Elemental

by Steven Savile

  “Well …” said Macduff, scratching his chin. “I suppose you’re right …”

  “Have at you!” said Macbeth, standing back and raising his sword.

  Twenty people had followed the two of them to the library; and so it was that twenty people watched Macbeth and Macduff fight for about a minute and a half, clanging their swords together vehemently and grunting, until Macbeth swung a blow that Macduff failed to intercept, cleaved through his helm and split his head open. Macduff dropped to the floor dead.

  “Right,” said Macbeth, cheerily. “Who’s next?”

  ACT II

  It took Macbeth less than five minutes to cut his way through the soldiers in the library. No matter how they swung or stabbed, their swords always slid away from Macbeth’s body. It was, as one of them observed (just prior to having his leg fatally severed with a lunging swordstroke, such that he fell and quickly bled to death) the weirdest thing.

  Macbeth, his armor smeared with blood, strode along the corridor and out into the courtyard. With a cheer the crowd there surged toward him; but he was not dismayed. It was, from his point of view, a simple matter to stand his ground hacking and chopping targets as they presented themselves. His assailers soon discovered that swords aimed howsoever accurately and forcefully would glide from his armor as if they had been merely glancing blows wielded infirmly. When a hundred had fallen and Macbeth was still unscathed, the heart rather went out of the advance party. A few tried upping the general mood of heroic battle by yelling war cries and running at Macbeth. Many more retreated precipitously through the main gate.

  Macbeth followed them.

  The carnage that ensued passed rapidly through various stages, being by turns astonishing, distressing, and, ultimately, frankly, rather boring. Wherever Macbeth walked, his sword brought death to dozens. When its blade was too chipped to cut effectively, he simply threw it aside and picked up a sword from one of the many corpses he had created.

  At the beginning of this assault by one single attacker, Malcolm ordered a general charge. But from his vantage point of being on horseback on the hill, he realized—though he could scarcely credit it—that not one of the swords, maces, arrows, or spears aimed at Macbeth was able to pierce his skin. His casualties began to mount up. He changed tactics: ordering a phalanx of men to press forward in the hopes of tramping or crushing the singleton enemy. But that was equally ineffective, and after two score men or more had been slain the phalanx as a whole broke up. Malcolm issued another order for a general crush, and the entire army—tens of thousands of men—surrounded Macbeth and tried to press in. There followed a quarter of an hour of uncertain alarum. But Malcolm soon became aware that a great circular wall of his own dead soldiers was being piled around Macbeth.

  By the end of the day Macbeth had single-handedly killed over eight hundred men. This slaughter had tired him out, and he made his way back into the castle—which was, of course, wholly overrun by Malcolm’s soldiers—mounted the stairs to his chamber, and went to sleep in his bed. “Now!” cried Malcolm, when this news was relayed to him. “Kill him in his bed! Stab him! Smother him while he snores!”

  But no matter how they tried, none of the men under Malcolm’s command were able to force the life out of the supine body of Macbeth. Blades skittered harmlessly off his skin. The pillow placed over his face, and even partially stuffed into his mouth, prevented him from breathing; but the lack of air in no way incommoded the sleeping man. They piled great stones on him, but no matter how great the weight Macbeth’s body was uncrushable.

  Finally the dawn came and Macbeth awoke, yawning and stretching. After a little light breakfast of poisoned bread and adulterated kippers (neither malign substance having any effect upon him) he resumed killing. He took it easier on this second day, careful not to wear himself out; and accordingly he worked longer and more efficiently: by dusk he had killed over a thousand men. Malcolm’s army, hugely discouraged, was starting to melt away; deserters slinking back to Birnam Wood and away to the south.

  On the third day Macbeth killed another thousand, along with Malcolm himself. After that it was a simple matter to either kill off or else chase away the remnants of the army, and by dusk of this day the place was his.

