Lesson 16: Wind

Every sailor on the Shore of Lamps knows that a wind which goes away comes back by the same door. If the last gale blew from the south-west, then the south-west is where you watch for the next breath, and a crew lying becalmed will sit with their faces turned that way day after day, as a family watches the road down which a traveller left, waiting for him to come home along it.

The Heron’s crew have watched the south-west for seventeen days, ever since the stillness came down, and the south-west has given them nothing but haze and the flat grey line of the sea.

On the twenty-seventh day, the wind comes home by the other door, and the crew are looking the wrong way when it does.

The crew watch the south-west all morning

The day dawns clear and hard, the first clear dawn since the fog, with a pale washed sky and the ice field glittering all around the ship so brightly that it hurts your eyes. The air has changed. It is colder and drier than it was, and it smells of nothing, and when you breathe out your breath no longer hangs in front of your face but drifts away, very slowly, to the south-west.

The crew have not noticed. They are standing along the steering side, Askel among them, with their eyes on the south-west where the old gale came from, and Bran is wetting his finger and holding it up in the still air in that direction and shaking his head.

“Nothing,” he says. “Not a breath. She is still asleep.”

Ingrith, on her chest by the chart table, has her back to all of them. She is facing the north-east, toward the high white heart of the ice field, and she has her hood pushed back and her thin grey hair loose about her face, and she is waiting, as she has waited every day of the calm, without moving.

“Come here,” she says to you. “Stand beside me, and look where I am looking, and tell me what you see.”

What the Old Song Says

Askel says the verse when he sees where Ingrith is looking, and there is a little impatience in his voice, the old impatience that you have not heard in him for days: “The Mother goes out by the western door, and by the western door she comes. Watch the way she went, sailor, and you will hear her drums.”

Every child on the Shore of Lamps knows what it means. The Wind Mother leaves her cave by one door and returns by the same one, like a woman going to the well and coming back along the path she wore going there, and any sailor who watches another quarter of the sky for her return is wasting his eyes.

Dark patches walk across the glass from the north-east

At first you see nothing but the glare of the ice and, beyond it, the open sea lying flat and pale as polished horn.

Then you see a patch of darkness on it, far off, where no darkness should be. It is a small patch, no bigger from here than a hand laid on a table, and it is darker than the water around it because its surface is roughened, covered in tiny ripples that no longer give back the light of the sky. As you watch, it slides across the pale water toward the ice field and fades, and another appears behind it, and another to one side, until the sea to the north-east is dappled with them, as a field of grain is dappled when a hand of air goes running over it.

“Cat’s-paws,” Ingrith says. “The first steps of the wind. They walk across the water before the wind itself arrives, the way the first runners in a relay come round the bend before you can hear the crowd. Now look up.”

You look up. High overhead, where the sky was empty at dawn, long thin streaks of white cloud have appeared, combed out like wool on a carding board, and they are all lying the same way, and they are all moving, very slowly, from the north-east.

“The cloud is the wind’s banner,” she says. “It flies before the army. When you see the mares’ tails come combed out of one quarter after a long calm, and the cat’s-paws walk from the same quarter, the wind is coming from there, whatever the song says about doors.”

Behind you, Askel has turned round. He stands looking at the darkening sea and the combed sky with his mouth a little open, and then he laughs, a short astonished laugh, and turns to the crew and says, not shouting, “Get the mast up.”

Lise and Bran raise the mast again

Lise has the mast wedges laid out on the deck beside the crutch before anyone else has moved, and she and Bran and four of the strongest rowers take their places on the halyards and the forestay. The mast has lain along the deck for five days, and the frost has stiffened every rope, so that they must work the lines through their hands, bending them, before they will run.

Then, slowly, hand over hand, with Bran calling the pull in a low steady voice and Lise watching the heel of the mast as it comes into the step, they raise it. It goes up as a felled tree would go up if the felling were run backward, the top swinging high across the white sky, and settles into its step with a deep, satisfied knock that you feel through the soles of your feet. Lise drives the wedges home. Bran makes fast the stays. For the first time since the black ships came to the ice, the Heron stands as tall as herself.

