path: root/lbh.txt

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"The months and days are travelers of eternity. Just like the years that come and go. For those who live their lives on boats, or lead horses towards old age, their lives are travel, their journeys are home." -- Matsuo Basho, Oku no Hosomichi (1689) 


'''
# Notes

- Need more details of landscape, sea, and marsh esp.
- household is father, Tambo and his wife, plus Kobayashi.

Plots
- The british captain from Charlestown is also the landowner of th etrees, McPhail. He comes after the family about the tree stumps, which he sees as his, being used for their profit, and also that they make the pirate ships that raid mcphail's ships more seaworth, insult to injury.  Add moral complexity for the kids, is papa a bad person? Is the McPhail a bad person? Or is it all just wrong and now can own the trees?

I own them fair and square.
She thought this over a for miniute. "No, you don't. You forced out the Ediston and the tk, and the tk. You overwhelmed them with force and marched them out."
"Yes. Yes, I suppose that's quite right, I did." He smiled quizically at her. 
"And that's wrong. Every bit as wrong was what you say papa did."
"No my child it's not."
"Then why is wrong when capitan Ratham overwhelms one of your ships and takes it from you.
"Woah!" He jerked the reins tight, and the horses nearly reared as the wagon can lurching to a stop. He said nothing, but turned and stared at her for a long time. She felt his eyes memorizing her features the way she had studied the pictures hir bool. then smilled aagain, shook the reins loos and resumed their journey, staring off into space and ignoring her the remainder of the way into Charlestown.

They eta waring from Ratham that McPhail is coming for them. 
How does the storm fit in?
No good guys, no bad guys. her father helps both ratham and mcphail. Warns mcphail of the storm, helps bring his ship int to he esuary to shelther, they take the wagon to chareston.



"Behind the veil of all the hieratic and mystical allegories of ancient doctrines, behind the darkness and strange ordeals of all initiations, under the seal of all sacred writings, in the ruins of Nineveh or Thebes, on the crumbling stones of old temples and on the blackened visage of the Assyrian or Egyptian sphinx... there are found indications of a doctrine which is everywhere the same and everywhere carefully concealed." ― Eliphas Lévi

Birdie the artist, Lulu the what? What does Lulu do? We need to get deeper into the kids playing at some point. Maybe this chapter something about them making figures and playing. Or perhaps playing in the Arkhangelsk. Could I insert adventures of the Arkhangelsk as little mini stories within the story? Or should I do that with Papa's stories? I kind of like it as a tale within a tail. Maybe that's Lulu's talent, telling stories. Birdie pants pictures, Lulu tells stories, Henri has adventures or writes maybe?





# Overplot:

- Opening at sea. The approach to Edisto through Birdie's eyes.
    - Scenes:
        - Birdie in the hammock, her as skilled sailor, desc of ship
        - introduce Tambo, Kobayashi and rice
        - Story of the storm, rumors about Nassau and the british
        - Backstory of the mother, landing on Edisto

- Pine forest intro: in the stumps
    - Scenes:
        - Camp establishing shot:
        - Lulu and Tambo in the boat, more on rice, father as anarchist
        - Lulu and the alligator part 1
        - Lulu on the stumps, break from the others, relationship with Birdie
        - Backstory of the edistow
        - return trip through the marsh
        - Aunt and the pot for the Arkhangelsk

- Fishing the Bank
    - Scenes:
        - Birdie on her cousins, father's rum speech
        - Cousins as poor sailors, land people
        - Birdie taking charge, Lulu as the sailor
        - Fishing the bank
        - Hint of the Storm

- Tar harvest
    - Scenes
        - making tar for the ships. 
        - autumn cool, swimming and playing at the beach in the wrecked ship.
        - further develop the cousins and Kadi

- Storm
    - Scenes
        - Birdie and her father sense the storm and try to stop the Uncle's boat
        - birdie and lulu on the northern edge of the island screaming into the wind
        - they go to get kadi
        - storm under the boat, aligator scene wiht lulu
        - cache barrels of tar in the high ground of the hammocks near their camp
            - one breaks
            - dark tar on the sand, foreshadowing of oil
            


- Ratham arrives to careen the ship
    - warns of mcphail
- McPhail part one
    arrives to arrest the father, talks his way out of it because the shortm
    - guides Mcphails ship into the estuary they take shelpter
- McPhail part two
    - Still arrests the father, takes him to charlestown.
    - Birdie goes with
    - Lulu and henri hide with the others, they escape by sea. 
        - get to Ratham, they meet up with a third
        - Ships proceed to blockade charlestown.
    - Ratham helps the father escape, family escapes to sea, heads south toward the Caribean.
'''

# Unused scenes

## Storm desc

That even a thunderstorm rolls in, cools off the land, the sunsets throught he clouds, the sound of the thunder was like drmming, a marshall, marching ound that advanced across the waves toward them. It was early, far to early for a big storm, those came later, at the end of summer, the first on was the sign it was time to move south, time to head to St Augustine for the winter. This was a thunderstorm from the south. A tk, Tamba called them. It brought a strange drop in temeprature as iff the storm were sucking something out of summer, giving it a viseral punch in the gut. No, as if summer were grathering herself up, taking a deeep breath, a momentary pause from her usual swelter to give them some reprieve. 

## Tamba backstory


The storm had been an early one, Tamba and tk were on captain tk's boat, bound for boston with a prize they'd taken off the coast of Florida when the storm came out of the south. Their captain tried to put in at Owen town, but they did not make it, the wind broke the mast and sent the boat over. Tamba and tk knew how to swim, the rest of the crew did not. Even so, they were lucky. They clung to piece of broken mast and managed to steer themselves in the heavy chop such that they madeit to shore. Tamba told of seeing a shark in the shallows on the way in, even it was so bewildered by the storm it showed no interest in them, merely passing by close enough to touch, though Tamba did not, before settling into their wake where it stayed until the water became too shallow for it.

## Cooking

The kettle hung ove rhte fire from the trupod her pap had made from iron taken out of the arkhnglsk. Her father was not a smith, but he' watched the man in Chrlestown enough to get ht ebasics. He come back the camp these year and built himself a small forge, and bellows out of sail cloth. So far he;s made two legs of iron for a fire tripod, the their was still a puece of willow, which was stong enough, though eventyually warped from the heard of the cials and had be replaced. 

In the kittle was a bubbling stew full of fish and rice and seasoned with salt and herbs Lulyu hadhelped father from the creak edge the day before. 

The sand was dug out, the six inch deep bit was lined with stone, but left caps on bothe swindward and landward sides so thta the windws would feed the firs enough oxygen even with the in burning almost entirely below the surace oft he sane. Sometime when her father or Tabe brough down a boar their father would dig another put and build a giant fire in it and let it durn down to a huge mountain of cials . Then he'd lay the board meant, wrapped in its down skin on the coals, burry the whole thing over night and then the next wmorning they'd dig it up and featst on meat so sweet and tender you never wanted to eat anythign else ever again. It would last them the better part of weeks, more if the weather was cool enough. They build a tootcellar in the dark shade of the hut, two feath cown in the sand, lined with planks of swap cypress ther papa had split, it kept food cool and fesh for quite some time. At night they banks the fire, but used the coals to keep the previous nights stew hot and in the morning the mother buit up the fire again and boil the stew and that wsas breakfast. 

Sometimes he roasted fish, but mostly lulu loved stews, fish stew, venison stew, boar stew, even rabbit stew wasn't have bad, espcially when the could trade with the Cherokee for ramps, which were lulu's favoir food in the world, at once swwet and sharp;y bitter, they made everything delicsious, When he could her father stuffed the boars with ramps before buring them to cook overnight. The resulting meat was tend an swet and smealed of the earth and tasted, a little bit like heaven Tamba said. 

## Delos original sketch

The boat was wooden, 12 feet from bow to stern, wood planked and sealed with the arckhanglsk tar, smooth shiny weathered wood with hardly a splinter in the boat. She ws rigged like a doah, triangular sail, mast near the bow, single ling coming back offf the boom and a tiller in the rear. She had a outrigger spar that would be lashed to the port or starboard gunwale via two blocks her father had attached with nails he'dpryed lookse from the arckhaglske. She would be a palfrom so stable their mother often used it to threw nets beyond the surfline, obut shoe could also be rigged for speed that would outrun every boat the had ever tried to match her. Lulyu had raced her in charles town harbor the winer efore winning by two lengths ten lengh over a very nice, but piirly rigged effort the tk governors siun had put together. He was a nice enough boy shed told Birdie, he ust doesnt know how to sail very well. Or build boats. Birdie had smiled. The took their prize opurse of two bit and bought peppermint sticks and licorish  imported from lindon. Hand their got their mother a brush for her hair. Their faother stood outside the store, sittinng on a barrel, carding something in the shade, watching the world pass but has his knofe flicked seeming absently at the thing piece of oak in his hand. He smiled when they came running out to show him the comb. She'll love that. 

Their mother was a stong independent woman who keep their camp with a nearly military sense of neatness. She didn't care a wit what the girls wore, but if they left a diry bowl lying a about she threaten them with a switch. This only very rarely happend to Birdie, the Lou had a defiant strek that foten set her up and kicked her about in whay  she did not really understand. propelling her down paths she did not mean the woalk, great screaming matches with her sister, stomping and growling in theatrical ways that drove her mother to step in and threaten switching. 



He father pulled the sail in tight, the boat heaved away from them, but her father leaned back against he gunwale slightly until to reached a balance point that balanced speed and awkwardness, the boat lept across the waves and out beyond the surf line of the sand bar to smoother water. The wind was blowing offshore, a storm from the west would be here tomorrow her father said. 

Her father spun the little boat into the wind, dropped the sail and walked toward the bow to get the net. Birdie sprang up and followed. They heaved the net over the side, letting the drift of the current carry them away from it, spreading it out. Once it was out her father used and oar to bring the boat about to where he wanted it and then he yanked the tk line , shooting the halyard and the sail back up. It caught the wind the minute it was up and tighted the lines of the net, pulling them and the net back toward shore. Birdie leaned over the gunwale and watch as fish swam by and were pulled into the net. 

By the time the neared the surfline again the net was choked with fish. She helped her father pull it in, though it became so heavy that eventually her effort was of little use. Her father wrapped the line around the mast and pulled the net, chock full of writhing fish up against the hull, fell off the wind as the boat came into the break of the sand bar and then, timing it with a wave, surfed the craft expertly over the sand bar and into the more sheltered inner waters where he began to paddle it in the shore.

Hoisting the net, cleanign the fish and drying wonderedthem. more description of their time at sea, her father smoking, talking of the sea, the old country perhaps, some kind of tradition.

## Sighted ship at sea

They had arrived early in the morning, the air still heald the wet chill of night, beads of dew shined on teh gunwales of the boat when Birdie came up to look at the coastline. Her father was on the bowsprit perched precariously, but riding the chop as if on a surfboard, glass to his eye, staring off at a horizon Birdie couldn't see. She came forward to have a look and saw the sail her father wa s studying. He did not look away, but did say, "merchant, heading north. Boston. Maybe Providence. Riding low. Make a prize if anyone gets to her." 

"Will they? "

Her father brought down the glass, and looked down at her. "I don't know. I only know who is where. Last I head Whydah Gally was up that way. Bellamy'd certainly take her, sitting low in the water like that. Not gold, but something out of Owen town." He stared off at the ship, "but you never know. The sea decides."

He jumped down the to the deck and rubbed her head. "It's always cat and mouse. That's why I stay out of it. Who are you rooting for?"

Birdie considered this for a moment, she wasn't sure really. She didn't like the merchant captains she'd met. She was pretty sure she didn't care what happened to them, the way they treated their men they deserved whatever they got. Her father had once told her that there were good captains, he'd never met them but he'd heard stories. He also reminded her that even those ugly mean snorting fat men had wives and children somewhere who end up paupers in debtors prison or some other ill might befall them. Still, she thought of the men and women who sailed with her family, who flew the black flag and, while there were a few she did not like, for the most part they were kind, fair people. They had a code, way of living that was about more than the fortune the merchant men were always chasing. 

Her father dropped bucket over the side and filled it up. He knelt and splashed some water on his face, rubbed his eyes and she walked over the handed him the linen that served as his towel. He washed his face every morning, rain or shine, shivering cold or blistering hear,, it did not mater. He father was a man of unbreakable, unbendable even, habits. Not many. But he always washed his face and he always sat and thought, every monring, nearly without exception. She'd seen him seated near the bow in six foot chop, wind howling down on them and he with his eyes closed, thinking.

He took the towel from her with a thanks and wiped the salt water out of his beard.

"I think I'd like the Whydah to take her," she said. 

He smiled. "I think I would too."

It was well past midday before the glided into the marshes and up the river to Tamba, tk and Cuthie's village. Tamba had waved them down in the marsh, coming out by canoe to guidethem in. Huge storms reshaped the mouth of the river and the marshes every year. Her family knew the river well last year, but that knowledge was dangerously out of date by now. If the wanted to make it to where the tk would be stored, they need someone who had been on the river all winter, knew it well. Tamba was that man. He took the tiller, the only man her father had every let take the tiller in Birdie's time sailing with him, and guided them slowly up the seeming still water. They rode the incoming tide through the marsh, but then the river began to take over, the boat slowed, finally it stilled them completely. The wind was not in their favor so her father locked two sets of oars to each side of the boat and took a middle seat for himself, while Lulu and Birdie and Henri took the other oars. Birdie worked the starboard oar while Henri and Lulu worked the port side. Slowly the boat crept up the river. The deeper water looked black and still but their oars told a different story, battling the steady current of the river that wanted so badly to merge with the sea.

Why do you want it so badly river? Lulu wondered. What do you get out of it? You become salty. You become just another bit of water in the endlessness of the ocean, a drop, every drop once it's own, not joined with others into something more, the sea. The sea. You want to be part of the sea. You are part of the sea, it's a coming home after the long journey down the mountains to here. 

The sea had personality, the sort of thing a single drop of water might lack. The sea was something more, a home, a joining together, but greater than the sum of it parts, it was greater than just about everything. Like the rest of her family, and any one who spent any length of time around it, Lulu prayed to sea every morning, greeted it palms out. Some welcome the sun as a god, others welcome the sun so they can once again see the sea.

arriving by ship
    meeting with Cuthie
    playing on the tree
    discovering the arkhanglsk


##Kids playing in Arkhangelsk

What do you want to play? Birdie was hoping Lulu would say I don't know and they could play a game Birdie had in mind, but she didn't.

"We're crocodile pirates?"

"Crocodiles that are also pirates?" Henri's face immediately brightened at this idea. "Can we eat people?"

"We are people though."

"Wait, I thought you said we were crocodiles?"

"We're half crocodile, half human."

"Do we have human heads or crocodile heads?"

"It depends, we can have whichever we need. Mostly we have human heads, but when we go into battle we have crocodile heads and teeth."

"Yes!" said Henri. "But we have human arms, because we still need swords and guns."

"Of course."





# Prologue

They were two. Blood covered the bed. Even the midwife was whimpering and pitiful by the end. "A night and day," she said. And they were born, one the night, one the day. 

People remarked on this for a long while afterward, though no one knew which was born in the night, which the day save the midwife. Nor would anyone have been able to tell you what difference it might have made. Still, the story followed them. It followed them like the whispers that had always followed the family. The whispers were a wind, one that blew them sometimes where they wanted, sometimes not. Seafaring people must live with that.

The whispering wind followed them out of the town where they spent their winters, across the sea, running the easterlies to the mouth of a river, the wide open flood plain where they spent their summers on the shore, amongst the great pines. But the whispers came with their neighbors working the cod offshore. It came on shore like the August winds that whistled the pines. A whisper that blew harder every year, as if a storm were gathering. 

Their father spent all summer, a cold summer, sitting in the evenings, outside the tent, stroking his thick black beard and studying the wind and waves. There are storms worse than the sea he said. 

That year, when the last the southerlies blew out and before the northerlies turned fierce and cold, they loaded the small boat and slipped out of the old story.

They kept to the coast, giving wide berth to the places men gathered. When they came upon the marshy lowlands of London, they put in for a time. A brother arrived, his mother too left as he came. Their father grew even quieter for a time, then he disappeared altogether for a while. 

When he returned the winds blew favorably again and they left, hugging the coast until there was no coast left. And they were gone again. 

To a new world where people said the soldiers were fewer, the winds warmer, the possibilities wider. By the time they arrived all the twins had left was a memory of trees. The deep darkness of the forest floor where they would lie as babies, staring up at the trees, the branches reaching like thick fingers to scratch at the light of the sky above.

# Autumn

"""
Opening scene on the boat establishes birdie, always aware of her surroundings, always learning from her papa.

Also needs to to introduce Lulu and Henri, Kobayashi, Tambo and his wife to be. At the end of the chapter, they land on Edisto, set up camp. Papa goes to fetch the cousins.




They sail in the next day, father tells a story of some kind, a gannet dives at the boat to add some drama. they reach edisto, sam and charlie, the cousins come out from Owen twon. Tamba and tk and cuthie, he gets introduced, they set up camp, play on the dunes, find the arkhangelsk, make tar, go inland to get chicle, hunt and fish and swim. Then north to Owen town, then the storm. The death of Sam and then the family heads north again.

"""

## Chapter 1: On The Sea

The scent of the world crept into her hammock before she ever opened her eyes. The smell of wet wood and salt. The soft sweetness of wood 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 small hold below her. She did not know where. Neither did her sister. Neither did her brother. It was a mystery they worked on nearly every day they were at sea.

The wood creaked. Some of the salt blew loose. The water slapping the hull told her the waves were small. Her hammock, strung between mizzen mast and taffrail, swayed hardly at all. She lay without moving, trying to feel the boat as her father had taught her. She closed her eyes again. The boat was lifting and rolling slightly. They were moving with the current, but not as fast as the light swell rolling past them. At this latitude, this time of year, this close to shore, that would be south, as it had been for days now, although a swell moving south was called a northerly swell, which always mixed her up. 

The sail snapped like a whipped wet towel. That meant the wind was light. She listened again to the sound of the water. It pulsed, rushing by the boat in surges, quiet, then loud. The boat was moving fast enough that the wind probably wasn't light she reasoned. That meant they were running before the wind, otherwise the sail wouldn't have snapped. 

"We're running south, riding a northerly swell, the wind is 6 knots" She announced from the hammock. She heard her sister groan, "show off". Her father chuckled. "You're close Birdie. I'd say dead on with speed and swell. More of a broad reach though. I fell off to snap the sheet so you two'd wake up. Sun will be up soon"

Birdie smiled in her hammock. She stretched, lifting her arm out to feel the air. It was still cool, though wet and heavy. The sodden heat would come even earlier today, as it had every day for the last week. They would make camp the next day, maybe the day after, Birdie reasoned. She pulled her head up out of the hammock to scan the deck.

The tk was 52 feet from her bow sprite to aft rail where Birdie's hammock was tied. There were two masts, one just fore of midship and another in the cockpit at the rear, where the other end of her hammock was tied. Her father was vague about the boats origins, or at least how the tk came to be in her family. As Birdie understood it, she was built in a place called France, sailed into Danish waters where she ran aground. Her cargo was offloaded and she was abandoned to the waves. That was not Poseidon's plan though. The tides had pulled her back out to sea. And her father, who happened to be on watch on another ship had spied her. Sensing his chance, he'd woken two companions, sailed alongside her and the three trimmed the sails of their vessel, pointed her in the opposite direction and jumped ship for the new one.

One of those companions, Tamba, a tall, powerfully man with skin so black it was almost blue, was walking toward Birdie. She hopped out of the hammock, her feet landing on the smoothly worn oak planking of the deck with a light thud. 

"Morning Birdie." Tambo was from Gambia, across the ocean. An even hotter place, he had told her, which Birdie found difficult to believe. He had sailed with her father so long neither of them seemed to remember a time when they did not sail together.

"Good morning Tambo." 

He laid his hands on her shoulders and bent down to press his nose against hers. "Yes." he said and then he straightened up and spun her around to face the east where the sky was already fading from red and orange. "See. It comes."

"Yes. The sun is rising. Again"

She heard her father chuckle. Tambo laughed in a way her father never did, deeply, with a kind of rumble like a wagon on a washboard road. He shook her gently by the shoulder. "Appreciate. Always."

"I do. I promise. But I'm hungry. Do you want rice Tambo?"

He shook his head. A sleep voice from a hammock on the other side of mast piped up, "I do." 

She could see her brother's unruly mop of hair sticking out the side of the hammock because slept very high up the hammock, almost as if he were standing up it seemed to her.

"What about you Lulu?" She swung her sisters hammock gently.

"Yes."

"Papa?"

He nodded to her and then turned back around to watch the sun rise. Birdie ran aft, ducking under booms, and hopping over the coiled lines and small barrels stacked along the gunwales, a name she did not understand since there were no cannon on the tk. Well, none on the gunwale anyway. Below deck in the stern were two small cannon loaded with forks and knives designed to shred an enemies sails. The tk is small, Tambo once told her. We would be blown to bits by a cannon, but we're fast, we can outrun them all. We have just enough fire power to convince any other small, fast ships not to chase us. That's all we need. 

She ducked into the small doorway that led below decks, hands on the rails and flung herself down with a single leap. It was much darker below, it took her eyes a moment to adjust. She could see the glow of the stove and Kobayashi's form bent over, stirring a pot. He never looked up at her thud. He kicked a clay pot by his feet so that it slid slightly toward her. She grabbed a basket hanging from the rafters and scooped rice out of the pot and into it. 

He handed her several strips of dried fish, which she balanced on top of the pile of rice. "Aiiie. You eat everything." Kobayashi smiled. 

"It's for everyone" she said tucking the lid on. 

Make sure your brother eats some, that boy is too skinny.

"You sound like Kadi." Kobayashi frowned at her, but but she hardly noticed, the thought of Kadiatu made her heart flutter like a bird's wings. Only a few more days and they would be at Edisto. Kadiatu and her family would join them, her cousins would be there. They'd have the forest to run through, the dunes, they'd have space again. Birdie loved the sea, the way it held and rocked them, the way the boat glided through it, but she always felt a guest at sea. It was like visiting a distant relatives, you have a connection, but it is an old one that's difficult to put your finger on, like the memory of a smell you can't quite smell again, you try to sniff deeper, but the harder you try the more it receeds. The soul of the sea was too old, to vague to under stand in a human way. Very few could ever feel at home in the sea. Birdie felt at home on the land. It was there at the shore, the edge, the space where the ancient sea met the land today that she felt most herself. 

She managed the trip out of the hold with one hand on the ladder, one carrying the basket of rice and dried fish. The rolling motion of the swells moving beneath them way it difficult to walk evenly. She lurched and stumbled her way to stern where everyone was waiting for the cold rice and dried fish. She'd be happy to eat some meat again. She hoped Papa and Tamba would go hunting as soon as they landed. They'd run out the last of the Pemmican two weeks before when they were held up in the outer islands by a late season storm. They'd spent the better part of two days beached, living under the tipped over hull, huddled out of the wind and rain, spitting the sand out of their mouths and wishing for sunshine.

When they finally floated tk again after the storm had past the rough seas seemed like nothing, anything was better than being wet and cold and chewing sand in the ceaseless wind. 

The wind had born them south, hugging the shoreline, out of the strong northward current that ran further offshore. They saw sails only twice and both times the ships were too far over the horizon to see more than a top sail. They were big her father said. This morning they were using a favorable offshore breeze to ride out further so they would only be a small bit a sail on the horizon to anyone with a spyglass standing on the shore in Charlestown. 

Running downwind, as they were, meant they were moving at the same speed as the wind. So even though there was wind all around them, it felt still, dead still, and the warm humid Florida air was like sitting inside a wet wool sweater. Birdie sat in the slight shade of the sail, with her back against the mizzen, alternately watching the shoreline for signs of Charlestown, and whittling a whistle she was planning to use to find duck nests when they got the island.

Her father, Tambo, and Kobayashi sat in the stern, taking turns tending the wheel. She did not turn around to see who was at the wheel, she could feel the boat and knew it was her father. The other two were probably smoking their pipes, and scanning the horizon for any sign of sail. They'd all done close to the same every day for the past ten days, but now it felt different. Birdie sensed a tension that had not been there when they were in the north. A tension that had not been there, she stopped whittling for a moment and considered it. Had she ever sensed a tension? She could not recall every feeling the tightness in her chest that she felt now. It felt like something was swelling in the air around them, squeezing them somehow. Her father's voice brought her back to the ship.

"You two should relax."

Tambo grunted. "Easier for you to say."

"Well then at least put your glass more to the north, They'll not cross the stream where we did, they'll stay out longer. They're provisioned better, have more sails. Why would they sail these shallows?"

"Because they people they are hunting sail these shallows."

"They aren't hunting you Tam. They aren't hunting anyone. They're coming to retake Nassau."

"You think they will?" She heard Kobayashi tapping his pipe out on the taffrail with sharp clicks.

"No."

The rumors from early in the summer, up on the cape, were that the British were planning to retake Nassau soon, and would very likely be putting in at Charlestown before they did. 

You don't think they'll come at all or you don't think they take Nassau.

I don't think they'll come at all. Not this year. They'll retake Nassau someday. They can't let Vane have run of the place forever. But they aren't coming this year."

"How can you be so sure"

"Have I ever steered us wrong before?

"Yes" Tambo and Kobayashi spoke in chorus, which made Birdie laughed. She heard her father laugh too 

"Okay. But on this one you'll have to trust me. No British warships coming to take Nassau this year." 

Neither of the other men said anything. The silence stretch out until Henri came running from the bow, careening the length of the ship without ever touching a railing or handhold yet somehow never losing his footing. She watched him shove his hand in the basket, pull out a handful of now dried out rice, and then turn and run back the length of the ship, again without touching anything or seeming to stumble, and then disappear into the hold where he was playing with Lulu. She envied him, those sea legs. Even her father seemed somewhat taken aback by Henri's sea legs. But he usually just shrugged and said, "I guess that's how it is when you're born at sea".

Henri's mother had given birth to Henri and died shortly thereafter on the short passage to London. Birdie had been two and half years old, she had a few fuzzy memories of Henri's mother. Dark hair leaning over her, the sunset in a window behind her. They had lived for a time on shore. Near the Thames. Her father worked on ships. It was here he had first met Tambo. A woman watched Birdie and her sister during the day. Sometimes her father would hire on a ship and be gone for several weeks. The last of these trips was nearly two months. Birdie remembered sitting under the table with Lulu, both of them crying, while the woman who watched them spoke to a harbor master about storms and her father's ship going down.

Two night later, there had been a tap at the window and there he was.

Neither she nor Lulu had any memories of their mother, save the stories she had heard her father tell, memories she inherited and clung too sometimes when she felt the tightness in her chest grow too much to bear.

