The strawberry woman, Kari, held up two plump, ripe strawberries. “You two, kids. I’ll give you these free if you promise to leave us be.”
Rachel immediately grabbed the strawberries. She shoved one into her mouth whole. Djoss had to force Rachel’s hand open to acquire the other strawberry for himself. Red juice smeared her lips and her fingers. She licked at her hands.
Djoss led Rachel into the mountains.
“I’ve got an idea,” he said, “We’ve got to find some mushrooms.”
Rachel was still licking her fingers, though most of the strawberry flavor was gone. “What for?” she said.
“We’re gonna find out which ones make someone sick,” he said.
“Why?”
“You’ll see,” said Djoss.
“Why, Djoss?”
“Hush,” said Djoss.
Djoss led his sister out of town. He avoided the hill where their parents were probably still sleeping, in the poplar grove. They walked up a dry streambed. Tiny frogs leaped away from them like grasshoppers. Rachel tried to catch one. Djoss grabbed her hand and tugged her up the hill.
“Come on,” he said, “We’re doing something important.”
He led her into the shaded forest.
“We’re looking for mushrooms,” he said, “Any kind of mushroom. When you see one, give it to me, okay?”
“Okay,” she said.
The forests smelled like cool rot. Red cedar trees smothered in moss sank in the weight of the rot in the air. The roots eventually let go. The trees collapsed into more rot. Two children strolled over the huddled mass of ruin upon ruin like flies landing briefly upon a battle in progress, unaware of the mass dying all around.
Djoss reached into a fallen stump, and he pulled out two different kinds of mushrooms.
“Here, hold these in your skirt,” he said, “but don’t eat them. They’re probably poisonous.”
Rachel gathered her skirt up in her hands so she could hold the mushrooms. She sniffed the air over her skirt. She curled her nose. “They’re going to make my dress stinky,” she said.
Djoss grunted. “Rachel, you already smell awful,” he said.
He led her deeper into the woods. “We’re following the stream so we can find our way back,” he said.
Djoss climbed between roots and ferns searching for mushrooms.
Some were brown, some black, some spotted, and some covered in yellow flecks, as diverse as bugs under stones.
When Djoss and Rachel had found a few dozen different kinds of mushroom, he led her back to the stream, and back to the village marketplace.
“Don’t drop anything,” he said, to his sister.
Djoss went up to the mushroom lady. She frowned. “Didn’t we tell you kids to leave?” she said, “Go on, then. Scat.”
Djoss grabbed a mushroom from Rachel’s dress. He held it up in the air for the woman to see. “I’m going to eat this mushroom,” he said.
“Don’t be a fool, boy. Look, some of the mushrooms out there might really harm you. Don’t be eating things you don’t know is safe.”
Djoss shoved the mushroom in his mouth. He started to chew. He smiled with chunks of mushroom squishing between his teeth. The mushroom lady didn’t seem to mind.
Djoss reached for another mushroom. “That first one tasted squishy,” he said. He held up the next mushroom. “This one looks better.”
The mushroom lady spit to protect herself from evil. She took the mushroom from Djoss’ hand. “Fine,” she said, “You want to know bad enough you’ll eat bad mushrooms to find out? Show me what you got.”
Djoss opened Rachel’s skirt. Fungus spilled from her dress and bounced in the dirt.
“If you touched any of these,” said the lady, “you be sure to wash them hands of yours off in the salt sea. Some of this stuff be nasty, nasty.” She took a long stick and speared three of the mushrooms. “Those three can make a fellow real sick. Real sick. Mayhap kill. They’d kill you if you ate them, easy. The one you ate will be making you pretty sick later, but it won’t kill you. Nobody to blame but yourself, you foolish brat.” She kicked the rest of the mushrooms on the ground into the street, and away from her little stand. “I ain’t telling you which ones of those are good and tasty. I don’t want you kids going after them and selling them, too. Strictly business, mind you. But, I don’t want you getting sick.”
