by C. E. Murphy
"He does, as a matter of fact. Not that he'd ever confess to it, but he keeps dropping by to hang around in a desultory fashion and ask after you. He does a very good heartbroken teen act."
Emma gave a startled laugh. "Can you imagine what an awful teenager he must have been?”
“There were different expectations even when I was a teen, Em. I can’t imagine what it was like when he was one.”
“Probably brutal.” Emma’s tone became clipped and she slipped her hand free of Cathal’s escort, working her way down the crowded aisle until they reached the row where Lorhen had secured their seats. The ancient Timeless stood so Cathal could pass him, then sat again, leaving Emma to sit on his other side. They were as close to an exit as Lorhen could get them, and she couldn’t help smiling as she murmured, “I’d think you’d be used to crowds,” and got herself settled.
Lorhen squirmed around, trying to get long legs comfortable in the narrow row. “Used to and enamored of are very different things. I always prefer to have an escape route.”
Anyone who had combat experience did, Emma thought, but before she spoke, the auditorium lights dimmed, turning their attention to the stage. A rangy woman with an expensive haircut and a well-cut suit came out to smile beyond the lights at the audience. "Good evening, everyone. If you can just take your seats, we'll get started. It’s nice to see a full house. I know we’ve got some sensational claims to talk about here tonight, but it’s always good to know that archaeologists not named Jones can get everyone's attention every once in a while." A laugh rippled through the auditorium and she smiled. “I'm Dr. Michelle Powers, the head of the archeology department here at the University. I expect a lot of you are waiting impatiently to debunk the findings we've made claim to."
Lorhen snorted. Cathal and Emma both elbowed him and he acquired a look of put-upon offense as Powers continued, “But I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. This isn't the kind of announcement we'd make without being very sure. I have the honor of presenting to you tonight's speaker, Dr. Mary Kostani. Dr. Kostani has been an associate of the University for about five years, and is widely known in archaeological circles for her work in translating some of the more difficult Egyptian hieroglyphics. Like many of us, she's had a life-long passion, although hers was the outrageous goal of finding the legendary city of Atlantis. Unlike most of us, she seems to have achieved this, and in record time. Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, Dr. Mary Kostani."
Polite applause echoed through the auditorium as Dr. Powers stepped back, beckoning Dr. Kostani onstage. Petite, with black hair cut at cheekbone length, Kostani had an expression of pleasant neutrality, approachable but firm, in the manner of a small woman accustomed to setting some immediate expectations of her audience. She came on stage with confidence, but paused as she approached Dr. Powers, looking past her and beyond the bright stage lights to scan the dark auditorium. Lorhen shrank down in his seat while Cathal straightened as if stung, and Emma, long familiar with both reactions, shot a startled look at them. "She's one of you?"
Dr. Kostani continued across the stage with only the slightest hesitation, her smile still warm, if not quite reaching her eyes any longer. She adjusted the microphone to her height—even standing on the raised podium the university provided, she was clearly not quite five feet tall—and inclined her head. "Good evening," she said, in faintly accented English. "Thank you for your welcome. I assure you, I have been looking forward to this day for a very long time."
Under the pleasantries opening Kostani’s speech, Cathal nodded. "She is, but I don’t know her. I’d remember that face. Do you know her, Logan?"
"Yes," Lorhen said, almost voicelessly.
Pacing in sand did not lend itself to the dramatic strides Lorhen tried for. The ground had the unpleasant habit of shifting away underfoot, causing sudden unexpected lurches at best, and badly twisted ankles at worst. Eventually he quit pacing, and, lifting his hands to guard his eyes, squinted over the dunes. In the distance, the great Anapa, guardian of the dead and guide to the underworld, rose up in the foreground of Khufu’s massive, nearly completed pyramid, blinding white with polished limestone reflecting the sun as brightly as a mirror. Anapa had guarded the land for centuries before Khufu began his monument to himself, and Lorhen half-remembered, at times, that even the god’s dog head wasn’t the first face the massive sculpture had sported. Nor would it be the last, most probably; gods changed faces as often as kings, but only the Timeless had any hope of remembering them all.
