Rule 533 - Lie At The Roads - Part 1 of 3

“‘Septimus Muir,’” Rolf read aloud, “‘Chancellor of the Sovereign Realm of Gorse Holm, Keeper of the Great Seal of the Realm, Warden of its Marches, Collector of its Crown Revenues and Custodian of its Anthem, to the Harbour Master of the Harbour, greeting.’”

He turned the letter over, in case the titles carried on round the back. The back was blank except for a wax seal the size of a saucer, cracked across the middle on its way out to the roads in the bottom of a co-op boat, between a basket of whelks and the skipper’s lunch.

“That’s one sentence,” said Rolf.

“There are seven more pages,” said Barnaby Ellwood, “and I haven’t touched any of them.”

The Liaison officer sat on the middle thwart of the pilot cutter with his hands tucked into his armpits, as if they might otherwise reach out and accept something. He had come out from the diplomatic quay in his good coat and a borrowed oilskin, and the pencil behind his ear was wrapped in a twist of oiled paper against the spray.

The cutter lay head to the flood at the outer roads, well beyond the co-op’s moorings, with her tan sail down and her engine muttering, and the Skerry Point pilot kept her there with small, bored movements of one hand on the tiller. Off the port bow, near enough to hit with a biscuit, lay the arrival.

Bjorn had been told it was an island, and had pictured something round. Gorse Holm was a long, whale-backed hump of turf the best part of a quarter of a mile from end to end, dark along its spine with gorse, and it rode to the tide the way a ship does, on three great cables running down from windlasses at its seaward end into the grey water. Its sides were peat and rock, streaked and dripping, hung with weed in long brown ropes. On top stood twenty or so whitewashed cottages, all facing the same way, having agreed at some point on the view, and a long stone dairy with a turf roof. And there were goats, a great many goats, standing along the very lip of the island and looking down at the cutter with the calm interest goats bring to everything below them.

At the highest point was a flagpole, and on the flagpole flew a flag: purple, with a gold crown on it, and under the crown a sprig of gorse embroidered with tremendous care by somebody who had plainly never seen gorse.

“Forty-one,” said Bjorn.

“Forty-one what?” said Rolf.

“Goats. On this side.” He had a printed Ecology form on his knee, headed LIVESTOCK, FOREIGN, UNPENNED, which Warden Callow had handed across the gunwale of the Ecology launch a quarter of an hour ago with instructions to count every head once and no head twice. Three of the goats along the edge had moved. “Possibly thirty-eight.”

“Count them from the island,” said Rolf. “They’ll wait for anyone who’s gone to the trouble of climbing up.”

A little way off the Ecology launch was working along the Holm’s flank with Callow in the stern, his tide almanac under his arm, looking up at the dripping peat as though it owed him a form.

Between the cutter and the island a rowing boat was coming across the water.

An old man was rowing it. He rowed well, in long flat strokes, and across his chest he wore a broad sash of the same purple as the flag, with MINISTER OF THE EXTERIOR worked down it in gold thread, in letters so large that the last three went round under his arm. Every few strokes he shipped one oar to set the sash straight, and the boat wandered off a little to one side, and he took up the oar again and brought her back.

In the stern sat a tall man in a black coat with a velvet collar, very upright, with a leather portfolio on his knees. Beside him, bolted to the stern seat on a brass stand, was a speaking-horn the size of a coal scuttle.

As the boat came under the cutter’s quarter the tall man rose, took hold of the horn, and put his mouth to it.

The horn played the anthem first.

It had eleven bars, all of them loud, with a drum roll wound into the works somewhere, and it came out of the bell across the roads like a brass band kept too long in a cupboard. Two gulls left the cutter’s masthead. On the lip of the Holm, forty-one goats, or thirty-eight, turned their heads the same way.

“That’s seven times since first light,” said the pilot, to the tiller.

When the anthem was done the tall man bent to the horn again, seemed to think better of it, and straightened up.

“Septimus Muir, Chancellor of the Realm,” he said, in his own voice. “Harbour Master, I have come in person, following my letter, to open the state visit.”

“The arrival,” said Rolf.

“I beg your pardon?”

“It isn’t a state visit. It’s an arrival. Everything that turns up out here is an arrival.” Rolf folded the letter of credence along its creases. “Your letter asks for a berth at the diplomatic quay.”

“For the Realm. With the Harbour’s Liaison officer appointed to the Realm, and the Realm’s goods passed free of customs, as the goods of a realm are.” Muir had a pleasant, carrying voice, and he set each word down in front of the next like a man laying a table. “A realm’s exports pay no world’s duty. And a realm’s rents, you will appreciate, are revenue of state, and not the income of any private person.”

“The Harbour doesn’t tax rents,” said Ellwood, from inside his armpits.

“The Harbour does not. Other jurisdictions are less enlightened.” Muir said it warmly. “They will be guided by the Harbour’s example.”

Bjorn looked at the old man at the oars, who was holding the boat off the cutter’s side with one hand and gazing up at the Harbour Master the way small boys look up at the stilt-walker at a fair.

