The Bearing She Kept

New log entry is up.

Grab a seat on deck. The sea is about to get loud.

✦

Nami could have reached the cove before the patrol crossed it. That was the sort of calculation that killed people: true right up to the moment the wind changed.

She held her skiff outside the pale line of the shoal and watched the Marine cutter turn under a low bank of cloud. Its sail carried the morning light. The hull did not. Dark against dark, it could have passed for a fishing boat if fishing boats kept two armed men at the bow and a lookout who never looked at the water.

Her own boat carried no flag. A folded sail lay at her feet, and the single oar made less noise than the loose block on the cutter's mast. If she stayed where she was, the cutter might sail past without noticing her.

The buoy was another matter.

It bobbed just inside the shoal, a cork float striped with the red paint she had found in a wrecked storehouse. Below it hung a net of copper fittings and folded sailcloth, salvage she had dragged out before dawn. The copper alone would pay for two decent charts and leave something to put aside. It was not a fortune. Fortunes were usually guarded by men with knives. This was honest work, apart from the part where the storehouse had belonged to pirates.

Nami had meant to take the load aboard when the tide lifted the skiff clear of the rocks. Then the cutter had come around the western point, and the tide had decided to take its time.

"Come on," she muttered to the water.

It rose a finger-width against the rock and fell again.

She could row in, hook the net, and be out in perhaps four minutes. Five if the sailcloth caught on stone. The patrol would need longer than that to cross the mouth of the cove at its present angle.

At its present angle.

She took the little board from under the thwart and laid it across her knees. Three charcoal lines marked the shore: western point, split rock, roof of an old watch shed. She had put them there at first light, before there was any reason to be afraid of the cutter. A mark was useful only if it had been made before fear started improving the facts.

The cutter passed the western point. Its bow did not line up with the split rock where she expected it. She narrowed one eye, held the charcoal upright, and checked again. The ship had turned a little toward her.

Not much. Enough.

The lookout at the bow raised an arm. Nami went still.

He was pointing at a patch of white water farther out. A gull rose from it, offended at the attention. The men behind him laughed, and the arm came down.

Nami let her breath go. She had spent years watching people point at things she could not afford to have them see. The gull had done her a favor without knowing it. She would not count on another.

The buoy knocked against the stone. Red paint flashed between two bands of foam.

If the cutter found a marked float and followed its line, the patrol would find the cargo. That was bad. If Nami brought her boat in to save the cargo, the patrol might find her. That was worse. The officer at the stern might call it recovered property and ask where she had recovered it. She had answers for both words. She did not have papers that would make him like them.

She looked from the cutter to the float. "You cost me more than you are worth."

The float bobbed, showing off.

Nami set the board under her knee and took up the knife she used for rope. The skiff was held to the shoal by a thin painter running from its stern to the buoy's short line. She had left herself a way to pull the load close when the tide rose. Now that same line made the boat part of whatever the patrol might choose to inspect.

One cut would separate them. It would also let the buoy and its net follow the current into deeper water. The cargo might lodge in another cove. It might sink. She had measured the current before dawn, but the wind had shifted since then, and she did not intend to invent a shore for the sake of feeling better.

She laid the blade against the painter.

The first strand parted. Copper clicked faintly below the float.

She stopped.

There was still time to tie the line back together. There was still time to row in and pretend the cutter had never turned. The sailcloth could patch her own sail; she had felt the old seam give on the way here. A chart seller in the next port would not lower his price because she had been cautious. The money she was putting aside did not care how hard she worked to get it.

The cutter's bow moved across the split rock.

Nami cut the second strand and pulled the free end into her boat.

The buoy drifted away from the stone. For a moment it looked almost obliging, sliding along the safe side of the shoal. Then a thread of darker water caught it and carried it toward the channel. The net sank until only the red stripe showed.

She wanted to follow. Her hands had already moved to the oar.

"No," she said, and made them stay.

The cutter kept coming. She pushed her skiff backward with two shallow strokes, careful not to splash, and tucked it into the lee of a low rock. From there she could see the patrol through a gap and little else. If the men saw the float, she could not see their faces. If they came closer, she had room to run west along the rock and no room to turn around.

The price of that shelter was information. Nami stood just high enough to find the lookout again. He had gone back to watching the horizon. The officer at the stern held a folded sheet in one hand and pointed with the other. Not at the buoy. Toward Orange Town, where smoke made a gray bruise above the roofs.

