Neverwhere - Page 62/85

The wind ripped feathers from Old Bailey’s coat and blew them away, off over London. He did not mind. As he also often told his birds, there were more where those came from.

A large black rat crawled out through a ripped air-vent cover, looked around, then came over to Old Bailey’s bird-spattered tent. It ran up the side of the tent, then along the top of Old Bailey’s washing line. It squealed at him, urgently.

“Slower, slower,” said Old Bailey. The rat repeated itself, at a lower pitch, but just as urgently. “Bless me,” said Old Bailey. He ran into his tent and returned with weapons—his toasting fork and a coal shovel. Then he hurried back into the tent again and came out with some bargaining tools. And then he walked back into the tent for the last time, and opened his wooden chest, and pocketed the silver box. “I really don’t have time for this tomfoolery,” he told the rat, on his final exit from the tent. “I’m a very busy man. Birds don’t catch themselves, y’know.”

The rat squeaked at him. Old Bailey was unfastening the coil of rope around his middle. “Well,” he told the rat, “there’s others could get the body. I’m not as young as I was. I don’t like the under-places. I’m a roof-man, I am, born and bred.”

The rat made a rude noise.

“More haste, less speed,” replied Old Bailey. “I’m goin’. Young whippersnapper. I knew your great-great-grandfather, young feller-me-rat, so don’t you try putting on airs . . . Now, where’s the market going to be?” The rat told him. Then Old Bailey put the rat in his pocket and climbed over the side of the building.

Sitting on the ledge beside the sewer, in his plastic lawn chair, Dunnikin was overcome by a presentiment of wealth and prosperity. He could feel it drifting from west to east, toward them.

He clapped his hands, loudly. Other men ran to him, and the women, and the children, seizing hooks and nets and lines as they did so. They assembled along the slippery sewer ledge, in the sputtering green light of their lanterns. Dunnikin pointed, and they waited, in silence, which is how the Sewer Folk wait.

The body of the marquis de Carabas came floating facedown along the sewer, the current carrying him as slow and stately as a funeral barge. They pulled it in with their hooks and their nets, in silence, and soon had it up on the ledge. They removed the coat, the boots, the gold pocket-watch, and the contents of the coat pockets, although they left the rest of the clothes on the corpse.

Dunnikin beamed at the loot. He clapped again, and the Sewer Folk began to ready themselves for the market. Now they truly had something of value to sell.

“Are you sure the marquis will be at the market?” Richard asked Door, as the path began, slowly, to climb.

“He won’t let us down,” she said, as confidently as she could. “I’m sure he’ll be there.”

FOURTEEN

HMS Belfast is a gunship of 11,000 tons, commissioned in 1939, which saw active service in the Second World War. Since then it has been moored on the south bank of the Thames, in postcard-land, between Tower Bridge and London Bridge, opposite the Tower of London. From its deck one can see St. Paul’s Cathedral and the gilt top of the columnlike Monument to the Great Fire of London erected, as so much of London was erected, by Christopher Wren. The ship serves as a floating museum, as a memorial, as a training ground.

There is a walkway onto the ship from the shore, and they came down the walkway in their twos and threes, and in their dozens. They set up their stalls as early as they could, all the tribes of London Below, united both by the Market Truce and by a mutual desire to pitch their own stalls as far as possible from the Sewer Folk’s stall.

It had been agreed well over a century before that the Sewer Folk could only set up a stall at those markets held in the open air. Dunnikin and his folk dumped their booty in a large pile on a rubber sheet, beneath a large gun tower. Nobody ever came to the Sewer Folk’s stall immediately: but toward the end of the market they would come, the bargain hunters, the curious, and those few fortunate individuals blessed with no sense of smell.

Richard and Hunter and Door pushed their way through the crowds on the deck. Richard realized that he had somehow lost the need to stop and stare. The people here were no less strange than at the last Floating Market, but, he supposed, he was every bit as strange to them, wasn’t he? He looked around, scanning the faces in the crowd as they walked, hunting for the marquis’s ironic smile. “I don’t see him,” he said.

They were approaching a smith’s stall, where a man who could easily have passed for a small mountain, if one were to overlook the shaggy brown beard, tossed a lump of red-molten metal from a brazier onto an anvil. Richard had never seen a real anvil before. He could feel the heat from the molten metal and the brazier from a dozen feet away.

“Keep looking. De Carabas’ll turn up,” said Door, looking behind them. “Like a bad penny.” She thought for a moment, and added, “What exactly is a bad penny anyway?” And then, before Richard could answer, she squealed, “Hammersmith!”

The bearded mountain-man looked up, stopped hitting the molten metal, and roared, “By the Temple and the Arch. Lady Door!” Then he picked her up, as if she weighed no more than a mouse.

“Hello, Hammersmith,” said Door. “I hoped you’d be here.”

“Never miss a market, lady,” he thundered, cheerfully. Then he confided, like an explosion with a secret, “This’s where the business is, y’see. Now,” he said, recollecting the cooling lump of metal on his anvil, “just you wait here a moment.” He put Door down at eye level, on the top of his booth,, seven feet above the deck.

He banged the lump of metal with his hammer, twisting it as he did so with implements Richard assumed, correctly, were tongs. Under the hammer blows it changed from a shapeless blob of orange metal into a perfect black rose. It was a work of astonishing delicacy, each petal perfect and distinct. Hammersmith dipped the rose into a bucket of cold water beside the anvil: it hissed and steamed. Then he pulled it out of the bucket, wiped it, and handed it to a fat man in chain mail who was standing, patiently, to one side; the fat man professed himself well satisfied and gave Hammersmith, in return, a green plastic Marks and Spencer shopping bag, filled with various kinds of cheese.

“Hammersmith?” said Door, from her perch. “These are my friends.”

Hammersmith enveloped Richard’s hand in one several sizes up. His handshake was enthusiastic, but very gentle, as if he had, in the past, had a number of accidents shaking hands and had practiced it until he got it right. “Charmed,” he boomed.