Lesson 10: Stars

Every child on the Shore of Lamps is taught that the stars are lamps hung on the inside of a great dark dome, the same lamps over every shore and every sea, so that a sailor who looks up on the far side of the world will see exactly the sky he left behind him at home.

You were taught it too, sitting on the harbour wall on winter nights with your hands in your sleeves, and it has always been a comfort to you: wherever the sea might take you, the sky at least would stay the same. On the fifteenth day the haze has gone completely. The sky is clear from rim to rim, and the Heron drifts north-east in her slow river without a breath of wind. All day long, while the crew sleeps and mends and talks in low voices, Ingrith keeps glancing up at the empty blue sky as though she could already see the stars waiting behind it.

The fifteenth day is bright and still

It is the warmest day of the whole voyage. The sun stands in a clear sky and shines down on the still sea, and the cold that has lived in your bones since the fog begins at last to loosen its grip. The rowers take off their wet wool and spread it on the benches to dry, and lie beside it with their eyes closed, and for a while the Heron looks less like a ship in flight than like a family resting by a river on a summer afternoon.

Wenna does not rest. She goes to the masthead at dawn and finds nothing. She goes again at noon, and this time, after a long silence, she calls down that she thinks she saw something far in the south-west, a single dark speck on the rim that might have been the tip of a mast. The glare off the water is so bright that she cannot be sure. When she looked again, it was gone. Askel goes up himself to look, and stays a long time, and comes down saying nothing. Nobody needs him to say anything. The black ships are out there somewhere beyond the edge of the sea, behind you and to the west of your river, still rowing to their patient drum, and the Heron is still a hare in an open field with the hounds somewhere out of sight.

In the late afternoon Ingrith sets out the little board and plays a game of stones with you in the shade of the sail, as she does on most evenings. She plays slowly and wins easily, and when the game is over, she does not put the board away at once. She sits looking at it, at the small square of wood with its scratched lines, and then she looks up at you and says, “Tonight I will show you another board. A much bigger one. And another kind of stone.”

What the Old Song Says

At sunset, when the crew gathers for the evening cup of water, Dunn sings the star verse of the Song of the Northern Way: “Follow the Nail that holds up the sky, it stands where it stood when the world was born; the lamps of the night are the lamps of home, on every shore and on every morn.”

The crew believes the verse is a promise. The star they call the Nail is the one that does not move, the one around which all the others turn. They believe that it holds the dome of the sky in place as a nail holds a hide to a wall, and that because it never moves, the sky it holds is the same sky wherever you sail. Lise says that this is why sailors are never truly lost, because they can always look up and see home. Bran says nothing, but he looks up at the darkening sky with something like relief on his face.

Ingrith listens to the verse with her head on one side. Then she says to you, quietly, “The first half of that verse is the wisest thing in the whole song, and the second half is the most foolish. By morning you will know which is which.”

Ingrith brings out the board and the knotted cord

When the light has faded from the sky, Ingrith unfastens a small bag of soft hide from her belt, where it hangs beside the oiled leather tube that holds the chart, and takes out the thing you have seen her handle a hundred times and never once seen her use.

It is a little board of pale ash, no bigger than the palm of your hand, smooth and square, with one straight edge darkened by years of her fingers. At one corner, a small bronze peg has been driven into the wood, and from the peg hangs a cord of twisted horsehair with a bronze bead tied to its end for a weight, so that when she holds the board upright, the cord falls straight down across its face. Along the cord, between the peg and the bead, there are knots, a dozen or more, some old and black and hard as wood, some newer and paler, each one tied at a different place along the cord. When she turns the board in her fingers, the bead swings and taps softly against the wood, and you realise that you have heard that small sound many times in the dark at the chart table and never known what it was.

“Every knot is a place,” Ingrith says. “This one is the Shore of Lamps. I tied it on the harbour wall when I was younger than you are now, and my teacher stood beside me and made me tie it three times before he was satisfied. This one is the fishing island where we took on water. These six here, close together, are the Northern Way, from its mouth to its end, and I tied them this spring, on the way north, on clear nights while you slept.” She touches the last of them, the palest and newest. “No one I know has ever tied a knot beyond this one.”

