Lesson 2: Storm

Ask any sailor on the Shore of Lamps what to do when a gale comes, and the answer will be the same: run for the nearest harbour, and run while you still can. A harbour is worth more than a hero, the old men say, and the songs are full of ships that stayed out too long and were never seen again. You have believed this since you were small enough to sit on a fisherman’s knee. It seems as plain as the fact that fire is hot and the sea is wet, and on the morning of the second day, when you wake under a sky the colour of lead, it is the first thing you think of.

The thin streaks of cloud you saw last night have thickened into a low grey lid that covers everything from the south-west to the north. The swell is bigger. It comes out of the south-west in long, heavy hills, and the Heron climbs each one and slides down its back with a groan of oak. To the east, low along the edge of the sea, lies the long chain of outer islands, dark and close, with white water already showing on their western shores.

The wind rises out of the south-west by mid-morning

It does not come all at once. It comes in gusts, each one a little stronger than the last, with lulls between them that are almost worse, because in the lulls you can hear it coming. The sail, which was drawing gently at dawn, begins to bang and fill, bang and fill, and the mast creaks in its step. Spray starts to come over the bow in sheets. Wenna, at the masthead, calls down that she can see rain moving towards you across the water from the south-west, a grey curtain that hangs from the cloud to the sea and swallows the horizon as it comes. Dunn goes along the casks with a hide rope, lashing them twice, then three times, to the ribs of the ship. Lise pulls the sailcloth hood down over the ravens’ cage and ties it, and you hear the birds complain inside. Bran takes off his cloak and folds it under a bench, as if he were about to wrestle someone.

Ingrith does nothing at all. She stands by the chart table with one hand on its post and watches the islands.

Askel points the ship towards the nearest harbour

Askel knows these islands, or knows of them. There is a sound among them, half a day’s run to the east, a deep inlet with steep sides where the fishing boats of the outer islands shelter in bad weather. He has been there once, years ago, by daylight and in a fair wind. He says it now in front of the crew, in his plain way, with the rain beginning to drive across the deck: they will run for the sound, get in before the worst of it, and lie there until the gale blows out. The rowers nod. It is what any of them would have said. Two or three of them are already looking east, towards the islands, as if the harbour were a fire in a cold hall and they could feel its warmth from here.

Then Askel turns to Ingrith, because he always does in the end, and asks her whether she agrees.

Ingrith asks where the rocks are in a storm

Ingrith asks him which way the wind is blowing. He tells her, a little impatiently, that it is blowing from the south-west, as anyone can feel. She asks him which way it will push the ship. Towards the north-east, he says. She asks him what lies to the north-east and the east. The islands, he says, and stops. Then she asks him, without raising her voice at all, what the mouth of his sound will look like by the middle of the afternoon, with the whole weight of a south-westerly gale piling the sea against those western shores, and how many rocks lie off that mouth, and whether he has ever seen it in anything but a fair wind.

Askel does not answer for a long time. You watch him look east, at the white water on the islands, which is bigger now than it was at dawn, a long ragged line of it rising and falling along the whole chain.

You watch him understand.

“A harbour is a narrow door,” Ingrith says. “In fair weather you walk through it. In a gale the sea throws you at it, and if you miss by the width of a hand, you hit the wall. The rocks are not out here, Askel. The rocks are where the harbours are. Out here there is only water, and water is something a ship can float on.” She lifts her arm and points north-west, away from the islands, into the rain. “We need room. As much room as we can get before the wind is too strong to let us take it. Room to be blown a long way without striking anything.”

It is what sailors call sea room. You have heard the words before, but you have never understood them until you see Askel’s face as he turns the steering oar and the Heron’s bow swings away from the islands and the harbour and every warm thing, out towards the open grey.

