She handed me a glass of whiskey, neat, as she spoke, sitting down on the couch by my side as if we were about to watch a show.
“Nah. I’m just really, really bad at domesticity.”
“Me too,” she said. She held up her own glass, which didn’t contain whiskey. It was a veggie shake of some kind: a combination of sand and cilantro, so far as I had ever been able to tell.
We clinked glasses, as if we’d just completed a ceremony.
“But I do know danger,” she added. “And that sound was the sound of danger.”
“You think so?”
“Instinctively, yes. Even having never heard it before. My neck-hair stood on edge.”
“Something visceral, then. Maybe species-specific, too. I didn’t get that at all.”
“Yes. But you run toward fires.”
She put down her glass and lay across the couch so that her head was in my lap.
“I do believe you have too high an opinion of me,” I said.
“When I was a child, I used to imagine what the man who would win me would be like, and what I imagined was a great hero. You’re what I ended up with, so allow me my fantasy, please.”
“All right. You want me on a horse, too?”
“Yes, a white horse would be excellent.”
“Armor?”
“Goodness, no. A loincloth, or nothing at all.”
“You have no idea how painful riding a horse in a loincloth is. Do I get a saddle, at least?”
She laughed. “No! Bareback.”
“Well, between me and the horse, one of us is going to end up a gelding. Are there even any horses on the island?”
“No. Cousin said there was talk of establishing a ranch, for tourists to ride horses along the beach, but it was scrubbed. Ghouls.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m only repeating.”
Ghouls are essentially man-sized carrion birds, minus the bird part. They’re skinny, bald, pale nocturnal things that I know almost nothing about, except that they tended to turn up on battlefields after major skirmishes to eat the dead. They greatly preferred horsemeat to human meat.
“I haven’t seen a ghoul in more than a thousand years,” I said. “But I don’t recall them being much interested in living horses. Only dead ones.”
“I’ve never met one, but I’m told having horses running about would have offended them in some way.”
“I’ll have to hang out at the hotel more often. I’d love to see a ghoul.”
“Yes, that’s my definition of a good time as well.” This was sarcasm, but it was really hard to tell with her.
She pointed to the screen.
“What have you figured out about your words?”
“Almost nothing. I think this might rhyme, but that’s nearly all I have.”
“That’s something.”
“I guess. It’s hard to tell, but I think the syllable count for each line is about the same, which makes me think the sounds represented at the end are homophonic.”
“How are you counting syllables? The lines are different sizes.”
“I know. A lot of languages have silent letters. Anyway, about the only thing I have going for me is I used to speak this language.”
“Well.” She picked up the remote and shut off the television. “I have an idea. Why don’t we go to the bedroom so you can speak to me in your ancient language while performing terribly sinful acts.”
“It’s not a particularly romantic-sounding tongue.”
“Then switch to one that is.”
“Well, all right.”
* * *
I had an odd dream that night.
As you might imagine, someone who’s been around as long as I have can end up with pretty interesting dreams. I thankfully don’t dream all that often, but when I do I usually end up in a weird cross-cut of historical epochs, featuring people who could never meet doing things they would never do.
I’m sure other people have equivalent experiences, but I’m pulling from a much larger bank of memories. In a lot of ways, I think dreams are how my mind flexes old instincts. They probably also help keep me sane.
It was a decent bet the dream—or the start of it—was Mirella’s fault, for asking me to speak to her in the Elamite tongue. Generally speaking, I’m entirely in favor of having a girlfriend whose kink (one of them) is dead languages, but it can lead to some strange mental associations, especially for the languages belonging to cultures I didn’t particularly enjoy.
Elam was one of those places; I didn’t really like it there.
The kingdom itself wasn’t called Elam—this is a modern title. It was called Haltamti. There was a loose government apparatus that connected the city-states of the kingdom and—interestingly—it was a matriarchy. (This is only interesting in hindsight. At the time, it didn’t strike anyone as particularly uncommon, because at the time it wasn’t.)
Anyway, the dream. I was back in Haltamti, in the city of Susiana. I was a farmer when I lived there, which should give you an idea of how little this was like a modern city: farmers worked land within what would be considered city limits.
It wasn’t really my property, because there wasn’t a lot in the way of property rights. Everything was more or less collectively owned, and collectively eaten.
We served at the will of the high priestess, which wasn’t a terrible way to live, to be honest, because she wasn’t sending anyone off to war, and everyone was getting enough food to get by. I was a farmer because that’s one of the things I happen to be really good at.
There was a guy named… well, I’m spelling this phonetically… Shif. Shif was the equivalent of a priest, which only meant he didn’t work with his hands for a living. Shif was a pretty interesting guy, which was why I considered him a friend. (To be honest, about 95% of any population is just not worth striking up a conversation with, and this has been true since we invented conversations.)
