Lesson 6: Fog

On every quay of the Shore of Lamps it is said that fog is a sailor’s worst enemy, worse than a gale, because a gale at least shows you the rocks it means to throw you on, while fog hides them until the hull is already breaking.

You have heard this all your life, from fishermen mending nets and old women selling smoked cod. Now the grey wall has closed behind the stern of the Heron, the four black sails that followed you all day have vanished as if a hand had wiped them from a slate, and you stand at the steering oar beside Ingrith in a world no wider than the ship, waiting to learn whether the fog will drown you or hide you.

The grey wall closes behind the stern

The fog does not arrive the way rain arrives, falling from above; it is simply there, as though the ship had rowed into a room whose walls stood a spear’s length from the rail in every direction.

Wenna comes down from the masthead, because there is nothing left up there to see, and sits at the foot of the mast with her arms round her knees. Above her the dark curve of the sail still draws in the fair southerly wind that has carried you all day, but its top has faded into the grey, and the sail has become a sound, a soft and patient creak of wool and rope that you have heard every hour of the voyage and never truly listened to until now. Your cloak grows heavy with small cold beads. When you breathe in, the air tastes of salt and of something colder underneath, like water drawn from a deep well in winter.

Askel comes aft along the benches, stepping over oars and coiled lines, and stops so close to Ingrith that you can hear him breathing hard.

“We should row,” he says quietly. “Every oar out, every back bent, while they are blind as we are. By morning we could be half a day ahead of them.”

Ingrith does not answer at once. She turns her head a little to the right, so that her good ear faces the south-east and her clouded left eye faces the fog ahead, and she listens for a long time, as a wrestler stands with his hands on his opponent’s shoulders before the bout begins, feeling for weight and balance rather than looking for it. Then she says, “Thirty-two oars striking the water make a noise that carries farther in fog than in clear air, Askel. If we row, we are not hiding. We are calling out where we are.”

Askel stands a moment longer, and you can feel his impatience like heat from a banked fire, but he goes forward again without a word, and the oars stay in their racks along the benches.

What the Old Song Says

There is a verse for fog in the Song of the Northern Way. Dunn hums it while he hands round the cold evening food, and soon half the crew is murmuring along: “Where the grey wall stands on the water, the drowned bells ring below; keep your oar in its bed and your tongue behind your teeth, and the bells will let you go.”

The crew believes the verse is a warning about the drowned, about the ringing of bells from ships and towns that the sea took long ago, which call to the living and draw them down into the cold. Lise touches the oak of the rail as she sings. Bran, who has rowed through more fog than anyone aboard, does not sing at all, but you notice that he lays his oar more gently in its rack.

Ingrith listens to the verse to its end and then tells you, so softly that only you can hear, that the song is wiser than the people who sing it. “It does not say the fog will kill you,” she says. “It says how to live in it. Quiet oars, quiet tongues. Whoever made that verse knew that in fog the ears do the work of the eyes, and that the ship which makes no sound is the ship that is not found.”

The lead goes down without a splash

When the fog has turned from grey to a soft, close black, Ingrith takes you to the bow with the sounding lead, one hand on your shoulder and the other on the rail, moving along the dark ship as surely as if she could see every plank.

The lead is a long bronze weight shaped like a bell without a mouth, and in its hollowed base Dunn has pressed a fresh lump of tallow. Ingrith makes you lower it over the side hand under hand, so that it slips into the water without a splash, and then she makes you pay out the line slowly while you count the marks by touch alone, because there is no light to see them by. A strip of leather at five fathoms, a knot of wool at ten, two strips of leather at fifteen, a scrap of red cloth at twenty; you learn them with your fingertips in the dark, as a blind player learns the pieces of a game by their shapes. At thirty-four fathoms the line goes slack in your hands, and you feel through the wet rope the soft bump of the weight settling on the bottom of the sea.

You haul it up as quietly as you lowered it, coiling the wet line at your feet, and Ingrith takes the lead from you and runs her thumb across the tallow. Then she holds the thumb close to her good eye in the faint grey light of the night and touches it to her tongue. “Black sand,” she says. “And broken shell, small, like crumbs of bread. There is only one bank on this water where the lead finds black sand and shell at thirty-odd fathoms, and we sounded it ourselves in the spring, on the way north. You wrote it in the log. Do you remember?”

