Virgin Earth (18 page)

“Shall we go back or press on?”

John hesitated. “You can hardly be sicker than you were,” he said.

“That’s what I fear!” the captain interrupted.

John smiled. “You must be seasoned now, my lord. And the weather is fair. I say we should press on.”

“Tradescant says press on,” Sir Dudley remarked to the captain.

“But what d’you say, my lord?” the captain asked. “It was you who was begging me to turn back at the height of the storm.”

Sir Dudley laughed, a thin thread of sound. “Don’t remind me! I say press on, too. Tradescant is right. We have our sea legs now, we might as well go forward as back.”

The captain shook his head but went back to the wheel and held the ship’s course.

Their luck was in. The weather turned surprisingly fair, the men became accustomed to the motion of the ship and even Sir Dudley came out of his cabin and strode about the deck, his pace rocking. They had been nearly three weeks at sea and slowly, the skies around them changed. It was like entering another world, where the laws of day and night had been destroyed. John could read a page of writing at midnight, and the sun never sank down but only rested on the horizon in a perpetual sunset which never led to dusk. A school of grampus whales came alongside and a flock of tiny birds rested in the rigging, exhausted by their long flight over the icy waters. John walked up and down the length of the ship all day and most of the bright night, feeling oddly unemployed with hours of daylight and nothing to grow.

Then a thick fog came rolling over the sea, and the daylight counted for nothing. The sun disappeared behind it and there was neither night nor day but a perpetual pale grayness. Sir Dudley took to his chamber again and summoned one man after another to play at dice with him. John found himself curiously lost in the half-light. He could sleep or wake as he wished, but he never knew when he woke whether it was day or night.

Despite Tradescant’s watching, it was a sailor who first called “land ahoy!,” spotting through the rolling fog the dark outline of the coast of the North Cape of Lapland.

Sir Dudley came up on deck, huddled in his thick cape. “What can you see, John?”

John pointed to the dark mass of land which was growing whiter as they grew closer. “More like a snowdrift than land,” he said. “Bitterly cold.”

The two Englishmen stood side by side as their ship drew closer to the strange land. A man-of-war detached itself from the shadow of some cliffs and sailed toward them.

“Trouble?” Sir Dudley asked quietly.

“I’ll ask the captain,” John said. “You go below, my lord. I’ll bring you news the moment I have it. Get your pistols primed, just in case.”

Sir Dudley nodded and went back to his cabin as John made his way the few steps to the captain’s cabin and knocked on the door.

“What is it?”

“A man-of-war, coming this way, flying the Denmark flag.”

The captain nodded, pulled on his cape, and came out of his tiny cabin. “They’ll only want passes,” he said. “Sir Dudley’s name is permission enough for them.”

He went briskly to the side of the boat, cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed. “Ahoy there! This is Captain Gilbert, an English sea captain on a voyage of embassy, carrying Sir Dudley Digges and the Russian ambassador. What do you want with us?”

There was a silence. “Perhaps they don’t speak English?” John suggested.

“Then they damned well should do so,” Gilbert snapped. “Before trying to delay honest Englishmen going about their business.”

“Ahoy, Captain Gilbert,” the reply came slowly, muffled by the fog. “We require your passes and permits for sailing in our waters.”

“Ahoy,” Gilbert shouted irritably. “Our passes and permits are packed away for the voyage and besides, we need none. On board is Sir Dudley Digges and traveling with him is the Russian ambassador, homeward bound. You won’t want to trouble the noblemen, I suppose?”

There was a longer silence as the Danish captain decided whether or not the troubling of the gentlemen was worth the possible embarrassment, and then decided it was not.

“You can pass freely,” he bellowed back.

“Thank you for nothing,” Gilbert muttered. “I thank you,” he shouted. “Do you have any provision we can buy?”

“I’ll send a boat over,” came the reply, half-muffled by the fog.

Tradescant stepped swiftly down the companionway and tapped on the door to Sir Dudley’s cabin.

“It’s me, all’s well,” he said quickly.

“Shall I come out?”

“If you wish,” John said and went back to the rail and watched with Captain Gilbert as a rowing boat, like a Dutch scuts, came out of the mist.

