As the final days of winter passed and the moon, losing its hold, retreated back toward midnight, Margaret settled to the thought of finding passage in a ship along with her new friends. It was a comfort, in a way, to have a shared plan. She was distressed less and less by thoughts of Andrew and Melody and Acton, their son, or by recollections of her life and family in Ferrytown. Even Franklin, her Pigeon, became more remote to her, despite the many occasions when her version of him as a father and a husband was offered to the women in the Ark or the many times she dreamed of their reunion. In fact, one morning when she was still exhausted from a restless night of Jackie’s teething, she realized she could not remember many details of his face, and she could scarcely recall his family name. It wasn’t Lombard, and it wasn’t Lopate. She was relieved when, finally, the name was retrieved. Lopez, that was it! Franklin Lopez from the plains. How could she be so ready to forget that part of him, to let him slip away? That was troubling. It was as if the winter in the Ark had enriched her and robbed her at the same time.

The first truly warm day came when snow was still on the ground and the earth was hard. Spring’s breath was in the air, crying green. Margaret had checked her pot of mint for signs of life, but there were none as yet. She was enjoying the sunshine at her duty spot beside the well and dozing, despite the usual hammering of carpenters and masons at the tower and the not-so-usual cries and hammering at the outer gates of the Ark.

Jackie, now into her second year, was playing push-and-pull with another toddler. It was she who first spotted the man dismounting from a horse and running across the courtyard from the entry gate toward the tower works, followed twenty paces behind by a gang of thirty or so, all armed with swords and pikes. Metal swords and pikes, some already wet with Baptist blood. But it was not their shining blades or brass-encrusted shields or the clanking of their buckles and their armor that most alerted Jackie. It was the first man’s clothes. A pinto coat like his, in such a striking pattern, was bound to catch a child’s eye. She called out, not a word exactly, and pointed at the man, clearly amused by something. For an instant Margaret, with her poor eyesight, mistook him for Franklin. She half got up. She half cried out. But then she saw how short he was, his bandy legs, his many layers, the colored ribbons tying back his beard. She recognized his face.

Thirteen

Franklin Lopez and his forty or so fellows in the labor gang had arrived outside the Ark soon after dawn and set to work at once. They were almost eager for the exertion. Work was their one protection against the cold, the hunger, and the boredom of captivity. The masters had kept their vassals lightly clothed and underfed, but the laborers had been told that this day’s work, if it was as richly productive as was hoped, might be rewarded with an evening meal and — possibly — brief access to a fire.

“Make it quick and keep it quiet” was the only instruction for the gang, though that was easier said than done. The winter months had shut the landscape down, hardened it and left it brittle. Even walking through the dead, frost-stiffened vegetation that morning had been far from silent. The ground had snapped and clacked loudly underfoot, protesting at the weight of so much flesh, though so far only telling anyone awake inside the Ark that men and horses were passing by. That was not unusual for these spring mornings, when everyone was impatient to catch first sight of sails. The ships were coming. Any dreaming citizen with any hope was packed and ready for the sea.

Franklin, clumsy and stumbling at the best of times, had made more noise than most as they approached the palisades. He’d been strapped across the neck as punishment and then strapped again when he’d cried out in pain. His masters, he’d discovered, were quick to pick on him and were less eager to punish shorter men. Sometimes, when his anger and his despair became intolerable, he stood and stretched himself and laughed out loud, shaking all his limbs as if his humor knew no bounds. It was a way to shrive himself of all the furies. It was a laugh that did not seem (well, not at first) too impudent. Sometimes his masters laughed along with him, counted him an idiot, called him Donkey. At other times they beat him for his laugh. But usually the beating was good-humored and less painful than not laughing.

Franklin had been relatively fortunate during his captivity. The morning following his separation from Margaret, after a cold, hard night sleeping with the horses and the stolen animals at the fringes of the Dreaming Highway, Franklin, Acton Bose, and the two Joeys had been tugged awake on their leashes at first light and hurried along at the speed of the slowest horse toward Tidewater.

The horsemen did not stop to feed their charges, whose only opportunity to rest and urinate had not been pleasant. The seven rustlers had caught up with a cartload of furniture and farming tools being pulled along the highway by four heavy horses. The three emigrants who owned it, two men — brothers, with identical beards — and one wife, hoped to make themselves invisible by staying absolutely silent and making no eye contact with the newcomers, who had first ridden around them in a circle, whooping like children, and then dismounted to inspect their prey more closely.

The travelers studied their own feet without comment or expression as Franklin and his fellows were forced to sit in a line with their backs toward the cart. The family’s horses were unharnessed and their boxes kicked open and their sacks emptied onto the highway. Only their dog did not understand that nothing could be done to save them or their property. Its barking protests were short-lived. Finally, once all the valuables had been discovered and stolen and anything fragile had been broken, just for the sake of it, the heavy horses were added to the string of mules and the two men were attached to the train of captives with loops of rope around their necks and wrists. But the woman, despite the protests of her husband, who called out her name—“Marie, Marie, Marie”—well beyond hearing distance, was left behind in the attentive care of two of the rustlers. They caught up with their comrades later in the afternoon in high spirits but unaccompanied. When the husband once again called out her name, they shook their fists to silence him and made vulgar gestures. “Make another noise and you’ll be beaten,” they said, and added, “Like the dog. Like sweet Marie. That goes for all of you. We’re in the mood.”

On their fourth day of captivity, exhausted by their pace of travel, by their anger and anxiety, and by the meanness of their rations, the six hostages arrived at an encampment in ancient wasteland to the north of Tidewater. The land was far too widely strewn with rubble and debris for many trees to have survived. Only weeds and a few low scrub bushes made their living among the remains of great stone buildings and the tumbled masonry of a grand, dead city. So deep were the fallen remnants of the now shapeless structures that pools of water, little lakes, were nestling in the marble and concrete piles. The horsemen stopped in a steep-sided canyon of rubble and wreckage where the sunlight hardly penetrated. There the captives were tightly bound and shackled to an antique, purposeless engine of some kind, smelling of decay and rust, and — or so they feared — left for dead, without a jug of water or a scrap of food, any protection against the cold or any word of what their fates might be. Their only freedom, now that their captors were out of earshot, was that they could speak among themselves, exchanging names with the husband and brother-in-law of sweet Marie, who made their oddly formal introductions, observing rules of precedence that could no longer have any value.