When We Were Executioners

by J. M. McDermott

  He pushed muster from his mind. He leaned towards Rachel’s demure smile. “How do you and him get by anyway?” said Jona, “I just don’t get how you can get by like that, traveling everywhere.”

  She smiled. “Oh, the best we can,” she said, “We work. We live.”

  “You’re sharp as daylight, and you ain’t even grinding the whores?”

  “When they don’t ask questions, they don’t look close. Sometimes, they don’t look at all. They just tell me what to do, and they pay me for doing it. People like us don’t get many choices. Djoss can barely read, and I can’t really work during the day. I’m not so good at prophecy, so I can’t read the cards well enough unless the fellow’s too drunk to care what I say. So, that’s my life. It’s the only one I got and I just have to bloom where I land.”

  He stroked her face with his hand.

  “I could be dead tomorrow,” she said, “Someone tells your fellows on me and I can’t bounce fast enough? I’m dead.”

  “I promise I won’t roll you,” he said. He leaned across the table. He placed his face upon her hand, and he kissed her just above her wrist.

  He put down his tea and brought her hand up to his nose. He breathed in her hand’s smell of smoke and old bleach. He pressed his nose into her skin and tried to fill himself with that smell.

  She looked at him like he was cheese-for-brains. Gingerly, her other hand touched the small hairs at the base of his skull. She traced those tiny hairs and wondered if this particular of-demon was crazy, or just sweet.

  Jona pulled his head up from the table. He frowned. “I guess,” he said. His eyes looked past her at the street. “I guess I have to go to work,” he said.

  She nodded. She waved.

  * * *

  Jona met Rachel on her night off for lunch. Outside, rain fell in steady waves upon the parasols as if it were still early summer, and Jona and Rachel stopped to eat at this cafe because neither had a parasol, and they didn’t want to walk through all that rain to the place they both knew down the road.

  This café was narrow, with tables along one wall, and the owner walked up and down with a huge teapot shaped like a swamp bear bleeding red tea from a punctured paw. The owner saw Jona’s City Guard uniform and perked up.

  Jona pointed at one of the tables. The owner nodded. Jona waited for Rachel to sit down. He wanted her to notice his courtly manners. He gestured at the teapot, and the owner handed it to him. The owner placed a cup on the table.

  “What’s this?” said Rachel.

  Jona popped his heels like a Lord’s servant. He bowed, and poured a cup. “Milady’s tea,” he said. He smiled gracefully.

  She cocked her head. “What’s this, then?”

  Jona dropped the charade. “Haven’t you ever had dinner with nobility before?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Well, you’d best be ready,” said Jona, “One of these days, I’ll take you to a grand ball, and you’ll have to be prepared for fine manners.” He poured a cup of tea for himself.

  “I’m not going to any grand ball,” she said, “and you look like a fellow going to get tossed.”

  Jona shared a quick glance with the proprietor. Jona winked at the old man, and the old man nodded.

  The old man praised Rachel’s beauty. She blushed.

  Jona slipped the old man some coins, and sat down across from Rachel. The old man continued to praise her beauty until Jona waved the old man away.

  Rachel covered her eyes. “I think my ears are burning,” she said.

  “I think he likes you,” said Jona.

  Rachel looked over Jona’s shoulder at the rain falling. Outside all this rain fell on the hats and the parasols and thunder crashed and lightning slapped white fingers across the sky.

  Jona tried to catch her eyes. He looked right at her—really looked at her. Her face was ashamed of his eyes. Her face spun around the room like a dancer spinning around Jona’s warm spotlight, never stepping into this steady light.

  She smiled at his eyes, still trying to escape them. She had crooked teeth, and Jona figured the teeth suited her face fine.

  * * *

  Who was Jona talking, to? Was it Rachel? Was it Pup? A man in a bar, asking Jona about the job of a king’s man—some upholsterer in an aura of lost thread, leaning into his empty mug, sneering at Jona?

  Jona said this to all of them.

  “Take a pig,” said Jona, moving his hands as if a dead pig was lying bare upon an examiner’s table in front of him, “Pig’s all parts. Nothing but parts.” A hand touches the imaginary nose, the imaginary spleen, the imaginary everything. “These parts go to the sausage man, these parts to the good butchers all over the town, and that part goes to the soap and tabor man, and this part goes to the glue man, and these other parts go to the tanners and knife-makers and all that.” He cut apart the pig with the edge of his hand, partitioning portions across the imaginary table.

  “These parts go everywhere but Elishta. Since gangers are everywhere, you can’t send anything anywhere in this town without guarding it, right? So a fellow hires armed guards, and calls himself a legitimate business.”

  Jona leaned in close, squinting a skeptical eye. “Remember how those parts go all over town?” he said, “Parts stink coming in, and stink going out. Nobody looks twice on account of the stink. So, if you’re running pinks or you’re a fence, you love the sight of that stinking, grunting bag of parts, right?”

