Cloud Castles (14 page)

That had some effect; a lot of the crowd, the women especially, stopped dancing and looked around hesitantly. With a sound like a last gasp the torn curtains caught. I grabbed them, swung on them and hauled. The big man tried to punch me. Hands full, I kicked out and caught him in the crotch, then landed a neat left on his ear with my sword hilt that dropped him face down in the muck. The curtains came free and landed beside him, steaming and smoking, dragging the torches with them. ‘Now get back!’ I yelled. ‘Put out the rest – for your own sake! And your families!’

There was a distant hubbub, a continuous clattering rumble, and somebody yelled out, ‘Dragoons! It’s the bastard dragoons! Leg it!’

I didn’t stop to see if they put the fire out; I was back into the shadows now, and moving fast. That little detour had wasted me too much time, and taken me too far out of my way – the Chartist riots, mid-nineteenth century as far as I remembered. But I could still see the flames from the hotel fire, casting long distorted shadows on the high walls around me, and suddenly I understood
what was happening. It really was casting long shadows, that thing, the shadows of the Spiral, reaching back through timeless reaches to other fires, other shadows, other riots, other outbursts of mindless hate and destruction around this spot. What I could remember of my local history seemed to include an awful lot of them; this had been a good town for mobs. And I was astray among them, till I could find this latest one again.

Around a corner ahead I saw light, I heard voices; that might be promising. But as I rounded it I was all but swept away.

The torrent was human, but it stank like a piggery in the smoky air. So did the muddy slush underfoot, innocent of anything as solid as a cobblestone. It almost sucked the shoes off my feet as I staggered back into the mouth of my street, but luckily they were tough trainers; I prayed the laces wouldn’t dissolve. The people who milled around me, hardly noticing me, were mostly barefoot, short squat figures in coarse dark tunics, much the same for either sex except for length, and crowned with simple headgear; but there were two in nothing but stained shifts, two women dragged along on ropes by men in leather and mail, buffeted and kicked by anyone who could get close. For some reason both of them were slathered from head to foot with what looked like great gouts of pitch or tar. I wondered why, until I saw what waited ahead, and my blood ran chill in my stomach – the rickety scaffold, built against a stone wall for strength; and beside it, in the centre of the street, the huge pile of brush and straw. In this country witches were rarely if ever burned alive; it was customary to hang them first, till they were at least partly dead.

I gaped in horror; but there seemed even less chance of doing anything here. There were hundreds of these people, their faces gloating and pitiless, and their victims weren’t exactly the romantic stereotypes a man might stick out his neck for. One old, one young: the crone was a shrivelled old thing that screeched with senile malevolence, as convincing an old devil as I’d ever seen; the younger was a great doughy lump of a woman with a coarse red face and crumpled features, howling and roaring at her tormentors. I couldn’t count on any support among the crowd, that was for sure. Should that make any difference? I’d seen too much tonight, and been taxed too far. I gathered up my courage, and as the foul cortege swung close to the mouth of the alley I plunged out into the human
stream.

I stand tall among most ordinary crowds; I towered over these, and my sword shone bloody in my hand. They gave back at the sight of me, and I reached the women in a moment and slashed out – once, twice – severing the ropes that held them, and hurling them back before me towards the dark. One startled soldier had the presence of mind to spring in my way and aim a pike, but one sweep sliced the head from it and tipped him into the mire. I hope he had his mouth closed, or he was a doomed man. Stones smacked painfully against my back, hands clawed at my clothes, but when the sword swung their way they sprang away. Often they fell, overbalancing their fellows and freeing the passage. The women screeched before me, as afraid of me as the crowd, and as they reached the alley the younger clutched the elder’s hand and they ran; so did I, but within moments I’d lost them in the dark. What chance they’d have of escape I couldn’t imagine, but I didn’t dare stop to look, not with that crowd at my heels. I couldn’t understand a word they shouted, but I guessed they might think I was these poor creatures’ master come to bail them out. In those circumstances, if they caught me they might forgo the hanging first. My long legs were my main advantage, and the column of fire called me mockingly on, as if to remind me of what awaited me in the Core, in my own time. The sounds of pursuit grew fainter, fading into a kind of general hubbub; but I didn’t hang around.

