Dirt by CC Hogan
Chapter 1 - Digging
If Johnson Farthing was going to reach the bottom of this bloody hole by dinner time, he would have to get off his fat arse and dig. Such was the conclusion of Johnson Farthing when he peered at his twisted reflection on the back of his rusty, mud-crusted shovel. He smacked the blade with his trowel and a little of the dirt fell off and back into the hole. At least his reflection now looked a little less like a lump of red grime, but it wasn’t much of an improvement.
“Oh, my bleeding back!”
Grunting with pain, the ancient Johnson staggered to his feet, set his spine into some usable angle, and tried to plunge the weapon into the rock-hard sediment at his feet. With a groan of aged tiredness, he scraped half an inch off the top, chucked it over his head and almost out of the hole; completely out of the hole would have been better.
Farthing leant back against the side of the hole, dragged out a leaf of blackjaw from his pocket and shoved it in his cheek. He made a few disgusting, toothless sucking-sounds and wallowed in the mildly soporific effects of the minty-flavoured painkiller that would make his day easier, but sadly for only a few seconds. A new leaf would have given him a good hour of relief from the accumulated muscle-pain he had earned so far this morning, let alone the pain still kicking around from last week. But then, he hadn’t managed to make enough coin for new leaves for months, so his ancient stock of dried out old ones was all he had.
A small dust cloud puffed off the top edge of the hole peppering Farthing with dirt; the distant giggle identifying the perpetrator.
“Young bastard!” grunted Farthing from the bottom of his hole. He felt a real sense of ownership of this hole. He had marked it out, set out what width it had to be and how deep he needed to dig it before, with good fortune, he hit water. The downside was that however much he might lay claim to the emptiness that was the hole itself, the dirt, both the remaining and the already shifted, belonged to the trader Truk, who was promising to pay only on the success of the mission. Farthing, despite his aches and pains, his grunting, groaning and general bad moods, had never saved up enough coin to own a patch of red dirt big enough to sit on, let alone dig up and throw around; even renting dirt was only just within his grasp.
Johnson Farthing scraped another meagre layer of dirt from the bottom of the hole, threw it out with gusto, and decided to quit for the day. Truk was off trading up the coast for the next couple of days and he could get away with a bit of truancy. Scraping the dust off his creaking frame for just one afternoon would be a rare but a welcome respite. He tied a rope around the shovel, threw it up and across the hole so it held firm, and dragged all six-foot-five of himself to ground level. Blinking in the summer sun, he unknotted his muscles with a grunt, eased himself straight, picked up the shovel, and covered the hole with the five planks he kept for the purpose. It could be bloody hard to convince people how tired, achy, and old you felt when you were only nineteen years old.
Well, bugger all that for a miserable dragon; Johnson Farthing was going for a swim, followed by a beer, followed by sleep, and he would try to forget that by this time tomorrow he would be back down his hole shifting someone else’s grit and grime.
“I told Truk you would be slacking off the minute he turned his back,” shouted the old fool Barkles who sold greasy vegetable pasties from a dusty stall on the corner. “Young people can’t be trusted, I told him. I was right too.”
“Shut your face, Barkles,” Johnson shouted back, grabbing his coat from his handcart and putting it around his shoulders to ward off a faint chill in the sea breeze. “I have been down that hole every day non-stop for nine days, and you know it too since you have been feeding me your disgusting pies for most of them.”
“Pastries, slacker. Not Pies; Pastries.”
“I thought pastries were just posh pies?”
“Can be.”
“Well, yours ain’t posh. So definitely just pies.”
“Ain’t seen you complaining!” Barkles snapped defensively. Farthing scraped up the red dirt from the red dirt ground and piled it on top of the rest of the red dirt in his handcart. Oh, the irony, he thought without conviction. Scraping dirt from the dirt on top of a world called Dirt. Then he cursed himself for cracking the same joke for the ninth day running.
“What did you call me?” shouted out the irritated Barkles.
“Nothing. I was cursing the fool who has to push his cart off to the dumps before he can get close to a beer.”
Barkles chuckled. “Well, with that I have sympathy, Farthing. Are you going to take the last pie, I mean pastry off me?”
“What, and go swimming afterwards? I would bloody well drown!”
“Well, sod you, then. If you ain’t going to buy the last one, I am going to eat it myself!” Barkles took a big bite out the pie and winced in pain.
Farthing laughed and pulled his handcart passed the stall. “Well, well. I Didn’t know you could get bones in veggie pies.”
Barkles spat something out. “Hey! That’s my old lady’s sewing thimble. How did that get in there?”
“Probably when she sewed up your pies, mate. Your pastry is so leathery there ain’t no other way you are going to hold them shut!”
“You go drown yourself like a nice lad, Farthing, and I will tell Truk what a lazy git you are when he gets back.”
“You do that, Barkles; you do that.” Johnson Farthing wrapped the leather strap around his chest, pulled his cart up the street and then turned left down an alley in the general direction of the dirt dumps. Barkles rubbed his bleeding lip, looked at the pie with one bite out of the end, carefully wetted the frayed pastry with his tongue and stuck it back down.
“Fresh Pies! Wonderful, mostly non-meat wonders! Only one left!”
The dumps were a fair walk right over the south-west ridge. To be honest, nothing was that far away in Wead-Wodder, the grimy and dusty capital of the small Prelatehood of Redust, but it felt like it was when you were dragging a cart full of dirt. It was an old coastal town spread around the mouth of the river Wead. South of the river was home to ordinary traders and anything in society below a trader, all the way down to the place in society that Farthing currently occupied. There were those lower than him, wallowing in the world’s dirt, but not many. Farthing had spent much of his life wanting to get out of Wead. It was dusty on a good day and like a cesspit in the short, wet season. Even the more affluent North Wead was far from being a paradise. Some of the houses there had gardens and the streets were free of beggars and street merchants like Barkles, but it was still dusty on a good day and ghastly when it rained. Much of this was the fault of the big River Wead which slowly oozed through the town except when it was being abused by the tide. It was a broad, sometimes shallow, sediment-filled highway; too wide for a bridge and traversed by ferry. Its source was in the distant Red Mountains in the Prelatehood of Caan, halfway across the continent of The Prelates, and that might account for at least some of the murky, red-brown tint of the water. The rest was from the herds of farm animals that grazed along the banks across Redust, and the rubbish kicked out of the villages along its route. One of the many meanings of Wead in the old Adelan language was dung; never was a better word chosen for a river.
Farthing bowed sarcastically at a foul-mouthed girl who was leaning out of a ground floor window showing her wares. He hadn’t sampled those particular wares; it was not something he had ever done, though many young men did. There was an undesirable subculture in Redust, but prostitution wasn’t part of it. Generally, it was seen as an honourable profession, if not a very polite one. He gave his cart a hard yank to pull a wheel out of a pothole and, adjusting the strap over his sun-bleached, tatty shirt, turned up one of the hillier streets towards the dumps. While the north of the town was built on a gentle hill, the south was mostly flat and level with the river, but it rose sharply to a low, isolated ridge as you moved south-west. The ridge was long-lost under a wave of apartments
piled one on top of another, but it was still there, still an obstacle to anyone pulling a cart and the dumps were on the far side.
“Half load today?” Fennerpop was at least forty years older than Farthing and still shoving around a cart of Dirt’s dirt for a living. His very existence and the future it promised could set Farthing into a fit of depression that would last days. “I remember being warned about half loads by my Grandfather. They will be the end of you son, he said. And then he said...”
“Going swimming, Fen,” Farthing said quickly, dragging the old dirt-man back on track before he lost the afternoon to an often repeated tale.
“Are you still digging that well for Truk?”
“Yeah, but I can’t wait that long for a swim.” Farthing leant back against his cart and rubbed a sore shoulder.
