We Leave Together

by J. M. McDermott

  The guard at the gates told Nicola that Franka heard he was coming.

  The night beyond the city walls was as dark as the sewers. It was darker, with no lamplight to drown out the stars and the moon. The clouds only made it darker. The humidity was terrible. It was still hot enough to melt conversation even an hour after sunset, but the breeze was clean and the sounds of the singing insects and frogs held none of the ominous echoes of wind and storms. It wasn’t going to rain, yet. The sky was just going to sit there and wait. Jona shoved the gear around so he could lie down on his back, sweating. He used the sack of armor like a metal pillow. He wondered how many nights he could lie like this before his sweat burned the cloth and damaged the wood. It wouldn’t take long, in this heat.

  He kept his eyes open. He looked up at the stars. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen so many stars. From where he was lying, he could see the helmet, still on Sergeant Calipari’s head, bobbing back and forth with the motion of the cart. In the near perfect darkness broken only by a small lamp hovering out above the donkey hanging off a branch Calipari had cut from a tree, the helmet was an absence of stars, luminous in the moonlight. It was like a ghost’s head hovering atop a shadow. The animal was exhausted and kept trying to stop and kick. Calipari whipped it hard, and often, to keep it going. He cursed at it. He made no friend that night.

  “You going to sleep on me?” said Calipari.

  “I’m trying to,” replied Jona.

  “Well, don’t expect me to wake you at the tavern,” said Calipari, “If you want to sleep in a bed, you have to be awake.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Jona looked up at the stars, and wondered what they were. Religions had answers, but there was never an answer that satisfied Jona when his own existence was an abomination to the religions. He didn’t feel like an abomination. He just felt lonely. Also, the hard road and the grumpy mule made the journey rough, and soon his back hurt on all that armor. He hopped out of the cart to walk off the jostling in his body.

  Behind him, he saw the city wall like a cliff, with the torches burning high on crenelated heights. His father’s skull might be up at the top, somewhere.

  He tried not to think of his father, but the night was so empty and there was nothing else to do but think.

  ***

  They reached the first tavern soon enough. Franka stood in the dark. She was a tall woman in dirty white with a long shadow in torchlight. She stood beneath the sign of a huge Owl carrying a rich man in its claws by the exposed backside. Jona strained his neck and squinted to see her better. Her voice was all he had. Her voice was high, and carried a sharp edge to it. This woman had the voice of a woman weary of speaking to men that wanted something.

  “Is that you, Nic?”

  “’Tis, my love.”

  “What took you so long? Heard from the wall that you’d be here an ages ago, and I been out here all night and now it’s almost morning.”

  The cart came to a halt in the tavern’s muddy yard. Already, sleep had claimed whatever drunks were inside. A few slept in heaps beneath the eaves where the rain might not wake them.

  Nicola stood up with his dark cape flowing, his hand on the pommel of his sword, and the ridiculous helmet reflecting the torchlight where it wasn’t covered in rust. He was a tall man on the cart, and he frowned down at her. “You waited for us all night? That’s foolish, Franka, and you know it. Stay in out of the damp! You’ll catch fever over nothing!”

  Franka touched his leg. She held out her other arm to help him down from the cart. “Well you should have thought of that taking your time. You know I wait up for you when you’re coming.”

  “If I’m late, go to bed, love.”

  “Shut up and get over here, already. I’m not tromping through mud for you.”

  “Aye,” he said. He swooped down from the cart and did his best dashing walk in uniform across the muddy yard. She held her arms out for him. They embraced.

  She rapped her knuckles on his headgear. “Nice helmet,” she said, “Is it new?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t kiss helmets. Might cut myself.”

  Jona cocked his head. Franka was much taller than Nicola. It looked strange to see her leaning over him, and him straining up. It reminded Jona of a mother with a child, but the kiss was all wrong for that. Jona looked away.

  The sergeant turned towards his corporal one last time that night. “Take care of the brute,” said Nicola, “We leave in the morning, soon as we can stand up. There’s probably a room for you somewhere, but it ain’t with me.” He threw the helmet at Jona.

