Farlander (9 page)

‘This one,’ she whispered, as Nico approached the window she had finally selected. ‘Inside with you, and search the bag for a purse.’

Me?
mouthed Nico.

‘Yes, you. You haven’t done anything yet but complain.’

‘Lena, I mean it, let’s go before it’s too late.’

The scowl on her face tightened. ‘You want to eat today or not?’ she demanded.

‘Not if it means going through with this business. Do as you wish. I’m leaving.’

She caught him in her grip as he turned to go.

‘I mean it,’ she hissed. ‘If we don’t do this, then I’m heading for the docks. Whatever it takes, I don’t care. I won’t starve to death like your dog did.’

Her words and grip seemed to hold him in a sudden spell. His stomach rattled, urging him on. He nodded dumbly.

She released him, offered him a foot-lift. He barely knew what he was doing as he gritted his teeth and scrambled upwards.

Awkwardly, he passed through the swaying lace curtains, trying to keep as silent as he could. His body trembled, and the whitewashed sill was warm against his palms. Inside, he lowered his feet towards the stone floor. His soles settled quietly, he straightened – then froze.

On the bed lay a figure clad in a dark robe.

Nico’s throat made a good attempt at choking itself. His heart seemed to be causing such a racket, he was sure it could be heard by anyone within earshot. The figure was asleep, though, his chest rising and falling in a regular, shallow rhythm.

The man’s skin was pure black. A farlander, decided Nico – an old farlander with a bald head and a tough, lean face etched with lines. And something else there, on the cheeks, glistening bright in a ray of sunlight that slanted through the swaying lace.

He’s crying in his sleep
, realized Nico.

Lena glared at him from the window. There was no way of getting past that face. Nico swallowed his fears and a sudden rising sense of guilt. He squeezed his sweating fists and stole across the room to where a chair sat. Carved from twisted driftwood, it was laden with a leather backpack. He reached it without causing noise. From the window Lena bared her teeth, her hand flapping in a signal to hurry.

It was a fumbling, sweaty business searching through the leather pack, and Nico’s hands moved clumsily as the sweat stung his eyes. For a moment he heard voices outside the room, and floorboards creaking as someone walked past outside the door. That only made him work faster, till at last he found a purse, fat and heavy with coinage.

Lena flapped her hands again. The old man slept on.

Nico was just about to leave, when he noticed something hanging from the same chair. It was a necklace of some kind, though not a pretty thing fashioned with jewels or silver. This was distinctly ugly, with the appearance of a large leathery nut, and it was coated in something that looked like dried blood.

A seal
, realized Nico.
That old man wears a seal.

Almost of its own accord, his hand reached towards the pendant. Behind him, the old man groaned suddenly in the bed. Nico stopped himself in time, pulled his hand away. What was he thinking of?

He turned to go, and almost dropped the purse in alarm. The old farlander was sitting upright, blinking at him with strange folded eyes.

Nico felt his bowels loosen. He could not move. He looked to the door, to the window, and licked his dry lips.

The old man turned his head, looking from one side of the room to the other. It was as though he could barely see.

‘Who’s there?’ he croaked.

Nico was past containing himself any longer. With six quick strides he was across the room, and clambering out through the window.

‘He’s awake!’ he hissed as they scuttled back across the sloping rooftop, the lizards regarding them as they hurried from the scene.

‘And half-blind by the sound of it,’ Lena replied, moving onwards. ‘Hurry up!’

Nico followed more slowly, focused on negotiating the tiles without slipping.

They reached the end of the rooftop, where it dropped a few feet on to that of another building.

‘Here,’ said Lena, turning back to him. ‘Give it here,’ she demanded, eying the purse in Nico’s hand. He pulled up short, the purse clutched to his chest.

Nico did not want this money. Somehow, though, he did not want Lena to have it either.

She made a snatch for the purse, but Nico jerked backwards.

It was then that his left foot slipped out from under him.

He fell sideways, catching a glimpse of Lena’s hands grabbing desperately towards him – for the purse, no doubt – before he slammed against the tiles in a scattering of lizards and expelled breath, and that was that – he was rolling and clattering down the side of the roof, all the way to its edge, where his legs swung out high over the cobbled street, a gasp in his throat and his fingers scrabbling for a hold that never came.

He fell off.

Nico screamed with all the remaining force of his lungs. His shoulder glanced the sign of the taverna, and his entire flopping body spun once before he continued plummeting face-down towards a canvas awning, hollering as he crashed through it, still screaming as the hard cobbled street lurched upwards, his arms throwing themselves over his face for protection as he smashed through one of the tables positioned outside the taverna.

Winded, Nico lay amidst the debris of awning and table, as chip-pings of wood and paint and fabric fell like snow all around him. After a pause, a fat old lady moved forwards to help him; other folk sat in shock with cups of chee still half-raised to their lips. Nico was stunned, unable to draw a breath. He could see his straw hat resting in front of him. He could barely believe he was still alive.

Of all the luck, though: the purse full of money must have fallen from his grasp as he slid down the rooftop, and it must have since been making its own slower, more complicated, though just as inevitable progress off the edge. As the old women bent to give aid the purse exploded on the cobbles right in front of Nico’s face, its silver and gold coins scattering across the street in a horrifying riot of noise and sunlit reflections. The old woman clamped a hand to her mouth. Passers-by turned to stare at the scene. Eyes took in this boy, this fortune in money, this fall from the roof of a taverna, and within moments the cry was raised.