“I dug a well once,” Fennerpop mused. “Took me two months it did and I never did hit water.”
“Well that doesn’t cheer me up any,” Farthing said, shaking his head sadly.
“Not my job to do that, lad. You want cheering, you go see Sally with the Virtues.”
“What, the whore down in Skattlings?”
“You probably passed her on the way up,” said Fennerpop, grinning.
“That I did. She shouted something unmentionable at me, and waved a couple of other unmentionables at me at the same time.”
“They be her Virtues, they be. Means she likes you.”
“Won’t like me for long when she finds how little coin I have.”
“True enough; Sally don’t do favours even for princes.”
“Not many of those around neither,” commented Farthing, pulling hard to get his cart rolling again, leaving Fennerpop to rumble down the hill and tell his stories elsewhere.
South Wead was divided into reasonably distinct areas. The Skattlings started from the bottom of the ridge and ran north to the riverside wherry quays. If the southern part of the town was thought dangerous as a whole or at least challenging to the unprepared, then the Skattlings were seen as suicidal, certainly by the posh of the North. In truth, Farthing had never seen any more trouble there than in Thanks, the slightly more affluent area where Truk and his ongoing well lived. Thanks was where many of the traders had homes, both those native to the town and foreign traders who liked a home or office in all their main trading bases. Most of the houses had windowless walls and central courtyards or atriums so they were more secure when their owners were off trading, but this did give the small roads between the properties a stark, unforgiving air. These were not the well-crafted houses of the north, anything but, but neither were they the multi-storey, wonky, over-occupied piles of apartments that made up the Wealle where Farthing lived, and through where he was currently dragging his load of Dirt’s finest.
Farthing snaked his way up between the villas, as he called the ridge-hugging dwellings. When he was at home, he would like to imagine that he owned the entire building, maybe even the entire block, but just chose to live in two tiny, squalid rooms for the hell of it. He and his sister Rustina had inherited the apartment, or the monthly rent, from their parents after their mother Deidre had died years earlier, and their waste-of-space father Ferall, who insisted on being called Bent for a lame joke, had run off to join a merchantman. He hadn’t been seen again and was missed little.
Farthing looked up at the rows of apartments as the hill steepened. The buildings, both homes and tiny businesses, were much the same; a heavy, cheap, timber frame, bleached white by sun and sand, infilled with the red dirt of Redust that had faded and turned a pale, dirty-grey pink in the sun. There was an argument that with the Wealle being up on the hill, the persistent wind should have kept everything fairly clean, but in reality, the dirt just got trapped between the close-packed buildings and the entire place could be a dusty, throat-gagging mess. The only saving grace was that the less pleasant detritus of human civilisation tended to wash downhill in the rainy season and became The Skattlings’ problem. Actually, the Weallers happily sacrificed a little water to encourage it downhill even in the dry season.
The last few paces of the hill were the steepest, and like all the other cart pushers headed to the dumps, Farthing stopped pulling his cart, turned it around and started pushing it up the road with every ounce of strength he possessed. At the top, where the red and black rocks pushed through the dust in an almost impassable barrier, a deep cutting had been hewed. Farthing gave one last run at the hill, pushed over the top and headed down to the dumps.
The dumps were an attempt to keep dust and dirt out of the town. Wead-Wodder had grown over the last few years as more and more trade made its way around the Prelates Sea to take advantage of the wherries that sailed gently up and down the River Wead, and that had meant more building and more dirt shifting. The dust produced had created a semi-permanent smog over the entire southern town which had shortened the lives of many, yet it was only when the same happened in the north that the Prelate took notice. He ordered that all waste dirt should be moved out of the town and dumped over the ridge to rid Wead of the small dirt-dunes that had been piling up all over the place. Amazingly, it worked. The wind was more prone to come from the Prelates Sea in the east, and so any dust in the dumps was just blown out over the low hills and the river plain and not back into the town. Of course, groaned Farthing, it was him not the bloody Prelate who had to shift the shit. There again, he had also made some extra coin shifting for others, the Prelate included.
“Move down the left path and take the third row,” shouted “Major” Payn as Farthing staggered past. The small, annoying man, the Head Dirt Forman, was sitting on a box and grappling with a discoloured and tatty umbrella at an attempt to keep off the sun. His job was simple; piss everyone else off, hence his nickname. This duty he executed with an exquisiteness that would probably one day be recognised in stone; preferably a headstone, thought Farthing. It wasn’t Payn’s fault, of course. Someone had to tell other people where to shove their dirt, and his dreary, nasal accent was probably the fault of parents, if anyone would admit to having sired such a scrawny little rat. But Farthing would still happily bury Benhal “Major” Payn under several barrel loads of red gravel without a second thought.
“How far down, Major?”
“All the way, lad, all the way. You know how it has to happen.” Payn barely looked up from the chalkboard he had on a stand in front of him as he made some mark understandable only to himself. “Okay, lads, stop there,” he shouted at a couple of haulers behind Farthing. “I can see green stuff sticking out of that cart. You know the rules; dirt only. Green stuff is your problem…”
His dreary voice faded away as Farthing rumbled down the left path about a hundred paces and turned down the third row. Each row continued down at a slight slope, fanning off from the main path. The idea was simple; dump the dirt in terraces from the bottom-up so the hill got no steeper but merely deeper. At the end of the long row, a small sign said, “drop here,” with an arrow for people who, like Farthing, had yet to learn to read; most people then. You upended your cart down the slope, pulled up the sign and moved it along one pace. The next person would do the same till the sign ended up at the junction with the left path. At that point, Payn would send one of his lads to grab the sign and move it back to the end of the row. It was not the most complicated system, but Payn had invented it and treasured it as if he had discovered a new star. Yet another reason for his demise, thought Farthing, and made his way back out of the dumps.
The cart fitted neatly against the side wall of the five-storey building in which the Farthing siblings lived. It had originally been a two-storey block with them on the top floor, but it had grown over the years. The ground floor was not strong enough to hold three extra floors, but someone had braced it up with more uprights and cross-beams to the buildings across the way and next door. In fact, much of the Wealle was supported like this, and most roads were criss-crossed with random but well-intentioned wooden
beams, regularly used for anything that needed hanging, though not always clothes. It would leave any half-decent structural engineer fearing the integrity of every building in the Wealle was wholly reliant on the integrity of every other building in the Wealle. If they were all as badly built as the one that Farthing lived in, and they probably were, what was holding any of them up? Most of the residents were sensible enough not to over think the issue and just worry about general surviving.
“Another hot one!”
Farthing smiled back politely at the large, friendly fellow who was passing on his way up the steep hill. It was early summer, but the rays from the old sun were struggling to offer much in the way of heat today against the cool, sea breeze. Still, work hard enough and you can get a sweat anywhere, and that man was certainly working hard dragging his bulk all the way up here. By his accent, he wasn’t a native Wealler or even from Redust, but the town was full of all sorts from everywhere. Farthing locked up the cart with a chain, hid the key and set off for the old harbour for a swim. Theft was not a major problem in the Wealle since nobody owned anything worth stealing, including food most of the time, but carts were sought after. If you had a cart in this dustless utopia imagined by the Prelate, you would always have work of sorts, and shifting dirt was probably the number one occupation in the Wealle. Farthing had made his own from scraps when he was a child as soon as he had needed to earn.
The trip downhill was definitely faster than the journey up with the cart. Farthing resisted the temptation to take it at a run, crashing into walls to break his progress as he and everyone else had done as children. Aside from the main road up which he had dragged his cart, most of the lanes through the Wealle were little more than two or three people wide, were surfaced with rough, pounded, red rock and dust, and were occasionally stepped. It was ironic that despite being the poorest area of Wead by far, the Wealle was right next to the main source of road-making material and it had the best-maintained lanes in the town; maintained by the residents, it should be noted, not the high priest of state. The residents may not have two rabbits to rub together even on high days, but they were damned if they were going to lose their footing on the steep hill because of bad roads.
