11
WELCOME HOME
Copying the words Master Sy showed him was one thing.
Reading them was another; and when it came to taking thoughts in
his head and writing them on to paper, he didn’t have the first
idea where to start. It took a few days for Berren to realise that
he was never, ever going to be able to do what Master Sy wanted him
to do, but the thief-taker was relentless. For three weeks, the
horror unfolded. Each day, Berren was left in the house to practice
his letters while Master Sy went about his business. Each day, he
was supposed to copy out a section of some old book with half its
pages missing that Master Sy had found. Each day, he was supposed
to read back what he’d written. And each day, he couldn’t. Yes, he
could copy what was in front of him well enough, possibly even had
a knack for it. But when it came to knowing what the words actually
meant, he hadn’t the first idea. Couldn’t even begin. Every day the
thief-taker came back, tense and frustrated, the afternoon rains
dripping from his hat and coat, already anticipating Berren’s
failure. He would listen to Berren stumble and make up a few words,
and then he’d rage and swear and tear at his hair. Each day got
worse and worse.
On the second
Mage-Day in the month of Lightning, Berren had a stick in his hand.
He was jumping back and forth around the room, lunging and slashing
as though it was a sword, shouting curses at imaginary enemies,
something he often did to pass the time when he was on his own.
Papers lay strewn on the table. The afternoon rains were hammering
down outside and the thief-taker never came home until after the
rain had stopped.
Berren didn’t even
hear the door, only a change in the sound of the rain. When he
looked round, Master Sy stood in the doorway. Berren stood frozen,
the wooden sword in his outstretched hand, caught in mid-lunge. The
thief-taker didn’t even wait for Berren to speak. He took one look
at the papers on the table and scattered them across the floor with
a sweep of his hand.
‘Boy!’ he roared,
lips tight with rage. ‘So this is why you never learn anything!
Stupid boy! Do you think this is all for fun?’
Berren skittered
around the table, keeping it between them. The look on the
thief-taker’s face made him want to run. It was the sort of look
that spoke of broken bones and worse. Weeks of frustration welled
up inside him. He snatched up the ink pot. ‘It’s not fair!’ he
shouted. ‘I can’t do it and I don’t want to do it! None of it makes
any sense and I don’t want to learn your stupid
letters!’
Master Sy snarled at
him, trembling. ‘Boy, sit!’
‘No!’ Berren was
holding the ink pot to throw it, but then a mad impulse seized him.
Very deliberately he emptied it over the papers littered across the
floor. The thief-taker’s eyes bulged. His knuckles clenched white.
For a moment he stood rigidly still and then he lunged. Berren
dodged him, round the other side of the table. He dropped the ink
pot and ran out the door into the rain. ‘I don’t want to learn
letters!’ he shouted. ‘Letters are stupid! I want to learn swords
and you never show me anything that I want!’
The thief-taker
picked up the ink pot and threw it at Berren as hard as he could.
It missed his head by inches and smashed on the wall behind him.
‘Get back here, boy!’ He strode to the door. As he did, he picked
up a belt. ‘Get back here now!’
Berren backed away,
trembling. He’d felt the rush of air past his head when the ink pot
had missed. Now the look on the thief-taker’s face was murderous
and terrible. Master Sy strode out into the yard and kept on
coming, belt in hand. Berren ran. He shot out of the yard, slipping
on the wet stone. Through the alley and out into Weaver’s Row,
quiet in the afternoon rain. A sharp turn into Button Lane got him
into a part of the city he knew well. He glanced over his shoulder.
Master Sy wasn’t chasing him. He slowed down to a trot through
Craftsmen’s and then zigged and zagged through The Maze, the warren
of narrow streets and alleys that separated the Market District
from the sea-docks. The rain meant there weren’t many people about.
The city was quiet at this time of day. Most folks were in their
homes, done with their work for the day, pulling off their boots if
they had any and getting ready to take their supper. Then there
were the ones who came out after the rains, the ones whose trade
were more suited to the evening. They’d be watching the skies,
waiting by their doors to rush out as soon as the cloud began to
break. As for the ones who came out after dark – well, it wasn’t
dark yet.
