Rule 9318 - Pilot The Weather In - Part 1 of 3

Rolf held the request up to the lamp, the Rule Book still open in his other hand, and read the form through the paper as much as off it. He had come out to the station bareheaded, as he went everywhere, and the morning had left a fine damp in his short grey hair; his long dark coat was still buttoned from the wall, and he had not noticed either.

Nobody had put the lamp out. Grey light was coming in along the Pilot Station’s one long window, which faced the approaches and nothing else, and the lamp and the morning were quietly disputing the counter between them. The room smelled of the stove and of wet oilskin, and under both, faintly, of the fish quay. Bjorn stood just inside the door with a lidded tin pail in both hands, the left one new out of its splint. It had been put into them on his way in, by whom he still wasn’t sure, and it was heavy, and warm on one side, and it smelled faintly of onions. Getting it down to the cutter with the lid on and nothing lost was the whole of his job this morning, and he meant to do the whole of it.

“It’s on the correct form,” Rolf said.

“Is that good?”

“It puts it ahead of most of what arrives before breakfast.” He tilted the sheet so Bjorn could see.

It was a pilotage request for small craft and other, the kind of form that lived in a tin box at the end of every jetty in the Harbour for boats that came in without a signal lamp. Every box had been attempted, in a round and careful hand. Vessel: Squall. Master: Squall. The line for last port of call had been left empty, not struck through, only left, as though the question had been read and thought about and set aside. Draught: varies. Beam: varies, but I will keep it small. Purpose of call: To stop somewhere for a while.

The signature at the bottom had run. Blue had crept out of every letter in soft threads and dried into the grain, so the name sat in a little pale cloud of its own ink.

“It was in the box on the end of the jetty,” said the woman at the window, “between the four o’clock lamp and the half-five. Lid shut. Everything else in that box is dry as biscuit.”

She hadn’t turned round. She stood with her back to the room and her weight on her heels, a thick grey plait down between her shoulders, and as Bjorn watched she licked the tip of one finger and held it up in the still, stove-warmed air of the station, as though the wind might have come indoors to make its report.

On the counter beside her flask, a brass instrument the size of a loaf rang its bell.

It had a dial, and a needle, and on top a bell no bigger than a thimble, and the bell was going ting, and then ting, with the steady grievance of a neighbour knocking on a wall.

“That,” the woman said, “has been at it since four as well.”

“Senior Pilot Beatrix Lowe,” Rolf said. “My apprentice, Bjorn. Who has your lunch.”

“Who has my lunch,” Lowe agreed. She turned at last and looked him over once, top to bottom, which in his case did not take long, and Bjorn felt himself measured for draught and found to be drawing more than he’d declared. She nodded at the brass thing. “Tattler Forty. Pocket Edition.”

Bjorn looked at it. The maker’s plate on its front said TEMPEST-TATTLER 40, POCKET EDITION, and it would not have gone into any pocket he had ever owned.

“The Thirty-Nine rang at gulls,” Lowe said, as if that answered the question of the pocket. “This one only rings when it doesn’t like the look of the glass. It doesn’t like the look of the glass.”

Ting. There was a brass slide on the side of it marked MUTE. Lowe did not trouble with the slide. She set her flask down on top of the bell, and it went tunk, and kept going.

* * *

Past the end of the jetty, past the long black rock of Skerry Point and its crust of gulls, the channel ran out between its markers to open water. The red can bobbed to port and the green to starboard, as they did in every chart of the approaches Bjorn had ever been made to copy, and a little way outside the outer pair there sat a cloud.

It was low, far lower than a cloud had any business being. Its underside was flat and grey and hung no higher above the water than a coaster’s masthead, and its upper edge had caught the first of the sun in one long rim of light. The ebb was running out beneath it. A breeze was coming in off the sea over the top of it. The cloud stayed where it was, as steady as a coaster with her engine ticking over, waiting at the markers for somebody to come out.

That was the part Bjorn could not stop looking at. A cloud in the wrong place was weather. A cloud that held its place against a running tide was something else, and he said so before he had any more words for it than that.

“That isn’t weather,” he said, to the whole room, a good deal louder than the room needed. “It’s keeping station.”

Nobody answered him. Rolf’s pale eyes came up over the top of the request, rested on him, and went back to it. Somewhere in the quiet after, when it could do no good at all, the part of Bjorn that liked to be sure caught up with him and asked how he knew, and he shifted the pail to his other hand, and it knocked against his knee.

It had stopped short of the markers. There was a clear strip of water between its edge and the red can, the kind of gap a person leaves at a counter so as not to seem to push.

