At the edge
of the marsh.

The cattle would not go down to the marsh.

Ebbe had driven them as far as the last of the hard ground, where the clay of the rise gave way to sea-lavender and the first grey creek. There the red cow had stopped dead, as at a shut gate. The others bunched up behind her. Nine beasts, small and rough-coated and none of them clever, and every one of them standing with its head up and its ears turned to the east.

“Go on,” Ebbe said. “It’s grass. You like grass.”

She put her shoulder to the red cow’s haunch and shoved. The cow leaned back against her, patient as a door.

It was the morning of the big ebb. Twice in a month the sea went out further than it had any right to, past the creeks and the mud and the mussel beds, almost to the long low islands that lay along the edge of the world and kept the worst of the weather off. When it did, the forest came up.

It was there now, a mile out across the flats: black stumps in their hundreds, standing in the wet shine as far north and south as she could see. Her father had told her they were trees, and when she was small enough to be carried he took her out at low water to prove it: the roots going down into the clay like fingers into dough, the bark still on, hazelnuts lying in the peat as if they had fallen that autumn. He cracked one for her. It was full of black water.

Nobody burned that wood. It gave a sour smoke and bad dreams, her mother said, though her mother said that about most things from the shore.

Ebbe gave up on the cow and straightened, and looked where the cattle were looking.

There was a heron on the nearest creek. There was a great deal of mud. There were the stumps, which she had seen at every big ebb of her life and could have drawn in the ashes with her eyes shut: the cluster like a hand, the leaning pair, the one her brother called the Reeve because it was fat and did nothing.

And there was one she did not know.

It stood a little apart from the hand, out towards the islands. It was thinner than the others and much taller, and it did not lean. A stake, she thought first. Cretta’s men drove withy stakes to mark the fish-weirs, and were careless about whose shore they marked. But a stake that size would have needed two men and a maul, and a boat to carry it, and there were no boat-marks on the mud.

She stood and looked at it. It did nothing. The heron stabbed at the creek and came up with nothing either.

“Well, I’m not carrying you,” she told the red cow, and turned them for home.