A Ship in Ordinary Sunlight

They heard Rusk's case on the fourteenth of March, in the same room where the fishing boat's master had told his story. It was a gray wet morning, with the rain coming in off the Reach.

He walked up Ropewalk Street to the Admiralty House without irons. That was the first difference, and he was aware of it with every step. The second was the street itself. In September it had been crowded with porters and carts and the smell of the ropewalk. Now half the shopfronts were shuttered, and the other half had been turned into kitchens for the islanders who had come east over the winter. There were queues at every door. A woman from Tull was handing out bread from a window with a child on her hip, and a boy from the Levels was chalking the day's ration on a board.

Orris walked beside him with a stick and a covered basket.

"You don't have to come in," Rusk said.

"I'm a witness," Orris said.

"You're not on the list," Rusk said.

"Then I'm a spectator, and I've brought pies, and you can't stop me." Orris shifted the basket. His leg had healed short, and he walked with a roll he had not had before. "Have you eaten?"

"No."

"Drown me," Orris said. "Eat a pie."

He ate it on the steps of the Admiralty House, standing in the rain, and it was very good.

The hearing room was full. The benches had been brought in from the chapel and set in lines, and there were people standing along the walls and in the doorway. Rusk knew some of the faces. Dunning was there in his blue coat with a sergeant-major's knot on his shoulder, sitting very upright, with his fiddle case under the bench. Isobel sat beside her father, who had his bad hip propped on a stick in the aisle. Joss had come in his best shirt, with his mother beside him in her chapel bonnet, holding his arm as if he might sail off the bench. Nera stood against the back wall with her arms crossed and her braid down her back, looking as she always looked at anything run by clerks.

And at the back, by the door, stood a big man in a leather apron with his cap in his hands. Wat Gorley had come, the docker whose son had burned in the Halcyon, as Marr had told him on the long wharf that he might.

Judge-Advocate Hask came in at ten. She was smaller than Rusk remembered, sharp-faced, with her spectacles pushed up on her forehead, and she sat down without ceremony and pulled them down onto her nose.

"Tavin Rusk," she said. "You were charged on the twenty-fourth of September with abandoning your station in the face of the enemy at Ember Roads, three years since, when in command of the Osprey. The charge was interrupted. It was not withdrawn. This court has also received a great many letters about what you have done since." She looked over the spectacles at the clerk's table, where a stack of paper stood a foot high. "Some of them are from people I would not have expected to write to an Admiralty court about anything. The court will hear the charge first."

They heard it. A clerk went through the old reports from Ember Roads in a high, careful voice. The squadron's orders. The Osprey's station on the weather wing. The time she left it, under all sail, for the burning beach at Sallow. The time the corsairs came through the gap. The Halcyon's loss, the Plover's surrender, the names of the dead, which took eleven minutes to get through.

Rusk sat and listened to every one. He had heard them before. He had known some of them. Behind him somebody was crying quietly, and somebody else was telling them to hush. After that they called Jonas Leary.

Leary came up from the benches in a good brown coat with his cap under his arm. He stood at the rail and told the court what he had seen from the Plover's deck. He had seen the gap open on the weather wing and the corsairs come through it, and the Plover's captain dead on his quarterdeck within the half hour. He kept his voice level and his eyes off Rusk.

"Captain Leary," said Hask. "You sailed under Captain Rusk's direction in the action at the Orra strait in November."

"Under Commander Marr's, ma'am," Leary said. "But aye, he had the Crown boarding, and I had the western boats."

"Do you wish to say anything about that?" Hask asked.

Leary turned his cap in his hands. "Only that he did what he said he'd do, ma'am, and stopped where the plan said stop. That's all I've got to say about November." His eyes were on the rail in front of him. "It doesn't change what I saw from the Plover. I want that written down too."

"It has been," said Hask.

Marr was the last witness. She stood at the rail in her blue coat with her hands behind her back, as she had stood at the Sparrowhawk's rail in September. She gave her evidence in the same level voice she used for a report. She told the court about Ember Roads first, and she left nothing out. She told it the Halcyon's station, and when the Osprey's sails had gone away to the north, and how long it had taken the corsairs to find the gap. She told it how Captain Mallory had died. She told it about the boat, and the thirty she had brought out in it, and the ones she had not.

