Jamie Buxton - Temple Boys

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Egmont UK Limited

The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN

Text copyright © 2014 Jamie Buxton

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

First e-book edition 2014

ISBN 978 1 4052 6800 4

eISBN 978 1 7803 1369 6

www.egmont.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Stay safe online. Any website addresses listed in this book are correct at the time of going to print. However, Egmont cannot take responsibility for any third party content or advertising. Please be aware that online content can be subject to change and websites can contain content that is unsuitable for children. We advise that all children are supervised when using the internet.

For my dear friend Leon Arden, who gave me the idea.

For the king has come to seek a flea, as one who hunts a partridge in the mountains

The Book of Shama-el

Stone disobedient children

The Book of Spoken Words

Flea smelled the dump before he saw it. A bad place, deeply unclean. The thick air bounced with fat black flies and once Flea had seen a body there. Swollen, revolting, compelling, it had lain for three days until the Temple persuaded someone to move it with promises of spiritual purification. But that was nothing compared to what he had just seen today. Nothing at all, really.

Big white moon, gusting wind and the sky pulsing silver and black, black and silver. The rolling clouds sent the walls into a slow endless topple towards the valley floor. Flea dragged his right hand against the stone blocks. Their rough mass told him the walls still stood so the Temple still stood, and the dead were not walking so the world had not ended. Not ended yet.

Maybe he still had time to put things right. Maybe he could find out how a man he had just seen die was going to change everything.

He heard the dogs start up again in the distance and forced his feet to shuffle into a broken run. The quicker he moved, the sooner he’d find Jude, and the sooner he found Jude the quicker he’d be sorted. Jude would know. Jude would help him.

And all would be well.

Wouldn’t it?

Cover

Title page

Copyright page First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Egmont UK Limited The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN Text copyright © 2014 Jamie Buxton The moral rights of the author have been asserted First e-book edition 2014 ISBN 978 1 4052 6800 4 eISBN 978 1 7803 1369 6 www.egmont.co.uk A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Stay safe online. Any website addresses listed in this book are correct at the time of going to print. However, Egmont cannot take responsibility for any third party content or advertising. Please be aware that online content can be subject to change and websites can contain content that is unsuitable for children. We advise that all children are supervised when using the internet.

Dedication For my dear friend Leon Arden, who gave me the idea.

Epigraph For the king has come to seek a flea, as one who hunts a partridge in the mountains The Book of Shama-el Stone disobedient children The Book of Spoken Words

three days to go

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two days to go

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one day to go

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the day

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one day after

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two days after

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three days after

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many days after

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The cold woke Flea and drove him out of the shelter.

It was a grey dawn. Misty dawn. Damp, dewy dawn with dark drips on tawny stone walls. Flea flapped arms, stamped feet, blew hard and waved a dirty hand through the thin cloud of his breath. He looked at the gang’s shelter and wondered if it was worth burrowing between the sleeping bodies in the hope of getting a bit more sleep. He decided against it. He hated violence, especially when it was directed at him.

The shelter filled the end of an alleyway, its sagging roof slung between the Temple walls and the back of a baker’s oven. The gang had nicked its timbers from a half-built house in the new town. The roof was scraps of leather taken from the tanneries and painfully sewn together. Rain dripped through the thread-holes and sometimes the leather got so heavy the whole thing collapsed, but most of the time it worked.

Flea could put up with a drip or two, and the roof falling in. For him, quite apart from practical issues, the shelter was a battleground for status, a battle that he lost every night. In cold weather the older members of the gang – Big, Little Big, Smash and Grab – would hog the oven wall and when it was hot they moved away from it. Flea was constantly pushed around, ended up being too hot or too cold and, either way, was always the first to wake.

The sky was a low grey roof above the walls of the alley. For days now clouds had pressed down over the City, trapping the smoke from the Temple’s fire altar so it drifted through the alleyways in a greasy haze. Everyone’s eyes stung and every surface was sticky with fat. And out-of-towners were flooding into the City for Passover, the Feast of the Death Angel. More people meant more sacrifices, and more sacrifices meant yet more smoke . . . The mood wasn’t good.

A lump of shadow detached itself from the wall and began to waddle along the gutter towards him. Flea blinked, rubbed his eyes and blinked again.

‘RAT!’ he yelled. He scrabbled for a rock, found a pebble and flung it as hard as he could. It clicked harmlessly off the stone gutter and the rat continued towards him with hardly a pause.

‘RAT! RAT! RATS!’ Flea backed up against the shelter, feeling behind for a weapon, anything to fend the brute off. Another was coming – they must have smelled the crumbs in the shelter. His hand closed on a stick, which he grabbed. Unfortunately it was holding up the front of the shelter, which collapsed.

Furious shouts as the heavy leather roof collapsed on unsuspecting sleepers.

‘RATS!’ Flea yelled again.

‘What the . . .?’ Big, the gang leader, stuck his head out of the shelter. ‘FLEA!’