Alys Clare - Land of the Silver Dragon

Hrype had been there, that day when I first saw the parchment; it was the day he first introduced me to Gurdyman. He had explained to me what Gurdyman had been trying to do, which was no more and no less than making a visual representation of the voyages of his ancient Norse ancestors. I hadn’t really understood then, when the manuscript was in its early stages. Now that it was nearing completion — if the fact that almost the entire surface of the parchment was covered in pictures, writing or both was any guide — I knew I was going to need some help.

Side by side, Gurdyman and I sat staring down at the manuscript. I remembered how, on that first visit, he’d asked me to try to draw the journey I’d just made from Aelf Fen to Cambridge, and all I’d managed was some rudimentary sketches of trees and barns and a feeble, wandering line that ran off the edge of the parchment long before it got to my village. Now I said, ‘I think I understand what you’re trying to do, but I’m afraid this — ’ I waved a hand over the entire parchment — ‘doesn’t really mean anything to me.’

‘No reason why it should,’ he replied. He drew a breath, held it and then said, ‘I am not the only man attempting to map the world, Lassair.’ Map . I memorized the word. ‘Men of the Church are working on it, although from what I have seen and heard of their travail, their faith is the driving force, and Jerusalem is always presented as the world’s centre: its navel, if you like, for the Greeks used the word omphalos , meaning the same thing. Not that their world’s navel was the Christians’ Jerusalem, of course, but Delphi,’ he added, half to himself. ‘But I digress. This map — ’ he put his fingertips delicately on to his own beautiful work — ‘represents a different aspect of the world; or, more accurately, the world viewed without the bias of faith. Here is the land, and here are the surrounding seas.’ He indicated first a large, amorphous shape covered with pictures and writing, and then the rippled area I’d already identified as water. ‘See these ships?’ Once more he pointed, and, now that I was looking more closely, I saw that the same little images of square-sailed ships were dotted all over the manuscript.

‘Yes,’ I breathed.

‘Behold the voyages of the Norsemen,’ he said eagerly, excitement thrumming in his voice. ‘Into the north and the west they went, heading out on the wide ocean that has no end.’ The left-hand edge of the map, indeed, ended in a mass of ripples, gradually decreasing in size. ‘Down into the great land mass that lies to the south and the east, those long, narrow boats edging ever onwards down the great rivers until finally emerging into seas very different from those that we know in the north. One such voyage led to Miklagard, their Great City,’ he said, his voice dropping to a whisper. I thought for a moment he was going to elucidate; explain, perhaps, that strange name. Miklagard , I repeated silently. But, with a shake of his shoulders, he went on in a different direction. ‘So many miles they travelled, pushing on, on, into strange lands where unknown trees and flowers flourished, where unlikely animals thrived, where a man’s very skin was of a different hue.’

‘What drove them on?’ I whispered. It was all but unimaginable, to think of those men in their frail boats, so far from home, voyaging into the unknown.

‘Trade, for the most part,’ Gurdyman said, grinning as my face fell in disappointment. ‘Trade, or the need to find new lands to live in. I am sorry to give you so prosaic an answer, child, but we must always face the truth, even when it is not what we had hoped it would be.’

A memory surfaced. ‘Hrype’s rune stones!’ I exclaimed, remembering.

Gurdyman looked at me approvingly. ‘ Yes ,’ he agreed. ‘They were fashioned from the translucent green stone that is brought out of the east.’ He grabbed a fold of the glorious, heavy silk shawl that he always wore and thrust it at me. ‘This, too, reached my hands only after a very long journey. The fabric is precious, Lassair, and silk of this quality is reserved for great kings and emperors.’ He smoothed the shawl delicately, his fingers hovering over the image of a magnificent and surely imaginary bird, with a brilliant blue head and a great fan of tail feathers that seemed to be dotted with eyes. Elsewhere, set against the same dark red background, flowers, leaves and lithe little creatures like weasels flowed together in an intricate pattern. ‘One of my own forebears brought home this shawl. It cost him dear, for in exchange he had to part with a lot more of his skins than he would have liked. But, you see, he fell in love with it, and from the instant he set eyes on it, he knew he had to have it.’ He looked down fondly at the shawl. ‘He brought it for his sister, my mother, whom he dearly loved,’ he added softly, ‘because she was barren and he wished to bring the smile back to her face.’

‘But she can’t have been barren because …’ I began. Then I stopped, because I recalled what he had once told me: My mother was advanced in years, and my birth was treated as a miracle .

Gurdyman acted as if he hadn’t heard. ‘There is a great road that stretches for thousands of miles,’ he began, his face dreamy, ‘and along it pass caravans of merchants, their pack animals laden with the treasures of the east. They travel westwards, and the traders of the west journey eastwards to meet them, and where the two converge there is a great city on the water. It is a city of graceful towers and warm, honey-coloured stonework, and it is riven by a stretch of water where the tides rip through as fast as a galloping horse. There, where men go to trade the greatest treasures of East and West, there are markets so vibrant, so thrilling, that all are reluctant to waste their time in sleep.’

I tried to imagine such a place. I failed. The biggest town I knew was Cambridge, and, although we undoubtedly had our share of merchants from near and far, I hadn’t noticed anyone here being all that reluctant to retire at nightfall.

With a start, Gurdyman came out of his reverie. ‘Enough,’ he said. ‘It is time to begin our lesson.’

Having aroused my curiosity by showing me his map, Gurdyman seized the moment and leapt straight into explaining how the Norsemen had succeeded not only in discovering the routes to the far-flung places they visited but, perhaps even more importantly, had managed to find their way home again.

‘They had faith in their ships,’ he said, ‘those light, sure-footed vessels that were sufficiently shallow-drafted that they did not run aground as they traversed the great river routes. Under sail, the ships were so fast that they seemed to skim over the waves. When the wind failed, the mariners removed the mast to prevent wind resistance and set to at the oars.’

It seemed to me, listening, that Gurdyman must surely have been speaking from personal experience. At what point in his long and eventful life, I wondered, had he sailed with the Norsemen? And how had he come by all this knowledge? He had told me once that he studied with the Moors of Spain when he was a youth, but today’s lesson concerned the wisdom of a very different sort of people …

What he told me next sounded like magic.

He had been describing the ways by which the Norsemen navigated, and much of it was based on sound common sense. Sailing close in to shore, a mariner would look out for familiar landmarks, noting them in sequence, much as I had tried to illustrate my pathetic little attempt at indicating the way home to Aelf Fen by drawing a particular tree, stream or cottage. The mariners also used the Pole Star to steer by; that, too, was familiar, for one of my earliest childhood lessons was how to locate the bright star that lies where the Pointers indicate. If you know where North lies , my father had explained, you can find your way . It’s very easy to become lost in the fens, where it’s often misty and where the land and the water are constantly changing. All fen children learn young how to find the Pole Star. If you’re lost out on the fens overnight and nobody finds you, you’ll likely be dead by morning.