Lesson 8: Oars

Every summer at the harbour races on the Shore of Lamps, the old men stand on the quay and lay their bets on the crew with the thickest arms, because everyone knows that when two boats race on flat water, the strongest oarsmen win.

Bran has won the harvest race three summers running, and he has never once doubted it. So when Ingrith wakes the crew in the middle of the night after the long calm day, and the oars are run out through their holes in the side with the wool still wrapped round them, it is Bran who takes the stroke bench nearest the stern, facing aft, where every rower can see his back, and it is Bran who sets the pace for the whole ship. You sit on the bench behind him with an oar of your own, because tonight every pair of hands is needed, and far away in the south-east, across the dark and silent sea, the drum of the Wolf is beating.

Bran sets a stroke like a hammer

The first stroke jerks the Heron forward so hard that you nearly fall off the bench.

Bran pulls as he does everything, with his whole body and his whole heart, driving his legs against the stretcher and hauling the loom of his oar to his chest so fast that the blade tears the water white, and the crew follows him because they cannot do otherwise. Your own oar is longer and heavier than any you have handled, and for the first strokes its blade skitters across the surface, until you learn to let it bite and then to lean back with it. The narrow ship leaps under you. Water rushes along the hull, louder than at any time since the gale. For the first hour it is glorious. The rowers grunt and laugh between strokes, someone shouts that the black ships will never catch them now, and you feel the strength of the whole crew moving through the oak beneath you like one great animal running. Ingrith, at the steering oar, says nothing at all. Every so often you see her turn her head to listen to the faint drum astern, and then turn it back.

By the second hour nobody is laughing. By the grey of dawn the rowers are breathing like men who have climbed a mountain, and the stroke, though Bran still drives it as hard as he can, has begun to fall apart, some blades catching the water early and some late, so that the oars clash and the ship rolls a little at each pull instead of running straight.

What the Old Song Says

When the first light comes, Dunn starts the rowing verse of the Song of the Northern Way, because it has always been sung at the oars, and the crew takes it up between gasps: “Pull for the Mother, pull for home, pull till the oak groans under you; the strong arm brings the ship to land, and the weak arm sinks her too.”

The crew believes the verse means what it seems to mean, that strength is everything at the oars, and that a crew which cannot outpull its enemy deserves to drown. Bran sings it louder than anyone, and pulls harder on the word “strong”.

Ingrith lets them sing it through twice. Then she says to you, so quietly that only you can hear above the oars, “Listen to the tune, not the words. Count the beats. That verse was made to be sung slowly, one line to each long stroke, with a breath between. Whoever made it was not telling them to pull hard. They were telling them how often.”

By noon the hands begin to fail

The sun climbs into a sky as pale and empty as yesterday’s, and the sea lies as flat as ever, and the Heron crawls across it on her oars.

Your hands, which had felt hard enough at dawn, are on fire by the middle of the morning. The skin of your palms has risen in blisters, and the blisters have broken, and every stroke tears them a little more. The man beside you is pulling with his teeth set and his eyes closed. Two benches forward, a rower lets his oar trail and slumps over the loom, and the blade drags in the water and slews the ship until his neighbour shakes him back to work. Bran is still driving the stroke, but it is slower now than he wants it to be, and you can see the sweat running down his neck and the muscles of his back jumping under his wet shirt.

At noon Askel sends Wenna to the masthead, and when she comes down, she does not need to say anything. Her face says it. The four black ships have come up out of the haze in the night. From the yard she can see their masts and the long dark bodies of their hulls, low and heavy in the water, and the white flash of many oars rising and falling together, slow and steady, all at the same moment, like the wings of a great flock of geese. They are nearer than they were at dawn. Not much nearer. But nearer. Dunn passes along the benches with a ladle, one swallow of water for each rower, and you have never tasted anything so good in your life.

Ingrith asks Bran to count the drum

Ingrith gives the steering oar to Askel and comes forward along the benches until she stands at Bran’s shoulder, and she says to him, in the middle of a stroke, “Bran. Stop pulling for a moment and listen.”

