never heard of. The pair would spend their time ogling the worldly traders and their goods, dreaming of travel and adventure. Those markets were a place of magic and mystery.
These small street stalls, on the other hand, were a nuisance. It took time to detour around the crowds, and some of the traders cuffed the boys if they drew too close — they were always wary of thieves, and one dirty street urchin looked much the same as any other. Certain traders lashed out at any child who came within striking distance.
“I want to be a trader when I grow up,” Vur said, smiling as they passed a fish stall, ignoring the putrid stench.
“Aye,” Larten said. “We can hunt elephants and sell their tusks.”
“No,” Vur shivered. “I’d be afraid they’d eat me.”
“Then I’ll collect the tusks and you can sell them,” Larten decided.
They’d heard many tales of elephants, but had never even seen a picture of one. From the wild stories, they believed the mighty creatures were bigger than five houses, with twenty tusks, ten on either side of their trunk.
The two boys often discussed their plans for the future. The nineteenth century had dawned a few years earlier and the world was a place of mystery and intrigue, opening up to travellers more than it ever had before. Vur wanted to visit the great cities, climb the pyramids, sail across an ocean. Larten wanted to hunt tigers, elephants and whales. He knew that was unlikely, that both boys would probably remain at the factory, marry in their teens, have children of their own and never venture beyond the outskirts of the city where they’d been born. But he could dream. As poor as they were, even he and Vur had the right to do that.
They arrived fifteen minutes early for work, but Traz was already outside the door, buckets of dye lined up, a brush in his hand and a wicked glint in his eyes.
Traz was their foreman. He had been at the factory for a long time, part of the staff even when Larten’s father had worked there as a boy. He was a cruel master, but he produced excellent results and kept costs down, so the owners tolerated his brutality.
Traz’s eyes narrowed as the boys approached, their heads lowered and knees trembling. Part of the fun for him on daubing days was catching the children by surprise. He loved it when they turned up on time, only to find themselves at the back of a line. By the time he’d processed those ahead of them, the children at the rear would be late and Traz could legitimately beat them.
Traz disliked the Horston boy intensely. The pale weakling was too smart for his own good. He did a fine job of hiding his intelligence, but he gave himself away at times like this. Only the shrewder children were able to second-guess Traz. These two almost always turned up early on daubing days, and he was certain that the Crepsley brat wasn’t the brains of the outfit.
“You’re early!” Traz barked when the boys stopped before him, as if being early was a crime.
“Our mother had to leave earlier than usual today,” Larten muttered. “She threw us out, so we came here.”
Traz glowered at them, but decided not to press the matter. Others were already arriving and he didn’t want to waste too much time on the daubings — he would take the blame if production dipped.
“Bend over,” he grunted and grabbed the back of Larten’s neck. Thrusting the boy down, he reached into the bucket of orange dye with his brush, swished it from side to side, then ran the coarse bristles over the top of Larten’s scalp. The dye stung, and a few drops trickled into Larten’s eyes, even though he kept them squeezed shut.
Traz painted Larten’s head a second time, then a third, before releasing him. As Larten staggered away, coughing and wiping his eyes, Traz forced Vur down over the bucket. He was even rougher with Vur and daubed his scalp five times. Vur was crying when the foreman finally let him go, but he said nothing, only stumbled along after his cousin.
Traz daubed the head of every child in the factory. Each had a specific colour, depending on their job. The lucky few who worked on the looms were blue. Cleaners were yellow. Cocooners were orange. He liked being able to tell with a single look where a child was meant to be. That way, if he saw an orange-haired boy lurking by a loom, he knew straightaway that the child was shirking.
Larten and Vur had been assigned to the cocooning team when they started at the factory at the age of eight. Their heads had been orange ever since. In fact Larten couldn’t remember what colour his hair had been before that.
Larten’s father had been a muscular child and had worked on a team carting heavy loads around. His head had been dyed white, and although he’d left the factory before Larten was born, his locks had kept their unnatural colour, so Larten had resigned himself to a life of orange hair. Nobody knew what sort of poisons Traz included in his dyes, but they seeped into a person’s pores and remained there for life. Larten wouldn’t be surprised if the dye had even turned his brain a dark orange colour.
Once past Traz, the boys made their way to the room of cocoons to begin their shift. They worked in the factory for twelve hours a day, six days a week, and eight hours on most Sundays, with no more than a handful of holidays every year. It was a hard life, yet there were others worse off than Larten and Vur. Some of the children were slaves, bought by Traz from poor or greedy parents. The slaves worked constantly, except for when they slept. They were supposed to be set free once they came of age, but most died long before that. Even if they lived long enough to earn their freedom, they were usually ruined by that time, good for nothing except stealing or begging.
The factory primarily produced carpets, but it also manufactured silk clothes for patrons with more money than Larten or Vur could dream of ever possessing. Silk came from worms, and the boys were part of the team responsible for loosening the strands of the worms’ cocoons.
Silk worms hatched from the eggs of carefully bred moths, and were fed on chopped mulberry leaves to fatten them up. They were kept in a warm room, countless thousands stacked on wooden trays from floor to ceiling, munching away. Larten had been in the room a few times and the sound was like the rain falling on the roof of their house during a storm.
When they had eaten enough, the silk worms spun a cocoon around themselves. It took three or four days. After that they were stored in an even warmer room for eight or nine days, then baked in an oven to kill the worm, but preserve the cocoon.
That was when Larten, Vur and their team went into action. When the cocoons were delivered, they sorted through them, dividing them into piles on the basis of size, colour and quality. Then they dipped the cocoons into vats of hot water to loosen the threads. Once they’d done that, they passed the cocoons to another team, whose members unwound the threads onto spools, which were finally given to the weavers at the looms.
Although Larten couldn’t remember what colour his hair had been when he first came to the factory, he would never forget the first time he dunked his hands in a vat of near-boiling water. Traz watched, smiling, as the boy worked up the courage to stick in his fingers. The foreman laughed when Larten touched the hot water and jerked away with a yelp. Then he grabbed the boy’s hands by the wrists and jammed them in. He held them under, chuckling sadistically while Larten cried and his flesh reddened.
Larten studied his fingers. They were callused, stained and cut in many places. He didn’t mind the calluses and stains, but the cuts worried him. Silk worms were disgusting, filthy creatures. Larten had seen many of his team lose a finger or a hand when a dirt-encrusted cut became infected. Some had even died of blood-poisoning.
There was nothing worse than the stench of gangrene. Sometimes a child tried to hide an infected wound in the vain hope that it would miraculously cure itself. But the smell always gave them away, and Traz would gleefully cut out the rot with a heated knife, or hack off the diseased limb with an axe.
Larten lived in fear of infection. He hoped he would have the courage, if the day ever came, to cut himself before Traz could, and cleanse the wound with a firing brand. But he knew it would be a difficult thing to do, and he was afraid he’d try to hide it as so many others had before him.
“I see some