The Way Between the Worlds

by Alys Clare

  He realized he was sitting stock-still on Strega’s back, eyes fixed on the figure on the hillside. With a huge effort he made himself look away, and immediately the sense of dread diminished. It was as if he had been standing under a lowering, chilling cloud, which had suddenly moved away to allow the blessed heat of the sun to reach him.

  He knew he should instantly ride on, as fast as he could, and put some distance between himself and that sinister figure. But the temptation was too strong. Turning to face her once more, he yelled as loudly as he could, ‘I do not fear you! You have no power over me!’

  It might have been his imagination, but as he hastened away down the road, he thought he heard a scream of fury come flying after him.

  Once the sun had fully risen and the bright daylight had banished the shadows, he stopped at a decent-looking inn beside the road. He dismounted and led Strega under a low arch into the yard, where he paid a lad handsomely to rub her down, feed and water her and then groom her. He also told the lad to do what he could with the saddle and bridle, which needed a good wash. Then he went inside the inn and ordered the largest breakfast the innkeeper could provide. While it was being prepared, he paid for hot water and towels and set about cleaning himself up.

  He shaved, untangled his darkened hair, hacked most of it off with his knife and, liberally using the coarse lye soap, washed it several times, restoring its natural fair colour. He washed his body next, thoroughly ridding himself of lice, and he bundled up the old garments he had been wearing and gave them to the innkeeper to burn. He dressed in clean linen – and what a luxury it was – and a tunic of fine wool, from which he had managed to get out most of the creases by hanging it up in the steam from the lavish hot water in which he was bathing. His good cloak, unrolled from his pack, lay ready on the bench beside him. He had even cleaned the layers of mud from his boots, and the chestnut-coloured leather shone again.

  When he sat down to his meal, he suspected he was barely recognizable from the filthy creature who had first walked in. The food was plain but abundant, and by the time he was ready to leave the inn, he felt like a new man.

  As he rode the long route south, he tried not to dwell on those he had left behind who sought revenge. He did not allow himself to believe the danger was past: it was not and probably would never be. People had long memories, and, as he had once heard the king say, there was nothing else to do in the border country except pursue blood feuds and plan the next bout of rape, pillage and murder.

  He told himself that he had increased his chances by changing his appearance and by keeping off the best-known and most commonly used tracks. Sometimes he barely saw a soul all day. It was lonely – he longed for company, even that of some fellow traveller with whom he had nothing at all in common – but the loneliness kept him safe.

  Or so he hoped.

  At length he came to the wide estuary of the Humber river. He and the mare were both exhausted. They had travelled perhaps a hundred and fifty miles since turning south, and the cold winter they had left behind in the country around the Wall had turned into a mild spring. They had covered at least five miles every day, and sometimes, when the roads were flat and straight, as much as thirty. Now both of them needed a rest. Rollo, in addition, needed some time in which to think about the next phase of his mission. Its appeal had lessened with each day and every mile that had taken him closer to it, but he knew there was no avoiding it. In his heart he knew that he feared what he had to do. He did not like feeling afraid.

  He had been born into a family of tough fighters: men who had gone to the hot southern lands to carve out a kingdom for themselves. His father was a Norman knight, and his mother was equally fierce and fiery. From a young age, Rollo had been taught that the way to deal with fear was to stare it in the eye and shame it into submission. He wondered, with a wry private smile, just how well that advice was going to stand up as he set about carrying out the alarming and strange task his king had entrusted to him.

  He found a place to stay – an inn in a small village a few miles inland, on the northern shore of the estuary – and made his plans. He needed more information, and he needed to find the right people to ask. He knew what sort of people they would be and where to find them. He thought as far ahead as he could – as he dared – and then he gave in to his fatigue and went to bed, where in warmth, comfort and peace, he slept dreamlessly from mid-afternoon of one day to mid-morning of the next. Then he rose, bathed, ate, settled his account with the innkeeper and went to fetch Strega from the stables. She was as well rested and restored as he was, and together they set off on the last and most perilous leg of their long journey.

