to the Far Blue Mountains (1976)

by L'amour, Louis - Sackett's 02

  "There are honest men among them, and dishonest, even as with us. One must deal fairly, and watch himself against weakness, for they despise that. Give no gift without reason or they will think it an offering from fear, and kill you out of hand.

  "In the forest they are masters, craftsmen as sure and true as men can be, and there's much to learn from them. Vast areas of the land seem to be uninhabited, for they are few in proportion to its size. They are a different people, of different backgrounds, and you cannot expect them to react like Christians. They have not heard of turning the other cheek-"

  "And well enough they haven't. I never got far with that myself."

  We came upon William. He and I had much of which to talk, of plantings and harvests and what to do with the money earned from the produce of my land, little though it was. In all I owned but some small pieces of tillable land, and some from which rushes might be cut-enough for a man's living and a bit over.

  William was a solid man, and I'd promised him half. When there was sufficient earned, he was to buy another small piece of land.

  "And what if you come not back, Barnabas?"

  "Leave it in the trust of a good man. For if I come not back, a son of mine surely will."

  William and I had known each other from boyhood, although he was the older by some seven years, a strong, resolute man who had land and crops, and worked hard with his hands.

  I said to him, "And if the time comes you wish to cross the sea, come to me and I shall find a place for you."

  "I am an Englishman, Barnabas. I want no more than England."

  Was he wiser than I? My father had lived through wars and troubles, and it left him with a sense that nothing lasted but what a man made of himself. "Be wary," he advised me, "of trusting too much. Men change and times change, but wars and revolutions are always with us.

  "Own a bit of ground where you can plant enough to live, and be not far from fuel, for days and nights can be cold. Be friendly with all men and censure none, tell nobody too much of your affairs and remember in all dealings with men, or women, to keep one hand upon the doorlatch ... in your mind, at least.

  "Men distrust strangers, so have a few places where you are known ... but not too well. Not even a marsh-rat will trust itself to one hole only, so always have an escape route, and more than one, if it can be."

  So in the days of my growing up we had used more than one market town, to become somewhat known in each, and we went to church now here, now there. My father did no smuggling as many fen-men did, but we knew the smugglers. We of the fens were a close-mouthed lot, not given to talking to strangers, but with a strong loyalty for one another.

  The mysterious swordsman, if such he was, might ask in vain and learn nothing to help, nor would he find me now, for a myriad of watery routes led to many towns and villages in several shires.

  With a warm fire going William and I talked much, and at the last he said, "Do not worry about your fields. I shall handle them as I would my own, and will take one-third."

  "One-half," I repeated.

  He shook his head. "You give too much, Barnabas."

  "One-half," I insisted. "I wish you to have the reward of your care, and with what you have and what you can make of mine you can become a man of consequence."

  "You go to a far land, Barnabas. Are you not afraid?"

  "The forest seems safer than the London streets, William, and there is land for the taking-forests, meadows, and lakes. And there is game."

  "Poaching?"

  I smiled. "There are no lords there to bespeak the deer or the hare, William.

  There is enough for all. I shall take seed to be planted, William, and tools for working the land and cutting down the forest I shall build what I need. My hands are fanning with tools, and necessity will add to their skill."

  He shook his head, slowly. "No, Barnabas, it is for you to do this. I have not the courage to risk all upon a chance. My own land is here. I shall plough my own acres, sleep in my own cot."

  "I wonder what it is?" I said. "I wonder what chooses between us, that I go and you stay? Our situations are not too different, one from the other, nor is one less or more the man than the other, it is only that we are different."

  He nodded. "I have thought much upon this, Barnabas, and asked of myself the reasons. I do not know. Perhaps it is something in the blood of each of us that you go out upon the sea and I cling to my small holding here.

  "You will allow me to say I think it a foolish thing you do? What will you do for drink, Barnabas?"

  "I will drink water."

