started new chapter about Birdie getting two shares of the Whydah prize

1 files changed, 29 insertions, 10 deletions

diff --git a/lbh.txt b/lbh.txt
index c1399d4..ecfea2d 100644
--- a/lbh.txt
+++ b/lbh.txt
@@ -66,7 +66,7 @@ By the time they arrived all the twins had left was a memory of trees. The deep
 
 # Main
 
-## Chapter 1: On The Sea
+## Chapter 1:  On The Sea
 
 The scent of the world crept into her hammock before she ever opened her eyes. The smell of wet cedar wood and salt. The soft sweetness of cedar too long at sea and then the bright briny salt smell of the sea itself. She opened her eyes and looked up. A sliver of purple twilight peaked through the canvas of the hammock, wrapped up around her. She craned her head back to look at the dark brown mast, crusted with salty white patterns that looked like the drawings of snowflakes in Papa's big book, which was wrapped carefully in walrus leather and stored somewhere in the hold beneath the deck. 
 
@@ -198,7 +198,7 @@ Their father tacked Delos back and forth up and down the windward side of the is
 
 Everyone on the island had seen them come in, but they were still too deep in the marsh to make it to camp before dark. They made the last meal of the season on the ship with Birdie's fish and hatched plans to get Delos unloaded the next morning. Birdie, Lulu, and Henri fell asleep making plans for what they would do when the saw their cousins the next day.
 
-## Chapter 2: Off The Sea
+## Chapter 2:  Off The Sea
 
 The feel of sand stuck to her fingers. Lulu flicked her fingers and felt the rough sand fall away and the smooth skin beneath. She was inside a pale white cocoon of sheet. She stretched her arms up over her head, feeling for the edge, for the sand. She found it and pull it down over her head and sat up to look around.
 
@@ -274,7 +274,7 @@ She had heard someone once whispering in a shop, calling them pirates, but she d
 
 Tonight though he did not tell any stories. He danced. First with Birdie, then with Henri, then with her. After a while Uncle Cole professed he was tired and put away the fiddle and sat down by the fire. There was catching up, plenty of poking fun, a rather long story about planting rice that Lulu lost track of in the middle when she began to doze off. She found a blanket in the pile of still unsorted belongings in the hut and went partway up a dune where she could still feel the heat the fire, but also see the stars and the sea. She fell asleep watching Castor and Pollux twinkle in the night.
 
-## Chapter 3: Birdie Organizing Camp
+## Chapter 3:  Birdie Organizing Camp
 
 It was hard to believe it would be cold in another turning of the moon. Or, maybe two this year, thought Birdie as she sat sweating in the sweltering afternoon heat, weaving swamp grass with Kadiatu and her mother. They were making the last five or six mats that would serve as the walls to their house. Birdie and her father had already set up the inside of the hut. She loved to organize things, to find a place for everything and put everything in its place. Her father loved the result, but not the process. He left that to Birdie, only stepping in from time to time to point out that they needed something to be in a particular place. Pans by the fire for instance. Birdie had wanted to hang them from the rafters, but her father said no, by the fire. Where we use them. Besides, if they hang they can fall. If they're on the ground they'll never fall on someone's head. The thing was, they would have look so beautifully organized hanging there. Kobayashi agreed and he cooked nearly as many meals as their father, but he too wanted them on the ground. It is sometimes necessary to not be quite as beautiful so that it can be more safe. 
 
@@ -1736,7 +1736,7 @@ He turned and walked back toward the beach. "Take the man you call uncle teach,
 
 "But," he spun around to face them with a menacing look on his face. "Never take another man's rum."
 
-## The Tale Black Sam Told
+## Chapter 13: The Tale Black Sam Told
 
 Henri avoided Ratham for several days, heading off into the woods in search of boar, while Birdie helped clean up and organize their camp each morning. A full ship's company could make an impressive mess of their camp. Lulu helped out, but Birdie always went beyond cleaning into organizing, leaving Lulu to her own devices. 
 
@@ -1870,7 +1870,7 @@ He continued to stare off into the fire as a tears ran down his face. Finally he
 
 Lulu didn't know what to say. She thought a thousand thoughts, but none of them could do anything to ease the pain of that image, of Owen and tk and Uncle Cole, somewhere out there in the darkness, never able to find their way back, searching for their families, but never able to find them. She said nothing, but when Henri finally laid his head down, she pulled him close and wrapped her arms around him and they fell asleep that way.
 
-## Careen
+## Chapter 14: Careen
 
 Sam and Jack and the crew spent two weeks on the beach. The crew helped her father frame out a new Maggie. It still needed a mast, but they'd floated it and rowed it up the river. It was a slightly modified design her father believed would sail faster. Jack stood on shore watching Sam and her father trying to surf it in from its maiden voyage. "You know Birdie, three years ago I started sailing in something not much bigger than that thing. I sailed into a Nassau two winters ago in a canoe. A canoe Birdie. It was a fine canoe. But look at that Birdie. He pointed down the beach at Whydah, which was nearly upright, waiting for the tide to lift her enough to slide back out into deeper water, her hull sealed, her rigging the next thing to be worked on. 
 
@@ -1914,7 +1914,7 @@ Bellamy might be the captain, but the ship came to life when the quartermaster c
 
 And just like that, Whydah was gone, back to what she did best, chasing sails over the horizon.
 
-## Whydah Returns 
+## Chapter 15: Whydah Returns 
 
 It was a quarter turn of the moon before the Whydah returned, with the prize ship right behind her.
 
