The Empty Leg

The message found Marsten at the Verre dock with his hold two-thirds loaded and the last third promised, a consignment of pump housings that a bigger operator had dropped for being awkward weight at an awkward hour, which was the kind of freight the Curlew had lived on for twenty years. Take the thirds nobody wants and a hold fills. A hold that fills is a crossing that counts. He had built a whole life out of sentences like that, and most of them he had from one man.

The message was from Stannage, relayed twice, two days old by its stamps. It was signed for the yard, in a hand he didn’t know, and it said that Corven was dying, that the doctor had stopped pretending otherwise, and that the old man had asked for him. It did not say how long. Messages from yards never do; a yard learns not to promise schedules it doesn’t control.

Stannage was four crossings out, and the legs between them honest space — nine days of it, flown hard. The next scheduled sailing that went anywhere near went in thirty-one days, a consolidator out of Verre with berth space and a chaplain and a place in every window queue between here and there, and it would arrive, by any reckoning at all, at a grave.

Marsten stood on the dock with the message in his hand for the length of one unloading cycle. Then he found the agent for the pump housings and gave the consignment away — gave it, with his own carriage fee, to the operator who had dropped it, a man who could not believe his morning. The two-thirds already aboard he put back on the dock himself, cell by cell, four hours of reversing a morning’s work under his own crane while the trade walked past not asking, which on a freight dock is the loudest thing there is. Then he filed a departure for Stannage, empty, and went up the ramp of his own boat with his boots loud in a hold that had nothing in it at all.

In twenty years he had never flown light. It was not a rule anyone had set over him; there was no office that counted crossings against a man. There was only the man.

---

The first crossing he made without letting himself think.

That was possible, at a seam. It was the door that cost, not the road to it — the opening of a thing that size for whatever you happened to be, and the Curlew happened to be sixty tonnes of nothing with one pilot and his kit bag. The transit itself took four seconds. It had always seemed wrong to him that it took four seconds. A thing that spent what a crossing spent should take a winter. You should have to watch the price going out of the world the whole slow way, the way ore goes down a chute, load by load, where a man can stand and count it. Instead there was the junction’s throat, and the flare of it, and then the far side, ordinary stars, ordinary dark, his instruments settling, nothing anywhere to show that anything had been paid by anyone.

That was the thing he had understood at nineteen, with Corven standing over him at the chart table: nothing shows. No gauge drops. No sky flickers. The cost of a crossing is real and invisible and lands on everyone and bills no one. Corven had said it shorter. Full hold or no hold. And, when Marsten had asked him — nineteen, and thinking himself clever — who would ever know the difference: You would.

Then there were two days of honest space to the next junction, the Curlew run up harder than he had ever run her loaded, with nothing to load, nothing to lash, nothing to check on in the hold because the hold had nothing in it, and a man can do a great deal of thinking in two days that he has flown twenty years of full holds specifically to avoid.

The second crossing he made knowing.

---

Her name was Maud Ferrant, and she had stood at the foot of his ramp at the Corris dock eleven — no. Nine years ago. Nine years ago in the spring.

Maud Ferrant was a small woman in a good coat that had been brushed too many times, and she had a case with her, packed, and she asked him — the independent, the one they said sometimes took the odd loads — whether he would take a passenger to Halte, off-schedule, at whatever rate he thought fair. Her son was at Halte. Her son was dying at Halte, of the slow thing, which had stopped being slow. The scheduled sailing went in nineteen days. She had done the sums herself; she did not make him do them for her; she just stood at the foot of the ramp with her case and asked.

And Marsten had said no.

Marsten had said it well. That was the part that kept. He had not been brusque and he had not hidden behind the boat or the weather or an invented survey of his own commitments. He told her the truth, kindly, on the dock, in the spring: that Halte was three crossings, that he would be flying light both ways for one passenger, that he did not do that, ever, for anyone, because of what a crossing spends and cannot give back, and that if he broke it for her — and part of him wanted to; he told her that too — he would have no ground left to stand on the next time, and there would be a next time, there was always a next time, the reaches were full of dying and the sky was going out. He had offered what he had instead: the name of the consolidator’s agent, who owed him; a relay message flown ahead at his own expense on the next scheduled crossing, so the boy would at least have her words. She had listened to all of it with her hands folded on the handle of the case.

Her son died in eight days. She made the scheduled sailing on the nineteenth day and rode it to a funeral. Marsten knew this because he had checked, once, through the agent, and had been sorry ever since — sorry there had been something to find.

At the foot of the ramp, nine years ago, when he had finished being right, Maud Ferrant had thanked him for his time.

For nine years he carried the housings and the grain and the machine parts of half a reach with those words riding the jump seat, and had gone on believing every syllable he’d said to her, and believed it still — that was the thing he could not get to lie down, on the long empty legs, in the dark, at speed. He believed it still. The rule was right. The arithmetic was right. The sky was going out and a door that size should never open for one man’s errand, and his hold was empty, and his heading was Stannage, and the man dying at the end of it had taught him every word he’d said to her.

On the long third leg he tried the case both ways, in the only court there was, with Corven on every bench of it. The prosecution was easy; he knew it by heart; he had delivered it himself, gently, to a small woman on a spring dock. The defence kept not coming. Everything he could put up — that it was Corven, that it was once, that a rule had to bend once to prove it was a rule and not just a habit of luck — he had heard before, at his own ramp, in other mouths, wearing other faces, and had turned it away with the full weight of his believing. There was no argument he could make for himself that he had not already refused when it came from somebody braver. He gave it up somewhere in the middle watch and flew the boat.

