Fog Day at Pell’s Bench
Pell patched airship envelopes on the quays at Cloudbreak, at a bench where every needle lay in a row from the smallest to the largest. The room behind the bench was another matter. It was full to the rafters with bolts of cloth in every color Pell had ever failed to resist, which was all of them.
The outside of an envelope has to be sensible. The inside is nobody’s business, and Pell had made it Pell’s business. Pell lined things the way other people take second helpings.
Nine days ago Pell had promised Ferris the Cloud-Ferryman that the new envelope for his ferry would be ready tomorrow. Then the lining had arrived. It was saffron, the color of an egg yolk with the sun on it, and Pell had spent a good part of the nine tomorrows since just looking at it.
The plan for the tenth morning was simple. Ferris would take the ferry up one last time under the old faded blue, and when he came back Pell would lace on the new one. Then the fog came up.
At Cloudbreak the fog usually lies underneath the harbor, flat and white, like a floor nobody has to sweep. That morning it had come up over the quays instead. It was soft and thick and quiet, and nothing could fly in it. The sky-ships sat on their lines. The dock wards under them glowed like lamps with a cloth thrown over. People went along the quays with one hand out in front of them, the way people cross their own kitchen without a candle.
There was nothing else to do with the morning, so the new envelope went on early. The old blue came down and lay folded at the end of Pell’s bench, and Ferris sat beside it with nothing to do. In Ferris, nothing to do always came out as opinions.
“It’s very yellow,” Ferris said.
“It’s saffron,” Pell said.
“It’s very saffron.”
The worst of it, for Ferris, was the hood. The ferry had a little hood over the steering seat, cut from the same cloth as the envelope and lined the same way. Of all that lining, the hood was the only part anybody would ever see, and the person who would see it was Ferris, all the way to the Hollow and back.
“I carried a hatmaker once,” Ferris said. “She said yellow was a loud color. She also said fog is only cloud being lazy.” He looked at the fog, which had come up instead of staying where it was put. “I’ll have to give her a point for today.”
Ferris remembered every passenger he had ever carried, and every argument any of them had ever had with him about the weather, and he kept score. The hatmaker was now on five. A cheesemonger from the Hollow, who held that fog was the sky trying to come indoors, was on three.
A voice came out of the fog from somewhere near the stairs. “Pell? Is the Gannet’s patch done?”
“Tomorrow!” Pell called.
“You said that yesterday,” said the voice, and went away.
Nobody on the quays believed Pell’s tomorrows. They were kindly said and sincerely meant, and they arrived, as a rule, about a week late.
But Pell had two things to do that day, and neither of them was patching. The first was a rematch. In the spring Ferris had won their last game by a whole lantern, talking all through the Night round about a man who believed hail was aimed at him personally. Pell had been practicing ever since. The second thing was a secret, and it needed Ferris to be somewhere else for about an hour.
“I’d have liked the last run under the old one,” Ferris said. It was the only soft thing he said all morning, and he said it to the fog.
“Tomorrow,” Pell said.
“Tomorrow it goes in your scrap basket.”
“Tomorrow,” said Pell again, and shook out the old envelope across the bench like a tablecloth.
It was a soft, tired blue, the color of a shirt washed a thousand times. In one corner were nineteen patches, overlapping like roof slates. Ferris came in to the quay the same way every single time, a little fast and a little to the left, so the mooring hook caught the same corner every single time. Pell had mended it nineteen times, and Ferris had chalked a nineteen on the ferry’s stern to keep count. Inside each patch, where nobody ever looked, Pell had stitched a tiny P.
Pell set the board down in the middle of the blue. “Loser fetches the packets.”
“Have you been practicing?”
“Every night for a month.”
“I haven’t,” Ferris said, “and I won’t. I play when there’s a game. When there isn’t a game, I don’t. That’s the whole of it.” He took out his deck. It was the same deck he had always had, soft at the corners. The Rain Cloud had once been dropped in a puddle and had a tidemark across it. “Still rains,” Ferris said, when he saw Pell looking. “That’s all I ask of a rain cloud.”
The practice had been done in the chart room, against Ilex. Pell had written down exactly how Ferris played, and Ilex had played it exactly as written. She opened with the Rain Cloud every Morning. She held the Moonlit Whale back for every Night. She would not say a word while she did it. The notes recorded what Ferris played, not what Ferris talked about, and she was not going to make up a ferryman. Pell paid her a chapter of the serial for every game, and she would not let Pell say one word about what happened next.
