‘Jesus Christ,’ Nicholas said. He took a breath. ‘Does your brother know that you’re here?’
‘He will now. I left him a message.’
‘He knows I have the Svipa?’
‘We heard as soon as we landed. I slipped away then, and came here.’
‘After making sure that Torolf was rejected. You think I would bribe a pilot to mislead his employer?’
‘I knew you would,’ the girl said. ‘As soon as I learned what my brother was doing. As soon as I heard you had dashed out of Edinburgh.’
‘How? You were at Dean Castle,’ he said.
‘Your wife joined us after you’d gone. My brother wrote me from Ayr. The lady Mary talked of your link with the Faroes. She hid in Nólsoy when Tom Boyd and she first fled from Scotland. Her son was conceived there. She speaks with tenderness of the idyll you made possible for her. Her summer alone with her husband.’
‘I note the vinegar,’ Nicholas said. ‘But you didn’t have to come and rebuke me in person. You had only to mention all that to your brother.’
‘But then he would have attacked you,’ she said. ‘Now he can’t.’
‘No. But I can attack him,’ Nicholas said. ‘Nothing personal, of course. But the Bank has a stake in this trade, and I plan to put another through Martin.’
She said, ‘Their ship is bigger than yours.’ She paused. ‘Don’t blame Anselm. I forced him to let me sail with him.’
‘Of course I blame him,’ Nicholas said. ‘And you. I should take you back to him.’
‘Then you would lose your ship and your men. M. le Grant was right. And after all this trouble, I wouldn’t reach Iceland. They were going to leave me till summer in Nólsoy. Nólsoy!’
‘And look what happens there,’ Nicholas said. He spoke absently. He said, ‘Kathi?’
‘Jà,’ said Katelijne. She never blinked.
‘Mother of God, don’t do that,’ Nicholas said. ‘Are you doing all this just because you want to go to Iceland?’
‘Of course,’ Kathi said.
Her eyes shone. She loved adventure. She loved any kind of adventure, as he ought to have remembered. Father Moriz, hauling open the door to the cabin, stopped and looked at them both. He said, ‘What are you doing? What is she doing here?’
‘We are all,’ said Nicholas, ‘going to Hell. Come and join us.’
They got there in three remarkably satisfactory days. Among the crew, it was recognised almost at once that the girl was not the padrone’s young piece, as assumed. This was made exceptionally clear by the priest, who had given his cabin to the young person. Thanks to Kathi (they used her name freely), the Unicorn wouldn’t harm them, and the master wouldn’t force an attack. Why the girl was doing it all was a mystery. She wasn’t sweet on either Mick or de Fleury, far less the two older men and the ‘prentice. She seemed more like a boy than a maid. Christ, did you see her run up those ropes like a squirrel?
Nicholas had her ordered down twice, before he found she was as sure-footed as he was. She was more competitive in all things than Robin. Like Gelis, she could sense the mood of a ship, and work to keep the crew’s loyalty. But Gelis never wasted her time, as Kathi did, with ceaseless activity. Kathi did things because they occurred to her, and not with any permanent object. She was like a storekeeper filling his shelves with delicacies that instantly perished. In time, he let her race where she wanted, and sometimes competed against her. He did not always win.
He had, of course, lectured her about her foolhardiness. She was aboard, among men, with only the priest for a chaperon. The voyage was dangerous. Her reasons, however altruistic, might never be recognised or believed: she could be labelled a traitor, a spy or a hostage.
‘I know,’ she had said. ‘But you can’t put me back on the Unicorn now. It would be suicide. And anyway the damage is done. And further anyway, if we all survive, I can get myself back home with Sersanders, and no one will know I ever left him.’
‘You are absolutely right,’ Nicholas said. ‘I can even suggest what you might do with the two shiploads of men you are going to have to bribe to keep quiet till you’re dead. Kathi, I shall try to look after your brother, but I can’t promise the same for your uncle’s ship. Do you understand?’
The clear eyes didn’t change. He was left to review his own words, and regret them. He saw her follow his thoughts with a half-smile. She said, ‘My uncle has other things on his mind. Yes, of course I understand. Tell me your plans if you like. It won’t hurt me. Sersanders will be doing the same.’
