The Dagger X (The Dagger Chronicles) (27 page)

Julius took that moment to voice his protest once again with a terrible caterwaul. The wagon’s driver turned and saw the boy standing behind him.

“Whoa!” He pulled back hard on the reins. The horse’s hooves clopped unevenly on the cobblestones, and the wagon slowed. “Get off my wagon, you little waif!” shouted the man. Julius twisted from Duck’s grip and leaped for the ground.

“Julius!” Duck jumped too. His feet shot out to one side as he hit the moving ground, and he tumbled along the cobbles several feet. He rose to see Julius scrambling down a tiny alleyway between two buildings.

“Julius, come back!” Duck shouted and ran after him, glancing over his shoulder to the pursuing
sailors—red-faced, hair streaming behind as they ran at full tilt—the cudgel-bearer in front and not twenty paces away.

The alley was barely wide enough to fit a man, narrowly separating the fishmonger’s shop and the victualler, who provided outgoing ships with all manner of supplies. It was wide enough for Duck, though, to hit at full stride. He ran pell-mell, Julius lurching ahead of him. Suddenly Julius stopped and whirled around, for he had seen what Duck had not yet. Duck scooped the monkey up into his arms, and then he saw.

“Aw, crumb!”

The alley was a dead end. It ran itself directly into a windowless stone wall that rose two stories.

“Now you keep that beast in your ’ands, boy, or I crush his cursed skull right here and now.” Duck turned to see the large man with the cudgel stepping along sideways so as to fit in the narrow passage. He edged toward Duck and Julius, still near to the alley’s opening. Instinctively Duck stepped back, retreating until he bumped up against the stone wall.

He looked up. Above him, on the second floor, a shuttered window to the victualler’s shop was open. Inspiration struck.

Back in Falmouth—when both his parents were occupied and not paying Duck any mind—he would occasionally entertain himself by what he called “flying.” He would bridge his palms and the soles of his bare feet against either wall of a narrow hallway leading to the
back door overlooking the garden. So doing, he would lift himself all the way up the wall—setting his feet and reaching higher with his hands and vice versa—until the crown of his head touched the dusty ceiling planks.

The alleyway in which Duck now stood was precisely the same width as that hallway. Duck set Julius up onto his shoulder and planted his palms against either wall, fingers down. He lifted himself up several inches, then braced his feet.

“What the devil you doing?” the man said, sidestepping closer.

In seconds Duck had reached a height of four feet. Then five.

“No, you don’t!” the man barked. Duck’s elevation allowed him now to see over the man’s head at the four other sailors behind him in the alley.

By the time the man with the cudgel stood under him, Duck was nearly to the open window. The man jumped, swinging the cudgel at Duck’s lowest foot. Duck snatched it away and hoisted himself up another six inches.

“Get back here!” The man swung again. Again Duck lifted his foot out of the cudgel’s range. When they reached the open window, Julius jumped from Duck’s shoulder and into the room beyond. Duck looked down at the man below him. He stuck out his tongue and blew his best raspberry.

“You meanie!” he said. The man replied in vulgar terms as Duck shoved off the far wall to flop gracelessly
onto the windowsill. He twisted and thrashed until he’d swung a leg up and over. He tumbled to the second story of the victualler’s shop.

Barrels. The entire floor was filled with them: all sizes imaginable, stacked three high in some places, others flopped onto their sides. Toward the windows overlooking the street was a large table littered with papers, and at that table sat a man as thin as the quill he used to write. The man perched at the end of his chair in shocked disbelief at the boy picking himself off the floor and the monkey who had vaulted up to the top of a stack of barrels and was glowering at him dubiously.

“What? What?”

“How do I get out of here, sir, if you please?”

“What? What?”

The sound of raised voices rang out below as the pursuing sailors burst through the front door of the victualler’s shop.

“Please!” Duck whimpered. Toward the middle of the room was the flight of stairs leading straight down to the shop. Duck ran over to it in time to see one of the sailors starting up.

