Fly by Night (45 page)

Kohlrabi seemed to know the paths of the wood where moss would silence their steps. He appeared much taller in the dark, or perhaps, Mosca’s tired brain wondered, perhaps he wore daylight in a way that made him seem shorter and more ordinary.

‘Who are they?’ whispered Mosca when they had been creeping in this way for some time.

‘Stationers.’ Kohlrabi’s whisper was a little louder than hers, as if he thought Mosca’s pursuers had probably been left behind. ‘Little god, you have been crashing through the undergrowth like a wounded boar, and they have been following the sound. I in turn have been following them. They were quite worried when you stopped walking, and they started arguing about which one of them should creep forward and get a sight of you. I thought I would try and reach you first.’

‘An’ how did you know I was goin’ after the printing press?’

‘A little guesswork, based on an apron in a herring-barrel. The Stationers must have suspected as much to trail you like that, and I trust them to know their job. So – where is the press?’

‘In the hold of a ragman’s raft. I hid it in the rushes an’ made sure I’d know the place again. I can take you there.’ Mosca paused and swallowed mournfully. ‘Are you going to take it away?’

‘Mosca –’ Kohlrabi’s voice was kind and patient – ‘look at all the hubbub this one printing press has caused in Mandelion. You must see that it is far too important a thing to have it falling into the wrong hands. Now, the Stationers would break it apart, or use it to print dull essays, and I think that would be a waste, don’t you? And other people might use it to print all kinds of stupid things and get themselves in trouble. Someone has to make sure it is used properly and fulfils its destiny.’

‘If there are books there with the press . . . can I read them?’

Kohlrabi mulled this over for a few moments, his face invisible in the darkness.

‘Perhaps,’ he said at last. ‘Yes. I think, when we take the raft downstream, it would be best if you came with us.’

‘We can’t go downstream, Mr Kohlrabi! That’s what I wanted to tell you about! There’s people comin’ from the coast, an’ they mustn’t catch us. And listen, listen, Mr Kohlrabi, I got to warn you about Lady Tamarind . . .’

As Mosca’s voice rose in pitch, Kohlrabi turned to stare back through the trees behind him, hushing her. One of his hands slid to his belt, and she remembered his pistol. He held up a hand for silence and spent a few seconds quite motionless, before beckoning to her sharply, and creeping on stealthily as they had at first.

Almost stifling with unspoken words, she followed him as the woods thinned and gave way to fields. She followed him at a crouch along ditches and through hedge shadow, across streams and over drystone walls. By the time they reached the darkness of the woods again, she had taken her new pipe from her pocket and was chewing at the stem while she fended the briars from her face.

‘I think that pipe is twice as loud as our steps,’ Kohlrabi whispered at long last.

His only answer was the sound of wood clicking against the teeth of his companion.

‘You must be hungry, if you are willing to devour wood.’

Mosca said nothing, but continued her champ, champ, champ in the darkness.

‘At this rate you will chew your way right through the stem. I would probably not have given you the pipe if I had known that you would think so hard with it.’

‘I can believe that,’ Mosca muttered.

An opening in the trees allowed the moon to fall upon Kohlrabi’s face. He strode in silence for a few moments, then turned a puzzled smile upon his companion. At least, he would have done so if that companion had still been at his side.

‘Mosca?’ Kohlrabi’s expression see-sawed between a smile and a frown as he looked about him. Then both expressions faded like smoke and he wore only the wide-eyed look of one who is listening very intently.

Hidden behind a fringe of ferns, Mosca lay flat, her cheek against the clammy softness of the dead leaves.

‘Mosca?’

In a Mandelion street, Mosca would have been at the mercy of its flurry and flow, the hurried weaving of stride and barrow. But this was the freckled woodland, where you needed a different set of tricks. Be still where you can, be as silent as you can, let other small sounds drown your steps. If you cannot fool the eye, then fool the brain – stand where you are not expected and you will not be seen. Keep to the highs, keep to the lows, and avoid eye level if the terrain lets you. These were tricks that Mosca knew.

