Daniel Hatch - In Forest Afloat Upon the Sea

Blake was clearly concerned with more immediate problems.

“All right, let’s get organized. Miriam, light off down the path and find Pastor Kline, let him know there’s a ship coming. Telly and Eppie, you’re coming up to the bridge with me. Ivan, you stay down here and man the plotting board—you’re quick enough to help up topside, but you’re just too big to take up in the hoist with the rest of us.”

Ivan frowned, but it wasn’t serious. Telly knew he was nervous atop the bridge and was just as happy to remain below.

The navigator collected his equipment—a whiteboard, his own sextant, a battle-scarred long glass from the Pirate Wars—and whistled up to the bridge. “Three on the hoist,” he reported.

They entered the cramped box while the watchstander shifted ballast weights up above. A moment later, Blake and Telly began cranking the windlass.

It was a difficult and sweaty job to get them up the tall tower to the bridge—even with the counterweights taking off most of the load. When they reached the top, Blake opened the hoist door, and they all spilled out onto the bridge wing. Telly felt quick relief as the wind hit him square on—here on the North Equatorial the trades blew unceasingly, pushing the waters and the floats along day after long day.

He looked over the rail briefly at the forest floor seventy meters below. It made him feel more than a little dizzy, so he shifted his attention to the tops of the steelwoods and mast trees that danced in the breeze only a few meters beneath the bridge.

Schenker Float was almost ten kilometers across, but from up here, it looked so small—and to Telly almost as confining as it felt. Down there were all the boringly familiar landmarks of his life. The hog farm spread off to the east—a barren patch in the otherwise rich greenery of the float where the poisons from the livestock dissolved the native vegetation. Villages were barely visible through the woods on the float’s port side. The Great Lagoon to the south and the smaller lagoons around the compass seemed to glow with a turquoise light.

The paths connecting them were more than tracks through the trees, they were lines burned into Telly’s mind and impressed onto his memory. Their unchanging constancy, like everything else about Schenker, formed the chains that bound him to its ground.

But from up here, Telly could also see all that made him feel free and alive—the sea and the sky. The endless sea that wrapped Okeanos with waves without end was dotted with countless bergs—some large enough to sprout spar trees and yardwoods. To Telly, they looked like dozens of miniature floats—the ocean made small enough to see all Schenker’s distant neighbors at once.

And the sky was filled with countless fluffy white clouds, chains and columns, trailing off upwind and downwind, making barricades around the horizon. Gray clouds were piling up on the southwest side of the float, trailing gauzy rain across Fishing Village. To the southeast the bright white dot of the Furnace burned painfully bright in a deep azure sky.

Also to the south, near the horizon, Telly saw the sparkling white triangles of a ship’s sails emerging from the distant haze.

“Eppie, you uncover the heliograph,” Blake said. “They’ll be in range in a little while. Telly, I want you to help me track them. Maybe we can even get some good triangulation bearings to figure their distance.”

Telly’s moment of inspiration at the grand view of the world was swept away by the needs of the moment. He went to one end of the bridge and unlimbered the peloris while Blake did the same at the other end.

It took them several minutes to get bearings that were accurate enough to calculate the distance—more than eleven miles.

“If you were sailing master, how would you approach us?” Blake asked as they put their heads together over the whiteboard.

Telly looked upwind, then off to the south. “I guess I’d have to come up on the west side of the float and tack in from the northwest to get to the docks.”

“Good guess,” Blake said. “How long do you think it’ll take them?”

Telly shrugged. “I don’t know. I’d need a plotting board to work it out.”

“You shouldn’t. Not if you know your sailing. I give them four hours if they’ve got a clean hull.”

“I’m ready with the heliograph,” Eppie called.

Blake hustled down the platform to where she stood next to the vaned shutters. Telly put his eye to the peloris to get a better view of the sailing vessel. It had two masts and three sails—two big ones on the masts and a jib rigged out front. It had to be more than thirty meters long.

“Go ahead,” Blake said. Eppie slapped the shutters open and shut rapidly three times, waited, then repeated the signal. A minute later she did it again. A third try produced a response—three flashes from the main deck of the schooner.

“All right!” Eppie shouted.

“Send this message,” Blake ordered. “Welcome to Schenker Float. Mooring and docks bearing 330 true from here.”

The shutters clapped quickly. Eppie was good at working the heliograph, even better than he was.

A couple minutes after she’d finished the message the reply began to flash across the sea. Telly started reading the code, but had trouble keeping track as Blake spoke it aloud. “Ahoy… Schenker… Hospital… Ship… Relief… Nine… Days… Out… Of… Bishop… Anchorage… break.”

Telly’s heart leapt skywards at the news. Bishop Anchorage. Sacred words that were inscribed in the navigation manuals and almanacs in the chart house below. Words he had memorized as a child, when he first had dreamed of fixing the position of the float against the sea and stars. “Published by the Navigation School, Bishop Anchorage.”

From that moment on, as far as Telly was concerned, no one afloat on Okeanos was as important as a navigator. They were the link between the inhabitants of thousands of isolated floats. Fishermen could not venture beyond sight of home, merchants could not trade, pastors could not communicate, and physicians could not visit the sick and injured without a navigator to find the way.

Long before his first lessons with Duncan Blake, Telly had imagined himself a student in the school at Bishop Anchorage, learning the secrets of the craft. Before he knew what the calling involved—long weeks at sea far from anchorages or floats, through fair weather and foul, in crowded quarters aboard leaking ships. But as he grew and learned, the burdens never seemed to outweigh the romance.

Graduates from a navigation school could write their own tickets. You could work your way around the world, sailing from anchorage to anchorage on a merchant ship or man-of-war. Blake had studied in the school at Crawford Anchorage in the South Einstein, but Telly had always set his sights on Bishop—for no other reason than that it was known to him.

Now it was less than nine days’ sail away.

And it might as well have been on the other side of the world, he realized suddenly. His heart dropped like a wounded bird as he thought of what he would have to do next.

There was no chance he could leave for Bishop Anchorage without the permission of his parents. He wasn’t of age yet—and when he would be, in two more watch-years, Bishop would be far behind them.

But the thought of asking his mother if he could leave Schenker Float for the wider world made him shiver. His hopes fluttered, dying on the wind while barely out of the nest.

They tracked the ship for two hours, watching it make its way along the course Blake had described. It worked its way up the west side of the float until it was a few points north of due west, then it came about and headed straight back towards them on its southeasterly tack.