第7章 Ice on the Wing

On the fourth day the fuel for the stove and the lamp ran out, and the weather gave them a hole. It was a narrow hole, two hours of clearer air after a night of freezing rain, and Nessa took it because a cabin with no heat and no light was a cabin they could not hold for another day. There was a fuel cache on an island two ridges east, a drum under a rock ledge that the service had left the summer before, and if she flew fast and low she could reach it and be back before the hole closed. She did the walk-around in the grey dawn with Isaak watching. The floats were clean. The struts were clean. The wing had a rim of clear ice on the leading edge from the night's rain, and she ran her glove along it and frowned. "That will pick up more in the air." "Then we do not go," he said. "Then we sit here in the dark and freeze, and when the boat comes back we are too cold to run." She climbed onto the float. "Freezing rain at this temperature puts ice on the wing faster than the forecast admits. I will fly low and slow and I will not turn. If I start to lose lift I will put it down anywhere flat and we will walk." He looked at the wing, and then at her, and then he got in. They went up into the grey. For ten minutes it was the best flying she had done all week, the lake below them running long and dark, the islands standing out clean and near, and she felt the old thing rise in her, the thing that had made her a pilot before it had made her anything else. Then the air thickened and the first rime began to form along the leading edge, white and fine, and the Merganser slowed the way a horse slows when the ground turns uphill. She fed in power and held her altitude and watched the ice grow. It grew faster than the book said it would. That was the lesson of the north, always: the book was written somewhere else. Within five minutes the rim had become a ridge, and she felt the stall creeping up on the wing like a numbness, and she made the decision she had promised herself not to make. "I am putting it down." "Where?" "East shore of the next island. There is a shingle beach under the cliff. It is short and it is not a runway, and I am going to hit it hard." She turned. The turn cost her. Halfway through it the left wing shuddered and the nose dropped and she caught it with power and a hand that knew exactly how much to give, and then the beach came up under them, grey shingle streaked with ice, and she set the Merganser down on it with a violence that drove the breath out of both of them and tore something loose in the starboard float. The plane ran up the shingle and stopped with the nose against the rock face, and the engine coughed and died. For a moment there was only the ticking of the cooling metal and the sound of the wind. "Is anything broken?" he asked. "On me? No." She flexed her right hand and felt the sharp answering pain in the wrist and did not mention it. "On the plane, the starboard float is taking water and there is a crack at the attach point. We are not flying out of here today." They got out onto the beach. The island around them was bare rock and wind, low and grey and treeless, and the cliff gave no shelter to the south where the swell was running. Isaak walked the length of the beach once and came back and stood looking at the damaged float with the same flat, cataloguing attention he gave to everything. "Can it be patched?" "With what? We have the dive bag and a hand saw." She knelt in the shingle and looked at the crack. "There is a hole in the float skin, here, above the waterline if we beach her bow-up. If I can get the water out and seal the crack with something that will hold wet, she will float long enough to get us home. In a pinch." "In a pinch," he repeated. "In a pinch." She stood up and looked at him. "You said you had worked in cold water. What kind of work?" He hesitated, and she saw the hesitation, and for once he let her see it. "Boat repair," he said. "When I was young, before the numbers. My father had a yard on the coast. I know how to make a float hold water. I do not know how to fly one." "Then you patch, and I fly." She handed him the tool roll from the plane. "There is a tube of two-part sealant in the kit. It will cure in the cold if we keep it against our bodies and warm it before we use it. It is going to be a long afternoon." It was a long afternoon. They worked side by side in the lee of the plane with the wind cutting over the cliff, and she learned the shape of his patience, the way he worked without hurry and without complaint and checked each step twice, and he learned the shape of her hands, which were quick and sure even with the wrist she was favoring, and by dusk the float was drained and sealed and beached high on the shingle and they had made a small fire of driftwood out of the wind and were sitting beside it. He had taken off his coat to work and had not put it back on, and the cold had put color in his face, and for the first time since the dock he looked less like a hunted man and more like someone she might have known in another life. "You are favoring your right wrist," he said. "You noticed." "I notice things. It is the only skill I have." He looked at the fire. "Let me see it." "It is fine." "It is not fine." He held out his hand, and when she did not move he said, quietly, "Nessa. Let me see it." She gave him her wrist. He turned it in the firelight and pressed along the bone with careful fingers and found the place that made her catch her breath, and he did not apologize for hurting her and she did not ask him to, and he wrapped it with a strip torn from the spare blanket and tied it off the way a man ties a knot he has tied a thousand times. "Sten," he said, not looking up, "was the better pilot." "Yes." "And you are the better swimmer." "I am the one who is still here," she said. "That is not the same thing." "No," he agreed. "It is worse." He let go of her wrist and sat back and looked at her across the fire. "Survivors do this. I have watched a great many people try to pay a debt that cannot be paid. It is not a virtue. It is a habit. And habits can be put down." She looked at him for a long moment, and the fire snapped, and the wind came over the cliff and took the smoke away, and she did not have an answer, and did not need one, and they sat there until the light was gone. ---