The Ringed Castle

by Dorothy Dunnett

  At that, Lymond woke. He called Buckland’s name and was driving out of the door, the sailing master on his heels while Chancellor, felled by sleep, was still rousing.

  A wall of black air, thick as a blockhouse, struck them out of the north and rammed them, suffocating as a quilt, against the low starboard rail while the sea crashed down after it, like an axe on their shoulders and backs. Then Lymond had gone, leaping, crashing, colliding to get to the helm and Buckland, gasping, cannoned off after him. And Chancellor, stumbling at last on to the howling darkness of the quarterdeck, saw.

  The Edward was running free. Pushed and thrust and buffeted by the changing, violent wind she had burst her worn shackles and was lurching, beam to the wind, through the ghostly white surf of the bay while the sea raced and the stars reeled above her and the jagged coast, black on black, went spinning past, offering itself and withdrawing, a wanton and merciless lottery.

  The ship had roused. Before Buckland had arrived, gasping, to find Lymond dragging the whipstaff there was shouting, and dark figures holding against the tilt of the sea-swirling decks, and then the bos’n’s whistle, cutting across as Buckland began to relay his orders, Chancellor talking quickly beside him, straining his eyes, trying to get his bearings, trying to remember what they had seen last night; what they had gleaned from the chart. Lymond, abandoning the weight of the helm to a seaman, found his own men at his side and sent d’Harcourt to make a sea-anchor and Blacklock down to the Russians and then, sliding and hurtling, made with Hislop for the lee rigging. He was up it, already calling directions, when she struck.

  The heads of the reef stoved her sides, as a line of pikes impaling a cavalry charge. The men still on the main deck below died where they were thrown as the granite thrust through planks, beams and standards and the white ballast poured like chain-cable, followed one by one by the blundering weight of her guns. The mainmast came down, sweeping the sloping deck clean with its rigging; snatching at Lymond as he jumped free, to be met and dragged clear by d’Harcourt’s powerful arm. Lymond shouted against the wind, ‘Get Nepeja into the pinnace!’ as a wave struck, and sent them both staggering. Then he broke away and began to pull himself up the towering waterfall of the deck, marshalling with his voice the dim figures which remained struggling about him, black against the pale, rushing spume. Blacklock’s voice, suddenly clear, said, ‘I’ve got the Russians. The pinnace has jammed.’

  They were half a mile from the shore and the reef, almost wholly submerged, offered no foothold. ‘The small boat. We stay,’ Lymond said.

  They dropped the small boat over the lee side five minutes later, and formed a staggering barrier, shoulder to shoulder as the blundering form of Osep Nepeja was dropped into its bows, followed by his six semi-conscious fellow countrymen. Then the good oarsmen followed, with Robert Best, and Christopher and Diccon Chancellor, because he knew the rocks, and the safety of the Muscovite Ambassador to England had been placed in his hands.

  Chancellor boarded last of all, and the Edward lurched and settled as he laid hands on the rope, her timbers squealing plainly through the thud and the crash of the waves, and the new resonant sounds of water pouring, from all around them, under their feet. Chancellor stopped, his hair clawed from his scalp by the wind, horror and despair on his face, staring at Lymond.

  Lymond said, ‘We will launch the pinnace. Go quickly,’ because the ship was breaking beneath them, and the five of them were holding back, by main force, the screaming men who had not found a place in the boat. Chancellor looked at them all and then at Lymond again. ‘I have lost you before I have found you,’ said Richard Chancellor. And turning aside, jumped into the boat, and cast off.

  Adam Blacklock was sent to fetch Chancellor’s box, and what he could collect of the ship’s papers while Buckland directed the repair on the pinnace. How long they had, no one knew: the wind, gusting in the dark, was kicking the ship round the reef, and probably only the reef itself was staunching its gougings. When the wind sucked her off, she would sink, giving them to the storm, and the cold winter sea, and, half a mile off, the shore with its black, spray-dashed rocks. And of them all, only Buckland and the men of St Mary’s could swim.

  Only Lymond did not at once turn to help with the pinnace. He sent Blacklock on his errand and stayed alone where he was, braced by the shards of the mast, watching the spray rise and fall in the dark, and the pattern of white, disclosed and hidden again, which was the wake of the small boat, plying west and dipping its oars. And achieving his errand, Adam came to his side also and said, ‘What is it? They should be all right.’