The mushroom woman tossed the mushrooms on the stick off into the piles of trash around the marketplace.
Djoss was sick for a few days. His mother stayed with him, and left only to bring him food. Rachel told about the mushrooms, but her mother didn’t punish Djoss for it. Djoss was very sick.
When Djoss got better, Rachel’s mother went back to the village, to cast fortunes for coins. It wasn’t a very large village. When the village ran out of fortunes, and out of things to move, the family would move on to a new village.
***
Djoss’ father lounged in the grove, sleeping off alcohol with his huge arm resting over Rachel’s back. She had closed her eyes. She had curled up tight. She didn’t want his hand on her back. She wanted to pull away from him—to run away from him.
She heard Djoss. He said, “Hey,” and he seemed to trudge up to the poplar grove. The hand moved off her back. She didn’t open her eyes right away. Instead, she listened to the sound of eating, but it wasn’t normal eating. Her father had something pressed against his ear, and the thing inside of his head was eating something from the inside out. That’s how he ate.
“This tastes like shit,” he said.
Djoss snorted. “You don’t like it, you go get something for yourself.”
“Where’s your ma?” He’s talking and he’s eating at the same time. Rachel can hear the chewing, smacking noises of eating, and she can hear them speaking like they’re not eating anything. She’s afraid to open her eyes because she’s afraid she’ll see the creature darting from the ear, its black, centipede body wiggling in and out of the man’s head like a bug tongue.
“I asked you a question,” said her father.
Djoss didn’t say anything.
Rachel heard her father standing up. “Whatever you got, you eat it. It’s awful.”
“You know that’ll just make me sick,” said Djoss.
“I’ll make you eat something else and it’ll make you sick, too,” said her father.
“No,” said Djoss, “And back to Elishta with you.”
She heard the sound of hands striking skin, hard. A body tumbled to the ground. The body rolled towards her, and then she heard the body cursing and it wasn’t Djoss, or her father, really. She heard the sound of vomiting, but it wasn’t human vomiting, and it was muffled. That was her father. Her brother had knocked her father down in one strike.
She opened her eyes.
“What the hell did you feed me?” said her father. Golden bile spilled from his ears, into the tree. The fluids smoldered in the wood. That poplar was dead, now. Brown death rolled up from the roots to the branches. The poplars had always had their branches up in surrender, and now they were going to die from the ankles up from the demon stain.
Her father’s eyes rolled in his head.
Djoss had a quarterstaff in his hands. He stepped on his father’s back to hold the older man down.
“Rachel, get out of the way,” he said.
Rachel didn’t move.
Djoss swung the stick hard, directly onto the man’s skull. The first strike drew blood. The fourth scraped skin away. The fifth cracked bone.
Through the miasma of blood and tissue, a long, slender insect unrolled out of the crevice like a living chain, wriggling in its own toxic vomit. The thing had tiny insect eyes. It looked directly at Rachel.
“Rachel, get out of the way!” shouted Djoss. He kicked his sister away from the long centipede crawling out of her father’s cracked skull.
The poplar tree and the grass seemed to burn in the blood spurting out of the body.
Djoss’ stick desc
ended upon the narrow demon. Djoss cracked the creature’s chitinous back. The red blood that leaked out of the long demon looked human. Every little drop seemed to kill the grass.
When the beast stopped wriggling. Djoss tossed the staff onto the beast. The staff had been badly burned where blood had struck it. Bits of wood burned away in the acid. The staff was only half as long as it was.
Djoss stepped back from his handiwork in the poisoned grass. “You all right, Rachel?” Djoss said. He started coughing. He choked up something and spat it out. Blood. His eyes had turned red, all bloodshot and weeping blood.
“What did you do?” she said. She wasn’t crying, yet. She looked at the broken skull and the dead black centipede.
