The horse was just a little warm when Franklin cut into its flanks and upper thighs for the leanest meat. It was a laborious and messy task, and he returned often to the water trough to wash his face and clean the blood from his hands and arms. The horse’s smell was overpowering, but the rewards were plentiful. Soon he’d filled one fish basket with steaks and chops and cuts and a second with thin strips of rib meat and red sinew, suitable for making jerky. With some help, more time, and better tools, he could strip the whole horse down, bones and all. Back home, on the family stead, a butchered horse could provide everything from glue to a cudgel, but Franklin was in too great a hurry. There was much to do before Margaret’s return.
He tried to pull the carcass away from the smokeshop himself. Within a day or two it would smell and fill with maggots, flies, and rats. It would attract the foxes, wolves, and bears and draw attention to the cabins. But the horse’s carcass was too heavy still, despite the butchery. So, although it seemed in Franklin’s mind to offend the rules of good husbandry, he harnessed up the little mare and led her over to help drag her mate away with ropes passed through the exposed rib cage.
Together they labored over rising ground until they found a path into the thickest salt scrub in a shallow dip. Franklin did his best to hide the carcass, kicking sand over it and pulling dead leaves and wood onto it, but by the time he and the mare had returned to the row of cabins and Jackie’s cries, the gulls had arrived in their hundreds. They could be seen and heard from afar.
Fifteen
Margaret spotted the frenzy of the gulls as soon as she reached the dunes above the cabins on her late-afternoon return to Franklin and Jackie. She studied the birds for a few moments through the spy pipes — still in her possession — but their quarrelsome frolics did not disturb her. Gulls were a mystery anyway, she had decided after just two days of their constant, nagging company. They were like the crows of Ferrytown in everything but color, always busy and complaining, always in a mob. White crows. Her day had been disastrous and depressing, but she was in no hurry to be back at the cabins. She was the bearer of shocking news, and she was fearful.
It had been easy walking out that morning — exciting, even. Leaving Franklin and Jackie asleep in their shared bed had made her parting from them especially tender. And somehow her hunger and the early start had made her feel vigorous and purposeful. Certainly the route along the marsh tops and the high dunes was eyecatching, though somewhat baffling for a woman who was not yet used to the ocean. She could not make any sense of how the shore retracted and advanced, and how the sea could express itself in such variety, now blushing blue, now gray as ash, now green. Its moodiness made no sense. What could be the purpose of so much restlessness and indecision? But Margaret was in high spirits nevertheless. The sun was on her side, and what little wind there was was at her back, lending its hand.
By midmorning she had reached a cluster of seven or eight cottages gathered around a cobbled slipway that led through flattened sand ridges onto a beach. Fishing boats were pulled up and full of water, their wooden hulls silvered by the winter and the salt. Plumes of heavy smoke, always a pleasing sight, curled from the buildings and hung across the clearing. Margaret hid her spy pipes under her clothes and walked as quietly as she could. It was not possible to tiptoe through, however. There were too many dutiful dogs for anyone to pass without alerting the inhabitants. But only women and a few young children came to greet and question her, women with faces as weathered and as brown as bark, a couple of them clothed in gaudy dresses more suitable for a town. They wanted to know where she was staying, where she was coming from. They did not touch, but still she felt that they were picking at her, like hens, inquisitive and hungry. Visitors arriving from that side of the coast were rare, they said. “There’s nothing up there, girl, excepting wind.” But Margaret managed to avoid their questions, saying only that she was lost — a subtle plea for help, she’d found — and that her family was waiting for her. “I hope to find out everything I can about the ships,” she said.
“You’re hardly dressed for it,” they told her, pointing at her yard sandals and tattered patch skirt. “Show your knees to our fire for a little while. There’s something spare for you to eat, if you can manage it.”
Indeed she could manage it, even though the it was fish and bread. At first the low, smoky room, the greasy food, the fug of burning driftwood and animal chips, and the press of bodies all around her made her tired and a little nauseous. The bread sat in her stomach like a weight, but still she was glad of it and the sociable warmth provided by the fire. Very soon, though, she was wide awake and shivering. These women were not the wives of busy fishermen, as she’d supposed, left alone for the day while their sons and husbands went out among the furrows of the sea to plow the water for its crops. They were instead abandoned wives.
“You’d best be warned, sweetheart,” one of the older women, Joanie, explained. “Or you’ll be sorely disappointed when you reach the anchorage. Best turn around right now and go back to your husband and your kid. Save yourself the misery.”
Like Margaret herself, Joanie explained, these women had been emigrants. Two seasons before, they all had made the journey eastward, “full of hope,” to the coast and the ocean passage. Several had been through Ferrytown and had mixed memories of their short and costly stay there. They shook their heads at Margaret’s news of Ferrytown’s destruction but did not seem surprised. Misfortune was universal, and therefore sympathy was hard to rouse.
“There’s not a road in this whole land that isn’t crowded with dangers,” one of them said. “We all started out with husbands. And now we’re castaways and jetsam. We haven’t got one single man to share between the nine of us. We only share our beds with dogs and kids nowadays. Except when someone’s paying us, of course.” So that explains the dresses, Margaret thought, and how these women earn their keep. The younger ones and the best kept of the older ones are whores.
“What happened to your husbands, then?” she asked, not really wanting to be delayed by the answers but keen to be polite. Now all the women were speaking at once. Three of their men had been lost on the journey, one to fever, one to drowning, and the other crushed by a collapsing cart. One of their men had, like Franklin, been taken as a slave by a gang of rustlers. Again that phrase, “He could be anywhere by now. Or dead.” But the other five men had made it all the way to the coast and, as far as their wives could tell, continued all the way across the ocean to the Far Shores.
“Then why are you still here?” asked Margaret.
“Because about that time the boats decided they wouldn’t take us, dear. New rules.”
“Wouldn’t take you? Why?” Margaret was instantly alarmed.
“Because we’re neither men nor girls.”
“Nor rich,” added Joanie, her voice a little louder and more insistent than those of her neighbors. “That’s all they’re taking on the boats and has been for more than a year…” She held her fingers up and tallied off the types of travelers who might still find a welcome at the anchorage. “That’s pretty girls, for one, girls who haven’t got a husband or a child, girls that they can marry on the other side, or sell. Families that have the valuables to bribe themselves some berths, is two. Men that are fit enough to put to laboring, or men with skills. That’s three and that’s all, as far as I could tell. Everybody else can go hang. They’ll never get a berth.” She shook her head gravely, to allow her sisters to chorus Never, never, not a chance.