Fly by Night (16 page)

Eventually she called out to one of the ‘ragmen’ who poled their laden rafts up and down the Slye, bartering for scraps and discarded cloth. He was glad of a conversation with someone who had travelled beyond Mandelion. Mosca traded him some extravagant lies about life in the Capital in exchange for some drab facts about local geography.

‘Don’t know that there’ll be much there for you, though.’ The ragman stared quizzically at her departing figure, and Mosca concluded that he did not think she looked scholarly.

Only as she neared the right street did her self-confidence falter and her insides start leapfrogging. What if the teachers sneered at her grimy muslin or asked about her background? What if they expected her to be able to read Old Acrylic?

She turned the final corner, and stared.

The school’s weathervane had been fashioned in the shape of a crouching man with a book in hands, head jutting forward eagerly, and Mosca easily recognized the pointed features of Goodman Whiskerwhite, He Who Searches for Truth.

Unsteadily, Mosca walked forward and prodded the weathervane with her foot. It was half buried among broken, mossy roof-tiles. Raising her head, she looked across at the mounds of rubble shored against the few remaining walls of the school, their gaping windows sad and jagged with broken leads. She shrugged both shoulders like a bird settling itself.

To judge by the advance of the moss and decay, the Ragged School had been dead longer than Mosca had been alive. Only as the dream broke and its shards cut her did she realize how close she had been clutching it. She had not
hoped
the school would accept her, she had
known
they would. At the back of her mind, she had believed that her father had meant her to hunt down the school, had made plans to ensure her future happiness when he was gone . . .

‘Daft old dunnock.’ Mosca could hardly recognize her own voice. ‘What’s the point of sending me here? That’s it, is it? That’s the best you can do?’ Quillam Mye’s mention of the Ragged School had not been a clue, or a part of some all-wise and all-knowing plan. He had died and abandoned his daughter without making any provision for her future. The ruin of the Ragged School was a devastating disappointment, but it also felt like a betrayal.

Mosca scrambled across the ruined school, her eyes stinging. The demolition was too complete to be a matter of accident or time, and there were no traces of fire. She found a hiding place beneath the lean of a tumbled timber, and hugged her knees there for a while, while ivy tickled the back of her neck.

While she was glowering numbly at her own clogs, she noticed something square-cornered and yellow-white wedged between two nearby bricks. Mosca wrestled it out, and found herself staring at a child’s hornbook. Gripping its handle, she shook the dust off it, and raised it up to stare into it like a hand mirror. The layer of horn meant to protect the paper underneath was grimy and cracked, and the weather had blotted the letters of the alphabet almost beyond recognition. The backing board was rotten.

As a child she had spent hours sitting with such a hornbook beside her father’s desk, while he wrote and she laboured over her lessons. Not a word or a look between them in an hour, just a strange, silent sense of connection. Despite herself, Mosca glowed with the memory.

This was something, at least, and there might be more treasures to be found. She crawled out of her cave, and began searching through the rubble. She was just starting to conclude that dozens of other looters had stripped it bare, when she looked up and found she was not the only forager.

Two other children were picking over the rubble, one a girl of fifteen or so in a bent yellow bonnet, and the other a boy of about six, still in his infant gown. They saw her and pulled themselves upright like startled hares. The girl seemed to be holding a steel pen in her hand.

Something rushed past Mosca, and the hornbook was snatched out of her hand. She could only watch as a boy of her own age galloped, goat-footed, away from her across the rubble, his hand-me-down breeches flapping loosely.

‘Oi!’

She hitched her skirts and sprinted after him, leaping a fractured chimney in a bound. Too much had been taken from her during her short life for Mosca to surrender a treasure that easily to an opponent her own size. The boy sprinted flat out without looking back, and Mosca matched his speed, her bonnet flapping against her back at its ribbon’s limit. Down another alley, and another.

Round a corner, on to a busy thoroughfare . . . and right into a fustian coat and a blow to the gut.

Mosca doubled up and took a step backwards. Her hands knotted into fists and readied themselves at her waist to fend off another blow.

Further down the road, she saw the boy she had chased toss the hornbook to a group of older boys without breaking stride. One of them caught it, and slipped it into his pocket without looking at it. The thief kept running.

Mosca looked up from her crouch to see who had struck her.

It was a boy of about fifteen, dressed in the shabby style of most apprentices, with a pigtail as stubby as a paintbrush. He was arranging rolls of satin across the tables outside a haberdasher’s and, to judge by his manner, had no idea of her existence, let alone the fact that his elbow had just found its way into her stomach. Nonetheless, when she advanced a step to move around him, he moved backwards with an insolent nonchalance, under cover of shaking out a length of cobra-green silk. His eyelids flickered as if beneath his lashes he had given her a surreptitious glance. He had a pleasant, pink, rounded face, and the smile of someone who would always find something flattering to say about ugly women’s hats.

It is a very terrible thing to be far smaller than one’s rage. Mosca felt something enormous swell within the knotted stomach that she hid behind her fists. It seemed it must surge out of her like a wild, black wave, sweeping away stalls and strollers alike and biting the plaster from the walls. However, when her vision cleared, her attacker was standing unharmed and unruffled.

The thief was almost out of sight. Mosca took another impulsive pace forward, and was knocked off her feet as the haberdasher’s apprentice stepped quickly to block her. There was a hot ache in her jaw where his arm had hit her, there was a bruised shock in her hip from her fall, there was a prickle of rage about her heart and fingertips. She had no doubt that her attacker was blocking her path so that the thief could escape. On all fours, Mosca crawled away from him, then rose to her knees, wiping the mud from her hands.

It was while she was recovering her breath that Mosca witnessed something rather extraordinary.

