Never Knew Another (24 page)

How did you do it when you were young? What was it like?

You know.

I hate it.

We do what we must.

I hate this place.

What did Jona think of Dogsland?

He loved it here. He still does.

Still want to go home?

Not yet. No, not yet.

What do you see with our eyes?

When I went among the ruins, I smelled her. I could practically see her when I did. She walked down the street like any moment someone was going to wound her with their eyes. People never look each other in the face. She was walking, and she looked so scared.

Show me where. Take me.

So, I did.

***

Rachel walked from building to building in her new clothes. Senta clothing was usually plain. This was plain, but there was craftsmanship in the way the the red lashes splayed out below her waist and pulled tighter when she tied her belt over it all. She still had the crossing red lashes on her chest, and the fraying out where the lashes splayed into threads below her waist, but it was cut for a woman, and the pants were so baggy they were practically a dress. It would help her stay cool in the sweltering sun, and obscured her figure. Traveling women did not accentuate their hips. It had been a while since she had found clothes from a woman.

She wondered if she had wrapped it right, and if there were any scales showing. She felt for wind while she walked through the crowded streets.

She needed to get back to familiar districts to find Djoss. He wouldn’t be here. This wasn’t the Pens. A theatre spilled patrons into the taverns across the street. Behind the tavern, a huge, black bear fought a pack of ferocious dogs. People were cheering for the bear. They had been betting on how long it would survive. Rachel couldn’t see much past the packed crowd except the ferocious bear, standing high on its hind legs and roaring at dogs.

It was a hideous thing. She wanted the dogs to tear the monster apart. She heard a dog whining in pain, and it knotted her stomach. A street performer cracked bawdy jokes from a pair of stilts, walking through the streets high above the ground like the lamplighters, looking down and shouting obscenities at the people he saw beneath him. He had a large bucket on a stick, and he pushed it down below into the crowd when a coin was offered up to him. He shouted down to Rachel. “A Senta Witch about the town! If you can see the future, you know how good I am in bed!”

Rachel looked up at him, a mask falling over her face. She didn’t want anyone to see how terrified she was. “I see a large puddle in your future,” she said. “And broken stilts.”

He laughed. He held down the bucket for a coin. Rachel gave him the very coin she would have given the Senta for these new clothes. She didn’t want to make a scene.

For just a moment, she looked around herself, in her new clothes, in this different place, and she felt like a different person. She stood up a little straighter, felt something break inside of her, then mend: She was never more alone than in a crowd like this, people who knew they would eat tomorrow night and never have to run away. But there was someone else in the city who probably felt the same way about things with whom she might be able to talk, might form a tiny crowd of two, together. Even if he was evil, he couldn’t have been much worse than Turco or Dog.

Walking on, back to the Pens, she scanned the crowd for a face. Any hint of a king’s man uniform got her to turn her head quickly.

By the time she made it back to the ferry, the streetlamps drifted on and off in the dwindling oil. Strong stars fought past the night haze overhead. Rachel watched a bored city guardsman lighting matches in the dark as he waited for the ferry to come back across the river. He looked up at her, holding a match. He looked right at her.

She looked away, terrified of him, even if she wanted to talk to him alone, pour all her secrets onto him like bleeding a wound.

Jona looked right at her. He was dressed for the night, not his king’s man uinform. A body had been dropped into the water already that night. Jona was trying to piece together what all these merchant men might be doing to merit death. Jona had climbed into a window, and waited for the man to come. He had choked him to death with a cord, and pulled him out through the window. Jona tied a heavy brick to the dead man’s belt, and it pulled him down into the water. When he was done, Jona had gone back into the room and searched for signs of anything that made a man worth killing.

