The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [195]
They reached it with the wind in their favour. So, instead of the haven it might have been, it became a place for garbled talk and quick loading: Brooke had gone to Bergen, they said, with the captain, and they had to glean what news they could from his deputy. The Searchthrift had been at sea during all May and June, and had left Vardȯ again after a brief stay in July: the captain’s deputy did not know where they were going. The snow blew like burst flock on the shutters and Buckland, getting to his feet with the meal hardly over, said he ought to be getting back, and dragged Chancellor and the rest with him.
He was right. The days were shortening; the cold had not lifted, and would never lift now. And the bays and inlets and fjords which were shallow would begin to fill with a thick, shining gruel of ice, against which their arms would crack, rowing the pinnace; into which their ships would sail, and never move afterwards. While the bays which were not shallow would give them no holding, but would let them rock and spin past on the wind like the keys of an ash tree, to seed their profitless souls on a reef. So they sailed, knowing they must now trust only to God and their pilot.
And Chancellor did not let them down. A quiet man with a quick sense of humour, he stamped no menacing mark on his company. Only the observant eye, the lively brain, the pure, canalized flair of the mathematician had made him what Henry Sidney always said he was: the supreme man of his time on the sea.
He took the Edward on compass and chart out of Vardȯ, and sailed her on instruments, on instinct, on geometry for a month while the wind drove the fleet on bare poles from one point of the compass to the next; into and out of the sight of land; in quarters where he had no charts and no books of reference, and could only trust to his work, to his tables, to his and Dee’s calculations. And where Willoughby’s pilot, lost and weary and desperate, had fallen at last uncaring on land, and had dragged himself and his two ships towards it, regardless of where and what it was, or what fate it might bring, Chancellor kept to the sea, marshalling his ships through darkness and mist by every means Buckland and the rest could devise; by drum and beacon, by cannon and trumpet. And they kept together, and sailed round North Cape, and at length, in the last days of October, started south down the high crumbling coastline of Finmark.
Forty miles west-south-west of the Cape, in the sound of the island of Ingȯy, the wind dropped for a day. For a few brief hours of daylight the tired, patched ships, heavy with seawater floated together, and men stood on the decks under the bearded ice of the rigging, unshaven and hollow eyed, and called to one another: greetings, and messages, and obscene, rueful jokes. They tried for fish in the flat, gelidous waters and came up with glistening netfuls of cod: a matter for weeping when the milch cows and sheep are long since slaughtered and eaten, the eggs and cheese finished, the onion and garlic rotten, the butter rancid, the bread moulded and hard as the bacon and peas. They ate them half raw, because there was neither water nor wood to spare for their cooking, and thought them finer than saffron cakes and white bread, or oysters wooed down with claret. Then, that night, the gales sprang up again, from the north and the west, and the last struggle began.
They had to cape south-west, past the reefs and islands and cliffs of west Norway, driven by a wind which turned them always inwards, against the threatening land. The problem was how to win sea-room; to avoid steering too far west into the empty white Arctic; to keep far enough from the coast to deny the quick-veering wind which would hurl them on to the rocks. Chancellor did it by standing day and night on the quarterdeck over the helmsman, his eyes red, his lashes and beard coated with frost, with a line round his waist as the Edward pitched and