Stealing Into Winter. Graeme Talboys K.
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men and six boys. Two of the men had been beaten and blood had dried hard on their swollen faces. The seventh boy had fainted and lay in the dust. The only comfort to be drawn was that there should have been fifteen men.
I hope you’re not somewhere doing something foolish, she thought. Willed it. Though where Trag would go, she had no idea. The stables across the road were his work, his home, his whole world.
Jeniche moved with cautious steps, shifting her perspective. The group of soldiers guarding the stable staff had not moved, but others were now emerging from the buildings. They crossed the main courtyard and appeared in the grand gateway. She leaned forward and caught sight of the tops of the heads of two just below her. A board creaked beneath her shifting weight.
The voices below stopped their murmur. Not waiting to see what was happening, Jeniche launched herself through the door, made a forward roll that would add more bruises to her collection and was up the stairs to the roof. She could hear booted feet clattering up behind her.
Grabbing her sack of provisions as she passed, she crossed the flat roof, jumped the narrow alley to the next roof and was up and over the shallow pitch of pantiles with nimble steps, skirting a garden courtyard before dropping onto an outhouse roof and down to the packed earth of a narrow service alley. She doubted anyone had seen her, but she didn’t stop moving until tiredness forced her to rest in the shade behind an old, public fountain.
‘Are you all right, lad?’
She looked up, startled. A dishevelled man smelling of sweat and cheap alcohol stood a few steps away, watching her. He looked familiar in a vague kind of way, but she could not place him and did not much care. Two friends were gone and she had nowhere to sleep. All on top of being caught for the first time in her life. It really was time to be leaving the city.
‘You lost?’ continued the man. ‘You don’t look the type who gets lost.’ He shrugged.
‘I’m… just a bit tired,’ she said, not really wanting to get into a conversation, especially with someone she didn’t know.
The man nodded and lifted a stone bottle to his lips. ‘Don’t suppose you got much sleep last night.’
He waved his free hand in aimless circles and wandered away with the careful steps of someone perpetually drunk, raising the bottle to his lips again as he went. Jeniche watched him go until he was out of sight, her eyes burning, her throat dry, and her head full of questions.
There were no answers where she went looking, but there was a bed in the shade of a rooftop awning. However, after that first night of restless, dark, dream-haunted sleep, she moved down into the deserted house.
Shuttered and barred against the world, the building felt as if it was in mourning. A deep sadness permeated the rooms. Jeniche feared it meant yet another death. She touched little, despite the worth of some of the items. This was the house of a friend. And of all the friends she had made, the strangest and the best.
She made up a small bed for herself in an upstairs room near the stairs to the roof. A straw mattress from the kitchen and spare sheets from a linen press, that was all she used. That and cool water drawn from the well for bathing before she ventured out at night for food, searching the streets and taverns, listening to the talk.
And every time she slept, her dreams of being trapped, of sour breath and rough, grasping hands, drove her to a restlessness that woke her. Sick with weariness and ever more uncertain about the life she had made for herself in Makamba, she would make her way up to the roof terrace and sit beneath the awning to listen to the city, wondering whether the dried blood she had found up there was that of the child.
A week passed and the mood in the city turned from bemusement to discontent and then to open anger. Firecracker sounds sparkled in the night, most often from the direction of the Old City, but sometimes up on the high ridge and over towards the wealthier quarters. Shouts and the sound of running feet echoed in the hot dark.
On that seventh day, risking a daylight foray, she found one of the stable hands.
‘Endek?’
His hand half way toward a piece of fruit on a market stall, he looked round, searching the crowds nearby. Jeniche flipped a sou at the stallholder and picked up the slice of melon.
Endek eyed her with suspicion as she handed him the fruit. The faint remains of bruising stained his left cheek. ‘Who are you, then?’
‘I’m looking for Trag. What happened?’
‘Trag? Didn’t know he had any friends.’
‘You don’t remember me from the stables? Never mind.’ She had always tried to remain unobtrusive. It was a hollow triumph. ‘What happened? I saw you all lined up outside the main gate.’
A brief frown, followed by memory. ‘Bastards. They just walked in. Odrin tried to stop them and got beaten for his trouble.’
‘You, too, by the look of it.’
‘Wasn’t going to let them do that,’ he said round a mouthful of melon. ‘Odrin’s a foul-tempered old piece of shit, but he gave me that job. So they beat me as well. Then they made us stand in the sun. Well, stupid goat arses. It’s not like we’re not used to it, working for the gentry.’ He wiped juice from his chin. ‘After that they told us to get lost. Using the horses for their soldiers.’
‘Trag?’
Endek shook his head. ‘No idea. I thought he might wade into them soldiers and pull their heads off. If you know him, you’ll know what he’s like about those horses. But he weren’t there. Gone. Best thing, I suppose. Us, they beat. They would’ve had to kill him to stop him.’
‘Any idea where he might have gone?’
‘Hasn’t he got an old aunt? Down near Northgate.’ He shrugged and wandered off, sucking at the rind.
Jeniche pushed her way through the crowds and into an alley cool with shadow. She spent a hot afternoon following fruitless rumours and trying to pick sense out of gossip. But Trag, for all his bulk and slow ways, seemed to have disappeared as easily and completely as a dust ghost.
Wondering if she should start visiting the cemeteries to talk with grave diggers, she trudged back up the steep slope from Northgate. People were coming back out after the heat of the day. Soldiers were standing on street corners in whatever shade they could find, watching for signs of trouble.
To avoid getting too close to a group of four who looked bored and restless, Jeniche crossed the street. She need not have bothered as their attention was taken by two men who began a fierce argument. Continuing across, she kept a wary eye on a handcart laden with building materials that was being brought down the hill by a group of men. The wheels rumbled on the baked earth and the whole thing creaked.
It came as little surprise when the sound of the wheels changed, although it was odd no one shouted a warning. With sudden, stark clarity she realized why and looked for an escape route.
Before she could move, the cart had picked up deadly speed. The soldiers noticed the change in sound, turned, and leapt for their lives. One was too late. He was pinned against the wall and crushed to death. Another spun through the air and fell to the ground, scrabbling feebly to get out of the open. The other two ran into the middle of the street, shouting. They pulled their moskets from where they hung on straps on their shoulders and raised them like crossbows.
Jeniche watched from an alley and jumped at the loud firecracker sound the weapons made. One of the men who had let go of the cart was struggling up the hill, looking for cover, when his head exploded. Jeniche stared, unable to make sense of the horror she had seen.
More soldiers appeared and there were more loud sounds, crackling up and down the street. A boy ran down the hill past Jeniche, his face full of numb fear, a dark bloody patch blossoming on his tunic. She heard him stumble and fall. A woman began screaming.
That night, she sat with her back to the parapet at the rear of the roof terrace well away from the street, close to the bed beneath