CHAPTER XXI
ISLE RUGEN
They had travelled for six hours through high arched pines, their fallenneedles making a carpet green and springy underfoot. Then succeededoaks, stricken a little at top with the frosts of years. Alternatingwith these came marshy tracts where alder and white birch gleamed fromthe banks of shallow runnels and the margins of black peaty lakes. Anonthe broom and the gorse began to flourish sparsely above widesand-hills, heaved this way and that like the waves of a mountainoussea.
The party was approaching that no-man's-land which stretches for upwardsof a hundred miles along the southern shores of the Baltic. It is a landof vast brackish backwaters connected with the outer sea by deviouschannels often half silted up, but still feeling the pulse of the outergreen water in the winds which blow over the sandy "bills," bars, andspits, and bring with them sweet scents of heather and wild thyme, and,most of all, of the southernwood which grows wild on the scantilypastured braes.
It was at that time a beautiful but lonely country--the 'batable land ofhalf a dozen princedoms, its only inhabitant a stray hunter setting uphis gipsy booth of wattled boughs, heaping with stones a rude fireplace,or fixing a tripod over it whereon a pottinger was presently a-swing, insome sunny curve of the shore.
At eventide of the third day of their journeying the party came to agreat morass. Black decaying trunks of trees stood up at variousangles, often bristling with dead branches like _chevaux-de-frise_. Thehorses picked their path warily through this tangle, the rotten sticksyielding as readily and silently as wet mud beneath their hoofs. Finallyall dismounted except Joan, while Werner von Orseln, with a rough map inhis hand, traced out the way. Pools of stagnant black water had to beevaded, treacherous yellow sands tested, bridges constructed of thefirmer logs, till all suddenly they came out upon a fairylike littlehalf-moon of sand and tiny shells.
Here was a large flat-bottomed boat, drawn up against the shore. In thestern a strange figure was seated, a man, tall and angular, clad injerkin and trunks of brown tanned leather, cross-gartered hose of greycloth, and home-made shoon of hide with the hair outside. He wore ablack skull cap, and his head had the strange, uncanny look of a wildanimal. It was not at the first glance nor yet at the second that Borisand Jorian found out the cause of this curious appearance.
Meanwhile Werner von Orseln was putting into his hand some pledge orsign which he scrutinised carefully, when Jorian suddenly gripped hiscompanion's arm.
"Look," he whispered, "he's got no ears!"
"Nor any tongue!" responded Boris, staring with all his eyes at theprodigy.
And, indeed, the strange man was pointing to his mouth with the indexfinger of his right hand and signing that they were to follow him intothe boat which had been waiting for them.
Joan of the Sword Hand had never spoken since she knew that her men weretaking her to a place of safety. Nor did her face show any trace ofemotion now that Werner von Orseln, approaching cap in hand, humblybegged her to permit him to conduct her to the boat.
But the Duchess leapt from her horse, and without accepting his hand shestepped from the little pier of stone beside which the boat lay. Thenwalking firmly from seat to seat she reached the stern, where she satdown without seeming to have glanced at any of the company.
Werner von Orseln then motioned Captains Boris and Jorian to take theirplaces in the bow, and having bared his head he seated himself besidehis mistress. The wordless earless man took the oars and pushed off. Theboat slid over a little belt of still water through a wilderness of tallreeds. Then all suddenly the wavelets lapped crisp and clean beneath herbottom, and the wide levels of a lake opened out before them. The tenmen left on the shore set about building a fire and making shelters ofbrushwood, as if they expected to stay here some time.
The tiny harbour was fenced in on every side with an unbroken wall oflofty green pines. The lower part of their trunks shot up tall andstraight and opened long vistas into the black depths of the forest. Thesun was setting and threw slant rays far underneath, touching with goldthe rank marish growths, and reddening the mouldering boles of thefallen pines.
The boat passed almost noiselessly along, the strange man rowingstrongly and the boat drawing steadily away across the widest part ofthe still inland sea. As they thus coasted along the gloomy shores thesun went down and darkness came upon them at a bound. Then at the farend of the long tunnel, which an hour agone had been sunny glades, theysaw strange flickering lights dancing and vanishing, waving and leapingupward--will-o'-the-wisps kindled doubtless from the stagnant boglandsand the rotting vegetation of that ancient northern forest.
The breeze freshened. The water clappered louder under the boat'squarter. Breaths born of the wide sea unfiltered through forest danknessvisited more keenly the nostrils of the voyagers. They heard ahead ofthem the distant roar of breakers. Now and then there came a long andgradual roll underneath their quarter, quite distinct from the littlechopping waves of the fresh-water _haff_, as the surface of the mereheaved itself in a great slope of water upon which the boat swungsideways.
After a space tall trees again shot up overhead, and with a quick turnthe boat passed between walls of trembling reeds that rustled againstthe oars like silk, emerged on a black circle of water, and then,gliding smoothly forward, took ground in the blank dark.
As the broad keel grated on the sand, the Wordless Man leapt out, and,standing on the shore, put his hands to his mouth and emitted a longshout like a blast blown on a conch shell. Again and again thatmelancholy ululation, with never a consonantal sound to break it, wentforth into the night. Yet it was so modulated that it had obviously ameaning for some one, and to put the matter beyond a doubt it wasanswered by three shrill whistles from behind the rampart of trees.
Joan sat still in the boat where she had placed herself. She asked noquestion, and even these strange experiences did not alter herresolution.
Presently a light gleamed uncertainly through the trees, now lost behindbrushwood and again breaking waveringly out.
A tall figure moved forward with a step quick and firm. It was that of awoman who carried a swinging lantern in her hand, from which wheelinglights gleamed through a score of variously coloured little plates ofhorn. She wore about her shoulders a great crimson cloak which maskedher shape. A hood of the same material, attached at the back of the neckto the cloak, concealed her head and dropped about her face, partiallyhiding her features.
Standing still on a little wooden pier she held the lantern high, sothat the light fell directly on those in the boat, and their faceslooked strangely white in that illumined circle, surrounded as it was bya pent-house of tense blackness--black pines, black water, black sky.
"Follow me!" said the woman, in a deep rich voice--a voice whose tonesthrilled those who heard them to their hearts, so full and low were someof the notes.
Joan of the Sword Hand rose to her feet.
"I am the Duchess of Hohenstein, and I do not leave this boat till Iknow in what place I am, and who this may be that cries 'Follow!' to thedaughter of Henry the Lion!"
The tall woman turned without bowing and looked at the girl.
"I am the mother of Maurice von Lynar, and this is the Isle Rugen!" shesaid simply, as if the answer were all sufficient.