So he crouched amongst shadows at the base of the Clocktower, under the blank watch of statues: the seven sons of George Pitch, founder of Pitch End. He waited and watched, only a little worried. ‘Loitering and snooping, staying out of sight – can’t be good and can’t be right!’ the Elder words reminded his head.
He hoped for something to happen. Pitch End Curfew (dictated by the arrival of dusk) would soon be in effect, and he tried to keep his thoughts from what would happen if he was discovered. The noticeboard by the town hall’s double doors advised:
NO ENTRY WITHOUT ELDER APPROVAL
&
ONLY ON RIGHTLY-DECENT BUSINESS
(REMINDER: ANYTHING DESCRIBED AS
‘RIGHTLY-DECENT BUSINESS’
MUST FIRST BE APPROVED BY THE ELDERS.)
Bruno swallowed.
Somewhere above a one-footed raven cried out, took off.
Cold dashed his finger. Then his wrist, nose – the ground began to darken in spots of rain.
But his waiting was rewarded in the next moment. There was a fresh arrival of noise and, at the bottom of the cobbled slope that burrowed into still-lingering sea mist on the shore, Bruno saw a consolidation of darkness. A horde of Enforcers, all on horseback and all oncoming like a wave. He ducked lower, wishing himself smaller, but still watching – the Marshall was at the head of the tide.
They slowed and just about stopped in front of the town hall and Bruno expected them to move inside where they had their barracks. Instead, the double doors opened and, wordlessly, four Enforcers emerged, struggling to carry between them something long and wrapped in black. Bruno watched more: he saw a limp hand, a clutch of fingers, a bulge of swollen flesh, seaweed trailing. Gumbly. His body, but no crate.
The voice of the Marshall went: ‘Hurry it up.’
Something in his tone made Bruno’s scalp prickle.
Gumbly’s body was lifted and flung over the Marshall’s stallion where his leather-gloved fingers held it fast. A dig of his heel, the low command of, ‘Into Old Town,’ and the Marshall galloped off, Enforcers all following.
Bruno shifted. Old Town was the last place he’d expected the Marshall to head and he felt certain he’d be seen, his shock sending out signals. He pressed himself to the Clocktower, eyes shut. He listened.
The hollow rap of hooves faded, a sodden silence left in their wake.
He opened his eyes, looked to the entrance to Old Town, to the pair of crumbling pillars topped with ram’s heads. Thought for a moment longer … To hell with it! He followed the Marshall and his horde.
As steeply as the slope from Hedge School to the Clocktower ran upwards, all ways into Old Town delved just as steeply down. It was part of Pitch End no one wanted to be found in. Shops opened at odd hours, if they did at all – under a full moon maybe, or on the first day after the Breaking of the World celebration, or when the weather was fairer, or fouler. Few called anywhere in Old Town home, and any that did had to put up with being ignored or called gypsy or no-hoper or vagrant, or seen as simply ‘indecent’.
Vegetation was allowed to flourish, slated rooftops and windows sprouting vast, crooked limbs of vast and crooked trees. And huddled amongst dark foliage – a gleam, a keen eye, but raven or Cat-Sentry? Every doorway or window as dark and deep-set as a sunken eyeball or broken mouth, there were plenty of places to remain concealed, to watch but remain unseen. But Bruno wondered, as he entered a narrow laneway – a ‘darkway’, as most Pitch Enders called them – why the Enforcers would come into Old Town at all? The security and respectability of their barracks was only an echo away.
The sky groaned, lamenting unspeakable storms, releasing more rain.
A sudden flare of light by Bruno’s face – he ducked, and the window beside and above him blushed with light.
‘Put him – it – on the table. Carefully.’
The gravel-and-gunshots voice of the Marshall. Heavy footsteps beyond the window, then a loud thud.
‘I said be careful on it!’ the Marshall shouted.
A few apologetic mumbles.
‘The chest,’ said the Marshall, ‘it’s that – that thing fixed in the chest. Temperate Thomas wants it removed. For looking at more closely.’
The clock, thought Bruno.
A new voice now, high-pitched: ‘I see. Well then, let’s have a wee gander.’
Silence, into which Bruno poured himself, straining, trying to hear. But no good. So he picked himself up onto tiptoe. He found only a tiny, frayed sliver of seeing where the curtains should’ve met but didn’t quite. An Enforcer stood in front of the window inside, a thick-set barrier of scarlet.
