"Heigh-ho, I could sleep the clock round myself!"
Caspian, escaping the Dark Island
Several days after their escape from the Island of Dreams, with the Dawn Treader scudding along at a fine pace, five figures stood in line on her main deck, wooden instruments raised to their eyes. On either end of the line were the tall figures of the ship's Captain and Mate; between them, much smaller and more inclined to fidget, stood Lucy, Edmund and Eustace. Caspian, who had long ago given up any pretension he might have had to ability in the art they were practising, rested against the ladder to the poop deck, content to laze in the sunshine and wait to tease his friends for making as much of a botch job of their lesson as he once had.
Setting down his sextant (for such was the instrument named) Drinian seized a slate and chalk, rapidly scrawling a succession of numbers. A second later and Rhince too was scribbling furiously, his brow deeply furrowed with concentration.
More slowly, the three children lowered their devices and set about scratching out their sums: Caspian was mildly relieved to observe in them a complete lack of the casual confidence that marked the actions of the two experienced seamen. Eustace nibbled the end of his chalk, oblivious to its taste. Lucy rubbed out furiously. Edmund hissed, hesitated, squared his shoulders, and ploughed on.
By which time, Drinian had swooshed a dramatic line beneath his final calculation. A raised eyebrow, a nod, and Rhince was beside him, comparing his slate to the other's. The two men glanced at each other's answers, and smiled.
The Mate bustled away, passing the lounging King with a brisk greeting, on his way to record the Dawn Treader's present position, her speed, course steered, and the distance covered since yesterday's noon sight had been taken, in the ship's log. Drinian would check and sign it later, Caspian knew: theirs was a journey into the unknown, his friend had told him severely, when he had dared question the need for such scrupulous record-keeping. And no man would accuse the Lord High Admiral of Narnia of failing to follow his own meticulous regulations!
"I think I've done it, Drinian." Edmund scratched his nose, getting chalk all over it. Lucy, her eyebrows still drawn tight together from the effort of thinking, turned her slate to his.
"Golly! One of us has gone wrong somewhere!" she cried, for by her calculation, the ship was at least eight degrees further north than Edmund allowed. "And you're awfully quiet, Eustace!"
"If either of you are right, I've spoiled my good run," her cousin told her petulantly. "After three successive days of perfect navigation, it would be too bad to have mucked up now, as Rhince would say!"
Drinian laughed heartily at the impersonation of his deputy's put-upon tone. "If you're awry, so too are Rhince and myself," he said, with all the confidence of one who knew he was no such thing. "Aye, latitude and course are exact: you're a mite out in your estimation of speed - a knot, by my reckoning - but otherwise… we may have to promote you, Eustace!"
"Put me on an oar then, Drinian, because I've gone hopelessly wrong somewhere." Edmund scowled at his offending slate. "How the devil did I get that?"
"I'm only a little way out." Lucy was quite relieved. "What did I get wrong, Drinian?"
He took her slate, frowned for a moment, then nodded. "Easy enough; you see, Queen Lucy, your subtraction is out by one - make this seven instead of six, and the equation balances perfectly."
Aware that a handful of malingerers were eavesdropping, ready to convey the result of the apprentice navigators' lesson to their fellows, he raised his voice a little. "As for King Edmund here… Your Majesty will have company in the galley, should that crisis ever befall us! You are not the only member of this ship's company that struggles to take a decent sight!"
"A relief indeed, my Lord," said Caspian formally. Edmund stamped his foot.
"Bother!" he said. "I can't cook!"
"No more can I; but our captain assures me for a replacement galley master, that is more an advantage than a disqualification."
Muffled snorts of laughter rose from the loiterers. "I worked so hard in maths last term," Lucy reflected. "And I can still make a silly mistake like that!"
"A misjudgement in calculation can be easily amended," The mathematics of navigation, as natural as breathing now, had not come so readily to Drinian in his early days at sea; a source of frequent frustration, when the other arts of seamanship had always been so easy, he wondered why others struggled with them. "A sight wrongly taken, that cannot be repaired. King Edmund, take another, let me - ah!"
