CHAPTER 32

“Antarctica!” the captain roars the next morning. “That’s where the monster’s headed, and that’s where we’re going, too!”

He winks at me.

For weeks we sail on in the South Atlantic, trailing a pod of whales that seems to know the clearest way. Wherever they emerge to breathe is where we go. Captain Abbot takes a few for rendering, but not many. He’s not satisfied with them and wants to get right back on the trail of the big one that got away because of me. Each day brings us closer and closer to my destination. And each day grows colder and colder. Ice hangs from all the rigging and sails. The deck is slick ice. The sea bobs with icebergs and ice sheets.

I welcome the fire that burns the blubber into oil. Though it smells terrible and is smoky, the heat makes the frigid ride tolerable. I find myself looking forward to the next kill. Belowdecks, ice has formed on the beams of the ceiling. The moisture on the deck has crystallized and is slippery again. Eustace stands watch for icebergs and whales. He keeps flitting his eyes to the north and saying “There’s something out there.”

“Th-there is something out there,” I stutter. “Ice.”

“Something else,” he says.

Sometimes icebergs appear in the distance. They are so big, they look like islands or mountains. In between are great plates of ice floating on the water. Once in a while, a seal rests on top of one. I saw a seal scratching himself by dragging his body along the ice, like a dog might do in the gravel.

A new but familiar scent is on the air. Land.

“Do you smell that, Eustace?” I ask.

“Yes, I do,” he says. “Soil.”

“This means we’re getting closer, right?” I ask.

“Yes,” Nova says. “We’re getting there. The Xerxes won’t be able to take us all the way to the continent, though. We’ll have to take a whaleboat. Too much ice. It would shred the ship to pieces.”

One morning, as I lie in my hammock curled up with Fob to keep warm, I hear a cannon fire. I jolt upright.

“What was that?” I ask.

Nova leaps from her hammock. “Up,” she says. “Up the hatch!”

When I get to the deck, she nearly pushes me out of her way and dashes past me.

“Hey,” I say. “Watch out!” But she’s gone, and I can’t see where. A lantern flame flickers in the dark. After my eyes adjust, I see Captain Abbot standing at the bow.

It’s pitch black except for stars and lanterns on deck. The air is sharply cold, pinching like needles on my skin wherever it’s bare. Captain Abbot smokes a pipe.

He turns to me. “He’s here for you, Miss Wonder. Or for the head. Captain Greeney, that is.”

“What!” I yell. I run to where they are and look out at the dark ocean. I peer through the icy air. Then I make out the shape of a ship and the dull lights of lanterns. “Is he shooting cannons at us?” I ask. I think about all the people on board our ship. I think about the Medicine Head. If it’s destroyed, who will live forever? Me? Captain Greeney? Both of us?

“He is,” says Captain Abbot.

“W-well,” I stutter. “What are we going to do? We have to do something!”

Captain Abbot puts his hand on my shoulder.

“We’re not going to do anything.”

Another cannonball zings through the air. It drops in the ocean, only a few feet from the deck of the Xerxes this time.

“We’re all going to die!” I yell.

“Not all of us,” says Captain Abbot. “Only one of us.” He laughs and tilts back his head until he begins to cough.

“You’re mad,” I say. “We’ve got to run. Tell the men to sail! Or we’ve got to fight. Tell the men to ready the harpoons! Where are our cannons?”

“Cannons?” he laughs. He coughs. “This is a whaling ship, you nitwit! I am the captain!” He coughs again. “And I say we do nothing.”

“Do nothing?” I yell. “You must be mad. We could all lose our lives!”

Captain Abbot leans over and breathes into my face. His breath is fusty as a pigpen. “Well,” he says. “Not all of us.” He crosses his arms over his chest. “Besides, only one of us will be claimed by the big drink tonight. You can count on that, lassie.”

“You’re insane,” I say. I turn away from him. I’ve got to get off this ship. I’ve got to get Eustace and Fob off this ship. I’ve got to get the Medicine Head off this ship.

Captain Abbot laughs into the night. Then he shouts at me. “The big leviathan is coming back! He’s coming back! Hee hee hee!” He laughs like a child.

Maybe he’s lost his mind. Another cannonball shoots through the air and lands with a tremendous splash near the Xerxes. I look where it landed. Rings of water crash against the side of the boat. And all over are the pointed fins of dread. Sharks. What are they doing in this freezing water? More importantly, what will they do to me if the Xerxes goes down?

Nova, I think. I’ve got to find Nova. I rush to one end of the ship and then the other. I look up at the masts. I look in the ropes. I descend to the forecastle and the hold. I can’t find her. She’s not in the galley. She’s not at the try-pot.

The only place I haven’t looked is the captain’s cabin. I run to it and open the door.

Then a cannonball hits the side of the Xerxes and explodes. Wood and sparks shoot into the air and into the water.

“Water!” a crewman shouts. “Planks and nails!” shouts another. The cooper races past me to the damage with his tools. “Don’t worry, Barnacle,” he says to me. “It’s more smoke than fire!”

