Never Knew Another (8 page)

That was Jona’s life, before he knew there was anyone else like him. This was before he found out about Salvatore, the immortal—I think his name is Salvatore—and before he met Rachel Nolander. This is the life he wouldn’t tell her about, under the willow tree, when she asked him.

There wasn’t anyone else in the world like him, and he felt it deep inside, all the way back until before he was born, as the Sentas said.

***

This was the life Jona knew. And then Rachel Nolander, a doppelganger’s daughter, came to Dogsland with her human half-brother.

They came on a ship.

CHAPTER IV

R
achel came to Dogsland on a ship. I had to think hard on it. I had to be sure so my husband could tell the Church of Imam, and the guard. They needed to find the smuggler’s ship and burn it, arrest the smuggler and hang him. I had to search for every hint of her I could find in Jona’s memory. When the candle burned low, and her hand pressed into his bare chest, and the sun lingered on the western horizon and Rachel was about to get up, get dressed and slip into the night and Jona was about to get up, get dressed and slip into the night, just before then, they talked.
What is your face before you are born?
she had asked Jona. He could ask the same of her. Rachel had never had anyone but her brother to talk to about her life. The demon’s mark couldn’t be cut away from her skin. Her hands were human enough, with most of her arms. Her face and neck appeared human if no one noticed her tongue. Everything else was twisted from the stain. Her father was a doppelganger demon that had burrowed into the skin of Djoss’ human father. Their mother was a Senta, telling fortunes and casting small spells for coin. Rachel hid her twisted flesh beneath Senta robes, like her mother had taught her. She practiced her mother’s faith, though the Senta would burn Rachel just like everyone would burn her. Her brother raised her after her mother died, and he was a hard man that knew no way to raise a girl. The koans raised her, studying them focused her mind into a form that carried her into the world, and her place inside of it.

When I entered Jona’s skull, I heard the coagulation of her stories inside of him, and saw her with my eyes, smelled her, tasted her. I saw deep.

This was his
Her.

***

We came to Dogsland on a boat.

The sloop was full of garbage. The old man who sailed the little boat alone never tossed anything away.

Below deck, damp papers clung together tied up with strings and stacked. The paper attracted flies chasing the greasy remains of the food eaten off the paper. Clothes were folded loosely across every spare spot of floor. Old crates and empty boxes piled against the walls. The shifting waters knocked them over sometimes, never to be picked up again.

Beneath the rotten crates, people and things came to Dogsland, and back out again, where no inspector would want to look. He knew what Rachel was, and he didn’t care. He was paid better for this than for the pinker’s weed. Rachel’s passage had cost almost everything she and her brother had. She had been found out. They had jumped out a second story window to escape the city. They had run to the seaport and moved fast to find a man who would take their coin.

Her brother, Djoss, stayed on deck to help with the sail and the rudder. They sailed for three days. Rachel sat alone in the dark. She felt the ocean below her rolling around. When she was bored, she snapped her fingers and watched the Senta fires flicker in the little cabin. She couldn’t keep a fire inside a wooden hull with all that rotting paper everywhere. All she could do was spark a little.
Snap. Snap. Snap.
When she wasn’t fidgeting from boredom, she crossed her legs, and closed her eyes, and her breathing drifted into soft syllables in her mother’s tongue. She searched for the truth in the koans she had memorized since she was young.

After nightfall, Djoss came down below to bring her food and eat with her. They ate sea tack in the dark. It was hard, and tasted like pig fat and sand. They drank weak tea made without any boiling water. Fire left a smoke trail in the sky that could be seen and followed.

Rachel tried to say she was sorry she had been found out. Djoss wouldn’t let her apologize. “People would never understand,” he said, “and there’s nothing anyone can do but move on.”

“Run, you mean,” she said. “Run for our lives before anyone can catch us.”

“Something like that,” he said.

“Maybe things will be different this time.” She didn’t believe that, but she had said it anyway.

The sloop faced fair weather all three days. The channel’s famous storms were missing. The old captain leaned back in his seat. “Must be blessed by the Nameless,” he muttered. “Not a cloud in sight.”

