Lamplighter (6 page)

“Amble ye by the dray, Master Come-lately,” Grindrod commanded. “Keep yerself available to tend their hurts.”

So Rossamünd walked, as did Assimus and Puttinger and the haubardiers, staying by the ox dray, ready if a script was needed. On the farther side of the woodland Rossamünd saw the crumpled bodies of the park-drag driver and his side-armsman. They had been mauled then tossed from the stampeding vehicle to land dead on the side of the highroad. Wrapped in canvas tarpaulins, they were laid on the dray alongside the remains of the two calendars.

The round hills of the Tumblesloe Heap loomed black against the starlit gray.The lanterns became more frequent: at last the cothouse was near. What swelling relief it was to finally spy the beacon flares and window-lights of the small twin keeps of Wellnigh House at the base of the hills. A pair of squat towers stood on either side of the Pettiwiggin, each fenced by a thick drystone wall. These were connected by a hanging gallery known as the Omphalon, a bridge with walls of solid wood and a steep-sloping roof that spanned the road. In this raised gallery were the lighters’ quarters, and the sight of lanterns winking from its narrow windows set Rossamünd’s thoughts to bed and sleep.

At last they entered the walled lane between the two keeps. Here they passed ornate warding censers, great brass domes that squatted in heavy three-legged stands on either side of the road. Within these domes, day and night, nicker repellents were burned, their poison fumes seeping through holes bored in the dull metal. On Rossamünd’s very first night at Wellnigh House he had sucked a lungful of their foul fetor and for an instant thought his end had come, but the wind had mercifully blown another way and he recovered. From that day he learned to stay upwind of the censers or hold his breath and shut his eyes till he had passed.

What relief it was to pass through the thick oak gates in the broad wall of the northern fastness and stand safe within the cothouse’s tiny foreyard.The unhappy deeds that had ruined the night were already common talk there, yet still the calendars received a barely civil reception. The long-faced Major-of-House was waiting for them in the yard and insisted on a brief conference with Grindrod while Rossamünd was made to remain in the cold. The lamplighter-sergeant looked mightily unimpressed with what he was hearing. Dolours approached them as they remonstrated under the light of a yard-lamp and the discussion came to an abrupt and obviously unsatisfactory end. The house-major raised a refusing hand, loudly declaring, “That is all, madam! I had my reasons.Take the matter up with our Marshal in Winstermill if you want further hearing.” He dismissed Grindrod and called for Rossamünd with an authoritative wave.

The young prentice hurried over dutifully while, with stony face, Dolours turned wearily on her heel and returned to her sisters-in-arms.

“I’m told these blighted women have taken a liking to you, boy,” the house-major said quickly, not stopping for the inconvenience of an answer, “so you can be their liaison. Meddlesome wenches—you may not find them so agreeable once you’ve spent time in their company. Take them now to the store on the farther side of the Omphalon. They may rest their troublesome heads there.”

Rossamünd groaned inwardly. He led the women through the windowless watch room on the ground floor of the north tower, pointing the way down narrow passages of dark wood and through the cramped rooms of a structure built for efficient military function rather than genteel comfort. Up the tight stairway to the gallery he took them, and over, along the access way of the raised gallery and by the night sounds of the already sleeping prentices, to their room beyond in the southern keep. He became aware that a hushed, earnest talk between Threnody and the bane Dolours—begun in the front watch room—had now become a repressed yet passionate struggle. As he stood at the top of the southern stairs to point the way down, he heard Threnody exclaim through clenched teeth with petulant words too low and hissing to distinguish.

Arriving at their hastily arranged quarters, the calendars testily reviewed the inadequate lodging. Crates and goods had been rearranged and foldable cots squeezed between, all still dusty and crawling with earwigs.

Embarrassed, Rossamünd bid them fair night with a stiff bow.

Despite their weariness, Dolours and the pistoleer returned the compliment, the bane saying, “Grace and manners. We are obliged to you, young lighter.You have been a great service to us.”

Threnody just frowned and, with a huff of spleen, lay on her ill-made cot.

His thoughts all for bed, Rossamünd went to his own lodgings, shuffling among the sleeping prentices, and threw himself down clothes, boots and all.

cothouse(s)
type of fortalice; the small, often houselike, fortresses built along highroads to provide billet and protection to lamplighters and their auxiliaries. Cothouses are usually built no more than ten to twelve miles apart, so that the lamplighters will not be left lighting lamps and exposed in the unfriendly night for too long. Their size goes from a simple high-house with slit windows well off the ground, through the standard structure of a main house with small attendant buildings all surrounded by a wall, to the fortified bastion-houses like Haltmire on the Conduit Vermis or Tungoom on the Conduit Felix.

 

 

R
OSSAMÜND woke, having slept very little, to the drum roll of “Stand While You Can,” a merry martial tune rattled out every morning at five-o’-the-clock to rouse the lantern-watch.

 

 

He gave a gentle groan. The common-quarter night at Wellnigh had been full of snores and night shouts and a paucity of proper rest. He should have been used to this: it was how he had spent all his sleeps at Madam Opera’s. Two months’ prenticing at Winstermill, however, with a cell of his own, had given him something he had never truly known, privacy. Cold and small though his cell might have been, with a cot lumpy like tepid slogg-porridge, he had come to prize its seclusion.

Rousing himself, Rossamünd rubbed grit-itchy eyes and sat, his head still swimming with nightmares of gnashing shadows and carriages attacked. Fouracres, the ambling Imperial postman he had met on his journey to Winstermill, had told him a lamplighter’s life was dangerous, and now the prentice well understood why.

Bright-limns were turned and their cool light slowly revealed the long, low quarters. Waking and rising, the other prentice-lighters hubbubbed with restrained excitement, retelling last night’s theroscade.

