The Return of Fursey Read online

  “You will observe,” he said, “that I have nothing up my sleeves. What would you like me to produce for you in the way of food or drink?”

  For a moment no one spoke, then a hoarse voice growled from the back:

  “A vat of the best Spanish wine.”

  “Certainly,” said Fursey. “A vat of the best Spanish wine.”

  He gave the rope a sharp chuck and immediately an immense tun fell out of the tree and rolled down the beach into the water. Fursey skipped out of the way just in time to prevent his legs being broken, and the Norsemen scattered in all directions. Sigurd did not run, but Fursey noticed that he bent down and picked up a battleaxe.

  “Don’t do anything hastily for which you might afterwards be sorry,” pleaded Fursey. “Maybe you’d like some mead?”

  He pulled the rope, deftly caught the beaker and presented it to Sigurd, who sipped it gingerly.

  “It’s mead all right,” he admitted.

  “Maybe we ought to be getting on board ship,” said one of the sea rovers nervously.

  “I have here,” continued Fursey, “a bag in which I have tied up half-a-dozen favourable winds. Fixed to your mast they may come in very useful.”

  “What is your proposition?” demanded Sigurd.

  “I want passage to Ireland in your ship,” explained Fursey. “In return my magical knowledge is at your disposal. Furthermore, if you should think of calling at a place called Clonmacnoise, I will be your pilot and guide. I know that country and the monastery intimately, having been a laybrother there until three months ago, when they expelled me and relieved me of my vows.”

  The Vikings gathered around again, their faces quickened with interest.

  “Why were you expelled?” asked Sigurd carefully.

  “A flock of mischievous demons attached themselves to my person. It wasn’t really my fault. I couldn’t get rid of them.”

  “So the monks got rid of you?”

  “Yes,” replied Fursey dolefully. “I was most unjustly treated.”

  In the silence that followed, Fursey heard a battle-scarred veteran muttering: “He looks like a monk all right. I should know. I’ve killed scores of them.”

  Noticing their hesitation, Fursey proceeded hurriedly:

  “It would be an exaggeration to say that you can’t move around Clonmacnoise without tripping over piles of gold and other valuables; but gold is there, nevertheless, in great quantities. The monastery is situated in the interior on the River Shannon, and the religious settlements on the coast have for many years past sent their treasures inland to Clonmacnoise for safety.”

  “Describe the exact location of the monastery,” commanded Sigurd.

  “It’s situated many miles inland from the sea and above the Danish city of Limerick,” replied Fursey, “but it lies on the Shannon, a great river, readily navigable by ships of shallow draught such as yours.”

  Sigurd motioned a warrior to step forward. He was a tall, spare man of most uninviting aspect, with only one eye, which was a large, melancholy one. Fursey noticed that he had only two teeth, big, yellow fangs, which dwelt apart.

  “Snorro,” Sigurd addressed him, “you’ve heard what the stranger says. Is it true?”

  “Yes,” replied Snorro. “It is even as he says. I’ve been in the Danish settlement called Limerick, and I’ve heard the monastery Clonmacnoise spoken of. It lies in the vicinity.”

  “Why do you want to lead us to Clonmacnoise?” said the Skull Splitter, turning suddenly to Fursey.

  “I want to get my own back on the monks who expelled me.”

  Sigurd nodded to Fursey and withdrew his men to some distance, where they conversed in guttural whispers. Fursey noticed with foreboding that some of the warriors drew their fingers across their throats before contributing their opinion, while others spoke first at length and then drew their fingers across their throats. He decided that this meant that there were two schools of thought among the Vikings, the first lot was persuaded that it was proper to slit his throat without further delay, while the second school deemed it more sensible to defer the slitting until he had led them to Clonmacnoise. He made up his mind that if the first school prevailed, he would try to make a run for it; but that if they were outvoted by the second school, he would make a run for it the moment the ship touched Irish soil. At length the group broke up, and Sigurd came back to Fursey.

  “You can come with us,” he said, “but we carry no passengers. You must become a Viking.”

  Fursey hastily assured him that to become a Viking had been his dearest wish ever since he was a small boy.