You remember, though at the time you copied the numbers without understanding why she cared about the colour of mud. The bottom of the sea is a chart that cannot be blown away, and a navigator who has sounded it carefully can find her place on it in the blindest fog. Morvane has never sounded this bank. He does not know it exists.

“He is a hunter,” Ingrith says, as if she has heard your thought. “A good one. But he is following us into a room we have already walked through with a lamp, and he is walking through it in the dark.”

Every sound aboard must be put away

Through the first hours of the night Ingrith and Askel go along the ship together, and you follow them, and one by one every sound aboard is found and put away. Lise packs fresh wool round each oar where it lies in its hole in the side, so that no oar will knock if the ship rolls. Dunn wedges his pots against each other with rags, and lays his ladle and his knives in a fold of sacking, where they cannot ring against anything. Lise pulls her sailcloth hood down over the wicker cage of the raven, which has called at every dusk since its companion flew west, and Wenna lays her own cloak over the hood as well, and in the warm dark the bird falls silent and tucks its head beneath its wing. Bran tells the rowers on the benches to take off their boots, so that no heel will thump against the planks, and you see big men moving barefoot along the ship like children creeping past a sleeping father.

The sail is left to draw, because a square sail makes almost no sound in a steady wind, and the Heron moves north through the fog at a gentle walking pace, her bow whispering against the water.

It is the strangest game of hide-and-seek you have ever played. The seekers are as blind as the hiders, and the hiders win not by finding a good place to crouch but by making no sound at all for as long as the night lasts.

A drum beats somewhere in the grey

Some time after midnight, when your eyes have begun to close, you hear it: a low, slow beat, very far away, so faint that at first you think it is your own heart. Then it comes again, and again, steady as a pulse, and you feel Ingrith’s hand close on your wrist.

“A drum,” she breathes. “Morvane’s drum. He beats the stroke for his rowers, and he beats it so that his three other ships can follow the sound and not lose him in the fog. Listen how slow it is. They are rowing gently, feeling their way.”

You listen, and you try to tell where the drum is, and you cannot. One moment it seems to come from astern, the next from the right hand, and once, horribly, it seems to come from straight ahead, from the dark where the Heron is going. Fog does this to sound, Ingrith tells you. It carries a noise a long way and then turns it about like a cat playing with a mouse. “Do not chase the sound with your head,” she says. “Let it come to you. Listen to whether it grows, not where it is.”

So you stand still and simply listen, and after a long while you understand. The drum is growing. Slowly, one beat at a time, as a runner in a long race comes up from behind without hurrying, the sound is coming closer.

The Wolf passes within a long bowshot

Askel comes aft again, and this time Ingrith speaks before he can. “The sail stays,” she whispers. “Nobody moves. Nobody speaks. If he hears us, he will find us. If he does not hear us, he will pass us by, and he will never know how close he came.”

So the whole crew of the Heron sits and lies and crouches in the dark among the benches, every face turned toward the sound, and the drum comes on. Now you can hear more than the drum. You can hear the oars of the Wolf, many more oars than the Heron carries, dipping together and lifting together with a heavy, creaking sound, as though the black ship were a great tired animal breathing. You can hear water running along a hull much deeper and broader than yours. Once you hear a man cough, and another man hush him, and you are so close that you could almost tell which of them is older. Then, through the grey, comes a voice that is not loud but carries perfectly, low and even and unhurried, saying only, “Easy. Easy. Hold the stroke.” Ingrith’s hand tightens on your wrist, and you know without being told whose voice it is.

You never see the Wolf. She passes somewhere off the right hand, perhaps a long bowshot away, perhaps less, a great dark noise moving through the grey, and the fog keeps her from you as completely as it keeps you from her. The drum is beside you. Then, beat by slow beat, it is drawing away into the north-east, carrying the black ship and her three sisters with it, as an archer’s arrow that misses its mark goes on flying past the target and into the empty field beyond. For a long time after the last faint beat is gone, nobody aboard the Heron moves. Then, from somewhere among the benches, you hear Wenna let out a breath she has been holding, it seems, for half the night.

