“You’re a hell of a man for one who never did this work before,” was all Angus said, extending his big maw of a hand.

Sam did not want to accept his defeat again, but he shook anyway, though he did not speak.

By then the evening sun had all but disappeared from the horizon, and there was little left of its light except the last red-golden rays. The men added to this the light of bonfires, which they had set up all around the camp to mark the end of their taskwork. Magnus watched it all from astride his favorite horse, who was called Annabel, as he had watched the harvest all day long. He dismounted then when the results were settled and called for silence as he reached in his pocket for the coins.

“Angus, you proved yourself once again to be the best worker of all my men and, I would wager, equal to any in the entire colony.”

He gave him his prize, which Angus measured in his palm with relief and satisfaction before slipping one into each of his pockets for safety.

“The contest this year was better than any other, though, and it would be a shame if that went unacknowledged,” Magnus went on, going into his purse again. “Sam, this is yours,” he concluded, “for making a show that in any other year, or on any other farm, would have won you two.” He then handed Sam a single glittering gold coin, which seemed to him as he received it to slip through the light like a fish through a stream of water.

He held it in his palm for a good long time, examining all the strange letters and markings embossed upon it, which were all indecipherable to him except the image of a crown. At last he closed his fingers around the warm metal. He thought how much he had done to get it, and how it had excited and divided all the men in the barracks.

“What do you suppose it be worth?” he asked Effie, finally putting it away and turning to his woman.

“Why, Sam, it be worth a whole lot,” she said. “A whole lot.”

The men all congratulated him on his great showing as the night wore on, but the excitement had faded from the air, and to rekindle it someone had started up a series of games. First there were to be foot races, then wrestling, and someone else suggested boxing, but Magnus vetoed that idea, knowing it would surely get too far out of hand.

When they began the wrestling, Caleum ached to join in the trial, as he had with his friends when he was younger, knowing he could defeat any other man there, but Magnus also put a halt to that notion, claiming the reason for his decision should be self-evident. Caleum accepted his uncle’s authority but only reluctantly, because he loved few things so much as a contest and knew no one could beat him.

“If you did win, you would rob the men of a prize, and if you didn’t win it would just never do,” Magnus said to him, as he watched the two final contestants circle each other inside the ring of men.

Magnus then left that circle and made his way through the bonfires and the music to seek out his slave Sam Day. When he found him, at the edge of the gathering, where he was drinking rum punch, he drew him away from the crowd, saying only that he would like a moment of his time. It pleased Sam to be spoken to this way, and, though he was much absorbed in the other games, he went willingly with Magnus to hear what his master had to say to him.

They walked together away from the others, and Magnus was not commanding and aloof as usual but waited so that Sam was at his side and stayed there as they made their way across the cow-shorn grass of the home meadow.

“Sam, I should never have taken you from the home you knew,” Magnus said, without looking at him, as they rested at the top of a rise. “I had a problem, and I let that get the better of what I knew to be right, so we have some business to settle between us.”

Sam listened without saying anything, but he was surprised to hear Magnus admit his fault, as that was not usual to hear from men who owned other men.

“I told you when I brought you here you could go at the end of the season,” Magnus reminded him, as they surveyed the land out to the edge of their sight and the darkness beyond that. “I didn’t know how to do it sooner, on account of not knowing what the town would think of me buying slaves just to turn them loose. You’ll have your wages, though, Sam, same as everyone else; then you can set up on your own. I suppose somewhere out here on my land.”

“You would give me a part of your land?” Sam asked incredulously.

“Not give, Sam,” Magnus corrected him. “Sell.”

“Master Merian,” Sam said, looking his owner in the eye, “I know what kind of problems plagued you before, and I don’t blame you too much for what you did. We both know, though, that if people think you buying slaves just to turn em free, they run both of us out from Berkeley.”

“I thought about it, Sam,” Magnus interrupted him, “and I think it’s what’s best. I can grapple with the consequences. The only other thing is for you to head out with the caravans at the end of the month, and that’s still a hard road.”

Sam looked at Magnus and understood what he meant. “I know ain’t nothing free to a certain way of thinking,” Sam said. “How much you think a plot of land cost me?”

“I’ll think of something fair,” Magnus answered him. The two of them then stood looking out over the country. “There’s a place out that way that might suit you just fine,” Magnus went on. “Good land too if you got a mind to do a little work, which I know you do.”

When he was Sam Day’s age Magnus had already been free for more than a decade, and he had been free now almost as long as he was captive. He did not know if Sam could learn everything he needed so late in life, and to manage his own place instead of just taking on itinerant work. The thought of him and Effie out there by themselves gave him pause, as he knew how difficult it would be, but he was willing to do it because he knew he had to restore the balance he had upset. “Tell you what, Sam, I’ll give it to you for your wages from this season,” Magnus said. “Then you’ll still have enough to start out with, and you can do some work around Stonehouses during the fall to earn a little extra.”

“Let me weigh it over, Master Merian,” Sam said, reckoning the prospect of turning into a farmer. “It’s not something I ever had a notion of before, so I need some time to wrap my mind about it and talk to Effie.”

“It’s good terms,” Magnus said, without telling him the only thing he himself had ever got such good terms for was Sam Day himself.

“I never thought getting sold away would work out like this,” Sam said to him.

“You know, I was once a slave, Sam,” Magnus said to him, trying to express what he felt just then.

“Couldn’t nobody never have told me that.”

“Well, I was.”

When Sam looked at Magnus at that moment, his master was a mystery to him: that a man who had been a slave could take one for himself. He did understand, though, why he was being set free.

“I’ma put a blessing on this place for you, to keep anything wrong from ever happening to it again,” he promised, having learned by then the original reason he was called there in the first place. It was his word, not as one grateful returning a favor, but as a doctor and expert in the workings of complex roots and hidden phenomena.

eight

It started raining the first of September that year, and rain was still descending violently two weeks later when the western caravans set out from Berkeley. Three-quarters of the way back in the train, Sam Day and Effie drove a used wagon he had bought cheap from the wheel-wright, because it tilted a little more to one side than the other and there was no way of fixing the condition. It was drawn by two piebald hinnies he had also gotten a deal on, who were the strangest animals he thought he had ever seen. They pulled his wagon without complaint, though, and he held the reins, guiding them westward with all the provisions he had bought for what he hoped would be his best chance in life. Nor did he have illusions it would be anything but difficult. He knew as well there was no real place for him anywhere else anymore, except that he might make one in a new country. Effie would go wherever her man did, but she was powerful afraid to be giving up Berkeley and Stonehouses, and she had heard many frightening tales about the western lands.