“You can see it’s waiting,” said a young man with his forehead against the glass. His breath fogged the pane. He wiped it with his sleeve and fogged it again and wiped it again. “Look at it, Skip. It’s waiting for someone.”

“I can see it’s sitting on my tide,” said the man at the counter. “Ollie Frayne, get your face off the Senior Pilot’s window.”

Skipper Enoch Pike was built along the lines of a mooring bollard, short and wide and bolted down, in a knitted cap that had been navy some years ago. He had both forearms flat on the counter.

“Nine boats,” Pike said. “Nine co-op boats at the fish quay with ice aboard and nets aboard and crews stood about on the quay eating their breakfasts. Tide turns at ten. Pilotage shuts the fairway while an arrival’s keeping station in it, fine, I know the Rules, I’ve fished out of this Harbour since before that lad was born. But there’s nothing out there to arrive. That’s weather. You don’t shut a fairway for weather. You fish through it.”

“You can fish through it the day it stops keeping station like a ship,” Lowe said. “I’m not sending nine boats past a thing that’s holding against the ebb until I know why it’s holding.”

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“Then send it off.”

“I don’t know what it is well enough to send it anywhere.”

“Then you can put that in writing for Hepzie Quint,” said Pike. “She chairs the co-op, and she’ll want it.”

Rolf lowered the request and closed the Rule Book on one finger.

“There is a Rule,” he said, and opened it again, and read from the page in the same voice he used for tide tables.

Rule 9,318. Weather that requests pilotage by name is to be piloted in as a vessel would be.

The bell went tunk under the flask.

“By name,” Lowe said.

Rolf held up the request, with its small blue cloud of a signature.

“Who wrote that Rule?” Lowe said.

“Somebody who didn’t sign theirs,” Rolf said.

Lowe took her flask off the Tattler, drank from it, and put it back with more force than the bell deserved.

“A pilot goes aboard,” she said, “or a pilot goes ahead and the master follows her in. Either way there’s a master. There’s a hand on a wheel I can shout at. There’s a hull I can get a line on if it goes wrong. The Association hasn’t got a procedure for weather, Harbour Master. There isn’t a page in my book for it. If I take that through my markers and it drifts down onto the fish quay, that’s my licence on the table and my name in the inquiry, and nobody at the inquiry is going to ask me whether the form was filled in nicely.”

“No,” Rolf said. “They’ll ask whether you followed the Rule.”

“Then they can ask the Rule to pilot it.”

The door came open hard before Rolf could answer, and let in Berth Overseer Hask Corrin, a gust of gull noise, and no wind at all.

“Berthing,” Corrin announced to the room, as though the room had sent for him personally and at great inconvenience, which from Lowe’s face it had. He was a short, round man in a good brimmed hat, and he had come out along the Point on foot. It showed in his boots, his breathing and his temper. He held up a sheet of his own. “Allocation request, forwarded from this station at ten to six, for an arrival with no hull. Draught, varies. Beam, varies, but I will keep it small. Harbour Master, I have deep water. I have shallow water. I have pens for things that float and moorings for things that don’t need water at all. What I haven’t got is a berth for varies. There isn’t a box.”

“There’s a box on this one,” Rolf said, and showed him.

“Of course there is,” said Corrin, and sat down heavily on the bench under the signal board, and made the face Bjorn had seen him make at a door on Berth Six, the face of a man whose day had been reorganised before he was awake.

“Nobody needs to berth it,” Pike said. “Nobody needs to do anything but send it off and open my fairway. It’s ten past eight.”

The Tattler rang. The clock above the chart drawers agreed with Pike.

Rolf set the request down square on the counter, lined up with its edge, and turned to Lowe. “Senior Pilot. I’m not asking you to take it in this minute. I’m asking you not to turn it away before any of us knows what we’re turning away.”

Bjorn saw the word asking land on Lowe, and saw that it was the wrong word for her this morning, though he could not have said what the right one would have been. Her mouth went thin. She licked her finger and put it up again, in the still air, and whatever the room told her, she didn’t like it.

“It’s my station,” she said, and went to the pegs by the door, and took down two flags.

“Beatrix,” Rolf said. He didn’t raise his voice.

She went out anyway. Bjorn, who had not been told to put the pail down, went after her with it.

* * *

The flagstaff stood at the head of the jetty steps, where the stone of the quay was worn into shallow dishes by generations of boots. Lowe bent the flags on without looking at her hands, hauled, and made the halyard fast with one turn and a flick. Red over white ran up the pole and stood out stiffly in the sea breeze.

“No pilot available,” she said, to Bjorn, or to the morning. “Stand off.”

