Aloren (14 page)

“They’re following us,” Floy said.

“Damn.”  I dove through someone’s legs, left a pile of silver, and started running. 

“Thief,” someone called.  I tripped over feet and knocked bodies aside, and a stream of coins fell through a hole in my skirts, attracting more attention. 

I broke into a sprint, neared the river, and thought of jumping the wall, into the place where the water lapped close.  Then Floy noticed the next tree growing from its stone plinth.

“The tree,” she said.  “Like Padlimaird said.” 

I turned my head and rammed into the balustrade.  The coins popped over the river, flashing like jumping carp. 

“Don’t jump after them.  The tree––it’s in blossom––”

I swept her out of my hair, and dashed around the plinth; folk were sitting on every stone of it.  A few boys jumped from their places to tussle on the ground. 

I bounded onto the stone and scrambled up the trunk. No one noticed; the branches were laden with white and my chemise kept me hidden, and I climbed to a comfortable fork. 

The wood smelled of green apples.  The sun glowed through the blossoms and wore on my eyelids. I sat still for a long time, pinching myself to keep awake.

The hanging never happened––the mob locked with the soldiers in another stalemate, and the action wound down to a steady seethe, and I stayed put, anxious still over the folk who’d chased me. 

I grew antsy and began knotting together a chain of apple blossoms.  The chain soon reached a handsome length, and I absently spooled it around the head of one of the boys, who had fallen asleep against the trunk.  The crowd had cleared from around the tree, leaving space on the plinth; and the other two boys were merrily playing dice. 

One of them glanced over at the sleeper’s head. “Hark at her ladyship,” he said to his friend, “the duchess of the daisies.”  The smaller boy doubled over with laughter; his cloak swept chips and silver from the stone.  “Max!” said the taller. “How shall I be compensated for all my hard work?” 

“You were losing, anyway.”

“Wasn’t.”

Max threw a chip at him; it struck the third boy instead, and he woke. “Throwing stuff?” 

“Forgive me, milady,” said Max.  “Almost got your bonnet.”

“What bonnet––” said the third boy, and a loop of the flowers fell over his eyes.  He pushed them from his head and saw me. “Look at that thing. More mange than person. Stay there.”  He stood up.  “Don’t want it spreading.” 

This struck a chord in me painful and funny all at once. Like hell I was staying there.  I swung from my branch and dropped in front of him.  He was a head taller than me, with tawny eyes.  A human. 

He put his arm over his nose.  “Filthy Eldine rat.” 

I put my fist in his mouth. 

His head hit the trunk with a great crack, and he crumpled over the plinth.  The smaller boy gasped and the other began to laugh.  I whirled on them, “Funny, is it?” 

The smaller boy whispered, “Let’s go find Mir.”  They left, the smaller dragging the bigger by the wrist.

The third boy lay quite still.  Between his feet a dandelion had slumped over.  “Floy.”  I squatted and touched it: the first thing I’d ever wilted. “Floy, I’m a woman.”

“That’s likely,” Floy said, and I began walking away.  “Where’re you going?”

“Away,” I said. 

“You can’t just leave him there.  Go and drop him in the river.”

“No.”

“They’ll rob him and trample him into a pulp.”

“I hope they castrate him, too,” I said. 

But something niggled in the back of my mind.  So I stumped back and took him up, one long leg under each arm, and dragged him down a ramp  to the river.  No one noticed, the crowd having moved away.  The boy’s feet stuck out in front of me, strapped into good leather sandals. His tunic darkened with muck, and his hair, too.

I dragged him across a strip of silt and pulled him into the water until it swilled over his face.

He gurgled and sat upright.

“Look at you in the mud,” I said. 

He wiped his face with his arm.  “What are you doing? Did the garbage pickers send you to piss all over me?” 

“Aye.”  I watched him shake his elbows free of muck.  “They picked too deep and came across your god-awful, stinking arse.” 

He stood up, towering over me, and I marveled that I had leveled him with one punch. I decided then was a good time to leave. 

