1.

In Turdington-Fly, a cathedral town in a kingdom not unlike the real England of seven hundred years ago, and yet not much the same, there lived a boy called Anthony.

He was a scrawny thing with raven hair that stuck out like dandelion fluff above his stick figure body. His eyes were wide and bulging, his nose was always cold and wet, and the rest of him descended chinlessly into the same dull brown homespun tunic he had worn for years and years, ever since he could remember. Unremarkable would be a kind description of the boy, but unsightly would be closer to the truth. Nevertheless, the Chronicles of Hildaclare tell us that he came to be at the center of a great and wondrous miracle the events of which I shall relate here.

Anthony had never known color the way we do today. Fluffy pink candy floss? Neon rainbow slime sets? Blue-lit gaming apps with an elaborate array of skins? No. They would have blown his mind, for he knew only a world of soot and stone and mud and wattle. Mostly brownish and grayish and yellowish things. And while (on an unusually positive note) he did live in a plastic-free environment, he was still, unfortunately, very hard done by. An orphan, in fact. No one loved him. He was put upon, lonely, and pale. He was a loud mouth-breather who was forced by demeaning living conditions to scratch himself often and in many locations.

This story begins one Sunday morning by the dank and cavernous basement laundry of Ivar Dingleberry & Sons Great Emporium where Anthony worked (and by worked, I mean slaved, for Anthony got no pay for his labor – his only benefit was to have a roof over his head).

When commonplace traders hawked their wares from makeshift market stalls in all kinds of weather, the Dingleberrys owned and operated a great hall - a novel series of indoor showrooms and workshops where their own candlemakers, cutlers, grocers, stationers, tailors, and so on, catered to the more prosperous Turdingtonians. Down in the cellar, the Great Emporium also undertook the cleaning of the fine and delicate linens of the upper crust. Anthony spent many a day and night there hauling baskets and stirring lye-filled cauldrons bubbling with underthings, stamping them underfoot, bleaching and bluing them to resplendence, darning a sock here and there, and otherwise letting his hands be peeled raw and red with caustic steam, his face ridden with boils from the contact of infested and soiled new arrivals as he sorted them.

Excuse me for mentioning it, but there was also a bit of urine collecting to do as it was used to wash the clothes with. (Seriously.) Weedy though Anthony was, he was tasked with that job as the women refused to do it. (He was the only boy, you see). He’d regularly clamber up the backstairs to the top floor where the Dingleberry Counting Chambers were. There he would stand by behind a tapestry curtain listening out for a little bell to tinkle. He often removed several bucket loads of liquid waste during extended late night adding up sessions (for there were towers and towers of coin to count). It was said in those days that the wee-wee of the wealthy made the best detergent, you see, and the Dingleberry father and sons were dripping in gold. Anthony would dutifully haul it all back downstairs, ready to break with the weight of the pails, taking each step slow and steady to circumvent splashing onto his person.

But have you ever carried a bucket of liquid – even a glass of water – up or down a flight of stairs? I would be surprised to hear you never made a splash, minuscule or generous, and so it was with Anthony – he often made splashes and accordingly smelled of urine. But at least it was highfalutin urine.

Thankfully, that Sunday morning his life changed.

So here it is: It had been a long night of frustrating stain removal (for the inmates of Blitheslygread Manor had recently enjoyed a feast heavily reliant on summer fruits and beetroot salad). Now, taking a brief pause, he left the confines of the building to inhale the morning air and eat a turnip.

This daily turnip snack represented a brief respite to break the never-ending drudge of subterranean laundering. The anticipation of coming up to the street for air, taking the turnip from his pocket, peeling it secretly, and biting into its sweet, soil-flavored flesh was his one indulgence (illicit at that, for food was not allowed to be consumed by workers in or near the Emporium).

He obtained a monthly sack direct from a toothless old cottar called George who came to town on market day. For some reason, Old George had taken a liking to him after he helped him cross Shadwake Turnpike in the rain. George was half blind, and the rain pounding on the mud didn’t help, so Anthony took it upon himself to guide the old man to avert his getting trodden on by an approaching squad of assassination knights bearing the colors of Bishop O’Day.

From there on it was a monthly thing, a sack of rejected turnips and a gummy smile. Anthony usually hid the vegetables down in the basement laundry works under the austere undies of some dowager, where no one cared to look or raise eyebrows at the faintly earthy and incongruous smell. Then he baked them surreptitiously, one by one, in the low heat airing oven (it was a slow cook air fry method he had developed during work hours, each little turnip usually took two nights to get a good soft middle and a crisp skin so he had them on rotation).

So, as I say, he was just tucking in to the sweetly warmed taproot that Sunday morning when a shaggy gray cat pounced upon his shoulder and started foraging around in his hair as if it had spotted something worth swiping its paw at. Some kind of bloated louse, I suppose.