  “All right,” said the Skull Splitter. “You’re under the care of Snorro. He’s responsible for you.”

  Sigurd went off to see his men aboard, and Fursey, by direction of Snorro, went down on his knees and swore allegiance to Thor and undying hatred of the Christian faith. Then Snorro helped him into a corselet of mail and a pair of greaves. It was rather difficult to fit Fursey, who was small and tubby; but Snorro managed it at last, except for the helmet. Even the smallest helmet fell down over Fursey’s eyes when he nodded his head, but he found that by throwing his head well back and keeping his eyebrows raised he could keep it in position. Then Snorro girt on him a long, dangerous looking sword, which incommoded Fursey greatly in his walking. He found that it took all the strength of his two arms to lift the weighty battleaxe, but after several efforts he managed to raise it and rest it in a soldierly manner on his right shoulder. Thus accoutred he marched down in Snorro’s wake to the dragonship. Willing hands helped him, stumbling and falling, to a place in the narrow waist of the ship, and Snorro clambered in after him. At Sigurd’s request he tied his bag of favourable winds to the mast, hoping earnestly as he did so that they would not be required during the voyage. Back in his place beside Snorro, he raised his helmet from over his eyes and looked about him. The first grey of the dawn had lightened the sky in the east. Fursey took off his helmet altogether and contemplated the two ox horns with which it was ornamented. Then he wiped the sweat from his brow.

  “It should be a pleasant trip,” he said to Snorro, who only grunted by way of reply.

  “Will there be much murderings?” enquired Fursey anxiously.

  “Don’t worry,” replied his gloomy companion. “You’ll get your share of fun. These monks don’t fight, but they squeal a lot when you cleave them. Of course we may run into fighting men. That’s another matter altogether.”

  “I expect so,” said Fursey. “In that eventuality how would you advise me to comport myself? I have never wielded lethal weapons before.”

  “Irish fighting men don’t fight with any discipline or artfulness,” replied Snorro. “They’re strangers to wile. They just run straight at you and hit you with whatever they’ve got. I’ve known them with one blow to drive a warrior’s helmet so far down into his breastbone as to render it impossible of extrication.”

  “And where was his head?” asked Fursey anxiously.

  Snorro turned on Fursey his one melancholy eye.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “We could never find out. It must have been in his stomach.”

  Fursey turned away his face and looked longingly at the receding shore.

  “The best thing to do when you encounter an Irish fighting man,” said Snorro, “is to receive his first blow on your shield. Then you must hew off his feet at the ankles. This upsets his balance and, as he falls, you can, if you’re any good, sweep off his head with a back stroke of your sword. There’s nothing difficult about it.”

  For the first day and a half, during which the dragonship rode up and down across the swelling seas, Fursey lay in the bilge water on the floor of the boat hopelessly seasick. It was only on the afternoon of the second day that he dragged himself up on to his seat in the slim waist of the ship and cast a jaundiced eye over the waters.

  “You’d better have something to eat,” said Snorro, passing him a hog’s foot and a pannikin of metheglin. Fursey averted his gaze.


  “No, thank you,” he replied. “I fear that my stomach is in a state of consolidation.”

  “I never heard such retching,” asserted Snorro, looking at him curiously. “And the queer things you brought up! What did you last have to eat anyway? It wasn’t a goat’s skin overcoat by any chance?”

  Fursey shook his head despondently. He pondered Snorro’s words for some time, and at last realised that he had probably rid himself of the goat’s skin parchment on which was inscribed his agreement to sell his soul. Its loss cheered him considerably, until he remembered that there was a duplicate copy filed in the archives of Hell.

  An hour passed, and it became late afternoon—a lazy September afternoon, soaked through and through with sunlight. He had been dreamily watching the thin line of foam in the wake of the ship, spreading left and right; and, as it divided, veining the waters like marble. Now he awoke to the fact that for some time apparently there had been a slackening of speed. The waves no longer ran out to left and right from beneath the keel. He heard a sudden shout from the prow.

  “Sorcerer!”

