Lesson 14: Doubt

On every ship that sails from the Shore of Lamps, and in every hall where the Council of Lamps sits arguing through the winter, people believe that a crew follows the loudest voice. The captain who roars in a storm is obeyed, the man who strikes the table with his fist carries the vote, and whoever can make himself heard above the wind and the rowers’ grumbling is the one who really steers, whatever the steering oar may say.

You have believed it as surely as anyone, and you have half admired Askel for his great voice, which can carry from the stern to the bow in a gale without seeming to try.

On the twenty-fourth day, frozen into stillness among the ice with four black ships waiting at its edge, you watch a crew come within a breath of breaking, and you watch it held together by the quietest voice aboard.

A voice comes across the ice at dawn

The morning is grey and windless and so cold that the water in the bilge has a skin of ice on it, and the crew are stamping their feet and beating their arms against their sides when the voice comes.

It comes from the edge of the field, where the Wolf’s small boat lies against a floe with its oars shipped and a man stands up in it with his hands cupped round his mouth. In the calm, sound travels over ice as clearly as over a frozen pond, and every word reaches the Heron as though he were standing on her deck.

“Navigator of the Heron! Hear the word of Morvane, captain for the lord Hask of the Iron Shore!” He waits, as a herald waits at a fair before he names the winners of the races. “The lord Hask wants nothing of yours but the chart. Leave it in its case on the ice where we can see it, and row home. No ship of ours will follow you. You have the word of Morvane.”

Then the man sits down, the boat backs away toward the Wolf, and the silence comes back over the ice, heavier than it was before.

Askel opens his mouth to shout an answer, and Ingrith puts her hand on his arm. “Do not answer,” she says. “A voice tells him where we are and that we are listening. Let him wonder.”

But the words have already done their work. You can see it in the way the rowers look at one another and then down at their hands, and in the way nobody quite looks at Ingrith, or at the leather tube at her side.

You feel it in yourself, too, and that frightens you more than anything the man in the boat could have said. For a moment, standing on the frozen deck boards with your hands tucked into your armpits, you see the harbour at home as clearly as if it lay just beyond the tall ice: the lamps along the quay coming on one by one at dusk, the smell of peat smoke and frying fish, your mother’s door with the crooked latch that sticks in wet weather. You see yourself walking up from the boats with your sea bag over your shoulder and nobody chasing you, and nothing in the world to carry but the bag. It would be so easy. It would only take a leather tube laid down on the ice and a few strokes of the oars, and the long cold game would be over, and you would be home before the first frost on the hills.

What the Old Song Says

It is Dunn who says the verse, slowly, as if he had been carrying it in his mouth all morning: “Ten voices in the storm, and the loudest steers. The ship goes where the shouting goes, and the shore hears what the strong man swears.”

On the Shore of Lamps the verse is sung to boys who are too quiet, to tell them that they must learn to raise their voices if they want to be heard at sea. The crew believe it the way they believe that the tide comes in twice a day: a ship is a place where the strongest lungs decide, and a quiet man had better learn to follow.

Bran stands up on his bench to speak

It begins with Bran, because any hard thing that has to be said aloud on the Heron is always said first by Bran.

He stands up on his bench in the middle of the ship, so that his head is above everyone else’s, and he speaks to the whole crew in the voice he uses to set the stroke, a voice made to be heard over thirty oars.

“I have rowed for this chart since the fishing island,” he says. “Through the gale and the fog and the calm, all of us, until our hands bled, and I have not complained once. But I have two children at home who will not know my face if I am gone another month. We have water now, and we have a word from Morvane. Why should we sit in the ice and freeze for a skin with lines on it? Let Hask have it, and let us go home.”

There is a murmur all along the benches, and it is not a murmur against him. The men are worn thin. Their lips are cracked and bleeding from the cold, their fingers are split across the knuckles from the oars, and the dried fish in Dunn’s stores is down to the hard, salty ends that nobody wanted in the first week. They have been hunted for more than three weeks across a sea that would not give them a breath of wind, and now someone has offered them a way out. Two of the younger rowers stand up beside Bran. Somebody says, “He is right,” and somebody else says it louder, and then there are five voices saying it, and then eight.