She had abandoned her gleaming white bonnet and cap on the path as she slipped away. Her dark hair was now pulled forward to mask the pale skin of her face. She waited for Kohlrabi to take a few steps in the wrong direction before rising to a crouch. While he turned his back, a light figure beam-balanced its way along the trunk of a felled tree, arms spread for balance, stockinged feet silent on the dank green velvet covering the bark. By the time he looked back, the figure had dropped out of sight with a faint sound like a chestnut falling.

These were tricks that Mosca knew better than Kohlrabi.

Her skirts scooped over one arm, the pipe clamped silently in her mouth, Mosca slipped to the thicket’s edge, and found a feathered sea of reeds before her, shivering moonlight like shot silk. Where was the ragman’s raft? Mosca found a gash in the mud where she had anchored the mooring peg, and she knew that the raft must have pulled loose and floated away. But no – there was a strange, squarish clearing among the reeds. The raft had floated, but not far.

Wading through the reeds, Mosca found the ground growing treacherously moist and cloying, the mud welcoming her feet eagerly and giving an annoyed cluck of its tongue each time she drew them out for another step. At last the unseen ground surpassed itself by suddenly becoming river. Mosca found herself up to her hips in icy water, her descent slowed only by her skirts, which spread about her, the muslin seething with bubbles like egg white in a poaching pan.

Mosca grabbed fistfuls of the reeds and used them to drag herself towards the raft. She reached it just before her skirts became sodden enough to drag her down, and she heaved her torso on to its planks. Using her legs to kick, she pulled at the reeds to drag the raft out towards the river. Only when she reached the very edge of the reed-forest and pulled herself up on to the timbers did Mosca realize why the raft had not floated away. The mooring rope had pulled taut. Somewhere among the reeds the trailing end with the mooring peg had caught on something.

Almost in tears with desperation and cold, Mosca gave the rope several violent tugs, but it held. The mooring rope was fastened to a metal ring on the raft with a knot that made no sense to her, and her fingers were so numb the bristling rope was painful to twist. She was still struggling with it when she looked up and saw that Kohlrabi was standing on the bank.

He was out of breath, as if he had reached the bank at a run. The moon was full on his face, and he still wore an expression of slight puzzlement. He took a step towards Mosca, before looking down at his feet, up at the raft, and then searchingly at the reeds separating him from the raft. Perhaps he had worked out that he was near the brink. Mosca was fairly sure he did not know how near.

In his left hand he carried his hat, as if he had snatched it off in order to run without losing it. He held it casually, but in such a way that it hid his right hand.

‘Little Mosca,’ he called out at last, ‘do you really want to keep the press so much?’

‘I don’t think I want the future we was talkin’ about.’ Mosca did not move a muscle, but stayed crouching with her hands around the knotted rope. ‘I don’t want to work for Lady Tamarind.’

‘To tell the truth, I never intended that you should.’ Kohlrabi smiled, and looked rather relieved. ‘She is a very clever woman, but her aims are rather tawdry.’ A touch of embarrassment crept into his smile, as if he had been caught buying Mosca a nameday present ahead of time. ‘I’m afraid I was always planning to steal you away from her. It’s probably time I explained things properly but, Pale Fates, can you bring the raft in first? If we keep shouting like this we will have the Stationers or worse to deal with.’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Kohlrabi, but I got all these bits and pieces of thoughts. An’ most of ’em are just little, an’ none of ’em proves anything, but they stick into my mind like pine needles in my socks. An’ there’s only one way of lookin’ at ’em all that makes sense.’

Looking at his carefully hovering hat, Mosca knew exactly what Kohlrabi was holding in his hidden right hand.

‘It all makes sense if you’re a Birdcatcher, Mr Kohlrabi.’

Kohlrabi still wore a look of slightly concerned attentiveness. It seemed to Mosca that he was staring at her hands. He could not know if the mooring rope was still fastened, or if Mosca had already loosed it and was simply holding the rope. For all he knew, if she let go, the raft and the printing press would float away down the river and be lost to him.