She was startled out of a midday drowse by Tambo's shout from the bow. "I see the bank." Birdie jumped up and ran the bow (grabbing the mizzen mast, rails, lines and other other holds, as normal people do on a ship), racing past Lulu and Henri coming out of the hold. She nearly slammed into a Tambo, but managed to hit the rail next to him instead. She followed his finger and saw the light green patch that marked the bank. It was high tide, still under water. The bank was a deposit of sand and silt that started a few hundred yards out from the north fork of the Edisto river and stretched between half a mile and mile out to sea, depending on the year. This year it looked to be shorter than usual. The bank was where they did most of the their fishing, and last year they'd even careened a very large ship on it. Birdie had not been allow to come on that ship, but she, her siblings, her cousins and some of the local kids had all sat on the end of the island and watched as three smaller ships careened a new ship, the largest ship Birdie had ever seen, a ship called Queen Anne's Revenge. 

Birdie ran astern to tell her father what they had seen, but he was already standing on the Taffrail, glass to his eye. "Bit smaller this year, eh Birdie?"

"I thought so, but I wasn't sure."

"Must've 'ad some weather this summer." Her father hopped down. "Hope we're done with that," she heard him mutter to himself. He pointed to the wheel. "Bring us out a wee bit." Birdie turned the wheel a quarter to port and tk's nose edged out toward the open ocean, carving a wide berth around the bank. 

Orange-headed gannets and brown pelicans dove at the outer edge of the bank, their sleek wings pulled back until they looked like harpoon tips thrown from some unseen ship sailing in the sky. The sliced through the air and hit the surface of the sea with such a quiet, tiny splash, transformed in an instant from bird to fish. And they surface, the Gannet's always with a fish in their beak. Birdie turned to her father, "Papa can we fish?" 

"Sure, throw in a line, see if you can grab dinner for us."

Birdie dashed forward and down in the hull. She fumbled around in the darkness near the stack of water barrels where she kept her line. She felt the iron hook and pulled it gently until the spool of catgut revealed itself. Next to it her fingers felt for the burlap she used to wrap her hand. Once she had everything, she grabbed a piece of dried fish hanging from a rafter, and climbed back up on deck.

At the stern she baited the hook, tied it off on the rail, and threw it out. It jerked in her hands as skipped and then sank until the slack had all fed out. Before it had, she saw the tkfish coming for it. "Papa!" she squealed. He nodded, but turned back to watch the sea in front of them, hunting for the river mouth they would follow into the marshland, where they would secure the boat for the season. 

Birdie pulled it in, Lulu held it for her while she cut its throat and tossed it in a bucket to let the blood drain out. She baited the hook and gain the tossed it out. This time, just as she was getting ready to bring her second fish on board, a gannet dove hard, the line jerked and her fish was gone. Birdie frantically pulled in the empty line and breathed a sigh of relief when she found the iron hook still there. I was, after the doll K had sewn her, her most prized possession. She took it as a sign, and began to coil up the line. It was far easier to fish from the smaller bateau she and her cousins rowed out to the bank. The slower boat meant their lines went deeper, the birds rarely had a chance to steal their catch.

"Coming about," Her father yelled. Birdie instinctively ducked as the booms creaked and groaned and lines whirled and the ship pitched from starboard to port and pointed her nose at a sharper angle to shore.

The tk was a lateen rigged Caraval with two masts and two triangular sails. She was light, fast and manuverable, but still had a relatively short keep that made it possible to bring her nearly a mile up the Edisto river if they had really wanted to. Their winter home was nowhere near that far, in fact it was on the island, but they kept the boat in the marsh, protected from storms by a massive stand of lobblolly pine that protected the marsh.

The worst part of winter camp was arriving. Every year they had to somehow beat upwind, while fighting the current of the river, while constantly sounding to watch for shallows in the mudding brown river mouth. Even now, still a quarter mile off shore, Kobayashi and Tambo were hauling up the sounding lines while her father shortened the traveler so the tk could take faster and beat closer to the wind. All Birdie wanted was to get ashore and see Kadi, but she went below and stowed her fishing gear. She and Lulu climbed to the crows nest on the main mast and began watching for light patches of water that meant shallows.

The tk tacked back and forth up and down the windward side of the island for most of the day, waiting for the tide to begin streaming in, since this would give them the added momentum the needed to make it into the river mouth where, for a time, it was too narrow to tack. Last year they had to run out the two oars that her father had carved from great thin, nearly perfectly straight tk pines and paddle with the current. This year though the gods smiled on them and the wind shifted to the north enough that they could swing out to see, and ride the wind west right into the mouth of the river where they dropped the main sail and landed just as the sun was disappearing in the trees that tangled up the western horizon. 

Though it was very likely everyone on the island had seen them come in, 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 tk unloaded the next morning. Birdie, Lulu, and Henri fell asleep making plans for what they would do when the saw their cousins again the next day.

## 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.

She was named Linnea for her father's friend in the old country, but her mother called her Lulu the only day she saw her. Like her twin sister she'd been easing sheets and tightening lines since she could walk, crossed an ocean before she'd seen five winters, and survived the burning sun and flaming fevers of the Carolina swamps to reach her eighth year. 

Her skin was brown from long days in the sun. She was thin, but strong. Her body all bone and taut ropy muscle. Her hair was brown bleached to blond by the summer sun. She licked her lip, pulling the beads of sweat into her mouth and savoring the salty flavor. *You are the sea, you sweat the sea all day every day.*

She sat on a low rising dune a hundred yards from the shoreline. The eastern sky was already pink and rapidly turning orange. She knew her father would already be awake back at the boat. She hadn't wanted to sleep in the marsh. She preferred the seaside. Near where their camp would be, where she would sleep all winter. She didn't mind the hammocks of the boat, but there was something about the sand that made Lulu sleep easier. It conformed to you, it hugged you. Like the sea, but firmer. 

She wrapped the sheet, which had once been the tk's foresail, around her shoulders and walked down the beach to the Arkhangelsk. She was a 22ft Bermuda sloop that had been taken by the Whydah and put ashore with a small crew to careen and re-tar the hull. Unfortunately for the Ave Marie, as she was known at the time, her hull was too worm eaten and split even for the quality of tar Birdie's family was known for making. This had been the subject of some dispute between her father and the would-be captain of the Ave Marie, but in the end, the boat was abandoned on the beach. A storm two years ago had washed her up and into the dunes, but left her mostly in tact. Then the next year another storm had spun her around, bow to the sea and in doing so torn off much of the stern. But as she settled in the shifting dunes, the top deck leveled out. She still listed a little to port, but not so much that you couldn't raise around the upper deck more or less just like you could on the tk, which was currently back in the marsh, and would soon have to be unloaded.

Lulu walked around the Arkhangelsk, checking and comparing with her memory of it when they'd left last year. If there had been a storm over the summer it didn't seem to have affect the wreck at all. She stuffed her sheet in the hold so it wouldn't blow away and climbed up to the top deck. The wood was dry and brittle but so far it had not broken up as much as she would have expected. She and Birdie had begged their father to tar it, that it might last but he refused, the tar was too valuable.

She jumped off the bow into the soft sand and began walking back to camp. By the time she arrived everyone was up and unloading barrels except her father and Tambo who were looking over the pirogue, which had been stored for months now in the hold of the tk. They seemed satisfied with it and set in the muddy water next to where they'd landed the tk. 

"Lulu, good of you to join us again" Her father smiled, but his tone of voice told her she was late. Papa did not suffer anyone not pulling their weight. She looked around. Henri and Birdie were bringing things up from the hold and stacking them as best they could and the listing deck. The tk was aground now that the tide was out. 

Suddenly arms grabbed her from behind and lifted her into the air, she was squeezed tight against a warm soft chest. "Lulu, I've missed you." Kadiatu put her down and spun her around. Lulu wrapped her arms around her. "Kadi, I missed you." Lulu felt the warm of Kadi's belly against her face, she felt the warmth spreading through her body and all the tighter. 

"Hi Lu." said a shy voice behind her. She slipped slow out of Kadi's embrace and turned to face her cousin Charles. He looked older. She wondered if she did too. His front teeth had finished growing in and he looked somehow like an adult. Lulu wasn't sure she liked this look, but she hugged him anyway. 

"The Arkhangelsk is still in good shape."

"I saw."

"You already went there?" He had a look of disappointment on his face that made her instantly regret saying anything. But it was too late, she nodded, "I slept on the dunes."

"By yourself?"

She looked at him like he had two heads. "Of course." She could see the way he whithered under her looks and it made her feel guilty. She didn't mean to make him feel bad, but he asked such silly things sometimes, and she had no time for questions which seemed to her to have obvious answers. It made her dislike him a little for making her feel like she was a mean person. She was pretty sure she wasn't a mean person. Why did Francis seem like he thought she might be? Henri and Owen saved her from further awkwardness by zooming by at top speed chasing each other with wooden swords. "Hi Lu!" screamed Owen as he dodged around her and dove into the oak shrubs after Henri, who hadn't even acknowledged her existence.

Francis took the opportunity to go back to where he and Birdie were helping unload stores from the ship. Lulu watched him go, feeling that sinking feeling she got every autumn when her brother and sister abandoned her. They didn't mean to. They didn't really, especially Birdie who always went out of her way to make sure everyone was included in everything. Still, Birdie and Francis were like a little team. And Owen in Henri were another little team. Lulu did not have a team. There was just Lulu. In some ways she liked this, it left her free to do the things she wanted without anyone interfering. She could spent her time with Kadi and her daughter Cuffee, and her mother and grandmother at their cottage up the river. She loved to sit and rough pine boards of their porch and listen to them talk about anything and everything. She love to use the vines hanging from the big oak that stretched out over the river to swing out and drop midstream into the delicious cool pool of black water.

Sometimes she would spend the afternoon hunting plants in the thickets with Kadi and her mother. Other days, when Cuffee was in the mood, she would bring her down river to their camp to play in the Arkhangelsk. Cuffee would be thirteen this year though, and from what her grandmother had said last year, she might not be playing on the Arkhangelsk anymore. Lulu wondered why, but did not want to ask because it seemed assumed that she knew why, and she did not want to admit that she didn't know. Birdie did not know either when Lulu asked her. 

Today though, Cuffee came up out of the hold of the Arkhangelsk with a load of pots and pans that would serve the camp kitchen and, when she saw Lulu, she dropped the lot of them on the deck with a clatter, vaulted the side railing into the mud and ran over to hug Lulu.

"I missed you so much."

"I missed you too."

The hugged and laughed and hugged some more. Until that moment Lulu would not have said that she missed Cuffee that much, but then suddenly she realized she had, without knowing she had. And somehow it made her want to cry that she did not know that she had missed her this much and so she squeezed her tighter and buried her face in her shoulder and thick braids of hair and cried for a moment. Cuffee pulled her back and wiped her tears. "It is okay, we are here now. Together. Come on, help me get these pots down to your camp."

Lulu followed her back up onto the ship and helped gather up the pots, taking extra care with Kobayashi's precious rice steamer and basket. 

All morning they hauled gear out of the Arkhangelsk down the island to the cluster of dunes at the south eastern tip. There they found a sheltered area in the middle of the dunes and set about constructing their camp, which consisted of little more than a thatched hut, built to a design the Edistow had taught Tambo, who had taught her father, who had taught his children. It was, as all great shelters are, ingeniously simple. A pole structure made of half oak timbers, which gave it strength, and half pine timbers, which were bent to give it shape, was then covered with thatching made of half woven reed mats. Her father and Tambo had the basic structure done by mid afternoon. For the time being they simply draped the main sheet over the top in case of rain. In the next few weeks Lulu, Birdie, her Aunt Māra, Cuffee, Kadiatu and sometimes her parents would help to make the thatching. 

Her father brought two large flat stones to build a hearth in the middle so the smoke would drift up through the opening. He lit a fire, said a prayer, the threw of some Frankincense resin on the coals. The sweet, light scent of Frankincense filled the hut when Lulu walked in carrying a load of tk and it immediately smelled like home. 

It was still much to hot to have a fire inside though, so she soon retreated to the dunes outside where the long afternoon shadows began to race their way across the clearing they'd be calling home for the next six to eight months.

Her father was just completely the outdoor cooking area, which consisted of a fire ring and an iron tripod that fit over it and from which they could hang their cooking pots. Kobayashi and her father did most of the cooking, though sometime Francis and Owen's mother would bring them something or tend the fire during the day when no one else was around to look after it. 

Lulu turned and looked west. A little back from camp there was a like of oak trees and that then gave way to the marsh where the tk would be anchored for the season. In those oaks they would soon construct great kilns that would be used to make the tar that brought them to the island in the first place. Across the flat reedy world of marsh was another line of oaks and then a no man's land of cypress swamp and brackish water that slowly, as you moved south, resolved itself into the southern fork of the Edistow. Another half mile beyond that was Kadiatu's family's house and farm. Beyond that were the great pine forests of the low country where they would dig stumps and then haul them by barge and horse out here to the beach where they would burn them, slowly extracting the sap and then boiling it down into a sticky resin that sealed wood against the sea.

They ate as the sun set through the trees behind their half-finished hut. Lulu went down to the shore and rinsed her abalone bowl. The air had a hint of chill at the edge of it. The sea was cold on her feet. When she came back her father and Kobayashi were laying oak logs on the coals that had cooked dinner. It wasn't long before the fire was roaring and light filled the circle of dune. Lulu sat on a log gray driftwood and watched her uncle play the fiddle while Birdie and her father danced in circles. Henri and Owen sat on a log next to her Aunt Māra and directly across the fire. Lulu smiled. She like winter camp, she liked her family. She knew enough of the world to know they were different. Perhaps even odd to most people. But she didn't care. She was just glad they had a place to live their lives the way they wanted to, a place they could fish, a place they could weather storms. 

She had heard someone once whispering in a shop, calling them pirates, but she didn't think they were. They had never captured a ship or found any treasure. She asked her father about it and he just laughed and said no, pirates have much bigger ships than we do. But maybe someday Lulu. He had that twinkle in his eye that made it seem like just about anything was possible, like when he told stories around the fire on winter evenings and Lulu felt like the worlds he described were out there somewhere, waiting for her to discover. Worlds of pirates and ships and storms, talking animals, and tk and tk. Her father never failed to take what would always tart as a normal story and turn it in someway that you never saw coming but afterward couldn't imagine turning out any other way.

Tonight though he did not tell any stories. He danced. First with Birdie, then we Henri, then with her. After a while Uncle Clay 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, which was not much smaller, but also see the stars. She fell asleep trying to find the tk, lost somewhere up among all the others.

## Chapter 3: Birdie Organizing Camp

It was hard to believe it would be cold in another turning of the moon. 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 hut. She loved to organize things, to find a place for everything and put everything in her 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 a as beautiful so that it can be more safe. 

She settled for hanging the bag she had made last year from the rafters. She had woven it from spare hemp, scrap fabric, and the occasional reed to make it more water proof. It held her book, which she brought everywhere with her, sketching the things she saw all around her. Shells, plants, birds, boats, the shore, the clouds, the sea, Birdie drew everything. When she wasn't drawing she was imagining the drawing should soon make. Sometimes she drew what she saw around her, other times she drew when she saw in her mind. She would lay in the dark of the hut at night, listening to the soft sigh of the others breathing while white shapes danced in the darkness behind her half closed eyes. She would watch them until she made some sense out of them and then arrange them into scenes, organize them, find where each belonged. Sometimes, when the moon was waxing, she could creep silently out from under the warmth of the covers, and slip outside, her feet silent on the sand, to draw by the moonlight, or firelight if her father was still up, as he often was. He would stare at the glowing coals, she would draw, and they would be together silently in some way that felt to her deeper connected than when she was talking to someone, despite the fact that neither of them ever said a word, or even acknowledged each others presence. 

Drawing as much as she required Birdie to make her own ink. She did it the way her father taught her, blending octopus and pine tar to make a dark grayish purple that was good for outlines. She made green paint from just about any plant, and she'd discovered how to make yellows and reds be experimenting with flowers that grew around the island. She needed a good blue though, blue had thus far eluded her. Paper and brushes were harder to come by, those she had to buy.

She still had two of the three brushes she'd bought last year in Charlestown using the money she'd managed to make by drying fish with Lulu and Francis. They fished and dried all through the first Autumn moon and managed to preserve enough of their catch that they were able to trade in Charlestown. They spent some of their money on enough peppermint sticks for everyone back at camp, and then they split the leftover money evenly between them. Lulu bought a doll, Birdie bought horsehair paint brushes, and Francis bought a small compass which Birdie did not have the heart to tell him, was not very accurate.

One of the brushes she'd lost somewhere on the voyage north to summer camp on the cape. She thought she had packed them carefully away after she tried (and failed) to paint the ship's rigging one day, but the next day when she went to get them out there were only two. She'd searched the entire hold, everyone had pitched in, but they never found it. The tk claimed that brush as her own. Luckily it was her least favorite brush anyway. Still, she had already built a new rack to dry fish on again. As soon as their camp was set up, the hut thatching finished, she was planning to get out to the bank to start fishing. She was going to get more brushes, and this time they weren't going to get lost, she was going to sleep with them if she had to.

"Birdie?" Kadi was looking at her with a curled smile. "Your mind moves much faster than your hands."

Birdie looked down and realized she'd been holding the same strand of reed for, how long? She did not know. She had been thinking of drawing, painting. "Sorry, I was thinking." 

Kadi's mother laughed, "How old are you Birdie?" She shook her head. "Lost in thought, stopping work at the age of eight. You are your father's child." She laughed again.

This last comment startled her, did she disappear like her father? Was that what it was like for other people when she was thinking? What that what it was like for her father when he disappeared from the present?

Kadi laughed again, "right back to it. Go girl, go and play, we will finish this."

Birdie looked up at her to see if she was serious. Kadi and her family never let anyone out of chores, but they seemed serious. Birdie had a momentary pang, she was abandoning them to work on her own house, she should make her own house. 

"Don't worry," said Kadi, "go and play. This is almost done anyway."

Birdie jumped up, blurted out a thank you and took off down toward the dunes where she knew Lulu and Francis were digging up last year's stumped and spreading cut reeds to dry. She reached the top of the dune and stopped so abruptly she nearly toppled over. Lulu and Francis were down below, spreading reeds along the side the dune and weighting them down with drift wood gathered from the beach. Judging by the pile near Lulu they had about ten minutes of work left. Birdie shouted in the wind, "Hurry up, and meet me at the ship."

They looked up at her squinting. She saw Lulu nod. Birdie turned and walked out to the harder sand near the shoreline and made her way down to the Arkhangelsk. She saw Henri and Owen playing on the rear deck. For reasons she did not understand no one ever made either of them do any chores, though both were perfectly capable of helping out. Somehow they both got a pass. Birdie was pretty sure she'd had chores at their age. She tried to set aside the anger she felt rising in her chest when she realized they'd had nothing to do all day but go play hunting in the forest with their bows and arrows and play out here on the ship. Her ship. She stopped herself. Their ship. Everyone's ship. Poseidon's ship. The island's ship that it had been so kind as to preserve so they could use it. 

It wasn't long before Lulu and Francis arrived and they began to play. As with most of their adventure's it started with Lulu creating a back story. They were a family of sea gods who had been cast out of the high temples where their mother and father had disowned them for some reason that Birdie was entirely clear on. From that time they were doomed to wander the seas for forty years, and woe to any ships that crossed their path for they would devour them and all their sailors. As captain is was Birdie's task to find a new homeland, but since they could not find it for forty years she mostly just conjured ships for them to attack. 

Lulu had a back story for every one of those ships too. Birdie sometimes complained to her that half the time they were playing they were just listening to Lulu tell stories, but everyone else seemed to really enjoy these outlandish tales. Too outlandish for Birdie's taste. Who had ever heard of sea gods cast out of somewhere? How did a god get cast out of something? What was the point of being a god if you can get cast out just like a person?

"Because Bee, Gods are just like us, they have to deal with other gods. They get in fights and stuff. They have to work things out."

"My dad says there's only one god." Owen looked at Lulu accusingly.

Lulu, Birdie, and Henri exchanged a glance so quickly neither of the other two noticed it. "Well," said Birdie, "that may be. Who knows? We're just playing anyway."

Lulu climbed up on the railing of the ship, balanced for a moment there and then, with a wild yell, leaped off and started running down the beach, shrieking like a banshee. Birdie climbed up and looked after her. "Well," she said slowly, "I have heard that Poseidon used to drive some people mad."

"What?" said Francis. "Does this mean the game is over?"

"I guess so." Birdie smiled helplessly.

"Come on Owen. Let's see if we can find some duck eggs in the marsh."

They left. Henri sighed and climbed up to look after Lulu. "You think she'll come back."

"Of course."

"Should we go get her?"

Birdie studied her brother. He could be completely infuriating sometimes, but Birdie realized for the first time that her Aunt was right when she called him "the sweetest boy I ever met."

"Let's go find her. I want to know what she was yelling about."

They climbed up on the railing just as Lulu had and, though neither of them said anything they both knew what they had to do. They jumped off the railing, hit the sand running and began to shriek like banshees as they ran down the shoreline after Lulu.

She was laughing by the time they caught up to her. Laughing and throwing seaweed at the gulls. Birds were thick just down the shoreline from where they were standing. Birdie saw the silver flash of a fish as a school attempted to get away from the swooping gannets and pelicans. She wished she gone out to the banks to fish. 

Lulu and Henri walked up the beach and sat on a ledge of sand, inching themselves forward until their weight made it collapse and sent them sliding down. The kept getting up and doing it again. Birdie went over to join them. 

"Bee," started Lulu when they all sat down to catch their breath. "Do you like Francis and Owen?'

"What? What do you mean like them? They're our cousins, of course I like them."

"Even when they're fantastically dense and clueless about the world around them" Lulu had a triumphant look on her face, as if she'd just somehow trapped Birdie.

Birdie considered this for a minute. "Well, yes, I still like them. It's like father says, you can like someone even if you don't agree with them."

"Ugh, he would say that."

"Why?"

"Because he's so *nice*. blabidy blabidy blah" Lulu stuck her tongue out and imitated their father's voice so eerily well that Birdie had to laugh in spite of herself. 

Henri fell back in the sand laughing. "Do it again, Lu, do it again." 

And so she did. But then the scowl returned to her face. "Well I don't care if they're our cousins, I don't like them. I think they're dull little boys with no imagination."

"Owen has a good imagination," Henri said from the sand behind them.

"When he's with you maybe." Lulu did what Birdie called her hrumf, and hrumphed into silence. They sat side by side, legs drawn up, arms wrapped around them, staring out at the sea. Papa was right Birdie decided, we're different. She did not really know why or what the difference was. It wasn't something she wanted. But it was there. She knew Lulu felt it too. She wasn't sure if Henri did yet or not, but she thought so. He would eventually anyway. Still she felt sorry of Francis and Owen more than anything. They didn't get to sail much. They had to live in town half the year. And they had to live with their father.

---

Kobayashi was digging up the roasted boar when they got back to camp. He and Tambo had killed it with a single arrow the day before. "Lucky shot," Tambo had said when he told her father the story. They butchered the animal, splitting it between their camp, her cousin's camp down the beach, Kadiatu's family, and a family of Edistow that were camped across the river mouth. Kobayashi, who claimed to have been a cook in the emperor's household before he was Shanghai'd from a Hayama bar, had buried their portion of the boar the day before in a pit of coals. He pulled it up and gently unwrapped it from the great leaves of seaweed he'd wrapped it in.

Her father and Henri dragged some driftwood up from the shore and soon they had a good blaze going. Her Aunt Māra and Uncle tk came with their cousins. The incident on the beach was forgotten. The boar was sweet and salty and possibly the best thing Birdie could remember eating. The fat and juice drained into her rice and she ate until her belly ached. 

The sun disappeared to the west, an orange glow in the tree line. Birdie hunted around the eastern sky for the first star, but as it always seemed to be, Venus was the first light in the sky. Should I wish upon a planet? It's a god right? Can you wish to a god? She wondered what she should wish for and then it came to her, she saw it in her mind and focused on it until it seemed almost real, and then she silently asked Venus, grant this one wish, if you like it, if you think it's a good idea. If not, it's okay.

She wasn't sure what you were supposed to say. The rhyme her father had taught her didn't really have instruction on precisely how one wishes, just that one could wish on stars. And maybe planets, hopefully planets. 

Across the fire Kadiatu and Tambo were talking quietly together. Her father was lying back on his elbow, listening to Kobayashi tell stories of Japan, but she also say him watching Uncle tk out of the corner of his eye as tk drank from a bottle of rum he'd brought. Lulu came over with a sheet for Birdie. She laid down by the fire and listened to the crackling wood as the darkness closed in around them. Far off in the distance she could hear the waves breaking on the shore. She closed her eyes.

A frightening hissing sound woke her up. She didn't move for fear it was a snake, but then she heard it again and realized it was her father. She wasn't sure how long she'd been asleep but the fire was coals and only her father and Uncle tk were awake, standing very close together and speaking in hissing whispers Birdie could hear, but not understand. She didn't need to understand the words to know that her father was not happy. She glanced around and saw that Tambo was awake as well. She saw his eyes in the darkness and glint of his knife in the sand next to him. Until that moment Birdie had still been half awake, but the knife snapped her out of it, clearly her father was angry and something was wrong. 

Whatever it was her father seemed to have convinced her uncle to leave. He stumbled away into the darkness. They watched him go. Her father came back over the fire and it was only then that she noticed her Aunt Māra was lying on the ground. Her father helped her up and Birdie saw dark smear running from her nose across her cheek. Her father handed her a cloth and she wiped her face.

"There's a blanket inside if you want to sleep here tonight."

"No, Nicholas." 

Her father sat down, "well, you can come down here whenever you need to. You're family, not him."

"He's my husband."

Her father shrugged. "Doesn't mean you have to go down with the ship."

Birdie saw her nose flare slightly. She gathered up her bag, turned and hurried off into the night. 

## Chapter 4: Among the Stumps

Lulu hopped from stump to stump. Crouching down, her knees bent like coiled springs and then sprong, she exploded toward the next stump, landed, teetered, stopped there. There were plenty of stumps. The whole forest was gone. 

"Unbelievable what these people will waste." her father had grumbled earlier as he paddled Lulu and Tamba upriver in the pirogue. Tamba sat in the bow. Lulu in the middle. They were headed inland to inspect stumps. "They probably cut them all down for some waterfront mansion."

Tamba turned carefully around, not letting his weight move side to side, and smiled knowingly at her. "Rice lulu. They cut em down for rice. They sell the timber to the city." Tamba smiled again, rolling his eyes toward the sky. They both knew her father, who was standing in the stern of the boat, pushing them through the marsh with the long pine pole, could not see Tamba's rolled eyes beneath his hat. But they both waited and heard him grumble again, "stop rolling your eyes behind my back Tamba." They all laughed. 

"The rice will give us food. We won't have to buy it."

