Lesson 13: Ice

Every captain on the Shore of Lamps knows that ice is the sea’s last word. When you see it, you have gone too far, past the edge of the safe water and into the place where ships are crushed like eggshells in a fist, and the only wise thing to do is to put the steering oar over and row south until the white is out of sight.

You have heard it said so often, and so firmly, by men who have sailed for forty summers, that it has never seemed like a belief at all, only a plain fact, like the cold of snow.

On the morning of the twenty-first day, rowing north-west along the edge of the cold water with the whales far behind and the black sails a smudge in the south, you are about to learn that the men who said it had simply never gone far enough to find out.

The first piece of ice is no bigger than a sheep

It comes out of the morning haze on the steering side, turning slowly in the flat water: a lump of white no bigger than a sheep, rounded and pitted like old bread, with a heart of blue so deep and clear that it seems to glow from inside.

Wenna sees it first and says nothing, which is so unlike her that Askel looks up at the masthead to see whether she is ill. Then she points, and the oars stop one by one along both sides, and the whole crew watches the lump of ice drift past the ship as people watch a stranger walk into a hall where everyone else knows each other.

It knocks once against the hull, a small hollow sound, and is gone astern.

Before the sun is high there are dozens more. Some are flat and grey like broken paving stones, and some stand up out of the sea in blue-white shapes like the towers of a ruined hall. The air above the water smells of nothing at all, so clean and cold that it stings the inside of your nose, and every breath you let out hangs in front of your face like the breath of the whales.

Ingrith sits by the chart table with her hands folded in her lap and watches the ice come as calmly as an old woman watching her neighbours come to market. When you crouch beside her, she tells you that this is the outer edge of the field she charted on the way north, that it has drifted further south since then, and that she is glad to see it.

“Glad?” you say.

“As glad as a runner who sees the last hill,” she says. “It is hard ground. But it is the ground she trained for.”

What the Old Song Says

Lise knows this verse best, because her father used to sing it while he worked at his bench, and she says it now, half to herself, as she looks at the white towers: “When the sea turns white and the white sea sings, turn your prow to the summer and the green things. Past the singing is the end of the world, where the cold one sleeps with her wings furled.”

The crew believes the cold one is the Wind Mother herself, lying asleep in her cave of ice beyond the edge of everything. To row into her white sea is to wake her, and a woman woken in anger is a dangerous thing, Dunn says, though he does not say it loudly enough for Ingrith to hear.

Askel says the ship must turn back

Toward midday, when the ice lies so thick ahead that the rowers must pick their way between the pieces like a man crossing a stream on stepping stones, Askel walks aft along the gangway and stands in front of Ingrith with his feet apart.

“Navigator, this is far enough,” he says. “Every captain I have sailed under would have turned at the first piece. The men are frightened, and if one of those towers rolls over beside us, it will take us down with it. We turn south, and we take our chances with the black ships on open water.”

Ingrith looks up at him with her good eye, and for a while she says nothing, as if she were weighing the words in her hand to see how heavy they were.

“The black ships have more oars than we have, Askel,” she says. “On open water, in a calm, they can change their rowers and we cannot, and when our arms give out they will catch us, in three days or in five. The river that helped us is spreading thin, and they have found it too. You have done the sum as well as I have.”

“And in the ice?”

“In the ice the Heron is a hare, and they are oxen. The Heron draws little more water than the length of your arm. She is light enough to be pushed off with an oar, and narrow enough to slide through a gap that a heavy ship would jam in like a cork in a bottle. The Wolf is built of thick oak to carry Hask’s men and their iron. She is deep and heavy and slow to turn. If she comes in here after us, the ice will open her side as a knife opens a fish. Morvane knows it. He is a careful man.” She rests her hand on the leather tube at her side. “We do not turn back from the ice. We go into it, and we hide.”

Askel stands for a long moment with his jaw working. Then he nods once, like a wrestler who has felt the other man’s weight shift and knows the throw is no longer his, and he goes forward to tell the rowers.

The white light under the clouds shows the way

By the afternoon a thin roof of cloud has spread over the sky from the north, and Ingrith calls you to the stern and tells you to look at its underside, low down near the edge of the sea.

