Lesson 4: Birds

Every fisherman on the Shore of Lamps will tell you that a bird at sea means land is near. The songs say it, the old men by the boats say it, and the children who have never been past the harbour wall say it most surely of all: when the gulls come, the shore is close, and a ship that sees wings has come home. You have believed it as simply as you believe that smoke means fire. On the seventh morning of the voyage, when the grey lid that has covered the sea for five days finally begins to break, and you wake to a sky full of wings, it seems to you that the old saying is about to save you all.

The cloud is coming apart in long rags, with pale blue showing between them, and for the first time since the gale the sun throws a shadow of the mast across the deck. All around the Heron, as far as you can see, there are birds.

The cloud breaks and the sea is full of wings

They are everywhere. Grey-backed birds with stiff, straight wings glide along the faces of the swells without a single beat, tilting from one wing-tip to the other, so close to the water that they seem to be skating on it. Small black-and-white birds sit on the sea in loose crowds, dozens together, bobbing on the swell with their heads tucked under their wings. Now and then one of them wakes, looks round, and dives without a splash, and comes up a long way off. High up, two or three great white birds with black wing-tips circle slowly over the water, and as you watch, one of them folds its wings and drops like a thrown spear, and hits the sea with a sound you can hear from the deck. It comes up with a fish.

The crew are on their feet. After five days of grey with nothing to look at but grey, the sight of so much life is like a fire lit in a cold room, and you can see the change in every face.

Bran shouts for land at the first gull

It is Bran who says it first, as you knew he would, standing on his bench with one great arm flung out at the birds. Land. There must be land close by, just over the edge of the sea, with water on it and a beach to stand on and perhaps a stream. Dunn, who has been counting the water every evening and frowning, begins to talk about filling the casks. Two of the rowers start to argue about which way the land must lie. Wenna is already climbing to the masthead, and you hear her laughing up there with pleasure at the sun.

Askel turns to Ingrith. He has learned by now to turn to her before he turns the ship, and he does it this morning without being asked, which you notice. Ingrith is sitting on the chest by the chart table with her face lifted to the sun, her eyes half closed, warming herself like an old cat. She does not look at the birds at all.

“Which birds?” she asks.

Askel does not understand the question, and neither do you. Birds are birds. But Ingrith only waits, the way she waits for you to see a move on the board that has been in front of you the whole time, and when nobody answers, she points with her chin at the grey-backed gliders skating along the swells.

Some birds sleep on the sea all their lives

Those birds, she says, do not need land. They come ashore once a year to lay a single egg on a cliff, and for the rest of the year they live out here, on the open sea, far from any shore. They sleep on the water. They eat on the water. In a storm they ride it out the way the Heron rode out the gale, by keeping away from the rocks, and she has seen them many days’ sail from any land. Seeing one of them, she says, tells you that you are at sea, which you knew already.

Then she points at the small black-and-white birds sleeping in their crowds on the swell. Look at them, she tells you, and you look, and slowly you see what she wants you to see. Among the grown birds there are small ones, stubby and dark, which cannot fly. Each of them swims close beside a grown bird, following it wherever it goes, diving when it dives. Ingrith says that at the end of summer the young of these birds leave the cliffs before their wings are grown, jumping down into the sea, and their fathers swim out with them into the open water and teach them to fish. They will not touch land again for a long time. A crowd of these birds sleeping on the water means only that there is good fishing here, and that the birds are as much at home as you are on a bench by the fire.

It is like watching a game of stones played by someone who knows the rules only by halves, she says. He sees a stone on the board and thinks it means one thing, when every stone means something different depending on where it stands and what stands near it.

Bran sits down slowly on his bench. He does not argue. But you see him look out at the birds again with a different face, as if he were trying to see what Ingrith sees, and could not, and was angry with himself rather than with her.

