Mordew

by Alex Pheby

  There was the Itch – wasn’t it always?

  He let it build, quickly, feeling his temper rising, feeling it like an appetite. Beware. What did his father know about ‘beware’? Didn’t he understand anything? Lying in his bed, sweating himself into nothing, day in, day out, in his nightgown?

  He’d get the medicine, there was no need to worry about that, but they had no food, no fire, no water. Dead-life half-flukes rattled at the boards. Disease. Shouldn’t he be worried about all of that?

  And Nathan was thirteen now; he made his own decisions.

  When the Itch was strong enough, he kneeled, put his hand out. The fluke sensed his closeness and kicked and struggled in an approximation of a run towards him.

  Nathan Scratched, meaning to kill it, to return it now to the Living Mud and end its misery, to make a decisive action with a clear outcome. But when the Spark met the thing’s flesh it writhed briefly, thrashed, but did not die. Instead it became a rat – red-eyed and yellow-toothed – which leapt at him and bit him in the soft part of the hand between the thumb and forefinger.

  Nathan grabbed the new rat and pulled, ripping its teeth from his flesh. He threw it as far as he could into the slums, where it buried itself in darkness.

  XI

  He took a route by turns up the hill, backtracking when he met a dead end or a blazing bonfire, climbing round wherever he could, sucking at the wound on his hand. Along one stretch of road – nothing more really than a gap between two opposing, waist-high piles of gathered waste – someone had stuck firebird feathers at intervals. Where they met the Living Mud it roiled and smoked, a little red light given off. Nathan looked back to where he’d left his parents, clenched his jaw, strode on without stopping.

  After a climb he was on the border with the Merchant City, a line marked by stone walls and cobbled roads, high enough to see the slums laid out, the Sea Wall behind them, and beyond that the sea, rough with waves.

  Up the slope there was a gate without a guard. Nathan took it in but walked right past, put his hands in his pockets and his head down. The guard was nowhere to be seen – visiting some other poor boy’s mother no doubt, or servicing some merchant’s wife with a taste for the rough, and the only man there was a broom-handler. He was too old for his job, the hair on his head as sparse as the bristles on the broom, his arms as thin as the stick. He put what strength he had into pushing Living Mud and stray dead-life down into the slums, but soon this gave out and he wandered groaning up into the maze of streets.

  Nathan wheeled back. What right did his father, nothing more than a bone bag, have to decide what Nathan did any more? Would he prefer it if Nathan blacked his eyes? It would never happen.

  It will never happen.

  Enough.

  Nathan went to the gate and put his hands over the lock, as if he was cupping a lit match, and he concentrated. It was harder to make it come with the rat in his mind, but he could do it. He cleared his thoughts and breathed, reaching down inside his head, down through the throat, and then the lungs, and then into the stomach.

  There was nothing left… at first. It was as if the rat had robbed the Itch of its fuel, but, little by little, it came up inside him. He egged it on, felt the physicality of it, circling up, running like a marble round the inside of a steel drum until it reached his chest. He whipped it faster and the Itch built in power again, rattling between the surfaces of his throat, stronger than before. Through his skin and the loose weave of his clothing, he could see the glow. He tensed across the chest, so that his muscles lined up between his ribs and teased the Itch out into his bones along his arms.

  Nathan gripped the lock and turned his attention towards the metal. He tried to Scratch, but the Spark wouldn’t catch, just as fire is reluctant to light damp kindling. Then came his father’s face, unbidden, forbidding him, his finger wagging.

  Nathan furrowed his brow and concentrated as hard as he could: on the gentleman callers, on the dead-life, on his mother’s face, on the fluke rat. The Itch flared up wildly, lighting the crevices of the street, the mortar between the bricks, the solder on the ironwork, revealing every hidden detail of that place. With a grunt, Nathan Scratched. He sent the Spark down, tingling through his arms, burning his skin where the bite was, into the lock.

