Free Land of the Silver Dragon by Alys Clare Page A

would have liked. But, you see, he fell in love with it, and from the instant he set eyes on it, he knew he had to have it.’ He looked down fondly at the shawl. ‘He brought it for his sister, my mother, whom he dearly loved,’ he added softly, ‘because she was barren and he wished to bring the smile back to her face.’
    â€˜But she can’t have been barren because ...’ I began. Then I stopped, because I recalled what he had once told me:
My mother was advanced in years, and my birth was treated as a miracle
.
    Gurdyman acted as if he hadn’t heard. ‘There is a great road that stretches for thousands of miles,’ he began, his face dreamy, ‘and along it pass caravans of merchants, their pack animals laden with the treasures of the east. They travel westwards, and the traders of the west journey eastwards to meet them, and where the two converge there is a great city on the water. It is a city of graceful towers and warm, honey-coloured stonework, and it is riven by a stretch of water where the tides rip through as fast as a galloping horse. There, where men go to trade the greatest treasures of East and West, there are markets so vibrant, so thrilling, that all are reluctant to waste their time in sleep.’
    I tried to imagine such a place. I failed. The biggest town I knew was Cambridge, and, although we undoubtedly had our share of merchants from near and far, I hadn’t noticed anyone here being all that reluctant to retire at nightfall.
    With a start, Gurdyman came out of his reverie. ‘Enough,’ he said. ‘It is time to begin our lesson.’
    Having aroused my curiosity by showing me his map, Gurdyman seized the moment and leapt straight into explaining how the Norsemen had succeeded not only in discovering the routes to the far-flung places they visited but, perhaps even more importantly, had managed to find their way home again.
    â€˜They had faith in their ships,’ he said, ‘those light, sure-footed vessels that were sufficiently shallow-drafted that they did not run aground as they traversed the great river routes. Under sail, the ships were so fast that they seemed to skim over the waves. When the wind failed, the mariners removed the mast to prevent wind resistance and set to at the oars.’
    It seemed to me, listening, that Gurdyman must surely have been speaking from personal experience. At what point in his long and eventful life, I wondered, had he sailed with the Norsemen? And how had he come by all this knowledge? He had told me once that he studied with the Moors of Spain when he was a youth, but today’s lesson concerned the wisdom of a very different sort of people ...
    What he told me next sounded like magic.
    He had been describing the ways by which the Norsemen navigated, and much of it was based on sound common sense. Sailing close in to shore, a mariner would look out for familiar landmarks, noting them in sequence, much as I had tried to illustrate my pathetic little attempt at indicating the way home to Aelf Fen by drawing a particular tree, stream or cottage. The mariners also used the Pole Star to steer by; that, too, was familiar, for one of my earliest childhood lessons was how to locate the bright star that lies where the Pointers indicate.
If you know where North lies
, my father had explained,
you can find your way
. It’s very easy to become lost in the fens, where it’s often misty and where the land and the water are constantly changing. All fen children learn young how to find the Pole Star. If you’re lost out on the fens overnight and nobody finds you, you’ll likely be dead by morning.
    Gurdyman told me of other ways in which the Norse mariners had used the world around them to navigate. Over many generations of observation, they built up a knowledge of the winds: if it was warm and wet, it blew from the south-west; if it was cold and wet, from the north-east. They learned to utilize