The first cat’s-paw reaches the ship as they finish. You feel it on your face, cold as a knife and fresh as water from the tall ice, and you hear it rattle the loose sail in its gaskets, and every head on the ship turns toward it at once.

The Heron leaves the ice under oars

“Not the sail,” Ingrith says. “Not yet. Not here.”

In the ice, she explains, a wind is no friend until you are clear of it. The floes feel the wind long before a ship does, because they lie in the water like a hundred little sails, and when the breeze strengthens the whole field will begin to move and press together, and the lanes that are open now will close like hands. A ship under sail among moving ice is a runner trying to cross a crowded square at full speed. A ship under oars, going slowly, can stop, turn, and back out of trouble.

So the crew take their benches and Bran sets a long, easy stroke. The Heron creeps out the way she came in, between the floes, with Lise and two others in the bow pushing off the ice with oars held upright and Ingrith at the steering oar reading the lanes ahead with her one good eye. Twice the ice closes ahead of you and you must back and wait for it to open. Once a floe swings into the lane behind you with a long groaning scrape and you hear the whole field begin to talk, the flat ice grinding against the tall, the old air in the towers crackling louder as the water stirs. You row on, slowly, never hurrying.

By the middle of the day the Heron is clear of the last of the floes, out on open water that is no longer glass but dark and wrinkled, with small, sharp, white-lipped waves beginning to run on it from the north-east.

The sail fills and the water talks under the bow

Askel gives the order himself, and the gaskets come off, and the great square sail drops from the yard and hangs for a moment, slack and heavy and dark with old wet. Then the wind finds it. It fills with a sound like a great breath drawn in, and the sheet goes tight in Bran’s hands, and the Heron leans gently over and begins to move.

You had forgotten the sound. For seventeen days the only sounds of moving water have been the dip and drip of the oars and the creak of the looms in their holes. Now the water begins to talk under the bow, a low, rushing, chuckling sound that grows louder as she gathers way, and the wake opens out behind her in a long white road across the sea. The rowers ship their oars and sit on their benches with their hands in their laps and stare at it. Wenna is crying, though she is laughing at the same time.

Ingrith puts the ship on a course south and a little west, with the wind behind her and a little on the side away from the steering oar, away from the ice and away from the Iron Shore, where the black ships have gone.

“We will come home from the north-west,” she says, “by the long way round, and keep the whole sea between us and Hask until we see our own lamps. Morvane turned for home. But he is not the only captain Hask has, and a hare that has escaped the hounds does not run back past the kennels.”

Later, when the crew have eaten and the first watch is set, you ask Ingrith why the wind came from the north-east, when every song and every sailor said it would come back from the south-west.

“Think of the calm as a great sleeping animal lying over the whole of the north,” she says. “The gale that blew us here came out of the south-west, passed over us and wore itself out. After it, the air lay still for days over the ice, and the ice made it colder and colder, and heavier, as water is heavier when it is cold. Heavy air does not stay in a heap forever. Sooner or later it spills down off the ice the way water spills over the lip of a full cask, and it spills toward the warm water, which is south and west of it. So it comes from the ice. The singers say the Wind Mother has turned over in her sleep and breathes now from the other side of her mouth. That is a good way to remember it. Only do not let it make you watch the wrong door.”

The Mark on the Chart

That evening, with the wind steady and the Heron running easily over a long, low sea, you unroll the chart on the chest, with both hands holding it flat against the breeze.

You mark the place where the ship left the ice, and then, for the first time since the wind died, you draw a line out from it, a long straight line running south-west, with a small arrow at its end. Ingrith watches you draw it and does not correct it, which she has never done before.

In the log she makes you write: Day twenty-seven. Wind from the north-east, from the side of the ice and not the side of the old gale. Cat’s-paws first, mares’ tails high. Mast raised; left the ice under oars; sail set at midday. The wind does not come back by the door it went out of. It comes back by the door you are not watching.

The star sinks a little lower every night

For six days the north-east wind blows, steady and cold, and the Heron runs before it, south and west and then south again, as fast as she has ever sailed. The nights are longer now than when the voyage began, and darker, and on every clear one Ingrith takes out the board of pale ash with its knotted cord and measures the star that does not move.

