The Trochiabite Boy...Just Journaling...Chapter 1

His mother stopped coughing, and Jallin tried to run to her.  Counselor Yubrin clutched his shoulder like an gull plucking a fish out of the bay and held him back.  Jallin didn't fight.  He didn't want to upset her.  Not now.  

He looked to Eja, his sister, lying over on the broken sofa near the wall.  He could see her knobby little legs through the holes in the rat-chewed blanket, and she shivered a little in her sleep.  Jallin went and put her head in his lap, and she coughed a few times.  These were not the bone-rattling coughs of his mother.  

In the next room, Jallin heard Counselor Dursus praying, performing some ritual over his mother.  He didn't listen, except to take comfort in the fact she was still alive in there.  

Counselor Yubrin, a man about eighteen years old or so, stood awkwardly in the dim room.  He wore an overcoat, like what sailors wear when it rains, and his hands seemed to forget his pockets were empty.  Like the noses of raigs, they sniffed around inside his pockets.  His hair was neatly trim, but looked shiny in the light from the little oil lamp on the tattered table between him and Jallin.  He bore no sign he was a priest of any religion whatsoever, no badge, no shawl, no medallions or medals, no robe, no hat, nothing.  It was the same for Counselor Dursus who had walked into the back bedroom an hour ago.  The two of them might as well have been uncles or friends of Jallin's father.  But they weren't.  They were priests.  

"Is she dying?" Jallin asked.  He surprised himself at how cold he sounded when he said it.  He had thought about the death of his mother for a long time, ever since she first started coughing.  She'd fought it a long time, longer than Jallin could remember.  All his memories had her coughing now, stopping her washing or her cooking or her laughing or talking or scolding, to brace herself, hands on the table, face down, coughing.  It had only grown worse.  

"Only Trochia knows," said Counselor Yubrin.  He shuffled his feet, apparently finding a bit of dirt or trash to kick at.  "He takes care of his faithful.  All will be for the best."  The words seemed to linger like an unwelcome visitor.  The priest's eyes looked all around the room, as though looking for something, anything to talk about.  His hands found his pockets again.  

"Your sister?  What's her name?"  He nodded at the sofa and the little bundle upon it.    

"She's Eja.  It's short for Ejalina."  

"And how old is she?" 

"I don't know.  I think ten.  Mama says I'm twelve."  

As if in response to mentioning her name, another fit of gasping and coughing filled the room.  Jallin started to get up, but Eja's head on his lap stayed him.  She grunted and buried her face in the blanket.  Jallin adjusted it around her, but it was little use.  Some part of her was exposed no matter what.  The moths and mice and raigs had all had their way with the thing and left very little for the family.  

"What happens if she dies?" Jallin asked, but Counselor Dursus stepped out of the bedroom.  He pocketed something and waved over Counselor Yubrin to talk.  He mumbled under his breath and turned his back to the two children on the sofa.  The difference between the two men was big.  Counselor Yubrin was a short and thin man; Counselor Dursus took up space.  His back, under his cloak, seemed to stretch like a sail in full wind.  Counselor Yubrin's hair was brown, like the fur of a young Kinto-Shah.  Counselor Dursus' hair was almost totally gray, like a bit of rusty iron.  

Counselor Dursus had some folded piece of paper in his hand and he flapped it up and down as he talked.  Jallin didn't care about it.  He took the opportunity to slip out from under his sister's head and try for the bedroom.  The two priests, if they noticed, did not try to stop him at all.  

The strong breath of incense met him at the door, like a nurse putting a hand up to stop him.  The mother he had now lay in the bed, covered up to her armpits by blankets.  It wasn't the mother he knew when he was young.  This was a different woman, a woman who could not do mother things for him anymore at all.  Once, a long time ago, she used to sing.  Now, she was dry skin over sharp bone.  Her eyes were tired and did not look at him much.  Her lips were wrinkled, parched.  Jallin was ashamed.  He was ashamed of how he felt, how he hated what had happened to her, how he didn't cry.  He hated stealing things to keep them alive, because she could not work.  He hated her for being sick and not working and not being his mother anymore.  He hated the way she looked now, the way she smelled, the cracking in her voice.  He hated hating things.  He could not comfort her, could not do enough for her, could do nothing to keep her from coughing, from gasping for every precious breath of air.  

"Come and take her from this life of misery.  Let her pass into the Waiting world, where she can be at rest until the time she returns to this world," whispered Counselor Dursus.  He stood with his heavy hand on Jallin's shoulder now, not to hold him back, but to keep him there.  His other hand wavered in the air between them and the dying woman.  It was as though he were pushing the image of the sick woman further and further away, as though his mother was nothing more than a bad smell, the stink of death.  

Jallin went into the room.  This room's furnishings consisted of a pile of unsorted clothing in the corner beside another pile of assorted junk someone in the family thought might be useful in some way, a bed scavenged from a dump, a mattress made of rags and bits of cotton bails, and a crate for a nightstand.  The woman on the bed, as thin as a a pile of sticks, moved only a little and did not open her eyes.  She shuddered, too, whether a breeze came through or not.  

