by Neil Gaiman
“Tonight,” said Hunter. “Belfast.”
“Thank you,” said the woman. She had the most amazing eyes, thought Richard. They were the color of foxgloves.
“I’ll see you there,” she said, and she looked at Richard as she said it. Then she looked away, a little shyly; she stepped into the shadows, and she was gone.
“Who was that?” asked Richard.
“They call themselves Velvets,” said Door. “They sleep down here during the day, and walk the Upworld at night.”
“Are they dangerous?” asked Richard.
“Everybody’s dangerous,” said Hunter.
“Look,” said Richard. “Going back to the market. Who decides where it gets held, and when? And how do the first people find out where it’s being held?” Hunter shrugged. “Door?” he asked.
“I’ve never thought about it.” They turned a corner. Door held up her lamp. “Not bad at all,” said Door.
“And fast, too,” said Hunter. She touched the painting on the rock wall with her fingertip. The paint was still wet. It was a painting of Hunter and Door and Richard. It was not flattering.
The black rat entered the lair of the Golden deferentially, his head lowered, ears back. He crawled forward, squeeing and chittering.
The Golden had made their lair in a pile of bones. This pile of bones had once belonged to a woolly mammoth, back in the cold times when the great hairy beasts walked across the snowy tundra of the south of England as if, in the opinion of the Golden, they owned the place. This particular mammoth, at least, had been disabused of that idea rather thoroughly and quite terminally by the Golden.
The black rat made its obeisance at the base of the bone pile. Then he lay on his back with his throat exposed, closed his eyes, and waited. After a while a chittering from above told him that he could roll over.
One of the Golden crawled out of the mammoth skull, on top of the heap of bones. It crawled along the old ivory tusk, a golden-furred rat with copper-colored eyes, the size of a large house cat.
The black rat spoke. The Golden thought, briefly, and chattered an order. The black rat rolled on his back, exposing his throat again, for a moment. Then a twist and a wriggle, and he was on his way.
There had been Sewer Folk before the Great Stink, of course, living in the Elizabethan sewers, or the Restoration sewers, or the Regency sewers, as more and more of London’s waterways were forced into pipes and covered passages, as the expanding population produced more filth, more rubbish, more effluent; but after the Great Stink, after the great plan of Victorian sewer-building, that was when the Sewer Folk came into their own. They could be found anywhere in the length and breadth of the sewers, but they made their permanent homes in some of the churchlike red-brick vaults toward the east, at the confluence of many of the churning foamy waters. There they would sit, rods and nets and improvised hooks beside them, and watch the surface of the brown water.
They wore clothes—brown and green clothes, covered in a thick layer of something that might have been mold and might have been a petrochemical ooze, and might, conceivably, have been something much worse. They wore their hair long and matted. They smelled more or less as one would imagine. Old storm lanterns were hung about the tunnel. Nobody knew what the Sewer Folk used for fuel, but their lanterns burned with a rather noxious blue-and-green flame.
It was not known how the Sewer Folk communicated among themselves. In their few dealings with the outside world, they used a kind of sign language. They lived in a world of gurgles and drips, the men, the women, and the silent little sewer children.
Dunnikin spotted something in the water. He was the chief of the Sewer Folk, the wisest and the oldest. He knew the sewers better than their original builders did. Dunnikin reached for a long shrimping net; one practiced hand movement and he was fishing out a rather bedraggled mobile telephone from the water. He walked over to a small heap of rubbish in the corner and put the telephone down with the rest of their haul. The day’s catch so far consisted of two odd gloves, a shoe, a cat skull, a sodden packet of cigarettes, an artificial leg, a dead cocker spaniel, a pair of antlers (mounted), and the bottom half of a baby carriage.
It had not been a good day. And tonight was a market night, in the open air. So Dunnikin kept his eyes on the water. You never knew what would turn up.
Old Bailey was hanging his wash out to dry. Blankets and sheets fluttered and blew in the wind on the top of Centre Point, the ugly and distinctive sixties skyscraper that marks the eastern end of Oxford Street, far above Tottenham Court Road Station. Old Bailey did not care very much for Centre Point itself, but, as he’d often tell the birds, the view from the top was without compare, and, furthermore, the top of Centre Point was one of the few places in the West End of London where you did not have to look at Centre Point itself.