Rusk had never heard her tell it. In all the weeks of the war she had given him the numbers and the names, and never the story. He sat with his hands between his knees and made himself hear all of it.

After that she told the court about the war. She told it about the chain house and the Kestrel's seam, and the dead coming up the ladders. She told it about a hundred and ten people taken out of Greyhaven in a condemned ship in the dark. She told it about the Skerrow, and how they had both been wrong there, and what each of them had done wrong. She told it about Crown's tow deck, and a man who had taken a beaten enemy by the collar and refused to let him drown.

"Commander," said Hask. "You brought the prisoner home to stand trial. Do you now ask this court to acquit him?"

"No, ma'am," Marr said.

The room moved.

"I ask the court to try him," Marr said. "On the charge as it stands, and on everything since. He broke formation at Ember Roads, and men I served with died of it. That is true, and nothing that happened at Orra makes it less true. He also saved six hundred people that night, and some thousands since. I don't know how to weigh one against the other. That's the court's work, not mine." She paused. "I would serve with him again. I wanted the court to know that as well."

She stepped back from the rail.

Hask took off her spectacles and polished them. She put them back on and asked Rusk whether he had anything to say.

He stood up. He had thought about it for three months, and in the end there was not much.

"I left my station," he said. "I knew what it might cost when I did it. It cost what the clerk said it cost. I'd make the same choice again on that beach, and I don't ask the court to tell me I was right."

He sat down.

The court gave judgment at four o'clock, after the lamps had been lit.

Hask gave it standing, which she had not done all day. She said that the court had two matters before it, and that it would not let either swallow the other. On the charge of abandoning his station, the court found Tavin Rusk guilty. His commission was forfeit, and his resignation of three years ago was not accepted in place of that. He was barred for life from command of any ship of the Compact's navy.

"In respect of what he did at Sallow," Hask said, "and of his service from the twenty-fourth of September to the tenth of November, the sentence is mitigated. This court has heard that service at length and has no reason to doubt it. He will not be imprisoned. He will not be fined. He is free to go." She looked down the room over her spectacles. "The court wishes to be understood. It does not say that the deaths at Ember Roads have been repaid. They have not, and they cannot be, by this court or by the prisoner. The court says only that it has weighed what it was given to weigh."

She sat down. The clerk banged his gavel twice, and it was over.

Rusk stayed where he was while the room emptied round him. Orris put a hand on his shoulder and took it away again. Isobel squeezed his arm as she went past. Marr went out by the side door, and he did not blame her.

When he came out onto the steps the rain had stopped. The harbor lay below in the last of the light, full of ships. Wat Gorley was standing at the foot of the steps with his cap in his hands.

Rusk stopped. Orris, beside him, shifted his grip on his stick.

Gorley came up two steps and stood looking at him. He was thinner than he had been in September. His hand was scarred across the knuckles where Marr's point had opened it.

"My boy's still dead," he said.

"Yes," Rusk said.

"They hanged the admiral at Lisk." His voice did not rise. "And they let you go."

"They did."

Gorley stood there. Whatever was in him, he kept it. He put his cap on, and turned, and went down Ropewalk Street toward the harbor and never turned his head.

"Come on," Orris said. "I've a fire lit at the Lantern and Oar, and the beer isn't watered, whatever they tell you."

The new glass for the Lantern of Orra went west in the Kestrel's hold in the first week of April, packed in straw in eleven crates. A lampwright from Halsey came with it to fit it, and so did a great deal of advice from everyone who came aboard.

On the way west the Kestrel put into Fallow Creek for an hour at the top of the tide. The oak still leaned over the water, with its first leaves coming, and Enoch's marker stood under it, cut from the Kestrel's broken rail. Somebody had cut the letters deeper since October. Joss went ashore with the cat in a basket and sat by the grave, and they let him take his time. Rusk stayed in the boat. He had sat with Enoch all one night already and found no words then, and he had none to add now.

