The Eternal World

by Christopher Farnsworth

  Aznar never shut up. He implored them to go after Narváez, and then threatened to go himself when no one listened. It was an empty threat. He hurried after them as they kept trudging through the tall grass and among the trees. Finally, he contented himself with cursing Simón, an endless muttering stream of promises of hellfire and damnation and insults.

  It made Simón grind his teeth, but he kept on walking, even as the sun began to set. He knew the way from here. He could find it, even in the dark.

  They reached the caverns by the light of the moon. The others were tired and hungry, their eyes hollow. The reality of their situation was beginning to impress itself on them, Simón knew. They had been marked as traitors, abandoned an ocean away from home, and left for the savages.

  He led them into the cave. They followed, because they had nowhere else to go.

  They stopped at the edge of the pool. The blue glow reflected over all their faces, and Simón saw the fear there. Good. They were not dead yet. They were not completely broken, because fear was the only appropriate response for something as otherworldly as this.

  Aznar, of course, was the first to find his voice again.

  “What is this?” he demanded. “Is this some kind of pagan sorcery? Is this the work of that savage whore? Was she a witch as well? Answer me, Simón! What kind of abomination in the eyes of God—”

  Simón hit him in the face.

  Aznar fell down hard. He looked up at Simón and struggled to rise.

  Simón hit him again. And did not stop. Despite the pain in his arms and the bone-deep exhaustion, he hit him again and again and again.

  The others watched. Perhaps they saw the demon lurking behind Simón’s eyes then, or perhaps he was simply doing what they’d wanted to do for a long time.

  Whatever the reason, Simón stopped beating Aznar only when he could no longer lift his fists.

  He looked at the others. They looked back, wary and anxious or dull-eyed and apathetic. It made no difference to him. As long as they were watching.

  Aznar lay on the ground, blood bubbling through split lips and broken teeth.

  Simón went to the pool and took one of the ceremonial bowls from the stack by the pool, just as he’d seen Shako do. He filled it from the pool and held it to Aznar’s lips, almost tenderly.

  Aznar struggled slightly, but there was no power to it. He was half-dead.

  Simón forced him to swallow.

  Then he drank deep from the same bowl himself.

  Aznar sputtered. Beneath the congealing blood, the broken bones of his face shifted. The bruises softened, cleared, and then faded. The broken skin closed and healed.

  “Holy Christ,” one of them whispered.

  Now they all looked at him with only one expression: fear. Even Aznar, who sat up, blinking, not comprehending what had just happened. They all feared him.

  That was good. That was a start. He needed them to listen.

  “This is the treasure I promised you,” he said. “This is where our new lives begin. We are reborn here and now. This is the Water. The Water is Life.”

  Simón’s fists and arms no longer hurt. His hands were whole and unbroken when he passed the bowl.

  They all drank.

  NARVÁEZ NEVER MADE IT back to Spain, or anywhere. He wandered, lost in Florida, until starvation forced him and his soldiers to melt down their weapons and armor to make parts for boats. A hurricane drowned the would-be ruler of Florida somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico. The surviving members of the expedition washed up on an island that would one day be named Galveston. From there, they made their way back to land, before trekking on foot to Spanish settlements in Mexico. Of the eight hundred men who began the expedition, only four survived.

  At least, that was the version the history books recorded.

  Simón and his conquistadors returned to Tampa Bay, where they found the shipwrecked remains of the two ships. They dragged the timbers onto the beach. They collected rope and damaged sailcloth. They boiled sap from the nearby trees and made pitch.

  They worked steadily, morning until night, every day for months.

  They made barrels. Hundreds of barrels.

  MIRUELO RETURNED WITH THE fifth ship of the expedition, as he promised Narváez he would, and found them waiting on the beach. At first, it seemed as if Simón and the others were to be captured and chained as deserters.

  But Simón convinced Miruelo to speak with him privately. He took him to the place in the jungle they had cleared for their camp. Simón gave him a drink of water and made his offer.

  From that moment on, Miruelo was another member of the Council.

  They sailed back to Cuba and used Narváez’s credit to begin their real work.

