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There comes a point when Silna has done all she can for Crozier. She’s tended the stump at his wrist, covered him with a blanket, and sheltered him from the wind. When a fever dream settles over him, she turns to other tasks. There’s no reason to watch the suffering of others when you can’t help them anymore. It’s always better to keep your eye on the things that can change; the environment, the sky, the patterns of animals.
She listens, though. Crozier’s voice reminds Silna of some kind of bird, although she’s never been able to decide on which one.
He never screams. There’s often a hissing sound in his throat like he might be hollering in a nightmare. Or he’ll whimper, sigh, or mumble. Sometimes she recognizes a word or two. Names- mostly- that seem to bubble up from that muddle of indecipherable sound. She’d whisper them back if she could. Instead, after a bit too much of this, Silna goes and looks for water. She walks so far that his moaning is indistinguishable from the ground crunching beneath her feet.
Much later she wets his lips with water. His delirium doesn’t release him, but he looks up at Silna with filmy eyes. He uses the white men’s name for her. It sounds half like her true name, half like the sound of wind whistling through rocks.
*
Silna checks Crozier’s arm for rot. All of his skin is gray with pain, but she can’t see anything alarming. Their tent smells of sweat and blood, and strong smells often fool her into thinking she still has a tongue. Goodsir had eaten things with a strange rounded knife, and a tiny pronged instrument. Once or twice she had attempted to use both of them, but she had never enjoyed the experience. The taste of that metal had been similar to the scent of Crozier’s blood.
Metal had been the last thing she ever tasted.
There’s a strange flapping on the wind. Silna steps outside and watches as blade-thin rectangles scrape against the land. Paper. That’s what Goodsir had said these things were. They came from tree pulp, and the white men marked them up with a substance dark as the winter sky. Those symbols meant words, and if Crozier were lucid right now he would be able to make sense of them.
Silna catches a piece of paper in her hand. Somehow it smells like Goodsir’s area on the boat.
She brings it back into the tent. For a moment she’s nauseous from the competing scents of paper and blood. Silna has heard of people further to the south who eat tree bark in times of hunger. The page crumples against her fingers, and she can’t imagine anything like this growing from the ground.
Crozier stirs, then, but she can’t tell what he’s saying. She reaches for his remaining hand, though. Her hardened palm meets his wind-damaged skin, and her stomach settles. They’re here, together, at the end. And Silna would never want to trap this experience by minimizing it with words on a piece of paper.
*
“Are we going to look for your people?”
Silna nods.
In the seasons before, Crozier had always made questions sound like a command. Now, when he asks her things, it’s like he believes that Silna is a patch of snow that might melt away. He should know, by now, that nothing melts on this island.
As they begin their journey, she watches how he walks. At first it’s to make sure he’s well enough for the ordeal. Then she watches out of simple curiosity. Like all the white men he takes long strides. He’s not as wary as he should be of hidden ice or stones that might trip him up.
Soon enough his teeth are chattering. And soon after that he’s hunched over, coughing.
When Silna goes to check on him, he holds out his hand to her. There’s a tooth shard in his palm, and it reminds her of a pebble.
She stares at the tiny bit of tooth, and then she looks up at the wide, disinterested sky.
“I’m sorry,” Crozier says. “I know that teeth can break in the cold. I wasn’t careful. I think only a piece fell out, though. It didn’t fall to pieces.” He says everything slowly when he speaks her language, as though he’s slowly carving a bit of stone into the right shape.
Silna has him open his mouth to confirm that the tooth didn’t shatter. Then she wads up a piece of cloth and has Crozier put it in his mouth until he stops shaking as much.
*
Most of the time Crozier is as silent as she is, even when he hasn't been gagged. There are rare moments when he talks and talks, though. He does so the night they decide to eat part of a shoe that she had found. Crozier tells her that his former leader had done just this exact thing the last time he had come to Silna’s home.
Silna tears the shoe into the smallest possible pieces. She can’t wet things with her tongue, anymore, so that makes it difficult to consume this kind of thing. However, she also can’t taste it which is fortunate in this case.
“I wish I could do that for you,” Crozier says, glancing down at his stump. “I really would if I could.”
Silna looks at him for a while. It’s alright. He will adjust and adapt to the new way of things. (Or, perhaps, he won’t.)
“I also wish we had wood or oil. And something to boil the shoe in.” Crozier adds. “I can start a fire with a piece of ice.”
Silna points upwards, toward the sun. You reflect light off of that, right? She tries to communicate this with her eyes alone. It must work because Crozier wheezes out something that might be a laugh.
“That’s something that impresses people back home. Not you?”
She shrugs. It's something she has done, too.
When he gnaws on their meal (she left larger pieces for him), Crozier’s face is passive. He speaks as he continues to chew. “Do you know why we sailed here?”
Goodsir had pointed to a map in one of his books. He’d said something about lands that are far away (to her and to Crozier alike.) She points to the remains of the shoe, points to her lips, makes a face.
“Yes. To…” Crozier struggles for a moment. She can almost see him picking and discarding words from his original language. “To make our food taste better.”
Later they lie down to sleep. He offers to sit outside the tent and keep watch, but she taps her hand on his shoulder and shakes her head. No.
There probably wasn’t anything to guard against, and they were both tired. Sometimes it was as simple as that.
Tired or not, she struggles to fall asleep. The cold doesn’t keep her awake. The cold is as much a part of her as the blood below her skin. She knows this is likely to be her last human contact for the rest of her life; Her, Crozier, a tent, and a bed of sharp rocks. Someday she will miss this.
She already misses it.
*
They come across a camp of his men. The paper that found its way to Silna must have originated from here. They whirl around her legs as she stands still and waits for Crozier to make sure everyone has died. She wonders if spirits sound like this as they make their way over this plane of rocks. So many areas of this island have seen death, now. There are so many places that her people should not go near for a long time.
One corpse in particular seems to cause Crozier a great deal of grief. At least the man was able to die under the open sky unlike Silna’s father.
Crozier starts to reach for rocks. Silna realizes she is going to bury the man under them in that particular way that the white men do. She stops Crozier and shakes her head.
“I have to. It’s Jopson.” Crozier says that name like it’s the only explanation that’s needed. And maybe that’s true.
Silna gestures in order to explain the way things should be done here. Crozier catches on quickly, placing a rock at Jopson’s head and a rock at Jopson’s feet. He takes a while, choosing those markers carefully. And then he does so for the other men.
The process takes the better part of a day but Silna doesn’t mind.
“Thank you,” Crozier says, after, as though she’s not sure why. He’s saying it in the white men’s language, but it’s a phrase she learned from Goodsir. “Thank you, thank you.”
After that there’s nothing they can do but keep walking. She has a sense of where prey might have gone. Which means she has a sense of where her people might be. She could be wrong.
The only thing that matters is that they keep moving.