Never Knew Another (22 page)

***

The new place was on the second story, with clean wood floors. The place had a wash tub, a decent stove, and a clothesline out the window, overlooking a narrow street.

Rachel pushed open the shutters and leaned out. The butcher kept some of his animals two buildings away, and the big killing yard of the Pens was on the other side of that and two more buildings down. Women aired their laundry out on the ropes between the bricks above the heads of playing children. The wind smelled of the slaughter houses of the district, but the stench of death also carried layers of turnips and cabbage and onions and the cloth diapers boiling clean.

“This is much better,” she said. “Be sure to tell Turco thank you for me.”

“I’ll see about two new cots when I get back,” he said.

Rachel frowned at her brother. “Where are you going?”

“Where do you think?” he said. “Got to get to work.”

“Oh.” She frowned. “Okay.”

Rachel locked the door behind him. She touched the solid wood walls, all clean and painted with white wash. She knew bouncers and maids didn’t get apartments like this, even in neighborhoods near the Pens. Money must be coming in, then.

Rachel went to her new window. She leaned out to follow his broad and strong shoulders down to the end of the street. He turned the wrong way to be going back to the old room.

There wasn’t anything she could do about it.

Rachel sat in the corner, legs folded and eyes closed. She tried to call on the powers of dreamcasting again. She wanted something small from the fates. She wanted to see the fate of one night, or one face, or anything.

She opened her mind’s eye slowly. She let the feeling of the dreams drift in from the top of her head like wet silk. She saw a wide gray plane, with darker shadows of visual mumbles. She heard the muffled rumblings of voices—a conversation caught in pillows. She stayed there, struggling with the koans, clearing her mind of all her sorrows and fears.

Djoss shook her awake. She had fallen asleep in a corner. It was the middle of the night. Djoss asked her what she was doing. He had brought back a bed. She had fallen asleep meditating, with her legs crossed and her hair pressed against a wall.

She shrugged. “I guess I was making my legs stiff,” she said, “Help me get up.”

He pulled her up into the cot. “Well, I only got the one cot for now. You can use it.”

“Hey,” she said, “Look at me. Can we afford all this?”

“Of course not,” he said. “Why’d you think it took me so long to get it?”

“Be careful,” she said. “If you’re arrested and I have to run…”

He walked back to the door. “We don’t have a choice, Rachel,” he said. “We have nowhere else to go, and nothing else to do but this. It’s this, or it’s nothing.”

“That’s not true. We could just run,” she said, “We don’t have to stay here.”

He smiled, sadly. “I like it here. It’s been a long time since we’ve had a chance to settle down a little, make friends.”

“You make friends. I never do. Djoss, we have to think about how we’re going to run.”

“We will, but we’ll be fine here a while. I can feel it. This is a good place for us. I need to go. I’ll bring you breakfast.”

Rachel fell back on the cot. She looked up at the ceiling. She considered going down to the neighborhood fountain for water. She considered waiting for ice to melt, if she pulled upon a koan. She chose the spell. She put the first chunk of ice in her mouth to drink the water of it. The second chunk she pulled from the air went into the tub, and then another and another.

She considered the man she had found in that brothel, and what he might do if he was truly like her. He might be scared of what she knew. He might run away. He might be evil. He might try and kill her if he got scared.

It was hard to focus on anything when she got to thinking about him. All the strange things she had grown up hearing all her life—the wickedness of the demon children, the terror they brought to the world and the sickness, could not coagulate into a clear understanding of a king’s man hiding behind the door for a prank with a perfume bottle in a pillowcase. They should have been plotting the rise of Elishta and the Nameless. Instead, she was pushing a mop in a brothel, and he was pushing people down in the Pens, where nobody ever plotted anything. If she could find him again, she’d want to talk to him. She wondered what his life was like.

The ice melted slowly. She placed her hand onto the surface of the water, and pulled the fire of her blood into a heat all through the water. Ice dissipated. Steam welled up from the tub.

All these tricks from the Senta koans, and all she ever used them for was lighting the cookfire or heating the bathwater and sometimes showing off to scare away a trouble. Magic could win wars, but what use was winning wars to people with no nation? Seeing the future in dreamcasting rarely meant anyone could avoid the patterns of their life. Boiling the water, lighting the cookfire:
that
was useful. The Senta sat on the street corners with tarot cards and for a coin they’d tell you if he loved you or he loved you not. They never tried for more—humility, always humility with the koans.

If she saw the man again, she’d try to find out more about him. She’d try to talk to Turco about him. She’d try to do something. The pattern of her life had to change.

She stripped off her clothes, and slipped into the water.

***

My husband found her first rented room. There weren’t many bakers near the Pens. Jona had never even been inside. He had watched her walking here, once, along a street he knew all the days of his life until he could remember things and never have to remember where they happened. A lamppost was enough, for him, or the angle of a building on a corner. I had to push through his mind.

The bakery with the basement room was where it had always been, waiting for us to find it.

My husband and I walked inside and down, under the ovens, to the muddy basement. Rainwater collected in pools and runnels. The bricks were rotting. Large wooden posts lined the walls, and braced the ceiling.

We stepped among the people there sleeping in sacks, sitting in dirt, and resting along the walls where the heat wasn’t so hard on their backs. They didn’t even look up at us.

We had blessed apples, and dandelion wine. We poured out the wine into the rainwater puddles. Fireseeds would never clean the mud in this damp room. Not even burning the building would dig deep into the groundwater, here. We placed blessed apples in a basket in the center of the room. Wolves lived better than this, among the meadows and hills.

Upstairs, we gave notice to the baker that his house would be burned. He was to clear out the people, the upper floors, anything he wished to keep. He was to take it all to a temple for purification. The demon stain was all over his building.