The wind-blown sands between himself and Anapa were no busier with life than the dunes he’d been climbing, and after a moment he turned away from the brilliant erections to rest his eyes on river-fed greenery where it began to fade into desert sands. Slave camps lay on that border, and a tent city along their edge, where merchants and travelers trade stories and goods beyond the regulated bazaars in the ruling city of Manf. All of it bore life and motion into the sand, but it felt remote, belonging to another world, or at least another people. Lorhen turned his back on it, preferring the deliberate solitude to unexpected melancholy. Finally a voice, thin in the heat, broke the air, a woman calling his name. Moments later she crested the edge of a sandy hill, waving to draw attention to herself. As if there was anything else worth watching nearby, Lorhen thought.
He slid down the loose earth to meet her in a small valley, lifting her easily into an embrace before setting her on her feet again and smiling down at her. No more a native of this country than he, Ghean looked the part more, with her bronzed skin and dark hair, but something else entirely set her apart from even her own people. He had met Timeless by the score, but only one or two, in his long life, who held the waiting potential of immortality in their blood. That untapped power waited to be triggered through violent death; nothing else he had ever encountered awakened Timelessness. He wished, at times, for her life to be gentle all the way through, and at others, that the magic might roar to life within her, so that an impossibly long future might be hers, as an impossibly long history was already his own.
Centuries fell away inside a heartbeat, back to the night he had made his first—so far as he recalled—heartstrike blow, and experienced the Blending for the first time. The memory was blurred, with a black sky and hard stars, and weapons in his hand. An ax in one, stone but with a keen edge and a short, thick haft, bound together with sinew rope. A knife in the other, hardly more than a hand in length, and more poorly made, but made well enough. He’d taken it from his opponent, and when the man rushed him to get it back, he’d skewered himself on the stone blade, a heart strike. Nothing at all, no vestigial memory, told Lorhen where he'd learned the skill to wield the ax as efficiently as he had then, or why, having slain him already with the knife to the chest, he then took the nameless man's head in a moment of panic.
Certainly nothing had prepared him for the storm that surged from the clear sky, or for the lightning that screamed through him, leaving him in the shaken aftershock of the Blending, shuddering from the intense electric pain, almost indistinguishable from pleasure, that rattled his body. When it occurred to him he was not dead, he'd staggered to his feet and limped away, leaving the body behind, but keeping the weapons clenched in his fists.
Before that night, before that foggy memory, there was nothing but a vague sense of many, many years passing.
Hairs rose on his arms despite the heat, and he cast the memories away, but not without wondering how much of a kindness immortality was, after all. It didn't matter: neither path would be decided for Ghean today, and she’d asked him to come out beyond the Anapa monument to talk, so he put on a faintly petulant look and demanded, "Where have you been? I've been out here sweltering in the heat half the day."
Ghean laughed. "I saw you leaving the edge of town not more than," she glanced at the sun, pursed her lips, and finished, "not much more than an hour ago. Mother wanted help with a seam. I don't understand how she can write so neatly and not sew a straight seam."
"She p
robably doesn't understand how you can sew straight seams and still have dreadful handwriting."
"Mmm." Ghean slipped an arm around Lorhen's waist, tugging him along with her. "True. Come, let's circle back around to town."
Lorhen smiled briefly. “I thought you wanted to talk out here in the gods-forsaken sand, instead of in town, in the shade, with sweet juice to drink.”
“I wanted to talk to you without people overhearing, and that’s impossible in town. You're looking awfully solemn, Lorhen." Ghean stopped to look up at him, and he felt, for a moment, very tall and very foreign beside her. He had browned as much as he could, but towered above even the tallest men. He usually did that in the cooler climates he remembered as being his first home, too, but almost everywhere along the inland sea, whether on its northern or southern shores, he seemed a pale giant.
"Mmm." He echoed her sound from earlier. "I was thinking, earlier, about the past, that's all. And the future."
