The Ringed Castle

by Dorothy Dunnett

  They had to cape south-west, past the reefs and islands and cliffs of west Norway, driven by a wind which turned them always inwards, against the threatening land. The problem was how to win sea-room; to avoid steering too far west into the empty white Arctic; to keep far enough from the coast to deny the quick-veering wind which would hurl them on to the rocks. Chancellor did it by standing day and night on the quarterdeck over the helmsman, his eyes red, his lashes and beard coated with frost, with a line round his waist as the Edward pitched and rolled, her timbers shrieking, her sides thudding with the crash and hiss of the waves while above in the darkness there floated the long, chorded voice of the wind which you listened to, for it spoke its own language, to the sea and to the men who sailed on it. And at one shoulder, through it all, stood Buckland his sailing master and friend, relieving him when he could; transmitting into painful, deliberate action all Chancellor’s ceaseless, precise orders. And on the other, like a rock, Francis Crawford.

  So they passed round the shoulder of Norway: past Soroya and Senieno; past the teeth of the Lofoten Islands; white spray like knives against the staring snow ranges beyond; for a hundred miles and fifty miles more rock after rock, cliff after cliff, until they heard, above the thunder of their own passage, the rolling voice at Moskenesoy of the Maelstrom, which could swallow trees and toss them out, limp as hemp stalks; whose roar could shake the door rings on cottages ten miles from its brink.

  Because they knew precisely where they were and were expecting this; because Chancellor had given the right instructions and Buckland, using his sails like a sculptor, had carried them out, they weathered it and pitched past, changing the helmsman over and over because of the weight of the whipstaff, dragging a ship foul-bottomed and battered, laden with ice and with bilge water which moved over her keel like a boulder, pushing her shuddering into the waves.

  Past Vaeroy and Rȯst, with open water before him again, and daylight to see by for a while, Chancellor untied his lashing with frozen fingers and got back to his cabin where Lymond, waiting to relieve him, had fallen asleep on the edge of the straw mattress which had been Christopher’s, before this small shack on the poop quarterdeck had become the workbench and altar and parliament of the Muscovy fleet.

  Francis Crawford was asleep, for once dreamlessly, in the clothes he had worn for three months, with dirt grained in his hands and dulling the salt-tangled hair over his eyes. Unable to shave, he had joined them all in the uniform anonymity of a barberless beard: even fur-hatted on deck, he could be picked out from the rest by the bright glittering gold, which concealed the marks of undernourishment and fatigue, as Chancellor’s clinging black hair emphasized his.

  He bent now over the Voevoda and, touching him, said, ‘A penny for the turnspit. You are needed.’ And as Lymond opened his eyes, ‘I have news for you. We are going to winter at Trondheim.’

  He was roused into automatic movement at once, swinging round from the mattress, and reaching for the matted sheepskin, soaked still from its last wearing. He said, ‘Weather ahead?’

  In the doorway, Chancellor shouted, ‘John!’ into the wind and then returned, Buckland on his heels.

  ‘Weather ahead. The wind is veering again. And the beakhead has broken again, and one of the spars. The sails will hardly mend one more time: the forecourse and maintop are in tatters.’

  Buckland said, ‘We’re more than half-way home, with by far the worst of it behind us.’

  Lymond said, ‘But with the weather worsening, and this bloody wind heading us off. We haven’t got time to wander about. Or if we have, the other three haven’t. The Esperanza springs her planks if you cough.’

  ‘That’s the point,’ Chancellor said. ‘We have 160 tons under us. The Bona Confidentia is a cork and the Esperanza little more, and low in the water. Even if we could make the crossing, they can’t.’

  ‘Have they said so?’ said Buckland.

  ‘They won’t say so,’ said Chancellor.

  Lymond said, ‘How good are your charts?’

  ‘Good enough. It’s a dirty entrance. I shall have to con them in.’

  It was his supreme domain, and there was no argument. Only Buckland said, after a moment’s silence, ‘It means spending the winter in harbour. Once in, we shan’t get out until the spring. If you have contrary winds, you might not be in London till May, or back in the Dwina till summer or autumn. You won’t get a cargo from Muscovy next year at all.’

