When We Were Executioners (24 page)

The men collected their things quietly. They walked into the dark.

Jona called up to the engineers for the measuring line. He held it down to the bottom of the sewer, and felt the rope tugged taut from above.

* * *

Workmen came the day after Tripoli’s funeral.

The Chief Engineer, in his wisdom, had designed heavier equipment that sneak thieves couldn’t carry alone, and nobody could fence easy. Two strong men, each holding half a forked handle, slammed huge picks into the stones. Two strong men pulled the mud into iron wheelbarrows with giant shovels.

They sang while they worked, and the streets filled with the weary baritones of the birth of the new canal.

Shopgirls spun their own singsong into the songs of the workmen.

Fresh-faced girl with the restless palms 

I’ve got apples in my palms

Tossed me off for all I own

Fresh flowers for the lady left at home 

Now I work all day and night long 

Apples fresh as the dawn

Because my girl gave me a son

Sweet corn here, hot as the sun

Jona stood on the roof in the morning light, waiting for his uniform to dry. He watched the men with their giant equipment and their tiny, shirtless bodies, a few blocks away over the rooftops. He listened to the songs from the street. Somebody had a drum and beat the rhythm for the digging men.

And Jona listened, his uniforms like flags on the line drying in the sea breeze.

CHAPTER VII

The ragmen’s kids picked through the trash. The ragmen made cheap paper from the ragpickers’ recovered trash. This paper, the ragmen sold to the temples and businessmen of the district. The temples and businessmen used

the ragman’s paper as receipts and cheap scratch paper. The receipts, the items bought, and the notepaper fell back into the trash piles on the street. The ragmen’s kids recovered the fibers and brought them to the ragmen.

The forest has the cycle of leaves. The city has the cycle of paper.

I write this down, to remind my husband and me to see this world as it is, to help us search with Erin’s guidance and understanding.

The ragpickers tell us what they know of the dead. They are too afraid of my husband because he is a man, with steel grey hair, and a body as hard as a wolf ’s. I must go with him to search it out, give them apples and dried figs.

Salvatore is missing from these pages, but maybe he will be found if I pass through them all. I see into the way of the streets, and the men who lived among them. I smell their blood spilling, and pouring from their ruined skin.

He wakes with the night fall. He keeps nothing in his room but his hammock. His tools are hidden in the street stones, loose bricks, and sewers of the city. He is immortal, and must be killed. He has lived too long. His mind can’t hold the memories of his moments. He is patterns and shapes of a man. He loves until it is no longer easy, then he cannot remember her name for long, for she is gone from his mind.

Take a piece of paper, and write upon it seven times, along the same lines. Write again and again, for centuries. In time, the paper is destroyed. The ink remains, carrying the shape of the letters in the strokes, but only where so many brushstrokes have moved.

To seduce a lonely woman in the night, to find a way to use her hands for thievery, to take something innocent and bend it away until it is lost.

Aggie waits in her cell for him. All he has to do is show up and she will walk away with him, out of the prison and into life. She won’t leave without Salvatore. She won’t believe in anything but death without him.

And she is dead. He never came for her.

I write this down because I wish for her soul to know that my husband and I will come for Salvatore. We will come for him, and there will be peace for her, in his death. I write down my wish because I feel it, and in writing what I feel, I can move beyond it, to other felt things inside the memories.

We search the streets where a weed rules even the king’s men, who would rather push out new gangs than fight the old ones. No one can stop it, and no matter what the Captain of the Guard says, it’s better to have demon weed quietly than to beat it back to the ships in a pool of blood, for it only to return and return and return. Would that my husband and I could find the fields of the flowers, and burn them to the ground. Even then, the men on the streets would pay for it.

There are women who carry mattresses on their backs. They run after the ships that are coming in to port. They shout for the men to pay them for a trip into an alley. All they have to do is lean back, with the dirty mattress to catch their fall.

Ragpickers run after them, shout names at them and throw rocks and bricks at the mattresses. When they’re older, they’ll know a few by name. Probably, they’ll find a few of them dead coughing, bleeding from the lungs, with the pink blood and fluid seeping out of their pores that eats their skin from the inside out. Pink mattresses from the blood, and black from the mud.

