Lesson 15: Waiting

Every child on the Shore of Lamps learns the first rule of the chasing game before it can say the words: when the hunter comes, you run. The hare that sits still is taken, the boat that lies still is caught, and the only way out of danger is to put distance between yourself and it, as fast as your legs or your oars will carry you.

You have played that game in the dunes behind the harbour a hundred times, and you have always run.

On the twenty-fifth day, in a fog so thick that you cannot see the bow from the stern, with the Wolf rowing toward you through the ice, you are about to spend the most dangerous day of your life sitting perfectly still.

The fog lies on the ice like wool

The fog that rose from the lanes at dusk has not lifted with the light. It has only grown paler, so that the dawn comes as a slow whitening of the air all around the ship, without a sun and without a shadow, and the tall tower of ice beside the Heron is no more than a faint blue shape that you could almost believe you were imagining.

Everything is wet. Drops gather on the furled sail and the rails and the ends of your hair and fall with tiny sounds on the deck boards, and the cold gets in under your cloak and lies against your skin like a second, clammy shirt.

Ingrith is awake before anyone. You find her sitting on her chest with her head tilted, her clouded eye turned toward the south and east, where the black ships lay at the edge of the field when the fog came down, and she is listening so hard that she does not seem to breathe.

“They have moved,” she says, when you crouch beside her. “In the night, after the fog came. I heard their oars for a while, very far, and then I lost them. Morvane has gone looking for a way in.”

What the Old Song Says

Wenna knows this verse, because it is a children’s verse as much as a sailor’s, sung in the chasing game itself: “The hunter hears the oar, the hunter hears the cry, but the hunter never hears the stone. Lie still as the stone when the hunter comes, and he will go home alone.”

Nobody aboard has ever thought it means anything. It is a rhyme for children, the crew believe, a thing to sing while one of them hides his face against a wall and counts, and every grown sailor knows that at sea the hunted ship must run.

Ingrith, when she hears Wenna say it, smiles for the first time in days, as if a child had just told her something that the grown men aboard had forgotten long ago.

The crew make the Heron as silent as stone

Before the crew have finished waking, Ingrith has Askel pass the word from bench to bench in a whisper: no fire, no cooking, no talk above a breath, no oars out, and nobody to move from his place unless she says so.

Then the whole ship sets about putting its sounds away, as a household puts away its silver when soldiers are seen on the road. Lise goes along the rails stuffing rags into the oar holes so that no loose oar can knock in them. Dunn wraps his pots and his ladle in a cloak and sits on them. Bran ties the loose end of a halyard that has been tapping against the mast crutch all night, a sound so small that nobody had noticed it until now, and now everyone hears it stop. The ravens’ cage, with the one raven left in it, is covered with a thick hide, and Wenna puts her hand inside to stroke the bird until it settles.

When it is all done, the silence is so complete that you can hear the fog dripping from the ice, the faint crackle of the old air escaping from the tall tower, and your own heart.

“Now,” Ingrith whispers to you, so close that her breath warms your ear, “we wait. That is all. If a man in a hiding game is sure the seeker is coming, he wants to run. Running is how the seeker finds him. Do nothing, and keep doing it.”

The drum of the Wolf comes back through the white

It is a long time, a very long time, before anything happens, and the light grows a little whiter while you wait, and the drops go on falling from the sail. Your legs ache from crouching, and you shift them slowly, a finger’s breadth at a time, and Ingrith’s hand on your wrist tells you to be still. Bran sits on his bench with his hands on his knees and his eyes closed, and you see that he is breathing slowly and deeply on purpose, as he breathes when he sets a long stroke, and you understand that he is rowing in his head so that his body will not have to.

Then, far off in the white, so faint at first that you take it for the beat of your own blood in your ears, you hear the drum.

It is the same drum you heard in the first fog, when the black sails had only just found you, the drum that sets the stroke on the Wolf, but it is slower now, much slower, and softer, as if the hand that beats it were tired. Boom, and a long pause, and boom. Under it, faintly, comes the creak of oars working against their thole pins, the splash of blades going in a little out of time, and now and then a man’s voice calling out ahead of the ship, a short word you cannot make out, and another voice answering it.