‘
Thief!
’ they shouted, with Nico still too winded to even move. ‘
Thief!
’ they shouted in chorus, as he flopped on to his back and stared up at the roof he had just pitched from, to see that Lena was gone, and only the sun remained to glare down at his ill fate.

In his daze, Nico was hoping that this was all a dream, a nightmare dream that he would soon awaken from. But a pair of rough hands were soon shaking that fantasy out of him. And, as he was dragged to his feet, reality impacted with a greater force than even the ground itself.
Oh sweet Er
s
. . . his mind yelled at him . . .
this is real
. . . this is actually happening!

And then he passed out.

CHAPTER THREE

He had never seen a gaol before, let alone spent the night in one.

The place was an open affair, and most of its inmates could wander freely within its walls. There was even a taverna of sorts for those with the money to frequent it, and a cantina that sold better food than the gruel slopped out in the yard. On the whole the guards – mostly prisoners themselves – kept out of the way and left the other inmates to themselves.

Nico settled in the corner of a cell, one of many to be found in the labyrinth deep beneath the main yard. He sat on a layer of mouldy, lice-infested straw, a single oil lamp hanging above the doorway for light. The straw reeked of stale urine, and he could see cockroaches scurrying within it.

The same was occupied by other thieves and debtors of various ages, some of them as young as Nico or even younger. His fellow inmates paid him little notice; mostly they came and went and rarely stopped there for long. Nico was grateful for that as he sat in his corner, nursing his bruised and aching body, his thoughts circling like dark flapping birds intent on tormenting him. Try as he might, he could not help but think of home and his mother.

She would be distraught if she ever heard of what he had become: a common thief caught in the act. She would be angry with him beyond words.

But then, his mother was hardly without fault herself. After all, if he traced his present predicament back a whole year or more, then she was as much to blame for it as he. She was the one who had needed to fill her empty life with a string of ill-suited lovers. She was the one who had chosen to ignore the antagonism between Los and her son, causing Nico to be driven out as a consequence; then driven to this.

Los had been yet another in a long line of his mother’s poor choices. On the first night she had brought him home from the crossroads taverna, dressed in fine clothing that was much too loose on him – clearly stolen – the man had eyed the contents of the cottage as if to assess what they were worth, including his mother. It was obvious he had set about catching her that night; the couple had made so much noise in the bedroom that Nico was forced to drag his bedding out to the stable and bed down with their old horse, Happy.

He resented her for it, this weakness regarding men. He knew she had her reasons, knew too that she was hardly the one he should be resenting for what had become of them both, mother and son. But there it was, and he could not help it.

This had already been the worst day of his life, and the rest of it passed in numb shock, timeless and awful. With the falling of night, marked here not in fading daylight but by the snuffing of the lamps and the slamming of distant heavy doors, the stench within the place grew even more fetid, a drifting, clogging miasma that bore with it the smells of the human animal caged too long in its own squalor. It became so bad that Nico tied his kerchief around his mouth and nose. It helped little though, and he would occasionally have to lean to one side and lift it in order to spit from his mouth the rank taste that had accumulated on his tongue.

It seemed that whatever truce existed between the inmates during the hours of daytime vanished during those long ensuing hours of blackness. A fight broke out in another cell, shouts and catcalls and then the long keening howls of a man in pain, which dimmed to the occasional sob and then to nothing. For a time, a dull thudding penetrated the stone wall at his back, as though someone was crashing his head against the other side, while shouting out with each impact muted words that might have been,
let me out, let me out
.

Nico could not bring himself to sleep in such a place. Still, he was tired, exhausted from the day’s events, and the thought of those still to come. So he lay awake listening to the snores of his cellmates, swiping the odd cockroach from his body, and cursed himself for ever coming to this city, for bringing Boon along with him, for getting involved with Lena and her fool ideas.

He had known that she was not to be trusted, having displayed few signs of scruples in his company. What was she doing now, at this same moment, he wondered? Did she even care that he had been seized by the Guards and thrown in the city gaol to await his punishment? He doubted it.

Nico stared into the gloom, only too aware of what they did to thieves in the city. It was this fate he was trying most of all not to think about. Last Harvest Festival he had seen a thief flogged and branded for his crime, and the young delinquent had not been much older than Nico himself.

Nico did not know if he could bear such punishment.

*

Sometime later in the night he jerked from a daze to find a hand pressed against his leg and a face breathing foul air into his own. He jerked upright, shoved the unseen man’s weight away from him, shouted something that was more a cry of fright than distinct words. A muttered curse in the darkness, the scraping shuffle of someone retreating.

He rubbed his face to wake himself fully, then hunkered back against the wall.

He needed to get out of this place. He could barely breathe, in this airless, roiling stench. The blackness pressed down on him like a blanket of heavy velvet. He felt trapped, knowing that till morning he could not simply stand up and walk outside of his own volition, not even to see the sky, feel the fresh air upon his face. A memory that was more a recollection of sharp emotion came to him then: that time he had found the snare while walking in the hills overlooking their cottage – the tightened loop of wire holding the severed limb of a wild dog, flesh still hanging in shreds from the leg bone that had been chewed clean through.