At first you see only grey. Then, as your eyes grow used to it, you see that the clouds to the north and west are lit from below by a pale, cold, yellowish white, as though a great lamp were burning somewhere under the edge of the world. In other places the underside of the cloud is dark, almost black, in long streaks and patches.

“The ice throws its light up onto the cloud,” Ingrith says. “Where the cloud is white, the sea beneath it is covered. Where the cloud is dark, there is open water, because water is dark and gives nothing back. You can read the ice from a day away if the sky is low. The sky is a map of the sea, if you look at it the right way round.”

So you steer for the dark streaks, and the rowers pull the Heron along a lane of open water, black and smooth as oil, with ice on both sides close enough to touch. Bran and two others stand in the bow with oars held upright, and when a floe drifts into the lane they push it off, gently, as a mother pushes away a child’s hand from a hot pot, never striking, never hurrying. Lise goes along the rails hanging bundles of old rope and folded hide over the side wherever the ice is likeliest to touch, so that when a floe nudges the hull it meets something soft instead of bare oak, and the Heron answers each knock with a dull thud instead of a crack.

The black sails, when Wenna finds them again, are closer than they have been since the fog, and they are not slowing down.

The ice sings as old air leaves it

That night you lie awake in the half-dark of the short northern night and listen to the ice.

It is not silent, as you had thought ice would be. It ticks and whispers all around the ship, a fine, steady crackling like fat in a pan or like rain on dry leaves, and now and then a deeper groan rolls across the water from somewhere far off, where two floes are pressing together. Once there is a crash like a falling tree, and a long wave comes rolling through the lanes and lifts the Heron and sets her down again, and Dunn sits up with a shout.

“A tower rolled over,” Ingrith says from the dark. “Its bottom melted faster than its top, and it lost its balance. That is why we keep clear of the tall ones.”

“And the singing?” you whisper.

“The tall ice came from the land, long ago, from snow that fell for a thousand winters and pressed itself into ice. There is old air locked inside it in little bubbles. When the sea melts the ice, the bubbles burst, one by one. That is the song of the white sea. It is only air that has waited a very long time to be let out.”

You lie listening to it a long while after she stops talking, and you find that it no longer sounds like a warning. It sounds like a great many small things being set free.

Lise lays the mast down on the deck

On the twenty-second day the black ships reach the ice.

You see them come in the clear morning, four of them in a line, their black sails furled and their oar banks rising and falling together, and you see the Wolf at their head, the largest, with her carved prow. They come to the outer edge of the field and stop there, a long bowshot apart, as runners stop at the start line and look at the hill they must climb.

“They can see our mast,” Askel says. “Above the ice. That is all they need.”

Lise has been waiting for this. She has the mast wedges knocked out before Askel has finished speaking, and with Bran and two others on the halyards she lowers the mast backward along the ship, slowly, hand over hand, until it lies in its crutch along the length of the deck with the furled sail lashed to it. Now the Heron is no taller than the floes around her. Lying low among them, white with frost along her rails, she is a hare lying flat in the snow while the hounds go by.

“A game of hide-and-seek,” Wenna says, crouching by the gunwale with her chin on her hands. “And we are the ones hiding.”

“Then hide well,” Ingrith says, “and keep still, and keep quiet. The seeker always finds the one who moves.”

Through the morning the rowers ease the Heron deeper into the field, a few strokes at a time, behind a great tower of ice whose blue walls rise twice as high as the mast stood. Ingrith chooses it because it sits broad and squat on the water, with its feet deep in the current, the steadiest tower in the field. From the top of a low floe you watch the Wolf try the edge once. She noses into a lane, and you hear across the still water a long, grinding screech, and a shout, and her oars backing hard. She comes out again slowly and lies off the edge with her bow toward you, like a dog at a hole it cannot get into.

A small boat comes looking along the lanes

In the afternoon the Wolf puts a boat over her side.

You see it from the floe where Ingrith has sent you to watch, lying flat on the ice with a hide over your back so that you are only one more grey lump among the many. It is a light boat with six oars and a man standing in the bow with a pole, and it slips into the field by the lane the Wolf could not use. The men in it row slowly and carefully, stopping often, the man in the bow leaning on his pole and turning his head this way and that, like a seeker counting aloud by the wall and then setting out with his eyes everywhere at once.

