Never Knew Another (15 page)

Salvatore looked at the space in the doorway where she disappeared. He leaned out the window at the world outside the convent. He smelled the air like an animal searching the wind, and all the night city and the humid lamplight and the fog and the people walking up and down the dark streets and the people moving in and out of windows.

Salvatore looked back into the darkness where Aggie had disappeared. If he left her, he’d never return. If he stayed, he’d never leave her until the end. If he stayed, he’d try to protect her and damn them both.

If he left, he’d forget her face in a couple months, and then he’d forget her name, and then he’d find a new love.

He looked to the pitch black doorway, then to the window, and back into the black.

***

Jona watched Salvatore descending alone from the window. Salvatore left his hook where it was on the convent wall. Maybe he wanted to give the girl one last chance to change her mind, or escape.

In the street, he looked around for signs of his stalker, gesturing to his collar. He wanted his cloak back.

Jona came out to him with the cloak under his arm. He held it out.

“Thanks,” Salvatore grunted.

“You done with her?” said Jona. “We need you to be done with her. You could get a lot of people hurt.”

Salvatore turned and walked away. Jona tried to quicken his step to catch up, but Salvatore kept ahead. Soon, they were running, Jona chasing Salvatore through unfamiliar streets.

Jona slowed. He didn’t have anything else to say, or to do. Salvatore ran on alone.

That must have been his life, mostly.

***

The carpenter raised his eyebrow and shook his head, incredulous. “You sure that was enough?” he asked. “That was a light, light finger. You always seemed like a heavy, then you’re so light.”

“Salvatore isn’t going back.”

“She still had the… whatever it was?”

“It’s all her, now. Salvatore’s not around to take it.”

The carpenter shook his head. “You took too long on it. Go on, then. Hope it don’t come back and I’ll tell what you did to the ones that care about it. My advice is stay on your man. Isn’t going to end well between us if you don’t get smarter. Be back to blood soon, off the sharp stuff, I bet.”

Jona waited.

“What?” said the carpenter. “You want something?” He picked up a mallet. “You better not.”

“I want to know what your name is,” said Jona. “I want to know what the point of all this is. Why do I do what I do? I can’t figure it out. None of the people seemed to matter, and nothing I do for you makes sense.”

The carpenter put down his mallet. He smiled. “Thought you were gonna ask for money,” he said. “Get out of here, demon. Best advice is don’t ask questions. Stay on your man. Watch out for him.”

The next morning, Jona was early for muster with the king’s men. He sat with a night shift scrivener and the night shift desk sergeant. Jona helped them cut the dead wax from their candles while he waited for his crew.

Finally, Sergeant Calipari came in, piles of paper in his arms. He placed them on the table, and started to flip through them.

“You’re in early. Weren’t out with the boys were you?”

“My ma needed help with something,” Jona said. “You go out?”

“I went home right after work and wrote Franka a letter. Went to bed.”

It was like nothing had happened, and all of the nights were unreal—dreaming of being dreamless, and nothing else. Better that than all the killing and stalking in the dark.

A hammock in a dark room, swaying gently, and a girl in a window, letters to a woman on the edge of the city—all these things were equally unknown to Jona. He tried to wrap his head around them. He tried to nod like he understood it and figure out what people had said before he had to speak again, but inside it was like fish seen through water. He darted his hands in to snatch at a normal life only to feel it slip from his grasp, a silver glimmer darting away. He had done what he was told. He’d always do that. It made his head hurt to think about what Salvatore could have been doing right then, what was happening to Aggie in her convent, and if the temple nuns had found the demon stain or the magic wherever the girl had hid the basket with a Sabachthani’s dog.

CHAPTER X

W
hen’s the last time you did any… you know, Senta stuff? Yesterday, I managed some dreamcasting. It’s how we see the truth beneath people’s lives, like the way dreams are true with what they say, but never in how they say it. Sorry, I guess you don’t know about that. It’s like dreaming. We’re wide awake. It’s real, but it’s not real. It’s hard to explain without a koan.

Which one is that?