Djoss kept coughing. He clutched at his own stomach. His skin was green. He was dying with all the plants. The poplars groaned and cracked in death. A brown wave of dying grass like the essence poured from some invisible decanter in the clouds, splashing all around them.
Djoss touched Rachel’s arm. “You can tell Mom when we find her,” he said, “We have to find Mom.”
Rachel touched her face. She was crying, now. The tears burned. When they touched her dress, they burned the cloth.
“Elishta! You’re crying! Stop crying!”
“I can’t,” she said. She brushed at her own tears. The sleeve of her dress burned where she wiped.
Djoss picked Rachel up, and slung her violently over his shoulder. He staggered to the water down the hill and along the beach beside the village.
Behind them the poplar tree, where her father had died, had collapsed into a dead heap and the grove around the tree was dying. The poplars’ bark dropped away like peeling wallpaper. The branches wilted. The trunks popped and groaned. The weight of the branches falling swung the trees around until they cracked entirely, tumbling down.
Rachel was still crying. She felt bruises rising in her stomach from her brother’s sharp shoulder bouncing into her. Every leaping step hurt her more until she was screaming.
When he reached the fjord, he threw her into the cold water, clothes and all. He jumped in after her, letting the blood seep out from him and his own sickness.
“Stop crying, Rachel!” he shouted.
Rachel couldn’t stop. She cupped water in her hands to splash the tears away from her face. She tried to say something, but she couldn’t speak.
Djoss turned around and looked up at the hill. Some men from the village had climbed the hill with axes to investigate the fallen trees, perhaps collect wood. The man looked down at the dead body of man and the dead demon beside the body. The man looked surprised.
Rachel kept crying. Djoss jumped into the water. He grabbed his sister again, and carried her under his arm like a bag floating in the water. He ran down the beach, away from the village. He stopped long enough to puke blood. He collapsed three times. Rachel helped him up, out of the waist-deep water. She was able to walk now. She had his arm around her shoulders, and she was holding him up, in the water. He was terribly heavy. He told Rachel that he couldn’t see anymore.
Then, when they had gone a way through the water, and he was having too much trouble walking to walk through the water, the two turned up the beach and into the low salt flat marsh grasses at the edge of the woods.
She put him down against a tree. He rested his hands on his knees. He gasped for air. “She’ll find us,” he said.
Rachel curled into a ball and turned away from her brother.
“I need you to wait here,” he said, “Can you wait right here and be very quiet?”
Rachel didn’t say anything. She was clenched up tight on the ground. She let her tears smolder on the mossy ground below her face.
“Rachel!” said Djoss, “Are you listening to me?”
She didn’t respond.
“Just stay here!” he said.
And he stood up and ran off again, looking for his mother in the village.
Rachel didn’t move.
“We have to get up,” he said. He fumbled at his belt for tiny bottles of clear liquid (holy water, I suspect or alcohol) to pour into his eyes.
“Where’s Ma?” she whimpered.
“I’m going to smear mud on our faces so people won’t recognize us, okay? Then, we’re going to go into the village and we’re going to see if we can find Ma, okay?”
“I want Mommy.”
“Rachel, I need you to stand up, okay?”
“Okay.”
Rachel stood up. She let her brother cover her in his shirt on top of her old clothes, leaving him naked to the waist. She let her brother smear mud all over her face. She let him take her hand. She smeared mud all over him, too, his strong shoulders and back.
They walked along the beach to the village. He had to stop three times. He said that he was sick. He said he was going to be sick a long time, maybe forever. He said he would need Rachel to steal holy things for him, to help him get better. She didn’t say anything to him.
They arrived in time to watch their mother burned alive in the village square, screaming in pain and agony in a voice that didn’t sound like Rachel’s mother at all. The waves of death from the demon’s body spilled an announcement to all who could watch the falling trees. The body was recognized by its clothes, and the wife was called for by a crowd of village men and women all of them angry and sickening.