Some streets on now, still trying to follow that infernal light, still dogged by that distant confusion of sounds, I realized I was running on a hard surface – cobbles. For a minute I hoped I might have come out into one of the conservation area streets. But these cobbles were awash in a slurry of hay and dung. I was about to turn back smartly when I heard a faint groan, and realized the shapeless heap a few feet from me was a human shape – or had been. I squatted down, panting, appalled. I’d heard of people beaten to a jelly, I’d seen some terrible approximations, but never this. It was just recognizably a man, a tall one maybe; but the features were gone, the splintered bone poking up through the raw flesh. Amazing that he was still alive – and horrible. A sudden steadier light fell on him, and I looked up to see a thin man holding a lantern; he had on a long shabby coat, knee breeches, buckled shoes. Lank yellow hair straggled around his chinless face, but there was
something a lot more formidable in his bloodshot eyes. He stared at me, gave back a little as he saw my sword, then gathered himself up as others drifted out of the smoke around him.

‘She’s escaped, is the whore, but at the least we have made certain of the he-idolator, eh? What, be there life left in him yet? Not so strange that his soul should cling to his filthy corpse, given the torment that awaits’t upon the leaving, in the uttermost cauldrons of the pit!’ Apparently that was a joke. At any rate some of the others laughed, a couple of women among them. They had sticks in their hands mostly, the odd dungfork and flail. The pale man snapped his fingers. ‘Come, we’ll speed him thither! Alexander Marshall, hast still thy rope? So then, upon a linklight with it, and tie a goodly halter.’

‘You’re going to
hang
him?’ I demanded, swallowing. ‘Why, for the love of God? He’ll be dead in a minute, anyway!’

‘For the love of God, thou sayest? Call it a pious work then, that we lift this plotting Papist equivocator as close to Heaven as’s like to come!’

Another joke, apparently. A bundle of laughs, this guy.

‘Let me get this straight. You did this to him – and you still want to
hang
him?’

‘Aye, friend. The hand of the multitude, that speaks with the voice of the Lord against the sin of popery and the Whore of Babylon that is its Church, was laid heavy upon him – but aye, mine was foremost, that detected the sinners in the midst of their sinning. Shall it now be backward?’ He peered at me more closely, and there was an unpleasant glitter in his eye. He had the look of a man thoroughly enjoying himself. ‘And, friend, what might be thy concern in the matter? I perceive thou’rt of a somewhat strange mien, art thou not?’ He jerked his head at the people behind him. ‘And has not Master Oates unveiled the deadly stratagems of foreign princes, that would, by the agency of their servants sent hither to walk hidden among us, subvert our land and faith, and vomit upon us the filth of their own corruption? Shall we suffer those to walk free among us, or shall we not use them even as we use their willing pawns, even as we have used this one at our feet?’ His soft voice rose to a sudden galvanizing shriek, and he brandished a heavy-looking stick at me. Gobbets of blood and
hair clung to the silver-banded head.
‘Upon him! Tear the black heart out of his body, strew his entrails before his eyes! So saith the Lord—’

I grabbed him by his greasy shirtfront and ran him through to the hilts. There was a general scream from his followers as I pushed him off to collapse into the mire by his victim, and turned the sword on them. Their fright gave me just enough time to duck back into the shadows and run like hell.

Turn, turn, twist and dodge, and God help the first of them that caught me. Titus Oates, the Popish Plot – so its paranoid influence had reached this far from London. I didn’t remember hearing about that, but maybe too few people had died for this incident to make the histories. Then a less cynical thought struck me; maybe there had been only that one death. Or two, depending on how you looked at it. Maybe the mob had worn itself out in hunting me and, deprived of its rabble-rouser, had gradually cooled off, regained a bit of common sense and gone home ashamed. I hoped so, but I’d never know; I wasn’t going back to find out. The sound seemed to be fading away again, but I kept running till I saw light and skidded round a corner – right into another huge crowd of people.

I was so startled I thought they were my pursuers, and almost slashed out at them till I realized how differently they were dressed, how quietly they spoke. They stood in an open space between high buildings, beneath the light of hanging lanterns. This was a richer place and time, later than the last by the look of it, as if I’d finally found the right direction and was headed back towards the shadows of my own time. Here, the long coats were of better stuff, often richly decorated, the hats three-cornered, with badge and cockade. Even the man who struggled in their midst wore a bullion-embroidered coat, evidently a uniform; those who marched him through the crowd were relentless, but they didn’t hit him. Those around him neither called nor taunted, but spoke in low voices or not at all. And yet there was a menace in their soft rumbling murmur greater than all the frenzy of the others. Scarcely a moment later I saw it consummated, swift, silent, brutal – a line of washing lifted carefully from a high frame and a cord flung over it, to be placed around
the victim’s neck. I clutched at a passer-by’s arm.

