Jimmy the Hand (5 page)

When it stopped
in front of her, she realized that this one wagon was different. It
was a curious sight, with high sides and hoops over the top as though
it was meant to be covered by a canvas tilt. But there were crossbars
tied onto the hoops with rawhide thongs, making it look like a cage.
It was driven by a pair of Bas-Tyran guards and followed by four more
on foot, their hobnails a counterpoint to the clangour of iron-rimmed
wheels on stone and their halberds swaying as they marched in step.

Some of her
friends moved away cautiously—anything out of the ordinary was
dangerous. But the majority of the girls watched with arms folded
across their breasts and their eyes flicking toward the surrounding
alleys, holding their ground despite their suspicion. After all, a
lot of their business came from soldiers.

A sergeant
descended from the wagon and approached the girls with the rolling
swagger of a man who’d spent as much of his life on horseback
as on foot. His corporal went to work lowering the tailgate and
opening the cage door; the rest of the squad braced their polearms,
the sharp hooks on the backs interlinked, a bare upright tent.

The sergeant
chucked Flora under the chin and turned to grin at his men who also
moved in, smiling. He smelled of sweat, leather and sour wine; she
was used to that, but this man was ranker than most, and she wrinkled
her nose a little. Flora tossed her head and with a slightly nervous
smile asked, ‘Anything I can do for you, soldier?’

‘Yes,’
the sergeant said, leaning in close, ‘you can come with me, my
little canker-blossom, you and all your friends. We’re having a
party for you back at the keep.’ He took hold of her arm with a
hard grip and a cruel, crook-toothed smile.

‘Well,
there’s no need to be rough about it,’ Flora snapped,
trying to pull away.

‘I suppose
there isn’t,’ he agreed amiably. ‘But, ye see, I
want to be.’

With that, he
picked her up by her hair and the waist of her skirt and tossed her
into the cage in a squawking cartwheel of limbs and cloth. Her knee
hit something hard enough to bring tears to her eyes. Before she
could get to her feet, her friends were thrown in on top of her,
driving the breath out of her lungs with a force that left her
struggling for air. One of her teeth cut the inside of her lip with a
little stab of pain, and the iron-salt-copper taste of blood filled
her mouth.

‘Wait!’
she cried after an instant, sucking back her breath as she went
scrambling backward out of the writhing heap. ‘We haven’t
done nothing! What are you doing?’

The cries of the
others were shrill around her: protests, sobs, curses and wordless
shrieks of rage. She hauled herself up by the bars of the wagon in
time to see two of her friends scurry down an alley with their skirts
gathered up, and took heart from the sight. Word would get back to
the Upright Man and something would be done about it. Flora rattled
the wooden bars of the cage as hard as she could, glaring.

‘You can’t
just throw us in jail for nothing!’ she shouted.

The sergeant
came up to her and smacked her fingers with a mailed fist; not hard
enough to break anything, but more than hard enough to hurt. ‘Oh,
yes we can,’ he said, with what might have been mistaken for
good humour, if you weren’t watching his eyes.

Those eyes had
something in them that made her shiver and remember what Jimmy had
said about the risks of freelancing.

The sergeant
slapped his gloved hands together; the metal rings on their backs
clinked dully. ‘So says the acting governor. We can do anything
we want to trash like you, and serves you right. Now shut up and
settle down like a good, sensible girl or I’ll knock your teeth
out.’

Flora sucked her
wounded knuckles and did as she was told. The pain was distant, less
real than the way her heart pounded with fear, and her throat tried
to squeeze itself shut beneath a mouth gone parchment-dry.

By the time they
arrived at the keep, the cage was full to bursting and Flora was
pressed tightly against the bars—which was still better than
being in the middle, since at least there was open air on one side.
The wagon was filled with whores and beggars and a very few of the
younger pickpockets who had been doing absolutely nothing illegal
when they were taken. The soldiers had even rounded up a few people
who were simply poor, or who’d happened to be standing next to
the wrong whore. But she’d noticed that most of those in the
cage with her were Mockers. And that frightened her. Clearly Jocko
Radburn was not taking the Mockers’ adventure with the Princess
Anita lightly.