‘You never swear by the Beloved, never. I mean, I seen you in the cathedral . . . but in the bit which is still the old church really, with its Heart of the Consequence still there under the shines an’ shimmers.’ Mosca paused, but the figure on the bank remained silent and motionless. ‘An’ you work for Lady Tamarind, an’ Lady Tamarind is working with the Birdcatchers. An’ then there’s you followin’ Mr Clent all around the country, an’ sayin’ it’s cos he’s dangerous an’ got blood on his hands, when all the time he’s a fat, skittered old tomcat with long claws an’ no teeth.
That
only makes sense if it was you what stole the letter Mr Toke sent to Mr Clent – the second one, asking him to come to Mandelion. You found out the Stationers had sent for a special agent to find the printing press, and went out to stop him ’fore he even got here. They just brung him in cos they didn’t want to risk one of their own, and didn’t care if the Locksmiths killed him, but
you
thought they must be sendin’ for someone really special and clever and dangerous. An’ when you . . .’ Mosca paused, wondering if she was going too far. ‘When you told me that story ’bout the night your father died, when that church got blasted to smithereens by a Birdcatcher spy . . . the spy
was
your father, wasn’t he?’

‘The bravest man I have ever known,’ Kohlrabi said simply.

Mosca’s waterlogged petticoats clung to her legs, and her teeth were starting to chatter. She realized suddenly that she had wanted Kohlrabi to laugh at her, and deny everything, and show her where she had been stupid. Instead, he continued to smile as if everything was still a game, and a game that Mosca was playing rather well.

‘You’re a Birdcatcher,’ she said in a small, stifled voice.

‘Birdcatcher is a word,’ said Kohlrabi. ‘The whole country is frightened of a word. Mosca, the word has no poisoned bite. It has never smothered a baby. You cannot fire it out of a cannon. And yet, say “Birdcatcher” to a company, and they will scatter like rabbits at the scent of a fox. You are better than that, Mosca. You are not a rabbit.’

Mosca sniffed, and wrinkled her nostrils, very much like a rabbit. An icy tickle plagued her nose, but she dared not move her hands to scratch it.

‘Will you let me tell you what the name Birdcatcher means? A Birdcatcher knows that there is something higher and better in this world than the dirt and darkness which surrounds us. Not the Beloved, sitting in their little shrines like wooden shopkeepers, with everyone trying to buy their favours with gold and flowers and turnips. No, something else, something pure, something so bright that its light could enchant everything else, like sunlight through a stained-glass window. Now, are you going to shun someone just because they believe the world has meaning?’

Mosca shook her head slowly.

‘Then can we please bring in the raft?’ Kohlrabi still wore an expression of tender good humour.

Mosca shook her head again, and snuffled out a single word.

‘I didn’t hear that.’

‘Partridge,’ she repeated, with muffled fierceness. ‘The barge captain. He was a crotchet an’ a bully an’ he left bruises on my shoulders, an’ he was stealing the Beloved out of their shrines, but . . . then someone stuck a knife in him ’fore I’d decided what I thought of him. An’ maybe there was a story to the way his wrist was broken, and the way his smile looked like he was suckin’ crab apples, an’ nobody will ever care enough to find out. But leastways, someone ought to care ’bout the last bit of his story, the bit where he died.

‘It’s funny, I mean, everyone thought he got killed cos he was a Waterman spy, or cos he was blackmailing radicals, or cos he went after Mr Clent wantin’ money. But it wasn’t really ’bout any of that stuff. He died cos of a goose. And . . . cos of me.

‘All he wanted was his barge back, the one my goose Saracen sort of stole by mistake. An’ so when he saw me, he chased me cos he needed me and Mr Clent to take Saracen away. An’ then, right in front of a coffeehouse, I disappeared an’ he couldn’t find me. So I ’spect he searched up and down, an’ then someone took his penny and said, “Yeah, we seen the ferrety-looking girl. Popped under a gentleman’s cloak, she did.” So he got a description of the gent with the cloak, an’ started asking to find out where he’d gone.

‘Sooner or later he tracked him to a ragman’s raft. Maybe he even spied the gent comin’ up out of the hatch. Then . . . I think I see how it went. He pushed his way past the gent and climbed down through the trap-door, thinkin’ I was hidin’ below. But I wasn’t. An’ suddenly there Partridge was in the dark, and in front of him was the printing press an’ lots of pages of Madness and Mayhem drying on racks . . . and behind him there was
you
, Mr Kohlrabi.’