by C. E. Murphy
More than one thing, in fact. She pressed her elbow against her rapier's hilt, smiling at its deadly presence. Her heartstrike knife lay at the small of her back, a presence so old and comforting she wouldn’t know what to do without it, and the song ran through her mind again: I know something you don’t know!
He knows things we don't know, too, the patient one reminded her. We should be careful around him.
"I will be," she murmured under her breath as she examined the man stalking past her again.
He had to know his whole body expressed outraged tension, but he just as clearly didn’t care. Ghean supposed that in a way she couldn’t blame him: even the Timeless usually stayed dead, once they were dead. No doubt they weren’t supposed to crop up as archaeological experts, and no doubt dead wives were especially not supposed to turn up. Ghean’s smile broadened again, enjoying Lorhen’s offense. He dropped his shoulders suddenly, like he was trying to shake his anger off, and rain trickled down the neck of his coat. With a grunt, he hunched up again, forging over the curb and into the middle of the street as Ghean tilted her head at the other two and guided them up a side street. Several seconds passed before she heard Lorhen’s footsteps alter and his pace quicken as he strove to catch up with them, and she took advantage of the time to grin even more violently at the wet street ahead of her. She probably wasn’t being fair, enjoying his discomfort so much, since she’d been searching for him for decades while he’d had no idea she was alive at all.
Fair? the patient one said incredulously. Fair?! Ghean laughed and the voice subsided. She glanced back and caught Cathal and Emma both watching her with open interest that, in Cathal’s case, turned to faint guilt at getting caught. Emma, long since accustomed to spying on the Timeless, only lifted her eyebrows as if offering a faint challenge that Ghean chose not to accept. Lorhen, sulking along behind them, kept his gaze fixed on the wet concrete and missed all the byplay, but Ghean had no doubt the other Timeless and his Keeper were trying hard to communicate to each other without words, guessing at whatever story Lorhen hadn't yet divulged.
"Right here." Ghean turned abruptly to climb up a short flight of stairs and dig keys out of her pocket. The locks clicked open and she herded the others inside to drip on her carpet. "Towels, anyone?"
"Beer," Lorhen said, shedding his coat.
Ghean pursed her lips. "Perhaps it's just fond memory, but I'm sure I remember you being somewhat more polite."
"It was a long time ago," Lorhen said shortly.
Cathal frowned. "Lorhen. There's no need to be rude."
Ghean opened a coat closet, reaching up for a hanger. "Why, thank you, Cathal. Do you make a habit of rescuing damsels who may or may not be in distress?" She hung her coat up, offered Lorhen a hanger, and offered to take Emma's coat.
Cathal, reaching past her, got his own hanger, and smiled. "I'm afraid so. Lorhen thinks it's a character flaw, but most of the damsels don't seem to mind."
"I'm sure they don't. The beer is in the fridge, Lorhen. No one else wants a towel? You must, Emma. You’ve got rain beaded in your hair. The kitchen and living room are that way." Ghean pointed down the hall and gestured to the left. "I'll be out in a few minutes."
Ghean disappeared into a second door in the hall, her flats clicking on the hardwood floor. For a moment the other three stayed where they were, overcome by silence, but then Lorhen shrugged and went in the kitchen in search of beer. A moment later he returned, carrying four beers by the necks in his long fingers, to find Emma and Cathal at the door to the living room, looking guiltily at the rain water they were dripping on the rug. “For God’s sake, she said to come in.” Whether they intended to or not, he did, glancing around as he put three of the four beers on a glass-topped oak coffee table, and opened the fourth for himself.
The living room was elegantly decorated. Bookcases, the top shelves no more than five and a half feet from the ground, were stuffed with textbooks of histories and languages. Knickknacks were settled on top of the bookcases, one a photograph from the early twenties, obviously of Ghean, signed, 'Love, Grandma'. Tall lamps bounced light off the ceiling and cream-colored walls, their white light clashing with a warmer kitchen light at the other end of the room. A pale cream rug with splashes of crimson covering most of the floor.