What were your hands before you were born?

I don’t get it.

Hands are the thing that make you a man, Jona. Without them, what are you?

I don’t know. What is that supposed to mean?

It’s dreamcasting. It’s one of the koans that reveals the truths of the world. I was meditating on it, then I went walking around, looking for signs it might be working, and I went into this butcher shop, and I asked him for the best sausage he had. He handed me the closest sausage to his hand. He didn’t seem very enthusiastic about it.

I asked the butcher how he knew which sausage was the best.

He told me that every sausage was his best.

Then, I saw him having the same conversation with his sons about which one of his sons was the best, and then I saw his sons having this same conversation with their sons, forward and backward in time a thousand generations.

Are you meditating on me right now?

Oh, I can never concentrate naked.

***

Fear becomes normal, like walking with a limp. You have to walk. I went out with my brother.
Rachel double-checked her clothes for holes. She re-tied the lashes at her sleeves. It would be too easy to leave the edge of a scale out, black and shining like a dark coin. She wouldn’t even feel it.

Sentas, strict adherents of a disciplined faith, cover themselves up all the time, no matter where they are. They wear long, flowing pants or dresses, and always rugged boots. They wear two long leather strips, stained red, that cross over their chest. This is supposed to symbolize the Unity. Rachel’s leather strips fanned out, ragged and frayed, from her belt to her boots.

In these clothes, Rachel could hide everything but her face, her hands, and her hair. Seeing her on the street, no one would bother her. She kept away from the kinds of places a good Senta might go for coin: rich houses, opera halls. She kept away from temples and the men of law. Her clothes had a shadow.

People didn’t seem to bother looking closely at her behind the Senta leathers. They just saw her clothes. Uniforms were like that.

Djoss stretched, and flipped the dust off his cloak. “Ready?”

“Check me,” she replied, “can you see anything?”

“No,” he said. He wasn’t looking at her. “Let’s go.”

“Djoss!” she said, “Check me!”

He sighed. “Nobody will look at you out there.”

“Just check me out, okay?” She pulled her hair up over her head so she could see her whole back. Djoss found a place on the collar where her cloak had pulled it down. No scales were showing, but he flipped it up just the same.

“See,” she said.

“Nothing was showing,” Djoss huffed.

“This time. We need to think about replacing my clothes soon. It’s been a while.”

“I’ll ask around,” he said. “Turco knows people.”

“I don’t trust him.”

“He’s been honest with me so far. He’s not a bad fellow if you gave him half a chance.”

“Be careful,” she said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you. If you get arrested, or killed…”

Rachel’s sweat ate through the cloth eventually, and she wore one layer of rags to take the brunt of it. In the heat of Dogsland, sweat leaked out like tears from her scales day and night. She had gone through the rags beneath, replacing them again and again with Djoss’ help. Replacing her Senta leathers, unlike just rags, would be hard if Djoss wasn’t around. Sometimes, a good Senta might dreamcast too much of the truth of her life. They’d know.

Rachel hadn’t been outside the building in weeks. She was hiding out, sweating out the fear of all that time spent sleeping in alleys, with the sound of boots stomping through the street late at night, and men with bats chasing her and her brother away if they weren’t hiding enough, looking hard at them, after anything that could be used against them—a tongue or a glittering scale, for instance.

The streets smelled worse than the muddy basement room. Households emptied their chamber pots in the alleys between the houses, sending waste flowing through the mud in a vast delta of silt and filth towards the sewer drains. Somewhere, below the mud, there used to be cobblestones. Mud and piss and rain crawled to the salt flats south of the city, where land melted into the ocean like wet, frayed silk.

On the streets, men wrapped their boots in full spats. Women wore their skirts to their knees to keep the fringes from the mud, and long boots with cloth bindings covered their legs.

The wealthy all carried parasols because it would rain soon, and when it wasn’t raining, the sun was hot, hot.

Djoss’ shirt reeked of sweat. Rachel kept close to him, and the acrid stench of his body drowned out the rest of the city smells.