So the Morning went the way the notes said. Ferris’s Rain Cloud came up off its card, tidemark and all, and hung over his lanterns, raining very gently on the board.
“As if there wasn’t enough weather,” Ferris said.
Out in the fog, somebody started banging a spoon on a pan.
When the fog comes up at Cloudbreak, the stall-holders who sell hot paper packets bang spoons on their pans so that hungry people can find them by ear. Soon there were spoons all along the quays. Ferris knew every one.
“Two bangs and a stop, that’s cheese and onion,” he said, and laid a card. “The one that can’t keep time is the pepper bread. I carried his mother up the day he opened the stall. She said there was no such thing as a light drizzle. Only rain, being polite.”
“Is that a point?”
“It’s a half.”
He talked all through the Afternoon. He talked about a boy who wanted to know where the wind went on its day off. He talked about the hatmaker again, and gave her the point again, and then took it back because he had already given it. Ilex had never once done this. Pell found it very hard to count lanterns and listen to the hatmaker at the same time, and twice nearly played the Kind Gust too early. Twice Pell put it back.
Then came the Night round, and Ferris laid the Moonlit Whale, the way he always had.
It rose off the card about the size of a loaf, silver and very calm, with a little moon of its own on its back. It swam slowly over the board in the fog. Ferris looked pleased with it. He always did.
Pell played the Kind Gust.
The Gust picked up the Whale as gently as a sleeping cat is lifted off a chair, carried it to the edge of the board, and set it adrift. The Whale sailed off into the fog, not at all put out, still wearing its little moon. With nothing in the way, Pell’s Lantern Page walked across the board and put out one of Ferris’s lanterns, very politely.
When the Night was done, Pell had two lanterns lit and Ferris had one.
Ferris looked at the board for a while. “One lantern,” he said.
“One lantern,” said Pell, who had wanted this since the spring and found it every bit as good as hoped.
“That settles the game.” Ferris stood up and buttoned his coat. “It doesn’t settle the saffron.”
“I know.”
“Two cheese and onion?”
“Two,” said Pell, and Ferris went off into the fog after the spoons.
The moment he was gone, Pell took the big shears off the hook.
The shears went through the old blue in one clean square, all nineteen patches together. Then Pell climbed into the ferry with the square and a needle, sat down in Ferris’s seat, and looked up at the hood.
Pell had planned this on the walk home from the chart room, every night since the saffron came. Out came a square of saffron, right over the seat. In went the old blue, wrong side out, on purpose, so that the nineteen little Ps faced down. The stitches were small and even and quick. Out on the quays the spoons went on banging, and somewhere among them was Ferris, arguing with the pepper bread man about whether fog is wet.
By the time Ferris came back, the old blue was folded with the hole on the inside and Pell was sitting at the bench looking innocent. Looking innocent, it should be said, is much harder than patching.
Ferris put down two cheese and onion. Then he put down a pepper bread, which was Pell’s favorite and sold out every morning by nine.
“They had too many,” Ferris said.
Toward dusk the fog began to thin. First the dock wards came out from under their cloth, one by one. Then the masts, then the stairs, then the lamps along the rail, and at last, far off, the white floor of cloud lying down below the harbor where it belonged.
“The hatmaker loses the point,” Ferris said, and went to check the envelope.
He checked it the way he did everything, the same way every time. He went along every lace with his thumb. He looked at every seam and said nothing about any of them, which from Ferris was praise. Then he climbed in, sat down, and looked up at the saffron he would have to look at all the way to the Hollow.
In the middle of the saffron, right over his head, there was a square of old faded blue. It had nineteen patches on it, one over another like roof slates. In the corner of each patch, in very small stitches, was a P.
Ferris looked at it for about as long as it takes to count to nineteen. On the quay, Pell became very busy with a needle that did not need anything doing to it.
“That’ll do,” Ferris said.
That was all he said. He did not rub the nineteen off the stern. He cast off from the quay, a little fast and a little to the left. Then he took the ferry up into the lit evening, with the saffron glowing all round him and the old blue over his head.
He flew all night through the deep blue air, with the lamps of the road going by below, and he came down at Lantern Hollow with the first of Juniper’s morning bells. So it was tomorrow, and Ferris was flying under the old blue, just as Pell had said. It was the first of Pell’s tomorrows anyone could remember arriving on the right day. Ferris counted it, being a man who counts things, and gave Pell the point.
So the old blue got its last run after all, and then it simply kept going. It flew over Ferris’s seat on every run after that, faded and patched and signed nineteen times. Whenever a passenger asked about it, Ferris said it would do, and then he looked up at it, glad, the whole way there.