To Lie with Lions (46 page)

Kathi gritted her teeth. She said, ‘It was M. de Fleury who helped you escape.’

The Countess gave a watery smile. ‘And his shipmaster, Crackbene. Crackbene had friends in the Faroes who helped us. But yes: without M. de Fleury, Tom and I would never have been together in Nólsoy, with the poffins.’

‘Dear M. de Fleury,’ said Katelijne.

‘Why?’ said Betha Sinclair, coming in with a brisk curtsey. ‘What has he done?’

‘Nothing,’ said the lady Mary, drying her eyes. ‘We were just talking of Nólsoy.’

‘Were you?’ said Betha Sinclair. ‘And persuading Kathi, I hope, not to leave.’

Kathi could not tell them the truth. She could only repeat that her brother had called her to Edinburgh. She found herself moved and distressed by their determination to keep her at Dean. She rode off wretchedly in the end, with Betha standing foursquare and cross in the doorway, and Jodi waving happily from the arms of his nurse. Margaret, pleased to have one keeper the fewer, was already tormenting poor Pasque.

Katelijne travelled quite a respectable distance before she ordered her escort to turn about and spur to a gallop. They were surprised, but they did what she asked. Ayr was not far away.

Chapter 21

H
ALFWAY TO THE
islands of Orkney, with the
Svipa
pitching and rolling and the sea crashing green into her waist, it occurred to Nicholas, as it still occasionally did, that he was happy. Since this could have nothing to do with the weather, which had been consistently fearsome, it must have evolved from his memories: home-made rafts on the lake at Geneva; his first tuition from John on the voyage to Trebizond; his first command of his own ship at Lagos. And despite all that later had happened, the tranquillity of the Nile and the Joliba; the sail with John, full of hope, to Alexandria; the cloudless small passage from Gaza. The voyages, high in expectation, here to Scotland. The healing sweetness last spring, with his son.

But of course, past contentment was not the sole cause of his pleasure. He liked the physical challenge, and the camaraderie, and the isolation from the rest of the world. Isolation from all responsibility save that owed to the ship and its men.

This ship named the
Svipa
, the
Whip
.

He spoke to the helmsman who was lashed, as he was. Lutkyn Mere was a pirate, of Danish birth, and spoke several languages. Most of the crew did; although at present he had to converse in broken Danish with Yuri and Dmitri, the Muscovite father and son. There was an Orcadian related to Mowat who spoke all the Scandinavian tongues, and two from the Baltic, fluent in German. Between them, they could navigate from Finland to Greenland and back. The rest of the seamen had spent the last years crewing and fighting with Crackbene. He had known them all by name before twenty-four hours were out. He would trust few of them on land and all of them at sea.

John and Moriz had reached, he supposed, the same conclusion. John the mathematician, whose calculations Crackbene respected. The dwarfish chaplain from Augsburg who, through resolution or
prayer, had found his sea legs at last, and his appetite. And Robin, whom he had not meant to bring at all.

When Berecrofts the Younger wouldn’t come, Nicholas had had to make up his mind quickly. He had made this decision before: to allow a boy to prove out his manhood. Felix de Charetty his step-son had died. This voyage, central to all that he planned, was unusually dangerous. He had not pretended otherwise to Archie of Berecrofts – but he had not said, either, what their real destination was. Had he known, Berecrofts might not have allowed Robin to go. It had therefore been the decision of Nicholas, not of Archie. He knew what Moriz thought of it, and of him. Then he looked at Robin’s ecstatic face, and listened to his shouts as he raced up the rigging with Dmitri, and thought that he had been right. Dmitri was only a year older than Robin, and Yuri had brought him. It didn’t strike him that Robin was happy because
he
was happy.

Lutkyn shouted something, and he answered. It had to do with the herring fleet. The Moray Firth had been covered with boats, and the caravel had gone far out to sea to avoid them. He was already resigned to doubling the length of this part of the voyage; the weather couldn’t be helped. They would meet other vessels no doubt, and would claim to be bound for Deerness. It was early: they might be believed. But even at the wintry beginning of March, there was traffic at sea.

The stop in the Orkneys was vital; but then so were all the components of this expedition. Adorne had accused him, with Roger, of achieving nothing complete; of attempting nothing with a whole heart. John and Crackbene could have enlightened them. It was true, he could not compare what he had done in December with this. That had been wholly within his control, and enacted in a single long day. This was a scheme quite as intricate, prepared over a very long time and necessarily unrehearsed and full of imponderables.

