The Ringed Castle (57 page)

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 smile 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.

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.’