The cutter adjusted its sail.

Nami had expected it to work along the coast. Instead it crossed the current at an angle that would take it outside the town's eastern approach. The change might have been a patrol pattern. It might have been the officer avoiding the smoke. She could observe the bearing. She could not make his motive fit in the same small box.

She waited for the cutter to clear the split rock, then scratched a new line on the board. The mark began where she had actually seen the turn and ended where the ship stood now. Beside it she wrote the time by the sun's height and a question mark, not a name for the destination.

The board was not much to look at. It would keep her from using the western point as if the ship had never changed course. That mattered more than a beautiful chart with a false straight line.

The cutter passed the drifting buoy. One of the men at the bow glanced down. Nami felt the glance in her throat. The float turned in the wake, flashed red, and rolled with its dark side up. The man looked away.

She did not move until the cutter was beyond the eastern point.

Then she rowed after the buoy for three strokes.

It had gone farther than it should have. The copper pulled low; the sailcloth, soaked and heavy, dragged the whole net toward the bottom. If she followed it into the channel, the cutter would still be close enough to look back. If she waited, there might be nothing to retrieve.

Nami set the oar across the gunwales. She watched the last red edge disappear beneath a wave and marked its position against the watch shed roof. The next swell hid the spot. The one after that showed no float at all.

She could come back later. She did not promise herself she would find anything.

The skiff rocked. Wind worried the fold of her sail.

"Two charts," she said to the empty boat. "You owed me two charts."

Nobody argued. That was one of the few advantages of sailing alone.

She put the board in a waxed sleeve and tied the sleeve inside her coat. The knife went beside it. A loose knot at the stern had begun to unravel where she had yanked the severed painter aboard. She retied it twice, because the first knot was angry and anger made poor knots.

Only then did she look at Orange Town.

The smoke over the square had thickened. Pirate colors showed above a roofline when the wind pulled them straight. That flag told her nothing about what was locked inside the town or who would be left to guard it. It told her the shore would be watched from the streets, not only from the sea.

She had wanted a quieter landing. The inlet east of the watch shed would put her behind a row of warehouses, but the patrol's new bearing crossed that water. The west beach offered cover among broken pilings. It also meant carrying her staff and the few tools she still had across open stones, in sight of anyone posted on the roofs.

Nami studied the board again. The eastern inlet was not closed forever. It was wrong while the cutter held that course. She had paid for that distinction with the load under the water; she might as well use it.

She turned west.

The oar pulled against a contrary current. Her shoulder began to ache after a dozen strokes. By twenty, the town seemed no nearer. A burst of laughter carried from the shore, then stopped too suddenly. Nami lowered her head and kept the skiff close to the rocks.

At the beach she dragged the bow above the wash and tied it to a piling that looked rotten but held when she tested it. She covered the hull with an old net. It did not make the boat invisible. It made it less interesting than the damaged fishing gear around it.

She had no copper to hide now. She still checked the knot on the skiff before she left.

A woman was closing a shutter on the nearest house. Their eyes met across the lane. The woman looked at Nami's staff, then toward the pirate flag. She pulled the shutter in without a word.

Nami could have asked which streets were occupied. That would put a stranger's answer between her and a route she had not measured. It would also make the woman remember her. Neither seemed fair to the woman, and neither helped if she guessed.

She climbed the warehouse steps and found a view of the roofs. The square was hidden, but the wind brought the stink of powder and hot paint. There were routes over the buildings; there would be guards on at least one. She watched a pair of striped sleeves cross a gap and counted the time until they crossed it again.

The interval changed on the second pass. One of the men had stopped somewhere she could not see.

Nami drew a short charcoal stroke on the edge of the board. She left the space after it blank. It would have been easy to fill it with a neat patrol circuit. The space was more useful empty.

Far out, the cutter's sail vanished beyond the point. No signal passed between it and the town that she could see. A ship going one way and pirates guarding another did not make a story until someone supplied a connection. She had no reason to be that generous.

The loss in the channel still sat beneath her ribs. She touched the sleeve inside her coat to be sure the board was there. A direction observed once could be wrong. A direction she had written with its time and landmarks could at least be checked.

She waited until the striped sleeves reappeared. Then she slipped off the steps and into the narrow street below the roofs, carrying what she knew and leaving what she had lost to the tide.

✦

✦

✦

Need the next island already?

Patreon is ahead of the public release, with early chapters, previews, and extra story updates.

www.patreon.com/c/thehakilog