CHAPTER 21
Jallin descended smooth, dark stairs made of stone masonry. He told Jallin it was a wine cellar, at some point, but maybe it had originally been an entrance to a catacomb. Jallin could easily believe either story. Warm damp wrapped itself around Jallin like a friendly, but unwelcome, drunk man suddenly deciding Jallin was his brother and best friend. The air was full of yellow smells: urine, sweat, rotten breath, bodies.
The floor at the bottom of the stairs was slimy, spongy. Jallin stood on his tiptoes for a moment and dropped to his feet again. With the toe of his boot, he scuffed up a wrinkle in the slime. He searched for walls and found grimy walls, streaked with all manner of…something…lurking claustrophobically close to him. He was in a small room here, lit by an oil lantern, not a sunstone, which seemed to cower as it hung at eye level from a splintered rafter.
A hallway opened up on the other side of the room from the stairs, as dark as a throat. And from this darkness came the sounds of the hospital.
Jallin could wait here. This was an easy thought. He could wait here, and Eja and Hurga would come back soon enough. Hurga took Eja down here to see a death, Jallin thought. By now, the woman was probably dead. They’d be out soon.
A few coughs. Grunts. Groans. A muffled wail. Then, a laugh. It flitted out through the dark hallway like a little sparrow finding a way out of hell. Eja’s laugh.
Jallin had to go in. Eja was there, and she was laughing. Jallin would have to go in.
This room was wider, but only wider. The ceiling was no higher, the floor no lower. The back wall was nothing but coagulated darkness far away, farther than Jallin could ever want to go.
One after another, ghostly pale beds, like funeral slabs, lined the greasy walls, the slime reflecting the flickering light of the oil lantern. Jallin tried not to look at the bodies on the bed, some wriggling, their feet and legs curling up, or kicking at nothing, while the other people…didn’t move at all.
A few women moved among them all, like wums finding flowers. Hurga was among them, not even noticing Jallin at all. He’d heard these people called ‘buckets’ or ‘listeners,’ and he couldn’t remember which the more respectful word was. They all carried buckets to catch the vomit and blood and other refuse of the dying.
Jallin stopped at the foot of a bed and looked at the patient lying there. It was a boy, someone about Jallin’s age, or at least about his size. He lay balled up in the bed, as though wrapped around the last gold coin in the world, and occasionally he shuddered violently. Jallin squinted at the boy, and stepped out of the way of the light. He went to the side of the bed and tried to get a glimpse at the boy’s face. Something familiar was there, but Jallin wasn’t sure.
“Jallin,” Eja cried out. Some of the patients down here squirmed a little. A few, particularly the ones that seemed older, sat up. In the dimness of this place, dim smiles and skeletal eye sockets gleamed at the little girl darting between the bucket listeners going back and forth.
Eja, in a filth-covered smock billowing to her knees, charged at Jallin and hugged him. She took his hands, dragged him deeper into the sick room. All around him, voices whispered:
“Who’s that beautiful girl?”
“She doesn’t have the ‘lung, does she?”
“No, she’s got some of the pox, I think.”
“She’s coughing; the pox don’t make you cough.”
“She’s so beautiful. I’ve never seen…such…a beautiful child. C-c-counselors said…she’s perfect…she’s a Sponge of Trochaya. Is that her brother with her. The Sponge and the Cloth of Trochaya, the prophesied children, the ones who will help Trochaya end all suffering in the world. Here is the fertile soil, the purified, fertile soil, where the never-dying tree shall grow, and the fruit of life shall ripen and never rot.”
Eja held Jallin in the whispers and questions as though she were accepting praise for a street performance. Among these people, she was the sniff, the word the professionals used for the attraction holding an audience’s attention while the pickpockets moved.
“You hear that, Jallin? Listen. I’ve never been a blessing before, have you?” she smiled at him as though expecting him to ask her to dance. He wanted to ask her why she changed clothes, but someone was calling to them.
Jallin freed his hands and met an old woman’s stare. She had almost no hair. It was her smile on her face representing all the others. She stared, but she didn’t seem to see. Her face was stuck in the absent grin of an imbecile.
She reached for them.
“I go…I go…soon, I go…. I’ve seen the blessed children, the children of the prophecy, and soon, soon, I go…to…Trochaya. He has promised and here stand his promises, the promises of the great god who found us and loves us, who plucks us up from the mire and filth of the world and polishes us and cherishes us. Please, children, please come here to me, so I can touch you, so I can touch the blessings of Trochaya.”
