The Sailing Prince

Stories for Another Day

Because of things that had happened in his early life which you may have heard about, Prince Opie loved water. He loved being in the water and on the water and over the water. His best friend was a giant named Timber, who besides being a carpenter and captain of the guard, had lived long enough to know a great many useful things.

He taught Opie how to swim and how to paddle, how to row and how to float, how to steer a boat, and how to judge currents, but one thing that Opie learned for himself was how to sail, and once he had learned that, he knew what he had been born for.

When Opie was still a very young boy, Timber helped him to make a raft. Now you can be sure that anything Timber made out of wood was sound and watertight, so the raft floated magnificently and never tipped at all. They took it down to the stream that ran by the castle, and it was so blithe and slippy that Opie would have floated out of sight downstream in a trice if it hadn’t had a long, stout rope tied to it that Timber kept hold of.

Over and over Timber let out the rope so the raft would float away down the stream, and then hauled it up to the dock again, until his patience was almost worn out, and for a giant that is saying something. After that, nothing would satisfy Opie but a boat of his own.

Timber insisted that Opie build it himself, so that he would know every board and every nail in her, and even with Timber helping and making Opie re-shape and re-hammer board after board until it was perfectly shipshape and safe as an egg, it took a long, long time. By the time it was ready to launch, Opie was older and taller and slightly wiser in the ways of wood and shipcraft, which had been Timber’s plan all along.

In the meantime, of course, Opie spent every spare moment he had on the water, so he had gradually become an expert at rowing and punting and kayaking and capsizing and marine rescue, as well as fishing and trout-tickling and swimming and water-gazing.

Every day Opie studied history and languages and state-craft with his tutors, as every young prince must, but at night he studied navigation and geography by himself, so that he could find his way by the wind or the stars, or by the shape of the coastline, by day or by night.

The day finally came when Opie’s sailing-boat was finished, and Opie raised his first sail.

Timber knew nothing about sailing, and neither did anyone else in the castle except for Timber’s wife, Rose, who had at least seen a sailing boat before. It was Rose who made the sails for Opie’s boat, out of her memory, from clean, white canvas, but she knew nothing about how to raise them or lower them or use them to make the boat move. But as soon as Opie felt the wind fill the sail and tug at the rope in his hand, his deepest instincts moved his hands and his muscles, and he knew what do without thinking. Before Timber could take a breath to say, “Be careful,” Opie and his sailing boat were out of sight.

When Opie and the sailing-boat reappeared, just as night was falling, his eyes shining, muttering about wind direction and more sail area, Timber knew that his job was done. He could relax and spend more time watching over his own growing family of young giants.

From then on, every moment that Opie was not actually studying or eating or sleeping he spent in his sailing-boat. Day after day Rose would watch him run down to the water and jump aboard his boat, with her heart in her mouth, wondering if he would sail too far this time and not be able to find his way home again, or test himself against a wind too powerful and he and his boat both be lost.

One day she was proved right. Opie set off early, as soon as the wind was up, and by the time night had fallen, he wasn’t back. “Something has happened to him!” Rose said to Timber. “I know it – something terrible!”

Timber listened to her. He dragged the old rowing boat out of the boatshed and set off, just as the moon was coming up.

A sailing boat may be swift and cover a lot of distance in a short time, but a fully-grown giant rowing with all his strength is not far behind. Timber rowed as fast as he could until he felt as if the muscles in his arms would break, downstream along the great river and then into the huge expanse of the lake, where the wind was whipping up waves as high as his head. Then he heard a weak cry. It was Opie, clinging to a few boards in the middle of the lake. With his great strength, Timber hauled the prince into the rowboat, soaked and half-frozen, but alive and bursting with a story that he couldn’t wait to tell Timber.

“I dropped anchor in a little sheltered cove, to do some fishing,” he said. “The water was perfectly calm, and then suddenly the boat tipped as if something was pulling on the anchor, and I was thrown overboard. That was no problem, many’s the time I’ve gone overboard and hauled myself back on board again. But as I was sinking in the water, something grabbed my leg.” His voice grew strained and his eyes opened wide. “I’m sure it was a giant hand!”

“A giant hand grabbed your leg and tried to pull you down?” Timber said, wondering if Opie had hit his head and imagined everything.

