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

He held on. It was a good line, thick as his wrist, with a hard wooden toggle knotted into it every few feet for hands that wanted a grip, and there was a toggle just above his gloves and another a yard below his boots. He got his hands up over the first and his feet hooked round the second, and hung between them with his knees drawn up while the ship carried him out over the field wall.

The quiet had come back, and it was a different quiet: the creak of the line, the air going past his ears, and from far below a sound like a whole market drawing in its breath.

The Harbour opened out under him in the sun. The roofs of the bonded warehouses went by close beneath his boots, grey slate and green lead and a chimney with a gull on it, and in a yard between two of them a woman was pegging out sheets and did not look up. Further off were cranes, and a glitter of water. He did not look at any of it for long. His gloves creaked on the line, and through the leather he could feel the rope beginning, strand by strand, to slide.

Somebody was walking underneath him. Kemble had gone over the field wall by the stile and down the lane between the warehouses, and she walked beneath the ship at the speed the ship was going, with her face turned up and the tin trumpet at her mouth and her gloves still tucked in her belt. When she saw him look down, she lifted the trumpet.

“Hold.”

He held.

“Hold,” she said again, further on, in the same level voice she had used for the other word, and he held.

Behind him and above, something began to whine. It came from far back along the hull, from the last ring, a thin climbing note like a wet finger drawn round the rim of a glass, and under that ring the air began to tremble. Down in the yard the sheets on the line lifted all together and stood out flat, and one tore off its pegs and went over the wall, and the woman who had not looked up looked up. Bjorn knew what the sound was for. Lift the tail and the nose comes down. Somebody aboard had had the same thought he had, and when the tail came up the nose would come down in one hard swing, and the line would crack like the end of a whip, and he would come off it.

The belly hatch flew open. Joss’s head came out of it upside down, ear-muffs and all, and he bellowed back into the ship in a voice Bjorn would not have thought a person could carry about with him. “You’ll shake the lad off her!”

The whine went on climbing, and the round hatch in the nose opened, and Stavely leaned out and looked down the length of the line at him. She was near enough now that he could see her face, and she could see his. Her hand was on the bright rim of the hatch. He saw her thumb move once across the metal, from habit, and stop.

“Strike the last ring,” she said over her shoulder, into the ship.

The whine did not wind down. It stopped, as a sung note stops, and the tremble went out of the air, and in the yard the sheets dropped back against their line. Bjorn’s jaw, which had been clenched long enough to ache, came unclenched.

“Passengers forward,” Stavely said, louder. “All of you. Everyone up to the nose, now, please. Mr Joss. Gas aft. All of it.”

The portholes began to fill from the tail forward, one round window after the next, and through the line, faint and deep inside the hull, Bjorn felt a pump begin to thud.

For a long time nothing else happened. The ship went on over the rooftops with her nose in the air, and the Stilts came up ahead of her: the long landing stages on their timber legs, a hoist beam jutting out over the lane from the top of each, and the square sky-barge on the nearest stage with half her wool already unloaded. The hoist gang had stopped work and stood among the bales looking up, and so did the customs officer at the hoist gate. Among them, not looking up, stood Rolf.

Bjorn could not hear a word from him. But he saw Rolf lift one hand and point with one finger at the edge of the landing stage, under the line the ship was taking, and he saw the hoist gang look at the finger, and at the ship, and fall on the barge and begin to heave wool bales off her onto the stage under that finger, one on another, as fast as they could throw.

Then the belly of the ship came down onto the end of the hoist beam. The line jerked, a shudder ran the length of the hull, and then the noise came, bright metal screaming as it dragged over iron-banded timber, louder than anything since the engines. The beam bent. It did not break. It held the belly of the ship back while the breeze pushed the rest of her on, and her nose, which had been rising, stopped rising, and tipped forward, and began to come down.

It came down slowly, like the head of a man nodding off in a chair. The pump thudded, the faces crowded at the forward portholes, the nose came down and the line with it, and Bjorn swung in on the line over the edge of the landing stage, and under his boots, all at once, was a heap of grey wool bales as high as a cart.

Kemble had come up the Stilts’ stair from the lane and stood by the hoist gate at Rolf’s shoulder. She put the trumpet to her mouth.

“Let go.”

Everything in him wanted to hold. His hands had been holding a rope above a city for what felt a long time, and had made up their own minds about what they were for. The heap of wool looked small, and it was sliding away under him as he swung. The last time that voice had said those words, he had decided he knew better.