Lulu heard her father grunt and mumble something about diggers. Tamba turned around again. The boat slid silently along the edge of the marsh, where a thin line of trees still stood, offering some shade from the already brutal mid morning sun.

The water ran out right before the line of great oaks started. There were clumps of prickly, fan-leaved palmetto trees growing beneath the oaks. The muddy bank of the marsh quickly gave way to the dark coloured clay, mixed with sand and hundreds of years of leafy hummus. This was the soil, rich in nutrients, that would grow rice. "For a time at least," her father had said as he dragged the small pirogue up onto the muddy clay bank, next to a stand of palmetto and tied the pirogue to a tree. "But you take away the pine and it all goes, nothing will hold this soil."

"Rice will hold the soil." Tamba stood under the shade of an oak, arms crossed, nearly invisible in the darkness of the shade.

"You know this?"

"My people know this."

Her father shrugged. "I'll take your word for it then." He climbed up the bank and reached down to lift Lulu up as well. "I tell you what won't hold it. Potatoes. Turnips. I've seen that."

"Turnips?" Tamba looked quizzically at her father.

"Like a potato, thin skin, waxy, but bitter."

"Ah, like you."

Her father smiled at Tamba. "I am not bitter."

"No, not you." Tamba shook his head slowly, a sly look crossed his eyes, "But you are waxy. Skin like tallow. So white."

Her father laughed. They walked through the oak and palmetto forest toward the bright clearing ahead. Lulu puzzled over why her father and Tamba argued about rice, why they cared at all, since neither of them farmed. Her father hated farming and made no secret of it, though he was happy to live by farmers. The Geechee were good farmers. But most of them were not free. 

Tamba and her father walked out into the field, leaving her at the tree line. They stopped every so often to dig at the roots of the stumps with their sharpened staves, marking choice stumps as they went. She could hear them still arguing about rice as they worked. "Mind the gators Lu," her father called over his shoulder. "And the snakes. Fresh cuts and all." 

Cutting trees stirred up the forest. Stirred up the animals of the forest. The plant eaters lost their homes, the insects lost their homes. The animals that ate the insects lost their food. Only the animals at the very top stood any chance. The snake might get the homeless mouse, but eagle got the snake. Nothing got the alligator though. Nothing ever got the alligator. Her father always said not to fear the alligator, but to respect it. Give it a wide berth and do what you can to make sure it doesn't see you as meat. She sat down on stump and wondered what made you look or not look like meat.

Lulu didn't think alligators were scary anyway. She'd once been sitting on a fallen log in the river upstream, dangling her feet over, gnawing on a stick of dried fish when a small alligator swam up beneath her. It stayed back and seemed to watch her. At first her heart leaped into her throat and beat so hard she could feel the blood pounding in her ears. But then some part of her reasoned with the fear, it was in the water, she was on a log. If it was going to try to jump at her, it would not have swum up on the surface. She turned over the situation in her mind for several minutes and eventually her heart slid back down into her chest, her breath began to come again and she found herself strangely relaxed as the aftermath of fear, the relief of not being eaten washed over her. She and alligator sat like that for some time, eyeing each other. Lulu reasoned they were probably close to the same age. Maybe not in years, but the alligator was probably about the equivalent of an seven year old, which was how old Lulu was at the time. This made her feel closer to it, they had that at least in common. It was not easy being seven. Lulu knew that. The alligator probably knew that to. What did a seven year old alligator have to do? Did it have a moody father? Was it's mother alive? Did it have cousins and aunts and uncles? Did it have to stand watch? Probably not she reasoned, alligators don't sail. Then she pictured an alligator ttrying to sail, an alligator propped up on its hind legs, one hand (or claw?) on the wheel, one holding a spyglass to it's eye.

The ridiculousness of this image helped relax her even more and she went back to eating her dried fish. The moment she took a bite though, the alligator's eyes flinched. She couldn't describe it, but she saw something almost like hurt flash through it's eyes, the same sort of thing she'd seen in the eyes of her cousins' dogs, the pain of a pack animal whose pack isn't sharing it's food with them. Except that alligator weren't pack animals. Or were they. Lulu wasn't sure, but she didn't think so. Still, did one need to be a pack animal to feel hurt when someone doesn't share their food. She momentarily thought of Birdie and how she always took the last bowl of food, letting everyone else have theirs first. She waved the stick of dried fish at the alligator, "you want some of this?" "Of course you do."

She bit off a decent sized piece and held it up. "This is all I have, and I have to paddle all the way back to camp." She regarded the dried fish in her hand again. "Still, I know what it's like to want something and not be able to get it. So I want you to have it." Having made up her mind to do it, she tossed the fish in to the water quickly before she could change her mind. The alligator swam quickly toward it and in a movement so deft and fast Lulu barely saw it, it swallowed the stick of dried fish. 

Now it was closer to Lulu, nearly at her feat. And once again they stared at each other for a long time. Lulu took another bit of fish and broke off a smaller piece and tossed it to the alligator. This time it knew what it was, and it snapped it up without hesitating. Lulu saw its teeth and for a moment she was afraid again. What if it followed her to the bank when she walked up the log and back down to the pirogue, which was tied just upstream? What if she was a fool to feed an alligator and it wasn't thinking she was nice, but trying to decided why dinner was feeding it dinner? 

She pushed these thoughts out of her head and decided she like her original story, the alligator was cute, maybe even cuddly in some strange way, and they were friends. Until something happened to make this seem wrong, this was the story she was sticking with. She took another bite of fish and flung some to the alligator, but this time she threw it behind the creature so it had to turn around and swim the other way, she liked her story, but she also liked to cover herself. As the gator turned around and circled back to get the fish she wondered, was feeding an alligator respecting it? Was thinking it was cute respecting it? She wasn't sure. She knew getting it to back away from her was respecting it.

Eventually she'd walked off the log and back to her boat to make her way home. The alligator had gone its way. Apparently it had not seen her as dinner. Or she'd given it enough dried fish that it had changed its mind.

Remembering the alligator made Lulu want to see one. Sort of. A small one again. But it was already mid afternoon and she hadn't seen anything but biting flies and mosquitos. The sun was directly overhead and felt like it had been worked with a bellows. Lulu could just barely see her father on the far side of what had once been a forest of broom pine. Slash pine the sailors called it. Whatever you wanted to call it, it was gone. No more tufts of green above to filter the harsh clean light of day, no more long thin needles to whistle in the wind when the onshore breezes started. It was a dead still afternoon. The world highlighted in a glare that made it difficult to see. It was hot, humid. The air felt like a wet wool blanket wrapped around you. Lulu decided she would not like to be a rice plant or anything else that tried to get along in this place. She liked it better back at camp. By the sea, in the wind. What was life without wind?

She jumped to another stump and looked down. It had her father's mark on it. A square inside a diamond. "Two squares really," he had once told her and her sister, "one is just rotated 90 degrees. It's easier to draw than four interlocking circles, which is what I used before."

Lulu shielded her eyes from the sun and lifted a gourd of water to her mouth. It was bitter and hot, but it coated her throat for a moment and kept her tongue from feeling so swollen. She was hot and bored. She wished she'd stayed with her sister and her aunt, setting up winter camp. She hated staking tents and lugging bundles from the boat though, so when her father, who was worked up about the big cut, asked if she wanted to come along, she'd jumped at the change. Now though, she wished her were setting up with her sister and brother and cousins. Even cleaning and drying fish would better than this stillness and heat. Anything to escape this relentless sun. At least at the beach, at camp, there was a breeze. 

Lulu wore a straw hat that a woman had given her the year before when a ship had come to careen on the beach. Despite repeated soaking, stretching and pulling, the hat was too small for her now. "At least your head is growing," her sister, who was nearly a head taller, teased.

Lulu wanted to punch her in the mouth, but instead she took off her hat, hit her sister over the head with it, bared her teeth and growled at her. Then she ran before Birdie could retaliate. Sometimes it was intolerable to have a twin. Usually though these moments were just that, moments. And then they were gone as quickly as she felt them, though she was not above drawing them out for a while to get at her sister, who rarely seemed to feel this way. 

Sometimes Lulu needed to get away, to be alone, so she had come today with her father and Tamba out into the scorching midday sun to find stumps to dry for next winter. Her father made carvings in each stump, a square within a diamond, the beginning of wisdom he told her when she asked what it meant. 

Others would mark their stumps with their own marks and then all of them and their wives and children would come out together every night for a week, maybe two for this field, thought Lulu as she glanced around at the vastness of the clearing. They'd come for a week on either side of the full moon, to work in what light could be had, digging stumps and hauling then back to the beach, to the dunes just beyond camp, where they would be piled in great heaps and lie there for a year, drying like great white bones bleaching in the sand until they were so weathered they were gray. Once camp was set up today, perhaps tomorrow, her father and her uncle would begin repairing and improving the kilns so they could begin to burn the stumps they had gathered last year.  

Lulu and Birdie and Henri and two other families worth of children, their cousins and friends, would gather moss and dry grass to feed the slow heat of the kilns. As the wood burned the dark pitch drained down to the bottom of the kiln and dripped into barrels set below the catch it. This was the Arkhangelsk tar. The way her father's people had made it for generations he said. The archangel tar that kept the ships afloat, the rigging tight, the sailors safe and bought Lulu and Birdie and Henri a place in the world, clothes to wear, food to eat and sometimes even peppermint treats or dolls or new ribbons for her hair. These stumps were the reason Lulu's life was possible.

But that didn't make the day any cooler or her patience any greater.

Lulu hadn't been able to see her father or Tamba for at least an hour. They were resting in the shade on the far side of the clearing she guessed. Which meant another hour before they'd be back.

When they finally did return, both were pouring sweat and no longer bickering about farming rice or anything else. They drank the gourd of water and sat a while in the shade in silence. Lulu sensed that asking anything at that moment would only have earned her grunts. After a few minutes her father motioned with his head and they all set off, back through the trees to the pirogue. 

Her father ruffled her hair as he stepped over her into the boat. He pushed them out again, following the trail through the reeds, back to the deeper waters of the marsh, toward the river, which would lead them back to beach where camp was being set up. Lulu watched the little black snails, which had climbed ever so slowly up the reeds as the tide had come in while they were hunting stumps. It was was nearly time now little snails, nearly time to slide back down, nearly time for the tide to return.

The moon was nearly full so she doubted they'd gather any stumps this moon. There was still too much to do. They hadn't yet been to Charlestown. Lulu hated town because she had to wear a dress. Most of the year she wore the clothes of the Edistow, a deerskin skirt that reached midway down her shins and was fringed with shells Lulu was extremely proud of and forever changing when new shells washed ashore. Unlike her sister she often wore a cotton shirt if she was going to be in the sun all day, but she had not today. Her long blond hair was pulled back in a single braid that reached nearly to her waist and had shells woven into it. She looked, aside from her slightly lighter skin, like everyone else on the island they called home.

The Edistow have lived here for hundreds of years, probably more, her father said. There were few of them left, but enough still that her family traded with them. Her father changed their camp from a canvas tent to one of the circular pole structures he'd seen the Edistow use and it was still what they called home. Her father had also taken to wearing a deerskin loincloth for a while. Lulu thought he looked ridiculous with his thick black beard and hairy chest and then the little flap a deerskin which reached right above his knees and looked, no matter how long it might have been, too small on his rather large body. At nearly six feet their father towered over almost everyone on the island, save her uncle who was about the same height. 

Tambo just shook his head and walked away when he saw the loin cloth. Later he told Lulu, "You should have seen when he tried the grass skirts." Kobayashi threatened to sign on with the Royal Navy if her father didn't go back to wearing pants. Her father became rather indignant. "They've lived here longer than we have, I expect they know what's best to wear," he said. But after a few days, and a badly sunburned butt, he had returned to wearing pants.

This was how he looked in her earliest memories and how she preferred he look all the time. Lulu looked back at him now, pushing them slowly along, still sweating, eyes fixed on some point in the distance. Lulu loved her father, but often felt lost around him. He could be stern, or even cross with her or Birdie or Henri, at times, but more often he just seemed to be elsewhere, lost in depths of thought no one, not even Tambo seemed able to plumb. The worst was that he often returned from wherever this far away place was quickly with startling bursts of temper. Just as often though it was laughter. What was hard was figuring out which it would be at any given moment. When they were at sea, it was always laughter. On the land, it was hard to tell.

Lulu thought about this, and about her mother, about things she barely remembered from the old country, a different river, a different marsh, a different shoreline with the cold smell of wet mud and salt brine, the barnacle crusted rocks that had cut her feet tile they bled. She could still feel them sometimes when she starred into the fire in the evenings or when she watched the stars at night, lying under her sheets in the soft cradle of sand. She did not miss it exactly. She did not remember enough to miss it. But she did think of it sometimes on the edge of sleep, she'd hold it in her thoughts, turn the memories over and around, looking for details she'd missed in all the times before. Though it had been a long time since she'd found a new detail she didn't already hold in her memory, still she did it most every night, letting those old visions usher her into sleep on the hot summer nights when the mosquitoes dove at her all night long, even through the smoke of the smudge fires.

Lulu could feel the water pulling them now, partly the tide of the marsh, partly the current of the river it was drawing them to the sea. The boat rocked slightly as her father laid the pole down and took up the paddle he used to steer. She looked back and he was sitting, smiling now as they drew nearer to home. Stern and distant though he might sometimes be, her father was almost always smiling when his face was turned toward the sea and the wind was on his cheek.

Shadows of moss lengthened across the ground like fingers stretching out of the oak trees by the time the pirogue finally nosed onto the sandy shore of the island. It was a half mile walk to camp. Lulu hopped off the side of the boat and into the water, wading ashore. She glanced back at her father who nodded once. She needed no further encouragement, taking off down the path that led back to camp.

Lulu rounded the corner at full speed, through the tall field of sea oats that formed the southern border of their camp, bursting out of the grass like a lion. She smelled the warm sweetness of fish stew. Her aunt was stirring a kettle over the fire. Her sister and Henri came running from the other side of camp, calling her to come to the dunes, but she was hungry. She ran over and hugged her aunt, who pulled the stray hairs from her face, tucked them back behind her ears and scooped her up a bowl of stew with a piece of cold fried bread. Lulu slurped at the hot stew, earning her a frown from her aunt. "Don't slurp Lu."

"Did you mark stumps?" Birdie watched her eat.

"Papa did." She took another bite of bread. "Squares." Her sister did not seem to care. Birdie had never liked stumping.

"Aunt Māra gave us a pot for the kitchen in the Arkhangelsk."

Lulu stopped chewing. "Really?" A smile came over Birdie's face, all she could do was nod faster than Lulu had ever seen a head move before. "It's the best" blurted Henri.

"I started to carve spoons for it they aren't done yet but do you want to see?" Birdie was already pulling on her arm, dragging her away from the fire.

Birdie was always making things for them to play with, she'd fixed the wheel, carved a pole for the flag, made fish hooks out of deer bone, and was always helping Papa repair the fishing nets. Sometimes Lulu hated the way Birdie was so good at making things, but mostly she loved to use the things when they were finished. She scooped up some sand and wiped her bowl out. She dumped it all at the edge of the fire and handed the bowl back to her Aunt. "Going to the ship," she blurted as the three of them ran out of camp.

They slowed when they reached the dunes, they all knew from experience that running in the dunes was a waste of effort. From the top of the rise they could see the single mast of the Arkhangelsk. 

"How come Māra gave us the pot?" Lulu had been trying to come up with reasons for a gift in her absence ever since Birdie had said it, but she had come up empty.

"She said we could use it if we her left alone." 

"Were you bad?"

Birdie nodded at Henri, who scowled. "Was not!"

Henri was four, and as their father said, clever as a Lynx and innocent as the doves. Henri had a way of twinkling his eyes when he smiled so that adults were immediately less angry at whatever had attracted their attention in the first place. It did not, naturally, work on Lulu or Birdie, though they both secretly and not so secretly, admired this ability. In fact Lulu and Birdie had practiced this twinkle for hours, Lulu thought they were pretty good at it. But it never seemed to come off right when they tried it on adults. 

Despite his twinkle, Henri never got away with anything. He was too naturally mischievous and yet not sneaky. If something was amiss in camp, some prank played, some calamity caused, everyone always came looking for "the little brown imp." The only other possible culprit was their cousin Charles, but he was a year younger, actually quite sneaky, and lived a quarter mile down the beach with their aunt and uncle, which generally absolved him.

They crested the last dune and from the top the Arkhangelsk came into view, lying as she always did in a gully just beyond the beach, listing slightly to port, her mast pointing nearly due north, marking time nearly as well as the sundial her father kept in his tent. The three ran down the slope of the last dune in great bounding leaps, sinking deep into the soft sand and leaping out again great whooping war cries rising from their lips.

Lulu ducked under the crumbing beam that had once supported the deck, following Birdie down into the hold, where the new pot sat on their makeshift stove. It was a world of black and white, dark shadows punctuated by bleach white light streaming in the occasional holes in the deck. The damp sand under the shadows was a cool luxury after the heat of the swamp. Lulu sat down and Birdie passed her the pot. She felt it cool and smooth in the darkness. She ran her finger along the lip feeling the nicks where metal tongs had banged into it. She passed it back to Birdie who put it on the stove. They all went out to gather crab shells and seaweed for a stew.

It was dark by the time they walked back to camp. The air had turned cold as the sun set. Not cold, but cool enough that Lulu got her blanket out of the pole lodge. They only ever slept indoors in the worst of weather. Lulu brought out her blanket and lay down in the sand, pulling it over her. She lay for along time whispering with Birdie about plans for the next day, watching the thin sliver of moon drag its light across the shifting ripple of the sea.


## Chapter 5: Fishing the Bank

Birdie woke early, before first light. She sat up on the dune where she had slept and looked off toward the sea. She saw the silhouette of her father down by the shore, his back to her. His hand went up and pulled down to his head with a movement so sharp and sudden she felt as if the starlight itself bent down to him. She watched at he turned to each direction, and then back to the center where he stood still, facing east.

She lay back in the sand and stared up at the stars. They began to fade as the pre-dawn blue crept up from the edge of the world, turning the black night sky first to blue, then to pink, to orange and then the stars were gone. A new day. Her father came walking up from the ocean, swinging his arms and stretching his back. He saw that she was awake and plopped down in the sand next to her. His beard was still wet and droplet of salt water sprayed her as he sat down. They did not say anything, the just sat together and watched the dawn paint the sky in front of them. 

Birdie's people were sea gypsies, Alban, was what her father called himself. Got lost on our way to the old valuta grounds her father would say, laughing. Birdie wasn't quite sure what this meant. He never elaborated. He was a man of few words, comfortable with silence. He expected everyone else to be comfortable with it as well, especially his. 

The low landers, as he called anyone who didn't live on the sea (which again made no sense to Birdie, how could people who lived on the sea not be the lowlanders?), "talk to hear themselves, talk about what they don't even know until they're half way through talking about it," he said. "I know I am the only one of our people you have to judge by, but we are not that way. If there is something to say, say it. But mark your words Birdie, pay attention to them, think on them, choose them well, find the best ones you can and don't speak until you have found them. The low landers think they can learn by talking, by asking questions, but you must listen first. Listen and watch the world around you. If you have a question, ask it first of yourself, see what answers you can come to and once you have those ask someone else and see what answers they have. Compare yours with theirs. This is how you learn."

Her father sat silent now beside her. She wondered where he was. Was he here, next to her? Was he on some other shore? As if reading her mind he turned to her and smiled. "It will be good day," he said in a whisper. And then he rose and walked back toward camp. Lulu sat up. "I was dreaming of pine trees." Birdie glanced at her. She too had dreamed of pines. She wondered if they both were thinking of burning stumps or if there was something more. Birdie still remembered the northern forests, or thought she did, or perhaps her father's stories had worked their way into her head until they became her memories and dreams too, lodged there as if she had seen them with her own eyes. And now she dreamed of her imagined memories, layers and layers of story peeling back to reveal at the end... what?

She stood up. "I'm going to get some food." She skipped down the slope, feet squeaking in the dry sand. Memories of cold salt air, oceans crossings, fog and pines, where it was always cool, and soft breezes blew did not help her here, in this land of swelter and storm. What she wouldn't give for a cool dry breeze stirring the pines of some rocky northern shore. 

She stopped at the top of the dune and watched the disk of the sun break the horizon. She stood, rooted like a sago, feeling the first warm orange rays, savoring the brief moments when it seems like perhaps it would not be murderously hot by mid morning. Then she uprooted herself and walked toward the teepee into which her father had disappeared only moments earlier. Inside it was dark, she blinked as her eyes adjusted to reveal the thin slivers of light from the windows, the rafters hung with dried fish and herbs, roots and tubers she and Lilah had dug the day before. Plants Tamba had shown them that he and his people had learned from the Edisto. There was plenty to eat in the marshes and pine forests if you knew where to look. Still the hut smelled as it always did, of the sea and fish. There was fishy smell inside that rarely left since most of what the family ate came from the sea, fish, clams, mussels, oysters as big as Birdie's head, seaweed and sea oats, even salt dried from the sea, there was always a bit of the sea in the stew pot. This morning it smelled of dried fish and onions. Her father smiled at her, asked about her dreams while he ladled the leftover stew into Birdie's bowl, a coconut shell sanded and polished smooth, carved with a scene of mermaid rising from a clam shell, something her father had seen in London. It was in fact the one and only story of London he had ever told her. 

---

Birdie sat in the shade of a sago palm. It was the last palm, the edge of camp. After the palm was the beach. She watched the ocean from the top ridge of the small, shaded dune, squinting in the bright light of the midday sun. Birdie's real name was Māra, after her mother's sister, who was down at the shoreline, pulling in a fishing net with Henri. Birdie had helped them cast out the net and secure it to the buoys earlier in the morning. Now she was waiting for her cousins to be done with their chores. She glanced up the beach toward their camp but there was no sign of Owen or Francis. She sighed and plucked at a sea oat, slowly breaking up the stem.

Down the beach she would see the single mast of the Arkhangelsk. Most of the time she loved seeing the boat, but sometimes it reminded her of the awful day it arrived. After her father had told the captain of the Ave Marie it could not be saved, the rest of his crew shrugged and went off hunting the wild boar that were forever rooting in the jack pines. The captain sat on the beach and stewed. He drank rum all afternoon until finally he'd strode into camp shouting for her father, who eventually appeared. There was a good bit of quarreling in several languages until at some point Birdie remembered the captain drew his sword and her father had gone very quiet. Aunt Māra pulled all the children inside the teepee, but Birdie had stood by the door and watched as her father walked very slowly forward until he had placed his neck against the captain's sword, a move that had been so unexpected that the captain did not appear to know what to do. He stammered something Birdie could not hear, though she heard her father's voice quite clearly, I know how I will die and it is not by your hand. The captain had dropped his sword, spun on his heel and marched right out of camp in the direction of Charlestown.

A few hours later the crew of six returned from the woods with a wild boar so huge they staggered under the weight of the pole it was slung out on. Birdie's father had informed them of their captains departure, the news of which they barely acknowledged, bent as they were to the task at hand, namely butchering and roasting the boar. There'd been a great feast in camp that night, with music and dancing that didn't stop until long after Birdie was asleep. The crew had stayed on for a quarter of a moon, until the rum ran out and they too headed off down the road in the direction of Charlestown. 

Birdie had been worried that the angry captain might return. For several nights she refused to sleep outside until her father finally coaxed the problem out of her. "My girl, you don't need to worry," her father had said, "he's gone." And indeed no one had ever seen him again.

And so the little ship had been commandeered by Birdie, along with Lulu, Henri, their cousins Owen and Francis, and Kadiatu's boy Cuffee. They'd spent the autumn in the ship, every free moment they had, sailing the sands of the island, re-christening her the Arkhangelsk. Birdie was captain. They had voted, as free sailors did, and she had been elected. She had only been voted out once, when Lulu called a new vote after Birdie had ordered all the boys over the side to raid an enemy ship for the hundredth time, holding Lulu back. But Lulu's term as captain had lasted only a few days before Henri called a vote that put Birdie back in charge, and set the boys, along with Lulu, over the side to attack the forts and towns of the coasts they sailed.

Birdie was trying to decide what they should do today, with their new pot they should have new adventures, when she noticed a small sail rounding out of the northern river. The boat road the middle of the current. Birdie's heart leaped up. Don't do that Charles. She tried to send this thought to him somehow but before she could even begin to concentrate she watched as the boat slammed hard into the leeward shore of the bank, hurling two small figures through the air like dolls pitched from a catapult. She winced as they landed. She watched them get up. Down at the shoreline Henri and Māra were laughing as they folded up the net. 

"My sons sail like his father," said Auntie Māra as she walked by Birdie carrying the basket of fish on her hip, with the net slung over her shoulder. 

Henri sat down beside Birdie. "Did you see them" Henri giggled. "They hit so hard."

"I've told him a dozen times, you have to stay south and use the wind to get out of the current."

"He knows," said Henri matter of factly. "He likes to crash so they go flying."

"What?" 

"It's fun I think?"

"They're going to break the mast one of these days. Or lose the sail. And then how will we fish?"

Henri shrugged, but didn't say anything. Birdie stood up. "I'm going to get my line." 

"Get mine too will you please?"

"Sure." Henri took off down the path to the teepee where both their lines were coiled and hung from a rafter over the door.

It took Francis the better part of an hour to get the boat down the beach to their camp. While she loved her cousins, they were not sailors. The did not come with Birdie and her family to Summer camp in the north. The left the island, but only went as far as Charlestown where they lived on Sullivan's Island. Birdies's Uncle tk helped run a distillery, spending his days tending the vast vats of boiling sugar, turning it slowly to rum.

No one on the tk drank. Her father didn't forbid it exactly, he simple did not associate with people who drank it. "When you drink or eat something you do not just drink the liquid or eat the flesh of the thing, you consume its spirit as well," he told her one day when she asked why he never drank rum. 

"Different things have different spirits Birdie." He dipped a ladle of water and drank it. "The spirit in the rum, it is not a good spirit. To me it seems like not a good spirit anyway. Many people, it takes them and makes them do as it wishes, sends them nowhere but in search of more of itself. Your uncle for instance, it drives him to work all summer making it. Other people it just visits and then leaves with no problems, it all depends." He shrugged and swatted at a mosquito on his shoulder. "Some days it visited me and left, but some days it visited me and wanted to stay even after I no longer wanted it, so I decided one day not to let it in me any more."

"It is not the way of our people I don't think. We did not have it back home. There was Vodka, but that was a drink of the lowlanders. We never drank it. Vodka has a strong spirit, but we did not need it. For us there is the sea, it has the strongest spirit as far as I know. I would rather stand on its shore for one minute and taste its salt air than have a lifetime of rum or vodka. The sea is the spirit I want to spend my time with, the sea is who I serve."