He ran after me, tripping over his sandals, and I bounded up the ramp. 

Old Nat Breldin had been taken away to molder for another two months in the palace oubliettes, and most of the mob had dispersed.  So I ran towards the bustling quay. 

The boy proved remarkably nimble, squeezing through chests of tea and heaps of coal with a determination that made me nervous. 

Floy was beside herself: “Cut through those gamblers; slip into that sawyer’s yard, there’s an outhouse you can hide in; that hut has an upper story, try the doorknob; look, a sewer-pipe.”

“Ain’t crawling around the sewers, Floy.”  I pushed through a narrow quayside street and stopped in front of another way: an alley with a collection of stinking garbage, deep potholes, empty doorways, and walls scribbled over with coarse words, all slowly disappearing under a layer of soot.  It looked familiar.

“Keep going.”  Floy knocked against my head.  “He’d have to be really thick to follow you into there.” 

There was a dilapidated stone arch over the entrance.  I hid in the corner just behind it.  The boy burst through, tunic still dripping, and sprinted down the street.

“Well,” Floy remarked as my breathing slowed, “that proves he’s thick.”

I sucked on my teeth, taking a few steps after him, wondering when I had come this way before. I saw a sign hanging above a door, green in the daylight.  It’d looked black last night.  “It’s the tavern that gets hold of me letters.”

“Then we oughtn’t go any further.”

“I just knocked a boy off his head.”

“Luck,” said the sparrow.  “And you’re apt to run out.”

“You think me
lucky?”
I said.  And I walked on, with big, brave strides.

Turning a corner, I stumbled upon little, black-haired Bequen from last night.

She was agitated and didn’t glance at my face as she steadied me with her hand.  Once in the alley she broke into a run, and I stared after.  She went down a side street.  I continued down the way she’d come––a darker road that ended with the gleaming harbor. 

Walking along the gutter I heard a shout:  “
There
you are.”  The human boy ran full-tilt toward me.

I started into a stumbling run, looking about for a hiding place. Right before the harbor a small door stood open in a high wall.

I ran through it.  It was suddenly dark, and I stood rooted to the ground, waiting for my eyes to adjust. I heard boiling water and tinking metal, and the air stank so strongly of spirits my eyes watered.   

The room was built like the tavern boathouse, with a gate at the back for the water to come in.  On two stone docks stood a number of pear-shaped pots, much taller than me, with glowing ovens in the bottom.   They looked like giant lamps.  

Half-sunk in the harbor water were three wooden tubs filled with a dark liquid––I couldn’t tell how deep.  The stink came so obviously from the liquid that I backed away, hand to my nose.  Letters on the side glimmered in the light of a single lantern:
Grennandew 100 proof
.

“Whiskey?” I said. 

“Hide,” said Floy, and the boy’s feet thumped behind me.  I reacted too slowly.  He caught me by the front of my chemise, and dragged me back over to the tubs. 

He lifted me over the first; the fabric started ripping.  “Don’t look so frightened
,
” he said, face ghastly in the lantern light.  “When I’ve dropped you in I’ll throw the candle in after, so you can see your way out.”

But he must have been inexperienced in these kinds of situations; his feet were planted squarely, his groin unguarded. 

I slammed my knee up.  He howled, and I thumped onto the wood and swung him around by the tunic.  He lost his balance and fell backwards into the tub. 

He stood up with a great gasp, and whiskey sloshed over the sides.

Boots galloped on wood.  I turned and saw a tall woman running down a flight of stairs.  She jumped the last three steps and reached for the lantern.  “Someone’s robbing us, Martly.” 

I sprang towards the street door.  The woman threw herself in front of me, and I slipped and fell on my knees.  She dropped the lantern, catching me under the arms, and the lantern rolled over the stone towards the tub.  It was still lit.

“You’d better get out,” I told the boy.  He obliged very quickly, putting his arms on the stone and hauling himself up.  The lantern fell in with a soft
ploosh
, and an orange light flashed.  A low, blue flame spread over the whiskey, making the tub glow green. 

