Lesson 9: Currents

Ask any fisherman on the Shore of Lamps what the sea does when the wind stops, and he will tell you that it stops too. Flat water is dead water, he will say, lying in its bed like a pond in a field, and a boat on a calm sea goes nowhere unless somebody rows her.

You have rowed for two days and two nights across such a sea, and every stroke has seemed to prove it. But on the morning of the thirteenth day, in the grey half-light before the sun, you go forward to the bow as Ingrith told you to. You have two black feathers in your hand from the floor of the raven’s cage. She is already there, sitting on the bow thwart with her cloak round her shoulders, looking down at the water as if she were reading a page of the log.

Two feathers fall on either side of the line

The oars are shipped, and the ship is quiet.

Ingrith had the rowers stop a little before dawn. The off-watch is still asleep, and the Heron lies quite still on the glassy water, not ten oar-lengths from the crooked line of weed and foam you saw at dusk. In the grey light it is clearer than it was in the evening. It runs away from you to the north-east, straight and thin as a chalk line on a floor, and on either side of it the sea is a slightly different colour.

Ingrith has two of the rowers who are awake give three slow strokes, no more, until the stem of the Heron rests on the seam itself, and then she tells you what to do. You lie on your belly on the bow with your arms over the side. You lay one feather on the grey-green water on the near side of the line, gently, so that it sits on the surface like a tiny boat. You lay the other on the bluer water on the far side. Then you keep very still, and you wait, and you watch.

For a long time nothing happens, and you begin to feel foolish. Then you see it. The feather on the green side sits where you laid it. The feather on the blue side does not. So slowly that you have to fix your eye on a fleck of foam to be sure, it is sliding away along the seam toward the north-east, as if somebody under the water were drawing it on a thread. By the time you have counted a hundred, it is level with the mast. By the time you have counted two hundred, it is past the stern. The green feather lies beside the bow where you laid it, as still as the ship.

You look round at Ingrith, sitting on the bow thwart behind you, and she nods to you, very slightly, as a teacher nods when a pupil reads a hard word for the first time without help.

What the Old Song Says

When you get up from the bow, Dunn is awake and stirring the cold porridge. He is singing, as he always is in the mornings, a verse you have heard a hundred times without listening to it: “There are roads on the sea that no oar has cut, and the gulls and the drowned know where; the dead go home by the roads in the sea, and the living may follow them there.”

The crew has always believed that this verse is about ghosts, about the paths the drowned walk under the water on their way back to the shores where they were born. Lise touches the oak of the rail when Dunn sings it. Wenna says that her uncle once saw lights moving under the sea on a calm night, going north, and that he never sailed again.

Ingrith says nothing about ghosts. She only says to you, “Whoever made that verse had seen a dead body carried home by the sea, and a feather, and a drift of weed, and had wondered why. They are carried along the same road. Roads in the sea are real. You have just watched one carry your feather away.”

The colour of the water tells its secret

Ingrith makes you lean over the rail beside her and look down into the water on either side of the seam, as the Heron drifts slowly toward it.

The green water on your side is cloudy, as if a little milk had been stirred into it. When the sun comes up and shines into it, you see that it is full of tiny drifting things, specks and threads and small pale shapes that pulse and turn. The blue water beyond the seam is clearer and darker, and the light goes down into it a long way before it fades, so that you seem to be looking into a deep blue well. Ingrith tells you that cold northern water is always thick with these small living things, which feed the fish and the birds and the whales. Water that has come a long way from somewhere warmer is clearer and bluer, like a guest who has walked a long road and arrives in different clothes from the people of the house.

Then she makes you put your hand into the water on each side, and hold it there. The green water is so cold that it aches in your bones after a few breaths. The blue water is cold too, painfully cold, but less. It seems to you, though you cannot be sure, that it is a little softer in the hand, as if it remembered some southern summer it had passed through on its way here.

“It comes from the south-west,” Ingrith says. “It runs along the edge of the cold water like a river running between its banks, slowly, no faster than a small child crawls. You cannot see it move unless you have something that stays still to measure it against, and on the open sea nothing stays still. That is why the fishermen say that a calm sea goes nowhere. They have never lain on a seam and watched a feather leave them.”