The only thing he found were tax ledgers on a rolltop desk. Jona couldn’t read them in the dark. He slipped the ledgers into his shirt and left. He had to repress the urge to pull them out and study them for any signs of trouble in the night. He was in a crowd of workmen waiting for the ferry, the lamplight fading out after the long night. He bought packs of cheap matches and tried to light the whole packs like short-lived candles because he wanted more light to read once the men passed by. When they caught their ferry, Jona had the ledger out. He lit a matchbox as if it were a candle. The fire was bright and hot, but it didn’t last long enough to read anything.

Jona tried just one match, enough light to find the man’s name in a corner. It was a forgettable name for a forgettable man. The match bit into Jona’s thumb, and he threw it into the water just as he had the man. He gave up. He shoved the ledgers back under his shirt. He sat down to think on a stray brick of a trash pile, deep in the building shadows. He had matches left, but it was hard to light them in the dark. He thought about how it was easier to kill a man than to light a cheap match, and read his name.

The ferry came for everyone. Jona was supposed to take the sewers home, but he was sick of sewers and the sewer stink and all the killing he was doing that didn’t make sense. He wanted to ride the ferry over, and walk like a decent man down the street to his home. He’d be at work by full sunrise, an honest king’s man, walking the streets, watching for trouble. He looked through the crowd out of habit, toying with his last cheap box of matches. He stopped in his tracks. His gut twisted. He stepped away from the ferry. He slipped back into the shadows.

He saw her, looking at him like she knew him.

When the ferry cast off, he used the crowd for cover to escape.

He ran to the sewer line to pass over the water on a workmen’s little ferry boat, to the Pens, and then to his home.

Jona didn’t want to kill anyone anymore. He especially didn’t want to kill her.

***

What did you do when you saw me?

Nothing. I went home. I had a fight with Djoss. You?

I went home, too. I didn’t do anything.

What were you fighting about?

I’d rather not talk about it.

Djoss came home, at last, and saw Rachel sprawled out on the cloth from the destroyed cot.

“What happened?”

Rachel sat up, yawning. “I broke it,” she said. “I got a new job. I’m working down closer to you. Go get two cots. Actually, get beds. Get large, soft, feather beds.” She threw him some coins from her pockets.

“Your clothes look different,” said Djoss. “They wear out again?”

“I washed them,” said Rachel. “Where have you been?”

“What?”

Rachel sighed. “You’ve been gone forever.”

Djoss frowned. He sat down on the cold stove and folded his hands. “I was working.”

“Oh,” she said. “I have to work tonight, too.”

“You broke the cot?”

She stood up. She stretched again. “Come on. You’ve got money, right? You’re making real money? Let’s get some beds, with mattresses.”

Together they took to the street. The wind off the ocean was strong and beautiful, and it carried away any words they might have shared. And if anyone saw the rugged bouncer and the Senta standing next to each other, waiting for a gap in the carriages to cross the street, they would’ve known they were related by their silence. Only relatives can be so quietly together like that.

They bought two beds with barely a word. Djoss had plenty of money. They didn’t even need to use Rachel’s coins. Djoss carried both mattresses on his back, walking slowly behind the carter from the store. He and Djoss dragged the new furniture upstairs. Lying down on a bed, with a mattress of stuffed hay and feather, was at once comforting and frightening. Djoss didn’t seem to notice. He fell asleep the moment he laid down. Rachel remembered holding a mattress, and jumping out a window. She looked over at Djoss, and wondered if he really knew what he was doing. It was like watching a stranger in Djoss’ skin. His face blanked and his body slackened, and everything about him that was full and alive sank down into the mattress, and the Djoss she knew was gone. It was like how he looked when she found him in the basement at a hookah.

He rolled over away from her, and his shirt rode up his back. Someone had dug fingernails into him. She got up from her new bed. She pushed the shirt up higher and studied the marks on his back: fingernails.

Rachel frowned.

