Rule 14290 - Answer To The Crew You Know - Part 1 of 3

“One sky-whale,” Rolf read, “registered as the Long Amity. With her harness, her saddle-house, her head-rings and lines, and her book of calls.”

He had the bill of sale spread on the drum of the winch, because the drum was the only flat thing in Mast Two’s winch house that was not the stove, and he read it with one finger moving under the words, the way he read anything somebody was waiting for him to sign. The winch house was a squat stone room built against the Mast’s foot, with a door at each end, a rack of handling lines along one wall and a kettle on the stove beginning to think about it. The winchman sat beside the kettle in a knitted cap and watched the paper as though it had come in without wiping its feet.

“Seven copies,” said the buyer’s agent. “The Harbour’s endorsement goes at the foot of each. I’ve marked the places in pencil.”

He had introduced himself at the door as Quenby, of Quenby and Nephew, registrations, and had shaken Bjorn’s hand as well as Rolf’s, which almost nobody from off the Harbour ever did, and had taken the right one, the left being splinted along a batten. He was a round, pink, courteous man in a coat buttoned to the chin, and every so often he pressed a palm to the front of it, over something square, to make sure it was still there.

“And the date,” Mr Quenby added. “Today’s. My principals are particular about the date.”

“I have yet to meet a principal who wasn’t,” said Rolf, and turned the page. The winch drum, which had been waiting for somebody to lean on it, gave a quarter turn under his finger, and the pawl dropped with a clack, and the bill of sale went round with it and hung over the far side. Rolf brought it back without comment and laid his palm on it.

The door at the Tether Field end banged open, and the runner from the Kite Station came in on the last of her breath, with a spool of kite-line clipped at her hip and the cold coming in behind her.

“Senior Air Pilot’s compliments,” she said, before she had got it back. “There’s a roarer out of the Cantons holding high over the outer roads, cold, for Mast Two. She says, how long will the Harbour Master be?”

Rolf lifted his hand from the page.

“Not long,” Bjorn said. “It’s a signature and a rope. Tell her noon.”

The girl was gone with it before the door had finished swinging. Through the little window over the stove Bjorn watched her run the length of the Tether Field towards the timber tower of the Kite Station, and he was still watching when the Mast Two kite went up the signal line to the loft, and under it the short-tailed kite that meant by noon. They stood out stiff on the wind, where the whole of the Sky Dock could read them. Very far out and very high over the outer roads, something bright winked once in answer.

Somewhere under his ribs the old caution turned up, a kite too late, and asked whether that had been his to say.

“Noon,” said Rolf, to the bill of sale.

* * *

She was hanging beside the Mast at the height of its cup, and she was longer than the Mast was tall.

Bjorn stood in the winch-house door and looked up, and kept looking up, and she went on. She was the grey-blue of a slate roof after rain, paler underneath, and so large that the eye gave up on her all at once and went to the details instead, the way it does with a cliff. There were the long side-fins, which sculled at the air slowly, one and then the other, like somebody treading water without much interest in it. There were the rings grown into the hide above her mouth, with head-lines running down from them to the mast crew at the foot. There was the saddle-house on her back, a hut of lashed timber with its door propped open and bundles coming out of it along her ridge, where riders in harness moved about clipped to rings in her hide, packing. She floated. Nothing he could see was doing it. She lay on the air as easily as a barge lies at a quay, and the wind that was standing the kites out over the Kite Station did not seem to have been told about her.

Her eye was as wide as a barrel-head. It was dark and wet and in no hurry about anything, and it was looking at the winch-house step.

A woman sat on the step with her boots crossed at the ankle and her sleeves pushed up past the elbow in the cold. Her forearms were brown and corded and striped all over with the pale old marks that lines leave, and she was talking. Nobody Bjorn could see was being talked to. It was a low, steady, unremarkable sort of talk, the voice people use for shelling peas in company, going on and on without seeming to want an answer.

She stopped when Rolf came out behind him, and stood up.

“Harbour Master.” She had a broad weathered face and a plait gone the colour of iron, and she looked him up and down, chain and all, with frank interest. “Anneke Sull. I was her chief.” She tipped her head at the sky, where most of the Long Amity was. “Nineteen years.”

“Rider-Chief,” said Rolf.

