by Jamie Buxton
Flea found he could straighten up.
“That’s better. Follow me out.”
Out in the open, the girl led him away from the pipe and the tree and headed for the bridge.
“I’m sorry about your friend,” she said.
“What happened?”
“Well, I found him and passed on your message. He seemed worried but he said he’d wait. Then I went away to scrounge some food and when I came back … he was like that. There were men hanging around.” Realizing her mistake, she put her hand over her mouth. “Sorry, there were men close by.”
“What did they look like?”
“Men. Just men. I didn’t want to be seen and hid up the pipe. Like you.”
Flea opened his mouth to say something about being lucky to have found her but started shuddering again, as if a very large dog had gotten him in its jaws and was shaking.
“I think … I just n-need to rest,” Flea said.
“Not yet. We need to get away from here.”
He followed the girl along another goat track that cut into the valley side, happy to be led. They dropped down to the Black River and scurried under the great looping arch of the bridge, then climbed a zigzag path. Flea was finding it hard to keep up. The squat towers of the Fortress loomed black above the city walls.
“Don’t worry, I know a way in where you don’t have to walk past Imps. It’s a bit stinky but I’ve done it loads of times. And if you do see an Imp, just try to ignore him. They’re bored, most of them, and a bit scared. They know we hate them, so if we’re caught, don’t do what you normally do.” She put her fists up and bounced around, mimicking Flea’s sudden bouts of fury.
Flea found he still had a little fire in him. “Don’t tell me they’re all right. I saw their torture chamber. I saw Yesh being flogged in the courtyard. Romans did that.”
She shrugged. “Try to forget it. Look pathetic. It works for me. By the way, my name’s Tesha.”
“Isn’t that a number?”
“It’s a long story. But your name?” She patted him on the head. “That’s probably a rather short story. Now come.”
45
The Fortress had its own dump, but the girl showed Flea how you could climb up the side of it and then squeeze through the waste gate for the rubbish. Then they were in an alleyway and Flea could smell cooking.
“The Fortress kitchens,” the girl said. “Hardly anyone comes here, but Roman food’s the same as anyone else’s. Better a lot of the time.” She began to rummage through a row of leather buckets that were lined up against the wall, full of scraps to be chucked out in the morning.
“Posh bread!” she whispered, and held some out to Flea. He took a bite. Roman bread was soft and delicious. More rummaging produced a couple of dried figs. The food revived Flea. A little bit of strength returned to his legs.
“Now we just need somewhere to sleep,” the girl said.
“I know a place,” he said. “It’s a bit of a walk but I think we’ll be safe there for a while.”
And so he led the girl across the sleeping city. At the fountain where he used to fetch water for the gang, he washed the worst of the sewer slime from his hair, legs, and arms. The scouring cold revived him. While he was at it the girl slipped away and came back carrying a bundle, but she wouldn’t tell Flea what it was.
They skirted the lower slums and turned toward the south until Flea found the right street. He looked up and down it. No one moved. They crossed it quickly, creeping by the walls and keeping their eyes on the shuttered windows overlooking them. Flea climbed the steps, gesturing for the girl to stay behind. As before, the door opened to his push and, as before, the room smelled of wine and old cooking.
He beckoned to Tesha. “We’ll be safe here,” he said.
“Are you sure? How come?”
“It was rented for a week for Yeshua and his followers but I don’t think they’ll come back,” Flea said. “Too scared. Too many bad memories. They won’t forget their last supper together.”
“Look, there’s more food.”
“And wine. Eat. Drink. I just need to…”
He could barely stand. He fell onto cushions, managed to swallow some water, and then was engulfed by sleep.
ONE DAY AFTER
46
Flea woke suddenly. Shutters sliced sunlight and striped the wall. He felt a sudden spurt of panic. Where was he? What was going on? Where was everyone?
