The Harbour Master's Rule Book

The mast crew held her.

There were six of them on the head-lines at the foot, with their heels in the turf and the lines taken round the iron bitts beside the winch-house door, and for a long moment they were all that stood between Mast Two and the whale’s opinion. The iron bands groaned. Up on the platform Bjorn took hold of the rail with both hands and felt the whole Mast come over a hand’s breadth under him, and hang there, and not come back.

Vasse did not take hold of anything. He looked down at the step.

“Rider-Chief,” he said. He did not call it. It went down the Mast anyway.

Sull was already on her feet. “That’ll do,” she said, to nobody at the top of the Mast. Then she lifted her face, and in the same low, ordinary voice she had been using all morning: “Now then. Now then, my lady. Did you think I’d gone off without you? I’ve not gone anywhere. I’m sat here on this step with my backside freezing, same as I’ve been since breakfast.”

The fins began again, one and then the other. The eye stayed on her. The weight came off the head-lines by degrees, the mast crew coming up off their heels as it went, and Mast Two stood up straight under Bjorn’s hands, taking its time about it, like somebody old getting out of a low chair.

Sull kept talking. She talked about the step, and the cold, and the Harbour Master’s chain, which she said was very fine, and about Bjorn, who she said had a voice on him like a gull down a chimney. The riders on the ridge were not laughing now. They were looking at the platform.

“Well,” said Vasse. “Now we know.” He coiled the bit-line on his shoulder and buttoned his coat over the book of calls. “I can’t be known by getting better at it, can I.”

It was not really a question, and Bjorn had no answer to it. He went down the stair a great deal faster than he had come up, missed the last turn in the dark, and finished the descent of Mast Two sitting down.

* * *

Mr Quenby was waiting at the winch-house door with the bill of sale in both hands.

“Harbour Master,” he was saying to Rolf, over Bjorn’s head, as Bjorn got up. “She took it. Your apprentice counted. I heard him.”

“She took it and she gave it back,” said Rolf. “The Harbour saw both.”

“It’s a very small difference.”

“It is the whole of the Rule, Mr Quenby. The rest is paper.”

“Then can the Harbour not see it a little?” Mr Quenby held out the bill as though a closer look might help. “Enough for the endorsement. My principals would be quite satisfied with a little.”

“The Harbour sees a thing or it doesn’t,” said Rolf. “It isn’t a lamp you can turn down.”

Hask Corrin came across the Tether Field from the direction of the other Masts with his board under his arm, walking like somebody bringing news he had not made and would be blamed for anyway. He nodded to Rolf. He did not nod to Bjorn, which was worse.

“Harbour Master. There’s a roarer out of the Cantons holding over my outer roads on the strength of noon.”

He did not look at the Kite Station. He had no need to. The short-tailed kite had come down the signal line while Bjorn was up the Mast, and something with a long tail had gone up in its place and hung there, drooping, over the loft.

“That’s holding, that is,” said Corrin. “That’s the Senior Pilot being polite.”

Bjorn looked at the long tail. Somewhere up the Mast, while he was busy with an eye, noon had come and gone without him.

“Every other Mast I have is spoken for until tomorrow,” Corrin went on. “She’s got her still-gas trimmed to hold cold until the half after one, and then she goes on to her next spire with her cargo still aboard and the Harbour’s dues in her master’s pocket.” He looked up at the Long Amity, the whole length of her, and wrote something on his board that was very short. “Of course.”

Kemble came down from the Kite Station a little before one, with the station book in her hand and a pair of gloves pushed through her belt that had never been on her hands, and brought the roarer’s own word with her: the half after one, not a minute past, and the master sent her compliments and was sorry. Kemble did not sound as if she was sorry. She tipped her head back under Mast Two and looked up at the whale on its lines in the air that was hers, and at the two chiefs, and then at Bjorn, until he was sure she had read his kite.

“While you’re down, Senior Pilot,” said Corrin, “there’s still a balloon lying on my Tether Field with nobody in it.”

“It isn’t your Tether Field.”

“Anything at the Sky Dock that lies still long enough ends up on my board.”

“Then I’ll keep moving,” said Kemble, and walked the head-lines, stopping at every hand, and gave each the words she gave every hand on every line she had ever had charge of. Everyone lets go at the pilot’s word. The mast crew had heard it a thousand times and nodded as if it were news. The last of them, a young woman with her cap pushed back and her lips pursed to whistle, nodded too, and whistled a scrap of something through her teeth, and the winchman in the doorway said, “Wenna,” as if he had said it before and expected to again.

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Kemble turned to the ridge. “Rider-Chief. Your riders know the one law?”

“My riders let go at my word,” said Sull.

“At my Mast,” said Kemble, “they let go at mine.”

Sull considered her, and nodded, as one chief to another, and Bjorn saw that it was the first thing all morning that she had agreed to.

* * *

It was Mr Quenby who said it, in the end. He said it helpfully, as you might offer somebody the last biscuit.

“Harbour Master, if it’s only a matter of time, I don’t need her flying.” He had taken out a small calendar bound in green cloth and was holding his place in it with one finger. “My principals won’t want her on the spring runs until the spring. She may lie here on your Mast until then for all they mind. They’ll pay the berth.” He shut the calendar. “It’s the registration that has to be today. Today is the close of their year, you see. A vessel on their books at the close counts on their licence for the whole of the next. Off the books at the close, and it doesn’t. I don’t do whales, Harbour Master. I do dates.”

“She may not lie on my Mast until the spring,” said Corrin.

Nobody else said anything.

Vasse had come down the stair behind Bjorn and was standing by the bitts with the bit-line on his shoulder. He did not move. He looked at Mr Quenby as if a step had turned out not to be there.

