We Leave Together

by J. M. McDermott

  “Have you ever lit the fire?” said Jona, to the private.

  “Aye,” he said. “Once it dries off a bit, the raiders come. Only getting too wet for an invasion. Can’t march horses in mud. Can’t do anything with the mud.”

  “It’s not raining tonight.”

  “It will,” he said. “You wait. There’s already clouds for it from the west. It’ll be a hard one, too. Ocean’s over that way, I hear, and it always sends the worst this time of year.”

  After nightfall, the spurned private lit a pipe. He puffed away quietly. It smelled so peaceful. Then, it smelled of rain. The heavy rain fell hard, flooding the roads for a day. There was nothing to do but wait and watch the hills for the warning fire.

  Even in the worst of the storm, birdsongs drifted away to the cadences of bugs. And owls in their trees gently cooed their territory in the dark. And wolves far away howled to the waxing moon, my husband and I and our pack were smelling something wrong traveling the woods, but we did not know it yet and our place in Jona’s death had not begun.

  Jona took a deep breath in the dark, while the private fell asleep beside him. He closed his eyes. He held real still, smelling rain and the sweet damp of the pine forest hills.

  He wondered if this was like dreaming.

  Tomorrow was another day. Calipari rested in the back of the cart with a damp cloth over his eyes. Jona drove the mule.

  They kept a pile of paper in a heavy leather sack to keep the rain out of it. They kept a series of reports about their inspections. Calipari filled them out before they left each station. They were destined for a room of files where they would be skimmed quickly by a clerk and filed away.

  Calipari shoved coins in Jona’s pockets. Calipari had led them off the path to this barn on a little milk farm.

  Jona stumbled into the dark. He had a flask in his hand. He hadn’t tasted a drop. He listened to an old horse breathing heavily in a stall. The stench of cows and horses and pigs was everywhere, but Jona could only sense the old horse wheezing.

  An oil lamp crept out of the darkness. The dim light spilled across an anonymous woman. She pressed one finger to her lips.

  Jona closed his eyes. He held the flask out to her. She took it. Jona turned away from her. He took off his cloak. He spread the cloak over a low pile of hay and told her just to hold him a while, and do nothing.

  “I just want to hold you a while, until you fall asleep. Okay?”

  She shrugged. “I could do more.”

  “I know, and you’d be good, too. But, I can’t right now. I don’t want it. I just want to hold you and watch you fall asleep. Can we do that?”

  She shrugged. Pressed into her, it was all wrong. She smelled like the animals and a little bit like spoiled milk. She felt wrong, too, with too-soft flesh and bones pushing uncomfortably. She snored when she slept. He thought she was faking to get rid of him, and he was fine with that. He left the cloak and the money. It was drizzling outside, and he pulled his collar up. He walked back to where Nicola was asleep under the cart.

  Salvatore was wandering these hills, following in Jona’s footsteps.

  He wondered if Salvatore had some trick to keep the girls from throwing up and trembling all pale and terrible as if they were giving birth to their own death.

  CHAPTER 18

  I know this scent.

  My husband stops before I do. He smelled it first. He bristles.

  Underground, then. There’s a sewer grate that’s thrown aside, and it connects to many dry lines. As long as it doesn’t rain too hard, he would be safe below ground, for now.

  Not for long.

  ***

  Salvatore and Jona checked in with each other in the dark.

  Salvatore waited, leaning into a tree. He had a brand new guard uniform on, with the rank of private, and who knows how it got there from the city, but there it was.

  “Have you found out where we’ll need to do this?”

  Salvatore shrugged. “I’ve been making the signal, but no one’s come out of the woods yet. I don’t know where they’re crossing the valley or if they’re going around. Horses fight to go around. I can see their camp fire smoke. They don’t care much for who sees them. No one thinks they’re coming in the rain storms.”

  “I’m getting tired of waiting. We’re half the day from the last watch tower. We’ll settle things before they get here. If they’re coming, they’re coming.”

  “Want me to bring you the message and tag along?”

  “Sure. After this, what’s your plan?”