What the Old Song Says

There is a verse in the Song of the Northern Way for this too. When the crew see the ship turn away from the land, one of the rowers begins it, angrily, as though it were an accusation: “When the Wind Mother shakes out her hair, turn your back to the hearth; the hearth is where the rocks are, and her breath is gentler than stone.” The crew believe that the Wind Mother, who breathes the winds from her cave in the far north, grows angry when ships hide from her in harbours, and that a ship which runs to shore in a storm insults her. They sing the verse as a prayer and a fear. Ingrith listens, and then she says to you, quietly, that whoever made the song had stood on a cliff and watched a ship try for a harbour in a gale. She does not say what the ship did. She does not need to.

The sail comes down to a narrow strip of cloth

There is a short time, perhaps as long as it takes to eat a meal, when the wind is still only strong and not yet wild, and Ingrith makes Askel use every breath of it. With the wind on her left side the Heron leans over and drives north-west, away from the islands, with the spray sheeting across her and every rower bailing with a wooden scoop. The chain of islands slides slowly back on the right. Ingrith watches it with her good eye, and once she has you look along her arm at the last island in the chain. On the chart, she says, the chain ends there and bends away east, and beyond it there is nothing but open sea for many days. If the ship can pass that last island before the wind grows too strong to hold this course, she will have all the room in the world.

It is like a race, you think, with the gale running after you to see whether you can pass the turning post before it catches you. You pass it. The last island goes by, a black hump with white water exploding up its side, and then there is only grey water to the right as well as the left. That is when the full gale arrives. It comes with a scream in the rigging that you will hear in your sleep for years. The sail, still at its full size, thunders and kicks, and Askel shouts for it to come down.

They do not take it down altogether. Bran and four rowers lower the yard halfway, fighting the cloth. Lise goes along the foot of the sail tying the short cords that hang there in rows, gathering the lower part of the sail into a fat roll, until only a narrow band of wool is left at the top. With that small strip drawing, Askel turns the ship until the wind is behind her and a little to the left. The Heron stops fighting the sea and begins to run before it, north and north-east, out into the open water where there is nothing to strike.

The Heron runs before the gale into open water

Running before a gale is not resting. It is the hardest steering there is, and Askel cannot do it alone; he and Ingrith stand together at the steering oar, and you stand behind them because Ingrith tells you to. The seas come up behind the ship now, each one higher than the stern. You look back and see a grey wall rising, its top curling over and streaked white, and every part of you wants to flinch and look away. Ingrith will not let you look away. She makes you watch each sea come, because the stern must meet each one squarely. If a big sea strikes the ship on the quarter, from a little to the side, it will swing her round across the waves, and the next sea will roll her over.

So you watch, and you call out when you see a big one coming, and Askel and Ingrith lean together on the oar to keep her stern square to it. Then the stern lifts, high, higher, until you are looking down the whole length of the ship into the trough ahead, and the sea passes under you with a roar and the bow lifts and you slide down its back.

It is like a tug of rope that never ends, where both teams are so evenly matched that no one can ever let go. Every sea must be met. You cannot rest between them, because the next is already rising.

In the middle of the afternoon the leather strap that holds the steering oar to the side of the ship begins to fray. You feel the oar loosen and wobble under your hands, and Askel shouts. Lise is there before he has finished shouting, crawling aft along the deck with a coil of hide rope in her teeth. She lashes the oar while the stern rises and falls under her, passing the rope round and round and pulling it tight with her whole weight. She does it the way she does everything, as if it were an ordinary piece of work on an ordinary day. When she is done, she pats the oar as if it were a horse and crawls back to her bailing scoop.

Once, in the worst of the afternoon, a sea breaks over the side and fills Wenna’s lap as she bails. She laughs out loud, high and astonished, and shakes the water out of her hair, and half the ship laughs with her without knowing why. Ingrith tells you afterwards that a laugh at the right moment is worth a dozen bailing scoops. Wenna knows this, she says, without ever having been told.

Bran bails all afternoon without stopping. He bails twice as fast as anyone else at first, flinging water over the side in great sheets and shouting at the sea. By evening he has slowed to the pace of the others and stopped shouting, and he sits with his scoop in his lap during a lull, breathing hard and staring at his hands.