  Fursey’s heart gave a jump; and, glancing around, he saw Sigurd the Skull Splitter smiling affably as he directed Fursey’s attention to the great raven-embroidered sail. It lay against the mast quite loose and relaxed.

  “The wind has fallen,” said Sigurd. “It’s time for you to unloose one of your favourable winds. It’s a good thing you brought them with you.”

  Fursey could see no way out of his predicament. He arose shakily and made his way to the mast. When he pulled the cords and four stones fell from their covering cloth on to the deck, the Vikings looked rather surprised. They said nothing, however, but sat back waiting to feel the brave breeze on their faces once more and to see the raven sail flap and swell. When five minutes had elapsed without anything happening, they began to whisper among themselves and cast dark glances in the sorcerer’s direction. Fursey closed his eyes and began to regret that during her lifetime he hadn’t been kinder to his mother. The discussion which followed was tumultuous and protracted. It centred mostly around the manner in which Fursey should be ravaged and maimed before he was flung overboard. The Vikings had come speedily to appreciate that in the absence of a favourable wind it would be incumbent on them to resort to the back-­breaking business of rowing until a wind should once more spring up. It was obvious to Fursey that he was a grievous disappointment to them, and he listened with dismay to their talk of hamstringing and houghing. The steersman, who seemed a man of particularly irritable temper, impatiently drew a nine-inch knife from his belt and, placing it between his teeth, began to scramble over the benches towards Fursey.

  “Drowning is too comfortable an end,” he mumbled. “Let us proceed at once to demolish him utterly, but by small stages.”

  Sigurd took no part in the discussion, but stood by the mast listening to the various expressions of opinion. It was Snorro, who seemed to have taken a liking to Fursey, who restrained the ardour of his shipmates.

  “Even the best of wizards,” he urged, “can make a mistake. I’ve been watching Fursey, and I’m convinced that he’s the briskest of men, but is at present suffering from a consolidated stomach. Under such conditions no sorcerer can do himself justice. You have all seen him producing wine and mead from the bare branches of a thorn tree. Take care lest by laying violent hands upon him you offend so powerful a sorcerer and he retaliate by starting to beat the sea and thereby raise a storm. Remember, too, his value to us as a guide to the opulent monastery of Clonmacnoise.”

  The Norsemen hesitated and stood in groups muttering fiery Viking oaths. Snorro stepped up to Sigurd and began to urge him to use his influence on Fursey’s behalf. The wretched Fursey sat alone on his bench shivering in every limb. At last Sigurd spoke.

  “Fursey,” he said, “in this matter I fear that you have fallen appreciably short of success. How has that come about?”

  “To tell you the truth,” squeaked Fursey, “I’m not much of a sorcerer. I lack practice. I really don’t know how to capture and imprison favourable winds.”

  Sigurd studied him thoughtfully. “Maybe it’s just as well,” he said at last, “that you know nought of the subject. A little knowledge might have been dangerous and productive of lamentable, and even fatal, consequences. You might have only succeeded in dealing out a hurricane. Go back to your places, men, and take to the oars.”

  “Maybe the men would like a drink,” suggested Fursey weakly, “to make up for their disappointment.”

  This suggestion had a soothing effect on the crew, and for ten minutes Fursey busied himself producing satisfying beakers of the choicest ale, which he distributed to all. When everyone was carousing merrily, he pulled his rope from the mast and, coiling it over his shoulder, returned to his seat beside Snorro.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I owe it to you that I have escaped their desperate purposes.”

  There was a friendly light in Snorro’s one eye. “That’s all right,” he whispered. “I have fortunately some influence with the Captain. My mother is promised to him in marriage. You can do something for me when we land,” he added. “I would deem it a friendly act if you would so work magically on my coat of mail that through it no steel may bite.”

  “Certainly,” agreed Fursey. “The moment we land I’ll work on it with the mightiest charm I know.”