  "Water? But water is not fit for men to drink. For the cattle, for birds and beasts, but a man needs ale ... or wine, if you are a Frenchman."

  "The water of the new world is wine to me, William. I ask no more. The water of the streams is cold and clear."

  And so we parted, we two who were friends but strangers, we whose paths would diverge, yet cling. As he waved good-bye from the island, I thought there was a little of wistfulness in his face. Perhaps something deep within him longed to follow me to the far lands. But that may have been my own pride in what I was, and where I was going.

  The route we took to London must be roundabout. I decided upon Thorney. It was a lovely fenland village, a place I'd loved since boyhood when my father had told me stories of Hereward the Wake, the last man to hold out against William the Conqueror. Thorney had been one of the last places he defended. From here I would ride on to Cambridge, and then London.

  So easily made are the plans of men! We poled our clumsy craft down the watery lane, reeds and willows tall about us. The dawn light lay gray-gold with the sun and mist upon the fens, and around us there was no sound or movement but the ripples of water around our hull and the small, ultimate sounds of morning birds among the leaves. My horse had no liking for the scow, and the uncertain footing worried him, yet the craft was strong if not swift.

  Seated in the stern, I turned my eyes ever and anon toward our wake, but there was no sign of pursuit. Nonetheless, I was uneasy. It disturbed me that I knew not my enemies, for these were no common thief-takers. There was motive here.

  Well ... soon I would be abroad upon the seas, and if they wished they might follow me to Virginia and to those blue mountains that haunted my days and nights with their unfathomable promise and mystery.

  Unfathomable? No. For I would go there. I would walk the dark aisles of their forests, drink from their streams, challenge their dangers.

  The last shadows wilted away to conceal themselves shyly among the reeds and under the overhanging branches to wait the courage that night would bring them.

  The sun arose, the fog lifted, sunlight lay gently upon the fens. Some distance off we saw men cutting reeds and grass for thatch, then they were blotted from view by a thick stand of saw-sedge, seven to ten feet tall, but giving the appearance of a simple meadow if looked upon from distance. Passing through it was quite another thing, and I recalled returning from those meadows as a boy with cuts upon arms and legs from their wicked edges.

  What memories would my children have? Would they ever know England? They would be far away and in another land, without schools, without books. No. There must be books.

  It was born then, this idea that I must have books, not only for our children but for Abigail and myself. We must not lose touch with what we were, with what we had been, nor must we allow the well of our history to dry up, for a child without tradition is a child crippled before the world. Tradition can also be an anchor of stability and a shield to guard one from irresponsibility and hasty decision.

  What books then? They must be few, for the luggage of books is no easy thing when they must be carried in canoes, packs, and upon one's back.

  Each book must be one worth rereading many times, each a book that has much to say, that can lend meaning to a life, help in decisions, comfort one during moments of loneliness. One needed a chance to listen to the words of other men who had lived their lives, to share with them trial
s and troubles by day and by night in home or in the markets of cities.

  The Bible, of course, for aside from religion there is much to be learned of men and their ways in the Bible. It is also a source of comments made of references and figures of speech. No man could consider himself educated without some knowledge of it.

  Plutarch also. My father, a self-educated man, placed much weight upon him. He was, I quote my father, urbane, sophisticated, and intelligent, giving a sense of calmness and consideration to all he wrote. "I think," my father said, "that more great men have read him than perhaps any other book."

  "Barnabas?" Black Tom was watching the riverbanks. "Is your boat anchored in London?"

  "Aye. And there is a man in London with whom I speak. I shall be gone for a long time, and there are things he must do for me here, business he must handle when I am far from England."

  "Do you trust this man?"

  "Aye," I said, after a moment of thought, "although he has the name of one gifted at conniving. Yet we have things in common, I think."

  "What manner of things?"