Birdie had decided then and there not to waste her time with rum or vodka or anything with bad spirits. She too would serve the sea. She watched as Francis tried to bring the little boat in through the waves. It was an offshore wind, which mean the sail luffed whenever he tried to head straight in through the waves, but to take them at an angle meant the little boat pitched and tumbled and threatened to roll with every wave. Francis might enjoy catapulting himself out of it when there was a nice soft sandbar to land on, but rolling in this surf would quickly be the end of the boat, and quite possible Francis and Owen as well.

Birdie considered swimming out to help them, but beyond the break was where most of the sharks hung out. She did not mind the sharks too much, most of them were harmless enough, but there were a few, the larger ones with very sharply pointed fins, that she avoided unless there were dolphins around. She walked down to the shoreline with Henri just as Francis finally road a wave through the break, somehow failing to capsize despite forgetting to lean back and counterbalance the roll of the boat. 


**Scene of Francis and Birdie fishing** Make Francis an approachable enough character that there is tragedy when he dies. what makes him approachable, some level of vulnerability, cruel father? Drinking father? No cruel, a drunk. Who's getting worse. But where can I put a scene of that? First cool night, they have a bonfire, he gets drunk. Words with the father, hits Francis. 

Francis was smiling as the boat road the last the crumbling wave toward the shore. His dimples shadowed into his tanned cheeks. His impossibly white two front teeth that Birdie was very jealous of. She unconsciously traced her tongue across her lone front tooth. She returned his smile, but tried to keep her gap tooth hidden. Owen leaped out the boat and tossed the bowline to Birdie, who helped him drag it onto the beach. 

"Did you see that?" Owen said breathlessly. "We flew Birdie, we flew."

She dropped the bowline back in the boat. "I saw you nearly break the mast on the only fishing boat we have, if that's what you mean." 

His face dropped. He mumbled something about finding Henri and walked off down the beach.

"Lighten up Birdie," said Francis climbing out of the boat.

"Lighten up? What if you'd broken it?"

"Did I?"

She shook her head at him. He rolled his eyes at her and turned around. She wanted to say *I like you less when you act like your father* but she bit her lip and said nothing. She knew he didn't mean any harm, he just didn't think. But she knew Francis didn't have what she had. She could feel him floundering some times, like he was lost in a way that she never would be and so she bit her lip and kept quiet. 

He leaned against the gunwale of the boat. She came and stood next to him, thinking about what she should say, but she could come up with nothing. 

"You always do the right thing Birdie," he started, but she interrupted him by bursting out laughing. 

"My father would disagree."

Francis didn't seem to think it was funny. He looked very serious for once. She was quiet again. "I didn't mean... You did a good job getting her through the surf."

"You think? I forgot to lean out when she pitched down the first time."

Birdie shrugged, "I guess you didn't need to. I mean, you didn't capsize, you made it to the shore." She saw him smile out of the corner of her eye.

"You want to go fish?"

"Yes. Henri did too."

They both glanced down the beach in the direction Owen had gone, but there was no one. "Let's just me and you go."

Birdie bit her lip, Henri had wanted to go, but she'd spent all morning with him and going without him suddenly sounded good, though she knew she would feel guilty about it the whole time she was out. "Okay."

He seemed to sense the hesitation in her voice and sighed. "Owen probably talked him into going turkey bunting." Owen and Francis had somehow managed to kill a turkey with their homemade bow and arrow and Henri was obsessed with doing the same. Francis was probably right she decided. Lulu had gone up the river with Kadiatu and Cuffee. There was no one else around save her father. She smiled. "Alright, you push us out." 

Francis went to bow and pushed the boat while Birdie pulled on the stern. They dragged her into the water and spun her around. Birdie jumped in as Francis continued to push from the stern. Birdie grabbed the foresail line and sat down on the port gunwale. The little boat was a lateen rig, like the tk, but with a single mast, a fore and back stay holding the sail and a cleated line that could be loosed and tightened to draw in the sail and come closer to the wind. Birdie unwrapped Francis's poorly cleated line and let the sail out to catch the offshore wind. Francis was up to his waist now in the water. Birdie leaned out to look past the sail and saw nothing but water. "Get in," she shouted. 

Francis heaved himself up over the side of the boat and rolled down into the bottom, Birdie drew the line in and turned the tiller to put them at an angle up the face of the wave. Near the top a gust of wind finally hit the sail the little boat leaped forward, sending them over the wave and rushing out, toward the next. Two more waves and they were beyond the break. Birdie watched the dark shape of shark cruise slowly under the boat and then the bottom dropped away and there was nothing but dark, blue green water. She pointed the boat as northerly as she could without luffing the sail. When she was happy she wrapped the line around the wooden cleat, looped it back under itself and sat back, letting her body relax for the first time since she'd hopped in.

She glanced at Francis, he was leaning over the side, dragging his hand in the water. Birdie pulled her handline out of her pocket and baited the hook, she dropped it gently into the water, letting the speed of the boat cutting through the waves carry it back away from her. She pointed the little boat toward the outer eastern edge of the bank. When they'd sailed by last month on their way in she'd noticed that there appeared to be an upwelling not too far out past the bank and it was near that updraft of cold water that she'd landed two huge tuna. She wanted to do it again, though she wasn't entirely sure she and Francis would be able to pull in something as big as she'd caught last time. It had take her father and Kobayashi a gaff hook and still a considerable effort to land the last one. But the tk was a bigger boat and much of the trouble was getting it aboard, up the side of the boat without it breaking the line or getting away. The skiff was only twenty feet long and worst case, she could always tie off the line and simply sail for shore to get it in. Although that would likely be very tempting to the sharks that hung around the outer edge of the break. 

As they eased further away from the shore she saw Francis glance back at her more frequently. She could tell he didn't like to go this far out. At least not in the smaller boat. It was a calm day though, the wind was light, it was the best sailing day she could remember since they'd arrive, especially for a vessel this size, light and springy as she was. Bordie could feel her dancing across the water, almost giddy to be moving it seemed to her. Boats have their own character, this one like the zip and zig and zag, she like the lean too, which Birdie fought by leaning out over the water to counterbalance the wind. A flat boat is a fast boat her father always said. Tipping was more fun though. If you knew your boat well enough to know where she like to be, what was too far, what was not far enough. You had to spend time with a boat to get a sense of her, and then you had to spend time on the water to get a sense of different conditions and how she would handle each of them. Birdie had been sailing the twenty foot sloop her father had built and named Delos for three season now, and in every weather short of a gale. While her father had given Delos to her wife's sister and her British husband, tk, Birdie still thought of her as her own boat. Only Birdie ever took her more than 100 meters offshore. Only Birdie pushed her, though birdie did not think of it that way, she thought of it the way Lulu thought of horses, she just gave the boat its lead, let it go where it naturally wanted to go. A good boat you could trust like that and Delos was a good boat.

They crossed into a different channel of wind and suddenly the water around them went dark. They were still within sight of the shore, an easy swim to the bank even, but here was were the ocean began in Birdie's mind. That deep blue that speaks of depth, real depth. That was the open sea. That was the point at which land, even if you could see it, became irrelevant to your life. You were out here, in the deep blue beyond. Free. Birdie closed her eyes and listened, taking in everything, the the wind whisping strands of hair in her face, the surge and tilt of Delos as she road gently up the now large swells, the churning froth of water foaming at her bow as she broke the crest and headed down toward the next trough. The mast creaked, the canvas seemed to gently sigh as the wind lulled slightly in the trough and the she felt Delos surge up again, catch that wind and fairly leap forward...

"Birdie!"

Her eyes popped open, startled. "What?"

"Bit far out don't you think?"

She looked around. Maybe? They were definitely too far from shore to have any hope of swimming in if something went wrong. They might make the bank. But what did it matter really? They could just keep sailing out here forever... she smiled at Francis. "Sorry, we'll jibe round."

He ducked as she jibbed around, something she rarely got to do in the bigger boat since jibbing with three sails was a rather violent maneuver. When the tk jibbed two booms came swinging across the deck at high speeds, which put tremendous force on the rigging and the boom itself. tk had broken her boom two years ago during an unintentional jibe that happened when her uncle fell asleep at the helm. This was why her cousins and their family no longer sailed north with Birdie's family. Birdie did not understand why her father, who was normally quick to forgive, even if his temper was sometimes quickly ignited, refused to forgive this incident, but she did know it had made it so no one else was in a hurry to jibe on purpose either. Since the wind never left the sails when jibing there was a lot of power in it, and with anything involving a lot of power, a lot care needed to be taken. The safer thing to do would have been to take, or bring the bow through the wind, which let the sail luff and slowed the boat, making for a gentler turn. But Birdie did not want to slow in this swell. Delos handled it well when she was moving, but slowed down she would bob like a cork in these waves and that idea did not sound like fun to Birdie. So she brought her stern around through the wind and waited, feeling for that moment when the boom would swing over, it was like that moment when you swing on a vine high up in to the air and you can feel yourself slowing slowing slowing but never stopping, instead you're suddenly moving the other way. And with a sudden snap of the boom, which Birdie slowed by tightening the line that held it, Delos came around and started her broad reach back to the shoreline.

They'd come far enough out past the back that Birdie was able to head right back to it and beach the ship on the small spit of sand that stood above the water. It was somewhere between tides, which gave them about thirty square feet of somewhat dry land to stand on, though periodically a swell came through large enough to soak their feet as she and Francis stood on the edge of the sand, untangling and prepping the net.

If you had looked out from the shore you would have seen two children standing on the water, appearing in fact to walk around their boat, as if out for stroll on the water. Even though Birdie could not see herself that way, she everything around felt similarly magical. It was warm, but not hot. The wind and water together kept them cool in spite of the afternoon sun and sweltering humidity. Birdie took off her skirt, then her shirt, and dove naked into the water, dragging the net behind her with her foot. She slipped under and tried to kick like a mermaid, legs locked together. She surfaced well beyond the bow of the boat, treading water. "Come on Francis! It's so lovely. Oh, it's perfect really." She dove under as he took off his shirt and dove in. Under water everything was silent save the occassion squeeks and pops of shrimp running in the sand somewhere below her. A school of dark, silver-sided fish she could not recognize through the blur of salt water was swimming just beyond where she could touch. She came up for air.

"I see a school out here. Quick, Francis, tie the net to the stern and we'll drag it out behind us, then circle back. She threw up the anchor and scrambled into the bow. Francis pushed them off the sand and they slipped silently, slowly through the water, Birdie could see the school better from above, she directed him to turn the boat to port, then starboard, and then, when she could tell the net was fully extended she grabbed the boom and pushed it back, against the wind to stop them dead in the water. Here they were enough out of the wind that there were no waves to toss them. They slowed, and then stopped. Francis pointed them into the wind and they both leaned over as watched and the net slowly sank down, startling the fish as it touched them, they darted and shimmered in confusion. "Bring it round." Francis laid the tiller over and Delos slowly turned, catch a breath, then another, and with a snap the sail filled and the boat lept forward, back toward the bank. Birdie scrambled to the stern and looked back to see nearly the whole school of fish caught in the net. She let out a whoop. And looked at Charles. She was so excited she jumped on him and hugged him. 

They landed and pulled the net in, there were easily hundreds of fish. They could not even haul it all the way up out of the water. They waded out to inspect it, Birdie knew there was no way they could get their entire catch to shore in Delos, she would have sunk under the weight. Birdie looked at the writhing mass of fish trying to decide how they could divide it up, let some go without losing them all. That was when she noticed a strange line sticking out for the water. It was a slight thing, thin and gray. She had never seen anything quite like it, which was why it took her so long to realize it was a dorsal fin and it was coming straight for Francis faster than Birdie had ever seen a fin move. 

"Francis! Get out! Now!" Birdie dropped the net and ran for the bank. Francis was right behind her, but as Birdie scrambled up on the dry sand she realized the fin was curved, not straight. She started to laugh. At first Francis thought she had played a trick on him, but then teeth closed around his leg and he screamed. 

Fortunately for him, they were not shark teeth, but it took a moment of screaming and terror and panic before either Francis or Birdie realized this, because seeing a curved fin might have made Birdie feel better, but dolphins don't bite. Except this one did. It bit and Francis fell to the sand and it began to drag him back into the water, Birdie grabbed his hands and pulled and Francis kicked the Dolphin gave up and darted off to deeper water. 

The sat panting on the sand, watching the fin trace circles around the boat. 

"Let me see your leg." Birdie went to the boat and pulled on her skirt again, tightening the tkbelt and pulling her knife from her belt. She cut back his pant leg and surveyed the wounds, there were five punctures, none more than a quarter inch across, and none very deep. But there was still plenty of blood and it looked like it would hurt. Birdie felt a wave a fear come over her and she wanted to run away from the blood and the torn flesh and the pain it must have been causing, but she quickly set that aside and went to work. She cut off Francis's pant leg to the knee, and then cut it into strips. She helped him down the water's edge—which was getting closer as the tide came up—and washed out the wounds with salt water. Then she wetted a few of the strips of torn pantleg and wrapped them gently around his leg. She tied to strips together and wrapped that one over the others, gently tying it to help hold everything in place.

"That's the best I can do. When we get in we'll go to Kadi's and her grandmother will know something to put on it so it won't get infected." She glanced over that Delos. "Let's get you in the boat."

"No, let's deal with the fish first."

"I'll open the net."

"What? No. We've never had this much, we have to bring it in somehow."

Birdie considered it. It was a lot of fish. "Are you sure you're okay?"

"I'm fine, help me in the boat and I can help you from inside, that way I can sit down." Francis stood and she helped him limp to the boat. Birdie stepped into the water, looking around for the dolphin, but she saw no sign of it. She waded out to her knees and started to pull the net full of fish over to the hull. That was when she noticed a lot of fish guts already in the water. Had the dolphin attacked because it was hungry? She turned the net pulling up the bottom and heavy the top into the boat. Francis took it and began to pull it out of the water and into the boat. That was when Birdie noticed a very different eye in the net, not a fish eye, staring at her. "Stop!"

"What?"

"There's a baby dolphin in the net"

"What?"

"There's a baby dolphin in the net" In flash she realized why the dolphin had attacked. It hadn't attacked, it had defended.

"What do we do?" Charles stared at her.

"I don't know." She thought for a minute. They could haul it all in, and risk crushing the dolphin. Or she could cut the net, let the dolphin out, but she'd lose possibly all the fish and she'd have a net to repair. She wondered what her father would do. And then she cut the net. She cut just in front of the baby dolphin, which had already eaten half of the fish in front of it, so there was no thrashing when her knife stabbed that fish. When she had a hole big enough for the dolphin to get out she worked the fish out first, and another came shooting out after it. Then the dolphin kicked once and shot free. It paused and seemed to eye her for a moment. I'm sorry Birdie said softly, staring at its big dark eye. It twitched and disappeared under the boat, out of sight.

Birdie tried as best she could to keep the net closed while Francis pulled it into the boat. It took them a good twenty minutes to get it into the boat, but in the end they saved well over half their catch. The ride back into shore was shared with six dozen flopping fish, and once, Birdie thought she saw a dolphin streak by.

After she had helped Francis limp back to their camp, and her father and Tambo had organized a trip upriver to see Kadiatu's family, Birdie came back out the beach to sail Delos back to her home at her cousin's camp around the north end of the island. She pushed off, but the wind was blowing off shore, forcing her farther out than she wanted. She ended up right back at the bank. She took it as a sign. There was only a small spit of sand still above water, wet sand, but she ran aground on it and climbed out. She looked around for a fin, but saw nothing. A turtle swam by in the shallow water. Birdie She sat down on the sand and lay back in the sun, feeling its warmth against the cool of her skin. She felt the chill of the wind as it dried the salty drops of water running down her arm. 

She lay back on the sand and closed her eyes, and she immediately felt something strange happening in her body, or to the world around her, she couldn't tell. At first she thought perhaps it was the linger pitch and roll of the boat, which stayed with you even after you got out. But then the whole world seemed to undulate, like a rippled passing through it. She felt as if she were floating in the water, but she was laying on solid sand. Then it came so suddenly it was terrifying. Something immense and unfathomable washed over her, a presence that stretched through her, encompassing her and everything she had ever known or done in an instant. She was afraid to open her eyes. A voice, no, that was the wrong word, something thought words for her, inside her. She could not understand them, a jumble of words falling in her mind so fast that she could not catch them, could not find the meaning of them, not even the order. She felt as if something massive and uncontrollably wild had seized her up in its arms and was taking her on some wild, frightening, but exhilarating dance. She became afraid again and forced herself to breathed slowly in and then slowly out. As she did this is was like the thing gave up and set her down again. She felt it slipping away. She blurted out, "No! Wait!" She wanted it to stay, it was just too much, too sudden, she wanted to say, give me a minute, but it was already gone, slipping away, the world settled, she opened her eyes and there was the sea, Delos, looking as it always did. She stared out the flat horizon where the sky bled into the blue of the sea. Come back. But nothing happened. She got up, she pushed off and climbed in Delos. She raised the sail and turned the boat toward home.

## Chapter 6: Fire

It was mid afternoon by the time Papa rounded them up and set them about gathering grass and small sticks. He would light the kilns when the sun went down and he had a very precise mixture of grasses and wood of all sizes that was entirely in his head, but Lulu and Birdie and even Henri had long since learned which thing they needed more of just by glancing at the piles, which they kept separate. Grass, then oak, then walnut. Papa claimed that to get the most tar out of the roots, you needed the right temperature kiln and to get that you need the right combination of each wood, plus there was always some trickery with wind and venting. The secret was to get the wood hot, but control the flow of air so that it burned very slowly and under some pressure that caused it to give up the liquid sap that hid inside of it. This tar or pitch tricked out the base of the kiln into buckets which were then put in barrels and either used by ships that called on their camp, or sold to the shipyards in Charlestown.

This year Papa had built three kilns, each used the side of a dune as its primary structure, reinforced with a layer of split logs, and then packed earth and then packed clay. The other side was built up of logs and earth until a conical shape was formed and then the whole thing was filled with clay. For days Lulu, her father, and Kobayashi had hauled the rich red clay of the banks upriver down to the beach and packed it into the kilns until they were smooth as glass. Then they little smoldering little fires to dry the clay and bake it hard. This took several days, but when it was done the kiln was ready to make pitch.

Kobayashi and her father worked all the next day dragging last year's stumps to the kilns and took turns splitting them with the axe until all the roots had been neatly stacked. Tambo, her uncle, and Francis had gone inland to gather walnut logs in the wagon, while Lulu, Birdie and Henri gathered downed oak and stacked the grasses they had cut and dried several weeks before.

Now they had everything neatly stacked and ready. Lulu was chewing something Francis had brought back from his trip inland. A Mvskoke woman they'd run into far up river had given him a strip of partly dried spruce gum. Francis did not like it. "It's like eating a tree," he said. 

"Because you're eating a tree." He gave the rest to her. She enjoyed it. It *was* like eating a tree. And there was something wonderful about eating a tree. It gave her some of its huge spirit. Lulu could almost feel herself expand as she chewed, though she did wondered if the tree people minded her walking among them chewing up the flesh of one of their fellow trees. She asked an oak, but it just shrugged off a few leaves in the wind. Everything gets eaten eventually.

Lulu wandered away from piles, deeper into the sandy hummock that separated their camp from the marsh adjacent the leeward side of the island. Edisto wasn't a very wide island. It was long and skinny. Not as long and skinny as Ocracoke Island  where they stopped on their trips north and south to provision and get the news about points further north or south, depending on which way they were headed, but long and skinny nonetheless. Edisto's marshy backside meandered for miles, as ribbons of the 

The forest was a clutter of shadow and light. Lulu sat down on a log and watched the shimmering leaves dancing in the breeze high up in the tree tops. Everything was so different up there. She decided to climb up and have a closer look. She cast about for a suitable tree to climb. She was near the marsh, in a mostly oak and pine forest. She would liked to have climbed a pine, but there was nothing to hold onto, the trunks were bare well above her head. She settled an youngish oak that had a huge low limb she should get on and then make her way up it, to the trunk where another branch allowed her to pull herself up. She kept at this for a while, ignore the scrapes from rough bark and trying to not pay attention to how high up she was. It took her a good ten minutes but she manged to get high enough up that she was afraid, and could no longer drive the fear from her mind and continue. She made herself step up to the next branch, the last that seemed like it would support her. She sat down on it, and wrapped her other arm around the trunk and looked out over the canopy. She was higher than the tk's mast, she knew that because she'd been hoisted up it several times to fix things. The mast was 35 feet. She guessed she was forty feet up. High enough to see out over the tops of the trees anyway. She watched two squirrels who'd scolded her the whole way up retreat through the thin branches to the next tree over where they took up their scolding again until Lulu threw a nearby acorn at them and they took off for good. 

She watched an eagle circle the marsh, slowly, lazily, hardly ever beating its wings, just rinding the air like a boat. Lulu wished she could fly. That would be even better than sailing, to glide on the air and go and down with the thermals and drafts rather than be stuck on the ground, moving side to side across the water. Although that was fun too. She twisted her head to try to see if she could see the beach from up here, but there was another tree in the way. Just then the breeze kicked up again and Lulu felt the whole tree sway. 

She wondered what it would be like to be up here in a storm, to ride the winds. She closed her eyes to enjoy the music of the leaves tinkling around her, mixing with the percussive clatter of palm fronds drifting up from somewhere below her. The tree smelled of a tonic of warm, wet wood, not unlike the tk, mixed with traces of scents coming off the marsh and farther off the sea. A briny mix of salt coming in undulating currents across the marsh to wave the leaves of her tree.

Birdie and her father loved the sea in a way that Lulu understood, but did not. She loved the wind. The wind is everything. The wind is everything it has ever touched. You could always smell the land from the sea. Whenever they were coming down the coast, any time the wind blew offshore Lulu could tell how far it was by how strong the scene of flowers. She assumed the opposite was true as well, that if she ever went far enough away from the sea, she would know just how far she had gone be how faint its tangled smell of salt and tk and tk and tk had become. It suddenly occurred to Lulu that she had never been far enough from the sea not to smell it. She knew the smell of land more as a stranger scenting exotic perfumes on the wind and reading them than she did of walking on it and losing herself on it. She resolved to one day walk inland far enough that she no longer smelled the sea and smell perhaps what other tales the wind had to tell as it passed over all those mountains and valleys and forests and deserts that lay between here and the infinite Lulu would walk toward. She sat swaying in her tree, planning grand expeditions to chase the sun around the world. She would cross the deserts, she would walk with lions, she would climb the mountains and stand on the peaks with her snowy leopard companion, and then she would say her goodbyes and journey deep into the jungle with her jaguar guide to see the lost cities of gold. Then she would say goodbye to her jaguar and walk again to the sea where she would build a boat and return home.

The sun has already disappeared into the thickets of distant trees on the western horizon when she noticed for the first time that it was finally growing cooler. There was some almost imperceptible drop in the humidity, some deep part of her awareness noticed just slightly less sweat seeping out of her int he course of the day that trigger some unconscious part of her to conclude, that winter is nearly here. She shivered slightly at the thought and then made a mistake. She was thinking only of getting down, but to do so she had to look down and when she did, a hot flash of fear shot through her. She realized suddenly she was along in the forest, high in a tree. No one was coming to help her. It was possible they might hear her if she yelled loud enough, but it would be after dark before they found her and that would be worse. No, she realized, I am alone. I have to do this myself. She sat back down and gripped the trunk of the tree until she felt stable. She forced herself to breath deeply and slowing. She heard her father's voice in her head, count to four as you inhale, hold that breath while you count to four. Count to four as you exhale, count to four with your lungs empty. Slowly and steadily in and out. Lulu did this until she began to lose count and found that she was just breathing normally. She opened her eyes and looked down. The last rays of the sun had poked their way through the forest thickets to fall here and there on Lulu's tree. It seemed to her as she looked below—she was careful not to look down, but at the trunk just below her feet—that the light was illuminating a kind of path down the tree. She could see the irregularity of bark in startling detail, it began to form a pattern of moves in her head, knobs seemed to jump out at her and she moved her foot down to the first one, easing her wait onto it as she gripped a branch above her with both hands. She shifted her weight onto that foot and gently moved forward, off the branch where she'd been sitting. She was up and moving. Now she looked down again and saw the perfect branch just below her other foot. She stepped down. And down again, her arms finding the branches her feet had given up only moments before. She moved in a zig-zag pattern down the tree, using branches like a staircase, back and forth across the trunk, until she found herself back at the large branch she'd used to get up. She walked out on it, away from the trunk, balancing with her arms out, to where it very nearly touched the ground and then she vaulted off to the ground. 

She turned back and looked at the tree, up at where she'd been. The light was gone now, twilight spread evenly through the forest, turning everything a soft gray that made it hard to tell where tree ended and sky began. "Thank you." she said to the tree. 

The smell of simmering boar reached her well before she got to camp. She found her siblings sitting near the fire where she joined them and listened to the grown ups talk. It was dark in the east, stars were out on the horizon. 

Then her father stepped toward the fire and raised his hands. Everyone fell silent. "Friends," he began. "Thank you for being here with me." He paused. Lulu looked around the fire at all the faces flickering warm and orange in the firelight and she realized everyone she loved was here in one place, at one time, it did not happen all that often and it made it even better when it did. She felt a wave of warmth pass over her, noting in passing that it washed over her much like the fear had passed through her earlier in the tree. Emotions always move like waves, and we ride on them. We can't change the wave, but we can control how we ride it and where it takes us.

Her father turned toward the sea and with both her arms still raised over his head, "Hekas, hekas! Este bebeloi!" His voice vibrated as he spoke and Lulu felt the words move through her, vibrating her blood with a tingling sensation that faded slowly as the sounds of the night became louder. He again vibrated the words and again let the sounds of the night once more return. He then spoke in a language neither Lulu nor her sister knew, but which somehow seemed ancient, as if it had been born millenia ago around fires just like this. It was guttural and strange in way that was both thrilling and a little frightening. Lulu knew what it all meant because her father had finally told her last year, but she still could not match the sounds she heard to the meaning in English and trying to do so made her head swirl in a confusion of noise and sense and meaning until she could feel more than she could understand.

Tambo took a large stick out of the fire and went to each of the quarters in turn. First the East, then the south, then the west, then the north and then back to the east. At each stop he called on the archangel, the arkangelsk, of that station, offering a bowl of water to each. When he was finished he handed the stick, with its glowing red tip to her father. 

Her father then nodded to Aunt Māra who went to the kettle of simmering stew. He handed her a bowl and she ladled some stew into it and gave it back to him. Lulu's father lifted the bowl in the air, the abalone shell glittered and sparkled in the moon light and not for the first time Lulu thought how lucky she was to be surrounded by such wealth, bowls that shone like gold in the light. "Uriel, bless this earth, bless this bounty we give back to you that you might bless these fires. Thank you for you love." He carried the bowl over and set it down on the first kiln. He repeated this incantation twice more until all three kilns had bowls atop them. Then he laid the stick to the dry grass that Lulu and her siblings had gathered over the past week. Lulu watched as he lit each of the kilns in turn.