The wind ripped feathers from Old Bailey’s coat and blew them away, off over London. He did not mind. As he also often told his birds, there were more where those came from.
A large black rat crawled out through a ripped air-vent cover, looked around, then came over to Old Bailey’s bird-spattered tent. It ran up the side of the tent, then along the top of Old Bailey’s washing line. It squealed at him, urgently.
“Slower, slower,” said Old Bailey. The rat repeated itself, at a lower pitch, but just as urgently. “Bless me,” said Old Bailey. He ran into his tent and returned with weapons—his toasting fork and a coal shovel. Then he hurried back into the tent again and came out with some bargaining tools. And then he walked back into the tent for the last time, and opened his wooden chest, and pocketed the silver box. “I really don’t have time for this tomfoolery,” he told the rat, on his final exit from the tent. “I’m a very busy man. Birds don’t catch themselves, y’know.”
The rat squeaked at him. Old Bailey was unfastening the coil of rope around his middle. “Well,” he told the rat, “there’s others could get the body. I’m not as young as I was. I don’t like the underplaces. I’m a roof-man, I am, born and bred.”
The rat made a rude noise.
“More haste, less speed,” replied Old Bailey. “I’m goin’. Young whippersnapper. I knew your great-great-grandfather, young feller-me-rat, so don’t you try putting on airs. . . Now, where’s the market going to be?” The rat told him. Then Old Bailey put the rat in his pocket and climbed over the side of the building.
Sitting on the ledge beside the sewer, in his plastic lawn chair, Dunnikin was overcome by a presentiment of wealth and prosperity. He could feel it drifting from west to east, toward them.
He clapped his hands, loudly. Other men ran to him, and the women, and the children, seizing hooks and nets and lines as they did so. They assembled along the slippery sewer ledge, in the sputtering green light of their lanterns. Dunnikin pointed, and they waited, in silence, which is how the Sewer Folk wait.
The body of the marquis de Carabas came floating face-down along the sewer, the current carrying him as slow and stately as a funeral barge. They pulled it in with their hooks and their nets, in silence, and soon had it up on the ledge. They removed the coat, the boots, the gold pocket-watch, and the contents of the coat pockets, although they left the rest of the clothes on the corpse.
Dunnikin beamed at the loot. He clapped again, and the Sewer Folk began to ready themselves for the market. Now they truly had something of value to sell.
“Are you sure the marquis will be at the market?” Richard asked Door, as the path began, slowly, to climb.
“He won’t let us down,” she said, as confidently as she could. “I’m sure he’ll be there.”
Fourteen
HMS Belfast is a gunship of 11,000 tons, commissioned in 1939, which saw active service in the Second World War. Since then it has been moored on the south bank of the Thames, in postcard-land, between Tower Bridge and London Bridge, opposite the Tower of London. From its deck one can see St. Paul’s Cathedral and the gilt top of the columnlike Monument to the Great Fire of London erected, as so much of
London was erected, by Christopher Wren. The ship serves as a floating museum, as a memorial, as a training ground.
There is a walkway onto the ship from the shore, and they came down the walkway in their twos and threes, and in their dozens. They set up their stalls as early as they could, all the tribes of London Below, united both by the Market Truce and by a mutual desire to pitch their own stalls as far as possible from the Sewer Folk’s stall.
It had been agreed well over a century before that the Sewer Folk could only set up a stall at those markets held in the open air. Dunnikin and his folk dumped their booty in a large pile on a rubber sheet, beneath a large gun tower. Nobody ever came to the Sewer Folk’s stall immediately: but toward the end of the market they would come, the bargain hunters, the curious, and those few fortunate individuals blessed with no sense of smell.
Richard and Hunter and Door pushed their way through the crowds on the deck. Richard realized that he had somehow lost the need to stop and stare. The people here were no less strange than at the last Floating Market, but, he supposed, he was every bit as strange to them, wasn’t he? He looked around, scanning the faces in the crowd as they walked, hunting for the marquis’s ironic smile. “I don’t see him,” he said.