Then, for the first time, he gave all his mind to what she had done. He said, ‘I thought you would have gone back to Bruges with your uncle and aunt.’
‘They didn’t tell me they were going,’ she said. ‘They left while I was at Dean Castle. They want me to stay in Scotland, and do well, and marry. It is right that I should do what they want. They have been a father and mother to me.’
‘But you would rather have gone.’
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘But Dr Andreas is there to take care of her. He will be better than anyone.’
‘So that is really why you are rushing to Iceland. I’m sorry,’ he said.
She looked up and smiled. ‘I had other reasons. No, they are right. I should marry soon.’
‘I hear there are suitors,’ he said. ‘Someone, for example, not too far from Berecrofts?’
Her smile remained, full of friendship and mischief. ‘Perhaps. My uncle has several favourites, all kind men, and good. He says the choice may be mine.’
He thought of Gelis’s sister, forced into a loathsome Scottish betrothal and repudiating it with such violence in Bruges. The suitor was dead, and so were the parents who picked him. ‘Do you like them?’ he said. ‘Your uncle’s candidates?’
‘I’m in no hurry,’ she said. ‘But yes, I could share a house and a family with one of them. I should like to have sons like your Jordan. He enjoyed the ponies at Dean, and the country.’
‘Of course. You said Gelis came.’
‘Not for long: Bel of Cuthilgurdy took her off to see Beltrees. I hear it is a beautiful place. You would make a good lord of the manor.’
‘You have been reading my mind,’ Nicholas said. ‘A coat of arms, do you think, with a fish in it?’
‘And a tree, and a ring? It’s been done. I’m going to bait hooks. What about you?’ said Katelijne.
‘The very same thing,’ Nicholas said. She thought he meant it; until she saw him with John le Grant, supervising the emplacement of cannon. The Unicorn had no artillery. She would have to decide whether to say so.
She remembered le Grant in Egypt. She liked his unsentimentality, and his fervour for the things that he created, such as the machines for the Nativity Play. Since she came on board, she had encouraged him to talk about it and he had done so, in bursts of impassioned exposition, his fingers stabbing, his chalk slashing out diagrams. The sliding of the scenery thus. The smoke, the vapours, the lights orchestrated thus. The ghosts of the Prophets – how did she imagine that had been done? The unbearable light for the Deity? The paintings that moved?
She asked intelligent questions, and he went on to relate to her, chuckling, the fearsome tally of near-disasters that they had overcome, all of them, that terrible, that miraculous day. He spoke like a man starved, recalling a banquet. She realised that, since the immediate intoxicated aftermath of the Play, he had never been allowed to digest what had happened, or even refer to it. M. de Fleury had made it impossible.
It worried her. She learned quickly that Father Moriz was baffled as well. She had heard a good deal about the chaplain from Germany. It was he and Will Roger, they said, who had involved M. de Fleury in the Play: for the sake of his voice or his character, or perhaps both. It didn’t seem to have worked. The Play, in all its purgative glory, was past; and M. de Fleury had sailed off to Hell unredeemed, and was about to start a small war over fish.
Tackled in private, Father Moriz admitted that he shared her regrets. ‘But
,’ he said, ‘I see we are two people who do not easily give up on the gentleman. You are here, then, hoping to turn him back from this unsavoury venture?’
‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘But I had nothing better to do, and he does need a sharp word now and then. I couldn’t leave it to Robin.’
‘To Robin. Of course. Although I doubt if I have ever seen M. de Fleury receive a sharp word from Robin.’
‘I goad him. Robin looks after him. Until someone else comes who can do it.’
The priest studied her thoughtfully. He had a large, unkempt head and a short neck. He said, ‘You are risking a great deal to do so. So is Robin. I am not sure if his father appreciated as much.’
‘Robin would have come anyway,’ Kathi said.
‘Indeed? His father would be relieved, nevertheless, to know you are here,’ the priest suggested.
‘I suppose so,’ said Kathi. ‘He likes M. de Fleury as well.’
In Edinburgh, Archie escaped from his father and strode with his news to the house in the High Street. Gelis received him, but didn’t ask Mistress Clémence to leave. She had bound her hair up again. Archie smiled at the nurse and young Jordan, but spoke to Gelis at once.
