Rule 14290 - Answer To The Crew You Know - Part 3 of 3

Bjorn ran for the door in the foot of the Mast.

He did not know what he meant to do at the top of it. The line was nowhere near it. It was out over the Tether Field wall, going away, with a person on the end. But the stair was the only thing at the Sky Dock that went up, and he had his hand on the latch when somebody took hold of his collar from behind and stopped him as if he had walked into a post.

“And do what at the top?” Kemble said. She said it into his ear, quite quietly. “Go out along a line after her? Nobody goes up into my air but whom I send. I’m sending nobody.”

“The balloon—”

“Into that?” She let go of his collar. Out over the wall the side-lines were swinging from the whale’s flank in long slow loops, and any one of them would have taken a basket out of the sky like a hand taking an apple. “There’s a hand in my air I didn’t put there. I’ll not put another up after her.”

Her eyes were not on the whale. They were on Wenna, and her face had gone perfectly still, and her bare hands were closed at her sides.

The chiefs were calling.

Vasse had run out across the turf after the trailing lines and stood under them with his head tipped back, singing the gathering call from the book, clear and true and note for note as it was written. Sull stood below the Mast singing the same call, louder, in a voice that had gone hoarse at the edges, and out over the wall, caught between them, the Long Amity turned her great head one way and then the other and could not settle, and every time she turned, Wenna swung.

Bjorn had heard the calls sung all morning. He had heard them sung beautifully, from the top of the Mast, and they had not moved her eye a hair.

He went to Sull. He had to go close, because she was singing, and he took hold of her sleeve, which he would not have dared to do at any other moment of his life.

“Not the calls,” he said. “Talk to her. The way you were on the step. The way you do when you think nobody’s listening.”

Sull stopped singing. She looked at him, and for a moment he thought she would hit him. Then something in her face caught up with him, and was sorry to.

Out on the turf, Vasse had stopped too. Nobody told him. He lowered his arm and stood where he was with his head still tipped back, and was quiet.

Sull kept her voice where it was. She wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist and began to talk, low and plain, as if the whale were on the step beside her.

“Now then, my lady. Now then. What’s all this. What’s all this fuss, over a lad in a new coat and a man with a green book. You’ve got our Wenna on your side-line, did you know? That’s Wenna, off the mast crew, and she’s not for taking home, she’s got a mother in the Harbour who’ll have my hide for a tablecloth. Come round. Come round and look at me. I’m here. I’ve not gone anywhere.”

It should not have carried across the width of the field. But the field had gone quiet round it, Vasse silent on the turf and the mast crew standing with their hands open, and the whale had been hearing that voice under the wind for nineteen years. Out over the wall the great head came round, and stopped turning, and the eye came round with it and found the foot of Mast Two, and stayed.

“Wenna, love,” said Sull, in the same voice, without a breath between. “You look at me and not down. Down’s no use to you. She’s going to come down to you now, slow, because I’m asking her nicely, and when she’s down you’ll take that turn off, and when your boots are on the grass you can be cross with me for the rest of your life. Come down, my lady. Come down to me. There’s a good girl. That’s it.”

The fins moved, the near and then the far, slowly, the way they had moved in the morning beside the Mast. The whale came in over the wall. She came lower, a little at a time, for every sentence a foot or so, and the side-lines dragged on the turf again and hands ran to them and did not take hold. Wenna came down towards them at the end of hers, turning, with her face on Sull, past the height of the winch-house roof, past the height of a door. Sull went on talking about nothing, about the cold and the step and the kettle in the winch house, which she said had been on since breakfast and must be boiled dry by now, and the whale came down to her a foot at a time, like somebody coming downstairs in the dark.

“Now, Wenna. The turn. You’ve a hand free. Take it off.”

Wenna took it off. Bjorn saw her fingers work at it, and saw it give, and then she was not on the line any more, and the last ten feet she fell.

Four of the mast crew were under her. They broke her fall and did not stop it, and she came down among them onto the turf with a noise that reached Bjorn at the Mast, and lay there.

* * *

He was the first to her who was not already there.

She was on her back on the grass with her cap gone, looking at the sky with an expression of great concentration, and her right arm lay wrong from the shoulder in a way that arms do not. The inside of her wrist, where the turn had been, was raw to the width of the line and bleeding. She was breathing short and fast through her teeth, and not whistling.

