Little Lost Lambs at the Post
Page 17
Arn glanced up at the tower. Their few horses had got off in the night. Their number would hardly man the tower. But it would be a last defense for them. So he gave his rede.
Du Brae closed his eyes in thought and moved his head from side to side. "Nay. By day, the field. . .. Jakekin.”
The thin archer stepped forward, taking the word. "Into the field by day, lads, and now it is day. Briskly, churls!”
He directed them into a loose square with their bows. All the spare bow cases were stacked in the cart; the cart stood in the center of the square. A half dozen badly wounded clambered into the cart with their bows. Before Arn realized what the archers were about, they moved off toward the gate, the wooden cart trundling gently down the slight slope.
Then John of Lincoln came up with a fine gold processional cross. This he stuck upright in the cart. When the ray of the rising sun struck it, it made a handsome appearance. So Arn thought, walking beside it. At the gate, the girl knelt and signed herself as if she had been in a church aisle.
"Fare thee well, Gretchen!” sang out the archer by Arn.
"Cheerily,” said Jakekin, limping. "Yew for the wood!” he sang.
"Wings for the feather!” sang out the archers. "Stand we all and drink together!"
The sound carried to the horsemen. All their heads turned to watch the small group emerging from the wall on the knoll that had been held with strange stubbornness during the night. For a moment, the restless riders were still in surprise.
Jakekin’s eye swept their line. For a few moments he was leader of the company. Squinting at the sun’s ray, he called out, "Flight arrows! Two yards for the wind! At the white horse, my hearts! Shoot all together!”
The flight of sixty shafts whirred for eight hundred feet. Only a few of the riders at the standard had thrown themselves bodily from their horses in time to escape it. The Tartar leader and many of his officers were killed in their saddles. At that distance, their deaths appeared incredible to the watchers. Then wild rage swept through the disciplined regiment that had been ordered up to clear some unknown enemies out of a tower. In a mass, the riders rushed toward the cluster of archers walking in step around a cart down the slope toward them. On the cart gleamed a talisman of the Christians.
Before the Tartars could use their short saddle bows, they heard the whir of wings of wild birds, and the long arrows cut down men and horses in the lead. They swerved by instinct and dashed in at the flank of the archers, and the arrows seethed among them as before. They whirled and charged back. The arrows tore through them, but they came on straight.
"Together, lads,” Jakekin’s thin voice pealed, "at the hairy standard!”
He was knocked to earth by a Tartar lance, as the horsetail standard of the Horde fell among the riders. They piled up before the cart and the standing men, as if an invisible wall had risen before the bows that snapped and the shafts that hissed.
The rush of riders parted, to pass on either side the cart with its golden staff. From the cart, the arrows followed them farther and farther. They carried off their standard; they picked up the body of their commander with their other dead, and they rode away.
When the last horsemen had disappeared beyond the groves, an archer stepped out and shaded his eyes. The land all around him was empty except for stray horses. He counted twenty-two of the company still on their feet.
"Lads,” he said, taking the word, "we must catch some of these nags to draw the cart back up the hill.” Then he ordered Jakekin’s body put beside that of Du Brae in the cart.
At high noon that day, the twenty and three stood beside the grave they had made for four times their number. Arn sat on the wall to listen.
John of Lincoln took the word then. His heavy, lacerated body sagged on his feet, but his voice went out, tuneful and clear: "Requiem aeternam dona——”
In a few days they were able to start off from the tower with their comrades who could not walk. They had a great property for so few men, so they asked Arn the Axman to guide them west toward the sea. They had no more thought of spoil or the abbey of Brünn, only of their island in the sea.
After Arn came the Moravian girl, pulling the cow by its rope. Looking back at the pair of them, Arn suddenly felt joyful that they were alive and coming along. In their way, they had been harder to move than the English.
In his own field, Arn said farewell to the remnant of the company going on along the highroad.
That summer he heard that the terror of the Tartars was lifted from Europe. In the churches Te Deums were sung in praise to the Lord God because the invaders had departed into Asia. In the courts it was said that the great Khan of the Tartars had died there in the east, and so they had gone away.
Working his own field. Arn did not hear or think overmuch of that. But sometimes, leaning on his spade, eying the new scars on his arms, he wondered if the Tartars had not gone away because of the archers who were in the grave by the tower. At least they had not shown themselves again, beyond there.
No one spoke of that. And Arn himself hardly thought about it. It was more important to him that the Moravian girl should be dwelling in his hut and the cow in his shed, to abide there.
"That, my lads,” said Mac at the end, "is the story of the man who saw it happen.”
Venarey shook his head thoughtfully. "I remember now. History tells us that the Tartar armies went away from Europe that summer because their great Khan, their supreme commander, died in the east.”
But Venarey was still puzzling over something. "This Saxon’s story does not prove that the English longbow could defeat the horsemen of the Golden Horde. You see,” he pointed out, "the Tartars had actually won the battle. No, they retreated from something they could not master. Those archers had an élan—a spirit ——”
"They were licked,” said Mac, "but they didn’t know it.”
Then the jet planes came over with a roar, faster than any wings of the wild birds.
