Chapter 1 — Thinner

Tovi went down to the weir before the light was properly up, because the seaward stakes had been leaning since the thaw and Jory had been saying so since the thaw, and because if she had them reset before her mother was at the racks it would be one thing this morning that Dalla had not said first.

The weir was a fence of hazel driven into the creek bed in a long shallow V with its point downstream. It had been in that creek since before Tovi was born and none of it was old. Every stake in it had been cut and driven and pulled and driven again by somebody, and the whole line of it moved up the creek a little every few springs, the way everything moved up. The two she wanted were at the seaward end where the bed went soft. She got the first out on the third pull and went over backwards into the water with it, which was cold and up to her thighs and going out, and Jory laughed at her from the bank without any attempt to hide it.

“You want to do it?”

“No.”

“Then get down here.”

Jory came down into the water. He was built like a heron and better in a boat than on his feet, and he had been saying those stakes to her for a whole moon without once going down to them himself, which was Jory: he would tell you a thing wanted doing until it was done. The two of them got the second stake out together and cut the point back and drove it a hand higher up the bank, and by then the water had dropped enough that the trap at the point of the V was showing its ribs.

The run was in. It had come in four days ago the way it came in every spring, and the creek from the bend down to the flat was full of hook-fish, thousands of them, dark and going up, the males with their jaws hooked so badly they could barely have taken a hook themselves. They came up on the tide and hung in the slack and went on. The weir let the creek go and kept the fish, and the trap at the point of it was so full by first light that the top ones were out of the water and drying, and had to be thrown back over the fence to wait their turn.

Tovi worked the trap with a scoop of woven withy and Jory took them off her and killed them on a stone and threw them into the flat-bottom, and the flat-bottom took a hundred and then another hundred, and the dogs came down for the ones that fell short.

There were always dogs. Nobody fed them on purpose and nobody counted them, and Tovi counted them anyway, because her eye did that with anything that moved: six at the creek this morning, and one of the six in the water to her chest going after fish with her mouth like a child, and getting them.

“That one’s yours,” Jory said.

“She’s not mine.”

“She sleeps against your door.”

“She sleeps out of the wind.”

By the time the sun was up over the forest the flat-bottom was too heavy to pole and they dragged it. The drag was the part of the morning Tovi hated, the mud taking a boot at every third step, and Jory took the bow line without being asked, which was the sort of thing that meant he wanted something later. She let him have the line. Whatever it was, he would get round to asking when he had worked out how, and she would find out then, and there was no sense spending the drag on it.

The hill came up out of the creek in a long dry back with the houses on the crown of it — wattle and turf and weathered plank, a dozen of them, some good and two of them not, and smoke standing straight up off four because there was no wind at all. The racks stood on the south side where the sun got them: three long and two short, poles on forked uprights, and split fish hanging off them in their hundreds, going from silver to brown to the hard dark colour they kept all winter. The whole hill smelled of alder smoke and fish oil and the pit. It had smelled of that every spring of Tovi’s life and she had never once come up off the creek without her mouth watering.

They had no salt. Nobody had salt — there was a story about salt, or a piece of one, and what they had instead was smoke, and smoke was wood, and wood was two boys and a boat going across to the far bank every second day for as long as the run lasted. The fish were free. The keeping of them cost everything the hill had.

Dalla was at the second rack with the splitting knife and a stone, and half the women of the hill were with her, and the pile at her feet was going down faster than the pile at her back was going up, which meant she had been there since dark.

“Those are thick,” she said, before Tovi had put the basket down.

“They’re the same as yesterday’s.”

“Yesterday’s were thick.” Dalla took one off the top and opened it along the spine in one stroke and held the two halves apart. “That’ll go soft in the middle before the cold’s in, and then the whole rack’s got a smell in it.”

“Then say thinner.”

“I’m saying thinner.”

Tovi took the knife off her, which was the only way it ever came out of Dalla’s hand, and started on the basket. Her mother stood there a moment doing nothing, which she never did, and then went and moved a pole two fingers along its forks and came back.

“Hen went out.”

“I know she went out.”

“With Brannoc.”

“She’s got sense.”

“He’s got none. He’s got no shoulders left and he can’t see the bank at that distance and she knows it, and she went out with him to the far ground because he asked her in front of people.” Dalla took the knife back. “Thinner.”

Tovi let her have it. Her aunt had sense and a pair of arms that were better than Brannoc’s had been for a long time, and if she had said yes to an old man in front of the racks it was because saying no in front of the racks would have been the end of him, and Hen knew that, and so did Dalla, and Dalla would say none of it. She would say thinner to the fish. Out past the creek mouth the water was flat and grey and went a long way, and there was a boat on it, small, most of the way to the far ground, and another one nearer with two heads in it. Tovi counted them the way she counted them, and went and got the next basket.

