Madoc

by Bernard Knight

  ‘Why did you give Llywarch the slip like that?’ asked Svein, compassion and rage vying with each other in his concern for his friend.

  ‘I was ordered to Ireland by the quickest route … as a passenger on some worm-ridden ship from Aberseiont. That was not for me –I wanted the company of my men and the feel of the Gwennan Gorn beneath my feet. Having you, as well, is a welcome bonus, Svein. How did you come to be here?’

  ‘I was on my way to Abergele to select new spars for the Liffey yards – there are none better. As I passed this creek of Afon Ganol, I spied the unmistakable shape of the GwennanGorn, so I came ashore here yesterday. I was going on to the Gele tomorrow, but if you are journeying to Ireland, I will sail back with you for company.’

  Madoc stood up and looked out at the sea.

  ‘I have a fancy not to go to Ireland, Svein. I have a yearning to go much farther.’ He looked at his friend and brother, then at his men. ‘Will you come with me again?’

  All had been with him on the Long Voyage and, except for Svein, through the maelstrom of Bardsey Sound.

  ‘Aye, we’ll come,’ came a chorus, unhesitatingly.

  ‘Where?’ asked Einion, after a short pause.

  ‘To the Isles of the Blessed – to look for the Fountain of Eternal Youth!’

  There was a silence and each man looked at his neighbour.

  ‘We’ll come with you, Madoc,’ grunted Svein.

  ‘This land is not fit for decent men at the moment,’ agreed Einion, ‘I’d as soon be at the bottom of a clean ocean as live in company with those who would murder women and children.’

  There was a ripple of assent around the circle of crewmen.

  Einion stood up. ‘Go to the tavern, Gwilym, fetch the rest of the men.’

  Within a few hours, the crew were ready to sail with the high tide. Not a man had objected to the sudden crazy plan to sail out of the known world. Those who had families nearby had taken a hasty farewell. Their wives were quite used to months of separation at short notice.

  Towards evening, the Gwennan Gorn was a dot on the horizon, sailing well out to sea to avoid the coastal lookouts on Anglesey. They put in to a small port on the coast of Cornwall, to take on enough provisions to last them across the short seas to Brittany. Madoc had all his personal fortune of a number of gold and silver coins, which was more than enough to purchase their simple needs.

  As Madoc had done several times before, they went in a few land-hugging hops down to the coast of Spain, where they revictualled again and then set out on the next leg of their journey, this time repeating the voyage of the previous year into the warmer waters that led to the Fortunate Isles.

  Now these in turn were behind them and they set their faces towards the Unknown.

  There were thirty-four souls aboard the Gwennan Gorn, as she glided before her fair wind across the Western Ocean. In a boat only forty-five feet long, this allowed little space, but the vessel could have carried another dozen if necessary. Before a good wind, half a dozen men were enough to manage the vessel, so the remainder had to find a place to put themselves and find things to occupy them. A great sheet of sewn ox-hides was stretched across the well of the hold, which took up a third of the ship. This had the double purpose of collecting any rain that might fall, to add to the drinking water and also to protect the stores, animals and crew. Lashed on top of the hold were six flimsy coracles, little boats made of leather-covered wickerwork.

  Svein and Madoc were standing together on the stern deck, on the afternoon of the tenth day out from the Fortunate Isles. The weather was perfect, with high white clouds scudding south-westerly across a blue sky.

  ‘How long will we sail for, Madoc?’ asked Svein contemplatively.

  Madoc shook his head slowly. ‘Neither I nor any mortal knows that, good friend, as no one has ever been here before.’

  ‘Unless it was this good Saint Brandon you often speak of,’ retorted the Viking, with a grin splitting his fair beard.

  ‘Not even he, I think. The stories tell how he left the coast of Ireland and sailed west. We are many a hundred leagues from there, though maybe … and God trust … our paths will come together eventually.’

  Svein grinned again. ‘It is a pointless question, asking for how long we will sail this way.’

  Madoc stared at him. ‘Why so?’