The town had a simple logic to it. The wide river Wead oozed into the town and then widened out like a huge letter Y into the sea. Right in the middle of the Y sat Slypa Burh, the Prelate’s Palace, on its own island. The posh people were to the north of the river and the poor to the south, and each had their own swimming beaches on the estuary sands facing out at the Prelate’s island. A meeting of the two groups was prevented by the currents, to the relief of all. The modern docks were upriver at The Skattlings since the estuary was shallow and trying to dredge out more than a navigation channel for the larger trading ships and galley fishing boats would have been an act of futility; it was hard enough in the river proper.
Farthing headed past the patient line of adherents queuing outside the local temple of the Church of the True and turned down towards the oldest part of the town. He liked The Hive, the area around the old harbour. Although the modern docks were now upstream, this remained the hub of business and retail, and it buzzed liked the beehive from whence it got its name; in Wead, the term Hive of Activity had additional meaning. The Hive was as crammed together as the Wealle, but as the oldest area of Wead-Wodder, it was an unplanned mix of new buildings made of wood and plaster, and large, older buildings made of red stone. Inns gushing ales, warehouses filled with bales of the exotic and crates of the illegal, offices hiding scratching accountants keeping duplicate books, markets selling the unmentionable and buying the downright weird, shops with perfumes, barely dead meat swinging from hooks right next to meat that should have been buried months before, stationery supplies, dubious remedies, clothes of every culture and age, street traders shouting and fibbing and grinning and fighting; there was nothing that was not bought and sold in The Hive. Just beyond, was the ruined remnants of the old fishing harbour, not now used by boats and half buried in sand and sediment. This had become the recreation ground for the lowly and unwashed.
“Clothes baskets two-hundredths!”
At the bottom of the steps, a group of youngsters looked after the pile of baskets where swimmers stored their clothes. Most of the Southern Weaders swam since for many it was as close as they could get to a bath, and that meant they often went down to the harbour on their own. For two-hundredths, they could store their clothes in a basket under the watchful eyes of the young people. Farthing fished out the two, thin coins from his pocket and was rewarded with a basket. He quickly stripped down to his shorts, put the clothes in the basket and swapped it for a knotted string which he tied around his wrist. He had never managed to work out the system of knots that associated his string with his basket, but he had yet to be handed back the wrong clothes.
“Collect your basket from the far end when you’re done, mate,” the lad told him. “I’m packing up this end in a bit. Got to help my mum with the cart.” Most lives revolved around a handcart somewhere along the line. “Oh, and tell your sis that me mum says she will have that apron repaired by the day after tomorrow.”
Farthing held up his hand in thanks and made his way over the pinkish sand towards the sea. The lad and his mum lived opposite them in the Wealle and were the most enterprising people Farthing had ever met. There was nothing they would not take on for hundredths, the paltry almost valueless coin of the continent. A hundredth of a hundredth people reckoned it was worth, and they worked all day and most evenings for a handful. It said much about the Prelatehood and the system that ran it that despite their industry, they still could only just scrape together the rent. And sometimes, like Johnson and his sister, failed to do even that. Farthing shook the sadness from his head, and with a yell, ran straight at the cold sea.
“Yeeeeaawww!”
Cold it was, and cold it almost always was. Even though Redust was a dry, dusty Prelatehood without suffering the winters of the more northern countries, it was far from the warmest region of Dirt, and the Prelates Sea never warmed up much past stimulating.
“Get out of my face, boy!”
Farthing shook out the water from his hair as he came up from under right in the face of a big, multi-chinned woman.
“Sorry, mate, er, ma’am!” Farthing tried to wipe the salt from his eyes and back paddled.
“Oh, might have guessed it was you, Farthing.” The woman stood up in the shallows, hands on hips, her light bathing shirt hiding little.
“Geezen! How are you?”
“Cold and annoyed. How is my well?” Geezen was Truk’s wife and a local midwife. She had known Farthing’s family for years and Johnson was not the only one that had been smacked into this world with her podgy hand.
“It’s fine, as wells go,” Farthing said, smiling weakly.
“Oh good! So why are you not in it?”
“Look, sorry Geezen. I have spent the last week and a bit scraping at that hard-baked piece of Dirt where your husband wants his well, and I had to stop and get the dust out of my eyes.”
Geezen’s expression softened. She could be as hard as nails some days, but Farthing was one of hers and a favourite too.
“I know, I told him it was a mad place for a hole. You know what he is like when he gets an idea, but that nose of his can smell water a mile off, I swear it. It might be tough going, son, but I will bet your smacked behind there is water down there.”
Geezen was right of course. Truk was a pillock as an employer, as far as Farthing was concerned, but he was no fool. He had managed to drag himself out of the poverty of The Wealle and into Thanks, and would probably have been in North Wead by now if he had been of the right blood. Geezen thumped Farthing round the head with a heavy, thick hand.
“Go on, get your swim, you ungrateful louse. I imagine you will be down the hole bright and early!” She grinned at him, then lay back into the current and float
ed off like some mythical creature on its annual holiday.
Farthing looked around at the growing numbers of people, mostly mothers with squalling children having their weekly bath. He struck out away from the beach and into deeper, less child-polluted water, and then followed Geezen’s example and floated off on his back. To reach the deep water, you had to swim halfway out to the island, if you could be bothered since it was a fair distance. The estuary was filled with the red sedimentary dust of thousands of years and the two clear channels either side of the island were only clear because of the strong currents on the turn of the tide and much hard work from small, busy dredgers. Between the shore and the channel, some of the red sandbanks pushed up into small islands at low tide. Farthing swam up onto one of them and sat down in the warm sun. The unwelcome easterly had petered off, and the small, temporary island had gained a population of people wishing to get away from the urinating kids by the shore.
Facing the island, Farthing watched a couple of the dredgers in their constant war against the might of Dirt. They were long, flat-bottomed boats, rowed and punted by two men, while a third dropped a fine sand net into the sea attached to a long rope and a supporting A-frame. He dredged up the sand and hoisted it back into the boat, the water gushing through the net in a glistening shower. They could get a surprising amount in the wide boats which they then pushed round the headland to deposit the sand somewhere along the coast.
The island itself was a feat of defensive engineering going back hundreds, maybe thousands of years. Slypa Burh, named after the slimy, pale-green seaweed that grew in profusion around the estuary, was part mansion, part castle and mixed up with the ecclesiastical buildings associated with the Prelate. It was a rocky place that was frequently dredged around the perimeter to keep the rocks exposed and the water deep. Low walls ran the whole way around the island, and within those, at the east end, were the remaining high walls of the ancient castle. The need for security always grows with the paranoia of statehood.
“How old is it?” Two women had swum on to the sandbank and sat by Farthing.
“Are you new to Wead?” Farthing asked.
The woman had light, sandy-red hair which was rare on Dirt. In fact, the only other person Farthing knew was his sister Rusty who had vibrant red hair; now that was properly rare. Oh, and that girl Sally with the Virtues. He remembered she was red-headed, but that might have had some help, thinking about the unusually bright colour.
“My brother is setting up a trading post here,” the woman told him. “I am going to be running it with his business partner and Shelela here.”
Farthing nodded a hello to the other woman. “The castle is ancient, as far as I know,” he said. “I think it dates from before the Prelatehood. The rest of it was built by a prelate hundreds of years ago. I don’t know the details.”
“Oh, yes,” the woman said with a smile. “Your religious government that runs everything.”
“Oh, that. Well, it's not mine, exactly. I just have to put up with it.”