  Jona caught it in mid-air. It was still warm from the sergeant’s skull, and had a misty patina of sweat. Jona tossed it back on the cart where it clanged.

  The sergeant and his lady disappeared into the building.

  Jona looked around, and didn’t see a stable. He walked around the building. It was solid stone bricks along each side, mortared together with good plaster. The front was logs in lumps like an old cabin, as if the stones had collapsed on one side and been replaced.

  Jona unhitched the mule from the cart. The worn out animal immediately kicked and snorted and stepped towards a trough of water near the hitching post. Jona slipped a rope from the cart, from the lip of the sacks. He tied it to the mule’s neck. When the mule was done drinking, Jona pulled the stubborn animal into the stable. The warm stink of fresh manure was as deep as the darkness. A single sliver of moonlight crept through a crack in the roof and reflected on the murky metal of the shovel. Jona stood in the doorway, waiting for his eyes to adjust.

  “Hello?” he said.

  He heard horses breathing. Somewhere, a mouse scurried through the hay.

  “Is anyone here?” he said, again. Jona’s eyes adjusted to the dark. He fumbled for a match. The innkeeper would kick any fellow out for lighting a match around all that hay, but Jona needed the light.

  He looked up into a white face. Both men froze, hands on hilts.

  “Are you my new boy?” said Jona.

  Salvatore whispered, “Only if you’re the blood monkey I’m following.”

  “Aye,” said Jona, “How’ve you been, Salvatore?”

  “Fine, I guess,” he said. He folded his arms in the dark. Jona suspected he was fingering his blackjack inside his sleeve.

  “Do you know me? Do you know my name?”

  “It’ll come to me,” said Salvatore.

  “I’m Corporal Jona Lord Joni,” replied Jona, “You got a message for me?”

  “I do,” said Salvatore. He handed a small sheet of paper over to Jona. Jona pocketed it. “How’s your girl Mishaela?”

  “She’s gone,” he said. “I think her husband found out.”

  “They’re just gone?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Listen, I don’t remember so good. I mean, I’m not good for remembering things. So, don’t get mad if you have to tell me twice.”

  “What do you remember?”

  “I think… That’s all I really want to say about that.”

  “Aggie. Do you remember that?”

  “It sounds familiar.”

  Jona didn’t allow himself to draw back his fist. He just threw it up hard and fast, right into Salvatore’s neck. Jona punched him in the throat hard enough to knock Salvatore over. Salvatore looked up, furious.

  “Every time you forget something important, I’m going to hit you like that. Can you remember that?”

  Salvatore had his blackjack out and took a swing, but Jona was ready for it, and dodged it. He grabbed Salvatore’s shirt with his free hand and threw him hard into the hay. The match burned up to his thumb and singed him. Jona pinched it out and tossed the dead match into the mud in the yard.

  The animals were restless; Salvatore held still. Salvatore had to breathe hard with the wind struck out of him like that.

  “Don’t think it’s personal when it’s not,” said Jona. “You’re going to remember things. I don’t have time for p
eople who forget important things.”

  “I’ll have you killed if you touch me again.”

  “No, you won’t,” said Jona. “You don’t know anything about this, and you’d forget even if you knew. You stay close, Salvatore. You stay close and wait for me to make the move. Have you got the uniform already?”

  “Fellow brings it for me in the morning.”

  “If he doesn’t show up, you can always win one in a card game. The kids in these towers got nothing but cards to pass the time. They love a new challenger now and then. They don’t know when to stop.”

  “Fellow’ll come,” said Salvatore.

  Jona bedded down his mule. He lingered in the dark with Salvatore, fingering the mule’s ratty mane. “Hey, Salvatore,” said Jona.

  “I got nothing to say to you, king’s man.”

  “Right,” said Jona. He walked out from the stables. He looked over his shoulder at the shadow in the dark. He touched the note in his pocket, and wondered if he’d get the chance to kill Salvatore before the tasks were through.