Djoss waved at a vendor with a huge conical hat. “That guy’s totally off,” he said to Rachel. “Talk with him a minute and he starts babbling about how the king’s coins are reading his mind. He won’t accept local coins. Only foreign ones.”

Further down the road, Djoss took a left. “It’s easy to get to the pub,” he said, “You just hang a left right there at the crazy guy, and straight to the river. When I’m not out with Turco’s crew, I’m there.”

“How do you hide what you carry for him?”

“Meat,” said Djoss. “Heavy, but it makes you move faster on account of the weight. Sell of chunks of meat if I can. Sew it up and keep walking. Gets lighter as I go.”

A left into emptiness, a vacant street where the only sign of life was a lamp-lighter’s cart. Rachel and Djoss walked up an empty hill for two blocks. At the top of the hill, a few cobblestones poked up through the mud that wept down the rest of the road along the sides of the hill. River sailors passed the night in a string of inns and pubs and cheap brothels at the bottom of the hill. The hot baths were more popular than the girls.

Djoss led Rachel down the other side of the hill to a pub that squatted on a high wall over the river dike’s edge. Disheveled men slumped in sleep along the benches lining the river’s edge, pissing off the piers when they woke up.

He was working tonight, and needed to stay near the door. She walked in alone. She pushed for room between two drunk women, and raised her hand for service.

She turned around to see where Djoss was, but couldn’t see the door past the swarming crowd. When she turned back to the bar, the harried barmaid was in her face, impatiently waiting. Rachel ordered a single drink and looked around the bar for a place to sit. She wanted her back to a wall, so she could watch everything.

A bartender pounded a bell three times. A cheer went up, but there didn’t seem to be a reason why. Rachel sat down where she could. She raised her hand at the tavern boy when he came by lugging bowls of soup, and paid him quickly.

Rachel searched for some kind of silverware. She saw none. She looked over her shoulder. A man nearby was slurping from the bowl in his hands. He managed to do it without spilling a drop on his shirt.

Everyone was shouting over the music, so the musicians played louder, and it all escalated. Rachel had to shout to get the barmaid back. She gestured at her bowl of soup for silverware.

The barmaid shouted. “No more spoons!”

Rachel didn’t want to spill it all on her clothes. She picked up the bowl carefully. She tried to figure out how to maneuver the soup into her mouth slowly and carefully. The brim of the bowl flattened out at the edge, and it made drinking it precarious.

People stopped talking to watch two fighters bounced. Djoss pushed through the crowd to bounce them. He got them both in his arms, a giant next to these brawlers who stilled in Djoss’ shadow. He got his arms around their necks and dragged them into the street. He looked like he was half horse, dragging those two smaller men.

Rachel leaned to the man on her right without looking at him. It felt daring to talk to anyone after so much time hiding. “What do you think they’re fighting about?” The man wasn’t paying attention to her. He was talking to a woman on his other side. She touched his arm. “Hey,” she said.

The man turned her way, frowning. “What is it?”

“Hey, what do you think those men were fighting about?”

“I don’t know,” he grunted, turning from her. The woman he’d been talking to had disappeared. He turned back to Rachel. The way he moved, he must have plenty to drink already.

“This your soup?”

She picked up the bowl gently. “I guess so.”

“I’ve got a spoon, if you want.” He reached back into his pockets and pulled it out, holding it up to her. She shook her head. “Thanks, but I don’t want your spoon,” she said. He’d probably want it back. He probably wouldn’t wash it. He might use it right there, where it might make him sick right there.

“How about a handkerchief?”

“No, thank you.”

“You’re going to need it.”

“Am I?” she said. She decided that she didn’t like this man very much. She looked around for her brother. She didn’t see him. She leaned closer to the stranger anyway. “I’m here with someone,” she said. “I don’t see him, but I’ll use his handkerchief if I need it.”

“That fellow, is he here where you need him?”

She laughed. “He works here.”

“Good for a man to work where you can keep an eye on him.”

“I’ve never been here before.”

“My name’s Salvatore.”

“I’m not telling you my name.”

“You should,” he said. “It’s polite.”