People will buy anything they want. It cannot be stopped.

The trees of our woodlands wait. They do not mind the axes of the farmers, for the farmers will fall down and feed the roots of trees. The roofs will fall. The wolves will return to rule the streets, and eat the dogs that remain to gnaw on the festering corpses of their masters.

And Salvatore, who would live longer than this city, a festering wound among the night streets, pouring his loneliness upon the loneliest girls of the city, must be laid low.

All things must die. Everything must die.

Rachel, I’m sorry.

* * *

Rachel never told Jona about the whistles of the ragpickers, and Calipari never bothered with the origin of them, either.

The whistles were a good idea, so they needed no explanation. One boy had a whistle, and blew it to call his friends for help. It worked. Everyone else acquired their own whistles. Soon, the streets were alive with whistles converging like king’s man bells.

In the official city reports about this little street gang, the whistles were what first got the guards’ attention. Suddenly, every ragpicking mudskipper had a whistle, and suddenly they were using them to fight back in packs against grown men.

The real smugglers—the big fellows that could arrange a meeting with the Night King—figured it was a front for something else. None of them believed the kids could be in the real business without leadership.

Calipari was getting tips from all over about the three men who ran an unaffiliated den in quick bursts, moving all over as soon as they thought someone might be looking for them. They never used the same room two nights in a row.

But, the kids were in the real business.

There wasn’t a leader. There was just money. The ragpickers swarmed over someone, ripped his weed from his pockets, and sold it to Turco. The only leader was hunger. Street kids didn’t make enough money to sleep off the street. If they wanted to eat, they had to steal.

This blighted place needed orphanages. It needed schools and farms and parks.

Dogsland, I smell your ruin on the wind. The patterns and weights of this city carve away at the foundations, until all towers will crumble, all rich men will flee or die.

* * *

Rachel never knew the origin of the gang’s name to tell it to Jona. Neither did Sergeant Calipari. Neither did Salvatore. No one knew but Turco, Djoss, and Dog. Turco’s dead. Dog is as good as dead. And Djoss is one whom we seek, either dead or alive.

If you seek to know the source, than find Djoss alive and ask him. We seek him out for answers about demons, like Salvatore and Rachel. We do not concern ourselves with the etymologies of street gangs. I know what I can see and smell and know from the memories of Jona. I see with my eyes into his world, and see what I see, know what I know.

* * *

Jona heard it said, while walking around his streets on the Night King’s business, looking for a fellow that needed a knife in his back. Jona heard it from an alley. He peeked around, and Turco was there with a ragman against a wall, a knife against the ragman’s cheek.

Turco said it. “You and your mudskippers helping us? We’re the Three Kings of Dogsland. We got our signs all over.”

And Jona kept walking because he was on the Night King’s business.

Three Kings was a simple gang, for simple folk.

* * *

I’m in this alley, sniffing out the stink of Salvatore’s paths, dropping holy water wherever the mud collects an evil strength. Maybe Salvatore pissed behind this particular crate when he was alive. Maybe Salvatore lost blood there.

Smell Salvatore in the dirt, pour the holy water in a ring around the stink. Burn the center with good kerosene.

In front of me is a tribal scrawl in faded black. The Three Kings’ crowns stare back. I touch the ink, and think about Dog.

Djoss tried to get Dog to stop painting crowns, because Djoss knew the fastest way to lose turf is to claim it. Dog grunted. Dog kept stealing ink or paint and putting crowns up everywhere he went. He used his thumb if he couldn’t find a rag or a stick.

Turco didn’t seem to care either way, because the money was good.

* * *

Djoss came back with decent food from a different district that didn’t carry the stink of the Pens. Rachel was in bed, looking up at her brother with all this food.

“Hey,” she said.

Djoss didn’t look at her right away, busy hiding food in the cupboards. “Don’t say anything,” he said.

“I didn’t.”

