The Harbour Master's Rule Book

The frost went to water under his fingers straight away, and then the stone underneath it began to go too.

Bjorn’s whole weight hung off eight fingers on a wet lip of quay. He got his chin over the edge and there was nothing to put a boot on, because the wall below the lip had been cut back to take a fender that wasn’t there any more, and the creepers rang off the stone and found nothing twice.

Somebody landed flat on the frost in front of his hands.

It was not Cobb. It was a small sharp-angled crewhand in a borrowed oilskin, who had come from the stacked crates at the run and gone down full length, and who now got both hands round both his wrists and set her elbows.

“Don’t,” Kest said.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You’re going to kick. Everybody kicks.” Her face was a hand’s breadth from his. The rasp under her breathing had gone ragged and her grip was a ring of cold round each wrist, under the cuff, skin on skin. “You kick, you come off. Hold still and be heavy.”

He held still and was heavy.

It took a while. He knew afterwards that it was not long, because Cobb had heard the gangway go and was moving before it landed, and Cobb had to come the length of the berth on frost. It was a while. Bjorn’s fingers stopped being fingers and became a set of hooks he could no longer feel the shape of, and Kest held on to his wrists and took the weight his hands were giving up, and swore at him steadily in a language he didn’t have, and did not once look down into the berth.

“Your hands are going,” she said.

“I know.”

“Look at me.”

He looked at her. Slit pupils, very wide. Dust of frost all along one cheek. Somebody’s blood on her knuckle, probably his.

“There,” she said. “Now you can’t see how far it is.”

Somewhere behind all of it, Rolf’s voice said one word, and the word was “Cobb.”

Cobb arrived with two Nevelund ice-wrights and no ceremony whatsoever. A hand shut on Bjorn’s collar and another on his belt and the third and fourth on his coat generally, and he came up over the lip of the quay in a long ugly scrape and lay on the frost with his face in it while the berth roared and cracked below him.

“Miss,” Cobb said. “You can let go of him now.”

Neither of them let go.

Kest was flat on the stone with her elbows out and her hands still round his wrists, and Bjorn was flat on the stone with his arms out in front of him, and neither of them moved, and the noise came up out of the berth, and for three or four seconds the whole of Cold Berth One was somebody else’s problem.

“Miss,” said Cobb, “you can let go.”

She let go. Bjorn got his arms under himself. She was up first, and then she was ten feet away, being a crewhand carrying a crate, and nobody who had not been watching would have known she had been anywhere else.

* * *

The ice-wrights got their own people off, and they did it the way people do a thing they have done before.

The deck lay over at a slope a man couldn’t stand on, so two of them went up the high side on their adzes, cutting steps as they went, three chops a tread, and the rest came after with a line. They cut a staircase down her canted deck into the dark of the after hatch and they brought the hold crew up it one at a time: three ice-wrights, a boy of about fifteen with a bloody ear, the second hired hand from the Marrowline routes with his arms full of somebody else’s coat, and, last, Solveig Nyberg, who came up the steps her own crew had cut and stepped off her ship onto Harbour stone without looking back at it.

Reyne’s staff had the cordon stakes in and the tape run out before the last of them was clear. Down on the barge the Sumpsucker had been shut off at some point in all that, and nobody could afterwards say when. Cobb counted heads twice and gave Rolf a number, and Rolf checked it against the Notice himself.

Fourteen. Nobody in the berth. A boy’s ear, a wright’s wrist, and an apprentice’s hands, which were white to the knuckle and had begun, as the feeling came back into them, to hurt in a way that made him want to lie down.

One of Reyne’s staff wrapped them in wool and lint without being asked and told him to keep them still, which was the only instruction he obeyed perfectly all day.

* * *

Nyberg declared her hull at the foot of the fallen gangway, standing on the frost, with her cap in her fist and her eleven behind her.

Reyne had the form. Rolf had the Book.

“Kindly Frost, of Nevelund,” Nyberg said. “I declare her hull as cargo, under your Rule.” She stopped. Then she said the rest of it, in the voice of a woman paying out a rope she can see the end of. “Contents unknown.”

Reyne’s pen stopped. “Unknown.”

“I did not grow the ice. I was given it. I do not know what is in it.” Nyberg looked at Rolf. “I have thought since first light that there is something in it. That is not knowing. I am not going to swear to a thing I have only thought, and I am not going to write ice on your form either, because I have had my thumb in that wall.”