  “After this?”

  “Yeah, we do this job, and then what do you do?”

  “I go back to Dogsland. My contacts there let me do what I like. What else should I do?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you could try to… you know, figure out what happened to you. See if you can find your history somewhere. Go east. You look like an easterner. You’ve got the nose for it.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Well, I heard when this is over, I’m going to get married to a rich woman.”

  “Do you love her?”

  “You care about that?”

  “I was married once, I think.”

  “Did you like being married?”

  “I don’t know. I’d do it again if I could find the right girl, which I guess means I liked it. I don’t know if I have kids or not. I don’t think I do. I don’t remember any. You going to have kids?”

  “Maybe,” said Jona, “Maybe, someday. I’d better head back.”

  “Bye.”

  “Hey, whatever you do, don’t kill Nicola. The guy I’m riding with? Don’t kill him, okay?”

  “Oh, I’m no blood monkey,” said Salvatore, “I don’t kill people.”

  “Right,” said Jona, “Right, I forgot. Well tell the others not to kill him for me, okay? He’s mine. I want him.”

  Jona didn’t want Nicola to die when the time came. Jona didn’t want anyone to get hurt, but he knew blood was going to spill soon.

  The last tower on the northern edge was the end of the way things were, for him. After that, he’d be a decorated officer, field commissioned, and marrying the future queen.

  (Of course, he died in these woods.

  He saw Rachel again before he died.)

  ***

  We found the lair at last in the labyrinth of sewers underground. It was the same hammock, attached to a wall, replaced when it wore through from the acid sweating from his skin in this hot, damp tunnel. He had stale food hanging from bags in the ceiling, rigged to keep the rats out. He had lived like this before. He had tools for the job of living in sewers.

  We disturbed nothing. We slipped into the darkness and into a dark corner that was free of his scent. He would return home. We would hear him.

  We held very still.

  Below the street, the muffled echoes of the city came down to us through the stones and the mud. It dripped like the water through the grates, and empty chamber pots and trash, that were the muted remains of a life, poured into the earth. Do you see the end of Salvatore’s life in all this noise? Do you hear it? I’m writing in the dark, and waiting. It’s hard to write, but I can see enough in the streetlight. I have the ink under my wolfskin cloak and the paper. I write, and I wait.

  I can only imagine what he is feeling, now, so separated from the patterns of his life, with no one to guide him. He’s adrift, and hiding.

  I can only dream of his life as Jona knew it.

  I can write it down.

  Wait, I hear him coming here to hide. I know it is him because Jona recognizes the sound of his footsteps inside of me.

  It’s him.

  CHAPTER 19

  Calipari and Jona returned to the road. Calipari drove the cart during the day. Jona drove it into the night.

  When the whip would no longer move the cart an inch, it was time for them to stop. The driver unhooked the donkey, and let the animal wander off into the woods. If it was after dark, Jona followed with the lamp held
over his head. When Killer realized he was lost, Jona dragged the animal back to the cart where Calipari was sleeping like nothing had happened at all. Then Jona fed the animal hay and oats from the back of the cart, which usually woke up Calipari. Calipari was sleeping on the back.

  The first night on the road, Jona was driving the cart and Calipari was sleeping on some hay piled in back like a bed.

  Salvatore stood in the road in front of the mule. The lamp illuminated his boots first. They were shiny as patent leather. The mud hadn’t seemed to touch them at all. Jona saw his hands held up in the dark. Jona nodded at him. Salvatore had an envelope in his hands, too, with the official seal of the king. A forgery, of course, but a good one.

  Salvatore walked around the mule. He handed the note to Jona. Jona pointed at Calipari. Salvatore nodded. Jona turned to his partner. “Hey, Nic, wake up. Hey, Sergeant?”

  Sergeant Calipari bolted up fast, his hand on his sword. “What?” he said, “Why’d we stop? It isn’t my turn, is it?”

  Salvatore bowed. “Rush message from the captain himself, for Sergeant Nicola Calipari and Corporal Jona Lord Joni. That you two?”

