Temple Boys. Jamie Buxton

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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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three days to go

1

      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!’

      ‘BUT THEY’RE COMING! LOOK!’

      Big’s blunt features were blurred by sleep. He rubbed his face, grabbed the stick from Flea and sent the rats scurrying away down the hole at the end of the alley.

      ‘What bloody use are you, Flea?’

      Flea was panting. ‘I had a bad experience with rats,’ he said. ‘When I was a grave robber.’

      ‘When you were a grave robber’s slave . . .’

      ‘It doesn’t matter! He sent me down a hole. I got attacked. Look. LOOK!’

      Flea pulled out his lower lip to show the small pale scars on the inside. The hole in question had been a cliff tomb outside the City walls. The way in had been too narrow for both Flea and a lamp, so he had been forced to rummage through the old bones for jewellery by touch. In the utter black, scraped by the rocks, aching with the effort and choking on the dust of dead people, he had felt the darkness bunch, writhe and squeal. The grave robber had pulled him out, screaming, with one rat hanging off his mouth and the other dangling from his ear.

      Flea had been sacked, of course. Grave robbing was meant to take place in silence – rats or no rats.

      ‘Leave it or we’ll shove you down the rat hole to be eaten alive,’ growled Big. ‘I mean it. Now fix the shelter.’

      ‘I can’t. You’ve got the stick.’

      ‘And