The Harbour Master's Rule Book

At noon the kiters sent up bread from the Welkin, and nobody in the loft ate it.

There were five of them on the grass round the drum, and they stood with their faces turned up the line the way people stand at the end of a pier when somebody they know is out in the weather. Now and again one of them lifted a hand towards the white kite. It was much too far for her to see.

Orrin talked. She talked about the gull, which had been joined by a second gull, and about the Harbour’s roofs, which she said looked from up there like a tray of burnt toast, and about the sea, which she said was a great deal of water to have to look at when you had very little. Bjorn stayed by the horn and answered when she wanted answering. He found that what she wanted most was not answers. It was somebody there.

Calloway had been down to the hull and back twice. The second time he came up the ladder slowly, like a man carrying something heavier than a can of tea, and went to stand by Kemble at the rail.

“There’s our own way,” he said. “Not the blade.”

Kemble did not look round. “Go on.”

“We strike from the bottom. We always have. One, then two, then three and four, and each one we take off the line and fold into the hull as it comes. With four off her, the train loses her lift under the knot and comes down a long way, and the fifth kite comes in over your field wall.” He put his arm out along the line. “Saffi comes down her line to meet it. Across the knot, hand over hand. There isn’t a kiter alive who hasn’t walked a line. And the fifth is where your balloon takes her off.”

Kemble measured the fifth kite with her eye, and then the pilot balloon’s tether, coiled on its winch at the tower’s foot, and then the fifth kite again.

“Four off,” she said, “and the fifth comes inside my tether. Just.”

“I heard that,” said the horn. “I like it. I’m not saying I’ll enjoy the knot.”

It was the first plan all day that ended with her on the ground, and the loft knew it. The kiters on the grass, who could not hear it, saw the master’s arm go out along the line, and one of them already had his hand on the drum’s brake.

Everybody looked at Rolf.

* * *

Hask Corrin’s board came up the ladder before he did. It was pushed up through the hatch and laid flat on the loft’s boards, and then his hat was laid beside it, and then Berth Overseer Corrin came up after them both and said, from the top rung, “I’ll not keep you.”

He had brought news, and he gave it standing. The Sky Dock was shut to everything, in and out, for as long as the Welkin’s line stood across it. Two arrivals were holding at the outer marks and a third had given up and gone on. And under the train, out in the outer roads, the fishing co-op had its boats out on their grounds.

“The launch has been out to them twice,” Corrin said. “Pike told it the fish don’t move for a kite.” He looked out along the line to where it went down towards the sea. “Whatever comes out of that sky today comes down on their boats.”

He turned the board over as if the answer might be written on its back, and his eye, travelling along the Masts, stopped at Mast Two, where something very large and grey lay along the air with its nose in the cup.

“She’s no trouble to me,” said Kemble, who had seen him look. “She’s in nobody’s air.”

“She’s on my board.”

“Then she’s in the right place.”

Corrin did not dignify that. He turned back to Rolf, and so did everybody else.

The Rule Book was open again on Rolf’s arm, and not at a new page. He was reading the same line he had read at ten o’clock, and Bjorn, who had stopped breathing without noticing he had, watched him read it twice.

“Master Calloway,” Rolf said. “When you strike your first kite, and take it off the line, and fold it into your hull. Where is your ninth?”

“Flying,” said Calloway. “Till last. The hand comes down with the last of it. That’s the order.”

“Then your first kite is struck from the Welkin while a part of her is still flying. So is your second, and your third, and your fourth.” Rolf did not look up from the page. “In order or out of it. The Rule doesn’t say out of order. It says nothing.” He closed the Book on his finger. “You may not strike them.”

Calloway stared at him.

“It’s how we land,” he said. “It’s how every kite-ship that ever flew brings her train down. You’ve had kite-ships in here before.”

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“At the outer marks,” said Kemble. She said it to the rail. “They strike at the outer marks and come in under their storm kite with the hand already on the deck. I have never had one inside my marks with her train up.” She was quiet a moment. “I brought you in because the roads were no place to leave a hull at first light with a hand on the end of it.”

Nobody said what that meant, and everybody heard it. If she had left the Welkin at the outer marks, the Harbour’s Rule would never have reached up that line to the top of the sky.

Bjorn looked at the words on Rolf’s page, upside down, where the Book lay along his arm. They had been written by somebody long dead, for vessels that were flying somewhere else before this girl’s grandmother was born, and they held her in the sky as firmly as if they had been written with her name at the top. The Rule had kept the blade off her at ten o’clock. At noon it would not let her come down.

“You said nothing,” Calloway said to Rolf, quite quietly. “At ten. You said nothing was being sent. I thanked you for it.”

“I know,” said Rolf.

Down on the grass, the drum had begun to turn.

