Chương 95: The High Ground

The mouth of the cut had been the end of a street once, before the sea took the low city. Now it was a black gap under the harbor road, as wide as the street it used to be, with the water going in under the stones. The swells came out of it one after another, as even as breaths, and they had been coming since before dawn. Dobbs put everything Calder had in front of that gap. He gave the orders at first light, from the harbor steps, loud enough to reach the end boat.

"Everything under this city has one door big enough to use, and you're looking at it. If it comes out here, it comes out into us, a boat's width at a time. If it picks its own doors, we're hunting it out of the drains until summer. So we stand at the door." He looked along the boats.

"Nobody puts a hand in the water they don't have to. Nobody plays hero. You hold your place and you let the work come to you." Then he said the other half, in the same voice, and nobody made a sound while he said it.

"You all heard what else the boy found down there. If the water stands up, you're done fighting. Boats to the piers, everybody up the wall, and you don't wait for me to say it twice." The punts stood in a wide curve off the mouth, close enough together that no gap between them was wider than a boat. Every hand in them held iron, boathooks and crowbars and the long pry bars off the shed wall. The two piers either side of the gap had men on them with ropes.

All three of Calder's guards were down on the harbor steps with the hooked poles off the station wall. Colin was on the bottom steps with his crowbar. Someone from the shed had tried to get him to go up the wall with the others and had given up. He'd held a doorway all Friday night and he had decided, out loud, that steps were the same job.

"Where do you want me?" Abe asked.

"In front." Dobbs didn't look up from the tide sheets he no longer trusted, spread flat on the crate with stones on the corners.

"You're the only thing I've got that can stand in the water, so stand in it. The shallows between the boats and the steps. Whatever gets through the line is yours before it reaches the stone." He put one more stone on the sheets.

"And when I call you somewhere, you come. Don't make me send a boat to fetch you."

"Right," said Abe. Nobody had gone back inside the Bell House. The cut ran under its floor the same as it ran under everything else, and after Friday night, nobody was going to sit over that dark again and listen to it. So at dawn all six hundred of them came out with their blankets and their children. Mrs. Garside said the sensible place was the school, up the hill, and no one went, including her. After three days, nobody could stand being somewhere they could not see the water.

By full light, the city stood along the wall, looking down at it. Mullen had a soup hatch going out of two washtubs, and he was telling every crew that came past the same thing.

"My hip says it starts falling tomorrow," he said, ladling.

"Get through today and you can all sleep in." Mrs. Amery had her folding chair up on the wall with her bag open beside it and her paperback shut. Peg had the crew routes weighted flat on a table. June was at the back of the crowd with a little kid on each arm, keeping the youngest ones from the hall out of everybody's way. Tench was down on the steps with the hauling line, an iron bar in his good hand, and nobody had asked him for a card.

"DOLAN!" Croft, from up on the wall, hands around his mouth, cheerful as a man at a race.

"It's Saturday! You owe me an hour in the yard, so don't get eaten!" Abe raised the bar at him without turning around, and the near end of the crowd laughed. Six hundred people wanted very badly to laugh at something. Piers Danforth stood far along the wall with the Salt Row people, and watched. Prosser stood at the edge of the wall with his watch in his hand. He'd been counting the swells since before the sun cleared the roofs. He kept catching people looking, and apologized every time, and went on counting.

"Twenty-six seconds between swells," he said to Dobbs, when Dobbs came past.

"It was thirty-one when I started. Thirty, really. I lost one to a gull." Dobbs nodded and went on down the steps. The rain had thinned to the kind you stop noticing. The swells rolled out of the dark under the road, crossed the harbor, and broke against the punts. The boats rode them and stayed in their curve. Between the crowd and the boats there was a long stretch of nothing, gray water and gray light. Abe stood in the middle of it up to his thighs, with the bar hanging from his hand.

The whole city could see him, so there was no stopping the world today. That was fine. He had never needed the world stopped to swing it. Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

"Twenty," said Prosser, up on the wall. Then, not long after, in a different voice, "Twelve." The swells stopped. The last one rolled out from under the road, crossed the harbor, and broke against the boats, and nothing came behind it. The water at the gap went flat. It stayed flat long enough that Prosser's count died in his mouth. Every hand in the boats got a second grip on its iron. Somewhere up on the wall a baby was crying and being bounced, and that was the only sound anywhere. Then the mouth turned white.

They came out under each other and over each other, like water comes out of a broken hydrant. Wet backs the color of brick, three and four across, filling the gap wall to wall, riding their own wave out into the daylight. Behind them came more. Behind those, the water was already humping up with the next lot before the first had cleared the piers. The first ones out never reached a boat. The guards' poles took two off the top of the wave.