He opened his hands, unhooked his feet, and let go, and fell about as far as a man falls off the top of a hayrick, and landed on his back in the wool.

It took him in up to the ears. It was warm from the sun and smelled powerfully of sheep and was full of burrs, and when he tried to sit up it went on taking him in, gently and thoroughly, until he had to roll out of the side of the heap onto the boards. He lay there looking at the sky with wool in his hair and his collar and his mouth, one glove gone, bruised in every place that could be bruised and broken in none of them. Over him the nose of the Gentle Reminder hung still, with the hoist beam jammed beneath her and her line swinging empty.

A hoist man came and looked down at him. “You’ve burst one,” he said. He picked a tuft of wool off Bjorn’s eyebrow, considered it, and put it back on the bale.

* * *

Bjorn got to his feet, which took two tries and a hoist man’s hand under his elbow, and stood in front of Kemble shedding wool.

“Why did you hold on?” said Kemble.

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She asked it at the pitch she used for everything, in front of the hoist gang and the barge’s polers and the customs officer, and the people from the lane who had come crowding up the stair to see, with Ibbotson at the front of them, red and blowing.

Bjorn looked down at his bare hand. The rope had taken the skin off the inside of two fingers.

“Mr Ibbotson had a loop round his wrist,” he said. “The line was going up. I thought if I kept hold, it wouldn’t pull tight on him.”

“Did it?”

“No.” He made himself look up. “It came off him when he let go. It had come off before I took hold again.”

At the top of the stair Ibbotson held his wrist up and turned it round so everybody could see it, like a man selling it.

“So he was clear,” said Kemble.

“He was clear.”

“So when every hand on that field let go but yours,” Kemble said, “who was the emergency?”

The hoist gang looked at him. The polers looked at him. Somebody on the stair said, “Go on, lad,” kindly enough.

“I was,” Bjorn said.

Kemble nodded. She hung the trumpet on the hoist post by its cord and stood looking at him with her hands down by her gloves, not touching them. “You’ll not take a line of mine,” she said, “until you can tell me why I say it.”

“Let go?”

“Why I say it.”

He had an answer ready: a loop falls off a slack rope and snaps tight on a taut one. It was true. He could see from her face, before he had said a word of it, that it was not the answer she meant, and he closed his mouth again.

Rolf stood by the hoist gate through all of it, and said nothing, and did not come any nearer.

* * *

It took the hoist gang a quarter of an hour with bars to ease the beam out from under the ship. Stavely held the Gentle Reminder there the whole while without a sound from her rings, and her forty passengers stood crowded at the forward portholes and did not complain, or not through the glass. Then the mast crew dropped fresh lines, and down in the lane the Walk-in formed up again, and Kemble went along every line and said it to every hand. “Everyone lets go at the pilot’s word.” This time nobody told her they knew.

Bjorn walked at the side without a line, holding his one glove and dropping wool at every step, and watched two hundred people walk a ship up the lane and across the corner of the Tether Field to Mast Three. The mast crew took her nose line up through the cup and onto the winch, the pawl clacked, and the nose of the Gentle Reminder came down to the top of the tower and went into the cup with a sound like a lid going onto a pan. After that only her tail moved, swinging a little round the Mast on the breeze.

PROCLAIMATRON 304 walked at his heel, also without a line, nobody having offered it one, and told the lane that the apprentice was walking beside a ship and not upon it, and that a report would follow.

“Oh-Four.”

“Three Hundred and Four,” it said.

Hask Corrin was waiting at the foot of the Mast with a new allocation sheet, the first having emigrated. He licked his pencil and wrote in the class box, and Bjorn, going past, saw what he had written. Vessel. With a full stop after it.

“Thank you,” Corrin said, to nobody in particular, and put the pencil behind his ear.

Stavely came down the stair inside the Mast with Joss behind her, and at the bottom she turned and looked up at her ship. The dent ran along the belly forward of the first ring, where the hoist beam had ridden her: a long, shallow, shining crease the length of a rowing boat, catching the light at a different angle from the rest of her, as it would for as long as she flew. Stavely’s hand came up with the thumb out, as if she could reach it from there and rub it away. Then she folded her arms.

“Log it, Mr Joss,” she said. “Cold. One dent.”

Joss wrote it in a small book, and left his ear-muffs round his neck.

* * *

Rolf gave his ruling on the Tether Field, among the torn balloons, because that was where the wash had come down.

