The Ringed Castle (56 page)

They said old Master Cabot had boarded the ship at Gravesend, and had given alms to the poor, and prayed for them, and then swept them off with a great concourse of men and women to the sign of the
Christopher
and given Burroughs and his company a great banquet, at which the old man had danced himself half the night, as lusty as any young seamen there, in his black cap and his long, forked white beard.

He must be well into his eighties. Chancellor knew the sign of the
Christopher
. It didn’t matter if Burroughs found the way to Cathay. He was a good man. Not a mathematician, but a good man, whom Dee had taught well. Not like the man he had found here, whose first name he could not even use, and whose mind was like the star over their heads.

They struggled, sluggish with ice, towards Vardȯ. The Ribatsky Peninsula, across whose narrow neck you could drag your ship if, for example, you were sailing a pinnace, but which otherwise you must laboriously round. The sounding, Christopher said, was like the scurf of a scalded head: his spirits must therefore be rising. They anchored in thirty-three fathoms and rode out yet another storm in a bay west of Point Khegore, with a group of Norwegian boats including a big one from Trondheim. He remembered afterwards thinking longingly of Trondheim, and wishing to God they were round the North Cape and so far safely home.

Then Buckland came back to tell him the peninsula was seething with Russians and Danes and Lapps with fish to barter, and even some Dutch. They had nothing to sell, but they went on shore, and
had some strong Dutch beer over a stove in a worm-eaten log shed, and borrowed someone’s ovens to make a good batch of bread. Two of the Russians refused to get up and had to be carried by main force back to the ship. They were still thirty miles south-east of Vardȯ.

Then the Varanger Fjord, which the sailors had named Dommes-haff, because of the little round hill on it, five hundred feet high. There was a monastery, on the south shore, founded twenty years ago to convert the Lapps. They turned their backs on it, and on Lapland, and sailed north-west to Vardȯ.

They reached it with the wind in their favour. So, instead of the haven it might have been, it became a place for garbled talk and quick loading: Brooke had gone to Bergen, they said, with the captain, and they had to glean what news they could from his deputy. The
Searchthrift
had been at sea during all May and June, and had left Vardȯ again after a brief stay in July: the captain’s deputy did not know where they were going. The snow blew like burst flock on the shutters and Buckland, getting to his feet with the meal hardly over, said he ought to be getting back, and dragged Chancellor and the rest with him.

He was right. The days were shortening; the cold had not lifted, and would never lift now. And the bays and inlets and fjords which were shallow would begin to fill with a thick, shining gruel of ice, against which their arms would crack, rowing the pinnace; into which their ships would sail, and never move afterwards. While the bays which were not shallow would give them no holding, but would let them rock and spin past on the wind like the keys of an ash tree, to seed their profitless souls on a reef. So they sailed, knowing they must now trust only to God and their pilot.

And Chancellor did not let them down. A quiet man with a quick sense of humour, he stamped no menacing mark on his company. Only the observant eye, the lively brain, the pure, canalized flair of the mathematician had made him what Henry Sidney always said he was: the supreme man of his time on the sea.

He took the
Edward
on compass and chart out of Vardȯ, and sailed her on instruments, on instinct, on geometry for a month while the wind drove the fleet on bare poles from one point of the compass to the next; into and out of the sight of land; in quarters where he had no charts and no books of reference, and could only trust to his work, to his tables, to his and Dee’s calculations. And where Willoughby’s pilot, lost and weary and desperate, had fallen at last uncaring on land, and had dragged himself and his two ships towards it, regardless of where and what it was, or what fate it might bring, Chancellor kept to the sea, marshalling his ships through darkness and mist by every means Buckland and the rest could devise; by drum and beacon, by cannon and trumpet. And they kept together, and sailed round
North Cape, and at length, in the last days of October, started south down the high crumbling coastline of Finmark.