“Mr Ellwood,” said Rolf. “The diplomatic quay.”

Ellwood freed one hand long enough to count on it. “Berth Four takes a hundred and forty feet. Berth Five takes ninety, and it’s spoken for.” The hand went back.

“Pilot?”

“Four hundred and forty yards, stem to stern,” said the pilot, without looking round. “Not counting goats.”

Rolf stood in the waist of the cutter with his weight set against her roll and the Rule Book open in one hand. He turned the pages two at a time, stopped, and read the Rule out as if a clerk had just handed it to him.

Rule 533. Anything too large to berth is to lie at the outer roads, whatever it declares itself to be.

Muir listened with his head tilted, like a man hearing a fine point made in a sermon. At the end of it he smiled.

“Whatever it declares itself to be,” he said.

“That’s the part you’ll be wanting,” said Rolf, and marked the line with his thumb. “I invoke Rule 533 on the arrival, Gorse Holm. It lies at the outer roads.”

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The toll came a breath later, from far back across the water behind them: one low note from the Lighthouse, which went out over the roads and under the cutter’s keel and away towards open sea. The pilot lifted her hand off the tiller while it lasted. Rolf’s thumb stayed on the line a beat after the note had gone past the Holm, and when he took it off he set his feet a little wider on the boards, as though the cutter had begun to roll harder and nobody else aboard had noticed.

Muir took a watch from his waistcoat and considered it.

“Then the Realm will declare itself more precisely,” he said. “Under the Instrument of the Realm, Harbour Master, a proclamation of the Chancellor takes effect on the hour, and is announced by the anthem. You will hear from the Realm at noon.”

“I expect we will,” said Rolf. “So will the co-op.”

He had already taken a blank Arrival Notice out of the pilot’s chart case, and wrote it out against the lid in square capitals while the boats rose and fell together. Bjorn read it upside down. Rule 533, the arrival to lie at the outer roads. Ecology hold on livestock, produce, seed and soil, nothing to land until passed by the Warden. At the top, where a Notice named the vessel it was for, Rolf had written TO ALL ABOARD GORSE HOLM, AT THE OUTER ROADS.

Muir read it upside down as well, faster.

“It should be addressed to the Chancellery.”

“It’s addressed to everybody it applies to,” said Rolf. “That’s more people than live in a chancellery.”

He held it out over the rail. Muir reached for it, the swell lifted the boat and dropped her a foot, and the hand that closed on the Notice was the old man’s, because it was nearer.

“I’ll put it up on the dairy door,” the old man said happily. “Everybody goes by the dairy.”

“Minister,” said Muir.

“Sorry, Chancellor.” The Minister of the Exterior tucked the Notice inside his sash, took up his oars, and rowed the Chancellor away.

The horn, as they went, did not play anything, and Bjorn found he had been waiting for it.

* * *

“If anything from that island comes up the diplomatic quay steps with a letter in its hand,” Ellwood said, low, while the pilot brought the cutter round towards the Ecology launch, “I have to meet it. Third step from the top. And I bow.”

He showed Bjorn, sitting down. His right hand went flat to his breastbone, his head went down and very slightly to the left, and his eyes lowered, all in one smooth, old movement that seemed to happen to Ellwood rather than be done by him, and came up again.

“Like that. A bow to credentials is a reception. If I do that, the Harbour has received a state. And I’ll have done it, personally, with my own neck.”

“What if you don’t go down the steps?”

“Then I’ve refused it, and that’s a finding as well.” Ellwood tucked his hands away. “The Harbour doesn’t make findings about what places are. It hasn’t the stomach.”

“It has the stomach,” said Rolf, from the bow. “It hasn’t the jurisdiction.”

The cutter came alongside the launch. Callow had a crate of sample jars at his feet and the look of somebody who had been kept waiting by an island.

“Go and count the goats,” Rolf told Bjorn. “The Warden wants his numbers before noon. Mr Ellwood and I will be at the diplomatic quay. Mr Muir will come to us there by two.”

“How do you know?”

“Because noon won’t answer either,” said Rolf, and turned back to the letter of credence, which had seven more pages, and was going to get all of them read.

* * *

The Holm had a landing stage on its lee side, tarred timber lashed to iron rings in the rock, and above it a ladder went up twelve feet of wet black peat to the grass. Callow went up first, one-handed, almanac clamped under his arm and a canvas bag of jars over his shoulder. Bjorn buttoned the goat form away and followed.

At the top of the ladder a small girl in a knitted hat was waiting. Before he had got his second knee onto the turf she held out to him a round white cheese the size of a saucer, wrapped in a dock leaf, and since she was holding it out, and he had a hand free, and it seemed very rude not to, he took it.

He stood up with the cheese, thanked her, turned round, and walked into the customs barrier.

It was a broom handle painted in purple and gold stripes, laid across the path at about the height of his belt on two trestles. It came off the trestles as he hit it. He caught it with the hand that had the cheese in it, got the cheese under his arm, and laid it back across its trestles, slowly, and checked that it was going to stay there. Beside the path stood a little timber hut, freshly painted in the same purple, with CUSTOMS OF THE REALM lettered over the door. The paint came away on his sleeve when he leaned on it. Inside, through the open door, was a table with a rubber stamp and an ink pad on it, and a stool with nobody on it.