And under it, unargued, the sum he did not do out loud: her boy died in eight days, and Stannage was nine out, and the message did not say how long. There was a version of this where he arrived light to a filled grave, the rule broken for nothing, and he flew that version too, every dark watch of it, and it changed no heading by one degree. Somewhere past the third junction he understood why. He was not flying to arrive in time. He was flying so the old man would not die short one of his own, which was a different errand, and one that would keep.

The third crossing he made tired, in the middle of a sleep shift, because the window fell where it fell.

The fourth he made in the morning, shaved, with the cabin squared away and his logbook up to date, the way you go to a thing you have decided to deserve.

---

Stannage was a yard more than a settlement, a strip of dock and shops and housing rowed up along a cold bay that the founders had picked for its water and stayed for out of stubbornness. Corven had gone there old, to be near his daughter’s family, and had spent fifteen years mending other men’s boats at rates that embarrassed the trade, and Marsten had made the run out perhaps once a year, always with freight, always full, and had sat in the yard kitchen being fed and corrected and sent home heavier in several respects.

The granddaughter met him at the dock. She had written the message; the hand was hers. She looked at the Curlew sitting on her cradle with the hold doors up on nothing and no handling gear within fifty metres of her, and she was a yard child, she could read a dock gauge before she could read, and she said nothing about it at all, which told him the household knew what his coming had cost and had decided to know it silently.

“I knew what I was asking when I wrote,” she said, taking his bag, not looking at him. “Grandad doesn’t. He thinks you were passing.” The lie was offered like a coat. Marsten thanked her and did not put it on.

Corven was in the back room, in the bed by the window, small in the way the strong get small, with the bay light on him and his hands on the blanket. The hands had gone to bone. The eyes had not gone anywhere.

The old man looked a long moment at Marsten, who stood in the doorway with his cap in his fists.

“How was the road?” Corven said.

Marsten came in and sat down on the hard chair and answered it: the queue at Verre, the second junction running slow, the port engine hunting a little above three-quarters, which he’d been nursing for a month.

“Valve seat,” Corven said. “The starboard one went the same way in ‘19. You’ll do it at anchor in an afternoon if your hands remember anything I showed them. Don’t let a yard sell you the whole manifold.” His voice was down to a dry wire, but the wire held. “An afternoon. Cheap fix. Everything on that boat is a cheap fix except the man.”

“That’s a cheap fix too,” Marsten said. “You did it in an afternoon.”

“I did it in thirty years,” Corven said. “Pass the water.”

Four days. Marsten fetched and carried, and sat, and let the household move around him, and talked engines when the old man wanted engines and was quiet when he wanted quiet, and it was never said, not once, in any form — what the Curlew had done to get there, what was in the hold, what the doors had opened for. Twice he caught the old man looking at him with something that had judgment in it and something that did not, the two of them run together like weather fronts, impossible to keep apart, and both times Corven closed the subject before it could open, once with an instruction about the valve seat and once by going to sleep in the middle of his own sentence, which the dying are permitted.

Once, on the third evening, Corven got as far as “You know I’d never have asked you to—” and stopped, and looked at his own hands on the blanket a while, and then said the tide was making a mess of somebody’s mooring out the window, and Marsten agreed that it was.

On the fourth morning, early, before the light, he died with his daughter and the granddaughter in the room, and Marsten in the kitchen, keeping the kettle going, which was the job he’d been given, and he did it.

---

The funeral was a yard funeral: everyone, briefly, and then work, because boats do not care. Marsten stood at the back and was introduced afterwards to more people than he could hold as “one of his,” which was the whole eulogy anyone got out of him.

Then he stayed nine days at Stannage, and put it about that the Curlew was taking freight for the Verre side, any weight, awkward thirds welcome.

It came in slowly, the way it does from a small place — dried fish and cured hides, a rebuilt compressor going back on warranty, a crate of effects for a family that had moved reachward two years ago and finally sent for their things, four passengers with paid berths and reasons of their own, one of them a young man going to stand up at his brother’s wedding on the Verre side, who told Marsten the whole courtship at the rail on the second evening, unasked, and was good value for it. He priced it fair and under, and took the compressor at cost, and by the ninth day the Curlew sat at her marks, full to the frames, and the scheduled window at the junction had a place for her in the queue, one hull among the traffic, and the dock gauge, this time, had nothing to tell anyone.

Marsten knew what the nine days were. He was not a man who hid things from himself in the general case, having had no cargo of that kind aboard for twenty years, and he did not hide this: the rule was broken and would stay broken; keeping it now mended nothing, banked nothing, was seen by no office and no sky; the doors he had opened were open forever in the only place such doors are recorded. He kept it anyway. Standing at the rail of his full boat in the Stannage cold, waiting on a scheduled window, he could not tell whether that made him a serious man or a ridiculous one.

Marsten did not write to Maud Ferrant. He had drafted it in his head on the empty legs, some nights, the letter that began by admitting everything — and every draft was for him, and none of it was for her, and the one thing he had left of the ramp at Corris was that he had not, at least, made her carry his feelings as well as her case. She had thanked him for his time.

The window came up at four in the morning, yard time. The junction took the scheduled traffic in order, a consolidator, two tankers, an independent off the fish run, the Curlew. The door opened, vast and quick, and the crossing took four seconds, and cost what it cost.

Marsten slept the first leg badly. On the second, at anchor off the junction light, he did the port valve seat in an afternoon with his sleeves rolled, the way Corven had told him, and did not let anyone sell him the manifold, and when he ran the engine up at dusk it went to three-quarters and past it and sat there, steady, hunting nothing.