In the captain’s cabin, I find Nova leaning over my Medicine Head’s crate, rocking back and forth on her knees and chanting. She’s smoking her pipe, and the room is thick with its strange scent.

“What are you doing?” I say to her. “I need that!”

She ignores me and sings more of her song over the Medicine Head. She takes her pipe and waves it over and around the crate.

“Nova!” I shout.

She leans back and raises her face to the ceiling. She blows out an impressive plume of smoke, which rises in rings.

“Now you are ready,” she says softly. She stands with the Medicine Head’s crate and hands it to me. “You must go. Now is the time.” She takes the buffalo robe from her shoulders and wraps it around mine. “You’ll need this.”

“Come with me,” I beg her. I want to cling to her and tell her that I love her. “I’m scared.”

She puts her hands on my cheeks. Then she pulls me into a tight embrace and strokes the top of my head. “Hallelujah Wonder. I wish you were my own child. You are very brave and strong and smart.”

I can hear her heart beating. I hug her back hard.

“Eustace can row you in,” she says. “I must stay and protect the captain and the ship.” She softens her eyes in a way I’ve rarely seen her do. “You’re braver than you know.” Then she leans into my forehead and kisses it. “Now go!” She points to the door.

Another cannon blast rocks the ship. I exit the captain’s cabin. The whole deck is full of smoke.

“Eustace?” I call. “Eustace?” I can’t see. My eyes sting.

From the haze appears Fob, dirty and scared and shivering. Icicles dangle from his jaw and whiskers. He tries to sit down on my feet.

“Come on, boy,” I say. My mouth barely works, it’s so cold. “Come on. Show me where Eustace is.” Fob stands up, but his whole body is shaking. He walks gingerly across the deck to where the whaleboats hang. Eustace is at the pulley.

“Lu, are you all right?” he asks. “Do you have it?”

“Yes,” I say. I lift the crate for him to see.

“Get in,” he says. He nods to the boat. “I’ll lower you and then jump in.”

I step onto a keg. Another cannonball blasts the Xerxes. I get into the boat and hold the Medicine Head’s crate. The head is dead quiet.

Eustace heaves Fob in next to me.

“He’s been with us all along,” Eustace says, as if to explain why we’re bringing the dog. But he doesn’t have to explain to me. Fob is welcome wherever in the world I go. Even if it might be to my frozen tomb.

“Sit, Fob,” I say, even though he’s already sitting. Eustace guides the whaleboat, lurching, over the side of the Xerxes and slowly lowers it onto the surface of the slate-gray ocean. Chunks of ice slap against the whaleboat. I grab the rope that moors us to the Xerxes and try to hold us steady. My teeth chatter. The joints in my fingers don’t want to work. Even my bones are cold. Eustace climbs down the rope and lands in the whaleboat. He unties us, takes the oars, and we’re off.

“This is it,” he says. “Hold on.”

I hold tight to the Medicine Head’s crate. I smell Nova’s smoke coming up off the wood. It reminds me to be brave.

Eustace rows us away from the Xerxes, away from the cannon fire. Away from Captain Greeney’s ship. Away from Captain Greeney.

I lean over the whaleboat. Long, eerie shadows glide beneath us. First this way, then that. Sharks. Sometimes they rise close enough to the surface to cut the water with their fins, like a scalpel opening skin. Wherever they swim, the ice chunks curtsy above them. Ice floes rise out of the ocean like floating hills. Some people could be tricked into thinking that those blocks of ice are land, are solid rock with bases settled into solid ground. But not me. I know we have to go farther. I know we’re close. But we haven’t reached Antarctica yet.

The air is thin, so thin it’s impossible to breathe deeply. Short breath in. Short breath out. Each one is like a steel knife in my neck. Eustace, Fob, and I shiver from head to toe. The cold is otherworldly. When I open my lips the slightest bit, I worry the cold is going to break my teeth or snap off my tongue.

The sky is magic, with auras of orange and blue and pink and purple and cream that arc and bend above the horizon.

“Eustace?” I whisper. I raise my finger, shaking like an old woman’s, to the sky.

He nods. “It looks like the thunder egg,” he says. “I know it.”

As Eustace rows, the water on the leeward side of the whaleboat flutters and spits, just like it did before the giant whale breached and leapt into the air, tossing me into the ocean. We watch. Then the water calms down and ripples normally.

“What was that?” I ask.

“Don’t know,” says Eustace. He rows and rows, pulling at the water with more strength than I’ve seen in any human before.

I look back toward the Xerxes and Captain Greeney’s ship. Smoke rises from the Xerxes, but it is afloat. I squint, and out of the smoke, I see the shape of another small whaleboat coming toward us.

“No,” I whisper. Saliva falls from my lip and freezes to my chin in a second. It’s him. It’s Captain Greeney following us in his own whaleboat.

“Row, Eustace!” I say. My mouth is frozen. It’s difficult to make the words. “He’s coming.”

Eustace heaves the oars through the water. Greeney’s boat gets nearer and nearer until his body and then his eyes are in view. He sets down his oars. He’s reaching for something in the bottom of his boat. And then a harpoon flies past us and lands in the water and ice beyond.

“He’s trying to catch us,” I say.