He heard breathing. The girl was lying by his side, curled up on a big floor cushion like a cat. Tesha. She was called Tesha. Flea’s mind began to spool backward. Jude hanging. Yesh dying. The arrest of the Temple Boys. The Results Man. The riot in the Temple. How had he gotten through it all? He sat up and rubbed his face, waking the girl.
“How can you be awake already? This is the best bed ever.” Tesha stretched and sat up. Unlike Flea, she woke up bright and lively. “Food! I forgot about the food. And look!” She grabbed a metal goblet and held it up to the light. Beams scattered around the room. “I want this,” she said. She took a sip of the wine that was left in it and spat it out. “Yuck.”
“I’ve got to go,” Flea said.
“Where?”
The words were in his mouth before he knew what he was going to say. “Back to Jude. I can’t leave him there.”
“Look, you’re in a bad way,” the girl said. “All cut up. You need rest, and we’ve got our own place here.”
“You don’t understand,” Flea said. “I let him down. I was supposed to be there yesterday but I wasn’t and someone killed him.”
“Oh, so I understand about rescuing people, but because I’m a girl I’m too stupid to understand anything else. Is that what you’re saying? I’m so stupid that I’m the one that stays alive and you’re the one that’s so clever he gets himself half killed.”
“All right,” Flea said. “So why are you always trying to rescue me? Why did you hang around the gang’s shelter? Why did you follow me halfway across the city? And why did you talk to Jude for me?”
The girl stared at him, breathing hard, her nostrils flaring. “You really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“It was a bet,” she said.
More humiliation loomed. “What? With who? Your friends?”
“Me. I haven’t got any friends.”
“So what was the bet?”
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Shook her head. “All right. When I start something I have to finish it. It’s how I stay alive. Otherwise you give up. Get that?”
“Yes.”
“So it’s got nothing to do with you, this bet. But it was a bet.”
“Nothing to do with me,” Flea said. He noticed Tesha’s expression had changed from sullen to sly and from sly to … amused.
“That’s right. I saw the smallest, stupidest beggar in the smallest, stupidest gang and I bet that I could do a better job all by myself than you lot could…”
“At what?”
“At being in a gang. And I was right. They’re all in prison, I’m still alive, and I saved your worthless skin. And you know what?” Tesha said. “It was better than hanging around street corners looking pathetic. I won.”
Flea couldn’t work out whether he was hurt or relieved. “So you won a bet with yourself,” he said. “Big deal.”
“All right, big deal. What’s your excuse?”
“I got sucked in. Then I suppose…” Flea shrugged. “I wanted to stop it, I wanted to put things right. It all just seems so stupid. I mean, Yesh wanted to change the world and he’s dead and Jude wanted to save him and he’s dead and there’s no power, no secret, no nothing, except everything’s worse than it was.”
Tesha was silent. A fly droned across the room to batter heavily against the shutters. She tore a piece of cold meat off the ribs, wrapped it in bread, and began to chew. The noise seemed intolerable to Flea.
She swallowed. Even worse. “Except it doesn’t make sense,” she said.
“I know. I just s
aid that.”
“No. I don’t mean the way grownups behave. That never makes sense. I ran away from the quarry out on the Bethany road—you know it? That’s where I got my name. The gangmaster used to wake us up by calling, Sheva, Shmone, Tesha, Eser … They weren’t our names. They were just numbers, and if one of us died, the new girl would get her name like it was just borrowed.”
Her voice grew shaky and she dashed away a tear, angrily, before carrying on.
“We had to carry rocks in baskets to make roads. If the gangmaster fed us, we could work. If he starved us, we couldn’t. He starved us so we could hardly move and then he beat us and that made it worse, so in the end no one could do anything. I ran away because it was all so stupid.”
She looked at Flea, who nodded, then she continued. “Anyway, the thing your magician wanted doesn’t make sense, because how could he be the Chosen One and make everything change if he knew he was going to die? One or the other, surely? Dead guy, Chosen One. Chosen One, dead guy. How can you be both?”
“Right!” Flea said. “You can see that and I can see that. How come no one else can see that? Grownups. They’re so stupid. It was all for nothing. Every bit of it.”
