Rule 649 - Answer For Your Wash - Part 1 of 3

“Fish, frightened,” Rolf read. “Per basket.”

The Rule Book was open along his left forearm, with the wash tariff spread over its pages, and he read the line in the voice he used for berth fees. The tariff was one long printed sheet with the Office crest at the top and a brown ring near the bottom where somebody had once stood a mug, and it would not lie still, because nothing at the foot of the Kite Station would.

“Boat, swamped, at moorings. Per boat. Mooring line, parted. Per line. Net, fouled.” He turned the sheet over, found the back blank, and turned it the right way up. “It goes on in that vein all the way down to the waterline, and there it stops.”

Bjorn stood at the bottom of the ladder with a wicker basket of kites in his arms and looked up, because there was no not looking up.

The ship hung over the Tether Field between the two inner Sky Marks, a little higher than the Kite Station’s roof, and she was the brightest thing he had ever seen that was not on fire. She had the shape of an airship, long and rounded with a blunt nose, and there the likeness ended. From nose to tail she was one smooth skin of metal, polished until the sky lay along the top of her and the Tether Field lay along her belly, upside down and a little stretched, like a room seen in the back of a spoon. Portholes ran in a line down her flank. Round her middle, in four rings set one behind another, stood her engines, squat dark bells pointing at the ground, and out of every one came a hard shimmer he could see through without quite seeing, which arrived on the field below as wind. The ladder hummed with the noise of them under his hand, and so did his back teeth, and yet she was not moving at all. A thing that size, making that much noise, ought to have been on her way somewhere, and she hung between the marker balloons as steadily as a lamp on a hook.

Underneath her, the Tether Field was having a very bad morning. It was a long walled field of rough grass, full of balloons on long tethers, patched and striped and faded, and every one of them leaned away from the ship at the same steep angle, like a row of people leaning back from a man with a heavy cold. Their tethers stood out taut and the pickets sang. Catch crews lay full length on the worst of the drag-ropes. In the middle of the field a man in a checked waistcoat knelt holding the two halves of a red and yellow envelope together, as though they might knit if he kept them touching. As Bjorn watched, he gave it up and came across to the tower at a crouching run, one hand clamped on his hat.

“Sefton Ibbotson,” said Rolf, still reading. “The penny ascent.”

“Eleven panels, Harbour Master,” Ibbotson said, arriving. By his face he had been doing sums all morning and disliked every answer. “Eleven out of twenty-four, clean through at the seams, with a gentleman and his mother up in the basket at the time. Tuppence a stitch, my sailmaker. That last one was a sixpenny gust. I felt it go.” He jerked his hat at the sky. “It’s the blast off her.”

“Wash,” said Rolf.

“Wash, then. It’s tuppence a stitch either way.”

A gull came in low over the wall with its feet down and made for the top of the nearest picket. The wash caught it a yard short, and it went over backwards in a clatter of wings and rolled the length of the field into the far wall with its feathers on inside out, and Bjorn watched it the whole way.

“There is no line for gulls,” Rolf said, turning the tariff over again. “I have looked.”

“Is that my kites?”

The voice came down in pieces from the rail of the signal loft, a long way above. The Kite Station was a tall square tower of weathered timber braced with iron, with an open-sided loft at the top and a ladder up the outside on the field side. The ladder looked long from the bottom. Bjorn suspected it would look longer from the middle.

“Apprentice,” Rolf said. “Kites.”

Bjorn got the basket against his chest with one arm hooked through both handles and began to climb. For the first dozen rungs the tower kept the worst of it off him. Above that the ladder came out over the top of the field wall and into the wash, which leaned on him like a crowd on a gate. At about the twentieth rung the peg holding the basket lid went. The lid stood straight up on its hinge and flapped, and through the gap the wash reached in, took hold of the top kite, which was red, and unfolded it.

It was a good kite. It filled at once and went up past his face with a crack, its string racing off its winding stick, and the next kite down, a white one, came up out of the basket after it to see what the fuss was.

Stopping on a ladder in a wind seemed to him a worse idea than carrying on. By thirty rungs he had the red kite flying from his left elbow and the white from his right, and a blue one somewhere behind that he could feel tugging at his collar and not see. By forty the three strings had got acquainted. He did the last rungs by feel, chin tucked in, and came over the top into the loft on his knees, wound round from collar to belt like a parcel somebody had lost patience with halfway through wrapping, with three kites standing out from him in three directions and the basket still clamped to his chest.

