The Fly Guild (7 page)

Quinton shook his head.

“Right. I approach somebody with my
bag and get the person’s attention. While they are lookin’ at me, you grab
whatever they have, then run like hell. Got it?”

Quinton nodded. “Run to where,
though?”

“Wherever they stop chasing you.
I’ll find you. I know these streets in this quarter really well. We need to get
away from Turnbull first, though, so we’ll move over a couple sections.”

Huck left the alley and walked
across the street past Lady Turnbull, with Quinton close behind.

“Boys,” she pleaded. “Leave behind
your life of street crime. Come to me and let me show you a better way of
life.”

“Sorry, m’lady,” said Huck. “Got
work to do. If I don’t fill up me bag, I’ll be in the river tonight.”

Her eyes moved to Quinton, who
didn’t know what to say. Her eyes were soft and green and they pleaded with
him. He just shrugged and kept following Huck.

“You’ll end up in the river
eventually if you keep doing what you’re doing,” she yelled after them. “If not
by your own people, then by someone who catches you.”

Huck ignored her and continued down
the street. “She means well,” he said to Quinton as they stopped two corners
down and started scanning the streets. “She just don’t understand what the Fly
Guild is. If we left to live with her, someone would slit our throats in the
night the first day we were there.” He looked over at Quinton, the smile gone
from his face. “And you can count on that. No one leaves the family. Ever.” He
stared at him for a minute then smiled. “Okay, I’m going to cross the street
and wait for a smack to come down, then … “

“What’s a smack?”

“A person we’re going to steal
from. Now listen, once I approach him, you have to sneak up from behind. When
he reaches for my bag, that’s when you run by and snag whatever the person is
carrying. And don’t forget to keep running.”

Before Quinton could say anything,
Huck bounded off across the street to stand near a building, slightly hidden in
the shadow of a recessed doorway. Several people walked by, but Huck let them
go. They either weren’t carrying anything, or looked too tough to deal with.
Quinton spotted a middle-aged man walking up the street with a small
oil-covered cloth covering a lump of something tucked under his arm. Quinton figured
it to be a loaf of bread and looked over at Huck, who nodded once in response.
Quinton’s heart started to race. He had been doing something similar the day
Sands caught him. His ribs ached in response to the memory.

The man passed by and Huck stepped out
from his hiding spot, bag in hand. He held the neck of the bag so that it
looked as though it had something in it and he feigned weight.

“Pardon me, sir,” he said, “would
you like to buy a freshly strangled duck? It’s a bit small, but it’s got plenty
of meat on it.” He held the bag up and waved it from side to side.

The man hesitated for a moment, and
Quinton used the time to close the distance between him and the man. Huck moved
the bag to his other hand and took half a step to the side opposite the bread
loaf so as to not be in the way.

“How much?” the man asked.

“Two silver,” said Huck.

“Two silver?” the man said
incredulously. “I haven’t even seen it, and you said yourself it was small.”

“All right then, take a look for
yourself.” Huck held out the bag to the man.

Quinton bolted. As the man reached
for the bag, Quinton punched at the package under the man’s arm, popping it
loose. In the same motion, he ran by and caught it, never missing a step.

Huck turned and started yelling,
“Thief! Someone stop that thief.”

The man yelled in protest and began
running after Quinton, his few remaining threads of grey hair flapping wildly
in the breeze. He took several steps before it occurred to him that Huck was
part of the scheme. By the time he turned around, Huck was disappearing down
another street.

Quinton looked behind him. The man
took a few more steps in his direction, then realized he would never catch the
boy. He threw up his hands in disgust. Quinton kept running, zigzagging through
streets until he was out of breath. He was at the top of a small rise. At the
end of the street he could see the docks, where a ship was making final
preparations to sail. He stopped to catch his breath. As he did so, he peeled
back the package which was far too heavy to be just bread. Sure enough, it was
a freshly slaughtered piglet, its eyes wide, as if its final moment was one of
great surprise. His mouth watered as he thought about the taste of pork, which
he hadn’t had since the old lady died, and even that was just scraps. He was
holding a small feast and knew it was also worth quite a bit of money.

