12
SHELTER
He stood in the alley, wet and scared. The stink of
pig-shit wafted around him. His breathing was ragged. He was
trembling. Anger flushed through him. Sheltered me? You sold me! His fists clenched. He had a mad urge to rush
at the door and pound on it until Hatchet came back and then punch
and kick all this rage away. But that could only go one way, a bad
one. As far as Berren knew, Hatchet had never lost a fight with
anyone. He took a deep breath. Loom Street. The arse end of
Wrecking Point and Reeper Hill in the middle of the night. Not a
good place to be. Not that he had anything much worth taking, but
that didn’t mean people wouldn’t try.
He moved back down
the alley to the door of the brothel and gave it a very gentle
push. It opened. That was usual enough. Club-Headed Jin would be
waiting up the top of the steps if anyone came in. Now there was
someone who could have given Master Hatchet a good run when it came
to fisticuffs, but as far as Berren knew, the two of them were
friends. At least they used to go and get drunk together, which, as
far as Berren could tell, made them friends.
The smell of pig-shit
followed him through the door. Berren sniffed at his shirt and then
recoiled. Jin was good-natured enough. Maybe he’d let Berren stay
the night if he kept out of the way, but not with him smelling like
a pigsty. With a sigh he took off his shirt and threw it back into
the alley. It was a good shirt. Master Sy had given it to him, and
he was fairly sure that Lilissa had brought it. Might even have
made it. It was plain and simple and it scratched at his skin, but
it was easily the nicest shirt he’d ever had.
Chances were it would
still be there in the morning. He could pick it up then, take it
out to the sea and wash it clean. Maybe.
‘Oi-oi!’ Berren
jumped. He looked around, back up the steps from the doorway. Dim
light framed the shape of Club-Headed Jin. ‘Who’s that down
there?’
‘Berren,’ said
Berren. Jin knew all of Hatchet’s boys. He was easy on them most of
the time, as long as they didn’t mess with his women. The older
boys often spent their money here, if they had any.
‘Thought you were
gone. Heard you’d taken up with a thief-taker. What you doing back
here?’
‘I don’t want to be a
thief-taker.’ He found he wasn’t nearly as sure of that as he was
when he’d left Master Sy. He tried to remind himself of the
thief-taker’s temper. Of the flying ink pot that could have taken
his head off. Instead he found himself remembering fresh clean
water and meals that were simple but at least not stale or mouldy.
Remembering walking with Master Sy through the city streets,
gawping at everything, pretending to pay attention to what the
thief-taker was saying about who lived where and did what and why.
Remembering Lilissa.
Jin made a
means-nothing-to-me sort of noise. ‘Well you can’t stay here and I
doubt Hatchet’s going to take you back. Running away from your
master?’ He drew a long breath between his teeth. ‘Boys should know
better. Now you’ve run away from two.’
‘I said I didn’t want
to be a thief-taker.’ He shouted it up the stairs. ‘Hatchet sold
me.’
‘Oi.’ Jin frowned.
‘Keep it down.’
Berren sighed and
flopped down on the bottom of the steps. ‘I don’t know where to
go.’
‘You’re not staying
here.’
‘Where do I go,
then?’
‘Home. You
stupid?’
‘Up Reeper Hill and
through the back of the docks? In the middle of the
night?’
Jin thought about
this. ‘What’s that smell?’
‘Master Hatchet threw
a bucket of pig-swill at me. He missed,’ he added quickly, ‘But
it’s all over the alley.’
‘Outside my door?’
Jin made a discontented rumbling noise. ‘We’ll have to have words
about that. Who’s going to come in through that stink, eh?’ He blew
out a great lungful of air and then shrugged his shoulders. ‘It’s
late anyway. Not many fellows about this time of night. I won’t be
sheltering one of Master Hatchet’s boys if they’ve crossed him
some, but I suppose if you sat down there all through the night and
kept very quiet and very still, I might not even notice you were
there. Mmmm.’ He shrugged again and then turned and vanished back
into his room at the top of the stairs.
‘Thank you, Master
Jin.’
‘Quiet and still,’
rumbled a voice.
So he sat on the
steps, hugging his knees to his chest to keep warm. At some point
he must have nodded off, because when he looked up it was light
outside. Not proper daylight, but the grim grey light of dawn. His
arms and legs were stiff. The world was quiet. He crept up the
steps to look for Master Jin, but the room at the top was empty and
he knew better than to go any further; instead he went outside. His
shirt was lying in the alley where he’d left it. When he picked it
up, the stench almost made him sick. Then he trotted out of the
alley and turned right down Loom Street, all the way to the end
where it petered out into a shingle beach scattered with ropes and
little boats turned upside down, with nets hung up to dry in
amongst the broken bones of shattered ships. This was the thin end
of the fishing district. South of Wrecking Point and north of The
Peak and Deephaven Point was the huge Horseshoe Bay, home of the
sea-docks. The waters there were deep and sheltered. North of
Wrecking Point, starting here, the waters were shallower and when
the winds came in off the sea, they howled straight up the beach
and onto the shore. A whole string of small bays and coves were
home to the Deephaven fishing fleet; in fact what the city called
the fishing district extended for more than twenty miles up the
coast and the fishermen who lived in the scattered villages at the
far end of that would have been surprised to be told that they
lived in Deephaven at all. Deephaven did that. It reached out along
its waterways like a greedy prince stretching out to grasp at
everything within reach.
Berren felt a pang of
anger. Those were Master Sy’s words, from one of the rare times
he’d been given a break from beating his head against his letters.
They’d walked half a dozen miles together along the bank of the
River Arr to see how the city never quite came to an end. Past the
river-docks, through Sweetwater and past Sweetwater Bend where rich
and poor alike collected drinking water from the river before it
flowed beside the city proper. Up into the gentle affluence of the
River District, where small markets and expensive riverside inns
mixed with open farmland.
He shook himself and
picked a path down to the sea. The water was cold this morning, the
waves gentle and calm. Most of the fishing boats huddled together
on the north side of each cove where they’d have shelter from the
weather if they needed it. The southern corners like this became
something of a wilderness. Debris washed up from storms past lay
scattered about, all the pieces too big or too useless to be
carried away. They’d stay until winter, when the beach would be
picked clean of its wrecks. Anything that would burn and keep
people warm at night.
He wasn’t alone. The
fishermen were already up. Old men mostly, down here. The old, the
broken. People who eked out a desperate living as best they could.
They’d take their little boats and row out into the water and throw
out their nets and take what they could from the bay. None of them
paid much attention to Berren as they groaned and dragged their
boats into the waves. When he’d finished rinsing and wringing out
his shirt, Berren stayed and watched them for a while. A breeze was
slowly but steadily picking up, the usual wind blowing from the
north-west, trying to push the fishermen back onto the shore. They
had no choice but to fight it, labouring through the waves, hauling
themselves out through the breakers, fighting against the will of
the ocean. Berren shuddered. There was always this. Whatever else
the city dangled in front of him and then took away, there was
always this. He could spend his life breaking his back against the
sea just to make sure he didn’t starve.
Of course, if you
didn’t come from around here, you wouldn’t know that the leaky
boats that these old fishermen used weren’t their own. They paid
rent for them, every day, whether they used them or not, to men
like Master Hatchet. Most days the rent cost them almost everything
they caught.
He shivered again.
The wind was chilly and he was already cold. He turned and left the
fishermen to their work. He didn’t know where he was going to go,
only that it was somewhere else. Anywhere but here.