  The rumour that had so concerned the king spoke of a specific location, although it had not been given a name. Its description, the king had hoped, would be enough to identify it, once Rollo was in the vicinity. The location was on the coast and, now that Rollo had reached the right area, he made the decision to proceed by water. He found a long quayside on the river’s north shore, where ships of varying sizes were tied up. Others were arriving and departing and, as far as the eye could see, traders were busy. Rollo approached the captains of several vessels and eventually found one who was going in the direction Rollo wanted and was willing to take a paying passenger and his horse. The captain spat in his hand and the two of them shook on the deal, then coins changed hands and Rollo and his horse went aboard.

  The ship sailed on the evening tide. She was a coastal vessel, not all that big, and usually plied along the east coast from the Humber to the Thames. Her crew were mainly old hands who had served with their captain for years. They knew their profession well and, to Rollo’s relief, most of them seemed willing to enliven the monotony of their daily life by chatting to a stranger.

  On the morning of the first day out, as the ship commenced her voyage around the wide bulge of Lincolnshire, Rollo got into conversation with the mate and the lad who, as his shadow, was learning his job. The two were uncle and nephew, alone in the world except for each other. The lad’s parents – the mate’s late sister and her husband – had died with the rest of her family and most of her village in the floods of the previous autumn. Rollo would not have pressed them to speak of such a recent tragedy, but both man and boy seemed willing, even eager, to do so. Perhaps, he mused, they were trying to get the grief out of their minds by talking about it.

  ‘You’ve never seen seas like it,’ said the mate, eyes full of horror as he thought back. ‘The wind came howling down out of the north like some furious ice demon, and the waves rose up like – like – well, higher than the highest tree.’

  Any man other than one from East Anglia, Rollo reflected, would have said higher than a mountain, but there weren’t any mountains in the fenland.

  ‘The tides were real high and all,’ put in the lad, ‘and what with the hurricane blowing and the sea pushing up with the swell of the tide, the water didn’t have anywhere else to go, so it flooded over the low-lying land.’

  ‘A storm surge,’ Rollo remarked. He had heard tell of such phenomena, although he had never experienced one himself.

  ‘We have funny old storms hereabouts,’ the mate went on with the voice of long experience, ‘and sometimes you’ll think they’re heading off out to sea and you can stop worrying about them, and then they have a change of heart and back they come and hit the land again.’ He shook his head. ‘There’s no accounting for it,’ he muttered, ‘unless it’s magic.’ Both he and the lad made a surreptitious gesture with their right hands. Rollo thought he recognized the sign against the evil eye.

  ‘You get fogs and all,’ the lad piped up. ‘Real strange, they are, floating up out of nowhere like great white phantoms and then vanishing as quick as they came.’

  ‘Are there many shipwrecks?’ Rollo asked. He was pushing his luck, he knew, for sailors were a superstitious bunch, and he thought he could well be castigated for asking such a question when actually at sea.

  The mate and his nephew exchanged a glan
ce. Then the mate leaned closer to Rollo and, dropping his voice, said, ‘There’s sandbanks, see, and they shift around like living things.’ He gave a visible shudder. ‘Round the edges of the Wash, you just never know from one trip to the next where you’re going to find water deep enough for your boat’s draft and where you’re in for a nasty surprise because some stray wind, tide or current has piled up a mess of silt that wasn’t there before.’ He paused, nodding and slyly touching a forefinger to the side of his nose. ‘There’s captains I could mention who have come to grief because they didn’t allow for a sudden change in depth,’ he said softly. ‘Add a stiff wind to the picture, and before you know it, you’re blown on to a sandbank, your boat’s tipping over, your cargo is ruined and you’re like as not drowned, because out there –’ he waved a vague hand – ‘there’s places where you think you’re on firm ground and then you realize too late that you’re sinking fast and you’re trapped in the quicksand. Why, only last—’

  ‘Uncle!’ hissed the lad, making the sign against evil frantically with both hands. Even the mate seemed to realize he had gone too far.