“Anything worth having?” Sir Dudley asked, from behind Tradescant.

The men waited. The little boat came alongside and threw up a rope. “What’ve you got?” Captain Gilbert shouted.

The two men on board simply shook their heads. They understood no English but they held up a basket of salted salmon. Sir Dudley groaned, “Not salmon again!,” but he held up two silver shillings for them to see.

They shook their heads and held up a spread hand.

“They mean five,” Tradescant remarked.

“They can add then, even if they can’t speak a civilized language,” the captain noted.

Sir Dudley reached into his purse and held out four silver shillings.

The men spoke briefly one to another and then nodded. Sir Dudley tossed the coins down into the boat and Tradescant caught the rope the sailors threw to him. He hauled in the basket of salmon and presented it to Sir Dudley.

“Oh, wonderful,” Sir Dudley said ungratefully. “I know, let’s have it with dry biscuit for a change.”

Tradescant grinned.

The rest of the voyage they hugged the coastline and watched the landscape change from the steady unyielding white of snow to a russet dry brown, and then slowly to a green.

“Almost like England in a hard winter,” Tradescant remarked to Captain Gilbert.

“Nothing like,” Gilbert said crossly. “Because half the year it’s under snow and half the year it’s under fog.”

Tradescant nodded and retreated to his vantage point at the bowsprit. Now there was more and more for him to see as the coastline unrolled before the rocking prow. On land John could see the people of the country, who startled him at first with their appearance of having no necks, but heads which grew directly from their shoulders.

“It can’t be,” he said stoutly to himself, and shaded his eyes from the sun to see better. As the people ran down to the beach, shouting and waving to the passing ship, and the ship drew a little closer to shore to avoid a midriver sandbank, John could see that they were wearing thick cloaks of skins over their heads and shoulders, giving them the illusion of a hooded misshapen head.

“God be praised,” John said devoutly. “For a moment I thought we were among strange countries indeed, and that all the travelers’ tales I had heard were coming true.”

The people on the shore held up their bows and arrows and spread a deerskin for John to see. John waved back; the ship was too far out to make any bargaining a possibility, though he would dearly have loved to examine the bows and arrows.

The ship anchored at sunset, Captain Gilbert declaring that he was more afraid of sandbars in an unknown river than all the sailing he ever did across the North Sea.

“Can I have the boat take me on shore?” Tradescant asked.

The captain scowled. “Mr. Tradescant, surely you can see all you need from here?”

John smiled engagingly at him. “I need to gather plants and rarities for my Lord Wootton,” he said. “I’ll be back before dusk.”

“Don’t come to me with an arrow up your arse,” the captain said coarsely.

John bowed and slipped away before he could change his mind.

A young sailor rowed him to the shore. “Can I wait by the boat?” he asked, his eyes round in his pale face. “They say there are terrible people on this shore. They call them the Sammoyets.”

“Don’t go without me,” John said. “The captain is far more of a terror than the Sammoyets, I promise you. And he will kill you for sure if you maroon me here.”

The lad managed a weak smile. “I’ll wait,” he promised. “Don’t be too long.”

John slung a satchel over his shoulder and took a little trowel. In the pockets of his breeches he carried a sharp knife for taking cuttings. He had decided against carrying a musket. He did not want the trouble of keeping the fuse alight, and he thought he was as likely to shoot his own foot off in a moment of abstraction as confront an enemy.

“You won’t be too long, will you?” the lad asked again.

John patted his shoulder. “As soon as I have found something worth bringing home I will come straight back,” he promised. “Ten minutes at the most.”

He walked up from the shelving beach and at once plunged into the deep forest. Huge trees, a new fir tree that he had never seen before, interlaced their boughs above his head and made a twilight world which was shadowy green and sharply cold. Underfoot there were thick cushions, as big as bolsters, of fresh damp moss. John knelt before them, like a knight before the Holy Grail, and patted them with loving hands before he could bring himself to dig in his trowel and take a clump to stuff in his satchel.

