Never Knew Another (12 page)

Salvatore pulled the helmet from a pouch under his cloak, and placed it on Aggie’s head. “What’s this?” She tugged the helmet off and grimaced at it. It wasn’t fashionable.

Salvatore smacked the helmet with his blackjack, knocking it into the air. She struggled to catch it, and missed. It clattered onto the ground. Salvatore had already jumped into the darkness past the candle light, into the sewers.

“Wait!” she shouted.

Aggie picked up the helmet, and the candle. She moved slowly, protecting her fragile light from breezes and movement.

He turned at the edge of the light. He was laughing.

Underground, and above ground, and over a ferry, and Jona watching behind them.

Jona wanted to stop them both, grab Salvatore by the collar and shake him, yell at him:
We can’t live like that! We just can’t!
And yet there Salvatore was, a demon child with this beautiful girl, running through the night, not a care in the world and no one at home with breathing as thick as oatmeal.

Jona walked on, behind them, back in the darkness, jogging and counting the grates like in his map. He had learned the ways well enough in time. The sewers ran under the streets, and because he knew the streets he knew the sewers fast.

***

Aggie stopped to vomit in the middle of a street. She leaned over the gutter and her body convulsed. She wiped it off her lips with the back of her hand.

Salvatore touched her back. “You okay?”

She spat it all out, then leaned into a wall to catch recover strength. “I’m chewing too many redroots,” she said. “It’s staining my teeth. Have to stay awake, though.”

Salvatore ran a his sleeve over her face. “If you’re sick, they’ll let you sleep all day,” he said. “They’ll bring you gruel in bed, right?”

She forced a smile. “That only happened once.”

Most nights Jona followed them, the girl threw up.

***

I know what she was doing, with the redroots, and everything else she made Salvatore buy for her. In the girl’s mind a woman could lose a baby if she ruined her body. If that didn’t work, there were places she could go. Salvatore would know. He’d probably done it enough times.

She wasn’t pregnant, though. She was too naive to know pregnancy, which Anchorites were never really taught or shown, and the demon stain made it hard to get pregnant, as sick as she was.

The nuns had never taught her the ways of flesh. She was just getting sicker and sicker. Her stomach didn’t grow. It hollowed out.

***

Jona couldn’t touch the girl, because he was told he couldn’t touch the girl.

Aggie was given to the Anchorites when she was five. The nuns watched her all day. They probably knew something was wrong, but they didn’t know she was out in the night. She was beautiful. I saw her tumbling from a window on a rope in Jona’s memories. I saw her running with a candle in her hand, trying not to drop it in the darkness. I saw her weak and frail as a bird, her stomach upended. She looked up at the man she thought she was dying for.

I wanted more for her than her life gave to her. I wanted so much more for her that I could shout at Jona—grab him by the collar and shout at him. His memories are all I have. They are not a man; they will never change.

***

Before Aggie wore a helmet and worked alone in Sabachthani’s estate, Salvatore took her dancing, where they could rob rich men. He brought her dresses he had just stolen from shop windows. They barely fit, and they’d have to pin the dresses together. They danced at night parties to which they weren’t invited, and to which they showed up very late. Aggie smiled and leaned back in a rich man’s arms. She whispered with a thick accent about vast holdings in far-off lands. Most of the rich men knew she was lying. They assumed she wanted money. She did. They did not expect to be drugged for it. They drank too much wine, all of these men. She had a handkerchief inside her glove. Salvatore wasn’t far if something went bad.

In the dark, Aggie looked down on those men. She said, to Salvatore, that she liked to imagine her father asleep the same way, beneath her. She couldn’t remember what he looked like, or his name. For all anyone knew, the man with foul breath and wandering palms was the father that bought her a place among the Anchorites.

She watched the men’s eyes while the drug spread through their blood. Their eyes glazed in surprise, then fear, then something else, and then they rolled back in the head like they were dying. She wiped their rancid kisses from her lips. She wondered if these men had daughters.

She sifted through their clothes for money, while Salvatore took anything else he found worth taking that was small enough to hide in his clothes. Sometimes, if the light was right from the moon, or maybe a candle, she’d catch a glimpse of herself in a mirror before they escaped, and stop to stare. They didn’t have mirrors in the convent.