‘I’ve just heard where they are. Has Govaerts told you?’
‘They?’ she said.
‘Robin and Nicholas.’ The child, who was playing with wool, looked up at his mother. So did the nurse.
Gelis said, ‘Govaerts told me this morning. They have gone to Ultima Thule, that desert that lies in the ocean.’
‘He told me he was fishing for herring.’
‘He told me the same. Place thy trust in cod,’ Gelis said, ‘rather than in aleci rubei, or red herrings. What else have you heard?’
‘That the Vatachino have a ship there as well,’ Archie said. ‘Sersanders, Adorne’s nephew is on it. And his sister Katelijne.’
‘What?’ said Gelis. Of course, she liked Kathi too.
‘She joined her brother at Ayr and sailed north.’
‘Why?’ She spoke as if he might know. He could only guess.
‘On an impulse, it seems. The ladies at Dean didn’t know until later.’
‘But why?’ said Gelis again.
‘I don’t know,’ Archie said at last. ‘Upset over her uncle and aunt. Worried about her brother and Nicholas. Maybe even she wanted to go. You know Kathi. A one-person tornado. Thank God Robin is there.’
The nurse was looking at him. He added, ‘He’s a helpful boy.’
Unexpectedly the nurse spoke. ‘It is spring. Young people embark on adventures. They are in capable hands.’
‘You are right,’ Archie said. He knelt and took some of the wool. ‘Your papa has gone to the top of the world. What will he bring you?’
A slow dismay spread across the boy’s face. The nurse picked him up and sat down. ‘He will bring his two ears,’ she said. ‘And some ice. He will bring some ice from Iceland to keep fresh that long, long difficult poem, so that when papa asks, there it will be, all the verses like new. And papa will be so proud.’
Soon after that, Archie left. He had come to soothe and be soothed, but remained troubled. Nicholas had deceived Gelis; he had deceived Archie himself, and taken Robin his son into danger. But you couldn’t hold a boy – or a girl – from adventuring. And the nurse had been right. It was spring. The boughs in his orchard were sturdy with thickening twigs, and the sun was warm through the glass in his windows. The sea was blue in the spring, and there was a harvest in it for everyone.
The sea was blue, the colour of cobalt. The sky and the sea were both blue, and both vacant. The sun illumined the sails, and the bright knitted hats on the heads of Katelijne and Robin in the mast-basket of the Banco di Niccolò’s Svipa. ‘The mainland of Iceland,’ Kathi said, ‘is a fifth bigger than Ireland, three-quarters empty, and you could put the entire populace twice into Venice.’
‘Including the trolls,’ Robin said.
‘Including the trolls. The Danish Governor lives in the south-west. The Danish Bishop lives a day’s ride from that to the east. The Burning Mountain is further east about the same distance.’
‘The Mouth of Hell,’ Robin said.
‘The Mouth of Hell. They call it Hekla. It opens once a year and swallows the damned. Henne is painting it. There are other hot mountains as well. You can tell them by the white clouds above them.’
‘Unless they’re exploding.’
‘Unless they’re exploding. Then you tell them by the black smoke and fire.’
‘And the boiling hot fountains,’ said Robin. ‘You can tell those by the steam. What do you think we’ll see first?’
‘I see it,’ said Kathi. Her voice faded, and then gained a resolute strength. ‘M. de Fleury, black smoke!’
‘The children are frightening one another,’ said Father Moriz. He turned an inquisitive eye upon Nicholas.
‘You underestimate them,’ Nicholas said. The call from the masthead had reached him. He tilted his head and made a soothing remark. It was something about voting for Beelzebub. Then he turned back. His voice was still soothing. ‘The mountains smoke a great deal of the time, Lutkyn says; it doesn’t mean anything. Except that we are about halfway there, and the Unicorn hasn’t caught up.’
The priest said, ‘I hate to say it, but it looks as if you were right.’
Nicholas grinned. So far he had been gloriously, happily right in all his guesses. The Unicorn’s problem was the same as his own: how to obtain a full load of fish and get away before the Hanseatic ships came to blow them out of the water.
