by Alex Pheby
Nathan watched as coins were given, children taken, coins taken, children returned, then he turned his back on it all and went on.
The further he walked from his home, the less the drumbeat on the Sea Wall troubled his ears. There was something in the sheer volume of that noise up close which lessened the other senses and bowed the posture. But when Nathan came gradually onto the Strand where it intersected the Promenade and led towards the Circus, he was a little straighter than he had been, a little taller, and much more alert. There were other slum-dwellers here too, so there was more to be alert to – both good and bad.
Up ahead there was a bonfire, ten feet high. Nathan stopped to warm himself. A man, scarred and stooped, splashed rendered fat at the flames, feeding them, keeping the endless rainwater from putting the wood out. On the pyre was an effigy of the Mistress, crouched obscenely over the top, her legs licked with fire, her arms directing unseen firebirds. Her face was an ugly scowl painted on a perished iron bucket, her eyes two rust holes. Nathan picked up a stone and threw it. It arced high and came down, clattering the Mistress, tipping her head over.
People came to the Strand to sell what bits of stuff they had to others who had the wherewithal to pay. The sellers raised themselves out of the Mud on old boxes and sat with their wares arranged neatly in front of them on squares of cloth. If he’d had the money Nathan could have got string and nets and catapults and oddments of flat glass and sticks of meat (don’t ask of what). Today there was a glut of liquor, sold off cheap in wooden cups, from barrels marked with the red merchant crest. There was no way this had been come by legally – the merchants kept a firm grip on their stock and didn’t sell into the slums – so it was either stolen or salvaged. Drinkers wouldn’t know, either way, until it was drunk. If it was stolen, then buyers got nothing worse than a headache the next day, but if it was salvaged then that was because it was bad and had been thrown overboard to be washed up port-side. Bad liquor made you blind.
Nathan wouldn’t have bought it anyway – he didn’t like the taste – and he had no coins and nothing much to barter with except his pillowcase and the handkerchief in his pocket, so he joined the other marching children, eyes to the floor, watching out for movement in the Living Mud.
He didn’t recognise anyone, but he wasn’t looking – it was best to keep your distance and mind your own business: what if one of them took notice and snatched whatever was in your bag on the way home?
There were some coming back, bags wriggling. Others’ bags were still, but heavy. A few had nothing but tears in their eyes – too cowardly, probably, to venture deep enough into the Mud. Nathan could have stolen from those who had made a catch, grabbed what they had and run, but he wasn’t like that.
He didn’t need to be.
As he got closer, the Itch pricked at his fingertips. It knew, the Itch, when and where it was likely to be used, and it wasn’t far now. “Don’t Spark, not ever!” His father used to stand over him, when Nathan was very small, serious as he wagged his finger, and Nathan was a good boy… But even good boys do wrong, now and again, don’t they? Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between good and bad, anyway, between right and wrong. His father needed medicine, and the Itch wanted to be used.
Above, a stray firebird struggled up into the clouds, weighed down by a man hanging limp below it.
The Strand widened; the street vendors became fewer. Here was a crowd, nervous, a reluctant semicircular wall of children, nudging and pushing and stepping back and forwards. Nathan walked where there weren’t so many backs and shouldered his way through. He wasn’t any keener than the others, he wasn’t any braver, but none of them had the Itch, and now it was behind his teeth and under his tongue, tingling. It made him impatient.
The wall was three or four deep and it parted for him, respecting his eagerness, or eager itself to see what might become of him. A dog-faced girl licked her teeth. A grey, gormless boy with a bald patch reached for him, then thought better of it and returned his hand to his chest.
When he was through, Itch or no Itch, he stood with the others at the edge for a moment.
In front was a circle marked by the feet of the children who surrounded it, large enough so that the faces on the other side were too distant to make out, but not so large that you couldn’t see that they were there. The ground gave way and sloped, churned up, down to a wide Mud-filled pit. Some stood in it, knee deep at the edges, waist deep further out. At the distant middle they were up to their necks, eyes shut, mouths upturned, fishing in the writhing thickness by feel. These in the middle had the best chance of finding a fluke – the complexity of the organisms generated by the Living Mud, it was said, was a function of the amount of it gathered in one place – while those nearer the edge made do with sprats.