  Jona leaned back, away from the examining table in front of him. He points with his thumb here and there. “We got plenty of gangs in the Pens, but they just don’t mark themselves like they do everywhere else, see? Most of the time, they’re legitimate businessmen in the business of parts. We got our share of fences at the edges, but most of what we got is the demon weed. Pink smoke flowing through these streets like you wouldn’t believe. Stop five people in the street, two of them are smuggling, two of them are using, and the last one’s too scared to say a thing over it. Smugglers have guards that’ll kill you surer than a street gang’ll roll you for a coin. Smugglers don’t just club a fellow. They’ll drop a baby straight into the water like nothing.

  “Any stupid gangers slip into the Pens and start trouble with smugglers, we club ’em out quick. We club gangers out, and we probably save their worthless little lives. Then, we go after the smart smugglers. We watch books. We watch carts. We watch parts. We negotiate with ’em.”

  He held his hands up, offering his imaginary pig to the people who heard him speak. “See?”

  “I don’t see anything,” said Rachel. “All I see is my brother, and his friends, and they’re gone all the time. Sometimes Djoss comes home bloody.”

  CHAPTER IX

  You should get out of these kinds of places. Stay off the streets a while, if you can.

  Think I’ll end up like one of the hot corn girls? I’m Senta. I can see their fate. I don’t choose that for myself. I couldn’t even if I wanted to.

  That’s not what I mean. I mean, try to keep off the streets a while. Something is… It’s getting strange out there. Getting raw and wrong. New people trying to come up rowdy. Workmen are coming to tear up the streets, build new canals. Who knows what’ll happen when the roads change, and everyone’s angry about it. Not good for anyone foreign times like that.

  Not good for you, either. You should get out of it. Marry rich. Be a lord.

  Yeah. My mother says that.

  I don’t think you should marry anybody. I don’t think you and I should ever marry anyone at all. I was just being spiteful.

  You only get sold once when you get married. It’s cleaner that way.

  A young girl—I’ll call her Jess, because Rachel never knew her name—was not earning enough to pay for her room. She was too slow with them. They didn’t come back for her like they were supposed to do. The owner of the building went up to Jess in her room with a new girl in tow. The owner—I shall call him nothing at all—handed Jess a bucket of hot corn. He told the girl t
o walk about and sing out the corn songs a while. Maybe she’d find enough young men to fill a room again.

  Rachel pushed a rag from one side of the room to the other, an invisible observer like all maids. In the street, Jess came up to Rachel, and offered her some corn for free. “Just go in and give it to the cat. See if he’ll eat it. Don’t let him starve.”

  “I’m working,” said Rachel. She lined sheets up along a wall. She pulled down sheets that hadn’t had time to dry. “Don’t steal any of these sheets. We’d know it was you.”

  “Please…”

  “He counts the corn at the end of the night. You know he does. He counts the coin and the corn.”

  “He’s helpless without me.” Rouge cracked in river deltas beneath her tears. Polluted make-up streams stained her yellow shift.

  “There are as many cats as there are women in this city. Maybe more.”

  “Don’t you care about anyone? Please, help me.”

  And Rachel heard Jess crying in her head all night.

  A new girl came to work in the room, and the cat was still in it. The cat hid from the new girl in Jess’ old room behind a crack in the wall and yowled for Jess to come and throw this strange girl out of the cat’s bed. This new girl clapped her hands over her ears, and then pulled powder out from her bag of make-up. She doused a piece of old food in the powder and threw it into the wall for the cat to eat.

  Later that night, Rachel had to pull the dead cat from a crack in the wall with a long broom handle.

  Rachel threw the dead cat over the wall, where the rain would come to wash the body into the sewers.

  With Jess crying somewhere about her lost cat—selling hot corn among the thugs and night bruisers, paying for anything stolen— Rachel figured that the powder had done exactly what it had been made to do. The powder had killed a working girl’s baby.

  She never went back to that establishment. Somewhere new, always a place that needed cleaning, and Turco had long since turned a blind eye to Rachel’s work. He wasn’t coming around and demanding a cut like before.

  Night came and there was no end to the beds in the city, and the whorehouses strung together in a chain of forgotten buildings, sheets, and the smell of them, like a swamp full of rosewater.

  * * *

  I want you to know who my brother is, if you see him in a crowd. He’s not worth making trouble over, if you run into him. He’s a good man, trying to make money for me.

  Your brother should stay out of the demon weed.

  He should. He won’t, though. Look, just leave him alone, okay?

  Djoss was cooking when Rachel came home. He was leaning over a pot, stirring. He looked tired. She touched his shoulder. He leaned back, into a cot. He fumbled in his pockets for some money, but there wasn’t any. He said, “I’m doing better. I barely touch the stuff.”

  “I wish you were around more often.”

  “I’m around, just not when you’re here.”

  “How’s Turco doing?”

  “I don’t know if he sleeps. I’ve never seen him sleep. The weed wakes him up. It gives him this huge energy. He runs all over the city to tell people where we are. I think he gives all his money to the mudskippers. Looks like he does, anyway.”

  “You making good money?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Got rent paid. Got food. How’re your clothes?”

  “Not good.”

  “We can go get some. I can go get some tonight.”

