Passage #1

The Battle of the Sun by Jeanette Winterson Pages 7-9

"Two men, short, hooded, black boots, black cloaks, black hats were waiting either side of the water-gate. As Jack came through, panting from his run, the men seized his body, pinioned his arms, threw a rough damp torn sack over him and bundled him into a waiting boat.

    'Be this the one?'

    'This be the one sure as I have a tongue and one ear."

    His accomplice laughed. 'If he be not the one, you shall have a tongue or one ear but never both on the same head."

   'Quiet, you water-rat! Give him the drink.'

    The man held back Jack's head and opened his mouth with his fingers, as you would to a dog, the other fellow poured a think red liquid down Jack's throat. Jack spat and coughed and choked, but he had to swallow some of it. It tasted bitter. It was gritty. It was like fire ashes or fine-ground oyster shells mixed up in red vinegar.

    The men shoved Jack into a closed coop at the stern of the boat. It was a poultry boat and there was a big slatted wooden hen-coop perched at one end where the fowls were rowed to market. Jack looked out through the torn sack and the slats of the boat; the boat was being rowed rapidly east. Jack wanted to shout out, but he couldn't because he was dizzy, and the last thing he saw were the boats on the river no longer going up and down, but round and round and round and round like at a fair.

    Jack felt a great dullness, like the world spinning to a stop at the end of time. He passed into a dead and dreamless sleep, a black place.

    The men in the boat sat still without speaking. One lit a clay pipe.

    As the boat reached its mooring place, several servants dressed in grey came to meet it. Jack was carried from the coop, and the boat and the two men rowed on, distant now, towards Limehouse.

    The servants took Jack down and down and down. They laid him there and walked away. There was nothing more to do.

    At home, his small spaniel could not be quieted, and ran up and down, down and up, stopping and crying in a dark corner of the room. Jack's mother, standing at the water-gate, had a sense, an instinct, that her son was alive but in danger.

    'He is a boy, he's fallen over, he's eating apples, he's met with a friend,' said the groom, wondering why women never used good commonsense but fretted and worried over simple foolish things.

    'He was to be here at twelve midday,' said Jack's mother, 'and if he comes not to be here by twelve at midnight, then shall I go to him.'

    'And how shall that be done?' said the groom, laughing at her, 'in all the teeming city of London, its lanes, lodgings, highways and byways, inns and dens, how shall you, a woman, find one strayed boy?'

    But Jack's mother knew how she would find her son. She went up to her room and opened the little door in the wall, and took out a small leather bag with something inside." (7-9)