A stack of three barrels stood just to the far side of the railing. Duck ran over to them and pushed at the top barrel. It teetered, overbalanced, then fell silently over the rail and out of sight until it smashed into the stairs and bounced into the man charging up them, knocking him backward into the cudgel-bearer two steps behind.

“Please!” Duck said again to the lanky clerk. He
yanked a second barrel down and wrestled it over to the top of the stairwell. He lay it on its side, and the moment another set of boots came into view below, Duck kicked at the barrel. The empty cylinder bounded downward, greeted by a chorus of howls and angry shouts.

“Ain’t there another way out of here?” Duck said to the man, who had now raised himself half out of his chair, his back straight as a board, the quill in his hand dripping ink.

“What?”

“Another way out of here!” Duck said. The man pointed. At the front corner of the room a wooden ladder was fixed to the wall, leading up to the ceiling where a hinged door allowed access to the roof.

“Oh, yes!
Thank
you, sir, and God bless!” Duck tossed one more barrel down the stairwell for good measure, whistled for Julius, and ran for the ladder. When the first sailor reached the top of the stairs, Julius emitted another caterwauling scream—stopping the man momentarily in his tracks—giving Duck time to work the hasp and flip open the doorway to the tiled roof.

In a moment Duck and Julius were standing atop the victualler’s roof. Duck slapped the door closed and stood upon it, thinking his weight might stop his pursuers.

“Which way, you think?” he said. He and Julius turned about. The choice was clear. To one side, leading away from the quay, there was nothing but open air to greet them beyond the roof’s end of the victualler’s
shop. Back in the direction they had come, however, there was the small gap between this roof and the one of the fishmonger next door, followed by a row of several buildings built smack upon the other, stretching nearly fifty yards.

Duck felt a pounding on the tar-papered hatch beneath his feet, followed by a stream of muffled curses.

“How do we get back down, do you think?” he asked Julius, who glared at the door on which Duck stood. Duck wobbled as someone pushed from beneath, nearly upsetting his balance and throwing him off the tiled roof and into the lane far below. Quickly he stepped aside, and a second later the door whacked open.

Duck retreated several steps, then turned to face the gap between roofs. A man’s head appeared at the hatch. Again it was the man with the cudgel, one eye clenched shut from where a hurtling barrel had struck him.

“Aye, you better run!” the man said. And so Duck did, Julius right behind him.

“Don’t look down!” Duck shouted to Julius just before he jumped. An indistinct blur that was the alley below passed beneath him, but Duck easily cleared the gap and landed, running along the tiles of the fishmonger’s shop. He dodged a chimney and ran on, risking a look back to see that three of the men had emerged now and were giving chase.

On they ran. Thankfully the roof levels were on a rough par with one another, requiring no great drops or climbs to go from one to the next. But it was not
long before Duck—Julius on his heels—had reached the last rooftop. Duck peered over the tiled edge. His foot struck a loose piece of slate and sent it spinning out into space to smash against the cobblestones below. A few passersby looked up and pointed. Duck retreated from the edge and took refuge behind a large chimney that protruded from the last roof high enough to conceal him.

The men were nearly upon him now, three of them, with two more in the distance. The three had stopped running, seeing that Duck had nowhere to go. The cudgel-man whispered something to the other two, and they spread out along the width of the roof to create a human net.

“You best stop right there!” Duck said, his voice trembling. “I ain’t done nothing to you!”

“You stowed away is what you did,” the cudgel-man said. “And you done injured me.”

“That’s ’cuz you chased me. I didn’t mean to.”

“Nowhere to go, lad, but down,” another man said, dark-haired but with a friendly enough face. “You come take your medicine. It’s not nearly so bad as falling to the lane from this height.” The men drew another step closer.