He does not want to. You can see that he does not want to. But he lets his oar rest across his knees, and the whole crew rests with him, gasping, and in the silence the drum comes to you across the flat water, faint but clear. Slow. Very slow. Much slower than the stroke Bran has been setting since the middle of the night.

“Count it,” Ingrith says.

Bran counts, his lips moving. Then he looks up at her, and for the first time since the night began, you see doubt in his face. “It is half our stroke,” he says. “Less.”

“Yes. And it has not changed since midnight. Not once. Morvane is not trying to win the morning, Bran. He is trying to win the week. He has more rowers than benches, so every few hours his tired men stand up and fresh men sit down, and the drum never changes, and the heavy ships go on and on at the same pace, like a runner who knows exactly how far the race is and will not hurry a single step before the end. Our ship is lighter than his. She runs on between strokes where his ships sit down in the water. If we row as he rows, slow and long and always, we can hold him. If we row as we have rowed since midnight, we will be finished by tomorrow, and he will come up to us while we lie over our oars like dead fish.”

For a long moment Bran says nothing. Then, in a low voice, he says, “I have won every race I ever rowed by pulling harder than the other crew.”

“Every race you ever rowed was over before the sun moved a hand’s width across the sky,” Ingrith says. “This one is not.”

Half the benches row while half the benches sleep

So Ingrith and Askel divide the crew, there at noon on the flat sea with the black ships in sight. Half the benches will row, and half will rest, and every time Dunn has moved twenty pebbles from one bowl to another, a pebble for each hundred strokes, the two halves will change places, so that every rower has as long to rest as to pull. Bran will set the stroke for his own half, and for the other half Ingrith chooses Wenna, who has light arms but a perfect sense of time, and who has watched the stroke from the masthead often enough to know it by heart.

Bran does not like it. You can see on his face that he hates to leave his oar while other people are still pulling, as a wrestler hates to step out of the ring while the bout is still going on. When his first rest comes, he sits on the deck beside the mast with his hands hanging between his knees and watches Wenna setting the stroke, and every so often his own shoulders move a little with hers, as if he were still rowing in his mind. But he does not lie down, and he does not sleep, and when his turn comes again, he is not much more rested than before.

It is Ingrith who goes to him. She sits down beside him on the deck, slowly, because her knees are stiff, and she says, “You are rowing even when you rest. That is the hardest rowing there is. Lie down and close your eyes, and let the ship carry you. The others need your arms tonight, not now.”

He looks at her for a long time. Then he lies down on the planks with his arm across his eyes, and within a few breaths he is asleep, and you have the strange feeling of having watched a very big man do something much harder than lifting a cask.

The Mark on the Chart

At sunset on the eleventh day you mark the chart in the last of the light, with your torn hands wrapped in strips of cloth. The line you draw north is short, much shorter than any day’s run under sail, but it is a line, and it leads away from the small circle of the calm. To the south-east you draw the four black ships nearer than they were, and Ingrith makes you write the distance as Wenna judged it, honestly, without shortening it to make yourself feel better. Then she makes you write: Day eleven. Calm. Rowed north from the middle of the night. Hard stroke till noon, then turns. The black ships gained in the morning, held in the afternoon. A race that lasts for days is won by the stroke, not the arm.

Lise wraps the oar looms in wool

Through the evening and the night, the ship rows on, half her benches pulling and half asleep, and the pattern of the turns begins to settle into the crew as a pattern settles into a game after the first few moves, until nobody needs to be told when to stand and when to sit.

Lise goes along the resting benches with a basket of old sail scraps and a pot of tallow, and she binds the looms of the oars where the hands grip them, winding the cloth round and round and smearing it with tallow so that it will not chafe. Then she goes along again and makes every rower hold out his palms, and she cleans the broken blisters with sea water, which makes them sting so badly that grown men hiss through their teeth, and smears them with more tallow, and binds them. When she comes to you, she looks at your hands and shakes her head, but she does not tell you to stop rowing. She only binds them more carefully than the others, and says, “Hold it looser. You grip it as if it were trying to get away from you. It is not going anywhere.”

