By My Sword Alone by David Black (ebook reader ink TXT) 📕

see your passage to the low countries. A Dutch buss sails for the Texel on the evening tide. Her skipper has agreed tae take ye as long as ye promise no’ tae spend the voyage complaining. I’m givin’ tae understand her accommodations are no’ saloubrious. And here, take this letter. There was no passport tae be had, but this is a note fay my professor tae his correspondent at the University of Leiden … Professor Pfuffenkipper … a learned Rhenish gentleman who writes and lectures on aw’ matters ethical … asking him to speak for you, and see ye on yer way. It should suffice to pacify any over nosey official. But tell me James, how are ye in yourself? You certainly look like you’ve been pondering on the gravity of this pass you’ve come to.’

‘That I have,’ said James. And then he gave Davy a taut, confident smile, and said no more on the matter, changing the subject entirely.

‘My horse, Sophie,’ he said. ‘She’s stabled at Glasgow. Here is the place,’ and he handed Davy a card with a note scribbled on the back. ‘Give this to the farrier and she is yours. Look after her, man, don’t let her end at the knackers, for she’s a lovely lass.’

Davy also had a small valise for him, with a change of linen and stockings, and a short sword they called a hanger. The stockings James immediately swapped for the coarse ones Mistress Cantly had loaned him last night, his other ones soiled by the Nor’ Loch beyond saving.

It was dark down on the quay, where James took farewell of his friend, the same perpetual har roiling off the water, and the drizzle swaddling them as they shared a final embrace. Davy felt the force of James’ last handshake and of the spare, heartfelt words James spoke to him in thanks for everything he had done. ‘We’ll meet again, James,’ he said in reply. ‘I’ve a feeling God isn’t finished with either of us.’

‘Amen to that, my friend,’ said James, and then he stepped aboard the charmless, fat-beamed trader that was to carry him to exile.

 

3

A Foreign Land

On the morning of James’ fourth day at sea, he woke, body aching from the falling damps, and he took his first look over the Hilde’s gunnel. There had been no cabin for him aboard, and so, like the crew, he had spent his nights curled on the bare deck. What he saw to his right was a long, low, solid patina of light beginning to coalesce out of the dark, like a firm line between sea and sky, and dead ahead, a forest of trees, which in defiance of all logic, seemed to be growing directly out of the brightening sea. Alarmed, James looked up at the man on the tiller; the sailor remained impassive. But then in the course of this voyage, all of Captain Dros’ crew had proved phlegmatic to a fault.

With the light came a nautical bustle, from which James had learned to absent himself – usually by perching on one of the hatch covers and remaining there, out of the way. It was turning into a bright day, but with a high, thin cloud through which no blue shone. When James looked around again, he was this time presented with a flat, featureless coast, and dead ahead, the forest had transformed itself. What he had taken to be trees, were masts, and he was gazing upon a crowded and busy anchorage, the likes of which he’d never seen before; a huge expanse of shipping, nearly all of them large sea-going merchant vessels, three-masted leviathans capable of taking on all the voyages of the world and a sea-going anthill of barges plying between them.

‘The Rede van Texel,’ said Captain Dros, nodding at the ships. Then he nodded at the land, and merely said, ‘Texel.’

They hadn’t been a very communicative crew, the Hilde’s, but then neither had they been unfriendly, sharing their food and the occasional dram of a clear spirit James never caught the name of, but that they assured him would, ‘Tegen de kou,’ which he gathered was something like, ‘keep out the cold’.

His first sea voyage had passed with few incidents of contrary winds, and no serious bad weather. They had made good time – or that was what he thought the captain had tried to tell him earlier. Yet throughout the passage, there had been a feeling of apprehension that had never left him. What else were you supposed to feel, on discovering yourself to being a mere speck on a featureless landscape of water, bounded only by a flat horizon that never changed and confronted by your essential, utter nakedness before the elements and nature? It was an experience he was sure was in some way salutary. Complementary even, to his reflections on the events that had so recently overtaken him, and the decisions he had made.

A small town appeared, and as they drew closer, its port revealed itself, and a daisy chain of fishing boats emptying from between its breakwaters and heading to sea. Then the crew were furling the sails, and setting two huge sweeps to row the Hilde the final few yards into the harbour, and suddenly the voyage was over. Lines had been thrown ashore and secured, plank run onto a wooden quay and Captain Dros was nodding to him and saying something in his unintelligible Dutch tongue, and James, carrying all he owned in his valise, was ashore in a foreign land for the first time in his life.

He quickly learned the name of the small town was Oudeschild, and that there was nothing for him here. Whatever he asked for, everybody pointed to what appeared to be farm track, smiling and repeating, ‘Den Burg’. He quickly gathered they were telling him that everything he needed would be found there.

Throughout these exchanges he