Orra had changed. The terraces had been cleared of wreckage over the winter, and the lower cistern pumped out and its sea-cave mouth walled up with stone and mortar. Two of the cottages on the east slope had new roofs. On the south terrace, under the wall of the refuge, stood a line of graves with wooden markers. Ansel Hart's was at the end of it, with a pilot's sounding pole driven into the ground beside it and a strip of blue cloth from his old coat tied to the top. Beside his stood Nat Lanyon's. Hal Brockett had cut the post at Darn and brought it west in the Kestrel's hold with the glass, and had cut nothing on it but the name, because the boy had been nineteen and there was nothing else to put.

East of the channel, on the sand beyond the Brack, Crown lay where they had left her, open to the sky like the ribs of some great beast on a beach. Nera's Darn crews had been at her all winter, and her timber was going east in rafts.

"Seasoned western oak," Nera said, at the Kestrel's rail, watching a raft come off on the flood. "It'll build me a slipway and two fishing boats and the roof of a mould loft, and that's only the first raft."

"Your yard?" Rusk asked.

"Mine and Gideon Dray's, until he dies, and he says he won't," Nera said. "Don't tell anyone I'm happy. They'll want a discount."

Marietta Voss met them at the boat slip with three young people behind her and a list in her hand.

"There are three of them," she said, as if Rusk had asked. "Jago, Linnet Drew, and Abner's granddaughter Ellis. They share the watches. They share the oil book. They share the scolding." She looked at the three, who were trying to appear unconcerned, and failing. "I am not going to sit up in that tower alone for another thirty years, Captain. I've decided. It isn't good for a person, and it isn't good for a light."

"No," Rusk agreed.

"Cal will keep the stores. Ruth will tell him he's doing it wrong." She tucked the list into her coat. "Now. You've brought my glass, and you've brought it in straw, and I want to see every piece of it before anyone puts a hand to a tackle."

They hoisted the crates up the tower face that afternoon, with a gin on the gallery and a tackle down to the terrace, because the stair was too narrow to carry them. Joss had rigged the tackle. Rusk stood at the foot of the tower with his hands in his coat and watched him do it, and said nothing, and that was harder than any of the rest of it.

The first eight crates went up without trouble. The ninth held the great central lens, as broad as a cartwheel and thicker than a man's wrist at its rim. It was the heaviest crate, and the lampwright from Halsey would not let anyone else touch the slings. He had them doubled. Joss had the hauling party on the fall, eight island men and two of the apprentices, and he called the heave himself.

The crate was halfway up the tower when the upper block split.

Rusk heard it go, a sharp crack from the gallery overhead, and saw the crate drop a fathom and stop with a jerk that set it swinging. The block had split across its shell. One sheave was out, and the rope was running over the broken edge of the wood, and every swing of the crate sawed it further.

"Hold!" Joss shouted. "Hold the fall! Nobody let go!"

The hauling party held. The crate swung out from the tower face and back, and struck the stone, and the straw spilled from a broken slat.

Joss never glanced at Rusk. His eyes went up to the block, and down at the fall, and at the bollard set in the terrace for mooring the tower boats. He took the fall's tail out of the last man's hands and threw two turns round the bollard and a third. He took the strain on the turns himself, braced on the stone.

"Ease off the party. Ease. Now, Jago, up the stair with a strop, and pass it round the crate's slings to the gallery rail. Don't stand under it."

The boy went up the tower stair at a run. Rusk counted the swings of the crate and kept his mouth shut. The rope sawed on the split block. At the top, Jago came out onto the gallery and leaned out over the rail with a strop, and missed. He leaned out further, and Marietta said something sharp under her breath that Rusk had never heard a keeper say. On the second cast the strop went round. Jago hauled it to the rail and made it fast.

"Fast!" he shouted down.

Joss eased his turns, and the weight came off the broken block onto the strop, and the crate hung quiet against the tower face.

The lampwright from Halsey sat down on the terrace wall and put his head in his hands.

"Well enough," said Rusk to Joss, when it was over.

"It was slow," Joss said.

"It was well enough." He looked up at the crate. "Who taught you to throw turns like that?"

