Strange painted shop signs swung slowly above their heads like gallows fruit. A dagger through an apple. A bird with a broken neck. A bone. A set of keys. A set of keys. Keys, everywhere. A Locksmith town.
Dark figures looming in this street and that, forcing Mosca and Clent to weave like fish. A hand with missing fingers reaching out through a shutter to throw some slops into the street. A slight figure sitting aloft on a gallows arm, swinging its legs.
The streets all seemed to be in different places, but Mosca knew that the castle was on the north side of the town. To reach it, they only needed to keep the dying streaks of sunset to their left. At last they reached the perimeter wall of the castle courtyard. Mosca followed Clent through the entrance arch at a sprint, only to cannon into his back as he came to a dead halt.
The castle on the other side of the courtyard was no longer barren and unlit. Reddish lantern light flickered in every arched window. Silhouetted figures spiked the parapets. At the crest of the highest tower flapped a large black flag with a set of silver keys patterned on it.
Mosca emitted a scream in miniature, a distant-sounding squeak. A similar noise seemed to have come from Clent’s open mouth. They locked eyes.
‘Quaternary plan!’ gasped Clent. ‘Creative panic!’
A second later, Mosca was taking a crash course in creative panic. The most important part of it appeared to be bolting at high speed back through the narrow alleys, taking turns at random and fleeing from any alarming noise that sounded nearby. Bouncing off street corners and ripping clothes on torch brackets appeared also to be essential features. But Mosca tightened her fists and gasped the cold air and kept herself a pace behind Eponymous Clent. Right now he was running pell-mell with peril at his heels and counting on his instincts to save his skin. He had been doing that his whole life and appeared to be rather good at it.
The alleys threw all sounds this way and that, so that you could judge the direction of none. There was a sound like sleighbells behind them. No, it was in front of them. No . . . to the right . . .
‘The Jinglers – they’re on all sides, Mr Clent!’
Clent halted, clearly having reached the same conclusion. Then, unexpectedly, he lunged into an alleyway.
As he did so, Mosca realized a little way down the alley a door had just opened a crack to admit a slight figure carrying a ewer. From within, a weird clattering uproar could be heard. Before the door could shut again, Clent barged through the closing gap. Mosca barrelled in after him, and slammed the door to behind her.
The dimly lit room in which Mosca found herself was very small, and was made all the smaller for being full of hanging washing, tallow smoke and confusion. From all sides came a bewildering cacophony of metallic clangs, clatters and chimes, and yells, which had grown all the more confused and high-pitched with Mosca and Clent’s unceremonious arrival.
The ewer-bearing figure they had pushed in behind turned out to be a sickly-looking youth of about fourteen with white-lashed eyes and hollow cheeks. Next to the hearth, a dark-haired woman of middle years and height stopped beating two empty pans together, her jaw falling open with surprise. Another woman beside her half rose from her worn mattress and stared at Mosca and Clent with hostility and fear through the damp strings of her hair. A youngish man with a nose like squashed dough dropped the rusty handbell he had been ringing and snatched up a cudgel. All four of the strangers had a pallid, unhealthy look, bruise-coloured shadows under their eyes.
‘Stay back!’ bellowed Clent, snatching up a poker and brandishing it alarmingly. ‘We are not to be crossed!’ And red-faced and wide-eyed as he was, he did indeed look wild enough for anything. Then again, so did the inhabitants of the room, with their inexplicable cacophony.
‘You get you gone . . . You get you gone or I’ll . . .’ the young man was snarling in a way that showed his teeth.
Mosca grabbed the solitary rushlight and stood with it raised close to the drab hangings that strove to hide the damp of the walls.
‘Hush your cackling, all of you, or I’ll burn the chirfugging house down!’ she yelled.
There was a moment of silence, broken when the woman on the mattress fell back with a whimper that rose into a full-throated wail. Mosca was filling her lungs to scream her threat again, when her eye was caught by something strange about the woman’s outline. Not even puffed skirts could leave someone so pear-shaped. No, there was only one explanation for a great, domed belly like that . . .
Clent appeared to have noticed as well, for he turned faintly grey and lost his grip on the collar of the pale-haired youth with the ewer, who scampered to the fireside.
‘That’s it!’ The dark-haired woman by the fireside had scrambled to her feet, her eyes somewhat manic, rebellious hairs escaping the confines of her braided bun. ‘That’s what we need! Again! Quickly!’