"College professors must be getting paid better these days than I remember." Ignoring his squelching shoes, he crossed the rug to sit on an overstuffed loveseat several shades darker than the rug. Cathal came into the room barefoot, and looked disapprovingly at the rug. “You left footprints.”
Lorhen tilted his beer back, shrugging his eyebrows. "You’re very refined for a boglands barbarian, Devane. Water dries. Have a beer."
"You're always so free with other people's beer." Cathal sat on one end of a couch that matched the loveseat and reached for two of the beers, offering one to Emma as she came to sit on the couch as well. "Why are you being so unpleasant?"
"She should be dead, Cathal. The things that happened in Atlantis…nobody could have survived it. I don't like mysteries.”
Cathal's eyebrows shot up. "You? You’re the original mystery."
"Not mysteries like this one. It’s too big. Too dangerous. Mysteries like this end up with somebody dead, and I don’t want it to be me." Lorhen shook his head, picking his beer up again.
"I can't believe we have no record of her," Emma said. "At least we have confirmed records of you, no matter how old the last ones are. I don't know how somebody could get by for five millennia without the Keepers noticing."
"My mother did begin the Keepers." Ghean came through the hall door, dressed in jeans and a black t-shirt, with her hair fluffy from being rubbed dry. She tossed a towel to Emma, who patted her hair with it. "Maybe she told me all about them, and how to avoid them. Or maybe I infiltrated them, learned how to avoid them myself, and then went on my merry way." She stopped in front of Emma, displaying the inside of her left wrist to her. The Keepers tattoo, greatly faded, was still visible against her olive skin.
As Emma gaped, Ghean curled up in the single chair left empty, a dark red recliner. "Or maybe someone there has known about me all along, and has kept the records very secret, at my request, because of this." She pulled a black cord with a silver pendant out from under her shirt, removed it, and handed it to Cathal with a nod toward Emma, then picked up a beer from the table as she settled back to watch the Keeper.
Emma gave the pendant a perfunctory glance, looking back at Ghean. Then her gaze returned to the necklace, sharply, and she straightened, staring at the symbol in her hand.
That the Keepers' symbol had been derived from the necklace she held there could be little doubt. Where the tattoo Emma shared with Ghean and Lorhen was rounded, the necklace was visibly the hourglass of the Hunter constellation, seven small, bright stones set into place at the four corners and across the belt. In the encircling silver surrounding the hourglass were thirteen studs, worn down with time but distinct all the same.
Emma turned her wrist up to study the differences between the necklace and tattoo, murmuring, “It’s the belt. I always thought the tattoo’s hourglass waist was angled because it represented sand that hadn’t fallen, that would never fall, but it’s Orion’s belt.” Cathal leaned over to examine them, too, looking back and forth. Lorhen, elbows on his knees and beer held in both hands, watched the pair of them.
"Or maybe," Ghean concluded, "it's none of those things at all. The necklace was my mother's."
Emma looked up at Ghean, the necklace still cradled protectively in her palm. "Why an hourglass? Or—Orion, why Orion? Do you have your mother's records? They would be invaluable."
"They would be unintelligible. I do have them, but I'm the only one who could translate them. How would you know if I was doing so accurately?"
Lorhen lifted an eyebrow at Ghean. Her lips pursed, and she inclined her head. "I stand corrected. There are two of us who could translate them. Orion—we called him the Hunter—was the symbol of my House.
My mother considered the Keepers to be her children, as much as I was. In a way, by wearing that tattoo, you’re part of the last House of Atlantis. It makes you my sister, by Atlantean law, as it makes family of all the Keepers."
Lorhen, silently and with a small quirked smile, slid his arm forward to display his inner left wrist. "Sister-wife," he said, somewhat drolly. "A custom I thought the Atlanteans had foregone."
Ghean's eyebrows elevated, and she looked at Cathal with amusement. "Well?"
Cathal grinned. "I'm afraid not. Just an ordinary Timeless. I don't belong to any other secret societies."
