Read Online Blood Ties by Pamela Freeman - Free Book Online Page A

off the Road: being a mediocre drummer and knowing hundreds of songs by heart (but not being able to sing them) weren’t much use to anyone. If Doronit was prepared to take him on with nothing, no skills, no silver, no family with business contacts, he would burst his heart trying to please her.
    Mountain girls are mighty kind
    And river girls are pretty
    Round the yard first, then down to the docks. His feet hit the hard stones of the street and slipped on the morning dew.
    But Turvite girls are kinder still
    To a smart boy from the city
. . .
    As always, he ran to the rhythm of “Turvite Girls,” a rousing drinking song. The song, he had discovered, was most popular with the Turvite women themselves. Singing it in his head kept his feet moving fast enough to make him sweat, but not so fast he became breathless.
    He turned the corner onto the drumming wooden planks of the docks. The fishing boats weren’t home yet. The merchanters raised their single masts brown against the gray clouds, and the shrouds rattled down from the mastheads like dice in a cup, tantalizingly just out of rhythm. Behind him the hills stretched up, blocking out half the sky.
    Turvite rose from its harbor in tier upon tier of houses, ascending in a semicircle of hills between two sheer cliff headlands. Down here near the harbor — immersed in the smells of old fish heads, rotten mud and bilges — the houses were wooden or wattled, with the occasional brown-brick inn.
    Ash looked up and back, toward Doronit’s house, wondering what she was doing, who she was seeing. Her house was amid the whitewashed brick buildings, halfway up the hills, with balconies out over the street. Farther up, on the highest tiers, the houses were golden stone mansions set in gardens full of small shrubs.
    He stopped for a moment at the lowest part of the harbor to get his breath before he began the long climb. This was the best part of the day in Turvite, the only quiet time. The gulls were off chasing the fishing boats and the only sound was the wind moaning through the rigging.
    For Carlion girls like salted flesh
    And Pisay girls like bulls
    But the Turvite girls love a city boy
    Who’ll fill their cup to full.
    Bodgers and todgers and sailors all know
    Yes, the fellows all agree
    There’s no finer girls in the wide, wide world
    It’s a Turvite girl for me.
    He remembered asking his mother why everyone laughed at the chorus — he must have been five, or six. She’d said that the words were just clever, and that was why people laughed. He was twelve or so before he found out what the “sailors knew.” He’d known there was another meaning, even at five, and he’d tucked it away in his mind, determined to find out the truth. He’d felt great satisfaction when he’d finally understood. Doronit said that only the truly determined survived, but he didn’t know the difference between “determined” and “truly determined.” He guessed he’d find out.
    The first time he came to Turvite he had been a child. They had gone to the harbor to find lodgings, of course; it was in the old part of the city where Travelers, if not welcome, were tolerated. Coming down the hill on the main road that cuts the town in two, moving from the rich to the poorer quarters, Ash had been overwhelmed by the noise and bustle: pedlars shouting their wares, spruikers calling for shops and breweries, delivery wagons and handcarts trundling over the cobbles and, above him, the neighbors gossiping over their washing, strung between the balconies that almost met over the street. And down by the harbor, there had been more to marvel at: shouts and whistles from the stevedores, the slap of the tide against the wooden docks, and above everything, like a clean descant to a muddy melody, the calls of the gulls. His ears had rung for days after they arrived.
    That first day, down at the harbor and almost onto the wharves, his father had turned him around to show him the city they had just walked