‘All right, my little linnet, I’ll add a bit more if you’ll throw in the goose.’ His smile was probably meant to be winning.
‘No!’ Mosca’s cry was echoed by Clent, who took her by the shoulder and guided her away from the haggler. ‘Trust me, sir,’ Clent added over his shoulder, ‘I am doing you the greatest of services.’
‘Mr Clent,’ whispered Mosca, ‘what shall we do if the money is short? Mr Clent?’
Clent had glanced over his shoulder and frozen, one hand creeping to his cravat as though he feared to find a noose there. Mosca risked a look behind her and felt her heart plummet like a stunned starling.
Struggling to the top of the track and into the shanty village was a familiar figure, wisps of auburn hair escaping from its mob cap, its freckled face strawberry-red with anger and effort. It was Mistress Jennifer Bessel. She did not appear to have spotted them yet, but she was barely twenty yards away and it could only be a matter of time.
Both Mosca and Clent instinctively ducked to avoid her view, and Mosca offered no resistance when Clent grabbed her wrist and dragged her away into the crowd and towards the gatehouse.
Once in the thick of the crowd, Mosca dared to raise herself on tiptoes, curious to see if she could peer past the gatehouse and catch a glimpse of the river and bridge, or perhaps even Toll on the far shore. However, here the crowds were denser and more urgent, and one short girl had no hope of seeing past the crush of adult bodies.
Worse still, there was little chance of two new arrivals pushing their way to the front. The shrill tones of Mistress Bessel were now all too audible. By the sound of it, she was mere yards behind them, and asking after ‘a girl with a goose’.
‘Coming through! Coming through! Message for the guards!’ Clent called out hastily, and his words carved a narrow pass through the throng. When Mosca, Clent and Saracen reached the front, they found what looked like half a dozen guards holding the crowds back from the portcullis and the great door behind it.
Arms aching with Saracen’s weight, Mosca watched with her heart in her mouth as the coins were counted out of Clent’s purse one by one into the hand of the leader of the guard. There was a pause. The coins were stirred with a forefinger. A nod.
As they were allowed past the line of guards the mood of the crowd changed, and the glances cast upon them became outraged, even hostile, as if they had broken a rule somehow by having enough money.
A cranking grind, and the portcullis was winched a yard or so clear of the ground, and Mosca and Clent were encouraged to duck under it while the guards held the rest of the crowd at bay. They were through the gate, and the portcullis began lowering behind them, inch by jolting inch.
‘Stop!’
Mosca flinched at the bellowed word and spun around. Pushing her way through the crowd behind them, she could see Mistress Bessel, her ice-blue eyes fixed upon Mosca’s face.
‘That’s her!’ Mistress Bessel jabbed a finger in her direction. ‘That’s them – the thieves – the skirling bandrishes! Raise the portcullis again! There is a magistrate in Grabely who—’
‘Sorry, madam.’ The guard touched his forelock. ‘These people have just paid entry – they are in Toll now. The Grabely magistrate has no sway here.’
‘What?’ Mistress Bessel stared in disbelief as the portcullis finished its descent with a resounding clang, then glared through it at Mosca and Clent with such intensity that Mosca feared the metal grille might melt.
‘Friend of yours?’ one of the guards asked Clent in an undertone.
‘Er . . . not precisely.’ Clent took a few surprisingly nimble steps clear of the portcullis. ‘Ha . . . this lady is, ah, a very sad case . . . fell into a melancholia and lost her wits after her shop burned down and incinerated her husband . . .’
‘. . . And now when she’s in her fits she thinks Mr Clent here is her husband so she follows him everywhere . . .’ Mosca shrilled helpfully.
In the face of this assertion, Mistress Bessel went the most radiant shade of fuschia-pink, and proved incapable of anything more than throttled frog-noises in the depths of her throat.
‘. . . And she will make up any lies to be near me,’ huffed Clent.
‘. . . Even landed him in prison before now, so she could bring him flowers and poetry each day . . .’ added Mosca.
‘You . . . scampergrabs!’ Mistress Bessel appeared to have lost the ability to breathe. ‘You . . . scale-tongued . . . maggoty . . .’
‘You see how it is.’ Clent kept his demeanour solemn and compassionate despite executing a high-speed backwards caper. ‘Mad as a mushroom minuet. Alas. A tragic figure.’