Gallant Gesture
AS soon as I stopped to look at the map closely I saw what was wrong with it. The island. Other things, too, seemed odd. It had no maker’s name on it, and it seemed to be an old chart of the Atlantic Ocean, with the island smack in the middle. But the island itself stood boldly where no land could have been sighted, and it had a name, " Faer-land,” unknown to me.
The bookseller, Peter Duns, had no other maps in his shop. And he said this one was not for sale. He kept it for a purely personal reason. When I told him I’d never seen one like it, with a Faer-land unexpectedly between Connecticut and Spain, he was silent a while.
"Saint Brendan’s Island was thought to be about there,” he said gently. "For a long time.”
That was true enough. Whoever the original Brendan may have been, the legend of his voyage out from the Old World to a kind of promised land persisted long after Columbus made his real voyages. Mariners kept searching for it much as the first conquistadors sought for the fabulous Fountain of Youth ashore in the New World.
"But not,” I assured Peter, "as long as this. Your map is much later than Ortelius, or even the Mercator-Hondius atlas. At the date it was made, the fables had disappeared.”
How did I know the date? How does a musician know the difference between the scale of a Gregorian chant and the sweep of Tschaikovsky’s Fifth?
"Had they?”
In his absent-minded way Peter seemed to be troubled because the map in his window bewildered me. When he took it down, reluctantly, I showed him proof that I was right. The Bermuda Islands were clearly drawn in their right place. Which meant that the map itself had been drawn long after Juan Bermudez and two other navigators had been shipwrecked there. By then all cartographers had given up the missing Saint Brendan’s as a myth.
On closer inspection the strange Faer-land became more of a puzzle than ever. Some details showed clearly—a great bay and a river leading into it from a lake. Somebody must have landed on it, to know that much about it. But the island didn’t exist.
"I’m not superstitious, Doctor Marly”—very quickly he had managed to find out who I was—"but this has a—well, a meaning to me.”
Wiping the dust carefully from a worn copy of Marco Polo, he said, "You see, I dreamed about the island before I—I found the map.”
I must have stared at him, because he tried to explain awkwardly. Many people, he said, felt drawn to a place they had never actually seen. A sort of castle in Spain. From his childhood he’d fancied he had a connection with a mythical island in the Atlantic.
Probably, he thought, it was merely a persistent dream. It began always with drifting through mist out on the ocean, the Atlantic Ocean. "And then the gulls flying over the mast, crying out. They followed when we drifted past the headland with the birch trees. You see, Doctor, I found out later in the dream that they were silver birches.” His shyness left him as he explained. "I remember how the long oars thumped as we rowed the ship into the fiord, where the branches almost met overhead. I smelled the sweet ferns on the land. And the steersman called out that this was not the Green-land but the Fair-land ——"
He hesitated, smiling. The name was almost identical with the island on the printed map. I didn’t know what to make of that. More, Peter said he’d been dreaming, but he had used some odd words. He had said "fiord” instead of "inlet,” and "steersman” instead of "helmsman.” Words that were centuries old.
"The prow of your ship,” I ventured to ask, "what was it like.”
"A dragon’s head.”
Now, the only kind of vessel propelled by sail and oars that could ever have been far out in the Atlantic was a viking longship or dragon ship. And the longships had crossed from the Iceland—as vikings named it—to the Greenland and thereabouts more than nine hundred years ago. Certainly not later than that—when legends like Saint Brendan’s voyage were common enough.
A man’s dreams are his own property. Peter Duns was a Norwegian by descent, and I thought that he had been reading too many of his own books or perhaps had remembered some tale told him as a child. That his dream should be confirmed by a printed map was, of course, impossible. I thanked him for telling me what he could about the map. He had shed no light on the mysterious island.
"I’m sorry.” His curiously light eyes blinked up at me. "What a wealth of knowledge you have about maps, Doctor Marly!”
When I passed through Perry Street again, his specimen was missing from the window. He said it was being used by someone.
About then I realized that there was a definite complex in Peter. A craving to escape, I conjectured too carelessly, from his shop and Perry Street. He would listen intently to any description of a place far beyond tourist travel.
"If it wasn’t Saint Elmo’s fire on the wings,” I heard Stefan ask him once, "what was it? Like flame, and iridescent too. We were over sixteen thousand feet, passing Minya Konka. You see, we used the snow summit of Minya Konka to pick up the gorge of the Yangtze. Like a marker ——”
Peter was listening with his eyes half shut, as if visualizing a snow peak above the ordinary cloud level. Later he told me that Stefan Ordvik—Steve, they all called him—hadn’t been an Army flier, but an ATC navigator pilot who had flown the Hump for a time. Ordinarily Steve had nothing to say. His big hands turned the pages of books awkwardly; he moved slowly, as if he didn’t much care where he went. Beyond that, I only knew that he worked with the ground keepers at the stadium—one of the last of the war group—while he studied for his doctor’s degree in, of all things, philosophy. He looked to me more like football material, and Phil Kennedy, the university’s walking directory of sports, said he was that. Steve Ordvik, it seemed, had made a record as end on one of the wartime Pre-Flight teams, but he had refused to go out for football when he came to the university. He only said he wasn’t interested. There was some trouble about the football that I didn’t understand.
