The Harbour Master's Rule Book

The hiss went on.

Calloway had the brass in both hands. He did not speak into it. He held it as if it might be warm. Out over the roads the white kite had stopped falling. It hung lower than before and further out, cocked over on one side and trembling, and the line to it was very long and very thin, and there was no telling from the loft whether anybody was still on it.

Then the horn said, “Still here.”

Calloway put his forehead down on the brass.

“Still here,” said Orrin. The voice was the same, only further off, and a little out of breath. “The seventh’s gone flat and the knot’s slipped, and I went round the spar twice, and I’ve my arm through the bridle now, which I ought to have had before.” A pause. “I’ve lost my water skin. It went. I watched it all the way down, same as your letter.”

Nobody in the loft said anything, so Bjorn did, because he had said he would.

“Then it isn’t four o’clock any more.”

“No,” said Orrin. “Call it two hours. Three, if I’m lucky with the wind.” She thought about it. “I’m not often lucky with the wind. I’d say two.”

Rolf opened the station book, crossed out four, wrote three in the margin beside it, and shut it again.

* * *

“Master Calloway,” Rolf said. “The Harbour will buy your train.”

Calloway lifted his head from the horn.

“All nine kites, and the line they fly on, from your drum to the top of the sky, at the Berth Overseer’s valuation.” Rolf did not look at Corrin, who had made a noise. “Once the Harbour owns them, they are not the Welkin’s. Nothing will be struck from the Welkin. The Harbour will be striking its own kites in its own air, and the Rule has nothing to say about that.” He shut the Book on his finger. “The Harbour strikes the bottom four in your order, with your people’s hands, until the fifth comes inside the Pilot’s tether. Miss Orrin comes down her line to it. When she is off the line and in the basket, and not before, the Harbour strikes the rest, out of order, which is the only way a knot is ever struck. I expect they’ll go into the roads.”

“They’ll go into the roads in pieces,” said Calloway.

“Yes. The Harbour will have broken them, and the Harbour will pay for them.” Rolf said it in the tone he kept for harbour dues. “Not before she is off. The Rule is there for her. I’ll not use a bill of sale to go round what it’s for.”

“We can’t cross without them,” said Calloway. “You know that. There’s no kite-maker between here and home. You’ll have bought us a field to sit in, till somebody from our side comes this way, and nobody does, often.”

“I know.”

“The Harbour’s never bought anything in its life,” said Corrin, to the roof.

“It bought a kettle,” said Rolf.

Calloway looked out along the line: at the rust kite hanging halfway down it where the drum had stopped, at the three clean kites above that, and the fifth, and the ugly knot, and the white speck cocked on its side beyond. Bjorn watched him do the other sum, the one nobody in the loft could do for him. He had come in wanting his ship landed and his hand down. He had been ready to gamble one for the other at ten o’clock. He was being offered the one he would have chosen, if anybody had ever let him choose.

“Sell,” he said. “Sell it. Get her down.”

Then, before Rolf could write a word, he put his palm flat over the mouth of the horn and turned to Bjorn.

“Don’t tell her it’s all nine,” he said, low. “Not till she’s down. She’s kiter-born. If she knows the Harbour’s cutting the train once she’s off it, she’ll not come off it. She’ll sit on that spar and try to save it, and she’ll spend her two hours doing it.”

Bjorn looked at the hand on the horn.

He had made one promise that day, on that wire, before he knew anything at all. It had been easy to make, and every hour since, it had got heavier, and he could see from here where it would come down. It would come down on the man in front of him, who knew his own hand and was probably right about her. And it might come down on the girl, who might do the stupid, loyal thing her master said she would.

“She asked me,” Bjorn said. “I told her I’d tell her.”

“You don’t know her.”

“No. But she asked.”

Calloway held his eyes a while longer. Then he took his palm away.

Bjorn leaned to the brass, and he kept his voice where it was, because it did not seem to him to be the kind of thing that ought to be said as if it were a secret.

“Saffi. It’s me. The Harbour’s buying your train, all nine kites, so it’s allowed to strike them. The bottom four come off first, in your order, and your fifth comes down to the balloon, and you come down your line to meet it. When you’re off, the Harbour cuts the rest. They’ll go in the sea. Your master’s selling so you can come down. That’s all of it.”