“Was.” She sat down again. “Paid off at the foot of the Mast, the lot of us, by his principals.” That was for Mr Quenby, who had come out behind Rolf with his hand on his coat. “Good money. My people had it spent before the ink was dry. Roofs, mostly. A wedding. A debt or two that was older than the roofs.” She looked up the Mast. “That’s her new chief up there. He’s a good lad. She’s not having him.”

At the very top of Mast Two, on the railed platform that ran round the cup, a man in bright new harness was coiling a line.

“She’s refusing him,” said Mr Quenby.

“She hasn’t answered him,” Rolf said. “Refusing is another thing, and it would go on another page.”

He opened the Rule Book along his forearm at the page he wanted, without looking for it, and read, not loudly, for the people at the foot of Mast Two and for the riders on the ridge, who had stopped packing to listen.

Rule 14,290. A vessel answers to the crew it knows until the Harbour sees it answer to another.

The Lighthouse gave its one note, a long way off and low, and when it reached the Sky Dock the iron bands on Mast Two took it up and hummed with it, so that Bjorn felt it come through the step into the soles of his boots. Rolf laid the flat of his hand against the timber of the Mast and kept it there until the hum had gone out of the iron, as if quieting a bell he had not rung.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“The Harbour registers a transfer when it has seen her answer to her new chief,” he said. “Not when it has been told that she will. Mr Quenby, your principals’ paper may say today as often as it likes. She hasn’t read it.”

Mr Quenby took his hand off his coat, considered the palm, and returned it.

“Apprentice.” Rolf shut the Book. “Go up and watch her take it. The Harbour has to see it with its own eyes, and yours are the pair that climbs.”

* * *

The stair inside Mast Two went up round the winch line in a square spiral, steep as a ladder and not much wider, lit by slits in the timber every dozen treads, and it smelled of tar and pigeons. Bjorn began by counting the treads, because it would tell him how much of his morning a Mast cost. He gave it up somewhere past a hundred, when he found he had counted the same ten twice.

PROCLAIMATRON 304 came off his shoulder at the third turn and set out on its own three legs, which was a mistake, and which it knew to be a mistake by the fourth. A square spiral is all corner. It got a leg down between two treads and stopped there with its lamp going a slow, dignified orange, which is the colour of a unit that intends to be rescued without having to ask.

“Three-Oh-Four,” said Bjorn.

“Three Hundred and Four,” said the unit, from inside the step.

He worked the leg out with the flat of his thumb and carried it the rest of the way up under one arm, upside down for a good part of it, while it told the tar and the pigeons that the apprentice was climbing, that the apprentice had still not eaten, and that the apprentice was doing splendidly.

He came out at the top onto the platform on his hands and knees, which had not been the plan, and the wind took what breath he had left.

The whole Sky Dock lay underneath him like a map drawn in a hurry: the Tether Field and its pickets, the other Masts standing in their row, the pale flags of the Scorch Field, the long roof of the Stilts over the warehouse lane, and the Harbour beyond, with all its chimneys smoking the same way. Level with his eyes, across a stretch of empty air, the Kite Station’s kites stood out on their line. His was still there. Its short tail snapped and fluttered. From up here it was not a signal at all. It was a promise somebody had hung out to dry.

“You’ll be the Harbour’s eyes,” said the man with the line. “Good. I’d like a witness, whichever way it goes.”

He was perhaps thirty, and tall, and still in the way that comes from practice rather than temperament. Everything he wore was new. The harness creaked when he breathed. In the breast pocket of his coat, buttoned down, was a small book with a hide cover gone soft at the corners, the only old thing about him.

“Emrys Vasse,” he said. “Rider-chief, for the Meridian Carrying Company.” He said the title carefully, as though it had been lent to him and he meant to give it back clean. “Or I will be. When she knows it.”

Bjorn got up off his knees and turned round, and the whale was there.

She had brought her head round to the platform while he was on the stair, and it lay along the air twenty feet off, as long as a boat, with the rings above her mouth and the head-lines falling away from them out of sight. The eye was nearer than it had seemed from below. It was nearer than anything that size ought to be allowed to come. He could see the fine creases of the lid, and his own shape in the wet of it, very small, standing on a platform at the top of a stick.

He lifted a hand to it. He did not decide to. It was the wave you give a neighbour over a hedge, and it was out and done before he could stop it.

The eye did not blink. After a while Bjorn put the hand in his pocket.