Lise, meanwhile, has been watching the great white birds drop. She says nothing to anyone. She goes to her tool chest, finds a bronze hook and a length of fine line, ties a scrap of bright red cloth above the hook, and lets it trail astern where the white birds are diving. Before the sun is much higher she has pulled in four fat silver fish, one after another, each as long as her forearm. Dunn takes them from her as if they were gold and has them split and laid out to dry on the chest lids in the wind. Ingrith watches Lise with plain approval. The white birds, she says, were telling everyone where the fish were all morning, and only one person aboard was listening to what they said rather than to what everyone hoped they were saying.

What the Old Song Says

Dunn, who knows every verse, hums the next one while he measures out the morning water: “Ask the black bird the way; the white birds ask only for fish; and the bird that sleeps on the sea has no more home than you.” The crew believe the black bird is the raven of the Wind Mother, who flies between her cave and the world of the living and carries messages for those who are lost, and that the white birds are the souls of drowned fishermen, still hungry, still looking for their nets. You see two of the rowers glance up at the circling white birds and make a quick sign with their fingers. Ingrith does not make the sign. When Dunn has finished, she looks over at the wicker cage by the mast, where the two ravens sit under the edge of Lise’s hood with their black eyes shining. Then she says that the song has been right about birds for a long time, and the singers have been wrong about them for just as long.

The noon sun proves that the swell told the truth

Before Ingrith will let anyone touch the ravens, she waits for noon. It is the first noon in five days with a sun in it, and she does not mean to waste it. She sits in the middle of the deck with a short stick standing upright between her knees, its foot on a plank, and you sit opposite her and watch its shadow. The shadow shortens and shortens as the sun climbs, and then, for a long moment, it seems to stop. That is noon, when the sun stands highest and due south. Ingrith looks along the shadow, which now points due north, and then along the keel of the ship, which also points north, or nearly. Three days of steering by the swell alone, under a sky with no sun, and the ship is pointing almost exactly where she meant it to point.

Askel looks at the shadow and the keel for a long time. Then he laughs, a short, surprised laugh, and claps Ingrith once on the shoulder, which nobody aboard has ever seen him do.

A raven is let out of the wicker cage

Now Ingrith asks for a raven.

Lise lifts the hood off the cage, and the two birds turn their heads and look at her, one eye and then the other. They are big birds, glossy black, with heavy beaks, and they have travelled with the Heron all summer, fed on scraps of fish and bits of Dunn’s bread. Ingrith tells you why they are aboard. A raven is a bird of the land, she says. It cannot rest on the sea, as the grey gliders can; it cannot sleep on the water or fish in it. If you let a raven go far out at sea, it will climb high, higher than any mast, and look round. If it sees land from up there, it will fly to it, straight as an arrow, because it must. If it sees no land, it will come back to the ship, because the ship is the only solid thing it can see. The raven does not know the way. But it can see farther than Wenna can from the masthead, and it cannot lie about what it sees.

Lise opens the little door and reaches in carefully, and brings out the larger of the two birds with both hands round its body, and gives it to Ingrith. Ingrith holds it for a moment against her chest, feeling its heart beating, and then she lifts it high and opens her hands.

The raven flaps heavily up past the sail. It circles the mast once, twice, croaking, and the whole crew stand with their heads tipped back, watching it. Then it begins to climb in wide, slow circles, higher each time round, smaller and smaller against the blue, until it is only a black fleck, and you have to look beside it, the way Ingrith taught you, to keep it in sight. For a long time it simply circles. Then, quite suddenly, it stops circling. It straightens out and flies away to the west, low and steady and fast, a black stitch drawn across the sky, and it does not turn back. You watch it until even Wenna, at the masthead, says it is gone.

Nobody speaks for a while. Then Bran says, almost shyly, that there is land to the west after all.

“There is,” says Ingrith. “And now we know where it is, which is more than the gliders could tell us.”

In the cage by the mast, the other raven hops from one end of its perch to the other and calls, a harsh, lonely sound, again and again. Lise lays the hood back over the cage and talks to it quietly through the cloth until it stops. Ingrith says that it will stay where it is. Each raven is a question that can be asked only once, she tells you, and the Heron has one question left; there may come a day when she needs it more than today.

