Go Saddle the Sea

by Joan Aiken

  ‘What has got into that lunatic?’ yelled the captain furiously. He was at the tiller, but could not leave go of it, for the ship was careering along, even faster than last evening, it seemed, between the piled and evil-looking criss-cross waves.

  ‘Matthieu!’ called the captain. ‘Luc! Abdullah! Catch hold of the idiot and knock him senseless with a marlinspike, before he sets fire to the ship!’

  ‘Eh, eh, he’m in a proper frenzy,’ muttered Sammy, watching the dancing madman. ‘If he were a Malay – I had one as a shipmate once – I’d say he’d gone amok. I’ve seen him wild like that when the fit took him. – We’d best try to head him off at this end, lad – if he burns the ship, we’ll all go to the bottom together.’

  And he took a length of rope from a coil beside us and formed it into a noose, then said to me,

  ‘Do you move that way, lad, and I’ll go this side, and we’ll see if we can edge him towards the stern.’

  The other three men were now at the after end of the caboose, and the captain, beads of sweat rolling down his face, was steering so as to try and keep the mainsail away from the dancing madman, who continued his wild capering, waving the burning banner, and roaring that he was King Conor’s trusty watch-dog who would rend any man that touched a hair of his head.

  Sam crept closer and closer, keeping the sail between himself and the maniac. I was on the other side of the ship, and the wind blew from the madman to me. Every now and then I had to duck as a piece of flame whirled past me. The man saw me and his eyes seemed to bulge; they were reddened in frenzy and the veins of his neck and forehead stood out like writhing snakes; he was a truly frightening apparition. He made as if to jump down on me, then suddenly turned in the other direction, and with a great shout:

  ‘Wait for me, Ferdia! I will fight you at the Bridge of the Leaps!’ he bounded off the roof with a spring that took him right into the ship’s well. Sammy, at that same moment, very adroitly hurled his rope, noosing the man’s arms to his body and stopped him in mid-leap, so that he fell helpless to the deck and lay stunned. Matthieu and Abdullah instantly flung themselves on him, snatched away the burning canvas, and tossed it overboard.

  ‘God be thanked!’ said Abdullah. ‘Another minute, and he would have set fire to the sail.’

  ‘Tie him up!’ said the captain grimly.

  ‘No need, Capitano. He has knocked himself unconscious. He will be sane when he recovers, doubtless.’

  ‘Tie him up just the same. – That was well done,’ said the captain, curtly, to Sam, as if he regretted having to be under an obligation; and, turning back at once to Abdullah, he asked,

  ‘What got into Shaemus? – Had he been drinking – or taken hasheesh?’

  ‘No, captain, not to our knowledge,’ said Abdullah, removing Sam’s noose in order to re-tie the man’s hands in front of him.

  By now daylight was near, and a faint band of light appeared eastwards over the lead-coloured sea. I looked around the ship, wondering where the Doctor and his assistant had passed the night; and, as if summoned by my thought, they made their appearance at that moment, emerging from the hold and climbing the ladder. The small swarthy man led the way, and, seeing his face, recollecting how I had been brought aboard the Guipuzcoa, I thought what a stupid gull I had been. I felt older now by twenty-four years, not hours.

  The Doctor and his assistant were paying me no heed just then.

  ‘What is to do?’ said the Doctor, looking at the body on the deck.

  ‘The Irishman has run mad,’ growled the captain, ‘and burned our spare vela menora; we shall have to pray that God does not see fit to damage the one we are using. You had best give the idiot an opiate, Doctor, to prevent his doing any further mischief.’

  ‘Let me have a look at him,’ said the Doctor.

  But as the Doctor and his assistant bent over Shaemus, the latter recovered from his brief spell of unconsciousness. Dragging his wrists from the hold of the startled Abdullah, he roared out,

  ‘Ferdia! Well met! Now we shall see who is master!’ and, showing all his teeth, he flung himself on the Doctor’s assistant. Wholly unprepared for this onslaught, the small man staggered backwards; Shaemus seized him by both arms and shook him as a bird shakes a worm. The smaller man, however, was quick to recover, and, spitting out some furious Basque oath, he whipped a knife from his stocking and jabbed it at the Irishman’s ribs. This served only to inflame the latter’s fury and, yelling with pain and rage, he too pulled out a knife and with a flickering upward motion drove its blade at the other man’s throat.

