The Coming of the Whirlpool (9 page)

The outer door clapped open, then the inner, and amid a swirl of cold air the man named Ethan returned. Behind him came a tall figure, yet gaunt and hunched, paused unwilling in the doorway.

‘Nathaniel Shear,' said Boiler. ‘Welcome.'

The old fisherman lifted one eyebrow to consider the room, not bothering to hide his disdain for everyone in it. ‘I'll not bide long, Boiler Swan,' he said in a parched voice. ‘So make this quick.'

‘It's up to the lad here,' the innkeeper responded. He turned to Dow. ‘Well? Is it the life of the sea that you're craving still? Or not?'

Dow stared from Boiler to Nathaniel. He had expected to loathe the very sight of the old man, but in light of his disappointment with the other fishermen, and after all he had heard of the maelstrom, Dow found himself regarding Nathaniel less harshly. The weak, raging drunkard of the previous night was gone. In his place was a more sober figure, haggard maybe, but enduring, with an air about him of habitual silence, as befitting one who had lived long alone. There was still great bitterness smouldering in the old man's bloodshot stare, but Dow now knew the tale of that bitterness, and somehow it even lent Nathaniel a strange authority. The other men, with the exception of Boiler, seemed to have shrunk in comparison.

Mother Gale, however, was shaking her head. ‘The life of the sea, you say, Boiler? What life of the sea? No one here lives that life anymore. You live only the life of the bay, and that's another thing entire.'

Boiler's red face flushed redder. ‘Don't mock us, woman, until you've seen what we've seen.' Then he said to Dow, ‘We are cursed men, remember, and only death awaits us upon the ocean. We fish as we must.'

But Dow had glanced to Nathaniel and caught a gleam in the old man's eye; a flicker of contempt that dismissed and denied Boiler's justifications. And hadn't Dow already seen it himself – of all these timid fisherman, Nathaniel alone was fearless enough to launch his boat in a storm, or to dare the Rip in flood. The old man was a danger, yes, but if Dow truly wanted to learn of the wild ocean, then to whom else could he turn? He remembered what it had been like to master the boat out in the Rip, and by his own skill tear it free of the currents. He would never experience that again if he went back to the highlands – nor indeed would he ever experience it in any boat that sailed from Stromner, except for one.

‘I will stay with Nathaniel,' he said, eyeing the old man directly, amazed at the confidence in his own voice. ‘If he will have me. And I will sail with him and learn of the sea, wherever he might voyage upon it.'

Mother Gale was rocking back and forth on her seat, nodding gleefully as if she had foreseen this all along, but Nathaniel only straightened severely for a moment, his unreadable gaze fixed upon Dow.

‘So be it,' he said at last. Then he turned and went out into the night, not waiting to see if Dow followed.

T
he foul weather held throughout that night, and for a further day and night beyond, but then the clouds and rain blew away and there came a sun-filled morning and a warming breeze from the south east. It marked the beginning of summer, and of Dow's initiation into the fishing life. For the next three months he lived in Nathaniel's house and sailed in Nathaniel's boat and hauled on Nathaniel's nets and obeyed the old man in all ways. And there were two things that Dow discovered about himself. He loved sailing – the boats, the water, the wind. But he hated fishing.

Every day followed the same pattern. Dow would be roused before dawn by the clatter through the thin walls of Nathaniel boiling tea. The fisherman was always the first awake, despite the fact that he drank late into every night, long after Dow had gone to his dismal bed. Some nights Dow was sure he did not sleep at all. The two of them would breakfast frugally and wordlessly, then, as the sun was rising, they would trudge down to the beach and to Nathaniel's boat, the
Maelstrom
.

The other men of the village would be there, preparing their own craft. Most of the boats were somewhat larger than the
Maelstrom,
carrying a crew of three or even four, but so shrunken was the population of Stromner that only half a dozen such vessels could be manned on any given day. There were few young faces among the crews, and not a single lad of Dow's age. Perhaps that was why the morning launch was so cheerless. Dow had imagined that, with the promise of a new day ahead, there would be shouts and laughter between the men, as there had been with the timber cutters back home. But there was no laughter, and little enough talk.

Nathaniel, in any case, remained apart from the others. In silence, he and Dow would slide the
Maelstrom
down over the stones and into the water, and just as silently lower the keel and set the sail. Then, in the light morning airs, and with the sun lifting behind them, they would plot a course away from the beach and out into the great emptiness of the Claw. Nathaniel would be in the stern, one bent arm resting almost idly on the tiller; and Dow, still drowsy and sluggish, would be occupied with trimming the sail and readying the net.