  ‘We have no choice, that’s why!’ cackled the big Norseman. ‘Look over the side, look into the sky … both wind and current are whisking us along at the pace of a horse’s canter. If we turned around, we would merely carry on in the same direction, at the same speed, only sternwards!’

  Madoc nodded, unperturbed. ‘We all know that, Svein. We have been at the mercy of these elements since we left the coast of Spain. But if the need arose, we can force ourselves across the wind and ocean stream to a small degree. That may eventually bring us to a part of the sea where different elements prevail.’

  Svein poked him in the shoulder with a hand like a ham.

  ‘But as we do not know where we are going, why should we want to change direction?’

  Madoc had no answer to this, but it was a question that was to come up more than once in the future.

  After more than another week, the whole crew, except a couple at the ropes and the steersman, were assembled on the deck for a holy service to celebrate White Sunday, six weeks after the Easter of the year of Christ eleven hundred and seventy.

  The priest Padraig, who had developed into a keen and able seaman, gave the sacrament, the making of which came from a large cloth bag which constituted the whole of his luggage.

  After the service, Madoc stood right at the after end, against the stern post and made something of a speech. On such a tiny vessel, with the men cheek by jowl with each other, every day and every night, there was never any lack of communication, but this was a formal occasion and the crew seemed to desire their leader to speak to them.

  The pure tones of the Welsh language rang out across the empty sea, accompanied by the splash of water under the hull, the creak of the timbers and the plaited leather of the rigging.

  ‘Friends, we are from the land called Cymru, so we are the Cymry, an ancient word meaning “comrades”. And comrades is our relationship. Not lord and servant, master and slave. We do what we do, because we have agreed on this thing. Not one of you need have left that quay at Aber Cerrig Gwynion, unless he had wished it – and I would not have thought a whit less of any man who had decided that exploring the Great Ocean was not an occupation for him. But every one of you did me the loyalty and honour of accepting.’

  There was a growl of assent around the ship. Every Welshman loved oratory almost as much as verse and song.

  ‘You accepted freely and now we are sitting in the middle of God-knows-where, for I do not know. Nor does our tame giant from Ireland, Svein Olafsen, know where we are! It is now eight weeks since we left Gwynedd and over three since the Fortunate Isles vanished from view, the last land we have seen. The weather has been good to us and we must be many hundreds of miles from the coasts of the known world. With the rain showers last week we have as much water now as when we left land and with the fish we catch daily, our food is holding well. So far, God has given us his blessing. There is little we can do to alter our course and until some sign of land appears, we may as well take the fastest route, as any other.’

  He stopped and looked expectantly around the other twenty-five faces, waiting for comments. He was not disappointed.

  ‘Madoc of the Ships, if anyone can lead us to new lands, it is you,’ said Alun, a wiry man with a bad turn in his eye. ‘But how do we know there is a new land? How can we tell that we are not sailing into eternity, ever onward until we die of hunger and thirst?’

  There were a couple of grunts of assent to this, which enabled Madoc to identify the men who might be the first to becometroublesome if things became difficult.

  ‘I cannot answer you from my own knowledge, Alun. But I can tell you that other men have found l
and across this ocean. I have heard as much from scholars in France and here on this very ship, we have men who have better stories than that, both from Ireland and from the North.’ He jerked his head at the big figure of Svein, and at Padraig, who had abandoned his monk’s habit for this voyage.

  Padraig raised his hands as if in benediction. ‘I have bored you all too much in the past with stories of the Blessed Brandon. He spent seven years on these seas. He sailed from western Ireland and must have journeyed further to the north, where the sun stands lower at noon.’

  Madoc looked at Svein. ‘What about your Norse tales, friend? We have not heard so much of them as from our Irish patriot here.’

  Svein ran a hand over his moustache and beard thoughtfully.

  ‘Land there is in the west, without a doubt, for the Northmen have had settlements there for more than a century. Iceland is now an ancient kingdom of ours and just before the thousandth year after Christ, Eirik the Red, from Jaeder, discovered and settled in the land he called Gronland, which was many days sailing west of Norway.’