  "Ideas, Tom. We have shared large ideas together, Peter and I. There is no greater time than for young men to sit together and shape large ideas into rounded, beautiful things. I do not know if our thoughts were great thoughts, but we believed them so. We talked of Plato, of Cathay and Marco Polo, of Roman gods and Greek heroes, of Ulysses and Jason."

  "I know nothing of these."

  "Nor I, of some of them, but Peter did. And I learned and became curious and someday I shall know more of them. Peter spoke also of a strange man who came once to his booth in St. Paul's Walk to sell some ancient manuscripts, a man who spoke of the wise Adapa and the Hidden Treasure of the Secret Writing. He spoke as if he expected somehow that Peter would respond, but although it disturbed him, Peter knew nothing of Adapa.

  "We talked of many things, Peter and I, and it is he who will handle all sales of furs and timber for me when I am gone away. When my ships return to England, he will dispose of their goods and order things for me.

  "Also, he has books I must have, and charts of land where we go."

  "They are new lands. How can there be charts?"

  "A good question, yet those lands may only be new to us because our knowledge is limited. They may have been old lands to those before our time. Although much history remains, much more has been lost. Men have always gone out upon the sea, Tom, and some few of them have made records. And if we do not leave records, who will know where we went or what we did? I shall try to write of these things, Tom."

  "I cannot write."

  "Nor could others who went abroad upon the world. So much was done, so little recorded. And much was recorded and then lost. Peter has talked to me of men and nations, of deaths and battles of which I never heard.

  "Avicenna? Who is he? Somewhere I heard the name, but Peter knew. A great man, a great writer, a man of knowledge in many areas, a very great man, indeed. If such can live and we not know of him, how many others might there be?

  "The strange man who came to Peter and then never came again ... who was he?

  Where had he found the manuscripts and charts he sold? Who was the one he called the Wise Adapa? Even Peter had never heard of him, nor scholars at Cambridge whom he knew.

  "I have myself seen the chart of Andrea Bianco that shows well the coasts of Brazil, and the chart was drawn in 1448, and it is said that Magellan found the straits named for him because he, too, had a chart ... drawn by whom?"

  "This all may be as you suggest," said Tom dryly, "but I worry less about charts of a distant land than a road to London that will keep us free of the Queen's men."

  "Worst of all," I said, "I do not know my enemies. Someone stands behind them with a well-filled wallet, or they would not have come so far upon a chance."

  We slept in turns, and when I last awakened our scow had brought us in the late afternoon to a point of trees where there was an opening in the reeds lining the shore.

  "We will leave the boat here." I stood and stretched, liking the feel of my muscles underneath my shirt. I could feel the ripple of them and sense their power, and before we were once more aboard ship I would have need of them ... this much I guessed. We glimpsed the steeple of a church, and a ruined tower.

  Thorney should be near.

  "The point," I said to Tom. "We will land there." Leading my horse ashore, we went along the lane toward the road that led to the village. No one was in sight. Already shadows were long and dusk was upon us.

  The street was almost empty, and only a few heads turned to look as we passed along the cobblestoned street. Outside of the village I mounted, and with Black Tom trotting beside, we made good time for a mile, then changed places.

  Willows lined the track we followed to Whittlesey. The market square was empty, shadows everywhere. A few lights showed.

  "I've a friend here," Tom said. "We'll knock him up and have a place to sleep the night and a quick start come morning."

  Glancing up at the tower of St. Mary's, I knew I'd miss the bells, for we could hear them far across the fens when out for eels or cutting thatch. Many a time I rested from labor to hear them.

  We shared work, we of the fens, and I'd worked in many parts of Cambridgeshire or Lincolnshire, travelling along the narrow waterways to meet friends with whom I fished. We of the fens were much less likely to remain close to home than others of our time, who knew little of any place more than a few miles from their homes.

  Even now change was upon us. Ours was a restless as well as a violent age. Men from the villages had gone out upon the water with Drake, Hawkins and Frobisher, with Gosnold or Newport, and some of them returned with gold and all with tales.

  Tom stopped before an ill-looking cottage on the edge of the village, a cottage set well back in the trees and close to the river.

  A rap brought no response, nor did another. Tom was growing irritable when a shadow loomed at the corner of the cottage. A voice growled, "Who comes?"

  "Richard, you're a poor host if you do not open your door and trot out the ale.

  You've two quiet men here who would remain quiet, wanting food and a quick start before the day breaks, and no bothering with keepers of taverns who remember too well. Will you have us in?"

  "Aye, Tom. I'll have you in, and collect the two shillings you owe from a fortnight past."

  He disappeared. After a moment there was the rattling of a chain and the door was opened. Once inside, Richard stirred the fire to a blaze, lighting up our faces.

  He was a long thin man with a dour expression. Yet upon a closer glance, when the light caught the side of his face, I saw that the wrinkles of ancient laughter had woven a net of humor around his eyes and mouth.

  "There's a horse outside, Richard, that will need rubbing down, and care. You'll see to it?"

  "I will ... when I've put something on." He puttered about, filling two flagons of ale and pushing out a plate of bread and cheese. "There's apples, too," he added, "if you'll be asking no questions how they was come by."

  While we ate he went to the stable, and when he returned Tom said, "There might be some asking about, Richard, and we'll be wanting no word of our passing."

  "Not likely I'd be talkin', Tom, but I do wish you'd stay on a day. There be a fine piece of bog oak close by that will bring a pretty penny, but I'll need a strong hand or two."

  Such a find was not uncommon, and was like the finding of a treasure trove to a poor man. Sunken ages ago by a falling of the land or rising of the sea, many great trees had been buried in the peat, and perfectly preserved by it, and if sawed immediately into planks and timbers were worth a good bit to the finder.

  But if let to lie about, the wood decayed, so the work must be done at once and the planks allowed to dry and season in the air.

  "Is it true, Tom, what they be sayin' about drainin' the fens?"

  "It is. And when drained it will be the richest farmland in the kingdom."

  "Aye," Richard g
rumbled, "but it ruins the eeling, and there'll be not so many birds. We live well enough now, with no drainage done, a goose to the table whenever we wish, eels and pike for the eating or the market, and our patches of crop land no tax gatherer can find. If the fens be drained, strangers will come in. Wild and lawless they say we be, and that we stink of our fens, but we are free men and better it is to remain so.

  "Once the gentry ken how rich is the land they'll have it from us by hook or crook, or they'll come on with their laws to interfere with the hunting, the digging of peat, or the cutting of thatch. They'd have us bound out to labor on their farms instead of us living free."

  True enough, and well I knew it, for most of the fens were held in common. Once the fens were drained the fine, free life would be gone and the birds and eels with it. We lived well, often better than a lord in his castle, for it was all about us, for the taking.

  Yet I was leaving this for a new world, new ways of living. Was I the fool? Was I leaving a certainty for a chance? No matter. My way was chosen. Not for a minute did I consider not going.

  Was it some impulse buried deep within me? Was there in my blood and bones some selective device that chose me and a few others like me to venture? To go on? To penetrate the strange and the new? Were we something chosen by nature for this purpose? Had we control over our actions, or were we mere tools of the way of things that must ceaselessly go forward?

  William would stay, Richard would stay, even Peter Tallis would stay, yet I would go. My friend Jeremy Ring would go, and Black Tom Watkins. You might say he was fleeing the noose, aye, and how many others here in Britain were likewise fleeing, yet did not go?

  "We will sleep now, Richard," I said, "for tomorrow Tom and I must travel far ... and fast."

  Chapter 3

  Dark were the London streets, and wet with rain. We walked my horse along the narrow lanes, keeping free of streets where we might be seen and spoken of.

  "We will do well to stay clear of taverns," Tom suggested.

  "We've a place, Tom, a sure place. It is the house of a sailor's wife, a clean place and the food is good."