Rule 9318 - Pilot The Weather In - Part 2 of 3

The pilot cutter was short and broad and very clean, with a stubby mast and a tan sail furled along the boom, a wheelhouse amidships no bigger than a sentry box, and an engine under the boards that started on the second pull and settled into a low, contented thump. Lowe had brought the Tattler down in a canvas bag and wedged it behind the wheel, where it rang against her boot.

Rolf stopped at the top of the steps long enough to give Corrin an instruction.

“Find me somewhere with no hulls in it, Overseer. Enclosed water, if you have it. In case.”

“In case,” Corrin repeated. “Of course.” And he went off up the Point, complaining to everyone he passed, to do it anyway.

The cutter came off the steps and out along the fairway, past the green can, past the red, and at the outer pair the sea changed its mind about what sort of morning it was having. Inside the markers it had been a flat grey floor. Outside, it was a long, slow swell coming in from somewhere a great way off, and the cutter went up the front of each one and down the back of it with the unhurried rise and fall of a sleeping dog’s ribs.

Rolf stood on the foredeck with his feet apart and his hands behind him, and did not hold on to anything.

Bjorn watched him do it for three swells and then went forward to stand beside him. He set his feet the same distance apart. He put the pail behind his back, since that was where Rolf’s hands were, and settled his weight, and lifted his chin a little towards the horizon. For the length of one swell he felt he had the knack of it.

The next swell was a larger one. He grabbed for the forestay with his free hand and caught it, and the pail, which had been behind his back, came round in a wide swinging arc on the end of his other arm. The lid went first. It sailed away to leeward like a thrown plate. After it went a paper parcel, a heel of bread, a wedge of yellow cheese and a pie in a cloth, in that order, and they hit the water in a short line, and within a breath there were gulls on all of them.

Bjorn held the forestay and the empty pail and watched the gulls.

“That was my lunch,” said Lowe from the wheelhouse.

Rolf did not turn his head. “It’s standing off.”

* * *

The lunch was not the last thing Bjorn lost over the side of the cutter that morning, but it was the only one worth mentioning. After the second time, Lowe reached out of the wheelhouse without looking, took him by the back of the collar, and moved him from the windward rail to the leeward one, and then handed him back the empty pail, and he understood what it had been for all along.

He sat on the leeward thwart with the pail between his knees and the cold air on his face and felt, for a while, very little interest in clouds.

Behind them, the fishing boats were coming out. They came through the markers one after another in a loose line, low in the water with ice, gulls overhead like smoke.

Bjorn watched them come, and past them, for the first time with nothing else to do, the Harbour. From out here it stopped being streets and became a hill. Grey slate climbed up out of the water roof over roof, and the smoke off every chimney leaned inland together on the sea wind. The warehouses made one blank wall along the quays, with the Stilts running the length of their roofline on tall legs, and the cranes stood up out of the stone in a row of iron. Far up and back, on the green of the high ground, the balloons of the Sky Dock lay over together on their tethers, and three Masts stood in a line behind them. Somewhere in all of it was the Office, and a kettle, and he could not have pointed to either.

The first of the fleet was already well ahead of the rest, a squat green boat with a white wheelhouse and Kittiwake in black letters on her bow, and she overtook the cutter a hundred yards to the south, throwing spray. Somebody all elbows in an orange oilskin was standing on her afterdeck, and waved.

Bjorn lifted the pail in reply, then thought better of it.

“He’s going too close,” Lowe said. She had her glass on the Kittiwake and one hand on the wheel. “Fish come up to the edge of anything that shades the water. He knows it. He’s lost half the tide, and he’s going to go and put his nets down right on the edge of the thing, because Enoch Pike has never in his life stayed south of anything.”

“Can you stop him?”

“I can tell him. I told him.” She put the glass down. “The grounds aren’t mine. The fairway’s mine.”

Bjorn looked at her hand on the wheel. It was square and brown, with a white scar across two knuckles, and it moved on the spokes very lightly, a touch here and a touch there, as though the cutter were an animal that only needed reminding.