  It fell to Macbeth himself to clear away all the corpses. He had, after all, no servants—Seyton had been hanged from a gibbet on the first day’s battle—and he could not command any. So over a period of a week or so he dug a large pit at the rear of the castle and dragged the thousands of bodies into it.

  ACT III

  Life settled down a bit after that. He found that he didn’t need to eat; although he was still aware of hunger, and still capable of deriving sensual pleasure from good food. So he scavenged the nearby countryside and occupied himself with wandering about the empty castle, cooking himself food, heating himself bath water, thinking, sleeping.

  He pondered the charms that protected him, meditating the precise limits the witches had established. They had not, for instance, said that ‘no man of woman born can harm Macbeth’ (which would have left open the chance that a woman, or child, of woman-born could kill him): they had specified none of woman born. That seemed safe enough. The other charm was even more heartening: Macbeth shall never vanquished be, they had said, until Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane castle shall come against him. Vanquished meant killed by an enemy; but it also, he reasoned, meant poisoned, killed by sickness, laid low by old age, or any of the consequences of mortal existence. Until the wood actually uprooted itself and travelled wholesale to his castle, none of these fates could befall him. That was indeed a powerful charm.

  After three months a second army came to beseige his castle. This time it was led by the English king Edward in person; and he brought with him, in addition to many soldiers, a huge assemblage of holy men, wizards, magi, and people otherwise magically inclined who had promised to undo the charm that preserved Macbeth’s life.

  Macbeth rather welcomed the distraction. Life had settled into quite a tedious rut.

  He made sure, this time, to do all his killing outside the castle walls, so as not to leave himself the awkward job of clearing dead bodies out of his corridors, rooms and stairwells afterward. And he especially took pleasure in slaughtering the magicians, most of whom were armed with nothing more than wands, books of spells, and crucifixes. Macbeth found and killed King Edward himself on day four, but it took a whole week for the army as a whole to become discouraged. Eventually the whole force broke up and fled, apart from a few hardened types who threw themselves at Macbeth’s feet and pledged allegiance to him as the Witch King of the North. He swore them into his service.

  ACT IV

  Every now and again, over the ensuing hundred years or so, Macbeth would gather around him a band of followers—men either in awe of his magic immunity, or else simply prepared to follow any figure in authority if the financial inducements were strong enough. But these groupings never added up to an army, and since none of the people who followed him were gifted with his invulnerability, they tended to get slaughtered in battle. His initial plan—to reclaim the throne of Scotland by war and by the sword—was, he came to realize, unattainable. People feared him, and a few would do his will; but most shunned him, would not follow him. He found himself thoroughly isolated.

  Eventually he stopped accumulating bands of followers and struck out by himself.

  He roamed about for many years, searching Scotland for the witches in the hope of extracting from them some useful magical fillip that would enhance his fortunes. But they seemed to have departed the land. His search was fruitless. He returned to Dunsinane castle to find that it had been claimed, in his absence, by the Thane of Aberdeen and his retinue. It didn’t take Macbeth long to kill off, or chase away, those interlopers.

  For several decades after this, he sat in his castle alone. The people in the local villages established a mode of uneasy coexistence with him: they brought him offerings of food, wine, books, and whatever else he asked for
; but they otherwise left him alone and went about their own business. Macbeth grew accustomed to the solitude, and even came rather to relish it. He had learned to despise ordinary humanity, with their ridiculous fleshly vulnerability, their habit of dropping dead at the slightest scratch, the inevitability of their physical aging, decay, and death. He wondered why it was he had ever wanted to rule over such starveling creatures. It seemed to him now as a butcher sitting in a throne and gathering his swine around him as courtiers. Mortal glory was no longer of interest to him.

  The castle began to decay around him. He undertook some repairs himself, single-handed; but no amount of rampaging around the local villages like a fairy-story ogre—no amount of railing and yelling—could persuade the villagers to help him. None of them was prepared to come and work as his servant, at even the highest pay. Rather they fled away, took refuge in the hills until he had departed.

