Daygo's Fury (4 page)

“Mister Spud,” Darren repeated, hooting with laughter. Deaglan was the only one who still held a sour expression. He turned and walked away, sitting down on his bedroll and rustling through his things.

******

Liam woke up the next morning at the first rays of light through the shuttered window above him. Immediately he felt a tingle in his throat and started to cough. He looked around the room from his position on the floor. He slept closest to the stairs with Calum nearest him on his right. Calum was already up and nowhere to be seen. Darren was the only other boy there, sitting up against the wall a few bedrolls to Liam’s right.

He sat up, coughed again and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. It took a few hours every morning to clear up his cough. The room was old, dirty and dusty, and each new morning was greeted with the coughing of the boys.

Ultan arrived up the stairs carrying the dung bucket and the bowl of water used for it. He lay them down in their corner behind the stairs and walked back out, nodding to Liam and Darren on the way. Feeling the need to relieve his bowels, Liam walked over to the bucket. Pulling down his loincloth, he lifted his tunic and squatted over the bucket.

He sighed with relief as his bowels emptied noisily.

Darren chuckled in the corner. “Ye goin’ for a good one today, Liam!”

Liam laughed. “Yip,” he replied, still squatting.

Darren held a broken leather sandal in his hands, leaning over it in concentration. One of the straps had come loose, and he was trying to cut a new hole at both sides of the base to pull the strap through tightly.

“Where’d you get that, Dar?” Liam asked.

“Found it in the gutter yesterday, some fool just threw it out.” He looked up at Liam with a grin. “Figure all I need now is to find another one!”

Liam laughed. “You goin’ to see yer ma today?” he asked, regretting his words as he saw Darren’s face drop, turning his attention back down to the sandal.

“Me ma’s dead,” he said after a moment, “died last week.”

Liam was in the middle of cleaning his ass with the water from the wooden bowl. He stopped.
Fuck.
He quickly finished and got up, pulling up his loincloth and let his tunic drop back down to his knees.

“Sorry, Dar,” he said quietly. Darren continued on with what he was doing, saying nothing. His mother had been a whore working a few streets down. She was a drug addict and past the stage where any sane man would pay for her. She had never been able to take care of Darren, and so when he was still a babe she had dropped him off at the school of Levitas where they had all grown up. She used to come and visit him every now and again, normally after she had gotten fixed up and was in a happy haze.

She had never done anything for Darren but since they’d been out of the school he had gone over to visit her every now and again.

Liam sighed quietly, his good humour evaporated. He picked up the bucket and bowl, bringing the contents down the stairs.

He liked Dar, he was quick to laugh and normally in good humour. There wasn’t much badness in him.

At the bottom of the stairs, he had to put the bucket down for a moment to pull the exterior door open. Walking outside into the daylight, he saw Calum playing with a couple of the kids from across the street. He carried the bucket a few yards down the street and threw the contents into the pit that lay at the end of every street. The gutters along the sides of each street were designed to flow into these pits, which were five to six feet deep, though the reality was they rarely did, unless with the help of heavy rain.

The rains couldn’t come soon enough. Even with the dung collectors coming by every week to clear up all the shit and piss in the pits for use in the royal gardens, it was accumulating.

Outside the door leading up to the flat there was an old wooden barrel, half broken around the top, which still managed to collect the rainwater from the flow off from the roof. The water level was getting low. Liam half-filled the wooden bowl, throwing the water into the bucket to give it a small rinse out before bringing it back up. He filled the bowl again and went back up the stairs.

Darren was where he had left him, still trying to fix the leather sandal. Liam put the bucket and bowl back and stood for a moment looking at him before returning outside.

It was another bright and sunny day. He walked across to Calum.

“You ready to go?” Liam asked. Calum nodded and got up, saying goodbye to the kids as they walked off.

“You know Darren’s mother died?” Liam asked him.

Calum nodded again. “Found out yesterday. She was sick a time, I think,” he said.

“He okay?” Liam asked. Calum looked over and shrugged.
He had little choice
.

They walked to the end of their street and took a right which led them down to Badgers Burrow. This was a small square at the intersection of three streets just outside Ratville. There were some vendors here selling food. Liam nodded as he caught one of their eyes. They had an unspoken agreement here. The boys wouldn’t try to steal or scam their stalls and the vendors would sell them food at a fair price as a result. “Don’t shit where you eat” as Darren’s ma used to say. Advice she rarely took herself, Liam guessed.

Their destination was the market that stemmed off the Great Road to Keisland and Sanhar. The road was a major trading route that went all the way into the city centre. It was made of stone and wide enough for two large horse-drawn wagons to pass abreast. They said the stone road extended all the way to the city of Darwin over a thousand miles away.

The traffic from the road helped to both supply the market and offer it custom. The packed street was generally a good place for thieving but was close to an hour’s walk from the flat.

As they walked through the streets on their way to the market, they spotted, almost as one, a guardsman from the inner city. It wasn’t a rare thing for a guardsman to venture out into the slums for some cheap entertainment. He walked in the same direction as them, about a hundred yards up the road. The boys smiled at one another.

From the man’s gait, it looked as though he hadn’t been to bed yet. His walk was a familiar drunken dance from side to side, more steps taken to keep his balance than to bring him towards his destination. His hand flicked up occasionally to hold the side of his head. Liam could almost hear his groans as he went.

The boys looked at one another, an unspoken question passing between them.

“You go,” said Calum. “I’m getting a bit old to pull it off anymore.”

Liam laughed. “Too old to be a wide-eyed bumpkin that never saw a sword before? Hardly!”