Ghean held her breath. "Our future?"
Lorhen laughed. "You are never one to dance around the point, are you, Ghean? Yes. Our future. Tell me what it was you wanted to talk to me about." He nudged her into walking again.
"Mother is settled now, with all her papers and research, and she's ready to meet you. She only expects to be here a few weeks, Lorhen. She wants to return to Atlantis at the end of the flood season, and I want you to come with us. You will, won't you?"
"I'd have a hard time marrying you if I stayed in Egypt, wouldn't I?" Lorhen glanced toward the gleaming pyramid, thinking for a moment of the histories being recorded inside to be kept for all time. That was what had drawn him to Egypt initially, a fascination with how short-lived mortals marked the stories of their lives, but there was no need to stay; the monuments would last for centuries, even eons, and he would have ample opportunity to return and see how those stories had played out in fact and in telling. "Of course I'll come to Atlantis. Only, you understand, because its reputation precedes it as a center for learning."
Ghean laughed. "Only. Of course. Mother will like you," she predicted. "You're cut from the same cloth she is, a scholar to the bones. I don't know why you've never been there, anyway. Why you haven't moved there already, instead of wandering around squinting at hieroglyphs. I know you can read, and we have more written knowledge than anywhere else in the world."
"I learned to read and write when I was—younger." He chuckled to cover the pause. "Obviously. It would be difficult to be able to do it, and have learned when I was older, wouldn't it?"
There were journals, secreted away, on clumsy clay tablets, rough notes sketched out in Sumerian pictographs and later, cuneiform. Writing had made him, in a very real way. Those tablets recorded history he could already no longer actively recall, though looking over them often wakened memories buried deep in his mind. Often, but not always: sometimes they were like reading a stranger's stories. Lorhen had wondered, from time to time, if those unfamiliar tales were in fact not his own memories, if they were taken from Blended minds, the strength and power of someone's loss or love so great that he had been moved to write it down even after the heartstrike's power had been subsumed into his own. In the end he always rejected the thought, believing his own strength of personality to be great enough to dominate the absorbed Blendings. Once or twice he'd met Timeless who lacked that sense of self, people who had become lost in their own minds, or who had taken a Blending so powerful it had altered their very being.
That had not, he believed, ever happened to him, but then, before the advent of writing, he wouldn't know. Written words gave him a persistent thread to follow, making him a whole person even when he shed memories in self-preservation. He wondered, often, how old he'd been when writing was invented, and how he'd come to be in the right place to learn it in its infancy. His easily-burned skin and his faintest, oldest memories said he'd come from more northerly climes, but somehow he'd been thousands of miles from his presumed homeland, waiting at the heart of civilization for writing to be born. Whoever he had been before he learned to write was long gone; the man known as Lorhen began with his journals, carefully preserved so he would lose no more time.
He was brought back to the present by Ghean saying, hopefully, "We'll settle there after the wedding. You could study." Black eyes searched his face, waiting for a reaction.
His heart lurched, though he smiled. How fair was it to wed her, when he would not grow old, and she would—or worse, when she might die accidentally, releasing her waiting immortality and extending her life down through the centuries, married to a man she'd met in her childhood? Not that he would hold her, or anyone, to such vows, but that the question was there at all disturbed him. "Settle? Perhaps," he answered. "You're the one eager to travel and study architecture. Return often? I should think so. But it isn't a decision we have to make now, or quickly. Tell me," he continued lightly, "did you have to escape Aroz?"
Entirely aside from Ghean's unrealized potential, Aroz was another problem. Employed as Ghean's mother's bodyguard, the man was clearly in love with Ghean herself, and her self-appointed guard dog. Above that, he was skilled with the heavy blade he carried, and Timeless to boot. And he obviously didn't trust Lorhen. There had not yet been cause or opportunity for a confrontation, but the peace would not hold.
Ghean rolled her eyes. "No. Mother sent him to get more ink, and so when I was done with the stitching I just slipped out. Lorhen." Her next words tumbled out in a rush. "You must come meet Mother, very soon. I've told her all about you, but I'm afraid she's planning to marry me off to Aroz. You have to convince her that we want to marry."
