The Nail

by Elendil, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

They brought the king down to the boat on a hurdle, the kind shepherds make of hazel for penning ewes, because the hall door had been burned and there was nothing else in the camp flat enough to carry a man on. Four men carried it. They came down the shingle in the last of the light, slowly, and set it on the stones beside the boat. Barinthus looked at the hurdle before he looked at the king. It was six feet long and three wide, and it would not go through the hatch.

"He goes on deck," he said. "Aft, by me. Lash the hurdle to the thwart, and lash him to the hurdle. Not tight. Tight enough that he doesn't roll."

One of the four began to say that this was the Emperor of the Island of the Mighty. Barinthus said that the sea had not been told, and the man was quiet after that.

The boat was his own. She was forty feet of oak plank on oak frames, fastened with iron nails as thick as a man's thumb, with one mast and one square sail of thin leather, stitched and dressed with oil. She stank of fish oil and old wine, because for twenty years she had carried tin across to the Armorican coast and wine back. Her steering oar hung on the right side aft, on a withy rope through a hole in the gunwale. The Saxons, who have a word for everything that floats, would have called that side the steering-board. Barinthus called it the right side. He had been in her since before his beard went white.

The poet came down last, with a harp in a leather bag on his back and a sealskin cloak over his arm. He was a slight man with large eyes, and he stepped over the gunwale as if he were stepping into a story he had already been told the end of.

"Taliesin," he said, and held out his hand.

"I know who you are." Barinthus did not take the hand; his own was on the oar. "You've the bearing?"

"I have the bearing." Taliesin drew himself up. He shut his eyes, which Barinthus had seen poets do before, and which always meant a delay. "West, over the grey back of the sea, keeping the Wain behind the right shoulder, until the land comes to meet you smelling of apples. That is what Morgen sent."

"That's all?"

"It is in my own words. Hers were shorter."

"The Wain walks," said Barinthus. "It goes round the top of the sky all night like a dog round a post. If I keep it behind my right shoulder at dusk I'll be going one way, and at midnight another, and by morning I'll have sailed you round in a circle. Did she say what hour?"

Taliesin opened his eyes. "She didn't say anything about hours."

"No," said Barinthus. "They never do."

---

They went out on the last of the ebb with the wind behind them, east and a little north, cold off the land. The river mouth opened and let them go. The boy Cadno, who was Barinthus's sister's grandson and eleven years old, sat in the bilge with a wooden scoop and his knees under his chin, and watched the king.

The king was awake. His face was the colour of tallow in the half-dark, and there was a wad of linen tied against his side under the cloak, black at the middle and brown at the edges. He did not groan. He breathed in short pieces, the way a man breathes who has found out which breaths hurt. When the boat came out past the headland and met the first long swell from the west and lifted, and dropped, and lifted, he turned his head on the hurdle and looked up at Barinthus.

"Will it be like this all night?"

"Worse," said Barinthus. "And then better."

"Good," said Arthur. "I'd hate to be lied to on the last voyage." He shut his eyes. "Talk to me. Somebody. I'm told I mustn't sleep."

Taliesin had been waiting for that. He had the harp out of its bag before the king had finished, and his fingers on the strings, and Barinthus put out a foot and pressed it gently but firmly on the bag, so that the poet looked round.

"Not the harp," said Barinthus. "The sea has enough noise. Talk if you have to."

So Taliesin talked. The light went out of the west beyond the sail, from yellow to green to a blue so dark it was nearly no colour at all, and the stars came, first the big ones and then the rest all at once, as if someone had shaken out a cloth. And Taliesin named them.

He named them as a poet does, which is to say with the names of his own people's gods and with no hurry. That long pale smoke from one edge of the sky to the other was Caer Gwydion, the fortress of Gwydion son of Dôn, who could make a woman out of flowers and a horse out of mushrooms. Those five bright stars in a crooked line, just there, in the north-east and climbing, a little bent, like a chair someone has sat on carelessly, were Llys Dôn, the court of his mother. That small ring of stars low in the west, setting now, was Caer Arianrhod, the castle of his sister, silver-wheeled, whose son had been — Taliesin stopped, because it was a long story and Arianrhod did not come out of it well, and began again. Then he came round to the little cluster nearly overhead, with its one hard blue-white star, and his voice changed.

"And that," he said, "is Telyn Arthur. Arthur's Harp."

The king opened his eyes and looked. "Is it?"

"It is."

"Who says so?"

"Everybody," said Taliesin, with dignity.

"You do," said Arthur. "You say so." He looked a while longer. "It doesn't look like a harp."

"It looks like a harp to poets, lord."