You feel the whole ship tilt under you, as a tug of rope tilts when the first man on one side slips and the whole line begins to slide toward the mark.

Askel shouts louder than all of them

Askel does what every captain on the Shore of Lamps has been taught to do: he climbs onto the chest by the steering oar, so that he stands even higher than Bran, and he roars.

He roars that they are sworn men of the Council of Lamps, that Morvane’s word is worth less than the ice it was spoken over, and that any man who talks of leaving the chart on the ice is no better than a thief. His voice is magnificent; it bounces off the tall ice and comes back doubled, and for a moment it beats the murmur down.

But only for a moment, because Bran roars back, and Bran’s lungs are as big as Askel’s. The younger rowers shout too, and soon the ship is full of men shouting at one another across the benches, like two teams of wrestlers who have stopped wrestling and started to brawl. Wenna is down from the masthead with her face white, Lise stands by the mast crutch with her arms folded and her mouth shut tight, and Dunn has his hands over his ears.

You look at Ingrith. She is sitting on her chest by the chart table, exactly as she sat when the whales came, and she has taken out her little board of stones and set it on her knee.

Ingrith waits for the shouting to tire

She does not shout, and she does not even look up. She lets them shout until the shouting has worn itself out, the way a runner who knows the race is long lets the fast starters go ahead of her and burn themselves out before the first hill.

It takes a long time, but even a quarrel needs breath, and the men have been rowing and freezing and going hungry for twenty-four days. One by one the voices drop. Askel is the last; he stands on the chest with his chest heaving and his hands open, and when no one answers him he climbs down and stands with his back to the crew, looking out at the ice.

Into that silence Ingrith says, quite softly, to you: “Bring me the tube.”

You fetch the oiled leather tube from beside her, and she does not take it. Instead she puts it back into your hands and closes your fingers round it with her own cold, dry fingers, which are thin as twigs and steadier than yours.

“Hold that,” she says. “If the crew decide to give it up, you will be the one who carries it to the ice. I will not stop you.”

Then she turns on her chest to face the benches, and you understand for the first time that she has been waiting for this very moment since the man in the boat sat down.

Ingrith speaks so quietly that they lean in

Her voice is so low that the men at the far ends of the ship have to stop shuffling to hear it, and then lean forward, and then come a few steps nearer along the gangway, until by the time she has said three sentences the whole crew is gathered round the stern as close as children round a fire.

“Bran is right,” she says. “He has rowed further than any of us. He has children at home, and so do others here, and nobody aboard has the right to call him a thief for wanting to see them.”

Bran stares at her; he had come ready to wrestle, and there is nothing to wrestle against.

“So let us think about what Morvane is offering,” she says, “as carefully as Bran has rowed. Think about where Morvane is. He has been at sea as long as we have, with four ships and three times our mouths, and with heavy oarsmen who drink more than ours. We filled our casks yesterday from the tall ice, and he cannot reach it without opening his hulls. Dunn, how long would our water last if we drank as we did before the rain?”

“Twenty days,” Dunn says, after a moment. “More, if we are careful.”

“And how long do you think his will last?”

Nobody answers, but you can see the sum being done along the benches, slowly, in faces that are no longer red.

“A man with plenty of water does not stand on the ice and beg,” Ingrith says. “He waits. Morvane is calling to us because he cannot wait much longer, and he knows it. And think about what the chart is. Hask does not want it to hang on his wall. He wants it so that every fishing boat and every trader who goes north through the Northern Way pays him for passage, every summer, for as long as he lives, and his sons after him. Your children, Bran, and their children too. That is what lies on the ice if we leave it there.”

She stops and lets the silence lie for a while, as an archer holds the bow steady at full draw before she looses, so that the arrow will fly true.

“And I may be wrong,” she says. “I am old, and one of my eyes is no good, so I will not decide this for you. You will decide it.”

The Mark on the Chart

Before anything else, she makes you unroll the chart on the chest, as on any other day, because a day without a mark is a day lost from the log, whatever else happens in it.

You mark the Heron where she lay yesterday, inside the outer edge of the ice field behind the great tower. Nothing has moved but the black ships, which have drawn a little closer together at the edge, four small marks south and east of you, and you notice that your hand is not quite steady and that the ink spreads a little where you press too hard.

