When We Were Executioners (8 page)

Jona yawned. He asked to be a scrivener for a day on account of how tired he was.

Nic handed Jona a pass. “Go home,” said Nicola.

“What?”

“You worked all the other night, and if I know you, you spent all day and night in trouble, and you still need some sleep,” said Nicola, “Don’t think my eyes and ears in the city don’t tell me about your wanderings. Take two days off to get your head back. Sleep in. Sergeant’s orders.”

Jona scowled. “I don’t get paid at home,” he said.

Nicola rolled his eyes. He held the pass out further. “You don’t get paid if we kick you on account of disobeying,” said Calipari, “Get out of here, Corporal. Go home. Sleep. That’s an order.”

Jona shrugged. He stretched his hands over his head as if he was tired.

Jona signed his pass. He turned to the door. Nicola clicked his tongue at Jona’s back. Jona turned. A large bottle of red wine soared towards Jona’s hands. Jona caught the bottle. He read the label, and nodded at Nic. “Thanks, Nic,” said Jona.

Calipari winked, and shooed Jona out the door.

* * *

And the engineers kept working. A new fellow found the mantle of Chief on his shoulders. He hid in the palace.

Chief Mishle Leva’s funeral was lavish. Lady Sabachthani, in black, stood on the front row, gently weeping behind her thin, black veil.

And down where the porters pulled crates from the ships and loaded them into the flatboats near the rivers and animals in crates rolled in from all over the world and passed through the slaughterhouses at the Pens and all the vendors walked barefoot in mud and ragpickers picked through the piles of trash and Jona and his boys walked about and Rachel lived and Djoss lived and thousands of people quietly tried to find their little piece of happiness—down there—no one batted an eye if they heard the news.

Didn’t bother the Pens and Docks and Warehouses a bit if some fellow got rolled. People got rolled everyday.

CHAPTER XIV

Jona took Calipari’s wine to Rachel’s apartment.

He wanted to see if she was home alone. He had been to her apartment a couple times. Her lock was worthless. He shook the handle and lifted it up until the old gears fumbled loose. When he opened the door, he saw her dozing in her bed. She hadn’t even looked up at the door noise.

Jona had never seen her brother, but he had seen the signs of the man. Bread, half-eaten, staled and molded on the counter. Huge, mud footprints led to his bed. His sour sweat smells spread across the room from his filthy bed on the other side of the apartment. Djoss wasn’t home now. He was rarely around in the daylight, unless he was sleeping.

Jona placed the wine on the floor next to Rachel’s bed. He sat down in front of her. He watched her eyes moving behind her eyelids. She was dreaming.

On the other side of the room’s wall, a young boy read aloud to an old woman. The old woman kept correcting the boy’s mistakes. Farther away in the building, a baby cried, a man snored, and even farther, women shouted gossip between windows while pulling in their wash. All around them, people were falling in and out of love, behaving lewdly, and everyone ought to be ashamed of themselves, because there was gossip about everyone.

Jona couldn’t find a corkscrew in the kitchen. He couldn’t find wine glasses, either. All he found were little tea cups and a tea pot with no smoke stain on the bottom like every other tea pot in the world.

He gave up. He pulled off his shirt. He slipped into bed next to her.

She smelled him. She woke slightly. She nuzzled into his neck, and drifted off again.

* * *

What do you do when you’re alone and don’t know what to do with yourself?

Nothing.

When a Senta doesn’t know what to do, the Senta closes her eyes. The Senta tries to breathe carefully and continuously. Each breath must fill the lungs, burn a little, and then fall like liquid from the mouth in a steady, flowing breeze. To seek the Unity, first the Senta seeks to find the places inside that are unharmonious.

Sounds like doing nothing to me, but I’m no Senta.

Sit up straight, allow the blood to flow freely, and feel the breath seeping in through the body to each relaxed finger and toe. Close the ears next. Close the skin. Seek a heartbeat, and the swell and sink of the lungs like bellows. The Senta seeks to purify the being into Will alone. In a limitless universe—our unbroken one—the center of the universe is the point of strongest Will.

I bet it’s nothing like a good bottle of wine. Do you have a corkscrew?

Listen. Look at your hands. We of the winds and the sun do not question Will. We see it in our hands. We see that animals have feet, teeth, hair, milk, faces, shit, sex, and blood. We see that only monkeys and men have hands. Monkeys use their hands to climb trees. Men use hands to cut down trees, or plant them new.