By tomorrow morning the first buckets of sap would be flowing, and then the fires would not stop until the stumps were burned up. This year Lulu was guessing it would take half a moon. Birdie thought longer, Henri was hoping it would only be a week, but she knew he was wrong.

Her father turned back to face the bonfire. He raised his arms again as his voice vibrated a final incantation and then a word Lulu recognized, "ahmen". "Friends," his face broke into a smile. "Let's feast."

Everyone cheered and Birdie, always the hungry one, jumped up and was first in line at the kettle. Aunt Māra ladled out of the stewed meat into the abalone bowls. Lulu took hers and walked over the to kilns. She watch as the stew in those bowls slowly came to a boil while hers cooled. She whispered quietly, "thank you for helping us. Thank you for helping me."

---

The next morning the smell of wood smoke and the faintly sweet scent of tar overwhelmed their camp. Lulu was watching the kilns while she ate, making sure the buckets below them were not too full so that they would be impossible to carry. She was not allowed to actually handle the hot tar. No one but her father and Tambo moved the buckets to the oak barrels, which, when full, were allowed to cool and then Lulu and her sister could hammer on the lids. No one had ever been burned too badly, though her father had once scalded his hand badly enough that the skin had come off. He made sure that the children did not handle the sap until it had cooled.

Lulu didn't need to be told twice. The hot tar scared Lulu. It was a fiercely hot, red-brown liquid that boiled and bubbled and almost seemed to snarl in the buckets. It smelled of the forest somehow, like the distilled essence of a tree now made so dense that all the complex smells of the forest, the light smell of living leaves, the floral scent of flowers, earthiness of bark, the soil, the dry leaves, the rotting wood, the mushrooms and lichens and fungus were all condensed down to a single point that was all of them and somehow none of them as well. It was a deep smell, plumbed out of the depths of the earth, too deep, too much all at once. 

Lulu did not like the smell of it until the far had been spread on the rigging or hull of a ship. Something about the way it mixed with the salt soaked wood and hemp lines of a ship took the edge off the smell of the tar and made it smell pleasant again, like the forest standing at the edge of the sea.

What she liked even less than the smell was the heat. Sweat dripped off the end of her nose as she ate. Working the kilns was a constant sweat bath. She sweated gathering wood in the stagnant air of the hummocks around the marsh, sweated while she fed more wood into the kilns, sweated as she sat in camp, doing nothing more than eating. Sweating was simply part of life while the kilns were burning. Even the ocean was no great relief. For the past two days a warm current had made the shallows nearly as warm as the air. It was Lulu's least favorite part of the year, making the Arkhangelsk tar, but she knew it was also the most important part of the year. She often thought the only thing that would make it worse would be having to tan hides while tending the kilns. She never complained about working the kilns or gathering wood though. She did however, complain plenty about tanning hides. Who didn't? It was a smelly boring business rubbing brains all over a hide and scrapping the fur off. This was how she made it through making tar, by telling herself over and over again, at least there were no hides to tan. It's the little things that get you through.

The sun was directly overhead when her father and Tamba returned from a barrel run. As soon as the previous day's tar was cool enough to move they secured it deeper into the marsh. It was unlikely there would be another storm this year, but her father was never a man to take chances on the weather. 

He nodded at her as he entered camp. Papa was a quiet man, prone to grunts and nods in lieu of the sort of comforting, I heard you type of comments most people make. He was often absorbed in a task to the degree that he seemed utterly unaware of the world around him and yet sometimes Lulu would notice that he was also watching her, watching her sister and not in fact missing anything that was going on around him at all, that he was in fact more aware of what she was doing than she was. She would pause and think about this sometimes and try to focus herself more fully on what she was doing, if she sould not take in the whole world around her like her father she could at least, she reasoned, pay closer attention to what she was doing.

"Lu, you look pale." He said finally. "Here, drink some water." Her father passed her a gourd and she gulped down the cool water. She had not realized how thirsty she was until she started drinking and then she could not stop. She finished the gourd gasping for breath.

"You need to drink more when you're down here with the heat." 

"Yes, Papa."

"You can go now. Tambo and I will take over here."

Lulu smiled and dashed off before he could change his mind. She knew Birdie and Henri were down at the ship. She found them playing with their cousins. Or rather Birdie and Francis were playing one game and Henri and Owen appeared to be playing another, which included harrassing them with toy arrows, a volley of which appeared just as Lulu was climbing up into the ship. "hey" she shouted as one actually stuck into the wood deck near her foot. She grabbed it. The tip was a shell that had been broken to a point and sharpened. It could easily have split the skin if fired with sufficient force. The closer she looked at it the madder she got. "That could have hurt." She leaned over the railing looking for Owen. She knew Henri hadn't came up with this plan. He might be annoying some times, but he was nearly always kind and never dangerous. There was no sign of either of them. She descended below decks to find Birdie and Francis.

are birdie and francis making out? are they playng doctor or something? Or are they just down there making plans to go after henri and owen? Or did Henri abandon owen and come over to their side. 

Her eyes adjusted to the darkness and she could see a strange dark shape wiggling up under a hole near the sand in the stern. Lulu could not tell who it was and started toward it. It was only then that she noticed Birdie in her periferial vision, sitting on the ground, carving a stick with the knife her father hand given her for Christ Mass last year. Lulu did not acknowledge her sister though, padding softly past toward the stern where the shape had clearly made its way into the boat now. Lulu stopped and slid against a bulkhead to wwait. The figured dusted the sand off itself and began to creep forward. Lulu heard a whispered "Birdie?" just as Henri walked through the bulkhead, past her, without seeing her, and Lulu let out a wild howl and leaped on him, tackling him to the sand. He shrieked and covered his face and before Lulu could properly box his ears he was crying and she felt bad so she stopped, sitting astride him, pinning his shoulders to the ground, she leaned close to his face. "That arrow could have hurt someone."

"I know," he started crying again. "That's why I snuck away."

Lulu rolled off him. "What game are you playing anyway?"

Birdie watched them but did not say anything. 

"We were playing boys against girls."

"Three against one?" 

Henri nodded. "I came to make sure Birdie was okay, and to help her."

Lulu glanced up and for the first time realized that Birdie was carving a spear. Not the sort of toy spear they used for pretend fishing when the Arkhangelsk was sailing the sands, but a real spear, of the sort she used for real fishing when the surf was calm and the tk would run close in to shore.

"You going fishing?"

Birdie glanced up. "No."

"What's going on?" Lulu glanced at Henri. He shook his head. She looked over at Birdie, but she only shrugged. 

"Papa get back?"

Lulu nodded in the darkness. "He told me I could go." She nodded at the spear, "I'll go fishing with you if you want. Wind is down, should be a good day for it."

"I was planning to throw this at Owen."

Lulu gulped. "Birdie, that...." Her voice trailed off.

"I suppose we could fish though. If we don't see him first."

Lulu and Henri looked at each other. "Okay," said Lulu nervously. Well, why don't we leave through the stern, and we'll just... we'll just walk down to the water and if we see they we'll say we aren't playing anymore. Whatever it is that you're playing."

"I'm not playing." 

"Okay, whatever. Let's just go before you hurt someone." Lulu loved her sister but she was prone to blind rages that were best avoided. Sometimes Lulu could talk her out of them, but usually, she'd learned, the best course of action was to find something Birdie liked to do and try to get her to do it. She was single-minded and once her mind had latched onto something everything else was forgotten. Even the previous thing her mind had been latched onto, like murderous desire to throw spears at her cousin. Lulu had become quite good an managing these rages, unless they happened to be aimed at her, in which case there was little she could do buy run. Or hope that Henri could calm her down, which he was getting better at doing. At least he no longer egged her on, or not very often anyway.

Lulu stood up. "Can I see it?" 

Birdie handed her the spear, and Lulu knew she'd won. She was glad too because the point on the spear, combined with the way Birdie could throw it, would have gone right through Owen if he'd run afoul of it. It was then that Lulu noticed the dark spot on Birdie's leg. 

They hit you with an arrow?

Birdie nodded. All at once Lulu could see the streaks on her cheeks and realized that Birdie wasn't mad, she was sad. And hurt. "Sorry," Lulu offered. "Does it hurt?"

"No. Not anymore."

"I'm sure they didn't mean to."

"No, I don't think so. Still did though."

"You can't call back an arrow." This was something their father said, and until this moment Lulu had never really understood what he meant by it. 

Birdie smiled. "No, you can never call back an arrow."

Lulu sat down next to her sister. Henri slumped down into the sand and busied himself drawing with the stick. He always listened to everything they said, but he rarely made any comments of his own. Often they assumed he was in his own world, ignoring him and then weeks later he would make a comment referencing something they had said and Lulu and Birdie would look at each other amazed that not only had heard them talking, but had remembered every detail of it.

This time, after they all fell silent, Henri looked up from a drawing he had made. "You can call back an arrow you know. You just have to tie a string around it before you shoot it."

### Campfire Talk

There was a day, just before the moon that would mark the equinox, when the heat broke. Everyone knew it would return again at least once more, but for a few short days, it was deliciously cool and the breeze came inland in the afternoons. The sago palm fronds clattered in the wind, a clicking ticking sound like the women's shoes on the plank sidewalks of Charlestown.

the grownups sat around the fire talking and Birdie pretended to be asleep. The sand was cool on her the skin of her arm



After dinner that night her father pulled out his fiddle and Tamba joined in with some driftwood rasps he'd been working on. The fiddle and percussion dueled and danced with each other in Birdie's head, first her father leading then Tamba stepping to the front, stomping with his foot to add bass to his scratch and clack percussion.

Auntie Māra danced with Kadi, her braid twisting back and forth, her feet light on the sand. The music found a pattern and the dancers hooked arms like the instruments and began to turn each other. Her uncle attempted to join in, but neither of the women would make room for him and he sat down again to smoke. 

It wasn't until Henri came rushing in that the women broke apart their dance and both reached down to each take one of Henri's arms and they began to turn in the circle, Henri pushing them ever faster. Papa picked up on it, bringing his playing in line with the increasing speed of the dance until all of them were frantically spinning and finally spun apart, spilling into the sand. 

It was late by the time fire died down and Papa traded his fiddle for his pipe. Henri was curled up against Lulu, already asleep. Birdie lay on the other side of Lulu, closest to the fire. She liked feeling the cool sand against her arm, the heat the fire on her back. She closed her eyes and began to drift toward sleep. In the background her father and aunt and uncle and Tamba continued to talk in lower tones. Birdie slept for a minute but woke up at some point to hear her uncle still talking. 

She drifted in and out of sleep still until she heard her uncle say with conviction in his voice, "I want to come with you this year when you leave." 

She woke up completely. She could almost picture the surprised on Papa's face. It probably matched her own she thought.

"What about your wife and children?" 

"I've built a boat." Birdie's eyes sprung open, he has? 

"I want to sail up to Charlestown, trade the furs I've been stockpiling and then use that money to get some supplies and take the boat north."

"That boat of yours won't make it. We'll have to tar her this summer, re-mast her if we can.

"She's my boat, I'll see to it."

Birdie tried to think of what her father would say, but he said nothing. She could hear the soft sigh of his exhale as he puffed on his pipe in silence. 

"You think it's a bad idea."

Her father still said nothing.

"You're worse than my wife," her uncle said.

Her father snorted. "You could learn something from your wife..."

She heard tk stand up. "Maybe you could learn something from me. Maybe you could make some plans with someone else for once instead of keeping all your secrets to yourself."

"Secrets?"

Birdie pretended to roll over in her sleep. Careful to neither open her eyes, nor squeeze them shut, she turned toward the fire so she could see them. Her uncle and her father had never been the best of friends, but now it sounded very much like they were about to come to some kind of a head and Birdie planned to stop them. She could feel their eyes on her. She tried to relax her body and keep her breathing slow and even.

Their voices got lower, her uncle seemed to hiss like a snake. 

"I know you don't want me to come north, I know you don't want me to be part of your summer camp because that's where you meet with all your sailing people." 

Her father laughed now. "Is that what you think?"

"It's what I know." Your children talk to mine. 

Her father said nothing. 

"You don't deny it?"

"No. I don't deny that there are people I know on the cape who sail. You have that much right."

Birdie thought of her summer camp. It was much like their summer camp, though there were hardly any trees near the coast. No pines anyway. She spent her time fishing. Her father often worked on ships and did other jobs around town. She loved summer camp, but there was no one to play with and the idea that Francis and Owen might come to it nearly made her jump up and cry out, yes, yes please come. 

"I'm not even sure we're going this year."

"What? Why not?"

Her father shrugged, took another drag off his pipe. "Things are changing."

"What things?"

"All things."

Birdie risked a peek through the veil of eyelashes. She could see her father, he sat on his stump, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, staring into the fire. 

"The British are coming."

"The British are already here."

"True. But more of them are coming. Many more. They're headed for Nassau. They need to bring it in line or they'll lose it forever. But you know where they will come first to provision. Charlestown. We'll need to be gone before that."

"You're just going to leave? You can't just leave."

"Sure I can."

"But you have a life here, people need you here."

For once Birdie agreed with her Uncle. But the thought of the British coming made her angry. She did not like the British. Their soldiers were always drunk, their sailors cruel. Unwashed, dirty men who brought nothing but pain and misery to anywhere they went, as far as she had ever seen anyway. Once in Charlestown she'd seen soldiers poking the slaves in the market with sticks.

Let the British come," She realized her uncle was drunk, slurring his words slightly. "Do you really thing they can control everything, be everywhere? Besides, they aren't going to bother with us, we're not big enough to interest them."

"They're not going to bother with us because they are not going to find us here. But do you really think they would ignore the people who make it possible for their worst enemies to continue to sail against them? Continue robbing their merchantmen? Stealing from the crown? Do you really thing the British crown is going to ignore that?"

"You're a coward."

Birdie could hear the fire over the silence. She watched her father contemplate his response, she could see him straining to hold back whatever impulse his temper was sending him. He exhaled slowly. And then spoke slowly and clearly. 

"You have never been to sea. Do not make the mistake of thinking that because you can walk proud on the land, that you have any idea what the sea is capable of doing to you. Do not presume to understand courage when you have never been out of sight of land."

Her father stood up and stretched causally. "And do not return to my fire for a while. I do not wish to see you. I will send one of the children for you when my anger has passed."

Her father walked off toward the ocean. Birdie saw him in the moon light take off his deerskin skirt and run into the waves. Her father often swam at night she new. It was something he had done since he was a small boy. It helps me sleep he had said to her once. The cold helps you sleep.

Her uncle sat on the log. She could hear him muttering something to himself, but could not make out was it was. "Come on Māra, lets go." Her aunt raised an eyebrow at him, but got up and gathered her things.

Birdie rolled over and stared up at the sky.

The British. Coming to Charlestown. She watched shooting stars and started to count them, but her eyes kept sliding shut. When she opened them again the sun was just cresting the sea.

# Winter
'''
Storm
    - try to stop the cousins from going
    - burying their stores, sailing the boat up the river, past Kadis
    - storm hits, under the boat, darkness and terror
    - alligator scene
    - storm aftermath. ship not heard from, waiting for their cousins
        - birdie won't eat
        - staring out at sea. hating the sea. cursing the sea
            another visit from the sea
        - Henri crying for owen. We need to add more about them together
    - Kadi's grandmother dies. 
Sails
    - Ratham arrives, break the spell of sadness
    - no word of the ship though
    - hunting and careening, winter solstice bonfire with the pirates
'''

## Storm

It was late in the afternoon when she felt it. Lulu sat straight up in the hull of the Arkhangelsk and hit her head on a cross spar. Ow, she exclaimed and quickly followed it with, Birdie, do you smell that? 

"What?" Birdie paused and sniffed. "What?"

"The wind is different."

Birdie sniffed again, she put her nose to a crack and sniffed deeply.

"What are you doing sister?" asked Henri.

"Lu says the wind smell different."

Henri too sniffed. He cocked his head to the side and studied Birdie or a minute, then turned and studied Lulu. He shrugged. "I think it smells like the sea."

"Yes," said Lulu, "but it smells like more like the sea."

Henri stared. "What did you say?"

While her brother and sister did not notice it, at nearly the same moment that Lulu had hit her head, her father had also jerked upright out of a sound sleep in a hammock slug between to pieces of driftwood. "Tambo!" He shout leaping out of the hammock. "Storm."

Tambo came slowly out of the hut, wiping the fish guts off his hand with a rag. He looked up at the sky. He frowned.

Papa stopped to sniff again when Lulu came around the corner at full speed and skidded to a halt in front of him. "Papa! the air smells different, I think there's a storm coming."

He smiled at her and turned to Tambo. "See?"

Tambo grunted. "I see. I see you have raised them like you. Like wolves." He smiled and then it disappeared. "We need to stop Mr tk, he was taking Delos to Charlestown today. 

Her father glanced out at sea. "I'm sure he'll stay."

"You're sure."

Her father sighed. "Birdie, Lulu, run down to Aunt Māra's camp and make sure they don't do anything stupid like sail for Charlestown."

Birdie glanced at Lulu and together they dashed out of camp.

"And hurry back, we'll be moving to the boat." Her father's voice trailed off as they left the dunes and ducked into the forest, following the well-worn footpath that led down the island to their cousin's camp. That was how Lulu though of it. Her father always called it Aunt Māra's camp. No one called it Uncle tk's camp, though really he was the one who lorded over it. To tell the truth, thought Lulu, I would have much rather been helping to secure our camp. She slowed a little as the oaks thickened and the ground became treacherously crowded with acorns that hurt even her calloused feet. 

"Come on Lu, hurry up," Birdie called. "I want to tell them so we can get back and help Papa pack everything up."

"Let's just go back, they won't leave. The wind is coming up."

"They're not Alban Lu. They don't know. We have to tell them."

"Aunt Māra is mother's sister, she's Alban."

Birdie shrugged. "Maybe, but we still have to tell them, Papa told us to."

Fine." Lulu crossed her arms angrily. "Let's run then." And she took off down the trail, leaving Birdie behind. Aunt Māra's camp, or their cousins' camp, was in nearly the same spot on the north end of the island as Lulu and Birdie's camp was on the south end. Nestled in the first row the dunes, out of the wind, and right by the river, that, while too brackish to drink, was good for fishing, washing, and cleaning. Lulu was panting hard as she rounded the bend and she could hear Birdie's feet pounding the sandy trail just behind her in what had become more a race between sisters than any message carrying errand. They both burst into camp, nearly knocking over Aunt Māra and both doubled over sucking wind, unable to speak. It was Birdie who first looked up and realized to her horror that no one else was around. She put out her arm and caught her Aunt's dress. "Māra, where is everyone?" 

"They've gone in the boat to Charlestown child, what is it?"

Birdie felt her heart sink. "How long ago?"

Māra glanced at the sky. "Left after lunch." 

Lulu and Birdie shared a look. On a good day, with a favorable wind, a good boat could make Charlestown in four hours. Delos was a good boat, and the approaching storm would make the wind favorable. Until it made it more than favorable. Still, Lulu had a terrible feeling in the pit of her stomach. A helpless feeling, like the world was careening against her will, she was being pulled by lines should feel all around her, but could not make out which way they were pulling her. She watched Birdie start to cry. She could think of nothing to say. "Bee," she said finally, "Let's run up to the point and see if we can see the sail. Then we'll get back to help Papa."

Birdie nodded and they left their Aunt to grab her things and head for their camp where they promised to meet her later. The trail from camp to the beach was hard going at this end of the island, loose sand you could not run in, sharp shells and sticker plants everywhere. It took them longer than either had planned to get out to outlet of the river where the sand bar at low tide was high enough that they could wade across the very and out on the point. A short swim beyond them offshore lay the bank. If they had time that would have been the ideal place to go to look for the sail, but there was no time. Already the wind had begun to pick up. Lulu could feel the pressure dropping. Her ears popped. This was going to be big one. 

And then they saw it, a tiny white triangle against a blue sea and blue sky that would soon be black. It was too far to hail, too close to make Charlestown by nightfall. Lulu prayed silently, *Please go to shore, please go to shore, please go to shore.* Birdie was crying again. "Come on," said Lulu. "We have to get back."

By the time they got back Papa and Henri were on their second sled drag from camp to the boat. Papa pulled, Henri ran behind grabbing anything that fell off. Lulu dashed into the hut and grabbed her bag, which held tk and tk, the only things in the world she cared about. She slung her bag over her shoulder as she waited for Birdie to grab her things. They set off after her father and Henri, who were already well down the trail. At the boat Tambo was already raising the sails while Aunt Māra hurried up and down out of the hold, hauling dried fish and water in small barrels. 

They would sail the tk up river, threading the marshes as quickly as they could, to tk Landing, where they could careen her against a grove of swamp cypress. They would lash her to the trees as best they could and ride it out there. It was not a new plan. They had gone so far as careen her once two years ago, but storm had never materialized. Wherever it went, it had spared this one. Lulu could feel in her bones that this storm was not going away. It was coming here. Now. Tonight.

The tide was raising tk, her father and Tambo used lines and a bent pine on the hammock next to it to winch it into deeper water. It took the better part of an hour, but she was soon floating. They used the Pirogue to load the last couple barrels of tar, which Kobayashi and her father were still manuevering into the hold as Tambo raised the sail to get a enough speed to fight the river current. 

High clouds had been blowing in all afternoon, but it wasn't until the afternoon sun sank below them and headed for sunset that they could see the line of the storm. It was so dark it looked like night blowing across the sea. Her father climbed the mizzen mast with his spyglass and studied the horizon. When he came down Lulu noticed something she had never seen in his eyes before, fear. It chilled her. She shivered and put her arms around him. He knelt down beside her and wrapped his arms around her. "It's going to be okay Lu. I promise."

She nodded, but said nothing.

"It's going to be a long one, a fierce one, but we will all be alright."

She looked in his eyes. "How do you know?"

He blinked at her as if this were the silliest question he had ever heard. "Because I asked."

"Asked who?"

"The sea."

"How does the sea know? Isn't the storm the storm?

"The sea knows everything. Nothing is older than the sea."

---

The darkness of the storm blotted out the sunset. Lulu was wishing she could be wherever the sun was setting. Some place happy and bright. She heard Tambo yell from the bow and both she and Birdie rushed up to see what was the matter.

Threading it's way out of cluster of cypress trees was a small dugout with six people in it. At the stern was man, probably about her father's age Lulu guessed. In the bow was a woman, perhaps about the same age, his wife she assumed. Between them, in the line were two girls and a young boy about Henri's age. The older of the two girls held a baby in her arms. The man was calling out to Tambo in a language Lulu did not know well, but recognized as tk. She had seen her father trade with the enough tk that Lulu and Birdie had learned to recognie words that seemed like they meant please and thank you and hello. Lulu heard the man say the word she thought meant thank you. Tambo spoke fluent tk and spoke for some moments as the dugout moved alongside the tk. 

He turned to Birdie. "Go tell your father that we're going to give this family a ride and they're going to show us an island, we can careen on the leeward side."

"We're not going to tk Landing?"

"They say the water is already rising there."

Lulu said nothing, she watched as the man rought the canoe alongside.

"How come every one asks Birdie to do things and not me?

What are talking about?

You immediately turned to Cirdie, you didn't even think of turning to me.

He studied her for a moment. "Lulu, go get a line and some rigging out of the hold that we can use to get this family on board."

She snapped to attention and smiled. "Yes sir!'

She took off for the hold. It was dark below, even the faint light of the evening was no help down here. She worked by feel to get several lines, but she could not find the rigging Tambo wanted. She ran back with the lines so the tk could at least tow the canoe along without the poor man having to paddle to keep up. Then she ran back into the hold and felt around where the rigging ought to have been but could not find it. She was about to give up and grab a couple of lines to just tie a ladder when she tripped and fell and landed on the unmistakably painful lumps of tightly knotted hemp lines. The rigging. She dashed back up and with Tambo's help, secured the rigging to the gunwale and lowered the ladder-like rope over the side so the family could climb aboard. 

It took several tries, but they eventually managed to get everyone on board. Tambo took the man to the cockpit to tell her father the directions. Kobayashi came forward with a lantern they hung of the bowsprit to provide some modicum of light as the sun ceased to be of any help. 

"Where were you when I was below?"

Kobayashi smiled at her, "I was lighting the lattern over by the stove, waiting for you to ask me for help."

"What? I never even saw you."

He shrugged. "You never looked."

A flash lit up the sky and the first rumble of thunder drifted toward them. Tambo came running foward and he and Kobayashi dropped sounding lines and yelled out depths. The number came ever smaller, then sudden bigger as they entered the main channel of the river. Lulu helped her sister reef the sail and together with the current this slowed them considerably and they swung alongside a low flat island. Tambo jumped for shore and pulled them in and around the back. In the fading light Lulu could see it was only maybe ten feet above the river at it's tallest. A thick stand of oaks and pines stood in the middle of the island. It was there that she and her Aunt took two tarps and plently of line to try to construct a shelter of some kind. Kobayashi and her father dragged the lifeboat off the tk, flipped it over, and propped it between two trees. Lulu and Aunt Māra drapped a tarp over the upturned hull and began tying the tarp down to the base of the trees around them.

Her father shone the lattern on their work. "That should hold for a while anyway."

The tk man split a piece of young sapling wood from along the river and began to carve notches in it. He came over and fit the notches into the line and began to twist it, drawing the line tighter. 

"Clever." Her father nodded at him excitedly. 

The storm came slow, it seems to pace back and forth somewhere just offshore. Lulu wondered what was happening at their camp. It seemed not so much angry, as... Lulu wasn't sure. She and Birdie were talking about it when Kobayashi interrupted them. "The sea is never angry. What we see as anger is just the sea god reshaping the shore. It takes tremendous force to reshape the coastline. Think what effort it would take to move this island ten feet to the left. Storms are the only tool the sea has to move entire islands. It reshapes things with wind. It blows hard because it has much work to do and wants to do it in little time. There are two faces to the world, one is so slow and patient it's tough to see it work, you see?

Lulu considered this, but before she could answer he went on.

"Trickle a stream down a bank of sand and it will slowly cut deeper and deeper as it comes to rejoin the sea. Deeper and deeper, until eventually there is a canyon where once there was just a trickle. Everyone thinks that's the end of the story, when that water flows into the sea, but we know better yeah? There are rivers in the ocean, the animals ride them, sometimes we ride them. Water is always in motion, that is it's nature. It is never at rest."

Her father and brother joined them. Tambo and Aunt Māra were building a small fire they hoped would burn down to coals they could keep until morning. The boat was half careened on its side at the rear of the island, as ready as it could possibly be.

