Lesson 5: Sails

In every chase that the old men tell of by the fire, the faster ship wins. It is the first thing anyone believes about a chase, and it seems too plain to question: if the hunter is faster, the hunted is caught, and if the hunted is faster, she escapes, and everything else is decoration. Children on the Shore of Lamps race their bark boats down the stream behind the drying racks and argue only about whose boat is quickest. You argued about it too. On the eighth morning of the voyage, when Wenna’s voice comes down from the masthead in the grey before sunrise, you find that you still believe it, and that the belief is the most frightening thing you have ever held.

She does not shout. She says it just loudly enough for the stern to hear. Sails, four of them, low in the south-east. Black.

Four black sails stand low in the south-east

At first you cannot see them from the deck. You climb onto the chest by the chart table and look where Wenna points, beside the place rather than at it. After a long moment they come to you: four small dark marks on the very edge of the sea, far apart from one another, so low that only the upper part of each sail shows above the curve of the water. The ships themselves are hidden below the horizon. Only the tops of their sails stand up, like the tips of four black fingers laid along the rim of a bowl.

The whole crew are awake now, and nobody speaks. Dunn ties his eighth knot slowly, without looking at it, his eyes on the south-east. Bran sits on his bench with his great hands open on his knees. Askel stands at the steering oar with his jaw set, and you can see him counting the sails again and again, as if the number might change. Lise has stopped in the middle of coiling a line and stands holding the coil against her chest.

Ingrith has not climbed onto anything. She sits where she was sleeping, by the chart table, with her blanket round her shoulders, and she asks Wenna how far apart the sails are from one another. Wenna says that there is the width of a hand at arm’s length between each pair. Ingrith nods slowly, as if she had been told something she expected to hear. Then she asks whether any of them has turned.

The net draws in towards a single line

For a while none of them turns, and you begin to hope, stupidly, that they have not seen you. The Heron’s sail is grey-brown, not black, and she is low and narrow, and perhaps from so far away she is only a speck among the swells. Then, as the sun lifts clear of the sea behind them, Wenna calls down that the sail on the left is moving towards the others. A little later, so is the sail on the right. Slowly, the way a net comes in when the fishermen on the beach begin to haul, the four black sails close together into a single line, one behind the other, all of them heading north.

They have seen you. There is no doubt of it now. Morvane spread his four ships across the sea like a net, just as Ingrith said he would, wide enough that whichever way the Heron had gone, one of them would see her. One of them has. Now there is no more need to be wide, and the net is drawing in to a spear.

The leading sail is bigger than the others, and a little darker. Wenna says there is a pale patch sewn into its upper corner, like a scar.

“The Wolf,” says Askel.

Ingrith says nothing. She only draws her blanket closer round her shoulders, and you see her hand rest for a moment on the leather tube under her coat.

What the Old Song Says

As the sun climbs and the crew settle to the work of the day, someone among the rowers begins the next verse of the Song of the Northern Way. The others take it up, low and stubborn: “The wolf that runs at noon lies down at night; the grey bird stands in the reeds and is not seen.” You have heard it many times, but never like this. The crew are singing it as if it were a promise made to them by name, because the ship behind is the Wolf and the ship beneath them is the Heron, the grey bird of the reed beds. Bran sings it loudest, and when it is over he says that the song knew about this chase long before any of them was born. Ingrith lets him say it. Then, to you alone, she says that the song is older than both ships, and that whoever made it had watched a heron fishing. A heron does not catch fish by chasing them. It stands still, for a very long time, until the fish forget it is there.

Askel wants every oar in the water

The wind this morning is fair, from the south, steady and fresh, the best sailing wind the Heron has had since the fishing island. It is fair for the black ships too. Askel says so, bitterly, and then he says what you knew he would say: put every oar in the water, all thirty-two, and row with the sail, and leave the black ships behind before noon.