The woman at the rail was long and narrow and weather-browned, with cropped grey hair pressed flat to her head by the wash, in a pilot’s leather coat buttoned to the throat. A pair of heavy gauntlets hung from her belt, tucked in by the cuffs, and when she bent over him their empty fingers swung, like a spare pair of hands brought along in case. She did not help him up. She took the red kite’s string between two fingers, followed it to his elbow and unhooked it, then the white, then reached behind his neck for the blue and pulled, and Bjorn turned half round on his knees like a bobbin.

“Apprentice,” she said, when he was facing her again. “They’ve sent you up with my kites.”

“Bjorn,” said Bjorn, from inside the string, in case she had forgotten.

She reeled the kites in and hung them on their pegs, then found the loose end of the rest. “Stand up and don’t help.” He stood up and didn’t help, and she pulled, and he revolved, and the string came off him in one long loop that she wound round her hand and elbow as it came.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Those were my last kites,” said Kemble.

* * *

From the loft he could see the whole Sky Dock, and all of it was plainer than the thing hanging over it. Three Masts stood along the far side of the Tether Field, each of them an iron-banded timber tower, cupped at the top, with a squat winch house at its foot. Beyond them lay the Scorch Field, where a pump crew was walking a hose along the edge of the pale stone flags and leaving them dark behind. Away to the left, level with the rooftops of the bonded warehouses, the landing stages of the Stilts stood on tall legs, with hoists running down from them into the warehouses’ upper doors. A sky-barge stacked with bales had settled onto the nearest, and the pilot balloon that had towed her in was bobbing back along the field wall on its tether.

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The signal pegs were bare except for the three kites. Knotted round the rail, blown into red rags on a cross of sticks, was the rest of Kemble’s morning.

“I flew her hold between the inner marks,” Kemble said, “while the barge came across. She held. Then I flew her strike your engines. That’s it there. The wash had it before it cleared the roof. After that I stopped wasting kites.” She took a shuttered lamp down off its hook. “You can’t blame a master for not obeying a rag.”

A light winked from the nose of the ship, long and short, and Kemble read it aloud as it came. “Gentle Reminder.”

Bjorn looked at the ship, then at Kemble. “Is that a message?”

“It’s her name.” Kemble’s face did not change. “Gentle Reminder. Holding as instructed. Request berth.”

She worked the station lamp’s shutter and read her own words aloud as she sent them. “Kite Station. Strike engines. Mast Three. The Walk-in will take your lines.”

The ship’s lamp considered this for some time. “Declined,” Kemble read at last. “Will hold. Request berth under power.” She hung the lamp back on its hook with great care, as a person puts a thing down in order not to throw it.

Rolf came up the ladder as if it were his own stairs, and stepped off it onto his feet. The wash lifted his chain of office clean off his collar and laid it over one shoulder. He took it by the links and put it back, and gave it a small tug at each side until it hung level, and only then looked at the ship.

Behind him, making much heavier weather of the ladder, came Berth Overseer Hask Corrin, complaining at every rung until he arrived in the loft with nothing left to complain with but his face. His allocation sheet flapped, so he pressed it to his chest.

“Scorch Field takes courier craft,” he said, when he had breath. “She’s three of it end to end, Harbour Master, I paced it. The Masts will take her nose all day long, and the Senior Pilot tells me the Masts take nothing that’s still roaring.”

“Nothing comes to my Masts hot,” said Kemble.

“So I’ve a board that wants a class and not a berth on it that’ll have her.” Corrin glared up at the ship. “Moorings for things that don’t need water at all, I’ve always said. I never once said for things that won’t stop shouting.”

Kemble slid a folded paper out of the station book and gave it to Rolf. “Her declaration. It came back down the weighted line with my Notice at the outer marks.”

Rolf opened it against the wind. His finger stopped on one line, and Bjorn read it at his elbow.

ENGINES: 48. WHUMPMASTER 48 (NOW WITH EXTRA WHUMP).

Rolf read the line again, looked up at the rings of engines, and looked back down at the paper.

“I would have settled,” he said, “for the ordinary amount.” He gave the paper back to Kemble. “I’ll speak to her.”

Kemble took down a long tin speaking trumpet, dented along one side, and held it out. “You’ll have to shout, Harbour Master. She’s got every ring up.”

“I don’t shout,” Rolf said, and did not take it, and Kemble went on holding it out. “Hold it closer to her.”

Kemble looked at him, and at the ship, and something crossed her face that might have been the start of a laugh or the end of her patience. Then she hung the trumpet on the rail and took the lamp down again. “Kite Station,” she read as she sent. “Harbour Master to speak with master. Close the station.”

“Not a thing that size,” Bjorn said, into the din, before he had so much as wondered what close could mean to a ship. The ship showed him.

