Temple Boys
Authors: Jamie Buxton
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For Sophie Hicks, with thanks
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Contents
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For the king has come to seek a flea, as one who hunts a partridge in the mountains.
âT
HE
B
OOK OF
S
HAMA-EL
Stone disobedient children.
â
T
HE
B
OOK OF
S
POKEN
W
ORDS
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Flea smelled the dump before he saw it. A bad place, deeply unclean. The thick air bounced with fat black flies, and once Flea had seen a body there. Swollen, revolting, compelling, it had lain for three days until the Temple persuaded someone to move it with promises of spiritual purification. But that was nothing compared to what he had just seen today. Nothing at all, really.
Big white moon, gusting wind, and the sky pulsing silver and black, black and silver. The rolling clouds sent the walls into a slow endless topple toward the valley floor. Flea dragged his right hand against the stone blocks. Their rough mass told him the walls still stood, so the Temple still stood, the dead were not walking, and the world had not ended. Not yet.
Maybe he still had time to put things right. Maybe he could find out how a man he had just seen die was going to change everything.
He heard the dogs start up again in the distance and forced his feet to shuffle into a broken run. The quicker he moved, the sooner he'd find Jude, and the sooner he found Jude, the quicker he'd get everything sorted out. Jude would know. Jude would help him.
And all would be well. Wouldn't it?
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The cold woke Flea
and drove him out of the shelter.
It was a gray dawn. Misty dawn. Damp, dewy dawn with dark drips on tawny stone walls. Flea flapped arms, stamped feet, blew hard, and waved a dirty hand through the thin cloud of his breath. He looked at the gang's shelter and wondered if it was worth burrowing between the sleeping bodies in the hope of getting a bit more sleep. He decided against it. He hated violence, especially when it was directed at him.
The shelter filled the end of an alleyway, its sagging roof slung between the Temple walls and the back of a baker's oven. The gang had swiped its beams from a half-built house in the new town. The roof was scraps of leather taken from the tanneries and painfully sewn together. Rain dripped through the thread-holes and sometimes the leather got so heavy the whole thing collapsed, but most of the time it worked.
Flea could put up with a drip or two, and the roof falling in. For him, quite apart from practical issues, the shelter was a battleground for statusâa battle that he lost every night. In cold weather the older members of the gangâBig, Little Big, Smash, and Grabâwould hog the oven wall, and when it was hot they moved away from it. Flea was constantly pushed around, ended up being too hot or too cold, and, either way, was always the first to wake.
The sky was a low gray roof above the walls of the alley. For days now clouds had pressed down over the Holy City, trapping the smoke from the Temple's fire altar so that it drifted through the alleyways in a greasy haze. Everyone's eyes stung and every surface was sticky with fat. And out-of-towners were flooding into the city for Passover, the feast of the Death Angel. More people meant more sacrifices, and more sacrifices meant yet more smoke ⦠The mood wasn't good.
A lump of shadow detached itself from the wall and began to waddle along the gutter toward him. He blinked, rubbed his eyes, and blinked again.
“Rat!”
Flea yelled. He scrabbled for a rock, found a pebble, and flung it as hard as he could. It clicked harmlessly off the stone gutter and the rat continued toward him with hardly a pause.
“Rat! Rat! Rats!”
Flea backed up against the shelter, feeling behind for a weapon, anything to fend the brute off. Another was comingâthey must have smelled the crumbs in the shelter. His hand closed on a stick, which he snatched. Unfortunately it was holding up the front of the shelter, which collapsed.
Furious shouts as the heavy leather roof fell on unsuspecting sleepers.
“Rats!”
Flea yelled again.
“What theâ¦?” Big, the gang leader, stuck his head out of the shelter.
“Flea!”
“But they're coming! Look!”
Big's blunt features were blurred by sleep. He rubbed his face, grabbed the stick, and sent the rats scurrying away down the hole at the end of the alley.
“What bloody use are you, Flea?”
Flea was panting. “I had a bad experience with rats,” he said. “When I was a grave robber.”
“When you were a grave robber's slave⦔
“It doesn't matter! He sent me down a hole. I got attacked. Look.
Look!
