Lesson 11: Water

The bold young men on the quays of the Shore of Lamps like to say that the sea looks after the brave, that it fills the nets of a fisherman who does not flinch and sends rain to a crew that does not lose heart, and that only the timid ever go thirsty on the water.

You have heard Bran say it more than once, laughing, with a cup of ale in his hand on the evening before a voyage. On the morning of the sixteenth day, under a pale sky with no wind in it, Ingrith calls the whole crew together around the mast, with Dunn standing beside her holding his knotted cord, and you begin to learn what the sea gives to the brave, and what it does not.

Ingrith tells the crew the truth about the casks

She tells them plainly, as she promised Dunn she would. She does not soften it and she does not make it sound worse than it is. The casks they filled at the fishing island are nearly all empty. What is left will last four days at the share they have been drinking, perhaps five if nobody wastes a drop in sweat. The Heron is farther north than any of them has ever been, in a calm that has lasted a week, and there is no shore on the chart within any distance a tired crew could row.

Nobody says anything for a long moment. You watch the words go through the crew like a cold wave through a shoal of fish, and you see each face take them differently: Wenna biting her lip, Lise looking down at her hands, Bran lifting his chin as if someone had challenged him. Then Askel steps up beside Ingrith, and says, in a voice that carries to the bow, that from today the water will be shared in a new way, and that he, the captain, will drink exactly what the youngest rower drinks, not a mouthful more.

The new way is simple, and Ingrith has worked it out with Dunn and with you during the night. There will be one cup, a wooden cup with a ring cut inside it near the rim, and the water will be poured to the ring and no higher. It will be poured twice a day, at dawn and at dusk, in front of everyone, at the mast. Dunn will pour it. You will stand beside him and call each name and keep the count. And Ingrith will drink last of all, after the youngest, after the captain, after everyone.

What the Old Song Says

That evening, when the cup has gone round for the first time and the crew is sitting with dry lips on the benches, Bran sings, which is unusual, because it is always Dunn who sings. He sings the water verse of the Song of the Northern Way, loudly, almost angrily, as if he were singing it at someone: “The sea is a mother to the bold, and she gives to those who do not fear; drink deep of her, you hearts of oak, and she will keep you here.”

The crew believes it is a verse about courage, about the sea rewarding those who face her without fear. Some of them sing it along with Bran, and their voices grow a little stronger as they sing, and you can see that it helps them, that it is easier to sit on a dry bench with a dry mouth if you believe that your courage will be paid for.

Ingrith listens with her eyes closed. When the verse is over, she says only, so quietly that you are not sure anyone but you hears her, “Listen to the last line. She will keep you here. The song does not say she will send you home.”

Dunn ties one knot for every day

Before dawn on the seventeenth day you sit with Dunn by the water casks in the stern while he ties the knot for the new day.

You have watched him do it every dawn since the first morning at sea without paying much attention, but this time you watch him carefully. The cord is an old one of brown flax, as long as your arm, and he holds it in his lap and ties the new knot with slow, thick fingers, pulling it tight and then running his thumb along all the knots from the beginning, counting under his breath. Each knot is the same size as the others. Each is tied exactly a finger’s width from the one before it. He tells you that his mother kept the days this way on her fishing boat, and her mother before her, because a memory can lie when a man is tired or frightened or thirsty, but a knot cannot.

Then he shows you the other thing he keeps. It is a thin stick of ash with notches cut down its side, and when he dips it into a cask and draws it out, the wet line on the wood shows how much is left. He has cut a fresh notch each evening for each cask. You look at the notches on the stick for the last full cask for a long time, and you do the sum in your head as you would in a game when you are counting how many moves you have left before the board is full. It comes out the same as his.

“Ingrith wants you to keep the count with me now,” Dunn says. “Not because she does not trust me. Because nobody on this ship should ever have to trust only one person about the water. Two counts that agree are a fact. One count is only a story.”

Bran dips a cup into the sea

On the seventeenth day the sun comes up in a clear sky again and beats down on the still water, and by noon the thirst is everywhere.

