The Book of Dreams (33 page)

Their fears were confirmed. Fingal had left them in the wrong place! Jean looked dismayed. Dana didn’t.

“This is the Brendan voyage!” she cried, delighted. “What’s the date? What year is it?” she asked the captain.

“It’s June 13,” he said, puzzled, “1977.”

“Câlisse,”
Jean swore.

“The last trip!” Dana said, excited.

She knew the story well, it was one of her favorites, the life-saver that had helped her survive a dose of chicken pox at age nine. Gabriel had taken a week to read the book to her, as they pored over the maps and photographs in it. The author was the captain himself, Tim Severin. A true tale of heroic adventure, the book described how Tim built a boat of leather and wood, following instructions from a medieval manuscript. Then he set sail with a crew of three men to prove that Brendan the Navigator, an Irish saint, could have reached Canada in the sixth century A.D., long before the Vikings or any other explorers.

Regardless of the mistake Fingal had made, Dana was thrilled.

“You’ve an Irish accent,” Tim said to Dana. He turned to the other Irishman in his crew. “Well, Boots, it’s either my dream or yours.”

Boots was well over six feet with a shock of yellow hair and a genial air of disorder. The youngest member of the crew, he was also the untidiest, managing to look even more disheveled than the rest.

“Can I not even get away from you lot when I’m havin’ a kip?” he responded.

“You’re both barmy,” said George mildly. “It’s not my form to fall asleep on watch. I must be dreaming wide awake.”

The other men didn’t argue the point. Tall and thin, George was a former English army man, and meticulous about his work and duties.

“Mass hallucination?” Boots suggested.

“Saltwater in the rations?” Tim worried.

Trondur continued to stare at the visitors without speaking. Big and burly, he had the hands of an artisan. He looked like a Norse god with his curls of chestnut hair and bushy beard. From an ancient Faroese family, he was a quiet man, shy to speak English.

“Strange things happen at sea,” he said at last, “but I think they are not so much problem.”

“Right then,” Tim decided, nodding to the newcomers. “We’ll play this out and treat you as guests. Do please join us for supper. You can tell us your story and we’ll tell you ours. The past week has been pretty dull. Dream or hallucination, we could do with the diversion.”

The crew was pleased with the captain’s decision. After braving gales, storms, and rogue waves in their perilous voyage from Iceland to Greenland, the men had found the journey to Labrador cruelly monotonous. Winds from the south along with calms and pea-soup fogs had slowed them to a crawl. With nothing to do and nothing to see, they were badly in need of some entertainment.

While the meal was being prepared, Jean and Dana conferred.

“Do you think the giant come back?” Jean said.

“He’s got to,” Dana pointed out. “Right boat or not, wouldn’t he have to bring us home?”

“We don’t ask him this. Only to help us find the book.” Jean touched his head. “He’s not too smart, eh?”

Despite their dilemma, neither could stay worried, for they were soon immersed in the
Brendan
voyage. The crew gave them sweaters, scarves, and mitts of oiled wool. These helped to ease the wet chill of the Atlantic. Sitting on damp sheepskins, they shared a night picnic, illumined by the ship’s lantern high on the mast. All around them heaved the dark swell of the ocean. Overhead spread a vast panoply of stars. Though much of the larder had long been consumed, the offerings of food included smoked sausage and smoked beef with the green mold scraped off, hazelnuts, oat cereal, and the last of a truckle of cheese. There was also dried whale meat and blubber brought on board by Trondur. He hunted at sea, providing them with fish and fulmar.

Dana ate only the nuts and cheese, but Jean was ready to try everything, including a slice of strong-smelling blubber.

“Is good,” Trondur assured him. “Very good.”

Jean almost gagged. Rubber soaked in machine oil!

Hot drinks finished off the meal, a choice of beef extract, black tea or coffee, along with dessert. The “Skipper’s Special” was a tasty sweet mush of stewed apricots, biscuits, and jam.

• • •

Jean and Dana leaned against the gunwales, sipping their drinks. They were getting used to the odd feel of the boat. Despite the creaks and the groaning of wood, the overall quiet was profound. The leather muffled the slap of wave against hull. Like a living creature, the boat flexed with the water, and its sides pumped in and out, as if it were breathing. Cupped inside, they felt curiously disembodied, like Jonah swallowed by a whale.

