Beyond the Fog

Chapter 3: An Inch from the Spokes

The chart was still open on the table. The goat had turned itself around to face the door.

It did that now, every time Dean came into the cabin: a slow wooden grind, and then the black eyes on him, the horns catching the lamp. Nothing in the wood had changed in four days. It was a lathed block of a head with a beard cut into it, the brown paint going gray in the curls, and there was no more expression on it than on a newel post.

He read expectation off it anyway. Four days was long enough to start seeing things in a lump of wood, and knowing that did not stop him.

"Captain." The voice came out of the throat of the thing, thin and dry, a hinge that needed oil. "You've not given me an answer, sir. I'll ask it plain, then. Do we make sail?"

Dean said nothing.

"Then it's the day that's troubling you," the goat said, when the silence had gone on long enough to suit it. "The Unhomed is patient, sir, but she is patient past patience. She would run to the world's end at your word and think nothing of it. And if it's the omens you're waiting on — I have a small art in that line, if you'd have it. The stars. Incense, if you can stomach the smoke. Crystal, if you'd rather see a thing than smell it. Speaking of crystal, you remember the—"

"I'm going up to look at the weather." Dean stood, and put the flat of his voice on it. "Stay here and be quiet."

The head stopped in the middle of its turn.

That was how it went, every time. The word went in and the wood obeyed it — not slowly, not with argument, the way a door obeys a hand. The voice still got the rest of its sentence out on the way, flat and dutiful, a man reciting a line he had been given and could not put down.

"As you will, Captain. Only take the helm soon, and put this voyage back on its course. Soon."

The wood ground once. The head went back to the attitude it had been carved in.

The cabin got about twice as large.

Dean sat still and let it. The hum the thing put behind his eyes drained away, slow, and the pressure went with it. It was not silence — the ship had her own noises and he had gotten used to them. Something ticked in the hull. Water went by outside. Wood complained, low, taking a swell. But the goat's voice was a thing that sat in a room and took up the space in it, and with the voice gone there was room to think.

He thought the same two thoughts he had thought eleven times, and got the same answers.

The ship was enormous. He had walked her length on the first day and come away with a number he did not believe, and he had no ruler long enough, and no second man to hold the other end of it. Two hundred meters, if he trusted his eye. Nothing that size went anywhere without a crew. Thirty men would sail her shorthanded and be tired at the end of it. A hundred would sail her and sleep at night.

He had one man aboard. And he did not know how to sail.

Once, in the first day or so, he had thought about asking the goat to teach him. He had run the conversation out to about the fourth sentence and stopped, and his stomach had been cold for an hour after.

He took the pistol off the table and stood up.

It had come out of a locker below on the second day, along with the sword. The pistol was older than it looked, heavy in a way that had nothing to do with its size, brass gone brown at the fittings, the grip worn pale where another man's hand had been. The sword hung at his left hip. Days three and four he had spent an hour at a time behind the deckhouse learning to load one and draw the other, badly, with nobody aboard to tell him what badly looked like.

He had not used either of them on anything yet. There had been nothing on this ship to use them on. He had been over her twice, bow to stern, and the only company aboard was a talking block of wood.

Talking objects didn't count.

The door opened onto the main deck, and the wind came in past him, cold and salt, with a wet-rope smell underneath. He stepped out and pulled the door shut and stood a moment with his hand flat on the wood, breathing.

The deckhouse ran aft of him, low and white-painted, and forward of it the main deck went out in a long plain of planking, hatches battened, pin rails empty of everything but the pins. From the deck she did not look any smaller than she had from the cabin.

The wind did what it always did. The tightness behind his ribs eased off a notch, and for the first time since the goat started talking he could get a breath all the way down to the bottom of his chest. Water went away from the hull in long gray sheets, and the whole deck smelled of salt and iron and cold, and none of it needed anything from him.

He looked up, because he always looked up.

Cloud. Rail to rail, horizon to horizon, one low dirty lid of it. No sun in it, no moon, no star, no seam or thinning anywhere a man might point at and call a direction. The light came down through it even and gray and did not change all day.

It had been like that since the hour he came aboard. He had stopped waiting for morning on the second day.

He turned around to look at the cabin, because the cabin was the only thing on this ship he had ever been able to check. The door stood shut in its frame, and above it, cut into the beam, there were letters.

He did not know them. He knew the alphabet he had been raised on and two others badly, and these were none of the three. Strokes cut deep and square into the wood, some of them doubled, some hooked at the top like a fish gaff. He looked at them the way a man looks at a word he has almost got.

Then the meaning arrived. Not word for word, the way it would come off a page — all at once, the way a smell does.

Door of the Unhomed.

He stood with that a while.

"Door of the Unhomed," he said out loud, because his own voice was still the cheapest instrument he had for testing a thing. He looked at the letters again. "The Unhomed. She could have done worse for a name."

He went along the starboard rail, past the davits with no boats in them, past an iron hatch cover with rust coming up through the paint in small orange stars, and up the iron ladder at the stern with one hand on the rail and the other on the sword, out of a habit he had built in four days and not out of any plan.

The platform up there was the best view on the ship outside the crow's nest. It ran the width of the stern, the rail at his waist, the wake going out behind in two long lines that came apart slowly and did not join again.

And the wheel.

It was heavy, black, iron-bound, the spokes worn pale where hands had held them. It stood by itself at the forward edge of the platform with nothing to do.

Dean frowned.

Something came up in him that had no business being there. A pressure. A hurry. The feeling a man gets when he hears a clock ticking somewhere in a room and cannot find the clock. It came with the sight of the wheel, not before it. He had stood on this platform three times since he came aboard, the last of them yesterday, and it had not happened.

He looked at the wheel, and the hurry got worse.

The wind changed. Not veered — changed, coming from two directions at once and then from a third, so that the sea stood up in short confused chops with no order to them and the spray came over the starboard quarter in a fine cold rain. It was not much. It would not have troubled a hull this size. He had no business being afraid of it, and he was.

He looked where the bow pointed.

The fog was across the bow. It came up out of the water with no shore under it and no foot to it, and it joined the cloud lid overhead; there was no top edge and no end of it, either side, only white going past both rails and on. It was not mist, which he had sailed through. It was not haze. It was a cliff of the stuff, and the sea went into the base of it and stopped being sea.

The Unhomed was pointed straight at it.

His hands were cold on the rail. The wind was cold and his hands were cold, and that was all that was happening to them.

He knew that fog. Not this water, not this wall — but four floors up, in a rented apartment with a bad lock on the door, there had been a window, and outside that window the fog had come up the street and eaten the streetlights one at a time and then eaten the far side of the street, and the lamp on his desk had been yellow and small and no help at all.

Whether it was the same fog he had no way to test and no intention of finding out.

The deck lifted under him, taking a swell, and he came back to himself with his hands still on the rail and the white wall nearer than it had been, and nearer again.

He was moving before he decided to.

Ten steps, boots ringing on the iron, right hand out — and then he stopped at the wheel with both hands an inch from the spokes and did not touch them.

The deck was pushing under his feet. Not much. A slow steady way on her, water going by the hull, and the wall of white getting closer the whole time he stood there doing nothing about it.

Two hundred meters of ship, and one man on her who could not sail her.

There was no one else on the deck. There was no one else on the ship.