He squealed.

His beloved turnip dropped from his hand and landed on the fouled thoroughfare. Inevitably, an obese rat tore into it at once, carrying it off in its jaws, half sprinting and half hobbling around the corner.

Anthony launched after it of course. He would wrestle the rat to the death if need be. But Young John Boxsted, who was son of the innkeeper a few doors down, had that very morning opened the cover of the trapdoor attached to the a side lane of The Boxsted Arms with the aim of delivering a cask or two to a passing associate of Gertie Thumper, the pirate Lioness of the Lair Straits, and in Anthony tumbled, falling to his death, as decidedly as his turnip had plopped and vanished a moment before.

And this was the sad event that led Anthony - who had nothing, and came from nowhere, and who people barely even noticed – to rise above his lowly circumstances and help save Turdington-Fly from itself.

Chapter Two. Enter Master John, the Innkeeper’s Son

But wasn’t he dead? Sure. Anthony was lifeless, limbs spread in different directions like broken twigs. For a long time he lay there sprawled in the dirt. No one saw. And no one came.

I can’t tell you how horrible it was. It was dark and cold. Hours passed and he lay there helpless and alone, but at least he didn’t know that he was helpless and alone and cold and in the dark. Because he was dead.

Then, after a long time in which the streets above had become alive to the swell of crowds and the rattling of carts, the cellar door creaked and there was a brief splash of daylight.

Anthony’s eyes opened at that. Staring at the intricacies of a dense network of webs overhead and watching a thick spider make soup out of a fly, he could see that things must not be so hopeless after all.

He had had a thought! Also, his ears were working, for he could hear the slow thud-thud-thud of feet far above him on the stairs descending. At last Young John Boxsted, the innkeeper’s son, appeared with a taper in one hand and in the other, a large joint of greasy meat. Now might have been a good time to cry out. Indeed, Anthony considered opening his mouth and doing so but it was a fleeting thought; for everything felt slow and peculiar as though he was observing himself in a dream.

Soon Master John began lighting candles around the place so that flickering shapes appeared on the walls, shedding weak illumination on the butts and bottles, the barrels and dusty shelves.

He shuffled here to there humming a lovelorn tune to himself, then stopped, sighed deeply, and breathed out the words -

Oh Molly!

He said it again:

…Molly!

Then to the meat leg he returned, devouring tenaciously, seeking out the last scraggy pickings from the bone. After a final suck and a thorough licking of fingers, he bent down and laid the bone on top of Anthony’s torso as if he was a refectory table.

Pausing to flex and crack his knuckles, he now set to work moving a large barrel.

“Son, son!”

A voice thundered from the shadows above and there was a rectangle of light on the wall. It was John Boxsted Senior.

“Where you with that drink, son. Folks be waiting up here. Don’t be dillydallying no more.”

Young John huffed.

“Can’t you see I’m doing it farther. I’ll be up presently.”

“See that you are. The Bishop is still ere looking for more rerfresherments. Ee’s brought his knights in all… Molly’s near run off er feet.”

Dust fell with the resettling of the trap door and the pounding of his father John Senior’s footsteps faded.

“Cor. Can’t even give me an honest fair go at it, can he? Always breathing down me neck. Laterally.”

Young Master John frowned and pushed on the barrel again: Stuck as a dead ox: must be something in the way.

He stopped and sighed.

“Poor Molly. I do ‘ope she’s coping alright. They’re a bad, bad lot that Bishop’s crew. Best get up there and keep watch on ‘er.”

He faced the barrel, took a deep breath from the very depths of his gut and heaved with all his might until he was purple faced. Then another herculean push, teeth clenched, closed almost to breaking.

That did it. Something crunched and splattered and the barrel gave way.

Now, normally in such a grim and dark cellar, the crushing of a robust snail or two, an empty jar, or even the skeletal remains of a mouse, would be unremarkable, but in this case the sound of grinding and the ensuing pop and splat of wet pulp - resulting in something akin to red cider apples smashed into the dirt floor - was the shattering of Anthony’s left phalanges under the weight of the barrel.

“Noooooooooooo!” he cried.

It was a long, piercing, (and if I’m honest) rather whiny yowl. So long and unnaturally whiny that Master John was more embarrassed for the mysterious whiner than perplexed.

For solace he picked up his beloved meat bone to chew on the marrow again even as he searched for the source of the yowl which was the stinking lump that was Anthony lying there.

He came closer and stared down. What greeted him was but a smudge of weakling boy on the cellar floor with a head like wild black sheep’s wool.

“Golly and my word. Who let you in ‘ere?,” he exclaimed.