第84章 The Outer Gate

The run south of the headland was two hours in a following sea with the dark waning, and then the engine came down, the canvas came off her, and they went in under oar the last three hundred yards, because Callum said a gate that had kept its own counsel for three hundred years should not be announced with a motor. The light came up colorless and flat, the sky the white of wet salt, and the water in the lee of the old breakwater fell away from the shore as if a plug had been drawn — not the ordinary ebb. It was the year's own withdrawal, the long age of the sea going out past the land's memory of its own shape, and the capstones came up first, black and streaming, in a ragged spine that walked out to sea. Then the gate-posts, two squared shoulders of stone taller than a man standing chest-deep, and between them, as the last of the ebb slid off it, the sill — a single great slab, furred with centuries of weed, running from post to post like a wall that had decided to become a road. They anchored out in the channel beyond the gate and went in over the stern ladder into water that came up by degrees to the waist and then fell away again, because the gate was a gate only where the stones stood; on either side of it the bottom continued soft and dark, indifferent to all their business. The kelp stood thickest against the seaward face of the third post, and that was where the chart said to stand and where the sounding had to go. Callum worked his iron rod along the foot of the post foot by foot, leaning his whole weight on it, eyes on the surface of the falling water as if reading the bottom through it; and it was on the fourth pass, in water to his armpits, that the rod struck a tone that was not stone — a hollow, ringing note, iron answering iron — and he turned his head slowly to where Lila stood on the sill and nodded once, the gesture that on a small boat means everything and costs nothing. The freeing of the chest took the next hour and a half against the draining tide. Callum and Neve went down on breath in the brown-green cold, working the hold-fasts of the kelp loose with their knives and letting them float up the way the sea lets its own lengths of rope go, then running a cradle of the old tarred line under the thing and out the other side, moving with the economy of people spending their air on purpose. Neve came up twice with her face working and went down again without being asked, and on the third rise she brought up with her a scrap the color of waxed linen, which she dropped into the boat without looking at it, and which would lie in her pocket until the gate was over, because some findings are too early to be findings. The water by then was at Struan's knees on the sill and falling still, though anyone could feel the bottom of the world had been reached and the long breath was about to turn. The lift was the whole sound of the undertaking — the block groaning on its shear-legs of spar, the line coming in hand over hand to Struan's old boat-shed rhythm, the sea's own thin hiss going quiet behind it — and the chest broke the surface half full of water and streaming, small, iron-bound, oak gone black and glossy with age, no bigger than the first box, and no man of them said anything until the water had sheeted off it and it hung in the dawn like an idea that had finally remembered its body. They walked it in to the sill and set it down in the middle of the drowned street, dry from the third post to the fifth exactly as the letter had promised, the way old letters promise, and the sea, having given it up, stood off the land for the moment and seemed to wait. It was then that the instruction in the letter had to be honored face to face with its consequences. The first leaf was to be read at the gate, on the low, in the open; and every instinct the reading room had drilled into Lila rose up like a wave to argue: you do not open sacred cargo in the open air between the sea's two turnovers, where a gust could take a page and a rising tide does not negotiate. But the letter had been explicit, and the letter had been right about everything else it had risked, and Callum, with his eye on the water's slow return along the sill, said what they were all thinking. "The sea gave you a door. You open it on the doorstep. That is manners." He had already begun timing the tide against the third post, the way you time a fuse. "We have one window here, keeper, and the window is closing the way windows do." The lock was a plate of iron, green with age, set into the face of the chest at the height of two hands folded one over the other, and in it stood the two keyholes, side by side in the same plate, close as a pair of sisters, the pattern the letter had described and the chart had drawn and nothing in the world had ever once turned. Lila worked her gloves off one finger at a time, because you do not offer a key to a lock through wool — the wards need the naked skin to know you — and she took the two keys from the cords where they had hung all winter, the old key of the first box and Katrin's key from the farthest door, and she knelt on the sill in the draining light with the sea standing off behind her shoulders, and she set them home, one in each keyhole, and turned them together — one motion, two halves of the same bolt, the way the letter had said nothing would open it but both halves turning in the same instant. The turning came up out of the lock plate like something releasing a long-held breath, and the bolt moved its whole length, and the lid, which had not been lifted for whoever could say how long, rose a hand's breadth into the colorless morning and stopped. It held. It would not rise further. And Callum, already up to his knees in the returning water beside her, said it flatly, the way he reported weather. "Someone has been under that lid before us. It is not the lock holding it. There is a turn of line round the inside of it, keeper, and the line is not four hundred years old. Somebody has been here within living memory, and they have sealed it up again from the inside, and they did not have the courtesy to leave the knot where we could reach it."