Night falls inside the storm without a star

The second night comes down early, under the cloud, and it is a different darkness from the first. There are no stars at all and no paleness in the north. There is only the noise, enormous and without any pause, and the white crests of the seas rising behind the ship like ghosts. And now you understand why Ingrith spent the first night teaching you to see in the dark, because the crests are all you can see. They glow faintly as they break, and you learn to read their height by how high above the stern they show and how long they take to fall. You call them to Askel, one after another, until your voice is gone and you are only tapping his shoulder.

Ingrith ties you to the post of the chart table with a length of rope round your waist, and ties herself beside you. The leather tube is inside her coat, inside a second wrapping of oiled hide, and twice in the night you feel her hand go to it and rest there for a moment and come away.

The storm hides the Heron from every eye

Towards the end of the night, in a lull, you shout to Ingrith that you are afraid you have lost your way, that the ship is being blown somewhere nobody knows, that nobody will ever find you. You mean it as a cry of fear. She takes it as a question, and she answers it as she answers everything, with another question. Who, she asks, would you like to find you?

You think about it while the next sea passes under the stern. Then you think about four black ships, heavy and deep and full of men, caught by this same gale somewhere to the south, and you understand what Ingrith understood this morning when she turned the ship away from the land. Morvane is a careful captain. He will not keep his heavy ships out in a gale like this one, among unknown islands, when there are good harbours under his lee. He will run for shelter, as anyone would, and he will lie there until the sea goes down, a day at least, perhaps two. And while he lies there, the Heron is being carried north by the same wind, into the empty sea, where no one on any island saw her pass, and where the rain and the spray have hidden her from any eye that might have been watching.

The storm is not only a danger. It is a cloak. It has wiped away the trail behind you as surely as the tide wipes away footprints on sand, and when it ends, Morvane will have to guess where you are all over again, like a hunter who has lost the scent.

Then the next sea rises behind the stern, and you tap Askel’s shoulder, and the long night goes on.

The Mark on the Chart

At the grey dawn of the third day, Dunn ties a knot in his cord with fingers so cold that it takes him a long time, and then shows you the three knots as though they were a victory.

By the middle of the third day the wind is still strong, but the worst is past, and Ingrith has you crawl to the chart table with her. You unroll the chart a hand’s width at a time, holding it down against the motion, and make your mark. It is not a small cross this time. Ingrith takes the burnt stick from you and draws a ring, wide as a thumbnail, somewhere north and east of the end of the island chain, out in the open sea. She tells you that a navigator who marks a small cross after two days of running blind before a gale is telling a lie to the chart, and the chart will tell the lie back later, when she can least afford it. The ring is honest. The ship is somewhere inside it; she does not know where. Then she gives you the line for the log. Ran from the land, not to it; land lost from sight on the second day; the black ships, by reason, in harbour.

The gale blows itself out under a closed sky

The wind goes down slowly through the afternoon of the third day, the way a long race ends, not with a sudden stop but with each lap a little slower than the last. The scream in the rigging drops to a howl and then to a moan. By evening Bran and the rowers have shaken out the roll of the sail and the ship is running north under its full width again, steadier, while the crew lie along the benches too tired to speak. Dunn hands round dried fish and a cup of water each, counting the cups. Wenna climbs to the masthead and calls down what you all know already: there is no land anywhere, in any direction, and no sail. Nobody cheers this time. They are too tired, and they have learned what an empty sea costs.

But the sky does not clear. The low grey lid that came over at dawn yesterday stays where it is, closed from edge to edge, with no sun behind it and no break anywhere. And the sea, though the wind has fallen to a light breeze, does not lie down. Great long swells still come marching out of the south-west, slow and smooth now, without white tops, lifting the Heron high and setting her gently down.

Askel asks Ingrith how she will find her way north with no sun and no stars and no land. She sits on the deck with her palm flat on the planks, as she did on the first night, and feels the long swell pass under the keel, and for a while she does not answer.

“The gale has blown itself out,” she says at last, “but its waves have not. They will keep walking for days after it has died, and they will keep walking in the same direction, and they will not lie to us. Sit with me and feel them. That will be the next lesson.”