Up at the pen Aske was in with the boar and shouldn’t have been.

There were six of them, taken as piglets out of the forest at the back end of last summer over three separate and ridiculous days, and they were half-grown now and striped no longer and had opinions. The pen was hurdle and posts and had been rebuilt twice. Her brother was in there with a scoop of mast and acorns from the sacks, all elbows and feet, the way he had been since the winter, and had four of them round his knees, and the fifth was behind him working at the hurdle where the withy binding had gone.

“It’s out.”

“It’s not out.”

“It’s got its shoulder in the gap, Aske.”

The boar had its shoulder in the gap. Then it had its head in the gap, and then it was through the gap and going down the hill at a speed nothing that shape should manage, and every dog on the hill came off the racks at once, and the whole thing went down the south slope in a spray of birds and shouting. Aske went over the hurdle after it. Two of the boys came out of the smoke house. An old woman at the fire threw a stick at a dog on principle.

They got it at the bottom by the gut pit, where it stopped to eat, and Aske sat on it, and it screamed like a woman being murdered, and the whole hill stood on the slope and laughed until they had to hold on to each other. Orel came round the end of the racks to see what had gone wrong, took it in, and went back to his boats without a word, and that made it worse, and Tovi had to sit down on the grass.

“You have to fix the binding,” Aske said, from underneath, on the way back up with it.

“I have to fix it.”

“You’re better at it.”

“I’m better at it because you never do it.”

Aske had a scrape down one forearm from the hurdle and mast in his hair, and the boar was still telling the whole hill about it from under his arm, and he was every kind of pleased with himself under the face he had on, because he had caught it. He had caught all six of them, in the first place, on three days that had each ended with him in a ditch. It was the catching he liked. The keeping was a thing that happened to other people, and mostly to her.

Orel had the spare dugout and the two hide boats up on the grass above the creek mouth, keels out, and he was going along them with a scraper and a pot of pine tar gone half solid in the sun. Orel had a face like the weather had been at it, and he counted boats the way Dalla counted racks, which is to say he counted them out loud at people.

“They go up,” he said, when Tovi came past with the empty baskets.

“They’re up.”

“Higher. Another two paces before the wet, and I want the two hide ones on the sled and under the lee of the smoke house before the dark.” He put his palm flat on the dugout’s gunwale and rocked it, and the whole thing shifted on its rollers like it weighed nothing. “You were down there. Where’s the tide top?”

“Above the third stake.”

“It was the fourth stake.”

“It was the fourth stake last spring.”

“Last spring.” Orel went back to scraping. “That’s what I’m telling you.”

The creek ran out over a flat of mud and shell that got wider every spring, and past that was the water, and under the water to the west was the country. On a low grey morning with the sun behind you it went on until it stopped being anything, and there was nothing to see out there at all except the light on it and, if you knew where to look, a place a long way out where the water broke different over something.

Tovi knew where to look because everybody did.

“My grandfather’s father’s grounds are under that,” Orel said, not looking up. “He had a fish wall along the north side of them. You can find it on the low tides at the back of summer if you’re willing to walk out farther than you should and get caught by it coming back.” He worked at a soft place in the wood with the scraper’s corner. “Two men have been caught by it. So don’t.”

“I’ve never been out there.”

“You went out there when you were still small enough for Jory to carry your boots.”

Tovi took the baskets up the hill. Halfway up she looked back the way she always looked back, which was once: the near boat with its two heads, the far one still where it had been, six dogs strung out along the racks again as if none of it had happened, and her brother at the pen with the boar back in and the hurdle leaning, doing nothing about the binding.

---

There was still milk.

Aiyar had been watching the level in the last carton for two days the way she watched everything, and at the change of the watch it was down to a hand’s width, and she had made up her mind about the hand’s width before she was through the mess door. The tables were rigged for a battle watch and had been since the middle of the night, so people stood, and the urn was going, and the printer had made the loaf on the schedule somebody had given it two weeks ago and was beeping about it until somebody took it out.

“Since before breakfast,” Pryor was saying, to a stoker who had had it before breakfast. “I said to him, I said, feel that. Feel that. That’s not a tooth, that’s a —”

“Kev.”

“I’m just saying what it is.”

The stoker had a piece of loaf and was eating it on the other side of his mouth from Pryor, which Aiyar thought was probably not on purpose and was funny anyway. Pryor’s jaw was up on one side like he had a walnut in it. He had shown it to the whole lower deck and most of the plant, and he had shown it to Belova, who had told him it was coming out when there was an hour and not before, and he had taken that as a reason to tell everyone about the hour.

