Lesson 3: Swell

Everyone who has ever stood on a beach believes that the waves come from the wind. You feel the wind on your face, you see the waves running the same way, and the two seem as joined as a hand and its shadow. When the wind blows from the west, the waves come from the west; when it dies, they die. You have believed this all your life without ever thinking about it, the way you believe that the ground will be there when you put your foot down. On the fourth morning of the voyage, when you wake under a sky that has not changed since the gale, you are about to learn that it is only half true.

The wind is light now, a breeze from the west that barely keeps the sail full. Yet the Heron is still rising and falling on great slow hills of water that come from the south-west, smooth-backed and silent, as if the gale were still blowing somewhere just out of sight.

Grey cloud closes over the sea from edge to edge

There is no sun. There has been no sun since the morning of the second day, and now there is no sign of it at all, not even a brighter patch in the grey to show where it might be. The cloud lies low and even over the whole sea, like a lid on a pot, and the light under it is the same at noon as in the morning, flat and colourless, casting no shadows. You cannot tell east from west by looking up. At night there will be no stars. Wenna climbs to the masthead at dawn as she always does, and calls down that there is nothing, no land, no sail, no bird, nothing in any direction but the grey sea meeting the grey sky in a line so faint it is hardly a line at all.

The crew go about their work more quietly than usual. You notice how often they glance at Ingrith. Ingrith is sitting on the deck by the chart table with her back against its post and her palm flat on the planks, and she has been sitting like that since before the light came. She looks, you think, like an old woman resting. Only you know that she is working.

Two seas run across each other under the keel

She calls you to sit beside her, and she puts your hand on the deck and tells you to find the two seas. You do not understand. There is only one sea, you tell her, and she asks you whether you are sure.

So you sit and feel, and you look over the side, and slowly you begin to see what she means. There is the swell, long and slow, coming out of the south-west, lifting the whole ship from stern to bow in one great easy movement and setting her down again. That is the gale’s swell, still marching on after the gale has died. And on top of it, riding on its back like small children on the shoulders of a giant, there are the little waves made by today’s breeze. They are short and quick and choppy, with tiny white tops here and there, and they come from the west, from a different direction altogether, slapping against the side of the ship in a quick, busy rhythm. The two seas cross each other at an angle. They pay no attention to each other at all.

Ingrith tells you that it is like two games of stones being played on the same board by two different pairs of players. One game is fast and noisy and will be over by evening. The other is slow, and its moves were made far away and days ago, but it is the one that will still be going on tomorrow. The little waves belong to the wind you can feel. The swell belongs to a wind that is gone, and it will go on walking in the same direction long after the wind that made it has fallen silent, because there is nothing out here to stop it.

“Which of the two would you trust,” she asks you, “to tell you where south-west is tomorrow?”

What the Old Song Says

That evening, in the grey half-light that passes for dusk under the cloud, Dunn hums the next verse of the Song of the Northern Way while he portions out the water: “Her breath runs on long after her mouth is shut; follow the breath and not the mouth, and you will find her door.” The crew say this verse means that the Wind Mother’s breath is everywhere, even when she sleeps, and that if you are faithful and patient she will lead you at last to her cave in the far north, where the winds are born. Lise says, half laughing, that she would rather not find the Wind Mother’s door, thank you, and Dunn tells her that is not for her to choose. You look at Ingrith, and Ingrith looks at the swell, and neither of you says anything. But you think that whoever made the verse had sat on a deck under a closed sky and felt the gale’s long breath go on lifting the ship after its mouth had shut.

Ingrith counts the long swell by slow breaths

On the fifth day Ingrith teaches you to count the swell. There is no other way to measure it out here, so she uses the only measure she has, which is breathing. You sit with your hand on the deck and wait until the stern begins to lift, and then you breathe slowly in and out, in and out, counting each breath, until the stern begins to lift again. The little wind-waves from the breeze come and go in less than one breath. The gale’s swell takes three slow breaths and more from one crest to the next.