The gates
clashed shut behind them. More Bas-Tyra guardsmen hauled them out of
the wagons to join a growing file of prisoners being herded to
stairways that led downward. Boots and fists and the steel-shod butts
of halberds and pikes thudded on flesh; almost all the cursing came
from the guards, though.

Their prisoners
were mostly silent, except for the occasional cry of pain.

Jimmy had slept
for a whole day and night, waking at mid-morning on the second day
after the
Sea Swift’s
departure. He stretched
luxuriously, rose and put on clean clothes—or rather, the
well-aired rags he’d left in this room the last time he’d
slept here—and descended the stairs. Instinct made him walk
close to the wall, where the boards were less likely to creak. On the
whole he liked growing up, but there was no denying it made you
heavier, and he was conscientious about learning to make skill
compensate for the additional poundage.

‘If ye’re
lookin’ for breakfast ye can look elsewhere,’ said his
landlady. She was a toothless beldame who glared at him with rheumy
eyes. ‘Ye know I’ve nothing for ye at this hour.’

‘I
wouldn’t think of asking you to trouble yourself,’ Jimmy
said gallantly. He smiled. ‘I needed the sleep more than the
breakfast anyway.’

‘At your
age?’ the old woman sneered.

‘It was a
long trip this time,’ Jimmy said.

And indeed it
was, into a whole other world in its way. But now it was time to get
back to business. First he would stop at Mocker’s Rest and see
what was happening. Then he could start the planning stages of
something bigger than picking pockets.

He’d been
apprenticed to Long Charlie for the last few months, though that
apprenticeship had been suspended the night Jimmy had caught sight of
Prince Arutha attempting to flee Jocko Radburn himself.

The Prince, his
Huntmaster—Martin Longbow—and Amos Trask—the
legendary Trenchard the Pirate—had come secretly into the city
a few days earlier before Jimmy’s encounter with the Prince.
They had tried to hide their presence but from Jimmy’s point of
view they stood out like red bulls in a sheep fold. By the time Jimmy
had chanced across Radburn pursuing Arutha, the Upright Man had put
the word out to pick up these three newcomers.

Jimmy had known
something was up between the smugglers and Mockers, something beyond
their usual uneasy truce, for Trevor Hull’s men had come and
gone in areas of the sewer that were clearly Mockers’
territory, but as he was only a boy, albeit a very talented one, he
was not privy to the secret of the Princess’s escape from the
keep.

Finding Arutha
had changed that, and had plunged Jimmy into the heart of a
conspiracy that had ended the night before with Anita, Arutha, and
his companions successfully making their escape. He had not only
become a conspirator but had become a companion to both Prince Arutha
and Princess Anita while they awaited their opportunity for escape.
He had played his part, earned royal thanks, and found within himself
a sense of something larger than himself for the first time in his
young life.

Such triumphs
left Jimmy in no mood to return to apprenticeship, opening
practice-locks while Long Charlie looked over his shoulder. Besides,
he’d long since caught the knack of lock-picking and the
samples he’d seen didn’t look as if they’d offer
any challenge. Frankly, the training he was getting was boring and
Jimmy knew in his heart that he was meant for more exciting things.
Sometimes it seemed that Charlie was just giving him tedious work to
keep Jimmy out of his hair. Even before the adventure with Arutha and
Anita, Jimmy had made up his mind to request a new mentor.
Life is
too short to wait for what I’m entitled to,
he thought.

One thing he
should do today was steal some more respectable-looking clothes. The
ones he was wearing smelled bad, even to himself.

Or I could
buy some, just for a change,
he thought. But first, a
money-changer.

The changer
worked out of a narrow shop in an alley, denoted by a pair of scales
on a sign above the door; the paint was so faded that only a hint of
gold peeped through the grime. Jimmy hopped over the trickle of filth
down the centre of the alley, nodded to the basher who stood just
outside, polishing the brickwork with his shoulder, and pushed
through the door. The basher would find a reason to delay any citizen
from entering the shop whenever a Mocker was inside.

Ference, the
money-changer, looked up and said, ‘Ah, Jimmy! What can I do
for you?’

Jimmy reached
inside his tunic and pulled out his coin pouch, and with a quick flip
of his wrist, rolled half a dozen coins on the counter. The others
were safely hidden on top of a ceiling beam in his room.

