Swords From the Sea (19 page)

Belike, thought Peter, she would suck the life from Master Ralph or else beguile him into the waters and swim down to the sea's bottom, she who had taken a dead man's name, who sat each day in the evening hour by a grave, who had a man's wisdom and a witch's craft.

"Peter," said Thorne, and his words came in an altered voice, so that the girl glanced at him fleetingly, "this is what we will do. Fetch me my arbalest from the Wardhouse, with pistols for yourself. Look yonder!"

The boatswain knitted shaggy brows and presently made out what the armiger had been looking at. A boat was heading into the harbor. He sprang to his feet to shout joyfully, when he paused uneasily. This was no full rigged ship, but a longboat that tossed on the swell, moving sluggishly under a lug sail.

"'Tis the sailing skiff that Tuon sent for," cried loan.

"It will be ours before Tuon is on his feet again," said Thorne.

The lugger-if the long, ramshackle skiff could be called that-staggered slowly through the crosscurrents at the mouth of the cove and was coaxed to the shore, where three men sprang out, to tug it up on the sand. A fourth Easterling, who seemed to stand no higher than Joan's chin, loosened the sheets and left the leather sail to flap as it would.

Then, without more ado, they started up the path to the Wardhouse and were confronted by Thorne and Peter with the crossbow ready wound and a brace of loaded pistols.

"Avast, my bullies!" roared the shipman. "Bring to and show your colors, or swallow lead the wrong way."

And he brandished a long pistol, motioning with the other hand for them to remain where they were. His aspect and voice had a startling effect on the savages; three of them dropped the light spears they carried and raced away; the fourth, the smallest of the lot, fell to his knees behind a hummock of grass.

Before Peter could sight his pistol, the little Easterling had strung his bow and loosed an arrow that flicked past Thorne's throat. The armiger pulled the trigger of his arbalest, but the bolt flew high, so closely did the miniature warrior hug the earth.

"Hull him, shipmate!" bellowed Peter. "Down between wind and wat-ugh!"

A second arrow from the native's bow struck Peter fairly under the ribs with a resounding thud, driving the breath from his lungs. Instead of penetrating, the missile hung loosely from his stout leather jerkin. Peter, being suspicious of the Easterlings, had prudently donned a steel corselet under his jerkin and mantle.

Pulling out the arrow, he tossed it away, and was sighting anew with the pistol when Thorne cried to him to hold hard. The Easterling champion had stood up, in round-eyed amazement, and was drawing near them, fascinated by the sight of men who were invulnerable to his shafts. As a sign of submission he unstrung his bow, and laid it at Thorne's feet, with a curious glance at the cumbersome crossbow.

Unlike the other Easterlings he wore tunic and trousers of gray squirrel skins, neatly sewed together with gut and ornamented at knees and neck with squirrel tails.

Joan Andrews, coming up, called him Kyrger, and said that he was a Samoyed tribesman, a young hunter who brought very good pelts to her father at times. The sight of the girl seemed to reassure Kyrger, who made no effort to escape; instead he took to following Thorne around.

Peter rolled off to inspect the lugger, and returned with mingled hope and disgust written upon his broad countenance, to report that she smelled like a Portugal's bilge, and was open from tiller to prow, some buff being stretched across the gunwales at either end. She seemed stout enough, he added.

But Joan, who had been questioning the hunter, cried out that Kyrger had sighted two ships several days before the lugger put off from the coast. The Samoyed had followed the vessels for a while, never having seen ships of such size in his life.

"That would be the Esperanza and the Con fidentia, Sir Hugh's vessels," observed Thorne. "Ask him where they were sighted."

Kyrger pointed to the eastward.

"How were they headed?"

The Samoyed indicated the same direction, and Thorne was puzzled. Sir Hugh had not put in to the Wardhouse but had gone on, apparently three or four days after Chancellor. The three vessels might be expected to join company again. At all events, Sir Hugh would not come to the Wardhouse now. But why had he not appeared at the rendezvous?

"Ask him if he has ever been far along the coast to the east," he said at length.

Kyrger held up all the fingers of both hands, and nodded his head emphatically.

"He means either ten days' travel or ten kills of game," Joan explained. "It might be a hundred leagues."

"In ten days?" broke in Peter, who scented deceit. "'Tis not to be believed."

"They ride behind reindeer when the snow is on the ground," Joan assured him. "They go very swiftly. And Kyrger says what I have told you, my masters. The ice hath closed the sea a hundred leagues from here."

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 driver 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.