The men on the dock were starting
to untie the large ropes that kept a ship moored to the dilapidated pier. He
wondered where the ship was headed, then looked down at his prize. Could he
bargain with the captain for a spot on the ship? Escape the madness of the
city? His legs were already moving down the hill toward the ship before his
mind had even made a decision. He would have to hurry, because in a few
minutes, the gangplank would be withdrawn and the ship would sail out of the
harbor. Already he could see the men scurrying up the masts to start work on
unfurling the sails.

Quicker and quicker he ran. He
thought he heard someone call out to him from a great distance behind, but he
didn’t look back. He was fixated on the ship. Most of the men were boarding her
now; time was almost out. There were only three men left on the dock. One was
untying the final ropes while the others grabbed the last of the provisions
being taken aboard. He could see the captain, a tall man in his early forties,
his long, dark hair tied behind his head in a neat ponytail with a bright red
ribbon. He could make out the letters on the ship’s side.
Excappare,
it read.

A large, dark shape suddenly
stepped out in front of him, and he collided with it. He would have gone
sprawling, but the man had grabbed him.

“Maggot, what are you doing?” asked
the man. The voice was familiar. It was his master. It was Sands.

Quinton looked past him at the
ship, then down at the piglet. Sands looked over his shoulder and shook his
head.

“Don’t you know any better?” he
asked. Before Quinton could say anything, his heart pounding and his mind
racing to find an excuse, Sands continued. “Doesn’t Master Red eye teach you
anything?” He was upset and shaking his head in disgust. “You never steal from
the sailors. I know there are a lot of goods down on the dock, but it’s our
rule. The Fly Guild has a special agreement with the Sailors’ Guild. Once their
goods are distributed to the buyer, they are fair game. Until then, they are
off limits. Understand?”

He grabbed Quinton by the throat
and forced him to look him in those deep brown eyes once more. What he saw
frightened him. There was an edge to the man that was very dangerous, out of
control even. But for just a fleeting moment, he thought he saw a softness,
too.

Quinton tried to tell Sands he
understood, but all that came out was some garbled words because of the
chokehold he was in. Sands let go and Quinton rubbed the blood back into his
neck and gasped for air. He heard footsteps behind him.

“There you are,” said Huck, who was
out of breath. His eyes met Sands and he quickly looked down. “Master Sands,
forgive me, I didn’t know it was you. I was trying to catch up to your maggot.”

“Take him away from the docks,”
Sands said coldly. He turned his back on them and trod off down the street.
Quinton watched him go and saw the ship slide back the gangplank and pull away
from the dock, its sails starting to unfurl from the high masts. He sighed.

“Wow, a piglet!” Huck exclaimed.
“What a find. But next time you don’t have to run so far, okay?”

Quinton looked at him, glanced back
at the ship, frowned and nodded.

“Come on, we still have one more
bag to fill before the day’s out.”

The boys spent the rest of the day
picking pockets, knocking down vulnerable citizens and practicing general
thievery. Nothing matched the quality of the piglet, though. The rest of the
haul was a few coppers, one silver coin, a few stale muffins, a small wedge of
cheese with only a slight bit of mold on it and some dried beef sticks that
looked inedible but helped fill up the bags. The sun was starting to set by the
time they gave up and began heading back.

“Come on this way,” said Huck,
cutting down a side street. “There’s something I want to show you.”

The boys wound carefully through
the narrow streets until they came to a wide avenue filled with taverns,
brothels and a population of dangerous-looking people. The buildings here were
a little better to look at, some with exposed half timbers and others with
stucco. They rose two and three stories high, each level set slightly further
in than the last, so when you looked down the street, it looked as though the
buildings were all leaning in, as if trying to see what was going on below. At
one end of the street, far in the distance, was a large gate with two flanking
towers. The tall stone towers looked forbidding in the fading light, their tops
covered with a timber roof that rose to a point to keep the rain from
collecting. Small openings were visible at the top, like eyes peering down on
you.

