The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [85]
The log was there too. With hesitant fingers, Chancellor turned back the limp pages. The Voyage Intended for the Discovery of Cathay, Sir Hugh Willoughby had headed it; and below he had listed the souls in his charge on each ship. And below that, day by day, an account of their wanderings until, lost and despairing, with the Confidentia leaking and the inshore sea thickening to ice, he had run into the deep bay and stayed there. He had sent three search parties ashore, but found no human life in the darkness: the fishermen and hunters had long since left the north coast for the winter. And although it was only September, snow and hail came upon them, and severe frosts, which sealed them into their harbour.
They had had food for eighteen months, but heat and water were different matters. They lived, it seemed, through Christmas to January, and Sir Hugh himself was one of the last on board to die.
Chancellor took the log with him back to the Edward. To cross the sea in the sunlight; to step into the hot, reeking uproar of his own living ship, was a comfort whose poignancy brought tears to his eyes.
Then he set his men hard to work, for in a week’s time the Governor of the Province would arrive, to escort them on the first stage of their thousand-mile journey to Moscow.
To Christopher, it was all fresh to his appetite, like food laid on a white cloth, tempting him with recondite colours and odours. And yet it was not so alien. No one spoke English. But who could speak English in Antwerp? There were trees outside, of a scrubby kind; and four little houses, and hens, which looked a bit smaller than London hens, but were still poultry; and sheep which looked about the same size as Norfolk sheep, although a different colour. And the church, although without pews and packed full of paintings and tapers and candles, had a cross on top, which everyone did reverence to.
During that strenuous week, he found time to explore the thick pine and birch woods and the small, straggling islands parting the Dwina’s four mouths. He picked wild strawberries and saw the cinnamon rose spilling its single-starred blossom over acres of meadow; he walked along virgin white beaches, and ate blackcock, and bought snow larks, fat and sweet, for three kopeki a basket, and wished that his father or Rob Best were there to translate for him what people shouted at him, from the doors of their cabins, before they hurried inside with a swing of coarse cloth and stained deerskin waistcoat.
He helped them all unload the Edward. Under the carpenter’s direction a log shelter was made, a primitive warehouse, to hold the Hampshire kerseys, the fine violet in grain, the London russets and tawnies and good lively greens; the barrels of pewter and the butts of Holland wine and the six hundredweights of sugar, which Christopher helped the purser to mark off and check. By the time the Governor came, the Edward was empty, and lying further east off the island of Jagrô in a cloud of gnats, from which, provisioned and loaded, she would leave them to go back to England.
The Governor’s name, alarmingly enough, was Prince Simeon Ivanovich Milulinsky Punkoff, and with him came Fofan Makaroff, the Chief Magistrate of Kholmogory, together with three of his colleagues.
Chancellor knew them all. By then his Russian had regained its fluency: he introduced his son, and his own three countrymen from the previous voyage, and then one by one the agents and merchants who had not been here before.
This was his duty, no less than the long weeks of pilotage and the tasks in which lay his real interest: in defining and mapping this country of Russia, and discovering what had been unknown before. This journey to Moscow was his duty, and all the stately mummery