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 wherry that flew the crossed crimson swords of the Parliament. To Mosca’s slight disappointment, everybody seemed more interested in hauling ropes than engaging in naval warfare. Each crew made a brief offensive gesture towards the other boat, but no one seemed to have their heart in it.
Mosca was also fascinated with the hauliers of the
Mettlesome Maid
, partly because she had never been able to watch anyone hard at work without being expected to do her part. Compared to the water-whitened villagers of Chough, they seemed tawny and terrible as tigers. Sun and sweat had left them hard and conker-brown, and they seemed to think nothing of the python-thick ropes they dragged as they strained their way along the bank. The jokes they exchanged were like clods of earth thrown at the face, meant good-humouredly – but meant to bruise as well.
The captain was a grim-smiling river-king named Partridge. There was something crooked in the make of his right wrist, as if it had been broken and never quite healed, and something crooked in the corner of his smile, as if that too had been broken and put back together slightly wrong.
‘I could never have stomached one of the Watermen’s little passenger wherries,’ Clent remarked, waving a dragonfly away from his face. ‘They are always in such a hurry, and one finds oneself rubbing elbows with so many undesirables.’
For a mad moment, Mosca almost believed that she and Clent had deliberately chosen the barge as the most elegant way to travel, and not because they were fugitives from the law. He seemed so comfortable and glad to have her company that she almost believed that he had not meant to desert her after all, that there had been a mix-up with the purse, that Mistress Bessel had lied about the goose . . .
Clent offered her some of the mellowberries, and she took them. Leaning over the edge of the boat to spit pips at the ducks, she caught sight of Clent’s reflection as he watched her with that queer, lean, calculating look she had seen on his face before. The taste of the berries bittered in her mouth, and she knew that he still meant to leave her or sell her to the authorities at the first opportunity.
For a savage moment, she thought of slipping ashore with his mysterious burlap package when the boat moored, and running away on her own. But she knew that she needed him. She had never been further than five miles from Chough – without a guide she would do little better than a tumbled fledgling. A twelve-year-old girl travelling alone, furthermore, would be an easy mark for footpads, gonophs and conmen. She had no contacts, no money, no friends. All she had was a homicidal goose . . . and Eponymous Clent.
In Mandelion, things might be different. Mosca squinted at a blurred memory. She had a recollection of her father talking about a ‘ragged school’ in Mandelion, and over the years her wishes had painted the memory with a false clarity. Surely he had said that the school never turned away a clever child? Surely he had said you could turn up with nothing but a shilling and a hunk of bread in your kerchief, and if you could read six fiendish pages without a slip of the eye they would welcome you in for the tiniest fee . . .
Mosca gave Clent a wide, friendly grin, which seemed to unnerve him, and took another mellowberry out of his hand. Of course, if she turned ‘evidence’ against Clent, perhaps they would give her a reward, and then she would at least have some money. But what could she tell them about him? Nothing much, nothing as bad as arson. And he would just unroll his tongue and talk his way off the gibbet, leaving her to take his place . . .
So . . . how to win the advantage again? Mosca’s eyes dropped for a tiny second to the package that sat between them. Somewhere inside lay the little packet he had been so eager to hide from Mistress Bessel. Perhaps later, if she and the parcel found themselves alone . . .
The sun slid to rest, and the western sky gleamed like a copper kettle in firelight. Mosca, watching the sun’s last gleam, saw it split by the flight of a buzzard, which seemed to douse the light in that instant with its black wings before swooping away to land on top of a haystack. Without warning, the hills which had been sunning themselves like so many contented dogs closed in, black and ragged as wolves.
As the wind became chill, the hauliers’ grumbles rose to an ominous level.
‘We’ll take our sup at the Halberd,’ Partridge declared. ‘Ye’ll dine with us.’
The Halberd had once been a little watchtower set up to prevent pirates sailing up the river from the sea and attacking inland towns. During the war, brimstone had bitten off its roof like the crust from a loaf, and pushed out one of the walls. The rubble remained, now moss-covered, and a rough roof of thatch had been used to shut out the sky.
The crew made the
Mettlesome Maid
fast, and all but two accompanied Clent and Mosca to the tavern’s door. Inside, the air was thick with pipesmoke and the moist scent of the earth floor and the cloying smell of overcooked tripe. To judge by their clothes and sunburned faces, most of the customers were boat crew or hauliers. They were, of course, all men. The tables were a jumble of upturned coracle wrecks, and long deck planks rested on barrels to serve as trestles. The seats were bales of greying straw. Against a far wall huddled a handful of straw mattresses, on each of which a man lay sleeping in his shirtsleeves.
They sat themselves at one of the wider coracles, Mosca noticing with a hungry pain beneath her ribs that a plate of small loaves and a jug of water were already set upon the table. She was also intrigued to notice that when he took up his ale, Partridge first swayed it over the loaves for a moment, before drinking. In Chough, everybody always waved their drinking cups over a jug of water to show that they were drinking a toast to King Prael, the ‘king across the Tosteroy Sea’. However, she knew that Partridge’s gesture was in honour of King Hazard, the ‘king across the Magora mountains’, as represented by the loaves.
At the next table a haulier spilt a little water on the table and wafted his cup over it, in honour of King Galbrash, the ‘king over the Fallowsmere Lake’. His friend seated opposite waved his tankard over the fingers of his own left hand, to show his allegiance to the Twin Queens, ‘the monarchs beyond the Jottland foothills’. A dozen or so royal allegiances seemed to be represented in the Halberd, and yet none of them showed any sign of leaping at each other’s throats amid a flurry of ale foam. The business of kings did not seem to be a fighting matter.