“Write it as she says it,” Rolf said.

Reyne wrote it as she said it.

“Who read you the Rule, Master Nyberg?” said Rolf.

“Your apprentice. On my own deck, out of your own Book, with my glass going down the gangway behind him.” Nyberg did not look round at Bjorn, which he was grateful for. “He read it and he asked me two questions and he went away again. I have had worse visits from officials.”

Rolf looked at Bjorn until he had decided something, and did not say what it was.

Then he opened the Rule Book on his forearm and found the page without hunting for it.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

“I’m invoking Rule 17,254 on the hull of the Kindly Frost, of Nevelund, declared as cargo, contents unknown, in Cold Berth One.”

Away over the warehouse roofs, the Lighthouse tolled once. It dropped into the berth, and the broken ice gave a little of it back, flat and out of tune. Rolf held the Book where it was until the last of it had gone, and when he spoke again he did it a shade more slowly than he had begun, like a man walking with something heavy in one hand.

“The declaration is good,” he said. “A master declares what she has, as far as she knows it. Rule 4,417 asks for cargo that can alter a person to be declared as such, and Master Nyberg has declared her hull as what it is, which is a hull she cannot vouch for. That is a declaration. There is no concealment on this berth.” He shut the Book one-handed. “Officer Reyne. It’s declared cargo, and it’s hazardous until your bench says otherwise, and it’s in your hands.”

“Then the berth is sealed,” Reyne said, already turning. “Nothing leaves it in a bucket, a boot or a bottle. Valve the sump, seal the outfall, and I want every drop that’s in there and every drop that’s coming into casks under my mark, and the casks logged where they stand.” She raised her voice without any apparent effort. “Mr Grice. Take your hand off my valve.”

* * *

Grice had the spindle wheel in both hands.

He was down the wall on his own barge’s rail with the hose coupled, eight feet under the coping, and the wheel was already a quarter turn over, and his boy had the Sixty going again before anybody on the quay had got a hand near either of them.

“I’ve a booking!” he shouted up. “Standing booking! Cold Berths, sump clearance, high water! There’s a berth full of it coming over the top and I’m the man who takes it away!”

“Mr Grice,” Rolf said.

The wheel went another quarter turn.

Cobb had the strap off his shoulder without hurrying, went to the wall edge, leaned out, and held the Stayfast 2 at arm’s length down the face of the stone with the little green light showing in the brass grip.

Grice stopped with his hands on the wheel.

He stopped mid-motion and stayed exactly as he was, leaning, with his jaw set, and only his eyes moving. On the barge below him his boy said something extremely rude and reached for the tiller.

One of Reyne’s staff went down the wall ladder a good deal faster than the ladder was meant to be gone down, stepped round the frozen contractor, wound the wheel back shut and drove the locking pin home. The Sumpsucker pulled on nothing, made a noise like a gull going through a hedge, and was shut off by a boy with both hands.

That was when Grice came unstuck, one arm at a time, and sat down hard on his own rail.

“Four seconds,” Cobb said. He looked at the baton. He held it up and looked into the grip at the light, which had gone from green to dark, exactly as advertised. “Four seconds!”

“It’s enough,” Rolf said.

“It’s four seconds, Harbour Master. I’ve been carrying that thing about for weeks like a christening present.” Cobb put the strap back over his shoulder and patted it, briefly, on the flank, and then remembered where he was and stopped. “Now holds longer.”

“Mr Grice’s barge is held for inspection,” Rolf said. “Both tanks, the hose, the pump and the log. The booking’s referred. Officer Reyne will want to know where a tank of Cold Berth sump water has been going for disposal, and who’s been signing for it at the other end.”

“I take it to my yard,” Grice said, from his rail. “I’ve always taken it to my yard.”

“Then your yard has nothing to be nervous about,” said Rolf, “and neither have you.”

Grice looked at the pump and did not answer, and Bjorn, sitting on a cask with his bandaged hands in his lap because nobody else on that quay was sitting down, watched him not answer, and filed it where it would keep.

* * *

Corrin came along the tape with his allocation sheet and stood at the cordon looking down into the berth at what was left.

It was not much. The landward side lay over the dock floor in slabs. What remained of her starboard side and her deck leaned against the far wall, going smaller as they watched, and the water in the bottom of the dock was an inch deep and rising and coming off the whole ruin at once.