And Flea was on his feet, suddenly angry, his fury bigger than the room. Bigger than the city. Bigger than the world.
“That’s why I’ve got to find out who killed Jude. It can’t be left like that. He can’t have died for no reason and then nothing happens about it!”
Tesha considered him. “That’s good,” she said. “I’ll buy it. But you can’t go anywhere like that.”
“Like what?”
“People are looking for you; it was all over the city. Cutters. The Temple. Romans. Anybody who wants to suck up to the Cutters or the Temple or the Romans. That’s about half the city, by the way. Popular boy.” She had a point.
“So what do I do?”
“You need a disguise. I thought about it last night while you were staggering along, and I raided a tent while you were washing. Remember that family who knocked down your gang’s shelter? I swiped it from them.” She pulled a bundle from under a cushion and shook it out. “It’s so nice I almost kept it for myself. Anyway, those rags you’re wearing really, really stink.”
She threw it over to Flea. The fabric was soft, unlike the tunic he wore, which was roughly woven out of something like sacking. It flowed. It was dyed dark blue. It was …
“This is for a girl!” Flea dropped the dress as if it might poison him.
“I said I fancied it for myself, but your need is greater than mine. No one knows who I am. No one wants to kill me.”
“I do! Why couldn’t you have stolen a boy’s tunic?”
“Well, it was dark. I had to crawl into the tent. Do everything by touch. If they’d caught me, I’d have been beaten or stoned. I just took the first thing I saw.”
“Then you wear it. I’ll wear your tunic.”
“It’s as bad as your old one. You’d still look like Flea.”
Flea made a noise like waaaah.
“Come on. I’ll pretend to be your slave. You can boss me about.”
Flea held the dress up. It was long and had sleeves, which were a novelty for him. Shoved down one of the sleeves was a matching headscarf. “If you ever tell anyone…”
“My lips are sealed, O mistress.”
“Don’t look.”
When he had finished, Tesha examined him. Flea screwed his eyes shut as she wrapped the scarf more tightly around his head, pushing his hair out of sight. The busy, light fussing of her fingers took him back to a time when … he couldn’t quite think. He risked a peek. Tesha’s face was close to his. The tip of her tongue was clamped between her lips as she concentrated. Gold flecked the gray of her eyes.
“There,” she said. “And, may I say, you look very beautiful now that we can’t see your filthy hair.”
He threw a cushion at her. She shrieked and threw one back and knocked over the jug of wine, which spilled on the cushions and rugs. Their eyes met, shocked, then they laughed and ran out into the day.
47
As they walked, Flea kept his eyes lowered, concentrating hard. He did not see how anyone could walk in a long robe, and his hair itched badly under the scarf. When they got to the east gate they realized something was wrong. An angry crowd was packed into the streets around it and the mood was ugly.
Tesha asked a woman what was going on.
“Lockdown,” the woman answered, as if it were obvious. “They’re looking for terrorists or something.”
“We’ll go out the way we came in,” Tesha said.
“But that’s by the Fortress,” Flea protested.
“Trust me. It’ll be fine.”
“I don’t know if I can walk past a soldier. I’m serious. I’m scared,” Flea said. He felt Tesha’s hand seek out his and give it a squeeze.
“You’re not you,” she said. “You’re a fine lady. Get used to it and remember, that’s all the guards are seeing.”
She was right. The soldiers at the back of the Fortress saw two girls—a rich one and her slave—and barely spared them a glance. When they were looking the other way, Flea and Tesha climbed through the stinking rubbish chute and began to retrace their steps along the valley side.
As they got closer to the tree, Flea began to feel sicker and sicker until he had to stop. “I don’t know if I can do this,” he said. “If he’s still … hanging, do we have to get him down?”
“Wait here,” Tesha said. “I’ll scout it out.”
She was back minutes later. “It’s all right,” she said. “There’s a bit of a crowd: Wild People, Samaritans, a few city people locked out. And the body—I mean your friend—is gone. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”
Neither did Flea.
