We Leave Together, стр. 44
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