“Get out of my shop,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It isn’t your fault. There’s nothing you could have done.”

“You get out!” He threw bread at my face.

We left him.

The king’s men had already been informed. They waited outside with bells on their belts. The captain of the guard nodded at us.

“Give them time to clear out,” I said. “This is their home, and they need time to leave it. Give them time.”

The Captain looked up at the sun. “Daylight doesn’t last. My boys need to get home, too. They don’t start coming out, we’ll ring the bells down on them. These aren’t the kind to leave a place easy.”

“Who is?” I replied. “It’s their home.”

The baker poked his head out from the door. He saw the king’s men there, and us. He and his wife came down to shout at the captain. He spit at our feet. The captain struck him over the head for it. The baker fell to the ground. He clutched at his head. He wept.

I bent down. I touched his hand.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He pushed me away as hard as he could. The captain arrested him. I watched him dragged away, with his wife. The captain raised his hands. “Clear the building, boys,” he said. “Everyone to temple, then to a cell they get rowdy with us.”

The guard lifted their bells, ringing them. Then, the king’s men swarmed the stairs. People came out, screaming. The fires were coming. The whole building had to be put down for the old demon stains in the basement. A demon’s child had lived here for months, sweating into the hot bricks.

I turned away from these things, to my husband.
Do you remember the great oak on the hill above the red valley?

I do.

Do you think it is still beautiful, in the sunset? So beautiful the pack howls late into the night because it’s so beautiful that you have to shout about it, scream it out of your soul. Is it still beautiful, there?

I do.

I want to go home.

My husband said nothing. The fire raced from the basement floors, strong and hard from the stain, and all the people screaming while their home burned down. The king’s men poured buckets of water on the bricks around the side to keep the fire from spreading. They formed a line of men from the wall, passing buckets around the fire. People gathered to watch. Word spread among them of demon children, I’m sure.

My husband and I remained there, silent at the fire.

***

We talk too much. I don’t want to talk about anything. I just want to stay right here, and sleep.

Don’t yet. Keep me company.

I don’t have any exciting stories to tell you.

Anything. What did you do when you found out about me? What was that like?

What was it like for you?

I didn’t want to think about it, so I didn’t.

I thought about it. I didn’t think of much else.

Rachel had lingered in the bath water, lost in thought. It occurred to her that she was going to be late for work if she didn’t move fast. She jumped from the bath, looked around for anything to dry off with. All she saw were her clothes. She pulled them on, uncomfortably damp beneath them. Djoss should’ve been home by now.

She looked out before dumping the water. She didn’t want anyone near. There was no one. The children had long abandoned the street.

She pulled her boots over her clawed feet, and decided she wasn’t going to go back to work. If there was another demon child, he didn’t know that she was one of them. If he didn’t know she was a demon child, she had to be careful, and try to find him first.

She wanted to find Djoss, and tell him that there was another one like her in the city. She thought he’d be at the baker’s. She left the room. It felt like she was leaving someone else’s home instead of her own. It felt like she was supposed to try and hide that she had been here, in someone else’s room while they were out.

Back in more familiar places, at the baker’s shop, she found one of Sparrow’s boys sitting outside the door.

“Hey,” she said.

He sat at the door. “Can’t come in. We’re out.”

“I’m not trying to go in. Is Djoss here?”

“Who?”

“My brother. Big guy.”

The child shook his head. “Nobody’s here but us.”

“Turco, then, is he here?”

“Nope.”

“Do you know where anyone is?”

The kid spit. He scowled at her.

She walked around a while, to the cart that only took foreign coins, and the tavern down the hill. She found no one there. She walked back to her new place. She got lost trying to find it. She wandered up and down unfamiliar streets searching for a familiar landmark. When she got home, at last, the room was empty. It didn’t look like he had come home at all. Rachel closed the window. She sat down in the cot, with her back against the wall.

Her brother had been with her in tiny fishing villages, where he pulled nets on a ship, and came home for lunch. In other villages, he had held down sheep for sheering while she slept in a field nearby, hiding in the long grass where farm dogs wandered to sniff at her hair where she slept. All the days of her life it had been this way. They had worked a caravan together, on a long desert, taking turns driving the animals through the scrub grass growing between the dunes.

Then they came here on a ship. Then she didn’t know where he was. It had happened so gently, like a tree growing limbs apart.

He was out. She didn’t know where he was. If she were found out right now, and she had to run, she would have to think about finding him or running. She would have to decide.

She’d never leave him. She waited until nightfall. She slept in the empty room alone. She woke up, and she was still alone. If he had come in while she was sleeping and left again, not even mud on the floor marked a step.

She went out after him again, first to the tavern where he used to work. She didn’t see him. She approached one of the bouncers she thought she recognized.

He looked her up and down. “No Senta tricks tonight. Got a band playing.”

“No tricks,” she said. “Looking for my brother. Thought he worked here. Djoss.”

“He quit. You’re his sister, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t look like him.”

“Lucky for me,” she said.

“Watch out for him. He’s been in some bad stuff, I hear. Pink around the eyes.”

All the places she knew to go, and some she didn’t, late into the night, she couldn’t find him anywhere else. The last place she wanted to look was the baker’s room.

When she did, she saw Turco sitting outside the door in a chair. He waved at Rachel.

“Where’s Djoss?” she asked.

Turco leaned back in his chair. “Thought he was with you.”

“You’re lying.”

“Don’t worry about your brother,” he said. “He’s fine.”

“Is he really?”

Turco shrugged. “I guess he is. How’s your new place?”

“Good, I think. Djoss hasn’t been back. I’m worried about him. I can’t find him. He’s been gone for days. Turco, if you got him arrested… If you got him hung…”