The guard peered out at Mistress Bessel. There was little in her stocky figure to suggest melancholy or wilting devotion, but at present there was plenty to indicate insane rage, and the guard also took a step or two away from the grille around which Mistress Bessel’s plump fingers were now gripped.
‘All right, I’ll make sure the boys outside the gate know about her. And don’t worry – unless she’s got the money to pay admission, she won’t be troubling you.’
‘I’ll find you out, my honeybumbles!’ Mosca could hear Mistress Bessel shouting as the gatehouse door swung open before them. ‘I’ll reach you, my dumplings!’
‘Follow me,’ muttered the guard. ‘I’ll take you across the bridge so the Committee of the Hours can talk to you.’
As she followed Clent and the guard further into the gatehouse, Mosca could not quite resist pausing in the doorway to wave adieu to Mistress Bessel with one of her own handkerchiefs.
They found themselves in a short, unlit corridor, with a large number of pikes and halberds propped in racks against the walls. Emerging at the far end through an open arch, they found themselves staring down the length of the bridge.
The bridge itself was an impressive effort in timber some twenty feet long, its planked walkway flanked by hundreds of Beloved carved from black wood, their faces ravaged by weather-cracks. But it was not the bridge itself that took Mosca’s breath away. Without warning, the ground had run out.
Where the bridge began, the earth dropped away into sheer, giddying cliff face. On the other side of the abyss rose another cliff, interrupted here and there with the chalky streaks of waterfalls, and a few small trees that had decided to make the best of things and grow sideways out of the sheer face. Between them lay a plummeting gorge, at the base of which a seething white river hurtled, twisted, fizzed and roared through a maze of warped, slick black rock. Somehow over centuries it had carved, scooped and polished the rock bed into weird shapes and valleys and tunnels. The gorge itself was gauzed over with the mist and spray that drifted up from the churn of water. Here and there the chill winter sun painted the vapour with faint swathes of rainbow. Occasionally a white gull or coal-grey jackdaw sliced through the mist below.
Mosca had heard a hundred times that the Langfeather was unswimmable, unnavigable and all but unbridgeable. Now she started to understand why.
It was also said that the city of Toll had not been captured, razed or successfully besieged throughout the whole of the Civil War. Raising her eyes to gaze upon the town on the opposite bank, Mosca could readily believe this too.
At the far end of the bridge stood a full-blown tower, flags flying from its zenith. The town beyond it was ringed about with a great wall, its fortifications peppered with arrow slits and chutes, great dark weep-stains marking the brick beneath them where generations of inhabitants had used them to throw out their waste. The town had been built on the tilt, and had the unnerving appearance of having slid off the ridge down to its current location, stopping just on the lip of the precipice that would have sent it tumbling into the Lang-feather. Beyond the wall, Mosca could just make out clusters of dark-tiled roofs, jostling like rook wings. On the northern side of the town the wall suddenly became grey and ragged, and Mosca could see that it had been built into the remains of some ancient castle.
There had been other attempts to build bridges across the Langfeather, not only in these uplands across the roaring gorge, but also in the lowlands where the river was broad and muscular. None had survived, some burned during the Civil War or the Purges, some quickly losing their supports to the force of the water, others betrayed by the crumbling of the treacherous ground. Only the Toll bridge remained through some freak of luck and craftsmanship, defended by Toll’s walls.
‘It’s all right.’ The guard who had followed them through the keep smiled, misreading Mosca’s awe-stricken expression. ‘Don’t be scared to walk across. You can trust to the Luck.’
Mosca’s clogged foot hesitated above the first plank of the bridge. A moment before she had had no reason to doubt the bridge. But ‘trusting to luck’ didn’t sound particularly safe.
‘ To . . . luck?’
‘Not just luck.
The
Luck. The Luck of Toll. As long as the Luck stays within our town, we’re all safe as sunrise.’
‘Ah . . . I believe I have heard of such things!’ Clent sounded genuinely intrigued. ‘Certainly I know that some mansions and castles have a “Luck”, an object which it is said must remain inside its walls to guarantee prosperity. Often a glass chalice, or an ancestral skull, or a collection of breeding peacocks. So, what form does your Luck take?’
‘Oh no, sir.’ The guard touched the side of his nose. ‘We don’t talk of the Luck in case we rub the luck off it.’ Mosca wondered if he even knew the answer to the question. In his place she would certainly have wanted to know.