Duck clung to the corners of the chimney. And then he looked up, inspiration striking again. The chimney was a fairly large construction, boxy, built simply, and open to the elements at the top with a square aperture roughly ten inches on a side. Duck leaped up to perch
on the chimney’s lip. He lowered one foot down into the blackness.

“You’ll never fit, lad,” the friendly man said. “You’ll get stuck and die in there.” Duck inserted the other foot.

And then the cudgel-man charged for him.

“Run, Julius!” Duck called. He pushed his hips off the lip of the chimney, thrust off his arms and let himself go, taking a deep breath as he went as if diving underwater.

The air in his lungs came out with a scream, though. The cudgel-man had thrust a hand into the chimney just in time to grab Duck by a handful of his hair, holding him in midair. Duck cried out and twisted his head about, unable to bring up his arms to fend the man off. The pain brought tears to his eyes. Duck thrashed and thrashed, felt something give, thrashed some more, and suddenly he was weightless.

H
e was falling. Above him the man with the cudgel withdrew a fistful of hair from the chimney opening.

Fortunately for Duck the rains had not yet arrived in Port Royal, and the owner of the Royal Coffee House had not yet resumed his habit of starting an early fire to drive off the morning chill for his customers. Nor had he employed the use of a chimney sweep in at least three seasons. When Duck tumbled out onto the large brick hearth, sputtering and momentarily blinded, a cloud of black dust billowed out into the parlor with him.

It was Sunday, a day for religious observation in many parts of the world, but in Port Royal it was a high time for trade. The coffeehouse was packed full of men and a few women, exchanging news and haggling over the finer points of their trades. It was a loud place that afternoon, each group raising its voices to be heard above the din.

When the blackened boy appeared so dramatically at the hearth—haloed in a blooming cloud of soot
dust—and got to his feet, not a single silver spoon stirred in a porcelain cup. Duck stared out at the adults with their open mouths and arched eyebrows, expecting at any moment for someone to grab at him. The crowded room offered no escape.

“It’s the boy on the run!” yelled a man over at the bar. He lifted his teacup toward Duck. “Give ’em hell, lad!” he said, flashing an uneven assortment of teeth.

“Huzzah!” called another. And to Duck’s astonishment the crowd was smiling and cheering him. Duck’s teeth shone bright against his sooted features. He took a step forward and the crowd parted, revealing a path to the door.

Duck ran. “Thank you and God bless!” he shouted as he ran, and the crowd erupted into cheers, spilling out into the lane just behind him to watch the chase.

Out in the lane again Duck turned to his right in the direction he had come. He locked eyes with the redcoated marine from the pier who pointed and snapped orders to the men behind him. In the distance beyond, Duck caught a glimpse of the sailors who had pursued him on the rooftop, having found another way down.

Duck stepped farther into the lane, forcing a wagon-cart driver to pull back on his leads and slow his horse.

“Julius! Julius, where are you?” Duck shouted up at the roof edge high above him. Two scores of onlookers had spilled out of the coffeehouse, and they too looked up to see what it was this fleeing boy hailed.

Sure enough, the monkey appeared at the edge of
the roof, just where Duck had left him. Duck held out his arms.

“Come on, boy!” He made a kissing noise with his lips. “Come on, Julius!”

“Naw,” said a man in a fine suit, elbowing his mate.

“Bet you two pounds,” his friend said.

“Done.”

“Julius! Come on now!” Duck dared another sidelong glance at the approaching sailors, the marine at their lead. They had nearly reached the crowd milling outside the coffeehouse.

“Jump, you bloody monkey!” called the man who had placed the wager. And sure enough, Julius did. He gave a terrific shriek and leaped out into open space, all four limbs outstretched, his tail curving up behind him, his mouth wide with terror.

Duck caught him neatly and held him fast to his chest. The crowd erupted, hot coffee spilling from cups and staining the cobbles.

“There it was! That’s a fine lad, there!”

“Out of the way, please! Disperse at once!” barked the marine.