Nathan took a breath and strode down the slope, the enthusiasm of the Itch dulling the pain of his blisters until he could barely feel them. When he had half-walked, half-slid his way to the shallows he clamped his pillowcase between his teeth, first to protect it from getting lost, but also, for later, to stop dead-life finding its way into his mouth.
The Mud was thick, but that didn’t stop it getting past his socks and into his shoes. He had to think hard not to picture new spawned dead-life writhing between his toes.
Deeper and there were things brushing his knees, some the size of a finger, moving in the darkness. Then, occasionally, the touch of something on his thighs, seeking, groping, flinching away by reflex. There was nothing to fear – he told himself – since whatever these things were, they had no will, and would be dead in minutes, dissolving back into the Living Mud. They meant no harm to anyone. They meant nothing.
When the Mud was up to his waist, he turned back to look the way he had come. The circle of children jostled and stared, but no one was paying him particular attention, nor was there anyone near him.
The Itch was almost unbearable.
His father said never to use it. Never use it. He couldn’t have been clearer. Never, finger wagging. So, Nathan reached into the Mud, Itch restrained, and fished with the others. Flukes could be found. He had seen them: self-sustaining living things. If he could catch hold of one, then he wouldn’t have to betray his father. He moved his hands, opening and closing through the Mud, the sprats slipping between his fingers. There was always a chance.
As he felt for things below the surface, he stared upward at the slow spiral of the Glass Road. It showed as a spider’s web glint that looped above him, held in the air by the magic of the Master. If Nathan turned his head and looked from the side of his eyes it became clearer, a high pencil line of translucence leading off to the Master’s Manse.
What did the Master think of the Circus? Did he even know it existed?
There! Nathan grabbed at a wrist’s thickness of something and pulled it above the surface. It was like an eel, brown-grey, jointed with three elbows. Its ends were frayed, and it struggled to be free. There was the hint of an eye, the suspicion of gills, what might have been a tooth, close to the surface, but as Nathan held it, it lost its consistency, seeming to drain away into the Mud from each end.
No good.
If it had held, he might have got a copper or two from someone – its skin useful for glove-making, the bones for glue, but it was gone, dissolving into its constituents, unwilling or unable to retain its form.
Now the Itch took over. There is only so much resistance a boy can muster, and what was so bad? They needed medicine, and he either blacked his eyes or made a fluke. Wasn’t this better?
He glanced surreptitiously to both sides and put his hands beneath the Mud. He bent his knees, and it was as easy as anything, natural as could be. He simply Scratched, and the Itch was released. It sent a Spark down into the Living Mud and, with the relief of the urge, pleasure of a sort, and a faint, blue light that darted into the depths.
Nothing happened for a moment – the relief became a slight soreness, like pulling off a scab. Then the Mud began to churn, the chur
ning bubbled, the bubbling thrashed, and then there was something between his hands, which he raised.
Each fluke is unique. This one was a bundle of infant limbs – arms, legs, hands, feet – a tangle of wriggling living parts. When the children in the circle spied it, they gasped. It was a struggle to keep his grip, but Nathan took his pillowcase from between his teeth and forced the fluke into it. He slung it over his shoulder where it kicked and poked and whacked him in the back as he trudged in the rain, back to shore.
II
The tannery was deep in the slums, and the whole journey there Nathan shielded his pillowcase from the gaze of onlookers whether they were children, hawkers or slum folk. This fluke would never live into childhood – it was too corrupted and had no mouth to breathe with, or eat – but that didn’t seem to discourage it; the dead-life in it provoked it to ever harder blows on Nathan’s back, which bruised where they landed.