Watching them from shadows and windows and rooftops, Jona considered telling Aggie all about what it was really like to never sleep and to live all day and all night, and to live out among the thieves. She didn’t know anything. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t do anything. He watched for days.

***

Redroots don’t work forever.

“What’s wrong?” said Salvatore.

When a novice slept in dark corners, a whip woke them. Aggie was caught asleep in a corner, and she was whipped. Welts lingered on Aggie’s shoulders for days and days, that kept her awake. Aggie couldn’t protest, or the whipping would get worse. Her blue eyes smoldered into the corners of her face. The whippings got worse and worse. She threw up all over the floor. She ran a high fever, and spent days healing in bed afterwards. Salvatore took her to an inn after he had made enough coin to pay for it picking pockets at a street puppet show. She wasn’t in any condition for dancing. He ran warm water over her back. He tried to touch her. She pulled away from him. He didn’t know what to do. He tore up clean sheets and got them damp with water. He placed them over the welts in her back.

“Do you have any scars?” she asked.

Salvatore sat quietly with her. He said nothing. After a long time, he spoke, quietly. “You’ll get better soon. You’re young. You’ll heal fast.”

She placed her head in her arms. “You don’t ever tell me anything.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Do you have any scars, Salvatore?”

He thought about that one. He looked at his hands, and what parts of his arm were in the open. He didn’t see anything. “I don’t think I do. Are there any on my back?”

“No,” she said. “No scars. Nothing at all.”

“Is something wrong?”

It was her turn not to answer a question. Salvatore seemed to like it quiet.

Jona had been horrified to see Aggie emerge from her window with blood all over her back hours ago. He pressed his ear against the thin wall and couldn’t think of anything. If he knew how to find the carpenter, he’d grab him and shake him and shout at him:
What do you mean improvise? What does that even mean!?

The room next door was quiet a long time. Near dawn, Salvatore woke Aggie up and helped her dress. She said she wanted to go home and to sleep a couple nights.

“When will I know to come back for you?” said Salvatore. “Do you even want me to come back for you?”

“Don’t say that,” she said. “Don’t say that, just… Three nights. I’ll sleep. Come see me, then.”

***

Aggie apologized to Salvatore for being so sick. She had to stop him because she was choking on her own blood. She ran naked to a window. She leaned out, and blood spilled from her lips with vomit.

People in the street cheered for her, naked in a window and puking. She paled. She fainted. She hadn’t even noticed the people in the street. She hadn’t seen Jona standing in a window across from her, waiting for any chance to do something, looking in at them, and listening.

Salvatore dragged her into an empty bathtub, and washed the blood off her body with a pot of tepid tea. He’d have to send down for water, and he knew she wouldn’t want anyone to see her like this, all bloody.

When she came to, she cried. She leaned into his arms.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she said, “I’m so sick all the time.”

Salvatore wrapped her in a blanket. He kissed her temple. “Everything’s going to be fine,” he said, “It happens sometimes to everyone. It’s nothing.”

And Jona, with his hands clenched, hearing it and not believing it from the next room, or outside their window, or anywhere he could see or hear, their constant ghost. I see it all in his memories, all those nights he followed them. He wanted to do something, but he didn’t know what to do.

***

The Mother Superior, in her written deposition to Calipari after the girl was burned, didn’t even suspect.

When she heard footsteps and hushed whispers in the night, she rolled over and touched the keys on her nightstand. She thought the girls were sneaking into the kitchen for a snack. She had been right so often that she didn’t consider all the possibilities the night held.

***

Inside the convent, new little girls cried loud at night, screaming for the mothers that had given them away. Jona heard them in their rooms, weeping and calling out for their mothers. No wonder the king’s men avoided this place at night.

Salvatore and Aggie never lingered or paused because of them. They stayed quiet until they slipped underground. They never reached out a hand to any of the other girls there.

Jona couldn’t ignore the screaming, frightened girls.