“The man in the bow is calling the ice,” Ingrith breathes. “He has men with poles out on both sides. Morvane has found a lane that the drift has opened in the night, and he is coming in along it, slowly, feeling his way. He is a careful man. I told you that.”

The drum comes nearer. The calls come nearer. You can hear the grinding of a floe being pushed off a hull, and a curse, and the drum stopping and starting again.

The Wolf comes along the open lane

The Wolf passes so close that you hear everything.

You hear the oars, every stroke of them, the long breathless groan of many men pulling together and the creak of the tholes and the drip from the blades as they come forward. You hear a man cough, a dry, tearing cough, and another tell him to be quiet. You hear someone ask, in a low, cracked voice, how much water is left, and someone else say, “Half a cup a man today, and less tomorrow,” and the first voice laugh without any happiness in it at all. You hear the bow man calling, “Ice on the left hand, ice ahead, ease her, ease her,” and the scrape of a pole, and the drum. You smell them, too, through the wet air: tar and wet wool and the sour smell of men who have been too long at sea.

You do not see them. There is only the whiteness, and in it, very faintly, a darker shape sliding along beyond the floes on the steering side, a long stone’s throw away, no more.

Nobody on the Heron moves. Nobody breathes. You feel the whole crew around you holding as still as wrestlers locked together in the centre of the ring, where neither man dares shift his weight, because the first to move will be the first to fall. Wenna has her face pressed against the covered cage. Lise has both hands flat on the deck. Ingrith sits as she always sits, upright on her chest, her hands folded on her knees, her head turned a little toward the sound, and if she is afraid you cannot see it anywhere in her.

The dark shape slides on. The drum goes past you, and past the tall tower, and begins, very slowly, to grow fainter.

Then it stops.

The fog opens for the space of ten breaths

What happens next happens because fog is never as even as it seems. It moves in slow rivers and pools, thinning here and thickening there, and a breath of colder air from somewhere among the ice opens a long ragged hole in it, as a hand might part a curtain.

Through the hole you see the Wolf.

She lies in the lane beyond the floes, much nearer than you thought, so near that you can see the frost on her black furled sail and the salt crusted white along her oars. Her men sit slumped on their benches with their heads down. Her carved prow is turned away from you, toward the open sea. On her stern, by the steering oar, a man stands alone.

He is not what you expected, for you had expected someone huge and dark, a monster out of the stories at the fire, like the whales. What stands there is a lean, grey man, older than Askel, younger than Ingrith, bare-headed in the cold, with a plain dark cloak and a face so weathered and still that it could have been carved out of the same oak as his ship. He has turned to look back along the lane, and he is looking straight at the Heron.

He is looking at Ingrith. And Ingrith, on her chest, has raised her head and is looking back at him.

For the space of perhaps ten breaths nobody on either ship moves at all. There is open water between the two ships, but between that water and the Heron lies a bank of broken floes and the foot of the tall ice, and you can see Morvane’s eye travel over it, measuring it, as a good player measures the board before he moves a stone. You can see him count his tired men, and his salt-crusted oars, and the floes between, and you can see him do the sum that Ingrith did yesterday aloud.

Morvane lifts his open hand and lowers it

Then Morvane raises his right hand, slowly, palm open and empty, to the height of his shoulder.

You know that gesture. Every player of stones knows it. It is what you do at the end of a long game when you have seen that the board is lost and you will not waste either player’s time pretending otherwise. You have made it yourself, many evenings, across Ingrith’s little board, and you have seen her answer it.

She answers it now. She lifts her own hand, palm open, thin and pale in the white air, and holds it there.

Neither of them says a word. Then Morvane lowers his hand without haste, turns to his drummer, and speaks one quiet sentence, and the fog closes over the hole as softly as it opened, and the Wolf is gone.

A moment later the drum begins again, slow, and goes on beating, and beating, and grows fainter and fainter until you cannot be sure whether you are hearing it or only remembering it. And then there is only the drip of the fog and the crackle of the ice.

Nobody speaks for a long time. When at last Askel lets out his breath, it sounds as loud as a sail filling.

“He could have tried,” he whispers. “He could have put his men on the ice.”

“And lost half of them in the lanes, and come back to a ship with no water,” Ingrith says. “He has a crew to bring home, Askel, as you have. He is a hunter, not a fool. A hunter knows when the game is gone to ground.”

