Fidelma gazed after him and gave a mental shrug. She had hoped that her first impressions of her fellow pilgrims would prove wrong. At the moment she felt that she had more in common with Murchad and his crew than with her travelling companions. Had she been able to look into the future and learn that Cian was to be aboard, she would never have set foot on The Barnacle Goose.
Fidelma suppressed a shiver; the wind was growing chilly. It had increased its force to that of a strong breeze, cracking the sails like the sound of a stockwhip. She was forced to push her flailing hair from her eyes.
‘Breezy, eh?’
She turned towards the young speaker. Wenbrit was passing with a leather bucket in his hand and he greeted her with a grin.
‘There is quite a wind getting up,’ she replied.
The cabin boy came over to her side.
‘I think we are in for a real blow soon,’ he confided. ‘It will sort out the sailors among the pilgrims.’
‘How do you know that we are in for bad weather?’ asked Fidelma, hazarding a guess that the term ‘blow’ meant there was a storm brewing.
Wenbrit merely inclined his head towards the mainsail and, following his glance, she noticed the power of the wind which was filling and cracking it. The boy then touched her lightly on the arm and pointed towards the north-west. Fidelma turned and saw what he was indicating. Across the darkening waters there were black banks of cloud moving rapidly towards them. As she examined them, so it seemed, the clouds were tumbling over each other in a mad rush to be first to reach the ship.
‘A storm? Is it dangerous?’
Wenbrit pursed his lips indifferently.
‘All storms are dangerous,’ he shrugged, as if the darkening sky was of little matter to him.
‘What can we do?’ Fidelma was awed by the menacing spectacle advancing down upon them. The boy looked at her for a moment and then seemed to relent; he became reassuring.
‘Murchad will run before it as it is blowing in the direction we wish to go. However, for comfort’s sake you had best go to your cabin, lady. I suppose that I’d better go below to warn the others to keep to their cabins. The wind will have risen to a gale within the hour, I’m thinking. Make sure that you have stowed away anything which is loose and could tumble around the cabin and hurt you.’
In spite of herself, in spite of having journeyed several times by sea, Fidelma felt a quickening of her heart and an increase in the rapidity of her breathing as she went below to her cabin.
It was almost exactly as Wenbrit predicted. The wind continued to rise and the sea’s surface turned into a foam. The ship began to rock and heave as if it were an object caught in the maw of some gigantic dog which shook and worried it. Fidelma had, as Wenbrit instructed, made sure that everything was secured in her cabin. Then she sat and waited for the oncoming tempest. Even with Wenbrit’s warning, she was unprepared for the violence with which it struck the ship. At one point, she heaved herself across the cabin to the window to look nervously through it onto the main deck. But outside was almost dark, the daylight eclipsed by the black rainclouds.
Above the sound of the howling winds, she heard a knock and her cabin door opened. She swung round, still clinging to the support of the windowframe, to see Wenbrit balancing himself within the doorframe. He looked around, noticed everything was put away and gave her an approving smile.
‘I am just checking that all is well with you, lady,’ he explained. He seemed very calm in the face of the onslaught of nature. ‘Is everything all right with you?’
‘As right as it can be,’ Fidelma replied, turning and finding herself almost running back to her bunk, precipitated by the incline of the deck.
‘The storm is here,’ Wenbrit announced unnecessarily. ‘It’s stronger than the captain anticipated and he is trying to lie head to wind now but there is a heavy sea running. We shall be in for a rough time so please remain here. It is dangerous to move about unless you are used to storms at sea. I’ll bring some food later. I don’t think anyone will be sitting down for a meal.’
‘Thank you, Wenbrit. You are very considerate. I have a feeling we will dispense with food while this storm lasts.’
The boy hesitated in her cabin door. ‘If there is anything you need, just pass the word for me.’
Fidelma interpreted this quaint phrase as meaning that she should send for him. She shook her head.
‘It’s all right. If I need anything, I’ll just come and find you.’
‘No.’ The boy was vehement. ‘Remain in your cabin during the storm. Pass the word to a seaman and do not venture out on deck. Even we seamen wear lifelines on deck during a blow like this.’
‘I will remember,’ she assured him.
The boy raised his knuckles to his forehead in that curious seaman’s salute and disappeared.
She realised how cold and dark it had become yet it was only early evening. There was nothing to do but to sit on her bunk and wrap a blanket over her shoulders. It was too dark even to attempt to read. She wished she had someone to talk to. She found the ship’s cat curled up on her bunk and took comfort from his warm black furry body. She reached out a hand and stroked his head. He raised it, blinked sleepily and gazed at her, letting out a soft rumbling purr.
‘I guess you are used to this sort of weather, eh, Mouse Lord?’ she said.
The cat lowered his head, yawned hugely and returned to his sleep.
‘You are not much of a conversationalist,’ Fidelma reproached him. And then she lay down with the cat beside her, trying to shut out the sounds of the agonised wailing of the wind through the rigging and sails and the heaving of the sea. She absently scratched the cat behind the ear and his purr intensified. Out of nowhere, the old proverb suddenly came into her mind: Cats, like men, are flatterers.
She was thinking of Cian again.
When Fidelma came awake on her bunk, the wind was still whining and roaring and the ship continued to be tossed this way and that. The cat remained warm and comfortable at her side. If only she had trusted her friend Grian; listened to her warnings about Cian’s shallow nature. For years she had been bitter and resentful. Then, out of nowhere, the thought occurred to her that this resentment and bitterness was not, as she had previously thought, directed at Cian. It was directed at herself. Fidelma had been angry with herself, had blamed herself for her stupidity and her silly vanity.
Now she could hear the wind rising, moaning through the riggingand launching itself against the sails. A distant voice was shouting faintly somewhere. She could feel the ship rise as it climbed each wave and then fall as it slid into the heaving waters beneath.
She swung off the bunk leaving Mouse Lord still curled up in a ball, fast asleep, and apparently oblivious to the tempest. By gripping whatever hand-holds she could find, Fidelma manoeuvred herself to the window. Drawing back the sodden linen curtain, she peered out onto the deck. A fine sea spray immediately hit her in the face. She blinked and raised one hand to wipe her eyes, stumbling a little as the deck pitched beneath her. It was dark outside. Evening had passed into night. She looked upwards but there was no sign of moon nor stars. They must be covered by clouds, low and rainladen.
The wind was now a whine through the shrouds and beyond the wooden rail she could just see, by their whiteness, the tops of the waves, being whipped into a froth of white lather by the angry buffets of air. She realised that the bow, where her cabin was situated, must be rising high into the waves as cascades of water pounded on the deck above her.
Dark shadows were heaving on ropes around the main mast. Fidelma was astonished as she watched the silhouettes of men braving the uncontrollable winds, the bucking of the ship and the torrential waters, to lower the big mainsail. A heavy sea suddenly heaved the vessel over almost on its side. Fidelma was flung without warning against one of the walls of the cabin, but she held on and grabbed at the rim of the window, regaining her balance. Another flood of water smashed over the decks and for a moment Fidelma thought the sailors had been washed overboard but, as the spray cleared, she could see them re-emerge from the deluge still hanging onto their ropes.