‘Gold?’
Ference said, looking at the thumbnail-sized coins Jimmy shoved
across the smooth wood of the table.

The
money-changer was a middle-aged man with a thin, lined face and the
sort of squint you got from fretting about your strongbox when you
should be sleeping. He dressed with the sort of sombre respectability
a prosperous storekeeper might affect.

‘Getting
ambitious, are you, Jimmy lad?’

‘Honestly
earned,’ Jimmy said, ‘for a change.’ And it was
even true, for once.

He kept a close
eye on the scales as Prince Arutha’s coins turned into a
jingling heap of worn and much less conspicuous silver and copper.
The Upright Man’s regulations kept men like Ference moderately
honest—broken arms were the usual first-time penalty for
changers or fences shorting Mockers, and then it got really nasty—but
it never hurt to be self-reliant.

‘There,’
the changer said at last. ‘That’ll attract a lot less
attention.’

‘Just what
I thought,’ Jimmy said, smiling a little to himself.

He bought a
money-belt to hold it—too big a jingling purse was conspicuous
too—and wandered out into the street.

‘Pork
pies! Pork pies!’ he heard, and the words brought a flood of
saliva into his mouth; he had missed breakfast. ‘Two of your
best, Mistress Pease,’ he said grandly.

The pie-seller
put down the handles of her pushcart and brought out two; they were
still warm, and the smell made his nose twitch. What was more,
Mistress Pease’s pork pies were actually made from pork, not of
rabbit, cat, or the even less savoury concoctions you got from some
vendors. He bit into one.

‘Feeling
prosperous, I see,’ she said, as he handed over four coppers.

‘Hard work
and clean living, Mistress,’ he replied; she shook all over as
she laughed.

Well, a thin
cook wouldn’t be much of an advertisement, would she?
he
thought.

He washed the
pies down with a flagon of cider bought from a nearby vendor, and sat
in the sun belching contentedly, his back against the stone-coping of
a well.

He was just
licking his fingers when a pebble hit the top of his head.

Ouch,
he
thought, and looked up.

Long Charlie’s
cadaverous face peered around a gable. His hands moved:
Report to
Mocker’s Rest,
he said in the signing cant.
Right now.
No delay, no excuses.

Jimmy swigged
back the rest of the cider and hastily returned his flagon to the
vendor with polite thanks. Then he headed for the nearest alley.

Once in the
sewers he moved at a confident jog—even through the pitch-black
places, of which there were many—and passed the guards the
Mockers had stationed at various locations, who seemed unusually
alert today. Not that they were ever less than wide-awake; sleeping
or getting drunk on guard duty could get you badly hurt or seriously
dead.

The smell was
homelike, though ripe; Jimmy flicked his toe aside and sent a rat
more belligerent than most flying through the air. Its squeal ended
with a sodden thud—you had to be careful about the ones that
didn’t run away, chances were they were sick with something.
Jimmy had seen a man foaming at the mouth from a rat bite and it
wasn’t a sight he would quickly forget.

The Rest was
like a kicked anthill, all swarming movement—although ants
didn’t produce that sort of din, or wave their arms so that you
nearly got clouted in the face walking through. Agitated people moved
quickly from group to group; everyone seemed to be talking at once.
He spied a boy he knew standing apart and went over to him. ‘What’s
happening?’ he asked.

The boy, dubbed
Larry the Ear because his were enormous, stood tense as a bowstring
watching the frantic activity. He spoke to Jimmy without taking his
eyes from the scene before them. ‘Bas-Tyra’s men are
arresting the girls and the beggars and anyone else they can get
their damned paws on,’ Larry growled. ‘They took Gerald.’

Jimmy blinked.
Gerald was Larry’s younger brother, not much older than seven,
if that. Jimmy had known Radburn was a vindictive swine, but
arresting babies was beyond contempt.

He started to
ask, ‘Was he pick . . .?’

‘No!’
Larry snapped, turning to glare at Jimmy. ‘He wasn’t
doing nothing. He was just playin’, just bein’ a kid!’

‘Damn
Radburn’s bones,’ Jimmy said quietly.