Senka peeped out warily. Oh Lord, the Prince had a flick-knife and he was pointing it straight at Death’s chest. Maybe he would kill her after all?
He even said: ‘Don’t play games with me – I might just lose control. Killing someone’s like swatting a fly for the Prince.’
‘But I’m not just anyone, I’m Death. Go on, then, swat me. Well, what are you gawping at? Either kill me, or get out.’
The Prince flung the knife at the mirror and ran out. The front door slammed.
Senka craned his neck and saw that Death had turned away. She was looking at herself in the broken mirror, and the cracks in the mirror were like a cobweb stretched over her face. The way she was looking at herself was weird, as if there was something she couldn’t understand. She caught sight of Senka, swung round and said:
‘You came back? That was brave. And you said you were a sparrow. You’re not a hawk, I know, but you’re not a sparrow, more like a swift.’
And she smiled – the whole thing was water off a duck’s back to her. Senka sat down on the sofa and pulled on the boots that had caused the disaster. He was breathing hard; after all, he’d had a bad scare.
She handed him his shirt. ‘Look, I’ve put my mark on you. From now on you’ll be mine.’
Then he saw that she hadn’t just stitched up his torn shirt, she’d embroidered a flower on it while he was sleeping, a strange flower with an eye like hers, like Death’s eye, in the middle. And the petals were coloured snakes with forked tongues.
He realised she was joking about the sign. He put the shirt on and said, ‘Thanks.’
Her face was really close to his, and it had a special kind of smell, sweet and bitter at the same time. Senka gulped and his eyelids batted, his mind went blank and he forgot everything, even the Prince. She didn’t want to mess around with the Prince. Which meant she didn’t love him, right?
Senka took a small step closer, and felt himself swaying, like a blade of grass in the wind. But he didn’t have the nerve to move his hands and hug her or anything.
She laughed and tousled Senka’s hair. ‘Keep away from the flames, little gnat,’ she said. ‘You’ll singe your wings. I’ll tell you what you should do. You heard what the Prince said about the treasure? You know Siniukhin, the pen-pusher? He lives under Yeroshenko’s flophouse, in the Old Rags Basement. A miserable man with a red nose like a big plum. I went to Siniukhin’s place once, when his son was sick with scarlet fever –I took the doctor. Go and warn him to take his family and get out of Khitrovka fast. Tell him the Prince is going to pay him a visit tonight.’
A swift was all right, no offence taken, but Senka drew the line at that ‘gnat’. She understood, and started laughing even harder. ‘Stop sulking. All right, then, I’ll give you just one little kiss. But no nonsense.’
He couldn’t believe it – he thought she was mocking a poor orphan. But even so, he pursed his lips up and pushed them out. But would she really kiss him?
She didn’t cheat, she touched his lips with hers, but then she started pushing him away.
‘Off you go to Siniukhin, run. You can see what a wild beast the Prince has turned into.’
As he walked away from her house, Senka touched his lips gingerly with his little finger – oh Lord, they were burning up! Death herself had kissed them!
HOW SENKA RAN AND HID AND
THEN GOT THE HICCUPS
It wasn’t Senka’s fault he didn’t get to the pen-pusher, there was good reason.
He made an honest effort, set straight out from Death’s house for Podkolokolny Lane, where Yeroshenkov’s flophouse was. It had apartiments with numbers upstairs – as many as a thousand people would snore away up there – and down below, under the ground, there were these massive deep cellars, and people lived there too: ‘diver-ducks’ who altered stolen clothes, paupers who had nothing, and the pen-pushers were the kind that settled there. Pen-pushers were a heavy-drinking crowd, but they tried not to overdo it, they needed to keep hold of a pen and set the words out right on paper. That was their trade, scribing letters for the unlearned: begging, weepy letters as often as not. They were paid by the