Ingrith asks him how long the rowers can row at that pace. Until noon, Askel says, perhaps a little longer. She asks how many oars the Wolf carries. He does not know exactly, but more than thirty-two; the trader said more than he could count. Then she asks him whether Morvane, seeing the Heron’s oars come out, will leave his own oars in their racks, and what happens at noon, when the Heron’s rowers are spent and the Wolf’s are not. Askel opens his mouth and shuts it. You think of a long race in which one runner sprints from the start to frighten the others, and the others let him go and wait, and pass him later as he walks, holding his side.

“He does not know yet what our oars can do,” says Ingrith. “Let him not know. There will be a day when we need them, and on that day I would like him to be surprised.” So the oars stay in their racks. The rowers sit on their benches with nothing to do but watch the black sails, which is harder than rowing.

Ingrith sets out the stones to show the chase

Towards the middle of the morning Ingrith calls you, and Askel, and Lise, who happens to be nearest, to the chest by the chart table. She sets out her board of stones. She places a single white stone near the top edge of the board, and four black stones near the bottom corner, in a line one behind the other, all pointing towards the white. It is the chase, laid out where you can see it whole.

Then she asks Askel to move the white stone wherever he would turn the Heron to escape. He moves it to the left, towards the west, where the empty island lies. Ingrith moves the leading black stone, not to where the white stone was, but straight across to where it is going, along the short side of the corner. Askel tries the right. The black stone cuts across again. Each time the white stone turns, the black stone does not follow the white stone’s path but cuts the corner of it, and each time it ends closer than before. You see it suddenly, the way you saw the trap in the corner on the evening at the fishing island. A ship that turns while the hunter is watching does not escape. She only shows the hunter a shorter road.

It is like a runner on the inside of a curved track, Ingrith says, who has less ground to cover than the runner on the outside. Every turn the Heron makes in daylight gives the inside of the curve to Morvane. So the Heron will not turn. She will hold her course north, straight as a stretched line, all day, as long as the black sails can see her. Turning, if she turns at all, will be done in the dark, when nobody is watching the corner.

Askel looks at the board for a long time. Then he puts the white stone back at the top edge himself, pointing north, and goes back to the steering oar without a word.

A chase is a long game of position

Through the rest of the morning you begin to understand that this is not a race at all, or not only a race. Ingrith watches the black sails as a player watches the other side of the board. She notes which of the four is gaining and which is falling behind. She notices that the last of the four ships sails badly, yawing from side to side, and that the third has a sail too small for her hull. She watches the wind, and the swell, and the colour of the sky, and the cold, and she spends a long while with her head over the side, smelling the water, which you do not understand at all.

Lise, who knows every plank of the Heron, has been watching the bow. Since the gale, she says, the ship has been sitting a little heavy forward, with the last of the storm water lying in her bilge, and a ship running before the wind with her nose down is like a runner leaning too far over his feet. Ingrith tells her to mend it. So Lise and two rowers bail the bilge dry, scoop by scoop, and shift the spare oars and two of the water casks aft, until the bow lifts a hand’s breadth and the Heron runs a little freer, with less white water piling under her stem.

At noon the wind eases for a while, and for that while the Heron holds her own. You see it yourself: the black sails, which had been creeping higher, stop rising. A light ship moves in a light wind when a heavy ship can barely stir, Ingrith says, as a small wrestler can be quicker on his feet than a big one, though the big one wins when he gets a grip. Speed is not one thing, she tells you. It is different in every wind and every sea, and with every tired arm. A ship that is faster in the morning may be slower at noon. The hunter who forgets this will lose the hunted in the end, even if his ship is faster most of the day.

The Wolf gains a little through the long afternoon

But in the afternoon the wind comes back, fresher than before, and the black ships begin to gain again. They gain slowly, but they gain. By the middle of the afternoon the Wolf is no longer only a black fingertip on the rim of the sea. Wenna can see the whole of her sail now, and when the ship rises on the swell, the dark line of her hull below it. The other three have fallen back and spread a little, as the slower ships drop behind the faster one, the way the runners in a long race string out along the road. The Wolf comes on alone at the front, steadily, never swerving.

Wenna, at the masthead, says there is a man standing at the Wolf’s stern who has not moved all afternoon.