  ‘If we don’t do this,’ Chancellor said, ‘we may not get a cargo from Russia this year, never mind next. Some of the cargo will keep through the winter. We save that, and the ships, and the men.’

  He took his decision a thousand miles north of London, on the edge of November, with a gale coming from the west bringing weather that they had not had, even yet. He confirmed it later that morning, when by flag and cannon shot he drew the fleet towards him and took aboard the captain of the Esperanza and the Confidentia, but not Howlet, of the Philip and Mary, whose boat was half stoved in making the attempt, and who had to be picked up by pinnace. It was only then that they learned what damage the small ships had suffered, and it was realized beyond all doubt that these could not hope to reach London.

  There was time for that, and a quick consultation over Chancellor’s charts; then they parted. Over the noise of the wind, presently, the men on the quarterdeck of the Edward Bonaventure could hear singing, reaching fitfully into the growing storm from the ships round about them. Chancellor listened to it, his face stiff and salted, his bloodshot eyes and ridged brow turned to the weather. ‘You can ask your ships to do too much,’ he said. ‘And your men.’

  They reached the entrance to Trondheim Fjord with the tide and a full gale from the west, which brought the sea green round the poop and over the worn and cracked pavisades of the four weary ships. They skimmed rocking before it into the cannonading spray of reef, rock and island, carried under bare poles as fast as four bladders, and as capricious; caught and swirled by the currents; turned by the waves and pushed and pulled by the wind.

  The entrance to the fjord was dirty. A lordly hand, gay with malice, had dusted the sea with black rocks and brought mountain heads, gritty with reefs, to its surface. Quicker than the eye could run on a chart, the ships poured and swirled through the great throats of water, and the less able died first.

  The Bona Confidentia struck at full speed. She exploded as if the reef had blown up beneath her, with men, planks and spars spurted into the sky like math from a scythe blade, seen small and distinct, between the wall of one sky-reaching wave and the next.

  The Bona Esperanza turned, shearing her sides; took water and turned again; half struck and turned again into the wind, her mizzen-mast down and her rigging fallen, tangled with men. Then the current took her and she fled jerking, like a disabled creature, dragging her dying trap with her. The Philip and Mary disappeared in her wake.

  Chancellor pulled the Edward out of the fjord. He did it conning the ship minute by minute, with the helmsman’s head raised by his foot and the whole crew working to him as his lips, his eyes, his ears, his finger-ends. He drove her between the islands as he had once envied another man in his element, swift and hard and firm on the reins, winning point by point from the winds, giving and winning again; reading the spume and the breakers and lifting his ship like a child round and over them. And he held it until he had brought her outside Froya; and outside Froya, the wind moved to the north, and let him turn aside from the haven which was no haven, and whose entrance they knew the Edward could never brook twice.

  He consulted nobody; but divined his course and gave his directions; and the Edward, swinging slowly, brought her beam to the storm and, limping, began the long journey homewards, alone.

  He wept that night, but not again; and held prayers for the dead in the morning, his voice hoarse and steady above the roar of the wind. He had fifty men and a tired ship to bring home in seas which turned the sun green and mantled the moon and the stars through the night. The
re was no rest, nor was it time yet for speaking.

  Chapter 2

  On November 8th, 1556, with her casks empty and her sails in tatters; with two of her crew washed overboard and one dead from the flux, the Edward Bonaventure sighted land and was able, slowly, to make towards it. A day later, it was possible positively to identify it as a major north-eastern headland in Scotland, by name Kinnairds Head. The wind was in the north-west, and had held steadily there for a day. Hoping for harbour, but praying for any inlet or bay where their anchors would hold and their shattered ship would have peace from the wind, they staggered on. Late in the evening of November 10th, a Tuesday, the wind started to gust and also to back, increasing in power, and Chancellor, using the Lindesay rutter and chart, sailed slowly up to the broad, rocky coastline, bare of trees and broken with low bights and sand dunes, and felt his way into the nearest small bay which gave promise of shelter.

  They had time, before the light went, to see the outline of a fair-sized keep on the skyline, and a modest handful of bothies. They had time, also, to note the position of the reefs behind and beside them, and to take up their position in clear waters, with every piece of ground tackle down that they had. The holding, Christopher reported, was good.