Later, after I woke up from this dream, it was pretty obvious why Shif turned up. He was the first one to show me written language, and it just happened to be the language written in blood on that hotel room wall. Given this was well over six thousand years ago, it took an awfully long time for my inability to fully grasp the significance of the written word at that particular moment in history to come back and haunt me. I appreciated the written word later, after the Elamite kingdom was gone and it was too late to learn their alphabet.
In the dream, Shif was standing in front of a schoolhouse chalkboard in the middle of one of the mud temples. Through the window, in the distance, a volcano was erupting, but neither of us much cared about this. The hotel room text I was trying to translate was written on the board, and Shif was berating me, in Elamite, for not being able to read it.
“You always make the same mistake, Adam,” he said.
“My name isn’t Adam, it’s…” but then I couldn’t remember what name I was using.
“The same mistake,” he repeated.
“What is that mistake?”
“Look out the window.”
There was no word in Elamite for window, so what he said was, look out the open, but the open was a modern window, with a windowpane and glass and all that. A transparent sticker of a rainbow-colored bird was stuck to the window. It changed the sunlight’s color from yellow to blood-red.
The bird looked like a large thing I used to hunt, tens of centuries before Shif’s birth, in the African bushes. It was extinct by the time of Elam.
“Look out the window,” Shif repeated, and the volcano was gone, and so was the room, and we were in a Roman bathhouse, covered in mud. We used to clean ourselves this way, by rubbing mud on our bodies and then rinsing it off in the baths.
“Why are we here?”
“You’re making the same mistake again,” Shif said, and that wasn’t getting any less annoying. “Open your eyes.”
“I know, and look out the window, I get it.”
“He doesn’t get it,” a woman
with red hair said, from the edge of the tub. It was historically feasible for this part to have been a memory, because it was theoretically possible for the red-haired woman—she’s been going by Eve—to have actually been in that bathhouse. She was immortal too, and I know she spent time in the Roman Empire just like I did.
It wasn’t a memory, though, because I would have definitely remembered it if it had happened.
“Priestess, how may I serve you?” Shif said, and we were back in Haltamti.
Eve was now dressed as the high priestess of the Susiana court, and my stomach lurched, because there was a real chance that actually was a memory.
“He doesn’t pay attention,” she said. “He won’t see until it’s time to kill again, and then he will.”
“I understand,” Shif said, and then the chair I was sitting in was an altar, and Shif had a sword.
The crowd beneath the altar muttered a sort of community approval for the sacrifice I was about to become—to the gods, for a good crop. Or maybe rain. Or to get the volcano to stop erupting. There was no volcano near Haltamti, but the sky was still full of ashes.
“The waters of the sea will meet the fires of the earth,” Shif announced. The crowd began chanting, and then the chanting started to sound like a low trill.
“Pay attention,” Shif said. “You’re not paying attention.”
“Can you sharpen that sword?” I asked. “It’s too dull, you’ll spend the day trying to get through my neck with that.”
“This is how I rise,” he said, and then he thrust the sword into my chest, and I woke up.
It took a minute or two to figure out where I was and convince myself I hadn’t just been run through with a dull sword on a Mesopotamian religious altar, and another minute after that before I stopped speaking Elamite.
I didn’t even try to go back to sleep. For one thing, that was the kind of dream that strongly argued against doing so, but for another, it wasn’t exactly a meaningless kind of dream. I was missing something, according to a dead high priest from the Bronze Age. Something obvious enough for my unconscious to have already figured it all out. Unfortunately, my unconscious was being a jerk about it.
It took me the rest of the night to figure out what that was.
6
“You’re saying it was a… fylgjur?” Mirella asked, the next morning. We were at the table on the back deck, eating a light breakfast consisting of fruit and strong coffee. “What tongue is that?”
“It’s Norse. I’ve heard them called banshees too, but it was a Norseman who named it for me.”
We’d already gone through the part where I explained why I was up before her and what happened in my dream. Listening to someone else describe a dream is one of the three most boring things that can happen in a conversation, so her capacity for patience and attentiveness was impressive.
“Ah, banshee is better. That word doesn’t hurt my ears. So you say it was a banshee we heard yesterday.”
“Or a fylgjur. I’m not exactly saying it was either of them though. What I’m saying is I now recall having heard that sound before, or something close to it, and when I heard it, the sound was attributed by people in my party as belonging to a fylgjur.”
“Or banshee.”
“Or banshee, sure.”
“I don’t see the difference between what I just said and what you just said. Either it was the thing, or, it was called the thing.”
“The difference is that people make mistakes, and invent things that aren’t real in order to explain things they don’t understand. I’m not all that sure there’s a real creature called a banshee, but the last time I heard that noise, a banshee was what I was told had made it.”
“And you didn’t investigate this? Whenever this was?”
“You would be surprised how rarely I find myself in situations where I can just wander off and explore. But no, I couldn’t, because there was superstition involved.”
“How so?”