The longer the count, Ingrith tells you, the farther the swell has travelled and the bigger the storm that made it. Short seas are born close by and die young. Long seas are the ones that have run a great distance, losing their small waves one by one along the way, the way a long race sorts the runners until only the steady ones are left. A swell with a long count may have come from a storm many days’ sail away, a storm whose wind you never felt and whose clouds you never saw. It is a message from far off, and it does not lie about where it came from. Each day she makes you count again, and each day you find that the gale’s swell is a little lower than the day before, but still as long, and still coming from exactly the same place.

Then she shows you how to steer by it. She stands behind Askel at the steering oar and has him keep the ship so that each swell comes up under the stern a little to the left, lifting the left side of the stern first and then rolling forward along the keel. As long as the swell comes that way, she says, the bow points north. She does not need the sun. She does not need the wind. She needs only to feel which part of the ship the swell lifts first, and to keep it lifting there.

The breeze is so light on the fifth morning that Askel puts half the rowers to the oars, more to keep them warm than to gain distance. Bran sets the stroke, as he always does, and he sets it the way he does everything, hard and fast, as if he could pull the ship out from under the grey sky by force. The rowers behind him strain to keep up. Within a short time they are ragged, oars clashing, some catching the water late and some early, and the ship gains almost nothing for all their labour. Ingrith watches them for a while without speaking. Then she says to you that a ship is not a wrestling match, and that one day Bran will learn it, but not today.

The wind turns and the ship turns with it

On the afternoon of the fifth day, while Ingrith is asleep under the hide roof, the breeze begins to swing round. It is a slow swing, so slow that nobody notices it happening. It goes from the west to the north-west and then a little beyond, and as it moves, the sail begins to lose its wind and flap. Askel is at the steering oar. He does what any good captain does when the sail begins to flap: he eases the ship round a little to keep it full, and then a little more, and then a little more, following the wind as a dog follows a scent. The sail fills and draws, and the ship moves well, and he is pleased.

What he does not notice, because the sky is grey and the sea is grey and there is nothing anywhere to show him, is that he has turned the Heron away from the north and towards the east. He is no longer steering by the swell. He is steering by the wind, and the wind has moved.

Nobody aboard sees anything wrong, because there is nothing to see.

Ingrith wakes and knows the ship is wrong

Ingrith wakes in the middle of the afternoon. You are sitting beside her, writing up the log, and you see her eyes open and see her lie still for a moment, not moving her head. Then she sits up and lays her palm flat on the deck. She does not look at the sky or the sail. She keeps her hand there for three swells, four, five, and you see her face change.

“Askel,” she says, not loudly. “Where is the swell?”

He looks at her, puzzled, and says that it is where it always is. Then he stops and feels the ship under his feet, really feels it, and his face changes too. The great slow hills from the south-west are no longer lifting the stern from the left. They are coming in on the right side now, rolling the ship from the side, and the Heron is pointing almost due east. For much of the afternoon she has been running towards the Iron Shore, towards Hask, and nobody aboard has known it except an old woman who was asleep.

Askel turns the ship back without a word. With the wind where it is now, the Heron cannot point north under sail alone, so he braces the yard hard round and calls the rowers to their benches, and for the rest of the afternoon they pull, with the sail half drawing and half flapping above them. You watch him put the gale’s swell back under the left side of the stern and keep it there, stroke after stroke. By evening the breeze slides back towards the west, as light winds do, and the oars come in. Askel does not complain about the slow going. When the ship is back on her course, he comes and sits down on the deck beside Ingrith and lays his own palm on the planks, and stays there a long time, frowning, learning to feel the thing he has been riding over all his life without noticing it.

It is like an archer who has spent years aiming at a target in a quiet field and finds one day that the target was moved in the night. The archer is not worse than before. But he must learn to look again.

The sun-crystal finds nothing behind the cloud

Before evening Askel asks for the sun-crystal. It is a small, clear stone the size of a child’s fist, wrapped in wool and kept in a box at the chart table, and on a day of thin cloud it can show where the sun is by a change in its colour when you turn it against the sky. Ingrith unwraps it and holds it up to the grey with her good eye close to it, turning it slowly, and then gives it to you to try, and then to Askel. Nobody can see any change. The cloud is too thick, Ingrith says, even for the crystal. She wraps it up again and puts it away, and says that a navigator who has only one way of knowing where she is has no way at all.