“Took a turn,” she said to Bjorn. “You never take a turn.”

“I know.”

“I know you know. Everybody knows. I took one.” She shut her eyes. “Don’t touch the arm. If you touch the arm I’m going to be sick on your boots.”

He did not touch the arm. He knelt beside her on the turf and held her other hand, the good one, because it was there and she did not object, and she held on to it hard enough to hurt. The winchman came with a hurdle and a coat to go over her. Kemble came, and knelt on her other side, and put her own bare hand on Wenna’s forehead as if she were testing bread, and said nothing whatever about turns.

Behind them Sull was still talking. She talked the Long Amity all the way back to the Mast, and along it, and up; and at the top, while Bjorn watched from the grass with Wenna’s hand crushing his, the whale put her nose into the cup of Mast Two, easily and all at once, like a hand going into a glove. The mast crew caught the trailing head-line, led it through the cup and down to the drum, and took up the slack. The pawl caught. Sull stood at the foot with her head back and her mouth still moving, and never once sang.

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Rolf had watched all of it from beside the winch-house door, and he had not moved from there, and he had not needed to.

“The Harbour saw that,” he said.

* * *

They carried Wenna off to the infirmary on the hurdle at twenty past one, with Kemble walking beside it and the winchman at the head, and at half past, over the loft of the Kite Station, the long-tailed kite came down the signal line and red over white went up in its place.

Bjorn knew that one. Everybody at the Sky Dock knew that one. No pilot. Stand off.

Very high over the outer roads the bright point winked once, and then again, and then began to move, slowly, away along the line of the roads, getting smaller, until it was not there. Its cargo was still aboard it. Its dues had gone with it. Bjorn stood by the bitts and watched until there was nothing to watch, which took longer than he wanted and was a long way past noon.

Corrin, beside him, wrote one word on his board.

“Of course,” he said, to nobody, and went away across the Tether Field to find out what else had gone wrong.

* * *

Rolf spread the bill of sale on the winch drum again. This time the winchman, who was back, put his foot on the pawl without being asked.

“The Harbour has seen the Long Amity answer to her Rider-Chief,” Rolf said, writing across the foot of it as he spoke, so that everybody at the door heard every word go down. “Anneke Sull. At Mast Two, this morning and again this afternoon, in front of the Senior Air Pilot, the Berth Overseer, the mast crew and me. Seen.” He moved his pen down a line. “The Harbour has not seen her answer to Emrys Vasse.” He wrote that too. Then he moved down one more line, and wrote nothing on it, and dated the whole.

“Transfer registered in part,” he said. “The rest when the Harbour sees it.”

Mr Quenby had come as close to the drum as a man can come without climbing onto it.

“You said the Harbour couldn’t see a thing a little.”

“It hasn’t.” Rolf blotted the page. “It has seen the half of it entirely. It has seen none of the other half at all. I’ll not write down a thing that isn’t true yet, Mr Quenby, whatever the date.”

“But it’s dated.”

“It’s dated today.”

Mr Quenby let out a long breath, and put his hand flat on his coat, and it was the first time all day that the hand had looked as if it believed what it found there. He brought out the other six copies from inside his coat, one after another, in a stack. Rolf endorsed one of them. The Harbour, he said, wrote a thing down once, and Mr Quenby’s principals might copy it themselves as often as they found it improving.

“And the vessel?” said Vasse.

He stood in the doorway, the bit-line still on his shoulder and the new harness creaking, and he asked it as if the answer would be about somebody else.

“She answers to the crew she knows,” said Rolf. “Until the Harbour sees otherwise, that’s the Rider-Chief’s crew. They fly her. She lies at Mast Two.”

Corrin, who had come back, said nothing at all, and it was louder than of course.

“My principals paid those riders off,” Mr Quenby said.

“Then your principals have bought a vessel that answers to a crew they aren’t paying,” said Rolf. “They’ll want to pay it.”

Mr Quenby took out the green calendar and a pencil and did a sum in the margin, and did it again, and regarded the answer like a dog he had been promised was friendly. “By the week,” he said.

“By the week.”