” Flea pulled out his lower lip to show the small pale scars on the inside. The hole in question had been a cliff tomb outside the city walls. The way in had been too narrow for both Flea and a lamp, so he had been forced to rummage through the old bones for jewelry by touch. In the utter black, scraped by the rocks, aching with the effort, and choking in the dust of dead people, he had felt the darkness bunch, writhe, and squeal. The grave robber had pulled him out screaming, with one rat hanging off his mouth and the other dangling from his ear.
Flea had been sacked, of course. Grave robbing was meant to take place in silenceârats or no rats.
“Shut up or we'll shove you down the rat hole to be eaten alive,” growled Big. “I mean it. Now fix the shelter.”
“I can't. You've got the stick.”
“And you've got trouble.” Big raised the stick above his head.
“Don't!” Flea pleaded.
“Then get water. Get bread. Get milk.”
Flea grabbed the water skin. The underfed girl he had spotted hanging about the shelter for the past week was just around the corner. She was smiling like she'd seen the whole thing. So he yelled at her to stay away from him if she knew what was good for her and he set off for the fountain.
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The Holy City
was built on two hills. The Temple sat on one, and the rich lived in the elegant palaces of the Upper City on the other. Squeezed in between the hills and spreading out at either end was the Lower City, a dense maze of streets and alleyways zigzagging up and down the slopes. Houses of two and three floors were crammed together in jagged blocks or stacked in precarious cliffs. The streets were so narrow that if you leaned out of your window, you could practically reach into the house on the other side. Flea knew the city like a hunter knows the forest, as a place of danger and opportunity. But he wasn't after game; food and money were what he wanted.
The city was crowded at the best of times, but in the days leading up to the feast it was stuffed so full you'd think the high old walls would burst. The law stated that for the night of the feast, everyone in the country had to come and stay within the city walls. Most people made a few days' holiday of it. Every house was crammed. Every rooftop groaned. Every street was blocked with milling out-of-towners.
Flea pushed his way up a winding alleyway to the fountain, the district's only source of water. As he drew closer, the crowd grew thicker and angrier. People were grumbling that lodgings were more expensive, wine was more expensive, food was more expensive, and, most of all, the Temple was robbing them blind. To pay your Temple tax you had to convert your money into Temple silver. To make a sacrifice you had to buy a holy lamb or a holy dove and, again, you had to convert your money to Temple silver. Every which way, you lost and they won. And what about the disgraceful water shortages that never got any better? The new aqueduct was meant to bring more water to the city, but who got it first? The priests, who were hoarding it in giant reservoirs under the Temple and leaving the city high and dry.
The Temple Boys despised the visitors, but relied on them like everyone else in the city. They were like a great flood that left behind a vast deposit of money: for the Temple, for the market traders, for the innkeepers, for the butchers and bakers and candlestick makers, for anyone who owned four walls and a roofâbut most of all for the beggars, thieves, and pickpockets.
As Flea worked his way through the crowd, he kept an eye out for easy pickingsâcoins on the ground, open purses, and the like. But he decided, on balance, it would be better to stay honest. In a dense and angry crowd like this one, getting away would be hard, and if you were caught you'd be beaten, kicked, even killed.
Not worth it,
Flea thought, but then, neither was hanging around. He pushed his way through, shouting, “Water for the leper! Water for the leper boy!” Ignoring the furious stares, he filled the water skin, slung it across his shoulders, and staggered off.
Halfway down the hill where two streets met, the Grinderman, a traveling knife sharpener, was setting up his wheel.
Flea called to him. “Hey! Why are you lazing around when there's work to do?”
“Why chase after work when work'll find you all too soon?” the Grinderman chuckled. “Lambs' throats are waiting to be cut and knives are waiting to be sharpened. Anyway, what are you doing here? I'd have thought you'd be off to the Black Valley Bridge this morning.”
“Why would I go there? Did a priest drop his purse?”
“Pay me and I'll tell you,” the Grinderman said.
Flea pretended to throw a coin that the Grinderman pretended to catch and then bite.
“Usual fake rubbish,” he said. “Now I'm not going to tell you about the magician who's coming to town.”
“What magician?”
“I said I'm not telling.” The Grinderman grinned, the large gap between his front teeth showing, and tapped the side of his long nose. “He's not from Gilgal and I wasn't told about him by a guy who saw him make pigs dance. He's not got a legion of demons behind him all bound to do his wishes. He can't turn water to wine, or make cripples jump over the moon, or conjure banquets out of thin air either. And you didn't hear it here first.”