“Berth fee’s by displacement,” Corrin said.

“It is.”

“There’s no displacement.”

“No.”

“There’s no vessel.” Corrin held up the sheet, where the third figure of the morning sat under the other two with a line drawn across it. “So she owes us nothing, and Cold Berth One’s out of service till the casks are gone, which is a berth I can’t let and a fee I can’t charge, and my board says rime-hull, in, first, ahead of the queue.” He lowered the sheet. “Nobody’s going to believe a word of this.”

“Write down what happened and let them not believe it,” said Rolf.

Corrin licked his pencil and started at the top.

He was still writing when Callow’s runner came round the warehouse corner at a dead sprint with a folded paper in his fist, and Callow took it, and opened it, and read it, and the quay went quiet round him.

“Bench,” Callow said. “Both jars. The berth’s water and the hull’s water, and the hull’s is the stronger of the two.” He folded the paper along its crease. “It’s in the same family as the Berth Six salts. It isn’t the same thing. It’s out of the same yard, near enough, and I’d want a week and better glass than I’ve got to tell you how near.”

Rolf did not say anything at all. He stood with the Book under his arm and looked at the ruin in the berth, and whatever else was in his face, none of it was dry.

“The hull was the shipment,” he said. “Say it plainly, Warden, for the record I’m going to have to write.”

“The hull was the shipment,” said Callow. “Grown wrong on purpose and sailed here as a ship, and due to run out of your sump at high water as waste.”

“Master Nyberg. Who gave you the ice?”

“The paper,” Nyberg said. “Whoever holds it. I have never seen a face.” She turned her cap over in her hands. “The yard sends what the paper says to send. We sign for a hull and the hull comes. Eleven of my people signed for this one, and their people stood surety for them at home, and I stood for all of them.”

“Then that’s what goes in it.” Rolf looked at Reyne. “The holder of Nevelund’s paper, by description, into the Ban proceeding that’s open from Berth Six. No name, because nobody on this berth has one, and I’ll not put a guess in a proceeding. The master and the crew of this vessel are declarants and witnesses, and I’ll have that in writing before anybody’s tired enough to remember it differently.”

Reyne wrote that too.

“Their wages,” Nyberg said. “Ask me what this costs us and then write that down as well, since you’re writing.”

“Ask her,” Rolf said, to Bjorn.

Bjorn stood up off the cask. “What does it cost you?”

“The cargo’s mine and the fish will sell and the glass will sell, and that pays the crossing and not the loan.” Nyberg said it as a fact, which made it considerably worse. “Nobody pays us for a seized shipment, and nobody on that side pays anything for a hull that never got where it was going. My eleven go home on the packet owing more than they left owing. Their people will make that up out of a fishing season. That is what it costs, Harbour, and it is less than being smugglers, and I know the difference, and I would like it in your book that I know the difference.”

“It’s in it,” said Rolf.

Kest gave her statement to one of Reyne’s staff in about as few words as the form would take, and signed it. Crewhand. Hired off the lane at the last port. Carried fish. She was not detained, because there was nothing to detain her on that would not have taken the whole crew with her, and her name went into the record in the place the crew list had already put it, between an ice-wright and the other hired hand.

She did not look at Bjorn while she did it. She looked at him afterwards, for rather too long, and then away, and she did not explain it and he did not ask.

* * *

By mid-afternoon the last of the Kindly Frost was in casks.

Reyne’s staff had run a hose down into the dock and worked the whole of it over, sump and floor and slabs, into sealed casks that went up the wall three at a time on a whip and were logged on the quay where they stood, and by the end of it there was nothing in Cold Berth One but wet stone, timber keel blocks, and her ironwork: the keel shoe, two rudder pintles, three mast bands lying in a row where the mast had been.

The Nevelund crew came along the berth edge and stood in a line above their iron.

They took their caps off. All of them at once, as though somebody had counted them in, and they held them in both hands and looked down, and none of them said a word. Bjorn understood, watching them, that this was what a hull got on Nevelund, and that they had all done it before, and that it was no less for being ordinary.

At the end of the line, Kest stood with her cap on and her hands at her sides.

A beat later, a good deal later than the rest of them, like somebody in a foreign church getting the words half a line behind, she took hers off too, and held it in both hands, and looked down into the berth with the rest of her crew.

Bjorn saw her do it.

End of Part 4