Bjorn was first in the loft to see it, being nearest the ladder. The kiter at the brake had seen his master’s arm go out along the line some while since, and must have taken it for the word, and he and two others were walking the drum round a spoke at a time. Over the field wall the rust-coloured kite was coming down its line towards them, huge and slow and flat to the wind, and a fourth kiter stood under it with her arms up, ready to take it off.

“Apprentice,” said Rolf. “The drum.”

Bjorn went down the ladder faster than a man with one hand should, and missed a rung near the bottom with his boot and took the last of it on his elbow and his good hand, sliding, and came off the last rung running. The Tether Field was wide and the grass was wet, and the Welkin’s hull seemed to get no nearer for a long time. When he got there the kite was over the wall and dropping.

“Hold it,” he said, to the man on the brake. “Stop the drum. Nothing’s to come off. Not that one either.”

The kiter looked at him and did not stop. He was a big man with a scarf wound up to his eyes, and he said something through it in a tongue Bjorn did not have, and the drum went round another spoke.

Bjorn put his good hand flat on the drum’s rim.

He could not have held it. The drum weighed more than the loft did, and the kite at the far end was pulling at it like a horse, and his one hand on the rim did nothing whatever except go round with it. But the kiter saw the splint on the other wrist, and saw the hand on the rim going round, and put the brake on hard, as a man stops a cart when a child runs out in front of it. The drum shuddered and held.

The big kiter looked down at what was on his drum. Then he unwound one turn of the scarf, considered Bjorn out of the eye it gave him, and wound it back. He lifted the hand off the drum the way a man takes a cat off a table, set it on the brake lever instead, where it could do no harm, and folded the fingers round it. Then he patted them, twice.

Over the wall, the rust kite stopped coming down. It hung halfway, lower than it had flown all day and higher than anyone could reach, neither up nor struck, and turned slowly on its line like a sign over a shop.

The kiters looked at Bjorn. Then they looked up at the loft, where their master stood at the rail with his hands at his sides and did not wave them on.

The woman who had been waiting under the kite put her arms down.

“Harbour,” she said, in the common tongue, and that was all. She had no need to say more. He climbed back up the ladder slowly, with his elbow bleeding through his sleeve, and nobody in the loft asked him how it had gone.

“Then it has to be the balloon,” said Bjorn, before he had his breath back.

He said it to Kemble, and he said it at the pitch he had used on the horn, so that the loft had it, and the horn had it, and the Station’s hands on the ladder had it too.

“Not at the fifth. Now. You could go straight up the line to the knot and take her off there. Nobody’s striking anything. It’s only a basket going up.”

Kemble faced him from the rail.

“Into that?” She did not point. She did not need to. All along the train the kites’ bridles were jumping and whipping on the wind, and at the knot the loose ends thrashed like the tails of something caught. “With four kites still flying under the knot, and every line on that train going like a flail? Nobody goes up into my air but whom I send. I’m sending nobody into that. Not you. Not me.” She turned back to the rail. “And don’t ask me again in front of my station.”

The horn was quiet for a moment, and then it said, “Fair enough, Pilot,” as easily as if somebody had turned down a biscuit.

Bjorn looked at his boots.

The old caution came a beat behind, as it did now, and told him that the girl on the end of the wire had just heard the Harbour’s pilot refuse to come for her, and that she had heard it because he had asked out loud.

* * *

It was Orrin who asked in the end, and she asked him.

“So what’s the Harbour doing?”

Rolf did not answer the horn. He had not answered it all day. Calloway had his back to it. Kemble was watching the white kite, and Corrin was looking at his board as though it had let him down personally.

Bjorn went to the brass.

“Nothing yet,” he said. “It can’t strike anything of yours while you’re up. Not in order and not out of it. That’s the Rule. It’s there to keep you safe, and it’s keeping you up there.”

It was the truth, and he had promised it, and it did not sound any better for being either.

“So I’m what’s holding everything up,” said the horn.

“Yes.”

A sound came down the wire that took him a moment to know for a laugh.

“That’s the first time anybody’s put me in charge of anything,” Orrin said. “You tell the master from me that—” And then, in the same calm voice, not raised at all: “Hang on. The seventh’s going.”

Every head in the loft went round to the line. In the knot, one of the three fouled kites had turned edge-on to the wind. It hung there for a breath, shivering, and then it folded along its spar with a crack that reached the loft a long moment afterwards, faint as a stick breaking in the next field. The knot sagged. The line above it went slack, and then snapped taut again with a jerk that went down the whole line to the Welkin’s drum and made the kiters on the grass step back from it. Far out over the outer roads, the white kite dipped its nose, and slid, and fell away sideways in a long sick swoop towards the sea.

“Saffi,” said Calloway.

The horn on the rail hissed like a kettle left on the hob, and no voice came out of it.

End of Part 2