He had found it a relief. He had drawn upon all his strengths for Willie’s Play, and had been rewarded. Yet in the end, empty of emotion after the white-hot intensity of the experience, he had come to question that sense of transcendental fulfilment. The ecstasy of creation had been there. But there also, he saw, had been ecstasy of quite another kind: the man-eating pleasure, for a space, of absolute personal power. An airless, passionate place where, for a time, he could foster those he wished to bind to each other, and to him.
A hatchery of chicks is ready and will be emptied this day
.

It was as well, perhaps, that Gelis had destroyed the blazing moment so deftly.

Before Godscalc’s death, he had discussed this other project with
Crackbene, and Crackbene had dismissed it as crazy. ‘They’d slaughter you. Everyone would.’

Nicholas had been irritated by Mick’s lack of vision. ‘They’d try to. They needn’t. Look. The Hanse – the Baltic ports – got a monopoly of the cod-fishing in Iceland, provided they paid dues to Iceland’s masters at Bergen. That didn’t last. Now, the only Hanse ships left paying at Bergen are the annual big vessels from Lübeck and Rostock and Stralsund, and all the others are sneaking to Iceland direct, and battling among themselves for the illegal catch. So not only fish are getting killed, I grant you, off the Westmann Islands; but there are fortunes being made. Why not by us?’

‘We haven’t a ship,’ Crackbene had said.

‘Then get one.’

‘Once we get one, it will be known what we’re doing.’

‘Will it?’ had said Nicholas.

A pause. ‘You’d have to get to the fishing-ground first. Even then, you’d find the
Pruss Maiden
likely creeping up on you. And then forty others.’

‘We have a master gunner,’ said Nicholas. ‘And yes, we’d need to get there very early, before the convoys arrive.’

‘In March. In the Arctic Circle in February and March.’

‘The Westmanns are south of the Circle. You’ve done it before. We’ve just talked of it.’

‘And even if the foreign ships aren’t there, the Icelanders will be. Their Governor’s Danish. They’re an island colony ruled by Denmark like the Faroes. They have a contract with the official Hanse ships, and that’s all. They don’t like it; they hate it, but they’re helpless. As I said, they’ll slaughter you to save their own taxes and skins. Or if they don’t, there will be an inter-state row and they’ll hang you.’

‘You’ve forgotten,’ said Nicholas. ‘The King of Scotland is being contracted to Margaret of Denmark.’

‘Are you simple?’ had said Crackbene, who occasionally forgot he owed Nicholas anything. ‘How in hell can the King of Denmark afford to fall out with the Hanse? And King James, so far as I’ve noticed, doesn’t have any uncles or aunties in England. What do you do when a fleet of bullies from Hull sets about boarding you?’

‘I’ll think of something,’ Nicholas had said. The scheme was possible. He had seen at once it was possible. Mind you, he hadn’t guessed at the time that Anselm Adorne would find out what he was building in Danzig and decide to compete. But it created interesting odds. The Banco di Niccolò against the Hanse, the English, the Icelanders, the Vatachino and the sea. He would have laid a good
wager with Roger except that if he didn’t win, he wouldn’t be in a position to pay him.

In the event, they didn’t sink between there and Orkney, although they lost a sail before they got into Scapa, and even there the ship needed four anchors. Mowat went ashore first, and came back with good news and an invitation. The yoles were built and delivered, and no one had spotted them. Bishop Tulloch was not on the island. And they were welcome to rest as many nights as they liked at his second cousin’s.

‘Where are we going?’ asked Robin who, in his new element, was becoming forgetful of form like Mick Crackbene.

‘To spend the night ashore and take on provisions. Make the most of it,’ Nicholas said.

Robin scrambled down to the ship’s boat beside him. ‘Yoles are boats.’

‘That is correct.’

‘Fishing-boats, clinker-built, with one mast and three pairs of oars.’

‘A team can build one in three or four days,’ Nicholas said. ‘In any small corner. Provided they are given the wood.’

‘The Earl of Orkney—’ began Robin in a great burst of realisation.

‘There is no Earl of Orkney,’ Nicholas said. ‘Only a Bishop. And he is away. The omens, in fact, are quite good.’

