Lesson 1: Darkness

Every child on the Shore of Lamps grows up believing that you need light to see at sea. A ship without a lamp at night, people say, is a blind ship, feeling her way like someone lost in a cellar, and the lamps on the posts of every harbour exist because darkness on the water is a wall. You believed it too. You believed it when you first came aboard, and you believed it only a little while ago, standing at Ingrith’s elbow among the rocks with your eyes wide open and useless. Now the rocks are behind you, the island is behind you, and the Heron is running north into the open sea with no light anywhere aboard, and the night is still only half over.

A light breeze has come up from the south-west, enough to fill the sail, and the rowers have shipped their oars and lie down along the benches in their cloaks. The ship moves with a long, easy lift and fall. Water talks along her sides. Somewhere forward, Bran is already asleep, and you can hear him breathing like a bellows.

Your eyes learn the dark slowly and unwillingly

At first there is nothing. You look ahead past the mast and see black, and you look to either side and see black. Above you the sky is a slightly different black, with a few thin stars in it, because the summer nights in the north are never fully dark. You say to Ingrith that you can see nothing at all. She does not answer, which is her way of telling you to wait.

So you wait. You sit on the deck beside the chart table with your back against its post, and you stop trying. And slowly, much more slowly than you would have thought, the black begins to come apart. First the sail grows out of it, a greyer shape against the sky, swaying. Then the line of the gunwale, faintly, and the heads of the sleepers on the benches, and the pale wicker of the raven cage by the mast. The horizon arrives last of all, not a line but a place where one darkness meets another. Ingrith tells you, when you whisper that you can see the sail now, that eyes take a long time to open fully to the night, longer than it takes to eat a meal. One look at a lamp, she says, even a small one, and the whole long opening is undone in a breath. That is why there is no light at the chart table tonight, and why there will be none tomorrow.

You think of all the nights of the voyage when you sat by the little tallow lamp writing the log, and of how dark the sea always looked beyond it.

Ingrith teaches you to look beside a thing

Wenna comes aft from the bow to stretch her legs, and Ingrith asks her, quietly, whether she can see the low islands to the east. Wenna says she can, just. You stare where Wenna points and see nothing. Ingrith takes your chin in her dry fingers and turns your head a little to the left, away from where the islands should be, and tells you to look at the empty sea there and to think about the place beside it. And the islands appear. They are a long, low smudge on the right edge of your sight, darker than the sky above them. When you turn back to look straight at them, they melt away again.

Wenna laughs softly at your face. She learned this as a girl, she says, watching for her father’s boat from the cliff, and nobody ever had to teach her; she simply found that the boat vanished when she looked straight at it and came back when she did not. Ingrith says that the middle of the eye is made for daylight and the edges for night, and that a lookout in the dark must learn to aim a little to one side of what she wants, like an archer allowing for the wind. You try it again and again until the islands stay, faintly, at the corner of your sight. It is a strange feeling, to see something only by not looking at it, and you are not sure you like it.

“Do you see better with one eye than you did with two?” you ask Ingrith, and then you wish you had not.

She is quiet for a while. “Do you think I ever saw the sea only with my eyes?” she says at last.

You have no answer, and she does not seem to want one. She turns her good ear back towards the sea and goes on listening, as patiently as someone waiting for a slow opponent to move.

What the Old Song Says

Dunn, who has the watch on the stores and therefore never sleeps properly, comes to sit with you. He hums the second verse of the Song of the Northern Way so softly that it is almost only breath: “The night has eyes of white and ears of stone; give her your silence, and she will lend you both.” The crew say that this verse is about the spirits of drowned sailors, who walk on the water at night with white faces and listen at the sides of ships, and that you must keep silent so as not to draw them aboard. Dunn half believes it, and you can see by the way he glances over the side that he half believes it tonight. Ingrith says nothing about spirits. She only asks you, when Dunn has gone back to his casks, what white things you might see on the sea at night, and what the stones out there might have to say to you if you kept quiet enough to hear them.