Askel doubts a river that cannot be seen

Askel has been listening from the steering oar, and when Ingrith has finished, he comes forward and looks at the seam for a long time with his arms folded.

“A feather goes the length of the ship while we count two hundred,” he says. “That is not a river. That is a man walking in his sleep. Why should we spend our strength rowing across to it, when we could spend the same strength rowing north?”

Ingrith does not argue with him. She asks him instead how far a man walking in his sleep would go if he walked all day and all night, and never stopped, and never ate, and never grew tired. Askel opens his mouth to answer and then closes it again, and you see him working it out, the slow sum turning behind his eyes. A walk that never stops, through every hour of a day and a night, is a long walk. It is longer, perhaps, than a tired crew can row in the same day and night, with their hands in rags and their water running low.

“And the black ships are not in it,” Ingrith says. “They are in the still water south of us, and they do not know the river is here, because Morvane has never lain on this seam with a feather. Every hour we drift in the blue water and they row in the green, we gain on them without lifting an oar. It is like a game of stones, Askel. You move one stone a single square to the side, and your opponent thinks you have wasted a turn. Only many moves later does he see that the square you moved to was the one that held the whole board together.”

The Heron crosses into the blue water

So the rowers are woken, and the oars are run out through their wool-wrapped holes, and with a dozen long, slow strokes to Bran’s quiet count, the Heron slides across the line of weed and foam and into the blue water on the other side. You feel nothing as she crosses.

There is no bump, no change in the motion of the ship, no sound. The sea looks the same and feels the same. But when the oars are shipped again and you look back, the line of weed is already a little farther away than it should be. It is sliding slowly past the ship toward the south-west, as if the sea itself had begun to move backward behind you.

Lise is not content to trust her eyes. She takes an old wicker basket from Dunn’s stores, lines it with sailcloth, and weights it with a stone. Then she lowers it over the side on the long sounding line until it hangs some twenty fathoms deep, where the water, she says, will be older and slower than at the top. For a while the line hangs straight down. Then, little by little, it begins to lean away from the ship toward the south-west, and soon it is trailing out at a long slant, as if the basket deep below were an anchor and the Heron were dragging against it. “There,” Lise says, with satisfaction, and ties the line off to a cleat. “Now we can watch it all day.”

Askel comes forward and stands over the cleat with his arms folded, watching the slanting line as he watched the seam at dawn, for so long that the rowers begin to glance at each other. Then he goes aft to the steering oar, where Ingrith is sitting with her eyes half closed, and says to her, gruffly, in front of everyone, that a man who walks in his sleep and never stops is a man worth having on his side, and that he was wrong. Ingrith only nods, as if a captain admitting his mistake before his crew were the most ordinary thing in the world, and you see that the rowers look at Askel differently afterward, the way a team looks at a player who has owned a foul without being asked.

It is only a wet rope running at a slant into the sea.

Yet it is the most beautiful thing you have seen on the whole voyage, because of what it shows: the whole ship, and the water around her, and the weed and the feathers and the light on the surface, all moving together over the slower water underneath, quietly, steadily, toward the north-east, with no wind and no oars and no sound.

The Mark on the Chart

At noon, as the shadow of the mast lies at its shortest along the deck, you and Ingrith mark the chart. For the first time since the calm began, the line you draw from yesterday’s mark does not go due north. It bends toward the north-east, gently, as a river bends in a meadow. Beside it, in the margin, Ingrith makes you draw a small wavy arrow, the sign she uses for a current, and then she makes you write in the log: Day thirteen. Calm. Found a seam of weed and foam running north-east. Blue water beyond, a little warmer. Crossed it at dawn. The sea moves when the wind does not. Measure it against something deeper.

The black ships row on in the green water

All through the thirteenth day, Wenna goes to the masthead every time the sun moves a hand’s width across the sky, and every time she comes down, her report is a little better.

