The potman and his son, both named Joey, had traveled from the south from a market town where, once the region’s farms had failed and folded and their owners had joined the emigration, there was no work, no market, no demand for pots, and so no supper on the family table. The elder Joey had made the future easy for himself by sending his wife and their three other children ahead in the company of neighbors. Then he’d traded some silver for the mules, loaded up his stock of finished pots, his tools, and some powdered fixing clay, and followed on, taking his time. He and his son had survived during the two months of their journey so far by doing pot repairs in exchange for food and lodging. The Joeys had been in Ferrytown ten days before, and they had sealed the cracks in several of the guesthouse’s earthenware water ewers and stapled broken plates and dishes in many of the wealthier homes. “My wife knows it’s her job to break as many pots as she can, ahead of me,” he said. “She does the damage. I do the repairs.” In just a few days’ time, he hoped, he’d meet up with his wife again, somewhere on the coast. “I’ll find her, you can bet. She’s got a laugh can shatter clay. That’s why I married her.”
Any plans that Margaret had for heads on shoulders and holding hands had been postponed. She and Franklin had made up beds at the back of the shelter a little distance from each other, as brothers and sisters, and certainly half-brothers and-sisters, must. But their knees had touched for several heartbeats during their evening at the fireside, and they were content to stay in this good company until their eyes dropped shut. It was such a pleasure just to listen to and talk with friendly strangers. But Franklin, avoiding the true story of what had happened to them and their families in Ferrytown, had hardly started to amuse the net makers with his account of how Margaret had fished for birds in the forest when — silently, appallingly — the band of rustlers arrived.
How had they been so careless? The eight travelers must have been half blinded by staring into their fire and deafened by their conversation and their laughter not to have heard so many heavy feet surrounding them or to have picked up on the sound of horses. They realized that they were snared only when, suddenly, the remaining brightness of the night from the moon and stars and metal luster was blocked. Too ill-prepared for trouble, too shocked to stand and run, they could only sit exactly where they were and look up at the silhouettes of six or seven well-armed men, who, attracted — invited, almost — by the smoke, the flames, the throb of human voices, had crept up as evenly as wolves on a sheepfold.
Everyone could see enough by firelight to know what kind of men these were. Their faces were too weatherbeaten for them to be townspeople. Their clothes were not the clothes of emigrants, designed for warmth and durability, but the highly colored, quarrelsome garments of men keen to be noticed and alarming. Their beards were tied in braids with ribbons. Their legs were bowed from a life on horseback. They were not clean. Their smiles were far too sharp to promise anything but cruelty.
“Stand up,” one of them said, a short man in a long yellow canvas coat. He was a little older than the others and evidently the one most feared.
The travelers did as they were told and tried to stay expressionless as another one of the group stepped into the shelter to inspect each of them, turning them round, feeling their arms, even touching the women and the baby. He touched Margaret too much and looked her too directly in the eye. He whistled through his teeth when he felt the strength and size of Franklin’s arm. He fingered the piebald coat and laughed. “Give me that,” he said. Franklin handed over the coat, hoping against reason that it would prove to be the only loss of the night. The coat was passed to the short man, who put it over his yellow one. It sat so high on his shoulders that the bottom hem reached only the top of his ankles.
Two of the other men went into the darkness of the shelter with brands lit from the fire to see what they could find and take. Another led away the horses and the mules. Another smashed the potman’s pots that his son had unloaded, and, not doubting their safety, left in view for anyone to steal or damage.
Franklin and Margaret had no choice but to watch their barrow being unloaded, their mint plant being dashed onto the ground, and the now empty silver cup — their greatest wealth — and the ornamented platters being thrown into sacks along with the Joeys’ and the Boses’ best possessions (of which there were many).
Now the short man came forward himself to take a look, oddly awkward in his many clothes but doubly threatening. “Not her,” he said, referring to Melody Bose. “Not him, too old,” he added, meaning Andrew Bose. “Not that”—the granddaughter, hardly nine months old, not walking yet and so no use. “We’ll take the rest.” His companions came forward with rope and started looping it around their selected captives, beginning with the potman’s terrified son. They made nooses for their necks and wrists, so that the Joeys, young Acton Bose, Margaret, and Franklin could be joined and led away like the mules had been, in one long train.
Franklin’s last action before he too was bound and haltered by the rope was not exactly a heroic one, but it was thoughtful and intelligent. He saw a chance for Margaret. He reached across, not so quickly as to cause alarm among the men, and pulled the blue scarf off her head. They backed away at once. Few men are so tough or so intent on rape that fear of illness doesn’t caution them.
“Not her,” the short man said. “We don’t want her.”
They gathered up their plunder as quickly as they could. Then, almost as suddenly and silently as they’d arrived, the silhouettes disappeared. The Boses’ grandchild hadn’t even woken to see her father taken as a slave.
Ten
The child, named Bella after her dead mother, was the only dreamer on the Dreaming Highway that night. The three adults judged valueless by the rustlers did not have any rest. For the first time since leaving the Pesthouse, Margaret spent the night alone, too shocked and frightened to sleep but not allowed to offer any comfort to the net makers or to seek from them any comfort for herself. The Boses had found a narrow, ferrous crevice, damp and unwelcoming but dark enough to hide them from any further passersby. Margaret had tried to squeeze in with them, but they had pushed her back with their feet and elbows, not wanting even to touch her with their hands. Their only conversation after that had been shouted, and brief, just long enough for Melody to warn Margaret to keep her distance “or else.” She’d armed herself with a heavy piece of metal. If Margaret came too close, Melody was ready and prepared, she said, to do some lasting damage to Margaret’s shaven head.
The night was not silent. Andrew Bose, chirring like a katydid, kept up a muttered chorus of curses against humankind for its cruelty and its treachery and against his own mother for ever having given birth to him. Melody soothed the baby and herself with rocking and repetition, “Son. Son. Son…,” not daring to invite more misfortune by naming him out loud. And all around, the relics made noises of their own. Trash disturbed by all the recent hoofs and feet settled back in place. Degraded concrete slabs shifted and wheezed as the night grew cold. Insignificant animals with outsized, moonlit eyes that were only scavenging for scraps sounded to Margaret and the Boses as large and dangerous as horsemen. The taller metal shapes picked up any wind in their hollows and their tubes and played their fluty monotones with it, competing to produce the saddest and most spectral sound.
Margaret was trembling for a long part of the night, too shaken by her loss — her losses — to settle on a single emotion. In just a few days everyone she loved had been carried off. Bitterness piled up on bitterness. She had not expected to get any sleep, but nevertheless, once the Boses had rejected her and she had exhausted herself with weeping and vomiting, she had moved her bedclothes onto the barrow and stretched out on her side, resting an arm across the empty space where Franklin had slept. Another good man gone, she thought, as if somehow it was her fault, that it was as inevitable that misfortune would attend Franklin once he was in her company as it was certain that the men in her family would beat with sticks that older, fine-mannered stranger who had proposed a midnight meeting with her all those years ago. Maybe it was correct what everybody said: “Red hair, bad luck.” But then, she had been lucky in other ways, hadn’t she? Like no one else from Ferrytown, she was alive. Yes, thanks to Pigeon, thanks to him. His touch had rescued her twice, first when his strong slow fingers had massaged her feet and then again when his sudden, quicker fingers had pulled off her scarf.