Farthing frowned. Each Prelate was meant to be a priest of the Church of the True, the nearest Dirt had to a common religion. Although the continent had a central ecclesiastical council called the Prelature, the Prelatehoods themselves were individual countries with the Prelates acting as king. Each Prelatehood like Redust and its northern neighbour Mudlands had its own take on the religious idea and ran their people into the ground accordingly. It wasn’t a lack of separation between church and state so much as a complete lack of any state at all. Redust, or at least Wead-Wodder, was more political than religious, mostly because it was an important trade port along the Prelates Sea and needed to attract trade, not scare it off. Many of the Prelatehoods, especially in the north of the continent, were very conservative, taxing their citizens with intractable ideology as much as with coin.
“It doesn’t get in the way much, at least not in Wead-Wodder,” Farthing said. “Are you from Bind?”
“Up in the North. The church there doesn’t get to run anything. My family has been trading for generations with The Prelates, but it's my first time here.”
Farthing looked over at the island. The sun was still high in the sky and the water was projecting dancing patterns of light onto the low perimeter wall. Out on the seaward side, a small sailboat appeared from behind the old castle wall, bobbing in the waves of the outer estuary, and made its way out into the open sea. Farthing squinted to try to see some details, but it was too far away to get a real idea of size or shape. It was a little odd, though. Most seaward-bound boats came from the upriver docks, not the back of the island; he wasn’t even sure there was a landing on that side.
“What are you looking at?” the woman asked.
“That small boat over there, the single sail.” Farthing pointed.
The woman cast the critical eye of a merchant over the craft.
“Well, it ain’t no trader; too small,” she said, laughing. “Small enough for a smuggler, I suppose, but you don’t see them in the middle of the day normally. Do you get much fishing here?”
“Not there,” Farthing pointed out. He had made a few trips on the boats as a rough hand. “The currents make trawling impossible around the island. All the fishing boats head along the coast first before going into deeper water and casting their nets. It's the wrong way for the tide too; it's heading in.” He could see the small boat tacking against the tide and the wind.
“True enough,” the woman said. “Should be seeing some of the traders coming in on the late tide soon.” The large estuary with its narrow channels made for strong currents, and all the boating turned around on the tides, even if that meant anchoring out at sea waiting. “It must come from the island then.”
Farthing shrugged. “Prelate’s problem,” he said with finality. It was a phrase you heard a lot in Wead and was used to end discussion. He glanced up at the sun, lay back on the sand, and dozed off gently.
“Hey, wake up!” The woman chucked sand at Farthing, who sat up in surprise. “What’s going on over there?”
Farthing squinted over at the island. At the river end, there was a large, paved plaza by the small riverside landing. It was used for pageantry and declarations on those few occasions the Prelate thought his disloyal citizens had taken disloyalty too far. Today, however, there was a definite commotion going on that was out of the ordinary. At this distance, it was hard to make out what was happening. It was very confused and the odd word that made it across the water was less than repeatable.
“I have no bloody idea,” Farthing told the woman and her friend. “Seems like someone has upset someone else or something. Not the usual, that’s for certain.”
“Prelates problem?” the woman suggested.
Farthing grinned. “Probably. My sister works as a general maid over there; I will ask her when she gets home later.” He looked up at the sky and the slowly descending sun. “Oh, not that much later. My turn to get the food, so I better head to the market while there are still some items without added wriggly protein.” He stood and bowed to the women. “Welcome to Wead, as they say!” And he ran into the water and swam back to his clothes.
He had left it a little late, but the bread was only stale and not half eaten by internal inhabitants. He had picked up some Toothen, the hard cheese from Bind that would last for months without going off, and some scrawny, early pears. He didn’t have enough coin for spices, but they had fresh herbs growing on the balcony, some fat somewhere, and half-decent flour in the bin, once he evicted the weevils. Stoke up the fire and he had the makings of melted cheese on bread and pears steamed in pastry; more than they often had and a change from the beans that were his true forte.
The advantage of being abandoned by your parents, Farthing thought as he flicked the thirtieth weevil out through the window, was that he and his sister were good at doing anything. They both cooked, washed, cleaned, and tried to earn. For Rusty, as e
veryone called Rustina, earning was more successful that it was for Johnson. That was not unusual. Maids were needed everywhere and were expected to be semi-literate and polite. Get those right and you were in a job for life if you were lucky. Male servants were not so popular and were only taken from the trader families. Men like Farthing had little prospect of a secure job unless their family had a business or knew someone that had one and needed an apprentice. Since he had no family other than Rusty, that left only the cart. Life was simple in Redust, and for most, bloody hard.
A little water, a stoked-up fire and a bit of scrap wire to act as a griddle, and Johnson made a passable toasted cheese sandwich and 4 pears in pastry. Rusty had not made it back from Slypa Burh yet, which was not unusual, so Farthing wrapped up her sandwich in cloth ready for toasting on the griddle and then put it and the other two pears in a terracotta pot and shut the lid securely. Rusty would know where to look. With that, he tidied up, grabbed a hard-earned coin from the box in the wall and headed back to the harbour. With any luck, he could just afford one mild beer and watch the evening light dance over the water.
“You ain’t going to get much of a beer with that, you lazy git!” Barkles was sitting down on the harbour wall nursing a small, earthenware bottle of beer. “Here, have a spare.” He handed over another that he had sitting beside him.
“Did you give Hetty her thimble back?” Farthing asked, nodding in thanks for the beer.
He and Barkles argued constantly, but he liked the thin-faced pie-man and his wife, and owed them. When his own parents had left the scene, the two had watched out for the young Farthings and made sure they did not get evicted from the small apartment, which was the fate of too many children in Redust. Barkles and Hetty had no children of their own, despite trying every potion known to the local midwives, and had taken a personal interest in the Farthing family. There were still a few good people in this tired world.
“Tried sneaking it into her box, but she caught me. ‘You filling your pies with my personals, Barkles?’ she shouts at me. ‘Cos my personals are my personals and don’t have no business being in your pies!’”
“She calls them pies too?”
“Seems like my misses and you have a common lack of understanding about the finer side of patisserie.”
“So, what other of her personals have ended up in your pies?”
“Pastries!”
“Pastries.”
“Oh, nothing much. The odd ribbon, bits of leather for shoe repairs, a few needles.”
“Needles?”
“That was a major incident, that. Damned expensive are needles.”
“Let alone filling people’s stomachs with holes!”
“Well, that too, I suppose.”
Farthing shook his head in amazement. He never knew how much to believe Barkles’s stories. “Rusty is late again tonight. They work her hard on the island.”
“There was some bother up there today,” Barkles remarked. “Something about the Prelate’s daughter.”
“I saw something happening over on the island when I was down here swimming earlier.”
“Geezen said she saw you when she passed by my stall,” Barkles said.
“Please don’t tell me you sold her that pie.”
“Pastry. And no, I didn’t. Strangely, she has never yet tried one of my delicacies.”
“So, what happened?”
“I don’t fully know, to be honest. Hetty said that it looked like the daughter had gone missing with one of the servants, or something.”
“A maid?” Farthing was worried.
“Personal maid, I think.”
“Oh.” Rusty was just a lowly, general maid and had nothing to do with the Prelate or his family. “What do you mean, gone missing?”
“Just that. She was there this morning and this afternoon she wasn’t, and yet no one had come and gone from the island since early in the day. That was all Hetty knew. Prelates problem.” Barkles and Farthing drained back their bottles. “I have two more in my bag, lad; one for each of us. And then I promised Hetty I wouldn’t be late.” He pulled out two more earthenware bottles. Farthing looked at his coin. “Keep it, lad. You work hard for your coin, despite my ribbing you. I knows that.”
“Thanks, Barkles. We owe you, you know.”
“No, you don’t, lad. Hetty wouldn’t hear of such nonsense. And anyway, I sold that last pie to some new bloke fresh in from southern Bind.” Barkles grinned from behind his bottle. “Told him it was a special and would bring him good fortune.”