“What does it feel like,” he said, “bringing something in?”

She didn’t answer straight away. The engine thumped.

“I’ve brought in a hull that was three parts whale,” she said. “I’ve brought in a ship that told me all the way through the markers she wasn’t a ship, in a voice like a church organ, and wouldn’t hear otherwise. I brought in a raft of logs once that had a whole village living on it and forty goats, and every one of the goats was sick on my boots.” She glanced down at him and his pail, and something at the corner of her mouth moved. “Every one of them, I could put my hand on. There was a rail. There was a deck. There was a bit of it that was solid, that I could get a line on if it all went wrong. That’s what bringing something in is. You’re the thing it’s tied to.”

“And that?” Bjorn said, and looked out ahead.

“That hasn’t got a rail.”

Rolf had come aft along the side deck while she was talking, one hand trailing the wheelhouse roof, and stopped in the lee of it.

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“And say I did bring it in,” Lowe said, to him now. “The Association wants a passage plan lodged for every piloted arrival. Course at each mark. Speed at each mark. Draught, so I know it won’t take the ground at the bar. What’s its course? It hasn’t got one. It’s got a mood. What am I meant to lodge for a thing like that, Harbour Master? A flight plan?”

“If it would help you,” Rolf said. “I’d read it.”

“You’d have it framed.”

“I’d have it filed,” Rolf said, “which in my office is the higher honour.”

* * *

They came up on the cloud from its landward side, and Lowe throttled the engine back to a mutter.

Close to, it was bigger than it had looked from the station, and less grey. The underside was grey, and the long flank of it facing them was grey, but inside the grey there was a paler white, and inside that there was light, moving slowly, like light in deep water. Veils of rain hung from its lower edge in long soft curtains and did not reach the sea. They swayed. Underneath, the sea itself had gone flat, flat as a pond, a wide oval of polished grey water with the swell passing under it like breathing under a blanket, and the air above that water was perfectly still.

The cutter slid into the still air and the breeze fell off the back of Bjorn’s neck. The sound of the engine came back at them from somewhere overhead. Water dripped from the boom.

It was the most beautiful thing Bjorn had seen in the Harbour, and he sat there looking at it with a pail of sick between his knees.

He put the pail down under the thwart, carefully, and stood up.

He wanted something from it, and did not know what. For it to be all right, he thought, and then was not sure what he meant by that, or why he should be the one wanting it. He looked at his hands on the rail, then back up at the light moving inside the cloud, and caught Rolf watching him from beside the wheelhouse. Rolf looked away first, towards the Kittiwake.

The Kittiwake had her nets down. She lay just beyond the southern edge of the still water, where the swell came out from under the cloud and began to break, and Pike was at her wheel and Frayne in his orange oilskin was at her rail with a second hand, hauling, and the gulls had found them.

Frayne was not hauling very hard. He had his head tipped back and was looking straight up at the edge of the cloud above him with his mouth a little open, and Bjorn, who supposed he was wearing much the same face himself, liked him for it. Then Pike shouted something from the wheel, and Frayne ducked his head and bent to the net again.

Lowe took down a brass speaking-trumpet from its hook in the wheelhouse.

“Senior Pilot,” Rolf said, at her shoulder. “What are you going to say to it?”

“What I’d say to anything sat on top of a fleet.” She lifted the trumpet. Her voice went out across the still water, flat and enormous. “Arrival off Skerry Point. No pilot is available. You are standing over working grounds, with boats under you. Stand off to seaward.”

She lowered the trumpet. And then, turning to hang it back up, in her ordinary voice, meant for nobody but the wheelhouse:

“We don’t bring weather in.”

Still air carries. Bjorn heard every word of it, and Rolf heard it, and Bjorn was quite sure the cloud heard it too.

For a moment nothing happened at all. Then the cloud turned. Bjorn saw it do that before he saw anything else, and he would hold on to that afterwards: before it darkened, before the wind, the whole great mass of it rolled a little away from them, the way a shoulder turns. The light inside it went out. The veils of rain stopped swaying.

The still air ended.

