Landfall
The hatch rolled back at first light and the hook came down for them.
It came down slowly through the rain on its chain, a hook as big as Dez, and stopped over the drums, and swung. Above it, in the square of grey where the roof had been, there was a jib, and a lamp on the jib gone pale with the morning, and somebody’s arm reaching out from under the lamp, pointing.
The renderer’s crew came down the iron stair after it. Four of them. They came down fast and went along the rows with chain slings over their shoulders, and they did not look at the five frames standing against the rib by the steam pipes until they were already among them.
Then they stopped.
Dez put his good arm out across Shim. He did it without thinking, the way he had done it in a drain under Gutter Lane, because the shapes coming at him between the drums were narrow and dark and had a slit across the face where a face should be, and a light behind the slit.
Then the nearest one said something.
It said it to the one behind it, short, over its shoulder, and it said it out of a mouth. There was a grille below the slit, rust-brown, the bars bent at one corner where something had hit it once, and the voice came out of the grille and had words in it. Dez did not know all the words. He knew enough of them.
"Who sent these down?"
They were not black. That was the next thing. They were the shape of the frames at the hatch, the frames on the Weigh, the frames on the stair at the top of Gutter Lane, narrow, long in the arm, with the slit; but they were brown, rust-brown all over the way a drum goes, and patched. The one who had spoken had a plate on its shoulder that did not match the other shoulder. The one behind it had a forearm off some other machine altogether, thicker, with the paint still on it in a band of yellow. They wore oilskins, short ones, to the knee, black gone grey with salt.
Kedge had not moved. He stood against the rib with his collar up and his grooved hands at his sides and his slit very low.
“The hull,” said Tare. She had her bound hand on the drum beside her and her apron rolled under her other arm. “The hull sent us down. On a sheet.”
The renderer’s frame turned its slit on her. It went up the stair two steps at a time and called up through the hatch, and something called back, and it came down again with a strip of paper in its fingers, grey with rain. It held it to the lamp.
"Eighteen," it read. Its finger went along. It read the way the lighterman had read, slowly, as if each word were a thing to be lifted. ”Hold, by hand. Four." It looked up at them. It counted. It got to five and stopped, and looked at Kedge, and did not count him.
“The purser’s,” it said, in Dez’s words now, or near enough. “You’re the purser’s.”
* * *
They went up in the net with the last of the drums.
It was the same net. Dez stood in it with his right hand on a drum and his left at his hip, and the cords closed round them and the hook took the weight, and the hold dropped away under his feet, the steam pipes and the rows, and then the edge of the hatch went past and they were out in the rain over the renderer’s deck, swinging, and the deck swung away too, and under them, very close, there was stone.
A dock. Long, black, wet, with the rain standing on it in sheets. Lamps on iron posts along it going pale in the light. Drums on it, stacked in walls, rust-brown, so many and so high that the dock was a street between them. Smoke going up somewhere behind the walls, a lot of smoke, more than the gasworks, leaning over in the wind. And the smell. On the renderer it had come down with the rain. Here it was so thick it was not a smell. It was the air.
The net came round on its chain. Below it, at the foot of the jib, a frame stood at the winch lever with its hand on it. A brown hand, patched at the knuckle, two of the fingers not the same make as the other two. Dez had seen it at the winch the night they came off the hull, through the rain.
Kedge saw it too.
He did not say anything. He turned his head inside his collar, toward the frame at the winch, and the light behind his slit went dark and came back. Long. Short. Short. Long.
The net stopped.
It stopped in the air, with a jerk that went through all of them, and hung there, ten feet over the stone, turning a little on the chain. The frame at the winch had not taken its hand off the lever. It had stopped the lever where it was. It stood looking up into the net, with the rain running off its hood, and its own slit did nothing at all.
All along the dock the noise changed. Dez did not know at first what had changed in it. Frames had stopped. At the drum walls, at the foot of the gangway, at a cart with a carcass on it under a tarp. One at a time, along the dock, they stood still and looked up at the net, the way a yard goes quiet when a load slips.
Kedge did it again. Long, short, short, long. Slower this time.
The frame at the winch lifted its patched hand off the lever, and held it up, open, to the net. Then it put it back on the lever and let the net down. All the way down. Gently. So that the drums in it touched the stone without a sound.
* * *
They came for Kedge before the net was open.
Not the renderer’s crew. Others, off the dock, eight or ten, from the drum walls and the carts, walking fast. They pulled the cords back and stood round the net, and they looked at Kedge, and one of them put out a hand and turned back the collar of his oilskin, the way Tare had done once in the dark, and looked at what was stamped there. Then at the four holes under his slit, where Burr had drilled the rivets out. Then at the grille.
"Say it," said the one with the hand on his collar.
"Kedge," said Kedge.
Nobody did anything for a moment. A frame at the back said a word Dez did not know, high and short, and another one said it, and the one at his collar let go of the collar and took his arm instead, at the elbow, the way you take the arm of somebody who has been out too long in the cold.
“Wait,” said Dez.
They were already going. They went through the drum walls with Kedge in the middle of them, and Kedge went with them on his bad knees, a step and a step, and nobody hurried him and nobody stopped. At the gap between the walls he turned round. His slit went short, short, at Shim.
“Yes,” said Shim, beside Dez, very quietly.
