Swords From the Sea (14 page)

"Captain's orders-fresh fish and wine for the hands that be taken sick. And why? Because the salt pork is corrupt, and the beer is vinegarish. Aye, as ever was. Likewise, the wine casks are not stanch, so the half of it hath leaked out."

"H m."

Thorne passed a hand ruefully over the bristle of beard on his chin and throat.

"Some of the merchants are all for turning back," added Peter, "but Sir Hugh's not the man for that. Hark 'e, my master. What game might ye be a playing-of? Thou'rt no more a lout than I be."

"What, then?"

"Why, by token of that white shirt, thou'rt gen'leman born. Come now, what's the Jay, a gen'leman born passing hisself off for a yeoman? Ah, that were a good song."

Grinning, even while his shrewd eyes dwelt on Thorne, the boatswain began in a very hearty voice:

Chuckling he slapped his thigh, and cocked his great head to one side.

"Ralph, lad, that were well sung!" And added in his stentorian whisper:

"In the dark ye fooled me. But now, ye talks like a gen'leman, drinks like a lord, and eats dainty as a prince. Why come off to the ships, Ralph, lad?"

"Have you forgotten," asked Thorne, "that I was fuddled-seas-over?"

Peter scratched his head over the black hood that he wore ever about his massive shoulders and sconce.

"Why, no, Ralph, no. But ye sniggled me as to being a yokel. Y'are a gen'leman born. I say and so it is. Now mightn't ye be a sniggling of me as to being fuddled. Supposing, now, ye was sober? Eh? We had sore need of mariners, so I took off the first likely lad that showed in the offing. But supposing ye was sober; why ever did ye go for to be took off?"

He glanced around the narrow forecastle, lighted after a fashion by two small ports and reeking of the bilge. Smoke from the galley-the wind being over the stern-clouded it, and the odor of grease and burned meat vied with the stench of soiled garments.

"This fo'csle a'nt suited to a gen'leman's disposition now. But y' are content to lie abed here. Most 'mazing content ye be, Ralph.

"So I says to myself, 'Peter, this young un's lying alow for a good and sufficient reason.' And what might that reason be? 'Peter,' says I, 'in all likelihood he does not wish to show his mug on deck for a while.' Until when? 'Why, Peter,' says I, 'until the coast of England lies well astern."'

The blue-eyed boatswain was not far wrong in his surmise, though Thorne's lean face told him little.

"I'm not a chap to ax questions," he went on, "and it's all one to me whether ye put a knife to the innards of another gen'leman, or summat else. Let bygones be bygones."

He held out a hairy fist and Ralph took it. Peter Palmer was the only man on the Edward who knew the manner of his taking off, and so long as the boatswain kept his counsel, no talk would arise to come to the ears of Master Chancellor. Ralph himself determined to keep both his identity and his mission secret for a while, until he could look around and get his bearings.

At first he had been disappointed to discover that he was not on Durforth's ship. Now he was glad of it.

On Durforth's vessel, the Con fidentia, which was much smaller than the Edward, he did not think he could have escaped notice. And, if Durforth had knowledge of him in his present situation, the easiest fate he could expect would be to be cast into the bilboes.

Peter saw to it that he was provided with a heavy robe from the merchants' stores to fend off the cold, and a small slop chest, with needle and thread, a knife, and a wrapping of frieze to sleep in, proceedings that aroused the curiosity of the shipmen who berthed in the forecastle and had experienced no such tender mercies from the boatswain. Until one day Peter haled the landsman into the depths of the ship.

Here he was turned over to a being who answered to the name of jacks and was the ship's cook. His duties were to tend the galley fire, fetch the victuals to the mariner's mess on the main deck, to wash plates, swab out the galley, and in general to do whatever jacks was minded he should.

"Ho, a landsman!" grunted the cook.

"Ah," nodded Peter, "a landsman as is a fancy hand with dirk or fist. A man as has put better men than you, jacks, where only the -- could find them. So speak him civil and keep your hand off him, or we'll have a new cook and fare better by the same token."