She is right. When you take your next turn, you hold the oar loosely, letting the loom roll in your fingers as Wenna does, and the pain is less, and the stroke is longer, and you find that you can row for a whole bowl of pebbles without counting every stroke until the end.

The old song becomes a count for the stroke

In the deepest part of the night, when even the turns cannot keep the weariness away and the stroke begins to falter on both halves, Ingrith sings.

She has not sung once since the voyage began, and her voice is old and thin and cracked, but it carries along the silent ship like the sound of a bell. She sings the rowing verse of the old song, but she sings it as you have never heard it sung, so slowly that each line takes a whole long stroke, and between each line she leaves a breath, a pause in which the blades come out of the water and swing forward, flat and dripping, and the ship runs on by herself, whispering, before the next stroke begins. Pull for the Mother, and pause. Pull for home, and pause. The rowers take it up, softly, one bench after another, until the whole ship is singing at the same slow pace, and you feel the stroke come together under you as it has not been together since the first hour, every blade striking the water at the same moment and leaving it at the same moment, as a rowing crew does when it has stopped being many people and become one.

It is not fast. But you realise, with a kind of wonder, that it does not hurt. You could row like this until morning. You think, in fact, that you could row like this forever.

On the twelfth day the gap holds

The twelfth day dawns as still as the eleventh, and Wenna goes to the masthead at sunrise, and again at noon, and again in the evening, and each time she comes down with the same answer. The black ships are there, astern in the south-east, their oars still rising and falling to the same slow drum, their hulls low and dark and heavy on the shining sea. And each time they are no nearer than they were.

They are no farther away, either. You notice that Askel’s face grows tight whenever Wenna says it, and you understand why: a race that cannot be lost is still not a race that has been won, and every bowl of pebbles draws a little more from the water casks that Dunn counts every evening with his lips moving. But the gap holds. Morvane has more oars and more men, but he is pushing four heavy ships through still water, and the Heron is a long light shaving of oak that slips along with half the effort, and between the two of them they have made a balance, like two teams on either end of a rope, straining with all their weight and moving neither way.

At dusk Askel takes an oar himself on the resting half’s turn and rows until the next change of the benches without a word. When he comes aft afterward he stands beside Ingrith at the steering oar and asks her the question he has clearly been carrying all day: how long can this last? Ingrith does not answer at once. She looks south-east into the dusk, where the drum is still beating, and then down at the little board by the chart table, where the stones of your last game still lie as you left them. “He has more stones than we have,” she says at last. “More oars, more men, more ships. But every one of his men is drinking from his casks, and every one of his ships is heavier than ours to move. The longer the game goes, the more his stones cost him to play. We do not need to beat him, Askel. We only need to still be on the board when he begins to count what he has left.”

Earlier that afternoon, when his rest came round, Bran did not wait to be told. He lay down on the planks by the mast with his arm across his eyes, and slept at once. When he woke and took his bench again, he did not hammer the stroke. He set it long and slow, as Ingrith sang it, and when one of the younger rowers began to pull harder than the rest, eager and red in the face, Bran said to him without turning round, “Easy. You are not trying to win the morning.”

Weed lies along the water in a line

Toward evening, while the off-watch sleeps and the oars dip and lift to Bran’s slow count, you see Ingrith standing at the rail with her head bent, staring down at the water off the bow on the right hand side.

You go to her, and she points without a word. Across the smooth water, stretching away to the north-east as far as you can see, runs a thin, crooked line of floating things: strands of brown weed, a scrap of driftwood, a pale scum of foam, a few grey feathers lying on the surface as if someone had drawn a line across the sea with them. On the near side of the line, the water is the dull grey-green you have looked at for days. On the far side, it seems to you, though you cannot be sure in the low light, a little darker and a little more blue.

“Mark the place,” Ingrith says softly. “Mark the hour. And tomorrow, at first light, before the rowers wake, come and find me at the bow, and bring a feather.” She looks at the line on the water for a long time, and you see the faint shape of a smile on her face, the smile she wears when the other player has left a corner of the board unguarded. “The sea is not as still as it looks. That will be the next lesson.”