Out past the markers, the cloud did nothing for a long moment.

Then the rim of light along its top went dull, as if someone had drawn a curtain across the sun, and a fine drizzle began to fall on the quay.

It fell on the flagstaff and on the dished stones and on Bjorn, standing beside the flagstaff with the pail. It fell in a patch perhaps five yards across. Lowe had stepped back under the eave of the station to watch the flags and was dry. Pike, filling the doorway with his arms folded, was dry. Frayne had his face at the window again, and the window beside him was dry. Down on the jetty steps a gull stood in the sunshine and looked at Bjorn with an expression of real contempt. Pike laughed, one short bark of it.

Bjorn stood in the drizzle and held the pail. It occurred to him that he could step out of it. Two strides would have done it. He didn’t, and when he tried afterwards to account for that he could only say that stepping smartly out of it had felt like turning his back on someone in the middle of a sentence. The drizzle was very fine, finer than sea rain, and it was not cold. It was warmer than the morning. He noticed that, and it seemed to him to matter, and he had no idea what to do with it.

“Come in out of the arrival, Bjorn,” Rolf said from the doorway.

“Out of the rain,” said Pike.

“Arrival,” Rolf said. “It asked for a pilot on the correct form. Until somebody with the standing to refuse it has refused it on the record, it’s an arrival.”

“I’ve just refused it,” said Lowe.

“You’ve hoisted two flags.” Rolf nodded back into the station, at the fat logbook on its slope beside the Tattler. “The record is that book, and you haven’t written in it.”

Lowe looked at the book through the window. She didn’t go in to write.

The drizzle stopped, all at once, like a tap turned off. The stones steamed faintly. Bjorn looked down and saw that the lid of the pail had collected a shallow skin of water, and that the rest of the quay was bone dry, and he glanced at his own boots, darker at the toes, and back up at the water.

The cloud was moving.

It went slowly, and it went backwards, easing away from the red can the way a vessel eases off when she has read the signal and means to comply with it. The clear strip of water between its edge and the markers widened into a stretch, and then into a channel, and the sun came through along the fairway in a long bright lane. Out it went, past the outer pair, past the point where the colour of the sea changed, and a good way further, and then it stopped again and settled, low over the water, a mile or more out.

“It’s standing off,” Lowe said, and it was hard to tell whether she sounded pleased.

“Then my fairway’s open,” said Pike, and was already on the steps. “Ollie!”

Frayne came out of the station at a run, all elbows, and went down the steps two at a time behind him, and at the bottom he turned and looked back up at the flagstaff, and at Bjorn with the wet pail, and out at the cloud on the grey sea, and touched two fingers to the brim of his cap to it, as a deckhand salutes a passing ship, and then went after his skipper.

“Keep south of it,” Lowe called after them. “Pike! You keep south of the thing.”

Pike’s arm went up without his head turning, which could have meant anything.

Lowe turned her glass on the cloud and held it there. Bjorn, who had no glass, shaded his eyes.

“It’s over the grounds,” she said.

“The fishing grounds?” said Bjorn.

“Unless it’s found some others.” She lowered the glass. “It’s gone out and sat itself down on top of the best water in the approaches, and in about forty minutes nine boats are going to be steaming out to fish underneath it.”

Rolf had come to stand at the top of the steps, weight settled, hands behind him. He looked at the cloud for a while without saying anything. Corrin came out behind him and looked at it too, and said, “Well, that’s not my berth problem any more, is it,” and did not sound convinced.

“Senior Pilot,” Rolf said. “A look isn’t pilotage.”

Lowe breathed out through her nose, very like Rolf. “Cutter’s at the steps,” she said, and then, to Bjorn, without looking round: “Bring my lunch.”

“It’ll be on the boat when you want it,” Bjorn said, to her back and most of the Point. “All of it.”

PROCLAIMATRON 304 came down off his shoulder at the door, walked the length of the Pilot Station counter with its legs going like a clockwork crab, and sat down at the far end of it under the chart drawers, where it turned its lamp a firm and patient blue and folded all three legs under itself.

“Three-Oh-Four.”

“Three Hundred and Four,” said the unit. “Water.”

“It’s a cutter. There’s a deck and everything.”

“Water,” said PROCLAIMATRON 304, and did not move, and announced instead, to the room and to the Senior Pilot’s back, that the apprentice was going out upon the sea, that Stores was to be told of it, and that the apprentice had this unit’s every confidence.

Lowe did not turn round. “Leave it there,” she said. “It’s the first thing in this station that’s talked sense since four.”

Inside the station, under nobody’s flask now, the Tattler began to ring, and did not stop.

End of Part 1