Forty miles west-south-west of the Cape, in the sound of the island of Ingȯy, the wind dropped for a day. For a few brief hours of daylight the tired, patched ships, heavy with seawater floated together, and men stood on the decks under the bearded ice of the rigging, unshaven and hollow eyed, and called to one another: greetings, and messages, and obscene, rueful jokes. They tried for fish in the flat, gelidous waters and came up with glistening netfuls of cod: a matter for weeping when the milch cows and sheep are long since slaughtered and eaten, the eggs and cheese finished, the onion and garlic rotten, the butter rancid, the bread moulded and hard as the bacon and peas. They ate them half raw, because there was neither water nor wood to spare for their cooking, and thought them finer than saffron cakes and white bread, or oysters wooed down with claret. Then, that night, the gales sprang up again, from the north and the west, and the last struggle began.

They had to cape south-west, past the reefs and islands and cliffs of west Norway, driven by a wind which turned them always inwards, against the threatening land. The problem was how to win sea-room; to avoid steering too far west into the empty white Arctic; to keep far enough from the coast to deny the quick-veering wind which would hurl them on to the rocks. Chancellor did it by standing day and night on the quarterdeck over the helmsman, his eyes red, his lashes and beard coated with frost, with a line round his waist as the
Edward
pitched and rolled, her timbers shrieking, her sides thudding with the crash and hiss of the waves while above in the darkness there floated the long, chorded voice of the wind which you listened to, for it spoke its own language, to the sea and to the men who sailed on it. And at one shoulder, through it all, stood Buckland his sailing master and friend, relieving him when he could; transmitting into painful, deliberate action all Chancellor’s ceaseless, precise orders. And on the other, like a rock, Francis Crawford.

So they passed round the shoulder of Norway: past Soroya and Senieno; past the teeth of the Lofoten Islands; white spray like knives against the staring snow ranges beyond; for a hundred miles and fifty miles more rock after rock, cliff after cliff, until they heard, above the thunder of their own passage, the rolling voice at Moskenesoy of the Maelstrom, which could swallow trees and toss them out, limp as hemp stalks; whose roar could shake the door rings on cottages ten miles from its brink.

Because they knew precisely where they were and were expecting this; because Chancellor had given the right instructions and Buckland, using his sails like a sculptor, had carried them out, they weathered it and pitched past, changing the helmsman over and over
because of the weight of the whipstaff, dragging a ship foul-bottomed and battered, laden with ice and with bilge water which moved over her keel like a boulder, pushing her shuddering into the waves.

Past Vaeroy and Rȯst, with open water before him again, and daylight to see by for a while, Chancellor untied his lashing with frozen fingers and got back to his cabin where Lymond, waiting to relieve him, had fallen asleep on the edge of the straw mattress which had been Christopher’s, before this small shack on the poop quarterdeck had become the workbench and altar and parliament of the Muscovy fleet.

Francis Crawford was asleep, for once dreamlessly, in the clothes he had worn for three months, with dirt grained in his hands and dulling the salt-tangled hair over his eyes. Unable to shave, he had joined them all in the uniform anonymity of a barberless beard: even fur-hatted on deck, he could be picked out from the rest by the bright glittering gold, which concealed the marks of undernourishment and fatigue, as Chancellor’s clinging black hair emphasized his.

He bent now over the Voevoda and, touching him, said, ‘A penny for the turnspit. You are needed.’ And as Lymond opened his eyes, ‘I have news for you. We are going to winter at Trondheim.’

He was roused into automatic movement at once, swinging round from the mattress, and reaching for the matted sheepskin, soaked still from its last wearing. He said, ‘Weather ahead?’

In the doorway, Chancellor shouted, ‘John!’ into the wind and then returned, Buckland on his heels.

‘Weather ahead. The wind is veering again. And the beakhead has broken again, and one of the spars. The sails will hardly mend one more time: the forecourse and maintop are in tatters.’

Buckland said, ‘We’re more than half-way home, with by far the worst of it behind us.’

Lymond said, ‘But with the weather worsening, and this bloody wind heading us off. We haven’t got time to wander about. Or if we have, the other three haven’t. The
Esperanza
springs her planks if you cough.’

‘That’s the point,’ Chancellor said. ‘We have 160 tons under us. The
Bona Confidentia
is a cork and the
Esperanza
little more, and low in the water. Even if we could make the crossing, they can’t.’

‘Have they said so?’ said Buckland.

‘They won’t say so,’ said Chancellor.

Lymond said, ‘How good are your charts?’

‘Good enough. It’s a dirty entrance. I shall have to con them in.’

