The Harbour Master's Rule Book

Officer Reyne said no before anybody had asked her anything.

She came down the Apron steps at a quarter to four in her grey coat, pulling her gloves on, with a lamp in one hand and the cistern book under her arm. Mrs Loveridge turned from the rail and drew breath, and Reyne said, “No.”

“I haven’t said a word.”

“You were going to ask whether a little of it might come down somewhere small. Over one yard, for a few minutes. For the children.” Reyne set the lamp on the wall. “No. Snow isn’t landed, it’s scattered. I can cask what goes through my grates. I can’t cask what goes over my wall, and nobody alive can tell me what the water of Brume does in a Harbour drain, and until somebody can, it’s Rule four hundred and eighty-eight, and it’s the cistern, and it’s me.”

Berth Overseer Corrin came down behind her with a board under his arm and a pencil already going, and the face of somebody reckoning a sum on a thing that shrank while he reckoned it. He stopped at the gate and looked up at the Fair Measure, and then down at his board, and then up again, as if one of them might have moved.

“I charge an Apron by what’s over it,” he told the gate. “And what’s over it goes down every time they turn a handle.” He crossed something out. “And I’ve the Apron booked for Thursday first light. Wool barge. The tank’s to be tested and pumped out to the roads before she comes over, and that’s a day’s pumping after an ordinary wringing. That hour of theirs is three days. It was built for rain, that cistern.”

“It was built for what I say goes into it,” said Reyne.

“You’ve still got my key.”

“It’s my key.”

“It was mine at midsummer.”

“Then you should have kept it at midsummer,” said Reyne, and opened the cistern book on the wall under her lamp.

Mr Tidey had taken a paper out of his satchel. It had been folded twice and was still warm from the Hall, where, it emerged, the Association’s committee had met in emergency session at half past three, quorate, with sandwiches, and passed a resolution. Mrs Loveridge asked him to read it to the Harbour Master, and he did, in the tone of somebody who had written it down and wished it on record that writing was all he had done.

“That the Association, having presented to the Harbour one hour of snow, and the Harbour having seen fit to forbid it—”

The lamp on Bjorn’s shoulder went white.

PROCLAIMATRON 304 rose on its three legs, gave the Apron the same few bars of anthem it had given it at three, a shade more stately for the company, and addressed it.

“By order of Stores, and with effect from this hour,” it proclaimed, “the apprentice has been on his feet since the morning, and his socks are wet. Stores is to be told. The apprentice is nevertheless doing splendidly, and this unit is proud to say so.”

It sat down again, its lamp a deep and satisfied gold.

Mr Tidey waited with his finger on the line. Mrs Loveridge looked at the unit and then at Bjorn, and her eyebrows asked a question that her upbringing would not let her put.

“It’s not the Harbour’s,” said Bjorn. “It’s Stores’.”

“Bjorn,” said Rolf. “Your socks.”

“Sit,” Bjorn told it, under his breath. “Three.”

“Three Hundred and Four,” said the unit, not under its breath at all.

Corrin looked at PROCLAIMATRON 304. Reyne looked at it. Then they looked at each other.

“Stores,” said Corrin.

“Stores,” said Reyne, and for a moment the two of them regarded it with a restful and perfect unanimity they had not managed about anything else all afternoon.

“—forbid it,” read Mr Tidey, “the Association informs the town that it has done so, and regrets it.”

“The Association regrets the Harbour,” said Mrs Loveridge, in case it had not been clear, and then she turned, not to Rolf but to Bjorn, as the member of the Harbour who had already been heard to have views. “You. You said there would be no snow, before your master had said anything at all. Very well. Can you at least promise me it will be done decently? That my hour is not simply to be poured down a drain like washing-up water, in the dark, with nobody to see it?”

Bjorn had the answer halfway up his throat before he noticed it had an I’ll on the front. He swallowed it, and found another one behind it.

“The Harbour will do what the Rule says,” he said.

It was the one thing he had said since three o’clock that he was entirely sure of, and it had no I’ll anywhere in it, and for about a breath and a half he was extremely pleased with it.

“The yard, Mrs Loveridge,” said Mr Tidey.

He said it quietly. He had put the resolution away and was looking up the Apron steps, towards the town.

