Fly By Night

So, Clent did have a destination in mind… he had sent her away so that he could make his arrangements… and he was headed for Mandelion, the very city where her father had once lived…

‘He’s taking a boat downriver, then,’ Mosca said, her hot, black eyes fixed on Mistress Bessel’s face, ‘an’ he won’t want to hire a Waterman.’

The Company of Watermen, originally a guild of boatmen carrying passengers, had long since taken on the task of policing the river. If Clent was nervous enough to change his clothes, he would probably avoid the Watermen.

‘You know which boat he means to take.’ Slowly Mosca uncurled her fist again, and separated the farthing from the other scraps.

Mistress Bessel watched with a smile that was still indulgent, but the warmth had drained from her eyes.

‘You had a pipe when you come in,’ she said evenly.

Mosca tugged the pipe out of her pouch, and slapped it into Mistress Bessel’s waiting hand, along with the farthing.

‘Well, I told you nothing, mind, and you chanced on him by your own good luck. He’s taking passage with the Mettlesome Maid, a barge fastened on the near bank. She flies a flag for King Hazard – you cannot miss her.’

Mosca took a couple of rapid steps towards the door, and then halted. Something was missing

‘Where’s my goose?’

‘The goose?’ Mistress Bessel whistled through her teeth regretfully. ‘Eponymous said it was his. I give him the names of some contacts in Mandelion and told him a place where he could stay, and he give me the goose in exchange. You better take the matter up with him when you find him.’

Mosca clenched her fists, and bristled like a cat.

‘Saracen!’ she screamed at the top of her lungs. ‘Foxes!’

Around the doorway a muscular white neck curled questingly. Into the shop proper came Saracen with his sailor’s strut, making a sound as if he was swallowing pebbles and enjoying it. Mosca knelt and reached for him.

‘Farthingale!’ In answer to Mistress Bessel’s sharp cry, a young man with an armful of stone nettles put his head around the door. ‘Take that goose away and keep it under control, will you?’ Farthingale wiped his free hand on his apron, and went to obey.

Rather a lot of things happened in quick succession. Since most of them happened after Mosca had ducked under the nearest table and pulled her new bonnet down over her face, she could only guess at their nature. However, they were loud, and violent, and sounded as if they might be expensive.

‘Throw a rug over it, boy, and grab it!’ she could hear Mistress Bessel shouting.

Farthingale must have followed her instructions, since a moment later there was a hoarse cry of pain and a sound like the counter breaking. To judge by his yelling, though, Farthingale was still alive, which relieved Mosca. He was bellowing a great many words that were new to Mosca and sounded quite interesting. She memorized them for future use.

At last she raised the broad bonnet brim and gazed cautiously out into the shop. The floor was awash with the chalky shrapnel of shattered leaves and shivered ribbons. Through the debris swaggered Saracen, trailing a hessian rug like a cloak, a sprinkling of stone dust across his orange beak. Farthingale had taken refuge behind the wreckage of the counter, and was cupping one hand over his bloodied nose. Mistress Bessel had scrambled on to a rickety chair, her skirts hitched. The wood beneath her portly weight creaked nervously as the goose strutted barely a yard from her feet.

Mosca emerged, carefully grabbed an armful of goose, and bobbed a hurried, inelegant curtsey to her hostess.

‘I am very sorry, Mistress Bessel,’ she explained hurriedly. ‘Saracen has an antipathy to strangers.’ She had long treasured the word ‘antipathy’, and was glad of a chance to use it.

She left the shop at a weak-legged walk. It surely could not be long before Mistress Bessel sent a constable after her anyway, but if she ran the woman might think to shout ‘Stop, thief!’, and then she would have the whole street at her heels.

Amid the forest of swaying masts, she spied a yellow flag upon which rippled the Grouse Rampant, the heraldic device of King Hazard. The Mettlesome Maid was a hayboat, and a heavily loaded one at that. The crew were doing their best to cover the bales with sacking, while the gulls tugged and scattered the hay across the deck.

Pulling her mob cap down to hide her white eyebrows, Mosca struggled through the crowd of impatient hauliers. A heated discussion appeared to be taking place on deck.

‘… a degree of haste would be appreciated.’ Clent’s tones were unmistakable.

‘Not for that price. After all, I run the risk. If the Watermen find out I’m carrying passengers ’gainst their rules, they’ll hole my boat as sure as rocks.’

‘Uncle Eponymous!’ squeaked Mosca, and reddened as a number of tanned faces turned grins upon her that glittered like hot tar. ‘I spoke to the wherry captain and he’ll take us for your price…’

The captain of the barge looked a little taken aback, but this was nothing compared to Eponymous’s start at being greeted by his ‘niece’.

‘Your niece?’ The captain seemed to be reckoning the odds of losing his passenger. ‘Well, can’t leave a lass standing on the wharfside wi’ these villains. Your price, then, and sixpence more for the girl, and we’ll leave it at that.’

Mosca was handed aboard, and delicately seated herself on a bale next to her ‘uncle’.

‘How resourceful of you,’ he murmured under his breath. ‘I was just arranging our… er… I see you have your…’ His eyes dropped to Saracen.

‘Mistress Bessel decided she didn’t want him after all,’ Mosca said carefully. As she spoke Mistress Bessel’s name, she recalled the interesting words she had heard Farthingale yelling at the top of his voice. ‘Mr Clent,’ she asked meekly, ‘what does “pixelated” mean?’

‘Deranged. Having had one’s senses stolen by the fairies,’ Clent replied promptly.

‘And pyewhacked feathrin?’

‘I believe that is meant to suggest a bird possessed by the devil.’

‘And chirfugging?’

‘Ahem. I think I shall tell you that when you are a little older.’

For the first mile or so, Mosca sat tensely among the bales, expecting every moment to hear cries from the bank. She felt sure that the barge would be ordered ashore by the river police of the Watermen’s Guild, and she would find herself dragged back to Kempe Teetering for arson and goose-theft and hanged without delay. Clent, she had no doubt, would sell her out immediately to the constables if they were apprehended.

Somehow, though, as the barge eased its way through the lapping leagues, the sun started to seep into her head, and it began to seem possible, just possible, that she would not end the day dangling from the Kempe Teetering bridge as a new scaregull. It was probably the new clothes, she decided. She felt as if she had borrowed somebody else’s body and somebody else’s life, and would probably find herself back in her own before very much longer.

The sun pricked holes in the weave of her hat and danced from ripple to ripple as the Maid eased its way through a haze of midges and a chase of jewelled damselflies. As the barge approached, moorhens abandoned their gossiping in mid-river, and in the green darks among the nettles coots crouched and stared down their white beaks.

Each vessel they passed flew a flag proudly announcing its royal allegiance. In theory, everybody in the country agreed that the Realm needed a monarch again, and was on tenterhooks to discover who the Committee of Kingmakers would choose to fill the throne. In practice, the Committee had been on the brink of a decision for twenty years, and many of the would-be kings and queens waiting in exile had died and handed on their claims to their children. In the meantime the Realm had broken up into a series of smaller city-states, each avowing allegiance to a different distant monarch, and leaving only the Capital truly under the control of the Parliament.

In theory, Chough lay in an area where everybody supported King Prael. In practice, Mosca knew nothing about him except that all the carvings of him looked rather old, and gave him a long chin.

As she watched, a barge painted with the Weeping Owl heraldry of King Cinnamon the Misjudged passed by a