It was his supreme domain, and there was no argument. Only Buckland said, after a moment’s silence, ‘It means spending the winter in harbour. Once in, we shan’t get out until the spring. If you have contrary winds, you might not be in London till May, or back
in the Dwina till summer or autumn. You won’t get a cargo from Muscovy next year at all.’

‘If we don’t do this,’ Chancellor said, ‘we may not get a cargo from Russia this year, never mind next. Some of the cargo will keep through the winter. We save that, and the ships, and the men.’

He took his decision a thousand miles north of London, on the edge of November, with a gale coming from the west bringing weather that they had not had, even yet. He confirmed it later that morning, when by flag and cannon shot he drew the fleet towards him and took aboard the captain of the
Esperanza
and the
Confidentia
, but not Howlet, of the
Philip and Mary
, whose boat was half stoved in making the attempt, and who had to be picked up by pinnace. It was only then that they learned what damage the small ships had suffered, and it was realized beyond all doubt that these could not hope to reach London.

There was time for that, and a quick consultation over Chancellor’s charts; then they parted. Over the noise of the wind, presently, the men on the quarterdeck of the
Edward Bonaventure
could hear singing, reaching fitfully into the growing storm from the ships round about them. Chancellor listened to it, his face stiff and salted, his bloodshot eyes and ridged brow turned to the weather. ‘You can ask your ships to do too much,’ he said. ‘And your men.’

They reached the entrance to Trondheim Fjord with the tide and a full gale from the west, which brought the sea green round the poop and over the worn and cracked pavisades of the four weary ships. They skimmed rocking before it into the cannonading spray of reef, rock and island, carried under bare poles as fast as four bladders, and as capricious; caught and swirled by the currents; turned by the waves and pushed and pulled by the wind.

The entrance to the fjord was dirty. A lordly hand, gay with malice, had dusted the sea with black rocks and brought mountain heads, gritty with reefs, to its surface. Quicker than the eye could run on a chart, the ships poured and swirled through the great throats of water, and the less able died first.

The
Bona Confidentia
struck at full speed. She exploded as if the reef had blown up beneath her, with men, planks and spars spurted into the sky like math from a scythe blade, seen small and distinct, between the wall of one sky-reaching wave and the next.

The
Bona Esperanza
turned, shearing her sides; took water and turned again; half struck and turned again into the wind, her mizzen-mast down and her rigging fallen, tangled with men. Then the current took her and she fled jerking, like a disabled creature, dragging her dying trap with her. The
Philip and Mary
disappeared in her wake.

Chancellor pulled the
Edward
out of the fjord. He did it conning the ship minute by minute, with the helmsman’s head raised by his
foot and the whole crew working to him as his lips, his eyes, his ears, his finger-ends. He drove her between the islands as he had once envied another man in his element, swift and hard and firm on the reins, winning point by point from the winds, giving and winning again; reading the spume and the breakers and lifting his ship like a child round and over them. And he held it until he had brought her outside Froya; and outside Froya, the wind moved to the north, and let him turn aside from the haven which was no haven, and whose entrance they knew the
Edward
could never brook twice.

He consulted nobody; but divined his course and gave his directions; and the
Edward
, swinging slowly, brought her beam to the storm and, limping, began the long journey homewards, alone.

He wept that night, but not again; and held prayers for the dead in the morning, his voice hoarse and steady above the roar of the wind. He had fifty men and a tired ship to bring home in seas which turned the sun green and mantled the moon and the stars through the night. There was no rest, nor was it time yet for speaking.

On November 8th, 1556, with her casks empty and her sails in tatters; with two of her crew washed overboard and one dead from the flux, the
Edward Bonaventure
sighted land and was able, slowly, to make towards it. A day later, it was possible positively to identify it as a major north-eastern headland in Scotland, by name Kinnairds Head. The wind was in the north-west, and had held steadily there for a day. Hoping for harbour, but praying for any inlet or bay where their anchors would hold and their shattered ship would have peace from the wind, they staggered on. Late in the evening of November 10th, a Tuesday, the wind started to gust and also to back, increasing in power, and Chancellor, using the Lindesay rutter and chart, sailed slowly up to the broad, rocky coastline, bare of trees and broken with low bights and sand dunes, and felt his way into the nearest small bay which gave promise of shelter.