The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [194]
His sailing master grunted, without responding to the cursory irony. The gifts, for all they were discussing them, occupied the bulk of their thoughts not at all. All they hoped for, all they were striving to do, was to bring these four ships somehow to London.
They rounded Cape Teriberskiy, which the sailors called Sour-beer, and passed the Kildin islands, where the reindeer graze in herds all through summer; and the mouth of the River Kola, empty now of its crowded boats of a few weeks before, when was held the great St Peter’s Day Mart, and watched by customars from Denmark and Muscovy, English cloth would change hands for salmon and cod, oil and furs. Robert Best wondered aloud if John Brooke was earning his salary at the new English station on Vardȯ.
They were making for Vardȯ. One of three little islands, two miles off the north coast of Finland, Vardȯ had a castle, church and garrison and was the most easterly of the King of Denmark’s possessions. The natives lived only by fishing, and raising a small store of fish-fed cattle, but boats of all nationalities put into its bight, and John Brooke, the Muscovy Company’s new agent, would be there with news and letters and fresh stores and goods perhaps to be loaded.
Also, there would be news of the Searchthrift, the pinnace dropped by the Edward on her April journey back to the Dwina. Chancellor knew Buckland was tired of questions about the Searchthrift, so he had stopped asking, but not before he had heard in detail all Buckland could tell him. Stephen Burrough was in charge of the pinnace, and Richard Johnson was sailing with him. And they were on a voyage dear to Diccon Chancellor’s heart: a voyage of pure exploration: to go farther east than any of them yet had been, and, passing Vaygach and Novaya Zemlya, to sail past the mouth of the Ob. They said the way past was land-barred, but he didn’t believe it. He believed the coast sloped south-east to Cathay, and the Searchthrift might find it, not Richard Chancellor.
They said old Master Cabot had boarded the ship at Gravesend, and had given alms to the poor, and prayed for them, and then swept them off with a great concourse of men and women to the sign of the Christopher and given Burroughs and his company a great banquet, at which the old man had danced himself half the night, as lusty as any young seamen there, in his black cap and his long, forked white beard.
He must be well into his eighties. Chancellor knew the sign of the Christopher. It didn’t matter if Burroughs found the way to Cathay. He was a good man. Not a mathematician, but a good man, whom Dee had taught well. Not like the man he had found here, whose first name he could not even use, and whose mind was like the star over their heads.
They struggled, sluggish with ice, towards Vardȯ. The Ribatsky Peninsula, across whose narrow neck you could drag your ship if, for example, you were sailing a pinnace, but which otherwise you must laboriously round. The sounding, Christopher said, was like the scurf of a scalded head: his spirits must therefore be rising. They anchored in thirty-three fathoms and rode out yet another storm in a bay west of Point Khegore, with a group of Norwegian boats including a big one from Trondheim. He remembered afterwards thinking longingly of Trondheim, and wishing to God they were round the North Cape and so far safely home.
Then Buckland came back to tell him the peninsula was seething with Russians and Danes and Lapps with fish to barter, and even some Dutch. They had nothing to sell, but they went on shore, and had some strong Dutch beer over a stove in a worm-eaten log shed, and borrowed someone’s ovens to make a good batch of bread. Two of the Russians refused to get up and had to be carried by main force back to the ship. They were still thirty miles south-east of Vardȯ.
Then the Varanger Fjord, which the sailors had named Dommes-haff, because of the little round hill on it, five hundred feet high. There was a monastery, on the south shore,