The first handbill, it came out, had not said only snow. At the foot of it, below the border, in type too small for anybody but a secretary to have read, it had said that the Chairwoman would say a few words in the yard of the Association’s hall at five o’clock, with lanterns and hot cordial, and that the snow would begin while she was saying them. The second handbill was on the gate of the Hall yard now as well. And the yard was full.

“Forty or so,” said Mr Tidey. “They’ve been there since four. They wanted good places.”

“The Association has informed the town,” said Mrs Loveridge. “What the Harbour has forbidden, the Harbour may explain.”

Nobody said anything for a while. Somewhere up the hill a lamplighter was working along a street, and one after another the windows along the Tether Field road came up yellow.

“I’ll go, Harbour Master,” said Corrin, and put his board down. “I’ve grandchildren. I can do a yard.”

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“Bjorn,” said Rolf.

That was all. Rolf, who would stand on a wet quay in front of anybody at all until they gave up, gave no sign of meaning to go anywhere near a yard of children, and did not say why, and did not look as though he expected to be asked.

“What do I tell them?”

“Whatever you tell them,” said Rolf, “they’ll remember it.” He held out his hand. “The day book.”

Bjorn gave it to him. Rolf opened it, turned back past the afternoon’s entries to the page written against the gondola rail, with the drizzle spots on it, and began to read.

At the top of the Apron steps Bjorn looked back. Rolf had gone to the bottom of the rope ladder and stood with the day book open in one hand, looking up.

“Mr Hone,” he said, at no more than his ordinary volume, and the whole gondola turned to listen. “A word about your trade.”

* * *

Every door between the Apron and the Hall had two handbills on it now, one on top of the other, and in the lamplight from the windows the snowflakes showed through the second as a faint grey frost of their own, back to front.

Behind him, over the roofs, the Fair Measure hung in her net above the Sky Dock with the Apron’s lamps shining up into her belly, a great dim shape the colour of pewter, holding perfectly still over the town. Bjorn had seen clouds his whole life. He had never before looked at one and known that it belonged to somebody, and that an hour of it had changed hands for money at a meeting with sandwiches. If an hour of snow could be bought and printed, then so could an hour of anything else that came down out of a sky, and the Harbour had a Rule about it. That meant that somebody, once, a very long time ago, had needed one. The Rule did not say why. It was a line and a half long and had nobody’s name on it. Whoever wrote it had watched something come down on a town once, the time it was released, and had taken great care that it never should again, and had not thought to say what it was. Everyone who might have known was in the ground.

He went faster.

There was an easier thing to say, and he had it ready before he was halfway up the hill. The cloud had gone wrong. It happened with foreign weather; it had come too far, it had turned in its net, it would not snow. Nobody’s fault. It would be kind for an evening. Forty children would go home cross with the sky, which could bear it, instead of with the Harbour, which would have to. And next year the Association would buy another hour of another cloud, and a yard would fill up under it again, and the Harbour would already have lied to it once.

He turned it over all the way to the Hall, and at the Hall gate he put it down.

The yard was cobbled and walled, with lanterns on poles round the edge of it and a trestle by the door with a copper urn of cordial going cold on a spirit lamp. It was full of children in mufflers, with a few grown people standing about among them the way grown people stand at the back of anything children have been promised, and a row of grandmothers along a bench by the wall with rugs over their knees. Every face in it was turned up to the sky.

At the front, by the gate, a girl of about ten in a green muffler had read the second handbill aloud to anybody who came in, and was standing beside it now in case anyone disputed it. A small boy near her held a jam jar with the lid off, ready.

Bjorn saw the room before he saw anything else in it, the way he always had and did not entirely trust. The fathers were angry and would be angrier if he was sorry at them. The grandmothers wanted to be told something plainly so they could go home. The children did not want anything explained at all; they wanted to know whether to go on looking up. And there was a mounting block beside the gate at exactly the height from which a yard this size could see a man’s face, and he knew that without having to think about it, and was on it before he had decided to be.

“I’m Bjorn,” he said. “From the Harbour. The handbill’s right. We forbade it.”

It went through the yard like a draught.

