The Harbour Master's Rule Book

It was a good knife. It was the kind of knife that has been sharpened every evening for years by somebody who likes a thing done properly, and it sat in Bjorn’s glove as if it knew the way.

One rope. He could see it from here, black against the Mast, going up into the dark to the cup.

He put the knife in his coat pocket.

“Nobody’s cutting her,” he shouted, down the lines. “Nobody lets go. No word, no letting go. Lean on it.”

They leaned on it.

He did not know whether it would be enough. He had said it anyway, to eight people in the dark who had never held a line before tonight, and they had heard the Harbour say it, and they leaned. The baker leaned with her eyes shut. The collier lads leaned with their heels dug in and their teeth showing. The man in carpet slippers leaned in his carpet slippers, which was an act of faith Bjorn would think about for some time afterwards.

The line at the picket came in an inch. Went out an inch. Came in.

He took a second turn round the picket, the proper way, with the rope doing the holding and his hands only minding it, and lay back on the tail with both feet against the iron.

The gust found its second wind.

It came across the Tether Field in a wall, and the Accrual heeled away from it, and her tail came round, and every stern line on the field went up off the grass at once and tight as bar iron. The turn on the picket surged. The rope ran round the iron the length of a hand in one jerk, and took Bjorn’s left hand in with it, between rope and picket, and shut on it.

Something in the back of his hand broke. He heard it inside the glove. A little dry snap, like a twig trodden on in another room.

He got the hand out. He did not know how. The rope had it and then the rope didn’t have it, and he had it against his chest, and his right hand was still on the tail and his whole weight was still on the right hand, and the line had not moved.

Nobody had let go.

He looked down the lines. Every hand was still on its rope. Mrs Dunmore with her eyes shut. Pim and Jem. Tully, who had dropped his pole somewhere and had both arms wrapped round the rope. They were going forward across the turf on their heels, a little and a little, and nobody had let go, because nobody had been told to, because the only person on that field who could tell them to was up a Mast in the dark with no lamp.

The tail of the Accrual came round towards Mast Two, and round, and slowed.

It stopped perhaps a boat’s length off the whale.

The Long Amity had not moved at all. She lay along her Mast with her riders on her back and her great eye, somewhere in the dark, very probably looking at the ship that had nearly come across her, and somebody on her ridge was talking to her, steadily, about nothing. The voice came over the field without its words, and Bjorn found he did not need them.

The gust went through, and went on over the wall, and was somebody else’s.

The tail came back.

Up at the cup, a match flared, and a lamp came alight, and hung still.

* * *

Hardacre came down the Mast with tar to the wrists and no cap. The black line was served where it crossed the cup, parcelled in canvas and bound over with marline, and it would hold till morning.

“Make fast,” she said.

They made fast. The stern lines went round the pickets and were hitched off there by the collier lads, who turned out to know a hitch, and who were very pleased to be asked. The hands came off the lines one at a time and stood in the wind and looked at their palms.

“That was well held,” said Hardacre, to all of them.

“We didn’t do anything,” said the baker. “We never let go.”

“That’s the whole of it,” said Hardacre.

The Accrual lay out along the wind at the top of Mast Three, still moored, with her tail pointing where it had pointed at ten o’clock and every window of her gondola lit.

Bjorn put his left hand inside his coat and buttoned the coat over it.

* * *

Rolf came over the stile at a quarter to three with Starling’s boy and a lantern. Senior Air Pilot Kemble came through the gate a minute after him, still doing up her coat, and behind her Hask Corrin, with his allocation board under his arm in a wrapper of oilcloth and the tail of a nightshirt showing under his coat.

Kemble went straight to Hardacre. They put their heads together by the Mast door, and Hardacre pointed up at the cup and then along the stern lines and then, once, at Bjorn.

Rolf walked over to Bjorn and stopped.

“You sent for me.”

“Yes.” There was no sense in any other answer, so Bjorn gave that one and the rest of it after it. “I said I wouldn’t.”

“He did say,” said Starling, from the winch-house door.

This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author’s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

“I heard him,” said Rolf.

That was all he said about it. More would have been easier.

Corrin had got his board out of its wrapper and was looking from Mast Three to Mast Two and back, and his face was doing the thing it did when a column would not come out.

“I’ve a Mast with a whale on it that nobody will own to,” he said, “and now a Mast with a bank on it.”

“The whale’s in my air, Overseer,” said Kemble, without turning round.

“The whale’s on my Mast, Senior Pilot. The air’s welcome to her any time it likes.”

Kemble let that go past her. She came over to the lines, and looked at the hands standing about in the wind with their pennies, and then at Bjorn.

“Anybody hurt?”

“Mrs Dunmore’s burned both palms on the rope,” Bjorn said. “Pim’s done his knee going over at the picket. Tully’s lost his pole. That’s everybody.”

He said it quickly and he said it all, and it was true, and it was a list of every person on that field who had got hurt except one.

* * *

The master of the Accrual came down Mast Three at five to three, with Mr Aske behind her carrying a ledger and the dark lantern, and stood in the winch house by the stove with her hands folded in front of her as if the stove were a desk.

Rolf nodded to her. She nodded back.

On Bjorn’s shoulder, the lamp came up. It did not come up gold. It came up a plain steady white, like a lamp left in a sickroom window.

It did not stand up and it did not clear its horn. It spoke.

“By order of Stores, and with effect from this hour. The apprentice has hurt his hand. The apprentice has counted everybody on the field, and has not counted himself. Stores is to be told, and the apprentice is to be seen to.”