He seized the boy's arm, brought the elbow down from its absurdly high position, then with the flat of his hand pressed down Edmund's head. "With the sextant so strangely held, Sire, I wonder you could see to take an angle!" he exclaimed. "Now, read off the angle of sun to horizon again."
"Oh!" Edmund was unsure whether he should be relieved to be reading the dial beneath the sight so easily, or mortified for being caught in so elementary an error. "It looks quite different now. Here, Lu, hand me the slate, will you?"
With his sleeve he wiped out the first set of equations and set about scrawling a second; quicker, more confident, he had the sums completed in a trice (having always been better at arithmetic than Lucy). "How's that?" he asked. I wonder if this is how Peter feels, waiting for the Professor to check his prep for the exam?
"Good, Your Majesty," Drinian approved, chalking a large tick across the slate. As the boy whooped his delight, and Eustace began to brag about getting things right first time, the Dawn Treader's captain allowed himself a moment of smug satisfaction. His ruse to distract their passengers from the lingering terror of the Isle of Dreams had worked better than he had ever dared hope.
Not half the ship's company was sleeping properly, he guessed, after their experience in the mysterious darkness. The fascination of watching their royal guests struggling to master some of a sailor's tasks had given every man a new subject to discuss. Their achievements (or otherwise) were praised (or pitied). Jokes like Caspian's about the galley master's cooking skills would be passed from stem to stern. Minds would be dragged from the shattered wreck that was the Lord Rhoop after his years in that place. The air about the decks would seem to grow brighter.
Yes, Drinian was pleased with the result of his careless inspiration. He said as much to his sovereign, when they were left leaning together against the starboard rail amidships.
"Perhaps we might interest Rhoop in navigation?" Caspian had come from an hour's conversation with his father's friend. He hoped his visit had raised the elder Narnian's spirits: it had had quite the opposite effect on his own.
Drinian snorted. "Seems to me we'd be wasting our time!"
"Now, I know he's not the liveliest of shipmates, my Lord…" Caspian began, really surprised by his friend's rudeness. "But after all that he endured…"
Drinian raised his hands. "It is wholly understandable," he agreed pacifically. "My meaning was only this; those seven friends of our fathers showed not the smallest interest in their ship - did not Bern admit it? - or the practicalities of their journey. A Galmian ship, a hired crew… they were mere passengers, without interest in how the ship sailed, or what their companions did. And that, the sailor in me cannot fathom at all!"
"You have shown exemplary patience, old friend, in bearing with the damnable lubbers cluttering your decks," Caspian told him. Drinian gave a rich, deep roar of laughter.
"I have done no such thing; as Your Majesty knows, having felt the rough edge of my tongue more often than most!" he bellowed. "Nay, Sire, your courtier's manners have been less than courtly on too many occasions! The patience has been yours, suffering my rudeness without complaint or (that I could see) offence."
"You have been - brusque, at times," Caspian acknowledged, conscious of Rynelf, scrubbing the deck behind them and eagerly recording every word. "But we have been a nuisance to you and your crew; come, if I'm to make an admission, so must you! Shall we take a tour of our good ship, Captain?"
Recognising the royal code for I have something troubling me, Drinian answered with a deep, graceful bow. "I am at Your Majesty's service," he said.
Still, it took the whole tour of the upper decks and a descent into the hold, where they paused to check the condition of the great oak water barrels, before the King could express the troublesome matter. "How much longer, Drinian?" he all but wailed, thumping his fist into the sloping planks of the lower hull in his frustration. "Six months of ploughing on east, east, with the wind behind us, Reep's dreadful ditty about sweet waves ringing in our ears… I want to go home!"
A severe case of homesickness. The thought in Drinian's head had a habit of tripping off his tongue a second later. "The wonder of it is, that it should be so long in afflicting so inexperienced a traveller," he added, guiding his friend forward to perch on one of the long benches for oarsmen across the breadth of the ship's body. "'Tis natural; every man jack of us has been touched by it, I dare say. The novelty, most likely, has protected you longer than the rest."