A man in a leather apron came down the stairs.  “There’s a nice batch,” he said.  “Smoked, triple distilled and burned off.”  And he laughed and laughed.

“You might laugh, Martly,” grumbled a bigger man who’d come down after him.  “That wash was two weeks in the make.”

A girl poked her head through the door at the top of the stairs.  “Smelled like a flower, too.”

“It was her done it, I think.”  The woman shook me by the arm.  “Stay up there,” she called to the girl at the top of the stairs.

“That little mouse?”  Martly looked incuriously at me.  “Did she come in to get warm?  Sometimes they do that.”

“And there’s that one.”  The woman pointed at the boy, who was inching toward the door.

The boy began to run.  “Grab him, Shadd,” said Martly.  The other man ran and grabbed the boy by the collar.  The boy jabbed his elbows about, and Martly walked over and twisted his arms up behind him so he was caught between the two men.

“Whoof.”  Shadd turned his head away.  “He’s all over whiskey.”

“He was in one of the tanks,” said the woman.  “I saw him crawl out.”

“She pushed me in,” said the boy.  He spoke in the trader’s tongue, and I wondered if he understood a word of what the others were saying.

“He’s a big lad, for a squeaker,” said Martly.  “Let’s bring them out to the street.  I can hardly see in here, I’m sweating rivers into me eyes.” 

The men dragged the boy outside, and the woman marched me after. 

Floy flew up my skirt.

“Good lord.”  Shadd pushed the boy against the wall and blinked in the sun.  “An owl.  No wonder he was such a big bounder.”

“They probably got in a scrap,” said the woman.

“She pushed me in.” The boy shoved against the men’s hands.  “And rolled the lantern at me.  Tried to
kill
me.”

“Good lass.” Shadd spat on the ground.  “The on’y way to kill a roach is by burning it.”

“Nasty talk,” said the woman.  “Thrash them and let them go.  Chelda,” she called into the door, “Chelda, bring me my stick.”  I heard shoes on the stairs, and the girl came out the door with a switch.  She was tall as the woman and had the same face, only younger.  The woman took the switch.  “Hold her,” she said to Chelda.  The girl sniffed at me.

“I’ve got to touch her?”

“Just do it, you’ve touched worse.”  Chelda turned me round and pressed me against the wall, keeping as far from me as she could.  Her mother thrashed the back of my legs, and I closed my eyes and bore it.  It hurt, but it wasn’t as bad as the things Fillegal did. 

Chelda loosened her hands and her mother said, “No, keep her there.  I’d like to find out her father.”

“You think she has a father?” Shadd shook his head. 

He took the switch from the woman and made to use it on the human boy, when a man called, “Shadd!”  He ran up the street towards us.  “Shadd, Martly––my wife said there was trouble.”  I saw the glint of his gold hair in the sun.  The Rielde from the tavern.  Another man came huffing after him.

“What’re you doing here, Ackerly?” said the woman. “ They’ll catch you and string you up.”

“Like they did to Nat?” Ackerly said.  He looked at the boy.  “What’s this?”

“Look at his feet,” said the other man.  He was the stout, black-bearded man from last night.  “He’ll make a nice ransom for poor Nat.”

“And after that”––Shadd swatted the boy with the stick––“his lordly parents can pay for my ruined whiskey.”

“If you don’t let me go,” said the boy, “I’ll have your ugly, knacker heads on a pike, and I’ll make them sing––”  Martly turned the boy’s head so his lips were pressed against the wall.  The boy kicked his backward and got Martly in the knee.  He moaned and bent, and the boy would have wiggled free if the stout man hadn’t moved in and locked him in place.

“Let him go,” said Ackerly.

“You off yer head?” said the stout man.  “An opportunity like this?”

“Is bound to go sour,” said Ackerly.

“But, look––”

“Go on, Haberclad.  Or my wife’ll kill me.  And you.”