We Leave Together, стр. 4

Jona Lord Joni did not see his world that way, but I do. Jona sees a world full of people and memories and feelings, not things. He does not know the horror of his home, for it is the only home he knew.

I know him, and his home, because of the skull we found below a bluff, far from the city he called home. Hunting demon children brought my husband and me to this city, by Erin’s will.

***

Jona saw this old woman sometimes in Rachel’s building. This old woman wore putrid bandages wrapped over her arms and legs where the rats chewed her rotting flesh.

The rats tell me that the woman’s arms tasted like rotten meat, and it is a soft and supple meat and easy to digest for rats. She swung at the rats with rags and trash that didn’t hurt the rats much. Sometimes she just lay back and wailed as if she were making love to a paramour shaped like a pack of rats.

She had rats because her little room was filthy all the time. She was too old and tired to clean it. She wrapped her arms in dirty bandages. She walked the halls and stared beautifully, terribly at the young men there. No one helped her, there.

Once upon a time, young men would have killed each other to follow her into her little room.

Now, there were rats.

Jona passed this old woman’s open door. She sat on her dirty floor, looking up at him. He looked long enough to avert his eyes. He kept walking to Rachel’s door. His boots were in his hand so he wouldn’t stomp her awake with his footsteps. He didn’t know if Rachel was home or not. He picked her door open with a knife. He peered inside, at the demon’s child sleeping there, half in shadow and half in the sun of the open window. All thoughts of the hideous woman of the rats faded, for the horror of the rats was a mundane thing, and the beauty of his beloved resting there was the unspeakable beauty that had no place to him, in this city.

Another memory rises, then.

Outside, standing on the corner, a girl waited for her lover to return from the abbatoir. She smeared her skin in white chalk, like dusting herself in corpse lime. She did it to make her skin beautiful white, and to quiet her body’s smells. Her hair, all braided and smeared in greenish-hues from the lime, hung like vines from her ceramic face. Her dress was sewn like a quilt from scraps, but it fit her well.

She was a dirty thing, wearing mud like it was her true skin and all that lime on top of it. She looked up into Jona’s eyes with no artifice to hide her contempt for him.

And, she was a pretty thing.

Someday the street-sweepers would come, the engineers with golden hammers, and the king’s men, and rat bite death and they’d scrape away all the things that made the girl beautiful.

Until then, Jona walked past her. She was the queen of the corner and sitting in the only place she’d ever know.

Her lover waved to her somewhere behind Jona. She left to kiss that man on the horizon, waving to him. She ran off past Jona’s eyes, into the crowd behind him, after her lover.

Pup smacked Jona’s arm. “You hear something?”

Jona’s attention returned to his job. His ear caught a sound bouncing around the narrow brick walls of alleys and small streets and crowded places. He gestured to the other King’s Man on that walkabout.

Around a corner and around another corner and then one more, and all the bodies in the mud were swinging fists like monkeys in the animal Pits. A local stevedore gang fought kids in crowns. Grown men with hands like bags of meat swung at kids that had never had a real meal they hadn’t stolen. The kids climbed up and down the big brutes like apes climbing moving trees. They got thrown off. Little ones sat and cried. They clutched at their heads and twisted limbs.

Pup reached for his bells.

Jona stayed Pup’s hand with a touch. “We ring the bells over a turf war, they’re just going to fight somewhere else,” said Jona. “Just watch. Anybody gets killed, we roll the killer when they’re done.” Jona shouted at the crowd of men. “You hear me! You can fight with your fists, but I see anybody swinging bats or teeth, I’ll roll you now and save ourselves the paperwork!”

Pup had his bat up and out. “We just let ’em fight?”

A man peeled a boy off his back, and threw the boy into a wall. The boy made this sound like dice rattling in a cup. His broken ribs showed through the holes in his shirt, like kindling wood in a skin bag. He sat there, clutching at his chest, trying not to cry. He would not survive this wound, but he would survive long enough it wouldn’t count to Jona.

Pup’s hand went for the bell in his pocket again.

Jona snorted. “I’m no scrivener, Pup. You the one to scribe it for Calipari and me both.”

That stopped Pup.

Jona saw a shimmer of metal in the corner of his eye. A boy tugged the crown from his head, and raised the jagged teeth of the thing up like a lamprey’s jaw. He swung down once, not strong enough to draw blood. He pulled it up again, poised to strike harder with both hands.

Jona jumped over broken boys in the battlefield. Jona plucked the crown like plucking fruit. “I said no teeth!” shouted Jona, “That means these crowns of yours, too! These’re all teeth!” Jona leaped back over the broken boys to Pup.

Jona handed the crown to his fellow. “What do you think?”

Pup had a flask in one hand and the crown in the other. He paid more attention to the flask. “I