Madoc

by Bernard Knight

  ‘Let’s hope it is not the Fortunate Isles,’ chuckled Einion, ‘and that we have not gone in a great circle in the Western Ocean.’

  ‘Where are we, Madoc?’ asked Svein, suddenly. ‘I know that we have gone south to about twice the distance from Spain to the Fortunate Isles … but how far west have we come?’

  Madoc pulled out the leather wallet from inside his clothing and carefully unrolled the parchment.

  ‘We have been away seventy-two days, Svein. Not counting the time we have been here, I have made a rough reckoning each day on the pace of the wind and current.’

  They looked expectantly at him.

  ‘Between two and three thousand miles from the coast of Spain – that’s where we are.’

  Einion gulped and the Norseman whistled between his teeth.

  ‘I never knew such distances could exist,’ muttered Einion. ‘Surely the world cannot be that big.’

  ‘Then where are we, Welshman?’ gibedSvein. ‘This island and the surrounding sea look very real to me, however far we are from home.’

  Madoc pulled his chart away. ‘I have marked each day’s progress and the course by sun, stars and lodestone, when we used it. It cannot be too far from the truth. Svein, how distant would you think those ancestors of yours sailed, when they found this Vinland in the north?’

  Svein shrugged. ‘There are no good records, Madoc. It was done in separate steps, from Island to Gronland and then across to the barren ice islands.’

  Einion got up from the sand. ‘What are we to do next, that is the thing?’

  ‘Simple, lad … we go on, for we cannot go back,’ answered the Norseman.

  Madoc looked towards the group of seamen at the fire.

  ‘It might come hard to some of them. But the winds blow always from the east and the current sets that way too … so we have no choice, the Gwennan Gorn cannot breast that river in the sea, with the wind as it is.’

  ‘It is already June … a few months and the sailing season will be over. We have to get somewhere to winter or find a way to re-cross the ocean before the autumn storms set in,’ worried Einion.

  Madoc stood up alongside his brother. ‘Then we had better get on with it,’ he said firmly. He called to the crew.

  ‘We sail the Gwennan Gorn onwards the day after tomorrow,’ he told them. ‘In the morning, we will hunt as many birds and small animals as we can and fill every water butt to the brim.I think there will be many other islands from now on, but it is best to take no chances.’

  There was an ominous silence.

  ‘Where do we go from here?’ muttered one of the crew.

  ‘To find the place we set out from Gwynedd to find,’ said Madoc, easily.

  ‘We know nothing of what we hoped to find,’ growled Alun, the man whom Svein had feared would cause trouble,even before they made a landfall.

  ‘Every group of islands is near a mainland,’ persuaded Madoc. ‘The isles off Menevia, the Caledonian isles, the Fortunate Isles off Africa, Anglesey off Gwynedd itself. We shall find the great land in the west that the Vikings discovered many years ago.’

  ‘And if we don’t?’ asked Alun, with a suspicion of a sneer.

  ‘Then do you wish to stay on a deserted island, ten miles long, and live on squirrels and great nuts for the rest of your life?’ snapped Svein. He had little time for Alun Crookeye.

  The man with the squint took a step forward.

  ‘Well, I for one won’t set foot in that damned cockleshell for quite a time yet. We’ve had the better part of a quarter of a year huddled in that thing, living like rats, squeezed together, half-starved and drinking slime. If I’d known what it was to be like, I’d never have set foot off that quayside at the Afon Ganol.’

  Several of the other men mumbled half-voiced agreement. Madoc felt pained at this sudden outburst. He thought that the few days’ rest and good food would have restored the men to their original zest for adventure.

  ‘We can’t leave you here, Alun, nor any others. We have no means of finding the island again, even if the wind and sea would allow us to retrace our path.’

  ‘Leave us here! No, you certainly will not leave us here,’ snapped Alun. ‘The ship does not sail until we agree. And that may be a long time. Why exchange the known, solid land for empty wastes on the edge of the world? The world must end somewhere … and I don’t intend to be one of those who findsout where.’