Djoss turned around, with a loaf of bread in his hands that was so fresh it was still steaming. “It’s like this,” said Djoss, “Only way to protect yourself from the bigger dogs is to be one.” He handed her the hot loaf of bread.

Rachel passed the hot bread from one hand to the other. “Or, not to be a dog at all. Be careful, Djoss,” said Rachel. She was talking about the hot bread in her hands. “We should leave the city.”

“You see something I don’t?” Djoss reached down to the loaf. He tore off a piece of the bread. He shoved it into his mouth, steaming hot. Crumbs fell all on her bed.

“Sometimes I do,” said Rachel.

Djoss shoved the rest of the bread into his mouth. “What do you see?” Crumbs spilled down his shirt when he talked, like snow from his scruffy beard. He needed a shave, a haircut, clean clothes. Instead, he had bought food.

“I don’t know what it means,” said Rachel, “and I don’t think you’d stop even if I told you what I saw. You like the money. You like being important to those kids.” She stared at crumbs like snow falling all over him, and all over the floor.

“If you know something, or think something I need to know…?”

“Djoss, I see lots of women dying all around me,” said Rachel, “these women I work with are always dying. I hope none of them are really visions of us hiding behind the skin of foolish bliss.”

“Where would we go if we left here? How would we get out?”

“I don’t know, Djoss. I don’t want to leave the city. I like it here, too. I have… I have friends here. A friend here. I can be alone in a crowded room with him. I can move with the whores among the different houses whenever I think someone is looking too close. I wish you had safer work.”

“It’s safe as anything. Safe as walking down that street. Kids are running in packs like dogs. Mudskippers get teeth, now.”

* * *

It’s not safe. What he’s doing is dangerous, Jona. But, what else can we do?

I got nothing for him. He could go birdie on his crew. A few coin in that, and he’s out forever.

No. Never that. They’d kill him. Anyone would kill him.

Rachel stitched a gash shut along her brother’s back. She didn’t want to talk about the injury. She asked about what caused the injury, instead. “Where does this stuff come from, anyway?

“Stevedores get it from the crates. Mudskippers lift it. We’re secondhand thieves. First, the stevedores and killing floor cutters are lifting their cut of the stuff out of the meat. Mudskippers are after them. They got whistles, now. Hard to stop a whole bunch of them. They don’t have Turco’s connections to do anything with it. We buy it, and we can set it up somewhere with a pipe. Turco has a pipe. Or Dog. I don’t know. I watch the door. They come and they pay and all I have to do is watch.”

Rachel poured hot wine over the wound. Djoss gasped.

“I knew that already,” she said. “It’s a weed, right?”

“That’s what they call it,” said Djoss.

“So, where does it come from? What kind of plant is this, and where does it come from?”

“I don’t know,” said Djoss. “It comes from the stevedores,” said Djoss. “They drop it off. I cut it into smaller packages. We give it to the mudskippers and the ragmen. Who cares where it comes from? All we have to know is where it’s going.”

Rachel keeps this thought she reserved for Jona, when they curled together, briefly, in the morning light.
But where is Turco going, Djoss?
A creature stepped off the ships one day, and the world behind him remained as mysterious as the weed that fed his desires.

The Unity ignored Turco’s past, for his death. She looked at him sometimes, and she saw no hands, and no feet. She saw his legs moving, and his arms moving, but the man was like a ghost to her, floating through the air, unable to touch the world where he moved. Hands are the things that make a man. Hands are what helps him control his world. Without hands, without feet, just a hunger on the street, grinding down and going nowhere.

When Turco spoke, she couldn’t hear anything from his lips but a gust of wind that blew in from the water and left as empty as it came.

* * *

My hand touched a large cobblestone.

I looked around me at the road signs and the doors. I knew exactly where I was, in a flash of borrowed memories. There, the zig-zag path to the animal pits. There, the tobacco shop. That way, the red brick ruin of the old brewery. Six steps backwards and I was in the Pens District’s new canal, that had made this awful place an island. Six steps forward and old wheel-ruts from dozens of carriages that had stopped in this field of mud remained like statues until the rain melted the old ruts away in new mud.