City of Crows by Chris Womersley

Author:Chris Womersley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia
Published: 2017-08-07T04:00:00+00:00

The following day the countryside became flatter and greener. There were many more people on the roads, and in the fields loomed giant haystacks and windmills larger than any Charlotte had seen before. There were boats on canals and flocks of birds drifting like dirty thumbprints across the cloudless sky. Villages, taverns, carts, cottages, herds of cattle, great houses shining in the distance. Women humpbacked in the fields stood upright – one hand cupped across a sweaty brow – to watch them pass. Groups of labourers squatted beside the road playing piquet on upturned barrels, a procession of monks. There were elegant ladies in carriages, travellers, merchants, beggars, lepers hovering in the shade with their clappers and bowls for coins. And corpses, sometimes, of children and old women and men, at first glimpse a skinny grey foot poking from a bundle of rags, then something body-shaped, purple-lipped, reeking.

Then, late in the day, Paris appeared. At first merely a grey smudge on the otherwise green horizon, but gradually the city resolved into buildings and spires, drifts of brown smoke and the glint of glass in the afternoon light. Black spots drifted in the grey sky over the city. Crows, Charlotte realised as they drew closer, and she slipped a hand into her dress pocket to touch her book.

She soon heard the human throb of the city, smelled mud drying in the streets after a summer storm. The road became more congested. There were plenty of other carts, people on foot, shepherd boys beating their flocks to market, nobles and priests and pilgrims and thieves. They joined the procession – the saved and the damned – and passed through its gates.

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