To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [157]
This ship named the Svipa, the Whip.
He spoke to the helmsman who was lashed, as he was. Lutkyn Mere was a pirate, of Danish birth, and spoke several languages. Most of the crew did; although at present he had to converse in broken Danish with Yuri and Dmitri, the Muscovite father and son. There was an Orcadian related to Mowat who spoke all the Scandinavian tongues, and two from the Baltic, fluent in German. Between them, they could navigate from Finland to Greenland and back. The rest of the seamen had spent the last years crewing and fighting with Crackbene. He had known them all by name before twenty-four hours were out. He would trust few of them on land and all of them at sea.
John and Moriz had reached, he supposed, the same conclusion. John the mathematician, whose calculations Crackbene respected. The dwarfish chaplain from Augsburg who, through resolution or prayer, had found his sea legs at last, and his appetite. And Robin, whom he had not meant to bring at all.
When Berecrofts the Younger wouldn’t come, Nicholas had had to make up his mind quickly. He had made this decision before: to allow a boy to prove out his manhood. Felix de Charetty his step-son had died. This voyage, central to all that he planned, was unusually dangerous. He had not pretended otherwise to Archie of Berecrofts – but he had not said, either, what their real destination was. Had he known, Berecrofts might not have allowed Robin to go. It had therefore been the decision of Nicholas, not of Archie. He knew what Moriz thought of it, and of him. Then he looked at Robin’s ecstatic face, and listened to his shouts as he raced up the rigging with Dmitri, and thought that he had been right. Dmitri was only a year older than Robin, and Yuri had brought him. It didn’t strike him that Robin was happy because he was happy.
Lutkyn shouted something, and he answered. It had to do with the herring fleet. The Moray Firth had been covered with boats, and the caravel had gone far out to sea to avoid them. He was already resigned to doubling the length of this part of the voyage; the weather couldn’t be helped. They would meet other vessels no doubt, and would claim to be bound for Deerness. It was early: they might be believed. But even at the wintry beginning of March, there was traffic at sea.
The stop in the Orkneys was vital; but then so were all the components of this expedition. Adorne had accused him, with Roger, of achieving nothing complete; of attempting nothing with a whole heart. John and Crackbene could have enlightened them. It was true, he could not compare what he had done in December with this. That had been wholly within his control, and enacted in a single long day. This was a scheme quite as intricate, prepared over a very long time and necessarily unrehearsed and full of imponderables.
He had found it a relief. He had drawn upon all his strengths for Willie’s Play, and had been rewarded. Yet in the end, empty of emotion after the white-hot intensity of the experience, he had come to question that sense of transcendental fulfilment. The ecstasy of creation had been there. But there also, he saw, had been ecstasy of quite another kind: the man-eating pleasure, for a space, of absolute personal power. An airless, passionate place where, for a time, he could foster those he wished to bind to each other, and to him. A hatchery of chicks is ready and will be emptied this day.
It was as well, perhaps, that Gelis had destroyed the blazing moment so deftly.
Before Godscalc’s death, he had discussed this other project with Crackbene, and Crackbene had dismissed it as crazy. ‘They’d slaughter you. Everyone would.’
Nicholas had been irritated by Mick’s lack of vision. ‘They’d try to. They needn’t. Look. The Hanse – the Baltic ports – got a monopoly of the cod-fishing in Iceland, provided they paid dues to Iceland’s masters at Bergen.