The white of breaking water shows the skerries

Not long after the song, you find out. The Heron is passing west of the outer skerries, the last scattered teeth of rock before the open sea, and Askel has eased her a little farther out on Ingrith’s word, though he cannot see the rocks and neither can anyone else. Then Wenna, back in the bow, lifts her arm. You look beside the place she is pointing, the way you have just learned, and there it is: a pale patch on the darkness, there for a heartbeat and gone, then there again. It is the white of breaking water. Each swell runs up onto a rock just under the surface and breaks into foam. The foam holds what little light there is in the sky, the way a white cloth holds the last light of evening after everything else in a room has gone grey.

It is a long way off and well clear, but you understand what it means. Every rock that lies near the surface will show itself in this way, as long as there is any swell at all to break on it. A lamp would not have shown it. A lamp would have made a small yellow room around the ship and turned everything outside that room to the blackest black. Ingrith watches the pale patch come and go for a long time, counting under her breath between the breaks. She tells you that the count tells her how far apart the swells are, and that the same count, kept up through the night, will tell her if the sea begins to change.

Askel asks her whether there are more rocks ahead. She asks him what he hears.

Surf on rocks has a voice that carries far

He listens, and so do you, and at first there is only the wind in the rigging and the water along the side. Then you find it, low and steady under everything else, a long murmur somewhere off to the right, like a crowd at a distance cheering a runner they cannot yet see. It is surf. Somewhere out there, beyond what anyone can see, a reef or the shore of a low island is taking the swell, and the sound comes across the water to you as clearly as voices across a quiet field. Ingrith turns her head slowly from side to side, her good ear forward, the way you have seen a dog do on a hillside. Then she says that the sound is steady and is staying where it is, which means the Heron is passing it and not running towards it.

You ask how she can tell. If the surf were ahead, she says, and the ship were closing with it, the sound would grow louder and would begin to come apart into separate breaks, each one with its own shape. A sound that stays the same and slowly draws aft is a sound you are leaving behind. She makes you close your eyes and point to it, and then point again a little later, and your arm has moved back towards the stern without your meaning it to.

It is like playing hide-and-seek with someone who must keep humming the whole time, she says, so that you always know where they are as long as you are quiet yourself. The crew on the benches who are awake have stopped talking. You notice that they too are listening now, and that their faces, which you can just make out as grey shapes, are turned to the right.

The keel feels what the eyes cannot see

Some time after the middle of the night, when the sky to the north has already begun to pale a little along its edge, Ingrith does a thing that you have seen her do before without understanding it. She sits down on the deck, not on the chest, and lays the palm of her hand flat on the planks, and stays very still. After a while she takes your wrist and puts your hand down beside hers. You feel the oak, cold and damp, and through it the ship moving: the long lift as each swell passes under the keel, the pause at the top, the slow slide down, and then the lift again. It is regular, almost like breathing.

Ingrith tells you to remember exactly how it feels, because this is the open sea talking, deep water with nothing under it. When the bottom comes up close beneath a ship, she says, the swell feels it before you do. It grows shorter and steeper and begins to stumble, like a runner on rough ground, and the ship begins to stumble with it. You will feel that through your hand long before you hear surf or see white water, if you are paying attention.

You keep your hand there until it is numb with cold. The lift and fall does not change. The open sea goes on breathing under you, slow and even, all the way to the dawn.

Dawn finds the sea empty to the south-east

The light comes up grey and then silver, and in the short northern summer it comes up early, while the stars are still showing in the west. Wenna climbs to the masthead before anyone tells her to, and everyone on the deck who is awake turns to watch her. She hangs there for a long time with one arm round the mast and her hand shading her eyes, looking south and east, back the way you came, where the islands lie low and blue along the edge of the sea.

Then she calls down that there is nothing. No sail, black or brown or any other colour, no smoke from the islands, no boat. The sea to the south-east is empty to the edge of sight.