  Deep inside, the metal wanted to live, rearranged itself like the Living Mud did into the semblance of a simple creature, like a lock might be if only it were an animal: a turning, clicking body of gears and cylinders. Nathan could feel it, breathing. The Spark burned his skin and the bite felt it the most, the wound most vulnerable, singeing, then blistering, then, horribly, blackening.

  Nathan pulled his hands away, gasped.

  If he could have stood it longer, the lock might have remained alive, but once the Spark stopped the metal died, leaving fatigue and corrosion where once it had been sound.

  Without fanfare, as if it were perfectly ordinary, the lock opened and the gate swung in. Nathan took a little while to compose himself, and then walked through, holding his hand.

  The Merchant City was quiet at night, not like the slums. The waves were just a gentle heartbeat in the distance that only made itself felt when Nathan turned into a street that led down to the slum-border. The houses here were solid and close and high, the upstairs windows shone gently with warm and flickering candlelight, dimmed occasionally by figures passing inside. In the steep streets there were lamps: burning wax and oil behind glass – oranges, blues, greens – beacons winding up. Each house had a door, closed, and numbers, some names, and slots midway rimmed in brass and shining.

  What sounds there were were muffled – pots and pans clattering from deep behind walls of brick. If there were shouts, they were enquiring, not angry – from a place by a fire, perhaps, asking after food, or hot milk – not about death or wounds. Mostly, though, there was the heavy, blanketing, silent moon, smoothing the streets, its pale gleam reflecting on every surface.

  Where was the red lightning of firebirds dying? Where was the dead-life? Where was the Living Mud? Nathan looked down at his feet, angled where they met the slope – no sprats on his boots. Over his shoulder there were no faceless flukes, observing him from the shadows. The street had been swept clean and this ground beneath his feet – stone, solid and ungiving – made his heels bang as he walked, not squeak.

  Suddenly, Nathan felt tired, exhausted even, so he huddled by the warm wall of a bakers, amongst empty flour sacks. It was just as comfortable as the floor of his house and much less damp. In the heat leaking out of the oven inside, his clothes became drier than he could ever recall them being, steeped as they always were in sea spray, Mud and rainwater.

  It was light when he woke. The street nearby was running fast with men and women. They were shouting and laughing and arguing to the crackling music of leather goads slapped on the wooden frames of sedan chairs carried shoulder height at a trot.

  The sun shone through a cloudless sky so blue that Nathan didn’t have a name for the colour. He took his handkerchief from his pocket – blue, he’d imagined it was – and held it up to the sky. It was drab in comparison, sludged brown and grey, mildewed. He was hard pressed to recognise it as possessing a colour at all, so blue was the sky there. It was as if God had come down and blown the clouds away, leaving nothing but this colour in its place.

  He wrapped the handkerchief around the wound on his hand, which was tender and swollen, throbbing now that sleep was gone from him. With the pain came the memory of the rat, and his father, and the promise he had made to get medicine.

  He needed coins.

  He searched around, looking for a token or attribute, something suggestive of an errand that might give him a legitimate purpose in the Merchant City. There was nothing but pallets and flour bags. Some of the pallets were broken, so he prised the wood of these apart, squeaking the nails out, or bending them flat against the wood where they would not snag, until he had a pile of almost equally long pieces. This pile he hefted onto his shoulder, lettin
g his other arm swing free and casual. He strolled out into the street.

  To the indifferent eye – to the sedan chair carrier and the merchant wives about their tasks – he might pass for a chippy’s mate on an errand. If a Guard saw him, that wouldn’t wash – as he hadn’t – so he kept a wary eye out for the uniforms and tried as best he could to walk with purpose.

  The sedan chair traffic was mostly in one direction – uphill – so Nathan walked in step with it, shoulder to shoulder with the stooped carriers, within spitting distance of the perfumed silk canopies that protected the merchant women within from the ageing rays of their naked sun. Here and there two chairs stopped by each other, allowing the wives to pull across the curtains and lean out, where they could exchange this or that bit of information directly into the other’s ear, their red lips brushing each other’s skin. Not a single one of them, at least of those Nathan could see, had blacked their eyes.