  It was hard to hear in the wind. Lymond said, ‘They are safe,’ and Adam saw with a shock that his face, under the short, blowing hair was withdrawn and perfectly calm.

  Adam Blacklock said, ‘You think we are lost.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Lymond said. ‘There was a prophecy once.… I think it is going to be fulfilled. And not before time.’

  He looked at Adam, and from the flash of white in the dimness, Adam realized he was smiling. ‘You are going to live anyway. Someone has to do Chancellor’s maps.’

  He had turned to go, thrusting Blacklock before him, when the shout came through the thunderous spray. They heard it, down in the waist where the pinnace was ready to launch. But high on the wrecked fo’c’sle with Lymond, Adam saw it: saw Chancellor’s boat stop only half-way to shore, where the long, marbled breakers were piling, and sudden ghostly cascades starred the night. Standing in the boat was a dark figure shouting, and struggling about it were others, clutching, clawing, trying to pull the man down.

  Lymond said, ‘Oh, Christ in heaven,’ and didn’t wait. They glimpsed, as they ran, the black figure fall from the boat, and then the struggling mass heel and tumble into the pale spume around him. The last thing they saw was the whale shape of Chancellor’s boat, upside down, lifted on the waves like the bellowing kit, tormented by dolphins.

  A moment later, Buckland got the pinnace into the water and they were aboard, and seizing the oars while the last of the Edward’s crew thudded over the gunwale beside them. Then they in turn struck through the waves, towards the overturned boat, and the black specks which were men’s heads, dead or alive, in the sea.

  The tide was against them, and the wind, pushing them south. You could see why it had taken the other boat so long to make such small headway, hampered with passengers as they were. Even with all the force of practised oarsmen, sparing themselves nothing, progress was killingly slow; the consequences of it unbearable. Blacklock, watching Lymond, saw him miss a stroke once, his hand hard on the bench, and then resume, without speaking, in rhythm. The temptation was just that; to plunge overboard and cut through the waves to the rescue. Forfeiting the power of fifteen men for the leverage strength of just one. So they waited, all of them, until they saw the boat heaving and lurching beside them, and then, catching Buckland’s eye, Lymond shipped his oars in one shining sweep and was overboard. The three St Mary’s men followed.

  It was a slow and desolate harvest, garnered in darkness and danger, and in a cold which turned warm flesh to glass. What you touched might be fur-lined shuba or sheets of strong, red-brown seaweed, chequering the long, streaming shore waves like mosaic. It might be a head, fronded with waving black hair and beard, or the soft, weeded face of a rock, overcome by white needle-clusters of spray which rose, and veined it, and vanished. And always the sea strode and surged and split over their heads; rocks threatened them in low, metal-grey ranges jutting into the ocean like gun batteries; on every side danger exploded, in the sudden ghost-like burst of a spray-palace, rising, changing, vanishing in the dark.

  The first two men Adam Blacklock touched were quite dead, and he ceased the effort of dragging them back to the boat; feeling was leaving his body, and he had to save his strength for the living. Then he heard Ludovic d’Harcourt call and saw he had a man in his arms and another was swimming feebly beside him. He struck through the wall of black waves, blind and deaf and desperate, a
nd got to him in time to support one of them. The pinnace was near, and arms were stretching over the side, to pull the half drowned men in. Then Lymond’s voice came, sharply, from the overturned boat, and both Adam and d’Harcourt turned and fought their way to him.

  He had Nepeja. Inert as a stranded walrus, the Ambassador lay on the sliding belly of the overturned boat and beside him, groaning through clenched teeth with the effort, was Robert Best the Englishman, half in and half out of the icy water, holding him firm and secure. As d’Harcourt gripped Best, Hislop appeared out of the darkness and helped Lymond steady the Russian. Lymond spoke to him.

  Nepeja groaned. Best said, gasping, ‘He’s been unconscious mostly. The Russian lads have all gone. We tried to get them up on the boat.…’

  ‘Chancellor,’ Lymond said. ‘Chancellor and the boy. Where is Chancellor?’

  Best said, ‘Christopher slid off the boat.’