  He stopped, but Madoc spurred him on. ‘There were even more discoveries after that, so I heard.’

  Svein nodded.

  ‘The son of this same Eirik, called Leif, sighted other lands far to the west and south of Gronland. Other adventurers took his sailing directions and for some years there were settlements in fair countries where even vines and corn grew. These facts are all recorded in the sagas of Iceland, but I know nothing of what befell them. There is now no talk of these places amongst the shipmasters that call in the Liffey, but it is an undoubted fact that there are great lands far to the west.’

  Madoc looked round the faces before him and saw interest and reassurance in most of them. But again, it was Alun of the crooked eye that spoke up.

  ‘These things may well be true, but you say yourself that all these voyages were far to the north of us. Why then did we come to these southerly levels, where the sun stands almost overhead at midday? Why should there be lands in front of us here?’

  Again there were one or two rumbles of agreement.

  ‘I came down to these warmer places to find better weather, Alun,’ replied Madoc. ‘Svein has told me that his fellow Vikings have had terrible passages when they try to reach their northern settlements. Some years, indeed, they are unable to reach them, other times they get blown God knows where and spend months limping home. Many other knarrs were never heard of again, being sunk by the hellish northern waters. So by coming down here, off the coast of Africa, we have the Fortunate Isles as a jumping-off place, better weather, a longer season for safety and the benefit of these fair winds and ocean river to waft us across to the west.’

  The meeting dispersed, giving the men much to talk about as they lay on their blankets that evening.

  Madoc, Einion and Svein sat that night on the after-deck, on the opposite side to the steersman, looking up at the incredibly bright stars.

  ‘We are not going in exactly the same direction as we were a few days ago,’ observed Svein critically, staring up at a group of bright stars shaped like a cooking pan with a long handle. Einion, who was not so expert yet in reading the sky, followed his gaze, then scratched his head. ‘They look the same to me.’

  ‘No, there is a change. We are pointing slightly more to the west and not so much to the south. Don’t you agree, Madoc?’ Madoc studied the sky intently for a few moments.

  ‘I thought that last night, but felt it might be imagination. But tonight, I agree, there is no doubt, Svein. Yet the wind and the current are exactly upon our stern, just as before.’

  The Viking slapped the deck planks. ‘Then they too have changed direction and are bearing us with them.’

  Einion looked ahead to where the phosphorescent sea was dipping and rising with the ship’s motion. ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘It means that we have changed direction,’said the ever-practical Svein. ‘No more, no less. I think the change is like a great circle, swinging around in the ocean.’

  ‘Maybe we will wake up one morning and find we have travelled the full circle and Aberffraw will be under our bows!’ jested Einion.

  In a way, he was not all that far from the truth.

  Five days later it was obvious to every seaman on the Gwennan Gorn that they were indeed in the grip of different currents and winds. The sun, which had been climbing higher in the sky at every noon, slowed its progress, though some slight change was still to be expected, as it was the last day of May and the summer solstice had not yet arrived. The breeze began to freshen, the sea became friskier and the vessel made even faster progress. The timbers creaked more and the leather-bound sail cracked and flapped with more energy.

  The hull was still as sound as a bell and needed only one man baling with his leathern bucket, to keep it dry below the bilge planks.

  Eight weeks away from Wales, the three leaders again held a navigation conference on the stern deck, this time with all their available apparatus. A circle of curious crewmen stood around them as they fiddled with the strange instruments.

  ‘It becomes hard to correct the peg of the skuggafjol for the season,’ grumbled Svein, as he tugged at the gnomon of his sun-board. When he had adjusted it as well he could, he floated the wooden contrivance in a large earthenware dish of water, which slopped wildly onto the decking as the Gwennan Gorn rolled and pitched.

  One of the younger seamen came nearer, obviously fascinated by the instrument. ‘I have seen you do this before, yellow beard,’ he said, ‘but I still fail to understand its mysteries.’

