'And half-blind by the sound of it,' Lena replied, moving onwards. 'Hurry up!'
Nico followed more slowly, focused on negotiating the tiles without slipping.
They reached the end of the rooftop, where it dropped a few feet on to that of another building.
'Here,' said Lena, turning back to him. 'Give it here,' she demanded, eying the purse in Nico's hand. He pulled up short, the purse clutched to his chest.
Nico did not want this money. Somehow, though, he did not want Lena to have it either.
She made a snatch for the purse, but Nico jerked backwards.
It was then that his left foot slipped out from under him.
He fell sideways, catching a glimpse of Lena's hands grabbing desperately towards him – for the purse, no doubt – before he slammed against the tiles in a scattering of lizards and expelled breath, and that was that – he was rolling and clattering down the side of the roof, all the way to its edge, where his legs swung out high over the cobbled street, a gasp in his throat and his fingers scrabbling for a hold that never came.
He fell off.
Nico screamed with all the remaining force of his lungs. His shoulder glanced the sign of the taverna, and his entire flopping body spun once before he continued plummeting face-down towards a canvas awning, hollering as he crashed through it, still screaming as the hard cobbled street lurched upwards, his arms throwing themselves over his face for protection as he smashed through one of the tables positioned outside the taverna.
Winded, Nico lay amidst the debris of awning and table, as chip-pings of wood and paint and fabric fell like snow all around him. After a pause, a fat old lady moved forwards to help him; other folk sat in shock with cups of chee still half-raised to their lips. Nico was stunned, unable to draw a breath. He could see his straw hat resting in front of him. He could barely believe he was still alive.
Of all the luck, though: the purse full of money must have fallen from his grasp as he slid down the rooftop, and it must have since been making its own slower, more complicated, though just as inevitable progress off the edge. As the old women bent to give aid the purse exploded on the cobbles right in front of Nico's face, its silver and gold coins scattering across the street in a horrifying riot of noise and sunlit reflections. The old woman clamped a hand to her mouth. Passers-by turned to stare at the scene. Eyes took in this boy, this fortune in money, this fall from the roof of a taverna, and within moments the cry was raised.
'Thief!' they shouted, with Nico still too winded to even move. 'Thief!' they shouted in chorus, as he flopped on to his back and stared up at the roof he had just pitched from, to see that Lena was gone, and only the sun remained to glare down at his ill fate.
In his daze, Nico was hoping that this was all a dream, a nightmare dream that he would soon awaken from. But a pair of rough hands were soon shaking that fantasy out of him. And, as he was dragged to his feet, reality impacted with a greater force than even the ground itself. Oh sweet Ers… his mind yelled at him… this is real… this is actually happening!
And then he passed out.
CHAPTER THREE
Visitations He had never seen a gaol before, let alone spent the night in one.
The place was an open affair, and most of its inmates could wander freely within its walls. There was even a taverna of sorts for those with the money to frequent it, and a cantina that sold better food than the gruel slopped out in the yard. On the whole the guards – mostly prisoners themselves – kept out of the way and left the other inmates to themselves.
Nico settled in the corner of a cell, one of many to be found in the labyrinth deep beneath the main yard. He sat on a layer of mouldy, lice-infested straw, a single oil lamp hanging above the doorway for light. The straw reeked of stale urine, and he could see cockroaches scurrying within it.
The same was occupied by other thieves and debtors of various ages, some of them as young as Nico or even younger. His fellow inmates paid him little notice; mostly they came and went and rarely stopped there for long. Nico was grateful for that as he sat in his corner, nursing his bruised and aching body, his thoughts circling like dark flapping birds intent on tormenting him. Try as he might, he could not help but think of home and his mother.
She would be distraught if she ever heard of what he had become: a common thief caught in the act. She would be angry with him beyond words.
But then, his mother was hardly without fault herself. After all, if he traced his present predicament back a whole year or more, then she was as much to blame for it as he. She was the one who had needed to fill her empty life with a string of ill-suited lovers. She was the one who had chosen to ignore the antagonism between Los and her son, causing Nico to be driven out as a consequence; then driven to this.
Los had been yet another in a long line of his mother's poor choices. On the first night she had brought him home from the crossroads taverna, dressed in fine clothing that was much too loose on him – clearly stolen – the man had eyed the contents of the cottage as if to assess what they were worth, including his mother. It was obvious he had set about catching her that night; the couple had made so much noise in the bedroom that Nico was forced to drag his bedding out to the stable and bed down with their old horse, Happy.
He resented her for it, this weakness regarding men. He knew she had her reasons, knew too that she was hardly the one he should be resenting for what had become of them both, mother and son. But there it was, and he could not help it.
This had already been the worst day of his life, and the rest of it passed in numb shock, timeless and awful. With the falling of night, marked here not in fading daylight but by the snuffing of the lamps and the slamming of distant heavy doors, the stench within the place grew even more fetid, a drifting, clogging miasma that bore with it the smells of the human animal caged too long in its own squalor. It became so bad that Nico tied his kerchief around his mouth and nose. It helped little though, and he would occasionally have to lean to one side and lift it in order to spit from his mouth the rank taste that had accumulated on his tongue.
It seemed that whatever truce existed between the inmates during the hours of daytime vanished during those long ensuing hours of blackness. A fight broke out in another cell, shouts and catcalls and then the long keening howls of a man in pain, which dimmed to the occasional sob and then to nothing. For a time, a dull thudding penetrated the stone wall at his back, as though someone was crashing his head against the other side, while shouting out with each impact muted words that might have been, let me out, let me out.
Nico could not bring himself to sleep in such a place. Still, he was tired, exhausted from the day's events, and the thought of those still to come. So he lay awake listening to the snores of his cellmates, swiping the odd cockroach from his body, and cursed himself for ever coming to this city, for bringing Boon along with him, for getting involved with Lena and her fool ideas.
He had known that she was not to be trusted, having displayed few signs of scruples in his company. What was she doing now, at this same moment, he wondered? Did she even care that he had been seized by the Guards and thrown in the city gaol to await his punishment? He doubted it.
Nico stared into the gloom, only too aware of what they did to thieves in the city. It was this fate he was trying most of all not to think about. Last Harvest Festival he had seen a thief flogged and branded for his crime, and the young delinquent had not been much older than Nico himself.
Nico did not know if he could bear such punishment.
*
Sometime later in the night he jerked from a daze to find a hand pressed against his leg and a face breathing foul air into his own. He jerked upright, shoved the unseen man's weight away from him, shouted something that was more a cry of fright than distinct words. A muttered curse in the darkness, the scraping shuffle of someone retreating.