In less then a hour everything had changed in the village. Everyone was sick. Everyone was angry. The wife of the beast—a Senta gypsy—had brought this death into the village, and she had to burn for it. She didn’t know she needed to escape until she was surrounded by the villagers looking for her.
Either that, or she knew from the beginning that Djoss was going to kill the demon, and that she would face death for being with the demon for so long.
Every dead mother is a mystery. She is a ghost that haunts dreams, with her scorched face and screaming.
This is no mystery: Djoss pulled his sister into the woods above the fjord. He placed his hands over her eyes, but she had already seen.
That night, he watched his sister by moonlight. Her pale moon face was like a blank piece of paper. Dirt and mud and grime all over it like words that had been rubbed while wet, and smeared. When the ink mess dried, it was a girl’s dark lips, a girl’s dark eyebrows, a girl’s dark mouth, and a sheen of mud across her moon face.
He watched her because he couldn’t sleep. He was vomiting blood, and seeing visions of a darker world in his high fever.
(She told Jona about this, about when her father died, and her mother died, and her brother almost died in bits and pieces I’ve been pulling out of Jona’s twisted memories and she talked about what her brother felt that night, looking at her, and I can feel him in the corners of the memories, a boy acting like a man and alone with this strange, deformed child sleeping in the moonlight, connected to him by half of his own blood.)
***
Djoss was sick a long time. Rachel was not. Rachel never talked to Jona about how her brother conquered the demon stain. I suspect he had learned things from his mother to survive the pollution he had lived with most of his life.
Holy water retains the divine dweomer even when it is stolen. Imam and Erin still spare mercy for the thieves.
***
My husband and I have spent a long time discussing exactly where the doppelgänger emerged from the bottom of a canyon. We do not know if the man was alone, or if he was with his family when it occurred. We have narrowed the world down a little, in hopes that you may find the gap in the crust, oh my brothers and sisters in Erin.
In a mountain range in the far north, near the Okena, water leaps from a crevice in a granite mountain, and lands in a pool of sandstone. The water carves the sandstone down and down into the pool. Further down, the pool becomes a river littered with chunks of granite that dig into softer sandstone.
This has carved a canyon. When the mountain snows melt, the water fills into the thousands of passageways in the soft sandstone. When the summer
sun is high, the river is a trickle of rocks that a child could cross alone.
And there, says my husband, a committed demon could push through the soft sandstones, and the mud. The veins of Elishta could erode open, and ooze their putrid acids into the river. Narrow demons, like doppelgängers, could squeeze through the small holes in the ground.
I disagree. I think the cliff is against the ocean. I suspect that the twisting fjords by the Rejk tribes in the far north, and their various cliffs and gaps in the geology are probably the source. Near the port of Nolika, where Nolanders come from, countless fjords reach into the land like fingers. Over time, a small vein of Elishta could have been pried open by the waves.
I have written these lines on this page with my own prejudice.
A porter—Rachel’s father was mostly a porter—would probably work near the ocean. Oceans have more ships than mountain ranges. Ocean ships meant more work for porters and stevedores. Sweaty summer work meant strong men might dive into the water at high tide to cool off.
CHAPTER 13
Jona was alone down in a dive bar out on the other side of the Pens. The place stank of dead animals.
The living animals smelled worse. I remember this place. The last time we were here, Geek was eating eggs, and Tripoli and Jaime were still alive.
The other people there were mostly desperates stumbling in a haze. The killers came after a hard day’s slaughter to pretend like they were normal folk a while and they had blood all over their arms and they kept slapping each other on their backs with their big, bloody overalls and the only music was a round or two of song that the killers kept singing because they sang all day while they worked while they were shoving cattle and goats and pigs up and down the killing floor, all terrified. And pinkers were there—were everywhere—slipping unsteady hands into anything that might hold a coin to feed the hookah. No one slipped a finger in Jona’s pockets. Jona was there alone, and he had a good two arm-lengths all around him; only the stink dared to touch this scowling king’s man.
We Leave Together Page 14