Salt by Maurice Gee Page A

of coins that lay on the bottom. She put them in Tilly’s hand. ‘A gift, not a payment,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry it’s so small.’
    ‘But it’s more,’ Tilly stammered, ‘more than my husband earns in half a year.’
    ‘I keep it for trinkets and sweetmeats,’ Pearl said, feeling ashamed.
    ‘Now, Tilly,’ Tealeaf said, ‘we’ll go out through the back yard and along by the wall. And you will try to forget you saw us.’
    Tilly tried to curtsey again, but Pearl stopped her and kissed her cheek. Then she and Tealeaf slipped away.
    They went out by a little gate beside the lavatory and moved along silently at the back of a warehouse. The wall cutting City off from the wasteland rose on their left, a dozen body lengths high and a body length wide. A narrow half-forgotten gate was set in an alcove, where a gateman sat dozing at the end of his shift with his back against the wall. A newly lit gas lamp burned above him.
    Tealeaf leaned close.
    ‘Sir.’
    The man’s eyes flew open. ‘Hey,’ he began.
    Tealeaf fixed him with her eyes: Say nothing, she said. Stand up.
    The man obeyed, with the same glassy look Pearl had seen in the mansion gateman.
    Take your key and open the gate.
    He obeyed again, moving clumsily. The gate creaked open. Pearl and Tealeaf slipped through.
    Now lock the gate. Put the key back in your belt. No one has passed this way. You have seen no women. Go back to your dreaming.
    He followed each command. Pearl felt she could see memory slide from his mind and flit away into the dark like a bat.
    ‘Tealeaf, when can I learn to do that?’
    ‘Perhaps never. Now be quiet while I think which way to go.’
    ‘You didn’t make Tilly forget.’
    ‘She was a friend. We’ve got two hours before the moon comes up. We’ll have to be out in the scrub by then or the wall patrol will see us. Come, quickly. None are close now.’
    ‘Tealeaf.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘The search hasn’t come here yet or the gateman would have been awake.’
    ‘Ah, you noticed. You’re learning to be a fugitive.’
    They travelled away from City across stony ground. Out beyond the first jumble of rocks they took off their capes and skirts and replaced them with jerkins and trousers. They changed the shoes they had worn through the streets for soft leather boots. Their bags were no lighter because they must leave nothing behind for horsemen and their sniffer dogs to find, but Tealeaf refolded them, changing them into packs that would sit comfortably on their backs.
    ‘Now, Pearl, we go hard. We need to be in the hills by dawn.’
    Pearl had never walked so far or fast. Her feet grew sore, her legs ached, her breathing grew ragged, but when she begged to rest Tealeaf answered abruptly: ‘You can sleep in the daytime. Night is all we have.’
    ‘Tealeaf . . .’
    ‘Do you want to spend your life as a slave in Ottmar’s house?’
    That kept her moving. Once they stopped and crouched unmoving while Tealeaf sent out sharp spears of thought at a hunting fangcat, half as tall as a horse, and drove him back and sent him spitting on his way.
    ‘If you’d teach me I could help,’ Pearl said.
    ‘Soon, Pearl. Soon.’
    ‘Does it hurt?’ Pearl said, hearing the tiredness in her voice.
    ‘An animal so savage – it’s like pushing on a door that won’t close.’
    The moon slid across the sky, shining so brightly it threw black shadows like hour-hands out to the travellers’ sides. City shrank to a pencil line on the horizon and jumbled hills grew large across a shallow river that shone as yellow as butter. They crossed, wading up to their knees. Far away, they heard the fangcat take his morning prey.
    ‘That sounded like a person,’ Pearl said, shivering.
    ‘No, a goat, coming down to drink at the river. Others are coming now, do you see? They know the cat has taken what it needs.’
    Pearl saw animals picking their way down from the hills. The sky was turning pink in the dawn.
    ‘Are there fangcats in the