by C. E. Murphy
"If she were mortal, you would wed her, and love her for the rest of her life." The words were spoken almost to herself. "If she were immortal now—" Minyah looked up. "Would you marry her?"
"Probably not."
"Why?"
"If she were to become Timeless today, she would still be terribly young. I wouldn't want to marry an immortal in her childhood. I don't know that I would want to marry one of us at all."
Minyah's eyebrows quirked up. "Why?" Concern for the current state of affairs visibly faded from her face as a new piece of information swam into her grasp.
"Because I wouldn't ever want to find myself in a position where I had to take my own wife's head," Lorhen said flatly.
Goosebumps rose visibly on Minyah’s arms, despite the heat of the room. She let the line of questioning go, pressing her lips together as she looked into her water cup. "When will she die?"
"That's not how it works. She could die of old age, or of illness, and never Awaken." He listened to himself speak with a faint sense of disbelief. In all his life, he could not remember telling a mortal these things, with the exception of a few wives. "We only become Timeless through violent or untimely death. But how can I marry her, knowing that she might die accidentally and then be married eternally to someone she expected a decade or two with?"
Minyah, without a hint of romance evident in her soul, said, "Lifematings dissolve. Very few people have the temperance to remain with one mate forever, whether words of ceremony have been said over them or not. Does she know the truth about you?"
"No."
"Perhaps you should tell her, both about herself and yourself, and let her choose."
"I can't. Or—we don't. It's—it's not exactly hard to talk about, save for why anyone would decide to believe us, but we don't interfere that way. We let nature take its course."
Minyah's eyebrows lifted. "Why?"
Lorhen stared at her a moment, then breathed a chuckle. "I don't know. Because we don't. Because everyone wants to grasp at immortality, but the reality is harsher. We kill each other, Minyah. We carry power inside ourselves, and we kill each other for it. It's almost a compulsion, and it's one of the prices that comes with immortality."
"What other prices are there?" Minyah circled her desk, not sitting. "The compulsion can be denied, yes? You and Aroz have not tried killing one another."
Lorhen muttered, "Not yet," then, more clearly, said, "It can be denied, yes, but it's often not. We can't have children, either, Minyah. Not once we've Awakened."
Minyah went quite still for a moment. "But before?"
"Until we Awaken we're just mortals. Most of us can, at least in theory, have children. And then if we Awaken, we outlive them. Watch them die. Watch their children die, if we're masochistic enough to do that to ourselves."
"Have you any?"
"Not that I know about. I don't remember being mortal."
Curiosity filtered over Minyah's features. "How long must it be, if you cannot remember?"
Lorhen sighed, putting his cup down on Minyah's desk, careful not to place it near any of the fine paper she was working with. "A very long time. A thousand years or more."
Minyah's eyes widened. "Thirty lifetimes," she breathed. "More."
Lorhen nodded, tired motion. "A very long time," he repeated. "All of which has come down to now, and whether or not to marry your daughter."
"She will be angry, if you do not tell her the truth."
"If I tell her the truth, she'll fling herself off Anapa or the pyramid!"
Laughter sparked in Minyah's voice. "Would you not do the same?"
"Well…yes."
"Do you love her enough to grant her immortality?"
"I don't grant it. It's just the way she was born. I would prefer not to interfere. It's not how it's supposed to be done."
"And if I told her?"
The corner of Lorhen's mouth twisted. "You'd be betraying my trust."
"She is my only daughter. Would you not do anything you could for your child, to ensure she would live beyond a normal lifespan?"
"I just told you we can't have children."
Minyah, again, dismissed the words with a brush of her hand. "That is not what I asked, Lorhen. If you had a child, what would you do?"
He scowled at her, pained. "I don't know, Minyah. I'm a scholar, and a very old one, at that. I walk around the world observing and writing down what I see. I try to stay out of the way, not to influence things, because I don't want to draw attention to myself. I don't have any children. I don't know what I would do."
