On November 8th, 1556, with her casks empty and her sails in tatters; with two of her crew washed overboard and one dead from the flux, the Edward Bonaventure sighted land and was able, slowly, to make towards it. A day later, it was possible positively to identify it as a major north-eastern headland in Scotland, by name Kinnairds Head. The wind was in the north-west, and had held steadily there for a day. Hoping for harbour, but praying for any inlet or bay where their anchors would hold and their shattered ship would have peace from the wind, they staggered on. Late in the evening of November 10th, a Tuesday, the wind started to gust and also to back, increasing in power, and Chancellor, using the Lindesay rutter and chart, sailed slowly up to the broad, rocky coastline, bare of trees and broken with low bights and sand dunes, and felt his way into the nearest small bay which gave promise of shelter.
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.’
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, and 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.’
‘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.
Francis Crawford had decided, quite sensibly, to give up, just before the fishing boat found him, there being a point beyond which in any philosophy, fruitless endeavour served no valid purpose. The white-hot wires by which he was operating had turned long ago into fodders of lead. His limbs, barely stirring, answered him rarely and he knew that none of his senses could be relied on, any more than a wrestler’s, who had been punched, continuously, on head and body for a very long time. The final point, the deciding factor was that if he found Chancellor in the next thirty seconds he could do nothing about it, except possibly drag him down to his death. And if Chancellor had to die, let him do it ignorant of this small fiasco, at least.
So, characteristic of an impervious and versatile engine, the ‘Not yet’ became, with logic, ‘Now.’
The lantern found him, because his hair was so bright. The Buchan man in the prow of the big, solid boat said, ‘There’s a loonie there. Bring her round, then.’
They hung over the side, fascinated, while the rowers, swearing, got to work on the oars. ‘It’s a Russ, for sure. Is he deid?’
‘Aye, he’s deid,’ said the owner. ‘But he’s got rings on his fingers.’
‘Then bring him in,’ said the owner’s uncle, impatiently. ‘See’s the lantern, Aikie. Are we far fae the ship?’
‘Na. But the sailing-maister’s in Martin’s boatie. He’ll see us.’
‘Never a bit. Or tell him we’re saving the cargo. If she lifts off the rocks, it’s tint onyway.… He’s no deid.’ It was the voice of regret. A moment later he said, ‘Jesus, did he hear what I said?’
The owner, who had skinned his fingers landing their catch, looked at him without sympathy. ‘I dinna ken. Ye’ll hae tae wait and find out. And then you’ll hae tae set to and mend it. Them that burns their arse has tae sit on the blister.’
There was no possibility, hearing that, that he had arrived either in Paradise or Purgatory, or regions less monotonous. Returning as an act of obedience, as Timothy to Paul, Francis Crawford said, without opening his eyes, ‘I am very deaf in both ears.’
‘It’s no a Russ!’ Aikie said.
‘I hear it’s no a Russ,’ said the owner’s uncle. ‘My lord. But for my sister’s son here ye’d be droont.’
‘On the other hand,’ Lymond said, keeping to a misty but obstinate point, ‘the Courts of Admiralty are extremely strict about stolen cargo.’
There was a long pause, occasioned by shock on the part of his audience and extreme inertia on the part of the swimmer. Then Lymond said, ‘But for one consideration, I shall see to it that no questions are asked.’
For his pains, he was swamped by a full wave of white water, and it was some time before they baled out and set themselves once more to rights, with an exhibition of colourful cursing in the direction of the bemused oarsmen who had neglected their duties. Then the owner, who had evidently achieved some serious thinking, said, ‘And fin ye say, no questions asked, fa might ye be?’
‘A Crawford of Culter,’ Lymond said. ‘And able to do what I say.’
‘And fit are we to do?’ asked the owner’s uncle. Impelled by sudden optimism, he helped the stranger to sit up.
‘Search for two men,’ Lymond said. ‘And bring me them both, or their bodies. Before you unload that cargo.’
‘And if we dinna find them?’ said the owner, a realist.
