Overturning the Table

He had spent the seventeen hours before the burning making war.

He had not known he knew how. In twelve years at sea, Garrick Wynmore had fired his guns at pirates twice and at a French privateer once, and had considered each occasion a regrettable failure of diplomacy. He had always thought of himself as a navigator, a measurer of stars and tides. But somewhere in the dark of the night, in a stinking alley off Blackfriars with a ball in his shoulder and three survivors at his back, something older had awakened in him. It was the cold clear logic of a man at the bottom of a pit, working out the exact distance to the sky.

They are a priesthood, he had told Nell, as they crouched in the lee of a coal wharf in the gray before dawn. They are patient. They are careful. They have never in their history been attacked in the open.

Nobody's that stupid, she had said.

Then we shall be the first.

He had told her the plan. It had taken ten minutes. When he finished, she had stared at him with her mouth open and said, in a tone of hushed reverence, "Christ, Wynmore. You're a pirate after all."

…

The first element was the fireships.

There were eleven coal barges at the Tidewater moorings at Wapping, old, leaking, worthless. By noon they had been towed upriver on the flood, past London Bridge, past Southwark, with a skeleton crew of lightermen at the oars, and anchored in a line across the stream above Blackfriars. They had been packed to the gunwales with tar, brush, pitch, and cask upon cask of cheap spirit, and their sails had been soaked in oil. On a signal they would be cut loose and fired. Driven by the ebb, they would burn down on the Navy's river patrol, and the Customs cutters, and the heavy gunboats that the Duke of Draymoor's friends at the Admiralty kept moored at Whitehall Stairs for just such a night.

The second was the Albatross.

She had come up the Thames at dawn, black as a coffin, with her sails furled and a bone in her teeth, under the guns of the Tower, flying no flag at all. No one had stopped her. No one had thought to. There was a fog on the water, a cold brown December fog, and the harbor pilots had mistaken her for a collier. Jory's old shipmates had taken her up the stream by night in total silence, slipped past the Customs House under oars, and brought her to anchor in the middle of the river below Blackfriars Bridge, a quarter mile from the priory, in perfect line with the River Gate.

Twenty guns. Round shot and grape. Powder for three hours' fighting.

Not at the people, Garrick had said, in the cabin, to the gunners. Never at the people. At the stone. At the gate. At the warehouses and the wharves. Make noise. Make smoke. Make them think the sky is falling.

Aye, sir.

And if any man fires at a crowd, I'll hang him from the yardarm myself.

Aye, Captain.

The third was the one he disliked most.

It was a trick. It was the old trick of the cuckoo and the lark. At the stairs below the priory's River Gate lay a long steep flight of stone steps, and at their foot, since the middle of the previous night, Nell's men had been quietly laying kegs of powder in the mud under the gate piers. They had run a fuse, in a pipe of lead, up the whole length of the steps, to a hole in the wall. Forty kegs. A hundred weight of black powder each.

It will blow the gate to pieces, Nell had said. And a good part of the river wall. And anything within twenty feet.

Warn the boatmen. Clear the stairs.

They know. She had wiped her face. And who warns the Magister's lads?

I do, said Garrick. Tonight. At dusk. With the cannon.

He had meant it. He did.

…

He stood on the roof.

It was a long way up. The house was five storeys, narrow and crooked, in the corner of the great square, and he and Jory had come up through a trap in the attic roof, onto a ridge of wet slate with a view over half of London. The wind tore at his coat. His shoulder was a burning iron rod. Pike had dug the ball out at four in the afternoon, in a tavern kitchen, with a boning knife, and sewn him up with a sailmaker's needle, and the wound had split on the climb. He could feel the blood warm under his shirt.

He did not care. He lay along the ridge with his eyes fixed on the square.

It was full.

He had known it would be. He had not known how full. From his perch he could see the whole of it laid out like a map: the crowd, a vast dark pool of heads, filling the square from wall to wall; the gray ranks of the brothers; the platform, raised in the middle like an altar; the black post; the lantern, swaying on its gibbet. She stood there. A small gray figure in sackcloth, chained to the stake, with her head up and her face white as bone, and for a moment he thought his heart would stop.