***

We landed north of here.

On the third day, they reached Dogsland. The customs agent took one look into that filthy sloop, and curled his nose. He handed the Captain a slip of paper from across the bow, and rowed on to the next ship.

At night, the true cargo unloaded. Rachel and Djoss stood on a rocky shoreline next to abandoned warehouses. Djoss pushed the old man’s sloop back into the sea, and waved. The old man didn’t wave back.

Rachel squinted at the moon over their heads. She couldn’t see any stars. The street lamps drowned out the night sky, their gathered light pushing against the sea clouds. The moon slipped out from behind the sky’s curtain like a pale, bodiless belly. A bad omen, after all that good weather. Storms were coming back, and soon.

By morning, rain fell in sheets. The streets ran black with rivers of mud. The sewers belched a thick, green sludge that smelled like noxious death and fed the street rivers. Rachel and Djoss waited it out on an abandoned stairwell, where a crumbling roof held back the worst of the water.

“I guess we made it,” Rachel said.

“Yeah,” said Djoss, “You know anything about this city?”

“No,” she said.

He frowned. “Me neither.”

The streets were flooded. Anybody walking there was ankle deep in muddy sewer water. Dead rats floated past clinging to paper and small sticks. Something else floated past, in a wad of cloth. A doll or a dead baby drifting through the flooded street, catching on the ridges of wheel-ruts. Rachel closed her eyes. When she opened them again, it was gone.

She forced a smile. “We’ll be fine,” she said. “It’s the biggest city in the world. Nobody will notice me here.” Her hands were balled up into fists inside of her pockets. She kept looking down to make sure her sleeves were still laced shut across her forearms.

“It’s not your fault,” he said.

This far north of the main city, the buildings were still cracked and bruised from the war nineteen years ago. All the men and women here walking the streets were shipwrecks with feet. All these cracks and angles pushing through the floods, they sank in every step.

***

We did the best we could, but there wasn’t much.

They spent weeks on the street, sleeping in doorways. The winter rain was ceaseless, and if it broke it didn’t break for long.

In the heaviest downpours, the landscape blurred before Rachel’s eyes. The mud, the cracked boards, and the faces in the street were all the same weary entity swirling its sea-beast tendrils like roots across the mud.

She closed her eyes again.

If they stayed on the street, people would notice that only her clothes had a shadow. Someone would step on her boot and discovered strange lumps that shouldn’t have been there instead of toes. Sleeping in doorways, sleeping in abandoned buildings, sleeping in hovels and trash, she was always at risk that her serpent’s tongue might fall out of her mouth where passing folks could see. They sought out shadows and hidden places in the night, but this was no guarantee. She tried to sleep face down when she could, deep in a shadow. They walked all day in between the sweeping storms, hidden in the crowds, and selling cheap illusions when Djoss couldn’t find work for the day.

Everywhere Rachel went, she was afraid.

There was work or there was not, safe and unsafe. That was all to the ones like Rachel and Djoss, on the street. If anyone came near, they didn’t stop to talk about anything that wasn’t a job. Rachel and Djoss pulled back into shadows and corners and crowds and walked away.

We kept moving.

***

We came south. Djoss and I kept going where we thought there might be work, and maybe a place off the street. It wasn’t fast.

Djoss and Rachel reached the edge of the warehouse district.

Down the street to the south, four men swung brickbats at each other. Three other men crawled away, crumpled in the blows. Blood was on the ground.

“A good sign,” said Djoss. He smiled at the war in the middle of an avenue. It was the kind of thing that meant no one would be looking after them. “Yeah, we’ll find a place down this way if we keep moving.”

“I hope not.”

“Hope so, you mean. Rowdy work’s easy to come by, easy to keep.”

“Djoss, please…”

He kept smiling. He led her down through the streets, south and south into the night.

Past the warehouses, a river curved through the levies to the sea. They crossed a ferry in morning twilight with the crowds of men on their way to work among the abattoirs. It cost almost everything they had left.

We kept moving.

