The valley here was almost a plain, and the river had grown broad and lazy. Gleaming flats of mud pushed their faces above the water here and there so that geese and swans could hold conference. Much further downstream an ash-coloured dome seemed to hang unsupported in the morning light, and Mosca guessed that this might be the hill where the ruined city of Fainbless stood.
Plying her pole, Mosca managed to force her raft through the reeds until it nudged against the bank. In the clear morning sun she realized that her hands were dark with more than grime, and that her gown and apron were a smudged mass of printed words.
‘Saracen!’ She gaped at him in horror. ‘Look! I’m all criminally printed!’
Below the rushes, water gleamed, so Mosca pushed them aside until enough water was visible to offer her a little mirror. The disaster was more complete than she had first thought. Her reflection showed her a host of blurry, backwards characters across her forearms and face.
‘Well, I can’t go back to Mandelion like this,’ she muttered. ‘I got an illegal nose.’
There was no saving her apron. She had knelt on it when wriggling out of the printing press, and her knees had crushed the cloth against the inky text plate. Mosca took it off hurriedly and paused to stare at a clear, black mark on the left-hand side of her apron. It was about the size of a hand’s palm, jet-black and shaped like a playing-card heart.
Where had she seen a mark like that before? After a few moments the memory returned, but it placed her in even deeper perplexity. Back in the Grey Mastiff on the night of the beast fight she had seen a woman in a white dress up in the gallery. A woman who tried to look like Lady Tamarind but had a foolish, flabby face, a dress like Lady Tamarind’s but with a black heart just like this one marking the sleeve. Lady Tamarind’s dress, another woman’s face, a black printed heart… it was a dreamlike jumble of oddments that did not seem to fit together.
She would make sense of it later. Cleansing herself of the ink was a more urgent matter. She dipped the corner of her apron into the water and began fiercely rubbing at her skin. After a while the letters on her face started to fade, but the printing on her right forearm was still clear and black. Indeed, it was so clear and black that Mosca was able to make out some of the words as she scrubbed.
‘… and where the sword and cannon hold dominion keep this heart from trembling…’ Mosca frowned. She’d been expecting some radical rantings, or political revelations, but this looked very like an old-fashioned ‘heart’s ease’ prayer. In the time of the civil war many soldiers had marched into battle with a prayer of this sort written out on parchment and folded in the pocket over their heart, in the belief that it would bring them luck and courage.
‘It’s like someone’s getting ready for a battle,’ she murmured under her breath. Why were the heart’s ease prayers being printed, rather than hand-written by a priest? Could it be that there was too little time to write them out – or too many soldiers to supply?
‘… the land has sunk into a sickness of the soul… a poison that can only be removed by letting blood… our figures seem dark for the Light is behind us…’ Mosca read on with new interest. ‘… our glorious brethren of the-’ The next word was hard to read, running as it did across Mosca’s wrist. She twisted her arm about and squinted until the smudged ink revealed its secret to her.
She sat back with a crash. The air was suddenly full of birds. They erupted from the rushes on all sides, their wings beating like frightened hearts, the white undersides of their wings flashing with each beat. The air they left behind them shook and rippled and would not settle.
But they’re dead, thought Mosca desperately, they’re all gone, everyone knows that…
With urgent eyes she stared at the smudges on her skirts, skin and stockings, tracing the threads of sooty letters that wound about her like snakes.
‘… with a sword of fire… and even their children… purity…’
And there again was the word she had found on her wrist. And there, and there…
Birdcatchers…
The morning air was as golden as ever, the wild rosehips still bobbed gaily on the hedges, but the breeze had a new taste now, and the cries of the birds sounded like tearing metal.
Birdcatchers…
Anything was possible now. Mosca thought she could hear bland hillsides groaning open to release the monsters of the past. The worst of the dead times were rising from their graves, and it would take more than Little Goodman Postrophe and a mountain of mellowberries to stop them coming home.
But no, Mosca realized, the truth was less childish and more frightening. The Birdcatcher army that awaited these prayers would not be a spectral horde. Its soldiers would be flesh and blood, men and women of Mandelion, all waiting through the years for the right moment with a ghastly patience, like the Birdcatcher church attendant in Kohlrabi’s story. The Birdcatchers had never been extinguished at all. They had just remembered how to be invisible.
And now they were ready to act. A battle was being planned, and beyond it Mosca seemed to see a world where trees screamed under the weight of hanged bodies, and the fears that still lurked like bats in the eaves of every mind surged out and blackened the sky.
Before her the clear, black heart on her apron burned into her gaze until it seemed to pulse with the heartbeat she heard in her ears. It was the Heart of the Consequence, the essence of purity, the drum of an unseen army. But it was more than that, and as she stared, Mosca started to see a new meaning in the mark.
Seven hours later, amid the crush of Mandelion’s main thoroughfare, two young girls huddled by a ragged outcrop of the old city wall and talked in low, urgent voices. The taller of the two had red ringlets too unruly for her cap, and she kept her hands bunched in her apron to keep them warm. The shorter had black hair, caked and clinging with earthy-pink powder, and she wore a patched olive-green dress of a style too old for her. On a strap over her shoulder hung a round, red wig box, and her clogs were caked with mud. Looking at the pair, a passer-by might think they were two shopkeepers’ daughters taking a moment out of their errands to gossip. Few would suspect that they were discussing gods, and guilds, and the fate of the nation.
‘I’m still not really talking to you,’ the Cakes insisted for the sixth time. She scanned the crowds in front of the wrought-iron gates of the Eastern Spire. ‘Remind me – what does she look like again?’
‘Plump and peachy,’ muttered Mosca. ‘With a flouncety walk, and a nose stuck up like this.’ With a fingertip she pushed up the tip of her own nose.
‘I never done anything like this before,’ murmured the Cakes nervously.
‘You just got to throw her apron over her head, and hold on. You won’t need to say anything.’ Mosca grabbed the Cakes’ arm. ‘There! There she is! Come on!’
The lavender girl had stopped at the gate to preen the frills at the bustle of her pretty saque-backed gown. She smiled her way past the guards, observing their admiration through lowered lashes, then paused to look for a gap in the ebb and flow of bodies and coaches. This hesitation was her undoing.
The first the poor lavender girl knew of her danger was when she found herself with a face full of linen. Before she could recover or scream, four thin hands gripped her arms, hurried her off her feet into an echoing alley and pushed her against a wall. The Cakes held on to her like a drowning sailor clinging to a beam, while Mosca placed a couple of well-aimed pinches on the prisoner’s plump arms.
‘Who are you? What do you want? Ow!’