  ‘Stop them!’ shouted the captain furiously. ‘Here – Matthieu – take the helm, damn you – I’ll soon stop them – ‘ for the two men, now engrossed in their fight, had jumped up on to the deck and were ducking, feinting, and stabbing at each other as if they were lifelong enemies, all the time drawing towards the forward end of the ship.

  Matthieu took the helm and the captain, drawing out a knife of his own and snatching up a heavy wooden spike, went after the two men and circled round them, watching for a chance to stun the Irishman. ‘Hey – you! You seem to have some sense!’ he bawled at Sam. ‘Help me put an end to this madness!’ – for the Doctor, shrugging as if he saw no recourse but to let the men kill each other, had returned to his original position and sat down at the foot of the mast.

  Sam picked up his noose again. I was afraid of what might happen if he came too close to the fighting pair. With his lame leg he could not move quickly. And already the captain, aiming a blow at the Irishman’s head with his spike, had received a savage slash on his arm which made him retire a step, cursing, and tie his kerchief over the cut, which was pouring blood. The deck was already spattered and slippery from the blood of the two combatants, who had given each other various wounds, which they treated with as much disregard as the utter lack of reason for their battle.

  Having tied up his arm the captain came on again – I had to admire his courage – and landed a vigorous blow on the head of Shaemus, who, shaking his head as if a bee had stung it, growling with fury, now picked up the smaller man bodily, and, bellowing,

  ‘We shall see now, Ferdia, who can leap the farthest!’ he bounded like a stag into the air.

  The ship, under the handling of Matthieu who, it was plain, was by no means so skilful a helmsman as the captain, had been slewing nervously from side to side like a balky horse, and at this moment she chanced to give a particularly violent, shuddering heave to starboard, as she staggered between two fierce gusts of wind. The result was that both combatants, still grappled together, were hurled headlong over the rail into the crisscross waves, and both disappeared from view without a sound or a cry.

  ‘Diablo!’ said the captain, and flung a rope towards the spot where the men had sunk. But no hand came up to seize it. No sign of a living form could be seen.

  Now the Doctor, for the first time since the start of this strange duel, showed signs of concern.

  ‘Put the helm about!’ he called sharply to Matthieu, and, to the captain, ‘Lower the boat!’

  ‘In this wind? In this sea? Impossible,’ said the captain shortly, leaping back to take the helm, for the ship was falling away from the wind, and seemed in near danger of capsizing. ‘We’d lose the vessel and all of us would drown, not just those two fools.’

  ‘How shall I do my work without Jaca?’

  ‘Train another helper,’ growled the captain. ‘I’ll miss that mad Shaemus too – he was a handy sailor. But I rate the ship above men’s lives.’

  ‘Jaca was no common sailor; he had many skills!’

  ‘He was also a murderer and dangerous hothead. Why did he have to fight that drunken Irishman? Now we are two men short and shall be in a bad way if the weather worsens. Go back to your slumbers, Doctor, and leave the management of the ship to me.’

  Muttering angrily to himself, to the effect that the Irishman had blood on his head and was no loss but that Jaca was irreplaceable, the Doctor went below. The captain, in
an equally bad humour, summoned old Luc to bind up his arm more firmly, and then shouted to Matthieu and Abdullah to reef the top-sails.

  By now day had come, but the light brought little cheer, for the skies were low and thick, the sea evil and creased-looking, while the wind came in wilder and wilder gusts, causing the mast to bend like a blade of grass. Although, as Sam had prophesied, my queasiness had diminished, and I no longer had the urge to vomit after every lurch of the ship, I was not at all happy in my mind at the captain’s curt words, ‘If the weather should worsen.’ How much worse than this could it grow? I wondered to myself.

  By now, too, there seemed a sense of brooding depression about the Guipuzcoa which was understandable enough. Two men had been lost in an outbreak of stupid, wasteful violence: what did this portend?

  We went into the caboose, for a little shelter from the incessant tugging of the wind, and found old Luc muttering to himself,

  ‘The Estadea are angry with us; yes, they are angry!’