"He could not do it,” Peter Duns insisted.
Peter had a way of finding out the backgrounds of his young visitors. Only once did he tell me anything more about his imagined voyage, and that was by accident. When I stepped in to look for the rare Marco Polo edition he called me into the back room where he was eating lunch—a bedroom as bare of furnishing as a ship’s cabin. His lunch consisted of an omelet of sorts in a paper container. The paper had a message scrawled on it: "Directions: To be taken at mealtime with a glass of milk. Margie.”
I didn’t see any glass of milk. Instead, the miniature figurehead of a viking vessel stood by him on the shelf, a small dragon’s head beautifully carved from a piece of walnut. Peter had been working on it with an array of undersized chisels and gleaming knives. "The prow of the ship was like that, Doctor Marly,” he explained restlessly. "As nearly as I remember
The dragon’s head, he added quickly, projected like that from the housing when they boarded in the vessel for winter on the beach.
"On the island? How did you live there, Mr. Duns? You had food stored in the ship?”
Yes, he admitted they had dried fish. But their sheep grazed plentifully on the fine grass by the lake, and they gathered in wild wheat and wine berries as well. They lived happily, he said in his odd way, until the skraellings came.
Now, a dream seldom goes as far as food, and the name "skraellings” happened to be the term the real vikings gave to the natives of unknown lands, whether Mark-land or Vin-land, as they called the American shore.
As if sensing my doubt, Peter hurried to explain that Margie Grier scolded him for not eating more. She never bothered so much about herself—she kept dropping books and she wouldn’t have her hair bobbed and made up as Mike wanted. Ordinarily, she did as Mike advised her. He had definite ideas and she was going to marry him.
"She stumbled into Steve, actually.” He smiled apologetically. "Carrying an armful of textbooks through that terrible door of mine when it was closed. When her books slid every which way, Steve picked them up. When she said her hair always got in her eyes in a wind, he told her rainbows never got in anyone’s way. He told her she’d be a fool to cut her hair. I thought he’d known her for years, but he hadn’t.”
Such little things Peter kept in his mind. It surprised me, but then I had not realized the significance of the tiny knives he used to work in wood or how much Peter had ferreted out about the people who came near him.
As soon as I saw Margie I recognized her by the gleam of her hair, the faint real gold of it above her sensitive face. It showed up in the half-light of the shop when she came in with Steve, neither of them noticing me.
" ... from Mentone,” she was saying quickly, "we are going to the Ambassador at Rome for four days and then down to Naples.”
She was looking up curiously at Steve. "All reservations made?” he asked.
"Yes, Steve, everything; the passport and picture, too,” she said decidedly, and added, "I don’t think you like the itinerary of my wedding trip.”
He looked down at his clenched fist. "Margie, I don’t like package deals.”
So swiftly she struck the side of his face that he blinked. Then he put his great hands on her shoulders, holding her. For a moment she waited, as if frightened.
Without moving, she said clearly, "Steve, I think you’re always going to push a patient motor mower across other people’s grass, and escape from responsibility by running off to your books. It’s an easy life. But other men stand up for themselves sometimes.”
She sounded like a solemn child, although both of them must have been twenty-five or so. I had not meant to listen in, and I let a book thump down to the floor. When I picked it up, they had gone.
Peter gave me a few particulars about Margie and the man she was marrying—the one he c
alled Mike. Mike had a fine record in scholarship and athletics, and wore custom-made shoes. He had a knack of success. More, he had an offer of a job with the chain-drugstore company, being the nephew of one of the owners. The chain had a unit across from Peter’s shop, and I knew Peter did not like their books or window displays.
"She said a woman wants to know where she’s going,” he murmured absently. "At least where her home will be.”
I thought how she had quieted down when Steve’s hands touched her.
"She loves him,” Peter said positively, without explaining whom he meant. I didn’t ask. Margie’s thoughts, like Peter’s queer dream, were not intended to be shared with strangers.
I hardly expected to see her again, but I did. The night the two outsiders appeared. There was a performance of Jenny Kissed Me at the university theater, and I caught a glimpse of the girl in a smart evening jacket with her hair coiled back. She was in a party that did not include Steve.
After the play I stayed up in my rooms to look through a package of books from Paris. So I heard the sirens of the ambulance and the police patrol without paying attention. Only when I was tired of reading and went out for a nightcap walk, I remembered the sirens vaguely.
As usual, I turned down toward the Sound to get a whiff of the sea air. It had stopped snowing by then. Hardly anyone else was out at that hour, and the streets looked odd under the smooth snow. Even the drugstore on Perry Street was dark. Across the way, however, a light showed in Peter’s shop. His door stood open and the light came from the back room. When I heard his voice I stepped in.
Still in her party dress, Margie was curled up on the cot, white and silent. Standing by his toy figurehead, Peter Duns was arguing with her eagerly, his eyes blue under the fringe of his hair. He only motioned me to sit in a chair, so intent he was—telling her more of his fantastic dream than he had ever told me. As if he himself had remembered more of it that night.