Never Knew Another (3 page)

I know
.
Can’t you smell his stain here?

And, I could, eventually. If I pushed Jona back from my own memories, and tried to ignore the rising waves of his life here, I could feel the taint in the air, like an edge of metal cutting at the stink of animals and death.

When we reached the Pens’ guard station, Sergeant Calipari wasn’t on duty. The new sergeant grinned and told us to call him ‘Pup’, not Sergeant, but I knew that before he spoke. Pup had been promoted since all the other guards Jona knew had died except for Calipari. It wasn’t the stain. This was a dangerous place, and dangerous work. Pup said that Nic was ill, and on leave for good. He wasn’t coming back.

Nicola Calipari had killed the betrayer, Jona. He alone had felt the demon child’s tainted blood spilled all over his skin at the moment of Jona’s death. The old sergeant would be trapped in poisoned visions of the dark soul he had destroyed when he had stabbed his friend, mistaking these for mere nightmares. He was going to be sick as dying.

I looked around the room. I saw a thousand moments. I saw them merge into one moment. I could still smell Jona, here, under all the smells of scrivener’s ink and interrogation room blood. I opened my mouth to speak, but my husband touched my arm. The new sergeant pointed to the edge of the city, past the walls, where Calipari had gone to be close to his beloved. Calipari thought the stain would kill him. He didn’t want to die in a cluttered room above cluttered rooms, alone. He wanted to die in Franka’s arms. Pup spoke so quietly about Calipari’s death.

My husband scoffed. “He won’t die. Jona’s blood wasn’t that strong. He will make everyone around him very sick. Why do men like you ignore the temples when you are in need? You give alms, and pray for help alone, but never let your face be seen by mortals when you seek your interventions.”

Pup shrugged. “I wouldn’t know about that stuff, sir,” he said. “Anything else I can help you with?”

The tavern was far beyond the city walls, to the east. My husband and I left Jona’s skull with the church of Erin in the city. We pulled the wolfskin over our back and charged through the streets. We were wild dogs, running, big like wolves. Women screamed and men drew back from us.

My husband had lied to the sergeant. Nicola might die. He might take people with him in death. We had to run.

***

We were back to the wall, and beyond it, but this time at the far eastern edge. The swampy pine forests stretched out across the hills with the black, muddy veins of roads. I smelled the wind against my face. We were home.

Night fell, and we didn’t stop. We kept our wolfskins on our backs and loped overland straight through woods.

We smelled the tavern before we saw it. Drunk men had lost their way to the outhouse and had leaned into the trees. I smelled it all over the roots at the ground against my nose. I smelled the cook fire dusting the trees. Lamplight in the dark guided weary travelers to a place of rest.

My husband stopped at the edge of the light. He told me to go forward; he would search the perimeter for any signs of the other two demons.

I looked up at the building. The bottom floor bustled with travelers and local farmers. In the rooms above, travelers slept, and the owner slept, and his staff slept after drinkers abandoned the bottom floor.

I went to the barn first. I smelled someone human there, and heard a child breathing. The horses whinnied nervously at my scent. But I needed to see in the dark a little longer, so I kept wolfskin.

I recognized the boy when I saw him. Franka’s son was sleeping on some hay, waiting for men to come with their horses and a few coppers for his trouble. He snored with his mouth slack, and flies buzzing around his teeth.

I pulled my hand and back free from the wolfskin to reach into my pack. Stretching my hand out, I poured holy spring water over his head. It must have been very cold. He woke with a start.

“Drink this water,” I growled.

“Wha…?” stammering, he stood up, clumsily backing into the wall.

I remembered myself. He was a child, and me, a wolf in the shadows. I pulled the wolfskin from my back completely. I smiled as warmly as I could, a woman in full, and kind.

“I am Erin’s Walker,” I said. “Do you know what that is? It is someone who helps people. I’m here to help. You’re Franka’s son, aren’t you? I’ve seen you before, but you do not remember me seeing you. Drink this.”

“I…?” He shook his head, wiping sleep from his brain. I watched his face as his mind struggled to name what he had just seen. A dream, surely. A woman rising up from the body of a wolf, speaking to him.

I handed him the water. “Drink this.”

