It will be quiet, I tell myself. Quiet like a concert hall waiting for the conductor to raise his baton. Not quiet like an empty house, or a dark forest road. Not quiet in a way that feels eerie and vast and alone. When you don’t fear yourself so much, I tell myself, you will not fear being alone with yourself.
Our tiny yawl is battered from our journey, and neither of us has enough money or time to pay for repairs or purchase another boat. Instead, we decide to go overland to the bay marked on Saad’s father’s charts as the last known place from which the Dutchman sailed. We sell the boat to a fisherman, and use the money to hire horses. Icelandic steeds, I learn, are singular, in that they are selectively bred so that they maintain short legs, almost pony-sized, but have extraordinary stamina and health. They also have manes of a length and luster that would put society ladies in England to shame.
We set off across the verdant countryside. The coastal trail is buttressed by dark cliffsides, their faces spangled with moss and foliage. Runoff from the glaciers spills from their edges in more waterfalls than I knew could exist in one place, sometimes dozens in a single mile. Their water is fresh and clean, and we stop at the pools that collect beneath them for the horses to drink. The clouds are low over the mountains and the polished peaks glow with the excess daylight.
The countryside is sparsely populated. We pass a few turf houses, which blend into the landscape so well I only notice them because of the sheep grazing nearby. The first night, we stop at one where we are given dark rye bread and thick lamb stew, which we eat crouched outside the barn beneath the sun that never sets. It is impossible to mark any time. The few minutes of darkness each day grow thinner and thinner. It gets harder to breathe, like the sun is sucking up the air around us.
The white cap of the glacier begins to loom over the cliffs, and the air turns colder. As we follow its edge inland, I can see in the distance a vast expanse of something that looks like it can only be the sea. I assume it must be water until, as we draw closer, I realize it’s lupine, fields and fields growing hardy and wild, all the way to the horizon. It stretches as far as we can see, and then farther. We sleep among them that last night before we cross the glacier, only a few hours in the bright night, and I wake with my hair full of petals.
When we reach the edge of the glacier, we leave the horses at a farm as collateral for the gear we’ll need to cross the ice. We attach spikes to the bottoms of our boots and start the climb, following sleigh tracks the farmer pointed out to us, first up one side, then down toward the lagoon. When I ask him how long it will take to reach the lagoon and he answers with only a vague and unhelpful hand wiggle, I want to grab him and shake him. Do you not understand how important this is to me?
The ice climb is brutal. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been so difficult if I had slept one full night in the last year, but I’m so tired. My limbs feel gelatinous within an hour from so much scurrying and digging in my heels and trying not to slip to my death.
But I can’t stop. If I stop, we’ll miss it. We’ll run out of time.
It’s Saad who finally calls for a rest. He’s breathing hard, every gasp misting against the air. I can’t make myself sit. I hike ahead while he rests, like the lagoon might be just over the ridge, but the ridge keeps going and going and going and maybe it’s the next one. Or the next one. I force myself to come back for him. The sun moves across the sky but the light never changes.
Am I losing my mind? I wonder over and over as I watch the sun set but the light remains unchanged, turning the question over and over until it becomes, Did I lose it long ago? Am I too far gone to change?
I feel manic, teetering on the edge of sanity. The urgency chews through me, the need to go, the inability to understand why no one else feels like their brain is on fire. I’m vibrating with it—I want to take off my coat, but I hardly get it to my elbows before Saad asks, “What are you doing? You’ll freeze.” And though I know he’s right, it starts to feel like I’ve wrapped myself in lead. It’s slowing me down. My own body is slowing me down.
I wonder if she knew the date. I wonder if she felt the Dutchman coming for her, to claim what was stolen. I wonder if she lived her whole life feeling like she had cheated death once, escaped a shipwreck she was supposed to die in, and if that second life had felt more urgent or less. If borrowed time made life harder or easier to live.
If we miss the solstice, I keep thinking as we hike, the words in time to the crunch of our spiked shoes. If we miss the solstice. If we miss the solstice, if we don’t return the spyglass, if I never know what the captain did to her, what bad luck or curse or magic fell upon her when she robbed the ocean’s gravedigger.
I cannot make my brain stop moving. I can’t stop my thoughts, or even redirect them. I can’t relax enough to sleep or eat or do anything but hike and turn over and over and over in my head all the questions I never asked her. The things I didn’t even know to ask—the things she didn’t tell me.
We hike south until the glacier tapers into clear blue water studded with pieces of ice that have broken from its sides and begun to drift out to sea, most of them small-looking from the distance, though I’m sure they’re larger than the turf farmhouses we passed. Some of the bergs look like cut diamonds, translucent and distorted, capturing the light and refracting it back. The surf has rolled them to a shining luster. Others are opaque, their frosty edges the pale blue of a robin’s egg. A small strip of black sand beach closes off the bay except for the narrow mouth where it meets the sea.
And upon that narrow bar, a figure sits, their face to the sea.
I stop, gasping for breath. I close my eyes hard, to be certain I’m not dreaming or delirious or simply seeing what I want to.
But when I open them again, it’s all still there.
The Dutchman waits just beyond the beach, a ship that, in the overcast shadow of the clouds, seems to have descended from the sky to sit upon the waves. I didn’t realize how clearly I remembered it until I see it again. Even in the sunlight, it looks gray and penciled, like it brings storms with it.
Saad stops beside me, leaning backward into the slope of the glacier with the spikes under his boots holding him in place. The fur lining of his hood sticks to his face. I want to grab him and pull him against me, thrust our clasped hands into the air in victory, make him shout with me, We made it! We found it! We aren’t too late! Why doesn’t he look happier?
But then he asks, “How long should we wait?”
The question startles me enough that I tear my eyes away from the ship. “What?”
“Or do you think we missed it?” Each of his quick gasps mists white before his face. “I thought I was keeping good track of the days, but the sunlight ruined my count. I’m not sure if we’re too early or too late.”
“What are you talking about? It’s right there.”
“What is?”
“The Flying Dutchman—right there, in the bay.” He stares into the sun, eyes scrunched against the light, until he raises a mittened hand.
“Can’t . . .” I fumble in my jacket for the spyglass. I shed my mittens long ago—having all my fingers bundled together and unable to operate independently yet another source of inexplicable stress. My fingers stick to the metal surface. “Can’t you see it?”