Aiyar got the carton out of the cold locker and poured her cup and the milk came out slow. She left a finger in the bottom. Somebody else would want a finger.

Chen was at the head of the mess with his cap on, reading the reliefs.

Out loud, every watch, the whole bill, by name and by station, and he had done it on every ship anybody had ever served with him on, and it took two minutes that nobody could get back and nobody had ever asked him not to. He gave the gate flat, Noor and Coyne and Pelham down to Bosch, and the relief for each, and the after machinery flat as Dubois and her two, Batts on the cooling, and went straight on to the mount and the plot without a gap for anybody to put anything in. Aiyar drank the milk while he did it. It was cold and it tasted of the carton and it was milk.

At the corner table the man with the car story had found somebody who had not heard the car story, which was getting to be a job on a ship of sixty-four, and had got as far as the part where the door came off. It was the same story every time. Nobody stopped him. Beside him on the shelf, where it had been since before Aiyar joined, was the leading hand’s coffee tin, sealed, that he was saving for something and would not say what, and had been asked about so many times that asking about it had become the thing people did instead of asking about anything else.

“The shot was called for the end of the middle watch and it’s held,” Chen said, at the end. “The bridge is doing its sums. You’ll get the count when the bridge has what it wants. Until then you’re closed up and you stay closed up, and if you can’t remember why, ask somebody who can.” He left, and the mess went back to whatever it had been doing.

Nobody asked what the sums were. The bridge’s sums were the bridge’s, and the conditions were the Commander’s, and everybody aboard knew that much about the conditions, the way everybody knew the urn ran hot: she did not fire blind, she did not fire burning, and she did not fire down a line with anything of anybody’s on it. There was a fourth one, and nobody on the lower deck had ever got it out of an officer, and it had been a while since anybody tried.

The gate flat was cold the way it was always cold, with the frame painted yellow and the emitter housing under its tarpaulin and the bench along the forward bulkhead with her card box on it and the sound-powered telephone above that with PANEL on the plate under it. Noor was at the board with his steel rule against his thigh, tapping, which he did without knowing he did it and which Aiyar had stopped noticing about a year ago and then started noticing again, because that was how it went with a thing you were in a compartment with every day. Coyne had the flat, and had had it for two years, and was going along the after end with a lamp looking at things that had been looked at. Jehan was on the stool under the mount’s own dial with a pad, because the mount’s count was read by hand on that ship and written by hand, and Noor would not have it off anything else.

“Sir.”

“Aiyar. They’ve held it.”

“The XO said.”

“Then we’ve got a while.” Noor tapped the rule. “Do the cards.”

Aiyar did the cards. She took the used ones out from the front of the divider and squared them on her knee, and counted the blanks behind, which was a thing she did whether or not she needed to, and put a fresh one on top of the box with the ruled side up. Then she wrote the hour at the top of it and the compartment under the hour, and the seven got its bar because her sevens always had, and the t in flat got its bar across the shoulder rather than through the stem, which was how her mother’s had gone, and she had never got it to go any other way and had stopped trying at school. Under that she left the two lines empty that the two proofs would go on.

That was the whole of the rule as the compartment kept it. The panel aft gave its proof on the telephone, and Noor gave his off the board, and Aiyar wrote the time against each, and the count did not run until there were two times on the card. Anybody who had not heard the second one said so. It was the Commander’s rule and had been since before Aiyar had the box, and the compartment kept it the way it kept the hook rail, which was without thinking about it and without ever once leaving it out.

The hook rail was in the lobby, along the starboard side, three hooks, and anybody coming into the flat from forward hung their jacket on it on the way through and took it off it on the way out, and Aiyar counted the hooks at the top of every day and knew who was through the door by the jackets before she knew it by faces, because a face turned away from you and a jacket did not. Lindgren and Tamura were in the flat for now and would not be for long: at the run-up the two of them went through the door aft to the isolation panel, because that was where they stood, and they went through in their jackets because the panel space was colder than the flat. Tamura had a photograph taped inside the door of the tool locker by the bench, a dog with its head turned and two children and a woman, and he touched the corner of it going past the way another man might have touched a doorframe, and had done it every watch Aiyar had ever stood with him, and would have said he didn’t, if she had asked, which she had not. Lindgren had a heel of the loaf in his pocket, which was against the standing order for the compartment, and ate it in pieces facing the bulkhead so that Noor did not have to see it, and Noor did not see it.

Bosch had one of her blanks and was sitting on the deck against the housing frame cleaning under his thumbnail with the corner of it, and she had already decided not to say anything about it, and it was costing her.

