Sect Year 5 · second month · night of day 3 · the forty-third life: Wenlow Cross, his ninth year
Wat came back up the cross lane at dusk with the hank held in both hands, the way you carry something that might spill. He had carried it all day. He had carried it through the cold of the morning and along the wall by the cookshop. He hadn’t set it down, not even when a man with a barrow shouted at him to get out of the road. His arms ached from the shoulders down. The thread was still warm from his body, and it still smelled of alum.
The cross was emptying. Doors were shutting along the lane, and somebody was beating a rug against a wall in a slow, tired rhythm. The smell of animal fat came out of the cookshop into the cold, and a shutter banged somewhere above the baker’s. Wat kept to the middle of the cobbles. He didn’t want to pass the baker’s step again, and he didn’t want to see the wall by the cookshop, where somebody had chalked marks he couldn’t read and had been sure were about him.
The yard gate stood shut across the lane. On the gatepost, at the height of a boy’s reach, someone had tied a black rag. It hung limp in the damp air and did not move.