Opie said, “It kept pulling and pulling me down. I struggled as hard as I could to get free, and just as I felt as if I couldn’t hold my breath for one second longer, it let me go. I swam back to the surface, but the boat was gone, except for a few planks that I clung on to – I knew you would come, Timber.”

As soon as the queen heard this story, she said, “Never again! Opie’s never going out on the water again, ever!”

“Now, Hazel,” the king said, “the moat will be all right, so long as there are plenty of guards about, all fully armed, of course…”

But the queen would not be moved. Timber could see from the spark in Opie’s eyes, that no matter what his mother said, it wasn’t over.

Sure enough, the next day he found Opie loading a rope into the rowboat. “If you’re going to look for your boat, you won’t be able to bring her back by yourself,” Timber said, climbing aboard.

They set off with Timber rowing, and before long they were back in the sheltered cove where Opie had dropped anchor before. “Here,” he said. “This is where it happened.” The sun was warm and the waters of the lake were calm and barely moving. There was no sign of the sailing-boat, not a single board or scrap of sail. Then a low sound echoed around the bay, like the howl of an unearthly animal.

Opie and Timber grabbed each other. “What was that?” Opie gasped. Then he said, “Wait – aren’t there underground caves around here? Maybe there’s an animal trapped in one of them.”

“Either that, or the creature that tried to drown you is hungry for a meal,” Timber said.

They rowed ashore and started hunting. Among the rocks they found the opening of a cave. “Be careful,” Timber said, peering in. “It drops straight down, like a chimney.”

Opie leaned over the hole and shouted. A hollow, piercing howl came back to him. “Poor creature,” he said. “It must have fallen in and been unable to climb out again. Can you lower me on the rope so I can go and take a look?”

“Wait!” said Timber. He shouted into the opening, and if you have ever heard a giant shout, you’ll know how it echoed down the hole, rumbling and roaring. Seconds later, they heard an answering cry. “It’s not an animal,” he said, “there’s someone down there.”

Opie looked down the hole and he looked out over the cove nearby. “What if the bottom of the cave stretches out under the lake itself?”

“Then it would be flooded, and nothing could live down there,” Timber said.

“Not if its floor was higher than the lake, and if there was just a small opening, like a passage that gets narrower and narrower, so that someone could swim to its end but not be able to get through.”

“Except for an arm or one hand!” exclaimed Timber. “You said a giant hand grabbed you?”

“A giant’s hand?” Opie said.

They both imagined someone Timber’s size falling down the hole at their feet into a great, dark cave half full of water far below, blundering about, wailing and moaning, and then finding a passage and swimming along it, hoping to find a way to escape, but instead finding the passage getting narrower and narrower, tighter and tighter around his body. They imagined him reaching out blindly with one hand through the hole at the end of the passageway, grabbing and snatching in the waters of the lake.

“Timber, get the rope,” Opie said quickly. They tied one end around the base of a tree and dropped the other end into the cave. Timber shouted down into the cave again, and then he began pulling the rope up.

Clinging to the other end of the rope, wet and hungry, was Timber’s friend, Wezel, about as angry as a giant can get. When he could speak, it was just as they had thought. “I fell down this hole, and I couldn’t climb out again. The bottom is full of water, so I tried to swim through an opening that leads to the bottom of the lake, but the passage turned out to be too narrow.” Wezel shivered. “I almost got myself stuck. I could have drowned! I went as far as I could, and I managed to get one arm through, and I grabbed hold of something that felt like a rope in the water and tried to pull myself out with it, but I suppose I was too heavy for it.”

Opie and Timber looked at each other. “My anchor rope,” Opie said.

Wezel said, “I kept feeling around, and I caught something that felt like an eel but it wriggled away from me.”

“That would have been your leg,” Timber said.

“I was never so happy in my life to hear your voice, Timber,” Wezel said.

Opie’s boat was lying at the bottom of the lake, too damaged to save, so Wezel helped them build a new sailing-boat, bigger and faster than the old one. Some of the other young giants came along and helped, and before long, they were building boats for other people too. Opie designed all sorts of ships, and the giants built them expertly. Eventually Opie, the sailing prince, led a whole fleet of sailing ships on voyages of discovery around the fourteen islands and far, far beyond. But that is a story for another day.