A new swell arrives from far to the north-west

On the sixth day something new comes. You feel it before you understand it, through your palm on the deck, as a kind of interference: the long south-western swell, which has been so steady, begins to stumble now and then, as if something were bumping into it from the side. Ingrith feels it too. She has you count again, and there it is, a second long swell, very low, so low you can hardly see it on the water, coming out of the north-west. Its count is even longer than the gale’s. Five slow breaths, almost six.

There is no wind from the north-west. There is no storm anywhere that anyone aboard can see. But somewhere out there, far beyond the edge of the grey, a great wind has been blowing, and the sea has carried its swell all this way to tell you. Ingrith says it is a storm none of you will ever see, unless the ship goes looking for it, which she does not intend. But she is pleased with the new swell. Now there are two marks to steer by instead of one, crossing each other under the keel, and if one of them fades, the other will still be there.

At dawn that morning Wenna had called down again that there was nothing to the south-east, and Dunn had tied his sixth knot. Askel says, a little too cheerfully, that perhaps the black ships have given up and gone home. Ingrith moves a white stone on her board.

It is the evening game, the first in three nights, and she plays it slowly, with long pauses, looking more at the grey sea than at the stones.

“Would you have given up?” she asks him. “If you were Morvane, and you had lost the scent in a gale, and you knew what the ship carried and where she must have gone? Would you go home to Hask and tell him so?” Askel does not answer. You think of a game of hide-and-seek where the seeker does not run about calling, but stands very still at the place where the hider must pass.

Later, when Askel has gone forward, Ingrith tells you what she thinks Morvane is doing. The gale will have kept him in harbour for two days, perhaps three. By now he is out again, and he will have sat on his deck and thought, as a good player thinks when the other player’s stones are hidden under a cloth. A ship carrying the only chart of the Northern Way, with four black sails between her and home, has one open door, and it is the north. So he will come north, not quickly, but spreading his four ships out across the sea with a long gap between each, like a net drawn slowly through the water, so that whichever way the Heron has gone, one of them will see her. “He does not have to be faster than us,” Ingrith says. “He only has to be wider.”

The Mark on the Chart

That evening you mark the chart. It is the hardest mark you have made, because there is nothing to fix it by, no sun at noon, no stars, no land, only three days of keeping the gale’s swell under the left side of the stern and guessing the ship’s speed by the chips of wood you drop at the bow. Ingrith has you draw a line of small crosses running north from the ring you drew after the gale, one for each day, each a little less sure than the last. Then, at the place where Askel’s afternoon turned the ship east, she has you put a short crooked line, bent towards the Iron Shore and back again. It is a reminder, she says, for whoever reads this chart after her. For the log she gives you three lines. Sky closed since the second day, no sun and no stars. Course kept north by the old swell from the south-west. A new swell from the north-west on the sixth day, from a storm unseen.

The first birds pass at the edge of the evening

As the light begins to fail on the sixth day, the cloud in the west grows a little thinner, not breaking but paler, as if a lamp had been carried behind it. And across that paleness, low over the water, a line of birds goes by. There are perhaps a dozen of them, black against the grey, flying with quick stiff wingbeats, close to the sea, in a long straggling line. They pass across the stern and are gone into the dusk before anyone can call out.

Half the crew saw them. Bran stands up on his bench and shouts that birds mean land, and that land means water and a beach to stand on, and some of the rowers cheer. Dunn starts to talk about fresh water. Askel looks at Ingrith.

Ingrith is watching the place in the dusk where the birds went. She does not cheer and she does not argue. She only says, quietly, to you and to nobody else, that Bran has seen birds and believes he has seen land, and that tomorrow, if the cloud lifts, she will show you the difference between the two. Then she lays her hand on the deck one last time, feels the two swells crossing under the keel, and tells you to sleep. The next lesson, she says, will come with the birds at dawn.