The Orphanmaster by Jean Zimmerman Page B

wilderness.
    A paradox, since those same inhabitants were welcomed, carrying heavy loads of furs, especially in the spring and summer months. In these two mid-fall weeks, after the first turn of leaves but before the harvest fair,
wilden
and
handlaers
haggled over the next winter’s furs, with trade goods exchanged for a promise of pelts. A hundred thousand beaver skins passed through Beverwyck in a single season.
    Purple seawan streamed like gold. The village population swelled tenfold. When they slept at all, which was seldom, traders stacked themselves four to a bed. They could not often find one to rent. Landlords let every corn-husk mattress ’round the clock, in four six-hour shifts. Tents and lodges encircled the rude streets of Beverwyck proper.
    It wasn’t a circus atmosphere, really. There were no jugglers or players. Trade, trade, trade, that’s what everyone was here for. A single-minded passion seized the whole town. Forget the hunt, forget the harvest, forget eating and sleep.
    Profit was afoot, and the Devil take the hindmost.
    “Yay, dearie, want a job of work?” a prostitute hailed Blandine in passing. “On your back, your beaver’d fetch a beaver easy.”
    Antony made a fake lunge at the offending woman, who cackled and made a dash for her hovel.
    This was Antony’s second year at Fort Orange’s Beverwyck market.When he had accompanied Blandine the year previous, the milling crowds disoriented him, a crush of people so different from the land of his birth. He was repeatedly baited to fight. Blandine managed to extricate him each time, but she hadn’t planned on taking him along again.
    He surprised her by begging to go. “Are you sure?” she asked. “You didn’t enjoy it last time.”
    “I did,” Antony said.
    “You fought, you remember?”
    “So what? Look at me. What’s fighting to me?”
    So the giant came along, and seemed to feel more in his element than before.
    “You’re a big one, now, ain’t you?” the laughing whore taunted Antony. “Come, let us measure it, see if you’re big all over.”
    Antony lifted his blouse, and the prostitute screamed in mock horror.
    Blandine laughed and passed on.
    She was feeling good. What merchandise Blandine still had left, she held back for the climactic market Saturday, the culmination of the annual autumn trading fury (second only to the spring trading fury) that gripped the whole district.
    She had already placed her pelt guns, her hand tools and metal implements, most of her cloth. Her only mistake, she noted for the future, was to ignore the fundamental draw of iron traps. She had none, and could have traded a score.
    She saw indians of both sexes parading through the streets, flaunting the ropes of wampum around their necks that represented so many hundreds of guilders to the visiting Europeans. The dense odor of rum hung in the air along Handlaer Street, the drink being sucked down and traded with equal avidity.
    Houses and shops of red moppen and yellow Gouda brick anchored the town. Blandine could see the tips of merchant masts riding in the Fort Orange harbor. Everyone was here. One last final push. Let it begin. She was more than ready.
    And yet she couldn’t shake off the idea that someone was watching her. It was partly what Antony said about Lightning. But it was also Blandine’s own notion, a physical, prickly sensation that dogged her.
    She stopped to confer with a trio of Mohawk women, translators she knew from her earlier seasons at Beverwyck. Two of them had ax heads suspended over their breasts on necklaces of deer sinew, while the third wore a gigantic spoon from an English silversmith.
    She asked if any of the three had seen Kitane at the Beverwyck market this year.
    “He’s gone mad,” a crooked-toothed woman named Oota said.
    “You know this?” Blandine said seriously.
    “I refused him my body,” Oota said, “and he lost his mind.”
    The other two women hooted with laughter.
    Blandine persisted. “I want