He walked back past the bonfire. The effigy of the Mistress was gone now, burned to ash. The bucket that had made her head was resting hot in the Living Mud, singeing the dead-life, making it squeak. A woman and her granddaughter, possibly, were throwing scraps of food, inedible offal, into what was left of the fire: offerings to the Master, sacrifices for luck.
Along the way a group of children were beating at something with sticks while others watched. Nathan slowed – justice in the slums was vicious, brutal, but worst of all infectious; if this was a righteous crowd, he wanted to avoid becoming an object for it. In the middle of them there was something red, struggling, rearing, reaching. Nathan took a few steps closer: it was a firebird, a broken thing near to death. Few firebirds made it past the Sea Wall, and those that did were always worse for whatever defence the Master employed. This one was gashed across the chest, rolling and bleating, its arms hanging limp, bucking with one good rear leg. Its wings were bare spines and torn membranes.
One child brought a heavy plank down across the length of its skull and a shout went up as the thing slumped. The spectators rushed in, pulling out handfuls of feathers, whooping and cheering, plucking it bald. Nathan looked away, but its woeful face, dull-eyed and slack-jawed, crept in at the corner of his thoughts.
He took a different way back, longer, and came to the tanner’s gate. Harsh, astringent pools filled with milk of lime made Nathan’s eyes hurt, but he was glad to drop the bundle on the ground, where it twisted and bucked and splashed.
He rang the tanner’s bell, hoping the daughter was busy and that the old man would answer – the tanning liquids had got to him over the years, and now he was soft, confused.
Nathan was in luck: the old man was there like a shot, as if he had been waiting just out of sight. He was small, scarcely taller than a boy, brown as a chestnut, shiny as worn leather. Without troubling to ask, he took Nathan’s pillowcase and looked inside. His eyes widened, cataracts showing blue-white in the gloom, and then quickly narrowed again. ‘A limb baby,’ he said to himself, not quietly enough, and then numbers passed across his lips as he counted the arms and legs and things that were neither. ‘What do you want for it? I’ll give you twenty.’
Nathan didn’t smile, but he would have taken ten. He had taken ten before, but when a man offers you twenty you don’t settle for it. ‘Fifty,’ he managed, his voice betraying nothing.
Now the tanner threw up his arms in comic dismay. ‘Do you take me for a fluke myself? I wasn’t born yesterday.’ He looked back at the tannery, perhaps to check with his daughter, perhaps to check to make sure his daughter wasn’t watching. ‘I’m no fool,’ he mumbled. ‘Twenty-five.’
Twenty was more than Nathan needed, but there is something in slum living that trains a boy to make the most of an opportunity. He reached out for his pillowcase. ‘If you don’t want it, I’ll take it to the butcher,’ he said, and pulled.
The tanner didn’t let go. ‘Thirty then, but not a brass more.’ He rubbed his sleeve across his lips, and then wet them again, ‘I’ll admit it: we’ve got an order for gloves…’ He looked back to the tannery, squinted and frowned as if he was thinking.
Nathan let go and held out his other hand before the old man could change his mind.
From a satchel at his waist, the tanner took the coins, slowly and carefully, scrutinising each and biting it to make sure he hadn’t mistaken one metal for another with his bad eyes. Once the last one was handed over, he turned, swung the pillowcase hard against the killing post, and slammed the gate.
Nathan cursed, realising too late that the tanner had taken the pillowcase with him.
III
It wasn’t far home and Nathan clutched the money, fifteen to a palm. Perhaps this would be the end of it, all the misery.
He rounded a turn between two shoulder-high piles of broken pallets, and there was his home ahead. It was the same as he had left it, except there was a woman drawing aside the tarp that made the door. She was broad and red-haired, fine of feature and unscarred. Nathan recognised her immediately – she was the witch-woman who provided cures. Before he could guess at why she had been inside, his mother came out. ‘You’ll do it!’ she screamed.
‘I will not.’ The witch-woman hitched up her skirts and turned.
They both saw Nathan. Whether there is something in the presence of a child that draws arguing adults to a stop is debatable, but they stopped. Nathan, as if he could sense what the source of their disagreement must have been, held out one hand and opened it, so that the coins glinted in the pile they formed.