The loft waited. The horn hissed softly.

“All nine,” said Orrin at last.

“All nine.”

“Then we can’t go home.”

“Not for a while,” Bjorn said. “No.”

There was a long quiet on the wire. When the voice came back it was steady, and practical, and it was not talking to him.

“Master. You there?”

Calloway took the brass. “I’m here, Saffi.”

“Strike them, then,” she said. “Don’t wait for me to be sorry about it. I’ll be sorry on the grass.”

* * *

Rolf wrote the sale into the station book under the two hours, in the same plain hand as the rest of the page, and Calloway signed it with Kemble’s pencil without reading it. The kiters struck the first kite at a quarter to two.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

They did it the way they must have done it on a hundred mornings at home, without a word: one on the brake, two walking the drum, two to take the kite as it came. The rust kite came down the last of its line over the field wall, enormous and flat and hissing, and they caught it by its spars and took it off the line and folded it on the grass in four movements, like people folding a sheet between them. Kemble walked among them with a handful of pennies out of her coat and gave each of them a line-penny, since they were hands on a Harbour line now. Each of them took it, turned it over, and pocketed it. Bjorn saw that from the loft and wished he had been looking somewhere else.

The second came down, and the third. With every kite off it the train sank, the whole long curve of the line settling down the sky like a rope let into a well, and the knot came in over the water and then over the quays, and the white kite came with it, lower and nearer, until Bjorn could see without the glass that there was somebody on it: a small dark shape, flat along the spar.

The fourth came down. The fifth kite hung over the warehouse roofs just beyond the field wall, with the knot above it and the line going up out of the knot to Orrin.

“Inside my tether,” said Kemble. “Just.”

She took the station book off the desk, wrote one line in it standing up, and turned it round for Rolf. Bjorn read it upside down. Pilot balloon up into a fouled train. Sent: Kemble. Rolf read it and set his initial beneath, and she shut the book and went down the ladder.

The balloon’s winch crew were three, and it wanted four. Kemble looked at them, and at the kiters, who were all on the drum, and at Corrin, who took a step back, and at Bjorn, who had followed her down.

“Check-line,” she said.

She did not ask about the splint. She put the line into his good hand, the check-line that ran from the floor of the basket down to an iron block in the turf, to stop the basket swinging round its tether in the wind, and showed him where to stand: behind the block, both feet braced, the line across his hip.

“You’re weight,” she said. “That’s all you are. You don’t take a turn, and you don’t pull. You sit on it and you keep her from swinging.” She climbed into the basket. “And you don’t talk to me.”

He did not talk to her. The ground let the basket go and the tether paid out, and the check-line ran up through his hand and across his hip in a long steady draw, and he sat back on it.

After that he could see very little. He could see the patched envelope rise over the wall and out across the warehouse roofs, lower than he liked, and he could see the kites beyond it against the grey. What he had was the line. It told him what his eyes could not. It told him when a gust took the envelope and the basket swung, and he leaned against the swing until it came back. It told him when Kemble’s hand went up to the winch crew and the tether stopped, because the check-line stopped with it. It went slack, and taut, and slack.

Up on the loft rail, the horn was still talking. He could only just hear it from the ground.

“Right,” it said. “Coming down now. Arm’s out of the bridle. I’m leaving the wire, so you’ll not hear me for a bit. Tell the master—”

Then it stopped. It did not hiss this time. There was nobody on the other end, and it was quiet the way a room is quiet when somebody has only just gone out of it.

Bjorn sat on the line and watched the sky. He could not see her. He could see, very far off above the roofs, the knot turning, and the line above it shaking in short hard jerks, a hand’s length at a time; and below it the fifth kite standing, and the envelope of the pilot balloon come up underneath the fifth kite and stop. The check-line went slack in his hand. Nothing happened for longer than he could stand, and he stood it, because he was there to be weight and nothing else, and it was the right amount of work for him to be doing.

Then the line came taut again across his hip, and it was heavier.

It was not much heavier. It was heavier by one person who had not eaten since the day before, and he felt it go into his hip and down through his braced legs into the turf, and knew what it was before anybody on the field had seen a thing.

“She’s in,” he said to the winch crew, who had not felt it. “She’s in the basket.”