At dawn the black ships were where they were the evening before, astern in the south-east, four dark hulls on the shining sea with their oars rising and falling to the slow drum. At noon they are a little farther off.

In the afternoon their hulls have sunk to the rim of the sea. From the yard she can see only their masts and the flash of their oars. By sunset she can see their masts and nothing else. From the way the masts have crept along the rim, Morvane seems to be rowing not toward the Heron but a little to the west of her, toward the place where she was yesterday.

That night, for the first time in three days, you cannot hear the drum. You lie awake for a long time listening for it, and the silence over the sea is so deep that you can hear your own blood moving in your ears, but the drum does not come.

Ingrith tells you, when you go aft at the change of the watch, that Morvane will find the seam too, sooner or later. He is a hunter and a good one, and good hunters notice the ground under their feet. “But a runner who finds the fast part of the track halfway through the race,” she says, “does not get back the ground he lost before he found it. Every hour he spends in the green water is an hour we keep.”

Bran learns to row with the river

On the fourteenth day the rowers row for only part of each turn, because Ingrith will not let them waste their strength on what the sea is doing for nothing. She has them pull for a while, gently, to keep the ship pointing true and to stop her turning broadside in the drift, and then rest with their oars across their knees while the river carries them. When Bran asks her, half laughing, whether he will ever row a full turn again, she tells him that the best rower is not the one who pulls the longest, but the one who knows when the boat is already moving and lets it run. He thinks about this for a while. Then he says, slowly, that in the harbour races it was the same: that the crews who won were the ones who did not fight the tide at the river mouth, but waited for it to turn and rode it home.

Lise, watching the slanting line of her basket, tells him that he has taken two weeks and a calm to remember something he knew when he was a boy. Bran laughs at that, the first time you have heard him laugh since the night the rowing began.

Something else changes too, which you do not notice until Dunn points it out to you. The rowers who row less are thirsty less. Dunn’s ladle goes round the benches more slowly, and the casks, which he counts each evening, are sinking more slowly as well. He does not say that this is good news. He says only, with his lips moving over the count, that it is less bad news than it was, and in Dunn’s mouth you understand that this is the same thing.

Ingrith keeps the ship inside the seam

All through the fourteenth day and into its evening, Ingrith keeps the Heron in the blue water as carefully as a blind runner keeps to his track by the rope that is stretched beside it, his hand never leaving it. She steers by the line of weed and foam, which now lies off the left hand side, keeping it always a few oar-lengths away. When the line bends, she has the rowers give a few slow strokes to follow it. When it fades, as it sometimes does where the two waters have mixed, she leans over the rail and puts her hand into the sea.

She holds it there until she can feel which side is the colder, and then she steers away from the cold.

Toward evening she gives the task to you. You lean over the rail as she did and put your hand into the water, and at first you feel nothing but cold, cold that aches up into your wrist. Then you put it in again on the other side of the bow, nearer the seam. You think you feel a difference, very small, like the difference between two stones that have lain in the same sun for different lengths of time. You tell her, and she asks you which way to steer, and you tell her, and she steers that way without checking for herself. It is the first time she has done that, and you do not forget it.

The sky clears for the first time in days

As the sun goes down on the fourteenth day, something changes in the sky.

For days it has been a pale, closed lid of haze, white by day and grey by night, with the sun a blurred disc and the stars few and dim. Now, in the evening, the haze thins and thins, and the sky behind it turns a deep, clear, cold green above the north-west, and darkens overhead to a blue so dark it is almost black. One by one the stars come out, sharper and brighter than you have seen them since you left the harbour, and each has its twin in the still water beneath. Wenna, at the masthead, can see the black ships’ masts no longer, not even against the last of the light.

Ingrith stands at the rail and looks up for a long time, her face lifted, her good eye half closed. Then she looks down at the little board on the chart table, where her pieces still lie from last night’s game. You see her reach out and touch one stone, very lightly, the way she does when she is planning a move that she will not make until much later. “If the sky stays clear like this tomorrow night,” she says, “we will find out how far north the river has carried us. That will be the next lesson, and you will need a steady hand and a good thumb, so keep them warm.”