Waterlines drawn at the same height did not indicate the same time.
Sera stopped her pencil before marking dry stone at Roan’s pier. She had imagined calling it the same moment when water fell this far at the western cape. But waves approached those places from different directions. The sea would not lie together like two sheets of paper.
Nine mornings had passed since the notice. Eleven days remained. Varen came with his stick to the dry upper place instead of the lowest railing. Sera brought a box to support his leg. Tio read the water-marker drawing with his sore hand pocketed.
They began comparing yesterday’s mismatched timekeepers on a table. Both stood on steady supports, with one agreed starting movement and finishing line. Liv marked separately where her sand caught at the throat. Sera did not tap it through.
Nume brought the boat’s hourglass. Its marks had been checked against a shore reference at safe anchorage; that did not automatically give it the same time throughout the archipelago. They first recorded the durations compared together today.
“This one’s fastest,” Tio said.
“It isn’t a race.”
He laughed at Nume’s answer. Sera put aside her urge to choose the fastest. Using Roan’s existing reference beside the others, they repeatedly measured how long each interval lasted. Where two readings differed, she widened the range.
Intervals between Liv’s inner lines were unequal. Reaching the first took a different duration from reaching the next. Sera turned over, rather than tore up, her proposed single-ratio table. On a fresh sheet, each interval received its own corresponding marks.
“We’d be late if we calculated all this at sea,” Liv said.
Correct calculation alone did not make a usable field tool. They marked today’s common interval boldly at start and finish, leaving the remainder in smaller writing.
Next came the starting reference. Roan’s shared record used falling water passing a particular line on the inner pier’s reference stone. Afterward it counted elapsed Roan time. They drew the downward direction to distinguish the same line crossed on rising tide.
Sera nearly stepped onto the wet edge to point. A closer view of water was not necessarily a safe observation place. Varen had her use a marker visible from the upper railing. The custodian checked again how the directly inspected low line related to that upper sign.
A wave covered the marker. Tio almost called start, then stopped at Nume’s raised hand. One brief wave was insufficient. They needed an agreed interval in which the overall ebb moved past that height. An uneven instant could not serve as the whole day’s reference.
Sera recorded a range. Refusing to pretend she had selected one precise instant made the table wider. Synchronizing two observations more closely would require rereading the starting reference. This table would not compel tomorrow’s voyage.
Edin had already requested limited access to the western village’s existing water-level records. Sera and Liv took the gentler village road with the custodian. Today was for the old gauge beneath the wall and each instrument’s basis, not the new platform.
Midway, Sera changed her knee cloth. Hurrying made her fasten a button wrongly. Liv would wait. Slowing their walk delayed observation, but a hurt observer arriving punctually and settling at the wrong height would create a larger error.
The village custodian showed their first water: the low rock at the landing’s end becoming exposed. It was not Roan’s reference height. Copying even its name as identical would only make a beautifully written wrong starting point.
Liv set old village times beside records transmitted to Roan. Several patrol-boat docking marks had previously been checked at both places on the same day. With the captain’s permission, they compared only the relevant lines of the actual sailing record. Those could not guarantee every recent tide.
Today’s comparison instrument and the village’s started together in one place. After matching their scales, they recorded the village’s falling-water interval. They linked it to elapsed time begun at Roan, retaining the handler’s marks for turns and readings during transport. Intervals with missed readings were excluded.
Once Sera copied the tenth mark beneath a board as the ninth. Instead of first calling out the same number, Liv opened her own record. The pages differed. Before recalculating, Sera examined the object. Water had faded one stroke.
She corrected it to ten and wrote why she had misread. A moment earlier she had been correcting mismatched instruments; this mistake belonged to her eyes. The custodian redrew the faint stroke on fresh paper and hung it up.
“If we’d only said I used the wrong instrument, that line would still be there tomorrow.”
Sera stepped backward to check the new sign’s legibility. Liv read it seated too. A little correction on paper had reached the actual board.