You crawl back across the floe and tell Ingrith, and nobody aboard speaks after that. The rowers sit with their hands on the looms of their oars and do not move. Bran holds his breath so long that his face goes red. Somewhere out in the lanes you hear the knock of a pole on ice, and then a man’s voice calling something you cannot make out, and then another knock, nearer.

Ingrith does not look toward the sound at all. She is looking at the tall tower of ice beside the ship, and at a flat floe drifting slowly past it, and you see her lips move as she measures the gap between them with her eye.

“The tall ice has its feet deep down in the cold current,” she whispers to you. “The flat ice floats on the top and goes where the surface water takes it. They do not move together. Watch the lane behind that boat.”

You watch, and you see what she has seen. The lane by which the boat came in is narrowing, very slowly, as the flat floes drift across it and the great towers stand against the stream. The man in the bow sees it, too. He shouts, and the boat turns, and its oars dig hard, and it scrapes back out through a gap barely wider than itself just before the gap closes with a long soft grinding, like teeth.

The boat does not come again. Across the ice the Wolf lies still at the edge of the field, and on her stern a single tall figure stands and looks toward your tower for a long time before he turns away.

The tall ice gives water without salt

The twenty-third day dawns grey and still. Dunn counts what is left in the casks, then counts it again, and comes to Ingrith with a face like a closed door.

She takes him, and you, and Lise with an axe, across a broad floe to the foot of the great tower of ice. There, in a hollow on its lower slope, the sun of the long days has melted a pool of water as clear as air. Ingrith kneels down beside it, stiffly, with one hand on Lise’s arm, and cups the water and drinks.

“Sweet,” she says. “This ice was never sea. It was snow on the land, and the land sent it out to sea. Do not drink from the flat grey ice. That froze from the sea itself and still holds the salt. But the tall ice is the best well in the north.”

Dunn drinks, and his face opens. Then he laughs, which you have not heard him do in many days, and he and Lise go back for the casks.

By evening every cask aboard is full, and the crew drink as much as they want for the first time since the rain. Bran drinks so much that he has to lie down. Even Askel smiles.

Across the ice, the black ships lie at the edge of the field, with their great crews and their heavy, thirsty oarsmen, and they have no way to reach the tall ice without going through the lanes that will open their hulls. Ingrith looks at them for a long time and says nothing, but you see her move a stone on her little board that evening, and you know which game she is playing now. It is not a race. It is a game of holding out, like a tug of rope in which the side that drinks and rests will still be pulling when the other has let go.

The Mark on the Chart

You unroll the chart on the chest by the steering oar. Ingrith puts her finger on the ice field at the top of the skin and moves it a little south and east from where she marked it on the way north, because the ice has drifted.

Then you mark the Heron inside the outer edge of the field, a day’s careful rowing in, behind the great tower, and the four black ships outside the edge to the south and east, a little more than two bowshots off. Ingrith has you draw the tall ice with a small cup beside it, so that whoever reads the chart after you will know where the sweet water is.

In the log she makes you write: Days twenty-one to twenty-three. Ice. Lanes open where the cloud is dark. Tall ice sweet, flat ice salt. Light ship hidden, mast down. The ice is not the end of the sea. It is the part the songs never reached.

The cold comes in at the end of the day

That night the cold comes down hard. Frost grows on the furled sail and the rails, and the crew sleep packed together under every cloak and hide aboard, like puppies in straw.

You do not sleep. You sit by Ingrith with the board of stones between you, playing by touch in the dark, the smooth stones and the rough, and she plays more slowly than usual, looking now and then across the dark ice toward the place where the black ships lie.

“We are safe here,” you say, at last, because it is the thing you most want to hear.

“The ship is safe,” Ingrith says. She takes one of your stones, gently, as if apologising. “The ice will hold the Wolf off for as long as we like. But the men have been hunted for a long time now, and they are cold, and they have had water today and will begin to think of home. Tomorrow they will look at the black sails sitting there and start to count the days. When men count days, they start to wonder whether the thing they are carrying is worth carrying.”

She sets down the last stone of the game and looks at you with her one clear eye.

“And the next lesson will not come from the sea at all,” she says. “It will come from the benches. Go to sleep. You will need to be awake for it.”