  ‘Good morning, Old Father,’ Sam said to Luc. ‘Can you give us a mouthful of breakfast?’

  ‘All I can give you is dry bread,’ grumbled the cook. ‘That mad pig of an Irishman came and finished off the potaje while I was asleep in the early watch. Much good it has done him! What a waste of good soup! Now he has taken it to the bottom of the sea. – You are a friend of the Estadea, young lord, and I think they are looking after you,’ he said to me, breaking off a piece from a great round loaf.

  ‘Can’t you please tell them to leave me alone, at least? I am a poor old man who only does what he is told and means no harm to anybody.’

  The captain at that moment bellowing that he was hungry, and where was his breakfast? Luc picked up the rest of the loaf and went out.

  ‘What did he mean?’ Sammy asked me in a low voice. ‘Why does he think you are a friend of the spirits?’

  ‘Because I was reading my book in here, and he thought it must be some book of wizardry.’

  I did not tell Sam the rest of the dark and frightening thought that had possessed my mind. I had poured most of the contents of that flask into the soup. Shaemus had drunk it, thus getting the draught that was meant for me. He was a grown man, of large stature; perhaps the draught that would have stupefied me had merely made him wild. By my deed I might have saved myself, but I had robbed two men of their lives. One of them was a murderer, true, and the other had decoyed me to this ill-omened vessel – but still I feared that the results of what I had done would haunt me for years, if not to my dying day. I decided, however, that I would not burden Sam by telling him about it, for he was saying, cheerfully enough,

  ‘At all events, we’re rid now of two possible enemies – an’ that’s no bad thing! Now the cap’n’s short-handed, he’ll likely value our company higher!’

  And indeed, during the day, as the weather steadily worsened, the captain approached Sam and, in a more friendly tone than he had used yet, said,

  ‘I have heard that you are a sailor, Ingles. If you are a better helmsman than those two idiots who are left to me, I will remit your passage-money and give you a free berth to Ireland, for my best steersman was the maniac who went overboard; he had a feeling for the ship which those two have not.’

  Sam, always obliging, said he would show what he could do, and gave me a nod to follow him – ‘In case,’ he muttered in English, ‘these raskills might do ’ee a mischief while I’m fixed at the tiller. So keep by me, lad.’

  I did so, but it seemed at present the captain had no other thought but to supplement his reduced crew, for after watching Sam’s handling of the tiller for a while, apparently satisfied with his skill, he went off to survey the damage that Shaemus had done before his sudden and violent end. There was a charred patch on one of the two mainsails that gave the captain much anxiety. – ‘If the wind would but drop, we should exchange that sail for the spare, but I dare not try that in this gale,? he muttered, scanning the burnt spot uneasily.

  Worse still it seemed that Shaemus, in his madness, had dragged the spare sails out of the lockers and slashed up one of them to provide himself with his flaming flag, while others of them had been hacked and one at least was lost entirely, probably fallen overboard before his crazy activities were detected.

  Grinding his teeth with rage at this discovery, the captain set everybody to work, stitching rents and sewing on patches – everybody except the Doctor. I and old Luc spent most of our day stitching with sailmakers’ needles, and the two remaining sailors helped whenever it was possible for them to do so.

  I thought that the captain should remit my passage-money, too, in return for my services, but did not dare suggest this, for, as the day drew on, and the wind blew harder and the sky darkened, his brow, too, grew blacker as if it reflected the murky bank of cloud to the east of us. The cloud was like a huge, slow-growing pyramid, lying over the invisible coast of France: lurid white round the edges, then grey, then a deeper grey, almost steel-blue, in the centre. Even Sammy’s ugly cheerful countenance became puckered with worry as he glanced over his right shoulder at the ominous pile, and at the hurrying scud behind us.

  ‘Yon’s a snow-cloud if I’m not mistook,’ said he. ‘And I’d as lief not meet a snowstorm in mid-Channel in this little bucket of a hooker; even in one o’ His Majesty’s men o’ war I’d as lief not face it, if the truth be told! Still, there’s this to be said, the wind is helping us on our way; I’ve ne’er crossed the Gulf of Gascony in quicker time! We oughta pass Le Conquet and the lie de Ouessant during the night, at this rate; and though the English Channel is no friendlier than the Gulf in bad weather, there’s more chance o’ meeting other shipping.’