"Is that all? So simple?" The weight that, on leaving Rhoop, had been close to crushing, lifted a smidgen from his shoulders, and Drinian, watching him sit straighter, cursed himself for not observing the minute signs in Caspian he had watched for and acted upon amongst his crew. "I swore a vow, I know; and I have been selfish, barely thinking of Narnia as we few have tumbled from discovery to crisis and on to adventure. Now… Drinian, I can think of nothing else!"
"Happens to us all, Caspian. And if the novelty of months at sea has protected you so long, I suppose, the blow must naturally strike with greater force, when it comes."
"You too?" It was hard, Caspian thought, to credit. Perpetually busy, always encouraging, his friend had been the model of confident determination through the whole course of their quest. Yet, had he not as many reasons to pine than any other man? "Do you find yourself yearning for a glimpse of green Etinsmere - for the smile of your sweet Daniela - and feeling this - terrible hopelessness that they are so far away?"
"I should be less than human, had I not those longings," replied Drinian simply. "But - being the hardened old tar I am - I know they come, and I wait for them to pass. Ah, Edmund - Lucy! Our shipmate has a sudden case of sea-blight."
"You're missing Narnia all of a sudden, eh?" Edmund squeezed onto the bench at Caspian's side. Lucy, tucking her feet under her beside Drinian, nodded.
"I thought you were quiet, this morning," she said sympathetically. "Goodness, I never miss the other place - England, I mean - when I'm here, but I do remember the awful, achy feeling in the pit of my stomach when we first sailed for the Lone Islands. We were only gone three months, but oh! How I missed Cair Paravel and all our friends!"
"I doubt anybody's ever away from home more than a few weeks without feeling it, to some degree," said Edmund. His eyes narrowed. "You must know all about it, Drinian."
"Just what I was saying when you came down." The nights were the worst; the still, silent nights that followed on the tail of a crisis. The achingly sweet torment of longing to hear her voice, feel the cool brush of her hand against his cheek. "I pined for Narnia all the ten years I was exiled, Caspian; I miss her still, the woods of Etinsmere, the great empty moors on the northern frontier… but I never really knew loneliness at sea before this."
"Daniela." Caspian smiled on her name. "My Lord Drinian left his enchanting betrothed in Narnia to command our quest; a sacrifice I ought never have asked of any man."
"Aye, Daniela. She knew - as we all knew, Caspian! - that there was none other in Narnia could captain the royal ship. And though I'll only cease to long for a sight of her when we're close to the Cair, and the fear that she might have found some contemptible lubber to take my place while we're gone can loom…"
"Drinian, for shame! The lady - mistress of Glasswater province, daughter to another of my father's murdered friends - is lost in love with you!" Caspian protested, startled into his first real laugh of the day.
"I should not have given my place on this ship to any other man," Drinian concluded seriously, though his eyes twinkled in the hold's musty gloom. "You see, Caspian, mine is the dilemma of the sailor: on land, I yearn for the sway of a ship and the salt taste of the sea on my tongue. A few weeks at sea, and I wish for naught but green fields and the comforts of my manor. Marriage will change that not a whit, as Daniela declares she understands; time will tell on that!
"As to your homesickness, there's no cure but time, and occupation. You'll know the times it affects me most; those are the mornings I discover a dozen duties unattended, and drive poor Rhince to distraction with more drills for the men and more unnecessary tasks for myself! Now, shall we return to deck? I dare say the men ought to be tested at the guns; we've not run them out these last six weeks at least."
"I've started you off now, haven't I?" asked the king remorsefully. Drinian shrugged.
"I shall shake it off, Caspian; and the instant another novelty hoves into sight, so shall you! Now, let's be away. Edmund, as Eustace appears to have your measure as a navigator, how would you care to try your skill as a gunner? We're lightly armed - two cannon a side, bow and stern as you know - but with good discipline amongst the crew, we can defend ourselves well enough. And what of you, Caspian? There's naught like the thunder of a pair o' ten-pounders to clear the head!"
