by Amy Hoff
“I’ve never heard the lasses complain,” joked Robert, trying for his usual bravado, but it fell flat this time, and doubt crept in like the mist on the bridge.
“I’m not – I can’t,” said Robert, trying to hide his fear. “I’m sorry, I just don’t have the time. I need to find Leah, I need to get to Caledonia Interpol, I need–”
“You need to take the subway,” the creature finished for him.
He indicated the dark entrance with a flourish. The escalator hummed as it vanished downwards. Robert couldn’t make out anything in the monster’s featureless face.
Still, despite some proof to the contrary, Agnes Broun and William Burness didn’t raise a fool. Not where it mattered. Robert stepped back from the brink.
“I can walk,” he said weakly, turned, and found himself facing a wall.
A wall of red sandstone, the colour of Glasgow, hemming him in; the orange sodium lamps of Kelvin Bridge had vanished.
The only way forward was down.
The creature gestured toward the subway one more time.
All the lights had gone. It was dark down there, a maw ready to swallow him whole.
But the escalator was still working.
The creature nodded, and Robert walked forward, stepping onto the escalator.
He looked back, gripping the rubber of the moving siderail, the orange sodium lamps once again visible, dim in the mist through the windows, as the shadowy figure stood sentinel.
Robert watched until the figure was out of sight, and he was engulfed in darkness.
He tried not to think about the fact that the escalator was carrying him downward.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A REQUIEM FOR
ROBERT BURNS
The sun rose in Alloway.
Not that anyone could tell.
The morning was covered in a thick mist that blanked out most of the view.
Mist, there’s something important about mist, Robert, remember who you are –
But the strange thought vanished as soon as it had wandered across the forefront of his mind.
Robert breathed in, the chill air of the countryside settling in his bones. He felt the gnaw of hunger, of never-full-enough, in a stomach that hadn’t known it for centuries.
Centuries? Where did that idea come from?
He looked out the window, a single pane of glass, and touched its chill surface with his fingertips. The whipcord muscles of his arms, too skinny, not at all the broad shape of a hale and hearty Scottish farmer’s – not yet. He was currently half-listening to the advice of his dying father to his sister. He couldn’t see much outside, although the sun was struggling to pierce the clouds and burn away the fog settling on the ground outside. He loved the quiet beauty of the countryside, rolling green beneath the cerulean blue of the Ayrshire skies.
“An’ yet, there’s ane o ye that gives me worry,” Robert’s ears caught, just barely audible.
In anguish, the young man turned from the window. Whisky-coloured eyes blazed in an intelligent, handsome face, beautiful even through years of backbreaking work at the plough.
“Oh, Father,” said Robert, “d’ye mean me?”
His father didn’t answer, as Robert knelt by the side of his death-bed, but the meaning was all too clear.
Robert gripped the sheets of the bed as his sister looked on, astonished.
“I swear to ye, Father,” whispered Robert, “that I shall no give ye reason to worry. I swear it!”
And did I, Father? Robert often thought to himself, over the centuries. Did I make you proud?
Robert knew his own infirmity; in life, he was plagued with an illness no doctor could diagnose. For all his hard work on the farm, the ploughman poet walked with an eternal stoop, and found himself taken ill repeatedly. He sought the advice of doctor after doctor, never finding an answer. It was in this state he finally sought out the solution only Desdemona could provide, after taking the cold waters of the Brow Well, ill-informed advice that did not heal his fever but probably hastened his demise. And in this state he begged her to save him, since no doctor knew how. It was not that he felt regret for the world; after all, it had been as hard on him as it had been kind, and money and fame can’t guarantee health or happiness. No, he feared leaving her alone in the world, although she had never much minded the solitude. He still did not know the reason she had taken pity on him and done as he’d asked, but he had passed away despite her efforts.
And some thirty years later, he had clawed his way back to the world again, with only her name in his heart.
He would come to know, later, that he had suffered from what was now called chronic illness, that people still had difficulty with diagnosis despite the modern miracles of medical technology. He often thought to himself that the life of a vampire was preferable to one in which he had been imprisoned within his own body, a body bent on torturing him until the fateful day he went into the spring in the coldest part of the year and then searched desperately for a bottle of wine, since the local would not allow him further alcohol. There, in a small countryside inn, Desdemona touched him for the first, and he assumed the last, time. He was never more grateful to her than when he encountered more proof that the world of medicine had not moved on much from his own day. He felt deep regret at the suffering of other people who did not have a Desdemona to provide them hope, nor people who understood their suffering. Those nights were long and arduous, and occasionally brought phantom pains to a body that had long since ceased to understand the word.
The problem, as it turned out, had been an invention of those gods who delight in irony: it was his heart.
***
Robert found himself drawn deeper into these memories. He began to understand what Leah had told him: that it was a Venus fly trap, honey-slicked and deadly. Even with that knowledge, he struggled to free himself from these things so long-buried.
What do we fear losing the most? Leah’s voice echoed in his mind.
