A Tailor's Son (Valadfar) (2 page)

Harold was the only surviving son of James Spinks, a tailor of
East Street. East Street was nestled close to the canals north of the
markets in the mid section of the city of Neeskmouth. Harold was not
even the head tailor and was of little importance to the history of
Valadfar for the most part, few people would recognise him as they
passed him in the street. He worked out in the back room most of the
time, doing repairs on the richer folks’ clothing, and if he was honest
with himself, he liked it that way. Harold was a loner of sorts. His job
did mean he had to interact with people occasionally but he did his best
to keep his contacts with others at a minimum. He enjoyed a quiet life
in his own solitude avoiding the bustle of the city. Neeskmouth had
been growing rapidly since the second war with the Dragon Lords,
factories and God only knows what else had been springing up along
the Copse Hill road. The industrialisation of the city marked a time of
change that meant little family owned tailors like Harold’s fathers
would soon be outdated. He had worked for his father all his life with
few stories to tell that didn’t involve a pricked thumb or a missed stitch,
until that accursed night. The night of the explosion at the local tavern,
it was that fire which started it all. His eyes were so sore that he could
see how reddened and bloodshot they were even in the deep blue
reflection of the ink well he dabbed his quill into. Yet he refused to
close them and continued to write on the parchment that lay on the
desk in front of him. Harold was no hero from a story, he was not the
brave warrior or bard that filled the tales of the many libraries in
Valadfar he was a normal man. For him, writing was the only thing
keeping him sane. He felt terrified and alone. The true reason he
scribbled so madly onto the pages was to keep his demons at bay, he
knew that it may be his last night on Valadfar but what choice did he
have but to continue. If he was to fail his notes might be the one thing
to save the city. Now, before you grow too weary of these ramblings,
let me take you back to the night that it started. To the last time Harold
was just a tailor’s son.

The night that would change Harold’s life forever started
fairly normally. It was a fortnight before that wintery evening he spent
in darkness writing his notes. The date was Nymon the 16
^th
of Thresh,
a harsh autumn and one that hinted to an even harsher winter just
around the corner with an icy breeze that kept the rats off the street. It
was the worst anyone had seen since the poor harvests of 99ab that had
almost plunged the city into total recession. The winter had come
around early yet again this year, and with the ban on imported food
from Gologan due to the damnable potato famine, everyone was
feeling the pinch. The price of food was the highest it had been in
centuries and meant that most people had taken on a second job just to
make the ends meet. Harold was no different. His family did have some
inheritance so they were not as poverty stricken as most, but would still
be classed as one of the poor souls the city came to know as
‘unfortunates’. The worst-off worked the streets and docks around
them barely scratching together enough to survive while the nobles
continued to live off the rich pickings of their broken backs and scarred
knuckles. Harold’s father was very tight with the purse strings and had
lived through the war that almost brought Neeskmouth to its knees
during the first century. He had learned not to spend a single copper
coin where it was not needed, a trait that had been passed on to his
thrifty son. Harold had just finished working at the little tailor shop on
East Street in order to make more coins that would no doubt hibernate
in his father’s moth filled wallet. His father had taken on an order from
one of the local factories, two hundred aprons to be finished by the end
of the next month. Harold had argued with his father that they couldn’t
finish the order in time; he had tried to convince his father that one of
the sweatshops that were filled with clanking machines, which the
Dwarfs had brought to the city in trade, would have been more suited
to handle it. Harold was ignored as always, and his father took the
work. Harold was not sure if he did it for the money or if he feared
giving work to the machines that drove the industrial revolution
forward would speed up the inevitable end of their little family
business. Whatever his reasons in his blind hope he had taken the
massive order to be just a challenge, and as usual wanted to face it head
on. He knew Harold would do everything he could to make sure they
succeeded. It was this need to please that had made Harold stay late
working on the aprons that day. He should have left the shop a few
hours earlier but they had already been running behind on the day’s
work and his father had rushed home sick with signs of influenza. This
had delayed them even further on an almost impossible order. Harold
had to admit that he was worried for his father’s health. The man was in
his fifties and was starting to show just how old he had become, he had
begun to weaken. Over the past year, Harold had seen the huge
mountain-like man that was his father shrink. The flu was a killer and in
his aged state Harold was worried about him carrying such an ailment.
Harold did not have time to linger on his worries for long, no sooner
had the last stitch been pulled tight he left the shop for the night. With
the door bolted behind him, Harold was off to the Queens for his
second job.