It sinks a little lower every night. You sight it along the edge of the ash board, holding still against the roll of the ship while the bead swings and settles, and pinch the horsehair cord where it crosses the wood. Each night the place under your fingers lies further back along the cord: past the new knot she tied on the fifteenth night, past the six close knots of the Northern Way, back toward the old black knot she tied on the harbour wall when she was younger than you are now. It is like watching a rope in a tug of war slide back, mark by mark, over the line it was pulled across.

The running is not easy, for all its speed. By the second day the wind has raised a long, steep sea from the north-east, and the waves come up behind the Heron in grey ridges taller than a man, lift her stern, and rush on past beneath her with a long hiss of foam. Ingrith will not let anyone else take the steering oar in the dark. You stand beside her through the first night and feel, through the oar under your two hands and hers, how each wave tries to catch the stern and swing the ship side-on to the sea, where the next would roll her over. Ingrith never fights it. She lets the ship run down the face of each wave and meets the swing just as it begins, with a small, firm pressure, the way a wrestler meets an opponent’s pull by stepping with it rather than against it, and the Heron runs straight.

Toward dawn she lets you take the oar alone. The first wave you meet by yourself nearly takes the stern away from you, and the ship yaws, and spray bursts over the rail. The second you meet a little too hard. By the tenth you have begun to feel the rhythm of it in your arms. Ingrith stands behind you with her hand on your shoulder and says nothing at all, which you have learned is her highest praise.

The crew sleep, and eat what Dunn gives them, and sleep again. On the third day Bran takes the steering oar for a whole watch under Ingrith’s eye and keeps the wake as straight as a furrow, and does not once look round to see if anyone is watching him do it.

On the fifth night Ingrith brings the Heron round to the south-east, a little at a time, so that the wind comes round onto the beam, on the side away from the steering oar, and the ship leans harder and the spray begins to come aboard over the bow in cold sheets.

“We have come far enough west,” she says. “Now we turn for home.”

The last raven flies toward the land

On the morning of the sixth day of the wind, the thirty-second day of the voyage, Ingrith tells Wenna to bring the cage.

The last raven is thin and ragged after so long at sea, but its eye is bright. Wenna takes it out with both hands and holds it up, and it sits for a moment on her wrist with its feathers ruffled by the wind, looking about it. Then it launches itself into the air. It climbs in wide, slow circles, higher and higher above the mast, until it is a black speck against the grey, and then it stops circling and flies away, straight and steady, a little south of east.

Ingrith watches it until it is gone.

“From that height,” she says, “it can see what we cannot. It has seen land, or it would have come back to us. Land lies where it flew.”

She turns the ship a little toward the raven’s line and sends Wenna to the masthead. From that moment the crew are quiet in a new way, the way runners are quiet in the last long stretch of a race, when the end is near enough to think about and far enough still to lose.

The lead comes up with sand from home

In the afternoon Ingrith calls for the sounding lead.

You arm it yourself, as she taught you long ago, pressing a lump of tallow into the hollow in its base. Bran heaves it out over the bow, and the line runs out through your hands, mark after mark, and stops. You feel the dull thud of bottom through the line. You haul it up, wet and cold, and turn it over, and there in the tallow lies a crust of fine pale sand mixed with tiny broken shells, pink and white, like crumbs of a seed cake.

Ingrith takes the lead from you and holds it close to her good eye, and then she touches the sand with her fingertip and puts the finger to her tongue.

“The long bank,” she says. “The one the fishing boats from home go out to in the spring. I have tasted that sand every spring for fifty summers.”

Nobody says anything for a while. Dunn turns away and busies himself with his casks, and you see his shoulders shaking. Askel takes the lead from Ingrith and holds it as if it were made of gold.

That night, with the wind easing at last and the Heron sliding over a long, quiet sea under the stars, Wenna calls down from the masthead in a voice you have never heard her use before, a voice that is hardly more than a whisper.

“Lamps,” she says. “Low down, ahead. Lamps.”

You think, as you stand at the bow straining your eyes for the small gold sparks on the edge of the world, that the voyage is ending and the lessons with it. Ingrith, at the steering oar behind you, knows better. She knows that the next lesson is waiting for you in the harbour, and that it will be the hardest one of all to learn.