Fly By Night

‘What do we do, heap earth on it so it doesn’t get away?’

‘The Stationers! Fetch the Stationers! They’ll know what to do.’

The wind picked up, and the paper rolled itself back into a scroll, and tumbled gently towards the kennel ditch of the street, the crowd clearing before it with a scuffle of frightened feet. One larding-pin-seller, bolder than the rest of the throng, stepped forward, one hand shielding his eyes, and kicked a clod of horse manure on to the wicked paper. After this it lay, weighted to the cobbles, but still curled and uncurled its corners in a lazy, beckoning motion.

Five minutes later, a small cart racketed up, with two men in Stationers’ livery gripping their hats to their heads and their writing boxes to their chests. They dismounted, and with great care one used tongs to put the dangerous paper on a curious long-handled spade, held by the other. The Stationer with the spade took a moment to clean his spectacles, then surveyed the crowd sternly.

‘Did anyone look at it?’

‘He did! He did!’ The manure-kicker was pushed to the front.

‘No I never! Well, not hardly… ’sides, I can’t read.’

‘Ooh, what a lie, I saw his eyes moving from side to side like they was following words…’

‘We’d better take him along too, then. Come on, sir, into the cart, don’t make a fuss. If it turns out you can’t read after all, then you’ve nothing to worry about, have you? Otherwise…’ The paper-scooper and the hapless larding-pin-seller were loaded into the Stationers cart, and the bay mare nodded sleepily at a twitch of the reins and ambled into motion.

The cart had just reached the corner when a rock flew from somewhere in the crowd, and struck one Stationer solidly on the back of the skull.

‘That’s for Mr Pertellis!’ A youthful shout with no apparent owner.

The crowd turned for the source in vain. Amid the gasps of outrage could be heard murmurs of approval.

‘Radicals!’ bellowed one man, and, ‘Locksmiths!’ another. Both calls were taken up, but pell-mell, so that it was impossible to tell if they were accusations or rallying cries. The Stationer who had been struck cried, ‘Call the constables!’

Soon the rim of the crowd was buckling before a handful of men in the Duke’s colours who strode in shouldering muskets.

‘A rock…’

‘Locksmiths! Somewhere in the…’

‘If so, we’ll find them. You! Take off your glove! Let’s see your right hand!’ The Duke’s men barged through the crowd, muskets levelled, forcing each man in their path to strip off his right-hand glove. Mosca knew they were looking for the Locksmiths’ key brand.

Not far from Mosca a man in a ragged, brown coat shoved his way free of the crowd and bolted for an alleyway.

‘Stop!’ A Duke’s man levelled his musket. Footsteps continued to ring out from the alley.

A summer’s worth of thunder in an instant, and a surge of musket smoke. A woman standing next to Mosca screamed and clutched a powder-burned cheek. One petty constable sprinted into the alley.

‘There’s nothing but a thief’s brand on the fellow’s hand!’ came his cry. Amid the crowd, angry whispers fizzed to and fro like water beads on a griddle.

Perhaps the world has always been like this, Mosca thought as she pushed her way through the crowd. Like a broken honeypot that looks whole, but just holds together because the shards are resting in place and are glued together with honey. You just need to prod it a bit, and it all starts oozing apart. And perhaps, when Clent had cackled on her, the world would come oozing after Mosca in a mass of madness and misheard gossip, accusing her of mill-burning and mischief and multiple misdemeanours. She needed to find somewhere to hide.

Kohlrabi.

His favourite coffeehouse was the Hind at Bay. When it drew near to its usual mooring place on Merryhell Row, it became clear that a fracas was taking place on board. Two men had hit the wooden wall with such violence that they had knocked a hole in it, and now their upper bodies protruded through the splintered gash, where they struggled over a tiny pistol gripped between their interlocked fists. The ball rolled out of the barrel and hit the water with a sad little plish, but the combat continued unabated. A plum-faced lawyer shouted a hoarse diatribe against the Locksmiths, while a young apothecary said nothing, happy in the knowledge that a bitten eyebrow was worth a thousand words.

‘’Scuse me,’ Mosca called out to the two coffeemaidens busy trying to pull the combatants back from the drop, ‘but is there a Mr Kohlrabi supping there, please?’

‘Not this last hour, me dove,’ one called as she wound her fingers into the lawyer’s cravat and hauled him back by force. ‘Try in the cathedral, I would, dearie. He’s often there at this time.’

But this was no easy matter. The road to the cathedral was full of crowds and excitable voices. Mosca’s legs were weak and her arms were full of Saracen.

There were other faces in the throng as well, child faces with tight mouths, and eyes that followed her. Word of Mosca’s part in the arrest of Hopewood Pertellis had travelled fast. Grim-faced and grimy-locked, the children of the Floating School left their mops and their marbles and followed her to the doors of the cathedral, first at a trot, then at a jog, then at a run.

Darkness was kind to the cathedral, and hid the scars left by flames, war and time. Mosca saw only rich hanging tapestries and pillars of rose-coloured marble, whorled in whisker-fine gold leaf. Until now she had seen the Beloved only in their wooden, workaday faces, but here they were languorous in marble, some indolently holding a sword or a set of scales in a drooping hand. High in the dome above were arches where more Beloved appeared in attitudes of mild surprise, as if they had opened the wrong door by mistake and found themselves above a perilous drop.

In the middle of the main aisle stood a mighty marble font, full of dried rose petals. An inscription on the side explained that this was the last resting place of the Little Goodkin, three children who had been abandoned in the woods and starved to death, but whose skeletons returned to their village church a month later to shame their parents. Even Mosca had heard the tale that when a child was lost in a dark and lonely place the Little Goodkin would come to them and guide them home. The Little Goodkin had doubtless been responsible for keeping countless children from harm, for there is nothing like the prospect of acquiring three well-meaning but skeletal companions to persuade one out of dark and lonely places.

Despite her haste, Mosca took a moment to snatch a handful of the petals and rub them against her face in the time-honoured manner, before letting them fall back into the font.

‘Fenfenny,’ she whispered, the common corruption of the old prayer ‘Friends defend me.‘

… where is she is that her this way…

The whispers were not far behind.

The nearest wall was covered from floor to roof with the arched mouths of tiny shrines which in turn led into other shrines behind them, all part of the same interconnected warren. Most were too small and inaccessible to be visited easily, and rich worshippers generally paid a priest to carry their offering up to the correct shrine, while those of modest means were reduced to flicking coins up at the little arches that appeared in the front facade and hoping for the best.

Mosca stowed Saracen in a nook beside Goodman Blackwhistle of the Favourable Wind, then scrambled in through the nearest shrine opening, bruising her hands on coins. Some connecting passages were little more than cracks in the masonry, and as she squeezed up through them she tried not to imagine herself getting trapped like a sweep in a chimney kink. Just as the pressing wall of the Warren was stirring panic in her, she saw light ahead and realized that she had reached an empty shrine, set twenty feet above the cathedral floor.

… there she is where how did she get up there…

For a while Mosca heard scufflings around and below her, and then one by one the children of the Floating School emerged back from the Warren and peered up at her. She had no idea how she had reached her current precarious position, and it was pretty clear that they hadn’t either. They stood by the font of the Little Goodkin, and as they discussed her in whispers each reached without thinking into the font to rub a handful of petals against his or her face and murmur the traditional benediction. It almost seemed as if they had gathered to pay their respects to Mosca, and it was a shock when the first flung stone stung her shin.

But a new set of steps rang out across the mosaic floor, and soon the stones ceased to clack against the