That was all. No flourish, no Stores is gratified, no exemplary anything. It said it the way a man says the ice is thin, and stopped, and its lamp sat white and still at his ear, and the winch house was full of stove-tick and wind.

Nobody looked at PROCLAIMATRON 304.

Everybody looked at Bjorn’s coat.

Rolf did not look at it either. He had not looked at it all night. He looked at the buttoned front of Bjorn’s coat, where there was a shape under it that was not a coat.

“Which hand,” he said.

Bjorn undid the coat and took it out.

It had gone the wrong shape across the back, and dark, and when he tried to close it for them to see that it closed, it did not. He looked at it himself, properly, which he had not done since the picket, and found he would rather not have.

Kemble took it by the wrist, not gently and not roughly, turned it once to the lamp, and let go.

“Batten,” she said to Starling, and Starling brought her a flat of wood off the rack of handling lines, and she laid the hand along it and bound it there with twine, quickly, the way she would have seized a rope end, and tucked the end in. “Infirmary at first light. Before that if it gets worse. Keep it up.”

“It’s all right.”

“It isn’t,” said Kemble. “It’s bound.”

He held it up against his chest, bound, as instructed. It hurt a great deal, and it had been hurting a great deal for half an hour, and he had been busy.

PROCLAIMATRON 304 was the first thing all night that had noticed him. He had spent the whole of the night noticing: a woman sitting still in a room full of moving pens, a boy with a slice of bread, a baker with her eyes shut, a lad whose grin was the wrong grin for a rope. He had put names to all of them by shouting. Not one of them had had any reason to look at him, and not one of them had.

It had. It had done it in front of everybody, at the top of its voice, because it did not know any other way to do anything. And it had been right.

He did not say anything to it. He put his good hand on it for a second, on the brass, where it sat silent on his shoulder, and then took the hand away again before anybody saw.

* * *

Rolf turned to the master of the Accrual.

“Master Bream,” he said. “Your vessel is moored at Mast Three, and she’ll stay moored there until she chooses to leave. Nobody is cutting her. A mooring is a mooring. The Harbour is moored to the Accrual. It is not moored to her paper, or to Mortmain House, or to anything Mortmain House says she owes, and it can’t be, because the Rule has said so since long before this winch house was built, and the Rule is the only thing in this winch house that isn’t tired.” He held out a hand for a pen, and Mr Aske, without being asked, gave him his. “I’ll write that to Mortmain House. Over my own name. You may carry it.”

He wrote it on the lid of the crate of gloves, standing, in the lantern light, with the winch-house door open and half the Walk-in crowded in it to get out of the wind, and it was short. Bjorn read it upside down. It said what the Rule said, and who the Harbour was moored to, and who it was not, and it was signed.

Bream took it and read it, twice, and folded it along its middle and slid it into her cuff.

“You know what this is, at home,” she said.

“A refusal.”

“It will be filed. Mortmain House will answer it. Your Harbour will be named in the proceeding as the mooring that refused, over the Harbour Master’s own hand.” She said it steadily, the way she said everything. “In a court you cannot see.”

“Or answer.”

“Nobody here can answer it. There is no way to.” She inclined her head. “You are a party after all, Harbour Master. Not the one I asked you to be. The one I wanted.”

“And the next master out of Scrivence with a claim on her,” said Rolf, “will have heard where to come.”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll have it printed.”

Mr Aske made a small noise into his spectacles and wrote something down.

“Your apprentice is in the book as well,” Bream said. “First, as it happens. He told us the Harbour would cut us loose.”

“He was wrong,” said Rolf. “Put under it that the Harbour Master said otherwise.”

Mr Aske wrote that under it. Bjorn watched him do it, and understood that somewhere across the worlds, in a counting-house court he would never see the inside of, his own worst sentence of the night and the correction of it were going to sit together in a clean small hand for as long as anybody kept books, and that nobody would ever ask him about either.

“Wind goes round to the land about noon,” Kemble said. “There’s a current off the Dock with it. She can go off on that.”

“Then she leaves on the noon current,” said Rolf, “with her claim.”

“I was always going to,” said Bream.

Corrin wrote Mast Three, to noon on his board, and under it nothing at all, and looked at the nothing for a while.

Mr Aske lifted the Ledger-Lantern by its bail and held it over his open ledger, from habit, because it was the hour.

It stayed dark. The claim was still in the books. Nobody at the Harbour had taken it out, and nobody at the Harbour could.

* * *

The Walk-in went home in the small hours turning over, when the wind had dropped to something a person could stand up in and the stars had come out over the Tether Field one at a time, as if checking it was safe.

They went across the field in twos and threes with their pennies, and their collars up, and their hands in their pockets. Mrs Dunmore went with her palms wrapped in rag and held in front of her, like somebody carrying two cups. The collier lads went off towards the outer roads arguing about the hitch. The lamplighters had found Tully’s pole and were carrying it between them. The man in carpet slippers went last, and alone, and said good night to nobody.

Bjorn went with them as far as the gate.

He put his right hand in his pocket, because everybody else had, and his left stayed where it was, bound to a batten and held up against his coat. PROCLAIMATRON 304 rode on his left shoulder with its lamp turned down to the colour of a banked fire, holding on to his coat very carefully, and said nothing at all. Bjorn let it.

At the gate he looked back.

The Accrual lay quiet at the top of Mast Three, nosed in, her tail downwind and clear of everything, and all along the gondola the windows were lit where the clerks had gone back to their ledgers. In the last window, on the flat desk, beside a woman with her hands folded, the brass lamp sat exactly where it had sat all night.

It was still dark.

End of Part 3