Mosca faltered under her zealous, glittering gaze.
‘What . . . ?’
‘Scream! Quickly! You’ve a fine pair of lungs, let’s hear you use them again! Our “scaring” won’t work unless we get some more sound!’
The woman on the floor clenched her eyes shut and gave a small pained whimper.
‘He’s coming, Mistress Leap. I don’t think he’ll wait much longer . . .’
‘Hold your siege there, Blethemy, he’s not here yet,’ the dark woman muttered. ‘We’ll scare him off for that half an hour we need, or burst our lungs trying. You, sir!’ Clent shook himself out of his paralysed horror just in time to catch a bouquet of bundled spoons flung at his chest. ‘Rattle them for all you’re worth. And you, lass – come to the fireside and take these!’ The rushlight was firmly and fearlessly snatched from Mosca’s hands, and suddenly she was gripping the handles of two heavy, battered-looking pans. ‘Bang them together and scream! Tell the world you’re setting fire to the house, so the little one’s skithered to come out!’
‘But . . .’
‘What . . . ?’
‘Wind and whistles! If you’re going to argue,’ Mistress Leap snapped, settling herself down by her patient once more, ‘then at least do it at the tops of your voices!’
The young man launched into a bellow that startled all of them, and Clent responded with a shocked-sounding yell, and the youth pitched in with a yodelling wail to show solidarity, and Mosca released the scream she had wanted to give vent to ever since she had seen Goshawk riding past. Everyone rattled cutlery, stamped feet, banged pans, rang Clamouring Hour bells or beat pewter plates like gongs.
Meanwhile Mistress Leap unfolded a great bundle and pulled out a slope-backed chair, a tiny metal bath, folded linen and some small bottles. Evidently she was some form of midwife.
‘I’M GOING TO BURN YOU ALL!’ screamed Mosca.
‘THAT’S BETTER! HOW LONG HAS SHE HAD THE PANGS, BLIGHT?’ Mistress Leap asked in a confidential screech.
‘SIX HOURS!’ shouted the young man, veins standing out on his face with the effort of continual bellowing. ‘COULDN’T SEND FOR NOBODY – WE DIDN’T EXIST . . .’
‘THAT’S ALL RIGHT, BLIGHT,’ answered the midwife in a kindly banshee wail, patting at his hand. ‘NOW, BLETHEMY, I NEED YOU TO TRY TO RELAX.’
The prone woman nodded feebly. Mosca could see now that it was perspiration that made her hair straggle.
Now that Mosca was seated closer to the hearth, the dark midwife’s features were clearer. She was probably nearer forty than thirty, but had a fine-wired bone structure that gave shape and character to her face. A fan of lines creviced the corner of her eyes, the tidemark of a thousand smiles. Despite the drabness of her dress and the pallor of her skin, the brown hair under her linen cap was tied up into braided whorls bristling with pins, from which only a few spidery wisps escaped. All this could have been confidence-inspiring if she had not been battering the coal scuttle with the ladle in her free hand.
‘NEVER LIKE HAVING MEN IN MY BIRTHING CHAMBER,’ she shrieked conversationally. ‘CANNOT BE HELPED THOUGH. FACE THE WALL, WILL YOU, BOYS?’
Clent, the pale youth and the young man with the squashed nose all obediently turned to face the wall.
The midwife shouted a question at Mosca several times before it was finally audible.
‘I SAID. WHAT. IS. YOUR. NAME?’
‘MOSCA MYE!’ The name was out before Mosca had time to think.
‘CONGRATULATIONS, MOSCA MYE. YOU ARE ABOUT TO HELP DELIVER A BABY.’
While the menfolk obediently yelled at the unoffending wall, Mosca helped the dark-haired Mistress Leap to guide the pregnant woman into the slope-backed birthing chair and then returned to pan-banging. Mosca had just about gleaned enough to guess that the ruckus of the ‘scaring’ was designed to persuade the baby that the world outside its mother was far too noisy, so that it would hold off from being born until everything was quieter.
Mosca banged the pans with her eyes closed, because there was something disturbing about looking at the stretched stomach of the pregnant woman and watching her skin glisten as she gasped for breath. And yet she could not help sneaking glances now and then, fascinated by the idea of an angry little scrap of life striving to force its way into the world. The fire was stoked to heat a kettle of water and a little crock of oil that filled the air with the smell of almonds.
The half-hour passed with painful slowness, the midwife consulting her battered pocket watch again and again. At last she called for silence.