Within an hour, however, they would trade positions, and Dow would come fully awake at last as he took the
Maelstrom
in hand. The sun would be warm by then and the morning mists clearing. Now came his lessons in the art of sailing – or what, in Nathaniel's eyes, passed for lessons. The old man was a reluctant teacher. He rarely addressed Dow directly, or even looked at him, and his instructions were terse, doled out without context or elaboration. But Dow understood that it was the best he could expect. Nathaniel had made his promise to the village, and was prepared to keep that promise, but only to the minimum necessary.

It didn't matter. Dow was such an eager student that he more than made up for any lack in his master. It didn't even feel to him that he was
learning
to sail, it was more like rediscovering something he already knew. From the moment he had first set his fingers upon the tiller during the storm in the Rip, something inside him had simply understood
the way that wind and wood and canvas worked. Nor did he again experience the awful nausea and weakness that had accosted him on that first voyage. Sea sickness it was called, and apparently it could afflict even the most experienced mariners – but Dow remained blessedly free of it.

Where such innate abilities came from, he didn't know – unless it really was the ancient blood of Honous Tombs in his veins – but he suspected it was something that even a thousand lessons might never teach. And maybe Nathaniel saw it too, because although he never praised Dow's efforts, or gave a single word of encouragement, the old man also never bothered to explain the more rudimentary laws of sailing, as might be expected when instructing a boy new to the sea. Instead he taught Dow only the finer details of the profession; the tricks that could tighten a sail, or edge a course yet closer to the wind.

Thus engaged, they would sail on until the sliver of land behind them sank below the horizon. To glance about – apart from the prominences of the two Heads, sticking up like islands – they might have been far out upon the ocean proper, for although the Claw was a landlocked body of water, it was still so vast as to feel almost limitless. It could be a hazardous place too, when the mood took it. There were no great storms that summer perhaps, but there were brief squalls and passing gales and sudden waves that arose from nowhere; challenges more than enough to test and hone Dow's newly emerging skills.

He learnt how to locate the lightest of winds by the ghostly shimmers they cast on calm waters. He learnt how to discern an over-strong gust as it approached on a blustery day by the way the foam on the waves flattened and thinned beneath it. He learnt how best to steer when the bay was smooth, and how best to steer when it was all chop and spray. He learnt how to navigate allowing for currents and tides, and how to set a course, tacking this way and that, for a fixed point upon the land. He learnt about the shaping of the sail, and how it could catch the wind in different ways. He learnt the mysterious truth that the boat did not necessarily move the swiftest with the wind behind it, but that rather it was a wind coming from an angle that sometimes allowed the boat to fly most freely.

He learnt how to be sure of his course even in the many fogs that beset the Claw. He learnt to note the flow of the mist as it oozed across the water, to listen for the far-off sounds of land and surf, or to plumb the depths with a weighted rope and discover where he was by recognising certain shallows and sandbanks. When far out upon the Claw, beyond sight of even the Heads, he learnt to find his way by reading the sun and the moon and the habits of the wind. And he learnt how to read the night sky, a map so clear that if only the stars shone by day as well, and through the long overcasts of winter, then surely, Dow thought, they could lead a ship right across the ocean and on to the very ends of the earth . . .

By mid-morning Nathaniel and Dow would have sailed far out into the Claw's heart, and both the sky and the bay would have cleared to a hard blue. A fair wind would be blowing, Dow would be at the tiller and the
Maelstrom
would be skipping so easily across the white-flecked waves that it might have been a flat stone skimmed across a river by a boy. In such moments Dow knew that – whatever else might be said about his life in Stromner – sailing itself was the greatest joy he had ever known. It was like some glorious and unpunished act of theft, so much speed simply snatched from the elements with no price to pay. It was as if, in his old life, a tree in the forest had fallen not because of axes, but because the fellers had simply asked it to. How could anyone ever tire of such a thing?

But then his eye would light upon Nathaniel, hunched silent in the bow. If the old man had ever felt any such pleasure in sailing, he did not appear to now. He never smiled, no matter how fine the day. He never lifted his chin to a fresh breeze, he never leant gratefully into a cooling dash of spray on a hot afternoon. He seemed cut off from feeling, indifferent to any joy the bay might offer, as if the act of sailing was no more a thing to him than walking.

And even for Dow there came a point in every day when the delight must end and the drudgery of fishing begin. Nathaniel would declare that the fishing grounds had been reached, the sail would be shortened, the net humped over the side, and the boat would slow to a wallow, an animal unhappily leashed. They would creep back and forth across the water, pulling in the net and casting it out repeatedly, both men sweating in the midday sun. Sometimes there were fish to be heaved in, silver and grey and gasping for their lives. More often there were not.

