Havelok The Dane - Charles Whistler (ereader for textbooks txt) 📗

to my father and asked him what he thought of the wind and the chance of its dropping. He had had the lead going for long now.

"We are right off the Humber mouth, to judge by the colour of the water," he told me, "or else off the Wash, which is more to the south. I cannot tell which rightly, for we have run far, and maybe faster than I know. If only one could see--"

There he stopped, and I knew enough to understand that we were in some peril unless a shift of wind came very soon, since the shore was under our lee now, if by good luck we were not carried straight into the great river itself. So for an hour or more I watched, and all the time it seemed that hope grew less, for the sea grew shorter, as if against tide, and ever its colour was browner with the mud of the Trent and her sisters.

Presently, as I clung to the rail, there seemed to grow a new sound over and amid all those to which I had become used--as it were a low roaring that swelled up in the lulls, and sank and rose again. And I knew what it was, and held up my hand to my father, listening, and he heard also. It was the thunder of breakers on a sandy coast to leeward.

He put his whistle to his lips and called shrilly, and the men saw him if they could not hear, and sprang up, clawing aft through the water that flooded the waist along the rail.

"Breakers to leeward, men," he cried "we must wear ship, and then shall clear them. We shall be standing right into Humber after that, as I think."

Arngeir heard the men trampling, if not the whistle, and he was with us directly, and heard what was to be done.

"It is a chance if the yard stands it," he said, looking aloft.

"Ay, but we cannot chance going about in this sea, and we are too short of men to lower and hoist again. Listen!"

Arngeir did so, and heard for the first time the growing anger of the surf on the shore, and had no more doubt. We were then running with the wind on the port quarter, and it was useless to haul closer to the wind on that tack, whereas if we could wear safely we should be leaving the shore at once by a little closer sailing.

"Ran is spreading her nets," said Arngeir, "but if all holds, she will have no luck with her fishing." [6]

Then we manned the main sheet and the guys from the great yards, but we were all too few for the task, which needed every man of the fifteen that we had sailed with. There was the back stay to be set up afresh on the weather quarter for the new tack also, and three men must see to that.

We watched my father's hand for the word, and steadily sheeted home until all seemed to be going well. But the next moment there was a crash and a cry, and we were a mastless wreck, drifting helplessly. Maybe some flaw of wind took us as the head of the great sail went over, but its power was too much for the men at guys and back stay, and they had the tackle torn through their hands. The mast snapped six feet above the deck, smashing the gunwales as it fell forward and overboard, but hurting none of us.

Then a following sea or two broke over the stern, and I was washed from the poop, for I had been at the sheet, down to the deck, and there saved myself among the fallen rigging, half drowned. One of the men was washed overboard at the same time, but a bight of the rigging that was over the side caught him under the chin, and his mates hauled him on board again by the head, as it were. He was wont to make a jest of it afterward, saying that he was not likely to be hanged twice, but he had a wry neck from that day forward.

No more seas came over us, for the wreck over the bows brought us head to wind, though we shipped a lot of water across the decks as she rolled in the sea. Then we rode to the drag of the fallen sail for a time, and it seemed quiet now that there was no noise of wind screaming in rigging above us. But all the while the thunder of the breakers grew nearer and plainer.

I bided where I was, for the breath was knocked out of me for the moment. I saw my father lash the helm, and then he and the rest got the two axes that hung by the cabin door, and came forward with them. The mast was pounding our side in a way that would start the planking before long, and it must be cut adrift, and by that time I could join him.

When that was done, and it did not take long, we cleared the anchor and cable and let go, for it was time. The sound of the surf was drowning all else. But the anchor held, and the danger was over for the while, and as one might think altogether; but the tide was running against the gale, and what might happen when it turned was another matter.

Now we got the sail on deck again, and unlaced it from the yard, setting that in place with some sort of rigging, ready to be stepped as a mast if the wind shifted to any point that might help us off shore.