  He did not explain these ominous words, nor did I ask for an explanation. Up to now, we had seen no other shipping at all, but the low-flying clouds and high-whirling spume kept the view from the Guipuzcoa down to a cable’s length around us. It was a wonder to me that the captain could grope his way through this cauldron of cloud-wrapped seething water without a sight of the sun; but Sam seemed confident in him and said that he was a good navigator. As the day drew on the captain seemed more and more absorbed in his battle with wind and water and his care of the ship; he paid little attention to the rest of us.

  By now the motion of the ship was far too violent to permit a fire, or cookery – all we had to eat that day was more bread, wet with salt spray, and some dried figs and goat’s cheese. Sam and I agreed there could be little risk in eating our share of this, for the food was divided among all, though we had to pay for our portion.

  Night came early, with an increase of the bitter cold; the captain, relieving Sam after a long spell at the helm, advised him to go to rest at once and take what sleep he might as soon as possible – ‘For,’ said he, ‘I don’t care for the feel of the wind; I may have to call on you during the night.’

  Sam and I therefore settled in the caboose. Water was now continuously bursting through the hawse-holes and over the gunwale, so that our previous perch up in the prow would have been too wet for comfort – quite apart from the hazard of being thrown off into the sea as the ship bounded up and down.

  I had intended to ask God whether it was His purpose that those two men should be drowned, or whether I had erred in supposing it His will that I should pour the contents of the flask into the soup. All day, sewing patches on the sails, I had been very distressed in my mind about this. But when it came to the point, so wearied was I from the long, frightening day, and the unremitting howl of the wind, that as soon as I laid my head on the deck, I fell instantly asleep. Perhaps God intended me to do so.

  I was awakened, not by any sound, but by a bright, knifelike glare, which blazed through my closed eyelids as if they were made of tissue.

  At first, in terror, I believed that some spark from the Irishman’s wild fire-dance must have remained hidden, and that the ship was now ablaze. Confusedly crying out, ‘Where’s the fire? Quick, we must put it out!’ I stared up and sprang to my feet.

&
nbsp; ‘Easy, lad!’ said Sam’s voice – and what a comfort it was to hear him, for the light had died again, I could see nothing at all in the black dark – ‘Be easy, there’s no fire! Or at least,’ he added in a thoughtful tone, ‘only in heaven.’

  Next moment the cabin was illuminated again, down to the last breadcrumb, cobweb, and curl of onion peel, by a wild red pulsing light.

  ‘What is it?’ I gasped out. ‘Where are we?’ wondering if we might be near some lighthouse with its flashing beam, or if a savage sea-battle was raging close at hand.

  But Sam said, ‘It is lighting.’

  ‘Then why is there no thunder?’

  ‘Because of the snow,’ he said gravely.

  I was not then aware of the fact, but electrical storms at sea, if there be snow also, are seldom accompanied by thunder.

  We went out into the well, where the captain was calling out loudly for Sam.

  ‘Here! You, Ingles! Come and take the tiller. We must reef the mainsail.’

  Once out of the cabin I felt as if I were being stung all over by giant bees. Snow, mixed with hail, was hurling itself at the ship, pouring down so fast that it lay like a white quilt on the surface of the sea. I could hear its hiss and crackle, as it struck the water, mixed with the whine of the wind, while overhead, against the repeated red-brown glare of the lightning, the snow-flakes appeared black like a cloud of grasshoppers, a million sooty whirling dots. The ship was all coated with snow, and slippery with ice; the ropes wore a silvery coating and whenever the lightning glared out, the whole ship sparkled as if made from crimson glass. It was most beautiful but frightening.

  Sam, looking calmly about him at all this turmoil – the white, curdled, snow-covered sea and the massive piled mountain of cloud in the sky, copper-coloured in the glow of the lightning – said to the captain,

  ‘Senor, I think you had best make straight for Falmouth. It should not take you too long to get there, with this wind behind us, even after you have reefed the mainsails. I am a Cornishman, and I do not think it advisable to sail round Land’s End in weather like this.’