It was Hurga who came to her side, a bucket dangling from her hand. She gestured for Jallin and Eja to come and stop being rude to the woman.
“She’s not Mrs. Golgottia, Jallin. Mrs. Golgottia’s gone now. It was so beautiful. You should have seen it. She died with a smile on her face. I wonder what she saw. I wonder if she saw Trochaya. What does Trocaya look like Jallin?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t like it down here. Why did you change clothes? Why are you wearing that nasty shift?”
She didn’t get a chance to answer. The old woman pulled her closer, and Jallin came with her, into a fog of strange foreign accented greetings and bad breath.
“Oh, blessed precious, you are like my own grandchild. You both. I must touch your hands, I must see your eyes. The great Trochaya gives me this priv….” The woman stopped speaking for a moment. Her smile left her face like fleabirds frightened off the façade of a building. A gurgling like water under a dock rumbled in her throat. Then, the smile returned. “Trochaya gave me a great burden. He gives me the bloodlung, and it is difficult. The fever was the worst part of it, I think, but the coughing hurts so much. Oh, you blessed little girl, you know all about it, don’t you?”
Eja nodded enthusiastically, and the woman rewarded her with a kiss on the knuckle. Then, she patted it, as though it needed tamping down. Jallin was thankful the woman had not yet managed to get around Eja and get to him, but she eyed him greedily.
“Counselor Dursus tells me…he tells me that I have taken on this burden of sickness, so many more will be born without it. He tells me that you two lived with a woman for…for almost a year? For almost a year with the bloodlung, and here you are standing here. My own grandchild did not survive the winter.” She put her hand to her mouth, trying to catch the words spilling out from her. “The bloodlung is particularly bad for children, the children that are not meant to survive, like that child over there.” Her gnarled finger pointed to the child Jallin saw earlier. “He was living on the streets, trying to survive on his own, and now, he dies. Let us praise Trochaya he did not live long enough to suffer.”
What did she know, the old crone? Jalllin thought to himself.
“What…are your names?”
“I’m Ejalina, and this is my brother. He’s Jallin. My mother died. She had the bloodlung, too,” Eja said. “My Aunty Hurga says the bloodlung is the next purification. Do you believe in purifications?”
“Yes, child. Yes. We must, mustn’t we? What is is what must be, after all. That is what Counselor Dursus has said all along. What comes to pass is what is meant to come to pass, after all, and those who die and do not fight the will of the gods are those who speed along the glorious day of triumph over pain and suff….” She broke into a fit of coughing and sprayed dark blood all across her bedsheets. Jallin could not find the new spots among the old ones. He didn’t look hard enough. Eja picked up a bucket from beside the bed and held it at the woman’s face. She pushed it aside. “I’m fine,” she croaked. “I’ll be fine. I’ve a long time yet before I go.” The old woman settled down into her pillow, her fingers still hanging on the side of the bucket. “I am a burning ember, and soon, I will grow black and cold. You, little Ejalina, are a torch. You will set the world ablaze.”
Eja beamed. She put the bucket down and, like a mother leaving a sleeping infant, pushed Jallin away from the bed out into the middle aisle again. The old woman still smiled at them, but her talking had taken all her energy away from her.
“You see? We’re special, Jallin. We’ve been chosen,” Eja whispered.
“To do what? What does all this mean? Why are we special? What do they think we’re going to do?”
“We’re going to help Trochaya judge the world. Counselor Dursus and Yubrin told me. They both said I was a light, and I would show the world what was good and what was bad.”
“How?”
“I don’t know…exactly. But they said.”
Jallin waited while a bucket passed. “What do these people know about anything? Doesn’t this make you feel…strange…being here? Watching these people just die like this?”
“They’re not dying, Jallin. We just don’t understand. They’re miserable. They go on to a better life. They die and are reborn in the Land of Waiting, and they’ll see all their families again. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be with Mama, and not have her coughing anymore? Wouldn’t it?”
“If that’s what happens, yes. But….” But Hurga had found them again, and she quickly herded them back towards the room with the stairs.
Jallin took deep breaths.
He wondered what Kir-Tuko was doing. He wondered how the slum’s air would taste just now. The air in here, the air he’d been swallowing, was poisonous.
Eja and Hurga talked softly while standing in the large doorway between the vestibule and the kitchen. Jallin didn’t follow them. The kitchen was as big a room in this old place, this old, once-upon-a-time mansion, as houses. The kitchen by itself, complete with a pantry attached, was bigger than the entire house Jallin and Eja and their mother lived in before she died.
