Two other children were picking over the rubble, one a girl of fifteen or so in a bent yellow bonnet, and the other a boy of about six, still in his infant gown. They saw her and pulled themselves upright like startled hares. The girl seemed to be holding a steel pen in her hand.
Something rushed past Mosca, and the hornbook was snatched out of her hand. She could only watch as a boy of her own age galloped, goat-footed, away from her across the rubble, his hand-me-down breeches flapping loosely.
‘Oi!’
She hitched her skirts and sprinted after him, leaping a fractured chimney in a bound. Too much had been taken from her during her short life for Mosca to surrender a treasure that easily to an opponent her own size. The boy sprinted flat out without looking back, and Mosca matched his speed, her bonnet flapping against her back at its ribbon’s limit. Down another alley, and another.
Round a corner, on to a busy thoroughfare… and right into a fustian coat and a blow to the gut.
Mosca doubled up and took a step backwards. Her hands knotted into fists and readied themselves at her waist to fend off another blow.
Further down the road, she saw the boy she had chased toss the hornbook to a group of older boys without breaking stride. One of them caught it, and slipped it into his pocket without looking at it. The thief kept running.
Mosca looked up from her crouch to see who had struck her.
It was a boy of about fifteen, dressed in the shabby style of most apprentices, with a pigtail as stubby as a paintbrush. He was arranging rolls of satin across the tables outside a haberdasher’s and, to judge by his manner, had no idea of her existence, let alone the fact that his elbow had just found its way into her stomach. Nonetheless, when she advanced a step to move around him, he moved backwards with an insolent nonchalance, under cover of shaking out a length of cobra-green silk. His eyelids flickered as if beneath his lashes he had given her a surreptitious glance. He had a pleasant, pink, rounded face, and the smile of someone who would always find something flattering to say about ugly women’s hats.
It is a very terrible thing to be far smaller than one’s rage. Mosca felt something enormous swell within the knotted stomach that she hid behind her fists. It seemed it must surge out of her like a wild, black wave, sweeping away stalls and strollers alike and biting the plaster from the walls. However, when her vision cleared, her attacker was standing unharmed and unruffled.
The thief was almost out of sight. Mosca took another impulsive pace forward, and was knocked off her feet as the haberdasher’s apprentice stepped quickly to block her. There was a hot ache in her jaw where his arm had hit her, there was a bruised shock in her hip from her fall, there was a prickle of rage about her heart and fingertips. She had no doubt that her attacker was blocking her path so that the thief could escape. On all fours, Mosca crawled away from him, then rose to her knees, wiping the mud from her hands.
It was while she was recovering her breath that Mosca witnessed something rather extraordinary.
The three boys who had been thrown the hornbook suddenly stiffened like dogs at a scent. With an air of purpose they darted across the road, and laid hands upon a young man wearing a chocolate-brown tricorn. They seemed set upon dragging the unfortunate man to the nearest alley, and Mosca assumed that they must be young gonophs determined to strip him of all his valuables. Curiously, however, their victim seemed neither worried nor surprised. He allowed himself to be manhandled out of the street, and disappeared from sight.
Near this alley rose a ragged wall where flints bulged and brandished, where arrow slits showed slivers of sky. Any native of Mandelion would have known that this was the old city wall, breached many centuries before during half-forgotten feuds over blood and money. Mosca knew only that this was something she could climb.
Carts splashed her hem as she slipped across the road, ducking her head so that the clothier’s apprentice would lose track of her in the crowd. She wriggled through a fissure in the wall. Blush-petalled daisies quivered in every crack and tickled her fingertips as she climbed.
The wall rose over an alleyway where the young man was recovering his composure. He wore a dusty coat and a wig so misshapen it seemed some absent-minded soul had used it as a tea cosy. He blinked at the world about him through a pair of tiny spectacles tinted the gentle blue of a spring morning. In one hand he carried a walking cane, and under his free arm was tucked a large loaf of bread.
A group of children was playing at marbles in the alleyway. A sharp whistle raised their heads, and their game was abandoned with extraordinary casualness. There was a fumbling in jacket and skirt-pocket, and each fetched out a roll of paper, an inkbottle and a quill. The girl with the bent yellow bonnet was there, wiping rust from her scavenged pen. The last child to join the group was the clothier’s apprentice. At the mouth of the alley he paused to cast a glance up the street as if still looking for Mosca, then moved to take his place next to a slim girl with a frayed, white lace shawl over her head.
If any of them had thought to look up, they might have noticed a hole halfway up the flint wall. It had for a time served as a station for a small cannon. Now it provided a crouching place for a short figure who hunched herself against the wind like a starling, frowning with her fierce new eyebrows of coal.
‘Ah… good morning.’ The man in blue glasses adjusted his hold on his bread, and tore it in two. It divided easily, and Mosca could see that a small and battered book lay within the crust. ‘From the place where we left off yesterday. Ah, yes… the responsibility of government is to protect the rights of the low from the tyranny of the high and not the property of the high from the desperation of the low… oh good heavens, my apologies, we covered that already, did we not?’ He crinkled his nose and adjusted his blue-tinted spectacles as he leafed through the book. Each of the dozen or so children seemed to be faithfully noting down his every word, including his hesitations and self-interruptions.
It was a school, a school! A back-alley school of stolen moments and stolen pens, but a school. Mosca could have wept tears of blood at finding herself forced to watch at a distance. All her life, her bookishness had made her a freak and an outcast, and other children had treated her with scorn and mistrust. Now it seemed clear that she would find no brothers and sisters even among schooled children like herself. She was an outcast still, and if she tried to approach, they would chase her away like a pack of young dogs snarling off an intruding stray.
‘Ah, here we are. Ah – A Colloquy on Truth, thought to be by the same author.’ The teacher cleared his throat and raised his head, and somehow the mist of absentmindedness seemed to clear behind his little spectacles. ‘On Truth.’ He started to read.
‘Truth is dangerous. It topples palaces and kills kings. It stirs gentle men to rage and bids them take up arms. It wakes old grievances and opens forgotten wounds. It is the mother of the sleepless night and the hag-ridden day. And yet there is one thing that is more dangerous than Truth. Those who would silence Truth’s voice are more destructive by far.
‘It is most perilous to be a speaker of Truth. Sometimes one must choose to be silent, or be silenced. But if a truth cannot be spoken, it must at least be known. Even if you dare not speak truth to others, never lie to yourself.
‘In my head I built a room, in which I kept the truths I dared not speak. And in this room sometimes I said, the kings will return no more to the Realm. Nobody dares say this, but everyone knows it is the Truth. In this room I said, it is good that the kings’ tyranny is gone forever. Men would hang me for saying so, but their hearts would whisper all the while that I spoke the Truth. And in this room I said that until the ordinary people choose their own leaders they will suffer, and this too is the Truth…’