They were approaching a smith’s stall, where a man who could easily have passed for a small mountain, if one were to overlook the shaggy brown beard, tossed a lump of red-molten metal from a brazier onto an anvil. Richard had never seen a real anvil before. He could feel the heat from the molten metal and the brazier from a dozen feet away.
“Keep looking. De Carabas’ll turn up,” said Door, looking behind them. “Like a bad penny.” She thought for a moment, and added, “What exactly is a bad penny anyway?” And then, before Richard could answer, she squealed, “Hammersmith!”
The bearded mountain-man looked up, stopped hitting the molten metal, and roared, “By the Temple and the Arch. Lady Door!” Then he picked her up, as if she weighed no more than a mouse.
“Hello, Hammersmith,” said Door. “I hoped you’d be here.”
“Never miss a market, lady,” he thundered, cheerfully. Then he confided, like an explosion with a secret, “This’s where the business is, y’see. Now,” he said, recollecting the cooling lump of metal on his anvil, “just you wait here a moment.” He put Door down at eye level, on the top of his booth, seven feet above the deck.
He banged the lump of metal with his hammer, twisting it as he did so with implements Richard assumed, correctly, were tongs. Under the hammer blows it changed from a shapeless blob of orange metal into a perfect black rose. It was a work of astonishing delicacy, each petal perfect and distinct. Hammersmith dipped the rose into a bucket of cold water beside the anvil: it hissed and steamed. Then he pulled it out of the bucket, wiped it, and handed it to a fat man in chain mail who was standing, patiently, to one side; the fat man professed himself well satisfied and gave Hammersmith, in return, a green plastic Marks and Spencer shopping bag, filled with various kinds of cheese.
“Hammersmith?” said Door, from her perch. “These are my friends.”
Hammersmith enveloped Richard’s hand in one several sizes up. His handshake was enthusiastic, but very gentle, as if he had, in the past, had a number of accidents shaking hands and had practiced it until he got it right. “Charmed,” he boomed.
“Richard,” said Richard.
Hammersmith looked delighted. “Richard! Fine name! I had a horse called Richard.” He let go of Richard’s hand, turned to Hunter, and said, “And you are . . . Hunter? Hunter! As I live, breathe, and defecate! It is!” Hammersmith blushed like a schoolboy. He spat on his hand and attempted, awkwardly, to plaster his hair back. Then he stuck his hand out and realized that he had just spat on it, and he wiped it on his leather apron, and shifted his weight from foot to foot.
“Hammersmith,” said Hunter, with a perfect caramel smile.
“Hammersmith?” asked Door. “Will you help me down?”
He looked shamefaced. “Beg pardon, lady,” he said, and lifted her down. It came to Richard then that Hammersmith had known Door as a small child, and he found himself feeling unaccountably jealous of the huge man. “Now,” Hammersmith was saying to Door. “What can I do for you?”
“Couple of things,” she said. “But first of all—” She turned to Richard. “Richard? I’ve got a job for you.”
Hunter raised an eyebrow. “For him?”
Door nodded. “For both of you. Will you go and find us some food? Please?”
Richard felt oddly proud. He had proved himself in the ordeal. He was One of Them. He would Go, and he would Bring Back Food. He puffed out his chest.
“I am your bodyguard. I stay by your side,” said Hunter.
Door grinned. Her eyes flashed. “In the market? It’s okay, Hunter. Market Truce holds. No one’s going to touch me here. And Richard needs looking after more than I do.” Richard deflated, but no one was watching.
“And what if someone violates the Truce?” asked Hunter.
Hammersmith shivered, despite the heat of his brazier. “Violate the Market Truce? Brrrr.”
“It’s not going to happen. Go on. Both of you. Curry, please. And get me some papadums, please. Spicy ones.”
Hunter ran her hand through her hair. Then she turned and walked off into the crowd, and Richard went with her. “So what would happen if someone violated Market Truce?” asked Richard, as they pushed through the crowds.
Hunter thought about this for a moment. “The last time it happened was about three hundred years ago. A couple of friends got into an argument over a woman, in the market. A knife was pulled and one of them died. The other fled.”
