While it was whirring in they hoisted the jigger. It was the first time Rate had ever set sail without using the engine to keep a heading into the wind. He hoped the flat sheeted jigger would be enough to weathercock the yawl while the mains’l was being winched up. It was, and by the time the last fathom of chain rattled through the winch the Alice was under all plain sail and chasing the stranger.
After a moment’s internal-debate Joe decided against setting the spinnaker. They could probably catch the stubby little merchantman without it and he didn’t want to worry about hundreds of yards of flapping canvas, should they have to come about suddenly.
Visibility was still less than two miles and the ship had disappeared several minutes ago. Joe thought about firing up the radar but he didn’t want to waste power. He’d sail an hour toward where they had disappeared first. He took the helm himself and tried to piece together what he knew about the other ship and the men who sailed her.
Dr. Krom lit his pipe. “Looked like something out of the Hanseatic League,” he guessed. All hands crowded aft into the cockpit, eager for any scrap of information.
“It’s not a Hanse ship,” Joe said.
Dr. Krom raised his eyebrows. He hadn’t really expected this navy-minded oaf to know what he was talking about.
Joe took a deep breath. “The ship we’re following,” he began, “is a knarr. They averaged eighty to ninety feet, carried a single square sail on a short, heavily shrouded mast. Bow and stern are pierced for eight oars which are used only when docking. The decking amidships is removable to load cargo.”
Every time Joe made one of these impromptu lectures he was dogged by the suspicion that he was a showoff—the kind of pompous fraud who’d shill for a rigged quiz show. He knew perfectly well he wasn’t a genius; he was merely cursed with a good memory. But even Dr. Krom was impressed so he continued. “My noon shot placed us on a latitude corresponding to the Gulf of Finland, Davis Straits, Hudson Bar, the Bering Sea, or the North Atlantic. The knarr was used to transport merchandise from and to Iceland and the longship, according to all the books, was used only on raids between the Scandinavian peninsula and the British Isles. Since knarrs bound for Iceland commonly took their departure from the Shetlands or the Orkneys, I’d guess we’re somewhere north of Scotland. And in time, we must be somewhere between nine and twelve hundred A. D.”
“Whooee, Mr. Rate, what’s a smaht man like you doin’ in the navy?”
Joe eyed the little Cajun sadly. What indeed? As a boy he had patiently cluttered his mind with useless facts for it was axiomatic that education brought wealth and position. Once in a while he’d wondered a trifle worriedly how all this was to come about. Meanwhile, he’d read more history than was required. It was the only reading he did strictly for kicks. He’d felt guilty about this for his father had often told Joe that one never acquired wealth and position by having fun.
And then Dr. Battlement had channeled the young man’s aimless reading by painting glowing pictures of the academic life. Joe decided to become a professor.
Various factors entered into this watering down of the young man’s dream. There was his aptitude for languages, his love of history, and his absolute incapacity to find any joy in transferring dollars from one ledger to another via the legal loopholery of modem business.
The decision was not, of course, arrived at overnight. There were mornings of chill self analysis while shivering through Naval ROTC drill. It was an inch by inch retreat from cherished, if undefined, dreams—a battle which ended in capitulation when increasingly frantic study of want ads during his final semester showed no openings for historians or specialists in dead languages.
Joe became an assistant. His future was assured. In ten years his salary would climb nearly to that of a union plumber. But there were other things entailed in being one of Dr. Battlement’s Bright Young Men. Even professors cast desirous looks on the opposing sex. Worse still, they have been known to marry and procreate their kind. Dr. Battlement had a daughter.
Ariadne Battlement was small, dark, and protective. Her capable hands were forever refolding the handkerchief in a father’s pocket or straightening the tie of a Bright Young Man. Joe rather liked her.
But when invitations to dine with the Battlements became frequent he turned restive. When Ariadne started sewing his buttons and turning his collars the young man panicked. After a night of floor pacing and soul searching he controlled his first blind impulse to hop a freight. When the office opened at 8 o’clock Joe was there.
“I want to join the navy,” he had said.
