Rule 6548 - A Mooring Is Only A Mooring - Part 2 of 3

Air Pilot Merryn Hardacre came down off the Kite Station at a quarter to twelve with a lantern in one hand and the Kite Station’s book hugged to her chest, open at the night page, with a thumb keeping the place against the wind.

“Three lamps,” she said. “Wind’s backing, and it’s building, and it’ll be a gale by two. I want her off that Mast and riding it out over the outer roads before it’s up.”

She was young for a pilot, and sharp-faced, and cold, and she had the night watch because somebody had to. She looked up at the Accrual the way a farrier looks at a horse that has been described to him as quiet.

“Off,” said Starling. “On a rising wind. At night.”

“On a rising wind at night now, or in a gale at night later. I know which I’d rather walk.” She turned to Bjorn. “You’re the Harbour.”

“Yes.”

“Then tell her.”

He went back up.

The winch house was warm, and on the way through it he unbuckled PROCLAIMATRON 304 and set it on the bench by the stove, because the strap had worn a groove in his shoulder on the stair and the ship was no place to take it twice. It climbed down off the bench, went round the stove once like a dog, and settled with its lamp to the warm. He did not see Starling’s boy crouch down in front of it. He saw it later. By then it was a long way too late to matter.

* * *

Bream did not unfold her hands.

“No,” she said.

The gondola was swinging properly now, a long slow sway and a snatch at the end of it, and the clerks had all shut their ledgers and stood holding their desks. Mr Aske had his open. He was the only one.

“The pilot says a gale by two. Ships ride gales off a Mast, she says. It’s what they do. She’ll take you off herself.”

“I know what ships do. I’ve flown this one for thirty years.” Bream looked past him at the dark windows. “I am not leaving your Mast until I am refused.”

Bjorn stood very still, which took a hand on a desk.

“Refused,” he said.

“By the officer of the mooring. In writing. Over his own name.” She said it plainly and without any pleasure at all, the way you would read out an invoice. “In Scrivence, officer, a claim that is refused at the mooring it has reached must be begun again from the beginning, at home, as though it had never been brought. Mortmain House takes a year to begin anything. A year is what I came for.” She nodded down the long room at its forty clerks. “They are owed their wages out of the third I do owe. The people whose money sits in those books are owed it back out of the rest. A year is time to pay the one and prove the other. I did not come here to be answered, and I did not come here to be sheltered. I came to be told no.”

“You asked me to answer it.”

“I asked your Harbour to answer it because I knew it would refuse,” said Bream. “Everyone refuses. It is the most ordinary thing in the world, to be asked to stand in somebody else’s lawsuit, and to say no.”

“I said no. I said we’d cut you loose.”

“You did.” Mr Aske turned back a page without being asked and held it up. There it was, in a small clean hand: The Harbour’s officer at the mooring, asked to answer, said the Harbour would cut the vessel loose that night rather than be tied into the claim. “It is a refusal,” Bream said. “It is the right kind. It is from the wrong person, and it is not written by him, and it has no name on it but Mr Aske’s. I am sorry. You were very quick.”

Bjorn looked at his own sentence written down in another world’s ledger, by lamplight, in the middle of the night, and found it looked a great deal less clever there than it had sounded.

He was right about her. She had been waiting to be told no. He had been right about that down on the grass, before he knew a thing about her, and it helped nobody, because he had been wrong about everything else.

“The officer of the mooring is the Harbour Master,” he said.

“Yes.”

“He’s asleep.”

“Then I shall wait for him to wake up,” said Bream, and the gondola swung so hard that the dark lantern went off the edge of the desk, and Bream caught it by the bail an inch off the floor, and put it back, and folded her hands.

* * *

Down on the grass, Hardacre heard it without saying anything, and then said, “Then she rides it on the Mast. And so does the Mast.”

