THE BALLAST

Bram Sallis kept the weight of the harbor, and the harbor did not know it was being kept.

His yard ran the length of the inner boardwalk, forty paces of stone stacked by origin: grey northern granite, the pale cuts off the far islands with their quarry marks still on them, dark basalt from the south that held more in a hand than it looked. Every ship came into Vess one of two ways. Full, and it sat low and asked nothing of him. Light, and it had sold down to the ribs and rode too high, and in the first squall it would roll its guts over the rail unless it took on stone. Bram weighed the stone and set the lines. No hull left the harbor sound without his hand in it; none left without Odile Vantre's word on its papers up at the north window. One weight, one word, and the harbor trusted neither alone.

He knew every stone in the yard. Nobody had told him the job would be that, so he had learned it the long way. A stone is not a stone. Granite holds weight in a small room and sits flat. The pale island cuts hold the same weight in twice the space and lie warm in the hand, like something that had been out in a sun. Ships came from places he would never stand on and left their ground on his boards, and he stacked the ground by where it came from, out of respect, which may have been a foolishness, but it was his.

At the turn of the tide the two Xeth walked the boards, and the fog kept a Draknid four rows over, and Bram had long stopped needing to know which of the Xeth was on patrol and which was the coat.

There was one stone that was not in the trade.

It sat on a shelf inside his shed above the ledger, flat and green and the size of his palm, worn smooth on one side as though the sea had held it a long while and then changed its mind. He had taken it off the ballast of the Marrow the night she came in light, the last ship his wife sailed on, hired cook for a week because she could not be still. The Marrow had needed weight; he had given her stones. And loading, he had reached into the pile and lifted this one out for no reason he could name and put it in his coat, and she had laughed at him from the rail and asked what it was, and he had said, my ballast, and she had said, you are steady enough, Bram, and gone out on the tide.

The Marrow came back in eleven days. She did not.

So he kept the stone. A man needs his own weight or he floats too high; grief was the weight he had, and it had held him down in the world near twelve years, which was a mercy on the mornings it was anything at all. He wiped the salt off it when it got salt on it, which it should not have, indoors, and did.

Tonight a ship came in light and needing ballast. A house hull, Vanderfar colors faded the color of tea, and the young master came up the boards with the weight the yard owed him already written on a slip. Bram read it, went to the piles, and found the yard short.

Not by much. By one stone's worth. He stood in his own yard doing the sum again, because the sum was his whole life, and it did not change. A storm was coming; two hulls were already booked to sail on the morning tide; he was one weight short. The young man did not know it. A slip is a slip, and the yard said the weight was there. Bram could have loaded him a fraction under his line and no man alive would have weighed it. The hull would have sailed, and if the squall was kind it would have made port, and if the squall was unkind the sea would have taken it for a fraction, which is how the sea takes most things.

He had done the sum that way once in his life. It had cost him the one thing he could not weigh, and he had sworn to nothing and no one to never do it again, which was the only vow a man like him could keep.

He stood a long time. The tide turned and the Xeth passed and the lamp at the north window burned its one cheap word over the harbor, and Bram went inside the shed.

He took the green stone off the shelf and held it, warm, smooth on the sea side and rough on the quarry side, and it weighed what a thing weighs when you have carried it twelve years. He set it on the counter. He picked it up. He set it down again.

Then he carried it out and put it in the young master's hands.

"This one's yours now," he said. "Low tier, starboard, at the turn. It sits flat. It'll hold."

The young man looked at the plain green stone and at the old man and did not ask. The harbor has one courtesy and it is this, and Bram took it.

He watched the hull take the tide with his stone in its belly, sitting a fraction lower and steadier for it, and the fog took it, and he did not know whether it would come back, and that was not his to know.

He went back to the ledger. He wrote the line. Ship, house, master, weight. And under the column, where no inspector looked, he wrote the green stone out of the trade and into the water, and it did not feel like losing. It felt like ballast, which is a thing that holds you down and a thing you set down, and he had never understood until now that they were the same word, and that a harbor is only the place where weight is passed from hand to hand, and nobody, in the end, keeps it.

The lamp did not go out. The Xeth walked. The fog kept the whole account.