The Svipa had a head start. Instead of trying to race them, Martin would surely consider alternatives. Every inlet on the south coast of Iceland was known to have its store of dried cod: stockfish already in store and ready to sell to incomers. By visiting the best of these now, the Unicorn could expect to arrive in the Westmanns with its holds already well filled, and would require no more than a little brisk fishing to leave well ahead of the opposition, including the Svipa.
Moriz said, ‘He’s running into a noose of your making.’
‘What noose?’ Nicholas said. ‘Poetic ropes, like poetic justice, are invisible, especially on mythical animals. The beards of women, the roots of stones, the sinews of bears, the breath of fish, the spittle of birds and the noise of the footfall of a cat made the cords that they used to bind Fenrir. Absolutely no residual evidence: they threw the poor brute’s case out of court and he didn’t even get compensation, although he did make a strong point with Odin. Never mind. Come and dice with Old Nick. First prize, Valhalla; second prize, you get cuckolding Vulcan. Moriz, you are Vulcan, I never noticed till now. John? Mick? A wager?’
His delight, his childish delight, the delight of childish anticipation ran through the ship like phosphorescence and carried them across the cobalt-blue sea until, between the sea and the sky, a white surf line appeared. A surf line that thickened and shone and took to itself glinting small shapes in a landscape of long gleaming whalebacks. On the sea just in front was a handful of rocks set in dust.
The dazzle of white came from the glaciers of Iceland. The rocks were the Westmann archipelago. The dust was the fishing flotilla of Iceland, busy there. It was spring in the orchards of Edinburgh, but Iceland in March floated pure as the hot-mountain clouds, white as mist, white as steam, white as snow, save for the fingers of smoke from the pyres of the damned.
Under the hand of Mick Crackbene, the Svipa sailed innocuously towards the storm of shrieking gulls and plummeting gannets and dropped anchor well short of the fishing. Then Crackbene went and stood in the prow while the sails were stowed softly as eggs, the awnings rigged, and the ship set to rights after her voyage.
The Svipa swung. Forward, the cook had set up his fire and his oven: smoke rose and was snatched by the wind, and a tapping told of a keg being broached. The gulls at their masthead had left to join those over the Icelanders, for the fishing there had continued, even if every man turned now and then to glance over hi
s shoulder and stare. The faces, hatted and hooded, were generally bearded and seemed curiously pale. It could be seen, between waves, that most of the boats had only two oars or four, and some of them were made of pieces of driftwood.
The moments went by. Oddly, the flotilla had thickened. A swirl was created within it, caused, it was apparent, by incomers from beyond; in particular a much larger boat approaching the bank from the shore, having set off, it was clear, as soon as the masts of the Svipa were seen. The flotilla embraced it and then, moving apart, allowed the new boat to row through and pass it. Now it could be seen that this was many times the size of the others: a dogger, recently built of good wood, and obeying a firm sweep of multiple oars. A man stood in the prow, and the men behind him were chanting. They were coming straight for the ship.
Then Michael Crackbene leaped up to the peak of the prow and cupped his hands round his mouth.
‘He’s going to say “Ey”,’ said Katelijne.
‘Ey!’ said Crackbene. And in the boat now surging up to their flank the blue eyes, the myriad blue, icy eyes opened and shone.
‘Svipa, ey!’ bawled the man from the boat. And the cry was taken up, from boat to boat under the gulls until all the faces were turned to Mick Crackbene, and smiling.
Peace, not war. They were in Thule and, thank God, they were welcome.
Only Katelijne, watching the dogger arrive, was disturbed. She said, ‘The fishermen know Master Crackbene. They’re coming aboard. Where would they get a new boat of that size?’
Robin wouldn’t have told her just yet. It was John le Grant, on his way to the steps, who seized the chance to explain. ‘Could you not guess? We built the doggers in Leith, exchanged them in Orkney for yoles, and presented the yoles to the Icelanders, together with one twenty-ton dogger that can fish as far out to sea as the Hanse ships.’
‘In return for what?’ Katelijne said. But she knew almost before she was told. In return for all the existing stores of dried cod, and the fill of M. de Fleury’s holds, if he liked, in fresh landings. She should have guessed. She should have managed to forewarn her brother. Betha Sinclair, so anxious to keep her at Dean, had known of her father’s Orkney involvement. Only Kathi had been blind.