Calum shoved him with a grin on his face. They watched for a moment to see if the guardsman would take a turn at the end of the street and were forced to stop a while as he tried to make that decision himself. He held a hand to his head as he looked left and right at the crossroads, trying to get his bearings as he swayed unsteadily.

The boys laughed as one as he chose the wrong way, taking the street to his left.

“Right, don’t be dawdling,” Liam said to Calum as he darted up a back alley.

The two boys knew the neighbourhood like the back of their hands and Liam twisted and turned through the alleyways without hesitation. It wasn’t long before he was peeking around a corner, looking back down the street that the guardsman had taken.

The man had made little progress, and Liam had to wait for a few moments for him to catch up. He looked further down the street beyond the man and could see Calum prowling behind him. His stride was one of a boy at ease and he looked nonchalantly from side to side, paying little attention to the man in front of him. He caught Liam’s eye and nodded his head.

Liam waited a second longer, then slipped out onto the street. He walked a couple of steps looking at the ground, seemingly as glum as the guardsman. He looked up then and appeared to notice the guardsman for the first time. His face lit up and he ran over to the man.

“Hey, hey, you a guardsman?” Liam let his voice go as high-pitched as he dared, trying to seem as young as possible. The guardsman looked at him through blurry eyes, frowning.

“What do you want?” he asked with a hoarse voice.

“You really from the city, ya? What’s it like working at the gate?” Liam asked, keeping pace with the man all the time. Calum was now just a step behind him. “Is that a real sword?” he said and reached to grab his sword. The man yelled and threw a backhanded fist at Liam, but Liam hopped out of its path easily.

Calum used that moment to strike.

The purse at the man’s waist was double tied, sitting in a leather holster designed for this purpose and tied to the belt he wore as well. It only took Calum moments to unbutton the holster and cut the string holding the purse to the man’s belt with his knife. Once the purse was in hand, he turned sharply and strolled quickly but casually in the other direction, towards the open alleyway that Liam had earlier appeared from.

Liam continued the distraction, giving Calum time to get away.

“Come on, what’s the problem? I never seen a sword before!”

“You’ll see its blade soon enough, boy, if you don’t fuck off!” The guardsman growled at him, offering a dangerous look. Liam looked disconsolate but resigned.

“Only wanted a look,” he muttered as he turned and walked away from the man. They had reached an intersection in the street and Liam turned right as the man continued on straight, oblivious to the missing purse at his side.

Once he was out of sight, Liam darted into the nearest alleyway and worked his way through the back alleys, putting distance between the man and himself.

After about ten minutes he found his way back to the original street they were on and found Calum sitting against a wall waiting for him. Liam smiled as he walked up to Calum.

“What’s it look like?” he asked. Calum gave a so-so look and handed him the purse. Looking inside, Liam could see there were three copper half klats and four full ones. An average take. There was rarely more at the end of a heavy night boozing and whoring.

They split the takings, Calum taking the extra half klat. The next one would be Liam’s.

Many of the slum boys wouldn’t trust each other with the purse and so tried to work similar jobs on their own, but they were fools. Liam and Calum’s takings on any given day were twice that which they would get on their own. Once they spotted a target, they normally succeeded in getting the prize. The plays were simple and repeated often, but they worked. There was no need for embellishment.

Liam’s trust in Calum was absolute. He would have starved to death years before had it not been for him.

They spent the rest of the day in and out of the market. Calum managed to slit another purse while Liam filched a couple of dried-up apples from a stall and a meat pie. All in all, it was a good day’s work.

It was late in the evening when they called it a day and walked to the public well. It was set at the end of the market where the road forked in two. As always, there was a long queue, and the boys were forced to join it.

The market workers were in constant flow to and from the well during the day, collecting water in great big pots. They used it to flavour with lemon and sell to customers in off the Great Road, or to fill barrels that they heated with stones to keep the food in their stall warm. There were even laundry women collecting the water to wash out their clothes.

The well itself was a large round wall in the ground that stood at waist height, made from stone and about six feet in diameter. There was a large bucket tied to the end of a rope that was lowered into the well and raised again by the use of a round iron pulley. It coiled and collected the rope along its rim as it was turned. It was a deep well, and it took several seconds to lower the bucket down. The bucket was weighed on the inside with stone and clay so that it would drop effectively into the waters. However, it then required tough work to draw it back up.

When it finally became their turn, the boys dropped the bucket down and drew a full load up. They drank from the rim of the bucket, the water splashing over the sides of their mouths, drenching their tunics. When their stomachs were full with water, they took turns in dumping the rest of it over their heads. Liam smiled, relishing the cooling down as his tunic got soaked. He rubbed some of the grit from his face and drew his hands through his hair, wringing out the excess water.

“I was thinking,” Calum said after he had rinsed his hair out, “that we should head down to Tanya’s, see if they have any leftover liquor that they might give us. Celebrate our takings.” Liam’s eyes lit up. He had only been drunk twice before and had loved the feeling of happy freedom that accompanied it.

“Let’s go!” he said. Calum smiled. “You think there’s any chance she’ll have some for us?”

“There might be. I called over last week and she promised me they would keep me some if I came back again this week.” Tanya’s was a whorehouse not far from Sally’s tavern. Calum’s mother had worked there before she died when Calum was four. He had been brought up there until then but afterwards had to leave because there was no one to mind him. That’s how he found himself in the school of Levitas with the rest of them.

However, Calum had kept in touch with them. Tanya herself had visited him a few times at the school until the priests had learned of her profession and ran her out. Since they had left, Calum had called over every now and again.