It begins as a dryness at the back of the throat, and becomes a stiffness in the lips, and then a dull ache behind the eyes that does not go away. Tempers grow short. Two rowers quarrel over a place in the shade of the sail and have to be parted by Lise. You notice that you have stopped talking unless you must, because every word seems to take a little more water out of you. Ingrith has the whole crew soak their shirts and caps in sea water and put them on wet, so that the sea and not their own bodies will cool them, and it helps, though the salt dries white on their shoulders and stings in every crack of their lips.

In the middle of the afternoon, Bran gets up from his bench. He takes the wooden bailer that hangs by the mast, leans over the rail, and fills it from the sea, and stands up with the cold green water brimming in it and the light shining through it. Some of the crew watch him, and one or two of the younger rowers half rise, as if they too might do the same if he dares. He looks straight at Ingrith, and you can see the old verse in his face, the mother who gives to the bold.

Ingrith does not raise her voice. She does not even stand up. She only says, “Bran. Come here and let me tell you about the man who did that on my first voyage.”

He hesitates, and then he comes, still holding the bailer, and sits down on the deck in front of her. And she tells him, quietly, about a young oarsman, strong and bold, who drank the sea on the fourth day of a long calm. By evening he was so thirsty that he drank again, and again in the night. By the next day he no longer knew his own name, and had to be tied to his bench so that he would not throw himself over the side. “The sea is salt,” she says. “Salt makes thirst. The more of her you drink, the thirstier she makes you, and the more you want her. She is not a mother to anyone, Bran. She is only water that cannot be drunk.”

Bran looks down at the bailer in his hands for a long time. Then he gets up, goes to the rail, and pours it back into the sea, slowly, and comes back and sits down on his bench. When the younger rowers look at him, he shakes his head once. Nobody else touches the bailer that day, or the next.

The Mark on the Chart

At dusk on the seventeenth day you mark the chart in the margin above the inked coasts, beside the cross you made two nights ago under the Nail. The new line is short. The river in the sea is still carrying you, but more slowly than before, and Ingrith thinks that it is spreading out and weakening as it runs north, like a stream reaching the flat ground at the edge of a lake. Then she makes you write in the log, in plain words: Day seventeen. Calm, hot sun. Two cups a day to the ring. Shirts wet with sea water against the sweat. No one drinks from the sea. The sea does not give. It only lets you take what you have brought, and what falls from the sky.

Fair shares are measured where everyone can see

By the eighteenth day the pouring of the water has become the centre of each day, the thing the whole crew waits for from the moment the last cup is drunk.

At dawn and at dusk they gather at the mast in a silent ring, and Dunn pours, and you call each name, and each person steps forward and drinks the cup to the ring, slowly, and hands it back. Nobody pushes. Nobody hurries. Every eye follows the water as it rises to the ring, and you understand that a fair share is not only a matter of how much water each person gets, but of each person seeing that every other person gets the same, as a crowd at a footrace must see the start for itself before it will believe who won.

On the evening of the eighteenth day, Wenna, whose lips have cracked and bled, holds her cup for a moment and then turns to one of the young rowers, who has been sick in the night, and holds it out to him. He stares at it. The whole ring goes still. You look at Ingrith, because you do not know whether she will allow it.

“A share that is given is still fair,” Ingrith says. “A share that is taken is not. Drink it, boy. She chose.”

He drinks it. And Ingrith, when her own turn comes last of all, drinks only half of her cup, and hands the other half to Wenna without a word, and it is so quietly done that half the crew does not notice it.

The black masts appear once more on the rim

That same evening, as the light goes, Wenna climbs to the masthead again, though her legs shake on the cleats, and stays there until it is almost too dark to see.

When she comes down, she tells Askel and Ingrith that she has seen them again: four masts, far away in the south-west, just on the rim, no nearer than they were three days ago, perhaps a little farther. They are still following. They have found the river too, or some of it, or they have simply rowed on and on toward the north, with the same slow patience as before.

Askel’s face is grey with thirst and weariness, but he only nods. “They have more mouths than we have,” he says, slowly, as though he were working it out aloud. “Four ships. Many more men. If we are thirsty, they are thirstier.”

Ingrith looks at him as she looks at you when you have made a good move on the little board. “Yes,” she says. “A tug of rope is not won by the strongest team. It is won by the team that can hold on longest. Remember that, in the days to come.”

Lise spreads the sail to catch the sky

In the night the sky changes. The stars go out one after another, as if a grey cloth were being drawn over them from the south. When the nineteenth day dawns, there is a low, soft, even grey lid over the whole sea, and the air is damp and cool against your face, and still there is no wind.