“You did what? How much did you get?”
“Oh, four bottles worth.”
Farthing laughed. “One day someone is going to find you out, Barkles, you know that, don’t you?”
“Nah. No one cares about the likes of us, lad. They forget us as soon as they’ve finished with us.”
Farthing nodded at the truth of what Barkles said. The only people that cared for the people at the bottom were the people at the bottom. They were the only ones who knew what the bottom was like.
If Johnson Farthing was going to reach the bottom of this bloody hole by dinner time, he would have to get off his fat arse and dig. Such was the conclusion of Johnson Farthing when he peered at his twisted reflection on the back of his rusty, mud-crusted shovel. He smacked the blade with his trowel and a little of the dirt fell off and back into the hole. At least his reflection now looked a little less like a lump of red grime, but it wasn’t much of an improvement.
“Oh, my bleeding back!”
Grunting with pain, the ancient Johnson staggered to his feet, set his spine into some usable angle, and tried to plunge the weapon into the rock-hard sediment at his feet. With a groan of aged tiredness, he scraped half an inch off the top, chucked it over his head and almost out of the hole; completely out of the hole would have been better.
Farthing leant back against the side of the hole, dragged out a leaf of blackjaw from his pocket and shoved it in his cheek. He made a few disgusting, toothless sucking-sounds and wallowed in the mildly soporific effects of the minty-flavoured painkiller that would make his day easier, but sadly for only a few seconds. A new leaf would have given him a good hour of relief from the accumulated muscle-pain he had earned so far this morning, let alone the pain still kicking around from last week. But then, he hadn’t managed to make enough coin for new leaves for months, so his ancient stock of dried out old ones was all he had.
A small dust cloud puffed off the top edge of the hole peppering Farthing with dirt; the distant giggle identifying the perpetrator.
“Young bastard!” grunted Farthing from the bottom of his hole. He felt a real sense of ownership of this hole. He had marked it out, set out what width it had to be and how deep he needed to dig it before, with good fortune, he hit water. The downside was that however much he might lay claim to the emptiness that was the hole itself, the dirt, both the remaining and the already shifted, belonged to the trader Truk, who was promising to pay only on the success of the mission. Farthing, despite his aches and pains, his grunting, groaning and general bad moods, had never saved up enough coin to own a patch of red dirt big enough to sit on, let alone dig up and throw around; even renting dirt was only just within his grasp.
Johnson Farthing scraped another meagre layer of dirt from the bottom of the hole, threw it out with gusto, and decided to quit for the day. Truk was off trading up the coast for the next couple of days and he could get away with a bit of truancy. Scraping the dust off his creaking frame for just one afternoon would be a rare but a welcome respite. He tied a rope around the shovel, threw it up and across the hole so it held firm, and dragged all six-foot-five of himself to ground level. Blinking in the summer sun, he unknotted his muscles with a grunt, eased himself straight, picked up the shovel, and covered the hole with the five planks he kept for the purpose. It could be bloody hard to convince people how tired, achy, and old you felt when you were only nineteen years old.
Well, bugger all that for a miserable dragon; Johnson Farthing was going for a swim, followed by a beer, followed by sleep, and he would try to forget that by this time tomorrow he would be back down his hole shifting someone else’s grit and grime.
“I told Truk you would be slacking off the minute he turned his back,” shouted the old fool Barkles who sold greasy vegetable pasties from a dusty stall on the corner. “Young people can’t be trusted, I told him. I was right too.”
“Shut your face, Barkles,” Johnson shouted back, grabbing his coat from his handcart and putting it around his shoulders to ward off a faint chill in the sea breeze. “I have been down that hole every day non-stop for nine days, and you know it too since you have been feeding me your disgusting pies for most of them.”
“Pastries, slacker. Not Pies; Pastries.”
“I thought pastries were just posh pies?”
“Can be.”
“Well, yours ain’t posh. So definitely just pies.”
“Ain’t seen you complaining!” Barkles snapped defensively. Farthing scraped up the red dirt from the red dirt ground and piled it on top of the rest of the red dirt in his handcart. Oh, the irony, he thought without conviction. Scraping dirt from the dirt on top of a world called Dirt. Then he cursed himself for cracking the same joke for the ninth day running.
“What did you call me?” shouted out the irritated Barkles.
“Nothing. I was cursing the fool who has to push his cart off to the dumps before he can get close to a beer.”
Barkles chuckled. “Well, with that I have sympathy, Farthing. Are you going to take the last pie, I mean pastry off me?”
“What, and go swimming afterwards? I would bloody well drown!”
“Well, sod you, then. If you ain’t going to buy the last one, I am going to eat it myself!” Barkles took a big bite out the pie and winced in pain.
Farthing laughed and pulled his handcart passed the stall. “Well, well. I Didn’t know you could get bones in veggie pies.”
Barkles spat something out. “Hey! That’s my old lady’s sewing thimble. How did that get in there?”
“Probably when she sewed up your pies, mate. Your pastry is so leathery there ain’t no other way you are going to hold them shut!”
“You go drown yourself like a nice lad, Farthing, and I will tell Truk what a lazy git you are when he gets back.”
“You do that, Barkles; you do that.” Johnson Farthing wrapped the leather strap around his chest, pulled his cart up the street and then turned left down an alley in the general direction of the dirt dumps. Barkles rubbed his bleeding lip, looked at the pie with one bite out of the end, carefully wetted the frayed pastry with his tongue and stuck it back down.
“Fresh Pies! Wonderful, mostly non-meat wonders! Only one left!”
The dumps were a fair walk right over the south-west ridge. To be honest, nothing was that far away in Wead-Wodder, the grimy and dusty capital of the small Prelatehood of Redust, but it felt like it was when you were dragging a cart full of dirt. It was an old coastal town spread around the mouth of the river Wead. South of the river was home to ordinary traders and anything in society below a trader, all the way down to the place in society that Farthing currently occupied. There were those lower than him, wallowing in the world’s dirt, but not many. Farthing had spent much of his life wanting to get out of Wead. It was dusty on a good day and like a cesspit in the short, wet season. Even the more affluent North Wead was far from being a paradise. Some of the houses there had gardens and the streets were free of beggars and street merchants like Barkles, but it was still dusty on a good day and ghastly when it rained. Much of this was the fault of the big River Wead which slowly oozed through the town except when it was being abused by the tide. It was a broad, sometimes shallow, sediment-filled highway; too wide for a bridge and traversed by ferry. Its source was in the distant Red Mountains in the Prelatehood of Caan, halfway across the continent of The Prelates, and that might account for at least some of the murky, red-brown tint of the water. The rest was from the herds of farm animals that grazed along the banks across Redust, and the rubbish kicked out of the villages along its route. One of the many meanings of Wead in the old Adelan language was dung; never was a better word chosen for a river.
Farthing bowed sarcastically at a foul-mouthed girl who was leaning out of a ground floor window showing her wares. He hadn’t sampled those particular wares; it was not something he had ever done, though many young men did. There was an undesirable subculture in Redust, but prostitution wasn’t part of it. Generally, it was seen as an honourable profession, if not a very polite one. He gave his cart a hard yank to pull a wheel out of a pothole and, adjusting the strap over his sun-bleached, tatty shirt, turned up one of the hillier streets towards the dumps. While the north of the town was built on a gentle hill, the south was mostly flat and level with the river, but it rose sharply to a low, isolated ridge as you moved south-west. The ridge was long-lost under a wave of apartments
“Half load today?” Fennerpop was at least forty years older than Farthing and still shoving around a cart of Dirt’s dirt for a living. His very existence and the future it promised could set Farthing into a fit of depression that would last days. “I remember being warned about half loads by my Grandfather. They will be the end of you son, he said. And then he said...”