“Fylgiurs are harbingers. Like comets, and blood moons, and a bunch of other things. The people I was with didn’t know what really made that sound, but understood anyway that they needed to be going in the other direction as soon as they heard it. I wasn’t in a position to persuade them otherwise.”
It’s not really fair to pick on the beliefs of ancient cultures, because we’re all just trying to come up with a reasonable understanding of how the world works with the tools we’re given. You and I might hear a weird noise and conclude it’s the wind pushing through a tree knot, or an extremely distressed bullfrog, or whatever. Someone else might hear it and declare that the sound is coming from a spirit, and it’s here to collect the dead, and since none of us are currently dead we had better run before it collects us.
Yes, the leap from bullfrog to a dead-collecting phantasm is pretty big, but still. We live in a world where someone might breathe a specific kind of air and die from it a decade later. Sometimes it isn’t all that crazy.
“I see,” Mirella said, sipping her coffee slowly. “Do you think we should notify Dmitri that you have indeed identified the source of the sound, and it is a mythical soul-eating monster?”
“No, but now I’m a lot more curious about what actually is out there.”
“Mm. All right. I will consider letting you go play in the woods.”
“Mythical soul-eating monster sold you on it?”
She stood, and took off her shirt, which would have been an extraordinary response under nearly all other circumstances, but was normal for us.
“Not really, but now I’m also curious as to what it might actually be. Maybe we’ll go camping. Are you coming into the water?”
“Not planning to.”
“Are you sure? Jumping in will undoubtedly help convince me to agree to your banshee hunt.”
“How does that even make sense?”
“It will show the depths of your resolve.”
“I’m a lot more concerned about the depths of the water under the cliff.”
“I do it every day.”
“Yes, but you’re you. You killed a demon with a bunch of knives once. For all I know you can fly and just haven’t found a way to tell me.”
“Hah. Coward.”
“Absolutely.”
“Oh, come on, just run off the edge, you don’t even need to dive properly. It’s invigorating.”
I was born in a jungle, and went five thousand years before I saw a large body of water that wasn’t also frozen. I feel perfectly at home among trees, hunting banshees. I don’t feel at home in the ocean, and never will. Not unless I’m on a ship.
But, I humored her, as I often did once we reached the name-calling stage, and walked the short path to the edge of our private cliff.
That was when I noticed the ocean was missing.
I heard Mirella’s footfall and realized she was about to perform the very same kind of leap into the ocean she insisted I attempt. Usually, her dives were relatively sedate, requiring not much more than a little jump, but since we’d entered into a sort of unspoken pissing contest—which can happen when you’re in a relationship with a goblin, just so you know—she was aiming for a more impressive performance. I’d seen her do this a couple of times before. She went from a run to a leap that was about twice the length of what one might expect from an Olympic-caliber athlete.
It would have been very impressive, but not impressive enough to reach the water.
“Wait!” I said, but words weren’t half as effective as the arm-tackle I had to commit to in order to get Mirella to the ground.
“Ow!” she exclaimed, as I landed atop her. The surface at this spot was a combination of loose dirt, scrub grass, and rocks, which was not a great landing when one is naked, as she happened to be.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“The ocean’s gone.”
“What are you talking about? Oceans don’t disappear.”
I helped her to her feet.
“This one did. Look.”<
br />
All the way down the beach to the hotel, the ocean water appeared to be missing, like low tide had come and then come again three or four more times without scheduling a high tide along the way. Either the water decided to pull away from the land further than it ever had before, or the island was rising.
Or, option number three.
“Oh my god,” Mirella said. “We have to call Esteban.”
A siren sounded in the distance.
“I think he already knows.”
It was an air raid siren, so as soon as I heard it I instinctively look to the sky for bombers. But that was the wrong place to be looking. The place to look was the horizon, because the ocean hadn’t disappeared. It had backed up, regrouped, and decided to charge.
In other words, there was an impressively large wall of water approaching the island.
“Well, that’s a sight,” I said.
“You’ve never seen this before?”
“Nope, first time.”
“Then we can say the day has been an accomplishment, for giving you a new experience. How tall do you suppose that is? More than ten meters?”
My eyes ran across the vast wave until I was looking straight ahead from our cliff vantage point.
“I think so, yes. How fast do you think that’s moving?”
She followed my gaze.
“Oh.”
“Pretty fast?”
“We have to go. We have to go right away.”
She spun and ran straight into the house. I was mesmerized, and not otherwise moving, because frankly it isn’t all that often you get to see an entire ocean of water racing to slap you in the face. It reminded me of the Hollywood version of the Moses story, with the Red Sea parted on both sides as the chosen people ran across a dry seabed.
Needless to say, that never actually happened, for a lot of obvious reasons. For one, speaking as someone who personally fled Egypt, that wasn’t even close to the best route. Plus, there’s a chasm at the bottom of that sea that would have been a little tough to cross, and I don’t recall reading about God throwing in a suspension bridge.
Immortal and the Island of Impossible Things (The Immortal Series Book 4) Page 11