The three boys who had been thrown the hornbook suddenly stiffened like dogs at a scent. With an air of purpose they darted across the road, and laid hands upon a young man wearing a chocolate-brown tricorn. They seemed set upon dragging the unfortunate man to the nearest alley, and Mosca assumed that they must be young gonophs determined to strip him of all his valuables. Curiously, however, their victim seemed neither worried nor surprised. He allowed himself to be manhandled out of the street, and disappeared from sight.

Near this alley rose a ragged wall where flints bulged and brandished, where arrow slits showed slivers of sky. Any native of Mandelion would have known that this was the old city wall, breached many centuries before during half-forgotten feuds over blood and money. Mosca knew only that this was something she could climb.

Carts splashed her hem as she slipped across the road, ducking her head so that the clothier’s apprentice would lose track of her in the crowd. She wriggled through a fissure in the wall. Blush-petalled daisies quivered in every crack and tickled her fingertips as she climbed.

The wall rose over an alleyway where the young man was recovering his composure. He wore a dusty coat and a wig so misshapen it seemed some absent-minded soul had used it as a tea cosy. He blinked at the world about him through a pair of tiny spectacles tinted the gentle blue of a spring morning. In one hand he carried a walking cane, and under his free arm was tucked a large loaf of bread.

A group of children was playing at marbles in the alleyway. A sharp whistle raised their heads, and their game was abandoned with extraordinary casualness. There was a fumbling in jacket and skirt-pocket, and each fetched out a roll of paper, an inkbottle and a quill. The girl with the bent yellow bonnet was there, wiping rust from her scavenged pen. The last child to join the group was the clothier’s apprentice. At the mouth of the alley he paused to cast a glance up the street as if still looking for Mosca, then moved to take his place next to a slim girl with a frayed, white lace shawl over her head.

If any of them had thought to look up, they might have noticed a hole halfway up the flint wall. It had for a time served as a station for a small cannon. Now it provided a crouching place for a short figure who hunched herself against the wind like a starling, frowning with her fierce new eyebrows of coal.

‘Ah . . . good morning.’ The man in blue glasses adjusted his hold on his bread, and tore it in two. It divided easily, and Mosca could see that a small and battered book lay within the crust. ‘From the place where we left off yesterday. Ah, yes . . .
the responsibility of government is to protect the rights of the low from the tyranny of the high and not the property of the high from the desperation of the low
. . . oh good heavens, my apologies, we covered that already, did we not?’ He crinkled his nose and adjusted his blue-tinted spectacles as he leafed through the book. Each of the dozen or so children seemed to be faithfully noting down his every word, including his hesitations and self-interruptions.

It was a school, a school! A back-alley school of stolen moments and stolen pens, but a school. Mosca could have wept tears of blood at finding herself forced to watch at a distance. All her life, her bookishness had made her a freak and an outcast, and other children had treated her with scorn and mistrust. Now it seemed clear that she would find no brothers and sisters even among schooled children like herself. She was an outcast still, and if she tried to approach, they would chase her away like a pack of young dogs snarling off an intruding stray.

‘Ah, here we are. Ah –
A Colloquy on Truth
, thought to be by the same author.’ The teacher cleared his throat and raised his head, and somehow the mist of absentmindedness seemed to clear behind his little spectacles. ‘On Truth.’ He started to read.

‘
Truth is dangerous
.
It topples palaces and kills kings
.
It stirs gentle men to rage and bids them take up arms
.
It wakes old grievances and opens forgotten wounds
.
It is the mother of the sleepless night and the hag-ridden day
.
And yet there is one thing that is more dangerous than Truth
.
Those who would silence Truth’s voice are more destructive by far
.

‘
It is most perilous to be a speaker of Truth
.
Sometimes one must choose to be silent, or be silenced
.
But if a truth cannot be spoken, it must at least be known
.
Even if you dare not speak truth to others
,
never lie to yourself
.

‘
In my head I built a room
,
in which I kept the truths I dared not speak
.
And in this room sometimes I said
,
the kings will return no more to the Realm
.
Nobody dares say this
,
but everyone knows it is the Truth
.
In this room I said
,
it is good that the kings’ tyranny is gone forever
.
Men would hang me for saying so
,
but their hearts would whisper all the while that I spoke the Truth
.
And in this room I said that until the ordinary people choose their own leaders they will suffer
,
and this too is the Truth
. . .’

The meaning of these words would have been lost on most children – and, for that matter, on many adults – but the eavesdropper in the cannon nook was Mosca Mye, who had begged and bartered for books and broadsheets all her life. This was radical talk – this dripped treason. The teacher below could be hanged for the words he was reading out. Mosca’s eyes glittered vengefully.

‘
In this little room of the mind the truths grew strong and strident
,
and I knew that I must speak them whatever the cost
. . .’

There was a sharp whistle from somewhere directly below Mosca, and with a shock she realized that the boy she had chased had been standing with his back flat against the flint wall, keeping an eye on the street.

‘Class dismissed,’ declared the teacher sharply, slamming his bread shut with a small explosion of crumbs.

Five of the children disappeared through holes in the ruined wall, the smallest leapfrogging through on his hands. The eldest boy scrambled up the side of the nearest house, then hung his arms over the roof’s edge to pull up a smaller friend. Four others dropped to their knees and silently renewed their game of marbles.

The teacher pulled his cravat loose, and then retied it as he walked back towards the street. By the time he reached the mouth of the alleyway he was pulling it back into its bow, for all the world as if he had simply stepped into the alley to get out of the wind and set it straight. At the street corner he passed a tall gentleman in a full-bottomed wig who had just stepped into the alley, the reason for the lookout’s whistle, and nodded to him courteously.