She's singing.

He could not hear it. He was seventy yards away. But he saw the shape of her mouth.

"Captain," whispered Jory, at his elbow. "Captain, the signal."

"Not yet."

"They're lighting the lantern."

"Not yet."

Not yet. Not yet. Hold.

He watched the Magister mount the steps with the taper. He watched the flame leap. He watched the men with the torches stride forward, big and hooded and anonymous, and kneel at the foot of the pyre. He gripped the ridge with both hands. His nails dug into the slate. He had never in his life done anything so hard as to wait.

The torches touched the brush.

"Now," said Garrick.

Jory raised the horn. He put it to his lips. It was an old coach-horn, brass, battered, with a crack in the bell, and he blew a single long note, raw and ragged, that went out over the housetops like a wolf's cry.

On the river, a gun answered.

…

The next ten minutes were chaos.

He saw it all, as one sees a battle from a hill. The first broadside from the Albatross, a great sheet of flame and white smoke that rolled across the water and set the windows of Blackfriars rattling. The balls fell on the warehouses at the water's edge, and the thatch and tar went up like tinder. The flames leaped from roof to roof. The cranes crashed down. A wall collapsed in a gout of red sparks.

The crowd turned.

He had counted on that. He had counted on the fear. He had thought: twenty thousand people, packed in a square. If they panic, they will crush each other. He had agonized over it. But Nell had said, They'll run for the streets. They'll run away from the river. They'll not run toward the fire, and there ain't a thing at the priory but the Order. She had been right. They broke and fled. He saw the human tide heave and surge, and spill out of the square by a dozen streets, and in a few minutes the whole broad space around the platform had emptied to a thin scattered litter of hats and shoes.

Only the brothers remained.

They stood in their ranks. They were soldiers of a sort; they did not run. But the fireships had come down on the stream, eleven blazing hulks, drifting inexorably through the dusk, spitting sparks, and from the river came a shouting, and the dull crash of a collision. The Order's guard at the River Gate was suddenly in a fight. He saw them wheel. He saw their commander bellowing for the reserves.

And then the gate went up.

The explosion was colossal. It hit him like a fist, even at a quarter mile. A column of orange fire shot up from the foot of the river stairs, taller than the priory roof, and the roar rolled out across the water and set every dog in London howling. The gate disappeared. The wall behind it slumped. A shower of burning timber and stone rained down on the quays. When the smoke cleared, a gap forty feet wide gaped in the riverfront, and through it, black against the flames, poured a line of small boats, one behind the other, each crowded with armed men.

"Tidewater," breathed Jory.

"Now."

"Sir?"

"Now, Jory. Down. With me."

…

He did not remember the climb.

He remembered a drainpipe, and a ledge, and a long fall that was not quite a fall. He remembered the street, and the rush of running men, and Nell's face looming out of the smoke with her cutlass in her fist and blood on her scar. He remembered a dozen of her people streaming past him toward the square, shouting, with torches, with pistols, with axes. A cart came rumbling out of an alley, piled with barrels, drawn by two panicked horses with their ears flat. Someone had lashed an iron-shod beam across the front.

"Ram!" bellowed Nell. "Open the pen!"

The square had been fenced. He had not seen it from the roof. The Order, with typical foresight, had set a palisade of oak stakes, twelve feet high, across all the entries to the open ground around the platform, with a single iron-bound gate on the north side to admit the faithful. It was shut and barred. A knot of brothers stood in front of it with halberds.

The cart struck the gate at a gallop.

The sound was like a tree breaking. The beam smashed through the planks, and the gate flew open in splinters, and the horses went down screaming, and the cart tipped and flung its barrels across the cobbles. Men tumbled in a heap. A halberd flashed. Then Nell's people were on them, and the brothers broke, and the way lay open.

Garrick ran.

He ran as he had never run in his life. He ran across the open square, over the bodies of the fallen, through the smoke and the red glare, with the sword in his right hand and Jory at his heel. The pyre roared ahead of him. He could see the platform clearly now, the black post, the lantern, the leaping flame. The brush was burning on three sides. The smoke boiled up in a dense gray column, and in it, tiny and tall, a figure hung against the post, bent double, moving.

