Blanche turned into the mouth of an alley. She walked past the body of a dead cat and hoped it wasn’t an omen. Garbage-mostly vegetable matter-lay in heaps, and her good palace shoes squelched through it.
Her anger grew.
“Voisi! Voisi!” voices shouted at the mouth of the alley.
She ran.
Ten yards in front of her, the alley split, running to either side of a brothel that stood like the prow of a ship, called, with devastating originality, the “Oar House.” From the very point of the corner hung the sign, a pair of oars crossed with an erect penis thrust suggestively between them, in case anyone missed the sign’s meaning.
Blanche knew where she was. She turned left and continued to run. Any of the pimps hereabouts would trip her up just to see what happened-so she was careful and kept to the middle of the street.
Catcalls and whistles followed her.
She turned at Sail Maker’s Lane. She was tending towards Ellen’s father’s shop-and at the same time wondering how much these men would dare.
Ellen’s father was not the man to save her.
But deliberation takes time, and she heard pounding feet.
She turned again, into the alley that ran parallel to the sail lofts where big ships paid to dry and mend their canvas.
An arm barred her progress-she slammed full tilt into it and fell, basket flying.
Panic bubbled close.
“What’s your hurry, my pretty?” said a lout. He wore old parti-colour in a southern livery and had a club in his belt. He squinted at her.
She rolled, fouling the whole of her best livery in the watery slime of human and animal excrement of the alley. But she got a hand on the handle of her basket-
A hand grabbed her left arm in a vise of iron.
She screamed. Knowing it was probably the wrong thing to do-that it might attract more predators. But her courage was cracking, and she knew what was coming.
“Look what I have!” said an Alban voice. But as she turned her head and her right hand came up, she saw it was another Alban boy aping the Galles in his tight hose, his arse hanging out in the breeze. Something pricked her right arm as she tried to fight him…
He put his hands around her waist from behind and tried to nuzzle her neck.
She raised herself on her toes, her hands on his, and as the master-at-arms taught the maids, she broke his grip and slammed her basket at him. With her right hand she pulled the offending object from her hair-her thread knife.
She slammed it into his reaching hand and it went all the way in and ripped out again, sharp as any razor. Blood fountained, and the man stumbled back.
He couldn’t take his eyes off it. “I’ll do you, you bitch!” he shouted.
The southerner tried to grab her. With the grace of desperation, she pivoted and slammed her skirted knee into his balls-hard enough contact to make him mew like a kitten, although his backhand almost knocked her down. She scraped her thread knife over his face and backed into the alley.
She backed three steps. It looked like a dead end-she prayed, and prayed, her mind running too fast, and she saw the dead man’s feet-a corpse-and thought of how soon she’d join it. And how odd that the dead man’s boots had curly toes like a Moor’s.
She toyed with using the little knife on her own wrist. It was a mortal sin. Eternity in hell.
She wished that she was a little luckier, but the dead end was resolutely dead.
The little knot of men were playing with her now. They knew she had nowhere to go, and they were laughing. The bleeding man laid claim to be first on her body.
She looked for a weapon.
“Look out! She bites,” laughed one of the Albans. He had a big dagger in his fist, and he thrust it into the southerner as he passed, and stepped aside as the blood flowed. The southerner looked stunned by his own death, and the squire laughed.
He looked at Blanche. “Come out, you little slut, and take what you get. If I have to dirty myself dragging you out, I’ll slit your nose when I’m done fucking you.” He smiled, raised his hand, and beckoned.
She shrank back.
“Last chance,” he said.
The alley ended where four ramshackle buildings came together, and two of them shared an ancient set of roof trees. Blanche had seen the gap-at her head height-the smell of piss told her that men and animals stood here to urinate, especially when it was raining. The gap was too high for her.
She whimpered.
“Stupid slut,” the man said.
“Four men on one poor girl!” she managed. “You cowards!”
He shrugged. But he respected her enough to keep his knife well forward, and he pushed in.
She decided to make him kill her, and she attacked.
He passed the dagger effortlessly under her hand and broke her right wrist in the twinkle of an eye. Her beautiful sewing knife fell in the piss.
He kneed her in the gut so hard that she threw up as she fell to her knees.
“Now,” he said, with grim humour, “I think I’ve earned the right to be first. I-”
She didn’t really see what happened, because her head was down, but suddenly there was an apparition out of hell in the alley-a big man, black as night, in outlandish foreign clothes.
The black man had come out of the gap above her. The dead man’s boots-the man wasn’t dead. Her disoriented senses allowed her that much.
“Who the fuck are you?” the squire said. He backed up a step and went for his sword.
The blackamoor stood easily, legs slightly apart. He wore a curved sword, sheathed.
The squire’s friends shouted from the mouth of the alley.
Blanche pushed a vomit-soaked strand of hair out of her mouth and tried to think.
The squire drew, and as his hand moved, the black man drew, and cut-one incredibly beautiful motion-a minute pivot of the hips and the squire’s sword-and hand, still attached-fell to the earth.
The squire shrieked. It was the sound of a man having the soul ripped from his body, and like Blanche, he fell to his knees. Blood fountained.
He seemed unable to understand what had happened. He leaned forward, and his searching left hand found his severed right and tried to pull it to him.
The black man snapped his sword in a short arc, and the very tip passed across the wounded man’s eyes and through the bridge of his nose, killing him instantly with an economy of effort that was wasted on the onlookers. The squire fell forward over his own lap, still kneeling.
The blackamoor stepped forward. Blanche got her hand on her sewing knife-like her clothes and her skin, it would wash. Her right wrist was broken or sprained. It would mend. She pushed her back against the filthy wall behind her and levered herself up.
Her linen basket had not spilled. She dropped the knife into it and picked it up left handed. She wasn’t thinking well. She needed the knife.
The black figure was not a daemon. He was an infidel-she’d seen his kind a few times. Black men were part of her life-Joe Green was the king’s greengrocer, and Miles Greathorn was black as pitch and in the King’s Guard. But this man’s blackness was almost blue, and he was taller and thinner than the others she’d seen.
And very still. He was at the mouth of the alley, now, and yet it was as if he’d never moved. His sword appeared almost small in his hands, held out behind him like a tail.
She watched the Galles hesitate.
The paynim didn’t hesitate. When the other men paused, he leaned and his blade snapped in a short arc, and blood fountained.
“Go for the watch!” shouted the wounded man.
The infidel moved his sword into a new guard, held economically in front above his hips, the curving point aimed at the Galles. The biggest of them drew-and attacked.
The black man spun and spun again.
The biggest Galle fell like a tree, and the paynim’s blade flicked back to kill the man he’d wounded.
There were now five corpses cooling, counting the southerner.