She had seen Djoss one time, when he was working, and he had Sparrow’s three boys beside, walking towards the basement. Too late in the night to be carrying meat like that, it stood out. Djoss had one whole sow slung over his strong back, and the kids had a pole that two of them carried with a pig on it. The third, the youngest, carried a piglet slung over his shoulder just like Djoss’ sow. The animals’ bellies had been cut already, and sewn back together with white twine.

The next morning, he had come home with fresh pork sausage, a teapot and four fine, white cups.

“Djoss, don’t,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Better to have the coin, instead. Better to just take coin and keep it. We don’t need things as much as coin.”

“We deserve to have a better life, for once. I’m making good money here. We can leave it if we have to. We can sell it back if we have time.”

Rachel decided not to say anything. The memory of the twine along the pig’s bellies made her think of running again. It made her think about Djoss blissed out beside a hookah.

She wondered if he had taken to Sparrow as Turco and Dog had. This thought was worse than the twine. He could afford furniture and teacups. That’s fine. If he could afford a woman who wanted food for three boys, he was hiding how much he was making because he knew Rachel would believe it was dangerous.

She had watched him eating, how he chewed his food and held it and ate it. She imagined her brother with Sparrow, how he would cut into her like that, devour Sparrow’s body, and how Turco and Dog would be there. She couldn’t eat.

“Djoss, I think it’s time to leave,” she said.

He grunted. “You’re just not used to settling down. This is a good place. Plenty of room for us to hide out.”

“No, Djoss.”

“I like it here.”

“Do we at least have a plan? Big city with lots of guards. We need a plan.”

“Plan is don’t get caught. Run to water. That’s always the plan.”

“I’m really scared about something and I don’t know what,” she said.

“You find out, you tell me,” he said. He was done eating. He stood up. The chair made a terrible sound across the wooden floor. Djoss didn’t seem to notice.

Rachel opened her mouth at his back. Then, she closed it. If he hadn’t been so busy making friends, making money, she’d have told him that she had encountered a man who had blood like hers, and maybe they should find him and talk to this man, or just run away from him. If it was just him and her, like it had always been and always would be, then she would tell Djoss everything. Right now, she thought it would be hard for him, when they ran. It was going to be so hard for him.

***

I’d rather not talk about it.

If Djoss was burning coins with friends, she needed to work hard.

In the morning, she got a new job at a new brothel, far away from her room. Turco didn’t know anything, and didn’t need to know. It was worth the walk to keep all her pay. Rachel mopped floors and changed sheets.

Sometimes drunks there asked the Senta for a prophecy, and if she couldn’t actually see anything, she’d make something up. She needed the money. She never told anyone bad news. She didn’t want to lose her job over a future they probably already saw for themselves. Usually the things that kill us are things we do every single day. Even Erin teaches that. Men in brothels who do not realize that would never believe their futures, anyway.

Rachel stripped off filthy, dusty, sweaty sheets and threw them in a big bag. Then, she spread a less filthy, damp sheet over the mattress. She ran a mop across the floor, and dumped any chamber pots out in the basement where a sewer grate opened to this stinking river of sewer that flooded in the summer rains.

The roof leaked constantly. When hard rain fell, Rachel also had to keep the many buckets across the top floor from spilling onto the floor, emptying them into a barrel near a window. She dumped the full barrel out the window, and put the barrel back where it was. She wiped the wetness off the floor with a dirty towel.

Women and men came and went all night. They didn’t look at her. The only thing lower than a cheap sailor’s whore was the whore’s maid.And with all the whores to gawk at, and all the men to attract, the night maids slipped in and out like breezes with candles, and days went by when no one even talked to her.

When the night wore down, Rachel scrubbed sheets in the tiny yard cut into the sidewalk. By the time the sun edged against the horizon, she piled the damp sheets into the closets on each floor.

Rachel picked up her night’s pay each morning. She counted it on the spot, right in front of the man that paid her. He didn’t pay attention to her once the money was in her hands. He just busied himself with the rolls of accounting behind his scrawny desk, counting the coins his girls had earned.