Minyah looked over her shoulder at her paperwork, and at her fingers, stained with ink, the marks of a shared profession. Thoughtfully, she said, "You have my permission to marry, if it is the decision you ultimately reach. Go. Find her. Tell her."
Lorhen blinked, nonplussed. "Thank you. Why?"
Minyah chuckled. "Because my daughter loves you, and you are honest. Perhaps not reassuring, but honest. Go." She flapped her fingers at him impatiently, and circled back to sit on her stool.
Lorhen smiled faintly. "Thank you," he repeated, and pushed the tent flap aside to step out into the desert again.
Minyah watched the small clouds of sand settle as the door flap drifted shut before reaching for the thin pen and ink she wrote out the language of Atlantis in. In her free hand, she lifted her necklace, turning the pendant so she could see it right-side up. Neatly, in the upper right-hand corner of her parchment, she began to sketch a copy of the necklace, the ancient symbol of her House: the night sky’s Hunter, the harbinger of winter and the aspect of death, whose brilliant three-star belt drew the eye and whose uplifted arms held the heart. She encompassed its seven points within a circle and left the ink to dry, then, in smooth print, began to write.
I am a Keeper. I alone know of a people who walk among us, men and women who cannot die. They are Timeless, and are compelled to fight among themselves for the power they carry within. It is my wish to observe and record the histories of these immortals, though not to interfere….
9
Ten minutes after Ghean crawled onto shore, she dug up a razor-edged shell and chopped her hair off. She'd had to put down her wedge to gather up the masses of it. Without holding its length in her arms, she couldn't lift her head; she could barely even hold it in her arms. When she was done slicing it off, the ragged ends barely brushed her chin, but she could move her head.
Afterward, she thought she should have braided it, but she couldn't figure out how she would have manipulated all of it anyway. She laid it out on the beach, the still-wet, gleaming length of it, and walked from one end to the other. Walking itself was awkward, uncertain steps on feet no longer familiar with bearing weight. She lost her balance more than once, tripping to hands and knees on the shore.
There had to be more than fifty feet of hair. Ghean set her wedge down on one end of the length, and went back into the water. She came back out with strands of seaweed, and wrapped her hair up in it, twisting the seaweed rope around it to keep it close and still.
She was hungry again when she finished. With her stone, she returned to the water again, to dart after fish. It was easier without having her own hair to dodge.
The next weeks blurred, as much as the time under the water had. She stole clothes from the first town she found, under the cover of dark. Certain memories stood out: the first car that whisked by, and the first plane that flew overhead. She'd fallen to her knees, shrieking in fear, when the plane buzzed over. The sound seemed too much like the end of the world, to her untrained ears.
Even without the language, she was able to communicate that she wanted to sell her hair, and to do so. She had no idea if the price was fair, but neither could she bargain; she had to trust, and to ask, lifting the paper and coins that represented his offer, "Kumet? Ta-mehew?"
"Kumet." He echoed the word, blankly at first, then with a laugh. "Egypt?"
Egypt. Kumet was still there, then. Renamed, perhaps, but the names
of everything changed, with time. With relief, she tried what few words she'd learned: "Egypt where? Go Egypt?" She lifted the fistful of money.
The wig-maker nodded again, pointing to the east. "Egypt is that way. There are buses."
"Buses." It meant nothing to her. "Buses where?"
He took pity on her, and brought her to a bus station, and arranged for her passage to a place called Cairo. A map, pinned to the station wall, seemed to tell her that Cairo stood where Manf had once been, that Manf had been swallowed up into the sprawl of a city that looked larger, on the map, than could be actually possible. She went to the bus rigidly, already knowing it would roar and rattle at unbearable speeds, but accepting that the journey to Cairo would be endless, and dangerous, on foot.
The bus terrified her anyway, and she distracted herself by struggling to speak with the people around her. The language was vastly different, but people were friendly, and she would ask and point, and they would give her the words for things. By the time the bus reached Egypt, she could make rudimentary sentences, and she had learned the year was 1915. It made no sense, to her own calendar.
