Camulod Chronicles Book 8 - Clothar the Frank (71 page)

Tristan, in truth, was something to behold. He was fair in the way that few other than the northern people of the snowy lands are fair. His hair was so pale that in certain lights it looked pure white, and his eyes were big and bright, piercingly blue with that hue that only certain flowers can possess. No trace of beard or mustache marred the smooth, gold-bronzed perfection of his face.

He liked me too, from the outset, which is always a sure sign of future friendship, but what moved me most of all was the pure, undiluted and unquestionable love and affection that he evinced for his long-lost brother from the moment of first seeing him and recognizing him there on the threshold of his lodgings. This was a man, I felt, who could ride with me anywhere.

He owned two horses and a full supply of armour and weaponry. He was, he assured me, a mercenary and a professional, prepared to sell his skills and his expertise to anyone who measured up to the criteria he demanded in an employer.

When we arrived in Gesoriacum, four riders and eight horses, we found Joachim, the first of Germanus's three preferred sea captains, in residence, preparing to return to sea in search of one last cargo to trade and money to be earned before the end of the trading year. I gave him Germanus's token of the lapis lazuli ring, and we discussed the price of hiring his boat and crew for our voyage.

We sailed for Britain at high tide on the following day.

I learned about the sickness of the sea on that brief voyage, for the Narrow Seas were rough and unfriendly to mariners, and their harsh lesson was to stay with me throughout my life.

Although I hated Joachim when, after two days of unimaginable agony, he suggested that we avoid the south coast known as the Saxon Shores and veer to the west, around the horn of Cornwall and then north to Glastonbury on the western coast, there came a day when the dawn was bright and golden and I looked out from the prow of the ship to see the high hill he named as Glastonbury Tor looming above the flat shores to the east of where we crept forward through a calm, still sea.

BISHOP ENOS

1

I had never seen such an inhospitable place. Britain, the vaunted land of riches famed by Julius Caesar and the Emperors Claudius, Hadrian and Trajan, was a hole without any redeeming features that I could discern. For the first seven days after our arrival on its coastline, heavy, driving rain fell incessantly and left us chilled to the bone, shivering in our armour and unable to escape the damp, appalling misery of the place. The moist, cold air contaminated every place we found during that time that might conceivably have offered us anything resembling accommodation or comfort and left us sniffling with discomfort and close to despair over the sheer foulness of the climate.

Perceval expressed best what we were all feeling late one soggy afternoon, after we had been vainly trying for the better part of an hour to light a fire using sodden wood. "I hate this damnable place," he said, "and I resent having to live in constant motion, afraid to stand still for more than a few moments lest my armour rust up and lock solid and I be stuck here forever." It was an inept attempt at humor, but we were in sore need of humor by that time.

We had made to land at Dubris originally, that being the easiest access point in the long line of high, white chalk cliffs that formed much of the southernmost coast of the island. An entire stretch of coast there, several miles in length, offered long, shallow beaches and safe havens set into vales and niches along the great white cliffs and had provided the landing place for Caesar's legions on his earliest exploratory expedition to Britain. But even before we had begun to sail in towards the land we had been aware of large numbers of armed warriors lining the cliff tops and watching us with intense, unmoving hostility, evincing absolutely no signs of welcoming activity. Joachim, our ship's captain, held back, eyeing the spectacle warily and looking distinctly unhappy, and when I questioned him on what was happening, he told me that he didn't know. The activity we were seeing here was new, he said, then added that his bones were warning him to stand away. He had sailed into Dubris many times, he said, and had always been welcomed as a trader, no matter who happened to be occupying the port. This approach, he swore, was different. He could feel the danger in the place and would not commit to a closer approach until he could be sure that there were no swift battle boats lying in wait just out of sight along the coast to swoop in on his stern once he had placed his ship and his crew in jeopardy.

The words had barely left his mouth when two swift-moving vessels came into view upwind to the right of us, the spray from their sweeps catching the rays of the midday sun and sending up rainbow showers of drops as the ships drove straight towards us, plainly intent on overhauling us. Fortunately for us, however, they had made their opening move too soon. Without even pausing to consult me, Joachim rapped out orders to his crew and we swung away westward, our ship lying over on her left side with the steepness of the turn. We had the advantage of a fair wind at our back and soon left our pursuers behind.

From then on, the weather began to deteriorate, and so did Joachim's good humor. He had been fretting for hours before that, eyeing the gathering cloud masses to the north and west and anticipating the onset of the winds as he muttered to himself, invoking the ancient gods of the sea to hold back their displeasure and not to send the winter storms too soon. But they were either deaf or angry with him, because all his pleading was in vain. The wind came fitfully at the outset, blowing in short-lived, uneven gusts for the first hour or so, with long gaps of stillness between gusts, but as the day wore on the gaps grew shorter and the gusts more violent, whipping streamers of stinging spray from the curling tops of the waves that had suddenly taken on an appearance more coldly hostile than any we had seen before.

Long before sunset we had lost all sense of sunlight. The wrack of clouds overhead was low and roiling, the masses of vapor churning upon themselves as the air grew darker. And then the first rain squall struck us and abruptly we were all blind, in a world of utter blackness filled with howling winds, hissing sheets of rain and terrifying, chaotic motion that annihilated all the rules by which we had been taught to live and move on land. Above and beyond all of those things, however, were the appalling noises made by the ship itself under the stresses of the storm, when the threat-filled, menacing creaks and groans and screams of tortured ropes and planks made it sound as though the vessel were about to rip itself asunder and disintegrate under the hammering of wind and water.