"We see the medium processes," continued Kobayashi. "The ones that move at our speed. We see the tides change every day, we see the moon wax and wane. We see the season turn. We see the winds change. We see only what moves at our speed. If we want to see the other things we have slow ourselves down. Or speed ourselves up. Or sometimes, like now, we just hang on and try to survive the ride."

The watched as the last of the light faded. The Indian family joined them there on the island. Everyone shared a meal of dried fish and watched the lightning begin to light up the sky. The line of rain was visible in the flashes, inching toward them, relentless, slow, and mighty.

The storm came on so strong it seemed to suck everything toward it. The wind blew out to sea for a while, then sudden it switched and began to come back, like the storm had inhaled what the land had to offer and was now ready to speak it's own story into being. It spoke in rhythm and rhyme. Wind that once whistled in the long leaf pines and clattered through palm leaves now shrieked and growled, rising like music Lulu had heard once coming from a big house in London town. It rasped over the reeds with a blast that knocked them flat, pinning them down to a single note that was washed over and drown out by the oncoming waves. As it grew stronger it beat waves across the marsh and up the river in front of them, ripples and surges of water. Then came the rain. At first a pelting, like drums rolling through the night. Everyone retreated then to the shelter of the pines, under the boats and tarp. 

And then it opened up like something terrible that Lulu had never dreamed was possible. She had never known that such forces existed in the world. Everything seems to screech and wail as the storm tore at the land, working hard to rearrange, reshape, renew. Lulu, Birdie and Henri huddled with the others under the shelter of the boat, but it rocked and began to move too. Her father ducked outside and added more lines. The tk man, who had been carving more of his tightening sticks went with him and together they shored up the shelter as best they could. 

"That's the last time we walk out there without a line." said her father when he ducked back under the shelter. He started readying a line should he have to go out again. The flashes of lightning came so fast and frequent that it felt like the sky was just light, with flashes of darkness. She saw Henri sitting in Birdie's lap, both of them huddled next to Aunt Māra. Tambo and Kobayashi were playing some sort of game with sticks the Lulu did not understand, gathering them up, throwing them and then starting at the resulting scatter of sticks and nodding and grunting thoughtfully before gathering them all up again and starting over. It seemed very boring to Lulu and a strange thing to do in the middle of a storm. 

Lulu knew if she went outside the wind would blow her away. She knew it would actually move her across the ground with more power and she had to resist it. It would shape her, it would put her wherever it wanted, she knew it and yet a part of her still longed to duck out under the canvas and feel it, feel her own helplessness in the face of the storm, measure herself against this great rearranging force, to feel as physically insignificant as she sometimes felt in her head. It was so big thing. She was so small a thing in the face of it. But she was sure she could outwit it somehow, could dodge it, could survive it using only what she had about her. It was a feeling at once of power and fear mingled together.

Then suddenly, when it seemed it could get no worse, it stopped. And eerie quiet calm descended upon them. The wind dropped to nothing more than a windy day at the beach. Her father, Tambo, and Kobayashi were out in an instant, the tk man said something to his family and went out with them. They secured the lines on the tarp, the lines on the boat. They moved  branches and debris that was washing ashore of the little island. Anything that the second round might be able to hurl at them, they moved and cleared as best they could.

Lulu and Birdie crawled out from under the tarp and looked around. The wind was steady, a stiff onshore breeze, but with gusts that would rip through suddenly, ferociously, a little reminder from the storm that it was not done yet. 

The men were joking and laughing as they came back from securing the tk. Tambo and tk man were carrying a barrel of water. Everyone came out and drank in the darkness and calm. Lulu wasn't sure, but she thought it was probably past midnight by now. 

"How much longer will it last Papa?" She could see the whites of his eyes gleam in a flash of lightning.

"I don't know my girl, maybe it'll be over by morning."

Tambo said something in tk, the tk man nodded. He knelt down by Lulu and looked at her face. It was so dark Lulu could feel his breath better than she could see him. He reached out in the darkness, she felt his rough hands on her shoulders. He began to sing in a soft voice. Lulu could not understand the words, but she understood the meaning. His own daughter came out and stood next to Lulu, holding her hand. 

The wind began to rise again, it felt like the pulse of the storm was quickening, building back to roar once more. The man's song finished. He squeezed Lulu's shoulder and she saw him smiling in the darkness. She crawled back under the boat with birdie and sat back down in the bow.

Despite the roar of the storm and the pounding of the rain Lulu felt her eyes beginning to droop. She leaned against her aunt and closed her eyes.

She wasn't sure how long she'd been asleep but all at once she was awake, the hair on the back of her neck stood up. She couldn't see, she couldn't hear anything other than the rain drumming on the canvas and wood, but she could feel danger. It wasn't until the next flas of lightening that she understood. She saw the teeth first, whatever part of her brain was in charge of keeping her alive zeroed in on the immediate threat of teeth. Teeth that were far to bit and far too close. Above them a single eye regarded her. Lulu felt the fear wash over her like a storm sopped wave and she realized that though she was shivering from the wind and water that soaked her the hot flash of fear made her sweat. She kicked at her fathers leg, but could not find words. He leaned over and stroked her head and looked at her kindly, as if she were scared of the storm. Still she could not find the make her mouth form the words. Finally in a whisper she said, "alligator" 

Her father had his pistol out and pointing in the darkness so fast everyone jumped. What is it Tamba screamed over the whining howl of the wind. Her father pointed the gun. The gator eased itself further in under the tarp and seemed to regard them.

Despite her fear Lulu could not help thinking that that the alligator looked every bit as scared as she was. Except it had giant teeth with which to protect itself from fear. Then again she thought, her father had a gun. A bunch of creatures thrown together, all afraid of each other. Maybe this was how the storm wanted to move her, maybe it did not want to blow her though the pines so much as put her under a boat with a scared alligator. But why? What was she supposed to do? It continued to stare at her, and it seemed to stare only her, though she thought maybe she was imagining that. She stared right back anyway. The fear faded some. One can only be truly terrified for so long, one adjusts. Terror becomes normal if you experience it long enough, and it when it comes to terror you don't have to experience it long to reach long enough. It's how you survive battles, storms at sea, perhaps alligators. 

Instead of terror she began to feel uncomfortable. Why was it staring at her? Was it staring at her?

She thought she might be losing her mind until she heard Tamba say, "It's watching her."

Her father answered just loud enough to be heard over the storm, "She's edible size."

Lulu cocked her head. Are you trying to decide if you should eat me? She glanced around. What's wrong with the rest of them she thought. 

"Maybe" said Tamba. "Maybe it's just scared too and trying to decide if she's going to eat it."

"You're feeling charitable."

"You're the one who hasn't shot it."

"If I shoot it we'll all be deaf and burned. And I'm not sure it'll kill it."

Tamba nodded. "Maybe it will just go away."

A particularly close flash of lightning made them all flinch and when they did the alligator flinched as well and it was then that Lulu noticed it was missing its other eye. Lulu cocked her head and stared at it's one eye again, but this time she saw it differently. Are you the same creature? Is that possible? You're bigger. So am I. A year is a long time. Do you recognize me? Is that why you're staring at me? Are you trying to tell me something?

The eye moved as she thought these questions. It focused back on her for a moment and then it lifted it's body up. Lulu saw her father raise the gun. "Wait!" she yelled. The alligator turned it's eye to her one last time and then it slipped out from under the tarp and disappeared into the night.

---

Lulu did not remember falling asleep, but she woke with a start, stiff and slumped against her father, who was still asleep. She did not move, but lay slumped, listening. The wind still blew, but it was only a gale, strong, stiff, steady, bending the palms and pines, but not tearing at the earth, not seeking to rearrange the world in a night. She gently eased off her father and crawled out from under the small boat that had been their world for a long terrible night. She half expected to see the alligator somewhere just outside, waiting for her, like a patient dog. Instead she found her sister, sitting on a washed up piece of gnarled old oak, starring down the river, out toward the sea, crying.

Lulu came ad sat beside her. Neither of them said anything. Lulu thought of Francis and hoped he was okay. Francis was kind and good, you could see it in his eyes. Her uncle had something of that in his eyes too, but he didn't listen to it. She put her arm around Birdie. "I'm sure they went ashore. I'm sure they're fine."

Birdie nodded. "Thanks Lu." She leaned her head on Lulu's shoulder. "They're not though."

Lulu pulled back from her. "What? Why not? How do you know? What happened?"

"Nothing happened. I just... I can't feel anything. It's like... there's just nothing when I think of them."

Lulu considered this, but didn't say anything. She tried to hold them in her mind and tried to feel them. She too felt nothing. But she wasn't sure she ever felt anything. She had never done this before anyway, how would she know? Then she wondered why she had never done this before. "I don't feel anything either, but I don't think I ever did."

"You don't think about people?"

"We'll of course I think about people."

"When you think about people, you don't feel them?"

Lulu was quiet.

"When I think about people I feel them, somehow, I don't... I just... I can't really explain it, I just... I feel them."

"I wish I could do that."

Birdie smiled, but started to cry again. "But now I don't know, I think about Francis and I can't feel anything, and I am scared that that means something happened to them, that, that they've died."

Lulu felt herself start to cry. She hugged her sister and began to cry on her shoulder, and she felt Birdie crying on hers and they cried together, until they had nothing left to cry.

## Sails

'''
so Tamba comes to the fire and starts to tell stories, her father tries to get him to stop but the fgirls, and the reader begin eto put things together, the swimming at night, the sailing at night, the sails on the horizen, Tabna's stories of beinging goods into the harbor. Then her father asks for a story aout tk, something to get the kids away from being curious about whta all he does besides making tar.

What does he do, he helpos get the goods ashore and brings water out to the boats when the need it. dried fish, he's paid in whatever the boat has, somethimes rich fabrics their mother makes into fine dresses f, sometimes rum, which her father sells to the taverns in charlestown. Perhaps there's  ascene where they all go to charles town to trade the rum for money and the kids get to go to the traders, scene at the slave market. That could be a rough one. need to find out when slavery reeally took off, when the slave market opened. woiuld it have been their in 1705? If not then some seen of blacks being treated poorly and the family's rage. Maybe her father buys someone, a child perhaps, a man and a child. Her father hauls them back out to camp and sets them free. They help out and then they go to join a crew. 

Tamba asks them their names, asks if they can sail. They buy someone that can and set them free.

'''

It was after breakfast, the first truly cold morning of the year, it would still be plenty warm by midday, but it was cold now in the mornings. Her father had come in from his morning swim and for the first time sat by the fire to warm himself. Birdie had been stirring leftover stew in the kettle, which she'd hung herself over the fire. She was the first up, after her father. She scooped out a bowl bowl stew and stepped out into the cold air. She sat on a stump and ate. The more she ate the hungrier she felt and before long went back inside for another bowl. "That's my girl," said her father, ladling another bowl for her. 

Birdie tried to smile but she didn't feel it. She hadn't felt it. It had been a week since the storm and there had been no sign or word of her uncle or cousins. Twice her father and Kobayashi had sailed up the coast toward Charlestown stopping along the way to survey the beaches and marshes for any sign of Delos, but had found nothing. Her father still said that they had simple been driven into the marshes and probably had to walk out, but Birdie could tell he believed that story less every day.

Her aunt wandered the north end of the island, staring out at the sea. She seemed in a daze, she did not talk to anyone and Birdie had not seen her eat for days. Every now and then Kadiatu would convince her to eat something, but it was never much and afterward she would wander back to her camp and sit on the top of the dune, waiting.

She probably saw the sail before anyone else, but if she did she didn't bother to come tell them. It was Birdie who saw it first at their camp.

She and Lulu had walked together down to the shore to wash their bowls in the surf. 

Birdie stopped at the shore. Lulu knelt and let the rushing water of the wave fill her bowl and pull the bit of fish at the bottom back out the sea. Birdie watched but she made no move to wash her own bowl. She stared out at the sea where she thought she saw something white on the horizon, something that might be a topsail coming into view. 

"Lu, what is that?"

Lulu stood up, she was shorter than Birdie by half a head, but she saw it too. "Sail?"

They looked at each other and smiled. Birdie quickly washed her bowl and they turned and ran back up to camp. Laughing and shouting "sail." Her father turned and squinted out at the sea. He hmmmed and went inside, returning with the spyglass. He trained it on the speck still wavering at the horizon. 

"Topsail, moving north." He handed Birdie the glass and she climbed up the nearest dune to get a better look. Northeast was no good, that meant it was headed away from them, but that made no sense, they should have spotted it earlier if it was coming out of Charlestown. They'd have seen sails well and clear when she rounded cape and turned to the north, headed for London or Northampton. The only boats that ever headed northeast without coming out of Charlestown were... she glanced over at her father. He was watching her, she could see him smile, she watched him watch her figure it out. Privateers. Pirates. It was a coasting ship that had drifted too close and, probably unbeknowst to its captain and crew, had been spotted. Word would spread north. Not from their camp, her father never passed on sea gossip as he called it, it was one of the reasons raiders came to their shore in peace, but this one obviously wasn't. She walked back over to her father and passed the glass to Lulu.

"Doesn't look like they're headed this way."

Birdie nodded. She screwed up her courage inside and said quickly before she lost her nerve, "Papa, can Lulu and I play at the Arkhangelsk until you need us?"

Her father looked at her darkly, but then he smiled. "What gave you the idea that there was ever a time when I did not need you?" He rubbed his beard and continued. "I always need you Birdie, at my side, we are joined at the hip. He clasped a huge hand on her shoulder and pulled her tight against his leg and attempted to take a step forward, swinging her along with him. She laughed and tried to pull away, but his grip was strong, she remained pinned against his leg and he took another, stiff-legged step, swinging her along again. He walked her like that, laughing as they went all the way over to where Lulu stood oblivious to the both of them, watching the sail through the glass. "She's tacking toward us."

Her father stopped and took the glass from her.

"Hey." 

He stared for a while. "Indeed she is." He put the glass down and frowned. "Lulu, Birdie, take the pirogue, fetch Tamba."

Lulu frowned, "where is he?"

Her father smiled, "Why he's at Kadiatu's of course."

"Why is he at Kadiatu's?" Birdie wanted to know.

"Never mind that, just go get him." Her father ducked into their hut and Birdie heard him waking Kobayashi. 

Lulu shrugged. "Let's go."

They ran through the woods to the edge of the marsh where they kept the pirogue. They took turns padding up the river.

Tamba was about her fathers age Birdie guessed, perhaps a few years older, the hair at his temples was whiter than her father's anyway. Tamba had no beard so it was hard to say what color it might have been, though Birdie figured it would be black like her father's. Tamba did not often stay with then at the beach. He spent the winters at a Gullah village deeper in the woods, ten minutes further up the river and then a good walk from the shore. We are not water people he told Birdie when she asked him why they did not live near the beach where it was cooler. We come from jungles hotter than this, he said, smiling. This English was stiff around the edges, acquired from many sources, including her father, who had acquired his from many different people. Birdie liked hearing Tamba tell stories though because his voice and the way he pronounced word made English sound more beautiful, more thoughtful, more important than when other people talked. 

Her father nodded when she told him this once. "Tamba is like us. He is the Alban of his place. Highlanders always speak less. We put more thought into what we are going to say." 

Birdie wasn't so sure any of them would qualify as highlanders, living as they did, so low, near to the sea. Even Tamba, though he claimed not to be water people, lived by and survived mainly from the water that was ever-present around all of them.

Tamba's skin was near black. Light seemed to disappear when it landed on him. She noticed that he used this to his advantage, sometimes to disappear into shadow, sometimes by wearing a white shirt that provided such a contrast he was impossible not to see, a shadow fleshed out into the light. She noticed too that he used clothes in a way that most people did not, they were not simply things that hung over his frame to keep the sun off, they were tools that helped him navigate the world.

And Birdie knew that it was harder for Tamba to navigate the world than it was for her. Many Africans were slaves, and those like Tamba who were not, who had arrived here free men aboard ships they helped to sail, were always in danger of becoming slaves. "Englishmen are devils, the worst kind of devils, the dumbest devils, so dumb they don't even know they are devils. Dumbest lot of humans I ever had the misfortune to be among," her father had said once in her hearing. Tamba had nodded with a sad smile Birdie still remembered. It was a smile of defeat, a smile one had when everything else has already been tried and still one was defeated, a smile that protects against a hurt too large to look at otherwise. 

"We should burn that lot of them." She'd burst out with it so fast she startled even herself. 

Her father and Tamba had turned to look at her and her face grew red under their gaze, but then Tamba had grunted and glanced at her father. "That's one we haven't tried." 

Her father smiled at her. "A wonderful idea my darling freewoman, but... but, we've other business here this go round. Besides," his eyes twinkled impishly, "they'll get theirs. Satisfying as it would be for us to be the ones to hand it to them." He glanced at Tamba and said more softly, "and gods it *would* be satisfying, but that is not our path on this turn." 

Birdie pushed the canoe up onto the shore and used her pole to vault out of the stern of the boat, over the water, to land on the shore. She dragged the boat up and tied it off to a branch hanging down from the sprawling oak that marked the landing that led to Kadiatu's family's land. She and Lulu followed the well worn path through the trees. Their house was on stilts made of cypress, thatched like every house in the area, but better and more substantially made. Kadiatu and her family were not travelers. They did not move camps like Birdie's family. Their camp had a more permanent feel to it. There was a privy made of leftover oak boards her father and Tamba had split last year to repair the shelving in the hold of the tk. Beyond the clearing the house sat in was a larger clearing where Kadiatu's grandmother grew corn and beans, plants she had received as gifts from the few remaining Edistow that lived on the island.  


---

Jack Ratham was dressed in his trademark calico shirt, black pants, red sash and worn, but somehow still very stylishly cut jacket. Birdie didn't really know it was stylish, she just knew that it looked unaccountably good on Jack Ratham, which is the merger of fashion, what a thing is, how it is shaped and so on, with who a person is, which is to say what sort of figure they cut in the world. The one Jack Ratham cut was distinctly his own. She reminded Birdie of her father. They could not have been more different, and yet in some fundamental way, the way they looked at the world perhaps, they were alike.

Ratham smiled at her. "Birdie, how you've grown my dear." He turned to her sister. "And Lulu, still climbing trees?"

"Oh yes sir." Lulu wanted to tell her about her latest adventure, but she stopped herself. She looked up at Ratham. "Captain Ratham..."

"Lulu, I know your question. I saw it in your sister's eyes as well. And the answer is yes. She is. She will be sailing in the tk. We plan to careen." He straightened up and turned to her father. "That is, captain, if you have any tar to spare us."

Her father laughed. "I do believe that's why were out here." He hugged Ratham. "Good to see you Jack."

"Likewise." 

There was much hugging and patting of backs and the crew shook hands with them, some they remembered from the previous summer, when Ratham had come north to the cape. 

Ratham glanced up at the dunes. "I see the Arkhangelsk has survived two years worth a storms."

"She lost her mast last week." Birdie dropped her head. "And her mate."

Ratham knelt down beside her. "It's a tough thing to take as a captain, Birdie. You, you are still captain yes?"

Birdie nodded and fought to keep the tears out of her eyes. 

"I lost a first mate to a storm. Whole ship full of men in fact, whom I'd been drinking with not three days before." Ratham stared down at the sand, seemed lost in thought for a moment. "I wish I could tell you something that would make it easier. But the truth is, it's never gotten any easier for me." He stood up and rested his hand on her shoulder. "I'm sorry Birdie." He turned and clapped a hand on her father's shoulder. I know you don't drink captain, but I may have to tonight."

Her father and Ratham headed down the path toward the camp. Ratham's men gathered up their things and followed them leaving Birdie, Lulu, and Henri standing on the beach, staring at the Arkhangelsk. 

"I wish it had been washed away." Birdie said it before she'd really thought about it, and then she realized she meant it. It would never been the same. She would never be able to play on the ship without thinking of Francis. She realized them that she didn't want to play on it anymore. She wondered if she really wanted to play. She wanted to... she wanted something and she didn't know what it was. She wanted Francis back. She wanted Owen back. She would even take her uncle TK back. She just wanted things to be how they had been. She wanted her aunt to be like she was, she wanted to play on the boat, she wanted... but as she stood there in silence, wanting, she suddenly realized it would never be. Nothing would ever be the same. A thing came, a storm happened, it reshaped the land, it reshaped her, it had made her into something else and nothing would every be the same. Her father had always told them, nothing remains the same, everything is always different, everything is always changing. He said it so often it was a kind of mantra they made fun of behind his back, not because they didn't believe him, but because they didn't realize, they didn't know. It was one thing to hear and understand a thing, it was another to live it and no, only now Birdie realized did she understand what her father was saying. Only now did she for the first time, have some incling of what it must have felt like for him to lose her mother. For her there was nothing. There was an absence she could feel, but it was not loss it was absense. Now she understood what lose felt like. She understood that she did not understand the loss her father must have felt when her mother died.

---

Anne Bonnie riding in, foot on the gunwale as the men row. Jack and her father talking about her as Birdie details everyting she loves about her.

Birdie glanced up and saw a second boat coming in, slowly rowing in against the tide. A figure in a wide brimmed hat was standing up in the front, one foot on the gunwale, holding a line tied to the bow, as if were reins on an unseen porpoise. It was too far to make out the figure's face, but Bridie knew who it was just by the way she stood. No one stood the way Anne stood. She had a perfectly balanced poise that suggested no matter where you might put her, she would be utterly at ease and soon in charge. 

Ratham stood next to her father, watching the boat come him. He shook his head. "That woman knows how to make an entrance."

Birdie heard her father chuckle. "Are you jealous John?"

"Jealous? Of course I'm jealous. Everyone of sound mind is jealous of her."

Birdie wasn't jealous. At least she didn't think she was jealous. She just loved Anne and whenever she was around her she felt better about everything, she felt better about herself, she wanted to be better. She wasn't sure if she wanted to better for Anne or just being around Anne made her want to be better. She wasn't even sure exactly how she wanted to better, she just knew that there was something about Anne that made everyone and everything seem like it was better and it was an elevation you had to live up to.

She never moved from her pose with one foot up, not even when the boat caught a reasonably large wave and pitched forward, sliding down the face of the wave which then broke and soaked the men in the stern. Anne's red hair blew in the wind and Birdie could see her smiling now, scanning the beach. The boat nosed up on the sand the Anne vaulted off the bow, her boots sinking into the soft sand, where she stood for a moment surveying the crowd before her. She walked straight toward Lulu and Birdie.

She knelt down before them, her huge black hat with its single ostrich feather was all they could see. She lifted her head and looked at each of their faces. "Birdie, Lulu. Have you been taking good care of your father and your brother?"

Birdie nodded, but could not being herself to speak. Anne spun her head around to Henri. "Is this true Henri?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Good. Good." A wide smile came over Anne's face. She put her arms around Birdie and then Lulu, and then waved a hand to draw Henri in too. "tk father's name, you know I am here to steal your children."

Birdie's father smiled. "And I thought I was using them to lure you here."

"Careful there tk father's name," said Ratham.

Anne straighted up and adjusted her hat. Birdie watched as she leaned in and quickly kissed her father on each cheek. "Strictly business tk father's name. We need to careen. *Revenge* has worms, our canvas is frayed, and lines are shredded. She's a sad sight when you get out there."

Her father nodded. "We'll bring her in at high tide then. Send some of your men out hunting with Tambo, let's see if they can't get a couple boar, we'll cook them overnight, have a feast tomorrow."

"You know tk father's name, that I and my crew will drink if we do that."

"Good for you John. I don't care if you drink all the rum on the island, so long as you're not aboard my ship."

"You still call that thing a ship do you?" Ratham smiled. Anne let out a low whistle. Birdie saw her father's face flash red and then return to normal. It happened so fast she was sure Ratham had not even seen it, but she knew Anne had. 

"I call it home actually." 

"Oh relax, tk father's name, I'm just playing. She's a fine vessel. She's got what, two guns is it? He slapped his hand on her father's shoulder and stopped laughing quite suddenly. "Everyone knows you're one of the finest captains in the East Indies and yet you have a this tiny boat, and you spend all your time on shore making tar... which, don't get me wrong, you make the best tar... anywhere, but I don't understand why, you could have a huge ship, a proper crew and I'd be willing to bet you could take a Galleon without hardly trying and retire in wealth and splendor. Do you like this jacket by the way, it's new." Ratham held out his arm and her father pinched the calico cloth between his fingers and rubbed it.

"I don't know anything about clothes John, but it seems nice to me. As for the ship, I rather like the one I've got." he paused and glanced at Anne. "You see John, when you know you can have something whenever you want it, you don't always feel the need to have it all the time."

Ratham laughed. "Well there you go then. Good man." He walked over to the first boat and began dividing its crew into hunting party and careening party. 

Her rather stood next to Anne. "Where's Mary?"

"In her quarters."

"She staying there?"

Anne shrugged. "I imagine she is."

"How does..."

Anne turned her head up to look at her father, Birdie could see nothing but an ostrich plum. "Doesn't matter to you does it?"

Her father laughed. No, I suppose not. You're an odd duck Anne."

"You're an odd duck too you know. I've missed you." 

---

Anne and her father did most of the work to get Revenge in and on her side. Captain Jack as Ratham told the kids to call him, made a chair out of some wood planks and a pile of sand and sat there, jug of rum at hand, watching the progress. It took the entire crew and half the trees they'd cut that summer to bring Revenge in and get her on her side, sufficiently out of the water to work on her full. At Ratham's insistence they started on the starboard side. "Always start on starboard," he said. Anne had just shrugged and passed the word on to the men doing the work. With the ship on her side, Mary did come ashore, despite what Bonny had said. She did not speak to anyone but her own ship's crew and seemed ill at ease. Birdie smiled at her, but she acted as if she could not even see Birdie. Birdie took an instant dislike to her. 

Lulu thought she was pretty and defended her when Birdie called her rude. "Maybe she's just having a bad day Bee, I mean her ships on its side, looks to be pretty badly worm eaten. Probably doesn't have but a couple years left in her at most," said Lulu.

The three of them were sitting on the bow of the Arkhangelsk, watching the men work on the hull of Revenge. Birdie wished she could help, but her father wouldn't let her even roll barrels of tar down the beach. Too dangerous he'd said. Birdie understood the danger of careening, but she failed to see what was dangerous about painting a hull with tar. "If a line gives way, if a timber rolls and that ship moves, it crushes anything in it's path like a bug" her father said. "I'd just jump out of the way," she said, but he'd only grunted and ignored her further pleading. And so she sat, watching from another ship.

Just over Lulu's shoulder, back toward camp she could see a plume of smoke rising up from the great pits her father had buried two huge boar in last night. By evening they'd be ready to dig up, and it would be Birdie's favorite meal, the delicious sweetness of the pork, with the special rice Kobayashi made to go with it, her mouth watered even now at the thought. 

