The Harbour Master's Rule Book

Rolf held the Arrival Notice out over the sump, where the light from the door was best and where anything he let go of would be gone for good.

Kindly Frost, it said. Of Nevelund. Master, S. Nyberg. Crew, fourteen. Declared: fish, cold-cured; ice-glass. And under that, in the Skerry Point pilot’s quick slanting hand, the line every rime-hull carried in: Melt line: berth to the evening tide, the day after tomorrow.

Under the Notice, the sump was making a noise like a mill.

It was a square stone pit in the floor of the sump house, the size of a grave, with an iron grating over it and a gauge post standing up out of one corner with rings painted round it in red. Three stone gutters came in under the wall from the berth and emptied into it. The water in them was clear and hard and very cold, and it wasn’t trickling. It was hurrying.

“The day after tomorrow,” Bjorn said.

“So says the pilot.”

“She came in at first light.”

“So says the sump,” said Rolf.

Bjorn leaned round the door to look at her.

Cold Berth One was a dock cut back into the quay, stone on three sides and a gate on the fourth, and the water had been let out from under the Kindly Frost as soon as the gate shut behind her. She sat on a row of timber keel blocks on the dock floor like a fish on a slab.

She was ice. Hull, deck, rail, deckhouse and the long low run of her bow, all of it grown, all of it the grey-green of deep water where the sun didn’t reach her and white fire where it did. There was iron where ice wouldn’t serve: a keel shoe, pintles for a rudder of ice, and three bands round a mast as thick as an oak. A gangway ran down from her rail to the quay. Her crew were bringing crates down it, one at a time, and stacking them on the frost.

And all along her sides, from the line where Harbour water had held her on the way in, she ran. Water came down her flanks in sheets, gathered at the keel blocks, found the gutters in the dock floor, and went off to the sump house in a hurry.

The cold came off her like the breath of an open ice house. The quay was white with frost for two yards back from the edge.

“She’s sinking,” Bjorn said.

“She’s on blocks. She isn’t sinking.” Rolf folded the Notice in half along an old crease. “She’s being discharged.”

He turned the Rule Book on his forearm, and Bjorn read it over the edge of his sleeve.

Rule 17,254. A vessel that will not leave the Harbour whole is to declare its hull as cargo.

Bjorn read it twice, and looked at the ship, and read it again.

“As cargo,” he said.

“As cargo.”

“Nobody declares a rime-hull.”

That wasn’t Bjorn. It came from behind him, and was followed into the sump house by Berth Overseer Hask Corrin, walking carefully on the frost, with an allocation sheet in one fist and a pencil between his teeth. He took the pencil out to be heard.

“Nobody,” he said. “I’ve had rime-hulls in this berth since before it had a gate. They come in, they drip, they go home on the packet, I sweep up the iron. Nobody’s ever declared the ice. It’s ice. Everybody knows what ice is.”

“The Rule doesn’t ask what it’s made of,” said Rolf.

“What’s she going to put, then? Water, eventually?”

“She’ll put it on the declaration when she signs the berth off. By then there’s nothing left of the hull but that.” Rolf nodded at the iron bands on the mast. “Iron has a price. Salvage will want to know it and so will duty. That’s what the Rule’s for.”

Corrin licked his pencil and looked at the back of his allocation sheet, where he’d written two figures one under the other, and underlined the second.

“Berth fee,” he said. “By displacement. I reckoned her at the gate, and I reckoned her again at seven, and she’s cheaper.”

“Reckon her at noon.”

“She’ll be cheaper still.”

“By teatime,” Rolf said, “we’ll owe her.”

Corrin didn’t write that down. He went out with the face of a man who’d been told his house was sinking by inches and his rent was going down with it, and he took a pair of iron frames off a peg by the door on his way, and held them out to Bjorn without looking.

“Creepers,” he said. “Nobody walks on my frost without creepers.”

Bjorn turned them over. “These are cut wrong,” he said. “Both of them.”

Corrin stopped in the doorway and turned round, which he had not done for the Harbour Master. “They’re cut for feet,” he said. “A left and a right.” He went.

* * *

They were iron soles with short spikes under them and leather straps over the top, and Bjorn sat on the sump-house step to buckle them on, since there was nothing else to sit on and Rolf plainly wasn’t going to.

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“Read her melt line,” Rolf said. “Not this one. Hers. Nevelund cuts marks into the bow. Tell me whether they agree with the pilot.”

Bjorn stood up.

The spikes bit. He took a step out onto the frost, and the frost took his boot straight out from under him, and he went two yards along the quay edge on one heel with his arms out like a man carrying invisible trays and fetched up against a bollard. He looked down. The spikes went backwards. The creeper on his right boot had been cut for a left one, and the creeper on his left boot had been cut for a right one, and every step he took forwards, the ice had nothing to argue with.

He tried a step backwards. It held perfectly.

So he went along the quay to the gangway backwards, one careful bite at a time, past the stacked crates of fish and a pair of Nevelund crew who stopped work to watch him come, and up the gangway backwards as well, holding the rail, which was ice, and which was wet.

At the top a woman was waiting for him with her arms folded.

She was tall, in an oiled-wool coat and a knitted cap with a grey plait coming out from under it, and her hands were red to the wrist from handling cold things. She let him get as far as the deck. Then she knelt on the ice in front of him, unbuckled both creepers without a word, swapped them over, buckled them up again, and stood.

“Harbour,” she said.

“Bjorn. The Harbour Master’s Office.”

“Solveig Nyberg. Master.” She had a Nevelund way of saying master, like a job rather than a rank. “You want the marks.”