  Ever ready to teach the ways of the sea, Svein demonstrated.

  ‘All it is, is a square board with a small hole in the middle, lad. In the hole is the peg, called the gnomon, which can be slid up or down. Around the peg are circles carved in the wood, like an archer’s target. We float it in water, so that it stays nearly level, whatever the motion of the ship.’

  ‘But how does it tell you where we are?’

  ‘At midday, the shadow of the peg will reach out and its length can be measured by counting the circles. If we go south, the shadow moves in. If we go north, it reaches out further. So to carry on a steady course, say from Bergen to Iceland, we steer so that the shadow stays on the same circle each noon.’

  The young man nodded. ‘But why move the pin?’

  Svein snorted, ‘Come on, any shepherd can tell you that! The shadow will move back and forth according to the seasons,without ever shifting the ship from its moorings. The peg must be lengthened every few days up to mid-summer, then pulled down again as the autumn approaches. Einion here keeps a record of each day on his notched stick.’

  Madoc produced a sheet of parchment, which he carefully guarded from spray in a sheepskin wallet. ‘This is better than a notched stick, though not so robust,’ he said. ‘Ever since leaving Gwynedd, I have marked our progress here as well as I am able.’

  He spread out the sheet on the deck and the men craned their necks to see the spidery charcoal lines that represented their voyage into the unknown.

  ‘Every day is written as a small cross,’ explained Madoc. ‘With such a constantly fair wind, I have made the distance between each cross the same. We have the direction of each day’s sailing from the sun and the stars.’ He pointed with his finger at the parchment. ‘Until a few days ago we were sailing south and west, but from now on I will have to bring the line upward, almost straight across to the west.’

  Svein stared critically at the map. He could not read the notes that Madoc had written in Welsh and Latin alongside some of the marks, but other things were obvious. ‘That marking you have on the right side of your map … that is the known land?’

  Madoc nodded as he pointed with a finger.

  ‘Here are the promontories of Llyn, of Menevia,of Cornwall, of Brittany, of Spain, and here is the entrance to the Pillars of Hercules. The Fortunate Isles were as far south of the harbour called Lisbon, as Lisbon is south of Cornwall.’

  �
�And we are now twice that distance further south,’ commented Alun, peering over Einion’s shoulder.

  ‘But also twice that distance out into the Great Ocean, if your reckoning is right,’ grunted Svein.

  Madoc folded up the parchment and put it carefully into the wallet. ‘Yes, but I make no claim to much accuracy. All we can use as a measure of westering is an average day’s sailing. We have had such fair winds these past weeks that perhaps we have travelled further than this course suggests.’

  Gwilym, for once off steering duty, had a question.

  ‘Why is it that the nights are closing in both earlier and more abruptly? By the sand-glass, yesterday had a good five hours less daylight than we should get at home on this date of the year.’

  No one had any convincing explanation, though all had noticed the peculiar behaviour of the sun, as it raced faster across the sky.

  ‘We are getting into strange waters, where the very sun itself no longer acts as it does in Christian countries,’ growled Alun, who was becoming the spokesman of the discontents aboard the Gwennan Gorn.

  In a few days, at long last, the fine weather began to break up. Great masses of cloud chased the vessel, at first white, then grey. The wind, swinging round even more until it came almost directly from the east, strengthened so much that the Gwennan Gorn began racing through the sea, her timbers groaning and creaking with the strain. On the third day, the sea became so restless that every wave sprayed over her stern, making the life of the steersman and those on the stern-deck, wet and miserable.

  The sun disappeared altogether.

  Madoc was glad of the idea that Svein had suggested when the vessel was being built – that of copying the Norse trick of rolling up part of the sail and tying it with thongs to decrease the effect of the wind upon it. Without this, he would have feared for the safety of his sail. He had one spare tucked away under the deck, but they were too precious to be allowed to blow to ribbons.

  As well as becoming wild, the wind began to act capriciously as to direction, changing within the hour almost a quarter of a circle, then back again.