The tall hills of a strange land rose athwart the deepening azure of the
second dawn. Spears of light fell streaming towards the sea, glittering
upon the ever-tumbling waves that hurried onwards towards the west. The
stars sped back behind the veil. The faint moon grew frail as a great
silver net burdened with transient dew.
Tristan le Sauvage, steering the boat, sat with his eyes fixed upon the
misty heights touched with the golden glories of the dawn. Before him
the multitudinous waves leapt and tumbled, washing the bulwarks,
plashing against the prow with a moist unrest. A light breeze bellied
the black sail, set the cordage creaking and humming about the mast. The
world seemed full of the awakening day and the sinuous and solemn
splendour of the sea. The waves were troughed with opalescent light as
they swept and heaved about the boat. There was a salt zest in the
ocean’s breathing, a deep intake of strength into its panting heart.
The men at the benches watched Tristan le Sauvage as they dipped their
sweeps. The dawn light shone upon his rugged face and the links of his
hauberk. There was no uglier man in Purple Isle than Tristan le Sauvage.
Nature had juggled with him from his earliest years. Of no great
stature, he was like a tough oak, cumbrous, huge of trunk, and gnarled
of limb. The long arms showed their great muscles even under the sleeves
of his hauberk. His chest was as the front of some great rock; his heavy
head seemed sunk betwixt his shoulders; his legs bowed as by the massive
strength above. A pair of dusky eyes peered out with honest faith from a
craggy, hairless countenance. The broad mouth was pursed up half
morosely over the strong white teeth.
Such was the pilgrim who plied the tiller, helming the boat towards the
broadening day. Tristan spoke seldom, crying now and again to Rolf the
pilot, as the boat heaved and rolled over the waves. His eyes were fixed
on the hills that rose above the waste of waters. Black cliffs, craggy
and solemn, began to frown upon the sea. The far heights bristled with
woodland, shimmering with magic mystery under the rising sun. The moist
surge of the sea cheered on the galley towards the shore.
Tristan stood to the tiller, and scanned the strange coast under his
hand. The wind freshened, the sail bellied from the mast, the toilers
drew in their oars, and watched the coast-line rising from the foam.
Like battlements of black marble, the cliffs towered above the blue
shallows, with rocky pinnacle and forest spire smitten from the east
with a glamour of gold. Precipice and wooded height were solitary as the
sea itself. No tower crowned the headlands, no town lurked in the green
shadows of the placid bays.
Rolf, old senator of the seas, stood forward in the prow, gazing at the
line of heights. Straight to the east a narrow valley thrust upwards
from the sea, walled on either hand with cliff and forest slope. Rolf
hailed Tristan to the prow, and pointed with knotted finger to the
shore.
“The Land of the Seven Streams, sir,” he said to him. “I know these
cliffs of old. See yonder valley; the Silver Snake runs therein, a great
river and a strong. The stars have steered us well. Hold for the opening
in the cliffs; we can ride in over the bar.”
Running fast on the backs of the billows, they came to where a counter
current beat upon the prow, fretting the sea into contending streams. It
was where the river charged the tide. The galley swerved and faltered;
the sail flapped against the mast.
“Out sweeps,” came Rolf’s hail from the prow. “Pull, lads; ware rocks to
the north. The passage lies ahead.”
With the sail lowered and much straining of oars, they swung in past the
rocky barriers where the waves chafed and broke in foam. The great
cliffs towered upon either hand, solemn and stupendous, tufted with
dwarf oaks, topped with pines. Once within the inlet, the galley ran
smoothly on the broad bosom of the river, whose curves smote landwards
into forest gloom.
The men rested on their oars while Tristan climbed into the prow and
stood beside Rolf the seaman, looking forth over crag and forest. No
plume of smoke ascended to the sky, no roofs shone out amid the green.
The place was steeped in the grandeur of solitude, and there was no
sound to break the silence save the perpetual plaining of the sea.
Tristan questioned the old man at his side; he had grown grey under many
winter skies over stormy seas; his beard was as the foam below the bluff
beak of a ship.
“Whence comes this river?” he asked him.
“Sir,” he answered, “this great river feeds upon the Seven Streams, and
like a vast snake, takes them all into its belly. We have entered in at
the sea gate of the land.”
“Who are its rulers?”
“Sir, there are many lords in the land, holding their fiefs direct from
the King. Southwards lies the duchy of La Marche Montagne, northwards
the duchy of Blanche the Bold.”
Tristan pondered his words, as the river sped past them to the sea.
“Hold on,” he said, “and bear me higher into the heart of the land. What
better path for us than this broad stream?”
As they passed on that day the heights descended, spreading eastwards
into wooded hills. The land grew milder and more green of face. Ancient
trees sentinelled the river; broad valleys swept from it under the
sapphire sky. Hills grey with olives, dusky with cypresses and firs,
rose from green meadows, sleek and brilliant under the sun.
About noon, they rounded a rocky point, where myrtles clambered up the
bluff brow of the hill. In the northern shallows they saw a boat moored
and a peasant fishing. As the galley drew near with a steady pulse of
oars, Tristan stood in the prow and hailed the man over the water. The
fisherman fingered his line, and sat staring none too trustfully at the
galley sliding towards him with ripples prattling at its prow. Strange
ships sailed seldom into those quiet waters; the bloody deeds of Norse
pirates still lived in the heart of the peasantry.
Tristan, seeing the man’s distrust, tossed him a piece of silver from
the leather purse at his girdle. The fisher groped for it amid the
cordage at the bottom of the boat. Questioned, he told them of the
knights and barons of those parts, of the castles and hamlets therein,
of the roads and forest ways. His lord was a certain Sir Parsival, who
held a tower perched upon a neighbouring hill. Lastly, he described the
region known as La Vallée Joyeuse, a rich and pleasant pasture land,
where vineyards purpled the hills, and Sir Ronan the Peaceful had his
home.