Bruno looked around and noticed a wizened trunk, branches like keen fingers clinging to the side of the building the Enforcers were in. Bruno had never climbed a tree before, but the fire of his curiosity made him bolder – he grasped a branch, settled his foot on another, and began to scale the side of the building.
Any creak or complaint from the tree was lost in rainfall. But when he reached the roof he was without any cover, felt too exposed. A breeze rushed over, the rooftop fluttering like many worried eyes – a canopy of leaves where the roof had once been, a little slate and a wide opening, lantern light from the room below illuminating the underside of foliage. Bruno crawled towards this opening, moving along branches. He slipped, snatched at a handful of leaves, and for long moments heard nothing but his own blood thudding. He remained where he was, trying to breathe and just be without shivering.
Then he moved on.
At the opening he gathered fragments he had to slot together of the picture below – a hand with a tremble, the shine of a bald head, a dark fireplace. Bruno could only see pieces, but felt at the same time that he was seeing more clearly than he’d ever done in Pitch End before; he was seeing what he wasn’t meant to. Then he saw the doctor he knew was called Pinchbeck, the top of his bald head bent close to the table. The Marshall was at his elbow, and around them both Enforcers were planted, some close, some at a distance. And on the table itself –
‘By the mountains!’ squealed Dr Pinchbeck.
A clatter of metal, a shiver that shook the room, all Enforcers uprooted, gasps and a momentary snatch of the table – Gumbly spread, blood, pale flesh, blank eyes and a clock face embedded in his ribs where his heart should’ve been, and yet more blood leaking. Everyone below had recoiled but one: the Marshall. And it wasn’t the sight of the clock or gore that had shook them all, Bruno realised. The Marshall stepped forwards, hand outstretched, and from Gumbly’s neck he snapped a chain. He let it hang, touched by lamplight. And there was no mistaking, no keeping the fear from Bruno as once again he saw the same symbol. A medallion spun on the end of the chain, an eye with the storm-petrel inside.
‘Rebel symbol,’ the Marshall breathed.
Before Bruno could think to move, to leave Old Town, he had that sudden, unmistakeable sense of being watched. He looked up. A Cat-Sentry was less than a foot away, coiled. Its eyes whirred, its legs lowered and it leapt away as Bruno snatched for its tail and had it in his grip for a moment before it opened its mouth and screamed a recorded human scream, fierce enough to carry over all Pitch End and shocking him into release. It tumbled into the below and struck the lantern – a smash, gasps, light snatched away.
Bruno didn’t move.
So much silence, only rainfall, and then the order, the voice of the unseen Marshall:
‘Get him.’
VIII
Cinder-Folk
If Bruno moved he was sure he’d be caught. If he didn’t move – same end. His fingers enclosed the medallion around his neck, the chain knotted in repair after the earlier break by the harbour.
Rebel symbol. Rebel medallion?
My father a Rebel? Bruno thought. A blunt thought, one that left him unable to move, to think further, clearer; to feel anything close to safe or innocent any more. Like knowing he was destined from birth for a lighthouse-keeper because he was born who he was, for having the father
he did – he felt in the same way suddenly predestined then, the same way condemned.
Then came the grumble of Enforcers and their foot-scrapes to distract him, boot against stone and the groan of the tree as bodies heavier than Bruno’s began to climb. Realising he had no choice at all he pushed on through leaves, the tree bearing him up but unwillingly. He needed to reach the other side of the roof, slip down, hope no one was there to meet him and then follow one of the darkways deeper into Old Town, hide until he was sure it was safer. Then run home?
‘Hand me my rifle! I see someone in the tree there!’
Bruno scrambled. But not much further on and his support deserted him: a snap and he slipped. He didn’t bother to grapple or grab for anything more, though, but decided to let himself drop, just fall, holding his breath and hoping for a landing not too severe … his spine slammed stone, in a puddle as large as a pond, soaking him. He blinked. The world tilted, spun and refused sense.
‘The other side! Go!’
Bruno shut his eyes for three long seconds, then opened them. He stood. Dead ends everywhere, blankness upon blankness. And which way would the Enforcers come from?
‘Down here! He fell into this darkway!’