Ingrith smells it before anyone else. She lifts her face and breathes in slowly, and then she sends for Lise and Askel. Within moments the whole crew is on its feet. They lower the yard until it lies across the ship a man’s height above the benches, and Lise has them loose the sail and spread it out wide and flat, its edges lashed to the rails on either side, so that it hangs between yard and rail like a great shallow bowl of wool. At its lowest point, near the mast, she cuts a small slit in the cloth and fits a short wooden trough beneath it, sloping down into the mouth of the empty cask that Dunn has rolled into place.

“The first water will be salt,” Lise says, as she works. “The sail has had a week of spray on it, and the salt has dried into every thread. We let the first of the rain wash it, and run it over the side, and taste it, and only when it is sweet do we turn the trough into the cask.”

It is the hardest waiting of the whole voyage, harder than the fog, harder than the long calm days, because now the water is coming and you must not drink it yet.

A windless drizzle falls all through the nineteenth day

The rain, when it comes, is hardly rain at all. It is a fine, soft drizzle that falls straight down out of the grey with no wind to drive it. You can barely see the drops, only feel them gathering on your face and your eyelashes, and on the wool of the spread sail they gather into beads, and the beads into threads, and the threads into a thin, slow trickle that runs down to the lowest point of the bowl and through the slit and along the trough and over the side. At first Lise lets it all run away into the sea. Every so often she puts her finger under the trough and tastes it, and shakes her head, and the crew watches her with their dry mouths open, and nobody says a word. Then, near the middle of the morning, she tastes it once more, and stops, and tastes it again, and her face changes. She turns the trough with her own hands, and the thin trickle of water begins to fall, drop by drop, into the cask.

It rains like that all day.

It never rains hard. There are hours when the drizzle thins until you can hardly feel it, and you watch the trickle in the trough dwindle to a slow drip, and the fear comes back along the benches. Then the grey thickens again and the drip becomes a trickle once more. All day the crew sits in the drizzle with their faces lifted and their mouths open, catching what they can on their tongues, and all day nobody touches the cask. Ingrith sits by the trough with her hand resting on the rim of the cask, as she rests her hand on the board between moves of a long game, and she does not move from it.

At dusk, when the drizzle finally stops, the cask is not full. It is not even half full. But it holds more water than the Heron has had for days. Dunn dips his notched stick into it, and you read the wet line together, and the sum you make comes out the same as his, and it is enough. It is enough for four more days, at the old share, and perhaps for five.

So the cup goes round at the mast, as it has every evening, and Ingrith gives the order herself: one cup to the ring for each person, and then, tonight only, one more, so that everyone can feel the water in their mouths and remember what it is. Dunn pours. You call the names. Nobody pushes, and nobody asks for more. You think you have never seen anything so strong as a thirsty crew standing in a quiet ring, waiting for its turn, while the water it needs stands open in a cask an arm’s length away.

Great breaths sound around the ship in the dark

That night the cloud breaks up and the stars come back, and you lie on the deck by the chart table, drowsy and almost content, with the taste of fresh water still on your tongue and the sky turning slowly round its Nail above you. The sea is quite still. Not a ripple touches the hull.

Then, out of the stillness, close by, you hear a sound that brings you to your knees.

It is a breath. A great, long, rushing breath, louder than any bellows, as if some huge creature had surfaced from the deep somewhere just beyond the rail and blown out all the air in its chest at once. A moment later comes another, farther off, and then another on the other side of the ship, and a warm, heavy smell of fish drifts across the deck. All along the benches you hear the crew waking, and someone whispering the verse about the monsters that rise in the north to drag ships down into the dark, and someone else telling him to be quiet.

Ingrith is already sitting up. In the starlight you can see her face turned toward the sound, her good ear forward, and you see that she is not afraid. She is listening the way she listened to the drum in the fog, counting, measuring, as a runner measures the breathing of the others in the dark before a race. “Nobody move,” she says softly. “Nobody shout. Wait for the light.” Then she turns to you, and you hear something in her voice you have not heard for days, something very like gladness. “Lie still and listen to them breathe,” she says. “At dawn you will see what they are, and the next lesson will be theirs to teach.”