The star that does not move stands higher than at home

The night comes slowly, as summer nights do in the north. Even when the sun has gone, a pale glow lingers along the northern rim of the sea, green and silver, and it never quite goes out, but moves slowly along the rim from the west toward the east as the night goes on. Above it, the sky darkens to a deep, clear blue and then almost to black, and the stars come out, first a few, then many, sharper and steadier than any you have seen since the harbour. The still sea holds every one of them, so that the Heron seems to float in the middle of a great hollow globe of lights.

Ingrith has you find the Seven Oarsmen first, the long bent row of seven bright stars that every child on the Shore of Lamps can point to. Then she has you follow the two stars at the end of the row, the ones the old people call the Oar Blades, and trace a line from one to the other and on, five times the gap between them, until you come to a star that is not especially bright, sitting alone in a dark part of the sky. “There,” she says. “The Nail. The star that does not move. Watch it, and watch the Oarsmen, and tell me in an hour what you have seen.”

You watch. In an hour the Seven Oarsmen have swung round, slowly, like a long oar sweeping across the water, but the star at the end of your line has not moved at all. All the sky is turning around it, as the painted rings on a child’s spinning top turn around the point it spins on.

Then you notice something else, and it makes your skin prickle under your wool. The Nail is too high. At home, on the harbour wall, you remember it hanging well up in the northern sky, about halfway from the rim of the sea to the top of the sky. Here it is higher, much higher, so that you have to tip your head back to look at it.

You hold the board at arm’s length against the star

Ingrith shows you how to use the board. You hold it out at arm’s length in your right hand, upright, with the straight dark edge pointing at the star. You bring your eye down close to your shoulder and look along the edge as an archer looks along the shaft of an arrow, until the star sits exactly on the end of the edge, like a bead on the tip of a needle. Then you hold still. The horsehair cord, with its bronze bead, hangs straight down from the peg across the face of the board, and wherever it falls, it falls true, because the cord always knows where down is, even in the dark, even when the edge of the sea is too dim to see.

“This is why I waited for a night like this,” Ingrith says softly, at your shoulder. “In a sea that is rolling, the bead swings and lies to you. On a sea as still as this one, it hangs like a stone. The calm has given you a gift. Take it.”

Then, very slowly, without moving the board, you bring your left hand up and pinch the cord where it crosses the edge of the wood, and hold it there, and lower the board, and with the fingertips of your other hand feel along the cord for the nearest knot, as you felt for the marks of the lead line in the fog.

The cord lies past the last of her knots

It lies under none of them.

You feel again, and count the knots, and look at Ingrith, and she takes the board from you without a word and does it herself, standing at the rail with the star on the end of the edge and her good eye pressed close to her shoulder, holding so still that she does not seem to breathe. When she lowers it, her fingers pinch the cord in the same place yours did: beyond the last knot she tied in the spring, beyond the end of the Northern Way, on a stretch of plain horsehair where no one she knows has ever tied anything at all.

By now the crew has gathered round you, silently, the rowers leaning on the benches and Askel at the steering oar and Wenna and Lise and Dunn and Bran in a half ring near the chart table, all watching Ingrith’s hands. She shows them the cord and the place where her fingers hold it. Then she tells them plainly, without making it sound either better or worse than it is, that the river in the sea has carried the Heron farther north than any of them has been before, farther than she has been herself, farther than any knot she knows of on any cord.

For a moment no one speaks. Then Lise asks, in a small voice, whether that means they have come near the cave of the Wind Mother at the top of the world.

“It means the Nail stands higher,” Ingrith says. “That is all it means, and that is a great deal. The farther north you go, the higher it climbs, as a lamp on a tall post climbs in front of you the closer you walk to the foot of the post. At home it stands halfway up the sky. If we could go on north until the world ended, it would stand straight over our heads. The star has not moved. We have.”

Then she takes the board, and in the grey starlight, with fingers that do not shake, she ties a new knot in the horsehair at the place where your fingers pinched it, and pulls it tight, and holds it up for all of them to see.

