THE BELL-BUOY OF THE FIRST ANCHORAGE

A Tale of Sogmarsh — told by the buoy that keeps time for a drowned town.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm. Stands on its own; not part of the Reader's Edition collection.

I am a bell-buoy, rusted the colour of old blood, and I ride the grey swell south of Saltgate, moored over the ruined First Anchorage — which is to say, moored over a town. There is a whole town down there under the cold water, the first place the exiles are supposed to have landed, drowned so long ago that the records of the arguments about it are older than the arrival itself, which is very Sogmarsh, and I shall not attempt to explain it.

Down in the drowned town there is a drowned chapel, and in the drowned chapel there is a bell.

That bell and I have an arrangement.

I ring on the swell — that is all I do, all day and all night, a slow iron clong as the sea lifts me and lets me down. And I ring the hours. But here is the thing that has driven three generations of harbour- masters to distraction and one to drink: I ring them half a beat behind the living church up on the Saltgate front. Always have. Cannot help it; the sea sets my tempo, not the sexton. So the two bells fall across the water at each other, the quick living one and the slow drowned one, and no soul on the whole Cold Coast has known for certain what o'clock it is in four hundred years. They have stopped minding. On the Cold Coast, "about the time the bells disagree" is considered a perfectly good appointment.

The dry-country folk who come to gawp — and they do come, in the summer, when the road is passable — want something else from me entirely. They stand on the cliff and they want. They want a drowned monk. They want a sea-ghost with weed in its hair. They want a judgement: a town sunk for its wickedness, a moral they can carry home and feel improved by. They ask the harbour-master, and the harbour-master, who keeps the Bell-Tally and has no time for tourists, tells them the truth, which is that the town drowned because the ground was low and the sea was high, and that this is the entire story, and that the sea passes no judgements because the sea cannot count. Then he charges them a penny to hear it, which is a judgement, of a mild and local kind.

But they have the wrong end of me, the gawpers, and so did I for the first century or so, when I thought my whole purpose was to warn the living off the shoal.

I do not warn anybody. Nobody sails the shoal; they have known about it since before I was forged. So what, I used to wonder, is a bell for, moored over a place with no living soul left to call?

Then one flat, black, freezing night, with no ship out and no ear on the water and no reason under heaven to bother, the drowned bell below me rang.

It does that, before the worst storms — rings of itself, down in the chapel under the sea, and the harbour- master hears it come up through the water and marks it in the Tally, and battens the town. But that night it did not ring for a storm. There was no storm. It simply rang, once, the way you might say a name into an empty room just to hear that the room is still there.

And I understood, at last, the whole of my arrangement.

It rang, and — half a beat behind, because the sea sets my tempo — I rang back.

That is what I am for. Not to warn the living; the living are fine, the living have the church on the front and the fire in the Cold Anchor and each other. I am for the drowned. I am the answer from the surface to a town that has been ringing up out of the dark for four centuries — ringing, I think now, not to threaten anybody, but only to ask the same thing the drowned have always asked, which is: is anyone still up there? does anyone still keep the hours? are we entirely forgotten?

And every hour, half a beat behind, I tell them: no. not forgotten. still here. still counting. sleep on.

The living time and the drowned time, a half-beat apart, across the cold water, forever — so that neither the town above nor the town below is ever, on any hour of any night, entirely alone.

Let the tourists have their sea-ghost. I have better work than haunting. I have a whole town to sit up with.

The moral, from the end of the mooring-chain: not every bell rings to warn the living off the rocks. Some ring for no ear at all but the ones under the water — to keep the hours for the forgotten, and to answer, half a beat late and every single hour, the oldest question the lost ever ask: is anyone still there? The kindest thing a bell can say is simply yes.