Kingdom River

'Get what things you can carry,' the lieutenant said, not in an unpleasant way. 'You're coming with us.'

'Is William Bovey dead?'

'I don't know any William Bovey, though I wish him well. I do know that you are ordered to come with us. So, get your whatevers; put your shoes on – if you have shoes – and do it fairly quickly.'

'No,' Martha said, and couldn't imagine why she'd said it. The big sergeant, standing behind his lieutenant, frowned at her and shook his head.

'Ralph, be still,' the lieutenant said, though he couldn't have seen what his sergeant was doing. 'Now, Mattie – it is Mattie?'

'Martha.'

'Martha. Right. Now listen, even though it may cost my men some injuries' – his soldiers smiled – 'I will have you subdued, bound, and carried with us as baggage, if necessary. Don't make it necessary.'

'But… why?'

'Orders.'

Her father still said nothing, just stood in the doorway silent as a stick. Suddenly, Martha felt she wished to go with the soldiers. It was a strange feeling, as if she'd eaten something spoiled.

She turned to Edward Jackson and said, 'You're not my father, anymore.' Then she went into the cabin to get her best linen dress, her sheepskin cloak, her private possibles (a bone comb, clean underdrawers and stockings folded in a leather sack), and her shoes – one patched at the toe, but good worked leather that laced up over her ankles.

…They walked south – the soldiers marched, she walked – through the rest of the day. Martha had started out beside the lieutenant, possibles sack on her hip, her cloak, like theirs, rolled and tied over her shoulder – but he'd gestured her behind him with his thumb, so she'd stepped back to walk beside the sergeant, Ralph, the one who'd frowned and shook his head at her. He was even taller than she was, and wider.

It had always seemed to Martha, when she'd seen them in parade at Stoneville, that soldiers marched slowly. But now, going with them, she found they moved along in a surprising way. It was a steady never-stopping going, nothing like a stroll or amble, that ate up time and Warm-time miles until her legs ached and she began to stumble.

Ralph-sergeant took her left arm, then, to steady her. He smelled of sweat, and of leather and oiled steel.

They camped at dark, but lit no fire, though frost had filtered down. The soldiers drank from tarred-wood canteens – the sergeant let her drink from his – and chewed dry strips of meat.

He gave her some of that as well… Then the soldiers went into the woods to shit, came out, and lay down in dead grass in their long woolen cloaks as if they were under a roof and behind house walls – the lieutenant, too. Only one man was left standing under the trees, watching, with a quarrel in his crossbow as if this was enemy country.

The sergeant had stood guard, yards away and his back turned, while Martha did her necessary behind a tree. Then he'd cut evergreen branches for her to lie on… She supposed her ringlets had straightened some from walking and sweating, so she had no good feature, now.

And that was the first day, traveling.

The second day, they rose before dawn, ate dried meat and drank water. Then the soldiers brought river water up in a little iron pot, made a small fire to heat it, and shaved their faces with their knives, the lieutenant first. After that, they went marching again. No one spoke to Martha – or spoke among themselves, either – except the lieutenant once said, 'Pick up the pace,' and they did, marching faster down the middle of the River Road, crunching through shallow, ice-skimmed puddles with everyone they met standing aside to let them pass. They went faster, but Martha kept up, her cloak flapping at her calves. It had became a pleasure to her to march with soldiers, to leave where she'd always been to go to someplace new, someplace that would be a surprise, with a surprising reason for coming to it.

Even so, sometimes a dread came rising that she might be being taken where an example would be made of girls who hammered men. But Martha swallowed those fears like little frozen lumps, managed to keep them down, and decided not to ask again where she was bound, or why, for fear of the answer.

Instead, she gave herself up to marching, and often could see the river on their right, flashing gray-white through stands of trees along the bank. Its icy current – still fed by Daughter Summer's melt, far upstream at the Wall – was too wide to see across, and milky with stone dust washed from the great glacier in Map-Ohio.

Several times, she saw barges and oared boats far out from the shore, still summer-fit this far down the river, sailing with black-and-orange flags and banners fluttering in the river's wind.

Martha's legs were aching in the worst way by the time they came to Landing in the afternoon. Landing was the farthest from her home – the farthest south – she'd ever been. The Ya-zoo River came to Kingdom River there – though her father had said it was the other way round, and Kingdom had grown over to Yazoo as blessing and welcome. Her father had brought horses down for the fair, that time, and she'd come with him, riding Shirley. Some rough river-boys had made fun of her.

But now, though hard Ordinaries – wagoneers, sailors, warehousemen, and keel-boaters – stood drinking outside whorehouses and dens with their girls or pretty-boys all down the muddy road to Rivers-come-together, none had a word to call to hurt her feelings. They were quiet as the soldiers marched by – still in step through mud, horse-shit, and wagon ruts… then past a summer storage yard of huge racks of ships' skates and runners, long beams whose heavy bright blades gleamed greased and sharpened for winter-fitting.

They marched past loads of stacked lumber, sheep hides, sides of beef, pig, and goat… sacks of coal from Map-West Virgina, crates of warm-frame cabbages, onions, cucumbers, broccoli, cauliflower… barrels of pickles, brine kraut, smoked and salted river char.

The docks were even busier, noisier. Martha hadn't remembered everything being so large, loud, and confusing. The soldiers marched past starters shouting and flicking their slim blacksnakes at sweat-slaves trotting pokes of last potatoes up the ramps of two big pole-boats painted dark blue. Martha could spell out the letters on the company flags. Jessup's Line.… A herd of spotted cattle was being run down to a black barge, forty or fifty of the animals, driven by rust-colored dogs and three men with long sticks to prod them.

Martha had had a dog named Parker, when she was a little girl, a coon-hound with a blind left eye. Because of the eye, she'd been able to buy him with fifteen buckets of blueberries – no softs and no stems. Only two days' picking…

Those herding the spotted cattle, though, were different dogs, squat, barky, and quick. Interesting to watch work. Martha thought it had been worth such hard marching to come to Landing, with so much to see. And smell, too; the docks had the rich stink of the Rivers-come-together running beneath them, dirty float-ice, rotting mud, and fish guts… Someone was playing a pluck-piano; she could hear the quick, twanging notes up the road behind them as a den door opened.

'Some moments for beer, sir?' The first thing Ralph-sergeant had said since morning.

'No,' the lieutenant said, and led them to a dock at the far left, calling, 'Clear the way!' to a work gang of skinny tribes-women, naked, with fox-mask tattoos covering their faces. They were smeared with pig-fat against the cold wind the river brought down… The women stood aside as the soldiers marched out onto the planking, the wide boards booming beneath their boots. One – thin, and with teeth missing – stuck her tongue out at them. Two of the others called out to the soldiers together, in an up-river language that sounded like sticks rattling. It wasn't Book, wasn't even near book-English. Martha couldn't understand a single word.

A ruined barge was sunk along the left dockside, so only its rails and pole-walk showed above swirling water. Gray sea-birds – come all the way up from the Gulf Entire, Martha supposed – strutted and pecked along the railings. The birds had pale yellow eyes, crueler than crows'.

There was a wonder floating at the end of the dock – a galley beautiful as the circus boat that once came down from Cairo. But this one was painted all red as fresh blood, not striped green and yellow, and there was no music coming from it. A long red banner hung from the mast, stirring a little in the breeze.

The galley had one bank of oars, just above where the iron skate-beam fittings ran – and a red sail, though that was bundled tight to a second mast slanting low over the deck, reaching almost from the front of the boat to the back. A lateeno, Martha's father would have called it.

The lieutenant marched his men and Martha right up a ramp and onto the red galley. Everything there was the