Fly by Night (46 page)

Kohlrabi’s face had no expression at all, and suddenly Mosca could barely recognize him. His face had always seemed so honest, like an unshuttered window through which emotions shone without disguise. Perhaps his expressions had always been a magic-lantern display, a conjurer’s trick.

‘You had to get rid of the body, an’ you wanted to scotch Mr Clent, so when we was out you dressed Partridge up in women’s togs, and brought him to the marriage house. I can just imagine the marriage, Partridge lollin’ and saggin’, you sayin’ he’s drunk and dippin’ your ear to his mouth so you can pretend he’s talkin’ to you, Mr Bockerby nippin’ through all the ver-sadiddle cos a pot of porter is waitin’ for him by the hearth, an’ the Cakes throwin’ honesty pods over you, with her eyes too tear-fogged to take a good, hard look at the bride . . . an’ you carry the bride off to the private chambers with your pockets full of wedding cakes, strip off the bonnet and gown, an’ leave the body sitting up straight an’ smart on Mr Clent’s bed . . .’

‘Halk Partridge was a pillager and thief of the lowest sort,’ Kohlrabi said quietly. ‘He had an ugly temper, and would have ended up bleeding his thoughts into a tavern’s floorboards sooner or later. The river runs more cleanly without him riding its back.’

‘Yeah, but you didn’t know all that when he had his back to you, did you?’ Perhaps Kohlrabi’s face had worn just this mask-like look when Partridge had turned in bewilderment from the printing press, his lips ready with a question that was never asked.

‘What if it had been
me
, Mr Kohlrabi? Would Mr Clent have rolled in from the tavern an’ found me sitting up on his bed, periwinkle-blue an’ cold as a lawyer’s heart?’

‘Do you really believe that?’ Kohlrabi tilted his head a little, and his eyes were bright with something that might have been hurt, and might have been moon. ‘Little god, you see the world through such black eyes.’

‘Got no choice. My father give ’em to me.’

‘I think he gave you more than that, Mosca.’ Kohlrabi’s tone set something jangling in the depths of Mosca’s soul like a bucket in a well. ‘I told you how I worshipped Quillam Mye when I was growing up. My own father was dead, and your father became my hero. He spoke out against the Stationers when they were trying to burn all books touched with our philosophy. It inspired me. I became certain that he must secretly be a member of our faith. The Stationers destroyed nearly all his books, but I found a few copies and read them. Mosca . . . down in the hold is a copy of one of his works. It is called
On the Popular Superstition and Delusion Commonly Called the Beloved
.’

‘No! I don’t believe you!’
He wasn
’
t a Birdcatcher he wasn
’
t he wasn
’
t he wasn
’
t
. . .

‘The hatch is right there. Take a look below for yourself. Or if you are afraid that I might leap on to the raft in a single bound, cast your mind back. Did it never seem to you that your father’s views were . . . uncommon?’

For the hundredth time in her short life Mosca conjured up a remembered image of her father. In her mind’s eye she set his desk halfway between herself and Kohlrabi and saw him writing there busily, despite the reeds tickling against his calves and the feeble light offered by the moon. A moth blundered through his head, but he did not even look up in annoyance.
I know you
’
re busy but this is really really important an
’
I need to ask somink
. . .

‘Mosca, your father wrote that the Beloved were no more real than the dolls that children give names and squeaky voices. Do you know what he said of them? He said, “They are best used as poppets and toys for green young minds while they are learning to understand the world, and it is the most miserable thing that our grown men cannot bring themselves to lock away the Beloved with their hoops and wooden soldiers.”’

The imagined Quillam Mye dipped his pen, and wrote eagerly, silently mouthing the very words the Birdcatcher was speaking. Mosca’s eyes misted. The manner of speaking was all too familiar.

You should have told me
, she shouted silently to the heedless figure of her father,
and I should have broke your pince
-
nez
,
and hid your pipe from your blind
,
old
,
black
-
pebble
eyes . . .

‘He was right, Mosca, can you not see that? The Beloved, with all their nursery-rhyme names, just distract everyone from the Greater Truth, the Brighter Light. Mosca, I believe that in your deepest heart you hunger for that kind of brightness. You looked at Lady Tamarind and thought you saw it: something shining, beautiful, pure, raised above the rest of the world. Of course she disappointed you, for she is only a human woman. She believes in nothing really – except power, in the same way that a pike believes in feeding. You need something sacred.’

‘I don’t think I like sacred very much,’ Mosca called back. ‘’Cept maybe Palpitattle . . . an’ he’s not
very
sacred.’

‘If nothing is sacred, then we are all left to crawl through the mud, and there is no meaning to anything. Since the Heart of Consequence was ripped out of the churches, even the stars shine crooked in the skies. Everyone goes to church to gossip and envy each other’s hats, but the
heart
has gone out of it. This country is like an old mother dying, and nobody cares enough to save her because they are too busy going through her purse. Every city is a snake’s nest of pillagers, pickpockets, anglers, cheats, cardsharps, harlots, forgers, smugglers, charlatans, footpads, highwaymen, blackmailers, pettifoggers, hedge-robbers and drunkards – you have seen all this for yourself. How can their soul survive when they have ripped out their Heart?’

The phantom Quillam Mye had paused, pen poised, but she could not tell whether he was re-reading his own words or waiting for hers. The wind shifted, and carried Mosca a whiff of remembered pipesmoke.

‘And yes, amid this poison smog of the soul that is trying to choke out the light of sun, moon and stars, we are trying to rekindle a light. It is a harsh light that will dazzle some and burn others, but it will take the world out of this terrible darkness of Disbelief.’ So this was Kohlrabi’s true face, pale and strange, older than his years, as if his father and countless others were speaking through him. ‘I am content to be hated, and bloody, and outnumbered. For in this sickened world, it is better to believe in something too fiercely than to believe in nothing.’

