The dust, when I saw it, floated thick above the trees that hid the road. I hadn’t even thought of the coach returning. I held my hillside. Inside the Walls they’d be waiting for it. The Day Watch would have orders about it, though I didn’t know what they would be. I didn’t want to be any part of the coach and the crowds, so I walked around the Walls away from the Ash Gate, and to the Stone Gate. I wanted stone permanence, stone hardness.
Still, I came to the Barefoot Square only as the coach did, led by two officers of the Day Watch, and heard the tale the crowd was gossiping, that the coachman Abel had refused to come in to a plague city and the Watch had taken him under guard. Even as I stood with the gawkers I saw them escorting him into the inn. The coach was brought round to the front door and met by Gustavus and Fritz.
Fritz tossed down baggage from the rack as if it were rocks, then dropped like a stone himself to the ground. Gustavus caught the pieces as he opened the coach door. Abel gave no thought to the sweating, gasping horses or the tumbled, bruised passengers. He pushed ahead of his guards and into the inn and anyone could hear him bellowing for his supper. Gustavus said nothing. He unhitched the horses and handed them to Fritz, then he pulled the coach by his own hand to its place in the front of the stable tunnel.
Abel had entered Basel again under protest and by threat of harm. He’d known of the plague because black pennants were already flying above the gates, and I saw the notice hammered to the troubadour pole in the Square’s center. It ordered that illness be reported, and that any sick person was to be brought to the Barefoot Church for the Physicians to see and they were empowered to put anyone out of the city who was deemed to have the contagion. I’d seen in the Council’s Law Code what would be printed in later notices, if they were needed: how corpses were to be collected, how their death-bedding was to be burned, and on, even to the laws regarding estates that were forfeit because no heirs were surviving. All those laws had been kept through centuries and called out as necessary like funeral dress.
Lieber the bookmaker hurried past me with a bundle under his arm. “What are you printing today?” I asked him.
“More of those,” he said, meaning the notice on the pole.
“But you’re a book printer.” He’d always left cheap broadsides to lesser printers.
“Plague laws,” he said. Those required that every printer produce these notices if the Council instructed. Much of common life was upended by the plague.
I left the Square. Not by a street, but through a doorway and into the Barefoot Church.
The falling sun in the west was on the face of the building. No direct light came in the high hall, just diffused glowing. My bench was still and I could feel that the church was still firmly held by heaven and wasn’t moving. It couldn’t be moved.
The Inn had its own foundation deep into the earth and couldn’t be loosed from it. Between earth and heaven, the Barefoot Square was stretched taut and Basel rocked by waves as a boat tied to two different piers. Someday the tension would become too great and the Square would tear loose from one side or the other. Or the city would tear in two between them.
I stayed a very long time there.
I rose early Friday morning; it wasn’t morning but still night. My grandmother never woke while I dressed and took my water buckets and went out. I heard a single declaration from the clock in Saint Leonhard’s, so I only knew it was half past an hour, but not the hour. There was no moon. It must have been after three. There was no dawn. It must have been before five.
I heard muffled, quietly drawn wheels and hooves. The Barefoot Square was formless and void. I waited at the edge until I could see the coach at the door of the inn. The horses somehow knew to be soundless. Their breathing was little more audible than it was visible. But one of them smelled me and whinnied. Abel, hard lout he was, still could quiet a horse with a whisper, and I heard him do it.
Voices in the door were crashing bells to the silence of the Square, but they were only murmurs. I could hear sullen displeasure from the passengers pulled early from bed and herded to the open coach, and the coach door closed but not latched. The luggage was already on the roof. I walked closer, hidden only by darkness in the openness. The horses knew I was there. I came close enough and stopped. Then we were all waiting. It was far earlier in the morning than the coach was ever readied, which showed how far more urgent was its reason to leave.
Silence and dark made time slow. The long minutes went by, but they were only minutes. Finally there were two voices and I listened. One was like coals and one like sparks. I couldn’t hear their words, only their heat.