‘Now, if it weren’t for the Luck,’ continued the guard, ‘that cliff over there would be crumbling away like good cheese, and the city would be tumbling off its ledge like a pie off a window sill. And as for this old bridge, why, weather and time would have broke it apart like a breadcrust. It’d be falling in flinders into the Langfeather, and us along with it. But thanks to the Luck they’re all sturdy as steel –’
‘Wonderful,’ murmured Clent, whose knees had started to shake. ‘Admirable. Er . . . is there any chance that you could stop reassuring us now?’
The guard was happy to do so, evidently feeling that his work was done, and with new trepidation Mosca and Clent ventured out on to the bridge. The planks showed no particular inclination to give way underfoot, though some gave a slightly tuneful xylophone
thunk
when you stepped on them, and Mosca could not help noticing discolorations here and there that made her think nervously of rot. The air was cold and mint-crisp, scoured clean by the white river below.
Mosca was rather relieved when they reached the tower at the far side without the bridge having crumbled away. As she passed through the arch, again she found herself blinking in sudden sunlessness, then was ushered through a side door into a dim, high-vaulted, stone-walled room draped with long, fading banners. At a desk in front of them sat a squat little man with a straw-yellow wig and a face so knobbed and purplish that he immediately put Mosca in mind of a raspberry.
‘Names!’ barked the Raspberry. ‘Ah, greetings, if you will permit me to take upon myself the introductions for our party, I am Eponymous Clent, whose poems and ballads may even have reached this noble town, and this is my secretary, Miss Mosca Mye—’
‘Eponymous – that’s Phangavotte,’ snapped the Raspberry.
‘Mosca – that’s Palpitattle. Kenning – the Book of the Hours!’
In response to these orders, a red-haired boy of about eleven clambered up on to a precarious-looking stool and disappeared between the leaves of a vast leatherbound book chained to a pulpit-like stand on which it rested.
Phangavotte? Palpitattle? Sure enough those were the Beloved under which Clent and Mosca had been born, but why this pompous interest?
‘Phangavotte’s names are daylight . . . just about,’ came the boy’s thin, chirping voice from within the book. ‘Committee of the Hours have considered it for endarkening six times though. On grounds of Phangavotte being a patron of wile, guile, tall tales and ruses. Acquitted on account of Phangavotte being a patron of inspiration, myth and proud dreams.’ The whisper of more pages. ‘Palpitattle – night. Children of Palpitattle judged to be villainous, verminous and everywhere that they’re not wanted. No plans to review this judgement.’ The boy reappeared, and the book gave a
wumph
as it closed.
There was a long cool silence, during which the Raspberry carefully wiped his quill before looking up at Clent with an air of pleased surprise, as if the latter had just that moment materialized most agreeably before him.
‘I see. Mr Clent, are you planning to stay long in our fair city?’ The Raspberry’s tone had suddenly become more civil. His pale blue eyes rested steadily on Clent, with not the slightest flicker in Mosca’s direction to acknowledge her existence.
‘Ahh, no alas, just passing through . . . I have patrons in Mickbardring who will not be denied . . .’ Clent himself seemed rather confused by the sudden change in reception.
‘Do you plan to stay longer than three days?’ continued the Raspberry. ‘No? Then, sir, we shall provide you and your household with visitors’ badges.’
Had Mosca imagined it? The tiniest pause before the words ‘your household’, and during that interval, the quickest, coldest flicker of a glance in her direction? No, she
had
seen it. She could feel that look stinging her cheeks like a snowball’s graze. She was used to being looked on with disdain, but the Raspberry’s eyes had held a contempt so deep that it was almost loathing. She looked around the room at the guards standing against the walls, and as she met the eye of each their gaze slid off her as though she was somehow indecent.
What?
she wanted to demand.
What is it?
Whatever ‘it’ was, she could feel it surrounding her, like a patch of frost spreading from beneath her feet.
‘Visitors are permitted to remain in the daylight city for no more than three full days after the day of their arrival,’ continued the Raspberry, ‘and must report to the Committee of the Hours daily to have their badges renewed. After those three days, if they are still within the walls of Toll they are issued with a resident’s badge. Of course in
your
case, Mr Clent, you would still be eligible for daylight citizenship. A man with a good name is always welcome in this city.’