"Your mother plans to marry you off without your consent?" Lorhen asked incredulously. "Has she met you? And to Aroz, of all people? That would be a complication." He gnawed the inside of his lower lip, considering survival. Staying within the tent city's boundaries would be the easiest way to delay the apparently inevitable battle. No Timeless in their right mind would fight with mortal witnesses: they might live through being burned as a witch, but no one wanted to experience that.
"A complication! It's a lot more than a complication! It'd be awful! He's so stern and so—old!"
Lorhen couldn't stop the laugh, although he swallowed it and looked as apologetic as he could manage. Aroz certainly appeared older than he did, but Lorhen was absolutely certain he was not only the elder of the two, but very likely the elder by centuries. "He's certainly a better financial match than I am," he teased Ghean, but relented at the horror on her face. "All right. I'll come meet her. What will you do if she opposes the match?"
"Marry you anyway." Ghean frowned to hide the doubt in her eyes. "When will you talk to her?"
"Tomorrow," Lorhen promised. "Alone." He lifted a hand to ward off her protestations, and spoke as lightly as he could. "You've already told her all about me, and I don't think I can make a good impression on two women of your family at once."
Ghean's shoulders dropped. "All right. But you'll talk to her tomorrow? You promise?"
"I promise."
Cathal leaned toward Lorhen, speaking softly as the woman on stage began her lecture. “Well? Who is she?”
"Technically," Lorhen whispered, "I think she's my wife."
7
She could fit her shoulders into the hole she'd chipped away before she broke through to the outside: the ceiling was that thick, and she needed room to maneuver her wedge of stone, to keep bashing at the wall. The space she'd carved was triangular, widest at the base and narrowing rapidly up to the apex, hardly large enough to fit her head into, at the top. But her wedge fit, and she had just enough space to keep cracking away at the roof as she kicked and kicked, keeping herself aloft to continue her excavation.
The rock made a different sound when she snapped through the final layer, a thin report echoing into other waters than those that had held her captive for so long. A few more frantic blows gave her an opening large enough to stick her fingers through. She flailed them against the water outside, shouting
at the top of her voice, as if someone would join her in the drowned city. How long she cried for help, she didn't know; it didn't matter. Withdrawing her hand from the hole brought fresher water into the room, a wash of salt much heavier than she was accustomed to after the long years. It tasted wonderful. With renewed energy, she swam for her wedge, and began again to pound at the rock.
It seemed to go faster now, with the greater circulation of water, and the taste of freedom. Stone cracked away, bigger pieces knocking out to fall on the opposite wall of her prison. Only hours went by before she could push her whole hand, up to her forearm, out into the water beyond. It seemed no time at all until she had a hole big enough for her head, then her head and one shoulder and, finally, both shoulders.
Only then did panic strike. She knew she would fit through the hole, though it was visible only to her impatiently seeking fingers. What was on the other side? Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing is there, all is here, here is safe, here is where to stay. She curled into a ball again, hair drifting around her, deadly as jellyfish tendrils.
What was on the other side? Drowned Atlantis, the shell of her home. The sea, and eventually sunlight. She remembered the idea of sunlight, the brightness that colored the world, but the world itself, those colors, were gone, lost in thousands of years of darkness. Would she be able to see at all, or had her eyes atrophied entirely, leaving her blind to the world she had once known?
Blind, the frightened one encouraged. Blind, we'll be blind, stay here where the blackness can't hide anything from us. Stay. Stay. Stay. There's nothing left of the world we knew. Nothing's there. Just the sea, just the water, just blackness forever.
The thin wail that escaped her was a sound unlike any she had made in hundreds of years. It vibrated through her, forcing tears from her eyes as she shivered, clutching her knees closer to her chest. Changed, all changed utterly, the frightened one chanted. Nothing recognizable. Our people drowned, our language lost. No one to talk to, no one to understand our words. Stay in the safe place.