  Then they went below, to the strange rocking creak of a ship swinging at anchor, and set their watches, and chewed their salt meat for the last time to stay them till morning, when the pinnace would steer her way through the rocks to the shore, and they would feel the earth swaying under their feet, and drink sweet water again, and tear bloody meat at a fireside … and see a new face … and listen to a tongue that they knew … and handle a girl …

  ‘The ship is sleeping already,’ Chancellor said. Too tired to eat, he had come in after the others and sat down fully dressed as he was. On one of the mattresses John Buckland was already stretched out, his face a landscape of bone-peaks and hollows, and Lymond had dropped on the sea chest beside him, his coat over his shoulders, his head supported on one motionless hand, his elbow on the chart table.

  Under the hand, with its unhealed blisters and callouses, his eyes could not be looked at. Chancellor said, ‘You will have to shave off your beard. I can’t tell what you’re thinking.’

  ‘About beer,’ Lymond said, without moving.

  ‘No,’ said Chancellor. After a moment he said, ‘We couldn’t have done it without your men. Blacklock and Hislop and d’Harcourt. I’ve been to see them. They’re sleeping.’

  ‘I know,’ Lymond said. He took down his hand and let both arms rest on the chart table. In the candlelight his blue eyes looked dazed. He said, ‘I can listen.’

  And Richard Chancellor, bowing his head, rested his arms on the same table and sobbed.

  A long time later, moving softly past Buckland, Lymond brought him aqua vite, and he found it at his elbow when, sniffing, he stirred at last to find a kerchief and put his wet face to rights. The candle had been moved, too, away from the table and was where it threw no light on his face, or on Lymond, leaning back against the wall. Lymond said, ‘You are allowed this much for every ship you go to Gehenna with, and bring back again.’

  ‘I lost three ships,’ Chancellor said. ‘And eighty-five souls.’

  ‘I stopped counting,’ Lymond said, ‘after I had seen the first hundred or so of my soldiers dispatched to their earthly rest through me. You lead, therefore you kill.’

  Chancellor said, presently, ‘We are in Scotland.’

  ‘And that, as perhaps you know, is my weakness,’ Lymond said. ‘I shall not be among the volunteers for your shore party.’

  In the chest on which Lymond was sitting, there was a letter, forgotten until this moment. Chancellor said, ‘Does it matter who you are, or where you come from? You don’t need to know Jenkinson is a Northampton man; just that he knows the world, and the secret of crossing it. The Burroughs are Bristol seamen; Bourne is a Gravesend gunner, Adams a schoolmaster, Eden a Treasury official …’

  Lymond said, ‘You are going to ask me to meet John Dee again. What use would it be? My God, in three months I still haven’t learned enough to understand half your arguments.’

  ‘That isn’t true,’ Chancellor said. ‘You have a … you have the right sort of mind. You know enough already to conceive ideas and discuss them. You only need to be guided.’

  ‘I know,’ Lymond said. ‘You want me to feast amazed upon the Tables of Ephimerides, and you will take the credit, as Henry Sidney does for you. But there is only one Richard Chancellor. And although I should like to join your unofficial academy of the geographical sciences, I have only one winter in England. I should have liked to have met Sidney.’

  Chancellor said, obstinately, ‘It is Dee you must meet.’ After a moment, he added, ‘It was you who told me Sir Henry had gone to Ireland?’

  In the shadows, he could see Lymond’s eyes studying his. Then Lymond said, ‘People write to me.’

  Chancellor said slowly, ‘As they do to Dee. He is ambitious for England. Letters come to him … from Antwerp and Worms, Rome and Paris and Amsterdam, Vienna, Seville and Genoa. And he is young; younger than I am. He is only twenty-nine.’

  Lymond did not speak. Chancellor said, ‘How old are you?’

  ‘The same,’ Lymond said. ‘I imagine … no. I have had a birthday, I suppose, in the last day or two.’ He rose, and crossing to the candle, brought it back and planted it straight on the table, so that on either side of it, Chancellor’s face and his own were clearly and strictly illumined. Lymond said, ‘I have misled you. I have never met Dee, but I have been corresponding with him.’