Indeed, in their first few weeks of fishing, Dow could not help but notice how small his and Nathaniel's daily catches were compared to the other boats, and for a time he privately scorned Nathaniel as the worst fisherman in the village. But eventually he came to suspect that the old man chose his fishing grounds not in the expectation of a catch, but merely to be as far as he could from any other boat; casting his nets where no other fishermen thought it worth their while. Hadn't Boiler Swan said it? Nathaniel no longer cared to hunt fish. It was the great whirlpool he hungered for, and until a south storm should blow again, and the maelstrom rise, it seemed that he sought only isolation upon the waters.

Nevertheless, the work went on. Once the net was cast, Nathaniel would steer the
Maelstrom
in a broad circle until they met up with where they had begun, and Dow would draw the net into a great bag from which any encircled fish could not escape, then he'd haul the dead weight of it back into the boat. The reward might be three fish flopping in the mesh, or five, their eyes staring blankly even as their mouths gaped and blood burst from their labouring gills.

At first they all looked much the same to Dow, and he would never like the feel or smell of them. Fish were fish. But in time he learnt their names, and how to identify them. The most common were Mackerel, long lean fish that swam in silver schools just below the surface. There were also Salt Perch, bigger and from deeper down, and Claw Cod, bigger fish again that drifted with the tide in solemn, stately assemblies. And there were other fish besides, Grey Shad and Dart and Short Eels, each with their own hue and sheen and shape.

But sometimes different creatures were hauled up in the net: turtles, which were regarded as delicacies to eat; and small sharks, thrashing about and snapping with their razor teeth; or shelled and spiny things that were dragged up from the bay floor, some with claws, some with dangerous spikes, some that were worth keeping and some that were quickly thrown away. And then there were the slimy things of tentacles and suckers and slavering mouths. Squid and octopus and jellyfish, squashed shapeless and strange once out of the water.

And too big for any net were the larger creatures of the bay. Giant turtles, twenty times the size of their smaller cousins, soaring gracefully along a fathom or so beneath the waves; and seals, warm-blooded and air-breathing, leaping playfully about the boat, eyes brimming with intelligence; and of course the greater sharks, white and deadly as they cruised past on their endless patrols.

But it was the
other
things that fascinated Dow most – the creatures even larger still that he half-glimpsed in the depths. Much of the Claw was quite shallow, its sandy floor home to beds of undulating sea grass, but out in the centre a long canyon reached inwards from the Rip, its bottom lost in hazy blue night. How deep it fell no one in Stromner could say, but staring down into the darkness made Dow feel that he hung uneasily suspended over a void. And once or twice he saw – or thought he saw – immense shapes moving down there.

‘There is some great beast swimming far below us,' he whispered in awe to Nathaniel, upon the first such sighting. ‘What might it be?'

The old man did not even stir to glance over the side. ‘Such shadows are no concern of ours. Whatever manner of creature they be, they hail from the deep ocean, and visit the bay only in passing, never to rise to the surface. Once, perhaps, we New Islanders knew more of them, but the Ship Kings stole away all our true learning when they forbade us from sailing the open sea – we are left only with rumours and hearsay about the monsters of the abyss. I won't waste my time repeating children's tales. Back to your work.'

An answer which satisfied Dow not at all.

But perhaps the greatest of all the puzzles he encountered that summer was nothing to do with monsters or fish or with the vagaries of wind and weather. Instead it concerned the hull of the
Maelstrom
. For a humble fishing craft fashioned from simple timbers, the boat possessed a remarkably slick outer hull. Dow had noticed it the first time he'd laid a hand on the
Maelstrom,
how the wood felt almost glassy to touch, how it gleamed darkly. But it wasn't glass. There seemed to be nothing there but the wood itself. And it wasn't just the
Maelstrom
– every boat that Dow inspected had the same superb gloss to its hull. Yet not once did he witness a single fisherman ever painting or polishing their craft.

He questioned Nathaniel about it one day, but the old man merely stared as if only a fool could be so ignorant, and shook his head. So instead, one night at the inn, Dow pressed Boiler Swan for an explanation.

‘Well,' said the innkeeper, ‘that's just nicre, isn't it.'

‘Nicre?'

Boiler looked surprised. ‘You don't know of it? I would've thought it common knowledge, even to a highlander. But it's simply told; whenever timber is immersed at length in salt water, a thin film will form across the wood, smooth and slippery, like the skin of a pearl – nicre is its name. And a blessing it is too, for nicre keeps a hull clean and quick and sound. In fresh water a hull will get all fouled with barnacles and rot away within a decade if it isn't repainted. But not in salt water. Why, with no maintenance at all other then wetting it regular, a salt-water hull can last a century and more, thanks to nicre.'