Jallin picked up some of the clothing from the floor and laid it across her feet and legs on top of the blankets.  It was like dressing a scarecrow.  Counselor Dursus let him and said nothing.  

Their house was like the nest of an animal.  Once, it had been the ground floor of a boarding house, but the upper floor had collapsed or been blown away in a storm, or perhaps it had burned.  Jallin never came up with a satisfactory story to explain it; he never really had to tell anyone.  A staircase going nowhere was in the middle of the front room, and under this was where Jallin slept while his mother and sister slept in the bedroom.  Evidence suggested a kitchen had been in the back of the house, but it had gone away with the upper floor, leaving only a pile of rubble and a stove standing in alone.  The stove was shared among the boarders and vagrants trying to keep warm in the winter and spring, like now.  

The landlord, a short, fat kinto-shah with gold earrings, whom Jallin always had to call Mr. Klacha, did nothing to fix the place or any of his other squalid, rotten houses, except to put a roof over what was left and to send around a bruiser to make sure no one squatted without paying rent.  Jallin had, like many children in the neighborhood, seen what happened to people who stayed in one of Mr. Klacha's houses without permission, even the abandoned ones.  He saw this slave bruiser beat a beggar to death with the man's own boot.  The house had stood empty for years before and years afterwards.      

Jallin took a certain satisfaction in stealing from anyone associated with Mr. Klacha's other businesses.  He loved to target kinto-shah slave owners, but he came to recognize Mr. Klacha's mark particularly, his brand, and he stole fruits and vegetables, as well as spices and liquor, which made good trade.  Some of his take was under the remaining pile of clothes.  

Eja coughed and Jallin decided to risk taking a few more clothes from the pile, but his mother's hand caught his elbow.  Her eyes opened, closed, stayed closed, opened again and found him in the darkness of the room.  

"J-J-Jallin," she hissed, unable to say anything above a whisper.  "T-t-take c-c-care of Eja.  Do what Couns-e-lor Dursussss....sssays."  

"I'll take care of Eja, Mama," Jallin agreed.  He tried to peel her hand off of him, but she held strong. 

"G-go with him, w-w-where he takesss you," she strained.  "You're going w-w-with Aunty Hurga, to...to...Master Nosho's...house...until...until...."  

"Aunty Hurga?  Mama, please."  

She shook her head.  She swallowed as though she had an entire sangamelon lodged in her throat.  She licked her lips, but it was like the ocean across the sand.  

"...will be taken...care of...until...of age.  M-master Nosho ag-agrees.  Ap-ap-apprenticed."  

His mother released him and fell back onto the bed.  She stared up at the ceiling.  Her eyes closed, slowly, and reopened.  Now, she fell into another fit of coughing.  It shook her as though she were possessed.  She put her hand over her mouth, but could not stem the tide.  Now, Counselor Dursus returned and pulled Jallin away from his mother.  He resisted, but Counselor Dursus insisted he stand away.  

From his pocket, he drew out a handkerchief and put it to the woman's mouth.  Now it grew stained, turning dark in his hand.  He put his hand on her chest and muttered something over her, low enough where it sounded like a raig growling over a piece of meat in an alleyway.    

Counselor Yubrin pulled Jallin the rest of the way out of the room.  

He wrapped his arm around Jallin's shoulder, but Jallin shrugged it off and moved to his sister again, who also coughed.  He kept his back to Counselor Yubrin all the while.  He piled a pair of pants, some stockings, and an old tattered coat over Eja's little legs and then sat down on the table.  From behind him came Counselor Yubrin's voice.  

"Where is your father, Jallin."  

"He was pressed.  We never saw him again.  I barely knew him at all.  He worked at the docks."  

The truth was this was only the story his mother gave him about his father's whereabouts.  It was possible his father was one of the Sarkoshian Aethren counsel.  He might have been a putright, for all he knew, patrolling the streets one night and finding his mother coming home from a day's washing, too weak to put up a resistance to his charms in her day's fatigues.  He had only a few dreamlike memories of a man living with them, talking to them, loving them.  

Putrights, the sorcerers who enforced law in Sarkoshia, did do that from time to time.  But his mother told him his father had been taken by a press gang and put into service on a ship somewhere, toted off to sea and never returned.  Because she couldn't read, she could not understand the markings of the ship, but she knew it was a kinto-shah ship, and illegal slavers that took him.  Of course, she could never prove it.  She said his father was a good man, upright, strong, a good sailor.  

"He had a big laugh," she said.  

She said she was glad he was gone now; she didn't want him to see her sick.  He was waiting for her now.  Counselor Dursus said he would be waiting in the Beautiful World, waiting for her to come, so they could both return here.  

After that night, Jallin never saw his mother again.