The Mark on the Chart

She has you bring out the chart, and she lays her finger on a small mark you made yourself, in the spring, on the way north. It is an island, a bare, steep, lonely rock with no spring on it and no people, which you passed on the outward voyage and named in the log simply the empty island. On the chart it lies some distance north and west of the ring you drew after the gale. Since then you have been laying down a line of small crosses north from that ring, each a little less certain, guessed from the swell and the chips of wood. Now the raven has flown west and not come back, which means that from high above the ship, in this clear air, it could see land to the west, and the only land on the chart in that direction is the empty island.

Ingrith measures with her fingers. For the raven to have seen it, the island must lie no more than a day’s sail west of the ship. She has you rub out your last uncertain cross and draw a new one, firmer, a day’s sail east of the empty island, and for the first time since the gale, the mark on the chart is a cross and not a guess. The log line is short. One raven sent at noon; flew west and did not return; the empty island lies a day’s sail west; the other raven kept.

Askel wants to make for the empty island

It is Askel who says what half the crew are thinking. The island is close. They could reach it by tomorrow evening, lie in its shelter, rest, perhaps find rainwater in the hollows of its rocks. He says it reasonably, without impatience, and you can see that he has thought about it. Dunn nods. Dunn has been watching the casks.

Ingrith asks him how many islands lie between here and the ice. One, he says, looking at the chart. That one. She asks him whether Morvane has a chart. He says no. She asks him, then, if he were Morvane, coming north across an empty sea with four ships spread out like a net, and he knew the Heron must need water and rest, and he saw one island rising out of all that emptiness, where he would look first. Askel looks at the chart for a long time, at the single small rock standing alone in all that blank hide. A hiding place that everyone can see, Ingrith says, is not a hiding place but a trap with a door in it, and the hunter only has to sit at the door.

Askel rolls up the chart himself and hands it back to her. The Heron holds her course north.

The evening birds fly home towards the west

In the evening, as the sun goes down into a bank of pale haze in the north-west, Ingrith takes you to the stern and makes you watch the birds again. The grey gliders are still skating over the swells, going nowhere in particular. The small black-and-white birds have gathered into larger crowds and settled on the water for the night, their heads tucked away. But the great white birds with black wing-tips, the ones that dropped like spears, are behaving differently. One by one, and then in long lines, they are leaving. They fly low and straight and steady, without circling, all in the same direction. They are flying west, towards the empty island, and towards the cliffs where their young are still waiting to be fed.

That is the bird that tells you something, Ingrith says. Not the bird you see at noon, which may be anywhere, but the bird that must go home at night and flies there straight at evening, like runners in a relay carrying the same message one after another down the same road. Morning birds are scattered over the sea, going out to fish. Evening birds go home. If you want to know where land is, watch which way the home-going birds fly when the light fails, and do not believe a single bird at any other hour.

You watch them go until the light is gone. The line of white birds and the black fleck of the raven point the same way. The old saying was not wrong that birds can show the way to land. It was wrong only in thinking that every bird can.

Wenna sees something at the edge of the dusk

Then, in the very last of the light, Wenna calls down from the masthead. Her voice is not loud, and it is not laughing. She thinks, she says, that she saw something low on the edge of the sea in the south-east, a fleck darker than the dusk, there for a moment and gone. Perhaps a bird. Perhaps a wave. She cannot be sure.

Nobody laughs, and Wenna, who laughs at almost everything, does not laugh either.

The ship is very quiet. Askel climbs halfway up the mast himself and stares south-east until it is fully dark, and sees nothing, and comes down. Bran says it was a bird, too loudly. Dunn ties nothing in his cord, because it is not dawn, but you see his fingers find it at his belt and hold it.

Ingrith sets out the board of stones on the chest, as she does every evening, and you play by touch in the dark, the smooth stones and the rough. She plays slowly tonight, and her good eye is turned not to the board but to the south-east, where there is nothing to see. When the game is over, and she has won as she always does, she puts the stones away in their bag and lays her hand flat on the leather tube under her coat. “If Wenna saw what she thinks she saw,” she says, “it will still be there at dawn, and higher. Sleep now. The birds were today’s lesson. The next lesson will come up out of the south-east with the morning, and it will come with sails.”