The Queens was a little Drow run tavern down by the docks.
Harold had started working there once or twice a week in the evenings
to help maintain the cost of the family estate; it was a way to make up
for the short fall in earnings coming from the tailors. That particular
night Harold was running late, but he knew that no one would notice.
They never did as long as Harold was there before the kegs ran dry. The
money was good for the hours he worked and for the menial tasks that
he was required to do, like lugging empty kegs of ale from the cellar
onto a wagon, or unloading full ones that just arrived and tapping them
ready to keep the foul smelling grog flowing. The money was much
more than the work was worth, but the reason it paid so well was the
hush money to avert his eyes from things going on there. The Drow
had always had strong ties to the White Flag pirates and the Queens
was a real den of iniquity. Gambling, fights, prostitution and other
unmentionable acts that should never be carried out by decent
Neeskmouthain men and women, were the stock and trade for the little
back alley boozer. The tavern was favoured by the worst Neeskmouth
had to offer. Still, Harold was left alone to do his job and he was the
kind of person to go unnoticed so he did not let himself worry about
what went on inside its walls. His only worry was the amount of liquor
that used to go in and out of the place. Harold was a tailor, so he was
not used to heavy lifting, but thankfully, he did take on a little of his
father’s shape and was bulky. Not overly muscular like some of the
bruisers that he saw fall in and out of the Queens of an evening but he
was not a reed pole. All the same, the full kegs almost tore his arms
from his body and with the number they had going in and out of the
place you would have thought half the harbour had gills.

Harold walked the quietening streets alone on his way to the
tavern not eager for the weight of the kegs that awaited him. His body
had begun to yearn for sleep although the sun was only just setting.
He had walked this same path many times before and knew each loose
cobble, each rise and fall and slope that cluttered his path. For just that
moment, Harold could relax. He did not need to think as he passed the
high and preposterously tall buildings all around him that helped to
block out the hustle and bustle of sound. As usual as Harold walked
along the canals and he was daydreaming. It was a good pastime for
him which he had carried and used most of his life. The trait had started
back at school when Harold was just a boy and had caused a fair few
chalk rubs to be thrown at him by his teacher, old Macgregor, not to
mention the cane once or twice. Harold had hated Macgregor. He was
from the Western Reaches somewhere and seemed to detest all
children. He was the headmaster of the school and he ran the place
more like a prison, often taking some of the more poorly behaved
children and locking them away in his room for hours at a time. Those
he took would always come out crying followed by a red-faced
Macgregor. Harold had been lucky enough to never go into his room.
Macgregor was a Pole, not an Iron Giant as his people were known in
times of peace, but a cold blooded warrior, a giant-like barbarian race
of men named after their Polearm weapons, and there were rumours
that he had slaughtered children during the war. Harold never found
out whether it was true or not and he did not wish to know. Harold was
a coward at heart and did his best to just block out the memories of his
school days. As he grew, his cowardliness continued into his
adulthood. The city scared him, although his family lived on the edges
of the more lower class parts of the city, he had been sheltered from the
worst it had to offer. Now as a man working for the Drow, he had seen
a lot he had never wished to. So to avoid spending too much time
surrounded by the horrors poverty could bring Harold had learned to
daydream.