He took the water, sniffed it, smelled the sweet flowers that had blessed the bottle. He drank hesitantly. “It’s good,” he said, surprised. He took a deeper swallow.

“You’re going to have to spend some time in the temple,” I said.

“I’ve never been to temple,” he said. He wasn’t looking at me. His back was to the wall. “I should get my ma.”

“She isn’t feeling well, either, is she?”

“Not for weeks. Bellini doesn’t want sick people working,” he said, “so I have to pick up the slack for ma.”

“Good man.” I ruffled his wet hair. He pulled away as if I had struck him.

***

Inside the public house, the owner woke at the noise of doors opening. When he saw me and my husband, he was quick to realize we weren’t paying customers. He eyed me, waiting for the trouble to start. His name was Bellini.

“People are dying here,” I said. “We came to help.”

He nodded, sternly, and told Franka’s son to lead us upstairs. He’d be up later, behind us. The boy took me upstairs, to the top floor, where the slate roof kept the sun’s heat long into the night. The staff slept here, sweltering in beds too hot for paying guests.

Franka’s son knew the way without a light. I followed him down a black hallway lined with buckets of rotting vomit. The heat did not improve the odor. No maid would serve this floor, and Franka was too sick to deal with these buckets herself, without encouragement. At least Bellini had the good sense to isolate the sick.

The boy opened a door at the end of the hall. Moonlight spilled over him from the doorway. “They’re sleeping,” he whispered. I walked in to the room. A woman and a man snored beneath an open window, curling into each other like wild roots despite the heat.

I had seen enough to know how deep the stain would run here. The whole place might need to be burned down. I turned to the boy. “They shouldn’t be together at a time like this,” I said. “He will only quicken her illness. You need to go downstairs, now, and tell Bellini to get everyone out of the inn. Everyone needs to leave. Go.”

The boy did not go far. I don’t think he understood what I was asking him to do. I don’t have children. I can’t make sense of them. Wolf pups would have understood everything, and instinctively known to flee this tainted hallway.

The bodies in the bed moaned. A woman’s voice, as thin as dying, rose from the tangled sheets. “Who’s there?”

I pushed the boy back from the door, and stepped into the room. I closed the door behind me. “I’m from the Church of Erin. I have come seeking a woman named Franka and a man named Nicola Calipari,” I said. “You are sick. I can heal you.”

The man awoke, too. “Who sent you?” he demanded. I recognized his voice from Jona’s memories, weak as it was. He was so frail. He tried to sit up in the dark, but couldn’t muster the strength. Franka pushed him down. Even in low light, I saw the man before me and knew his cheeks and eyes had sunken into his face since the day he drove a blade into Jona’s body.

“You need help,” I said. “The illness that plagues you is the poison of tainted blood, from Jona.” I grabbed clothes from the floor, and threw them at the bed. I could burn their clothes, later. We didn’t have the captain’s men here to enforce our commands. We’d have to work in stages. “Dress yourselves and come to the yard. Take anything that burns with you. Your bedsheets. Your clothes. Your books and papers. Bring it all.” I looked behind me towards the sounds of the first floor. Men were shouting. My husband was shouting. Bellini was not going to clear the building. “Actually,” I said, “let’s throw it all out the window. We’ll burn everything.”

I opened the room’s only window. I leaned out. I howled to my husband below.
I have them. Burn their things below.

He howled back to me.
I hear.

The mattress was the first thing to go through the window. It was little more than a large bag of feathers and hay sewn shut. It wasn’t hard to shove it through the gap. Little goose feathers floated down from holes in the seams. Next, I threw all the clothes they weren’t wearing, and all the buckets of the hall.

Sergeant Calipari could barely stand. Franka helped him into a chair. He heaved where he sat, but there wasn’t much inside of him. It spilled across his chest and stayed there. He didn’t have the strength to clear it away. She wasn’t as weak as him, yet.

I pushed Franka away from him. I told her to keep cleaning. I cleaned him up while Franka worked, throwing papers and the pillows from the furniture. She must have been embarrassed that anyone found her in such disarray. She must have been embarrassed that she hadn’t been able to help the sick as I could. I made Calipari swallow dandelion wine with mint to settle the burning inside of his guts. I didn’t have enough with me. It would take weeks to clean away the worst of his demon-fever. He was too sick to speak. We had to turn the tide inside of him, and burn everything he had touched that could not be cleaned.

