“And I thought you wanted to come out to get reassurance from your friend! Really, Preen!” Then she looked round and shrugged. “There were dozens of ‘em earlier, honest. I can’t say I’m not a bit disappointed myself. Oh, where are all the chairmen?”
“That’s all right,” said Preen, smiling and patting her friend’s arm. “I’m getting on all right now.”
There was a buzz of excitement in the street behind them, like a sudden cooing of pigeons, Preen thought. She turned her head to see a man running up the alley, pumping his arms and flinging out his chest: he wore a beard and a high red cap with a white pennant flying from its crown. In each fist he carried a flaming torch.
“Fire! Fire!” He bellowed suddenly. He swerved to the wall: there was a sound of breaking glass and the man lunged, reappeared and sped across the alley.
“Fire!”
He was only holding one brand now, but there was a bottle in his other hand and he was sloshing gobbets of liquid from it over a doorway. “Fire!”
“What are you doing?” Preen screamed, breaking away from Mina who had clapped a hand to her mouth.
She put out her hands without thinking and felt the bruise ripen in her shoulder.
The man touched the brand to the door: as Preen reached him it sprouted a lovely mass of blueish flames and the man wheeled round, grinning wildly.
“Fire!” he roared.
Preen slapped him hard across the face with her good hand. The man jerked his head back. For a moment he narrowed his eyes and then he dodged down and sped past her, up the street, before she could think what to do next.
Preen threw an alarmed look at the doorway: the blue flames suddenly started to spit. Some were turning yellow as they licked upwards, snapping at the old wood.
“Mina!”
Mina hadn’t moved, but she was looking from Preen to the other side of the street where a shattered window was leaping in and out of view as the flames guttered and shrank inside.
“Let’s go back!” Mina wailed.
Preen acted on impulse. People were already running in the street, in both directions. A few had stopped and were making an effort to smother the flames creeping round the doorway. But even as they beat the fire with their cloaks flames had started to shoot from the window opposite.
“No! Go on, to Yashim’s!” she shouted. She glanced back: a light seemed to hover at the corner of the alley, and then a wall of turbanned men with flickering torches surged around the corner, blocking the alley. “Run!”
The pain in her shoulder seemed to fade away as she began to run uphill. After a moment she put out a hand and rested it on Mina’s shoulder. Both dancers stopped and kicked off their shoes, those two-inch pattens on which they liked to totter into male company; and both, as women will, snatched them up and carried them as they ran barefoot through the alleyways towards the Kara Davut.
They didn’t get so far. As they turned into the alley which led to the open space beneath the Imperial Gate, they flung themselves into a packed crowd of men, jostling and elbowing against each other. Almost immediately they were hemmed in by other people running up behind them: Preen grabbed Mina by the arm and spun her round. Together they fought their way back to the street corner, and took the turn to the right.
“We’ll go round behind the mosque,” Preen whispered in Mina’s ear.
They slackened their pace, partly to avoid the people running up the alleyway towards them, partly because among so many people Preen felt unwilling to surrender herself to the panic that was already developing around them.
But at the next crossroads they had to push and shove their way through the crowd, and turning her head left, back west, Preen saw the flicker of fires smoking on the hill above.
Beyond the crowd the side-street was also heaving with men, and women, too, some of them leading children, trying to protect them from the constant buffeting of people running back and forth. Everyone seemed to be shouting, screaming to make way, bellowing about fire.
Two men, running into each other from opposite directions, suddenly stopped shouting and fell to exchanging blows.
A man called Ertogrul Asian, who had just poked his head out from his doorway, got a smack on his ear from a