  Jona resolved to kill Salvatore as soon as he was done with him. He wondered if that wasn’t the reason Lady Ela Sabachthani had sent Salvatore along. That, or she was trying to help him forget his girl, too. It was easier for Salvatore.

  There was a hole in Jona’s stomach that knotted up like a black hand holding him hard.

  Even now, his skull cries out her name into the dark.

  ***

  The sleepers slept. The night was clean. Jona crept in through the main hall and into a different hall up the stairs. He followed his ears to Franka’s room, where the two betrothed rustled in the darkness. He slipped open the door a crack, silently. He looked down on the two of them together, their bodies moving in unison.

  Jona heard footsteps in the hall.

  He looked, turning his blade in the night. He saw a child in a shadow.

  “Go to sleep,” said Jona, “It’s too late for you to be up.”

  The kid’s shadow backed into a room.

  Jona found an empty room. He played cards until the maid came with soft feet to clear chamber pots before morning light. He threw a few coins at the girl’s feet. “Sometimes night maids like to earn a little extra,” he said.

  The girl nodded. She picked up the coins. She peeled off her dress like a dirty washcloth. Her bones protruded at odd angles from her papery skin. Her eyes were black in the darkness of morning twilight.

  He looked over the body in the moonlight. “Keep it,” he said. “That’s enough.”

  She seemed offended and confused, but she didn’t say anything.

  “Wait,” said Jona. “Franka ever do this?”

  She shook her head, no. Then, without touching anything or cleaning in the room, she was gone with her clothes into the hall. Afterwards, Jona sprawled naked in an empty bed. He closed his eyes as if he could sleep. He thought to himself that Rachel was sleeping somewhere, surrounded by men who would kill her if they saw her real skin. He stood up and started to pace.

  In the city, he could do something to fill his mind. He could find a game of cards and bully the men into handing over all they had. He could find another woman, prettier, and he wouldn’t make her sick, but maybe he’d talk to her in a bustling room for a while or have tea with a phony and let everyone lie to each other. He could dance. He could drink. He could find some gangers and knock some teeth.

  Out here, all he could do was wait in the darkness and hope it wouldn’t rain. When it rained, on the road, he and Nicola crawled under the cart, and waited it out. If the wheels got stuck in mud, they used the worthless weapons to dig and wedge the wheel free. It rained a little every day. When it wasn’t raining, there was a haze of damp and bugs that bit at them.

  “You want to live out here?” said Jona.

  “You smell that air? Smell like animal shit to you?”

  “No,” said Jona.

  “Well, there you go. Anybody try to grind you today?”

  “Just you,” said Jona.

  “I didn’t do a thing, Lord Joni. I’m telling you, this is the dream. Land of my own, and a way out of the Pens. The air is so clean I could drink it in a glass.”

  At all the taverns along the way, when they could sleep in one out of the rain instead of huddling beneath the cart, Jona sat down on the edge of the bed again and waited. He looked over at the useless bed. Somewhere in the night, Rachel might not have a roof over her.

  The first guard post was one day’s journey past Franka’s tavern, but from the top of the tower, the walls of Dogsland were still in view as large as mountains. Sergeant Calipari inspected the place quickly. The boys inside, both young privates, saluted sharply. They had kept their log in order, and smiled at the weapons, even if the equipment was rusty confiscated scrap from hookah dens. Sergeant Calipari adjusted this and that for the sake of adjusting this or that, and within an hour, the inspection tour was on the road again to the next tower and they didn’t even stop for a meal. Calipari wanted to get to his land. They ate hardtack and the apples that hadn’t rotted.

  The second one had half the wall blown apart and left where it had fallen. The men there slept in tents and wondered when their time would come to return to the city. In the report, Calipari wrote down the damage to the guard tower, and said this had been reported since the war, when a falling war machine had shattered the wall like a catapult blow, but it had come from their own broken siege device. The tower had never been repaired. They traveled farther, until the farms thinned out and the roads were just fallow fields and woods.