  Increasingly reclusive, Macbeth devoted himself to gathering together and reading the world’s many books. Word spread of this mysterious hermit-laird (though by now most people had forgotten his name) who paid handsomely in gold for any book of curious lore or magical promise. Book traders made their way to the castle, pocketed their fees, and hurried away again, glad to be gone. When Macbeth’s gold was exhausted, he strode out into the larger world and ransacked and robbed and extorted until his fortune was restored. He hoped, by accumulating the world’s largest library of magical arcana, and by decades of dedicated study, to master the same supernatural skills that the witches themselves had possessed. Why should he track down those wild women and beg them for favors, when he could command the magic himself?

  But no matter how much he studied and practiced, he could not develop magical ability.

  More than this, he realized that the charm had changed him. He decided to found a dynasty, reasoning that even if his children grew old and died he could still live as patriarch over his own grandchild, great-grandchildren, more distant descendents yet and on into the abyss of future time. He could persuade no woman willingly to marry him of course, but it was a simple matter to abduct likely looking specimens from the locality. But no matter how long he kept them, and no matter what he did, not one of them became pregnant with his offspring. He realized that whatever it was that was acting upon his body to preserve it from death and harm was also preventing him from fathering children.

  At this he fell into a depression for several decades; barely moving from his chamber, letting his hair and beard and nails grow to prodigious lengths. He attempted to kill himself—an honorable, warrior’s death, falling on his own sword like Mark Anthony. But he was himself born of woman, and incapable of harming himself.

  After that he did various things. He spent much of the thirteenth century traveling the world; first as an anonymous foot soldier of the crusades, and thereafter as a curious tourist walking and riding to Cathay, to Siberia, over the ice to Alaska, and across the great plains of the New World. If I were to detail his adventures, this story would stretch through thousands of pages, and marvelous though the adventures were, they would come to seem tedious to you. He roamed through Central and South America, and finally traveled back to Europe on one of Cortez’s ships. Bored of travel, he made his way back to Scotland. Once again his castle had been occupied, but he disposed of the family living there and retook possession.

  For a decade or so this reinstallation in his own home provided him with various distractions. Enraged villagers, and later religiously devout armies, came to destroy him—now once again infamous (after many decades of anonymity) far and wide as a devil in human form, a warlock who had sold his soul to the devil, and many like phrases. They burned his castle around him, but the flames did not bother him. Instead he walked amongst them bringing death with his sword. Eventually they fled. They always fled eventually. It took Macbeth a decade to rebuild Dunsinane, working entirely by himself, but he found he quite enjoyed the work.

  In the year 1666 he became intrigued by the idea that the world might be about to end. Traveling preachers assured the world that the apocalypse promised by Saint John was imminent. Would his charm survive the end of the world? He thought about this a great deal and decided it would not. He had come to the conclusion that the operative part of his charm—the “none of woman born shall harm Macbeth”—was the woman. Mary, mother of God, had been a virgin. Therefore she was a girl rather than a woman: and Christ was not of woman born. At his second coming, Macbeth decided, there would exist in the world a person capable of destroying him—an end he looked forward to with complete equanimity. But 1666 turned into 1667, and then into 1668, and the end of the world did not come. Macbeth reconciled himself to a genuinely immortal life. He discovered that immortality tasted not of glory, not even especially of life. It was a gray sort of experience, neither markedly happy nor sad. It was the life stones experience. It was the reason they were so silent and unmoved. It was the existence of the ocean itself, changeless though restless, chafing yet moveless. It was Macbeth’s existence.

  ACT V

  There was a knocking at the door.

  Nobody had knocked at his door for a decade or more. His last visitor had been the census taker, and Macbeth—who had learned this lesson from experience long before—had disposed of him swiftly rather than risk having his precious solitude disturbed. Maps marked Dunsinane as a folly; Macbeth had gone to great lengths to dig out underground dwellings and knock down much of the upper portion, so as not to be too conspicuous from the air. What with the reforestation of pretty much the whole of Scotland following the European Act of ’57 his home was well hidden: off the ramblers trails and not listed in any land tax spreadsheets.

