Patrick O’Brian 3-Book Adventure Collection: The Road to Samarcand, The Golden Ocean, The Unknown Shore
rush.
He looked away and searched the sky and the horizon for the albatross that was nearly always there, a particularly fine one, with such a vast wing-span that it seemed impossible that it should ever be able to fold them and walk on the ground. But it was not there: nor were the gulls which usually appeared to swoop on the scraps that Li Han threw overboard.
Presently he went along to have a word with Olaf. ‘I say, Olaf,’ he began, ‘if you wanted to be a sailor, would you go to school?’
‘Well, I am a sailor, ain’t I?’ said Olaf. ‘What do you think Ay look like? A film-star, maybe, or a guy that dances on a tight-rope?’
‘No, I mean do you think school is a good thing?’
‘A good thing?’ said the Swede, watching the compass and considering. ‘Well, Ay reckon they wouldn’t teach me much out of a book, eh? Ay can’t read only big print, see? And Ay don’t want to be squinting down my nose at a lot of words Ay can’t understand.’
‘I mean if you were young and wanted to be a ship’s captain.’
‘Hum. That’s another thing. You got to know how to navigate, of course: but Ay don’t know that anything else ban much use to a sailor, except the nautical almanac.’
‘I think you’re right, Olaf. They want to send me to school.’
‘What for, eh? You can read and write and figure, can’t you? Ay never was a one for falals and doodads. My old man, he was the master of a whaler, see? And he never knew any more than navigation by rule of thumb.’ He turned the wheel two spokes, and went on. ‘Now Ay knew a man in Baltimore, could read out of books in Greek and what you say? Uh, Latin, ain’t it? Yes. Well, it worn’t any manner of use to him. He fell in the sea and drownded just the same.’
‘But that might happen to anyone, however much they knew.’
‘Ay don’t know. My old grandma, she was a Finn. Half Lapp, they say; and she was a wise woman. She could read the runes. You know what Ay mean? The old heathen writings, eh? And she could put good luck on a ship with what she knew, and she could sell you a nice little wind if you asked polite. If you went and tipped your hat to her and said, “Good morning, marm, I’ve come for a nice little wind like you can make, marm, if you please,”’ – Olaf imitated himself being polite, with a horrible smirk and a bob of his head – ‘Why, then you’d maybe get it. But if you was to say, “Hey, old girl, give us a wind yust one point off of east and make it snappy,” why, then you would get something more then you bargained for, eh? What she knew, my old grandma! Ay don’t reckon she would have drowned in any sea. Ay t’ink she must have been ninety when Ay remember her. Old, she was, with a beard like a man, and she was a little creature you could of broken like that …’ he snapped his fingers. ‘But they was all afraid of her, even the old pastor, though he hated her worser’n poison. She used to be able to tell the day when a man was going to die, and she could charm the whales out of the sea. But Ay reckon you can’t get that sort of learning in no school. If you could, maybe it’d be some use, eh?’
‘Could she really tell when you were going to die, Olaf?’
‘Well, maybe. There was only two or three ever asked her, and they died all right. After that, nobody wanted to know. But Ay seen her call an ice-bear over the sea. She was a wise woman all right.’
‘How did she do that?’
‘Ay don’t rightly know. We was up in the north of Norway, visiting a sick relation, see? And this relation, he went on keeping sick, in spite of my grandma. So she went out into the tundra and called in the reindeer – a good many Lapps can do that – and she made some kind of a spell then; but still this man, he could not get any better no way. So then she bawled him out and swore so that we all got frightened and asked her to stop, very polite. “Stow it, Grandma,” we said. “Stow it, marm, if you please.” And she stopped. She sat by the fire and smoked her pipe for a long while. It was very cold, Ay remember: up there the winters go on seven, eight months, and there ain’t no sun. The fjords were frozen deep, too, and the wolves, they came so close you could hear them breathe. After a long while she got up and looked out: there was a double ring of the Northern Lights flashing up all colours in the sky, and she went out. Soon there was a wolf howling close by outside, and another answered in the tundra. My father, he said, “That’s your grandma, son, talking to the wolves.”
‘Well, nothing happened for a long while, and they all ban gone to sleep when Ay took a look outside, because Ay wanted to see. And Ay saw my grandma going down across to the fjord. So Ay slipped out and followed her in the moonlight, see? She went right on to the ice and squatted down. She took out a knife, an old stone knife like some of the Lapps have, and she cut runes on the ice. Then she called out across the sea, and far away there was an answer. Ay can’t make the proper noise, but it was something like this – Haoo, haoo. She called six, seven times with her hand like that, see, up to her mouth, and each time the answer came nearer. She held her knife by the blade and beckoned with it. And over the ice I see a great white bear coming slow, with his head turning from side to side on his long neck. Eh! He was a big one. Sometimes Ay could not see him against the snow on the ice, because he was white too, see? But there was his shadow there all the time. And Ay was so frightened Ay could not move my little finger, and Ay was cold: cold to the heart. Soon he come right up to her, and he sit down on the ice, and they talk, grunting and nodding. Suddenly something seems to crack in me, and Ay up and run like mad for the house, hollering all the way. I hear the white bear roar as I slam the door, and they all wake up and ask what’s biting me? Have I had a bad dream, maybe?
‘But soon my grandma comes in and she swear at me and clout my head and say Ay have spoilt everything: but that night this relative got better.’
‘Was it your grandmother that did it, Olaf?’
‘Of course it was. The doctor from Kjelvik, he said it was his physic, but we knew it was Grandma. Oh, she was a wise woman, all right, my grandma, and they was all afraid of her because of her learning. When she died, they found she got hair on the soles of her feet, like an ice-bear.’ He stared up at the sails for some moments, and then said, ‘If you can get learning like that, you go to school and learn all you can. Otherwise you stay on board and leave it for these ship’s chandlers, eh?’
‘I wish I could, Olaf. But they seem set on educating me.’
‘Hm. Well, Ay reckon the Old Man knows best. Still, an albatross can fly clean round the world without learning out of no books, and maybe a sailor can do just the same without being learned no Greek or this so-called Latin.’
‘That reminds me. I haven’t seen the albatross this afternoon, nor any gulls.’
‘Ain’t you? That’s funny.’ Olaf looked over his shoulder to the western rim of the sea. ‘She don’t look quite right, neither,’ he said. ‘And the wind dropped a bit too quick. Ay don’t like it, not in these seas. Ay t’ink Ay know what it means, without no book-learning.’
Derrick looked at the bright horizon where the sun had set. ‘It looks all right to me,’ he said.
‘You look close. Don’t you see no sort of a haze up there?’
Derrick looked again. Yes, there was a haze; not quite a cloud, nor yet a mist. It was strange.
Down below Sullivan finished writing his log. He looked at the tell-tale compass, cast an automatic glance at the brass ship’s clock and the barometer and was preparing to refill his pipe when his eye shot back to the barometer. He sprang up, made sure that the barometer was not broken, and let out a long whistle. The thick column of mercury had dropped as if the bottom had fallen out of the glass. He moved aside to let Ross see, and without a word they ran up the companion-way. Olaf jerked his thumb over to the west and they stared at the sky: they gazed up to the sails, flapping wearily in the dying breeze. They looked at one another and nodded.
‘Derrick, take the wheel,’ ordered Sullivan. ‘Olaf, bear a hand.’ He ran to the foremast winch, shouting for the two Malays in the fo’c’sle as he ran. Ross hurried