Episode 88 · The Bell in the Fog

The fog had taken the quay from Tesa. For a moment she saw the paths beneath her own tree instead. A thin light ran through a plant she had not seen awake before. A stone lay at its base, and a name was cut into it.

Arn.

Nobody stood beside it. She touched the plant. Then the bell sounded, and the branches were gone.

— Round II —

The oars entered the water together, and Arn heard every one of them.

He could see nothing. The fog had lain over the sea since dawn and had not lifted even when the sun should have been high. He could not see the ship’s bow, or the sail furled against the mast, or even the boy standing forward with a hand on the wooden dragon’s head, listening. He could see only his own hand on the rudder, the black wood polished by the palms of other helmsmen before him.

He needed no more. Arn could hear where things were.

It had been that way since he was small, since his father had set him at the helm on a moonless night and left him alone to see what he would do. Arn had done nothing. He had listened. He heard where a wave broke on rock, where it stopped, where the water was deep and where it was not. He brought the ship home through the dark, and his father looked at him like a stranger wearing his son.

Now, in the fog, he heard the bell.

A small bronze bell hung at the stern of the black ship. It rang with every wave. The man who had killed Arn’s brother never took it down. He boasted about it in the ports: everyone heard it, everyone ran when they heard it. Arn had not run. He had followed it by sound for three days, ever since the salt islands.

— He’s close, Arn said.

He did not raise his voice. Everything could be heard aboard the ship anyway.

The oldest of the oarsmen sat on the second bench with his back to Arn and rowed. He did not turn.

— So are the rocks, he said.

Arn heard those too. To the left, still far away, the sea broke against something that did not move. A long, low sound with a hiss at the end, like a man drawing air through his teeth. The Fangs. That was what the fishermen called them. No one sailed among the Fangs in fog.

But the bell had gone in.

— He knows the way through, the old man said. We don’t.

— I can hear him.

— You hear the bell. You don’t hear what’s under the water.

Arn did not answer. The boy at the bow turned toward him, and Arn heard the motion: his neck, his woolen hood brushing his shoulder. The boy was his brother’s son. He was fourteen and had rowed for three days without complaint, because he knew whom they were chasing.

— Uncle, the boy said. I can hear the sea on the right too.

Arn heard it as well. The Fangs now stood on both sides. The bell rang between them, straight ahead, growing fainter along the route known only to the man on the black ship.

He could turn back. He knew it as surely as he knew where each oar was. He could shout “Back,” and the men would obey, because they always had. They would leave the Fangs the way they had entered. They would go home. And the man with the bell would go home too, and tell people in the ports how the brother of the man he killed had run away.

— Ten more strokes, Arn said.

The oars entered the water. One. Two. The old man rowed with his head bowed, and Arn heard his breathing change the way a man’s does when he prays without moving his lips.

On the seventh, the bell stopped.

It had not moved away. It had stopped. Someone was holding it in his hand.

Arn understood too late, his hand on the rudder and the whole sea in his ears. The man on the black ship was not fleeing. He had led them there. He waited somewhere in the fog, in safe water, the bell closed in his fist, and he was listening too.

— Back! Arn shouted.

The ship struck the Fangs on the ninth stroke.

The sound was unlike anything he had heard. It was not a blow. It was a long grinding from below, in the belly of the ship, as though the sea itself were gnawing the wood with its teeth. The rudder tore free of his hands. The deck reared to one side. Men fell from the benches over one another, and the oars broke with dry cracks, one after another, like bones.

The water came cold, everywhere at once.

Arn did not fight it. There was no use. He seized the rudder, now floating free, and listened.

He heard them all. He could see no one, but he heard them. The old man, ten arm-lengths to the left, cursing in his old voice, then coughing, then nothing. The two brothers from the fourth bench calling each other by name. The man who could not swim, who did not shout but only slapped the water with his hands, quickly, then less and less often.

The boy. At the bow, or where the bow had been. He called to him.

— Uncle!

Arn heard exactly where he was. He knew how far, in which direction, how deep the water lay between them. He knew he could not reach him. The Fangs were between them, and the sea was pulling toward them.

— Hold on to wood! he shouted. Any wood!

The boy called him once more. Then the sea broke over rock where his voice had been, with a long, low sound and a hiss.

Arn stayed with the rudder in his arms.

The cold climbed his legs. Nothing hurt anymore. He listened as the sea grew quiet around him, as no one shouted anymore, as only the waves on the Fangs could be heard and, far away, the bell again. It rang with each wave and moved out toward open sea without hurry, along the route only its owner knew.

Arn followed it with his ears until he could no longer hear it.

Then he could no longer hear the sea either.

❦