When I looked down again, I found that an extraordinary fracas had broken out just in front of me.
I had reached the entrance to the marketplace, and at first I thought I was seeing a repeat of the scene I had watched on the day of my sale, when my brother had forced his way past the police, but I soon saw that this was different. In particular, everything was happening on the far side of the gateway, and all the police on this side of it were doing was standing and watching with amused expressions, in between scrutinizing People going in and out.
A tall woman and a little wizened man were being harassed by what I took to be two unusually persistent beggars.
She was well dressed in a blouse and skirt embroidered with Popcorn flowers and wore her hair elegantly braided. He wore a tattered cloak, and his head was bent so far over that all I could see of it was the very top, which was the colour of a heavy frost. His arms and legs were mostly hidden by the cloak, although the fingers of one hand were visible, their sinews standing out as they gripped the material, bunching it together to hold the garment closed around him. He must be feeling the cold, I thought, although it was a mild day.
As I drew closer I realized that their antagonists were a couple of itinerant pedlars, trying, somewhat over-enthusiastically, to sell the white-haired man cures for the diseases of old age.
‘What’s the trouble, old man? Cataracts? We’ve just the thing for cataracts. Lizard-shit and soot. Provided you rub it in just the way I tell you, it’s a guaranteed cure.’
‘I think it’s haemorrhoids,’ the other one said. ‘Now, have I got the enema for you! You just boil up these herbs…’
‘Just go away and leave him alone, won’t you?’ the woman cried suddenly. ‘Otherwise I’ll call the police!’
Her voice was striking: surprisingly deep, not loud, but clear and well-modulated, as though she had been coached, in the way the children of lords and youngsters in the House of Tears were taught to speak. It drew my attention to her appearance. She had been a beauty, and although she was no longer young — I guessed she was a little younger than I, a few years short of forty — still she looked striking. Her eyes were so dark as to be black, or nearly so, and her skin was unusually pale, with none of the yellowish tinge that would have suggested its colour came out of a jar, unless it was a very expensive one. Her goal, and that of her ancient companion, was clearly the marketplace, but one of the pedlars was standing between I them and the entrance. ‘Look, let me show you. Having trouble passing water? You just take an extract of some roots I’ve got and squirt it up through a tube into your member…’
‘I said go away!’ the woman snapped, flapping at the man with her hands.
‘It’s a pity,’ said one of the policemen to nobody in particular. ‘If those two tried that in here we’d nick them for trading without a licence. As it is, she’ll have to wait for the parish police to come along. Or for them to get fed up and move on to their next victim.’
‘What if somebody sent them on their way?’ I asked.
‘Nothing to do with us.’ The policeman eyed my scrawny frame, with all its signs of recent ill-treatment, with interest. ‘If you want to have a go, we could do with a laugh!’
‘I…’ I swallowed. Something about the woman had stirred up an impulse to intervene, but I had no idea how. I had never been much of a fighter, even though, like all priests, I had learned something of soldiering as a youth and had served in the army. And these two pedlars were substantial specimens, each of them bigger than I was and neither, I could safely assume, suffering the after-effects of being made to live in a cage.
Unfortunately the idea of my tackling them was rapidly growing in popularity. The policeman had told his mates, and several passers-by had stopped to watch. I heard bets being placed on the outcome.
‘Go on, then,’ said a voice behind me. I looked around to see a burly man hefting a bag of cocoa beans, presumably his stake, in his hand. ‘What are you waiting for?’ A broad hand shoved me between the shoulder blades, hard.
Wishing my elder brother were with me, I reluctantly stepped through the gateway and up to the nearest pedlar, the one blocking the woman’s way into the marketplace. He had his back to me.
Excuse me,’ I said, interrupting his sales talk. ‘Do you have anything for bruises? A salve or a poultice or anything like that?’
The man half turned but kept his eye on the woman and the old man in front of him, as if unwilling to abandon them in favour of a fresh potential customer. Probably a victim who volunteered himself was too good to be true, in his eyes.
‘I have,’ he said gruffly. That was not surprising: I imagined he would claim to have a cure for death without blushing. ‘Why?’
‘Because you may need it,’ I said in my lowest, most menacing voice. ‘Now get away from these two and leave them alone!’
That got his attention, at least. He turned hilly towards me and looked down, taking in my appearance at a glance. ‘What?’
‘I told you…’ I managed to say, before he hit me in the stomach.
At first I did not feel the pain. I just found myself on my back, but doubled over so that my legs were waving in the air like a beetle’s when it cannot get itself upright. Then