  The sedan chairs gathered in a wide plaza, laid to grass, where the women disembarked and sat around, decoratively, on rugs and small carpets. Colonnades surrounded them among which vendors had established stalls. They called out from beneath the pediments in loud and cheerful voices, and above them reliefs were carved of scenes Nathan did not recognise or understand – gatherings of men and women and symbols that looked like they must be important.

  On the grass, the women paid attention mostly to each other.

  ‘Wonderful to see you, my dear.’

  ‘You are looking splendid!’

  ‘Will we see you at the ball?’

  These things were said, and many other things just like them, in tones modulating between raised voices and shrieks, depending on the distances between those exchanging them and the subjects of their exchange. Men with trays of drinks pirouetted between the women, offering cocktail glasses for coins, and young scraps darted between them all, gathering empties for reuse. Nathan, as he walked in an ever more conspicuous circuit through the colonnades, realised that his wood was no longer necessary. All he needed was a tray, and he could join the ranks of the glass boys with nothing more thought of it.

  He saw one, unattended on the wall outside a public convenience, and he made free with it while the boy’s back was turned and his attention diverted. Then Nathan was within the throng, collecting glasses, sucking the last drips from some, all the while alert for the careless disposition of some lady’s coin purse.

  The game was made rather more difficult by the constant grabbing of his wrists by the drinks sellers, who seemed to think he existed for nothing other than their convenience. They didn’t trouble to consider his feelings, or the limited elasticity of his joints: if he didn’t make a conscious effort to skirt past them, they’d pull him by the arm, take the glasses, and cuff him for his trouble. Nathan was soon sure that he did make the effort.

  The women were a mixed bunch – some young and fresh and apple-cheeked, some dry and withering, some smiling, showing their teeth, and others as pursed-lipped as lemon suckers. Whatever they looked like, all of them seemed determined to keep their coin purses out of sight.

  As he crouched to pick up their glasses, he slipped a glance at their crossed ankles and knees and thighs – pressed close as any penitent’s praying hands – the shapes of them anyway. There was nothing that could be filched from anywhere. He moved constantly, like a flea on a bed sheet, dancing in at the suggestion of a final sip taken to snatch the glass away, eyes always elsewhere. Here was a blonde child in a bonnet, legs tucked beneath her, there a crone, wrinkled as fingertips after a day of fishing in the Circus and just as cold, here a glossy-skinned matron, making play with a fan, sweat gathered on her top lip. All of them secreted their valuables, it seemed to him, with practised cunning.

  When a seller twisted him away and off the grass, he stopped and watched. If the women had coins to pay for the drinks, they must keep them somewhere. The seller withdrew with Nathan’s glasses to a tented bench, where the coins he had gathered so far were taken from him by a young gentleman with a scar. New glasses were laid out in a line for another man to wipe, then they were filled from a jug and the seller went back out.

  The coin pouch at his waist, which was just large enough to take five pennies, was open and gaping. When a buyer amongst the women was located, the seller barged his way past his competitors to service her. This particular seller was quick as a ferret, and before one woman – with a long, elegant chin, dressed in red – had barely indicated that she might be thirsty, he was there, tray tendered. The woman angled her hand back so that she could finger her baggy sleeve. When the fingers returned there was the coin between them.

  Nathan nodded and returned to the lawn.

  He was about to enter the throng again, a half-formed plan developing as he walked, when a better opportunity presented itself. Away from where the conversation was loudest and the women the most gaudy, the mob thinned and straggled. Here rose from her knees a brittle specimen, bones like matchsticks, in a huge, faded, lace ensemble, more like a tent than a dress, accented in greying white silk. She looked like an aged spider trapped beneath a doily. Moreover, she was lost. She wandered, two paces in one direction, and then two paces in almost the opposite direction, peering myopically along the hook of her nose. Her eyes were small and black, like sultanas, perhaps no longer as good at spying out her chair-man as they now needed to be.

