Eleven miles past Brine Step, on the south trail along the Reed Bight, I have a little under four hours of light. Copper Gauge signed the count at Keelmarket this morning. New construction starts on the bight this warm season stand at 128. Last warm season the bight started 203. The difference is 75 starts, 37 percent, each one posted and none of them opened.
The Opportunity Desk calls the reed an opportunity. The sheet is the size of a door: salt houses, a shell road, two quays, a landing for the touring circuit, and a pier inked in the color the desk uses for finished work. The map leaves out the mud under the third bent, chest-deep on a pony, and the hour the silt-crabs climb the fresh hemp.
Sedge Marrow keeps the stilt shed where the marked trail ends. She has had the shed nineteen seasons. Ponies who live within a day's walk ask her about a hole before they take the card.
"They pay you to set a post where the tide already decided," Marrow said. The coil on her rail was cut clean, each piece the length of a tie. "A salted crib goes in a week. I put that in writing. They sent a painter."
The crabs come at the turn, after the slurry on a new pile skins over. The yard salts the hemp against rot. The crabs work the line for the salt and take the knot with it, then stack the cut ends in a fan under the third bent. On the west crib, thirty posts long, Marrow counted 214 ends. The desk's morning note filed the fan under local cooperation and left the pier on the pipeline.
Tansy Quill was on day wages minding the cap log. The near pile settled, the log rolled, and Quill's left foreleg is splinted with a split of that timber. Quill sat on the bottom step, out of the wind, with a tin of Marrow's tea.
"I was on the wage, not the card," Quill said. "The log went over. They were on the shell road with the ribbon still boxed. Nobody walked back down to ask about the leg."
Banner Gleam's circuit had four ponies and bunting cut for wider posts. Gleam's clerk named the drop a pause, and the pause a coast gathering itself. The cart turned where the shell road softens, short of the map's mark, and took the ribbon back to Keelmarket still in the box. Gleam stayed seated the whole time.
The board at Brine Step pays 40 bits a post, the rate from the season of 203 starts. The rate held when the starts fell. A setter whose post the tide lifts by morning still draws the bits. A setter who declines the hole is crossed off the card. Quill's crew had been twelve. Nine left after the log, hired off the Keelmarket wall by a picture of a crane. The three who stayed can see Marrow's shed from their own doors.
Of Gauge's 128 starts, 61 still have a contractor on the water. The other 67 are a leaning stake, a card in a wax sleeve, and a name kept from last season. The 75 that never broke ground sit on a desk line called deferred opportunity, multiplied out at 18,000 bits each. The sheet carries 1,350,000 bits of pier. By this afternoon's light the sum is mud, cut hemp, and a splint.
The third bent leans a hoof-width toward the channel. A crab the size of a tea tin was on the pile while I stood there, done with one tie, testing the next knot, salt drying on its claws. It kept at the work in full daylight.
Brine Step is still possible if I leave the shed at the half hour, before the reed fog, which slides in while the sun is a hand above the flat. The map calls the walk nine miles. Marrow's count is eleven. The two miles sit in a slough the door-sized sheet draws as a promenade, between the pier and a stall for ribbons.
A clerk at Brine Step was reprinting the pier cards before I came out. The added line says weather. The sky is clear and the wind is light off the flats. Marrow has the next tide in hull paint on the shed post, and Quill's tin hangs on the nail above last week's water line. The new cards list the same posts and the same 40 bits, and they leave the step off.
