family could get by without selling the heifer calf, and when she grew, they would have more milk to sell. With the money paid for Mouche, the mill could be repaired, and there’d be money coming in from grinding the neighbor’s grain and pressing their grapes and olives. With the money paid for Mouche….
It was only fair, he told himself, desperately trying to be reasonable and not to cry. If he’d been a girl, he’d have brought in a great dowry to Eline and Darbos. Just as the money paid for Eline had gone to her family, so money paid for a daughter would go to this family. But that would be honorable, which this was not. Buying a Hunk was honorable enough, it was only selling one that wasn’t. Still, getting a good bid for a girl was just good sense. Why should getting a good bid for a boy be different?
Mouche said farewell to pasture and woodlot and barn, farewell to the cat and her kittens, allowed the freedom of the loft and a ration of milk in return for ridding the granary of the Newholmian equivalent of mice. And finally he went to Duster’s grave and knelt down to say goodbye, dropping more than a few tears on old Duster who had been his best and only friend, who had died in such a terrible way. He could have had one of Duster’s pups from the neighbors—Old Duster had been an assiduous visitor next door—but there had been no food to feed another dog, said Mama. Well. Duster had left a numerous family behind. He was g’Duster, for sure, and long remembered.
Then it was farewell to Mama on the last evening and a long night listening to Papa cry in the night, and very early on the morning of the fifth, before it was light, he and red-eyed Papa were on the road once more, back to Sendoph, Mouche carrying only a little bag with his books inside, and Duster’s collar, and the picture of a sailing ship he had drawn at school. Papa didn’t have to put his veils on until they were far down the road, and he spent most of the time until then wiping his eyes.
When they came to House Genevois, Mouche asked, in a kind of panic, “Can we walk down to the river, Papa?”
His papa gave him a sideways tilt of the head, but he walked on past House Genevois, down Bridge Street past the courtyard entrance, on to the corner where one of the little green-patinaed copper-domed towers topped the wall above the riverbank, and thence out over the stone arches of Brewer’s Bridge itself while the invisible people moved back and forth like little mud-colored rivers running in all directions, their flow breaking around the human pedestrians without touching them, those pedestrians looking over the heads of the invisibles and never lowering their gaze. The breweries stood across the water, four of them, and on the nearest stubby tower a weathervane shifted and glittered, its head pointing north, toward the sea.
The river was low and sullen in this season, dark with ash from the firemounts to the south and east, with the islets of gray foam slipping past so slowly it was hard to believe they were moving at all. Between the water mills, the banks were thickly bristled with reed beds, green and aswarm with birdy-things, and far down the river a smoke plume rose where a wood burning sternwheel steamboat made its slow way toward them against the flow. Down there, Mouche thought, was Naibah, the capital, lost in the mists of the north, and beyond it the port of Gilesmarsh.
“The sea’s down there,” he whispered.
“No reason you can’t go to sea after you retire,” said Papa, hugging him close. “Maybe even buy a little boat of your own.”
“Ship,” said Mouche, imagining breakers and surf and the cry of waterkeens. “Ship.”
His thoughts were interrupted by a rumble, a shivering. At first Mouche thought it was just him, shaking with sadness, but it wasn’t him for the railing quivered beneath his fingers and the paving danced beneath his feet.
“Off the bridge,” said Papa, breathlessly.
They ran from the bridge, standing at the end of it, waiting for the spasm to end. Far to the east, the scarp was suddenly aglow, and great billows of gray moved up into the sky, so slowly they were like balloons rising. Down the river, one of the legs of the rotted wharf gave