“People die all the time for nothing,” said Jona, “So, I’d rather talk about how beautiful you are, okay?”
Rachel threw another penny down, and shoved the rubber hose at Jona’s face. “Only if we’re red drunk,” she said, “Red, red drunk!”
Jona bit the hose with his teeth. “You’re beautiful,” he mumbled.
* * *
Tripoli’s folks came in from vineyards in the north hills. Tripoli’s father built casks for new wine. When Tripoli’s father got to town, he already had a casket for his son’s ashy remains, handmade from solid oak, and far bigger than the blackened bones needed.
The Lieutenant got some of the other districts to cover the Pens, so all of Calipari’s boys could attend the service.
Tripoli’s parents were Imam’s folks. An Imam Priest preached of paradise, and ashes to ashes, water to water, and bliss. Each soul that fell away from the flesh returned again to life, until the lessons of immortality taught the paradox of the Breaking, where the heavens tore to pieces while the earth remained whole.
(Rachel frowned when Jona told her that. “The false breaking,” she said, correcting him.)
Jona stared at the casket. Jona wondered if his soul would be reborn among the demons, deep below the skin of the earth, over and over, until he understood the true power of evil.
Tripoli’s father led the cart with his son down to the water. His wife, wailing beside him, didn’t exist to that old man. His jaw—he looked just like Tripoli, too—clamped like a steel trap against the grief. He stared off to where the water dropped below the horizon.
The casket shoved off from the funeral dock near the temple. The priest lit the arrowhead on fire. The priest drew his bow, aimed up, and loosed the arrow. The shot arced like riding an invisible rainbow. The arrow smacked the casket on the first shot. The arrow trembled. The casket rocked. The fire crawled down the arrowhead like falling down a mast. Then, the deck of the casket burned all over the top, and then down to the center of Tripoli’s ashen body.
Jona glanced at the priest. The priest couldn’t hide his satisfaction with the shot. Usually took priests a few to get a hit, and sometimes they couldn’t hit it at all, and the casket just rolled away into the water.
Jona frowned at that. People shouldn’t look proud now.
* * *
Tripoli’s landlord never showed his face for the ceremony, or in the flat afterwards. After what happened to the furniture, no one had expected him to show his face.
Thieves had already stolen everything inside the apartment. Landlords liked how fast sneak thieves worked. A word here or there with the local toughs, and a room unlocked in the dark, and the room’s ready to rent again in hours.
Tripoli’s parents didn’t seem to mind.
Everybody had brought some kind of food, and Calipari put his coat on the ground, so they’d have somewhere to spread the food out, like a picnic. People ate, but nobody talked. Tripoli’s folks didn’t know these city toughs and these city toughs didn’t want to really talk about Tripoli in front of his parents. They all just ate.
The dingy yellow walls echoed every little sound. Jona was afraid to eat too loud. He didn’t want to be heard.
After the food was gone, everybody went into the street. The old man walked through the king’s men, shaking hands and thanking the boys for looking out for Tripoli when he was alive.
Then, the old woman leaned on her husband’s shoulder. She reached up to old man’s stony face.
And that got him.
The man, standing by the funeral dock, crumpled into his wife’s arms like they were holding each other up now, but neither one should have been standing at all because both were broken.
Jona turned away. He thought about how beautiful Rachel was by candlelight. He thought about how it couldn’t have been his fault because Tripoli had gotten a little sick now and then, but never this sick.
But it was Jona’s fault.
* * *
The boys were drinking hard for four nights and tossing any street toughs hard. Word spread fast that king’s men were in a black mood. The district was dead quiet.
Private Pup became Corporal Pup.
A new private showed up a few days later, fresh from the guard posts along the southern frontier and ecstatic to be back in Dogsland. Two days scrivening, and he wasn’t ecstatic anymore.
Three weeks later, Jona looked around the station house at morning muster, waiting for the graveyard crew to cut back and report out. Everybody was there, laughing and up for a kick except for Tripoli.
Jona couldn’t, for the life of him, imagine what it was like to have Tripoli there instead of Pup. Black tears swelled in Jona’s gut thinking about that. Jona clamped the tears down until the urge passed.
His tears were poison, after all.
* * *
Chief Engineer Mishle Leva didn’t stop on the day that Tripoli died. Jona had to take over the sewer diving while a kid from an alley was paid to get the Sergeant. Another kid stood over the smoldering body to keep the ragpickers off the toxic corpse.
The rain was gone for such a short window, and no time could be spared over just one death. Jona understood that. (In his mind, he thought about how the Night King might want the Chief Engineer killed.)
Underground in his first sewer dive, tired men looked up at Jona from pallets spread on the damp ground. They didn’t say anything. The light slanted down from the open grate onto the shriveled heads and the men there looked like bones in burlap.
Jona tossed them a few coins. “Things are changing, soon, fellows. Find somewhere new.”
One of the men picked up the coins from the ground. This fellow used both hands to hold the coins up, one at a time, like touching something holy. He passed the coins, one at a time, back to the other men.
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.”
When We Were Executioners Page 19