The wind had changed its voice. It was not shoving any more. It was pulling, steadily, the way a river pulls, and the Accrual lay out along it with her tail over the Tether Field and her whole grey length straining at the top of Mast Three, and the Mast was humming now in a note Bjorn could hear with his ears and not only his knees.

And the wind had gone round.

He saw it before Hardacre said it, because he had been at the Sky Dock often enough to know which way the Masts looked in a sea breeze. Mast Three’s ship had always swung clear of Mast Two. There was room. The Masts were built with room. Tonight the Accrual’s tail was coming round, a little with every gust, towards the next Mast along the field, and on the next Mast along the field there was a whale.

The Long Amity lay along Mast Two with her nose in its cup and her great body taking up half the field, and she made Mast Two a great deal wider than anybody had built it to be. There were lanterns on her ridge. Her riders were up there, flat along her back, and somebody was talking to her. The words didn’t carry. The voice did, low and steady, the way you talk to something that is frightened of the dark.

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“If that tail comes round far enough,” said Hardacre, “it goes across her.”

“I know.”

“Do you.”

He did. He also knew what he had said down here at ten o’clock, and he was working out whether there was any way through the next three hours that did not go past it, when the lamp by the stove in the winch house came up from amber to a bright, ceremonial gold.

PROCLAIMATRON 304 stood up on its three legs, cleared its horn with a small brassy cough, like a verger before the banns, and spoke to the Sky Dock.

“By order of Stores, and with effect from this hour,” it began, in the full voice of a herald reading out a coronation to a market square, “the apprentice has been sent to his bed by the Harbour Master, and has gone to it, and is warm, and is asleep. Stores is gratified to learn of it. Stores has long held that an apprentice who is sent to his bed and goes to it is an apprentice who will be of use in the morning, and Stores wishes it recorded that on this occasion the apprentice has shown exemplary...”

The wind came round the winch house and took the rest of it away across the field.

Starling’s boy was crouched by the stove with both hands behind his back.

“I said good evening to it,” he said.

“That would do it.”

“I only said it to see.”

Starling looked at the brass thing by his stove, and at Bjorn, standing under Mast Three in the wind at one in the morning with his coat buttoned to the neck and his hair on end.

“Has he,” said Starling.

Bjorn held out his arm, because leaving it by the stove would now clearly be worse, and PROCLAIMATRON 304 ran up his sleeve and fastened itself back on his shoulder, glowing.

Then he did the other thing.

“Send for the Harbour Master,” he said.

He said it out loud, at the foot of the Mast, to Hardacre and to Starling and to the boy, which was every person he had said the first thing to. There wasn’t any quieter way to say it. There was a vessel on a lawful mooring that might have to be cut off it, and a master up there who would not come down until she had a letter, and he could not cut and he could not write the letter, and the one man at the Harbour who could do both was asleep across the town because Bjorn had told him he could be.

The boy went, with a lantern, at a run.

Bjorn stood and let it sit in him. Nobody said anything about it. Starling didn’t have to. He had heard both halves.

And somewhere up there in the swinging gondola, in a small clean hand, Mr Aske was very probably writing down that the Harbour Master had been sent for.

* * *

At two o’clock Starling took the Walk-in horn down off its hooks inside the winch-house door, stepped out into the wind, and blew it.

It was a long ugly note, like a cow with a grievance. The gale took it off over the wall towards the town, and for a while nothing happened, and then the town sent some of itself back.

They came over the stile and through the field gate in ones and twos, in the dark, with their collars up: a night baker from the lane with flour to her elbows, two lamplighters still carrying their poles, a pair of lads off a collier in the outer roads who had rowed ashore for something else entirely, a woman from the all-night laundry in a wet apron, a watchman with his rattle on his belt. A man in carpet slippers who had plainly come to see what the noise was, and stayed. Nobody who had ever taken a line in their lives. Bjorn could see it in the way they looked at the ship: upwards, and then a little further upwards, and then at each other.