The tree looked smaller in daylight, its bare branches poking up above the heads of a small crowd. He saw the black of the Wild People’s robes, the striped turban of a Samaritan. He pushed forward, preparing himself for the horror of what might be lying on the ground.
But there was nothing. The wind played with the frayed rope hanging from the branch. That was all there was to see; that was all these gawkers hoping for a quick thrill were going to get.
“Where are they burying him?” the Samaritan asked someone.
“Down there. At the bottom of the valley. In the blood fields,” a peasant answered.
“The what?”
The peasant drew himself up. “See that pipe? It takes all the blood from the Temple’s sacrifices and pours it all into the Black River. The river’s diverted into those flat terraces downstream, see? The blood soaks into the soil; they dig it out and spread it on their fields. Makes the best fertilizer in the world. All the city’s vegetables are grown with its blood.”
“Is that clean? Is that pure?” a worried voice asked.
A man with a sharp face and a shock of dark hair answered. “Don’t know if it’s pure. They’ve been doing it for centuries. And that’s where they bury all the criminals and beggars. Temple Police cut him down this morning and carted him off. Something odd about it, if you want my opinion. I reckon it’s a cover-up.”
“A Temple cover-up?” Another voice.
“Quiet! There’ll be spies about.” Yet another.
“I don’t care about spies.” The Samaritan again. “They’ll have more on their hands than they can deal with soon enough. You want my opinion? He was one of those troublemakers who want a revolution. The Temple finished him off like they finished off that magician.”
“That was never the Temple. That was the Romans!”
An argument started and Flea wheeled away, horrified. No one was thinking of Jude. They’d turned him into an idea to be batted around like a scrap of rubbish.
And Flea should never have come here. He knew that now. What could he do, a stupid little beggar boy? And more than that, what did it matter? It was like being at the bottom of the city dump as it fell in a stinking, steaming mound from the w
alls into the valley. You could stand at the bottom and try to stop it slipping farther down, but more and more rubbish would just come tumbling on top of you and in the end, for all your efforts, you would end up buried in other people’s—
“You all right?”
In turning to get away, Flea had cannoned into a farmer. He felt rough, protective hands on his shoulder.
“You’re trembling. Not surprised. This is no place for a girl. Where are your people?”
Flea made the mistake of looking up. The farmer’s face was blunt and weather-beaten, his teeth worn down to little brown stumps from eating too much grit in his bread. His expression changed from concern to something else.
“Hey…”
Flea knew his face would be dirty, the dirt made more obvious by the tear marks and snot trails.
“You don’t…”
Also his hair had begun to escape from underneath his scarf.
Tesha saw the danger and shrieked, “Mistress, mistress. What’s happening?” That attracted even more attention. Heads turned.
The farmer said, “That’s not a mistress. That’s a bloody boy!”
He tore off Flea’s headscarf and waved it above his head, then grabbed Flea and held him up. The crowd bustled around, keen to have something else to think about.
“That’s not any boy either,” a voice in the crowd said. “That’s the boy everyone’s looking for, I bet.”
“What? The one with the power?”
“You mean the blasphemer.”
“You mean the little traitor.”
“What does it matter? Hang him!”
“There’s some rope here!”
“Come on.”
Flea struggled but was held fast by several pairs of hands. He felt himself boosted high above the heads of the crowd and passed along like a parcel toward the tree.
“No!” he shouted. “You don’t understand. Jude was my friend. He wasn’t a bad man! He just wanted—”
Flea’s hands were tied behind his back and he was lifted higher. Someone had climbed the tree and shinned along the branch. Now he was tying the dangling rope into a rough noose. Flea struggled and fought. A scream built inside him. Through wide eyes he saw the valley and the hills beyond. He saw a white sky with the sun trying to break through and play on the lion-colored blocks of the city walls. He saw the roof of the Temple and then, above his head, he saw the noose.