Neither the pantry nor the cabinets along the walls had doors. Chipped boneburn plates and saucers lay in shadowy shelves; chipped cups hung from hooks along the bottoms of the cabinets and pots and pans from hooks along the ceiling. Along the outermost walls, three ovens hunched side by side, their faces black, thick metal.
He imagined this place, or tried to, the way it must have been once, in its younger days.
It wasn’t kinto-shah construction, so Jallin pictured human maids and servants frantically putting together meals, one of them walking past down into the wine cellar to get the bottle of blue from seventeen years ago.
Young women screamed at the cooks, reminding them dinner was supposed to be at sundown, and they were an hour behind already. The cooks, big bearded men maybe, wielding butcher knives, smeared blood across their white aprons and griped about the quality of the struk they had to work with.
A butler watched the whole thing with amusement, knowing this was a nightly routine, and knowing this was how the people worked and got things done: hasty, skilled movements, a juggling act of trays, pieces of unused food hitting the floor like cut hair, and angry-sounding commands.
In the next room were not sick people waiting to die from a cause. No, in the next room, at a proper table, with cloths and candles and goblets and implements worth a year and a half of a beggar’s life, the rich sat, dressed in fineries for one meal and whisper about the world. They swirled their glasses of wine or port by the stems between their fingers, sloshing the blood-red liquid like tiny oceans in their hands. They laughed at the foolishness of peasants, the short-sightedness of servants, the cost of bribing putrights to stay out of their lives, which guards could be trusted to keep secrets.
When Jallin had first begun to steal, Stasser had shown him this. They discovered the rich restaurants were where the best food was tossed out. The rich enjoyed seeing beggars taking things out of the trash; it made them, according to Stasser, think they were doing something worthy or good, like feeding fleabirds and raigs pieces of buttery bread. Stasser told Jallin the street once, and the name of the restaurant, but since they only went there when it was him and Stasser alone, Jallin forgot. It was an expensive place on the other side of the vin Sluska, apparently easy to access by the rich people on the northern parts of the city up near Triumph Square and King Street.
Hurga came into the kitchen to find Jallin seated by the door of the hospital. At first, he didn’t bother to notice her arrival, but she stood between him and his fantasy waiters and cooks.
“Jallin come into the parlor. The listeners need to begin the supper. You should be visiting with the others, anyway. It gives them hope.”
“Where’s Eja?”
“Counselor Dursus needed to speak with her for a moment. Did you know that Mrs. Golgottia and Mrs. Reggle both had grandchildren? And both of them want to donate something to Eja.”
“Mrs. Golgottia’s dead, isn’t she?”
“Yes, she has gone on, but Mrs. Reggle still has a long time yet. She has told us about her house, and she wants the church to have all her possessions. She told me she has three good dresses for Eja to have.”
Jallin felt a strange hunger in the back of his mind. He didn’t want to care about these old women dying and dead below him, but the thought of going through their possessions brought back some thoughts.
Counselor Yubrin appeared now in the kitchen. He must have heard something of what Hurga said.
“Jallin, why don’t you and I go to Mrs. Reggle’s home and collect some of her belongings? I think that would be a better use of your strength than simply sitting around moping, don’t you? A big lad like you should be able to help me carry quite a bit, and there might even be something in it for you.”
Jallin found the man’s face. He had bright blue eyes, and a kind, unsure, sort of smile. Jallin got the impression of him that he had forgotten how to be a child early in life.
“Well? Will you help me?” he asked. Jallin shrugged his shoulders. Hurga growled.
“I want to go back to Master Noshó’s now. I don’t feel well.” It was true. Jallin felt like he was going to be sick. He didn’t have a stomach ache so much as a headache. Being in the wine cellar bothered him. Trying to figure out what to think of Counselor Dursus, Trochaya worship, old ladies happy to die in front of children, all swirled his brains around.
“How do you feel?” Counselor Yubrin asked. “What hurts you?” A hand seemed to land on Jallin’s face, and Jallin swatted it away and sat up. Counselor Yubrin had approached so quietly, so suddenly, and decided he could touch Jallin without asking. The man didn’t have any manners.
“I’m fine. I just don’t feel well. I want to go home.”
“I think the best thing for it is to walk with me, so we can talk a while. Like I said, there might be something in it for you. Come on, I need your help.”
Reluctantly, Jallin stood.
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