The Maze slowly
merged into the back of the sea-docks. Berren stopped. He stood,
bent almost double, hands on his knees to hold the rest of him up,
gasping for breath. Once he was quite sure the thief-taker hadn’t
followed him, he sat down heavily in a doorway and held his head in
his hands.
Master Sy could have
killed him with that ink pot. He told himself that again, partly in
disbelief, partly to make himself
believe. And now he’d run away. Whatever else, that meant he
couldn’t go back. Not to someone like that.
So he was never going
to see Lilissa again. And he was never going to learn swords after
all, or be rich and important and powerful and tell people what to
do. It was all a big lie. He bit his lip. Crying never got you
anything but jeering and a beating from the older boys, but his
eyes burned all the same. Right there and then, he hated the
thief-taker more than anyone in the world for showing him so much
and then taking it all away again.
The rains slowly
relented. The evening sun broke through the cloud and glittered
across the bay, already fiery red. It would be dark soon.
Reluctantly Berren got up. Wandering the back alleys of the
sea-docks at night was no place to be if you were small and on your
own, even if you didn’t really have anything worth stealing. There
were gangs about who were interested in things other than money.
Berren had never run into them, but that was because he was
careful. He’d certainly heard the stories. Gangs of men who took
boys and dragged them off to sea. Gangs of men who took boys for
other reasons. Right now, going out to sea on a ship and never
coming back didn’t seem like such a bad thing, but Berren wasn’t
sure how you could tell those gangs apart from the other
ones.
And anyway, there was
always Master Hatchet. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have a place to
go. He took a deep breath. Shipwrights was a part of the fishing
quarter and the fishing quarter was a huge place, but Loom Street
was close enough to the docks. With a bit of luck he could get
there before the streets got really dark. He set off again at a
run. That was the thing. Never stop anywhere that wasn’t out in the
open. Never stop in the shadows. Never stop if someone shouted at
you or if a hand grabbed at you. Never stop at all if you could
help it. Not here in the back alleys of the sea-docks. He didn’t
stop when he reached the harbour and the waterfront either. There
was less to fear among the crowds of sailors and the teamsters.
Some of them were drunk, but most were still hard at work. The work
on the docks never stopped. There were always people there at all
hours of the night, hauling bales and crates to and from the boats
at the edge of the sea.
He slowed down again
once he passed through the Sea Gate and reached Reeper Hill. Every
house on the street here was a brothel, from the crumbling
ramshackle town-houses at the bottom by the docks to the
almost-mansions at the top and back to the squalid shanty-town of
huts down the other side on the edge of the fishing quarter.
Everyone came to Reeper Hill. Sailors and dockers mostly but
princes and priests too; you’d find them all if you knew where to
look. No one wanted any trouble on Reeper Hill. Although he’d
learned the hard way not to stop and stare for too long at any of
the ladies out by their doors.
Near the top of the
hill on the fishing quarter side there was a small road that led
out around the north side of the sea-docks. Further on it petered
out into a path that led eventually to nothing much except the
jumble of rocks at the top of Wrecking Point. Berren followed it a
little way and then turned down a muddy track, skittering down the
steep slope of the ridge and into the stinking backside of
Shipwrights. The smell reached out and grabbed him like a hand,
shaking him to his senses. He’d forgotten how strong it was here,
or perhaps he’d never noticed because he’d never really known
anything else. He hopped and skipped down the path, dancing from
one uneven step to the next without even looking. This was home,
this was, and between that and the smell, he was almost smiling
when he reached the bottom. He squeezed through the darkness
between the twine-maker’s house and the gloomy but familiar
half-collapsed bulk of an old compass-maker’s workshop. When he
came out the other side, he stopped. Loom Street. He sniffed. Over
in this part of the city, the air was rich. A heavy base scent of
the sea and of rotting fish. A steady mid-tone of manure from the
dung heaps. High notes of sweat, of soured milk, of vinegar, of
cheap perfume, depending on the time of day. They don’t get air like this up on The Peak. Makes you
strong, it does. When the smell from the fishing wharves got
particularly bad, that’s what Master Hatchet always said, regular
as the tides.