  Calipari frowned. “What?” he snorted. He pointed at Salvatore in a muddy uniform. “Who in Elishta are you?”

  “Private Salvatore Fidelio, Sergeant,” said Salvatore.

  “Fidelio? Never heard of you.”

  “Never heard of you either,” said Salvatore, “Are you the sergeant on patrol, inspecting watch towers?”

  “I am,” said Calipari. Calipari adjusted his clothes until his twisted-up cloak and the clumps of mud and hay fell away to reveal his sergeant’s rank.

  “Message from the captain, sir.”

  Calipari snatched the letter. He looked over at Salvatore. “How’d you get it out here?”

  “I walked straight from the city.”

  “We had a cart and a mule.”

  “I had no reason to stop and inspect a watch tower if you weren’t in it. I moved fast. Took long enough to catch you anyhow, all this way.”

  “So, that’s it then. Off you go.”

  “I’m supposed to come with you.”

  “What? Why? Does the captain want me to send him a response? Captains don’t ask sergeants for a response. I can’t believe he wrote me a note at all!”

  “I’m just doing what I’m told.”

  Jona laughed. “Good morning, Sergeant,” he said, “Waking up in a cart is worse than a two-day piss gin banger.”

  “I don’t need this, Corporal,” said Nicola. “I don’t need messages from the captain. I don’t. Bloody Elishta, but I don’t…”

  Calipari tore open the envelope. He read the message. His brow furrowed. “Straight from the man to me, and sealed. Toss me to the Nameless. Roll me into the bay.”

  The more he read, the more his brow furrowed.

  “We got a bad bird, Jona, singing for the wrong city.”

  “A bad bird? Who?”

  “I don’t know. It’s one of the fellows at the next station. We find the bird. We do him in fast and send our boy… Whatever his name is, here, to replace the dead bird. I know this corporal up at that station. He’s been here forever. I don’t know who they got him with this time.”

  “You think it’s the corporal?”

  “What’s that guy’s name… Kapelli? Matteli? He’s useless. He got corporal in the war and a few medals because he got out alive, and he hasn’t done anything since but wait for land.” Calipari turned to Salvatore. “What’s your name, Private?”

  “I’m Private Salvatore Fidelio,” said Salvatore. Then, as a mumbled afterthought from his thief slouch, “Sir.” He looked like a man in a costume. Jona wondered how Calipari couldn’t see right through the dirty disguise. Maybe he did, but it was a letter from the captain in his hand that had him thinking he was part of something bigger than he wanted on his last patrol before his parcel.

  “Right, Fidelio,” said Nicola. “I don’t know you and me and the corporal go way back, so you hang back and wait for us to finish our investigation. You don’t talk to anyone, got it?”

  “Sir,” said Fideli.

  “How long ago you finish training, Fidelio?”

  “I’m new.”

  “You ever kill anybody?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You got green all over yourself. I can see it from here. Stay out of the way. This is a bad business. I’ll handle the execution myself. Finishing the business like this. That’s me. Blood had to be my way out from the Pens.”

  Jona smacked the reins, and the donkey kicked into life again. Jona looked over his shoulder at the two men in the cart. “Hey, Nic,” said Jona, “you gonna let me have a piece of him, too? I’m so bored, I’d break them both just to pass the time.”

  Calipari said nothing. He re-read the note in his hand. He put it in his lapel pocket. He grabbed a stone from his pocket. He hocked a fat ball of spit onto it. He dragged his sword across the stone.

  Jona waited, and when nothing happened, he kicked the reins. The donkey started to walk again.

  Salvatore did his best to lie down and sleep with the mule cart bouncing around the road.

  Calipari was an old hand at sharpening his sword in a cart. Not once did his hands slip in a bumpy rut.

  ***

  Howl with us, dogs, for the victory of Erin.

  My husband is very sick.

  He said he would not die for me.

  I knew it was a lie.

  We are human, still. We wear the skin of the wolf, but it is not who we are.