The girl looked at the broom handle, then at Bjorn, and ducked under it.

“I’ll have that,” said Callow, and took the cheese from under Bjorn’s arm and put it in a jar, dock leaf and all, and screwed the lid down. “Dairy sample. Write on the label that it was handed to a Harbour officer at the top of the ladder by a minor. I want that in the record before anybody says it was bought.”

Bjorn wrote it on the label, which was not large, and ran out of room at the word minor.

* * *

They walked the Holm from its lee end to its seaward one, and Bjorn counted goats.

The goats did not wait for him. They moved across the turf in slow, shifting companies, went behind cottages and came out from behind other cottages, and three of them were a mottled grey he could not tell apart. He counted in fives and got sixty-four on the lee side and sixty-seven coming back along the same stretch, which was impossible unless the Holm made goats.

“Take the higher,” said Callow. “Nobody’s ever been fined for too many goats.”

The cottages had people at their doors. A woman shelling something into a bowl said good morning; a man hoeing a vegetable patch said nothing and went on hoeing. On four of the doors somebody had tacked up a printed sheet headed BY THE INSTRUMENT OF THE REALM, in a type with a great many curls on it. On the rest, nobody had.

The dairy stood at the middle of the island, with a spring running through it in a slate channel and out under the door. Inside, stacked on slate shelves and on boards across trestles, were rounds of white cheese the size of a cartwheel’s hub, and a woman in a brine-stained apron was scrubbing the top of one with a brush as though she wanted the skin off it.

Every round had CROWN PRODUCE stamped on it in purple ink.

“Warden,” said the woman, straightening. “Is that your boat? Can I take these in on it?”

“Not today,” said Callow.

“They’ve three days in them. Four, if it keeps cold.” She put the brush down and wiped her forearms, which were red to the elbow. “Jenet Cleeve. I make most of what’s made here. Forty rounds. And every one of them stamped in the night, while I was asleep, so nobody on the Harbour would take them from me as mine.”

“Who stamped them?” said Bjorn.

“The customs.” She jerked her head in the direction of the purple hut. “The Chancellor. Himself, with the stamp. I found him at it at five this morning with a lantern.”

Callow was already crouched at the channel, running water over the back of his hand and looking at it. He went along the shelves with a wooden probe, sniffed a round without comment, and put a knife into a rind and drew out a plug and looked at that for a long time.

The old man with the sash came in at the door, out of breath from the climb, and took the Arrival Notice from inside the sash with both hands, like a man producing a ring at a wedding.

“From the Harbour Master,” he told Jenet. “To all aboard.”

“Dad,” said Jenet, “you’re dripping on my floor.”

He went back outside to drip. Through the door Bjorn watched him take a nail from his pocket and knock it through the corner of the Notice into the dairy’s doorpost with the heel of his boot, carefully, and step back to admire it.

“Lemuel Cleeve,” said the old man, when he saw Bjorn looking. He put out his hand. “Minister of the Exterior.”

Bjorn shook it. It was a hand that had rowed and milked and dug for a lifetime, and it shook his as if the Exterior had been waiting some while for somebody to come and shake it.

“Pleased to meet you, Minister,” said Bjorn.

“Mr Cleeve,” said Callow.

“Nobody ever asked me to be anything before,” Lemuel said.

Jenet came to the doorway and read the Notice on the post. Her eyes went to the line about the Warden, and then to Callow’s back, and then out across the turf to the flagpole, where Septimus Muir was standing with his watch open in his hand beside the brass horn, which two of the island’s lads had carried up from the landing on its stand.

On the stand, as Bjorn came close enough to read it, a maker’s plate said PROCLAIMATRON 3 (NOW WITH ANTHEM).

Muir closed the watch, took a crank from his coat pocket, and wound the horn, and waited, entirely satisfied, with all his preparations made.

At noon the Three played the anthem across Gorse Holm and the outer roads and a fair way beyond them. The goats turned. Three or four people came to their doors with their hands on their chests, and Lemuel took off his hat, and the man in the vegetable patch went on hoeing. Then Muir leaned into the bell.

“By the Instrument of the Realm, and with effect from this hour,” he proclaimed, “the Sovereign Realm of Gorse Holm consists of the Chancellery, and the ground within the Chancellery fence. The residue of the Holm is Crown land, held in lease, and forms no part of the Realm.”

The Chancellery was a tarred hut down the slope from the flagpole that had very obviously been, until recently, a net store. Round it ran a new picket fence, enclosing the hut, a water butt, half a row of cabbages and one brown goat, which was eating the cabbages.

Jenet looked at the fence, and then back at her dairy, which was outside it.

“Apprentice,” said Callow, without looking up from his plug of cheese. “How many goats in the Realm?”

Bjorn counted. It did not take long.

“One.”

“Put it on a separate line.”

Bjorn took out the form and put it on a separate line.

End of Part 1