  Nathan had seen enough of the world to know that those who were weak and stupid and left the herd were vulnerable to predation. He had learned it the hard way, daily, until it was not so much knowledge as it was the flesh on his bones. He bit his lip though, hearing his father in the rustling of the breeze on the collected fabric of these women’s dresses – Do right, Nathan. Do right.

  Nathan rubbed the back of his neck – do right by whom?

  She was on the cobbles now, arms outstretched like a somnambulist, wandering away from the grass and through a passageway in the colonnade. Her ankles buckled this way and that on the uneven ground. Nathan put down his tray. A glass boy came close to her, another brushed her as he passed on the other side, and she grasped instinctively at a bulge on her right wrist, only partially hidden by her lace cuffs. Her white-leather-clad fingers poked, and, reassured that the bulge was where she had expected it to be, she resumed her pacing, just as aimlessly as before.

  It was now or never.

  Nathan sauntered in, eyes on that spindly wrist, eyes on the bulge, thoughts on his father, coughing up worms, his body bent double, as skinny as this old bird but nearer the grave.

  It was all too easy. He could afford to be polite. Gentle. No need for the Spark.

  He held her by the arm, helping her find her way. Are you lost, miss? Let me help you: one hand on the elbow, one on the wrist, leading her away. He used his best clipped accent, the one his mother had used, once upon a time.

  The old girl was willing to go with him into the shade of a butcher’s awning, striped red and blue, the shadows colouring her parchment-drawn face. Smiles and reassurance, and then, when there was nothing else for it, fingers scraping along the twin twigs of her arm, liver spots revealed under the sleeve, the coin purse torn from the ribbon that secured it.

  And then he ran.

  For seconds there was nothing but the sound of the air his motion disturbed rattling in his ears. The purse was heavy in his hand, filled with thick coins the edges of which bit nicely against his palm. Ahead the way was clear, cobbles running downhill through the narrow streets and the maze of alleys and ginnels which he knew would soon swallow him.

  But then a scream tore up behind – the kind of scream a piglet makes when his mother is taken away for bacon. There was no need to look back – only an idiot would look back, just run on ahead – but the scream was so sharp, as if he’d broken her bones. He turned in spite of himself. She was there on her knees, her arm outstretched, finger taut, nail quivering. All eyes were on her and then, inch by inch, those eyes swept along her arm, along her finger, along the quivering nail and acr
oss the intervening space to where Nathan was, suddenly stopped.

  ‘Get him!’ someone cried – a man, a litter-bearer by his accent – and then they were all coming after him.

  The world seemed to slow, to become viscous. In a long second Nathan watched the men separate from the women. They stood, or turned, or dropped trays, and there were thirty or forty of them – a pack of them – soon made one mass by a new shared desire: to get him.

  The air was thick as he turned, his feet slick beneath him as he tried to push, but when they bit the hard stone, his thin soles thin enough that he could grip the gaps between the cobbles with his toes, he found enough purchase to move.

  When he did, he raced away.

  He kept his head low. Now nothing on Earth would have got him to look back. The narrow streets squeezed between the high-garreted houses and though he didn’t know them like he knew the runs of the slum there was only one direction he needed to think of – down. Down from the Merchant Hill, down and out, down and home.

  He shot past jewellers, past glaziers, past rug sellers, past a hundred shops crammed high with things he would never have any need for, things that would tarnish or rot in the damp of the shack. He dodged between women with baskets piled up with fruit and bread under linen. They looked at him as if he was some species of entertainment, gawped and stood so that the men chasing him had trouble following, had trouble not knocking these silly fools off their feet.

  When he came to the gate, his pursuers were nowhere to be seen. He didn’t stop, just lunged for the handle which he knew must still be Sparked out. He expected to glide through and then away, to places no-one would ever follow him, places where the lives of Merchant City people were forfeit for the clothes on their back, the leather in their boots.

  But the gate did not open.

  It should have been unlocked, the mechanism dissolved away, but it was not. The scorch of his Spark was there, smooth waxy spheres of blistered iron were there, but someone had jammed a bar in the gap and welded it tight.