Fly By Night

out a roll of paper, an inkbottle and a quill. The girl with the bent yellow bonnet was there, wiping rust from her scavenged pen. The last child to join the group was the clothier’s apprentice. At the mouth of the alley he paused to cast a glance up the street as if still looking for Mosca, then moved to take his place next to a slim girl with a frayed, white lace shawl over her head.

If any of them had thought to look up, they might have noticed a hole halfway up the flint wall. It had for a time served as a station for a small cannon. Now it provided a crouching place for a short figure who hunched herself against the wind like a starling, frowning with her fierce new eyebrows of coal.

‘Ah… good morning.’ The man in blue glasses adjusted his hold on his bread, and tore it in two. It divided easily, and Mosca could see that a small and battered book lay within the crust. ‘From the place where we left off yesterday. Ah, yes… the responsibility of government is to protect the rights of the low from the tyranny of the high and not the property of the high from the desperation of the low… oh good heavens, my apologies, we covered that already, did we not?’ He crinkled his nose and adjusted his blue-tinted spectacles as he leafed through the book. Each of the dozen or so children seemed to be faithfully noting down his every word, including his hesitations and self-interruptions.

It was a school, a school! A back-alley school of stolen moments and stolen pens, but a school. Mosca could have wept tears of blood at finding herself forced to watch at a distance. All her life, her bookishness had made her a freak and an outcast, and other children had treated her with scorn and mistrust. Now it seemed clear that she would find no brothers and sisters even among schooled children like herself. She was an outcast still, and if she tried to approach, they would chase her away like a pack of young dogs snarling off an intruding stray.

‘Ah, here we are. Ah – A Colloquy on Truth, thought to be by the same author.’ The teacher cleared his throat and raised his head, and somehow the mist of absentmindedness seemed to clear behind his little spectacles. ‘On Truth.’ He started to read.

‘Truth is dangerous. It topples palaces and kills kings. It stirs gentle men to rage and bids them take up arms. It wakes old grievances and opens forgotten wounds. It is the mother of the sleepless night and the hag-ridden day. And yet there is one thing that is more dangerous than Truth. Those who would silence Truth’s voice are more destructive by far.

‘It is most perilous to be a speaker of Truth. Sometimes one must choose to be silent, or be silenced. But if a truth cannot be spoken, it must at least be known. Even if you dare not speak truth to others, never lie to yourself.

‘In my head I built a room, in which I kept the truths I dared not speak. And in this room sometimes I said, the kings will return no more to the Realm. Nobody dares say this, but everyone knows it is the Truth. In this room I said, it is good that the kings’ tyranny is gone forever. Men would hang me for saying so, but their hearts would whisper all the while that I spoke the Truth. And in this room I said that until the ordinary people choose their own leaders they will suffer, and this too is the Truth…’

The meaning of these words would have been lost on most children – and, for that matter, on many adults – but the eavesdropper in the cannon nook was Mosca Mye, who had begged and bartered for books and broadsheets all her life. This was radical talk – this dripped treason. The teacher below could be hanged for the words he was reading out. Mosca’s eyes glittered vengefully.

‘In this little room of the mind the truths grew strong and strident, and I knew that I must speak them whatever the cost…’

There was a sharp whistle from somewhere directly below Mosca, and with a shock she realized that the boy she had chased had been standing with his back flat against the flint wall, keeping an eye on the street.

‘Class dismissed,’ declared the teacher sharply, slamming his bread shut with a small explosion of crumbs.

Five of the children disappeared through holes in the ruined wall, the smallest leapfrogging through on his hands. The eldest boy scrambled up the side of the nearest house, then hung his arms over the roof’s edge to pull up a smaller friend. Four others dropped to their knees and silently renewed their game of marbles.

The teacher pulled his cravat loose, and then retied it as he walked back towards the street. By the time he reached the mouth of the alleyway he was pulling it back into its bow, for all the world as if he had simply stepped into the alley to get out of the wind and set it straight. At the street corner he passed a tall gentleman in a full- bottomed wig who had just stepped into the alley, the reason for the lookout’s whistle, and nodded to him courteously.

Legs shaking with excitement, Mosca scrambled down the wall, and set off in pursuit of the treasonous teacher. Very soon she was learning a few harsh lessons about spying in a busy city street.

She had long since learned tricks of invisibility. Be still where you can, be as silent as you can, let other small sounds drown your steps. If you cannot fool the eye, then fool the brain – stand where you are not expected and you will not be seen. Keep to the highs, keep to the lows, and avoid eye level if the terrain lets you. But these were tricks for the freckled woodland. Here in the street it was a matter of understanding patterns of flurry and flow. Stillness made one obvious, like a stone in a stream.

Time and again she would knock her bonnet against a swinging milk-pail, or nearly blunder beneath the wheels of a cart. Just to keep the teacher in view she was forced to squeeze alongside walls and between bodies, leaving a trail of trodden toes and murmured annoyance.

Thankfully, her quarry seemed cheerfully unaware of the world around him, but this too presented problems. At one point he stopped dead and dropped to a crouch to examine a snail whose shell had cracked beneath his boot. While an oyster seller’s tray tipped dizzily above his head, he could be seen placing together the fractured pieces of the snail’s shell and nudging it gently on its way. By the time he walked away with an oblivious smile, the road behind him was a tangle of tumbled bodies and overturned barrows. Despite herself, Mosca was impressed. The only other creature she had seen cause so much chaos in a ten-second period was Saracen.

She followed the teacher through Riversliver Race, where mackerel shimmered in slick silver heaps, where prawns with gummed black eyes questingly stirred their jointed legs. Through the Hides, where headless turkeys hung over doorways, plucked of all but wispy feather collars and garters, where rabbits dangled like furred gloves. Through a street sickly with the smell of tanners, through a network of alleys and ginnels. Down to the riverside, and in through the door of a coffeehouse.

‘Welcome back, Mr Pertellis,’ said a coffeemaiden at the door as she took the teacher’s hat and coat.

As the door closed behind him, Mosca watched, agape and aghast.

It was not so strange to see the teacher entering a coffeehouse. What Mosca did not expect was for the coffeehouse to judder, grind gently sideways, then abandon the roadside altogether and drift out into the open river.

A violent wind roared in through the newly opened gap, leaving Mosca to wrestle with her ever-rebellious bonnet. The walls of the coffeehouse had been painted cunningly to give the appearance of brickwork, but she saw now that they were wooden. Above the roof swung two broad, square sails. In the sky, at the end of long, strong tethers, tugged six or so diamond-frame kites, most of them only two feet across, but the largest was six feet wide, and was decorated with a twist of laurel on a white background.

‘You lose somink, love?’ asked a passing stevedore.

‘I lost a coffeehouse,’ Mosca answered indistinctly. ‘It… floated off down the river.’

The stevedore peered after the receding coffeehouse. ‘Half an hour late, too. ’Spect they were waiting for one of their regulars.’ This reply was somehow unsatisfactory.

Mosca tried again. ‘It floated away down the river.’

‘Wanted to catch it, did you? Well, the Laurel Bower stops on Tootle Street for sugar, that’s your best chance of boarding her this side of the river. Ye’ll have to run, though.’

And so, without pausing to question the strangeness, Mosca darted in the direction of his pointing finger.

She struggled down street after street, her eyes following the white kite above the roofline. And yes, at last, there was the coffeehouse, sliding to a halt alongside the jetty.

The door opened, and several men stepped out into the sun. One of them looked slightly familiar, and as Mosca