Finally he sank backwards, lost, awaiting capture. But there was nothing behind him but hands – they closed across his chest, dragged him off his feet and through a tall, narrow door that was bolted, rain shut out. A voice said to him, ‘Hush. Not a word or breath.’
Bruno obeyed.
He heard the splash and stop of the Enforcers outside.
‘Where’d he go to?’ said one. ‘We have to find him, else the Marshall will bloody have our guts for supper.’
‘Some of ye should’ve stayed on this side,’ said another. ‘Not just stood about below doing nothing and not watching!’
‘It’s alright saying that now,’ said the first. ‘Saying all afterwards is easy enough.’
‘Why don’t ye just—’
‘Oh, just shut yer trap ye—’
The bickering went on, and Bruno let relief remove him from it. He’d not been captured, not by Enforcers anyway. He realised then that he’d been released from the arms that had brought him inside, but to safety or not?
Bruno turned, wanted to know, but his senses were like dull lights against the dark. He heard rain puttering softly onto a stone floor. Then he saw something move, the motion reminding him of a weak stirring of ash in an empty grate. He wanted to step back and step forwards at the same time; retreat and investigate both. In the end he didn’t move at all, just watched the dark making shapes, things shifting, waking. He saw a mouth yawn – pink and black and scarce of teeth – then shut. Then a pair of eyes, yellowed, teeth below the same colour with gums dark. He thought of tallow and spent matches. And finally came a voice, a male voice that matched the dark in its foreboding: ‘Ye say thanks in our tradition when someone creeps up and saves yer life.’
The eyes blinked, staying suspended in the black.
Bruno wanted to speak but couldn’t even think, and before any speech came a figure rushed towards him, a rustling thing that pressed him to the wall and took his face in its hands.
‘Name,’ said the voice, the eyes, the man.
‘Bruno.’
‘Not first name,’ said the man. ‘No good to me. Tell me yer family name.’
‘Atlas,’ Bruno supplied.
The hand that held him loosened and dropped away. The eyes closed and for a moment their owner might not have been there at all. And then he reappeared, eyes wide.
‘Atlas,’ the man repeated. He raised his voice and called back, ‘What ye think on it, Da? Name of Atlas safe or no?’
The reply was a long time coming. But then, in a slow, deep voice: ‘Atlas family were good to us Cinder-Folk, times long-gone. Helped out our Silas once, got him outta trouble with the Enforcers maybe thirty-and-two turns back. I’ll be pleased to meet this Bruno of the family of Atlas. Make him welcome enough.’
‘He says ye’re alright,’ said the man close to Bruno. ‘So ye must be.’ And the man moved closer and gave Bruno something curious, utterly unfamiliar – a kiss to the forehead.
‘Bruno Atlas,’ he said. ‘See us. Meet the final Cinder-Folk family.’
Behind the man more eyes popped into life – three pairs, two wide and unblinking, another slower to open.
‘Connor’s my name,’ said the eyes nearest Bruno. ‘Or ye can call me just Conn, if ye like to.’ He half-turned and called, ‘Come here and be introducing yerselves, boys.’
The two livelier sets of eyes – not so yellowed, but bloodshot – jogged forwards.
Bruno blinked, things becoming clearer: the bodies of two small boys formed around the pairs of eyes. He blinked again, looking back to the man called Connor, and saw his face: hair black and long and matted, meeting a beard. All three, father and sons, wore long dark coats that dragged.
‘These here,’ said Conn, ‘are me two boys. Twins, good luck and precious gifts them both: Dominic and Donal. Don’t be fooled by their friendly ways though – they’ll have yer arm broke in a tick if ye try anything stupid.’
Bruno decided not to move much at all.
‘Dom is all ye need to be saying,’ said one of the boys. ‘Not Dominic.’
‘And just D for me!’ said the other.
‘Ye can’t be just “D”!’ said Dom.
‘Now, boys,’ said the father, ‘none of yer squabbling. Go there and give Granddad a hand getting his introduction.’
Only then did Bruno look again to the fourth pair of eyes. The twins moved off and began to lead the final eyes towards Bruno. An older man – back hunched, all of him shaking and the same long dark coat – approached. This had been the man who’d spoken earlier, confirmed the goodness of the name Atlas. His voice was low, but strong. ‘Bruno Atlas,’ he said. ‘Son of Michael Atlas, the lighthouse-keeper.’