Tristan, leaning on his sword, bade his men pole in towards the northern
bank, where a stretch of meadowland swept to the myrtle thickets that
hid the rocks. The water lay still as glass in the shallows. The woods
cast purple shadows athwart the stream, and the meads stood thick with
many flowers. The galley ran aground in a little inlet where reeds and
rushes bearded the bank. Tristan leapt from the prow, found sure
footing, and turned with a smile to face his men.
“Good voyage and a clean sea to you,” he said.
They crowded to the bulwarks with many rough and rugged prayers, holding
up their caps to him, proffering their service. Grizzled sea-dogs that
they were, they loved, him, even because he was strong and generous, and
a giant in arms. Like Homeric mariners gathering round Ulysses at the
entry to Hades, they prayed him to share with them the perils of the
unknown. Tristan put them off with bluff but unbending gratitude. They
would have hindered him, sea-dragons that they were. Such a pilgrimage
as his required but a single sword.
“Good men that you are,” he said, buckling his shield over his
shoulders, “you ride the waves better than the back of a horse. When I
have need of brown sails and a strong keel, I will send to Purple Isle
and call you over. To my sire and to Dame Joan, my mother, commend me.”
They tossed their rough blessings on him as he climbed the bank, rattled
the sweeps in the rowlocks, waved their fur-lined caps. Tristan saluted
them with his drawn sword, a warm colour on his ugly face. They were
still watching him and waving their brown fists when he disappeared from
their sight into the woods.
There was a strenuous tone in the man’s stout heart that day. The world
lay open at his feet, like a broad and glorious plain, unfolding its
many phases to his ken. Tristan, great boyish Titan, with a heart of
gold, welcomed the sun as it smote through branches upon his face. He
was glad of the woods and of their solemn liberty, glad of the hills,
and the broad, beaming valleys. Purple Isle had held him overlong in its
girdle of foam. The wide world smiled on him; the beacon of romance
burnt red upon the hills.
He followed the path that morning that the peasant had described to him,
a path that wound over uplands under the shadows of ancient trees. The
woods were virgin to Tristan’s heart. There were no such
broad-shouldered giants in Purple Isle with its waving pines and stunted
myrtles. The great oaks stood to him for sinew and strength. Their
gnarled loins spoke of the sap of centuries, their limbs of a hundred
battles with the wind. Youth ran riot in him that April day. He was as a
Bacchanal intoxicated with the wine of being. He smote the great trees
as he passed, bluff, open-handed buffets that would have shaken a
Hercules. Once, in the joy of strength, he grappled an oak sapling as he
would have grappled a python, wrestled with it, bent it beneath the
might of his broad back till the stem splintered and surrendered to his
grip. He tossed the broken tree aside with the smile of a conqueror,
strode on through the woods, singing as he went.
He had come to the brim of a valley, and had halted to gaze over the
meadows with their dark knolls of trees, when a shrill cry stirred him
like a wail of a hostile trumpet. Wild and inarticulate, it eddied
through the woods, terror breathing in the cry, as of life struggling in
the toils of death. The voice grew and gathered, died again into an
eerie whimper. Tristan, stiff as a wooden image, heard it with quickened
pulses and a sudden solemnity that overspread his countenance like a
cloud.
Pushing through a thicket of hollies, he came to a great break in the
woods, where the forest gloom gave place to an open valley, a golden
bowl brimming with sunlight. In green meadows a castle stood amid the
windings of a stream. Peace seemed throned above the olive thickets, the
shimmering water, and the gilded meadows. Yet from a stone bridge that
linked the sandy highway where it crossed the stream, there rose other
voices to denounce the dream.
Tristan, standing under the woodshawe, beheld a knot of figures swaying
to and fro over the keystone of the bridge. Swords were tossing, men
struggling together betwixt the parapets. The few seemed caught and
trampled by the many. Even as he watched, a horseman broke from the pool
of grappling, foining figures, and galloped northwards up the sandy
road. An archer, standing on the parapet of the bridge, loosed a shaft
at the fugitive, a shaft that found its billet in the rider’s back.
Tristan saw him thrust his arms to the sky, twist in the saddle, and
fall heavily to earth. His horse, whinnying with fear, left the high
road, and cantered over the fields towards the thicket where Tristan
stood.
Tristan was not a youth given to the subtle balancing of thought. Being
barren of all fear, save the fear of God, he obeyed without debate the
prick of impulse. Leaving the thicket, he hallooed to the riderless
brute trotting towards him over the meadows. The horse halted, tossed up
his head with ears agog, pawed the earth as he cast about from side to
side. It was a superb beast, black as a raven, with a single white star
on the forehead. Tristan called to him, advancing step by step. There
was a magic in the man that made all wild things trust him and obey. The
great beast suffered him to approach over the grass. Tristan’s hand
touched the sleek, foam-flecked muzzle. He caressed the brute’s ears,
took firm hold of the bridle, mounted at one spring, knew himself the
master.
“God helps him who helps himself,” he said, with a certain quaint
sententiousness, running his fingers through the long black mane.
Being imbued, despite his strenuous vigour, with some hard-headedness of
discretion, he ignored the blood-spilling in the valley, content to
shepherd the prize to his own good cause. Turning back into the woods,
he rode southwards from the place, keeping diligent watch, however, lest
any hot-handed gentleman should be following on his heels. Seemingly
they were busied with the purging of their own pastures, for Tristan saw
no more of them that day.