The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [155]
‘We waited a week for him at Vardȯ,’ said Chancellor. ‘All he had to do was reach Vardȯ. It was agreed: so soon as we lost touch, any of us. A common port, a fishing station, a harbour every boat used … it was full of Scotsmen, did I tell you that? And they told us if we went farther east we were crazy, for ships did not sail to the east. But Vardȯ was common to every ship. And he could not find it.’
‘Why?’ Lymond said.
Diccon Chancellor knew by heart the log of the Bona Esperanza: the contrary winds; the chartless wanderings. And how finally, they found the bight at the west side of Nokuyef Island, and, sailing up it, anchored off the mouth of the River Arzina. ‘It was six weeks after they had left us, and they had arrived more or less where they had departed,’ he finished. ‘They thought perhaps they were in the Lofotens. Willoughby lived, it seemed, longer than any of them.’
It was very quiet. A serving-man moved in the inner room where he and Grey slept. And in the unheated part at the back they heard the eagle shift, rasping its talons. Lymond had long since laid his meat aside, and was sitting, hands clasped and head bent, his face half lit from the open door of the stove. He said dryly, ‘A tribute to his superior nourishment. So. They had charts but they failed to read them. Their logging was faulty and their sightings must have been consistently bad. That is navigational, and none of it is Willoughby’s fault. But having wasted six weeks and got himself frozen into the fjord at Arzina, the matter ceased to be nautical at all. It was Willoughby’s job, and no one else’s, to see that they survived. The sea doesn’t freeze without warning. And even when it has frozen, it is still possible to cut canals and warp a ship out of an inlet. And if that failed, they had lying under them food for eighteen months and the equal in ton-tight weight of eight hundred oaks and three hundred beech trees. Yet they froze …
‘He was not without resource in the field,’ Lymond said. ‘He had all the pewter in Fort Lauder cast into balls, as I remember, before they relieved him. I think the heart of the matter lies there. He was a man of the land, whom the sea mystified, and eventually frightened. And whatever his inventiveness at the end, it would hardly have mattered. He had probably lost his authority.’
Lymond lifted his hands from his knees, and, stretching his arm, collected the small pot which stood at his elbow, half a measure of mead still standing in it. He said, ‘The sea demands a man who knows the sea and respects it. A man who is prepared to be lonely. There is no isolation like that of the helm in a storm, except the isolation when it is windless.’
Diccon Chancellor seized his drink, casually; slopping a little, in his firmness, on the straw floor. ‘It was merely a point,’ he said.
‘It was two points,’ Lymond said. ‘And I have them both. It will be known as Sir Hugh Willoughby’s expedition. There is nothing you or anyone else can do about it, and nothing you should. That was his epitaph. This is your beginning.’
He had risen, but not without courtesy. Chancellor rose slowly also. He said, ‘To you it is no problem. I don’t know whether I can sustain such isolation.’
There was a moment’s pause. Then Lymond said, ‘You have your sons.’
‘And you your mistress. But only one man can stand at the helm.’ Chancellor said abruptly, ‘I don’t want to go back.’
Lymond was studying him. He said, slowly, ‘These young men in Moscow and Vologda are creating a business against high odds in an alien land, and are drunk with it, as they should be. They will never do anything as exhilarating probably again. But in five years—less—the excitement will be gone, the business will be routine, the complaints will be growing. There will be a little cheating; a little bickering; some slackness; some grasping for power. The Merchants will