  So potent was the ale which Fursey had produced and distributed, that there was soon a gladsome change in the attitude of the crew towards him. His name was shouted from all corners of the ship, and when Fursey’s eye was caught he was toasted in the foaming beakers. Before long willing hands grasped him and conveyed him once more over the well of the ship to the mast, where he was required to produce a second round of drinks. Fursey, who had a weak man’s liking for being liked, worked with a will, producing further beakers, this time as big as buckets. Scenes of uproarious joviality followed. Fierce warriors rolled around in the scuppers, engaged in friendly throttling matches; while the ship’s skald, who had been brought along so as to compose a poem on the adventure, began to recite at the top of his voice, with tears streaming down his face, an epic of his own composition on the life and deeds of the fabulous Ragnar Ironbreeks. At length Sigurd the Skull Splitter intervened and restored order with a blunted axe half overlaid with iron, which he kept for such occasions. Back in their places, the oarsmen flung their moustaches back over their shoulders so that they would not interfere with the rowing and set to work with a will. For some time the dragonship kept going around in circles to the immense amusement of its crew; but at last matters righted themselves, and the long, slim ship, impelled by its fifty oars, cut its way forward straight into the sunset. The skald, who had fallen asleep with his head in a beaker, was prodded awake with a spear and instructed to recite a heartening lay. To obviate the possibility of his falling overboard, he was placed seated with his back to the mast, to which he was lashed with a length of rope. His timpans, flageolets and whistles were placed in a basket beside him so that his recital might lose nothing in artistic effect. After some moments of gloomy meditation he set his fingers coursing up and down the few strings of the timpan and began the epic account so well known to Viking raiders, of the tyrant Charlemagne, who had decreed death for every Saxon who refused baptism. Some parts of the history he related, some he sang. Hour after hour the tale continued. It told of the banishment of an entire race from their native land to Denmark and the shores of the Baltic, because of their fidelity to the faith of their fathers. It told of Christian fire and sword, of martyrdom and massacre; and it asserted that the faith in the old gods was living still. The faces of the Vikings grew pale and grim, and they tugged harder at their oars, as they listened to the relation of the wrongs of centuries. Fursey, happy in his new popularity, sat in his place amidships listening to the fierce, sad tones of the skald as they filled the ship and then faded away across the evening seas. The recital was in a language which he did not understand, but he thrill
ed at the emotion with which the passages were charged, and he was charmed by the occasional instrumental accompaniment. He sat, his eyes wandering from the rune-carved weapons and the grotesquely decorated ornaments of his companions to the great carved dragons rising high in the stem and prow. He gazed for a long time into the blood-red glamour of the sunset and watched the incredible play of pearl and copper green and every other imaginable colour on the surface of the water. The sun had disappeared into the shimmering carpet of the sea by the time the skald had concluded his recital; and, as he was now quite sober, he was unlashed from the mast and crept back to his place in the prow, where he sat motionless, gazing with a face of unutterable sadness at the fast shrinking colours in the west. Fursey watched his thin, delicate features covertly, wondering, as every layman wonders, what strange thoughts were gripping his poet’s brain. The skald could not have answered the question. His mind was a tumult of faint echoes of all the race’s memories of sunsets, of partings and of broken armies. The delicate forehead and intelligent eyes, brooding on the waste of darkening waters, concealed no real activity. The brain beneath was merely attuned to all that in human history had been dignified and beautiful; and because all beauty is permeated with sadness, his mind and face were sad. Fursey’s gaze wandered to Sigurd erect in the prow, and thence to the fifty oarsmen, moving rhythmically forward and backward as one man. It was one of those blessed hours when everyone is at peace with his companions, feeling himself to be in perfect union with those near him and with his surroundings. Fursey was indescribably happy. His troubles seemed to be very far away and unimportant. He felt that he loved these men and all mankind. The Vikings spoke little, and that little in undertones. Some time later, when the stars began to come out, Snorro raised to the heavens his one melancholy eye to identify for Fursey the constellations which he recognised, and Fursey in his turn named the few that were known to him. It was an abbreviated conversation though it lasted for hours, a conversation without strain, a dialogue such as is usual between old friends, mostly brief statement and affirmative grunt. When the moon came into the sky, changing the entire ocean to a sheet of silver, Sigurd arranged the relays of oarsmen, and a great part of the crew stretched themselves on the floor of the ship to sleep. Fursey bade Snorro good-night and, creeping beneath his bench, was soon asleep too.