"Fare better!"

Jacks was blind in one eye and the other was askew in his head, giving him a limited range of vision, but a baneful stare when his feelings were aroused, as now.

"You sons o' bilge puncheons 'ud like pickles with your beer, and rum every time you spit, I'm thinking. Half the stores were rotting in the salt barrels when they were stowed."

"So ye say-" Peter winked at the armiger-"but I say it's enough and more to spoil the beer to have it under hatches along of you, jacks."

He took Ralph aside for a word of advice.

"Bide here for a time. Y'are a landsman, mind, and Master Dickon and his bullies will stand for no favorites. Be a swabber for a while, then we'll make shift to have ye out of the orlop. By then thy natural mother, Ralph, 'ud not know ye for her son."

This proved to be true. For days Ralph labored in the dark hold, at duties that turned his stomach even more than the pitching of the Edward. Once, watched by the saturnine eye of jacks, he tried to wash head and hands in a bucket of salt water and surveyed the result ruefully. Soot and smoke coated the grease that clung to his skin.

Once on the spar deck, during evening prayer when all hands except Jacks were mustered in the waist, Chancellor met him face to face and half frowned as if something about the landsman struck him as familiar.

But at that moment a hail came from the masthead.

"Sail ho!"

That day they had entered a belt of fog, and though the shore was scarce a league distant they could see it not. They were lying-to, upon command of Sir Hugh, near a village from which Chancellor had been able to procure a boatload of fowls, to eke out his scanty stock of meat. Ralph could smell the hay that the people on shore had been cutting and the fresh, strong odor of pine trees.

But by degrees, as he watched the curtain of mist from the windward rail, he became aware of another odor, less pleasing.

Out of the mist a black vessel took shape-a long pinnace with two masts, only the foresail being set. It moved down the wind sluggishly, and he heard Chancellor mutter that it had the seeming of a pirate craft. Ralph wondered why such a small boat should venture to attack the Edward.

Chancellor sprang into the shrouds and bellowed through cupped hands:

"Stand off, or you will foul us. Keep to our lee, or take a shot!"

He repeated the warning in Dutch, but the pinnace kept its course. The master gunner, with some of the hands, climbed briskly to the foredeck of the Edward and whipped the tarpaulin from one of the calivers, while others ran below for shot and powder and Peter came up from the galley with a slow match that he had kindled at Jacks's fire.

The weather-beaten faces of the men about Ralph brightened at prospect of a fight. They were a rugged lot; many of them had sailed with Chancellor before and Peter dubbed them "tarry-Johns." Yet the master gave no order to issue swords and pikes to the crew.

His hail had not been answered, and before long all on the Edward saw the reason. The pinnace slid nearer, and veered away uncertainly. A man was visible now at the wheel, and another was perched under the bowsprit on the crudely carved dragon that served for figurehead.

Another pair hung from the yard on the foremast, and two others from the main yard.

They hung by the necks and turned slowly as the yards swung with a dry creaking. A puff of wind bore the pinnace almost under the Edward's counter and Ralph saw that the helmsman was as dead as the others, bound to the tiller. So, too, the sailor on the figurehead remained immovable, lashed to his place, his head sunk on his chest.

The rank smell of decay was stronger on the air. And then the black pinnace glided out of sight in the mist, vanishing without guidance from living hand and bearing with it that strange crew of inanimate beings.

With its disappearance the spirits of the men on the Edward revived perceptibly, some saying that it must have been a plague ship, or a craft from Danemarke that had been taken by pirates.

"Be that as it may," muttered Peter, "it bodes no good to us. Those chaps had been strung up for many a day by the looks of them, and still it keeps the sea."

"You are wide of the mark," put in another, who had made the voyage to Iceland. "Yon's the handiwork o' the Easterlings."

"What's them?" asked a young sailor, who was listening with all his ears.

"Why, the little people as keeps watch and ward upon the Ice Sea. Easterlings they be. They've set their hands to that pinnace."

"Save us!"

