CHAPTER XII
SNOW
THE days passed, and Thorne went more often to the lookout because it irked him to sit in the Wardhouse where he felt that the very food he shared was taken from her bounty.
Moreover she had warned him earnestly not to venture abroad without her, and this went sorely against his pride. And there came a day when the hoar frost was white on the ground. Snow fell that night, driving the Easterlings into the Wardhouse. Their hunger sharpened by the bitter wind, the savages fell upon Thorne's store of victuals. Only half warming the meat and fish at the fire, they gorged until their bodies swelled.
Thorne went out to the hill as soon as the snow ceased, after cautioning Peter against quarreling with Tuon and his men.
The aspect of the island was changed; the sun was invisible behind clouds and the gray light seemed to arise from the white ground under his feet. In spite of the brisk walk he was shivering when he reached the rocky height and searched the sea with his eyes.
No sail was to be seen and, peering to the eastward, he saw ice floes in the course taken by the Edward. This made it certain that Chancellor would not return to the islands until next season.
No animals were astir, and Thorne, who was not given to imagination, could not rid himself of the belief that invisible and malignant forces were closing in upon the island; elementals, his father had termed them.
Thrusting his numbed hands into his belt, he was setting himself to consider means by which they could live through the winter, when a clear voice hailed him cheerily.
“Ho, Master Thorne, you have disobeyed orders again. I' faith, you have led me a merry chase!”
The girl was climbing swiftly to the lookout, clad in a new manner, her small feet snug in deerskin boots, her slim body wrapped in a fox-fur tunic and a felt hood drawn over her head. It was the first time he had seen a woman without a skirt that came clear to the ground, but Joan Andrews was careless of her unwonted dress.
“Why, the lad is in a pet.” She glanced searchingly at his drawn face. “The frost will harden in you, if you go not abroad in warmer garments than those. La, sir, such things may do well enough in London town, but not upon the Ice Sea. I will beg furs of good Tuon and sew ye a proper mantle.”
“You need not, and—I am not angry, child.”
“Child, quoth'a! You are a large lout for your age, Master Thorne, but you are not old enough to call me child. Nay, I think you very young.”
So saying she beckoned him to a spot where the wind was warded by a great rock and, when he came reluctantly, sat close to afford him the warmth of her furs.
“Peter says that you were a gentleman at court. Is it true?”
Thorne found the girl difficult to understand; her gaze, as searching and guileless as a child was more disconcerting than the eyes, the bright and calculating eyes, of the ladies in waiting, for whom he had had a boyish awe.
“I can break me a lance in the tournaments, and keep the saddle of a horse,” he admitted. “I can train a goshawk for hare or wild fowl.”
“What else?”
“I have killed several in fair fight with sword and dagger.”
“Any lout can do as much, if luck be with him. What else?”
“Why, I can put a shaft from a crossbow through the ribs of a running hart at a hundred paces.”
Mistress Joan smiled behind the fur collar of her jacket. She had seen Thorne fail to do just that not so long ago, but she did not remind him of it. Instead her mood changed swiftly.
“Now, sirrah, tell me this: Was it courteous in you to run off and leave me beleaguered by the drunken Easterlings? They are near mad, with the spirits they have taken.”
“Are they so?”
Thorne frowned, thinking too late of the brandy and beer. Tuon and his men had seemed little inclined to try these strange drinks, but now apparently they had done so, and the result was not pleasant to contemplate.
The fault being his, he was loath to admit it.
“I knew it not, Mistress Joan. 'Swounds, I grew weary of your following. A man may not think aright with a vixen's tongue going like a bell clapper at his ear.”
The corners of her lips drew down, and she moved a little farther away.
“So my father used to say, when things went ill. Nay, Master Thorne, I followed you because I feared for—” she hesitated with an upward glance that judged his mood shrewdly—“I feared to be left by myself in the company of the Easterlings, and—and I am lonely, by times.”
“In that case,” assented young Master Thorne gravely, “you may walk with me as often as you are minded, aye and talk also.”
Around the corner of the rock Peter, the boatswain, hove in sight, his bead bent against the wind.
“Stand by, Master Ralph,” be muttered hoarsely, “stand by to go about. Luck sets our way.”
THORNE motioned to the shipman to join them, saying that they owed their lives to Mistress Joan and it would be ill repayment of her courtesy to talk apart.
At this Peter pursed his lips and was heard to growl that there was no knowing whether the maid was friend or unfriend, and for his part he would liefer keep his distance from one who ran about with Easterlings and dressed like a lad—a mortal sin to his thinking.
“The beer is gone,” he vouchsafed darkly, “ah, and the brandy. 'Twill be a dry winter for us.”
“Gone?” cried Joan Andrews. “Then the Laps have guzzled it.”
“As ever was. They drained the casks and now lie about the house like fish out o' water. Fuddled!”
He winked at Thorne and contorted his face in the effort to convey some hidden meaning unperceived by the girl.
“Scuppers awash! They screamed and danced and fit among themselves. You could stow them in the fire and they would not stir—all twenty of them.”
And he touched his dirk on the side away from Joan, beckoning with his head to his companion.
“Stir a leg, Master Ralph. Blast my eyes but here's luck a-playing our game, and”
He lifted a huge hand to his lips and mouthed in Thorne's ears.
“Has the wench put a spell on ye? We can be masters in this island before the sand runs from the glass again.”
Thorne looked at him silently. He and Joan had not been gone from the house an hour and in that time twenty savages had downed two half barrels of brandy and beer. They were not accustomed to such liquor, and he wondered whether they would ever stand upon their feet again. Here, as Peter said, was a chance to make sure they would not. And yet he had made a truce with these same savages.
“Mistress Joan,” he observed, “the boatswain here has a mind to rid us of the Easterlings while they lie befuddled. What say you? Are you for us, or for them!”
The girl lifted her head impatiently.
“You are both fools—faith, I know not which is the greater. Peter, have not the Laps eaten up the main part of your victuals?”
“Aye, mistress—” Peter was civil enough to Joan's face—“that they have. And they have e'en drunk up my beer.”
“Now if you kill them, how are we three to get us food to live through the winter?”
Peter started to reply, and scratched his head.
“How will we live in any case?”
“With bows and snares and nets that they make these savages will get us small game and fish. If you had slain them you would starve before another seventh day.”
To this Peter had no answer, but waxed surly for being reproved in his folly.
He had hastened to Thorne after watching from the tower stairs until the Laps were past heeding his doings, and he had expected that the armiger would fall in at once with his plan. Now he stared at his young companion distrustfully.
Thorne's mind seemed to be elsewhere. His eyes narrowed and his lips close drawn, he was staring at a wrack of clouds out to windward. Peter shook his head moodily, marking the high color in the lad's cheeks, the splendid poise of the curly head.
Aye, the boy was rarely favored, being more than handsome, and this was why the maiden, who must be a sea troll in human form, had laid her spell on him. She wanted to have him for her own.
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 Joan.
“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 cross currents 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 cross bow 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 amiger 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 Confidentia, 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' 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, Joan slept soundly in Kyrger's diminutive tent of heavy felt stretched over a frame of small birch poles, while Thorne and Peter took turn 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 half way out to the blur of the islands, tossing on a restless swell
Clearly there was wind out there 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 die 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 bad 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 he 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 starm 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 is 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 snow storms 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.