“It isn’t our snow,” he said, louder. “It came in a net from a world called Brume, and it’s been sold to people three worlds along, and the Association bought an hour of it for you, which was kind. But nobody alive knows what water from Brume does in our drains. And there’s a Rule, a very old one, that says weather brought in as cargo comes down into a tank, and not onto the town. So that’s where it’s going. Into a tank under the Rain Apron.”

“All of it?” said the girl in the green muffler.

“All of it. Tonight. It’s not going three worlds along and it’s not going anywhere else. It’s coming down on this Harbour.”

The small boy looked at his jar, and then at Bjorn, and his face did the thing faces do just before they decide whether to cry.

That was when Bjorn said it. He said it before he had worked out any way of saying it smaller, and he said it to all of them, from the block, loud enough to reach the grandmothers.

“Every bit of the snow you were promised is coming down on this Harbour tonight,” he said, “and in the morning you can come and see where it went.”

“Will it be white?” said the boy.

Bjorn thought of Mr Hone, and a tarpaulin, and a letter somebody had once written, and did not know.

“Come and look,” he said.

Somewhere over the roofs a clock began to strike five, and forty faces went up to the sky at once, because it was the time on the handbill, and the sky did nothing at all.

On his shoulder, PROCLAIMATRON 304 unbuckled its strap.

It had decided, apparently, that a yard ought to be addressed from the front. It went down his coat to the top of the mounting block, and from there down the block’s three stone steps towards the children, and on the second step its legs, which had been built for a flat quay, lost the argument. It stopped with two feet on one step and the third feeling for the next, its lamp a determined white, and addressed the yard from there.

“By order of Stores, and with effect from this hour,” it proclaimed, “the apprentice has made no promises today. Stores is pleased to record that he has kept himself entirely clear of any undertaking whatso—”

The third leg found nothing. It came down the rest of the way lamp first, and the rest of the word went into the cobbles.

The yard was very quiet. The cordial ticked on its spirit lamp.

The girl in the green muffler looked at the unit, face down on the cobbles with its legs still going, and then up at Bjorn on his block.

“He did, though,” she said.

* * *

He worked out the smaller version on the way back down the hill, with PROCLAIMATRON 304 under his arm and its lamp an injured violet, which was when he always worked them out now. You can come and see the tank. It was true, it was small, and it promised them nothing but a slate floor and an iron grate.

He heard the Apron before he could see it.

It was a sound like dried peas poured onto a drum, steady and hard and without a pause in it, and when he came down the steps he saw that it was coming out of the Fair Measure.

The four wringers stood well back along the gondola rail with their wrapped hands in their armpits. At the stern the tarpaulin was off, and Abel Hone stood alone at the Comfort Seven, turning its crank with both arms, and from the cloud’s underside, straight down, as straight as if it had been dropped down a pipe, came a hard white rattle of ice. Not a flake drifted. It struck the slate in a hopping, skittering sheet, ran in along the courses and went through the grates with a sound like gravel into a hopper, and not one grain of it went over the wall. The gate rail was furred with white. So were the four mooring lines, and the rim of Reyne’s lamp, and the brim of Corrin’s hat.

Rolf stood at the gate with the day book shut under his arm.

“What’s he doing?” said Bjorn.

“His trade,” said Rolf. “He was paid for an hour of snow. That is the nearest thing to it he can land.”

“Straight down,” said Reyne, at the grates, with her lamp held over them and something in her voice Bjorn had not heard in it before, which might have been professional pleasure. “Every grain. Not one over my wall.”

Hone looked down at them over the stern rail without stopping the crank. His breath was coming out white, and so was the cloud’s, in long threads from the meshes of the net.

“You said the how of it was my trade and none of the Harbour’s, Harbour Master,” he called, “so this is my trade, and I’ll answer for it. You know what you’ll have by morning. I told your lad they wrote to me. Sealed tank, still night, sea next door. By first light it’ll be up out of your grates and over your wall and white on everything you own, and none of it’ll be mine, and none of it’ll be foreign. There’s nothing in that Book of yours will stop it.”

“No,” said Rolf. “There isn’t.”

Bjorn looked at the gate, where the frost had begun to come up white round the edges of both handbills at once, the one that said snow and the one that said forbidden, and for the moment he could not tell which of them it was agreeing with.

End of Part 2