Alive.

She's alive.

"Ixara!"

He did not know if she heard. He bellowed it again, hoarse, cracked, desperate, and reached the foot of the steps, and a shadow rose in front of him.

…

Osmund Crale stood on the stair.

He had thrown off the cope. He stood in his white alb with the black mitre fallen from his head and a sword in his hand, a long, thin, gray-bladed sword, old as the Order itself, and he held it as if he had held it every day of his life. He was no longer the mild old scholar of the library. His face was transfigured. His eyes burned in their hollows. He looked, thought Garrick, like a figure out of a church window: Michael with the flaming blade.

"Lord Wynmore," he said. "You are not welcome."

"Stand aside."

"I cannot."

"I do not wish to kill you."

"That," said the Magister, "is the first untruthful thing I have heard you say."

He attacked.

It was so quick that Garrick barely saw it. The gray blade came out of the smoke like a snake and took him across the forearm, a shallow cut, a hot line. He parried by instinct, backed a step, parried again. He was a competent swordsman; he had fenced at Oxford and on the quarterdeck. But he had a ball-hole in his left shoulder, and a night without sleep behind him, and the man before him had not been a priest for his whole life.

"I was in the Low Countries," said Crale, in a conversational tone, driving him back across the cobbles. "As a very young man. Before I took the cloth." The blade flicked. A button flew from Garrick's coat. "I killed nine men in a month. It was very instructive."

"I'm sure."

"It taught me that nothing in this world is as dangerous as a man who believes he is right."

"I agree."

"Then you understand why I cannot let you pass."

Garrick ducked under a thrust. He felt the wind of it in his hair. He swung, backhand, a clumsy blow that rang off the Magister's guard, and the shock ran up his arm into the wound and nearly blinded him. He went down on one knee. The gray sword rose.

Behind Crale, in the smoke, the figure on the post screamed.

It was a sound he would hear in his sleep for the rest of his life. A raw, animal, tearing sound. It went through him like a spear. He had no thought, no plan. He came up off the cobbles in one motion and drove his shoulder into the Magister's chest, and they went down together on the stone, tangled, rolling, the swords clattering away.

They struggled.

The old man was stronger than he looked. He had Garrick by the throat. His thumbs found the windpipe, and the world turned red. Garrick brought his knee up. He struck. He struck again. Something cracked, and the grip loosened, and he wrenched free and rolled on top and drove his fist into the gaunt gray face.

Crale lay still.

He lay on his back on the cobbles with his eyes half open, bleeding from the nose, the white alb torn and black with soot. His chest rose and fell. His hand groped feebly for the sword.

Garrick kicked it away.

He knelt astride the Magister, panting, with the pistol out of his belt and the muzzle against the old man's forehead. His finger was on the trigger. He could feel the tiny resistance of the spring. It would have taken nothing. The least pressure. A pound and a half.

The Magister looked up at him.

His eyes were quite clear. There was no fear in them. There was only a deep, grave, terrible patience, as of a man who has been waiting for this a very long time.

"Do it," said Crale. "It is your right."

Garrick did not move.

"I would, in your place."

"I know you would."

"Then do it."

It would be justice, thought Garrick. It would be the simplest thing in the world.

And it would make me exactly what he is.

He thought of Brandt, dying on a pile of coal, with his arms spread. He thought of Tom Hake, falling like a tree. He thought of Perry, and Ned, and the forty kegs of powder under the stairs. He thought of a pile of vellum scraps on a library floor. I have killed enough, he thought. God knows. I have killed enough for one night.

He lowered the pistol.

"No," he said.

"What?"

"Live." His voice was a croak. "Live, Magister. Live a long time. And think about what you did tonight."

He stood. He turned his back on the man at his feet. He had never in his life done anything so dangerous, and he knew it, and he did it anyway.

Behind him, he heard Crale begin, very quietly, to weep.

…

The stair was burning.

He took it three steps at a time, with his coat over his face. The heat was a wall. The planks smoked under his boots. The air was a roaring blackness, full of sparks and the reek of pitch, and he could not see, and he could not breathe, and he found the post by feel. Chains. Iron links, hot as a stove. A body, slumped and hanging.