The Mark on the Chart

In the white afternoon you unroll the chart on the chest with damp fingers and mark the day. The Heron has not moved a single oar’s length, and you mark her where she was, behind the great tower inside the ice, and beside her, for the first time, Ingrith has you draw the track of the Wolf: a thin line coming in along the drift lane from the south-east, bending close to your mark, and turning back the way it came.

In the log she makes you write: Day twenty-five. Fog. Calm. The Wolf rowed past within hearing and saw us, and turned away. We did not move. The one who keeps still is the one who is not found.

Ingrith tells you who taught her to wait

The fog does not lift that night. The crew keep their silence, though it is not so hard now, and Dunn lets them have a cold meal and an extra cup of the sweet ice water each, and in the deep of the short night, when the others are asleep, Ingrith speaks to you in a whisper about a thing she has never mentioned before.

When she was younger than you are now, she says, she sailed as the apprentice of an old navigator called Teodor, who had only three fingers on his left hand and once kept a small trading ship hidden for two whole days in a narrow cove among the outer skerries while raiders’ boats went up and down outside looking for her. The crew had begged him to row for it, and some of them had wept. Teodor had sat on the chest by the steering oar with his three fingers folded over his good hand, and had told them that a ship which runs leaves a wake and a noise and a moving mast for every eye on the water to follow, while a ship that lies still is only one more dark rock among a thousand dark rocks. On the third morning the raiders had gone home, and Teodor had taken out his chart and made the girl Ingrith mark the cove on it with a small circle, and write beside it in the log a line that she has never forgotten.

“What did he make you write?” you whisper.

“That waiting is not the same as doing nothing,” she says. “It is the hardest work there is, because the whole body wants to run and must be told, every breath, to stay. A runner can be taught to run. Teaching a runner to stand on the line and not start until the right moment takes years.” She is quiet for a while. “Teodor gave me his chart when he could no longer go to sea. I was frightened of it for a whole winter. Then I learned it had been teaching me all along.”

Wenna climbs the tall ice to look south

On the twenty-sixth day, in the afternoon, the fog thins at last into a high grey haze and the sea around the ice field comes back into sight, piece by piece, like a room when the shutters are opened. Because the mast is still lying in its crutch, Wenna climbs the great tower of ice instead, on its broad low side, which has not stirred in four days, with Lise’s axe to cut steps and a line round her waist that Bran pays out below her, until she is standing on its shoulder high above the ship, a small dark figure against the haze.

She looks a long time to the south and east. Then she calls down, not loudly, as though she is afraid of breaking something.

“Four sails. Far off, south-east. Low down on the edge. They are rowing away.”

Nobody cheers, because it is not that kind of moment. Bran puts his face in his hands, and Dunn sits down heavily on his wrapped pots and stays there, staring at nothing, with his lips moving as if he were counting the days all over again from the beginning. Askel goes to the stern and stands beside Ingrith and says nothing at all, and after a while he puts his hand on her shoulder, briefly, and takes it away again.

You watch Ingrith’s face. You expected to see triumph in it, or relief, and you see neither. She looks tired, and a little sad, as if she had just finished a long race against a runner she respected and found no pleasure in passing him at the end.

“Short of water and short of strength,” she says quietly, “and a long way from home. I hope he gets them there.”

A breath of cold air touches the frost

That evening the crew sleep properly for the first time since the ice, stretched out on the deck boards under every hide aboard. You sit up with Ingrith over the board of stones, but neither of you is really playing.

Late in the long dusk, as you reach for a stone, something touches the back of your hand. It is so faint that you think at first it is only the cold. Then it comes again, a breath of air from the north-east, no stronger than a sleeper turning over, and on the rail beside you the frost that has lain there all day stirs and lifts in a fine glittering dust.

Ingrith has felt it too. She has put down her stone and turned her face toward the north-east, toward the cave where the old songs say the Wind Mother sleeps, and her clouded eye is wide open.

“Not yet,” she says softly. “Not tonight. But she is stirring.” She looks at you, and in the half-light you see that she is smiling. “All this time the crew have been watching the south-west, where the last gale came from, waiting for the wind to come back the way it went. Tomorrow they will learn otherwise. That is the next lesson, and you will want to be awake for it.”