‘Yes,’ said Bruno.
‘Wasn’t a question!’ said the old man. ‘I know what I know, remember what I rightly-remember, no matter what them Elders say or want!’
He coughed, harsh and hacking, deep gasps between.
‘Ye should sit yerself down, Da,’ said Conn. ‘Help him, boys. Bruno Atlas, come sit.’
But Bruno didn’t move as the twins led their grandfather back. He’d heard, same as all in Pitch End, of the breed of people who lived in Old Town: darkness in their lives and morals, ways and means below everyone else. He couldn’t shake off so many turns of being told so.
‘Ye’re afeared of us,’ said Conn. He sighed. ‘Don’t blame ye much. Spending all day and all night listening to those Elders, no wonder ye can’t think for yerself.’
‘I can,’ said Bruno, taking Conn’s words as a challenge. ‘I do think for meself.’
‘Then decide,’ said Conn, his eyes coming close. ‘Go on back out into the rain and run on and hopefully the Enforcers won’t get ye, or stay and listen and learn some things.’
Bruno said nothing. Then, ‘What did ye call yerselves earlier?’
‘Cinder-Folk,’ the man said. ‘The last Cinder-Folk family left.’
The name ‘Cinder-Folk’ shook small bells in Bruno’s memory, but the sounds they gave out were only Elder words: ‘Stay outta Old Town – gypsies, no-goods, thieves and vagrants giving themselves fancy names like Cinder-Folk, Free-Seers, Fire-Brands … but all still no good and rightly-indecent!’ But he was sure somewhere else in his past ‘Cinder-Folk’ had been mentioned, not in an Elder’s tones.
Bruno felt a tug on his sleeve, looked down and saw the twins. Their eyes were still wide, but smiles wider.
‘Stay,’ said one of them, the boy Bruno thought was called Donal.
‘We’ll look after ye,’ said Dom, who was a little taller.
So Bruno allowed himself to think other than what he’d been told. He followed the twins and Conn towards the old man.
‘Make yerself comfortable,’ Conn told him, and Bruno sank to the floor. He felt some soft
but fraying carpet beneath his fingers.
No one spoke, the rain still in fervent conversation with the rooftop. But after a time, Bruno saw a small, thin flame rising on the floor in front of him; Conn, his sons and his old father became clearer. Like their clothes and hair and eyes, their skin had been darkened, and Bruno thought maybe they might have rubbed it with ash or charcoal. Or perhaps they’d simply been living too long out of the light. At their waists, Bruno noticed many small packages bound in string. They knew Bruno’s wondering and answered without being asked –
‘To hide ourselves,’ said Dom, showing Bruno his blackened hands.
‘We make things,’ said Donal, showing his belt laden with small bindings.
‘Old Cinder-Folk traditions,’ said Dom.
‘We keep things going, not Forgetting,’ said Donal.
Bruno focused on Conn, whose hands worked the air as though trying to free an invisible skein. And continued to watch, waiting, half-knowing what he was about to see … flame leapt from Conn’s fingertips, joining those already gathered in front of them.
‘My teacher,’ said Bruno, the memory of the morning in the playground five turns before scorched into his mind, the burning of Tall Tales from Pitch End always close with him. ‘My teacher,’ he said again, ‘she can do that too, with her Talent.’
‘We have a Talent for fire,’ said Conn. ‘Cinder-Folk always have.’
‘Our mam,’ said Dominic, ‘she was the best ye ever saw with Talent.’
‘Ye shoulda seen her,’ said Donal. ‘On Cinder’s Eve, she’d make the biggest bonfires ever!’
‘Where is she?’ asked Bruno, and regretted the question instantly.
‘She died,’ said Conn, ‘near ten turns ago. When things went bad for us all.’
‘And for me too,’ Bruno found himself saying.
A kettle was produced by Dominic, enamel cups by Donal. Bruno heard the thick slosh of water inside the kettle as it was settled over the flames. Conn took a bundle of leaf and string from his waist and opened it. His fingers pinched up a little of what was inside and added it to each cup. Not too long and with water boiled, Dominic filled the cups and Donal offered one to Bruno.
Tall Tales From Pitch End Page 6