At the after end two of Rask’s people, in the flat because there was nowhere else for them to be until the mount wanted them, had got onto the billiard ball. The one that goes into the hole and comes out before it went in and can’t knock itself off the table, because it didn’t. It went round the ship whenever there was nothing to do. It had been round every mess aboard in one form or another and nobody had ever won it, and the two of them were not going to win it now, and Aiyar listened with half an ear.

“It says the ball can’t.”

“It says the ball didn’t. That’s not the same.”

“It’s exactly the same.”

“Then say it the other way and see if it still comes out.”

At the run-up Lindgren and Tamura went in their jackets, and Tamura touched the locker door, and they went through the door aft with the loaf heel still in Lindgren’s pocket, and the clips went on behind them one after another, eight, the way they did. A rating off the plot came down at the same time to watch a thing she wanted to see, and Noor let her stay, and she stood by the telephone because it was the one place in the flat nobody needed.

“Is it like going through?” she said, to the compartment, with her hands behind her. “I’ve been through the Seam eleven times. I’d like to know if I should be holding on to something.”

“You’ve been through eleven times,” Coyne said, without coming off the after end, “because somebody found a place it goes through, and put a mark down at this end and a clock at the far end, and you went where the far end said. Every ship you’ve ever stood on does that. That’s what a lane is.” The lamp went along a bracket and stopped. “This doesn’t go anywhere. There’s no far end. It gets hold of a thing out there for a quarter of a second and it lets go, and you’ll have to be told it’s happened. What it’s built for is to take one piece of a closing arrangement out of its line and hold it out there for a bit, and there’s nothing that comes off a lane will do that.”

“Then what’s it for?”

“Ask the Commander,” Coyne said, and went on along the brackets, and the rating put her hands back behind her and stood where she was.

Dubois came down behind her, when it was still the run-up to nothing, with her jacket over her arm and her cuff turned out at the wrist where she had been in something up to the elbow. Her name was on a strip of tape inside the collar in a hand nobody aboard could read but Aiyar, and Aiyar had never told her that, because Dubois would have wanted to know how, and there was no how — the letters just went that way, and Aiyar’s eye went with them.

“Sir. There’s a fan aft in the trunking making a noise I don’t like.”

“What kind of noise.”

“The kind I’d like to put my ear on before we run. It’s ten minutes.”

Noor looked at the board, which said nothing, and at the clock on the bulkhead, which said they had a while.

“Ten minutes. Take somebody.”

“Bosch,” Dubois said, because Bosch was on the deck with a card, and Bosch got up off the deck like a man who has been waiting for somebody to think of him. He put the blank in his pocket, and Aiyar let that go too, and he went out to the lobby and hung his jacket on the rail beside hers, where she had put it coming in, and the two of them came back through and took the clips off the door aft and went through and put the clips on again from the other side. You did not go through that door on your own.

Two jackets on the rail with nobody under them, and one hook bare, and four people aft of the door, and Aiyar had it without counting, the way she had it every shot.

Aiyar put the card back on her knee. She still had a mouthful of milk in the bottom of the cup, gone warm now off the flat, and she was keeping it for the count, because the count was the only part of a shot that took any time at all, and a person wanted something to do with a mouthful in it. She had said that to Sarratt once, carrying the second pot up to the wardroom, and Sarratt had looked at her over the paperback that had been on that table since March with the boarding card in it at page two hundred and something, and said that was the most sensible thing anybody had said to him that week, and had gone back to the page. He had not turned the page in a month. He read it in the wardroom and he never turned the page, and Aiyar had not worked out whether he was reading it or keeping it.

Forward, when she had gone up for the blanks that morning, the accordion had still been in the forward hold on top of the stores in its case with nobody’s name on it. It had been there since the yard. It was nobody’s. Twice a year somebody got it out and got two notes off it and put it back.

The flat had gone quiet the way it went quiet in the run-up, with the pumps under the deck and the two of Rask’s people done with the billiard ball. Noor tapped the rule. The telephone hung on its hook with the handset squared to the bulkhead and the crank to the right where a right hand found it, and the rating off the plot stood beside it with her hands behind her, not touching it. Through the door, if the door had not been a door, Tamura would have had his palms flat on the panel’s shelf and been reading it the way he read it, top to bottom and back up, and Lindgren beside him would have been humming two notes, the same two, which he did and had been told about and did anyway. Aiyar could have drawn the two of them where they stood.

“They’ll want their daylight,” one of Rask’s people said, to the compartment.

“What daylight.”

It was an old joke and it got what an old joke gets.

Aiyar held the pencil with the point against the first empty line, and did not write anything on it, because there was nothing yet to write, and drank the last of the milk.