‘Why?’ I demanded. ‘What’s he done?’

‘Do ye not know?’ returned the other, civil enough but surprised. ‘He’d quell a crowd at a hanging by ordering his troop to fire upon it, and fire they did, to many deaths. Well, let him quell this one!’

Even as he spoke a man with a white collar and bands stepped back from the victim, thrusting what was evidently a Bible into his bound hands; as quickly as that the rope was hauled taut. I winced, but I couldn’t look away. The man died inches from the ground, strangling slowly on his own weight with no neck-breaking drop. He died hard and long and horribly, and they quietly watched him writhe. I clutched my sword hilt; but who could I fight here? This was a whole city, or near to it, dispensing what it thought was justice.

‘Is this right?’ I spat.

‘Aye, it goes hard,’ mused the man I’d spoken to. ‘But it is fitting.’

I didn’t say anything. By my lights they were a lynch mob, the man they’d hanged was probably only doing his duty as he saw it. But who was I to condemn them? The blood was still drying on my sword. I vaguely remembered the story now, from school histories, but no doubt there’d be a story like it in every city, remembered or forgotten. Any of these things could have happened, anywhere – could still happen, as the night had shown. And from all I’d seen it looked as if forces that fed on them somehow were busy fomenting more. I turned away again, shaken, and let the shadows close at my back once more.

Even from here it beckoned, that column of firelit smoke, across the timeless distances of the Spiral. But I no longer saw it as a beacon. Above ruined roof-tops it rose like darkened battlements among the clouds, a vast shadow-tower that loomed over the land. Beneath its black pall, born of violence and terror, all such evils flourished and grew strong again. I’d tried to help, but had I? Or had I only touched myself with the same dark taint?

I ran, and I ran; and now I no longer turned towards any lesser lights or noises. I kept the terrible column in my eye, and fixed heart and mind upon it, and looked neither to left nor right; for I was afraid now to see any more shadows of what had been. How long I ran I don’t know, and there may be no way of defining it. That hubbub was all around me, but I knew better now than to follow; it stemmed from no one place or time, it was all of them, the same from all, the constant tumult of
a hundred insanities resounding across the pathways of the Spiral, swelling and feeding on one another, a roaring waterfall of wrath and cruelty and despair. At last, though, I began to make out other, shriller sounds that I thought were just more screams and cries, and perhaps at first they were; but gradually they became clearer. They were sirens, the familiar cutting notes of police and fire and ambulance, slicing through the rumbling disorder. The smoke swirled thicker around me, the road drummed hard and flat under my feet, and I felt the distant heat of flames on my cheek. A harsh blue light hurt my stinging eyes, and I stared wearily around.

The hotel fire still glowed up ahead; but this blaze was nearer. It was the church, with two fire engines playing hoses on its roof, and it looked as if they had it under control. Police cars were halted around it, roof lights on, and beyond them, lit by the swinging blue flashes, stood a motley crowd I recognized, watching the flames. I caught sight of Sean’s huge silhouette, dwarfing the policeman next to him, obviously talking amicably. There were the Rottweilers, chained again, licking their chops sleepily. Evidently no trouble there. Best I didn’t get involved again; the sword, for example, might take some explaining. I turned and limped away, back towards the hotel blaze and the road that would take me home.

Weariness wrapped itself around me as I walked, a leaden cloak. No point in heading back to the car, it wouldn’t be going anywhere ever again. That thought depressed me. When I came out at last on the downhill road, a flock of fire engines were damping down the great blaze, with the firemen in their yellow protective gear stamping around like so many deformed dwarfs. I wasn’t going to miss the centre or the hotel; still, they’d probably build something even more hideous in its place. Here and there cars were beginning to appear; there might even be a taxi. I remembered the sword, and was already slipping off my jacket to wrap it up when I realized it wasn’t in my hand any longer. I looked back in panic, and then remembered this also had happened before. I had a feeling I’d find it safe over the mantelpiece when I got home, as if it had never been away; but there’d be a broken window.