They brought the balloon home a pull at a time, while Kemble’s hand told them how. The basket came in over the wall and down onto the grass with a thump, and there were two people in it. One was Kemble. The other was a small, dark, wind-burnt young woman in a quilted suit, curled on the floor of the basket with her arms round her knees, and her hands in front of her were the colour of old rope and would not open.

Calloway got there first. He had the can. He had kept it hot through all of it, and he knelt at the side of the basket and put it between her hands, and when her fingers would not close on it he held it there with his own and tipped it for her.

Kemble climbed out and stood on the grass. Her palms were bleeding, both of them, where the bridles had run through them, and she looked at them in mild surprise, and then at the gloves in her belt, and said nothing about either.

* * *

At dusk, on Rolf’s word, the kiters cut the line at the drum.

It parted with a sound like a door slammed in another house, and the train went. It went slowly at first, as if it had not yet heard, and then all at once, streaming away down the land breeze over the roofs and the quays towards the sea, the fifth kite and the knot and the white kite, turning over and over and getting smaller. The knot came down in the outer roads among the fishing boats. The white kite came down a long way beyond it and lay on the water like a dropped handkerchief.

Orrin watched it from a hurdle by the field gate, wrapped in two blankets, and did not say anything, and nobody asked her to.

Corrin valued the train on the Tether Field that evening by lantern, with a bolt of blue silk borrowed from a draper in the lane, a yard-stick, and a great deal of complaint. The four struck kites lay spread on the grass where they had been folded. The boats brought the rest in after dark, wet and torn, in pieces, and the kiters laid them out beside the others as carefully as the whole ones.

“I’ve never priced a kite,” Corrin said, pacing one. “I price berths. A berth stays where it’s put. What’s this? Silk. Spars. A season’s sewing, he tells me, by people I’ll never meet, in a place I’ll never see. Master, what’s a season in your sewing-house, by the yard?”

Calloway told him. Corrin wrote it down, looked at it, and said it could not be right.

“You’re to value what it was,” said Rolf. “Not what the boats brought back.”

“I’ve only got what the boats brought back.”

“Value what was flying.”

Corrin looked at him, and up at the dark where the train had been, and went back to his yard-stick, and paced the white kite, which had come in last, in three pieces. Then he ruled a new column at the foot of his board, there and then, with the edge of the yard-stick, and wrote in it. Bjorn was holding the lantern, and read it.

Welkin: train of nine, with line. Bought by the Harbour.

Skipper Enoch Pike came up from the fish quay while the ink was still wet, short and square and bare-headed, with his cap wrung in one fist, a torn net over one shoulder and two of the co-op’s crews behind him.

“Your white one came down across my nets,” he said, to Corrin, not to Rolf. “Split them end to end. We heard in the lane the Harbour pays for what it breaks now.”

He said it mildly, as a man gives the price of fish.

Corrin looked at the net, and at the white kite in its three pieces on the grass, and at Rolf.

“It was the Harbour’s kite when it fell,” Rolf said.

“Of course it was,” said Corrin, and under the first line he wrote a second.

* * *

The nine kites went into the catch crews’ shed at the end of the Tether Field, folded and stacked on trestles, the whole ones at the bottom and the torn ones on top, with a Harbour ticket tied to the spar of the uppermost.

Bjorn came to count them in the hour before the gates were opened, because he had been sent the day before to count some kites and had never yet written the number anywhere.

The shed was cold and smelled of wet silk. The Welkin’s crew were asleep in the hull out on the grass, all but one. Orrin sat on the end of a trestle in her blankets, with her hands wrapped in linen and the empty can beside her, looking at the stack.

He counted them. It came to nine, once, and he did not need to count again.

The ticket said HARBOUR in the Office’s stamp, and under that, in Corrin’s hand, nine kites, with line, and under that was the ruled box that every Harbour ticket has, for the class of the thing.

The box was empty. Bjorn had a pencil. He looked at the box for a long time and could not think of a word that would go in it. Corrin had not managed one either, and neither, when it came to it, had the Rule Book.

Orrin looked at the ticket, and then at him.

“What are they now?” she said.

He opened his mouth. Then he shut it, and left the box the way he had found it, and sat down on the trestle beside her, and neither of them said anything while the light came up grey behind the shed.

End of Part 3