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| The Poetry of Nicholas Hancock The Poet of Despair Published by The British Hancock Society with the permission of the author. |
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| ROLF'S JOURNEY INTO THE SETTING SUN The winds of the seven mountains dropped as our longboat's keel with level hiss through the beach's pebbles moved to meet the approaching night-dark of the bay. And behind us the women stood stock-still on the dune like a line of peat hags stacked against the first light. Yes, we thought we heard them singing the song of the dead to us. But closer and closer came the dark. We shouted to urge us on and to still the faint chant behind us. Another heave: the bows knelt in the water, light as air. Up to our calves, we slid boards in the sea, and our spears rattled in, and eleven trussed boars, and water to last us to Iceland's gull cliffs, and deer skins for cold. Then we climbed up on board and backwards we looked at the peat hags, well back at the rising light, and we raised our oars. But which was Gertrud? Which Freja? And which was my own Lovisa, yes, which was she in that blackly secret line? And we lifted up our spruce oars, and the women their arms in the night, but the far seven mountains sent us a wind, and it stole us away from the dunes of Shaupang*. I sat at the steerboard hoping for stars while the men huddling silently day-dreamed of home, and, notching the days on the gunwale, I saw no sky on the breathing breast of the sea. The men were now muttering, 'Take us back. You've missed Iceland clear, and we've sailed for ten nights, and there's nothing beyond but the empty sea. We are tired of salt spray and the taste of smoked cod!' So I drew out my sword and I dared them to take the tiller away from the hand of their lord. They averted their eyes, but I knew that no sleep would be possible now if I wanted to live. After twenty more days Sigemund cut the throat of a boar, and I knew in his mind it was me; then a second, a third squeal was slashed with his knife, and each man except me had a taste of raw flesh. I stared at the blood and the frost in their beards while my hunger was stronger than sleep and despair; at my feet rolled the sunboard, and hills of the sea flexed green shoulders whose hair flew as white as a corpse. All the boars except one had been shat in the sea when my comrade young Hrothgar snatched that, and he fought all the way to the stern just to share it with me; all the crew's eyes were fixed on the red of our jaws. Night slowly became a quiet drooping of lids and dusk scarcely obscured the raw pain of my men; but Hrothgar and I took our turns to close eyes and let numbness possess us, a nodding of sleep. And islands of ice, green as jade, blue as sky, glided past our carved dragon in sea thick as broth. On the forty-third day when we'd thought it was dead the sun rose once again, and it dazzled our eyes. And it seemed - but we thought we were seeing a ghost - that before us sea-mountains as large as the earth were now barring our way to the west. Hrothgar smiled. 'It's the land of the dead, Rolf, the end of our world!' Three more days, and the mountains had reached to the sky, a white death that called to us, and we must accede. In a fjord the men lowered their weapons and rowed past a gleaming of falls and the neck-stretching rocks. At the head of the fjord cliffs descended until, like a rainbow of green, fields surrounded our ship. Cotton grass and low willows and sedges and reeds spread around us, and out of the heart of this green came a herd of shy reindeer, and they looked at us, and we at their land, at their coolly green land. Then, some forty-six days from Shaupang and its dunes, we hauled our ship up on the sand of this shore. There, pursued by mosquitoes in clouds, we recalled the mountains of Shaupang, those seven great giants, and our women who'd stood on the dune in that far irrecoverable past when we'd last seen their arms. *Spelt Kaupan |
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