Emma reluctantly offered the necklace back to Ghean. "I would love to read your mother's files," she said wistfully. "I wonder why we don't have copies of them."
"Time, most likely," Ghean answered. "Really, Emma, the Keepers have done an astonishing job of maintaining the records. There are gaps, of course, but once I was done with the Lorhen Chronicles—" She broke off as Lorhen straightened uncomfortably. "How else would I have found the necklace, Lorhen? I read everything the Keepers had on you. I had to learn new languages to do it." She shook her head, and added, "They're woefully incomplete, you know. There's very little about you prior to about thirty-five hundred years ago. Even Mother's records are sketchy, though you're the first Timeless she talks about. You began the Keepers, you know. Without you, they wouldn't exist."
Lorhen looked down at the beer in his hands, nodding. "I know. No more than they'd exist without Minyah. She was a remarkable woman. I've met very few people as dedicated to the preservation of history as she was."
Ghean smiled briefly, but turned her attention back to Emma. "I was in the Keepers during the second world war. I was astonished at how much information they'd managed to maintain over the centuries. The oldest records seemed to have been written about three thousand years ago, since they were in Greek, but many of them recorded events far older. I found nothing about Atlantis, nor my mother, so I suppose the copies I have are the only originals written in a drowned language. I suppose she would have written the rest of them in some other tongue.”
Lorhen shook his head. "She kept hers in Atlantean. It was far more sophisticated than any other written language of the time, but her students, the Keepers, kept them in whatever language they wrote most fluently in. She did the translations, both of her own records and many of her students' work, into Greek not long before she died. I helped, some. The originals were in tatters."
"Greek," Ghean said in a soft, dangerous voice, "didn't come into existence for two thousand years after Atlantis drowned."
Lorhen shifted his shoulders. "The cloak worked. Your mother lived a very, very long time."
A sensation of ice coated Ghean’s skin, much colder than the rain had been, and though her spine straightened she did all she could to remain expressionless, gazing at Lorhen. "How long?," she asked hoarsely. "How long did she live?"
Lorhen shrugged a shoulder. "About two thousand years."
Ghean shuddered. Betrayal upon betrayal. For nearly five thousand years she drowned and starved and Awakened, while her mother survived through the centuries. There will be revenge, the patient one promised. Aloud, Ghean managed, "I have only fifty years of records,” in a barely-controlled voice. “And the Keeper archives, I’ve read all of the oldest records there. None of them were written by my mother. I'd know her style, even in another language. But you said you'd helped translate them."
Lorhen nodded. "I did."
Emma was staring at Lorhen. "The Keepers," she echoed in a tone much like Ghean's, "don't have her records. We have nothing by or about our founder."
"No." Lorhen almost smiled. "You don't."
Emma's voice went colder. "Where are they?"
"Safe. Hidden."
The chill in Emma’s words exploded into heat, and venom. “Two thousand years of records, Lorhen! Two thousand years, all kept by one person? One viewpoint, one mortal experience, over that long? How could you? How could you?” Her hurt sounded very similar to the throb cutting through Ghean’s every breath, a pain so sharp it silenced even the patient voice.
Cathal pulled a hand over his mouth and spoke so quietly it seemed he’d cast his voice away with the gesture. "You're a scholar, Lorhen. Why didn't you give the Keepers the Greek translations?"
A smile filtered across Lorhen's face without touching his eyes. "There was far too much information about me in them."
Emma crushed her eyes shut, a spasm of profound loathing distorting her features as Ghean's voice rose. "You kept all that information to protect yourself?"
“Of course he did.” Emma spat the words. “Of course you did, you son of a bitch. Two millennia, Lorhen. We thought we didn’t begin until Grecian times, that the stories written down about Gilgamesh and Methuselah—”
“Oh, Methuselah wasn’t Timeless,” Lorhen said with aggravating calm. “Gilgamesh, now, yes, but not Methuselah.”