  So who was knocking?

  He clambered up the stairs to the main hall and pulled open the door. Outside, standing in the rain (Macbeth, sequestered in his underground laboratory, had not even realized it was raining) was a man. He was wearing the latest in bodymorph clothes, a purple plastic cape that rolled into a seam of his shirt as he stepped over the threshold, and dynstripes in his hair.

  “May I come in?” he asked, politely enough.

  “I don’t welcome visitors,” said Macbeth.

  “That’s as may be, sir,” said the man. “But I have official accreditation.” He held out a laminated badge for Macbeth’s perusal; an animated glyph of the man’s face smiled and nodded at him repeatedly from the badge. “And the legal right of entry.”

  Macbeth thought of killing him there and then, but he held back. He hadn’t talked to another human being in two years. He was curious as to what errand had brought this official individual so deep into the woods.

  As he shut the door behind him he asked, “So what is it you want?”

  “Are you, sir, a relation of the Macbeth family?” the man asked.

  Now this was a startling thing. The people of this part of Scotland had long, long ago forgotten Macbeth’s name and true identity. He lived, where he was not entirely forgotten, as a kind of legend; stories of an ogre who could not be killed, of a wizard with the gift of immortality. “How do you know that name?”

  “Databases worldwide have been linked and cross-Web searched,” the man said in a slightly sing-song voice. “Various anomalies have been detected. It is my job—assigned me by my parent company, McDF Inc.—to investigate these. The deeds to this property have not been filed in eleven hundred years. The last listed owner was a Mr. Macbeth. I am here to discover whether this property is still in the possession of that family, in order to register it for Poll Tax, Land Reclamation Tax, and various other government and EU duties.”

  This told Macbeth all he needed to know. This taxman would have to die or Macbeth’s life would be disturbed, and he hated disturbance. He reached this conclusion with a heavy heart. The youthful enthusiasm for slaughter had long since passed from his breast. Now, from his immortal perspective, the mayfly humans who were born, grew, and died all around him were objects rather of pity than scorn. Still, necessity overrode his compa
ssion. If it must be done (as, of course, it must) it was well it was done quickly.

  He pulled a sword from the wall and squared up to the puny individual. “I’m afraid,” he announced, “that I cannot be disturbed by taxes and duties. I value my solitude.”

  “I must warn you, sir,” said the taxman, holding up one finger in a slightly prissy gesture, “that I am licensed to defend myself from unprovoked attack. My parent company, having invested thirty-eight million Euros in my development, are legally entitled to preserve their investment from unnecessary harm.”

  Macbeth only shook his head. He swung the sword. The blade crashed against the man’s shoulder; instead of severing it as Macbeth expected, the collision resulted in a series of sparks and fizzes, and a scattering of gray smoke into the air.

  “You have caused several thousand Euros damage,” said the strange man, “to my right arm. I must inform you that my manufacturers, McDF Inc., are legally entitled to recover that sum from your bank account.”

  Puzzling, Macbeth wrenched the sword free and lifted it for another sweep, aiming this time at the taxman’s head.

  “I do apologize for this, sir,” the taxman said, with a mournful expression on his face. He pointed a finger at Macbeth. The end of the finger clicked out and swiveled to the side. With a loud thwup sound a projectile launched itself from the hollow digit and smashed into Macbeth’s chest. More astonished than in pain, he dropped his sword and collapsed backward onto the stone flags.

  The strange taxman, leaning over him now, was speaking into a communicator of some kind. “Please send a medical team at once. Unmarked and unnamed property, located near the center of Greater Birnam Wood. Lock onto my signal. Please hurry; subject is badly wounded.” He peered down at Macbeth, who was already losing focus in his eyes, with the sheer oddness of this feeling—these smashed ribs—this blood (which had stayed safely in his veins through all these centuries) spilling onto the floor. It was, he had to admit, and despite the pain involved, a feeling something like—release.