Then the walls had him, and the rain, and he was gone.
Dez stepped out of the net after him.
A clamp was in the way. Iron jaws, off some machine that had needed to hold things, bolted where a hand had been on the end of a forearm that came out of a short oilskin, and the flat of it was resting against his chest plate, not hard, just there. The frame behind it was old, and short, and had a board hung round its neck on a string, a slate board with chalk marks on it in rows.
"No," it said. Then, in Dez’s words: “Not you. You’re the purser’s.”
“We’re not anybody’s.”
The old frame looked at the paper in its other hand, which the renderer’s frame had given it. It looked at Dez. It took the clamp away and pointed with it, down the dock, at a shed.
"Purser’s word comes in with the hull’s next renderer," it said. “Four days, five. Goods by hand wait for the purser’s word.” It made a mark on the board round its neck with a stub of chalk, and the mark was not a letter. “In the shed.”
“And if we don’t.”
The old frame looked at him from the feet up. The boots. The knees, with the brass in them. The hook. The arm that hung from the shoulder and did not do anything. It took its time about it.
"Where to?" it said.
* * *
The eighteen went another way.
Dez watched them go while the old frame with the board wrote. The dock frames rolled them off the net on their rims, and they went chiming on the wet stone into a long shed at the end of the dock that was not like the other sheds. It was iron, and had a door that shut, and over the door, painted once and painted again, the crossed keys.
One of the dock frames had a bar, and put it to the lead on the first drum’s spout, and the old frame said something sharp, and the frame with the bar took it away.
"Not that," said the old frame. Then to Dez, who was looking: “House lead. We don’t open the house’s lead.” He made another mark. “It goes back the way it came.”
Shim went up on his toes to see past the drums.
“There,” he said. “That’s mine.”
It was the dented drum. It went into the iron shed with the others, rolling on its rim, the dent coming round and round. The door shut on it.
* * *
The shed they were put in had a tally board on the back wall as tall as the wall, covered in chalk, and a stove that was out, and a bench, and a window with no glass in it that looked down the dock. The old frame left them there. It did not lock the door. At the end of the dock, where the stone ran into a street between the drum walls, a frame stood in the rain and did nothing, and every so often its slit turned toward the shed.
Tare sat down on the bench and put her bound hand in her lap.
"Hold, by hand," she said. “I wrote that. Best forgery I ever did.” She looked at the door. “It got us on. It’s a sheet. It doesn’t care where we get off.”
“It got us here,” said Dez.
“It got us here as freight.” She was quiet a moment. “Somebody’s freight. The purser’s. Whoever he is. Kedge said he doesn’t look at what’s standing on the sheet.” She folded her hands. “He’ll look now. It’s his sheet. Four of somebody else’s off it, on his dock.”
Flux had set the pan down on the bench, and the coil beside it, still warm off the renderer’s valve where he had unbolted it in the dark before the hatch opened, and was standing at the window with his good side to it, listening. He had been listening since the hatch opened. Dez had watched him do it, on the deck, in the net, at the drums, turning his cracked housing to the noise.
“It doesn’t stop,” Flux said. Loud, but not as loud as usual, as if the noise outside had taken some of his away. “Can you hear it? Under everything. It doesn’t stop for anything. There’s something going round down there that never stops.”
Dez could hear it. Under the rain. Under the dock, the carts, the chains. A long low beat, wet, a long way off and everywhere at once, the way the pumps under the hill were everywhere at once in the winter.
“Sorry,” said Flux, to nobody.
Shim had sat down on the floor with his back to the tally board and Merrin’s tin in his lap. He had chalk on his shoulders off the board. He opened the tin, and looked in at the one bottle in it, the one for showing, and shut it. He opened his coat and took out the others, what was left of them, and set them in a row on the floor, and took out the cup with the nail-mark round the inside. He did the sum with his lips moving.
The bottles were the better, all of it now. Flux had tipped the coil’s run into the last of the eleven on the renderer, the last night, so there would be one stock.
It was what kept a seam from opening. Not One. Not a cure. Tare’s wrist had been dry for a day off a capful of the coil’s run, and wet again by the lamps; the bead on Dez’s right elbow went from a drop to a seed and back. It slowed. That was what they had come across the dark with: a stock that slowed, and a coil, and the question of how the stuff was made, to ask of somebody at the far end of the run. There was nobody yet to ask.
“Nine days,” said Shim. “To the mark. For four.” He looked at the row of bottles, and then at the door, where Kedge was not. “Three of us here. And Kedge’s.”
“Kedge’s goes to Kedge,” said Tare.
“If we can find him.” Shim put the bottles back inside his coat, one at a time, carefully, so they did not knock. “And nothing to run on.”
That was the other sum. They had drunk the last of the hull’s can on the renderer, the ten measures that were not for the coil, two each. There was no can. There was nothing in the shed but chalk.
Dez went to the window.
Down the dock, the frame at the street’s end had turned its slit toward the shed again. Beyond it, past the drum walls, past the smoke, he could see the tops of things: iron chimneys by the dozen, and pipes, and gantries with hooks hanging off them, and something very big and round with steam coming off its rim, and more of them, going along the shore until the rain hid them. And under all of it the beat, long and low and wet.
“Nothing to run on,” he said, “in the one place there’s nothing else.”