  ‘Not about navigation,’ Chancellor said.

  ‘No.’

  Chancellor said, ‘You have burned the letters.’

  ‘I have burned them, yes. I have told him I shall take no part in the thing he wishes me to meddle with. But we exchange news.’

  Chancellor said, ‘You should take him your dreams.’

  He meant it literally. He saw realization dawning on Lymond’s face; in his eyes deep-scoured like his own, he knew, in the candlelight, with a blurring of indigo underneath, on the thin eggshell rim of the bone. Lymond said, ‘Have I been talking?’

  ‘We all have, in nightmares. But yours have not been about the sea.’

  ‘You think Dr Dee cures opium eaters?’ Lymond said. And then, as Chancellor’s face changed, he smiled and said, ‘It was three years ago. But the effects are tiresome. I sleep alone when I can.’ He paused, and then said gently, ‘Your son will be John Dee’s next pupil. You cannot face marriage again?’

  Richard Chancellor drew in a short breath, and let it carefully out, without stirring the candle. He said, ‘I have only met one girl to match Eleanor. And you are married to her.’

  Lymond slid his hands off the table. On his shadowless face rested, openly, an astonishment so unexpected, so vivid that Chancellor himself was taken aback and said quickly, almost in anger, ‘I’m sorry. But she is a remarkable girl.’

  ‘She is a remarkable girl,’ Lymond repeated. He looked startled still. ‘She must be Christopher’s age.’

  ‘She must be about Christopher’s age,’ Chancellor agreed flatly; and Lymond suddenly shook his head, and pressing one hand, like a masseur, over the bones of his face, took it away, smiling.

  ‘No. I am sorry. You have the wrong impression entirely. If you are serious, there are no two people I can imagine who would suit each other better. I think of her as a child because I knew her as a child. But she is old for her age.’

  Chancellor said, ‘She is concerned for your future.’

  ‘She is concerned for her dog and her cat,’ Lymond said. ‘It is a Somerville failing. Tell her your dreams. She would help you realize them. Burroughs won’t get to the Ob; not on a pinnace. But the charts he’ll bring back will set you on your course. When you have corrected the compass bearing.… Does Dr Dee object to corrections?’

  He did not expect a serious answer, and Chancellor did not give him one. Lymond answered his smil
e with another. ‘No. What is his motto? Nothing is useful unless it is honest.’

  ‘Some of these tables are yours,’ Chancellor said. ‘He is going to want to see you about them. And the cross-staff Plummer made, and the drawings.… Something has to come out of this voyage.’

  ‘Something comes out of every voyage,’ said the other man sharply. ‘Out of every bloody fruitless endeavour. All the striving after the unknowable. The unattainable, the search for Athor, the creative force, rolled into a circle. You with your quest; I with my care-ridden Emperor; Sir Thomas, sitting before the fire, his bowels burning before him. We add something. If we didn’t add something, there would be no object in it.… I had better stop talking,’ said Lymond; and stopped.

  Chancellor smiled. He watched the other man drop to his pallet, then, pulling forward his own, blew out the candle and walked for the last time to the door. He had to save it from crashing wide open: the Edward was facing into the wind, and the wind was rising again. He checked the lanterns at topmast and stern and calling to the watch, was answered promptly. He turned back in, and closed the door.

  Everything creaked. It was not like the sound of a seagoing ship, nor like the motion. The Edward danced, as the short waves came in from the North Sea, and were blown back again by the wind. The noise in the rigging sidled and swooped, and the waves thudded, like a solid blow on his thighs. ‘I wish,’ said Lymond, ‘it would try a major key sometimes.’

  ‘Wind,’ Chancellor said, ‘is a melancholy creature.’

  He fell asleep first.

  It was no one’s fault that the watch slept. Or if there was a fault, it belonged to the wind and the sea, which had fought them for three months without respite, and now was to conquer.

  The Edward snapped her first cable at three in the morning, when the wind, rising to towering heights, sent its first gust from the north; and even then, as she jerked, her load of dog-weary men barely stirred in their sleep. Then the second cable gave way; and the third.