“
Moi
, I have a strange
canot
also,” Jean said to the men, looking around with admiration. “How do you make her?”

“Heart of oak, bark of ash,” Tim said proudly.

“And forty-nine oxhides to cover the frame,” George added, “soaked in oak-bark liquor and coated with wool grease, then hand-stitched together. Our fingers ached for weeks.”

“We’re depending on two things to stay alive,” Tim explained, “our sailing skills and the
Brendan
’s ability to survive at sea. In many ways it was easier for the original Brendan. For one thing, the weather was milder at that time. But more importantly, the saint and his monks were backed by generations of knowledge and experience in the building and sailing of skin boats.”

Even as they talked, they heard the low roar of an airplane overhead. It was disorienting to be on an ancient boat out in the ocean with jet planes flying by.

“We are proving that Brendan and his sailor-monks could have done this,” Tim insisted. “It’s no longer a fairy tale recorded in an old book. Once we cast off in our
Brendan
, we became like Saint Brendan himself. At the mercy of wind and weather, we have delivered ourselves into the hands of Fate, like the
perigrinni
of old.”

“
Perigrinni?
” said Jean. “What is this word?”

“Pilgrims. People who set out on a journey for sacred reasons. Usually they’re looking for something special or holy, like the Grail or the Isles of the Blessed.”

“
Ah oui, je comprends.
This is you, also,
non
?” he said to Dana. “You are
La Pèlerine.
”

Dana liked the title.

The crew wanted to hear their story. Dana and Jean took turns relating it. As the tale of the quest for the Book of Dreams unfolded, the men were enthralled to hear of fairy queens and portals, the
loup-garou
and
la chassegalerie
, the Cree Old Man and the Medicine Lodge, the Cailleach and Fingal, the Giant.

“If this is a dream, someone here’s got one hell of an imagination,” said Boots. “Who’s been boning up on Canadian folklore?”

Both George and Trondur shrugged. It wasn’t them.

Tim regarded his visitors thoughtfully. He wasn’t a superstitious man but he was a visionary, someone who was willing to go further than most in thought and action.

“If this is a dream,” he said quietly, “it’s what Carl Jung calls a Big Dream. We appear to have crossed paths in time and space, in a netherworld between realities. I can see why we’ve met. Both of us are questing between Ireland and Canada. I believe that each of us is born to do something special in our lives and it’s our mission to find out what that thing might be. I was meant to go on this voyage. I’ve thought about it and planned it since the first time I read the
Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis
. I guess in a way that old manuscript was the book of
my
dream.”

Dana’s mind was racing. What he said made sense to her. She was about to ask his advice about her own mission when George suddenly sat up, alert.

“We’re moving faster!”

“Look lively,” said the skipper.

The men were up in an instant and moving quickly. The sailing master was right. They were no longer traveling a steady course through quiet waters. The boat was speeding along at a clip. The wind had risen and the sea was choppy.

Crack-crack-crack.

“Damn! What’s that?” cried Boots.

George scurried up the mast with a flashlight to train it on the water.

“Hey, I do believe it’s ice!” he shouted. “We’re running into ice!”

The boat was hitting lumps of ice at speed. They rattled and crackled against the hull like ice cubes in a glass.

“Drop the sails!” Tim ordered. “We could be knocked to pieces! Our only chance is to stop!”

The crew worked frantically to lower the sails, but the boat was still speeding. George climbed higher up the mast and shone the flashlight over the water.

They were surrounded! Caught in a floe of icebergs! The grotesque sculptures were of every size and shape. They muttered and grumbled as they rubbed against each other on the waves. It was like a herd of sea monsters growling at the boat, out there in the cold night.

“This ice shouldn’t be here,” Tim swore. “I know the ice chart by heart.” Then a slow horror dawned. “If a freak gale swept over the main sheet along Labrador, it could crack the whole thing open!”

Jean and Dana, who were doing their best to keep out of the crew’s way, exchanged glances.