It wasn't until she glanced out at the sea beyond Revenge that she realized she had not thought of Francis or Owen for several hours. Is this what happens she thought with a start. Is this how we move on? We slowly forget them? It seemed somehow the most horrible thing she could have done and yet she realized she didn't do it, it simple happened. At most she let it happen. Suddenly she understand why Aunt Māra wore black and kept to herself. If you didn't make an effort to hold the dead in your mind you risked them slipping away from you. 

She found herself wondering what Francis would have thought of Anne. He would have loved Calico Jack, he was hard not to love. He was loud, often drunk, a bit of a fool, but completely lovable. Henri followed him around like he was the greatest thing on the island, which she knew irritated her father, though he never said anything or made any effort to stop him. Jack was harmlessly hilarious, though from stories Anne told he was fierce and quite capable when he needed to be. He did after all command a ship of about sixty men. And two women. He had captured a Spanish Galleon the previous year off the coast of Port Royal Jamaica, which Birdie knew had taken skill, perhaps some luck, but skill and daring certainly. It was hard to imagine the man now sitting in the sand in his fancy coat, swigging rum from a jug and throwing shells as seagulls leading a ship full of men into battle with a ship twice, maybe three times the size of Revenge, with three decks of 24 pound canons sticking out the side of it. Birdie had never seen a galleon. None of them had, not even her father, though he'd at least seen the British equivalent. If the rumors were to be believed British warships would be here soon enough. Birdie shivered. She wondered what Ratham would do when the British came for him. Probably get drunk she decided.

She watched as Anne walked away from the Revenge, over to where Ratham sat and flopped down beside him, taking a swig from the jug of rum. 

"You know what would be fun."

Henri's voice broke the silence and interrupted Birdie's train of thought. 

"We should try to sneak up on Captain Jack and steal his rum."

Birdie smiled. "Okay," she said.




They recognize it as ratham or vain because they come on the sprng or neap tide, which is when you wnat to careen. The girls are excited to see anne bonnie. There's a chapter where Anne Bonnie tells the kids a pirate tale, either of her fighting off the british while ratham gets drunk or of the ghost ship off the azores.

## The Tale Anne Bonnie Told

The firelight lit the circle of dunes a rich orange glow like a dying sun still trying to light a world. Anne's teeth shone white in the orange light.

We'd been in the duldrums for days, maybe weeks, it was hard to know, one brutaly hot day after another, no wind, no current, dead stillness. I remember Jack took off his jacket and tried flapping up and down at the sail to create a bit of wind, but of course it didn't work.And he just ended up tired. We were all hungry and thirsty all the time. Food was running low. We'd put a water ration in place the minute the wind died. Two dips a day. It was like sailing a merchant ship. (knowing laughter). We finally found enough of a current to pull us out and what do we see on the horizen but a sail. but it's impossible to know how far ahead she is, we might catch her in a matter of hours, it might be a week. There's still no wind, we're really just drifting, but with a bit of direction. Those sails though, they must be difting too. Revenge doesn't have a very tall mast so we often sight ships before they sight us.

It's one of Revenge's best points put in Jack.

Yes it is, Bonny smiled. So we figure there's not much to be done. Either we drift faster and catch it or it get the wind ahead of us and disappears. I hate drifting. Every sailor hates drifting. We float along for days with those sails on the horizen, never can see the ship. just the sails, the white against a world of blue, forever out of reach.
 
Finally after three days the sails disappear and we know. Wind. Life comes back to the crew, men get out of hammocks again. Everyone feels lighter, the water ration doesn't even seem so bad anymore. Two hours later we heard that first snap, that delicious curling sound of canvas catching wind. And we move forward, we leap forward. It feels like Revenge has been shot out of a gun. We're laughing and crying, everyone is hugging. 

The crew was smiling now at the memory.

And then we see the sails again.

Birdie noticed the smiles fade from the crew's faces. One man crossed himself the way the Spanish due. Anne continued.

This is our luck, we're out of the doldrums and there's a prize in front of us. It doesn't get much better than that. We slowly run her down. She's not well sailed. Jack takes a point of intercept that's about half a day out. We figure we'll have her before nightfall. Now of course we can see her. And it seems strange but there's no one on the deck. We figure they just seen our sails and are hiding. Wouldn't be the first time. Though usually there's still someone at the helm. We can't be sure, but Jack says come her Anne. So I go up to the poop where's he's got the glass and have a look. It's a strange thing, the deck is well laden, there's stuff lashed everywhere, she looks smartly rigged, not very well trimmed for someone trying to outrun a pirate, but not everyone can sail.

Laughter from the crew

Still, you ever get a feeling? A chill down your back? Like something just isn't right and you don't know what it is? I had that feeling. I took the glass and went up in the rigging of the main mast. We used to have a barrel up there, so I went and stood in it for a while studying a ship. I can't put my finger on it but something is off.

I told Jack when I came back down that I had a bad feeling. She glanced at Jack. He was breaking bits of a twig and throwing them in the fire. 

I told him it didn't feel right to me. He asked me if I wanted to fall off. But that would be crazy, a heavily laden ship you're having no trouble overtaking? Who falls of that. I said no, take her. But I put the men to the guns, just to be safe. It's just before sundown when we finally get within shooting distance. Jack gets the horn and shouts out, tells them to turn into the wind, we're going to board, all the usual stuff. No one answers. No one is on deck. We they're terrified, hiding below deck. So we pull along side, grappling hooks go over, we turn her into the wind and board. The men are up the masts, lowering sails to slow us all down. Jack and I and tk walk around. There's no one. It's so eery quite it's unnerving. 

I should say that by this time I am with Anne on the, something's not right here, feeling. But I was still hopeful of rum somewhere on that cursed ship.

We get to the tk door to below and all kind of look at each other. Everyone's least favorite moment of boarding, stepping down in to that darkness where you don't know if it's going to be swords or guns coming at you. Jack goes first, heel slides the ladder sword in one hand pistol in the other. It was quite impressive. She smiled at Ratham, he tipped his tri-cornered hat at her. 

Alex and me don't hear a thing. I yell down, Jack, what's going on. Nothing comes the answer. Alex and I go down, slow, guns drawn. There's Jack wandering around in the darkness, poking around the crew's hammocks. There's no one. And still that strange silence. You know how the presence of people makes a noise, a very quite, subtle noise you don't really notice... until it's gone? That noise was gone.

We struck a torch and searched the deck, There's no one. What's more there's no sign of anyone that looks fresh. There's no half eaten food. No mess dishes, nothing. It's like there hasn't been a person on that ship in weeks. I'm starting to get a little spooked. I looked over and Alexander's white as a fog. He says he's going to go up and check on the rigging.

Jack and I stand there for a bit in the darkness, looking at each other trying to figure out what's going on. The firelight from the torch is making strange shadows on the hull. Jack just stares at me. Where is everyone Anne? 

You don't think they'd hide in the bilge do you? Jack made that face the captain makes when he doesn't like your idea. Anne grinned. Jack waved his hand in mock theatrical bow. Birdie saw the crew laughing in the firelight.

We hunted around, but there wasn't much to hunt through. Some silk, mostly some barrels of alcohol. Not the kind you drink. A couple were empty. There was some salt pork that was still good. Jack found the bilge hatch and we open it and thrust the torch down in it, but there was nothing but stinky water. We went back up topside. It was pretty obvious, there was no one on the ship. It was just sailing. 

We sat down on the deck rails and talked it over.  

Jack threw the last of the stick in the fire. "I think they abandoned ship."

Several of the crew grunted. "Who would abandon ship?" asked Anne.

"In a storm? It's crossed my mind." Jack laughed, but seemed serious as well, and very drunk. 
"I mean, you really want to abandon ship right, but you don't of course because that would be stupid. Well suppose you gave into that? Suppose you really did it?"

"There were seven hammocks in that hold, no way you're convincing at least seven sailors to abandon ship. No way." Birdie was nodding along with Anne. She knew she would never do it. Better to die at the helm her father always said. 

"What were they carrying again?" Her father looked lost in thought. The way he looked when we a was a hundred leagues away in his mind. 

"It was grain alcohol mostly. Couple of empty kegs. Don't know how anyone drinks that stuff."

"Hmm. Did you seize it?"

Anne looked aghast. "No. We got out there quick as we could. I'm not taking a ghost prize."

"You left a perfectly good ship sailing itself across the Atlantic?" Her father looked incredulous. He seemed uninstested in the spoky part of the story, which had already made Birdie wish her Aunt Māra were there so she could crawl in her lap.

Anne and Jack glanced at each other. Birdie saw the crew stare away. She noticed her father pick up on it too. 

He shrugged. "Shame," said her father, "it'd help kill the worms in your hull."

---

Anne and Jack and the crew spent two weeks on the beach. The crew helped her father frame out a new Delos. 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 Anne 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 Revenge which was nearly upright, waiting for the tide to lift her enought to slide back out into deeper water, her hull sealed, her rigging the next thing to be worked on. 

"That my girl, is a warship. I captured that vessel without firing a single shot. We simply paddled up. There was no wind that day, so we were padding our canoe. We rowed up and they were so afraid of us they just gave up. I never thought I would see a day like this, when people like me, Anne, your father. When people like us would have our own ships." He took a large swig of rum from the small barrel in the sand.

"Sure, I dreamed of things like that, and maybe I even secretly thought maybe... maybe one day I'd have my own ship, nothing this big, but maybe one day the sea would grant me a ship, maybe I did think that was possible." He wiped his lips. "But good lord, look at that thing! It's a warship. People like us rule the sea right now. We have warships. This was not supposed to happen Bridie."

Her stared out at the sea in silence for a moment. "Somewhere, someone is very, very unhappy right now." He smiled. She smiled back at him. "Someone somewhere is plotting their revenge. And they will probably get it, but for now.... for now the seas is ours, Birdie."

---

Birdie went with Tambo and Kobayashi to work the rigging on Revenge. The ship was huge, so much larger than tk ship name as to make her home feel like a little toy. Revenge was a warship Jack kept saying, and Birdie thought he was just bragging until she got out there next to it in the rowboat and realized what he meant. It was big, a truly massive, hulking heavy looking piece of wood and sail. It had a presence you could not ignore. 

She climbed up the rigging with Tambo behind her. They got to work tarring the standing rigging, some of which the men were still retying and splicing. The smell of pine and tar and salt water mixed in the offshore breeze with it's scent of salt marsh and river mouths and maybe, if she really focused, the hint of campfire smoke. But she didn't focus, she focused on holding onto the rigging because she was higher than she had ever been before and, unlike her sister, she did not much like heights. She kept one arm looped tightly around the hemp line as she painted the tar onto the row of line above it. 

She was halfway down the mizzen mast rigging when she happened to stare out at sea at just the right moment so that she saw something white move. At first she thought it was a sea gull, or a skimmer dipping its beak down to snag some unseen fish, but then she realized it was not a bird, it was too far away, to indistinct to be a bird. It was a sail. Without really thinking about it, because it was what she always did when she spotted a sail, it was what any sailor would do if they saw a sail, she yelled "sail".

She felt every eye on the ship glance up at her, find her line of site and follow it out to sea. Tambo was in the rigging across from hers and he slowly turned around to look. She watched as it dipped below the horizon before he had turned. She gulped, what if no one believed her? She glanced down. Jack was standing below her, one leg on the rail, glass to his eye. She watched as he brought the glass down and glanced up at her, "Flag? Bearing?"

She shook her head. He nodded. He called out someone's name and handed them the glass. Birdie watched as the sailor climbed the main mast rigging up to the barrel and began scanning the horizon. He was at least 20 feet higher than her, surely he would see it. She watched as he silently shook his head to Jack. Tambo turned back around and looked at her. "You sure?" he asked quietly.

She nodded. "Very."

"We should hurry up then. Even if it doesn't show again, Captain Jack may want to chase it."

"What about the rigging?"

"We'll leave them the barrel of tar, they can finish it when they finish it."

Birdie felt her heart sink. Anne would be leaving too. She glanced around the ship, looking for her, but she was below. The barrelman still had not seen anything. Birdie began to wonder if maybe it hadn't been a bird. She and Tambo went back to their work. The men below went back to their tasks, but there was a tension, Birdie could feel it. She glanced back at Edisto. She wondered what her father would say. She decided he would probably say nothing. This was always a good assumption when trying to decide what her father would say. But would he believe her? Of course he would. He always believed her.

"Sail!"

Birdie glanced up at Tambo. He nodded toward the deck and they both began decending, brushes int thei mouths, the bitter taste of piney tar on their tongues. Captain Jack was racing up the main mast rigging and Birdie couldn't help wondering why he hadn't done that when *she* had yelled sail. Was it her? Or would he have ignore the first sighting no matter who had made it? Was the sailor in the barrel some eagle-eyed trusted salt? Was that why Jack seemed to belive him and not her. She had a dozen reason why he didn't act on her sighting by the time she reached the deck, but the truth was she was hurt. She didn't like it when people doubted her. Especially a whole ship full of people she liked and wanted to like her.

Anne came up from below deck dressed in leathers and carrying two tomahawks. Two more were strapped to her waist and to more to her back. Birdie had never seen her dressed for battle, she was startled by how different she looked. Her eyes seemed more alive, they had an intesity Birdie had never seen in them before. "Birdie," she cried. "I want to bring you with us," Birdie's heart skipped a beat, but before she could react Anne went on, "but your father would kill me." Jonathan, she turned to a sailor who was preparing to help hoist a sail. "Make read their pirogue. Birdie, you help Tambo get the bung in that barrel and then get overboard to the boat, we're raising anchor. 

The ship came to life when Anne came on deck. Men scurried up the rigging and began dropping the sails. Others were already winching the great wooden wheel that raised the anchor. Birdie had spent most of her life at sea, been on many a ready ship, but she had never seen a crew come together in the kind of concerted effort that the crew of the Revenge displayed now. It was like an organism waking up. An octopus moving first a few suckers, then whole tentacles, then sudden it's off, gone in a flash. She and Tambo hammer in the bung and fairly slid down the side of the rigging into the priogue. Jontahn hoisted up the rigging behind them and Revenge began to move away from them before they had even settled into their seats. The offshore wind sent her surging out to sea and she and Tambo watched her go as they set about raising their own sail and tacking back toward shore.

And just like that, Revenge was gone, back to what she did best, chasing sails over the horizon.

---

Tambo's people have been sailing these waters longer than ours probably. Her father nodded at Tambo, but he shook his head.

"I do not think so." 

Birdie glanced back and forth between the two them. Her father raised his eyebrow. 

"The Egyptians perhaps. There are stories I have heard from the northern tribes about trading for copper that came from over the seas. But my people were coastal cruisers. Why cross oceans when everything you need is right here?" Tambo stretched his arm toward the shore. "If you want to have food, you need to be by the shore. Maybe you sail out of sight sometimes, you follow the currents and migrations of the fish, but you do not need to go too far. Where I come from there is plenty of food to be had without even setting foot in a boat. You grow rice on the shores. We have yarrow and tk on the higher ground, and you cast a net in the shallows for fish. We have palms and a tree that is not here. It is very strong. Like the teak we traded in Siam. We have these trees for building shelter. Everything is just there, we use it. It is only crazy people who would leave this." He smiled and gestured at her father.

Her father grunted. "I didn't leave anything. I was driven out."

"So you say."

"Our people have been hunted down and driven out for centuries. The lowlanders do not like us."

"Why?"

"Yes, why?"

Her father shrugged. "I don't know. I think on this all the time. I think perhaps it is because they cannot stand the idea that not everyone is as miserable as they are."

Tambo laughed. "You may be on to something there. These people came to our shores too and seemed unable to leave us alone. And look what they do to the people on these shores. Some people Birdie, I don't know, they won't leave you alone. It is a great mystery."

"How did they drive us out papa?"

Her father sighed. "Drive might be the wrong word."

Tambo burst out laughing. "Yes, I think it would be. I have no love of the British or any of the rest of the people you call lowlanders, but I know you well enough to know that no one could drive you out of anywhere. You'd die in a hole before you'd be driven anywhere."

Birdie expected her father to join in Tambo's laughters, but he did not. He ignored him completely. "We left Birdie because I was tired of the place we were. I wanted to go somewhere no one knew my name, somewhere I didn't have to do anything so I could chose what I wanted to do. So I could be free of the obligations that places lay upon you."

Kobayashi was nodding. "I too left to be free. It is a hard thing for some. For me it was easy because when I am here, I can breath, I am free, no one looks for anything from me. I an able to be who I am. Your father can be who he is," Kobayashi's eyes twinkled, "he can wear his loin clothes and do his dances by the seashore."

Now her father laughed. I will never live down the loin clothes will I? Everyone shook their heads. "That's fine. That's what I wanted a place of possibility. A place individuals can do as they wish, no matter how eccentric that might be, so long as it doesn't harm anyone else or try to force anyone else to pay their bills. You wouldn't think that would be so hard to find really, but it is, by god it is. I've been nearly around the world and this coast here, this is close as I have come."

"That seems silly. Why would anyone care what you did? That would just make them stupid."

Tambo raised an eyebrow at her. "Strong talk in this one tk."

Her father smiled. "Yes, they are strong. They will have to be. Stronger than us I fear. I fear they will be living through much more than you and I have had to deal with this time."

Tambo puffed on his pipe and said nothing. 

Kobayashi leaned back against a stack of driftwood and packed his pipe. "This country is wild, it will not be tamed."

"I hope you are right Ko, but I worry that line of thinking will lead to trouble. People who believe they can do no harm are the most dangerous people of all."

Kobayashi grunted. "True." 

Aunt Māra leaned forward and stirred the fire until a log caught and flame flickered orange light on all their faces. Lulu and Henri were asleep, their heads in Aunt Māra's lap. Birdie yawned. Her father looked over at her. "You got us all serious Birdie, should I pull out the fiddle, lighten up the night?"

She surprised herself by saying no, that she was tired. She gathered up her quilts and walked up the rise of the dune, away from the fire and lay down in the sand, spread layers of quilt over her until she could feel a cacoon of warm begin to form around her. She laid her head back and looked up. The dusty spray of the milky way spread across the sky. Orion the hunter stood tall and strong, his bow ever at the ready. He must be with us she thought, he must be Alban. Maybe he too is looking for a place to be who he is, a place he can hunt and run free. As her eyelids dropped the stars seemed to gather up, and pull together, to rain down around her and keep her safe and warm there beside their brother the sea. Where she was free.


---

Her father was standing on top of the dune looking out at the sunrise when he spun around fast and yelled back toward camp, "Someone bring me the glass."

Lulu dashed into a hut and grabbed the glass out of her father's sea chest, which lay opposite the door. She turned around and almost barreled right through Kobayashi, who laughed. "What is this big panic?" 

"Father wants the glass." She darted out the door with the glass clutched tight in her hand and looped up the dine to where her father, Birdie and Henri were standing. They were all shielding their eyes, watching the thin line of horizon where two ships were sailing, nearly directly toward them. Her father held out his hand without ever looking down. Lulu handed the glass to him. 

"Revenge. And her prize I imagine." His voice trailed off to a whisper. "Why are they coming here though?" 

Lulu knew he was talking to himself, but she enjoyed answering his inner monologues when he spoke them out loud. Who talks aloud and doesn't expect other's to answer. "Maybe her prize needs to careen."

Her father took the glass from his eye and stared down at her. He cocked his head to the side as if considering her, but she knew he was really considering some silent thought in his head. "That could be Lu. That could be."

He turned around and walked back toward camp. "Kobayashi! Tambo! We may need meat. I am going to sail the Pirogue out to them and see what's afoot. I'll have them fire a cannon if they're coming ashore." Lulu watched from dune as he headed down the trail toward the marsh to collect the Pirogue. She considered running after him, but she knew what he'd say *it's too dangerous*. It was always too dangerous. She grumbled to herself as she walked back toward camp to see Tambo and Kobayashi packing their rifles. "You should take Henri." They glanced at her, then at each other. Tambo shrugged. Kobayashi looked at her, go get him. 

Lulu bolted back up the dune. Henri was already on the far side, walking the shore with Birdie. She yelled. They turned. But she knew they could not hear her. She gestured for them to come, and then she began running toward them. They met in the middle and Lulu had to bend over, panting hard before she could get it out even in gasps. "Henry... hunt... Tambo... Kobayashi..." birdie put is together before Henri, and shouted. "Tambo and Kobayashi said henry can go hunting?"

Lulu nodded and sat down in the sand. Henri did not ask for details. he was off and running the miute Birdie had opened her mouth. The girls sat in the sand, catching their breath. Birdie stood up. "Look, papa." 

There was the Pirogue, barreling out of the river mouth, sail smartly trimmed. They could see their father's back as the boat road the offshore breeze through the surf at the mouth of the river, where the currents were slippery and strange and Lulu hated the way the boat moved, it moved unnaturally. Unlike a boat ever moved anywhere else. It was the only thing she hated about sailing, crossing the mouth of a good size river. 

Her father slide right through it seemingly without noticing it. Soon after he was force to tack and the sail swung over blocking him from view, though she was sure he could see them on the sbore. The Pirogue was a sneaky little boat. Or at least Delos had been. She assumed the new Delos was as well, she had yet to be in it.

She felt a wave of panic pass through her chest at the thought of Delos. She and Birdie had not spoken of it since the days after the storm when they were still looking for it. She missed the boys. She missed Aunt Māra. Aunt Māra might still be on the island, but the part of her that Lulu loved to be around was gone. She was like a ghost wandering the island, never really there, never really anywhere. 

They watched as the Pirogue and the man of war closed the gap between them. The merchant hung back. If she was in need of tar, no one seemed in a hurry to bring her in. Lulu shivered in the wind. She and Birdie took turns throwing shells at seagull feather sticking up in the sand, trying to see who could get the closest, but not hit it. Birdie was winning.

They lost interest in the game as the two boat drew together. "I wish we had a glass," said Birdie. 

"I wish we were in the boat with Papa," said Lulu. Though she too wished they at least had a glass. Technically Tambo had a glass and he probably would have let them use it if they'd asked, but she had not thought of it. Her only thought was to get Henri headed back to camp so he could go hunting. Without Charles around Henry had no one to hunt with. He never spoke of Charles, or of hunting, but she knew he missed them both. She saw it in the way he sat quiet sometimes, staring at nothing. It was little bit like what Aunt Māra did, but it didn't last as long. Still it lasted long enough that Lulu had noticed it, and as soon as she noticed it she'd made a point to look for ways she could help him. This was the first thing she'd been able to do. It made her feel good to think of him off hunting, though she did wish that she'd thought to ask Tambo for his glass because it was impossible to tell what was happening offshore. Her father's boat was in irons, probably being towed by a line to Revenge, since she had not slacked sail, though she did appear to be coming about. The Pirogue's sail flutter like a flag alongside. 

And then they watched as the Pirogue heeled slightly, caught the wind and pulled away from Revenge. The big ship began to turn away, abreast the wind, Lulu saw the anchor fall from the bow and guessed Revenge was going to spend the night just off the mouth of the river.

Her father came back up the river, the tide and wind in his favor such that he sailed all the way up into the marsh without even tacking. Lulu watched him from the dune, and once she realized he might be able to do it, she darted off through camp and down to the edge of the marsh to watch. She was standing out on the huge fallen oak that served at their dock when he glided up and tossed the stern line to her. 

"You never tacked."

He smiled. "I got lucky."

"Birdie and I have been trying to do that for two years now."

"I know kiddo. I almost tacked just so you could be the first ones to do it. But then," he laughed, "then I couldn't believe *I* might be able to do it, so I had to do it." He looked down sheepishly.

"It's okay papa, I;m glad you did it."

"Thanks Lu. I'm glad I have to you to back me up, because if I were listening to me, I would not believe me. Ratham sure isn't going to believe me."

"Is he coming?"

Her father frowned. "Yes, he's coming with Anne. Only for the night. A party of hunters is going to try tk south island for boar and deer. They're provisioning to go back down to Nassau. 

"Is that his prize ship anchoring out there?"

Her father frowned again. "Yes. We'll talk about that tonight. Where's your brother."

"Hunting with Tambo and Kobe." Her father raised his eyebrows. "It was my idea," said Lulu.

"That was kind of you Lulu. I should have taken him yesterday when I went upriver. I know he misses having Owen around." Her father glanced inland.

"Do you think they're dead Papa?" 

Her father stopped coiling the line for a moment and looked at her, then looked away. He sighed. "I don't know Lu. It's possible. But I don't know, it seems like something would have washed ashore... but I don't know. Maybe they made it inland and something happened. I tell you what though, I don't *feel* like they're dead. But I'm not sure I was close enough to any of them to feel that, so I can't be sure. I still look for them everywhere I go. We'll find out more when we go to Charlestown."

"We're going to Charlestown?" Lulu nearly fell off the tree into the fluf mud she jumped up and down so much.

"We are. Time to provision."

"Wait, are we leaving? But I thought we were staying through Christmas?"

"We may. But we need a few things either way. Might as well get them. Ratham is paying us a share to this prize. You sister sighted it, he believes she deserves it."

"What? She gets a share? Like a real buccaneer?"

"She does if she wants. But she needs to understand everything that means before she takes her share."

"What do you mean, what does it mean?"

"It means she's a buccaneer, her name goes in the ship's log. That means anyone who ever gets hold of that ships log knows she's a buccaneer."

"Is that bad?"

Her father sighed. "It really depends who gets hold of the ships log, but I think it's not good either way, and I'd rather she did not do it."

"Why?"

He sighed again and climbed out of the Pirogue onto the log next to her. "I don't know what's right Lulu. On one hand, there's that man out there in that other ship, he's losing everything on his ship. Captain Ratham will take it, and the ship, and sell it for himself. That man gets nothing. Jack is stealing everything from him. On the other hand, most of those things were made by slaves or stolen from the people who lived on this land before the Spanish came. People I think of as Alban, though they may speak a different language. So that man who just had everything stolen, stole what he had in the first place. Is it okay to steal from the person who stole? Or is it just more stealing? I don't know. I can argue it both ways and in the end I'd rather just sail and fish and hunt and not worry about anything else. But we need new sails, we need tk, we need tk. We could make those things, but it would take us a long time, and apparently, there is a man coming who wants us off his island.

"Wait, what? His island? How is this island is?"

"It was granted to him by the King of England."

"How can the King of England give our island to someone?"

"Because the King of England has more soldiers with weapons than we do."

---

It was somber around the fire that night, Anne sat beside Jack, leaning into him from time to time. Lulu watched her father across the fire. She always suspected her father and Anne might be in love, but now she wondered if she was mistaken and it was Jack and Anne that were in love. TK fix this: She wished she understood this thing love that grownups talked about. What was it, what did it mean?

"This McPhail." It was Tambo who broke the silence. "Does he plan to settle here? On the island I mean? Like those plantations down south of here on that gooseneck island in Georgia?"

"Oh, I doubt that." Ratham chuckled. "He sounds more like the type to call Charlestown home, send a man out here every now and then to make sure riffraff like us aren't overrunning the place." 