The dreams Harold had walking down the Harbour Path
were the same ones he had as a child. They had always been about the
coast. His mother and father had taken him to the Port Lust when he
was young and the sights and smells of the sea stayed with him all his
life. Harold remembered staying in his grandmother’s little cottage and
how the gulls had flown overhead, they were a beautiful white, not the
dirty black grey of the pigeons that painted the rooftops around
Neeskmouth. Harold swore to himself that one day he would go back
there, but the house was ruined. It had decayed with years of isolation.
His father had always been too busy to travel down and maintain it and
his mother was unable to manage the Neeskmouth home, let alone a
far away holiday cottage that was rarely visited. The painted walls of the
seaside retreat had begun to flake and the once pure green grass of the
expansive lawn was now little more than a jungle of weeds. However,
in his daydream, it was still as perfect as when Harold was a boy. Small
and full of character, it had some small birds nesting in the thatch roof
– swallows Harold seemed to remember they were. They used to dart
back and forth through the air chasing the butterflies as he sat on the
cliff top watching them. Every morning Harold used to travel down the
stairs that lead from the garden straight down to the shore and spent
the day at the beach pestering rock pools and chasing clouds, then at
night they had slept with the sound of the ocean as it brushed the rocks,
stealing pebbles as it went. The little windows had wrought iron bars in
the shape of a perfect cross. The shutters themselves were engraved
with flowers. Harold felt happy and safe there, both as a child and now
in his dreams as an adult. Harold found a fossil of some long dead
creature at the base of those pure white cliffs and still had it to this day,
sitting above the fireplace. For him, it is a last memento of his
childhood, a memory of innocence that seems so rare in a city full of
beggars and thieves.

Still daydreaming Harold came down from the bridge that
crossed one of the waterways on the Harbour Path. The sound of the
waves in his dream married off well to the very real sound of a ship’s
bells that rang out from within the haze of smog. The changes to the
harbour had brought in a lot of work and made money for those that
already had it, but those that did not suffered even more, working
longer hours in hot, smoke-filled, and cramped factories that were run
by oppressive managers who had little care for those they worked to
death. The thick clouds these factories produced seemed to grow
denser with each passing year and now covered most of the city. They
mixed like an unhealthy stew with the smell of the canals. On some
days, it was so thick that it seemed almost pliable. The buildings around
this area of Neeskmouth had already begun to take on some of its
blackness and were quickly losing what little charm they had to start
with. They were overcrowded with multiple families being squeezed
into each one of the hovels like wharf rats. Many of the households
also had nowhere to graze their animals so kept them inside with them
sleeping with the slurry and straw in the same space they cooked. It was
a breeding ground for fleas and rats and sickness often plagued the
poor. With the promise of yet more gold to be made from the secrets
the Dwarfs were finally sharing from the Kingdom of Goldhorn drove
the greed of the rich. It meant there would be need for more people to
come to the city to work within the factories and it only promised to get
worse for those already below the bread line. The sun was falling over
the horizon as Harold’s daydream was broken by a husky and desperate
voice close to his left ear.

“Looking for a good time? You look clean enough so I’ll do it for half
pence, what d’yer say?”
The young woman leaning against a nearby wall
asked him as she staggered out of the shadows looking like a scarecrow.
She instantly made Harold feel ill at ease. She sported two blackened
eyes, no doubt from an unhappy client the night before or from her
pimp or, worse, her husband. Her ginger-red hair was pulled tightly
into a ponytail and was thick with grease. The few hairs that escaped
the grasp of the ribbon clung to her forehead as if glued in place. She
gave Harold a smile full of remorse and the smell of cheap bourbon hit
him. Harold watched unsure if he should risk aiding the poor girl as she
almost lost her grip on the wall she had taken to holding. She had been
drinking, maybe to keep out the cold or to block the thoughts of what
she would have to do for her meal that night. Harold could not say for
sure which. It was a world he didn’t understand, he skimmed along its
edges and in his naivety he even went as far as blaming the poor girl for
letting her life end up this way. Because of his sheltered upbringing he
did not understand. He could guess that having to work the streets
could not be an easy task, but he didn’t know that for some single
women it was the only life they had ever known being driven to the
trade as children by their own parents.