  He said this with an air of smug finality, then looked knowingly at his supporters, to get confirmation of their approval of his ultimatum.

  Madoc would have continued to argue and persuade, but Svein solved the immediate problem in a typically forthright way.

  Stepping forward, he said, ‘Alun, look!’

  The wall-eyed sailor turned his head to the Viking, and received a blow in the face that would have stunned a bull. He fell to the ground, bleeding from the nose and lay still.

  ‘You’ve killed him, Svein,’ snapped Madoc, dropping to his knees and lifting up the seaman’s head.

  The Norseman was unconcerned. ‘His head is too hard for that. Leave him alone, he’ll survive. Tell him that I’ll repeat the dose every time he talks mutinous nonsense … that should cure his wayward tongue.’

  Next morning, Alun was conscious and able to walk, though he was lacking several of his front teeth and had a broken nose. He was unable to speak, but the look in his eyes as he glared at the Viking made Madoc fear that Svein should be on the watch for a dagger in the back from now on.

  The day was spent in provisioning the ship and that night they all slept on board, ready for a start at dawn. They had decided that they would set off again towards the setting sun, until they met a wind or tide that set them on a different path.

  At dawn, they watched the island slowly slide behind them and vanish over the horizon.

  The wind was weak and the current set them slightly to the north of west, but they kept going all day and the next without incident. Several times they saw sandbanks and islands, then on the third day, there was no land at all, nor on the fourth or fifth.

  This worried Madoc slightly, as he felt sure they would have been in an archipelago of offshore islands. This empty sea made his heart sink.

  ‘What do you think of this?’ he murmured to Svein, as they stood on the sterndeck, six days sailing from their last landfall.

  ‘I think I should have punched Alun a lot harder, for he is already able to wag his tongue and disturb our other men,’ rumbled the huge fellow.

  ‘Many more days of this, and we will hardly be able to blame him,’ replied Madoc anxiously.

  Svein, looking around the sky, said nothing, but wondered if there was something brewing in the heavens that might do more than divert Alun Crookeye.

  The vault of the heavens had taken on a deeper blue and the wind dropped almost to nothing.

  By the next morning, it was apparent to everyone on the little ship that some change in the weather was imminent, unlike anything they had seen before. Towards evening, straggling white fingers of cloud appeared high in the sky and the sunset was a threatening yellowish colour.

  During the night, the heat became oppressive, the first time that this had happened on the whole voyage. There was no wind and the sail hung limply, with an occasional forlorn slap against the mast. No one slept, every man huddled on his small area of deck or bilge boards, feeling the sweat run down his skin and the feeling of prickling fear of the unknown inside his brain.

  Two hours after dawn, creeping over the southern horizon came a vast swirling mass of whitish-grey cloud, the underbelly of which turned blue-black as it climbed the sky towards the zenith. Before noon, it had blotted out the sun and the first gusts of wind began.

  There was a sudden rippling of the sea as a little squall hit the vessel and bounced her gently up and down. Ten minutes later, a longer and harder blow came, then all was quiet again.

  ‘I fear this, Madoc,’ grunted Svein. ‘I have been on the sea since I was seven years old,
in every sea known to the Irish and a few unknown to them. But I have never seen the likes of this.’

  Einion was frankly frightened at the great pall of cloud that crept inexorably across the sky. ‘Is it the end of the world?’ he asked Madoc quietly. ‘Perhaps this was the trap that nature has lured us into.’

  ‘It is a storm, Einion. Maybe the worst storm we have ever known. But it is only a storm and will die down, just as it started.’

  Another gust hit them, more violently this time and the vessel heeled sharply as it hit her high sides.

  ‘We had better take that sail right down,’ advised Svein. ‘Stretch it across the hold on top of the coracles and tie it as firmly as we can.’

  ‘But leave room for bailing in one corner,’ added Madoc, looking with apprehension at the swirls of white in the grey mass that now hung almost from horizon to horizon.

  ‘Bring the bow round to face the wind when it comes,’ shouted Svein to the men, who were now working frantically with the sail and anything movable above deck. ‘Put out two oars, just one each side, so that we have a chance to keep her prow to the storm.’