There were shrubs he had never seen before, many in flower, white star-shaped flowers, and some tinged with pink. He walked on and came to a bush of whorts, with an unusual red flower. John brought out his little knife and took cuttings, wrapped them in more of the damp moss and laid them carefully in his satchel. A few steps more and he was in a clearing. Where the sunlight poured in there were bushes forming fruit like an English hedge mercury except that they were a brighter red and with three sharply shaped leaves at the head of the twig, and every leaf bearing a berry inside it. In the darker places, beneath the trees, John saw the gleaming blossom of hellebores, thickly growing and carpeting the forest floor.

There was an explosion of noise from the trees above his head and John instinctively ducked, fearing attack. It was half a dozen birds, a new species to John, big pheasant-sized birds in white with green bodies and slate-blue tails. John clasped his hands together in frustration, longing for a musket so he could have shot one for the skin, but they were gone with a clatter of wings and there was no one there for John to compare notes with, and wonder if he could possibly have seen aright.

He dug and snipped like a squirrel preparing for winter until, from the distance, he heard a faint voice calling his name and looked up, realizing that it was growing dark and that he had promised the lad that he would be little more than ten minutes — and that was more than an hour ago.

John trotted down the path back to the boat and the shivering lad.

“What is it?” he asked. “Cold or terror?”

“Neither!” the lad said stoutly, but as soon as he had the boat pushed off and rowed back to the ship he scampered up the ladder at the side and swore that he would never take Mr. Tradescant anywhere again, whatever the captain said.

He did not need to risk a charge of mutiny. The next day the captain waited for the fullness of the tide to save them from the dangers of being grounded on sandbanks, and the ship landed at Archangel. The ship’s company were able to go ashore to eat the oat bread and cheese and drink the Russian beer. And the gentlemen traveling with Sir Dudley unloaded their goods and moved into houses on the quayside. The company were particularly scathing about the houses — which were wooden cabins — and about the bread, which was made in different shapes, some rolls no bigger than a single mouthful.

John waylaid the Russian ambassador and was given permission to hire a local boat and set sail around the islands in the river channel. He took a purse of gold with him and bought every rarity he could find for his lord’s collection, and took cuttings and roots and seeds from every strange plant he saw. At every island John went ashore, his eyes on his boots and his little trowel in his hand. And at every place he came back to the boat with his satchel bulging with cuttings and plants which had never before been seen in England.

“You are a conquistador,” Sir Dudley remarked when Tradescant arrived back at the Archangel quay and had his barrels of plants set in damp earth unloaded on the quayside. “This is a treasure for those who love to make a garden.”

John, filthy and smelling strongly of fish, which was all he had eaten for many days, grinned and came stiffly up the quayside steps.

“What have you seen?” Sir Dudley asked. “I have spent all my time getting my goods unloaded and preparing for the journey to Moscow.”

“It is mostly waste ground,” Tradescant explained softly to him. “But when they clear a piece of land for farming, they are good farmers; they can lay their crops down into soil which is only just warm and get a harvest off it inside six weeks.”

Sir Dudley nodded.

“But a poor country?” he suggested.

“Different,” John judged. “Terrible ale, the worst taste I have ever had. But they have a drink called mead made with honey which is very good. They have no plane to work their wood, but what they can do with an axe and a knife is better than many an English carpenter. But the trees!” He broke off.

“Go on, then,” Sir Dudley said with a smile. “Tell me about the trees.”

“I have found four new sorts of fir trees that I have never seen before, the buds of the boughs growing so fresh and so bright that they are spotted like a dappled pony, the bright green against the dark.”

Sir Dudley nodded.

“And a birch tree, a very big birch tree which they tell me they can tap for liquor and they make a drink from it. And they have a little tree for making hoops for barrels that they say is a cherry, but it was between the blossom and the fruit so I can’t be sure. I can’t believe there could be a cherry tree which could make hoops. But I have a cutting and a sapling which I will set to grow at home and see what it is. Its leaf is like a cherry. If you so much as bend a twig down to the ground it will grow where it is set, like a willow. That would be a wood worth growing in England, don’t you think?”

Sir Dudley had lost his indulgent smile and was looking thoughtful. “Indeed. And it must be strong to survive this climate. It would grow in England, wouldn’t it, John?”