1
BERREN
The crowd had come to watch three men die. Most of
them had no idea who the three men were. Nor did they particularly
care. They’d come into Four Winds Square for the spectacle, for a
bit of blood, for a Sun-day afternoon of entertainment. They’d come
for the jugglers and the fire-breathers, the pies and the
pastry-sellers, the singers and the speakers. They’d come for
everything the city had to offer, and that’s what they
got.
The thief ran through
them with practised ease. The crowd barely noticed he was there. He
slipped between the larger bodies around him like an eel between a
fisherman’s fingers, finding space where none seemed to exist. If
anyone had asked him how old he was, he might have said twelve or
he might have said sixteen, depending on who was doing the asking.
The truth probably lay somewhere in between. The truth was that he
didn’t know and he didn’t much care. He was small for a boy who
might nearly have been a man, and his name was Berren.
He’d come for the
executions like everyone else, but he’d come for the crowd too. A
watcher, perched on one of the rooftops around the square and
taking an interest in his progress, would have seen him pause now
and then amid all his motion. Each pause marked the crowd as a
fraction poorer and Berren as a token richer. The same watcher, if
he stared for long enough, would have seen that Berren was slowly
meandering his way towards the front of the crowd. When the
executioner and his charges finally emerged, Berren had every
intention of watching from as close as he could get.
After a time the
crowd began to hush. At one end of the square stood a wooden
platform, built especially for the occasion. For the last few hours
a succession of dancers and jugglers and other petty entertainers
had paid for the privilege of using it. The crowd had largely
ignored them, talking amongst themselves. The coming of quiet meant
something worth watching was about to happen. Berren began to worm
his way further forwards. He was a head shorter than most of the
people around him, and navigated by the simple expedient of
watching where everyone else was looking, and then heading that
way. From time to time he caught a fleeting glimpse of the
platform. A man in yellow robes was standing there now, making slow
gestures with his hands. Even Berren knew enough to know that the
yellow made him a priest.
As he reached the
front of the crowd, his progress slowed. He changed direction and
edged sideways until he reached the corner of the square. Four
Winds Square was in the centre of the Courts District of Deephaven
city. The buildings around it were high and made of stone, with
tall doors of heavy wood and dark wobbly glass in their windows.
Each of the doors had a stone lintel protruding a good six inches
from the wall. Boys smaller than him filled them, jostling for
space, squeezed up precariously close to the ends but never quite
falling off. Berren spotted a gap on the corner of one of them. He
scaled the wall and made it his own. It was too narrow to be
properly comfortable, but from up there he could see everything.
That more than made up for having to constantly push himself
against the stone and the grumbling boys next to him.
The priest was gone.
The executioner had ascended the platform now, a big brawny man
standing with his legs braced apart, holding an axe that was almost
as tall as he was. Behind the executioner stood the three who’d
been sentenced to die, chained and surrounded by guards. Beside
them, someone bald and dressed in fine clothes was making another
speech of some sort. The crowd wasn’t very interested. They hadn’t
come for speeches and they were talking restlessly again, so that
Berren could barely hear anything that was said. Snatches reached
him, the occasional two or three words, not enough to make any
sense. He didn’t care any more than the rest of the crowd.
Executions were a rarity. He was here to see people have their
heads cut off, not to listen to boring speeches. The crowd agreed.
It was late spring, the month of Floods, and the stifling
afternoons of humid summer heat were arriving early this
year.
Berren wondered
briefly what the three men had done. He knew a thing or two about
how the city punished thieves. Boys like him caught cutting purses
usually got a beating and that was that. Berren had had plenty of
those. If the watch knew your face and you got unlucky then you got
a branding or maybe had a finger cut off. He shuddered to think
about that sort of thing. Losing a finger, that was . . . well,
something he didn’t want to think about. Just as well Master
Hatchet kept things sweet with the watch around his piece of the
city. Master Hatchet was a bear in a man’s body, but that wasn’t
his secret. His boys, when they weren’t thieving, kept the streets
around Shipwrights and the south end of the Fishing Quarter clear
of animal filth. Most particularly, they kept Reeper Hill clear of
animal filth. Every morning and every evening and all through the
night, Hatchet would have someone up there with a dung-cart.
Keeping sweet with the ladies on Reeper Hill mattered more to
Master Hatchet than anything else. Their favour was what gave him
clout.
People lost their
whole hands sometimes. He’d heard of it but he’d never seen it
happen. Mostly, if the city decided it couldn’t stand to put up
with you any more, you got loaded onto a barge and shipped off up
the river to the imperial mines. The mines were somewhere in the
north, hundreds and thousands of miles away where it was always
raining and cold and no one ever came back. Berren didn’t know what
you had to do to have your head cut off, though. Every now and then
the city just decided to put on a show and that was that. They
didn’t do it very often, which was why today there was such a crowd
come out to watch.
