Page 49 of Dark Tides
Edward shook his head. “They’re strange folks.”
“Strange to us,” Ned said. “But I find my way round here better with the story holes than I ever did with milestones in England.”
“What story does this hole tell?” William asked.
Ned hesitated, curiously reluctant to share with them.
“What does it matter anyway?” Edward demanded, tired and in pain, his face swollen with bites.
Ned led the way on, at a steady walk, on the long twisting path, through wet ground where the moss sucked at their boots, over higher ground where the lighter soil under the pine trees shifted under their feet and made them labor for every step, steadily south, and always behind him he heard the rasping breaths of the two men.
They walked until the burning sun went down behind the hills on their right, and slowly the sky grew milky and then gray and then a dark indigo blue. Ned handed out cornmeal biscuits and some dried meat, and showed them a raised patch of land, sheltered by a few boulders, so that the ground was dry beneath their blankets and they rolled themselves up.
“When will he meet us?” William asked again. “The savage guide?”
Ned shrugged. “When he’s ready.”
“I’m bitten to death,” Edward said, ducking his face under his blanket. “Don’t the bugs trouble you, Ned?”
“Here.” Ned offered a small bottle made from sassafras bark and corked with a piece of the root. “Try it. It works. The Indian woman who minds my ferry traded me the bottle and the oil for some sugar.”
“Does it really stop the biting?”
“Well, I’m seasoned,” Ned said, looking through the canopy of trees at the stars over his head, piercingly silver in the completely black night sky. “I grew up with quatrain fever. I spent my childhood on a mire in Sussex.”
“You owned land in England?” William asked curiously.
Ned thought he had not words to describe Foulmire to an outsider: the moonlight on the hidden paths, the grind and thunder of the tide mill, the strange lonely beauty of the sea flowing through and overspilling the land for miles in every direction, the call of the oystercatchers in their wheeling flight and the setting sun on their white arched wings.
“Nay, we never owned anything much,” he said. “I had the right to work the ferry and my sister was the village midwife. Nobody troubled us as long as we stayed at the water’s edge, poor as water voles. There’s no profit in the tidal lands, there’s no interest in them.”
The dog raised his head and growled, looking into the darkness.
“Peace,” Ned spoke half to the dog, half to the shadows of the rocks.
Then one of the shadows moved. Ned was up and reaching for his gun in a moment, as William and Edward struggled to their feet and stared around them.
“Nippe Sannup?” came a voice from the shadows.
“Aye, it’s me,” Ned answered in English, lowering the gun and calling Red to heel.
“What did he say? Who’s there?” William demanded, rising to his feet and reaching for his hand ax.
“Peace. He asked if it was me. I know him.”
“What did he call you?”
“Nippe Sannup. It means something like Waterman.”
The dark shadow of a tree moved and materialized into a man of about fifty years. A tall Pokanoket, wearing an apron of deer leather, and several strands of beads, some of them deep purple wampum, a sheaf of arrows slung over one shoulder, his bow in his hand. He stepped forward and greeted Ned with the dip of his dark head. His long hair was tied to one side, his face unsmiling. He scrutinized the other two men and then turned to Ned with a quiet question in Pokanoket. Ned answered, and, apparently satisfied, the man patted the dog on the head and sat down on a boulder.
“What does he want?” William asked. “Beads?”
Ned hid a smile. “Nothing. We have nothing that he wants. He’s come to guide you.”
“Ask him if he knows somewhere we won’t be found.”
“I’ll ask him. He’ll know. He knows his own lands round here, and he knows ours too.”