  Five minutes later, with no further warning, the hurricane hit them.

  The crew of the Gwennan Gorn must have had many thousands of days seafaring experience between them, but none of them had ever even had nightmares about a storm as bad as that one.

  Within half an hour, Svein’s oars had been snapped off, the steering oar had vanished and with it Gwilym, the steersman. The little vessel became nothing more than an ungainly raft, tossed and rolled in the waves.

  Every man was driven off the deck and crouched terror-struck beneath the pitifully inadequate decking or under the edge of the leather sheets and sail that was lashed over the stores in the hold.

  Waves like mountains careered under the ship, lifting her high towards the black sky.

  Only the buoyancy of the light little vessel and the high bulwarks saved her, as the storm rushed her northwards at a speed that was treble that of a galloping horse.

  Any thought of baling was pointless. Gradually, the hull filled with water, until each man was in up to his chest. Only the floating power of the wooden hull kept the Gwennan Gorn on the surface, though she settled lower and lower in the water. Even so, she would probably have foundered, but for twenty empty provision casks – all the food long exhausted – which were trapped under the bow and stern decking, unable to float away because of the hatch covers lashed across the hold. These gave that little extra buoyancy that saved all their lives.

  All that day and all that night the storm went on unabated. One of the crew died when one of the wild lurches of the ship caused him to strike his head on a beam. He fell under the surface of the water inside the hull and in the dark, no one knew of it, until he was found swirling about against their feet, drowned.

  Daylight brought no relief and, by then, many of the wet,exhausted and terrified men were praying for death to end their suffering.

  Suddenly, the wind dropped and, within an hour, the sea abated to a long swell. The Gwennan Gorn rolled uneasily, almost awash, her oar ports level with the surface.

  ‘Has it finished, Madoc?’ croaked Einion, his mouth crusted with salt and his tongue swollen from thirst.

  Svein dragged himself up over the edge of the hold and unsteadily stood on the deck. There were hazy clouds overhead, but all around the horizon were masses of black, menacing and waiting.

  ‘I think it is but a respite. We seem to be in the centre of a whirlwind,’ he muttered.

  The crew crawled on deck and their first task was to quickly, but reverently, slide the body of their dead comrade over the side into the grey depths. Gwilym had been taken earlier, but nothing marked his passing but memories in the minds of his comrades.

  ‘Now bale, for our lives,’ called Madoc. He jumped down into the hold and set the pace by handing up buckets of water to Einion above him. The crew furiously lifted water from the hull, using any and every container that would hold fluid.

  Cramped for space and afraid to unlash the covers too widely, the process was slow and inefficient, but gradually the level in the little ship went down until it was around their ankles, instead of their chests.

  Madoc clambered out at this stage and stood and looked at the menacing sky and the threatening black water around them.

  ‘We have had almost four hours respite, Svein. But I think we are going to be stricken again, very soon.’

  On the southern horizon, the junction of black sky and dark water was already hazy, as the storm began catching up with the Gwennan Gorn across the fifty miles of its calm eye.

  The men looked fearfully at their officers.

  Madoc raised a hand in a gesture that was almost a benediction.

  ‘We have survived one half of the tempest … so we can survive the other half. We will shelter as before and trust in God. Padraig, you can best occupy your time in prayer for us. I think you are better at that than struggling with a bucket.’

  Madoc’s confidence rubbed off on the crew and there were even a few weak laughs at the skinny priest’s discomfiture. Sveinwalked across the gently rolling deck and laid a hand on the shattered pillar that had supported the steering oar. ‘A pity we lost Gwilym … he was a good sailor and a good steersman.’

  ‘Are we to rig the other steering oar?’ asked Madoc. ‘We carry a spare below deck.’

  Svein shook his head. ‘Why lose another? It can do us no good and if we survive we shall need it.’