  ‘And——?’

  ‘His father went after him.’

  ‘Where? When?’

  ‘Ten minutes ago. God knows. God knows,’ said Robert Best, and started retchingly to sob. ‘On that side.’

  The pinnace was feeling its way towards them. Without speaking, Lymond took Blacklock’s shoulder and thrust him, in his place, to share with Hislop the shuddering weight of the Ambassador. Then he turned, with a flash of wrist and pale skin and sliding, shimmering water, and went, with the wind and the tide and the current, into the darkness.

  Under guidance, Best swam to the pinnace. But it took Blacklock and Danny Hislop five long minutes and all their remaining strength to lever the Russian up and into the long, rocking boat, even after she manoeuvred alongside, standing off again and again to avoid collision with the other, derelict hull. Then Buckland said, ‘Get in. We’re going for shore.’

  Hislop said, ‘Chancellor.’

  Buckland’s voice, worn with shouting, embodied a tired authority, over-riding all weaker inclinations. He said, ‘If he has been in the water this long, he is dead. If I don’t get these men to dry land within the next few minutes, they will be dead, too. And you. Get in.’

  His eyes shone in the darkness. Adam, gasping and shuddering at Hislop’s side, realized why. A faint, ruddy light far off on the surf of the shore showed that someone was lighting a beacon. Someone grasped hold of his arm and tried to heave him aboard. He resisted. Ludovic d’Harcourt’s voice said, ‘The Voevoda is out there. Give us oars and help us overturn the small boat.’

  The weight of the small boat was the weight of a shot tower, filled to the skyline with lead. Adam, heaving, thought his heart would crack; knew that Best and Chancellor and the few seamen who could swim could never have done this, beset by drowning, struggling men. When it was over, dancing, half filled with water, it rose above his eyes, blacking the stars, and looked no more possible to scale and enter than the bright gates of Paradise. Hislop caught him as he collapsed, still looking up, and manhandled him up to Buckland, over the gunwales of the pinnace.

  The light from the shore was brighter by then; a real bonfire, rising smoking and crackling into the blustering air, with small figures dark round about it. Fisherfolk, from the cottages inland. There was a dark track, as if made by a snail; a boat was being launched. John Buckland said, ‘I must go. You’re certain?’ And the two men, burly d’Harcourt and Hislop, gripping his oar, unable to speak, looked from the small boat and nodded. Then the pinnace lifted away and, rowing, d’Harcourt started to call.

  Lymond heard him, an almost indistinguishable sound, flat as a gull’s cry above the crash of the waves on the rocks round about him, and the noise of the surf, like seething fat hissing and the bodiless buffet and thunder of the uneven wind, with its thin solo voices winding and weaving around it.

  He had always been a strong swimmer. Even after weeks of short commons, and the remorseless, unremitting strain of the voyage, he was still probably the best of them all, except perhaps Ludovic d’Harcourt, whose Order owed its strength to the sea. And since he had also an excellent brain he used it, to draw certain deductions.

  Christopher had slid from the overturned boat. He had slid without being seen, or his father would have caught him. And since he had not stayed near the boat, or shouted to attract their attention, he must have been nearly or wholly unconscious and at the mercy therefore of wind and of tide.

  So his father would also argue. Therefore one must swim with the pull of the sea, away from the shore and away from the ship, where one might find, as a very slim chance, the body of Christopher, floating unconscious, or awake now and somehow struggling far out here in the dark.

  Or more likely, one might meet with his father, still swimming strongly, intent on nothing but finding and saving his son.

  Having calculated so far, nothing remained but to apply the physical laws relating to motion and force. To deal with the violent swinging and constant belabouring of high, powerful waves, their tops sliced into spume by the wind. To avoid, if one could, the invisible reefs. The broken ridge dimly revealed, coursed like a dog by the waves, cheek to cheek with savage affection. The rock which stood ahead in the foam as you were pitched headlong and fighting down the shell of a cataract.