@@ -2070,15 +2070,34 @@ Ratham laughed. "No, I like my Nassau. I like my clothes and my wine and my food
 
 Her father sighed. "This island is a wonderful place to make camp for the winter, but there are dozen of places to do that within a day's sail of here, and thousands more another day's sail beyond that. You can call it running if you want to, but that's not how I see it." Her father propped himself up on one elbow. "My people come from the high country, we got there following the water, just looking for a place we could exist undisturbed. But we kept having to go higher. So some of us turned around and went the other way, followed the water back to it's source. If we leave here it will just be more following the water, flowing on. Water never stops Jack. That river over there," her father gestured toward the Edisto river, "would you say it's running away from something? Or is it running toward something? I say it's doing neither. Is it just doing the thing it was given to do, to journey through the world as best it can, follow its course out into the sea, and keep going on wherever the currents take it. The lowlanders, they think the rivers stop at the shore. You and I know that's not true. That water never stops flowing, nothing on this earth ever stops moving. Why would I? It's unnatural to stay in one place too long. Besides," her father smiled a broad, bright smile of the sort Lulu rarely saw him smile, "where's the adventure in sitting around some island all day?"
 
-Jack nodded and pushed his hat back a little, smiling. "Well, when you put it like that..." He raised her mug to him and then took a drink. 
+Jack nodded and pushed his hat back a little, smiling. "Well, when you put it like that..." He raised his mug to her father and then took a drink. 
 
 ## need birdie chapter here
 
-tk something between Whydah leaving and McPhail arriving.
+Birdie lay awake late into the night, watching Orion's belt move across the sky, wondering about the hunter. Did he like it up there? Was it small consolation? Did he miss hunting? Did that great son of Poseidon miss Artemis? Are you happy up there Birdie whispered to Orion. I think I should have liked to keep hunting if it were me she answered for him. Never trust a jealous god, not even Apollo.
 
-Deal with Birdie and her share of the prize.
+None of the stories swirling in her head had an answer for her real question though. Should she claim her share of the Whydah's prize? Ratham had offered two shares. One for sighting, and one for being part of the crew, even if it were only for that morning. Every member of the crew was entitled to a share. With her second, for sighting, she would get over 150 pieces of eight. 
 
-## The British 
+That was more money than Birdie had ever seen in her life. More than she had ever heard of anyone seeing or have. It was more than her father had. It was enough to outfit them for years to come. It was enough that they would not have to worry about money again for quite some time. At least that was what Ratham had told her. But she knew her father was against it. She knew he didn't want her name in the ship's log in case that log ever fell into British hands. If it did her name would be there, marking her a pirate, pure and simple. If captured she would be hung like any other pirate. 
+
+This was not a fate Birdie enjoyed thinking about. She had seen men hanging dead from the gallows in Charlestown, crows picking at their rotten flesh. She did not want to be up there on the gallows. But the idea that her family would be safer, could afford to find somewhere new to live, could maybe even find a home away from... the British. Hadn't her father said the British treated everyone badly? Did it matter then if she was official a pirate? Was being thrown in prison for living on someone else's island so much better than just being hung? Maybe Kobayashi was right, at least being hung it was all over quickly, there was no sitting around in prison. It was hard for Birdie to imagine a worse fate than being locked in a dark prison cell. Just thinking of it now made her wonder if she might not prefer the gallows, crows and all.
+
+The fire was nothing but coals. No one had banked them. Birdie got up and used a small log to move the coals to the side of the fire, piling them against the rocks to protect them from the wind, where they would last through the night and help them get the fire going again in the morning. She sighed and sat down beside the warmth of the coals. She shivered. It was getting colder. It was getting to only time of year she did not like, real winter, the two moons where it was cold enough that she had to wear pants and a coat all the time. It was the time they made their last batches of tar and the heat of the kilns finally became welcome. She wondered though, with the Whydah having used half their tar if they would have to keep making it longer than last year. There wasn't much left if they were going to tar Delos too before they left for northern shores in March.
+
+She could change all that if she claimed the prize. She could make it so they no longer had to make tar. *I like making tar* her father had said, but in her head Birdie had been thinking, then you can still make it, you just won't *have* to make it. She half wanted to take the money just to see if her father would really keep making tar or if that was just something he said so that she wouldn't feel obligated to put her name in the log for the sake of their family. But the truth was she realized, she did feel obligated, and as soon as she realized that there was no doubt in her mind what she had to do. She fell asleep watching Orion run down toward the sea. You never stop hunting, you just move to new hunting grounds.
+
+---
+
+She woke up before dawn and went down to the shoreline to swim. She stripped off her clothes and steeled herself for a moment before running headlong into the sea and diving under the first wave she could before she lost her nerve. The cold was a shock so sharp it felt like fire. Her skin tingled. She broke the surface and gasped involuntarily. She stood for a moment letting the shock wear off before she strode back in, gathered up her clothes and walked back to camp in the twilight. She was shaking involuntarily by the time she got the fire going and slowly, slowly she warmed and dried herself. She was dressed again and feeling refreshed by the time Kobayashi came out to stir up the fire. He smiled and nodded at her.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+## Chapter 16: The British 
 
 Lulu woke from a dream where she was gliding over the water, slow and smooth like a pelican, alone, her wing tips skimming the waves and watching the schools the fish dart from her shadow. And then she was in her usual body, lying on a calico quilt on the sand. She sat up and stretched and shook Birdie, who swatted at her. "Come on, Birdie, lets play what we were playing last night."