Eustace doesn’t respond to me. He’s working so hard, fighting the cold and the ice and the water and the weight of the boat and me and Fob. He strokes and strokes the oars. He’s breathing heavily but evenly.

Another harpoon flies at us, and this time it penetrates the side of our boat. The rope attached to it goes taut. Our boat lurches. Waves lap up and over it all around. Then Greeney pulls on the rope, yanks himself toward us.

“Pull the harpoon out, Lu,” says Eustace. He continues to stroke, though we go nowhere. He keeps tension in the rope. “You have to pull the harpoon out! I can’t stop rowing!”

I’m so cold that I don’t feel like I can move. I’m not sure my body works.

“Do it,” pleads Eustace.

I put down the crate. Every movement hurts. I shake my arms and my fingers to life.

Greeney is slowly yanking himself closer to us even as Eustace rows and rows to get away from him.

I grab hold of the harpoon. Its arrow tip is deep in the wood. I push it down and then up again. It barely budges.

“Resign yourself!” Greeney shouts across the water. “I will have the head!”

You won’t, I think. I shake the arrow tip back and forth and up and down. Come on, I think. Fob barks at Greeney. It’s a sad, hoarse bark.

“You’ll die like my father did,” I say. It’s so quiet I don’t know if he’s heard. “You must die,” I say louder. “Like all of us do.”

Then the ocean beneath me turns from grayish white to black. The water moves with whatever glides beneath us. I work and work at the harpoon tip. Eustace stops rowing and fighting against the pull of Greeney’s harpoon to watch the shadow slide away. Whatever it is, it’s big. One hundred feet or more.

To get tossed into this water, this bitter cold water, means certain death.

I tug at the harpoon, slow and steady, as I once did with Captain Abbot’s tooth. Finally, I wrench it free from our boat.

I hold it high. My arms shake. But my body fills with vigor. I rear back and throw it at Greeney’s boat. The harpoon wobbles through the air and lands in his bow.

“I am free of you, Captain Greeney!” I shout, my voice strong now.

He scrambles to pick it up and stands.

“I’ll follow you right to the South Pole!” he shouts at me. “I will have it.”

“You won’t,” I say, shaking my head. “You weren’t brave enough to get there last time. And you’re not now, either.” My words fly straight and sure.

He leans back and prepares to throw the harpoon at us again. His face contorts into something snakelike. His eyes widen and his lips sneer.

A strange wave rolls across the water, ominous. The wake pitches our boat up and down.

“What is that?” I ask. I watch a long shadow creep through the water. The wave it creates grows bigger and crushes any ice in its way.

“Hang on,” says Eustace. He holds on to the sides of the boat. “It’s your whale. It’s got to be your whale. Watch.”

I do.

The ocean seems to rise up and then fall away like the earth descending into a sinkhole. Only this time, the curved back of a giant rises from where the water falls. The whale gains speed, and the wake grows larger. When he’s within feet of Captain Greeney’s boat, the whale dives. His enormous fluke pops above the water and then slips down quiet as a ghost. The water goes silent and still.

Captain Greeney has seen the whale, too. He’s watching the water. He sits and grabs hold of the sides of his boat. He looks over one way and then the other.

Very slowly, Eustace takes up the oars and calmly pulls us farther away from Captain Greeney. “We have to keep going,” he says.

I put the Medicine Head’s crate on my lap. Eustace rows and I watch behind us, at the scene of Greeney on his whaleboat.

Then the water all around Captain Greeney flutters and bubbles and froths. His boat looks as though it sits on top of a boiling pot of soup.

The nose of the whale bursts out of the water and pushes Greeney’s boat into the air. The boat rises and rises, balanced on the boxlike nose of the sperm whale, my sperm whale.

Water sprays all around until the whale’s two fins are out of the water, his hump is out of the water. He rises until his own weight tips him forward and he dives, sending Greeney’s boat sailing through the air. Greeney is thrown from his boat. He’s aloft and flying. The whale falls back into the sea with a mighty splash. Then Greeney’s boat, and Greeney, too, land in the water. The waves roil. Frothing water bubbles and spurts.

Fob barks. I pat his head and tell him, “Shh.”

The whale thrashes and splashes and ruins the boat. Wood and ice chunks fly in every direction. Our boat rocks but remains upright in the violence. Eustace pulls and pulls the oars through the water and ice.

The whale shows no mercy. When he finally stops, parts of the boat float here and there, oars, boots, a cap, and harpoons bobbing on the water. For a while, the whale hovers on the surface. I can hear him heaving, as though he has exhausted himself. He blows a long spray of water and air into the sky. Then the whale curves his back and dives. Eustace and I wait. But nothing happens. There’s no sign of the whale or of the man who murdered my father.

Captain Greeney has succumbed to the ocean. That’s what Captain Abbot meant when he said “only one of us.” The Medicine Head showed him all this.

He’s not insane at all.

The ocean calms down like a lion does after he eats. Small tears gather in the corners of my eyes, which freeze and hurt like glass shards. Even after all he put my father and my family through, my heart is heavy for Captain Greeney. “Death is a gift,” I whisper, for my own sake, mostly.