"You did, Captain." Joss was coiling down the fall. "And Enoch, before you. He said a bollard's a friend that never lets you down, so long as you don't stand in the bight."

The lamp was lit at sunset. They stood on the terrace to watch it, all of them who were on Orra that day: the Kestrel's people and Marietta's, the apprentices, and the Holm Ennis fishermen in their boats. Annet Sorn had come out from Darn with Gerrit and Lise, and Tomas Ebb stood a little behind them, as he stood behind everyone. Marietta went up the stair alone. The light came on in the lantern room, small and yellow at first, and then the great lens took it and threw it out across the strait in a long gold beam. It swung slowly north toward Holm Ennis and the Kittle, and round to the west over the open sea where Vigil had lain. Then it came south over the Brack and east down the channel toward the Reach. Where it passed over the water, the fishing boats lifted their lamps to it.

Nobody cheered. Ruth Annick blew her nose, very loudly.

Ilyra Venn was on the terrace too, a little apart, with a dark cloak over her burned arm and Sabin beside her. She was going west the next morning in a Lisk cutter, to Sallow and the islands, under the terms Marr and the island elders had spent all winter writing. Rusk went over to her.

"You could have had a share," he said. "Marr asked you."

"I know. I told her no." Venn watched the beam swing out over the western sea. "Somebody has to go and tell them the Compact means it this time. They won't believe Marr. They won't believe you. They might believe me, for a year or two, if I'm careful."

"And after that?"

"Then it will be up to the Compact." She turned her head and looked at him with the side of her face that was not scarred. "Good luck to your crew, Captain. They'll need it, with that cook."

They signed the articles at the Lantern and Oar on the eighteenth of April, at the big table in the back room. The shutters were open on the harbor, and the smell of Orris's mutton came through the kitchen door.

The Admiralty's assessor had put the Kestrel's value at three hundred and eighty marks, as salvage, in the state she was in when the Navy took her back from the war. The figure stood unargued. The paper lay in the middle of the table with the Admiralty's seal on it and a line at the bottom for signatures.

The money was there too, in a strongbox, because Orris did not trust banks. Rusk had put in what he had saved in three years as a merchant master at Casmir. Orris had put in what he had from the Lantern and Oar, and from what he called his other trades, which he declined to name in front of a commissioned officer. Marr had put in her share of the prize money for Crown and Bounty. The crew's shares were there in a line of small leather bags, each with a name on it in Isobel's hand: Joss, Lew Farrow, Abner Daw, Sim Tolley, and twenty more.

Nera had put in nothing but her account for the Darn refit, which came to a great deal more than her share.

"I'm not having a gift," she said, for the third time. "I want it written down what I'm owed and what I've bought with it. A real share, with a vote."

"It is," said Marr. "Seven parts in a hundred, and a vote, and first call on the yard work at a fair price."

"A fair price is my price," Nera said.

"It's what three other yards would charge," Marr said. "You can argue with me about it every time she's hauled out."

"I will," said Nera, and signed.

The rules took longer. They were written on two sheets in Marr's small square hand. Most of them had been argued over at Fallow Creek in October, by lamplight, in a ship with a stump for a mast. Any signal that changed a ship's orders would carry a countersign. Objects of a voyage would be decided at this table, with Orris and Nera present. When the plan said stop, they stopped. Wages were set at the Greyhaven rate and a half for every hand, paid quarterly, with shares on profit after. The master of each voyage would decide at sea.

"Petch says the Admiralty offered you a ship," Orris said to Marr. "A frigate, and a captain's commission for good. He says you turned it down."

"I did," Marr said.

"Why?" Orris asked.

Marr squared the two sheets on the table. "Because I've spent six months giving orders to people who chose to be there, and I find I prefer it." She uncapped the ink. "And because Commodore Petch talks too much."

"And the master is who?" said Lew Farrow.

"Commander Marr on the first voyage," Rusk said. "Me on the second. Turn and turn about."

"And the one who isn't master?" Lew asked.

"Stands his watch as mate," said Marr, "and says what he thinks in the cabin, not on the deck."