  “Okay,” she said. She sat down on her cot and looked up at him. He had lost weight since coming to Dogsland, and regained it in his shoulders and back. He was dressed like a local.

  His clothes had the sweat-stain lines, the blood stains and pink splashes as if he stepped off the killing floor where they cut and grind the meat. He had the tan of a local, no longer a pale man

  from the north.

  “I was thinking,” he said. His hand started shaking when he spoke. “I was thinking maybe we should get our coin together, and put this place behind us.”

  “Why?”

  “Because… I don’t know. We’ve been here almost a year. It doesn’t seem right, does it?”

  “I know.”

  “We should go.”

  “We will. Just, not yet.”

  He nodded. “The weed is something else, isn’t it? I mean it really gets in your head.”

  “Yeah. So you need to cut it out.”

  “Or leave. We could go somewhere new, and I wouldn’t know where it was or how to find it. Maybe it wouldn’t be there at all.” “No one’s found out about me. We’ve been here for months and we haven’t had to run. No one is paying attention to us.

  Djoss, maybe you should start bouncing again. Maybe you should get out of it.”

  “We’d have to leave this place. Go somewhere cheaper.”

  “Yeah, but that’s nothing.”

  “Let me think about it, then. Let me just think about it.”

  “I’m working at a new place again. I’m way out on the water. I have to take a ferry to work. People there’re almost respectable.”

  “Show me.”

  “Tomorrow. You know you’re going to leave before I do.” She was meeting Jona later. She couldn’t show him anything.

  * * *

  Rachel saw a familiar face running from a mob of little sharks— a kid’s gang that claimed most of the boys on the street.

  In the poor streets, this girl that we called Jess once hauled muddy rags on her back in heaps, like a hump. Rachel caught the girl’s eye but she didn’t look long and soon they passed each other.

  When the ships unloaded their sailors, these women ran to the dock and pinched their cheeks red to look healthier, happier. They took any kind of coin you had, and not much of them. They slipped into alleys and fell back, their humpbacks like cheap mattresses. They pulled their skirts up.

  Men ran past the cheap girls with ragbacks while the girls ran for the new ships—owners hate free girls—with spikes and small clubs up their sleeves. The girls ran fast with their rag bed humps always on their backs. That’s why they wore them.

  Jess had children chasing after her—a kid gang screaming at her humpback. They threw rocks at it.

  The hump back girls stank worse than the alleys they slept in.

  And these girls liked to dream back to their younger days, at the best brothels in town, wrapped in silk and flattery.

  Then, the silks wore down to linens and then wools, and the men were workers with the smells of their profession—printers drenched in acrid ink, fruitmen like sweet rot, and bakers in a cloud of musty flour. Now, the sailors rolled off the ships to these used-up girls with beds on their backs for the first furious rounds of shore leave.

  Sometimes the smarter girls saw the shape of their destiny and saved their coins, opened their own brothels or married an older client whose wife had passed.

  The ones who married usually found themselves back on the street, when their husband passed, and the rest of the family threw her out of her own home over a few coins left in no one’s name and the judication that should have saved her was bribed to throw her out.

  * * *

  Rachel never told the women of her brothel about their future, no matter how often they asked. Sometimes Rachel lied, if she needed the money. Sometimes, she focused on the bright spots in the black night.

  She didn’t like to think about her brother’s future, but she knew it, too.

  Inside of herself, she wondered if there was anything she could do about it. She pushed her mop, and hung the clean sheets to dry. She threw out the trash. She focused on the Unity. She dreamed of Jona.…

  The hot corn girl, back in from the streets with a bed and men paying for her, asked Rachel for help. The words didn’t register right away. Rachel was mopping. The mop moved from one side to another. She didn’t look up. The night was almost done, and then Rachel’d go home.

  The girl, Jess, touched Rachel’s shoulder. “Hey,” she said, “Hey, Senta, can you
help me?”

  “What?” said Rachel.

  Jess had a speculum in one hand, and a small hook in the other. “You know what this is, right? Maids and Senta do this. I’ll pay you for it. Please?”

  Rachel took the speculum in one hand, not knowing precisely what Jess meant. Then, Rachel saw the hook and thought for a moment about what the two together could be used to do to a working girl, and how Rachel had seen these before, all bloody.

  Rachel frowned. “I don’t want trouble,” she said.

  “Maybe you know somebody?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “I’ve never…” Jess looked down at it. “I’m sorry. I thought you would. Everyone said to ask the maid. Ask a Senta. Ask someone.”

  “I don’t do that. I don’t want any trouble. I don’t want anything.”

  Two days later, Jess was gone. Rachel didn’t need dreamcasting to know what had happened.

  This book is dedicated to the early visitors in the streets of Dogsland, who each took time to make the city and people there more true: Nancy Holder, James Patrick Kelly, Michelle Muenzler, Sharon Maas, and Juliet Ulman.

  Juliet, in particular, moved mountains.

  When We Were

  Executioners

  J. M McDermott

  Book Two of the Dogsland Trilogy

  Table of Contents

  When We Were Executioners

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII