Swords From the Sea

by Harold Lamb

  Thorne considered this, and saw that there was no reason why they should remain on the island. He could be of more assistance to Chancellor by seeking him out; besides, he now had the maid on his hands, and had found in Kyrger a guide who might be invaluable to the voyagers.

  "Then will we follow the ships," he said slowly, "and, in God's mercy, may come up with them. And you, Mistress Joan, will come with me to the fellowship of Christians again."

  He watched the Samoyed and believed that the Easterling had no ill feeling toward them. What went on in the mind of the little hunter was a mystery; but it was certain that the man had attached himself to them.

  Kyrger assented to their plan without comment. He seemed more interested in Thorne's crossbow, which he was allowed to examine while Peter returned to the Wardhouse for a sack of biscuits and cheese and their few personal belongings, the girl accompanying him, to bid the grave inside the palisade a last farewell.

  Seeing that Kyrger had not been slain, the other Samoyeds put in appearance and squatted down a bowshot away, and were induced to go to the lugger when the others returned, Peter lamenting the fact that Andrews's trade goods must be left behind. There was no room in the boat for the bales and the seven of them.

  The wind was favorable, and in a few hours the island group was lost to sight, Peter guiding the lugger toward the shore that soon loomed over their heads. They coasted for a while until Kyrger called out that his camp lay inland from where they were.

  By nightfall they were sitting around a fire, in a clump of firs, thawing out their chilled limbs while the hunter roasted wild fowl on a spit over the flames, and the two Samoyeds crouched at the edge of the circle of light, watching the actions of the white-skinned strangers, afraid to come nearer.

  Afterward, loan slept soundly in Kyrger's diminutive tent of heavy felt stretched over a frame of small birch poles, while Thorne and Peter took turns at mounting guard by the fire, both in good spirits at being again upon the mainland. The hours passed, and the light did not grow stronger.

  Instead, the surface of the snow, broken by the dark patches of bare earth under the trees, seemed to glow with a radiance of its own. Not a breath of air stirred; the tips of the firs hung lifeless. It was as if a curtain had been drawn over the sun.

  Joan awakened, and they prepared food in silence, and before they had done Thorne uttered an exclamation, pointing out to sea. During the night, the Samoyeds, aroused by something unperceived by the Englishmen, had gone down to the shore and launched the lugger. Now it could be seen halfway out to the blur of the islands, tossing on a restless swell.

  Clearly there was wind out here and overhead a shrill whining was to be heard from a vast height. Peter cocked his head and listened attentively, becoming more and more uneasy without being able to put his foreboding in words; but Kyrger, who had come up with a pair of reindeer, cast one glance at the white-capped swell and fell to work taking down the tent.

  He threw away the birch frame and cut heavy stakes from the pile of firewood. These he drove into the ground in a circle about the edge of the felt, which he clewed down, using twisted strands of hemp.

  "Aye, aye, shipmate," cried Peter, bearing a hand at the task as soon as he saw what the hunter wanted done. "Here's all taut and snug. But what's the lay?"

  Working swiftly and moving about silently in his fur footsacks, Kyrger pounded in all the stakes but two until, save at that one point, his circular felt was tamped down to the ground.

  Then, with broad leather thongs, he bound up his supply of dried meat, with the belongings of his companions, and lashed the bundle fast in the crotch of a big fir. The bag of biscuit and cheese he thrust under the felt.

  "'Tis little he will suffer us to take with us when we set out," grumbled the boatswain.

  "Nay, I think he intends to bide here," said Thorne. "Look at the harts."

  The reindeer were behaving strangely. They were short-legged gray beasts with heavy hair and longer antlers than the men had ever seen before. As soon as Kyrger had turned them loose they had gone to a hollow between the trees and stretched out on the ground, their muzzles pointing toward the sea.

  The hunter trotted past Thorne, his arms filled with moss that he had grubbed up from bare patches of earth. This moss he piled under the nostrils of the beasts. He ran off and reappeared with three fur robes, one having a buff lining. This he gave to Peter, sharing one of the others with Thorne.

  His own he wrapped around him quickly, covering his head completely, and, walking to the hollow where the reindeer lay, stretched himself at full length close to one of the beasts. Springing up and throwing off his robe, he motioned to Peter to follow his example.

  "Kyrger says," Joan explained, "that we must wrap our heads in the coverings and lie down with our heads toward the sea. A khylden is coming out of the Ice Sea."

  "What is that?" Thorne asked.

  "A snow driver. I do not know what it is. Kyrger says we must do as his reindeer." The hunter spoke to her again, and she added, "You and I are to creep under the felt-'twill not hold Peter's bulk."

  "A snow driver? Faith, man or beast or elemental, let it come," growled Peter. "Who fears a storm on the mainland? I'll not lie battened under hatches."

  He went back to the fire and sat down, while Thorne went to see if the skiff was still visible. By now it must have reached the harbor at the Wardhouse, and before long Tuon and his men would be returning, he reflected.

  But Tuon and his men did not come that day. The sky overhead darkened to a black pall; only along the edges of the horizon a half-light played, like fen fires or phosphorescence at sea. The shrill and invisible voice in the heights deepened to a howl that was almost human, punctuated by the roaring of the surf.

  Thorne noticed that the trees of the grove were moving unsteadily; he heard a human voice calling him plaintively, and at once the sound was snatched away by a mighty droning in the air. The ranks of firs bent back and quivered, as a ship heels over before a sudden blast and labors in righting herself.

  And then he felt for the first time the breath of the Ice Sea, the touch of the snow driver.

  In that instant cold struck through him as if he had been utterly naked. He was driven from the knoll on which he stood, and pushed toward the camp. Without volition of his own he began to run, and heard his name called. He turned toward the sound, and saw Kyrger kneeling at the edge of the felt, beckoning him.

  Thorne crawled under the covering, and found that his fur robe had been pushed in ahead of him. Joan was there beside him, invisible in the darkness, her man's sea cloak drawn over her.

  "Roll up in your coverall," she cautioned him. "Kyrger says that we must keep warm, else we never shall be warm again."

  He both heard and felt the Samoyed driving home the two stakes that had been left loose. He was lying on a dry bed of pine needles, and even as he wriggled into his furs he was conscious that these were being driven against his face with something that stung his skin like tiny specks of hot iron.

  Covering his head, he lay still a while until the chill had left him, listening to the whining of the wind that came in great gusts, wondering how Peter and Kyrger were faring.

  At length, being minded to find out, he crept from his furs and pushed up the flap of the tent enough to thrust his head and shoulders out. And he almost cried aloud in astonishment. Snow, a fine, dry snow, was whirling about him, driving into eyes and ears, and making it difficult to breathe. This was not like the snowstorms that he had known, where flakes fell heavily into a moist mass underfoot.

  This was the breath of the snow driver, tinged with the cold of outer space, more malignant and pitiless than human enemies. Thorne knew now the meaning of khylden, knew too that it would be utterly useless for him to try to stir outside their covering.

  He crept back, shivering, and felt the girl draw nearer him for warmth.

  Chapter XIII

  The Gate in the Sky

  For nearly three days the snow drive
r raged, and then there fell a calm. The whole of the earth was blanketed in white and only the dense clump of firs showed the spot where four human beings slept, two feet beneath the surface of the snow.

  The reindeer were the first to sense the passing of the storm, and staggered up, tossing their heads and going off at once to paw at the drifts with their cleft hoofs in search of the moss that was their winter food. The movement aroused Kyrger, who bobbed up and shook himself like a dog. Picking up a fallen branch, he went to where Joan and Thorne were buried, feeling around with his feet until he found the spot.

  Here he hesitated a moment, his eyes traveling to the bundle of gear secured in the tree. This was to him incalculable treasure, and, above the other things he coveted the crossbow which sent a shaft twice as far as his bow.

  It came into his mind that if he let the outlanders sleep on they would die and the weapon would be his as well as the other things. In fact he wondered whether the other three were not dead already.

  Then the Samoyed began to thrust snow away with his branch. The same instinct that had led him to safeguard the lives of the helpless three now called to him to rouse them. Kyrger had accepted Thorne as his master. He looked upon the armiger as a young lord, in much the same way that Thorne cherished the memory of Edward, his king.

  He hauled up the felt and satisfied himself that Thorne still breathed; about the maiden he was more doubtful. He examined the biscuits and saw that they had eaten something. Then he set to work rubbing snow on the man's face and hands until the blue tinge faded from the skin and Thorne opened his eyes, grimacing with pain, and incapable of movement until the hunter had rubbed his limbs.

  "Mistress Joan?" he croaked, and rose to his knees, swaying dizzily as the blood began to circulate through his veins again.

  He drew back the hood from the girl's face and felt for the pulse in her throat. He could feel nothing through the numbness of his fingers.

  "Fire," he muttered. "We must have a fire."

  Helped by Kyrger, he plowed his way to the bundle in the tree and took from it a powder horn and steel and flint. Then, cutting off a length of the Samoyed's loosely woven rope, he untwisted the hemp strands. Gathering a double handful of dead twigs from the firs, he went back to the spot kept clear of snow by the felt and his own body.

  Building a small mound of twigs and pine needles, he poured a little powder from the horn and fell to striking the steel against the flint stone. Presently a spark flew into the powder grains and flared up, eating into the dead twigs and the hemp strands.

  Kyrger, who had watched with interest, now brought larger twigs and coaxed the tiny flame into a crackling blaze. To this branches were added until the fire glowed warmly. The heat only served to quicken the girl's heavy breathing, until Thorne chafed her wrists and throat with snow.

  After a while her eyes flickered, and she sighed. A kind of smile touched her lips, bringing the semblance of life back into her again. He himself ached in every joint and his vision played queer tricks. He fancied that the whole sky over the sea was on fire.

  Kyrger had anticipated his need and brought frozen meat, which he placed on rocks in the fire. A savory odor spread into the air, and, as if roused by this summons, Peter Palmer dragged himself out of his white mausoleum and crouched down by the fire.

  Thorne noticed with weary surprise that the stout boatswain was weeping. Tears trickled down his hollow cheeks, but he said no word. He kept his eyes fixed on the meat until Thorne had forced a piece between the girl's teeth and induced her to chew and swallow it.

  When Joan would eat no more the three men fell on the meat and divided what remained between them. Then Peter tightened his belt and looked around him slowly.

  "I said truth," he grunted at length. "This maiden was a sea troll; the land is not her place. By black arts she hath fetched us to the very portal of which is plainly to be seen over yonder."

  Thorne looked over his shoulder and rubbed his eyes. What he had taken for a fantasy was still visible.

  A light cloud arched over the northern horizon, and from this cloud fiery streamers stretched to the zenith. Up and down these streamers passed a radiance, now purple, now yellow, but always flickering up to an immense height where it vanished in a kind of mist.

  As Thorne watched, the radiance vanished, to reappear almost instantly in a different form. Gigantic, glowing pillars seemed now to rise from the dark horizon to the regions of outer space. This glow palpitated and grew stronger until his eyes ached. The pillars were columns of fire, towering over their heads, but giving out no heat.

  Then the fiery portals, which had so wrought upon Peter's fancy, vanished and the elusive streamers sprang into being again.

  "I have sailed the seas of the earth," said the Shipman solemnly, "and I have seen the water rise up into pillars that reached to the sky. I've clapped my deadlights on the serpent that the Good Book names Leviathan, daddle me else. I've seen fishes fly through the air, off Madagascar, it were. But yonder gate in the sky is the gate of Satan's dominions."

  Having relieved his mind of this augury, he fell into a troubled sleep. Somewhere in the lurid darkness a tree trunk cracked sharply, and Thorne heard far inland the howling of a wolf pack, coursing the hard snow on the heels of the storm. Hunched close to the fire that warmed them into life, he wondered what the morrow might bring.

  The armiger admitted to Joan that they must have heavier garments, if they were to enter the unknown world to the east. The girl labored with Kyrger in sewing rude coats out of the furs for the two men to wear. For thread she had the supple gut preserved by the Samoyed, and for needle a bit of whalebone rubbed into the desired shape.