“This is Pismire Street,” said
Huck, as proud as if he were showing off a beautiful family mansion. “Down
there’s the Lord’s Gate. On the other side of the gate is the good life. We’re
not allowed on that side. Fist has some sort of deal with the lord. They leave
us alone, we leave them alone. Anything on the far side of the wall is off
limits. Going there is a death sentence. Got it?”
“Yeah, I got it,” said Quinton, who wondered where the ship was by now.
“Pismire, though, is paradise. At least as close as we’ll ever get to it. Come
on, I’ll show you around.”

Huck led him down the street toward
the gate, pointing out every brothel, prostitute, conman and gambling hall as
if he had created it all himself. He was smiling ear to ear, giving an
occasional wave to someone who more often than not gave him an obscene gesture
back, cursed at him or just ignored him, none of which seemed to affect his
enthusiasm for the place. They were almost to the gate. Quinton could see the
large iron teeth of the portcullis raised up into the arch between the two
towers. The gate was closed, and Quinton couldn’t imagine how you could ever
force your way through it. The wood of the double gates was old and gray, but
still in good condition and banded in iron. There was a man-door cut in the
gates, and it stood open like a missing tooth on the gate’s smile. A large
guard, armored in chainmail and leaning on a spear kept watch as people bustled
by. Occasionally someone approached, said something to him, he’d nod and they’d
pass through the gate.

“They give some sort of password or
something,” Huck told him when he saw where he was looking. “Not that it
matters. We could just go over the wall if we wanted to. But the place is
filled with guards, and if they didn’t get you, Fist would. Come on, you have
to see the Pink Lady.”

The Pink Lady was another brothel.
It was three stories high and every window had a half-clothed lady hanging out
of it yelling at the revelers below. The whole place was covered in stucco,
which at one point had been painted what looked like bright pink, but the years
of rain and sun had faded it to little more than a pinkish white. The
double-sized doorway was wide open and light was spilling out into the fading
day. People, mostly drunken men, were stumbling in and out and Quinton could
see people beyond the doorway rolling with laughter and drinking toasts to each
other, all while topless women walked around filling mugs and sitting on laps.

“Nice, ain’t it?” Huck said with a
smile as he stared into the doorway. “That’s the family’s pride and joy. Makes
us a ton of money. The girls are the best-looking creatures you’ll ever see.”

Between the women in the windows and
those walking past the doorway, Quinton saw blondes, brunettes and redheads of
every shape and size, none of them dressed respectfully, some of them not
dressed at all. It was the most amazing thing he had ever seen.

“Can we go in?”

Huck shook his head. “No. Sometimes
you might get to go in with your master on business, but that’s usually early
in the day when things are pretty quiet. You still get an eyeful of sleeping
lasses wearing nothing but their skin, but someone will cut your hand off if
you thought about touchin’ one of ’em.”

The boys watched for a few minutes
longer, ogling everything they could see from the street, before Huck nudged
him. “Come on, we need to get movin’. Red eye will be wonderin’ where we are.
Lucky for us, we got a piglet, which will shut him up right quick.”

Quinton was about to turn away from
the heavenly scene when a particular girl caught his eye. At first she was
obscured by some other people frolicking in the doorway, and all he could see
was her hair and part of her face. He was immediately enthralled with her.
Long, slightly curled red hair hung down below her shoulders, pulled back with
a white ribbon. A few tresses hung down the side of her face. As she turned
toward him, he could see she had beautiful eyes, a delicate nose and
unblemished pale skin. A green velvet dress was tied at her thin waist, and
ample cleavage was enticing many of the guests to flock around her, one even
dumping a girl off his lap to do so. She was much younger than most of the
other girls, though none of them were really that old. In this city, there were
only a privileged few who got to experience their youth.

Huck had taken a few steps when he
noticed Quinton wasn’t following and turned back to see where he was. He saw
the other boy still staring through the doorway and glanced over to see what he
was looking at.