"Ixara."

"Garrick."

It was a thread of a whisper. Her head lifted. Her face was gray with ash, and streaked with tears, and her eyes found his in the smoke with a look of such pure shining joy that he thought his heart would split.

"You came."

"I said I would."

"You said—" She gasped; her whole body clenched against the chain, and she cried out. "Garrick. The child. It's—"

"I know. I know. Hold on. Jory!"

The boy was at his elbow, white as paper, with a leather roll in his hand. He did not speak. He swung up onto the stack of brush, ignoring the fire, ignoring the sparks that fell on his hair, and bent over the lock. The padlock was the size of a man's fist, rusted, black. He slid in a pick, then another. His tongue stuck out between his teeth. His hands did not shake.

"Hurry," said Garrick.

"I am."

"Hurry, lad."

"Sir, I'm not— there."

The lock opened with a click.

The chains fell away. Ixara slumped forward into his arms, a heavy, hot, burning weight, and he caught her. She was shaking all over. Her feet were blistered. Her hair was singed. The sackcloth smoldered, and he beat out the sparks with his bare hand and felt nothing. He lifted her, as one lifts a sleeping child, one arm under her knees and one at her back, and she put her face into his neck and clung to him with a strength that astonished him.

"Don't let go," she said.

"Never."

"Don't—ah—"

"I have you."

He carried her down the stairs.

…

Nell was waiting in the lee of the platform, with a lifted iron grating at her feet.

It was a hole in the cobbles, three feet square, black as ink. Cold air breathed from it, thick with the stench of the ditch. A ladder of iron rungs led down into the dark.

"The Fleet," she said. "It comes up under the square. It's how I got in last winter. You'll go down here, and along the ditch to the river, and Pike'll be waiting at the outfall with a boat. Go on. Go! We'll hold them."

"Nell—"

"I said go, you bloody fool!"

She turned. Behind her, across the smoking square, the Order was reforming. A hundred gray figures advanced in a ragged line, with muskets and torches, through the drifting smoke. Nell's men had fallen back to the foot of the platform. There were perhaps thirty left. They stood with their backs together, bleeding, grinning, black with powder.

"I'll see you in the Pool," said Nell, without looking round.

"God keep you."

"He never has before."

He went down the ladder.

It was the hardest thing he had ever done. He had one arm free, and a woman in labor in the other, and the rungs were slick. Jory went below to guide him. He felt for each foothold with his boot. His shoulder was a white agony. The light faded above him, a square of orange with a figure at its edge, and then it was gone, and there was only darkness, and the sound of water, and Ixara's harsh breathing in his ear.

"Garrick."

"Here."

"I think—it's—oh, God—"

"Hush. Hush. We're nearly there."

"It's too fast."

"It's not."

"It's too fast!"

He ran.

He splashed through the black flood with Jory ahead of him carrying the lantern. The tunnel curved, and dipped, and curved again. His breath tore in his throat. The water rose to his knees. Ixara gripped his coat and moaned through her teeth, and he talked to her, rapidly, without thought, telling her nonsense, the names of the stars, the order of the planets, the number of fathoms in the Bay of Biscay. He heard himself babble. He didn't stop.

There was a speck of light ahead. A gray crescent, low and wide. The outfall.

They burst out onto the foreshore in a flood of cold clean air.

The river lay before them, a vast black glitter of water lit from end to end by fire. The fireships had burned down to the waterline. The Albatross stood in midstream, a dark shape ringed with gun-flashes. Boats were scattered across the Thames, rowing in all directions. And on the shingle at the foot of the outfall, with a skiff drawn up and a lantern in his hand and an expression of ferocious panic on his face, stood Hollis Pike.

"Garrick! Thank God! Is she—"

He saw her.

He saw the wet sackcloth, the gray face, the way her hands clawed at Garrick's coat. He saw the dark stain spreading on the thigh. He dropped the lantern. He leaped forward, and in the same movement seized the gunwale of the skiff and shouted, in a roar that carried across the water, to the two lightermen at the oars:

"She's in labor! Now! Push off, damn your eyes, now!"