  With an attempt at a smile that convinced neither Rollo nor, apparently, his anxious nephew, the mate said, ‘Course, nothing like that’s going to happen on this ship!’ Then he grabbed the lad by the collar, nodded a curt farewell to Rollo and hurried away towards the stern of the ship, where the two of them disappeared down a steep ladder to the quarters below.

  What had the mate been about to say? Rollo wondered. He had an unpleasant suspicion that he knew. If so, it would mean that he had come to the right place . . .

  He thought back to what the king had said. It had been sufficiently alarming back then, miles and miles away from the place where the terrible events were rumoured to have happened. Now, when Rollo was in the very vicinity, what the king’s words suggested was utterly terrifying. If, that was, the rumours were true.

  As he gazed out across the deceptively calm waters that he had just been told could so quickly and so devastatingly change, Rollo was all but sure that they were.

  The little ship sailed on through the night and all of the next day. They put in at Skirbeck that evening. The weather was fine, warm and sunny with only a very light breeze blowing, and Rollo wondered why the captain had not opted to sail on across the mouth of the Wash. He did not ask – he did not want to draw undue attention to himself – and, as was his wont, he sat back in the shadows, made himself as unobtrusive as he could and listened to the sailors’ talk. They were uneasy, that became immediately apparent; to a man, they seemed to fear the next day’s voyage. They were muttering in low voices, as if they did not want to be overheard, and after a while one of them happened to glance up and notice Rollo, wrapped in his cloak and hunched up in the bows.

  ‘Course, this time tomorrow we’ll be well past the headland and safely on our way,’ the sailor said loudly, the forced cheerfulness evident in his tone. ‘Where d’you reckon we’ll be, master mate? Round the bump of Norfolk and heading south, do you think?’

  The mate mumbled something in reply, and Rollo thought he was trying to hush the first speaker.

  ‘Well, it’s all the same to me,’ the man said. ‘Still, reckon we’ll all be saying our prayers when we pass by, eh?’

  Now several voices joined in to stop him saying any more. There was a brief scuffle and a sudden shout of pain, quickly suppressed. The mate turned to Rollo, and just for a moment, before he managed to control himself, Rollo saw stark fear in his face.

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ the mate said. ‘We’ll see you right. Dropping you at Hunstanton, aren’t we? Well, if we make a good, early start in the morning, you’ll have your feet on dry land in good time for the midday meal.’

  Rollo hoped that it was only in his imagination that the mate added under his breath, ‘God willing.’

  The next day, they set sail soon after dawn on a bright morning with clear skies and a warm breeze off the land which helped their speed as they crossed the mouth of the Wash.

  By Rollo’s guess, they were somewhere around halfway between the land behind them and the land ahead when the weather broke. He was in the boat’s stern, looking out at the coastline far behind, when, with shocking suddenness, he couldn’t see it any more. In only a few heartbeats he could make out nothing at all: they had sailed into a bank of fog so dense that it was like being inside a cloud. He heard the captain yelling commands and, unfamiliar with the nautical terms, Rollo watched anxiously to see what the crew would do. As far as he could tell, they did nothing except take in some sail to slow their speed, although in truth the little vessel had not been travelling all that fast. It made sense, he realized. If you couldn’t see anything, the safest bet was to maintain exactly the same course and pray that any other vessels in the vicinity did the same. That way, if you hadn’t been on a collision course before the fog, you would not have inadvertently moved on to one.

  The little boat drifted on. The breeze had all but died, and above his head Rollo could hear the slap of slack canvas as the sails hung useless. Then suddenly he heard a horrible cacophony of noises: a crash, as if two immense sections of timber were forced together; the terrified whinnying of horses; an unearthly sound of vast, racing waters, as if all the seas of the world had gathered together and were sluicing down on them; the howl of a wind so fierce that he ought to have been blown off his feet and into the broiling sea; the screams of men about to die.

  He shot out his hands to grasp the rail, desperate to steady himself, to cling on to something. Then he realized – and this was the greatest shock of all – that there was no wind blowing. No huge mass of water gathering up to fall on him. No screaming men and horses, no colliding ships.