"It looks like a fishing float to me," said Barinthus, who had his own names. The White Road. The Crooked Chair. The Little Ring. The Float. He had learned them from his father on this same deck, and his father had never told him whom they belonged to, only where they would be at what hour, and in what month, and which of them would set and which would not. He had always thought that this was the more useful thing to know about a star.

---

The king asked, at last, the question Barinthus had been waiting for since the river mouth.

"Which is it you're steering by?"

Barinthus did not answer at once. He looked forward along the boat, at the sail full and dark against the sky, and at the long grey backs of the swell coming up under the bow and passing aft beneath them, and then up and to the right, over the steering oar, to the north.

"None of them," he said.

Taliesin made a small noise.

"Look there," said Barinthus. He let go of the oar with his right hand, keeping it with his hip, and pointed. "The Wain. Seven of them. Your poet's Wain, that I'm to keep behind my shoulder. Follow the two at the end — the back of the cart, see, the two that make the end-board — up, away from the cart, five times as far as they are apart. What's there?"

Arthur looked. It took him a while. His eyes were watering.

"A star," he said. "Not much of one."

"That's not it. It's near. Look next to it. Inside it, nearer the middle of the turning. Where there's nothing."

"There's nothing there."

"No," said Barinthus. "That's where I'm steering by."

The boy in the bilge had stopped scooping. Taliesin had his mouth a little open.

"All night," said Barinthus, "every star in the sky goes round. The Wain goes round, and the Chair goes round, and the Float goes overhead and down the other side. Everything you can name goes round something. And what they go round is that. A hole in the sky. A place the width of my thumb where there's no star at all. My father called it the nail, because the whole thing hangs on it. It doesn't move. Not all night, not all year. If I keep the nail just there" — he laid his forearm along the gunwale on the right side, square across the boat, and squinted along it — "straight out from the steering side, then I'm going west, and I'll still be going west at dawn."

"How do you find it," said Arthur, "if there's nothing there?"

"By what's round it." Barinthus took the oar again in both hands. "The little star a fist off, that you saw. The four in a square beyond. You learn where the empty place is from the shape of what isn't empty. Like a gap in your teeth. You don't need a mirror. Your tongue goes to it."

Arthur was quiet for so long that Barinthus thought he might have slept, and nudged the hurdle with his foot. The king's eyes were open.

"I'm awake," he said. "I was thinking about the gap in your teeth." Then: "Steer by it, then."

"I am," said Barinthus.

---

An hour after full dark the swell grew steeper and shorter, and the boat began to roll as well as pitch, a corkscrew motion that brought the boy up out of the bilge to be sick over the lee side, quickly and tidily, and then down again to his scoop. The king made no sound when the hurdle shifted against its lashings, but his hand found the edge of the thwart and held it, and stayed there.

Taliesin was still talking. He had moved on from the stars to their names, which was where a poet always ended up, Barinthus had noticed. A poet could not look at a thing for long without wanting to know what it was called in three other languages.

"The monks," Taliesin was saying, "have the Greek for some of these. They had it from their books. That one, the red-gold one in the west, sinking — they call it Arcturus."

"Do they," said Arthur.

"Arktouros. It means the guard of the bear. The bear-ward. It walks behind the Wain and keeps it, they say, the way a man walks behind a bear on a chain." Taliesin's voice had begun to rise toward the place where poems happen. "And arth, in our own tongue, is a bear, lord. So the monks' star has your name in it twice over, the bear and the guard, and so it has been from the beginning of the world, before ever you were born, written in the sky in the Greek tongue by men who —"

"Is it going down?" said Arthur.

Taliesin stopped.

Barinthus looked. It was low over the sail's right edge, a big warm star, the colour of a coal that has been blown on. It had been sinking all evening. Within the hour it would touch the sea.

"It's going down," he said. "It sets, this time of year. It'll come back before midwinter, in the east, before dawn. Low."

"Then steer after it," said Arthur. "If it's mine."

"No."

The king turned his head on the hurdle. It was the first time anyone had said that word to him since the boat left the river, and perhaps, Barinthus thought, for a good many years before that.

"You don't steer by a star that sets," said Barinthus. "You'd follow it down into the sea, and then where would you be? In the sea." He shifted the oar a little, by habit, though the boat had not wandered. "You steer by the one that doesn't go anywhere. Even if it isn't there."

The red star touched the edge of the world, and flattened a little, and was gone. Taliesin watched it go with an expression Barinthus could not read in the dark. Then, very quietly, the poet took his harp out of the bag, and Barinthus let him. He did not play it. He held it across his knees with his hand flat on the strings, so they would not sound.