Purnell's crew broke three more against the pier stones before the things had worked out where the daylight was. Cottle said "Left," once, and the punt came around, and three boathooks met the next one in the air. The wall came apart with noise. Six hundred people had held their breath while the water was flat, and the first dead thing let all of it out at once. Croft's voice carried over the top of it, telling the guards which one to hit next, as if any of them could hear a word.

Abe stood in front of the steps and killed whatever the boats let through. The first came at him along the surface and he hit it out of the air. It was dead before the spray came down. The second was already there, under the first, coming along the bottom like a crab. He put the bar through it without waiting to see the first one land. Up on the wall they were still shouting about the first when the second rolled belly-up against the stones. After that he stopped keeping them separate.

They came one and two at a time, between the boats and under them. He moved through the shallows hitting whatever was nearest, and none of it touched him. His feet knew the bottom. At some point he realized he was grinning, and did nothing about it. The wall roared his name every time the bar came down, and he had stopped feeling bad about liking that. The biggest one yet came at him fast and low. He used Croft's footwork, one small step out of its way, and hit it behind the head as it went past.

Up on the wall, Croft's voice went over everything again, and this time there were no words in it. For a while the work went well, and everybody could see it. Dead things bumped along the pier stones in rows. The curve of boats held its shape. Purnell talked her crew through it the whole time. She laughed her gull laugh whenever a swing landed, and her crew stayed loose because she was loud. But it kept coming. The gap had not been empty once since the first wave.

For every one that died on the poles there were two behind it. Behind those, the water under the road was full of backs, deep into the dark. There were too many to count. A swell got under the punt nearest the steps and threw it. It came down half on the stones with a crack of boards. Colin was under the bow of it, pinned from the hip down, with the next wave already coming back for him. Nell Mott got there before anyone.

She came down through the hauling line, got both hands under the side of the boat, and stood up. The punt went off him into the air like it was empty. She stood on the bottom step holding a boat over her head, and what she shouted was "PULL HIM OUT!" Sam Ottley was already in the water doing it. He got Colin under the arms and hauled. One of the things came up the steps and landed on his back with everything it had, claws working.

It was on him for four long seconds, and he kept both hands on Colin through all of it. Then Abe crossed the shallows and took it from him and broke it against the pier. Ottley came up soaked, one fist still closed in the back of Colin's shirt. There was not a mark on him anywhere. He looked down at himself, and then up at the wall, and spread his arms wide.

"DID YOU SEE THAT!"

"Look at him!" Purnell yelled across the water, rowing the whole time.

"He's having the time of his LIFE!" And the near end of the wall laughed with her. The line was bending. The curve of boats had been a curve all morning, and now it was a sagging string, dragged back toward the steps a yard at a time by the plain weight of what kept coming. The swamped punt's crew were up on the stones, hauled out by the line, one of them cradling an arm. Mrs. Amery's end of the wall had people waiting at it now.

Colin had been carried up first, swearing the whole way about his crowbar, which was still down on the steps. Dobbs's voice went along the boats, flat as ever, no faster than it had been at dawn, and the line obeyed it and gave up another yard. And the first of them got past. It went wide of the end boat, low in the water, too far out for any pole. It crossed the open harbor with its wake showing, in over the drowned streets where the roofs came up out of the water, and then it was gone into the low city.

A second went after it. Then two more, around the other end of the line, one of them dragging a broken boathook in its side. After that there was always at least one in the open water, swimming for the streets. There was nobody left down there for them to find. But every one that got past was loose under Calder now, and would still be loose tomorrow. The far end of the wall saw it first, and the sound up there stopped being cheering.

"Crew four," said Dobbs, and pointed at the low city. Crew four peeled out of the line and went after the escaped ones. The string of boats stretched thinner to close the space where they'd been. Three guards, the weekend crews, one boy, one healer in a folding chair. And the mouth still giving. Abe broke the last of a pair against the pier and stood in the churned water, chest heaving, waiting for the next one. The next one didn't come. Out at the gap, the water had gone flat again.

Along the boats, men straightened up over their iron one by one. Up on the wall the shouting fell away to single voices, people asking each other whether it was over.

"Prosser," said Dobbs, without turning around. Prosser had his watch up. His mouth was moving. He'd gotten a long way past twelve.

"It's stopped," he said. Then he leaned out over the edge, and his voice came out too high.

"No. It hasn't stopped." The water over the mouth was rising. All of it at once, the whole width of the gap and the harbor in front of it, coming up in one smooth hill that did not break and did not roll anywhere. The boats nearest it began to slide backward off the swell of it, oars digging. The hill of water stood higher than the piers now, higher than any swell all morning, and it was still getting taller.