He walked carefully.
The cobbles of Loom Street were either uneven and full of holes or
worn smooth and slick with a fine slurry of rain and sea-water and
dung. The locals here had a saying: You could always tell a Loom
Street boy from how clean their hands were. On Loom Street you
learned the hard way to wash your hands before you put them in your
mouth.
The alley behind the
tool-makers’ was as dark as it always was in the middle of the
night. Berren was used to it. Used to not being able to see his
feet or even his hand in front of his face. They used to run down
here, even in the pitch black, but today he was more cautious. The
alley had a few traps for the unwary. Buckets of slurry, brooms
propped up against the wall. Things that would make a noise and
give a warning if anyone came. Berren picked his way past them. He
reached the little door that led up a tiny flight of steps into the
brothel next to Master Hatchet’s. It was ajar. A breath of warm air
brushed his face, moist and heavy with cheap perfume. A few steps
on, the alley ended in one last entrance. Master Hatchet’s house.
In daylight he could have gone the other way, around into the yard
where they kept the dung-carts. The yard had a gate, though, and
that was always bolted shut after sunset.
He knocked on the
door. Quietly at first, then louder. Hatchet didn’t sleep much.
Except sometimes when he went out drinking all night and the boys
woke up the next morning to the sound of his snores shaking the
house.
Berren banged on the
door again. This time he heard footsteps, heavy and slow. A glimmer
of candlelight seeped through the gaps around the door where it
didn’t quite fit in its frame.
‘Who is it and what
do you want?’ growled a voice from the other side. Berren’s heart
jumped inside his chest. A little bit of fear, a little bit of
hope, maybe a little bit of despair. Master Hatchet.
‘It’s me, sir.’ His
voice had a tremor to it.
‘Who’s me? And what
do you want?’
‘It’s Berren,
sir.’
There was a long
silence. ‘Berren. Had a boy work here once called Berren. Worthless
little shit, he was. Can’t be that Berren though. Boy was stupid
all right, but not even he was dim enough to come back to Loom
Street after he’d taken up with a thief-taker. So you must be a
different Berren.’
‘Set the dunghill wet
so it may rot and be odourless; also set it out of sight; the seed
of thorn will decay and die in it. Asses’ dung is best to make a
garden with; sheep’s dung is next; and after that the goat’s and
also horses’ and mares’. Swine’s dung is the worst and should be
kept apart and thrown into the sea.’ All you needed to know to be a
city dung-collector. Hatchet made them recite it every day when
they went off with their carts. It was the closest thing they had
to a password. There was another long silence. The door didn’t
open.
‘Piss off, boy,’ he
said, at last.
‘Master, please . .
.’ No, that was a mistake. Begging and pleading with Hatchet never
got anyone anywhere.
‘Run away from your
new master, did you, little thief-taker boy?’
Berren swallowed
hard. ‘Yes.’
Now the door did
open. Hatchet stood there in a night-gown, clutching a
candle-holder. He gave it to Berren. ‘Here. Hold
this.’
Berren took the
candle. Hatchet bent over and reached for something just inside the
door. ‘Here’s your welcome home, boy.’ He stood up, holding a
bucket, and threw the contents. Berren jumped sideways, but not
quickly enough to completely dodge whatever Hatchet had thrown at
him. Cold wetness slashed his chest. The candle went out, plunging
them back into darkness. Suddenly he couldn’t even see Hatchet,
even though he knew exactly where he was. He stepped very carefully
away, backing silently down the alley, heart pounding in his
chest.
‘Your new master
gives me the ghosts, boy. I want nothing to do with him. I don’t
want him coming back here and I don’t want to see your sorry little
face again either. I raised you. Fed you. Sheltered you, and what
do you do? So piss off you little ingrate.’ He picked up the stick
he always kept by the door and banged it on the cobbles. ‘You come
here again, if I even see you on my patch, I’ll give you the
thrashing of your life. If you’re lucky.’
The door slammed
shut. Berren was alone.