During the day, when he was working on the streets of the Pens, Jona was followed everywhere by the animals crying out like the girls in the convent. He wanted to let them all out, to start a stampede of girls and animals all over the city, freeing them all to go home to their mothers. Jona wanted to do something big like that, something raw. He wanted to smash everything up.

Calipari saw it all over Jona’s face, and made use of it. He arrested a smuggler on flimsy evidence, and sent Jona into the room alone. “Don’t come out until you’re right in the head,” he said. “I want full confession. I want him in a prison cell or hanging. Get your hands dirty.”

Jona ground his teeth. “I’m fine.”

“Then do your job.”

Inside the interrogation room, Jona sat down across from the man. He sat there, and waited. He stared at the man. The man stared back. Neither one spoke a long time. When the man opened his mouth to start speaking, Jona’s fist met his jaw.

This went on a while, but all that came out of it was the confession. Jona emerged as raw as when he walked in. Calipari tried it again, and when that didn’t work, he decided to just ride it out. All things passed, eventually.

***

I don’t know where they were, but Jona was near and listening to them.

Salvatore asked Aggie what she remembered about her father. She told Salvatore that she remembered that her father always smelled like wax and roast beef. She thought that he was very fat, too, but who could really remember? Was she sad about it, Salvatore asked.

Aggie’s eyebrows creased. “He’s the one who gave me away, isn’t he? If it’s not one cage, it’s another. I’ll walk for the veil, but I’ll slip out the door and no one will ever talk about me again. We’ll get a little place all our own, in a new city, and we’ll be together forever. If I hadn’t come to the convent, I wouldn’t have that, right?” “Right,” said Salvatore. He ran his fingers through her hair.

***

Jona in the shadows, peering through cracks in the cheap walls, watched Salvatore’s hands moving gently over her long hair. It was all Jona had ever wanted. He wanted to hold someone beautiful. He wanted to stroke her hair.

***

Aggie talked a lot about her past. She was trying to draw out Salvatore’s life, and she used her own as bait. Salvatore listened. He was a wonderful listener. Jona listened too, when he could get an adjoining room or a place near an open window. If the carpenter asked him what he was doing, why it was taking so long, he’d say he was looking for an angle. That’s not what he was doing.

On seventeen occasions, Aggie was whipped in front of the whole convent and brought to tears. She was told to offer her pain up to her savior. Salvatore frowned when he heard this. He asked her about happiness. Aggie shrugged. “Who can remember that? It isn’t all bad, but it’s mostly bad. We’re raised to be terrified of the world outside our windows. We think everything outside is rape and murder and theft and wickedness.”

“Isn’t it?” said Salvatore. “I do my best, but I’m only one man.”

She didn’t laugh. “It’s not so bad out here,” she said. “Every year another group of girls stand in the aisle and bow their heads, and swear the oath of the Anchorites of Imam.

“Except some of the novitiates walk out just before the ceremony. Instead of walking up to the altar, the girls just… just leave right out the front door.

“Matrons warn us about the girls that choose this path. Evil is all that waits for us outside the heavy doors. Men will stab us with knives of skin. Wicked women will attack us in their petty jealousy. The weight of children will destroy our bodies until death. Only in Imam, sanctuary. Only inside four safe walls, true serenity.”

“It doesn’t sound so bad,” said Salvatore. “Really, it doesn’t. It sounds peaceful in there.”

“You try it, then.”

***

“Peace is boring,” Aggie shouted into a mug of wine. Her eyes dropped.

“I’ve had enough,” Salvatore bellowed back. “Are you ready to go?” He had his hands over his ears. The drums were so loud.

“I’m trying to tell you something!” she screamed. “Listen to me!”

“I’m listening!”

“Peace is boring,” she shouted, “Promise me we’ll never have peace!”

“I promise nothing!” he said. “Ready to go back? It’s late!”

She peered down at her mug. “Wait,” she said, and took the last of her wine in one messy chug. “Yes.”

***

“Growing up, the Matrons wanted me to sing all the time because it kept me out of trouble. I didn’t mind singing. I got to stand and look at all the congregation members. I got to see all these people. Once, I told one of the older girls this, and she smiled at me, and it was a key opening the door.