‘Then I’d advise you,’ said Lymond, ‘to leave the cargo alone. You won’t fox the master.’
‘Na,’ said the owner’s uncle, pulling his lip. He stared at the Crawford of Culter, who had lost a brief, if inevitable, battle, and was now, for the moment, no longer with them. ‘He’s dwined away. Ye mith pit him back far ye got him.’
Aikie said, ‘Fat’s her cargo?’
The owner said, ‘Fae the Emperor o’ Muscovy. They’ll watch it like gleds.’
His uncle said, ‘Culter’s namely. Could he dee it?’
‘Keep the Admiralty off? Like enough. It winna hurt us tae claa his back an’ dee as he wants us. Twa men. Russes likely. And never a mile fae a coo’s tail likely, the callants.… There’s Martin’s boat.’
‘Then wave your bluidy lantern!’ his uncle yelled.
So Buckland brought Lymond back, in the boat owned by the opportune Martin, and Robert Best on one side and Adam Blacklock, cursorily restored on the other, stood in the surf and helped haul it in. Lymond was virtually conscious and walked, with Buckland’s support, as far as the fire. D’Harcourt got up on one elbow and Adam could sense, on the other side of the blaze, that Osep Nepeja was stirring and also about to turn and struggle on to his feet. He stood between both of them and Lymond, and waited until Buckland had laid him full length on the sand, and wrapped sacking round the shredded cloth on his shoulders.
His eyes were shut, which meant very little, except that he did not intend to be sociable.
‘Soup,’ said Buckland. Adam followed him to the cauldron, stopping on the way to speak to Nepeja. Solid, bearded and hatless, after weeks of hunger and desperation, when he saw his compatriots drown and went from day to day, more than them all in fear of his life he sat now, his hands on the great silver crucifix which had hung from the day he was born at his neck, and prayed to his God, two thousand miles off in Russia. It had been a Russian, mad with panic, who had overturned the Edward’s small boat. And the man hurt most perhaps by what had then happened was this man, surviving.
So Adam spoke to him reassuringly in his serviceable Russian, and saw him sit down, and went to Buckland and said, ‘A man Fraser has offered us hospitality, and Forbes of the castle up there. They seem well-meaning and responsible: horses are coming, and carts for those who can’t walk. They have room for the seamen.’
There were nineteen men on the beach, out of fifty. Or out of a hundred and thirty-five, if you cared to count the four ships.
Buckland said, ‘Who——?’ and broke off, with the steaming ladle still held in his hand. And Adam understood. Of the seven men of birth who were left, who was to lead them? Robert Best, interpreter for the Muscovy Company, or John Buckland, their hired sailing master? The Ambassador, dumb without his interpreters? The three men, once of St Mary’s? Or …
Buckland looked back, and Adam with him to where Francis Crawford lay still in the brilliant glow of the fire, his lashes parted; and the seawater bright on his skin.
‘The Voevoda,’ said Buckland firmly, and prepared to march with the soup to his patient.
Adam’s hand on his ladle-arm stopped him.
‘Yes,’ said Adam. ‘The Voevoda. But for the mercy of God, not just now.’
*
Although the fishing boats searched, for their own venal reasons, for quite a fair length of time, no man that night or any other laid hands on Richard Chancellor, Grand Pilot of the Muscovy Fleet, or his beloved son Christopher.
Long before then, they had moved out of the bay, at first tangled kindly together, and later alone, out of sight of each other, but with the same broad and harmonious current bearing them east.
Over the lightening sea lay the path Chancellor had discovered, and the door he had opened, expending on it a sovereign order of courage in an element exacting of courage, for he sailed from home, and not towards it.
We commit a little money to the hazard of fortune; he commits his life. Wherefore, Sidney had said, you are to favour and love the man departing thus from us.
The way he had found opened for him, and his long-studied seas with dignity gave him his bier. And in the morning, he was accorded the crown of dead men, to see the sun before they are buried, and he set out with shoes on his feet as do the Muscovites, for he had a long way to go.