“Going swimming, Fen,” Farthing said quickly, dragging the old dirt-man back on track before he lost the afternoon to an often repeated tale.
“Are you still digging that well for Truk?”
“Yeah, but I can’t wait that long for a swim.” Farthing leant back against his cart and rubbed a sore shoulder.
“I dug a well once,” Fennerpop mused. “Took me two months it did and I never did hit water.”
“Well that doesn’t cheer me up any,” Farthing said, shaking his head sadly.
“Not my job to do that, lad. You want cheering, you go see Sally with the Virtues.”
“What, the whore down in Skattlings?”
“You probably passed her on the way up,” said Fennerpop, grinning.
“That I did. She shouted something unmentionable at me, and waved a couple of other unmentionables at me at the same time.”
“They be her Virtues, they be. Means she likes you.”
“Won’t like me for long when she finds how little coin I have.”
“True enough; Sally don’t do favours even for princes.”
“Not many of those around neither,” commented Farthing, pulling hard to get his cart rolling again, leaving Fennerpop to rumble down the hill and tell his stories elsewhere.
South Wead was divided into reasonably distinct areas. The Skattlings started from the bottom of the ridge and ran north to the riverside wherry quays. If the southern part of the town was thought dangerous as a whole or at least challenging to the unprepared, then the Skattlings were seen as suicidal, certainly by the posh of the North. In truth, Farthing had never seen any more trouble there than in Thanks, the slightly more affluent area where Truk and his ongoing well lived. Thanks was where many of the traders had homes, both those native to the town and foreign traders who liked a home or office in all their main trading bases. Most of the houses had windowless walls and central courtyards or atriums so they were more secure when their owners were off trading, but this did give the small roads between the properties a stark, unforgiving air. These were not the well-crafted houses of the north, anything but, but neither were they the multi-storey, wonky, over-occupied piles of apartments that made up the Wealle where Farthing lived, and through where he was currently dragging his load of Dirt’s finest.
Farthing snaked his way up between the villas, as he called the ridge-hugging dwellings. When he was at home, he would like to imagine that he owned the entire building, maybe even the entire block, but just chose to live in two tiny, squalid rooms for the hell of it. He and his sister Rustina had inherited the apartment, or the monthly rent, from their parents after their mother Deidre had died years earlier, and their waste-of-space father Ferall, who insisted on being called Bent for a lame joke, had run off to join a merchantman. He hadn’t been seen again and was missed little.
Farthing looked up at the rows of apartments as the hill steepened. The buildings, both homes and tiny businesses, were much the same; a heavy, cheap, timber frame, bleached white by sun and sand, infilled with the red dirt of Redust that had faded and turned a pale, dirty-grey pink in the sun. There was an argument that with the Wealle being up on the hill, the persistent wind should have kept everything fairly clean, but in reality, the dirt just got trapped between the close-packed buildings and the entire place could be a dusty, throat-gagging mess. The only saving grace was that the less pleasant detritus of human civilisation tended to wash downhill in the rainy season and became The Skattlings’ problem. Actually, the Weallers happily sacrificed a little water to encourage it downhill even in the dry season.
The last few paces of the hill were the steepest, and like all the other cart pushers headed to the dumps, Farthing stopped pulling his cart, turned it around and started pushing it up the road with every ounce of strength he possessed. At the top, where the red and black rocks pushed through the dust in an almost impassable barrier, a deep cutting had been hewed. Farthing gave one last run at the hill, pushed over the top and headed down to the dumps.
The dumps were an attempt to keep dust and dirt out of the town. Wead-Wodder had grown over the last few years as more and more trade made its way around the Prelates Sea to take advantage of the wherries that sailed gently up and down the River Wead, and that had meant more building and more dirt shifting. The dust produced had created a semi-permanent smog over the entire southern town which had shortened the lives of many, yet it was only when the same happened in the north that the Prelate took notice. He ordered that all waste dirt should be moved out of the town and dumped over the ridge to rid Wead of the small dirt-dunes that had been piling up all over the place. Amazingly, it worked. The wind was more prone to come from the Prelates Sea in the east, and so any dust in the dumps was just blown out over the low hills and the river plain and not back into the town. Of course, groaned Farthing, it was him not the bloody Prelate who had to shift the shit. There again, he had also made some extra coin shifting for others, the Prelate included.
“Move down the left path and take the third row,” shouted “Major” Payn as Farthing staggered past. The small, annoying man, the Head Dirt Forman, was sitting on a box and grappling with a discoloured and tatty umbrella at an attempt to keep off the sun. His job was simple; piss everyone else off, hence his nickname. This duty he executed with an exquisiteness that would probably one day be recognised in stone; preferably a headstone, thought Farthing. It wasn’t Payn’s fault, of course. Someone had to tell other people where to shove their dirt, and his dreary, nasal accent was probably the fault of parents, if anyone would admit to having sired such a scrawny little rat. But Farthing would still happily bury Benhal “Major” Payn under several barrel loads of red gravel without a second thought.
“How far down, Major?”
“All the way, lad, all the way. You know how it has to happen.” Payn barely looked up from the chalkboard he had on a stand in front of him as he made some mark understandable only to himself. “Okay, lads, stop there,” he shouted at a couple of haulers behind Farthing. “I can see green stuff sticking out of that cart. You know the rules; dirt only. Green stuff is your problem…”
His dreary voice faded away as Farthing rumbled down the left path about a hundred paces and turned down the third row. Each row continued down at a slight slope, fanning off from the main path. The idea was simple; dump the dirt in terraces from the bottom-up so the hill got no steeper but merely deeper. At the end of the long row, a small sign said, “drop here,” with an arrow for people who, like Farthing, had yet to learn to read; most people then. You upended your cart down the slope, pulled up the sign and moved it along one pace. The next person would do the same till the sign ended up at the junction with the left path. At that point, Payn would send one of his lads to grab the sign and move it back to the end of the row. It was not the most complicated system, but Payn had invented it and treasured it as if he had discovered a new star. Yet another reason for his demise, thought Farthing, and made his way back out of the dumps.
The cart fitted neatly against the side wall of the five-storey building in which the Farthing siblings lived. It had originally been a two-storey block with them on the top floor, but it had grown over the years. The ground floor was not strong enough to hold three extra floors, but someone had braced it up with more uprights and cross-beams to the buildings across the way and next door. In fact, much of the Wealle was supported like this, and most roads were criss-crossed with random but well-intentioned wooden
“Another hot one!”
Farthing smiled back politely at the large, friendly fellow who was passing on his way up the steep hill. It was early summer, but the rays from the old sun were struggling to offer much in the way of heat today against the cool, sea breeze. Still, work hard enough and you can get a sweat anywhere, and that man was certainly working hard dragging his bulk all the way up here. By his accent, he wasn’t a native Wealler or even from Redust, but the town was full of all sorts from everywhere. Farthing locked up the cart with a chain, hid the key and set off for the old harbour for a swim. Theft was not a major problem in the Wealle since nobody owned anything worth stealing, including food most of the time, but carts were sought after. If you had a cart in this dustless utopia imagined by the Prelate, you would always have work of sorts, and shifting dirt was probably the number one occupation in the Wealle. Farthing had made his own from scraps when he was a child as soon as he had needed to earn.
The trip downhill was definitely faster than the journey up with the cart. Farthing resisted the temptation to take it at a run, crashing into walls to break his progress as he and everyone else had done as children. Aside from the main road up which he had dragged his cart, most of the lanes through the Wealle were little more than two or three people wide, were surfaced with rough, pounded, red rock and dust, and were occasionally stepped. It was ironic that despite being the poorest area of Wead by far, the Wealle was right next to the main source of road-making material and it had the best-maintained lanes in the town; maintained by the residents, it should be noted, not the high priest of state. The residents may not have two rabbits to rub together even on high days, but they were damned if they were going to lose their footing on the steep hill because of bad roads.