The boy on the lintel
next to him nudged him. ‘’Scuse me. You ever seen one of these
before?’
Berren looked at him
with all the scorn he could muster. The boy must have been eight.
‘’Course I have,’ he lied. ‘Lots.’ He snorted and shook his head as
though it was the stupidest question in the world, but the boy
didn’t give up.
‘What happens,
then?’
‘Wait and
see.’
‘Is there lots of
blood? I hope there’s lots.’
‘Did you know that
the heads, after they get chopped off, they can still move their
eyes and wrinkle their nose and talk and things like that for hours
before they die?’ Hatchet himself had told him that.
The boy’s eyes grew
wide and his jaw dropped. ‘No! Really? Can you go and talk to them
afterwards?’
Berren shrugged. ‘I
suppose. If you want to. If they don’t take them away.’ Then the
man on the platform did something that got Berren’s full attention.
He stopped talking and held up a purse. The crowd’s murmuring
subsided, enough that Berren caught a few words of what he said
next. Something about a reward. Something about ten gold emperors.
Ten gold emperors.
A new man came
forward from behind the executioner. The one who’d caught the men
about to be killed. The thief-taker. From what Berren could see,
there was nothing special about him. He didn’t have particularly
rich clothes. He didn’t have a fancy sword or anything like that.
If Berren had seen him in the street, he would have thought him a
shopkeeper, or maybe a foreman from the docks. But now . .
.
Now he had a purse,
given to him by the man with the fine clothes. Now Berren would
think of him as a man who had ten emperors in his pocket . .
.
‘What’s happening?’
asked the boy beside him, craning his neck and squinting to see.
Berren cuffed him silent. Ten emperors! His eyes went wide even
thinking about it. He felt himself wobble and almost tumbled off
the lintel. He’d never heard of such a fortune!
The man who now had
this fortune stepped back while the executioner came forward again.
The prisoners were dragged to the front of the platform so that
everyone could see. The executioner made a big show of his axe,
holding it high so everyone could see that too. He spun and twirled
it, the axe head tracing wild arcs in the air, until he brought it
down on a thick lump of wood and split it. Splinters showered all
around. The crowd roared. The three prisoners were forced down into
the three blocks that waited for them. Berren barely noticed. He
was watching the man with the ten emperors, lurking in the shadows
at the back of the platform.
Suddenly the
executioner brought down his axe again. The boy beside him let out
a soft whistle of awe. Berren’s heart leapt. One of the prisoners
had been beheaded and he hadn’t even seen it! The body was still
there but the head was gone. He noted the dark spattered streaks
across the planks and the stain where the head had fallen. The
executioner was holding it up in the air now, gripping its hair,
making sure everyone got a good look at his handiwork.
Berren’s eyes began
to dart back and forth, from the man in the shadows to the
executioner and back again, back and forth, back and forth. He
didn’t dare lose track of the man with ten emperors in his pocket
but he wanted to see the head, too. He squinted, trying to see if
it was still moving. A waning trickle of blood still dripped from
its neck; he couldn’t see it, but he could see the dark stains,
spattering across the pale wood around the headsman’s
feet.
Abruptly the
executioner turned and tossed the head away into a large basket
lined with straw that was on the platform behind him. He stood
beside his second victim and raised his axe. The man in the shadows
hadn’t moved. Berren held his breath and let his eyes settle on the
axe. He watched it start to fall, slowly it seemed. His own heart
thumped in his chest, slow and hard, and he felt a thrilling
tightness inside him. As the axe struck flesh, he gasped with glee.
Skin and bone parted. Blood sprayed further than Berren could spit.
He was almost rigid with exhilaration.
One of the dead man’s
legs twitched with such force that it almost twisted the body off
its block. The executioner shied away in surprise. One foot slipped
in the pool of blood. When he caught his balance, he gave the
severed head a hefty kick. The head rolled away and fell down
somewhere under the platform. The crowd laughed, but by then Berren
was already searching again for the man in the
shadows.
The man still hadn’t
moved. Berren sighed with relief.
For the last
execution, he allowed himself to relax and take in everything the
executioner did. He appreciated the careful preparation, the
cleaning of the axe head, the touch of a sharpening stone. When it
fell, he watched and grinned. The last one was every bit as good as
the first. Not as much blood as he’d hoped, but still quite a bit.
When the executioner picked up the last head and held it up for the
crowd to view, Berren strained his eyes to see whether anything was
still moving. He squinted. He was sure he saw the dead head
blink.
He turned to the boy
beside him, overflowing with excitement. ‘Did you see that? He
blinked! Did you see it?’
The younger boy’s
goggling eyes stayed riveted to the head. ‘Yeh yeh, it did,
yeh.’
Berren stared
intently at the head again, peering in case there was more.
Finally, when the executioner turned to go, Berren sent his gaze
back in search of the man in the shadows.
He was
gone.