“What happened to him? Was he killed?”
Hunter shook her head. “Quite the opposite. He still wishes he had been the one to have died.”
“He’s still alive?”
Hunter pursed her lips. “Ish,” she said, after a while. “Alive-ish.”
A moment passed, then “Phew,” Richard thought he was going to be ill. “What’s that—that stink?”
“Sewer Folk.”
Richard averted his head and tried not to breathe through his nose until they were well away from the Sewer Folk’s stall.
“Any sign of the marquis yet?” he asked. Hunter shook her head. She could have reached out her hand and touched him. They went up a gangplank, toward the food stalls, and more welcoming aromas.
Old Bailey found the Sewer Folk with little difficulty, following his nose.
He knew what he had to do, and he took a certain pleasure in making a bit of a performance of it, ostentatiously examining the dead cocker spaniel, the artificial leg, and the damp and moldy portable telephone, and shaking his head dolorously at each of them. Then he made a point of noticing the marquis’s body. He scratched his nose. He put on his spectacles and peered at it. He nodded to himself, glumly, hoping to give the vague impression of being a man in need of a corpse who was disappointed by the selection but was going to have to make do with what they had. Then he beckoned to Dunnikin, and pointed to the corpse.
Dunnikin opened his hands wide, smiled beatifically, and gazed up toward the heavens, conveying the bliss with which the marquis’s remains had entered their life. He put a hand to his forehead, lowered it, and looked devastated, in order to convey the tragedy that losing such a remarkable corpse would be.
Old Bailey put a hand in his pocket and produced a half-used stick of deodorant. He handed it to Dunnikin, who squinted at it, licked it, and handed it back, unimpressed. Old Bailey pocketed it. He looked back at the corpse of the marquis de Carabas, half-dressed, barefoot, still damp from its journey through the sewers. The body was ashen, drained of blood from many cuts, small and large, and the skin was wrinkled and prunelike from its time in the water.
Then he pulled out a bottle, three-quarters filled with a yellow liquid, and passed it to Dunnikin. Dunnikin looked at it suspiciously. The Sewer Folk know what a bottle of Chanel No. 5 looks like, and they
gathered around Dunnikin, staring. Carefully, self-importantly, he unscrewed the top of the bottle and dabbed the tiniest amount on his wrist. Then, with a gravity the finest Parisian parfumier would have envied, Dunnikin sniffed. Then he nodded his head, enthusiastically, and approached Old Bailey to embrace him and conclude the deal. The old man averted his face and held his breath until the embrace was concluded.
Old Bailey held up one finger and tried his best to mime that he was not so young as once he was and that, dead or not, the marquis de Carabas was a bit on the heavy side. Dunnikin picked his nose thoughtfully, and then, with a hand gesture indicating not only magnanimity but also a foolish and misplaced generosity that would, obviously, send him, Dunnikin, and the rest of the Sewer Folk, to the poorhouse, he had one of the younger Sewer Folk tie the corpse to the bottom half of the old baby carriage.
The old roof-man covered the body with a cloth, and he pulled it away from the Sewer Folk, across the crowded deck.
“One portion of vegetable curry, please,” said Richard, to the woman at the curry stall. “And, um, I was wondering. The meat curry. What kind of meat is it, then?” The woman told him. “Oh,” said Richard. “Right. Um. Better just make that vegetable curries all round.”
“Hello again,” said a rich voice beside him. It was the pale woman they had met in the caves, with the black dress and the foxglove eyes.
“Hullo,” said Richard, with a smile. “—Oh, and some papadums, please. You, um. Here for curry?”
She fixed him with her violet gaze and said, in mock Bela Lugosi, “I do not eat . . . curry.” And then she laughed, a lavish, delighted laugh, and Richard found himself realizing how long it had been since he had shared a joke with a woman.
“Oh. Um. Richard. Richard Mayhew.” He stuck out his hand. She touched it with her own hand, in something a little like a handshake. Her fingers were very cold, but then, late at night, at the end of autumn, on a ship out on the Thames, everything is very cold.