So, you don’t have a corkscrew?

When I dreamcast of monsters, they are men with giant palms, all colored pink or black or red as blood. When I dreamcast of the dying men, their bodies end at the elbow. Blind men see with their hands. Deaf men talk with their hands. Men with no corkscrew use their hands. Use your hands, Jona.

I don’t think I’m strong enough for that.

Well, I didn’t really want any wine, anyway. I don’t want to work drunk. That place is unpleasant enough without an unharmonious mind.

This bottle will never open without a corkscrew.

Then, the bottle is empty of wine. It contains only the hope of wine.

If we go to my place, we’ll have a corkscrew.

I will stay here and sleep some more. I am not like you, Jona.

Do you want me to go?

Yes. Goodbye. Knock, next time. My brother might be here, you know.

* * *

Aggie with her sad eyes, and her face all dirty and her nose a bit crooked, and her hands reaching out for Jona’s gifts. Letters, blood pie.

Blood pie laced with demon weed, and demon blood. She ate the pie, and opened the letter and didn’t speak to Jona. She read the letter again, while finishing the pie.

The letter was a forgery Jona bought from a professional letter-writer who wrote what Jona told the fellow to write and made the letters romantic and hopeful and said Salvatore’s coming to save the girl.

Then Jona took the letter to Salvatore at his café, or his ball or his tiny little rented room, and Salvatore fumbled for something to write with. Salvatore read the letter and shrugged it off and made his mark.

And Jona took the letter here.

“Imam, I am too grateful for this torture,” she said. She fell back to her cot, her eyes glazed and the letter pulled against her chest.

Flies and gnats swarmed all over her filthy, thinned face. She didn’t bother knocking them away. When her mouth dangled open—while she read—flies landed on her teeth. They sucked at the thin, sick rot with their greedy little legs.

Jona washed her face off with a bowl of water while the demon weed held her mind still.

One time—just once—he touched her breast through her rags. He frowned at himself afterwards. He cursed Salvatore. He stood up over her. He watched her sleep, until he couldn’t stand it anymore. He walked out of the room. Her soft warmth lingered in his palm, like a rash.

He tried not to think about the girl.

Instead, he thought about killing Salvatore, just like he had done Lord Elitrean’s son.

* * *

Jona slipped into the door at evening twilight, a little juiced from the liquor and the duck sausage that was barely cooked and mostly made of bloody oats all drenched in malt vinegar. He shoved his way in, kicked his boots off in the foyer, and stretched his arms over his head.

“Ma, I’m home!” he shouted.

And the old woman, like a sparrowhawk, landed on her son from the kitchen hall. Spit-wet fingers scrubbed at Jona’s cheeks, and fixed his hair. Spindly seamstress fingers scurried over every wrinkle in his shirt.

Jona winced. “What the…? Ma! Back off!”

“Lady Ela Sabachthani is sitting in our kitchen.”

“What?” said Jona, “What’s she doing here?”

“Offer her something to drink. Offer her something to eat.

She won’t accept it, because she knows we got nothing, but you have to offer, anyhow. Anyhow, behave yourself, Jona. Are you drunk? You smell like liquor. Sober up. Hold still a minute. Let me adjust your shirt. What is this, blood?”

“It’s duck blood,” said Jona.

“Why you always get so much blood all over your shirt all the time? Is it your blood? Whose blood is it?”

“I told you,” said Jona, “It’s duck blood.”

Lady Ela Sabachthani touched Lady Joni’s hands. Ela smiled at Jona.

“Milady,” said Jona’s mother. She pulled away from Jona.

Lady Sabachthani took over for Lady Joni’s hands, adjusting Jona’s dirty, bloody, wrinkled uniform. “Lord Joni, I haven’t seen you in some time. Is there somewhere we can talk alone?”

Jona looked at Lady Sabachthani standing in his foyer in her fine dress. He bent down at the knee, stiffly, to pick up his boots. He nodded at her.

“Well?” she said.

“The roof, milady,” he said.

“The what?” said Lady Sabachthani. She leaned forward, like she hadn’t heard.

Jona pointed up. “We’ll go to the roof,” he said.

Lady Sabachthani cocked her head. “The… roof?”

Jona smirked. “You’ve never been to your own roof?”

She straightened his collar one last time. “Of course not,” she said.