In the log she makes you write: Day twenty-four. Calm. The Wolf offered terms. The crew counted the water. A loud voice is heard first; a steady voice is heard longest.

Every person aboard drops a stone in the cup

Ingrith empties the stones from her board into her lap, the white ones and the black, and sets the wooden drinking cup on the chest beside her.

“Each of you takes one white stone and one black,” she says. “Keep your hands closed. Then come past the cup, one by one, and drop one of them in. White, we keep the chart and wait. Black, we leave it on the ice and go home. Throw the other overboard. Nobody will see which you choose, and nobody will ask.”

So they come, one after another, every person on the ship: the rowers in their order along the benches, then Lise, then Dunn, then Wenna, then Askel. You go too, with the tube under your arm and the two stones cold in your fist, and when you stand over the cup you find that you do not know, for one long breath, which hand you are going to open. You think of the lamps on the quay and your mother’s door. Then you think of every fishing boat from the Shore of Lamps going north some summer and paying at the Way, and of Ingrith sitting with her board on her knee while the whole ship shouted, and of how small and steady her voice was afterwards. You open the hand with the white stone, and the black one goes over the side with a little splash that nobody notices but you. Last of all Bran comes, slowly, and stands over the cup for a long time before he opens his hand.

Ingrith tips the cup out onto her board where everyone can see. The stones lie there in a small heap, grey and pale in the grey light, and all of them are white but one.

Nobody asks whose the black stone is. Ingrith picks it up between her finger and thumb, looks at it, and puts it back in her board with the rest, as if it were simply one more piece of the game, which it is.

Askel asks how it was done

That evening, when the crew have eaten and the first watch is set, Askel comes and sits by Ingrith at the stern. It is Bran who has taken the first watch, standing in the bow with an oar, quite calm, and Askel watches him for some time before he speaks.

“I have shouted at crews for twenty years,” he says at last, “and today a crew shouted back at me, and I could not hold them. You hardly spoke.”

“You were right in everything you said,” Ingrith says. “That was not the trouble. The trouble was that you said it to beat them, and a man who is being beaten will push back, as a wrestler pushes back, even when he knows he is wrong. I did not try to beat anyone. I tried to give them something they could carry. A steady voice is like a pace a runner can keep, and nobody follows a sprint for long.”

Askel turns this over for a while, and then, to your surprise, he laughs quietly at himself. He goes forward along the gangway and stands for a moment beside Bran in the bow, and you see him say something you cannot hear, and you see Bran nod.

Later, when most of the crew are asleep, Bran comes aft himself and crouches by Ingrith’s chest with his big split hands hanging between his knees. He says, without looking at her, that the black stone was his, and that he thought she ought to know, because he would not want anyone else blamed for it.

“I did not ask,” Ingrith says, “and I will not remember. A man who says what he thinks out loud and then drops his stone where everyone can count it has done nothing to be ashamed of. Go and sleep, Bran. Tomorrow I will need you to sit still, and that is harder for you than rowing.”

He goes, and you hear him laugh once in the dark, low and tired, like a man who has put down something heavy.

You still have the tube under your arm, and when you try to give it back, Ingrith shakes her head. “Keep it tonight,” she says. “You have earned the weight of it.”

Fog begins to rise off the ice

As the light fades, a change comes over the ice field. A thin white mist begins to rise from the dark lanes between the floes, where the sea is warmer than the still, freezing air, and it curls up like the breath from a horse’s nostrils on a winter morning. It thickens as you watch: the great tower beside the ship goes soft at the top and then vanishes, and the black ships at the edge of the field melt away one by one, as if they had never been there at all.

Ingrith watches the fog come with her head tilted, listening, and you see her lay her hand flat on the rail, as she does when she wants to feel what the sea is doing under the ship.

“Morvane cannot wait much longer,” she says, “and he knows that we know it. Tomorrow, if this holds, he will try something before his water runs out, and he will row, because rowing is all a hunter knows. We will not row. We will not shout. We will not even move. That will be the next lesson: how to do nothing, perfectly, for as long as it takes.”