The Alice was making eight and a half knots under all plain sail. Her crew was making countless decibels, playing endless variations on “impossible; couldn’t happen to us!”
“What more proof do you need?” Joe asked. “Those lads we rammed were playing for keeps. And Freedy can’t fix the radio. Can you?”
Freedy shook his head.
“There’s nothing wrong with it; just no station to hear or answer us.” Joe sighed. They were shocked but he still couldn’t make them believe it. Dr. Krom mumbled something.
“We’ll have our final proof soon.” Joe studied his watch. They had been sailing across the wind for fifty minutes. “Was the yard squared when they first saw us?” he asked. Schwartz nodded. “They were running straight before the wind.”
Joe knew he was building a case on very little evidence but the knarr was probably bound for Iceland. The Norse had only seen the Alice with sails furled and could have no idea of her true speed. They had merely operated on the fine old premise that a stranger was an enemy and taken evasive tactics. Once out of sight they would probably revert to their original course. He wondered if the Norse sailors had an hourglass aboard.
Fifty eight minutes ticked up on his watch. “Slack sheets,” Joe yelled. With the main boom straight out the blanketed jib hung limp and the yawl tended to yaw like a drunken skater from the unbalanced push of main and jigger.
“There they are!” Villegas yelled. “Dead ahead.”
Joe felt the wave of admiration which passed through his crew. He was acutely aware of his status as a boot ensign and tried to show no emotion. “All hands lay aft,” he called.
“Something tells me,” he began, “that we’re going to need an interpreter. How many languages have we among us?”
There was silence.
“Gorson?”’
“Sir?” It was the first “sir” Ensign Rate had ever extracted from the bos’n.
“How about you? Norwegian or Swede?”
The bos’n spread his hands. “Used to understand it. I dunno any more.”
“Guilbeau, you speak something that might pass for French.” The Cajun nodded. “Cook?”
“Cain’t even talk English good,” the cook shrugged.
“Rose?”
“If they’re Hebrews I’m your man,” the engineman offered.
“Schwartz?”
“Don’t look at me,” Seaman Schwartz said.
“McGrath?” McGrath shook his head.
“Freedy?”
“No, sir,” the radioman said.
Joe sighed. More and more it seemed he was going to have to carry the ball. He turned to the civilians. “How about you. Dr. Krom?”
“Russian, French, German and Hungarian,” the oceanographer said.
“No Latin or Greek?”
“They were not required for my specialty.”
“Lapham?”
Dr. Krom’s assistant was a hornrimmed type straight from college who had infiltrated the lab’s personnel via its summer employment program. Twenty five percent of his time aboard the Alice was spent struggling with his queasy stomach. The other seventy five percent, he was actively seasick. “Pig Latin?” the unhappy young man offered.
A stern chase is always a long chase but to Joe it was not long enough. An hour halved the distance between them and the knarr and he still had not the slightest idea what he would do when the eventual meeting too
k place.
Mixed in with much other reading of ancient source materials, Joe had once struggled through the old Icelandic cycle and the Jomsviking Saga in parallel columns of Old Norse and Modern English. Though admirable for literary and teaching purposes, Joe suspected that his Old Norse would prove sadly lacking when it came to more mundane matters. He tried desperately to recall a few words. Would the men aboard the knarr parley or would they come out swinging like the longship Vikings? He hoped not. The bad actors must have been raiding England or Ireland and spoiling for a fight anyway.
He caught Gorson’s eye and they went below together. “Aside from the rifle and my pistol, what’ve we got in the way of weapons?”
The bos’n thought a moment. “You mean like spears? Say, if we’re really back a thousand years they won’t have guns, will they?”
Joe shook his head. “No gunpowder. There was Greek fire but I doubt if these people will have it. We’ll face axes, swords, spears, maybe bows and arrows.”
“What’re we going to do when we catch them?”
Joe experimented with an omniscient smile; then he collapsed. “Nothing in the book covers this situation,” he said flatly, “But I’d like to know for sure where we are. Say, are there any charts for the North Atlantic?”
“Pilot charts for all five oceans,” Gorson said, “But nothing that’d be any help getting in and out of a harbor.”
