The Pilots Oath
The Pilothouse on the Mole was one of the four old buildings of the kingdom. It had been raised, the histories said, in the second reign, when the strait had first been charted, and the tower of it rose ninety feet above the inner light and its lower course was of a dark stone quarried from an island that had since gone under the sea in a storm. At its base, in a chamber whose floor was three steps below the tide-line and whose ceiling was open in the centre to a shaft of sky, there was a font. The font was of the same dark stone as the tower, and it was kept perpetually full by a narrow lead pipe that led to the sea itself, and the water in it was the water of the harbour, and it was not blessed, and it was not refreshed by ritual. It was the sea, admitted into the chamber. That was the whole of it. That was, the Wardens said, what made it sacred.
A pilot's oath was sworn with the right hand in that water up to the wrist, and the words spoken above it, and the left hand laid on the charter stone set into the wall. A Warden's oath was sworn the same way, with the addition of a small cut on the pad of the left thumb, so that a drop of the Warden's blood was added to the water of the harbour. The blood, the Wardens said, did not matter. The willingness to give it mattered. The willingness was the oath.
Illo had sworn there three times in his life. Once for his pilot's license,