Vasse had not noticed, or was kind enough to seem not to have. He had uncoiled from his shoulder a short soft line of plaited hide, which he called the bit-line, with a smooth bar of pale wood the length of a forearm spliced to its end. He stood at the rail and held it out across both palms, the way you offer somebody a baby you are not sure of. Then he sang.

It was a long falling note and three short ones climbing, and he sang it well. Bjorn had heard worse sung for money. It went out across the gap, and the whale’s side-fins stopped, and the great head came in, slow and smooth, until Bjorn could have leaned out and laid his palm on the hide above her lip. The lip opened, and took the bar.

“One,” Bjorn heard himself say, under his breath, and she let it go.

It dropped out of her lip and swung in against the Mast on the end of its line. Vasse was hauling in before it had finished swinging, and the wet bar came back up over the rail and met Bjorn, who had reached for it, square in the chest. It was a good deal heavier than it looked. It folded him down on one knee with both arms round it, like a man who has caught a ham. Vasse took it off him without a word, and without looking, and coiled.

“Thank you,” Vasse said to the whale, formally, as though she had done him a courtesy.

“Is that three times?”

“Three.” Vasse wiped the bar on his sleeve. “I’ve every call she has. They came with her.” He touched the book in his pocket without taking it out. “The Rider-Chief wrote them down for the sale. Nineteen years of calls in her own hand, and I’ve sung every one of them the way she wrote it. I sing them better than I did at breakfast. I don’t think that’s the difficulty.”

He sounded like somebody reporting the weather.

While Vasse got his breath for the fourth, Bjorn looked down, because he could not go on looking at the eye.

It was a long way down. The mast crew at the foot were small and foreshortened, all shoulders and caps, leaning back on the head-lines. Along the whale’s ridge the riders had given up pretending to pack and sat in a row with their legs hanging, watching the platform. Mr Quenby stood by the winch-house door with his face turned up and his hand on his coat. Rolf stood a little apart from all of them, weight settled, and appeared to be watching nothing in particular. And on the step, very small, with her sleeves rolled, Anneke Sull had started talking again.

At this height the words did not reach him, only the sound of her: a thread of voice coming up the Mast on the wind, low and ordinary, broken off and taken up again.

The eye moved.

It was not much. It rolled a little down and to the left, towards the step, and the side-fin nearest the Mast stopped sculling and lay along the air. Sull stopped, and after a moment the fin went on. Sull said something else, and the eye went down to her again and stayed there until she had finished.

Vasse sang the call. The fin sculled. The eye did not move at all.

Bjorn watched it happen twice more to be sure, and was sure after the first, and did not trust that, and watched again. Nobody else was watching. The mast crew were watching their lines, and the riders were watching the bit-line, and Vasse was watching her mouth, and from the foot of the Mast the eye was a dark speck seventy feet overhead that could have been looking anywhere.

“She’s listening to her,” Bjorn said.

Vasse’s head came round.

Bjorn was already at the rail. He put both hands on it, leaned out over the whole of the Sky Dock, and shouted down the Mast, over the mast crew and the riders and Mr Quenby and the Harbour Master, to the woman on the step.

“Rider-Chief! Would you stop talking to her? Only while he tries. She’s listening to you, not to him.”

Every face below turned up. On the ridge a rider laughed, once, and stopped.

Sull looked up at him for what felt like a long time. It was too far to see her face, and he saw it anyway. Then she uncrossed her boots, put her forearms on her knees, and shut her mouth.

He looked down at his boots, which from the top of a Mast is a long way to look.

“Well,” said Vasse quietly. “Let’s see.”

He sang the call. The eye did not come to him. It went down, and down, to the step, and found Sull sitting there with her mouth shut, and stayed on her. The near fin stopped. The far one stopped. The whale hung beside the Mast with nothing about her moving at all, and the quiet of it was worse than anything Bjorn had heard that morning.

Then the note came. It was low, too low to be a sound, and it came up through the platform and the rail and the soles of his boots the way the Lighthouse had come up through the step. The Mast’s iron bands hummed with it. Far below, the head-lines went taut all at once, and the mast crew went back on their heels, and somebody at the foot called out a word Bjorn did not know.

The great head turned away from the platform, slowly, as a person turns in a crowd towards a voice they thought they heard, and the whole long weight of her leaned out after it towards the step.

Mast Two leaned with her.

End of Part 1