Bjorn saw it land. It did not land on Mr Quenby, who had his date and would have paid a good deal more for it. It went past him and came down on the step, where Sull sat, forearms on her knees and her hoarse voice resting. He watched her hear by the week. He watched it go through her the way a sum goes through a person who has lately had to do a great many of them: roofs, and a wedding, and the older debts, and her riders up on the ridge, who had heard it too, and one of whom had put down the bundle she was carrying and was sitting on it. Every week the Long Amity did not know Emrys Vasse, her people would be paid.

Vasse had seen it as well. He was a good deal quicker than he let on.

“Then it’s worth her people’s while,” he said, without any heat, “that I stay a stranger.”

“It’s worth my people’s while,” said Sull, “to eat.”

Rolf looked at the two of them, and at the bill of sale with its dated line and its empty one. “Yes,” he said.

Nobody said anything after that. It was not a good answer. It was the accurate one, and Bjorn could see that Rolf knew the difference and had chosen.

“Who wrote sees?” said Mr Quenby suddenly, looking at the Rule Book on Rolf’s arm. “In the Rule. Somebody must have chosen that word.”

“Somebody did,” said Rolf. “He has been dead longer than your principals have kept books. I’m bound by his eyesight.”

* * *

Bjorn had known since the top of the Mast.

He had known it with the eye going down to the step, and again on the grass with Wenna crushing his fingers and Sull’s voice bringing a whale down out of the sky a foot at a time with talk about a kettle. It was not the calls. It had never been the calls. She had nineteen years of somebody talking to her about nothing, every day, and it was all she knew of anyone. A man could learn that. Not by singing better, and not by teatime. By sitting on a step, and talking, and going on talking, for weeks.

And the one person at the Sky Dock with every reason in the world never to say so was sitting three feet from him, with her riders’ wages in her lap.

He could leave it. It was not his. He had said three things out loud already that day that were not his, and one of them had put a mast-hand on a hurdle, and the Harbour would get to the truth of it anyway, slowly, the way it got to everything.

He went and stood in front of Vasse.

“It isn’t the calls,” he said. “You sing them better than she does. It doesn’t matter. She knows being talked to. Not sung to, or called. Talked to, about nothing. Sit where the Rider-Chief sits and talk to her. The cold. Your boots. Anything.” He heard how it sounded and went on anyway. “It won’t be today. It’ll be weeks. But it’s a thing a person can learn.”

He did not look at Sull while he said it. He did not need to. He felt her hear every word.

When he did look, she was looking back at him, and she was not angry, which was worse.

“Nineteen years it took me to teach her that,” she said. “Without knowing I was teaching her anything. And you’ve given it away on a step in an afternoon.”

“She shouldn’t only know one voice,” Bjorn said.

Sull looked at him a while longer. Then she got up off the step without a word and went in at the Mast’s door. A long while later Bjorn saw her come out onto the platform at the top, clip on, and step across from the rail onto the whale’s head, and walk back along her to her riders and the saddle-house. She did not come down.

He looked at his boots. They were the same boots.

* * *

At teatime the winchman made the tea, the kettle having survived, and Rolf sent Bjorn up the Mast again to watch.

Vasse went up ahead of him. He talked all the way. He talked to the stair, and to the slits in the timber, and to the whale beyond the timber, whom he could not see; he told her the stair was steep and smelled of pigeons, and that his harness pinched under the left arm, and that where he came from the tea was green and much worse. He was bad at it. He had a rider-chief’s voice, made for calls, and it kept trying to turn into one, and he kept catching it and pulling it back down into plain speech like somebody hauling down a kite. Bjorn, climbing behind him, did not say anything, and counted nothing.

At the top the light had gone long and yellow across the Sky Dock. The Long Amity lay along the air with her nose in the cup and her eye turned to the platform, as though she wanted to see who was talking so much.

Down the long grey slope of her back, on the ridge by the saddle-house, Sull was sitting with her hand spread on the hide and her mouth shut.

Vasse held out the bit-line across both palms. He did not sing. He said, “Here you are, then,” as if he were passing somebody the salt.

The lip opened, and took the bar.

“One,” said Bjorn, under his breath. “Two. Three.” The eye was on Vasse. “Four.” A gull went over, and the fin nearest the Mast sculled once, slowly. “Five.”

Then the lip opened, and gave it back.

The bar swung in against the timber and knocked, once, and hung still. The great eye turned from Vasse, slowly, and went looking down the length of her own back to the saddle-house, where Anneke Sull sat with her hand on the hide, and said nothing to her at all.

End of Part 3