In Cairo, there were camels that took people into the deserts to see the pyramid and Anapa. Ghean rode the camel with the ease of muscle memory, idly stroking her wedge of stone as they loped along. The pyramid—pyramids!—came into sight first, looming on the horizon but strangely dull in the distance. Even so, as they came closer, the pyramids’ yellowed, wind-wracked sides looked better than Anapa, whose elegant long head was terribly shrunken and flattened, no longer a god at all. Ghean let out a cry of dismay, turning to the guide and gesturing at her face. “Head! Face! No! Where Anapa?”
He laughed, white teeth bright in a dark face. "Anapa? It’s the Sphinx, not a god. Its nose got shot off by Napoleon's cannon.” None of the words made sense to her, and she stared at the great god’s thick blocky shape in horror. It had been so beautiful when she left Egypt, and now it was so worn and old. Afraid, she turned back to the guide, pointing at the wreckage of Anapa again.
"How old?"
"Forty-five hundred, five thousand years old. About that."
Ghean stared at him blankly, trying to understand the numbers. She shook her head unhappily, and held up her hands, fingers spread. "How many?"
"What, fingers? Ten. Ten fingers."
"Ten," she repeated, and looked worriedly at the monument and the aged pyramids behind it. "How many tens?"
The guide hesitated, then slid down off his camel, encouraging her to do the same. She did, crouching in the sand next to him. He drew out ten marks in the sand. "Ten," he said, patiently, and drew a picture beside it: a stick with a circle following it. "Ten."
Ghean nodded, short hair brushing along her chin. Rapidly, but neatly, the guide made nine more rows of ten marks. "Ten tens," he explained. "One hundred."
She nodded again, touching the numerals he'd drawn. "Ten. One hundred. Yes."
His smile blossomed momentarily. "Very good." He drew a third numeral, a line with three circles. "Ten one hundreds is one thousand. Do you understand?"
Ghean did, but lapsed into her own language to state her understanding. "Yes. Ten times one hundred is a thousand. I understand." She nodded, dark eyes on his face. "Ten one hundreds," she said carefully, in his words. "One thousand."
He grinned again. "Good. Yes." Then he pointed at Anapa. "Five," and he held up five fingers. "Five thousand years old."
Ghean's chin jerked up and she stared at the ruined lines of the Egyptian wolf-god. "Five thousand years?" The brilliant blue sky around Anapa dimmed and fogged, and blackness swept in to comfort her.
She woke slowly to a familiar scene, the desert left in darkness by the sun, and the crackle of a fire just beyond the edge of the tent. For a moment, she relaxed, smiling, wondering when her mother would come get her for the evening meal.
Firelight glinted on the metal post of the tent, and memory rushed home with an almost painful blow. Her mother had been dead five thousand years. A wordless sound of loss ripped out of her, shattering the quiet night. Camels, not very far away, bellowed in irritation at the unexpected sound. As she had done for so long, Ghean curled on her side, no longer floating free, but weighted by gravity on a scratchy bed pad. Panicked fingers reached out far enough to find her stone, and she drew it close to her.
The guide came running, kneeling at her side to check on her. Ghean rocked gently, barely aware of him, as she tried to make her mind encompass the time that had passed. Still without noticing the guide, she climbed to her feet, and walked beyond the fire's perimeter, staring up at the sky.
She had looked at the sky for several nights, while she was in the water, but she had never seen it. The stars had wheeled in their cycle, no longer where they once belonged, rising in wholly different parts of the sky. Shaking, she picked out the Hunter, the sign of her House.
She was the last member of her House. "Mother," she whispered.
Leaving the guide behind, she began to walk toward Anapa. Methodically, in the cold desert night, she circled it, trailing her hand against the stone. It hadn’t weathered the centuries well, the poor beast, and she couldn’t bear to look beyond it at the ruins of Khufu’s pyramid, which had once been so bright and beautiful. Long before dawn, she knelt between Anapa’s paws, gazing up at him, no longer feeling the cold. No longer feeling fear or patience, either; it was, for this little while, as though those things had been burned out of her and nothing was left but a terrible silence.