“Oh great!” Joe moaned.
“We’re getting close, sir,” Villegas called down the scuttle. It was late afternoon by now and from the way the low wheeling sun swung north Joe guessed they must be near midsummer. “Bring the flare pistol,” he told Gorson. The stubby knarr was shorter than the Alice but her broad beam and blunt fore and aft sections gave her a much greater carrying capacity. “We’ll come up on her starboard side,” Joe said. “Better hang out some fenders.”
They came within a hundred years of the knarr and Joe faced a new problem: the Alice was moving twice as fast. If they grappled something would be torn out by the roots. The Alice ripped along, passing within twenty feet of the other ship. They caught rapid glimpses of a balding, redfaced man at the helm. Bright bearded men and a pair of boys stared at them. Joe was surprised to see several women aboard. A dark haired girl knelt before the fire which blazed in a sandbox amidships.
Seaman Villegas gaye a wolf howl. “Ay mamacita, que linda eres!” he panted. The girl looked up sharply. She was still looking when they passed hailing distance.
A mile ahead the Alice turned into the wind and dropped her mains’l. Hove to under jib and jigger they waited for the knarr to catch up. Rate half expected the vessel to sheer off and try to lose them again but the dumpy merchantman wallowed steadily forward. Then he understood why: there were at least thirty men aboard the knarr and its master had seen only eleven aboard the Alice. He was ready to trade or fight. Joe wished he knew which.
He gave the rifle to Cook. The gaunt Tennessean was the only crew member who had ever been known to hit anything with it. Irrelevantly, Joe wondered if his cook had ever target practiced on revenooers. He kept the pistol for himself.
The summer sun was still high but clouds were obscuring it again. The Alice carried a floodlight in her shrouds for handling the winch after dark. Joe thought of turning it on for whatever “magical” effect it might have on medieval minds. He decided not to—it might scare them away. Worse, under its glare they would be perfect targets if the Northmen did not scare.
The knarr brailed up its sail and drifted gently toward them. It bumped and ground for a moment at the fenders suspended over the Alice’s side. Sailors on both ships tossed lines and fended off with oars and boat hooks. Joe took a deep breath. “Here goes,” he said, and jumped aboard.
The skipper of the knarr stood stiffly at the steering oar. He showed no signs of moving, so Joe walked aft. He wondered about the protocol of the situation. It might have been better to stand on his dignity and make the other man board the Alice. The red-bearded man wore skintight leistrabraekr which exaggerated his incipient pot. The loose, ill-fitting blouse gave him a topheavy look.
He scowled ferociously over flowing mustaches whose tips were several shades whiter from lime bleaching. As Joe approached he held his awkward leaning posture on the steering oar. “Hvar ar vi?” Joe asked, hoping he was pronouncing the words right. Whiskers stared at him. He tried another tack. “Danamark?“ Another stare.
“Erin?”
“Angleland?”
“Scotland?”
Silence.
“Shetland? Orkney? Iceland?” Joe asked desperately.
Whiskers was losing patience. He roared something and as the sword flashed Joe suddenly understood why the man had leaned and kept his hand behind him on the steering oar. Though he had half expected some such thing, the swiftness of Whiskers’ assault surprised Joe. He saw with instant clarity that the Northman would bisect him before he could begin to draw the pistol.
Then a look of blank surprise filled the skipper’s broad face. He slumped back over the oar. The sword slipped from his hand and clattered to the deck. Good old Cookie, Joe thought. But he hadn’t heard the rifle go off. He glanced back at the Alice and felt sudden shame at his inbecility. No wonder Cook hadn’t fired. He was standing directly in front of the Northman.
The red-bearded man arched backward over the oar and made distressing noises. As the sloppy blouse pulled tight Joe saw the knife handle protruding from Whiskers’ solar plexus.
A girl burst through the crowd of starers amidships and lunged at Joe. He nearly beaned her with the revolver before he realized she was not attacking. “Amparo!” the girl screamed. “Rescue me from these pagans!”
Her language was archaic but time does little damage to Mediterranean tongues. The modem day Spaniard reads the exploits of El Cid without difficulty whereas 10th Century English sounds more like German.