“What about that young calendar!” Hanging by his arms from one of the low, steeply angled rafters, Punthill Plod gave a saucy whoop that set the sleepier ones complaining. Mornings always were his better part of the day.

“Aye! She was a bit of a fine dig,” Tremendus Twörp leered, “though she couldn’t wit for a goose.”

“Did ye hear old Grind-yer-bones last night?” Plod enthused. “We might get marked.Ye heard him: said prentices ain’t been puncted in a precious long time!”

“I’m not getting one,” Rossamünd declared, with more gladness than he meant to show.

“Why not, Rosey?” Plod stopped his rafter swinging.

“Lampsman Puttinger said I did not have a hand in killing anything.”

“Oh” was all Plod said.

“Ye don’t sound too troubled, Rosey. Don’t ye want one?” Twörp added. “Perhaps there should ’ave been more so you could’ve got yerself a kill.” He gave a sardonic grin.

“That was more than enough for me,” Crofton Wheede put in, wide-eyed. “I thought we were done in and no mistaking! It was like how me poor mammy ended all over again . . .”

“Don’t start on yer poor mammy, Wheede!” Eugus Smellgrove called testily, still lying abed.

“Aye,” Giddian Pillow offered, “just be grateful they weren’t one of them gudgeon-baskets I heard tell of—them ones running wild out Gathercoal way.”

“They reckon a wit can’t stop a rever-man,” Wheede shuddered, clearly glad it had not been a brace of these vile creatures on the road last night.

Gudgeons! Rever-men?
Rossamünd sat up. “Where did you hear about that?” he called.

“When we were in Silvernook the other day,” Pillow answered. “Some fellow at the skittle-alley on the Hackstone Row says he’d come from Makepeace and that it was all abuzz about the quarry being haunted by some handmade beastie.”

Rossamünd nodded, aghast. “But how did it get there? They have to be put somewhere, don’t they? Rever-men don’t just wander about on their own—do they? Someone has to make them. Someone has to place them.”

“It probably got loose from a hob-rousing pit,” Pillow offered with a grim and knowing look.

Hob-rousing was the illegal practice of setting monsters against gudgeons and betting on the winner. Rossamünd thought of Freckle and the rever-man once locked in the hold of the
Hogshead
.
Maybe that was where they were headed?
He was doubly glad now he had set Freckle free. “But that’s wrong!” he exclaimed without thinking.

The others looked at him blankly.

“Well, I’ve heard it that the fluffs use the baskets for guards to protect all their jools and secrets,” Plod said finally, rolling his eyes weirdly. He wiggled his fingers as if a great shower of coins were pouring through them, causing a chuckle among his fellows.

“I heard it said there’s some poor fellow back at Winstermill who’s all agog from what they reckon was a gudgeon fight,” Smellgrove joined in, fully awake at last. “Was once a fine lighter but has never been right in his intellectuals since.”

“Clap it shut, little frogs!” Assimus snorted, startling them all, stomping into the room to rouse them out to the sip-pots to wash. “Who talks on rever-men at this fresh hour of day? Git ye up and git ye at ’em! Out for yer scrubbing! Move yer carcasses!”

A line of tubs ran along a wall in a small yard adjacent to the foreyard of the northern keep. While the shivering boys scrubbed themselves in the freezing twilight, the topic of talk soon shifted to more friendly adventures. First it was the mischief done on the last Domesday visit to Silvernook and mischief planned for the next—for Domesday was the common, weekly vigil-day and their one occasion of rest. Much to the other boys’ bemused disapproval, Rossamünd had never joined them on these half-drunken jaunts, preferring to spend his money on pamphlets and remain behind at the manse reading. In the time since he started at Winstermill he had ventured down to Silvernook only twice to get more pamphlets and to see if he might meet again with Fouracres, who had helped him so much on his way to prenticing. The restless postman had not had an opportunity to come to Winstermill. Silvernook and the dwellings of the Brindleshaws were his range, and he was so devoted to his “custom”—as he called the people he delivered to, he rarely had a common vigil himself. Their reunions had therefore been necessarily and unsatisfactorily brief, and Rossamünd was still hoping for a day where they might sit and talk in earnest.

The boys’ chatter changed again to the most common topic—in what cothouse each prentice thought he would like to serve once prenticing was done and they had all become lampsmen 3rd class.

“I want to go to Makepeace Stile,” Plod said eagerly. “They work close with them obstaculars to catch bandits and dark traders and such.”

“What about Haltmire?” pondered Twörp, leering at Wheede. “Ye get to see plenty of nickers there.”

“They don’t send lampsmen 3rd class out there, Twörp!” Wheede rose to the goad. “It’s too unfriendly for new lighters.”

“Aye,” said Smellgrove, “the way ye was whimpering last night I can see why.”

Rossamünd did not particularly care: where he was sent was where he was sent. Surely it would all be the same: light the lamp, douse the lamp, light the lamp, douse the lamp, light the lamp, douse the lamp, always waiting for some monster to spring and deliver a horrible end . . .

Rossamünd contrived to wash only his face and not remove his shirt before being herded back to the gallery to dress in full. Today was the day when he was due to change his nullodor: the Exstinker he had promised both Fransitart and Craumpalin to wear, splashed on the cambric sash wound about his chest, under his clothes. But his precious Exstinker was back at Winstermill, wrapped up in an oilcloth at the bottom of his bed chest at the base of the lumpy cot.

Before putting on his quabard—the vest of rigid proofing all lighters wore over their coats—he stared at the embroidered figure upon it. Stitched in thread-of-gold was an owl displayed wings out, talons reaching, sewn over panels of rouge and leuc—red and white. Sagix Glauxes Rex—the Sagacious Imperial Owl—the sign of an Emperor’s man.
For the Glory of Ol’ Barny indeed!