged. His feet are unsteady beneath him, spinning as the ground is, and there’s an awful keening noise that Edward realises comes from his own jagged throat. Shame burns him, panic digs deep into his bones, and he knows that he is next, his captain is next, the steward he loves with the shining blue eyes…They’re all but one foot in the grave. There is blood in his throat, in his teeth–on the ground, now, in his handkerchief as he spits out bile and only hot scarlet comes pouring out. There is no hope for anyone he loves to make it out of this alive, just because he loves them. Love has damned him, has damned them all. Love has damned them ever since he left his heart at its doorstep, and expected it to be savored. It does not answer its call, and his heart rots to filth like the men they’ve left behind.
When he leaves behind the clear-eyed steward to die, Philoktetes is wearing a striped shirt dirtied with wear and throws a tin of Goldner’s at Edward’s head. He misses, but Edward can still hear the clatter of metal onto the shale, the howling of fury an abandoned boy screams out, betrayed by someone who loved him and left him to die. Hot tears roll down his face for hours as he marches, but he does not stop. He does not stop, he cannot stop, and that is the worst part.
When they start eating their men, Antonio the merchant is clad in slops and a red scarf, shivering with fear. He sits next to Le Vesconte, knees drawn up, and looks at Edward all the while. His eyes are haunted and full of disgust as that pound of flesh is passed around, the hot, red meat sliding down hungry tongues too whetted by desperation to argue against morality. They have to do what they can to survive, and they will, and they must.
Edward wants to live. He is so sorry for taking up space, and taking the place of good, good men and using them for food, but he wants to live. He wants to read his stories before bed, and touch the dark hair of a blue eyed man, and feel the sun beat down hot and sticky on his skin. He is so, so sorry for this admittance, this confession, but there it is. He wants to live. He will let others die if it means he will live.
There are no books in the Arctic. There were, once, shared between a dozen men, told at fireside, scribbled down into journals and intimate diaries; but now there is nothing. There is silence, blank pages scattered amidst scraps of metal and canvas. They wave with the wind, and bury themselves under the shale.
Everything is lost to him now. Edward does not remember his own handwriting. Plays and dramas flash before his eyes, but he cannot remember their characters nor their plots, nor their morals or warnings. If he did, maybe he would know what to do. He would see those who have suffered before him, and learn something from their trials; he would draw out meaning from his own pain like a doctor drawing blood.
But he does not remember. He does not remember anything of value. He does not understand why Lady Macbeth stands before him, outstretched hands dripping scarlet gore– he just moves past her on their endless trek, and leaves the spectre dripping blood onto the gray stone, just like he has left so many others behind.
She watches him all the while, sharp dark eyes catching his own. Her eyes are knowing and familiar.
Edward wishes he had a story to tell, now, looking up at the pinpoints of stars that flicker through the gaping holes of canvas. He’s flat on his back in a haphazard barely standing tent, and can feel blood trickling down the back of his throat, and he knows he’s dying, knows this is likely his last night alive, but the stars out there in the great wide wilderness are so beautiful his mortality is second on his mind.
He’s trying to name the constellations, that is. Hercules he’s got, Ursa Major he found easily, but he can’t find Cassiopea and can’t remember why she’s a constellation in the first place, and it’s frustrating him. Polaris keeps winking at him peevishly, and there are hundreds of other stars in this wide abyss of sky, but Edward can make sense of none of them. It feels like when he forgot his littlest sister’s name, forty three miles into the march, and choked on a stab of panic as it sat on the tip of his tongue. Catherine’s name had come back to him eventually, but he still can remember that ice cold fear he felt strike through him at the idea that it may be gone from him forever.
He tries to count the names of his sisters now, dotting them through the night sky, but he cannot find Cassiopea no matter how hard he tries. He is looking for Draco, too, winding around the tree of golden fruit, but where the serpent is meant to be is empty space. Dark and abyssal.
His brow furrows, confused. Where is that wily snake? Has he moved off to another hemisphere, hissing joyfully at the trick he’s played?
There’s another gap in the sky, where some tapestry of stars and fire is meant to be but has been abandoned, and Edward’s chest bubbles up with indignant anger, childish fury at these desertions. A tear drips down into his wild hair, soaked up by the oily strands.
“Come back,” Edward says, and the words sting on his throat, rasp like sandpaper through his lips. They are the first words he’s said in days; his chest burns with them. “Come back, damn it.”
The stars do not come back, nor the stories, nor the men. He lies in an empty tent watching the empty sky, and cannot think of a story that can end this ouroboros of pain. Edward Little, stuck on the shale and breathing measured, pained breaths, looks up at the endless night and waits in vain for the stars and their tales to return to him.
His time runs out before they do. His stories die with him.