‘He’s coming.’ Her voice was hoarse from continual strain. ‘Everybody stop; it’ll do no more good. He won’t hold off any longer.’
Even after the ‘scaring’ had ended, the birthing took a long time. For what seemed an age, the midwife talked in a quiet calming tone like one soothing a stallion with colic. The pregnant woman’s face was creased and flushed, and she gave a series of long, pained sounds of effort, like somebody trying to heave a cart off their chest.
‘Take her hand,’ said the midwife. Mosca obeyed, and found her fingers all but crushed in the pregnant woman’s grasp. Everything smelt of sweat, tallow and almonds, and Mosca watched the face of the mother-to-be like one hypnotized. Making a new life. A new person, right here and now.
‘There he comes . . . just a little more now, Blethemy . . . once more . . . and there he is . . .’
The mother slumped back on her little chair, her face so slack that for a moment Mosca feared she had died. Her chest was still moving, however. While the midwife was busy with wet cloths and linen and her knife, Mosca hung on to the mother’s hand, watching little moth-wing pulses flutter in the woman’s temples and throat.
Even after the midwife had cleaned up the baby in the miniature bath, it was still a prune-faced thing with a gravylike splat of dark hair and a swollen purple knot on its stomach. The midwife gave it a business-like slap and it emitted a vibrating cry, tiny fists trembling as it was slathered in oil and swaddled in clean linen. Mosca had seen mother cows, cats and dogs drop their young into the world like glistening parcels. This birth had been just as noisy and messy, and yet somehow it felt different.
Once upon a time that happened to me.
The new mother’s damp lashes fluttered as her eyes opened and sought out the midwife, who was cradling the child in one arm and fumbling for her pocket watch with her free hand.
‘How long . . . ? Which . . . ?’
‘Four minutes after the hour.’ Mistress Leap closed her pocket watch with a click, and sat back. ‘Did you hear that, Blethemy? An hour sacred to Goodlady Twittet. He waited just long enough. You can give your boy a daylight name.’
Blethemy, the new mother, managed a smile of exhaustion and relief, and then her face unexpectedly crumpled and she started to sob.
Half an hour after the birth the midwife had settled Blethemy back on her low bed with a cup of spiced wine and a loaf of bread. The new child, who had been swaddled into fat caterpillar proportions, lay over her heart. Mosca thought of her own mother dying in childbirth and wondered where she herself had lain on her first night of life.
‘What ’bout them?’The young man nodded fiercely towards Mosca and Clent. ‘They can’t stay here. Least of all
him
.’
Noting the direction of his pointed gaze, both Mosca and Clent made belated attempts to clutch at and conceal their visitor badges.
‘No.’ Mistress Leap tied up her bundle again, her brow creasing as her eye rested on Clent’s daylight badge. ‘No –
there’ll be a muckle of trouble if it’s even known we’ve talked to them. We’re done for if we harbour them.’
‘What? You can’t throw us out on to the streets!’ Mosca was shrill with outrage. ‘We screamed our lungs raw for you!’
‘Yes, we can.’ Mistress Leap’s tone was one of mild, brisk finality. ‘You’ve done us a good turn, so we will not report you, but now you must shift for yourselves.’ She heaved her great bundle on to her back and moved to the door.
‘I think,’ Clent murmured under his breath, ‘that we are in some distinct danger of outstaying our welcome.’
There was indeed an undeniable tension in the room again. Blight hovered protectively by Blethemy and their new child, his cudgel drooping in his hand, and the pale youth appeared to be fiddling with something sharp that gleamed in the firelight. The truce seemed to be over.
Heart in her mouth, Mosca saw the door opened again, the moonlit street looking daylight bright after the smoky murk of the room. Reluctantly she and Clent followed the midwife out on to the street.
‘Madam,’ Clent began as soon as the door closed behind them, ‘if there is an ounce of compassion in you . . .’
Mistress Leap responded by placing a finger to her lips, glancing up and down the street and beckoning them to follow her.
‘You’ll come home with me,’ she whispered, almost inaudibly. ‘Couldn’t say so before the others, or Blight would have been down to report all three of us, quick as a half-inch wick. He’s a good boy, but fear has made weasels of better men. Hold still a moment.’
She took out a blackened rag, and spent a moment or two daubing soot on to the badges of Mosca and Clent, just enough to dull the bright borders and darken the pale wood of Clent’s brooch.