Nobody asks who he is. Askel paces. Bran grips the edge of his bench. Dunn has started counting the water casks again, though nothing has changed in them since the morning. You find that your hands are cold and that you cannot make them warm. Only Ingrith seems the same as on any other day, sitting by the chart table with her blanket round her shoulders, her good eye turned south-east and then north, south-east and then north, as if she were watching two things at once.

The Mark on the Chart

Late in the afternoon she has you bring out the chart and mark the position: a small cross north of yesterday’s, a long day’s run north of the empty island, close now to the long line you drew in the spring where the fog lay along the edge of the cold water. You drew that line yourself on the outward voyage, and you wrote beside it in small letters that the sea there turns colder. Ingrith lays her finger on the line and then on your new cross, and the space between them is less than the width of her finger. Then she gives you the line for the log. Four black sails at dawn in the south-east; the Wolf leading; she gains in fresh wind and loses in light; course not changed while seen. And under it, a second line, which you write carefully: a chase is not won by speed alone, but by the place you are in when the light goes.

The sea ahead turns colder and darker

Now you understand what Ingrith has been smelling all afternoon. In the last part of the day the air changes. It grows cold, suddenly, as if a door had been opened onto a cellar, and your breath begins to show in front of your face, though the wind is still the same mild wind from the south. When you look over the side, the water has changed colour too, from the green-grey of the morning to a dark, deep grey, almost black. Ingrith has you put your hand in it. It is so cold that it hurts your bones.

You take your hand out and hold it under your arm until the feeling comes back, and you do not need to be told to remember it.

This is the edge of the cold water, she tells you, the water that comes down from the ice, and it lies here every summer like a long cold river across the sea. When the mild southern wind blows over it, the wind is chilled from below, and the wet in the wind turns to mist, the way your breath turns to mist on a frosty morning. She saw it on the outward voyage. She drew it on the chart through you. All day she has been keeping the Heron on her straight northern course not only because a ship that turns is caught, but because straight north was where the fog would be, and she has been pacing the ship towards it as a runner paces a long race, so as to reach the line just as the light fails.

The fog bank rises white across the bow

Then Wenna calls down from the masthead, and for the first time all day her voice has something like laughter in it again. Ahead, low and white, from one edge of the sea to the other, there is a wall.

You see it from the deck a little later, as the sun sinks red behind it on the left. It lies across the whole north like a long low cliff of grey wool, flat on top, with the last light catching its upper edge and turning it pink and gold. Below it the sea is dark. It does not move, or seems not to, and the Heron is running straight towards it with the fair wind behind her and the four black sails strung out behind her, the Wolf at their head, closer now than she has been all day. Askel looks back at the Wolf and forward at the fog, and back and forward again. You can see him measuring the distance to each.

It is a near thing. The light is going fast. The Wolf’s sail has grown all afternoon, and now her hull is plain to see on every swell. Morvane has seen the fog too. As you watch, a row of pale specks comes out along each of the Wolf’s sides and begins to rise and fall together, and you understand that he has put out his oars to catch you before the grey can. Askel looks at Ingrith, and his whole body asks the question. Ingrith shakes her head once. The Heron’s oars stay in their racks, and you watch the Wolf come on faster, and you think you have never in your life wanted anything as much as you want to row.

But the fog is nearer. The first thin wisps of it lie loose on the dark water ahead of the wall, and the Heron runs through them; they are cold on your face and wet on your lips, and they taste of salt and ice. Then the bow is in it, and the grey closes round the mast, and Wenna, clinging to the masthead with her knees, becomes a pale shape and then only a voice. You look back once, over the stern. The Wolf’s black sail is still there, faint in the last of the dusk, and then the grey closes behind the Heron too, and there is nothing.

Ingrith has sat by the chart table for most of the day. Now she stands up, folds her blanket, and comes to stand by the steering oar beside Askel, and lays her hand lightly on his arm, as she did among the rocks on the first night. Then she turns to you. “The faster ship has not won today,” she says quietly. “Perhaps it will win tomorrow. But tonight the sea has given us a cloak, and every soul aboard believes the fog is our enemy. How to wear it will be the next lesson.”