Andrew Hartley: Act of Will

I glanced down. I always loved being up here in the balcony with the music rooms behind me and a sea of faces turned up and hanging on my every word. I’d had some of my greatest actorly moments from this very spot, a suitably dramatic place to go down in a hail of arrows.

But the play wouldn’t end that way. Not today. No tragedies for William. I was in strictly comic mode, which is, I suppose, why I pulled the ladder over and started shinning up to the trap in the canopy. I started up, dodged another arrow, nearly fell to a messy death on the stage below, and wrenched the trap open. As the officer below started barking more orders and the crowd began to panic, I climbed, skirts hitched round my knees.

Inside the roof canopy was what the company members mock-ingly called “the gods.” It was from here that we lowered some poor bastard in dreadful makeup at the end of those awful the-plot-has-fallen-apart-and-only-some-ludicrously-unrealistic-device-can-cobble-together-an-ending plays. There wasn’t much up there but rafters, a winch, and another ladder up onto the thatch. I was up it before you could say “death wish.” The audience, those who weren’t running to get out before they were held responsible for this little fiasco, applauded me. No one liked the Empire all that much.

There was a chimney stack at one part of the thatched ridge, and I flung myself at it and clung on for dear life, wondering vaguely what lunatic scheme was likely to get me out of this unskewered. The roof ran only around a part of the stage and the perimeter galleries, so I could see the chaos in the yard below quite clearly. I leaned out to look down, and another arrow shot up and came within a cricket’s knee joint of finding my throat. Rufus was on the stage, shouting and pointing like the fool he was. And I was sitting on the roof in a dress being shot at by the Empire.

Oh yes. Rufus is the fool here.

Where the devil was I going? I looked around for the obligatory passing hay cart (a staple element of stories like the one I seemed to have wandered into) into which I could safely leap, but it had missed its cue. Five soldiers and the officer were on the stage now, all shooting and trying to shut Rufus up, while Brundage stood there like a sardonic angel of death, sending glances of bitter amusement up with their arrows. For the moment I was safe behind the chimney, but four of the troopers were on their way up after me.

There was still no sign of the hay cart.

There was, however, a house, its roof about ten feet away. The street was about thirty-five feet below. I released the chimney and let another arrow scud past me. Then I rose, setting one foot on each side of the sloping thatch, and began running or staggering to the far end, where I half jumped, half fell across the gap.

The edge of the neighboring roof hit me in the stomach, drove the breath from my body, and almost knocked my wig off. (Don’t ask why I was still wearing it. I have no idea.) There were shouts and the sounds of running feet below. I clawed myself up, that infernal dress making it almost impossible for me to get my legs up. ( How did women move in these things? ) I hitched the skirt up around my waist and-as if they had been waiting for me to do just that-one of their arrows immediately found my thigh and stuck there like a firebrand.

I rolled myself out of sight and stared with horrified fascination at the wooden shaft that grew out of the side of my leg, wagging about as I shifted to get a better look. Any sense of pain was temporarily stifled by disbelief. This was a new dimension to my life: Bill the Moving Target, Wounded Will. I pulled at it and gasped as it slid out easily, blood seeping out in a thin trickle. Not much of a wound, I pointed out to myself, vaguely disappointed. The flat arrowhead had gone in at an acute angle, barely under the skin really, but it hurt like. well, like an arrow in the leg, actually, and it served to remind me of what I was doing.

I tore a strip off the hem of my dress and tried to bind it round my leg to staunch the blood, but it fell off as soon as I rose to a crouch (the bandage, not my leg). The pain, which had been dull and smoldering, suddenly reared like a small pony and kicked me irritably. For a second I just sat there, but I knew that while the wound in my leg was pretty minor, if I stayed where I was, they’d give me something to be proud of.

I started to crawl, swearing under my breath at Rufus Ramsbottom, the Empire, the patrons of the Eagle, and, without good reason, Mrs. Pugh. I passed three chimney stacks, my dress snagging constantly on the thatch, and kept going. I knew that this chain of mediocre dwellings led into one of Cresdon Town’s poorer market areas, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember what was at the end of the terrace. After half a dozen successful (well, reasonably successful) years as a theatrical manipulator of other people’s greed and stupidity, with hardly a brush with the authorities, I was reduced to dragging my bleeding self-in a dress-through filthy, nest-filled, spider-riddled thatch, while members of the dreaded occupation force tried to put pieces of steel through my windpipe. Nice job, Will Hawthorne, you finally got what you deserve. Good old Quick Bill. Another blinding success delivered by Will the Sharp. And all for three lousy silver pieces. Not enough to cover my funeral. Curse Rufus, curse the Empire, curse me.

Then, without warning, the thatch became terra-cotta tile. Now what? I could hear geese and housewives in the street below. I lifted my head a fraction, waited for an arrow through my throat, and, when it didn’t materialize, looked about me.

The town had not fared well since the Empire took control, and this was one of the poorer districts. There were puddles of stagnant, muddy water ranging from mere wheel ruts to large greenish pools across the street, all choked with refuse and buzzing with summer flies. Some of the soldiers were down there, their noses screwed up in disgust, their mud-spattered white cloaks hitched up around their thighs, but they didn’t seem to know exactly where I was. I risked a glance back the way I had come and saw three more working their way across the roof. I had to get down.

I leaned out over the edge, wondering if I could survive the drop, and found myself looking upside down into an open leaded window set in the plaster and timber wall below me. An elderly woman with a bucket of God knows what poised to be dumped into the street met my gaze and held it.

Without a word she pushed the window wider and stepped back. I swung myself down and through in a single movement that only five minutes ago would have seemed impossible.

The woman silently returned to the window, caught the eye of one of the soldiers, and pointedly emptied her bucket into the over-flowing drainage ditch below. A waft of shocking stench reached us before she shut the window.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I babbled.

“Shut up,” she muttered, “you’re not safe yet. They aren’t that stupid. Get a move on. Don’t gape, you idiot, do something. What kind of a fool are you anyway, hopping around on the roof while they shoot at you?”

I looked at her with more irritation than I would have thought possible in the circumstances, and wondered vaguely if she could be related to Mrs. Pugh.

There was an open doorway that led into the house proper, a bed, a small table, and a wall of pine boards where the wing had been built out over the street so it butted up against a house on the other side.

“Got a weapon?” she asked in a businesslike tone. “Sword? Mace?”

I shook my head, temporarily dumbstruck. Of course I didn’t. That would have been illegal. She tutted pointedly, a look of bored exasperation on her wrinkled features, and started rummaging in a battered armoire, from which she produced a heavy-looking felling ax. She heaved it at me haft-first and it swung madly as I struggled to control its weight.