"What do you plan to do tkfather? I here Virginia is very nice these days. CErtainly a good bit of water to disappear into. Excellent fishing. Could be just your kind of place to winter. Bit cold though I suppose."

"Not enough jack pine, too far north for them, there'd be no point to wintering there, we couldn't make tar. Same reason we sail right past Okracok"

"You ever met that fellow, Dampier?"

"The one's always writing? Once, yes, in London."

"You don't sound impressed."

Her father shrugged. "We had a pint in a tavern, I was headed out, he'd just come in."

"I'd have thought you two'd have hit it off, scribblers the both of you," Ratham smiled. "And he's like you, not very interested in plunder, just wants to explore, sail off into the sunset. If he ever manages to command a ship, you'll never hear of him again."

Her father snorted. "I don't think anyone is going to give Dampier a ship and I doubt he's got the resources to build one."

"I wouldn't be too sure about that." Ratham said no more and the reflective silence once more fell over the small cluster around the fire.

"Why'd you bring up Dampier?"

"Hmm? Oh. I was thinking of a time he and I were crewed on a boat in Virginia. I helped him out with some troubles he was having."

"That's mighty kind of you Jack," said Anne. 

Jack shrugged. "His higher bred morals were unable to deal with the reality he found himself in so I helped him in exchange for some silver he'd taken on ship in the south seas. Other side of the isthmus."

"He sailed round the horn?" Anne seemed surprised.

"Oh, I don't know about that. He might have, but at least once he walked it. Over the Darien gap. The Kuna, that's the people that live down there, they hate the Spanish as much as anything so all you need to do is tell them you're headed to attack the Spanish and they'll up and join you, get you through the mountains, over the Pacific. That's the way he told it anyway." Jack paused and sat up to add another log the fire. A shower of sparks shot up in the dark. Lulu shivered.

Anyway, one thing that doesn't get to the South Seas much, apparently, at least as far as I can tell from the stories I've heard, is the British Navy. It's all Spanish out there and they're spread far too thin right now to be able to control it. I don't know if the place has Jack Pine, but I do know, if I were looking to avoid the British, that's where I'd head."

Lulu glanced at her father, he was staring into the fire lost in thought. She wondered what the south seas were like. She'd heard stories, Kobayashi had sailed the far side of them from his home in Japan, down though endless chains of islands, all covered in coconuts and mangos and surrounded by treacherous coral reefs, to a town named Batavia, where he'd somehow met up with her father, though both were rather vague on the details. 

"You want to sail Revenge around the south seas eh Jack? Her father smiled. "I'd go with you in Delos if you did. That'd be a fine adventure. Wouldn't miss it for the world."

Ratham laughed. "No, I like my Nassau. I like my clothes and my wine and my food, my Spanish Galleons. I'm a simple man, tk, I don't want adventure, I want more rum"

"They have Galleons in the south seas you know. The fleet comes from the Philippines."

"Oh I know, but the south seas go on forever. Thousands of leagues of ocean. Why try to locate a fleet in the midst of all that water, when you can just wait for them to sail through the straights of Florida and attack them there?"

"Where's your sense of adventure Jack?" Anne elbowed him and then sat up to take a swig of rum." I think it'd be swell fun to sail round all that way. Shame you can't get a ship over that gap your man talked about though."

"The Darien Gap? A ship over the... Anne you're mad."

She shrugged. Anne drank and wiped her lips. "Anyway, tk, you're not seriously going to run all the way to the south seas because some lord from London comes along claiming you're stealing his trees? That'd be mad." 

Her father did not answer immediately. Lulu heard Jack mumble under his breath, "that's a bit harsh don't you think. Anne? The man has children after all."

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 he kept having to go higher. So some of us turned around and went the other way, followed the water take to it's source. If we leave here it will just be more following the water, flowing on. Water never stops Anne. That river over there," her father gestured toward the tk 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 it's 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?"

Anne nodded and pushed her large hat back a little, smiling. "Well, when you put it like that..." She raised her mug to him and then took a drink. 

Lulu's father nodded at her. Her eyelids where heavy and she found herself having a harder time focusing, but she thought he might have winked.


## Sails

### Lulu spots ship

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."

Birdie sat up groggy, rubbing her eyes gently as they had all learned to do in a world where you never knew when there might by a grain of sand on your hand. "What game again?"

"Remember?" Lulu held up the braided sweetgrass doll she'd slept with. Lulu like to curl in a ball under the blankets, no matter how hot it might be, and tuck her doll, no matter how scratchy or hard it might be, up against her chest. Her mother said she was a born cuddler. 

"Oh right," Birdie turned away and scanned the sand. Birdie had a habit of flinging her dolls away from her just before she fell asleep. She was not a doll cuddler like Lulu. 

It was Lulu who saw the doll and scrambled out of bed to grab it for her sister. She looked up from the doll and saw a ship, not a ship far out at sea, but a ship at anchor, with a long boat rowing ashore. It was full of men in red coats.

She lowered herself slowly down, not wanting to be spotted. She scuttled over to Birdie. "There's a ship anchored out by the bar. There's a boat rowing in full of soldiers."

"What?" Birdie snapped awake. They gathered up their quilts and dolls and ran for camp. Their father was up, drinking some of the coffee Captain Jack had given him. Or maybe it was Anne. Lulu wasn't sure. She wanted to scream, but she did not. She forced herself to speaking clearly and slowly. There's a ship. Soldiers are rowing in. She watched her father's face. It flickered for just an instance, but otherwise he looked at her as if she had just told him about a shell she found on the beach. He took a sip of coffee. He swallowed.

"Lu, get Henri and go with Kobayashi and Tambo. Ready Delos to sail. Birdie, I want you to stay with me."

Lulu balked. She did not want her sister to stay. She started to protest. She glanced at Birdie and could tell she did not want to stay either. "Papa why? I want Birdie to come with us."

"Lulu," he hissed, "Do as I say, and go."

She ducked into the tent, Tambo and Kobayashi had a of sail cloth bag of their guns and swords already between then each was gather shot and powder. Lulu picked up the coppers and the iron skillet her father loved. Henri helped with a bag of shot. The four of them headed down the trail to the marsh, Lulu tried to think where the tide was. She thought about the boat coming in, she tried to see it in her memory, where was the surf line, she thought it was high, that would mean there would be enough water to easily float Delos, but it also meant it would be harder to 

---

### Birdie with her father

"Do you know why I kept you behind?" Her father sat still drinking coffee, but she saw him glance frequently at the dunes behind her. 

Birdie shook her head. She felt like she was going to explode. She understood what Anne had said once about battle. *Fear is different than being scared. Fear is feeling like you want to jump out of your skin and leave your body hehind*.

Her father smiled. "I don't know what this man McPhail is like, but it's been my experience that most men are less likely to murder a man in front of his own children."

Birdie felt herself floating up out of her body at these words. Her father was going to be murdered. He had gambled his life and her on a silly idea he formed somewhere along the way and she was about to pay for it by watching him die. 

A shadow drifted down the dune, extending past her. It had a stick poking out the side of it. She knew there was a man behind her with a sword. Or a gun, she could not tell as the shadow was mangled in a clump of grass growing next to her, but either way, this was it. Her head felt heavy, her mouth went dry and she thought she was going to fall over. She forced herself to blink, to steady herself. *The way to master fear,* Anne had said, *is not to ignore it, it's to feel it, to acknowledge it, and then chose to focus on something else instead, focus on what you know you need to do at that moment, focus on something you have trained to do. Like fighting back.*

Birdie slid her hand to her waist and gripped the handle of her knife. Things were happening slowly. Her father was talking she realized, but she had not heard what he said. He took another sip of coffee, set down his cup and stood with his hands raised in the air. "I am unarmed," he said. Slowly turning a circle so whomever was standing on the dune behind Birdie could see. I am not she thought. Was that part of her father's plan? Suddenly she felt foot steps trudging down the sand behind her, black boots passed her by, another pair stopped behind her. "Get up young lady" a voice commanded.

She stood and looked behind her for the first time. The sun was low on the horizon, golden rays bouncing off the reflective calm of the morning sea. She could not see faces for the glare, but there were soldiers all around them. They wore white wigs, one of them had on a the three pointed hats her father was always making fun of. They all carried guns, many of them wore swords as well. They wore heavy red wool coats. Birdie knew this was what English soldiers wore, she heard her father and Tambo and Kobayashi talk about redcoats before, but she'd never really understood what that meant until she saw them. They were made of wool and looked heavy, heavier than any clothing Birdie could ever remember wearing. For some reason she fixated on this detail. It was not part of her training, it was not fighting back, but somehow it made her come back around to herself. She stopped floating a few inches above her self. She settled back into her body and mind. They were ill dressed. They had made a mistake of clothing. What other mistakes might they make? There was hope here. Nothing was over yet. No one was dead.

---

McPhail hadn't even come ashore with the landing party. Captain tk, the man whose shadow had first come sliding downt he dune behind her, had to send for McPhail. When he arrived he seemed, not particularly interested in either her or her father. No one bothered to chain them, no one said they were under arrest. No one did anything, though Birdie could feel, she knew, that they could not leave. 

She spent most of the day trying to figure out what Lulu and the rest of her family were doing. She knew Delos was not in the marsh because the soldiers had gone down to the marsh to look around and come back and reported that there was nothing there. And yet it wasn't hard to tell that clearly it was not just her father and Aunt Māra, whom the soldier rounded up from the other end of the island, and her living here. The three of them sat around the cold ashes of the fire, her father and Aunt Māra sometimes whispering back and forth. Their voices were too low for Birdie to hear, but she could tell that her Aunt was mad at her father about something. Possibly about everything. 

For once birdie was half glad that tksamuel was not here to see them. She felt helpless. She did not like this feeling. She didn't not want to admit she was helpless so she plotted ways she could escape. *focus on something you have trained to do*. Birdie wished she had trained to do something. They didn't drill much when they were on shore. She knew everything to do on the ship, that would have been like breathing. They'd never had been caught in the first places, but even if they had, no one would take their ship, she felt quite sure of that.

But on land they never bothered. They had two rendevous points, depending on which way trouble came from. She assumed Delos and crew were at the river point, tied up in the clearing her father had made, up a channel in the cypress swamp. Not a perfect place to hide because there was no way to come bursting out of it, but a place very few people would ever think to look for a boat. It was a good place to lay low and wait for darkness. It was nearly a new moon, Delos would have a good dark night in which to come out of hiding and slip out into the ocean. Perhaps find Revenge, bring help of some kind. 

"Get up," said a soldier. Birdie did not look up at him, instead she studied his boots, trying to memorize them. I will know you by your boots. "Captain McPhail wants to see you." The soldier kick at her feet, startling her. 

"Me?"

"Her?"

"All of you."

Her father stood up. "I will go, leave her out of this." 

"All of you." He said, this time in a much more sinister voice that Birdie did not like. 

She followed her father and aunt through the dunes and down the beach where McPhail, Birdie assumed it was McPhail, sat at small table reading through some papers. "Ah, the legendary captain tk."

Birdie glanced at her father. Legendary? how did anyone from England ever know who they were?

"I did not know we had met" said her father.

"We have not. I am James McPhail," Captain Mcphail extend his hand and her father shook it. "And you are on my island."

"Your island?"

McPhail smiled. It was not an unpleasant smile. In fact Birdie did not thing McPhail was a particularly unpleasant person. But that made her nervous because her father always said it was the nice snakes you had to watch out for. The coiled snake hissing and ready to strike is easy to dodge, the one that gets you is the one you never say coming. Did she see McPhail coming? Did she need to? She could not decide.

"Yes, this piece of paper makes this land my island. If you look here," McPhail held out the parchment to her father, "that is the king's signature."

Her father never even glanced at it. "I am not English, so whether that is your king's signature or not," he smiled in nearly exactly the way McPhail had, slightly unpleasantly, but with that unplesantness under a thin veneer of pleasantry, "I could not say, but either way. I was not your island until you arrived and took it."

"McPhail glanced around, out at the ship anchored offshore. "Well, as long as you recognize that it is mine now we're making progress. But I had rather hoped you were a reasonable man."

Her father said nothing.

"Because this island was mine the moment the king put ink to parchment, which was two years ago. Which makes you... that makes you a criminal Mr tk. You have stolen my trees, poached them like a common poacher. No different than the poachers taking my game in England. Do you know what happens to them?"

"I expect you feed them to the dogs."

McPhail smiled again, this time genuinely, his whole face lit up, "why yes, that's exactly what I do."

For the first time McPhail glanced over at Birdie. She had drawn herself up to aunt's side as her father and McPhail talked, putting her left arm and hip into Aunt Māra's dress so that she could reach down and keep her hand on her knife. "this must be your wife and daughter."

Birdie said nothing. Her father nodded.

"Well I rather hate to do this in front of your family, I had really hoped perhaps we could work something out, but I can tell that that will not be possible. Which means I have no choice but to arrested you. 

Birdie's heart leaped into her throat. Her father just shrugged. "Do what you need to."

"Where will I find the rest of your, em, crew? entourage?"

"You won't."

McPhail scowled. "You do think you're very clever don't you? I don't think your crew are likely to get far with my warship sitting here do you?"

"Is that yours? A minute ago it was your majesty's."

This time McPhail smiled cruelly. "Do you see a king anywhere around us?"

"No I don't"

"Well that's because I am his majesty's emmessary. He did not deem it necessary to come all this way on this piddly little errand, he entrusted me to do it for him."

"Did he? Well, let me ask you something Mr McPhail, do you see a king around here?"

"McPhail frowned. "I think we already established that. Have you been drinking?

"Do you see an army around here?"

Birdie noticed McPhail almost imperceptibly flinch, "I do Mr tk. I see an infantry company that's about to take you to charlestown to be tried for trespass on the kings land."

Her father ignored the last statement, but he glanced around looking at the soldiers. "I see an infantry company of 14 men, and one warship of 32 guns. And if I were you McPhail." Her father paused and stared directly into McPhail's eyes. "If I were you that would make me very nervous."

Her father turned and began to walk back toward camp. Birdie glanced breifly at McPhail whose mouth was gaping open and shut like a fish out of water, and then she darted off after her father, her aunt running right behind her. They caught up and the three of them walked together through the dunes.

"Birdie stays with me. Māra, the boat will try to get out tonight, I want you on it."

"The soldiers will have us in irons after that performance."

Her father smiled. "Me probably, not you. His ego won't let him chain women in front of the crew. He's the sort of man who will only do awful things when he thinks no one is looking."

"You have much more confidence in your ability to read people than I do."

Her father said nothing. They heard McPhail yell something. Birdie started to turn, but her father caught her arm. "forward Birdie, no looking back. You don't react, the minute you react they're in charge. Always keep them reacting to you. Even when it seems crazy." He smiled at her. The three of them stopped in the shelter of the dunes, out of sight of both the beach and the soldiers back in camp. "It's okay Birdie. We're going to be fine. You and I are going to Charlestown. Most likely by wagon. We may be separated, but don't worry, don't react. Trust that I will come get you. No matter what happens, I will come for you."

Birdie said nothing. there was a hard lump in her throat and she felt scared. Not fear, not the electric aliveness of fear, but scared. She nodded because she did not trust herself to speak without crying. She heard the clinking of metal, the sound of soldiers running.

"They're going to chain me up Birdie. Remember. Everything is going to be okay. You have to believe that."

A soldier crested the hill point a rifle at them. Her father raised his hands over his head and stepped away from Māra and Birdie. "Easy soldier, it's me you want, don't point that at them."

The soldier said nothing, but he swung the rifle clear of Birdie and Māra while keeping it trained on her father. Two more soldiers came over the dunes. One of them carried irons. They placed the manacles around her father's wrists. They turned him around and pushed him forward, toward the camp. Birdie and Māra followed and the soldier with the gun brought up the rear.

---

The sound of iron clanging woke Birdie. Every time her father rolled over, the chains on his wrists clanged together with a terrible clanging sound. She stretched her back and reached her arm out for Māra and felt nothing. Her heart started, but she was careful not to react. She continued her stretch and rolled over again. How had aunt Māra slipped out so quietly. Birdie tried to imagine her sliding out the back of the hut. Her father had made a trapdoor in the the wall that allowed anyone sleeping against the way to slip out very quietly. He and Tambo had taken turns practicing slipping out of it queitly, but so far as Birdie knew, Aunt Māra had never practiced. Apparently she did not need to Birdie thought. From there one rolled a short distance in sand and there was a small shrub you could use for cover while you stood up and stealed yourself. Then it was just a matter of slipping quietly down the path and out of camp. Once Aunt Māra, or any of the rest of them, were in the woods the soldiers didn't stand a chance. This was what her father had always told them anyway. Get the the woods and move quietly. Most people cannot move as queitly as we can and so we can avoid them.

Birdie wasn't sure what their plan was, she had not paid much attention to the half whispers and nudnges that her Aunt and her father shared the afternoon after they put him in irons. She had been too struck by the fact that her Aunt seemed once more her Aunt. She was not a wandering ghost pacing the island. She did not seem numb and unable to see you, she looked at you again and while Birdie was still afraid, this was one good thing she had found in an afternoon she had spent mainly trying to thing of good things she could think of, because every time she looked over and saw the iron manacles on her father's arms she had trouble thinking of good things. The whole world seemed wrong. her sister and brother and the rest of her family were hiding somewhere in a swamp, trapped up the river by a 32 gun British warship and her father was in chains and he had warned her that they would be separated and none of this made Birdie feel anything but bad and scared and afraid and she wished she had a mother to hug her and tell her everything was going to be alright even if it wasn't.

Even now somewhere out in that blackness her people were trying to slip out of that river mouth, past the warship and off to find help. At least she hoped that was the plan. All she'd really heard was what McPhail had said, that the ship would likely make a run for it tonight and to have to watch doubled. But Birdie knew that the mouth of the river to the south of edisto was not the only way out of the marsh. So long as the ship could get downstream to the marsh undetected she could turn south, ride the high tide through the marsh to the south and come out much farther south, well out of cannon range. They would still see her though, there were no black sails on Delos, but her father had always said she was the fastest ship on the sea, so, as long as they could make it to the see, Birdie was confident they would get away. 

Aunt Māra getting away was the beginning of that plan and that had worked. So far so good. Birdie rolled over toward the wall of grass siding. She wished she could slip out the hidden door and disappear. But she could not leave her father.

### Lulu on Delos escape

It all happened so fast that Lulu never had a chance to feel anything. She and Henri were off down the trail headed for Delos before it really even hit her that Birdie was not with them. It wasn't until she was knee deep in pluff mud, helping Kobayashi push Delos into deeper water that it hit her, where was Birdie. It was like something in the center of her had switched off, a vast open space created where there had been none. She wasn't positive, but she was pretty sure she and Birdie had never been apart for more than a few hours. Even then, Birdie was out fishing, or Lulu was down the river at Kadiatu's, they were both here. And now they were not. 

Kobayashi lifted her over his head and she strained up until Tambo's huge rough hands gripped hers and she was lifted up over the gunwale and onto Delos' deck. Tambo fed a line down to Kobayashi and he walked himself up the side and onto the desk beside her. He nodded as her, 
"thank you."

Lulu nodded back, but said nothing. She saw Kobayashi and Tambo exchange a look out of the corner of her eye. She ignored them and started to go to her place in the bow, to watch for sand bars, submerged trees, anything that might snag them.

"Not this time Lulu," said Tambo. "We need you at the helm. Henri," he turned to Henri who sat by the wheel, picking at a splinter. "We need you in the bow. You know the drill? Call out anything you see, even if you're not sure."

Henri nodded in excitement and darted up to the bow. Kobayashi and Tambo went below to row. Delos had room for four oars. Or four guns, Lulu reflected, which suddenly seemed like maybe they might have their uses. She wondered if her father was changing his mind about cannon on the ship. Probably not. Four guns wouldn't do much good against the ship-of-line sitting outside the river mouth, presumably waiting for them. 

She brought Delos out into the wide channel of current. She felt the boat slip and shudder at the current of the river met the current of the incoming tide. She could feel the oars lifting her, driving her against the current. Still, they were slow. What would they have done if the tide wasn't in their favor. Could Tambo and Kobayashi really row Delos up stream? It felt like they were having trouble as it was. Lulu glanced at the sun and thought for the minute. The tide would shift soon, she guessed the crest would be another hour. Then it would run out and the marsh would be impassible for Delos for the better part of eight hours. They would trapped somewhere up river until well after nightfall and then they would have the ride the river into the oncoming tide and either row, or, if they got lucky perhaps an offshore breeze could push them through the southern marsh and out the tk river mouth to the sea. That way the warship would miss them. Once they were at sea, nothing could catch Delos. She knew that. Or at least she believed the adults who told her that. Kobayashi swore by it. Only an outrigger could catch this boat he'd told her once. She hadn't known what an outrigger was, but he'd explained how the doubled thin hulls paired with a sail and some of the best sailors in the world made the outrigger the fastest, and possibly the best, boat on the sea. Lulu desperately wanted to sail an outrigger.

"Hard port!"

"Coming port!" She spun the wheel and Delos swung to port. Lulu ran to the gunwale and watched as the limbs of a tree slipped by, like two bony fingers reaching out of the river, trying to catch them.

She turned Delos back into the middle of the river and squinted at the trees in the distance. They seemed so far away. Delos felt so exposed out here. She wanted to turn around and look, but she could not. Were there soldiers there on the shore watching them slide upriver. Had they captured her father and Birdie? She could not bring herself to turn around and look. It was better to wonder than to know that that had happened. There was nothing she could do anyway. She tried to force thoughts of her father and Birdie from her mind. Just focus on what you have to do. Take note of what's going on, because bad things may happen, but you can't react to them now. Never react, always act. Her father's words in her head. She tried. But somehow Birdie kept creeping back into her mind and she felt afraid. She shivered and tried to focus on the river, on the wind, the current, Henri's voice, but he sat silent in the bow. She wondered if he felt the great emptiness inside her that she felt. Is it different when you're a twin she wondered, or did everyone feel this way?

Finally, after what seemed like hours, Delos drew near the trees that marked the inland border of the marsh. Then they slipped into the wider current of the river. Here the current was slower, the water deeper. Another hour brought them to the stand of flooded Cypress they'd prepared years ago in case they need to hide Delos. She brough the boat alongside the edge of the largest of the trees and Tambo and Kobayashi, exhausted from rowing, but running on that same adrenaline and fear that Lulu had used to pilot Delos, managed to secure Delos. They lowered the dingy over the side with a block and some tackle. Using a bow line, Tambo rowed the small boat further into the thicket of trees and then, wrapped the line around a large cypress, ran it back through the tackle, and slowly winched Delos into the tree grove. An hour later could have been paddling up river within twenty yards of Delos and not seen her. Lulu knew this because she took the dingy and paddled twenty yards out to fish for dinner and she had trouble finding her way back to Delos with her three catfish.

Kobayashi cooked the catfish below deck, waiting until the sun had set and mist coming up off the river would mask any smoke that might drift up. They ate in silence, Tambo at the bow until Lulu had finished and she came up to relieve him. It was like standing watch, but not fun and exhilerating like that was. This was scary and nerve wracking and Lulu depserately wished she could close her eyes and everything would just go back to normal, that this was all a dream should wake from, still on the beach between her sister and brother, no ship on the horizon. But it was out there, the ship that is, somewhere out there. The question they all wanted answered was whether or not it was out there looking for them.

They gave Lulu and Henri first watch. Tambo and Kobayashi hung their hammocks topside and slept, or tried, Lulu wasn't sure how anyone could possibly sleep right now. They rested anyway. She and Henri sat on the windlass, staring out at the darkness. 

"Lu?"

"Yeah?"

"I wish Papa was here. I'm scared."

Lulu sighed. She was scared too. She wished Papa was there too. They were never apart and she did not like it. "Tambo says he'll get away as soon as he can. But he has to talk to the man, otherwise we might have to leave the island." She saw her bother's face squeeze up into a frown.

"But we are leaving the island. We already left the island. And tonight we're trying to get out to sea."

"to go get help."

"Why do we need help Lulu? We never need help, why do we need it now?"

This stopped Lulu mid thought. She realized he was right and she had not even thought about it. She had simply accepted that they needed help. But why did they need help. And why were they hiding? If all her father was doing was talking to a man about pine trees, why did he want the ship hidden? And why did the man bring soldiers? Obviously there was more going on than Lulu had worked out. She'd been too busy and too caught up in her own fear and pain to think about the bigger picture. She'd failed what her Papa always said, detach, step back and take a look around. See the whole picture before you dive into your part in it.

Not only had she not detached, spending far too much time worrying about the future rather than using the present to create future. Worse though, she had fail to look at the bigger picture and failed to ask questions... of herself, of Tambo, of anyone. She had accepted it all as it was handed to her. 

"I don't know why we need help," she said finally.

Henry scooted closer to her so their legs were touching. She could feel his fear. She put her arm around him and he laid his head against her arm. "What I do know, she said after a while, "is that we're going to make it out of here tonight and we're going to get help. We're going to do what we're supposed to do."

"How do you know?"

She wasn't sure. She could just... feel it somehow. She could see it in a vague way, she could already see them at sea in the wind and sunlight. "I don't know how I know Henri, I just know that I know."

Henry did not say anything, he just continued to lean against her. 

Lulu watched the water in front of them shimmering black in the starlit night. Overhead the wispy cloud of stars her father called the great sail was glowing above them. Lulu felt herself relax. She felt the weight of her bother against her, warm and safe. She squeezed him tighter and said a prayer for them all.


# Spring

## Into Town
    - The take Aunt Māra to Charlestown, she no longer want to live on the island

## Something
## Sails
    - McPhail arrives

# Glossary

**Bow**: The front of a boat
**Stern**: The back of a boat
**Port**: The left side of a boat
**Starboard**: The right side of a boat
**Taffrail**: Rail round the stern of a ship 
**Northerly swell**: a swell moving from north to south
**Southerly swell**: a swell moving from south to north
**Southerly wind**: a wind blowing from the south to the north
**Northerly wind**: a wind blowing from the north to the south.
**Lateen rigged**: One of the earliest triangular sail designs, this rig allows the tk to sail much closer to the wind (35 degrees to the wind with a skilled captain) than a square rigged ship of the line, which could only manage something like 50.
**Caravel**: The ship that, for better or worse, brought Europe to the rest of the world. The Portuguese developed the Caravel off a fishing boat design in roughly 1451. It proved so successful that it dominated the spice trade for nearly 100 years, though it had a good bit of competition from the Carrack, which was square rigged in the fore and main, but still Lateen rigged on the Mizzen. The Carrack was somewhat stabler in heavy seas and could carry larger loads.
**Hekas, hekas! Este bebeloi!**: The exorcism that opened the Eleusinian Mysteries, this phrase drives away anything not spiritual. It is said to mean "far, far be removed the profane."