  There was not all that much time, for his shoulders were very tired, and his body losing its skill as it chilled. He was, however, as methodical as it was possible to be, and the fire on the beach helped: now very large. He hoped Buckland had had the sense to take the pinnace in and get Nepeja and the rest round its warmth. He believed someone would come out again, looking for him and for Chancellor, and he hoped he would have strength left to shout when they did. He tried to watch the sea all the time, in the faint rosy glow from the fire and thought, the farther outwards he went, the better chance he might have of seeing a swimmer, or two, silhouetted between himself and the shore. On the other hand, a floating man had no more substance than a rock, or a tumbled patch of torn seaweed. It meant, in cold blood, visiting every half-hidden stone in the bay, and he was swimming as if disabled already.

  What he wanted was very near. It was typical of the monstrous, egregious, laughable irony which dominated his life that with every dragging lift of his arms, he should be saying over and over, ‘Not yet.’

  Hislop and d’Harcourt got to him soon after that in the small boat, and pulled him in. He did not give them much help, and they took in a good deal of sea. D’Harcourt, breathing hard, let him be where he was and snatched the oars again. Behind him Hislop, who had been shuddering violently, suddenly let his oar slip altogether. Water swirled round their legs. D’Harcourt said, ‘Her planks have sprung. Can you see to Hislop?’

  He didn’t say, ‘We shall have to turn back.’ For a long time now, the boat had been making more water than they could bale. And Danny, he knew, had now collapsed.

  Lymond said, ‘He’s unconscious. I’ll bale you out so far as I can. Send the pinnace.’

  ‘For you? I can’t leave you!’

  ‘You can’t take me. She’d sink. I haven’t finished,’ said Lymond. The wind on his wet body was throwing it into convulsions, like the sea, as he set about baling. He paid no attention at all to d’Harcourt’s expostulations. Only when d’Harcourt, stammering at him, tried to turn the boat, with the three of them still aboard, and row against the tide towards the shore, did Lymond put one hand on the gunwale and without wasting breath or temper or time, lift himself overboard.

  D’Harcourt stayed, shouting for a while, and rowing raggedly after him, until the boat began to settle low in the water and he realized that if he stayed, he would sink. He baled and rowed for a long time, single-handed, and in the end it did sink, but within sight of the shore, and there were men running through the firelit crocheting surf to drag him out, and Hislop.

  Robert Best was among them, seizing d’Harcourt’s shirt and shaking him so that his wet head rolled to and fro, and shouting in his face, ‘Did you find them?’

  His voice was rusty with seawater. He said, ‘Send the pinnace.’

&nbs
p; ‘Buckland’s gone with a fishing boat. There’s another out there already. Ludo!’

  D’Harcourt opened his eyes. ‘Lymond is still there. There.’ He rolled on one elbow and pointed. He added, ‘Nothing else.’

  Robert Best said, overtaken with anger, ‘You could have——’ and stopped, because it was wholly unfair. The boat had sunk. And the Voevoda was his own powerful law. He helped the other man to his feet, and laid him with Hislop near the fire, where the others were. The sailors from the pinnace were now helping to keep it going, and lying in its warmth, the others were beginning to recover. He and Buckland had moved no one yet, although the men and women who had come to their help were readily hospitable, and had brought sacking and bannocks and a cauldron of soup and a dipper.

  They said ‘Sir Alexander’ was coming; and somebody else. He supposed they were the local lairds; one of them belonging perhaps to the castle he could see, now pricked with lamplight on the south shoulder of the gentle small rise up above him. Apart from that, and the scattering of bothies well up the shore, there was no sign of civilized life.

  They were lucky to have as much. It was a pretty bay, half-moon in shape, with white grainy sand rising to thick sweet grass, still very green. Below, were the slabby rocks, sloping down to the sea, ochre and charcoal in the firelight, with their black feet in the spray. And the roar of the water. Sometimes, as the waves shifted, he saw the queer cabalistic shape of the Edward, like a black thornbush caught on a nail. The Edward Bonaventure, with her cargo. With her six timbers of sables, from the Emperor to the monarchs of England. Twenty entire sables, exceeding beautiful, with teeth, ears and claws. With four once-living sables, with chains and with collars. With thirty lynx furs, large and beautiful, and six great skins, very rich and rare, worn only by the Emperor for worthiness. And a large and fair white jerfalcon, upon which the wild swan, crane, geese and other great fowls might look down as she floated dead on the Bay of Pitsligo, with her drum of silver, the hoops gilt.