The Domesday Book II (Still Not That One) (A Tale of 1066-ish 2) by Howard of Warwick

Author:Howard of Warwick [of Warwick, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Funny Book Company
Published: 2018-06-24T14:00:00+00:00

Caput XIV

Follow The Leader

‘Lord Siward saw us through the storm.‘ King Harold was explaining how they had made it.

Mabbut growled and looked very disappointed with this unwarranted appointment.

‘Storm?’ King Sweyn shrugged at the description. ‘My men told me it was a bit choppy.’

‘Choppy? Ah, yes, choppy.’

‘And that you had your sail down, half the oars were broken, and you hadn’t even got a shield wall on the bulwarks. It was no wonder you were half under water.’

‘But we made it,’ Harold tried to sound as if they had defeated a great enemy.

He looked around the large table in King Sweyn’s council chamber. On his side the Saxons sat, still looking rather wasted from their seagoing experience. On the other side King Sweyn’s court gathered at his side.

The table was laden with bowls of bread and pickles and dried fish, all of which the Danes tucked into with relish. The Saxon’s nibbled cautiously on small bits of bread and passed the fish and pickles quickly on when they appeared under their noses.

When one particularly fine local delicacy of aged and fermented herring was offered to Lord Borton, he had to leave the room.

‘You were lucky we found you.’ King Sweyn didn’t sound as if the enemy was quite so great. ‘Very lucky indeed. The ocean is a vast and cruel master. It has taken whole fleets before now.’

‘Then God is with us.’ Harold nodded, indicating that he’d like to stop talking about their voyage now.

‘If you hadn’t still been just off the coast of Vinland we’d have missed you completely.’

That had been the most disheartening news for Siward, once he had recovered enough to realise that God had not descended to call them to his bosom; the first hint of that truth coming when it entered his mind to wonder why God smelled of fish. They hadn’t even made it a quarter of the way to Greenland, never mind back to England. If they’d turned around when the storm was blowing they’d have been back with Wapasku in a day.

Apparently, the sail had been rigged wrong, the steerboard was off-line, the oarsmen were doing more harm than good when they rowed, they’d chosen the wrong boat for the job in the first place and they clearly had no sense of direction. The best that could be said was that they’d given it a try. Even then, it wasn’t a very good one.

He did take some encouragement from the news that if they had kept going a little further they might have caught the great stream that ran across the ocean, bringing warm water from some far-off land in the south. That would have delivered them somewhere in the right part of the world, but they’d probably have starved to death by then.

Siward had been very miserable about all this. He had thought that he was getting the hang of ships when they travelled to Vinland. It was clear that he knew next to nothing. The only comfort was that the rest of the Saxon court were on the other side of nothing.

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