Nine Days of Calm

My grandmother told me this one with the lamp turned low, the way she told all the true ones, and I have carried it sixty years, and now I will set it down before the carrying-place in me wears thin. The ship was called the Gull's Mercy, and she was a fat honest trade-ship out of the Sedge ports, and the boy at the heart of this was her cabin boy, a thin watchful lad named Coll who was twelve years old and had been to sea exactly one season. That is important, the one season. A sailor of one season knows enough to be useful and not enough to be deaf. The old hands had spent their deafness years ago. Coll had all of his still. On the ninth day of the calm, it was only Coll who heard the road. You must understand what nine days of calm does to a ship. The first day is a rest. The second is a worry. By the ninth the Gull's Mercy lay on a sea like grey glass with her sails hanging dead as washing, and the water did not lap her hull, it only leaned against it, and the crew had gone quiet in the particular way of men who have run out of things to say that are not frightening. The captain, a hard fair woman named Tess Harrow, walked the deck and did not let her face do anything. The sailmaster prayed. The cook gave short measure and nobody complained, because complaining would have meant speaking, and speaking, by the ninth day, felt like knocking on a door behind which something was listening. And under all of it, under the creak and the silence, Coll began to hear the singing. It came up through the soles of his bare feet first, the way you feel a cart on a road before you hear it. A long low note, and then another, spaced out slow as breathing, rising up through the keel and the deck-boards and into the bones of his legs. He thought at first it was the ship herself, timbers working. But timbers do not keep a tune, and this kept a tune — a vast slow patient tune, coming from somewhere very far down, and very far ahead, and travelling. He told the bosun. The bosun was sixty and deaf in the way of old hands and said the boy had sun on his brain and to drink more water. He told the cook, who made the sign against the evil eye and would not look at him after. So in the end Coll did the thing a cabin boy is never to do, which is climb to the quarterdeck uninvited and tug the sleeve of Captain Tess Harrow herself. She did not strike him. I want that remembered about her, because of how the story ends. She looked down at the thin watchful boy and saw that he was truly afraid, and she crouched, so their eyes were level, and she said: "Tell me. Plain and quick." "There's a road under us, Captain," Coll said. "I can hear it. A long low road in the deep water and it goes on for ever and something is walking it, far off, and singing as it walks — and Captain, these last two days the singing's got nearer, and I think — I think we're not becalmed. I think we're anchored. I think something's holding the ship still on purpose, so that the road can come to where we are." Captain Harrow's face still did not do anything. But she stood up slowly, and she looked out at the grey glass sea with her own deaf ears, and Coll watched her and understood, with a cold drop in his belly, that she was not deciding whether to believe him. She was deciding whether to tell him a thing she already knew. "Boy," she said at last, quiet, so the deck would not hear. "When this ship was built, forty years gone, in a yard at Sedge — a thing was promised, to get her safe across the deep water all those forty years. A toll. Paid not in coin. And the bargain was that one voyage, an appointed voyage, the Gull's Mercy would lie still on a calm sea and the road would come, and collect." Her jaw worked once. "Every captain of this ship has known. It is written in the back of the log, in the first captain's hand, and we have each of us read it and prayed it would not fall in our years. It has fallen in mine." The singing came up through the deck-boards, nearer than it had ever been, and now — Coll would swear it to his last day, and he was my grandmother's father, so I have it close — now even the deaf old bosun by the rail went suddenly still, and turned his grey head toward the sound. "Nine days of calm, Captain," Coll whispered. "How long until it reaches us?" "By the look of this sea," said Tess Harrow, "and the sound in your young ears — one more day. Maybe two." She put a hand on the boy's thin shoulder, and it was not unkind, and that was the most frightening thing of all. "So we have that long, Coll, you and I, to read the whole of that bargain in the back of the log, and find out what exactly was promised — and whether a clever captain and a boy who can still hear can find the seam in a forty-year-old debt before it comes up out of the deep to be paid."