All four of us passengers, who had believed ourselves to be ill until then, immediately plunged to the bottom of an abyss of despair and abject, inhuman sickness. I know not how the sailors fared during all that transpired that first night—I have to presume that they continued doing what they were employed to do, since we survived the tempest—but we four, embarked upon an adventure, suffered beyond description. For several days one hammering storm rolled over us and passed by only to be replaced by another, even more violent upheaval. None of us could recall having been that sick, or that helpless, or that frightened at any time in our lives.

I often talked to people about that voyage in the years that followed, and I was always amazed at the unworldliness and the indescribably profound ignorance of people who have never been aboard a ship in foul weather. They simply cannot conceive of the difference between a storm on land and a storm at sea, and the most common question I encountered whenever I told the tale was, "Why didn't you go ashore and get out of it?"

Why indeed? It was a question I might have asked myself, the day before we set sail upon that voyage. But experience taught me very quickly that it was a question with no simple, clear-cut answer. In the first place, and most particularly at night, we could not even see the shore, and all we knew was the terrifying truth told to us by our captain and his crew—that we had to hold the ship in safety far away from the land in order to prevent its being hurled against the rocks and crushed like an egg. So great was the power of the breaking waves, we were told, that our bodies would be destroyed by its savagery, pounded into unrecognizable, bloodless meat against the rocks along the shoreline. That was a comforting vision to sustain us in our terror. Then, too, we were prohibited from any simple act of "going ashore" by the size and shape of our vessel. It was a trading craft, broad and deep-keeled, designed to carry large volumes of cargo, which meant that it could not simply be rowed up into the shallows fronting a beach and grounded there.

In order to bring our large ship to land and unload his goods in safety, Joachim required the presence of a pier at which he could moor the vessel, or, failing that—a situation the captain described with no great enthusiasm—he needed to find a straight-edged shoreline or a riverbank along which the water was deep and calm and its surface no more than half the height of a man below the land's. Neither one of these could be achieved with anything resembling safety in stormy conditions, and one or the other of them was necessary for us to unload our eight horses and all the goods we carried with us. We ourselves might leap over the side in relatively calm waters and swim to safety, but we would do so at great cost, since we would have to leave everything, including our armour and weapons, behind us aboard ship and would thus be stranded in a strange land without any means of surviving or even defending ourselves.

Shortly before dawn on the morning of our second day at sea, we felt the wind abating and the motion of the ship became less violent, sufficiently so for me to bestir myself to find the captain and ask him what was happening. He told me we were in the lee of Wight, which left me squinting painfully, wondering if I had lost the proper use of my ears. Wight, he told me then, is an island off the south coast of Britain, and we were now sheltered between it and the mainland, enjoying the respite that its bulk provided from the winds. We would stay there, he told me, in the hope of riding out the remainder of the storm.

Day broke, and even from afar we could see the fury of the waves that pounded the mainland to the north of us. To our left, however, the coast of Wight seemed placid, and I mentioned to Joachim that we might be able to land there. He gazed at me with what seemed like pity, and so long did he take to respond that I began to think he was going to say nothing at all.

"Aye, you could," he said eventually, a half smile quirking at his lips. "No difficulty about that, if you want to. But you might have some trouble after that, once you're ashore."

I frowned. "Why is that? Are the people hostile there?"

"No, they're not. But that's Wight. It is an island. If I land you there, then sail back to Gaul, you might not be able to get off again. There's four of you, remember, and eight horses. I doubt if you'd find a boat on the whole island big enough to carry off all of you at one time, and even although it may not look like a great distance from there to the mainland, this stretch of water is miles wide, so you couldn't swim."

I felt my face flush at my own obvious stupidity, but Joachim laughed. "Hey," he said, sweeping his hand across the horizon in front of us, "you're a landsman, how could you be expected to know about the shortage of ships on Wight? There's no way to tell from here that it's almost deserted, but it's true. Most of the people who once lived there now live ashore, on the mainland. But the only reason I know that is because I've sailed this way before, more times than I can recall. My livelihood depends on knowing things like that when I go to sea. I dare say, were we among your woods in Gaul, you'd be leading me by the hand, because I can't stand being hemmed in. I like to feel empty distances around me . . . nothing but me, my ship and my crew between the water below me and the sky above."

"But you could have dropped us ashore there anyway and made your way directly home, and had anyone asked, you could have said that I requested to be set down there."

He looked at me sideways and smiled more broadly now, although still with an element of ruefulness, as though wondering about my lack of wit. "Think you so? Really?" He shook his head. "I have your gold in my chest, that's true, but there's also the fact that you have come to me from Germanus, and that's worth more to me than gold. If I did anything as stupid as you suggest, I would lose his friendship, and I don't care to do that."

I nodded slowly, acknowledging the wisdom of what he had said. "Then what should we do?"

"Exactly what we are doing. We stay here in reasonable safety, riding at anchor, and we watch for wind shifts while we wait out the storm."

We remained in the shelter of the island for the rest of that day and the night that followed, and by dawn the following day the storm had blown itself out.

We struck out once more to the west, and for the space of several hours we had blue skies and only scattered clouds overhead, although the waves pounding the beaches had scarcely lessened in their fury. Once again, however, by the middle of the afternoon the clouds were blowing in from the northwest in marshaled ranks. Hoping to evade this new storm, we swung in sharply towards the coast, but we could see from a long way out that the coastline here was one of high, unbroken cliffs fronted by ragged lines of rocks against which angry breakers smashed themselves into towers of spuming whiteness. There might have been inlets there where we could shelter, Joachim said, but he was unfamiliar with the coastline here and by the time we approached close enough to search for suitable havens, we would be too late to make our way back out to safety against the incoming storm if we found none. So once again we remained far out at sea, at the mercy of the winds and the waves, and our misery deepened.