  Soon the wind began to hit them in irregular gusts. Having learned by experience, they hurried under the decks and crouched with the boards pressing on their necks again, clinging to the ship’s ribs or the deck supports. They had to trust in the buoyancy of Welsh oak and empty casks to keep them on the surface of this terrifying ocean.

  After a few preliminary gusts, the hurricane hit them as before, the wall of the eye slamming across the sea like a moving cliff of clouds, two miles high. Again they suffered for a day and a night, swamped, sick and in constant fear of death. The Gwennan Gorn raced northwest, covering untold hundreds of miles. Sometimes she sped bow first, sometimes sternfirst and quite often it seemed to be beam first. Rolling, pitching, almost somersaulting, the motion was so fearful that many men cried out in agony to die and escape the terror. Again the hold was flooded to nearly neck level, but no one died this time, in spite of the hellish conditions.

  Padraig prayed aloud as much as he could, though his voice was almost drowned by the shrieking wind.

  No one could eat or drink, they could hardly keep themselves above water, but the respite for a couple of hours when they were in the centre of the storm had given them the chance to drink a few mouthfuls and to swallow some dried meat and fruit from the island. More than that, they now knew that it was possible – if only just possible – to survive that tempest and this knowledge gave them the will to cling on until it passed.

  Just as it had come, so the storm went.

  Dawn came, so obscured that it was hardly noticed, but a few hours later, when the wind and the sea were at their worst, it suddenly abated and the great vortex of wind and cloud that stretched for almost a thousand miles, raced away from them to the north, to fling itself on some unknown coast.

  Within minutes, the sky lightened, the wind rapidly dropped, and the sea moderated, changing from a white inferno to a longgreen swell.

  Like animals emerging from a winter’s hibernation, the seamen crawled out onto the deck and lay trembling, almost afraid to believe that the worst was over.

  As the cloud thinned and the sun peered through, they scrambled to their feet and staggered about, clasping each other and muttering and crying almost like a boatload of drunks.

  ‘Bale … then a prayer for salvation!’ ordered Madoc, through cracked lips. They laboriously drained the hold right to the bottom, taking off the sail and cargocover, pulling the coracles aside and lifting out the remaining stores to dry in the sun that was by now back to its f
ull strength in a blue sky.

  As the day wore on, order was restored. They had no means of kindling a fire, as there was nothing dry on board for the flint to ignite, so any soup or cooked meal was out of the question. But they had some cooked birds from the island that were not yet too corrupt to eat and, together with fresh water and fruit, noon saw them almost back to normal. The spare steering oar was unlashed from the inside of the hull and rigged to a makeshift pillar. Alun, the potential rebel, was the best steersman now and he took the oar on Madoc’s orders. He was quiet, but not sullen, as far as Madoc could see. The perils of the sea overrode any quarrels for the moment and Alun’s bruised face and gums were forgotten for now, at least by everyone except Alun himself.

  ‘The Almighty knows where we are,’ muttered Svein, ‘for I’m sure that I don’t.’

  Madoc and Einion peered at their sun-board. ‘The shadow is longer,’ murmured Einion.

  ‘We must have come an incredible distance in two days,’ said Madoc, tilting the bowl in time with the ship’s roll to get the best reading. ‘Not only in northing. The speed that the tempest took us, for two nights and a day, must surely have sent us far to the west, as this northerly direction cannot account for anything but the smallest part of the distance.’

  ‘Would that some genius could invent a device for measuring east-west voyaging, as well as movements to the north and south,’ grumbled Svein, ‘for we now have no idea where we are.’

  ‘We did not know that before,’ pointed out Einion, ‘so we are no worse off.’

  Madoc dismantled the sun-board and stood up, ‘Wherever we are, it is a great distance from our islands. Let’s hope that something turns up soon on the horizon, or friend Alun will be up to his tricks again.’

  They had raised the sail again and were under way in the same direction as the hurricane, following it at a leisurely pace in the winds that it left behind.

  There were still masses of black cloud sinking rapidly far ahead of them and the horizon was too dark for anything to be seen clearly. The vessel sailed on uneasily across this totally unknown sea into the gloom of yet another night.