Alys Clare - The Way Between the Worlds

‘A storm surge,’ Rollo remarked. He had heard tell of such phenomena, although he had never experienced one himself.

‘We have funny old storms hereabouts,’ the mate went on with the voice of long experience, ‘and sometimes you’ll think they’re heading off out to sea and you can stop worrying about them, and then they have a change of heart and back they come and hit the land again.’ He shook his head. ‘There’s no accounting for it,’ he muttered, ‘unless it’s magic.’ Both he and the lad made a surreptitious gesture with their right hands. Rollo thought he recognized the sign against the evil eye.

‘You get fogs and all,’ the lad piped up. ‘Real strange, they are, floating up out of nowhere like great white phantoms and then vanishing as quick as they came.’

‘Are there many shipwrecks?’ Rollo asked. He was pushing his luck, he knew, for sailors were a superstitious bunch, and he thought he could well be castigated for asking such a question when actually at sea.

The mate and his nephew exchanged a glance. Then the mate leaned closer to Rollo and, dropping his voice, said, ‘There’s sandbanks, see, and they shift around like living things.’ He gave a visible shudder. ‘Round the edges of the Wash, you just never know from one trip to the next where you’re going to find water deep enough for your boat’s draft and where you’re in for a nasty surprise because some stray wind, tide or current has piled up a mess of silt that wasn’t there before.’ He paused, nodding and slyly touching a forefinger to the side of his nose. ‘There’s captains I could mention who have come to grief because they didn’t allow for a sudden change in depth,’ he said softly. ‘Add a stiff wind to the picture, and before you know it, you’re blown on to a sandbank, your boat’s tipping over, your cargo is ruined and you’re like as not drowned, because out there — ’ he waved a vague hand — ‘there’s places where you think you’re on firm ground and then you realize too late that you’re sinking fast and you’re trapped in the quicksand. Why, only last-’

‘ Uncle !’ hissed the lad, making the sign against evil frantically with both hands. Even the mate seemed to realize he had gone too far.

With an attempt at a smile that convinced neither Rollo nor, apparently, his anxious nephew, the mate said, ‘Course, nothing like that’s going to happen on this ship!’ Then he grabbed the lad by the collar, nodded a curt farewell to Rollo and hurried away towards the stern of the ship, where the two of them disappeared down a steep ladder to the quarters below.

What had the mate been about to say? Rollo wondered. He had an unpleasant suspicion that he knew. If so, it would mean that he had come to the right place. .

He thought back to what the king had said. It had been sufficiently alarming back then, miles and miles away from the place where the terrible events were rumoured to have happened. Now, when Rollo was in the very vicinity, what the king’s words suggested was utterly terrifying. If, that was, the rumours were true.

As he gazed out across the deceptively calm waters that he had just been told could so quickly and so devastatingly change, Rollo was all but sure that they were.

The little ship sailed on through the night and all of the next day. They put in at Skirbeck that evening. The weather was fine, warm and sunny with only a very light breeze blowing, and Rollo wondered why the captain had not opted to sail on across the mouth of the Wash. He did not ask — he did not want to draw undue attention to himself — and, as was his wont, he sat back in the shadows, made himself as unobtrusive as he could and listened to the sailors’ talk. They were uneasy, that became immediately apparent; to a man, they seemed to fear the next day’s voyage. They were muttering in low voices, as if they did not want to be overheard, and after a while one of them happened to glance up and notice Rollo, wrapped in his cloak and hunched up in the bows.

‘Course, this time tomorrow we’ll be well past the headland and safely on our way,’ the sailor said loudly, the forced cheerfulness evident in his tone. ‘Where d’you reckon we’ll be, master mate? Round the bump of Norfolk and heading south, do you think?’

The mate mumbled something in reply, and Rollo thought he was trying to hush the first speaker.

‘Well, it’s all the same to me,’ the man said. ‘Still, reckon we’ll all be saying our prayers when we pass by, eh?’

Now several voices joined in to stop him saying any more. There was a brief scuffle and a sudden shout of pain, quickly suppressed. The mate turned to Rollo, and just for a moment, before he managed to control himself, Rollo saw stark fear in his face.

‘Don’t you worry,’ the mate said. ‘We’ll see you right. Dropping you at Hunstanton, aren’t we? Well, if we make a good, early start in the morning, you’ll have your feet on dry land in good time for the midday meal.’

Rollo hoped that it was only in his imagination that the mate added under his breath, ‘God willing.’

The next day, they set sail soon after dawn on a bright morning with clear skies and a warm breeze off the land which helped their speed as they crossed the mouth of the Wash.

By Rollo’s guess, they were somewhere around halfway between the land behind them and the land ahead when the weather broke. He was in the boat’s stern, looking out at the coastline far behind, when, with shocking suddenness, he couldn’t see it any more. In only a few heartbeats he could make out nothing at all: they had sailed into a bank of fog so dense that it was like being inside a cloud. He heard the captain yelling commands and, unfamiliar with the nautical terms, Rollo watched anxiously to see what the crew would do. As far as he could tell, they did nothing except take in some sail to slow their speed, although in truth the little vessel had not been travelling all that fast. It made sense, he realized. If you couldn’t see anything, the safest bet was to maintain exactly the same course and pray that any other vessels in the vicinity did the same. That way, if you hadn’t been on a collision course before the fog, you would not have inadvertently moved on to one.

The little boat drifted on. The breeze had all but died, and above his head Rollo could hear the slap of slack canvas as the sails hung useless. Then suddenly he heard a horrible cacophony of noises: a crash, as if two immense sections of timber were forced together; the terrified whinnying of horses; an unearthly sound of vast, racing waters, as if all the seas of the world had gathered together and were sluicing down on them; the howl of a wind so fierce that he ought to have been blown off his feet and into the broiling sea; the screams of men about to die.

He shot out his hands to grasp the rail, desperate to steady himself, to cling on to something. Then he realized — and this was the greatest shock of all — that there was no wind blowing. No huge mass of water gathering up to fall on him. No screaming men and horses, no colliding ships.

He crouched there trembling with fear.

Around him the sailors also stood as still as if they had all been petrified. Then the captain called out, ‘Clear air ahead!’, the boat moved silently back out into the sunshine and the enchantment went away.

Rollo watched closely and saw several of the crew exchange nervous glances. Almost all of them held their right hands in the gesture against evil, and many fingered the crosses and other symbols they wore around their necks.

Nobody, however, said a word. Whatever it was out there that they all feared so much, they were not prepared to talk about it.

As the mate had predicted, Rollo was dropped off in Hunstanton around midday. He led Strega down the gangplank — mercifully short — and stood, far more relieved than he was prepared to admit, even to himself, on the firm stones of the little quay. He watched as the little boat set sail again, silently bidding her crew farewell and wishing them safe landfall. When the vessel was out of sight, he mounted and rode away.