A Measure of Timber and Sky

The workshop smelled of fresh-cut pine and boiled rope; sun slanted through the high shutter and painted the floor in long, honest bands. Tamsin moved through that light like someone following an instruction she had carved into her hands. Her plane sang once, twice, and the timber flared into a neat, springing curve that would bear foot after cautious foot across the market canal. Around her, clamps and pegs lay with the calm authority of tools that had been used well and often. A spool of hemp twine glinted like a promise. A measuring rod leaned against the bench, notched and annotated in a handwriting of trades rather than rhetoric.

Pip, the measuring crow, perched on a peg and tapped its beak against an offcut as if grading it. Pip always judged angles with the unforgiving face of a judge who had once been a mathematician and had taken a wrong turn. The bird cocked its head, let out a brash little caw and stole the last of Tamsin’s sea-flour biscuit while she wasn't looking; then it gave the biscuit a dismissive sniff as though the theft were the most reasonable thing in the world.

"You and your geometry," Merran said from the doorway, hands jammed into sleeves that smelled faintly of kerosene and old laughter. He had the lean look of someone who'd measured more ropes than years; his beard caught sawdust like a net catches minnows. "A bridge that won't tremble is no bridge at all. If it trembles, you can say it lives. If it creaks, you can swear at it and then fix it. Don't expect quiet glory. Expect work."

Tamsin grinned without looking up. "I expect it to be useful and to stay useful, Merran. That's the glory I can live with." She jabbed a rasp into the curve and made a small cascade of shavings. "And I expect it to be clever about wind. That's where we're always undone."

Wind was a trade companion here in the archipelago; it taught people to make friends with motion or else find a new profession. The islands rode on slow eddies and living updrafts like boats in an invisible sea. Bridgewrights read gusts the way a baker reads yeast. They measured not only wood but the biddings of air. Tamsin set a plumb and watched the bob swing in a lazy arc. The bob stopped not where gravity made it stop but where the skylarks decided to make room.

A child ran in with bare knees and a grin, clutching a fish-seller's paper cone of sugared kelp crisps. "Tassie! My sister says your new span's got a spring like a cat!" The child tossed a crisp to Pip, who accepted it with a look that said he considered the performance appallingly theatrical but would not refuse public acclaim.

Tamsin wiped her hands on her apron and pushed a folded scrap of sketchwork toward Merran. Lines suggested arches and a curious lattice that might breathe. "Three small crossings between the market and the river-mouth holdfasts," she said. "Light, flexible, and—if I'm allowed to try—made to sing instead of groan when the wind hits it. It would stop the scullers from having to load and unload at every tide."

Merran studied the sketch with the kind of look people give complicated knots: both admiration and the suspicion that beauty can tangle you. "You'd be dancing with living grain if you let it sing too clear. It learns to answer you, you know. That can be stirring in a way that will make cupboard lids rattling at midnight seem like pleasant music. It can also start asking for biscuits and opinions." He gave a cough that could have been laughter. "And sometimes it will refuse a crossing because it disapproves of the traveler's boots."

They shared a laugh that tasted of grease and sawdust. The village beyond the shutters carried on: a bell at the rope-hall, the rattle of carts, the murmur of market-bargains that were older than the settlers. A woman walked by with laundry pinned in bright, flapping flags; the cloth told weather like a cousin. That detail—laundry like a map of seasons—had no bearing on Tamsin's plan, but it grounded the place. People here kept their weather in fabric and their debts in pies.

When the wealthy Broderly woman arrived, she carried worry like a shawl. Broderlys always arrived with worry: a kind of careful unease inherited down three generations. Mrs. Broderly's hands hovered over the sketch as if afraid of making a mark. "We need a crossing that won't fail at the festival of flags," she said. "The market folk have been stalled two times running and my eldest cannot bring his wares if the scullers cannot land. Will your work hold?"

Tamsin's fingers traced the arc she had just shaped. The action was precise—a map of competence. She knew the way a lashing would find its home in a groove, the pinch an anchor needed, the secret little allowance for twist when a gust slipped through like a grin. "It will hold when it's tied right," she said. "And tied right isn't the same as tied tight. But I'll need better lash, a bit of fresh hemp, and—if you'll trust me—I'll lean on a new weave idea I've been thinking of. It could give the span room to breathe where it must, and strength where it must not."

Mrs. Broderly's mouth tightened. "New weave is trouble for elders," she said. Her son hovered at her elbow, deliberate and polite in the way of many who had never had to haul a beam at dawn. "We are willing to pay more for that kind of trouble if it keeps our cart-wheels turning."

Tamsin's pulse did an obliging thing: it tapped like an apprentice drum. This commission could be small and discreet—market crossings, public gratitude, coin for more tools—or it could be the first stitch in something bigger. She thought of a chain of spans that might link three holdfasts, perhaps more someday, letting people trade without waiting for the flow to favor them. The idea felt sharp and warm in her chest, like a saw that had just found its grain.