Free The Still Point by Amy Sackville Page A

abstract complex geometries, gigantic crystals glinting off every surface and smashing slowly into glittering facets. And everything suffused with the sunlight that left its colours lingering, flaming brilliant gold against the cobalt sky for an hour
before fading to pearlescence, the shadows hollowed out in deep lucent blue. As the dark drew in each evening, and the last of the colour gave in to the edgeless half-tones of moonlight, Persephone ached and groaned as the gullies narrowed about her and squeezed, squeezed, the ice insisting itself up her sides, forcing itself upon her with a giant’s roar, threatening to turn her, crush her and drown her deep in the freezing underworld. And then slackened and left them in peace for another uneasy night. As the ice packed the men were quiet, contemplative, then raucous in the evenings against the silence when the din had settled and their ship had triumphed once more. No, she would not go under.
    The nights grew longer until the days could hardly be said to have broken; the sun nudged at the sky for a few scant hours, hesitantly broaching the horizon before flooding the snow red again as it retreated before the quiet advance of twilight. Early in October, in the last of these ruddy evenings, Edward gave the order to make ready: they had been held fast for days now and could neither shift nor break a path; the ice had them gripped for the winter. Ten days later, the men drank a toast to the return of the light, in 1900. The sun had set.
     
    A collection of ink drawings between marbled boards illustrates this part of the tale; Julia lifts and turns each one delicately, with the proper reverence for old paper. The work of an unknown artist, survived by his impressions of the wilderness that engulfed him; a vision of a brave ship stranded. And a silhouette against the snow: Edward standing at the prow, a captain on watch; Persephone perched several feet above sea level, as if lifted from the waves and abandoned on the crag of an ice mountain.

    In the strange arrest of the Arctic night, there was no wind and nothing to stir in it anyway. The ship’s engine, dismantled, was silent; she had been stripped of sails, and the masts and remains of the rigging were stark, already brightly frosted against the deepening sky. She might have been there for a hundred years or more, freezing slowly into the semblance of her own white-glittering phantom. In the afternoons the ice still heaped itself against her like some ancient beast with a thorn in its side. They rose above; she forced the ice under and they were borne up, at a slight list to starboard which interfered with dice games but otherwise gave no trouble. Now, in the hour before midnight, the beast had moved off once again, and Edward almost found the distant stomp and growl of it a comfort, a part of the profound peace he had recovered. He felt rather than heard the far-off boom of pressure in his chest, looking out over the strange country that had formed and set around them, boundless and muted as far as the horizon. The men below deck were resting after supper, playing cards, listening to Lars’s tales of Scandinavian conquest with laughter and genial envy. Edward smiled. In England, his brother would be sitting by the fire, lighting a cigar; how strange, he thought, that they should share this ritual when there were so many miles between them, and they were in every way remote.
    Filling his mouth with peppery smoke, Edward savoured the cedarrichness of tobacco on his tongue. Gazing at the red glow, he felt his whole self condensed in that ember; he was nothing but a tiny spark of light, of bright brief life, on an incommensurable plain. On those twilit nights, he felt as insubstantial as the evening he surveyed. His breathing slowed to become part of the quietude he had forgotten, and longed for without knowing it, since
he was last locked in these seas. Far in the distance, the deep heart-boom.
    The full moon was bright enough