Read Online The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers - Free Book Online Page B

they began to make their way across the field.
    In a few minutes they had reached a stand of willows that screened them from the road, and one of the guards jumped to the ground and sprinted ahead. Crouching, he glanced right and left, and made a patting, keep-your-head-down gesture; a few moments later an open carriage rattled past from left to right, headed for the city. Doyle stared after it in fascination, awed to think that the cheery-looking couple he’d glimpsed through the willow branches would very likely be dead a century before he was born.
    The reins flapped and harnesses jingled as the horses advanced to the ditch and, with some effort and backsliding, pulled the coaches across it and onto the road. Wheeling around to the right they set off, and in a minute were rocking along at a good speed east, toward London. The coach lamps, which had fluttered and flickered during the jiggling passage across the ditch, settled down now to a regular back and forth sway on their hooks, casting yellow highlights on the horses’ backs and the brightwork on the coaches, but otherwise dimmed by the moonlight that frosted the trees and made the road glow like a track of palest ashes.
    If your heels be nimble and light, Doyle thought, you may get there by candle-light.

CHAPTER 2
“I am borne darkly, fearfully afar…”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
    Above the crowded sidewalks the windows of the stately, balconied buildings of Oxford Street were all aglow with lamplight on this young Saturday evening; elegantly dressed men and women were to be seen everywhere, wandering arm in arm, silhouetted by shop windows and open doorways, stepping into or alighting from the hansom cabs that jostled one another for positions at the curb. The air was clamorous with the shouting of the cab drivers, the whirring clatter of hundreds of coach wheels on the cobblestones, and, a little more pleasantly, the rhythmic chanting of street vendors who had strayed west from the weekly fair in Tottenham Court Road. From his perch Doyle could smell horses, cigar smoke, hot sausages and perfume on the chilly night breeze.
    When they turned right onto Broad Street Benner pulled one of his pistols—a four-barrelled thing, looking all spidery with its multiple flintcocks and flashpan covers—completely out of the leather sack and leaned his elbow on the coach roof with the gun very evident, pointed at the sky. Looking up front, Doyle saw that all the guards had done the same.
    “We’re entering the St. Giles rookery,” Benner explained. “Some very rough types about, but they won’t interfere with a body of armed men.”
    Doyle looked around with a wary interest at the narrow alleys and courts that snaked away from the street, most of them dark, but a few lit by reflections of some smoky light around a corner. There was much more street-selling here, on the main street at least, and the coaches passed dozens of coffee stalls, old clothes stands, and crates of vegetables watched over by formidable old women who puffed clay pipes and watched the crowd through narrowed eyes. A number of people shouted things at the two coaches, in so thick an accent that Doyle could catch only an occasional “damn” or “bloody,” but their tone seemed more jocular than threatening.
    He looked behind, and then touched Benner’s arm. “Didn’t mean to startle you,” he said quickly. “That wagon back there—behind the potato cart—the thing that looks like a Conestoga wagon. It’s been behind us ever since we got onto the Bayswater Road.”
    “For God’s sake, Brendan, we’ve only made one turn since then,” Benner hissed impatiently. He did turn around, though. “Hell, that’s just…” Suddenly he looked thoughtful. “I believe it’s a gypsy wagon.”
    “Gypsies again,” said Doyle. “They didn’t use to—I mean they don’t usually come into big cities much, do they?”
    “I don’t know,” Benner said slowly. “I’m not even sure it is a gypsy