“For two years I am slave to these pagans. When you hailed in my language I knew the time for vengeance had come. I made ready the knife.”
People amidships were beginning to recover. Joe saw the weapons they had been hiding. In a moment they would rush him. The girl still lay at his feet, her arms around his knees. Joe guessed he was already half a god. He raised his arms like an Old Testament prophet and began a sonorous chant:
“Gorson, thou whoreson,
Get the flare gun ready.
At the count of five,
Fire it straight up.
One.”
He bowed deeply and straightened, thrusting his arms heavenward again. “Two.” He bowed again. “Three, four,” From the comer of his eye he saw frantic activity on the deck of the Alice. Neptune help us if he cant find it, Joe thought—and said, “Five!”
There was a pop and hissing roar. Under the dazzle of a parachute flare Joe saw the last of the fight go out of the Northmen.
“What cargo?” he asked the girl,
“In truth, my lord, I do not know,” he said. “It was loaded before my mistress took me aboard.”
“Do you speak their language? Oh for heaven’s sake, stand up!” He undid her clutch from his knees and pulled the girl upright. She was small and dark but there her resemblance to the capable Ariadne Battlement ended. The shapeless gray woolen dress would have been prim and decorous on a girl several years younger and smaller but now it bulged in all the proper places. In fact, it threatened to burst in a couple of them. Her long loose hair was of the blackest black but her face was not spoiled with that coarseness so often found among Spanish Gypsy women. It was a demure little face with surprisingly large eyes which gazed up at Joe with the humble adoration of a cocker spaniel. Joe felt protective instincts starting to tingle all through him.
He remembered with something of a shock that this fragile creature had just skewered the steersman and only incidentally saved his life. “I understand something of the pagan tongue,” she said.
“Who’s the—” He couldn’t think of the word for first mate. “El numero dos,
” he finished lamely.
She pointed at a sandy-haired giant with a beard and mustache nearly as ferocious as the dead captain’s. Joe beckoned with a peremptory thumb. The giant stared at him. “Tell him,” Joe instructed, “to come here or I’ll call down lightning.”
She spoke in fluting gurgles until the giant came running. “Where to, where from, and what cargo?” Joe asked. She interpreted again and the giant mumbled an answer. They were out of Orkney, bound for Iceland, and with a mixed cargo.
“How far out?”
“Two days.”
“What’re the women and children doing aboard?”
The girl spat. “They couldn’t stick Olafs new law.”
Joe’s ears pricked up. “Olaf Tryggvasson?”
The girl nodded.
The Norwegian king had forced even the distant Icelanders to turn Christian in the year 1000. This must be 990 something or other. “You know the date?” he asked.
“I was taken in the 12th year of Almanzor.”
History was full of Arab kings named Mansour; Joe wondered which one she meant. “How many years since the birth of Christ?” he asked.
“How should I know?” the. girl shrugged.
The first mate still waited. “Tell him to start getting some provisions on deck.”
The Northman’s answer was brief.
“He says trading ships are immune to plunder by Viking law. Since you choose to disregard the rules of civilized warfare you can kill him now and load your own gurgle loot.”
Joe decided not to ask what the untranslated gurgle meant. “If he’d respected my life,” he said, “I would have respected his cargo. As it is, I’ll leave him provisions to reach port. If he holds his mouth right I may leave him enough teeth to eat them.”
A look of disappointment crossed the girl’s face.
“But,” Joe added hastily, “Any funny business and I’ll turn you and that knife loose.” He hoped the girl would interpret properly. Chances were she’d garble it just for the hell of it. But apparently she didn’t. The tall man turned and bellowed orders.
In a moment the midships planking was up and men passed coarse woolen sacks of rye over the Alice’s rail. Joe would, he imagined, soon be sick of rye bread but they could live a long time on it, providing he located fresh vegetables. “Do you bake aboard ship?” he asked the girl. She waggled her finger in a Latin “no” and Joe suddenly remembered how the Norse used to bake hardtack all winter—chewy as a phonograph record and just about as tasty.
The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream Page 2