  He crouched there trembling with fear.

  Around him the sailors also stood as still as if they had all been petrified. Then the captain called out, ‘Clear air ahead!’, the boat moved silently back out into the sunshine and the enchantment went away.

  Rollo watched closely and saw several of the crew exchange nervous glances. Almost all of them held their right hands in the gesture against evil, and many fingered the crosses and other symbols they wore around their necks.

  Nobody, however, said a word. Whatever it was out there that they all feared so much, they were not prepared to talk about it.

  As the mate had predicted, Rollo was dropped off in Hunstanton around midday. He led Strega down the gangplank – mercifully short – and stood, far more relieved than he was prepared to admit, even to himself, on the firm stones of the little quay. He watched as the little boat set sail again, silently bidding her crew farewell and wishing them safe landfall. When the vessel was out of sight, he mounted and rode away.

  The little port was busy, its narrow streets crowded with merchants and townspeople going about their daily rounds. Rollo found a tavern in the town centre, left Strega with a groom’s lad and went inside to find something to eat. The tap room was humming, and, after a mug or two of ale, men were, as they always are, more than willing to talk to a stranger.

  Rollo mentioned to a huge man with bare brawny arms and a scarred leather jerkin that he had recently made the crossing from Skirbeck and encountered a bank of fog.

  The man looked at him with a smile. ‘You’re lucky to be here, then,’ he remarked. ‘Them’s dangerous waters.’

  ‘So I’ve been told,’ Rollo agreed.

  The big man leaned closer, and Rollo smelt beer on him. He’d obviously been in the tap room for some time. ‘It’s the old stamping ground of the sea witch, see,’ he said in a low voice.

  ‘The sea witch?’

  ‘Aye,’ the man said. ‘She was there long before we were all born, and she’ll be there long after we’re dead. She’s always been there, or so they say.’ He frowned, took a long gulp of beer and belched quietly.

  An ancient myth, Rollo thought, kept alive by the superstition of people who lived close to the sea and were dependent on it for their livelihoods. ‘She’s very pow
erful, this sea witch,’ he observed. ‘She blew up a fog so sudden that even our captain didn’t see it coming.’

  ‘Aye, the sea frets are a speciality of hers,’ the big man concurred. ‘They say she likes to hide herself inside them, so men can’t see what she’s up to. Me, I reckon she’s no need of hiding places. She’s far too powerful for that.’

  ‘What else does she do?’ Rollo asked.

  ‘She lures ships on to the sandbanks, that’s what she does,’ the man whispered hoarsely. ‘Or she sends a tempest down out of the north and blasts them on to the cliffs, hurling good men into the water so their drowned bodies wash on to our shores for the gulls to pick out their eyes and clean the flesh off their bones.’ He was breathless, a sheen of sweat on his broad face, and Rollo could feel his deep dread.

  I must keep him talking, Rollo thought. He sensed he had come to the right place, and he needed to know more. ‘The crew of the boat I sailed on were very nervous,’ he said tentatively. ‘Has there – has the sea witch been particularly active of late?’

  He had gone too far, and he realized it as soon as the words were out of his mouth. The big man slammed his mug down on the table and turned to glare at him. ‘What do you want to know that for?’ he demanded. ‘What are you, some sort of ghoul come to gloat over the bodies of the dead?’

  ‘No, of course not, I—’ Rollo began.

  The man did not let him finish. ‘If you want a close encounter with her, you go and look for her,’ he said in a vicious hiss. ‘Go on up the coast to the north and call her.’ Abruptly, he laughed, a cruel, harsh sound. ‘You won’t need to find her, my lad. She’ll find you!’

  Some of the other drinkers had glanced up at the big man’s loud voice and were looking over in Rollo’s direction. It was time to go. He shook out some coins to pay for his food and beer, then quietly made his exit.

  Up the coast to the north, the big man had said. The day was sunny, and visibility was good, with no sign of any more fog. Rollo fetched Strega and, ignoring the fear and apprehension that growled deep inside him, set off along the coastal track.