The Mark on the Chart

When the crew has gone back to the benches, you take the chart out of its tube and unroll it on the chart table in the pale glow from the north, and look for a long time at the place where you must mark the night. It is not on the chart. The top of the chart is the northern end of the Northern Way, and the Heron is beyond it. So Ingrith has you mark the night’s position in the margin above the inked coastlines, on the bare leather, with a small cross and a short line rising to it from yesterday’s mark, and beside it you write the knot, as she tells you to, the way she writes all her stars. Then she makes you write in the log: Day fifteen, night. Calm and clear. Took the height of the Nail with the board, a hand’s breadth of cord beyond the last knot of the Northern Way. New knot tied. The sky is not the same everywhere. It changes as you move, and that is how it tells you where you are.

Askel asks what the hunter sees in the same sky

Askel has stayed by the chart table while the others went back to the benches, and he stands looking up at the Nail for a long time with his arms folded.

“Morvane has the same stars,” he says at last.

“He has.”

“Then he can find north as well as you can.”

“Any child can find north on a night like this,” Ingrith says. “Finding north is not the same as knowing where you are. He has no knots for these waters, Askel. He has never sailed them. And he is a hunter, so he watches the ground for the tracks of what he hunts, not the sky over his head. On the sea we leave no tracks.”

Askel is quiet for a while. Then he says, more slowly, that a hunter who loses the tracks may still guess where the hare must go, because a hare that has run north cannot run north forever. Ingrith looks at him with something that might be approval, as a player looks at an opponent who has seen further into the game than she expected. “Yes,” she says. “That is what I would think, if I were Morvane. So we will not turn yet. Not until he has grown tired of guessing.”

Stars that set at home now circle without setting

Late in the night, when most of the crew is asleep, Ingrith keeps you awake to show you one more thing. She points low in the north, just above the pale glow along the rim, to a bright star that you know well from home. On the Shore of Lamps, she reminds you, that star sets every summer night, sliding down into the sea in the north-west and rising again out of it in the north-east. You watch it for a long time, and it does not set. It slides down toward the rim, slower and slower, and then, just above the glow, it begins to climb again, as a runner rounds the last turn of a track without ever leaving it.

And far in the south, she tells you, there are stars you watched rising over the sea from the harbour wall every autumn of your life. Tonight you will not see them at all, because the edge of the world has risen up and hidden them, as the shoulder of a hill hides the bottom of a valley from a man walking along its top.

You understand then which half of the old verse was wise and which half was foolish. The Nail holds still, and that is the truth, and a sailor can steer by it on any night when the sky is clear. But the lamps of the night are not the lamps of home. Every shore has its own sky, slightly different from the next, and a navigator who knows how to read that difference can tell where she is without seeing a single rock or headland, as surely as a player who knows the board can tell from the pattern of the stones alone who is winning and by how much.

Dunn comes aft with the count of the casks

The pale glow in the north has moved round toward the east, and the stars there have begun to thin, when Dunn comes aft along the sleeping ship, stepping carefully between the bodies on the benches, and sits down beside Ingrith at the chart table without speaking.

He has a short length of cord in his hands, the cord in which he has tied a knot at every dawn since the first morning at sea, and he turns it over and over between his fingers. Then, in a low voice, he tells her what he found when he counted the casks at sunset: that all but the last two casks are empty, that one of those is low, and that at the share they are drinking now, the last will be dry in four days, perhaps five if nobody sweats.

Ingrith is silent for a long time. Then she reaches out and takes the cord from his hands, and runs her fingers along the knots, counting them as you counted the knots on her own cord earlier in the night. When she gives it back, she says, “Tomorrow we tell them. All of it. Plainly, the way you told me. And tomorrow we start keeping the count together, you and I and the apprentice, so that nobody can ever say a single cup went where it should not have gone.”

She turns to you. In the grey light of the coming dawn her face looks very old and very calm. “The stars have told you where we are,” she says. “Now you will learn how long we can stay here. That will be the next lesson, and the sea will teach it slowly, one cup at a time.”