Words, words, wonderful words. But lies too.

‘No, it isn’t!’ shouted Mosca the Housefly, Quillam Mye’s daughter. ‘Not if what you’re believin’ isn’t blinkin’ well True! You shouldn’t just go believin’ things for no reason, pertickly if you got a sword in your hand! Sacred just means something you’re not meant to think about properly, an’ you should never stop thinking! Show me something I can kick, and hit with rocks, and set fire to, and leave out in the rain, and
think about
, and if it’s still standing after all that then maybe, just maybe, I’ll start to believe in it, but not till then. An’ if all we’re left with is muck and wickedness and no gods, then we’d better face it and get used to it because it’s better than a lie. Which is what
you
are, Mr Kohlrabi.’

Mosca’s voice had become fierce and loud, and the low hills passed her words to and fro, marvelling at them. Kohlrabi’s face softened and took on the gentle, rueful smile with which he had always wished her farewell. The tricorn dropped from his left hand, and Mosca threw herself forward, bruising her chest against the iron mooring ring. Kohlrabi’s smile vanished behind a wreath of smoke. She felt a wind stroke her cheek, as if an invisible dog had licked her face with a long, cold tongue.

The pistol shot shocked Mosca’s ears into white, whistling deafness. Her trembling fingers forced the rough cords of the mooring rope to loosen. On the shore Kohlrabi would be advancing, testing his ground with a careful foot . . .

But there were other figures on the bank now, sprinting along the paths with swords drawn, calling words that made no sound. Kohlrabi drew his rapier and stepped forward. The foremost of his opponents slithered to a stop too slowly, and took a wicked kick to the kneecap. He staggered and fell to one knee, and the Birdcatcher aimed a vicious cut down towards his face. The stricken man flung up a parry too late, and fell back with a scream.

As Kohlrabi turned and ran, one of his attackers raised and levelled a pistol. Smoke gasped silently out of the gun, and then wind sucked it up greedily and swallowed it. Kohlrabi spun as if to face his pursuers, but somehow the motion did not end, and he kept on spinning right around, toppling sideways at the same time. Mosca saw him break the moon-gilded mirror of the river without making a sound, and then the current took pity on her and drew the ragman’s raft away.

Mosca was sure that the men on the bank would be calling to her, but she huddled herself in a nest of rags, and shivered in silence. It was only after she had drifted for an hour that the ringing faded from her ears. A low, soft booming seemed to sound from the hills like gunfire, but she could not be sure if it existed inside her head or out. At last she raised her head to look at the imagined figure of her father, whose desk was now perched up on the rag-mountain.

‘You weren’t much help,’ she murmured bitterly. ‘Why didn’t you tell me anything about all this?’

‘If you want someone to tell you what to think,’ the phantom answered briskly, without looking up, ‘you will never be short of people willing to do so.’ There. She had it at long last, his voice and manner exactly. Quillam Mye paused to polish his pince-nez, and then squinted at his daughter through them for a long while, as if mildly surprised that she had grown up so much while his attention was elsewhere. ‘Come now,’ he said at last, ‘you can hardly claim that I have left you ignorant. I taught you to read, did I not?’

V is for Verdict

As Mosca found out later, the distant booming she had heard reverberating between the hills was not a buzzing in her stricken eardrums. It was cannonfire.

On receiving Toke’s warning, the Watermen had sent all available boats downstream in two flotillas, one made of swift-skimming vessels, the other of larger, slower vessels, to intercept the ship carrying Lady Tamarind’s troops.

In the short term this meant that a boatload of highly disgruntled Locksmith troops, who had been trying to act upon the orders of their guildmaster in Mandelion to reach the city with all speed, were finally able to sail on without being stopped at every bend in the river by good-natured Watermen who insisted on ‘searching the boat for Captain Blythe’. They reached Mandelion, and found the city in a state of celebratory riot. Disembarking, they were mistaken for reinforcements of Duke’s men, were overwhelmed by the jubilant crowd, and stripped of their weapons and clothes.

The fast Watermen flotilla, meanwhile, reached Fainbless before the moon rose. There was barely time to put men ashore on the bank and a mid-river island before a solitary ship was spied, a three-masted lugger with eight cannon. She flew no colours.

From a tower in Fainbless, the Watermen hailed the unknown ship, waving brands to signal her to shore. Their only answer was an echo, and the crack of gunfire.

Three Watermen were lost as the tower collapsed, and their comrades were not slow to touch off their cannon. The crew of the strange ship knew nothing of the Watermen hidden on the island until a flaming ‘carcass’ arc’d from among the trees and landed mid-deck.

The little Watermen boats flitted and slipped around the great ship like dogs at a baiting, but her muskets and riflemen were too numerous to risk a close approach. Even at long range her cannon ripped their sails.

Just as it seemed that nothing could be done to stop her passing out of range of the Fainbless cannon, the second Watermen flotilla arrived. In desperation a boat was fired and the flaming vessel sent towards the lugger, which steered wildly from its path and grounded itself in unsuspected shallows.

Pelted with carcasses, the lugger slowly burned to the waterline. There was no call for aid from on board, however. No boats were lowered, no survivors were fished out of the water. A superstitious fear settled, and some whispered that the the unknown ship might as well have been crewed and captained by the dead.

It was during the journey back to Mandelion that a sharp-eyed sculler spotted a chilled and feverish Mosca Mye huddled on one bank in the middle of a nest of rags.