He stood between the pickets with the tariff laid over the Rule Book on his forearm, and the others stood round him: Stavely with her arms folded and Joss a pace behind, Kemble with the station book, Corrin with his sheet, Ibbotson with the rolled halves of his envelope under one arm. Bjorn stood a little way off, still moulting. On every side the balloons stood straight up on their tethers in the quiet afternoon, as if they had gathered to listen.

“Rule 649 applies,” Rolf said. “A vessel’s wash is what her passage throws onto others. The Captain says wash is water. The Rule doesn’t say water. It says comes down, and it came down here, and on the Kite Station, and on the Stilts.”

“Your tariff was written for boats,” said Stavely.

“It was, and I’ll read it for what we have.” His finger went down the sheet. “Boat, swamped, at moorings. Mr Ibbotson’s envelope was at its moorings, and it was swamped, by air. Mooring line, parted: the Kite Station’s signal kites, each, since each was a line to a vessel and each one parted. Picket, drawn: pickets, drawn.” He turned the tariff over, and back. “There is still no line for gulls.”

“And my ascents?” said Ibbotson. “I’ll not fly her till she’s mended.”

“Loss of trade, per day. See the Harbour Master.” Rolf looked at him over the top of the sheet. “I am the Harbour Master, Mr Ibbotson. I’ve seen you.”

“The hoist beam,” said Corrin.

“The hoist beam isn’t wash. She struck it.” Rolf did not look up. “That’s a collision claim, on a different form. Yours, Overseer.”

“Of course it is,” said Corrin.

“I put her on the beam,” said Stavely. “Put the beam on my account.” She unfolded her arms. “And I held where I was told to hold, Harbour Master.”

“You did,” said Rolf. “The Rule doesn’t ask where you were told. It asks where it came down.” He shut the tariff inside the Rule Book. “The Gentle Reminder answers for her wash.”

Stavely looked round the field, at the pickets and the rolled envelope, and then up at her ship on the Mast, and it did not seem to be the coin she was looking at. “She’ll answer,” she said.

She paid the Walk-in as well, over and above the Harbour’s penny. She had Joss carry down a strongbox and paid every hand who had taken a line at what she called the Cantons’ line rate, which turned out to be a small silver coin stamped with a spire. Two hundred people stood about the Tether Field holding one each and looking at one another, as though they had been handed something far too good and were waiting to be told it was a mistake. Ibbotson turned his over for a long time.

“I can’t tell you what that is in pennies,” he said at last, with deep unhappiness, and tucked it into his hatband.

Kemble had the station book open against a picket and was writing in it slowly, in pencil: that roarers were to hold high, over the outer roads, until a Mast was clear for them, and that a roarer came to a Mast cold and left it cold. She blew on the page, though it was only pencil, and shut the book.

* * *

The Walk-in walked the Gentle Reminder off Mast Three a little before midnight, under lanterns.

Lanterns on poles stood all round the Tether Field and along the lane, and there were more people than there had been in the afternoon, because word of the silver had gone round. The land breeze had come up after dark and blew gently out to sea. The mast crew let her nose go from the cup, and she came away from the top of the tower as lightly as a leaf lifting off a pond, and the Walk-in took her lines and walked her, cold, down the field towards the far wall, with the lanterns shining up into her belly and her belly shining them back, so that everybody walked between two fields of small lights.

Bjorn was in the crowd without a line. Going through the gate he had taken a pair of gloves out of the crate without thinking, and remembered by the time they were in his hand, and not known what to do with them. Somewhere down the field he noticed he had tucked them into his belt by the cuffs, with the fingers hanging down. He left them there.

Kemble walked backwards ahead of the ship with the trumpet. At the far wall she stopped and looked up at the ship, and past her at the sky, and waited while the breeze made up its mind.

“Let go,” she said.

Every hand in the field opened at once, like a flock getting up off stubble, and Bjorn’s opened too, at his sides, empty.

The Gentle Reminder went up off the field without a sound, trailing her lines, and the breeze took her out over the wall and the roofs and the quays and the black water beyond, a long pale shape growing smaller against the dark and catching the Harbour’s lights along her belly, until the lights ran out and she was only a faint shine over the outer roads.

Far out, a small bright spark lit beneath her. Then another, and then a ring of them. The sound came a long while after, soft and low across the water, and by the time it reached the Tether Field she was climbing, and her wash was coming down a long way off, on the open sea.

End of Part 3