Orris snorted. "That'll be a quiet ship."

"There's one more thing," said Joss. He had gone red to the ears. He put a basket on the table and took the lid off, and a fat orange cat looked out of it with an air of injury. "Enoch's share. He was on the books when she was condemned. He kept her when nobody else would. I want a share put by in his name, and Pudding to sail in her."

Nobody spoke. Pudding climbed out of the basket onto the Admiralty's paper and sat down on the line for signatures.

"Seconded," said Orris, roughly.

"Carried," said Marr. "Somebody move that cat."

Dunning, who had come to witness and had no vote, took his fiddle out of its case and played something that might have been a reel. It was very bad, and they let him finish.

The Kestrel sailed from Greyhaven for Halsey on the twenty-sixth of April, at the top of the morning flood. She had salt and Darn cordage in her hold and three paying passengers in the after cabins. She went out past the chain house with every sail set and the breeze fair from the south-west. The wharf took no notice of her, except for an old pilot with a bad leg who stood at the end of the mole until she was past the sands.

They breakfasted on the second morning off the northern coast, in the great cabin, with the stern windows open.

Orris had cooked. There was porridge, and bacon, and eggs from the Greyhaven market, and bread that had been baked the day before they sailed and was already arguing with the knife. Marr sat at the head of the table because she was master. Rusk sat at the side because he was not. Nera had come for the first voyage to watch her hull work in a seaway, and was eating as if she had been at sea a month. Joss had Pudding in his lap and was feeding her bacon under the table where Marr could not see.

The quarrel had started over the eels.

"Eleven casks," Nera said. "Eleven casks of smoked eels, stowed in the after hold, right over the run, where I told you three times we wanted nothing heavy. She's down by the stern four inches. I felt it at the helm last night."

"Southwick eels," said Orris. "Best on the coast. Do you know what they fetch at Halsey?"

"I know what they weigh," Nera said.

"They fetch two marks a cask," Orris said, "and I bought them for one, and I'm selling them on the owners' account, so you can thank me at the quarter."

"The stores list," said Marr, with her eyes on her porridge, "said four casks of salt pork and two of pease. It did not say eels."

"The stores list was out of date," said Orris.

"It was signed by the sailing master," Marr said.

"Then he has since amended it, Commander," Orris said, "at a profit."

There was a knock at the cabin door, and a stout, anxious man in a traveling coat put his head round it. He was Master Silas Fitch, a grain factor going home to Halsey, and he had been anxious since Greyhaven.

"I beg your pardon," he said. "I do beg your pardon. My trunk. My brown trunk with the brass corners. I was assured it had come aboard, and it is not in my cabin, and it is not in the hold, because I have looked."

"It came aboard," said Joss. "I saw it."

"Then where is it?" Fitch asked.

Joss opened his mouth and closed it again. He looked at Orris.

"Don't look at me," said Orris. "I never touched a trunk. I had eels to see to."

"Master Fitch," said Marr. "Your trunk will be found before we raise Halsey. Mister Ambry will search the ship himself after breakfast. Will you sit down and have some eggs?"

Fitch sat down. He had some eggs. His eyes went round the table: the old man with the bad leg, the young man with the cat, the tall shipwright, and the gray-bearded man who had been tried in March. He did not seem to know what he had got into.

The sun had come round onto the stern windows. It lay across the table in a broad warm band, on the bread and the eggs and the coffee pot and Orris's scarred brown hands. Rusk watched it.

"The well," Nera said to him, quietly, under the argument. "I sounded it at eight bells. She's dry."

"On the port tack?" Rusk asked.

"And in a seaway, with eleven casks of eels over her run." She broke a piece of bread. "The old stern knee. Enoch held the lamp for it the night the dark came. It holds."

"So it does," Rusk said.

Above them, through the open skylight, came Isobel's voice from the quarterdeck, high and clear.

"Helm, bring her up a point. Steer north by east a half east. The Halsey buoy's fine on the starboard prow."

The Kestrel leaned to it, easily, and came round. The band of sunlight slid across the table onto Fitch's plate, and Orris reached for the coffee pot, and Nera started on the eels again.

The end