His mother ran forward, almost insanely eager, her lips pulled back and her hair wild. She spared Nathan one glance, her eyes burning blue and ringed with black, and grabbed the money. ‘You’ll do it.’ She threw the coins at the witch and they fell into the Living Mud at her feet.
The woman bit her lip and thought and then, slowly, kneeled and picked them up, delicately separating them, wiping away the dead-life. ‘Whatever you command, mistress.’
The witch-woman began her folk magic, and her shadows met in the middle of the sheet that divided the two halves of their shack. The two witches came together, each shadow interfering to make a definite shape, dancing. This woman had enough about her to command the light to acknowledge her edges, round and wide and with a gathering of hair that extended her head back as if she had been skull-bound at birth after the manner of the slum-dwellers to the north of the city.
Nathan watched, his hands clutching in front of him. At what? The possibility of a cure? The revival of his father? There had been a time, though so long ago that it was less real now than a dream, when his father had lifted him high and held him up and shown him to the world. There had been a time when his father had laughed. There had been a time of happiness. Hadn’t there? Now, in the corners, rats and dead-life encroached on the shadows and the idea of happiness seemed nonsensical.
From behind the curtain came a high, light music, not specific to any instrument but not seemingly a voice. The silhouette worked at something, rubbed something between its palms and directed the contents of that working up and over where Nathan’s father lay. The dust of dry herbs? Pollen? Salt?
Nathan stepped forward – it was easy to make his father cough. It was easy to wake him. Nathan’s mother held him by the wrist and kept him still beside her. Nathan turned and she was staring, as he had been, at the outline of the witch-woman. There was something in his mother’s expression, some hopelessness in the set of her brow, something wrong that disturbed him. Did she want this to succeed? Did she want her husband better? It seemed, perhaps, that she did, but also…
The woman clapped her hands and when Nathan turned back, she was swaying, muttering, shaking behind the sheet. She stopped and the silhouette breathed, began again, flowed like water from a jug, arms twisting, repeating words under her breath, words which eluded the mind even though the ear could hear them clearly. Nathan could recognise some syllables by their edges, and the same with the movements of her body, the positions of her hands, gestures mapped against sounds.
The light from the candles guttered and flickered, increased in intensity. Her voice grew louder too, the potency of her spell, the depth of her shadows, the size of her silhouette. A smell, now, of rose petals, of aniseed. Nathan leaned closer, his mother’s hand around his wrist tighter.
He turned to her. ‘Is it working? Will it work?’
His mother turned away from him.
If there was any reluctance in the witch-woman’s dance it wasn’t visible in the shapes she cast on the sheet. If she was fooling them out of their coins, then she didn’t act as if she was. If anything, she moved with an unnerving commitment, a complete lack of reticence, no sense that she cared what anyone thought of her – as if she was dancing for unseen watchers, for magic, for God. The shack shook with the force of her heels hitting the earth, the sheet billowed when she spun from the waist, rippled when her fingertips touched it, her arms extended, her hair a vague flame in the air around her head. She whirled and span and threatened to bring the fragile integrity of their home down around them. The scent of her sweat overwhelmed the rose petals and her panted exhalations interrupted the incantation of her spells the faster she span, but she didn’t stop.
Just when it seemed she would bury them all in a jumble of wood and iron and junk, she grabbed out at the sheet, clenched it in one fist. She stopped, gasping for breath, her other hand on her knee and behind her – grey, flat and motionless – lay Nathan’s father, his chest unrising, his breath only visible in the dappled shadows his ribs made on the skin between them.
‘It’s no good,’ the witch-woman said. ‘The worms have him. There’s a power protecting them. Nothing I can do.’
Nathan’s mother was at her almost before she’d finished speaking, but the witch-woman was more than a match. ‘No refunds!’ she shouted. She pushed Nathan’s mother away and held her at arm’s length. ‘I’m sorry. No refunds.’