She took him forward along the deck. The ice underfoot was scored in a cross-hatch for grip, and his creepers, facing the right way at last, bit into it cleanly. Down every hatch Bjorn passed, light came up through the hull from outside, green and moving, as if the hold was under the sea. Crew went past him with crates on their shoulders. Nobody spoke much. They moved like people who had done this at the end of a great many crossings and would like to be home by the next packet.

At the bow Nyberg leaned out over the rail and pointed.

Cut into the ice of the stem, from the keel shoe up, was a ladder of short straight notches, each with a small mark beside it in Nevelund script. The water ran down over them. The notches near the bottom were already gone soft at the edges.

“Arrival,” Nyberg said, touching the air above one notch. “First night in harbour. Second night. The evening tide after.” She moved her finger down to where the water was, and stopped. “Here.”

The pilot’s line said the day after tomorrow. The bow said tomorrow night, and was thinking about today.

“Is that the sun?” Bjorn said.

“The sun is the sun. We know about the sun.” Nyberg reached down over the rail and knocked on the hull with a knuckle, twice, and listened, the way somebody listens at a door. She did it again a yard aft. “Landward side’s soft. She should be hard all through. She’s weeping like a spring hull and it isn’t spring.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means she’s quick.” Nyberg straightened. “It doesn’t matter. She was only ever for one crossing, Harbour. The ice came with the loan, with the salt and the rope. A hull goes, the crew go home. We don’t weep for a puddle. I want the fish sold and my people on the packet before she’s gone, and I want to not be standing in her when she goes.”

Across the deck, two of her crew had stopped with a crate between them and were looking at the landward rail. Bjorn looked too. The rail was running with water. It didn’t look any different from the rest of her.

It sounded different. Somewhere down in the ice, not loud, something went tock, like a pond at night.

* * *

The noise came round the end of the harbour wall five minutes later, and it came well ahead of the barge.

It was louder than anything Bjorn had ever heard on a quay, and it went on. It came off the water beyond the berth gate in a thudding, clanking, hissing roar, with a whistle over the top of it, and frost fell off the Kindly Frost’s rail in little glittering sheets. On the quay, a Nevelund ice-wright put both hands over his ears and kept them there.

A flat black barge came round the wall’s end under its own smoke, with a long canvas hose coiled on its deck and, amidships, a steam pump the size of a bread oven, shaking.

A brass plate on the side of the pump said SUMPSUCKER 60. Underneath it somebody had painted a board, in cheerful red, NOW QUIETER.

The barge came up under the seaward face of the wall, where an iron pipe stuck out of the stone halfway down with a valve wheel on a spindle over it. She couldn’t get near it. The tide was down and the pipe was up out of reach, and the barge lay off below it and waited, roaring.

A big man in a leather apron stood beside the pump with one hand flat on its flank, like a man keeping a horse calm.

“Mr Grice,” Rolf called, from the quay above.

“What?”

“Mr Grice!”

“What?”

Rolf didn’t try again, and he didn’t shout. He stood at the top of the wall and waited, and after a while the big man looked up, and saw the chain of office, and reached behind him and did something to a lever. The Sumpsucker coughed twice and stopped. The silence that came after it rang like a struck pan.

“Thaddeus Grice, Grice and Sons,” the big man said, much too loudly, into the quiet. “Standing booking, Cold Berths, sump clearance. High water’s early afternoon, Harbour Master. I’m early because the tide never is.”

“Your booking’s for high water.”

“And I’m keeping the Sixty warm for it. She’s a devil to start cold.” Grice patted the pump. “Sump’ll be full by then, by the sound of it. I’ll have her in my tanks and off out for disposal on the first of the ebb, and your berth dry by tea.”

“Leave it off until then.”

“She’s quieter than the old one.”

“I’m sure she is,” said Rolf.

* * *

Warden Perce Callow came along the quay from Ecology with a wooden crate of jars in both arms and his tide-almanac wedged in on top of them, and he didn’t say good morning. He said, “Nothing leaves that sump until I’ve had some of it.”

“Nothing can,” Rolf said. “Not till high water.”

“Then I’ve till high water.” Callow put the crate down on the frost, took out a jar, and knelt at the edge of the sump grating with a long brass dipper. He filled the jar, held it up to the light from the door, and capped it. Then he did something Bjorn had never seen him do: he took the cap off again and smelled it.

He capped it again. He wrote on its label. He didn’t say anything.

“Warden?” said Rolf.

“Bench,” said Callow. “By high water, if the bench is kind. Nothing out of there before.”

He went off up the quay at his own exact pace with the jar held upright in front of him.

Bjorn knelt where Callow had knelt, and put his face down near the grating.

Cold came up off the water into his nose, clean and sharp, like biting snow. And under the cold, so faint he thought for a moment he’d made it up, there was something else. Something sweet. Not sugar. The kind of sweet that wanted very badly to be a remedy, and wasn’t.

He had smelled it once before, coming up out of a cracked crate in a hold at Berth Six, on a morning with a man on the deck above him who wasn’t moving right.

He stayed on his knees. He didn’t say it. He had one smell and no jar, and a smell wasn’t a finding.

When he looked up, Rolf was looking at the sump too, with his hand near his chain and not on it.

“Callow will tell us what it is,” Rolf said. “Until then it’s a smell.”

Bjorn stood. The creepers bit. He looked up at the ship.

Up on the ice deck, at the landward rail, a small crewhand in a borrowed oilskin two sizes too big for her had stopped with a crate of fish in her arms. She wasn’t watching the fish. She was watching the sump-house door, and now she was watching him: sharp-angled, slight, with slit pupils in a face that gave nothing away.

Then she turned and carried the crate aft, and he knew the walk before he let himself know the face.

Kest.

End of Part 1