A sound goes along the benches that is not quite a cheer, more like a crowd breathing out. Bran sits up and stretches his great arms and says that the black ships are still lying behind their headland eating their breakfast, and some of the rowers laugh. Dunn takes a short length of cord from his belt and ties a knot in it. You ask him what it is for, and he says that he is counting days, because somebody aboard ought to, and the cook is the one who knows how many days the water will last. One knot for the first dawn at sea, he says, and ties it hard.

Ingrith does not join in the breathing out. She looks south-east for a long time with her good eye, and then she looks at the sky in the west, where nothing has happened yet.

The Mark on the Chart

By the light of the morning you unroll the chart under the hide roof and make your mark: a small cross a little north and west of the fishing island, outside the line of the skerries, with a faint dotted line behind it showing the night’s run. Ingrith judges the distance by how long the sail has been drawing and how fast the water went past the side, which she has been measuring all night by dropping a chip of wood at the bow and counting until it passes the stern. Then she gives you the line for the log. First night without light; outer skerries passed by their white water and by their sound; nothing seen to the south-east at dawn. And under it, at her word, a second line in your smallest hand: the dark hides us as well as it hides the rocks.

The crew learns to work without a single light

The first day is a quiet one, and the crew spend it learning how to live on a ship that will show no light at night. Lise cuts a hood of old sailcloth for the ravens’ cage, so that the birds will not wake and call in the dark, and stitches it with her tongue between her teeth while Askel watches over her shoulder and tells her to hurry. She does not hurry, and the hood is a good one. Dunn decides which food can be eaten cold and which cannot, and he rearranges his stores so that he can find each thing by touch. Bran sets the rowers to practising their stroke with their eyes shut, which they find very funny until he makes them do it properly. Askel walks up and down the ship, and every time he reaches the stern he looks south-east. He does it so often that by the afternoon Wenna has begun to call down from the masthead before he can ask, telling him there is still nothing there.

At noon Askel comes to the chart table and asks Ingrith the question that the whole crew has been asking each other all morning. How far north do they go, and for how long, and how do they ever come home when the black ships lie between them and the Shore of Lamps? Ingrith asks him in return how a hunter searches a wide sea for one small ship. He thinks about it honestly, as he thinks about everything. A hunter searches where the ship must go, he says, and the ship must go home. Then Ingrith asks him where a hunter does not search, and Askel looks north, at the empty grey sea ahead, where the fog and the ice are, and where only one chart in the world shows the way. He does not like the answer. You can see that he does not like it, and you can also see that he cannot find a better one.

In the evening, as the light fades, Ingrith sets out the board of stones on the chest between you. You think she means to put it away again for lack of light. Instead she closes her eyes and plays by touch. Only now do you understand why the stones were chosen as they are: the white are smooth sea pebbles and the black are rough flakes of slate, so that a player can know them in the dark. She beats you easily. She plays faster than she does by lamplight, as though the board were clearer to her now that she cannot see it. When you complain, she lays your fingers on the board and makes you feel where her stones are, one by one, until you can see the whole game in your head.

The evening sky turns pale and streaked in the south-west

When the game is over the sky is still light in the north, but in the south-west, low down, something has changed. Long thin streaks of cloud have come up from that quarter, high and pale, combed out across the sky like the tails of horses running. The breeze has not grown. But under the Heron the swell has changed in a way that you can feel now, because you have spent the night learning it. It still comes from the south-west, but each lift is a little longer and a little higher than before, as though something far away were pushing it.

You put your hand on the planks without being told, and Ingrith sees you do it, and for the first time since the fishing island she smiles.

“You need no lamp to feel that,” she says. “Something is coming up from the south-west, bigger than this little wind, and it is sending its swell ahead of it the way a runner’s footsteps come before the runner. When it arrives, Askel will want to run for a harbour. Everyone will want a harbour.” She folds the board shut and slips the bag of stones into her coat beside the leather tube. “Sleep now, while the sea lets you. The storm will be the next lesson, and it will not wait for us to be ready.”