  These men knew each other too well. They spoke so little to each other. They had nothing to say. Sergeant Calipari was supposed to be training his replacement, and he had given up on the Pens.

  (Jona lay back in the cart at night and stared at the naked sky, with his beloved in his eyes among the stars. When they stopped for the night he shuffled off to empty his body of water, and saw his shadow there, following.)

  Up the roads north, across two fords, and through the farms and pastures, the cart moved on. Farmers’ children walked to the edge of the fence, and waved at the men in uniforms passing through. Nicola pushed Jona from the cart towards one of the women. Jona stumbled against the fence where this beautiful girl in green and brown linen placed her baskets on the ground beside her garden.

  “Hello, king’s man,” she said, looking away and locking her hands together in front of her dress.

  “Say hello, Corporal!” shouted Calipari.

  Jona bowed gracefully to the woman, as if he were at a ball. “Hello,” he said, “my name is Jona Lord Joni, corporal of the City Guard.”

  “My name is Flower,” she said.

  “A pleasure,” said Jona, rising from his bow.

  She eyed him with a raised eyebrow. “Are you really a lord?” she said.

  “Yes,” said Jona. “Are you really a flower?”

  “I’ve never met a lord before.”

  “If you’ll please pardon me, I have to get back to work. We have to keep the roads safe, and inspect the guard posts. We’ll be back this way again soon.”

  “Are you really a lord?” she said, and then, louder to Sergeant Calipari’s back, “Hey, is he really a lord?”

  “He sure is,” shouted the sergeant from the cart, “He already attends balls with the king, himself.”

  Jona ran to catch up to the cart. He shoved a fist into Nicola’s back. Nicola fell forward. He kept on the cart by pushing against the donkey’s backside.

  Calipari laughed and laughed, anyway, and Jona never laughed. He never did anything but skulk and wait.

  They passed soldiers on the road, out patrolling the highways for the king. The army kept the woods and roads. The king’s personal guard kept the towers and the farmlands. Out a few days, the distinction was meaningless. They were men in uniform that saluted each other as they passed. Some of the older men recognized Calipari and shouted at him, and he shouted back.

  The worst thing, for Jon
a, was how there was nothing to do for days but walk or ride or whip the mule. He didn’t even know a song to sing to distract himself.

  ***

  At the next guard post, Calipari shook hands with a fellow he had known for years, a sergeant past the last months of service. He spent his days in the guard post waiting for his replacement to arrive from the city, and slept nights in a farmhouse on a ridge where he already had his first crop of wine grapes growing. The old sergeant and Nicola traded war stories for two drunken days.

  Jona had to take the old sergeant’s shift on the top of the tower, looking up to the top of the far hill, looking for fire. The other guard was a private that had racked up demerits in a fist fight with an officer. The officer used to be a plain corporal, and the fight occurred before the private knew about the promotion. The captain would’ve arrested the private for striking an officer if it hadn’t been for the rank mixup. Instead, the private will spend the rest of his career at this empty station, watching for fire, and keeping his own kindling dry in all the wet rain, with no hope of a decent parcel or of a fleur, or of anything but this.

  The private didn’t like to talk much. That was fine with Jona. Jona and the spurned private sat on the guard post, listening to the two sergeants singing old songs and pissing all over the broken furniture in heaps beside the tower and shoving each other.

  The sun set beside them all. Jona and the private of the tower stared north, to the top of this hill covered in pine. The blue sky misted in orange and purple. Evening twilight, and the two men sat there, looking up to this spot on the hill in the distance until it became a silhouette of a tower rising over the trees, like a giant land creature with four fat legs and a jagged back. Ahead was the last tower, at the edge of the woods that Dogsland called her own. Beyond that tower was a red valley that took so long to heal, and beyond that terrible boundary was a new city’s lands. Jona knew that an army was coming to that tower, and he looked out ahead to the watch tower’s horizon, seeking out the lines of smoke. There were none.