“Crowley?” Jean muttered.

“Could be,” Dana said anxiously. “Didn’t Grandfather say he could call up storm demons?”

“Big one dead ahead!” George cried.

Tim pulled the tiller as far as it would go to steer around the huge chunk, but no luck.
Crash
. It was like hitting concrete. Everyone staggered with the shock. Now a series in succession.
Thump! Thump! Thump!
A quick battering and the boat spun away. Worse loomed directly in front of them. A berg twice the size of the boat rolled in the water like a hippopotamus.

“Hang on tight!” Tim roared.

As they struck head-on, the boat tremored with the impact. George was flung off the mast. Hanging on to the halyard and dangling in midair, he was in danger of being crushed between the ice and the boat.

Trondur rushed to help him down.

Crash!

Another collision. The loud protest of wood.

Could the
Brendan
survive this punishment?

There was no escape. They were hemmed in by pack ice, mile after mile, floe after floe, driven toward them by gale and current. There was nothing they could do but fend off the attack as best they could, using wooden poles and their own hands and feet.

On the roof of the shelter, arm around the mainmast for support, George acted as lookout.

“Two on the port bow! Another to the starboard side! Mind the gap!”

Above all else, the
Brendan
had to avoid being caught when the ice bumped together. The boat would burst like a ripe plum.

For an interminable time, they wove in and out of the floes, clattering over tabletops of ice or scraping along the sides. As Tim said himself, it was “a cross between bumper cars and a country square dance.”

Sick with worry, gazing out at the ice, Dana suddenly saw Crowley’s features leering at her.

Then the squall struck.

Down came freezing rain and hailstones, cracking like bullets off the tarpaulins. The water rose ominously. Waves began to thrash and pound the boat. Deep troughs would threaten to swallow them only to toss them over the crests in a welter of foam. The full strength of the Atlantic was being hurled against them.

Veterans of sea storms, the crew reacted calmly and efficiently. They pulled on foul-weather gear and threw spare oilskins to Dana and Jean. With hoods drawn over their faces like cowls, all of them looked like monks.

“Trondur, handle the headsail sheets!” the skipper shouted. “Boots, take the mainsail and look after the leeboards. George, you’re the best helmsman, take over steering. I’ll handle the pilotage. This is going to be tricky.”

The wind was rising rapidly. So, too, were the waves. With a thunderous roar, a solid sheet of water crashed into the boat.
Water water everywhere
. The bilge was filled to the brim. The cabins were awash. They were too low in the sea. Water lapped over the gunwales, sloshing back and forth in the boat. As the bilge pump squirted it back into the ocean, Jean and Dana bailed with pots and saucepans. No one had to tell them that survival time in freezing water was five minutes or less. They could feel the threat of death lurking in the night.

Tim stood near Dana, eyes red with exhaustion and the sting of salt spray. His voice echoed a moment of despair.

“What on earth are we doing out here in this lonely half-frozen part of the Atlantic?”

“Following a dream,” she said.

He managed a smile and nodded. “Times like this you really have but one choice. Whatever will happen will happen, so you either face it as a coward, or you face it as a hero. It’s up to you.”

The sinister dance with the ice went on for hours. Yet despite the battering and the drenching rain, the deadly cold and numbing fatigue, the little boat held. Three things kept them alive. Along with the
Brendan
’s ability to survive at sea and the skill of its sailors, there was a third factor. Courage.

Then their luck ran out.

And the worst that could happen did happen.

The
Brendan
was trapped between two icebergs as if caught in a vise. The boat shuddered like a wounded animal. Everyone rushed to push the boat free. Too late. The damage was already done. Seawater swirled in the bottom of the boat.

“We’ve sprung a leak!” George cried.

Trondur agreed. His voice echoed doom. “I think stitching is broken by ice. Water in stern of
Brendan
is not so much problem. Water in bow is big problem.”

Tim looked around frantically. “It could be anywhere! We won’t find it in the dark.”

Climbing under the protective plastic that sheltered the radio, he put in a call to the Canadian Coast Guard. In calm terse tones he warned them to stand by for a Mayday call. But they all knew the truth. If they went down, no one could reach them in time.