The town had a simple logic to it. The wide river Wead oozed into the town and then widened out like a huge letter Y into the sea. Right in the middle of the Y sat Slypa Burh, the Prelate’s Palace, on its own island. The posh people were to the north of the river and the poor to the south, and each had their own swimming beaches on the estuary sands facing out at the Prelate’s island. A meeting of the two groups was prevented by the currents, to the relief of all. The modern docks were upriver at The Skattlings since the estuary was shallow and trying to dredge out more than a navigation channel for the larger trading ships and galley fishing boats would have been an act of futility; it was hard enough in the river proper.
Farthing headed past the patient line of adherents queuing outside the local temple of the Church of the True and turned down towards the oldest part of the town. He liked The Hive, the area around the old harbour. Although the modern docks were now upstream, this remained the hub of business and retail, and it buzzed liked the beehive from whence it got its name; in Wead, the term Hive of Activity had additional meaning. The Hive was as crammed together as the Wealle, but as the oldest area of Wead-Wodder, it was an unplanned mix of new buildings made of wood and plaster, and large, older buildings made of red stone. Inns gushing ales, warehouses filled with bales of the exotic and crates of the illegal, offices hiding scratching accountants keeping duplicate books, markets selling the unmentionable and buying the downright weird, shops with perfumes, barely dead meat swinging from hooks right next to meat that should have been buried months before, stationery supplies, dubious remedies, clothes of every culture and age, street traders shouting and fibbing and grinning and fighting; there was nothing that was not bought and sold in The Hive. Just beyond, was the ruined remnants of the old fishing harbour, not now used by boats and half buried in sand and sediment. This had become the recreation ground for the lowly and unwashed.
“Clothes baskets two-hundredths!”
At the bottom of the steps, a group of youngsters looked after the pile of baskets where swimmers stored their clothes. Most of the Southern Weaders swam since for many it was as close as they could get to a bath, and that meant they often went down to the harbour on their own. For two-hundredths, they could store their clothes in a basket under the watchful eyes of the young people. Farthing fished out the two, thin coins from his pocket and was rewarded with a basket. He quickly stripped down to his shorts, put the clothes in the basket and swapped it for a knotted string which he tied around his wrist. He had never managed to work out the system of knots that associated his string with his basket, but he had yet to be handed back the wrong clothes.
“Collect your basket from the far end when you’re done, mate,” the lad told him. “I’m packing up this end in a bit. Got to help my mum with the cart.” Most lives revolved around a handcart somewhere along the line. “Oh, and tell your sis that me mum says she will have that apron repaired by the day after tomorrow.”
Farthing held up his hand in thanks and made his way over the pinkish sand towards the sea. The lad and his mum lived opposite them in the Wealle and were the most enterprising people Farthing had ever met. There was nothing they would not take on for hundredths, the paltry almost valueless coin of the continent. A hundredth of a hundredth people reckoned it was worth, and they worked all day and most evenings for a handful. It said much about the Prelatehood and the system that ran it that despite their industry, they still could only just scrape together the rent. And sometimes, like Johnson and his sister, failed to do even that. Farthing shook the sadness from his head, and with a yell, ran straight at the cold sea.
“Yeeeeaawww!”
Cold it was, and cold it almost always was. Even though Redust was a dry, dusty Prelatehood without suffering the winters of the more northern countries, it was far from the warmest region of Dirt, and the Prelates Sea never warmed up much past stimulating.
“Get out of my face, boy!”
Farthing shook out the water from his hair as he came up from under right in the face of a big, multi-chinned woman.
“Sorry, mate, er, ma’am!” Farthing tried to wipe the salt from his eyes and back paddled.
“Oh, might have guessed it was you, Farthing.” The woman stood up in the shallows, hands on hips, her light bathing shirt hiding little.
“Geezen! How are you?”
“Cold and annoyed. How is my well?” Geezen was Truk’s wife and a local midwife. She had known Farthing’s family for years and Johnson was not the only one that had been smacked into this world with her podgy hand.
“It’s fine, as wells go,” Farthing said, smiling weakly.
“Oh good! So why are you not in it?”
“Look, sorry Geezen. I have spent the last week and a bit scraping at that hard-baked piece of Dirt where your husband wants his well, and I had to stop and get the dust out of my eyes.”
Geezen’s expression softened. She could be as hard as nails some days, but Farthing was one of hers and a favourite too.
“I know, I told him it was a mad place for a hole. You know what he is like when he gets an idea, but that nose of his can smell water a mile off, I swear it. It might be tough going, son, but I will bet your smacked behind there is water down there.”
Geezen was right of course. Truk was a pillock as an employer, as far as Farthing was concerned, but he was no fool. He had managed to drag himself out of the poverty of The Wealle and into Thanks, and would probably have been in North Wead by now if he had been of the right blood. Geezen thumped Farthing round the head with a heavy, thick hand.
“Go on, get your swim, you ungrateful louse. I imagine you will be down the hole bright and early!” She grinned at him, then lay back into the current and float
Farthing looked around at the growing numbers of people, mostly mothers with squalling children having their weekly bath. He struck out away from the beach and into deeper, less child-polluted water, and then followed Geezen’s example and floated off on his back. To reach the deep water, you had to swim halfway out to the island, if you could be bothered since it was a fair distance. The estuary was filled with the red sedimentary dust of thousands of years and the two clear channels either side of the island were only clear because of the strong currents on the turn of the tide and much hard work from small, busy dredgers. Between the shore and the channel, some of the red sandbanks pushed up into small islands at low tide. Farthing swam up onto one of them and sat down in the warm sun. The unwelcome easterly had petered off, and the small, temporary island had gained a population of people wishing to get away from the urinating kids by the shore.
Facing the island, Farthing watched a couple of the dredgers in their constant war against the might of Dirt. They were long, flat-bottomed boats, rowed and punted by two men, while a third dropped a fine sand net into the sea attached to a long rope and a supporting A-frame. He dredged up the sand and hoisted it back into the boat, the water gushing through the net in a glistening shower. They could get a surprising amount in the wide boats which they then pushed round the headland to deposit the sand somewhere along the coast.
The island itself was a feat of defensive engineering going back hundreds, maybe thousands of years. Slypa Burh, named after the slimy, pale-green seaweed that grew in profusion around the estuary, was part mansion, part castle and mixed up with the ecclesiastical buildings associated with the Prelate. It was a rocky place that was frequently dredged around the perimeter to keep the rocks exposed and the water deep. Low walls ran the whole way around the island, and within those, at the east end, were the remaining high walls of the ancient castle. The need for security always grows with the paranoia of statehood.
“How old is it?” Two women had swum on to the sandbank and sat by Farthing.
“Are you new to Wead?” Farthing asked.
The woman had light, sandy-red hair which was rare on Dirt. In fact, the only other person Farthing knew was his sister Rusty who had vibrant red hair; now that was properly rare. Oh, and that girl Sally with the Virtues. He remembered she was red-headed, but that might have had some help, thinking about the unusually bright colour.
“My brother is setting up a trading post here,” the woman told him. “I am going to be running it with his business partner and Shelela here.”
Farthing nodded a hello to the other woman. “The castle is ancient, as far as I know,” he said. “I think it dates from before the Prelatehood. The rest of it was built by a prelate hundreds of years ago. I don’t know the details.”
“Oh, yes,” the woman said with a smile. “Your religious government that runs everything.”
“Oh, that. Well, it's not mine, exactly. I just have to put up with it.”