They were storm-stayed for three days on Orkney but kept away from the other bu farms and the castle. Some of them had been here before; none seemed surprised by the rolling moors, the looming menhirs, the sheer red cliffs from which waterfalls spouted upwards. English ships had also touched there. Robin, the climber, brought back battered hooks found embedded in fish-bones. Crackbene recognised them.

‘But last season’s,’ he said. ‘And don’t concern yourself. Going north, the English ships prefer passing by Shetland.’ He paused. ‘But all the same, we ought to get on.’

‘How near are we?’ said Robin.

Crackbene stretched and looked down, hands on hips. Like all of them, his face showed a rough salty stubble, and the deep indents at his nostrils looked grim. M. de Fleury was the only person who joked with him. He said, ‘We’ll be halfway in two days.’

‘Halfway!’ Robin said.

“The Faroe Islands are halfway, near enough. We lost a day here, and we had a slow start with the dogger. We’re going to an island only two hundred miles east of Greenland.’

‘I know,’ Robin said.

They boarded next day, the fifth of March, at Deer Sound, having left Eric Mowat behind. Robin was sorry. Parting, he had tried to say something about Orkney. ‘It isn’t really like anywhere else, although you think it’s going to be.’

Mowat had grunted. ‘Picts and Irish and Vikings. You won’t find that mixture anywhere else, although Caithness comes closest. The history of Orkney was written in Iceland. The great earls lie here. They say you can hear the voice of Thorfinn in the wind.’

‘Who was Thorfinn?’ Robin said.

‘A better sailor than any of us,’ said Eric Mowat. ‘And the greatest earl of them all. His son Paul had a granddaughter who carried the earldom of Orkney to the Scots Earl of Atholl. A daughter a few generations on brought it to the Earl of Strathearn. And a girl descended from them gave the earldom with her hand to a Sinclair, and one of
them
was to sail further west than most men live to describe. Picts, Irish and Vikings. You can push the blood from one line to another, but it remains aye a powerful ichor.’

‘Dysart,’ Robin said suddenly. He thought of the crewman he had noticed, in the boat that had brought him to Montrose. He said, his voice hollow, ‘Lord Sinclair’s land is between Roslin and Dysart.’

Mowat grinned at him. ‘Aye, a great place for the herring, the Forth. A few well-built doggers can earn their price there.’ He contemplated Robin more seriously, and feinted a blow to his chin. ‘Come away! It’s the mark of your master’s fine native cunning, not sorcery. You wait and see what happens in Iceland.’

‘The Mouth of Hell is going to open, they say. Dmitri says it will open this year.’

‘Then let’s hope you get your trading done first,’ Mowat said. ‘Then Hell can do what it likes with the Lübeckers and the Vatachino and the rest.’ He paused. ‘It’s only a mountain, you know.’

‘I know,’ Robin said.

They reached the Faroes a day later than planned, on the Sunday. They were sure, that is, that it was Sunday. They had Crackbene’s word, supported by Lutkyn and Yuri, that the crags and drengs that passed, inch by inch in the fog, belonged to the Danish archipelago of the Faroes. They were meant to be seeking the shelter of Tórshavn. They could not even see the sea. Between the regular nerve-fraying blares of their own trumpet, they could hear the regular plop of the lead-line, and beyond that, a subdued piping of seabirds, and far, far distant from that, a lowing of elf-horns, or of trolls, or of small, invisible boats also mournfully announcing their presence. Eventually they dropped anchor and lay unpleasantly rocked by invisible rollers,
while a skiff was prepared to take the patron and Crackbene ashore. Father Moriz and John declined the privilege.

Nicholas said, ‘You’re sure you don’t want to come?’ Suspended in fog, his gilt-bearded face looked capable of biting off hands, like a leonine post-box.

‘We don’t mind,’ said the German priest blandly. ‘Ask where we are, and if they reply in Chinese, come and tell us.’ Then he went back to the cabin, where he was beating John le Grant at a stiff game of cards.

The boat returned full of stores, and proceeded to ply back and forth. The ship lurched as its holds were replenished and then became preternaturally quiet, except for the groans and bangs and creaks of its timbers and rigging. All the crew were on shore, except for the card-players and a couple of watchmen.

‘It
was
Tórshavn,’ said Moriz. ‘And the right harbour. Isn’t it unwise, allowing the seamen on shore?’

‘No,’ said John, picking up cards. ‘They need the change, they need the girls, and there’s nothing to get sick or drunk with. Why did you come on this voyage?’