01 A Parcel of Rogues by Joyce Lionarons

Author:Joyce Lionarons
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Historical mystery, NSF
Published: 2019-03-29T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

An Unwilling Tavern Boy

The alley behind the butchers’ shops in the Fleshambles reeked of blood and shit. Rann squatted miserably in a pool of urine behind a pen woven of willow branches holding three sheep that jostled each other to reach the water trough, too stupid to know that the butcher’s knife was but a few short hours away. A second pen held pigs grunting and pawing at the dirt, and although he could not see them in the fog, Rann could hear the bleats and shuffling of more beasts waiting to be slaughtered all along the alleyway. Piles of offal and excrement clogged the gutter and would remain, growing ever larger, until the end of the day when laborers would cart the waste away to the King’s Ditch.

Rann batted a fly from his face, then wiped his eyes with a dirty hand. Accustomed as he was to the odor of the Fleshambles, he breathed through his mouth and prayed that the fog that hid him from anyone passing the mouth of the alley would turn to rain and wash the filth away. He had crouched behind the sheep pen since just before dawn, when he had scrambled out the upper window of his father’s house to hide in the thatch until he was certain all the sword-bearing men were within, then he had dropped to the ground and run for his life.

As he shivered in the grey light, Rann wondered if the men had left his father alive. Buried in the thatch, he had heard them shouting for him to tell them where Rann was, the punches and kicks, and his father’s drunken, bewildered replies. He knew it was far too dangerous to go back, but how could he leave his own father to lie in his blood if he were still alive? Rann grasped the side of the sheep pen and pulled himself up to stand on cramped legs. Stamping his numb feet in the fetid urine to bring the feeling back, he took a deep breath to steel himself, plotting a twisted route between the buildings in hope of escaping notice if the men were watching the house.

A low whistle with a rising trill at the end sounded from the mouth of the alley. Rann stiffened and squinted through the fog towards the street. After a moment the whistle came again. Rann staggered forward on pins and needles to find eight-year-old Clay standing with one foot in the alley, glancing nervously up and down the street with his knife in his hand.

“Hurry!” said Clay as Rann appeared out of the fog. “They’re searching all the ’shambles. We’ve not much time till they’re back here. God, you stink!”

Rann followed as Clay ran up the street and turned into a narrow passage between a poultry shop and a ramshackle stack of rabbit hutches. “Where are we going?” Rann asked when he was certain the cackling and screeching of the poulterer’s birds would overpower his voice.

“Back of the Swan Tavern,” Clay replied.

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