Farthing frowned. Each Prelate was meant to be a priest of the Church of the True, the nearest Dirt had to a common religion. Although the continent had a central ecclesiastical council called the Prelature, the Prelatehoods themselves were individual countries with the Prelates acting as king. Each Prelatehood like Redust and its northern neighbour Mudlands had its own take on the religious idea and ran their people into the ground accordingly. It wasn’t a lack of separation between church and state so much as a complete lack of any state at all. Redust, or at least Wead-Wodder, was more political than religious, mostly because it was an important trade port along the Prelates Sea and needed to attract trade, not scare it off. Many of the Prelatehoods, especially in the north of the continent, were very conservative, taxing their citizens with intractable ideology as much as with coin.
“It doesn’t get in the way much, at least not in Wead-Wodder,” Farthing said. “Are you from Bind?”
“Up in the North. The church there doesn’t get to run anything. My family has been trading for generations with The Prelates, but it's my first time here.”
Farthing looked over at the island. The sun was still high in the sky and the water was projecting dancing patterns of light onto the low perimeter wall. Out on the seaward side, a small sailboat appeared from behind the old castle wall, bobbing in the waves of the outer estuary, and made its way out into the open sea. Farthing squinted to try to see some details, but it was too far away to get a real idea of size or shape. It was a little odd, though. Most seaward-bound boats came from the upriver docks, not the back of the island; he wasn’t even sure there was a landing on that side.
“What are you looking at?” the woman asked.
“That small boat over there, the single sail.” Farthing pointed.
The woman cast the critical eye of a merchant over the craft.
“Well, it ain’t no trader; too small,” she said, laughing. “Small enough for a smuggler, I suppose, but you don’t see them in the middle of the day normally. Do you get much fishing here?”
“Not there,” Farthing pointed out. He had made a few trips on the boats as a rough hand. “The currents make trawling impossible around the island. All the fishing boats head along the coast first before going into deeper water and casting their nets. It's the wrong way for the tide too; it's heading in.” He could see the small boat tacking against the tide and the wind.
“True enough,” the woman said. “Should be seeing some of the traders coming in on the late tide soon.” The large estuary with its narrow channels made for strong currents, and all the boating turned around on the tides, even if that meant anchoring out at sea waiting. “It must come from the island then.”
Farthing shrugged. “Prelate’s problem,” he said with finality. It was a phrase you heard a lot in Wead and was used to end discussion. He glanced up at the sun, lay back on the sand, and dozed off gently.
“Hey, wake up!” The woman chucked sand at Farthing, who sat up in surprise. “What’s going on over there?”
Farthing squinted over at the island. At the river end, there was a large, paved plaza by the small riverside landing. It was used for pageantry and declarations on those few occasions the Prelate thought his disloyal citizens had taken disloyalty too far. Today, however, there was a definite commotion going on that was out of the ordinary. At this distance, it was hard to make out what was happening. It was very confused and the odd word that made it across the water was less than repeatable.
“I have no bloody idea,” Farthing told the woman and her friend. “Seems like someone has upset someone else or something. Not the usual, that’s for certain.”
“Prelates problem?” the woman suggested.
Farthing grinned. “Probably. My sister works as a general maid over there; I will ask her when she gets home later.” He looked up at the sky and the slowly descending sun. “Oh, not that much later. My turn to get the food, so I better head to the market while there are still some items without added wriggly protein.” He stood and bowed to the women. “Welcome to Wead, as they say!” And he ran into the water and swam back to his clothes.
He had left it a little late, but the bread was only stale and not half eaten by internal inhabitants. He had picked up some Toothen, the hard cheese from Bind that would last for months without going off, and some scrawny, early pears. He didn’t have enough coin for spices, but they had fresh herbs growing on the balcony, some fat somewhere, and half-decent flour in the bin, once he evicted the weevils. Stoke up the fire and he had the makings of melted cheese on bread and pears steamed in pastry; more than they often had and a change from the beans that were his true forte.
The advantage of being abandoned by your parents, Farthing thought as he flicked the thirtieth weevil out through the window, was that he and his sister were good at doing anything. They both cooked, washed, cleaned, and tried to earn. For Rusty, as e
A little water, a stoked-up fire and a bit of scrap wire to act as a griddle, and Johnson made a passable toasted cheese sandwich and 4 pears in pastry. Rusty had not made it back from Slypa Burh yet, which was not unusual, so Farthing wrapped up her sandwich in cloth ready for toasting on the griddle and then put it and the other two pears in a terracotta pot and shut the lid securely. Rusty would know where to look. With that, he tidied up, grabbed a hard-earned coin from the box in the wall and headed back to the harbour. With any luck, he could just afford one mild beer and watch the evening light dance over the water.
“You ain’t going to get much of a beer with that, you lazy git!” Barkles was sitting down on the harbour wall nursing a small, earthenware bottle of beer. “Here, have a spare.” He handed over another that he had sitting beside him.
“Did you give Hetty her thimble back?” Farthing asked, nodding in thanks for the beer.
He and Barkles argued constantly, but he liked the thin-faced pie-man and his wife, and owed them. When his own parents had left the scene, the two had watched out for the young Farthings and made sure they did not get evicted from the small apartment, which was the fate of too many children in Redust. Barkles and Hetty had no children of their own, despite trying every potion known to the local midwives, and had taken a personal interest in the Farthing family. There were still a few good people in this tired world.
“Tried sneaking it into her box, but she caught me. ‘You filling your pies with my personals, Barkles?’ she shouts at me. ‘Cos my personals are my personals and don’t have no business being in your pies!’”
“She calls them pies too?”
“Seems like my misses and you have a common lack of understanding about the finer side of patisserie.”
“So, what other of her personals have ended up in your pies?”
“Pastries!”
“Pastries.”
“Oh, nothing much. The odd ribbon, bits of leather for shoe repairs, a few needles.”
“Needles?”
“That was a major incident, that. Damned expensive are needles.”
“Let alone filling people’s stomachs with holes!”
“Well, that too, I suppose.”
Farthing shook his head in amazement. He never knew how much to believe Barkles’s stories. “Rusty is late again tonight. They work her hard on the island.”
“There was some bother up there today,” Barkles remarked. “Something about the Prelate’s daughter.”
“I saw something happening over on the island when I was down here swimming earlier.”
“Geezen said she saw you when she passed by my stall,” Barkles said.
“Please don’t tell me you sold her that pie.”
“Pastry. And no, I didn’t. Strangely, she has never yet tried one of my delicacies.”
“So, what happened?”
“I don’t fully know, to be honest. Hetty said that it looked like the daughter had gone missing with one of the servants, or something.”
“A maid?” Farthing was worried.
“Personal maid, I think.”
“Oh.” Rusty was just a lowly, general maid and had nothing to do with the Prelate or his family. “What do you mean, gone missing?”
“Just that. She was there this morning and this afternoon she wasn’t, and yet no one had come and gone from the island since early in the day. That was all Hetty knew. Prelates problem.” Barkles and Farthing drained back their bottles. “I have two more in my bag, lad; one for each of us. And then I promised Hetty I wouldn’t be late.” He pulled out two more earthenware bottles. Farthing looked at his coin. “Keep it, lad. You work hard for your coin, despite my ribbing you. I knows that.”
“Thanks, Barkles. We owe you, you know.”
“No, you don’t, lad. Hetty wouldn’t hear of such nonsense. And anyway, I sold that last pie to some new bloke fresh in from southern Bind.” Barkles grinned from behind his bottle. “Told him it was a special and would bring him good fortune.”
“You did what? How much did you get?”
“Oh, four bottles worth.”
Farthing laughed. “One day someone is going to find you out, Barkles, you know that, don’t you?”
“Nah. No one cares about the likes of us, lad. They forget us as soon as they’ve finished with us.”
Farthing nodded at the truth of what Barkles said. The only people that cared for the people at the bottom were the people at the bottom. They were the only ones who knew what the bottom was like.