It may be thought how we watched that one cable that held us from the waves and the place where they broke, for therein lay our only chance, and we longed for the clear light that comes after rain, that we might see the worst, at least, if we were to feel it. But the anchor held, and presently we lost the feeling of a coming terror that had been over us, the utmost peril being past. My father went to the after cabin now, and though the poor children were bruised with the heavy rolling of the ship as she came into the wind, they were all well save Havelok, and he had fallen asleep in my mother's arms at last.

With the turn of the tide, which came about three hours after midday, the clouds broke, and slowly the land grew out of the mists until we could see it plainly, though it was hardly higher than the sea that broke over it in whirling masses of spindrift. By-and-by we could see far-off hills beyond wide-stretching marshlands that looked green and rich across yellow sandhills that fringed the shore. And from them we were not a mile, and at their feet were such breakers as no ship might win through, though, if we might wait until they were at rest, the level sand was good for beaching at the neap tides. For we were well into Humber mouth, and to the northward of us, across the yellow water, was the long point of Spurn, and the ancient port of Ravenspur, with its Roman jetties falling into decay under the careless hand of the Saxon, under its shelter. There was no port on this southern side of the Humber, though farther south was Tetney Haven and again Saltfleet, to which my father had been, but neither in nor out of them might a vessel get in a northeast gale.

I have said that this clearness came with the turn of the tide, and now that began to flow strongly, setting in with the wind with more than its wonted force, for the northwest shift of the gale had kept it from falling, as it always will on this coast. That, of course, I learned later, but it makes plain what happened next. Our anchor began to drag with the weight of both tide and wind, and that was the uttermost of our dread.

Slowly it tore through its holding, and as it were step by step at first, and once we thought it stopped when we had paid out all the cable. But wind and sea were too strong, and presently again we saw the shore marks shifting, and we knew that there was no hope. The ship must touch the ground sooner or later, and then the end would come with one last struggle in the surf, and on shore was no man whose hand might be stretched to drag a spent man to the land, if he won through. It would have seemed less lonely had one watched us, but I did not know then that no pity for the wrecked need be looked for from the marshmen of the Lindsey shore. There was not so much as a fisher's boat of wicker and skins in sight on the sandhills, where one might have looked to see some drawn up.

Now my father went to the cabin and told my mother that things were at their worst, and she was very brave.

"If you are to die at this time, husband," she said, "it is good that I shall die with you. Better it is, as I think, than a sickness that comes to one and leaves the other. But after that you will go to the place of Odin, to Valhalla; but I whither?"

Then spoke little Withelm, ever thoughtful, and now not at all afraid.

"If Freya wants not a sailor's wife who is willing to fight the waves with Grim, my father, it will be strange."

My mother was wont to say that this saying of the child's did much to cheer her at that time, but there is little place for a woman in the old faiths. So she smiled at him, and that made him bold to speak of what he had surely been thinking since the storm began.

"I suppose that Aegir is wroth because we made no sacrifice to him before we set sail. I think that I would cast the altar stones to him, that he may know that we meant to do so."

This sounds a child's thought only, and so it was; but it set my father thinking, and in the end helped us out of trouble.

"I have heard," my father said, "that men in our case have thrown overboard the high-seat pillars, and have followed them to shore safely. We have none, but the stones are more sacred yet. Overboard they shall go, and as the boat with them goes through the surf we may learn somewhat."

With that he hastened on deck, and told the men what he would do; and they thought it a good plan, as maybe they would have deemed anything that seemed to call for help from the strong ones of the sea. So they got the boat ready to launch over the quarter, and the four stones, being uncovered since the Vikings took our cargo, were easily got on deck, and they were placed in the bottom of the boat, and steadied there with coils of fallen rigging, so that they could not shift. They were just a fair load for the boat. Then my father cried for help to the Asir, bidding Aegir take the altar as full sacrifice; and when we had done so we waited for a chance as a long wave foamed past us, and launched the boat fairly on its back, so that she seemed to fly from our hands, and was far