Somewhere, a long time ago in Ayrshire, Robert Burns was walking along a path with his dog, feeling sorry for himself. Desdemona wouldn’t return his affections, and other women had let him down. Robert’s own responsibility in these proceedings was not really a matter he gave much thought; instead, he felt himself unfairly spurned.
His dog was not named Dileas, because Robert Burns was a Lowlander. His dog was named Luath, and was also a collie, just like every Dileas in the Highlands. Luath was a smooth-coated collie while Dileases are Border collies, which makes absolutely no sense at all. Luath means quick while Dileas means faithful, and while none of this may seem like it matters, to history it mattered a great deal.
Luath had run off, true to his name, and Robert gave him the chase. There was a woman outside doing laundry in her yard, and Luath ran up to her. She looked up. It was Jeannie Armour, just turned eighteen; a brunette vixen he’d met some time before during the Mauchline Race Week Dance, when Luath had run into the room and jumped up to greet his master.
“I wish I could find a lassie wad love me as much as my dug did!” he had cried.
Now, the winsome Jeannie winked at him as she pinned the laundry up and Luath ran around her feet.
“Weel, Mossgiel, have ye found your lass yet?” she teased him.
A grin started to spread across Robert’s face, as he realised he just may have.
***
Robert smiled down at the woman in his bed. A blonde woman, whose name he couldn’t remember.
I love you, he’d said. She changed into another woman with red hair, whose face he knew and yet her name escaped him. Woman after woman metamorphosed in his bed, all legs and breasts and long hair, and he didn’t remember the name of one. Not anymore.
It had, after all, been centuries.
This one, at least he remembered her name.
Robert smiled down at Jeannie, the love of his life.
The love of his life? No. That wasn’t right. He was forgetting something, something important.
“I love you too, Rabbie,” she replied. If she wasn’t the love of his life, he was the love of hers. Trusting, beautiful, the mother of his children. The mother of other women’s children, the mother of the children from some of those nameless women in his bed.
Jeannie was a saint. Nobody could deny that. And yet...
He frowned, getting dressed.
What was he forgetting?
***
Robert turned the corner of his house to find a woman standing there, leaning against the sandstone, smoke leaving her lips leisurely as she held a delicate white pipe between her fingers. Not that anyone else would have recognised the stern soldier with the shock of ginger hair as a woman. Not that she was a woman, after all.
“Those are some cheap words coming from your mouth, Robert Burns,” she said, exhaling harshly. She stood beneath his window. His and Jeannie’s. She must have heard him say –
Robert stared at her. It couldn’t be.
“Des?!” he finally gasped. “You’re alive? But how?”
Love of my life. Yes, this is the love of my life. But I am not the love of hers. If in fact she can love at all.
Desdemona grinned, a strange, crooked smile. Fat snowflakes began to fall; it was quite late in the season.
“I’m notoriously difficult to kill,” she said. She narrowed her eyes at him. “You know, I don’t think you’ve been honest with all these women.”
“I have!” said Robert, indignant. “I loved every one of them!”
“Is love such an easily traded commodity between you humans?” she asked. “Don’t you catch disease if you do that too much?”
Robert’s anger melted away as he watched her lips around the pipe, tongue and teeth, drawing smoke within her. He remembered the first time he’d focused on her mouth around that pipe, the first time he’d wanted that mouth on his own body; he shook his head, to dissipate the trance. Around her, it was like being in a too-warm room; unable to focus, unable to do more than float on the tides of her strength and her supple body. Not that she noticed or cared, he reminded himself ruefully.
“Desdemona,” he sighed, world-weary, stung again by his thwarted desire, “why are you here?”
“War’s not going well,” she said, nonchalant, though he could see that she wasn’t, in the tightness of her shoulders and the grey shadows in her brilliant green eyes. “Thought you’d like to join us.”
And Robert Burns, now rich; Robert Burns, now famous; Robert Burns, wearing his lovely red coat and working as a tax man for the government, yearned for nothing more than to leave everything behind and follow this creature anywhere she led, into the battle, into the endless lands of the Fae, into the warm darkness he so wished to share with her, into hell itself, should it come to that.
But this time, for the first time, something stayed his hand. Just a wisp of something – regret or responsibility, but it stayed his hand.
“I can’t,” he said, and disappointment rang out in every part of his expression. “I – I don’t think I can.”
Desdemona raised an eyebrow.
“One of the girls?” she asked, softer now, a dulling of her edges, diamond-hard.
“Her name’s Jeannie,” said Robert, warming to the story although his heart was cold within it. “We’re to be married.”
Desdemona, he was certain, could feel the doubt rolling off him in waves.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, with confidence he did not feel. “I will be responsible. We will have many children. She’s even said she’ll help me take care of all the others.”
This seemed to shock Desdemona. He was pleased to be able to evoke a reaction in her after all this time.
“All the others?!” she barked. “Good God, Robert, how many do you need?”