  Meanwhile Kyrger got out what appeared to be a pair of great wooden skates, nearly two ells long and as wide as the palm of his hand, with strips of reindeer skin fixed to the underside.

  Thus shod and carrying a long staff, he could glide over the surface of the snow beside the sled on which the girl rode. Thorne and Peter ran or walked in the hard track made by the cloven hoofs of the beasts and the run of the sled.

  It was necessary to carry on the sled powder, tinder, and pine branches enough to kindle a fire at a moment's notice. Only in this way could they ward off the attacks of the lean, gray wolves, larger than any the voyagers had seen before.

  It was after they had beaten off a pack of these wolves and were pushing forward warily that Thorne halted and pointed down at some large tracks that ran across the slot of the sled.

  "I pray you, Mistress Joan," he said, "tell the Samoyed we must have good fresh meat, ere ever we can reach the ships. Here are bear's tracks, and we will hunt down the beast."

  But when the maiden translated his speech to Kyrger, the Easterling shook his head and uttered one word decisively.

  "Kyrger says," she explained, "that this is ermecin-the strongest. 'Tis thus they name the white bear of the Ice Sea."

  "Nevertheless we will seek it out."

  The small Samoyed appeared to be troubled. Ermecin, he declared, could not be brought down by his arrows. Nor would the pistols of the outlanders serve to stop the rush of this beast. Moreover the white bear was sacred to a neighboring tribe, the Ostiaks.

  Thorne was determined to get good meat for the girl, and took his crossbow from the sled, winding it with care and setting a bolt in the slot. Joan insisted on going with him, saying that she had a dread of being left alone. Peter was put in charge of the reindeer and the three set out toward the shore.

  The tracks were fresh, and Kyrger followed them easily, though reluctantly enough. They descended a gully and came out on the shore, sighting the bear before long, among a nest of rocks.

  It scented or saw them at the same time and raised its head on a swaying, sinuous neck. Thorne saw that its head was small and its body greater than that of any bear he had set eyes upon. Moreover, being white tinged with yellow, it blended with the snow behind it.

  It did not seem to fear them because it made no effort to move
away when they approached within bowshot.

  "Bid Kyrger loose his shafts," said Thorne briefly. "For he can shoot several, and I but one."

  The Samoyed shook his head, reluctantly, yet obediently fitted an arrow to the string and bent his short bow. The missile whipped through the air and struck the white bear in the flank, but did not penetrate half its length. The brute swung toward them instantly, its head weaving from side to side.

  A second arrow pierced its shoulder, and it swept through the snow, moving with unexpected speed, so that Kyrger's third shot merely glanced along its ribs.

  The hunter cast down his bow and drew his knife, the breath hissing between his teeth, while Thorne planted his feet and sighted the crossbow, sending a bolt into the bear's throat.

  The beast plunged forward, and gained its feet slowly, blood streaming from its open jaws. Then it fell on its side, not a dozen paces from them.

  Kyrger shouted, wild with excitement. He pointed admiringly at Thorne's weapon and ran to the bear, chanting something loudly. To Thorne's surprise Joan smiled, although her lips were bloodless. She had not stirred or spoken during the charge of the great beast.

  "He is saying," she laughed, "that the spirit of the bear must not be angered at us. He is telling the spirit that we did not slay it, nay, a wicked Ostiak sped the bolt. And when the bear's spirit seeks blood revenge in another body it must follow the tribe of Ostiaks."

  "What are they?"

  "My father said they dwell more to the east. They are cruel people, who slay strangers. They are the dogsled people, more warlike than the reindeer-sled Samoyeds."

  Leaving Kyrger to skin the animal, they returned to the camp, where Peter had kindled a fire and Thorne took the shipman aside.

  "Many days have passed since we bade Master Chancellor farewell. By my reckoning this should be close to Christmas, if indeed it is not that very day."

  "Noel! "

  Peter glanced up at the flickering arc of the northern lights, and at the gray sweep of the shore with its fringe of ice floes.