  In the darkness of the sewers Salvatore came. He carried bread and stolen jewelry. He had no fear in his eye, and did not know to be afraid. How could he remember fear of death? How could he even remember he was alive if he could not remember his benefactors?

  He came into the darkness, then. We swept over one side and then another in the sewer to surround him before he knew we were there.

  “Please,” he said.

  He’s mine.

  No, he can see you. Let me.

  “Please, I want to live.”

  I want to kill him.

  That’s Jona. That’s not you.

  He must die.

  “Please, I don’t… I don’t know what you are… Big dogs… Elishta… But your eyes…”

  My husband pulled the wolfskin from his back and stood tall. He lit a match and threw it onto the ground, where the sweat and urine of the demon caught the flame like lamp oil, burning against Salvatore’s skin and clothes.

  Salvatore backed up, smacking at the flame, then he saw me behind him. He jumped ahead.

  My husband opened his arms. “Come here,” he said. “Everything will be all right. Everything is fine, now.”

  Salvatore stepped towards him, while I howled and swiped. I missed. He dodged me.

  Don’t talk to him!

  “She won’t hurt you,” he said. “She’s just angry, but it will pass. I have come to help you, friend.”

  Salvatore stepped towards my husband.

  “Look out,” he said. He grabbed Salvatore and pulled him from me. I was pouncing and snapping.

  Salvatore was so scared of me that he did not see the blade enter his back from my husband’s hand. I saw him take the blade. I saw his gasp and shock.

  “Please, no…”

  “It’s done,” said my husband. The blood poured out over his hand. I felt its power, and my eyes watered and my throat closed up in pain.

  “Please, I want to live!”

  “Hush, now,” said my husband, holding the knife. He eased Salvatore down. “This isn’t your fault. You did nothing wrong. I’m sorry for you.”

  The blood was all over his arm, eating up his clothes and burning his skin.

  “I don’t want to die,” he said. His voice was weak and pinched.

  “Everyone must die,” said my husband. His throat was closing up. Blood was coming out of his eyes and he fell beside Salvatore. “Everyone dies,” he said.

 
Salvatore whimpered and started to cry. Then, he stopped crying.

  My husband held his clean hand up to me. “Stay back,” he said. “Get the fireseeds.”

  It was the last thing he said before he vomited blood.

  The fire from the ground stain was touched by the blood. It spread.

  No time.

  I bit into my husband’s boot. I dragged him over the dirty rocks and mud. The fire caught the body, then, and dug into the blood. The noxious smoke filled the little hall, and stained a black, thick stain that would last a thousand years upon those rocks.

  My husband knew I would drive my teeth into the demon child’s throat. He knew I would taste the blood.

  He knew me.

  He had turned Salvatore’s body away from me. He had pulled him back from my claws and teeth. He had taken the blood upon himself, instead.

  I did not die for you. Don’t write that. I’m still alive.

  You could have died.

  I didn’t. I’m just very sick. We both could have died and we didn’t. I will heal. Nicola Calipari has healed. He took Jona’s blood upon his face and neck and went without your care for weeks.

  We are men, more than we are wolves, my love. Jona was not as close to the source as Salvatore. At least, we don’t know how close he was to the source of the stain. You love me and sacrificed yourself, as Jona did. We serve the world of men as no true wolf could. We are Walkers not wolves. We stand on two legs and walk these lands as man and wife. You are my husband, and my beloved. I would die for you, old wolf…

  Don’t.

  Just as you nearly did for me.

  I am a wolf that wears the skin of men. That is all.

  He rolled over. The wolfskin was pulled across his back, and he turned from me, with his ears twitching.

  ***

  The guard tower at the edge of the dead valley used to be the altar of arcane mysteries that Sabachthani used to cast his wicked magic. The giant bowl of mortal blood was covered in sticks and doused in kerosene. Soldiers had hammered a rough roof to guide the rain away from the pile unless a hard wind blew. The lord that owned this particular hillside preferred to keep his grape vines on the other side of another hill. He didn’t like to risk poisoning his wine so close to the dead valley. On a windy day, the red dirt soared up the side of the hills leaving a small trail of dead and dying plants.