***

In the yard, the fire attracted a crowd. Everywhere the demon stain had seeped in from Calipari’s deep fever of sweat and vomit, the fire caught it like kerosene, and coughed up balls of fire. People came out of their rooms to watch. Spectacle was more effective at clearing the building than our holy command.

My husband had already left, running through the dark to reach the nearest temple. We would need more supplies to fight the demon’s death tide rising inside his killer.

The drunks cheered now. Later on, their hangovers would be worse and the occasional bout of coughs would linger long into the night. Some among them might die, if they had been here night after night, drinking in the stain. My husband would try to walk the farms and houses here while I stayed with Calipari. The temple would help. Even Imam’s clergy would try to help. Death does not care whose god you serve.

***

I stayed with Calipari, in a cleaner room, on the second floor. After a few days, Franka was healthy enough to work downstairs. I couldn’t convince her not to work. We tried to quarantine the place, but Bellini only allowed us to block off the inn rooms. The tavern remained open against our command. We would fix that soon enough.

First, we focused on the man. As the stain faded from him, Sergeant Calipari was able to talk for long periods of time. With Calipari’s face and voice to feed Jona’s memories, a candle flickered in my mind, burning steady, then growing clear as scenes separated from each other. But Calipari himself was a hollowed out shell of the battering ram with legs that Jona had known. He should have been a tightly wound spring, not this feather on a mattress.

“What are you looking at me for?”

I had been staring. It made him uncomfortable.

I closed my eyes. “Do you feel strong enough to talk a while?”

“Yeah,” he said. The weakness of his voice betrayed him. I waited a while more. He said nothing else.

I smiled. “This isn’t an interrogation. I’m just picking up the pieces, healing the sick, and making sure there are no more.”

He still didn’t speak.

“We won’t hurt anyone, I promise. We’re trying to help.”

“Well,” he said. With my eyes closed, I imagined his face, his mouth screwed up like he was about to spit out the side where there was a gap in his teeth. “I don’t know. It wasn’t right, but, I know what happens when demon stains get involved. I don’t want to think about what comes next. Never good when we can’t handle it ourselves. You aren’t even human like us. You’re this other thing, a wolf or a priestess or something.”

I opened my eyes and reached out to touch his arm. “I’m human, Sergeant. I’m also a wolf. The divine goddess Erin wills me so.”

“What do you want to know, anyway?”

“Anything you want to tell me. If you want, you can just tell me about Jona. You don’t need to implicate anyone. We won’t be arresting anyone. If there’s a crime, we’ll hand the criminal over to the king’s men.”

He didn’t say anything for a long time. He was right not to believe me. I don’t know how familiar he was with church law, but my husband and I could kill anyone who carried the stain, or burn down any building. If he knew the extent of our duties, he wouldn’t speak a word. He rested silently, considering. I thought it a sign that he knew more than he was giving me. It could have been fatigue. He fell asleep for a time, as did I in my chair. Franka came up from downstairs with soup, and woke him up with a gentle hand. He ate what he could stomach of it. I didn’t touch a drop. I stayed there, quiet and still. Franka did not touch my arm to offer soup.

It took a long time, but Calipari finally spoke. “People get sick,” he said.

“They do.”

“People die?”

“Sometimes.”

“I know some people that died,” he said. “Lost plenty good boys. Lost so many. Some of them, I know why. Some of them, I don’t. You expect it to happen sometimes, especially you walking about down with the worst of everybody. Still…”

I nodded. He still had trouble looking at me. I had come here to save his life, and he couldn’t even make eye contact because he knew what might happen if he spoke. He knew something I could use. “Help me,” I said.

“Yeah, I guess I should.”

He did.

***

Jona was the Lord of Joni. He still had the family home, but no lands in the city or out of it. All the good furniture and finery were long sold off. The house stayed together because they only used a little bit of it, and watched the roof for signs of rot. His mother sewed dresses for noble families luckier than hers.