A cock crowed in early light. Dawn pushed against the jagged rooftops.

Somewhere, birds were singing.

The walking shop-girls were already awake with their handcarts. Street boys played dice on a fat brick fence for the honor of skinning a cat they had found in a rat-trap. Warehousemen chewed on bread and sawdust sausages while they walked to work. A skinny woman puked into the sewer-grate. She cursed her lover’s face.

Djoss bought an apple. Rachel snatched it from him before he could take a bite, and looked at it carefully. She shined it with her bare hands. He grabbed it back from her. “Get your own,” he said, and bit into the apple. With a frown, he looked down at it. The apple was all brown beneath its red skin. He ate a few bites anyway, then offered Rachel the rest. It tasted like wet rot. “I’ll get my own,” she said.

“If you do, you’re sharing.”

She tossed the core into a ditch.

“No, Djoss,” she said. “No, I won’t share an apple with you.”

Djoss blinked. They couldn’t share anything if she bit it first. He knew that.

Behind them, a homeless man pulled the core from the ditch, stuffing it in his mouth. Rachel felt a chill move over her skin.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said, glancing behind her.

Djoss had seen it, too. The two walked faster down the street.

***

We found the Pens, and we stayed.

Djoss and Rachel were in a cobbled street lined with colorful shops. They sat down at a street café for tea and biscuits that tasted like they were both made from the same wet, brown paste, and watched people walking.

Rachel frowned because no one was saying hello to anyone. It didn’t seem like a friendly place. Djoss smiled for the same reason. It was the kind of place he could find his brand of work.

Wind came up from the abattoirs, carrying the smell of animals kept in close pens and death. Rachel put down her tea and biscuit and tried to cover her nose. Djoss choked and held his breath until the wind passed. He nodded at her, trying not to laugh.

“Gotta be rowdy work around here. Smell it, can’t you? Nobody come looking for us if it smells like that. Good folk don’t bother looking.”

“We’ll get used to it,” she said. “We just need to…” Her eyes were still watering. She waved her hand. Djoss took her tea from her and tossed the dregs from her cup. He dropped what was left of her biscuit and smashed it into the ground, stomping on it. No one could eat what she left behind. No one could get suspiciously sick. He hadn’t done this since they came to the city. He was already planning on staying in this district longer.

***

Djoss fell in with some people when he was looking for work. It just happened. All that wandering, and it happened out of nowhere.

A butcher kept his pigs in a pen behind his shop. He wasn’t a big enough shop to house his animals at the merchant exchange, to get them slaughtered in the big abattoirs. He kept them in his yard, killed them in his shop, and sold them here. Only sixteen pigs remained, rooting in their own muck, waiting for their turn beneath the knife. They were small. Poor shops like this one killed what came in, butchered it and ground it all into sawdust sausage.

Djoss stood at the gate when the butcher came out, clearing his throat. Djoss wasn’t alone. Three boys were there, too, looking for work. They were probably brothers: tallest, middle-sized, and smallest with the same homemade burlap clothes. Djoss was like a tree beside them.

Everywhere’s different. In the north, he’d have knocked on the door in front of the building and requested work in writing, with a sealed certificate from the city work council, forged. Here, in Dogsland, he stood back and waited. They made you wait to make sure you’re serious.

Rachel waited in a nearby alley, watching from a shadow.

Three pigs went to their death in the shop without anyone speaking a word. The butcher was a small man, with ropy arms and crooked teeth. When he came out for the fourth pig, he sneered at the beggars at his gate. “You want something?”

The tallest boy spoke first. “Just looking for work. Anything you got.”

“Got nothing. I do all the work here. You tell your dad he stinks worse than my pigs. I don’t hire dirty people. Gotta have clean hands.”

Djoss rubbed his hands together. They were nearly black from grime and calloused.

“He ain’t our dad,” said the middle-sized boy.

Djoss said nothing. He frowned down at his hands. There was nowhere to clean them. The water was all muddy here.

“Hey,” said the middle boy. “I’m hungry.”

“Get out of here, all of you,” the butcher growled.