When the sun rose, she stayed where she was, letting it bring scalded color to her pale flesh, as it had once done to Lorhen, hundreds of lifetimes ago.
She sat for hours, until men came to make her move, and then with a remote dignity that made the men fall away, she stood, and walked out of the desert to claim her destiny, five thousand years delayed.
10
Lorhen sat in the sand with a graceless thump, burying his toes in the hot grains and propping his arms on bent knees. Wind blew traces of sand into small heaps, and smoothed them out again. He watched without seeing, still considering the conversation with Minyah. It had probably been a mistake to tell her about Ghean, but there was no doubt it had also been something of a relief. All of it: not just Ghean, but his own immortality, which was a closely-enough held secret that he could count the number of mortals he'd shared it with, over the centuries. Minyah was a scholar, the kind—he hoped—who sought knowledge for its own sake, not to sell or trade it for her own benefit. No: he could be certain of that, if she'd known Aroz's secret for decades. So the unburdening of hidden truths was a relief, if not, exactly, the answer he'd been looking for.
The answer, he had to admit—finally, after a few hours of wandering the burning sands outside the tent city—the answer was that he'd more than half expected Minyah to forbid their marriage, thus relieving him of the burden of deciding whether to tell Ghean anything about her potential. Mortals never alleviated problems that obligingly, nor should he have expected Minyah to, not on any level. If he had a child—and if he did, it was long lost to time and memory, because no Timeless he knew of had ever become a parent after their first death, and few enough did before—but if he did, he would like to imagine he could allow that child to shape their own life, and perhaps even their own death.
A snort of amusement shook him and he stood again to slide down the dune into one of the endless valleys created by shifting sand. Noble thoughts from an ignoble man; the truth was that if he had a child he'd probably throw her off the pyramids himself. Time was such a gift. The pain of loss that every Timeless experienced balanced the gift, but the possibilities brought by time were too great to ignore. Mortal lives were so short. Some burned brighter for it, while others simply disappeared in a moment. Ghean burned bright with her black-eyed enthusiasm and love as intense as the desert sun for everything she encountered. Time might dull the edge of that enthusiasm some, but the gift would be greater than the loss. He didn't have to tell her now, but he would tell her
before her youth was gone.
The rules they followed weren't set in stone, after all. They were more like guidelines, inspired by the whims of the magic within them, and any Timeless who had walked away from a fight knew the power could be denied, at least for a time.
Lorhen followed his tracks back toward the tent city. Another glance at the sun when he came to the town's borders told him he'd lost track of more time than he'd known. The sky hadn't yet begun to color with sunset, but it wouldn't be long now, and he'd left Ghean before noon. She would have paced a trench in the sand by now, probably deep enough to raise ground water, and she would drown him in it for making her wait. Well, it was one way to have the truth out, because she deserved, if nothing else, to know about him, before they were married. Driven by a wry combination of determination and amusement, Lorhen made his way through the city, side-stepping merchants and failing, with deliberation, to see other wares on offer.
A chill, wholly at odds with the desert heat, swept him before he reached Ghean's tent. The Timeless almost couldn't help it, the brief stillness that came over them, the unintended glance for another of their kind. It made them stand out in a moving crowd, as Aroz did now; Lorhen, though long practice, kept moving easily, but his height made him easy to pick out of the masses regardless. Their eyes met, and while neither precisely relaxed, Aroz's gaze dropped and he continued on to beneath an open tent filled with tables and stools, taking a seat across from Ghean. He leaned in, speaking to her, and she craned her neck, peering around him. A smile blossomed, then faded into her best attempt at a scowl as she remembered Lorhen had abandoned her for the entire afternoon. With a careless gesture, she excused herself from Aroz and came darting around the crowd to glower at Lorhen.
"I've been looking for you all day. Where have you been? What did she say? Did she say no?"
"She said yes. We need to talk, Ghean."