“I was told she was wanted,” he said. “For the first run out. I was told there wasn’t a day to spare.”

“She’s wanted on the books,” said Mr Quenby, kindly, as if that were the same thing.

Sull got up off the step.

“You paid my riders off at the foot of the Mast,” she said. “Every one of them, this morning, cash, so they’d be out of her hearing by noon. For a date.” She came across to Vasse, not to Mr Quenby. “Do you want to know what they’ve bought, lad, for their date? Nineteen years, and nobody’s ever been her chief but me. She’s never had to know anybody else. When I’m in the ground she’ll be up on a line somewhere, and there’ll be nobody alive she knows.” She turned to Mr Quenby. “Put that in your little green book.”

Mr Quenby, to his credit, did not.

“The Harbour can’t see a thing because it’s dated,” Rolf said.

“Then stamp what you have seen,” said Mr Quenby, a little desperately.

Rolf’s hand went to his chain and stayed there. He did not answer. He looked at the whale for some time, and at the two chiefs standing a yard apart under it, and he said nothing at all, and Bjorn could see him saying it.

Across the Tether Field the long-tailed kite hung over the loft. Corrin looked at his watch, and then at the sky over the outer roads, where something bright sat very high and very small and waited.

Bjorn did the sum. Nobody needed the whale today. Nobody needed her for weeks. The only thing at the Sky Dock that had to be done by the half after one was the thing he had put in the sky himself.

“Then there’s no need for any of it today,” he said.

He heard Rolf’s level cadence come out of his own mouth, and went on.

“Rider-Chief Sull, you walk her off to the pickets and let her rest. Mr Vasse tries her again tomorrow, when she’s quiet. Mast Two’s clear for the Cantons, and nobody’s lost anything.”

It sounded, for about a breath, like the answer.

“If the Rider-Chief flies her anywhere,” said Mr Quenby, “she has taken her back. My principals—”

“Is that the Harbour Master,” said Sull, “telling me to take her?”

She was not looking at Rolf. She was looking at Bjorn, and so was everybody else at the foot of Mast Two, waiting to hear whose word it was.

“No,” Bjorn said. “It’s me.”

“Then no.” Sull sat down on the step. “I’ve been paid to let go of her, and I’ve let go. I’ll not be put back on her by an apprentice so a mast can be tidy.”

Bjorn looked at his boots. They had nothing to add.

“Tomorrow,” said Vasse. He said it quietly, as if repeating the length of a sentence he had just been handed down. Then he unslung the bit-line from his shoulder. “No. I’ll walk her off myself. She can not know me on the pickets as easily as she does up there.”

He went to the near head-line and took the lead of it out of the mast crew’s hands, courteously, and tipped back his head and sang up to her the long walking call out of the book in his pocket.

Sull was on her feet before the first note had finished.

“You’ll not walk her anywhere without me,” she said, and took the far head-line, and sang the same call over the top of his.

It was the same call. Bjorn heard that. It was the same long note and the same three short climbing ones, in two voices, from either side of the Mast, a beat apart, and on the ridge the riders heard their chief singing and were up on their feet and clipping on before they had thought about it. The great head came round to the left, towards Vasse, and stopped. It came round to the right, towards Sull, and stopped. The eye went from one of them to the other and back. The fins beat once, hard, together, and the whole of her rose along the Mast a man’s height, and the head-lines ran out through the bitts with a noise like tearing cloth.

“Hands,” shouted the winchman. “Side-lines. Hands!”

The side-lines ran from rings along her flank down to the turf, and the mast crew were on them, and so were two porters who had come over to watch and a carter off the lane and, because it was nearest, Bjorn. He had a line in his fists before he knew he had taken it. It was alive. It went up, and took his arms up with it, and his heels came off the turf and went down again, and all along the flank the hands were going up on their toes like people at the back of a crowd.

The Long Amity turned on the Mast. She swung round it the way a weathervane swings, but slowly and enormously, her head going one way round the cup and her tail the other, and the side-lines swung with her across the turf and dragged the hands on them with it. Somebody fell and was dragged and let go. The saddle-house tilted on her back, and a bundle went off the ridge and burst on the grass, and a rider hung from her hide-ring by one clip and swung and got her boots back on the hide.

“Let go,” Kemble said.

It was no louder than the rest of what she said. It had never needed to be. Every hand on the side-lines had heard it at the start of every Walk-in of their lives, and every hand opened.

Bjorn’s opened with them. He did not think about it. It was only afterwards that he noticed he hadn’t.

The lines went up off the turf, whipping, all of them, and the whale went up with them, turning, and cleared the top of the Mast, and went out over the Tether Field with the lines trailing from her flank like the strings of a let-go kite.

All but one of them trailed. At the tail of the near side-line, Wenna had taken a turn of it round her wrist. Bjorn had seen her do it without knowing what he was seeing: when the line first jumped, before Kemble’s word, a quick hard turn round the wrist to hold against the pull, the kind of thing everybody who has ever held a line is told never to do, and does once. Now the turn had closed on her. When Kemble said the word, she opened her hand like the rest. The line did not care.

She went up. Her boots cleared the turf and then the heads of the people standing on it and then the winch house’s slates, and she did not cry out. She turned slowly on the end of the line with her other hand wrapped over the turn as if she could hold it shut, and her face turned down towards them, and it was very white. The whale went out over the Tether Field wall towards the rooftops, still turning, and swung her out wide on the end of it, against the sky.

Down on the turf nobody said anything. The one word the Sky Dock had for a hand on a line had been said already, and it was no use to her.

End of Part 2