---

Barinthus had never been to the island. Nobody he knew had been to the island. He had said so plainly to the four men on the shingle, and to the poet, and they had looked at each other and said that she had asked for him by name: the steersman who knew the seas and the stars. Barinthus did not think that knowing the stars was going to be much use when the island was not on any course that a man had ever sailed and come back from. But you could not tell four men with a hurdle and a dying king that you would rather not. So he had done what he would have done for any landfall he did not know. He had counted.

He counted all night. Every so often he sent the boy forward with a chip of wood to drop over the bow, and counted under his breath while the chip went down the side, until it passed the steering oar; and from that, and the length of the boat, and his long habit, he knew how fast they were going. He knew how long they had been going by the turning of the Wain round the nail, which was a clock if you had sat under it long enough. He knew their heading by the nail itself. Fast, and how long, and which way: put together, that told him where they were. It was only a guess, but it was a guess built of three true things. By the Wain it was a little past the middle of the night, and by his count they were well out, further west than he had ever taken the boat on purpose, past the last of the islands where men still kept goats.

Then the wind dropped.

It did not die. It faltered, and the sail went slack and filled and went slack again, and the boat lost way and began to wallow in the swell with her wet planks complaining. Barinthus felt it in the oar before he heard it in the sail. The cold east wind that had pushed them out of the river was gone, and for the space of a hundred breaths there was nothing at all, only the swell, and the creak of the yard, and the king's short breathing on the hurdle.

Then the air came again from the other side. It was soft, and wet, and warm, out of the south.

"Bring her round," Barinthus said to nobody, and brought her round himself, and the boy, who knew what to do without being told, went forward to the sheet. The yard came round and the sail filled from the left side. The boat leaned to it and began to go again, slower now, with the wind on her beam, still heading west. Barinthus put the nail where it had to go and held it there.

"Is that bad?" said Arthur.

"It's a different wind."

"Bad, then."

"Different," said Barinthus. He did not say what he was thinking, which was that a wind out of the south was a wind that had come over whatever lay to the south of them, and that if there was land there, the wind had touched it. A man can smell land long before he sees it. He can smell the peat in the smoke from a fire, and the hay, and the dung, and the green of the grass, and if the wind is right he can smell them a day's sail out. Barinthus had smelled Armorica in the dark from further off than he could have sailed in a morning. He breathed in. He smelled salt, and the fish oil in his own planks, and the linen on the king's side, which was not a good smell.

He did not smell apples.

---

The night went grey from the east, behind them. The stars began to go out from the bottom of the sky upwards, the small ones first, and then the bright ones, and last of all the Wain, standing high in the north-east now on its shaft. The little star near the nail held on longest, and then it was gone too, and there was nothing in the north but a pale grey that did not have anything in it at all.

Barinthus kept steering by it.

He could not see the nail; nobody could see the nail by day. But he knew where it had been, and the swell had not changed its direction, and the wind had not shifted again, and his body had held the oar at the one angle for so many hours that it would have been harder to change it than to keep it. He kept the empty place square off the right side, where it had been all night, and where it was still, though it was a grey place in a grey sky now and there was no way to show it to anyone.

Taliesin was asleep sitting up against the mast, with his harp in his arms. The king was not asleep. His eyes were open and he was looking at the north, where Barinthus was looking.

"Still there?" he said. His voice had gone thin.

"Still there."

"You can't see it."

"No," said Barinthus. "I couldn't see it last night either."

The king smiled at that, or his mouth moved in a way that would have been a smile on a man who had blood in him.

The boy came up out of the bilge then with the scoop in one hand and something else held out in the other, dripping, and he did not say anything. He only held it up in front of Barinthus's face, so close that Barinthus had to lean back to see it.

It was an apple. It was small and brown and soft, a windfall, with a wasp's hole in one side and the sea running out of it. It had been in the water some time, but not long, not days; its skin had not split. The boy had scooped it out of the sea over the side as it went past.

Barinthus took it from him. He turned it over in his hand. Then he put it to his nose, and breathed, and over the salt and the sodden skin it was there: sweet, and rotting, and brown, the smell of an orchard floor in autumn under trees that no one has bothered to pick.

The wind was out of the south. The swell came from the west. Whatever had dropped this had dropped it upwind of them and up-sea, not far off, and not long ago.

Barinthus put the apple into the king's hand and closed the king's fingers round it. Then he leaned on the steering oar and brought the bow round, slowly, a hand's breadth to the left, as close into the soft wet wind as the leather sail would bear, until the empty place in the north stood behind his right shoulder, where nobody but he could see it.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ab Elendile per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Elendil, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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