Jona gestured to the stairwell near the door. “Well, I’ll show you mine. Just climb the stairs up. Keep going until you run out of stairs, and you’re there,” he said, “You want something to drink? I don’t think our tea is as fine as yours, but I bet we got some brandy hiding somewhere.”

“Anything will be fine.”

Jona’s mother rushed off to the kitchen to find brandy. Jona knew he had already drunk all the brandy, but he wanted his mother to disappear awhile looking for it.

At the roof, he walked her to the edge. They looked down at people bustling. Singsong cries of the street vendors rose above the dwindling birdsongs of early nightfall. All the parasols in the misty streets like confetti-colored blood pulsed through the city’s black dirt veins.

Jona turned his back to the city. He placed his boots on the ground next to his bare feet. He leaned against the boundary wall. He looked at Lady Sabachthani in the lamplight spilling up from the street. “I’m glad you came, but it scares me that you came here alone. People will question your motives. That heart of yours…” he said. He shook his head.

“What about my heart?” she snapped back.

“Well,” said Jona, “your heart is a deadly thing to give to a man these days.”

She smiled, sadly. “Not my heart, Jona, just my hand,” she said. “My heart is the only thing that keeps me alive, sometimes, through all of this.”

“Right,” said Jona. Jona looked past her, at the door where he worried his mother might be eavesdropping. “So, let me get this down solid on account of my ma’s ears. You aren’t here to ask me to take that deadly little hand of yours, are you?”

Lady Sabachthani placed her hand next to Jona’s on the wall. She leaned over, looking down at the street. She sighed. “Not today, Jona. I’ve been playing a few suitors against each other, all convinced the throne is theirs once I settle a few accounts in the city. Two of these suitors are gone. One is dead, the other missing. I have to find out if young Elitrean is still alive. He is the most-logical choice, considering his wealth and his father’s prestige.”

Jona moved his hand away from hers, into his own lap. “You would let yourself be rumored into a marriage with that disgusting thing?”

She nodded. “No. His father would be too much trouble. If I don’t marry before the king dies, I don’t know what will happen,” she said, “The council won’t vote for just a queen. Once a king is chosen, his hand is his own, and he might never marry. I am not beautiful enough to have royal bastards, Jona. Elitrean is a powerful man, even if his son leaves much to be desired.”

“So, you want me to find out about Elitrean’s boy for you?”

“I do,” she said, “I need someone I can trust. You’ve been out of all this mess, but you know all about it. And you know Elitrean’s other life better than anyone else I trust. I need you to find Elitrean, and bring him to me alive.”

Jona took a deep breath. He furrowed his brow, and looked her, carefully, in her face. “I can’t do that, Ela,” he replied.

“Why not?” she said.

“Elitrean’s made his share of enemies.You can’t protect me in the Pens,” said Jona, “Where I walk about, they don’t even know your name. And if someone dropped the Chief, they might have dropped Elitrean, too, and we just haven’t found the boy’s bones.”

“Jona,” she said, “I need to find him alive.”

“His children won’t be clean.”

“Then he’ll die, and they’ll die, and a new king with clean heirs will mount me before it’s too late.”

“You think you got time for two husbands?”

“I won’t if we can’t find Elitrean soon. I am not a young woman, Lord Joni. I know this better than anyone in the world. I am also not beautiful. Men tell me I am beautiful, and I know that what is beautiful to them is my title, my lands, and my family’s power. Lord Joni, do you think that I am beautiful?”

“I’m the wrong fellow to ask.”

“Do you think I’m beautiful, Jona? You would never lie to me. You would tell me the truth. Am I beautiful, Jona?”

“Why do you want it from me, Lady Sabachthani? I can’t be honest with you.”

“Every woman wants to be beautiful to someone. You’re avoiding the question, and you will be honest.”

“I think you’re beautiful sometimes, and then sometimes you’re not.”

“How can that be? Isn’t it all or nothing with men?”

“When it’s just you and me here like this, talking like real people and being honest. Then, you’re beautiful. As soon as you get in front of a bunch of other people, it’s like your skin is the same, but the person inside of it is different. And you’re all haughty, and you let maids do everything, and you let people bow and scrape all over you and you show off your father’s... Anyway, right now, on my roof, and it’s just you and me and we’re being honest and nobody’s looking—here, you’re beautiful.” He was lying, of course. She might have believed him.