Hardacre stood at the gate with a tin of pennies and a sack of gloves, and gave every one of them a penny, a pair of gloves and the same sentence.

“Everyone lets go at the pilot’s word.”

She made each of them say it back. The baker said it back. The lamplighters said it back together, as if it were a hymn. One of the collier lads said it back with a grin, and she said it again to him until the grin had gone, and then he said it properly.

At two exactly, PROCLAIMATRON 304 lit up gold on Bjorn’s shoulder and began to speak, and the gale had every word of it before it reached the gate.

“Right,” said Hardacre, when the last hand had his penny. “Listen to me, Harbour.”

She pointed up the Mast.

At the cup, the black line came out of the ship’s nose and went over the iron lip of the cup and down, and by the lantern up there Bjorn could see it was not lying still on the lip. It was sawing on it. Every time the ship leaned, the line went across the iron and back.

“Her line’s chafing through on our cup,” Hardacre said. “I’m going up to serve it before it parts. If it parts, she goes, and there’s nothing on this field that’ll stop her. You’ve got her stern lines and every hand on them. Keep them on it. Keep that tail off the whale. Nobody lets go till my word. At night my word’s the lamp in the cup. You see it swing, that’s let go.”

“And if it doesn’t swing?”

“Then nobody lets go.” She was already at the Mast door. “You’re the Harbour on this field till somebody better turns up. Don’t let them see you’re not.”

She went up.

* * *

The stern lines came down from rings along the Accrual’s tail to the grass, six of them, and they were not ropes you held. They were ropes you leaned on with your whole body, heels in the turf and knees bent, and they leaned back.

Bjorn put the Walk-in on them in the dark. The baker and the laundry woman and a lamplighter on the first. The collier lads on the second. The watchman, the other lamplighter, the man in carpet slippers. He went down the lines in the wind, putting hands where hands would hold, and learned their names by shouting them, because it was the quickest way to be able to shout at them later. Mrs Dunmore. Pim and Jem. Tully. The man in the slippers said his name was none of anybody’s business and took a line anyway.

The two heaviest lines went round a pair of iron pickets sunk in the turf, where the field ran up to the wall. He took the tail of the nearest one himself.

The gust came at twenty past two.

It came over the wall and hit the Accrual all along her side at once. The whole long ship leaned away from it. Her tail came round. The stern lines went up off the grass and tight, and every hand on them went forward a stride on their heels across the turf with a noise like a sledge on gravel, and the baker said something she would not have said in her shop.

Nobody let go.

The tail came round towards Mast Two. It came round further than it had come all night. In the lanterns on the whale’s ridge Bjorn could see her riders sit up, and the talking on her back stopped, and started again, louder.

Up at the top of Mast Three the lamp in the cup went out.

It did not swing. It simply went out, in the gale, the way a match does, and there was no light at the cup at all, and no word could come down from it.

Every face on the lines turned to Bjorn.

Starling was beside him. He had come out of the winch house carrying something, and he held it out, handle first.

It was a rigging knife, short and hooked, with a cord through the handle.

“Mast book lets the winchman cut her away to save the Mast,” Starling shouted into his ear, “on the word of the Harbour’s officer at the Mast. That’s you. One rope. The nose line. She’s off my Mast and off your whale and off this field in a breath, and you can tell her it’s your refusal and she’s welcome to it.”

“She goes downwind.”

“She goes downwind.”

Downwind of Mast Three was the whale, and past the whale the warehouse roofs, and past those the town, sleeping. Forty clerks in a lit box under a bag of gas, going over the chimneys in a gale with nobody holding anything.

“You said you’d cut her loose,” said Starling. “I heard you.”

The Mast groaned. The line at the picket went through Bjorn’s gloves an inch and stopped. The tail of the Accrual came round another yard towards the whale, and the whale’s riders were on their feet now on her back, in the wind, and the talking had become shouting.

Starling put the knife in his hand.

End of Part 2