“It’s time I became a man,” Robert said decisively. “I canna run away wi’ the faeries forever.”
And the Faerie in front of him stared deep into his huge sad eyes and shook her head.
“All right,” she said. She turned away from him, and his heart began to shatter like the spun glass he knew it was made from, in the falling of the snow.
“Des. Desdemona. Wait,” said his treacherous mouth. She glanced over her shoulder.
“I just want you to know that – no matter what happens, with Jeannie, with any of the other women – I love you,” he said, and poured his everything into the phrase – the first time he meant it, really meant it, in all those long, lonely years.
Desdemona’s expression was Not Having It.
“Just say the word and I’ll come with you,” he begged. “Just say the word. Please.”
He knew he was asking her to assume a responsibility he was too much the coward to take himself. Shame washed through him, and yet he could not bring himself to decide on his own. He wanted to feel as if he were compelled to do it, as if she needed to cast a spell on a man who already knew he was damned.
Desdemona turned to him and lay her hand on his arm, one of the very few times they touched. He stared at her hand, felt the cool weight of it.
“Robert,” she murmured, and he fancied that he heard a warmth in her voice that had never been there before. “Go with this woman and take care of these children. Forget about this world, as I told you on the day we met. Enjoy your life. Live it well.”
She looked up at him and winked. Then it crashed over him all at once, and he could feel only the wanting of her, the indescribable pull, that cruel gulf in which he would sacrifice himself if given a breath of a chance.
“After all,” she said, dealing the killing blow, “you’re only human.”
She walked off wearing that same old cocky grin, and he could see the silhouette of her form in the low Ayrshire sunset, the mist gathering around him in the snow.
“Desdemona,” he said, his voice cracking.
“See you around, Robert Burns,” she said, and didn’t turn around.
***
He remembered another time, then; a time he thought he’d lost the creature he crawled after, soul-bound and starving, an obsession unlike anything he had known in life or after.
This time, it was a beautiful lochside, purple in the gloaming as the poets always say, and he should know. Deep, dark, soothing, Scotland, and yet bloody with loss was every square foot of his native land. He knew too well the feeling of death and gore marring the lovely hillsides of the country, when he saw her body there by the still water.
Anguish propelled him forward and he threw himself violently over her body as if his passion alone could revive her. Iain, her silent shadow, her lieutenant, sat wordless by her side in the smoke and fire and noise of the battlefield surrounding them, the two of them forgotten as the action moved away from the water’s edge and the quiet of the Scottish countryside enveloped again the three figures on the shoreline.
Iain was staring down at the delicate white pipe in his hands. He offered it to Robert for some reason.
“In case she wakes up,” said Iain, already willing to stand sentinel by the body of the only creature who had ever loved him, whom he had ever loved. Not in romance, but in camaraderie; unlike Robert’s strange obsession, it was a love borne of mutual friendship and respect. Sometimes Robert’s jealousy of Iain was intense. Iain’s distrust of Robert was evident, but in this moment it was a loss they two could share.
Robert felt pulled inside out. He couldn’t breathe. Everything within him, without him, the universe and the world and the empty hollow pressure calling for blood that thrummed in his veins, folded back on itself and all he could feel was loss and a grief so deep he did not know if human or faerie had found a word for it. A love such as he had found within himself, such a wellspring of love most days of his human life, would necessarily be the greatest pain he had endured. There was no death, no escape from this feeling, as if someone had dragged his insides out with a rough stone knife.
He sobbed, a loud an
d ugly thing, into the darkness. It was not so much crying as the scream of a soul, the wail of a broken heart.
She left was bad enough. She’s gone was something he had never considered, never even imagined. She was Desdemona, strong, brilliant, beautiful, hard as stone, emerald eyes sharp, between a wink and exasperation. She was, like the sea or the storms or the sky.
She was.
And Robert felt every atom within him tearing itself apart.
Robert Burns had never been under any false impressions. He knew precisely how odd he was; how much he loved being in love, how much he loved love for its own sake. He had always been a wistful, hopeful boy; this translated well into success with women, because he fell earnestly in love with all of them. This passion extended to sex; a careful, considerate lover, he took the time to learn the intricacies of each woman he had known, because to him well-loved meant in every way possible. He never thought of the women as conquests; rather, he wept bitter tears at their loss and was of a different mindset entirely. Although he enjoyed ribald joking and bawdy song, in his heart Robert was a lover – naïve, sensitive, dedicated to the poetry of the soul. He had never once entertained in his mind that others would call him the Don Juan of Scotland one day, nor worried himself with looking masculine to appease those around him. He was simply Robert, existing within the galaxies of his own universe, where love and beauty outweighed any other concern. And in all his heart, his experience, his eventual centuries of life, it was Desdemona that burned brightest at the centre, in the confines of his soul. She was the one he would follow into the darkness.
“Desdemona,” Robert had said, like a chant, like a curse, like a spell; a prayer to rise with the smoke of the battle and the smoke of her own rich history, tangled in the sky.