Ingrith turns the ship while the hunters listen

Ingrith waits until there is no sound anywhere but the drip of water from the yard and the soft talk of the bow, and then she does a thing you do not expect. She takes the steering oar from you, and with a slow, steady pull she brings the Heron round toward the north-west, away from the path the drum has taken. Askel and Bran haul the yard round in silence to keep the sail full, their bare feet careful on the planks, and the ship settles on her new course without a sound.

“He has passed us going north-east,” she tells you when the turn is done. “He believes we are ahead of him, running before the wind as we ran all day, and so he hurries after the place where he thinks we must be. Let him hurry. Every hour he spends searching an empty sea in the north-east is an hour he is not spending here. In a game of stones, you do not always win by taking your opponent’s pieces. Sometimes you win because he plays all his best stones on the wrong side of the board.”

You think of the evenings when she has beaten you at that game on the little board she keeps beside the chart table, how she played in some quiet corner while you took her pieces in the middle, until suddenly the corner was hers. You begin to suspect that she has been playing this same game all along, since the first black sail rose above the sea at dawn.

The Mark on the Chart

Near dawn, when the first grey has come into the fog and there is just light enough to see the hide, you take the chart from its oiled leather tube and unroll it on the chart table, and the two of you mark the night’s position together. The bank of black sand and shell is already drawn there in your own hand from the spring. From it you draw a short line north and then a longer line north-west, with a small cross where the drum passed by. Ingrith makes you write in the log, in plain words, the way she likes the log to be written: Day eight, night. Fog. Sounded thirty-four fathoms, black sand and shell, on the bank. Heard the drum pass to the east going north-east. Turned north-west in silence. Fog hides the quiet ship and shows the noisy one.

Morning comes as a paler kind of grey

The ninth day does not dawn so much as slowly appear, the black of the fog turning to iron and then to pewter and then to a pale, wet, shining grey that hurts your eyes after the long dark. The rowers stir, stiff and cold, and pull their boots back on. Dunn makes no fire, and nobody complains, because everyone remembers the drum.

All morning the fog holds, but it changes. It lifts a little from the water, so that you can see the long grey swell beneath it, and it thins above, so that once or twice the sun shows through as a pale white disc no brighter than the moon. When the disc fades again, Ingrith takes the sun-crystal from its wrapping of wool and holds it up to the brightest part of the grey, turning it slowly in her fingers until its colour changes, and she tells you where the sun stands behind the fog and nods to herself at the course. Wenna climbs to the masthead and stays there a long time. When she comes down, her face has begun at last to smile: she can see nothing anywhere, no sail, no hull, no black shape on the grey.

You understand then what the fishermen on the quay never understood, or never put into words. Fog is nobody’s enemy and nobody’s friend. It hides the hunter as well as the hunted. It rewards the one who knows where she is and keeps still, and it punishes the one who must make a noise to keep his own fleet together. The same grey that frightened you at dusk has carried you through the night as gently as a hand.

The sail begins to breathe more slowly

It is past midday when you notice that the sail has changed.

All night and all morning it has drawn steadily, round and full. Now it begins to breathe in a slower rhythm, filling and then falling slack and then filling again, like a runner near the end of a long race whose chest heaves more deeply and less often. The water along the hull stops whispering and begins to murmur. The fog thins further, lifting from the sea in long pale strands, and the patches of open water between the strands are no longer ruffled by the wind but smooth, with a dull and oily shine, like the skin on a cooling pot of broth.

Askel looks up at the sail and frowns. Bran looks at Askel. Lise lays down the oar she has been mending and looks at the water. Then all of them, one after another, turn to look aft at Ingrith, who is standing by the steering oar with her face lifted and her eyes half closed, as if she were listening to something none of the rest of you can hear.

She does not tell them anything. She only says to you, in the same quiet voice she used in the fog, “Note the hour in the log, and note how the sail was drawing. The fog has taught you to listen. Now listen to the wind, because it is growing tired, and when a wind grows this tired on this sea, it does not always wake again soon.”

You write it down. As you write, the sail gives one last slow breath, sags against the mast and hangs there for a long moment before it fills again, weakly, as if the wind had forgotten what it meant to say. The Heron drifts forward on the long smooth swell with almost no sound at all, and you do not yet understand that the next lesson has already begun, and that it will be taught by a wind that has stopped speaking.