It ended as a cold gust straight out of the heart of the cloud that bellied the furled sail against its ties and laid the cutter over and sent every loose thing on the deck sliding to leeward, including Bjorn. The flat water under the cloud broke up into a thousand small hard waves. The grey underside went dark as slate and climbed, and kept climbing, piling itself up into a black tower with a flat hard top, and out of the bottom of it the rain came down all at once, not in veils now but in rods, hammering, loud as gravel on a roof. In Lowe’s canvas bag the Tattler rang as though it meant to shake itself to pieces.

“Hold on,” Lowe said, and swung the wheel hard over, and gave the engine everything it had.

Rolf had put a hand flat on the wheelhouse roof. Bjorn, sprawled against the leeward rail in a slop of rainwater, noticed that before he noticed the cold, because he could not remember ever seeing Rolf hold on to anything.

“That,” said Lowe, through her teeth, “is not standing off.”

“No,” Rolf said. He was looking up at the black tower with an expression Bjorn couldn’t read. “That’s a reply.”

* * *

The squall line went across the grounds like a broom. Bjorn could see it through the rain in grey slices. The fishing boats that had not yet reached the grounds were turning, one after another, and running for the markers with the weather at their backs. The Kittiwakecould not run. Her nets were down and full and she was lying to them, beam-on to a sea that was getting steeper by the minute, and every sea that came through lifted her and dropped her and threw white water over her rail.

“Boathook,” Lowe shouted over the rain. “And the heaving line. Under the thwart, apprentice. Now.”

Bjorn went down on his knees under the thwart. The boathook was there, and the heaving line was there, coiled around it, and when he pulled the boathook out the coil came with it and opened up like a flower. He stood up with the boathook in one hand. The cutter rolled. When she rolled back, he had a turn of line around the boathook, a turn around his wrist, and a turn around one ankle, and he was standing on the other foot.

He hopped once, to keep his balance, and very nearly went over the side.

“Sit down,” Lowe said, without taking her eyes off the Kittiwake, “and undo it sitting down.”

He sat down in two inches of rainwater and undid it sitting down. His fingers were cold and clumsy, the knuckles skinned already from the forestay, and the line was wet. He did it one turn at a time, and when he got the last loop off his boot he coiled it again as he had been shown on the fish quay, big loops in the left hand and a small bunch at the end, and stood up with it, and nobody passed a remark.

The Kittiwake was close now, fifty yards and closing, climbing and falling. Pike was at her wheel with his cap gone. The second hand was sawing at a warp. Frayne was at the rail in his orange oilskin, trying to get the net in over it by main force, and he looked up and saw the cutter coming, and his face was white and wet and very young.

The sea that came through then was bigger than the others. Bjorn saw it coming, a dark, steep hill of water with its top torn off by the wind, and he saw the Kittiwake climb it, and heel, and hang there.

When she came down off the back of it, the rail where Frayne had been standing was empty.

“Man in the water,” said Lowe. Her voice was quite level. “Apprentice. Point at him. Keep your eyes on him and keep pointing and do not stop pointing for anything, whatever happens, whatever I say. Where is he?”

Bjorn saw orange, twenty yards off the Kittiwake’s quarter, in the trough, and he flung out his arm and pointed.

“There.”

On the Kittiwake, Pike had let go of the wheel. He came to the rail with a line and threw it, a good throw, low and hard, and the wind took the end of it and laid it across the water well short, and Pike was already hauling it back to throw again.

The orange went up the side of a sea. An arm came out of the water, and a white face, turned towards the cutter, mouth open. Then the crest broke over it.

“There’s a man in the water,” Bjorn shouted, and he was not shouting at Lowe, or at Pike. He was shouting up into the rain, at the black tower standing over all of them. “Please. There’s a man in the water.”

If anything up there heard him, the storm did not ease for it. The rain came harder. The wind leaned on the cutter and screamed in her rigging, and the next sea came through, and the one behind it, and the Tattler rang and rang.

Bjorn kept his arm out and his eyes on the place, as he had been told.

There was nobody there.

End of Part 2