“—that they were hearsay, ancient stories recorded by Greeks who had traveled and collected tales about the Timeless, not that someone had been there, recorded it, and lost the records—!” Emma’s rage was so clean and honest that Ghean’s throat tightened on it, wishing she could release the same kind of anger so freely.
Patience, whispered the one voice, and never, never! whispered the other. Don’t be angry, don’t feel, don’t let them see if they see they’ll know if they know they’ll kill us we don’t want to die, hush, hush, shh.
Over their whispered advice, but beneath Emma’s fury, Ghean asked, "How could you do that? How could you dishonor my mother that way?"
Lorhen made a moue. "Minyah was my friend, Ghean. She knew more about me than anyone else ever has, more, maybe, even than Timeless I’ve shared Blendings with. I can't afford that knowledge to be public, even to as select a public as the Keepers. I have worked very hard for a very long time to make myself an unknown quantity. Believe me, hiding some records is not a particular transgression on the list of things I've done. Overall, it’s been extremely successful." He looked directly at Ghean. "In fact, the only person who's been more successful in hiding her existence for the last five millennia is you. How is it that you're alive, Ghean?"
Ghean closed her hands in the padded leather of her armchair, cords tense in her throat as she whispered, patience, patience, to herself until she no longer knew whether it was her own voice or the patient one guiding her. There’s time yet. Don’t be hasty. Devane isn’t going to let you kill him now anyway. It seemed a long while, even to her distorted, immortal sense of time, before she trusted herself to speak, and when she did her voice was still tight and small. "How far in the story had you gotten?"
"You'd just forgiven me for being Timeless. Right after you stopped me from taking Aroz's head."
"Oh," Ghean whispered bitterly. "There's a lot left, then."
15
Atlantis rose out of the sea like a giant's long-forgotten castle. Jagged mountains swept down into the water, waves beating an endless tattoo against obsidian walls. Far above the edges of sheer stone that met the water, trees clustered along the mountains, rendering the sharp lines just faintly blurred with green softness. Tiny ports circled the island, large enough for the fishing boats that provided Atlanteans with their staples of life. Villages scattered up through the mountains at each port, roads spidering in toward the main city, all but nestled in the clouds. Lorhen leaned on the railing of their vessel, hands clasped loosely over the water as he looked up at the legendary island. The ship's captain had announced his sighting of Atlantis at mid-morning, and since then, the slender Timeless had been on deck, watching the island as they sailed by. A glance at the sun told him it was mid-afternoon now. Ghean came up as he looked back toward Atlantis, and smiled at him.
"The main port is around the next curve," she assured him. "You won't have to wait much longer."
"How can you tell? One mountain looks the same as any other to me." He gestured at the craggy, weather-beaten stone a few hundred meters aw
ay.
"I've made this journey since I was a little girl. Before my father died, he used to test me on the different ports, to see if I could pick out details to distinguish them." Ghean leaned against the rail, pointing at a copse of trees that hung precariously out over the water, growing nearly parallel to the water below. "Those trees are how I know Atlantis is around the bend. It's the only place on the island they grow like that. Father used to tell me a story about them. He said that when Atlantis was young, it was a small flat island, without the mountains, good for farming. The waves touched shore gently, with hardly a ripple. A young boy who was very vain would watch himself in the water for days on end, while he was supposed to be keeping watch for enemy ships approaching.
"One day, the enemies came, and he didn't notice. Because Atlantis is favored by the gods, they saved us from certain destruction by lifting the land into mountains and difficult ports. To punish the boy for his carelessness, they changed him into that stand of trees, destined to always look into the waters and never be able to see his reflection again."
Ghean smiled up at the trees as the ship passed under them. "I always felt badly for the boy. I can't imagine Atlantis being as beautiful as it is, if it were flat land. I never thought it was very fair of the gods."
"Your people have kind gods," Lorhen said. "Most gods would have let the enemy overrun the island, to teach the boy a lesson by killing his family and leaving him the only survivor."
"Maybe it's because our gods are kind that we've created a civilization unlike anyone else's."