He saw what a prick he must have looked to Kite, complaining about being taken away from his cosy lighthouse.
All of Edinburgh was uphill. The castle was on another hill of its own, a crag black from the foundries to windward. Everything was black. The church towers; the houses, which leaned into the streets and cast deep shadows in the fading light; the cobblestones. The sun was going down. Joe had lost any sense of what time it was. A cruel steep road led up to the castle walls, lined with soldiers in cockaded helmets whose plumes rippled in the freezing wind. The rain had cloaked most of the city when Joe looked back down the hill, except for pinpoint lights.
The way in was under a low portcullis, lit on either side by braziers whose heat pulsed out and made him want to stop there. Kite ignored them and went straight through. Joe had expected some impressive main doors, or something definitive at least, but the castle wasn’t one single building. It was at least a dozen, all ringed by the curving walls. Torchlight gleamed on the guns aiming out towards the town and the estuary. More guards stood everywhere. They weren’t ordinary soldiers. They were all much taller than Joe or Kite, even without the height of their helmets, and they were swathed in furs and tartan. Seeing it on soldiers made Joe’s stomach drop.
‘What have you got up here, the crown jewels?’ Joe said, caught right between uneasy and fascinated. It was another world up here, lowering and dark and silent, with a bleak grandeur he hadn’t expected.
Kite pointed to the left. ‘In there. With the King.’
‘With the …’ Joe stared that way. It was impossible to see the higher part of the complex; there was another wall, and another set of cannon whose muzzles cast stripy shadows on the stonework below. He had to laugh. ‘You’re joking.’
Kite wasn’t laughing. ‘Why am I joking?’
‘Because that’s …’ Joe struggled. Stupid, he wanted to say; obviously he knew England had had kings, but if he imagined them, he thought of primitive grubby zealots who insisted that their tiny miserable island in the middle of nowhere was the centre of the world. God Save the King was what the Saints said. It was just a fairy tale. ‘Britain is too small to have a proper king,’ he said. ‘It’s silly. What’s he in charge of, six tenements and a canoe?’
‘Really.’ Kite sort of smiled. ‘That’s funny. Good.’
Joe was lost. ‘Good?’
‘England deserves to be forgotten. You think I took you because I want to preserve a navy that likes beating people to death and a country that made its money from slaves?’
‘You could have fooled me.’
‘There are six hundred people aboard Agamemnon,’ was all Kite said.
‘England didn’t have slavery,’ Joe said, confused now.
Kite actually laughed at him. It was a silent laugh. He didn’t explain himself. ‘What, and I expect King Arthur led us into Trafalgar too, did he?’
‘I don’t understand what’s going on any more.’
‘I’m sorry, it’s shock,’ Kite said. It was the truth; he sounded shattered.
They had to slow down, because up ahead, some men were manoeuvring a cannon back into place. It took five of them to push it up the slope, and another two leading it on ropes. Kite followed the way around left, to a squat, windowless building to one side of the road. Joe hesitated. There were heavyset guards on the door.
‘Kite,’ he said, because the open gate was all iron bars.
‘I’m only going to leave you here for an hour.’
The two marines who’d come with them looked relieved.
‘This is a prison—’ Joe began.
‘Shall we take him?’ one of the men on the door asked.
‘Yes, please. I’ll be back in an hour. Much less, I imagine,’ Kite said. He caught the edge of the door. He was barely upright. ‘Drake, Pine; go and find yourselves some coffee, you deserve it.’
The old panic vice closed round Joe’s ribs again, much harder than it normally did. Beyond the gate, from somewhere down the steps, there was a hum, the nasty wasps’ nest noise of too many men in one place right on the edge of fighting.
‘Please don’t leave me here,’ Joe said.
‘I won’t,’ Kite said, unexpectedly soft. He let the strength in his voice go. Without it, he sounded smoky. He must have breathed in more gunpowder fumes in the last hour than Joe had breathed tobacco all year. ‘I can’t leave you anywhere else for now. It’s freezing on the ship. There’s a fire in here. Most of the prisoners are French. They’re not dangerous, they’re just sailors waiting for questioning.’
‘Why can’t I come with you?’
‘I need to say things you can’t hear.’
Joe didn’t believe him. This was it. Obviously Kite was going to keep him in a proper gaol from now on. What the hell had he imagined, a hotel and some conveniently unlocked doors? The gaol looked like a fortified cave. He would never get out.
One of the guards snatched his arm.
‘Careful,’ Kite snapped. The man let go quickly. Kite walked away, up the curve of the road, towards the brighter torchlight where he had said the King lived. The guard turned Joe by his shoulder into the prison, and pushed him through a low, heavy door, which thumped shut behind him.
The room was so crowded that at first all he saw was a dim jumble, lit only by isolated candles and the glow of a fire at the far end. There were beds across the whole floor, except where the pallets had been arranged in squares to accommodate a laundry tub. There was no room to stand straight beyond the doorway, because above the pallets were hammocks and hammocks, with just about enough space below to sit up in. Above those, washing lines criss-crossed between empty torch brackets. They were full, and the whole long room was humid from the dampness steaming off them. Every set of bedding and every hammock was occupied. Some people had made tables out of old planks and kegs. There were men playing dominoes, cards, dice, but mostly, they were making things. Tiny boxes were taking shape by the candlelight, and over the low murmur of talk was the rasp of files on wood. Right next to Joe, a man was arranging single strands of straw into a perfect picture of the castle, piece by meticulous piece.
Joe took a step away from the door and almost fell over a boy who had been sitting just behind it. He was holding a chisel. Joe thought he had been trying to chip at the hinge and escape, but he was just carving a picture in the oak. It was a ship, with three masts. He was putting on the rigging now.
‘That’s good,’ Joe said numbly in French.
The boy’s eyes ticked over Joe, quick and nervous. Joe was still covered – sprayed – in blood that had dried to butchery brown.
Not knowing what else to do, he eased his way through, in the small hope of reaching the fire. No one paid him any attention as he stepped between the pallets. He had to go down on his hands and knees to get below a cluster of hammocks where seven or eight men were playing cards. When he came up again, a splash of warm water hit his arm from the laundry tub where two boys were struggling with too heavy a load. Someone else told them to watch it.
The closer to the fire he came, the more the air smelled of people and stale straw, and fresh wood, and the closer the men were packed. He got within sight of the grate but no further. Next to him, a man in ordinary, clean clothes was explaining to somebody that he would like the box to be six inches wide, with an inlay of flowers in the lid, particularly irises, which were his wife’s favourite. The prisoner he was talking to nodded carefully, but paused over irises and asked with a heavy French accent what that was. The Englishman looked at a loss, so Joe chipped in and explained, and then watched as the Englishman handed over a canvas bag of wood, a tiny jar of lacquer, and six heavy silver coins. He and the Frenchman shook hands, and then he slipped away back the difficult way Joe had come, looking pleased.