For lunch they bought salty bean soup. The round line at her bowl’s bottom looked like a water mark, Sera remarked. Hunger raised every reference level, Liv said. Without Tio to meet that with a loud laugh, they smiled quietly.
Would every boat soon use this table? the custodian asked. Sera explained that it was experimental, for today’s compared instruments and reference points. A changed tidal pattern or different instrument required fresh comparison. The village asked for that limit directly below the main heading.
Walking home, Liv wondered about Nerin’s table. Sera thought they could still catch a boat, then checked the actual schedule. None could take them today. They could not light Roan’s reserve merely to fetch a timetable.
Requested material would arrive on tomorrow’s existing Omok run. Through his earlier official access request, Edin had asked for the water-record pages residents permitted to be copied, and comparisons of the local timekeeper. They needed to establish who had read what together, without claiming they had visited another island.
Both reserves remained clear that evening. Spending a day dividing time did not justify inventing a lighting expense in the ledger. Not sending a boat made preparation slower. That delay counted among the days left before closure too.
The next morning, ten days remained.
Omok unloaded empty containers and a small document tube: copies permitted by Nerin’s custodian and the captain’s relevant docking record. There was no name for the woman with seedlings, no account of the medicine recipient. Gathering needed records did not give them every person aboard a previous boat.
Nerin’s reference was water leaving the first low stone step after high tide. They could not translate it into Roan’s first mark. The local handler had recorded start and finish of a comparison between local and ship timekeepers in the same place. The sailing record separately identified the reference observed at each docking.
Sera did not treat the two different tides as simultaneous. Connecting ship time to each local instrument, she selected only what could be expressed against that day’s Roan reference. Where overlapping intervals had large errors, she excluded those lines from the shared test. Days with old records alone awaited correction.
Nume glanced over the table and shook their head.
“Too long for the boat.”
Liv’s earlier warning had returned. Sera kept the full calculation and made a smaller correspondence table for the narrow field interval beside it. Identically named water marks received their own pictures and locations. A captain needed to find whether today’s matched time remained valid, before how to calculate another.
The first trial took place indoors. Varen read elapsed Roan time; Sera and Liv marked the corresponding bold lines on different instruments. Unlike saying the same third, their actual waits became closer. Tio separately read when the board turned.
On the second attempt, Varen deliberately called one late. They did not smooth it into the sequence. Marking a missed intermediate signal, they restarted at the next common beginning. A table collecting successes alone might have joined that missed turn into the same path.
That afternoon they made another comparison at Najeon without a boat. They checked ground and fastenings first, selecting the same quarry face and peak from two actual positions. While their instruments pointed to different strokes, the common table indicated the same short interval.
This time both recorded the rock above water. Bearings approached agreement within the specified error. Sera nearly cried out with pleasure. At the next interval, Liv noted the low line disappearing. Sera wrote obscured as well.
The unseen times had become closer alongside the visible ones.
She unfolded both lines. Earlier failures remained, with today’s matching method attached. They had neither lit a stone for a new lane nor passed a boat through. Still, they now had a little evidence that two people could read the same time.
Before leaving the platform, Liv showed the new marks on her instrument. Its old scale remained beneath a thin wooden strip bearing today’s lines. Sera began saying a newly issued instrument would have been easier, then stopped.
Liv briefly removed the strip. Years of handling had worn the glass below. Treasuring a faulty object differed from continuing to use faulty marks. Must she throw it away before they could work together?
No, Sera answered. She meant they should check together which marks to use next time.
Liv replaced the strip and asked Sera to read the same line. They could give the same value without exchanging their objects. Sera felt that small request had taken longer to earn than two rows of numbers.
Back at Roan, a fresh reply awaited Edin. What justified including an unqualified observer’s timekeeper in the joint experimental record? Without folding the copy away, he showed it to Sera.
“Wasn’t submitting matching numbers enough?”
Responsibility for checking and accepting the records was also needed, he said. Only then did Sera see the empty signature field at the end of the marks they had aligned together.
Whose hand would receive that blank? Tomorrow they would need an answer from somewhere other than the sea.