She came towards the tower, slowly and with enormous care, sliding sideways without rising or dipping by a hand’s breadth and swinging her nose round to face the loft. She was plainly proud of it; she took her time. The forward ring of engines sank to a deep thrumming. The rings behind it did not, and as her nose came across the field the whole weight of her wash came with it, over the Tether Field and up the side of the Kite Station and in.

The station book leapt off its desk and flapped open in mid-air. Bjorn threw himself onto it and sat on it and stayed sitting on it. The three kites went off their pegs in a bunch, and Kemble caught them by their strings without looking round. Corrin’s allocation sheet left him altogether, and he watched it go away over the roof with the expression of a man watching a relative emigrate.

Below, the Tether Field turned over like a page, every balloon swinging round to lean the other way and the catch crews sliding across the grass on their drag-ropes. One picket came out of the turf with a tearing noise Bjorn heard even from the loft, and its balloon went bounding away down the field with four leather aprons hanging off its rope, and then two, and the last two held on as far as the wall. Ibbotson lay down flat on his envelope with his arms spread.

The nose of the Gentle Reminder stopped thirty yards off the loft rail as if it had been nailed to the sky. In its side a round hatch swung open, and a woman stepped into it in a dark flight coat with a double row of bright buttons. Before she spoke, she put out her thumb and rubbed at a mark on the polished rim beside her, and rubbed again, and only when it was gone did she raise a speaking trumpet of her own. Hers was silver.

“Captain Yusra Stavely,” her voice came across the gap, “of the Gentle Reminder, out of the Updraft Cantons, on the maiden call of the spire route. Forty passengers and the mail. I am holding where your pilot instructed me to hold.”

Kemble held the tin trumpet out towards the ship at the full stretch of both arms, and Rolf stepped up to the mouthpiece and spoke into it in the voice he had used on the frightened fish.

“Captain. Rolf, Harbour Master. Your holding is coming down on my field.”

It carried. It went out through the thrum of the forward ring, level and unhurried, and in the hatch Stavely turned her head a fraction towards it, as if somebody at her elbow had spoken.

“Then tell me where to go,” she said, “and I’ll take it off your field.”

“I’ll tell you something first.” Rolf opened the Rule Book on his forearm, and read.

Rule 649. Every vessel is to answer for its wash, wherever that wash comes down.

From somewhere behind the rooftops, far off across the Harbour and low under all that noise, the Lighthouse tolled once. Bjorn felt it through the station book before he heard it. Rolf stood heavier after it, as though the Rule Book had put on weight along his arm, and he kept his finger on the line while the note lasted.

Stavely polished the rim of her trumpet with her thumb before she raised it again. “Wash, in the Cantons, Harbour Master, is what a river boat leaves behind her in the water. My engines have not touched a drop of yours.”

“It doesn’t say water,” Rolf said. “It says comes down.”

“I held where your pilot put me.”

“You did,” said Rolf, and Kemble, holding the trumpet out at arm’s length, said nothing so loudly that Bjorn heard it over the engines.

“Then find me a berth I can reach under my own power,” Stavely said, “and I will pay your tariff for every minute until you do. I will not come in on ropes. In the Cantons a ship brought in on ropes is a wreck being recovered. This is the first call on a new route, and every master who flies it after me will read what I send home, and I will not write that the Gentle Reminder was dragged into your Harbour by her heels. I’ll hold.”

The hatch closed. The forward ring came back up to full, and the nose slid away from the tower as neatly as it had come, taking its wash back across the Tether Field and turning every balloon on it over a second time.

“Holding,” Rolf said, “is not waiting.”

Corrin sat down on the floor of the loft, since the bench had gone over, and Kemble looked aft along the ship to where a second light had begun to wink from a porthole near the tail. It was slower than the lamp at the nose and far less sure of itself, the light of somebody working a shutter by hand without much practice.

“Engineer,” Kemble read. “To pilot.” They waited. “She. Floats. Cold.”

The lamp at the nose flashed at once, quick and hard. “Disregard,” Kemble read.

The lamp near the tail thought about it. “She does, though.”

Rolf looked at the tail of the ship for a while, and then down at the pilot balloon, which its winch crew were holding at the foot of the tower on a short tether. Kemble followed his look. She slung the tin trumpet over her shoulder on its cord, pushed the fingers of her gloves more firmly into her belt, and went to the ladder.

“Apprentice,” she said. “You’re light, and you’re here. Basket.”

Bjorn got up off the station book. From the top of the tower, the pilot balloon’s basket looked no bigger than the one he had carried the kites up in, and the kites had not done well.

End of Part 1