Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [30]
On the face of it, this was merely a race. The plains of Poland yielded their crops in the autumn, when the great highway of the Vistula might be low, and the shipping roads of the Baltic were closing. The grain came to the river, and waited. In spring, the world’s fleets came to Danzig. Last summer, fifty had sailed out in April, bound for Flanders and Holland and Germany. Through the summer, there might be a thousand ships more. They came for grain, and for copper and timber. The great estates sent their corn to the riverside granaries, and men like Paúel Benecke floated it north on rafts a hundred feet long and nearly thirty feet wide which were worth more in themselves than the corn, for the rafts were made of the mainmasts of caravels. Other craft, small and big, came as well, often manned by their owners: tenant-farmers and smallholders. And whoever reached Danzig first received most for his wheat, oats and rye, and his timber.
He had wanted to do this, even before Paúel had wrenched him away from the Mission and Danzig. It reminded Nicholas of Iceland, of which he often spoke entertainingly. It amused the flotilla: his remorseless mimicry, his scathing tongue, until he turned it on their masters, their institutions, themselves. And even then, they brought themselves to put up with it for, like the Icelanders, they had been locked in their houses by winter and would seize on any diversion.
But that was by night, when the concourses travelling the river would arrive at their next loading-port and, mooring the rafts to the quays, would leave their dogs or their guards by the silos and surge bellowing into the taverns. Or sometimes, as dusk overtook them, they would come to rest on some hospitable shore where the country people would flock down to serve them, bringing black bread and sausage and cheeses, and frothless ale by the cask, and this season’s new batch of whores. Then the gambling and fiddling, the high-jumping dancing and singing would continue long into the darkness, until the most energetic lapsed into sleep.
Some rivermen, desperate for an advantage, tried to run the river with lanterns by night, but not many, and none could keep it up for long, however many polemen they carried.
That was why Nicholas never drank during the day. He had a reluctant respect for the power of the Vistula, this shining, swift-running highway which swirled through the fabric of Poland for six hundred miles to the sea. He had a respect for its dark, savage currents, and for the shifting white sand of its shoals. The men who manned the great rafts, poles in hand, provided the power and the strength, and dragged up the single unwieldy sail when wind and river might briefly co-operate. But it was the river pilots who were kings on the water; whose orders were law; and who rode their rafts with their steering-oars and their bodies, like men bounding downhill through snow, heeling out of one stream and slipping into the flow of the next, pitching safely aside from the watery glare of a shoal, even though the rafts lurched and juddered and bucked, and the timber groaned in the rush of the water. Sometimes even skill wasn’t enough, and a raft would strike and, bursting asunder, would send whirling downriver a pack of half-submerged logs: random, lethal. The rafter name for these, wilki, meant ‘wolves.’
Daytime was better than the night. You fought the river by day, and if you lost, you lost to the river. To lose by night in a brawl would be pitiful.
In the few days they had sailed, Benecke had been pleased to be complimentary. ‘You have the knack. You could learn the river in a couple of seasons.’
It was not true. Generations went into this skill, and every stretch of the bank had its experts. Nicholas had observed that much at least, even though they hadn’t come the whole way, but had picked up the fleet