"Aye," nodded the old hand, "here we be up beyond the Circulus Articus."

"By what token?"

"By this token, bullies all. 'Tis now nine o'clock, and yet the light holds. Come on watch at three bells and the light will be upon us anew."

"Aye," assented Peter moodily. "The hours o' darkness be diminishing. But the powers o' darkness be a-growing and a-girding and acoming about us."

As if to bear out the truth of his remark, the wind turned contrary and held the ships back. They seldom saw the sun now, except as a ball of silver hung in the mist. As the Iceland-farer prophesied, the nights grew shorter instead of longer as the season advanced.

Hard bitten and callous as were the hands of the Edward, they were superstitious to a man, and the visit of the black pinnace had set them on the lookout for more omens. The very day they changed course from north to east, having rounded the North Cape, one of the men on Sir Hugh's ship reported that he had seen a mermaid in the half-light of late evening.

He swore that the white body of a woman had appeared under the stern, a woman whose long hair was like seaweed, and who beckoned and smiled at him, before diving into the depths again. When she dipped out of sight he beheld clearly the scales of a fish and a great tail that whipped the water.

Both Peter and the Iceland-farer were agreed that the sight of the mermaid presaged death on board the Bona Esperanza. They recalled other occasions when shipmen who had been beckoned by women swimming upon the waters had fallen overboard in a storm.

The burly boatswain kept a careful rein on his own unruly tongue thereafter. Ralph he relieved from duty in the galley and made boatswain's mate, saying that the lad had done his work well and could help him upon the deck.

So the armiger enjoyed a good wash in fresh water, and persuaded the quartermasters to give him a new, clean leather jacket and hooded frieze shirt as a protection against the growing cold. The sailors believed that they were about to enter the Ice Sea, because they saw several whales, and noticed that Chancellor took his noon observation with more care than usual.

More than once Ralph caught sight of Durforth, when the little Con- fldentia drew abreast of them-the tall figure, clad in a robe of foxskins trimmed with ermine was unmistakable. He could even see the broad chain of gold the man always wore.

It was the day they saw the whales, the last of many upon which the circle of the sun was visible through the mist, that Durforth hailed the Edward. He had just completed his noon observation and held the backstaff in his hand.

Ralph, busy in the waist of the ship, caught a few words.

"Seventy degrees of latitude-the first of August, and soon the ice-Wardhouse."

Every hand of the watch on deck cocked an ear to hear Chancellor's reply, which came at once.

"It stands not with honor to turn back."

"We lack victuals to winter in the Ice Sea-a barren coast."

Chancellor's ruddy face darkened with anger, whether at Durforth's words or because the master of the Confiidentia had spoken within hearing of the crew Ralph did not know.

"Sir Hugh is general of this fleet. And we are for Cathay, not the Wardhouse."

Peter nudged the young landsman in the side with force enough to crack a rib.

"There's Master Dickon for ye! Aye, but he did not see the mermaid. Nor does he sour his throat with the beer in our butts."

Ralph glanced at the mariner curiously.

"Would you run from a woman, Peter?"

"Aye, younker, that would I. Signs and portents are sent for our understanding. Whatever befalls, some chap on the Bona Esperanza is doomed."

The big boatswain glanced at him sidewise and shook his head soberly.

"Lad, I be fair'mazed at'e. Thou'lt say next there is no black magic as well as white; aye, no powers of numbers or planets."

"It seems to me," quoth the armiger, "that a man stands or falls by his own deeds. I have come upon no spell that a sword would not sever."

Peter's great jaw fell open and he stared, round of eye.

"Now, - take'e, I mean, Our Lady save us! Lad, lad! I'll not gainsay the potency of Our Lady-" he nodded at the image on the mast-"but here we be on the Ice Sea; so Master Durforth did maintain, and who else should reek as well?

"Now Satan hath dominions of his own, and if this be one of them, why hold hard, lad, and do not miscall the powers o' darkness. Especially-" he nudged his friend violently in the ribs-"especially if ye have the blood of another gen'leman on your soul."