  They found the Water made them stronger. Tougher. Smarter. Faster. They never got sick. It was amazing how much of a difference these advantages made, in a world racked with danger and disease.

  They began as scavengers, picking over the world’s graveyards. When plagues ran through Valencia, Brazil, and Chile over the next several years, Simón and Sebastian walked through the cities without fear and paid almost nothing for the properties of the dead. When the Thirty Years’ War shattered Europe, they were able to amass a fortune selling food at extortionate rates to the millions left starving by the chaos. They even worked for a time as mercenaries, returning to the field despite wounds that would have killed other men.

  Then they became bankers. When the Dutch economy collapsed in 1637, they were there, profiting from the speculation as well as the sudden crash. They could lend money at a fraction of the cost, and make investments that would not pay off for decades, if not longer.

  At some point, Max began calling them the Council of the Immortals. He twisted it with irony, as he always did, but the others took it seriously. The name stuck, at least among themselves.

  Eventually, they became so rich and owned so much that the rulers came to them, seeking advice, approval, and protection, along with the money they always seemed to need. Simón and the Council were always happy to provide what was asked, for a price. Nothing was ever free.

  They used their influence to pull levers and strings behind the curtains of history, to nudge and shove and force the world in the direction they wanted.

  It wasn’t easy. They backed the wrong men time and time again, and were often blinded by their prejudices to losses that looked inevitable in hindsight. They didn’t have any love for the British, but Simón was stunned when an only marginally competent general named Washington managed to scrape out a victory for his colonial rebels. Their belief in the natural superiority of the aristocracy put them on the losing side of the French Revolution as well.

  It was not long after that when Simón Anglicized his name and began calling himself Simon Oliver. He learned English, and forced the others to do the same.

  He still believed he could make the world behave. He could force it to be the paradise he dreamed, given time.

  And they had nothing but time.

  At least that was how it seemed for almost two centuries.

  MIRUELO WAS THE FIRST of them to die, and the one who taught them the danger of going too long without a drink.

  He set out overseas to visit Mexico and manage some of the Council’s holdings there. His ship was caught in a hurricane and blown hundreds of miles off course, delaying him by months. He’d left without any of the Water.

  Simon received a report from one of his trusted subordinates a year later that chilled him down to his soul.

  By the time Miruelo made port, the letter said, he was barely recognizable. He’d lost all his hair and teeth, his eyes were milky with cataracts, and he was bent nearly in half with arthritis. It had happened within a few weeks on the ship, so quickly that the sailors suspected witchcraft. Miruelo lasted a few more weeks once the ship made land, and then died in his sleep, a
shriveled husk of his former self.

  But the most frightening thing, to Simon, was what had happened to Miruelo’s mind. It was as if all the experiences of the past century had crushed him under their weight. At one moment, his lieutenant wrote, he would speak in the confident tones of a master pilot, barking out orders on a ship. And in the next he would be weeping like a child for his mother. Most of the time, however, he simply reacted to everything and everyone around him as best he could; he’d become a new, third person with no memory at all.

  Simon’s lieutenant was utterly baffled. Simon was not. He wrote back about mysterious diseases that befell longtime sailors, and dismissed all of Miruelo’s desperate pleading for “the Water of Life” as the need of a repentant man to confess his sins before he died.

  Simon knew what had really happened. Without the Water, the years they had cheated would come rushing back all at once—and would take their minds as well as their bodies.

  From then on, Simon declared that every member of the Council would carry at least a flask of the Water with them at all times. He thought that would be enough.

  He didn’t know it at the time, but Miruelo was the only member of the Council who would die peacefully. He didn’t yet know that someone was hunting them.

  CHAPTER 22

  PANAMA CITY, FLORIDA

  NOW

  DAVID WOKE LIKE a drowning man trying to escape the ocean.

  He sucked down air in a huge gasp, kicking and thrashing hard, trying to push himself free of the massive weight that had been crushing him only moments before.

  Then he realized, sweating and panting, that he was in a bed.

  The details came to him more quickly and sharply than he would have expected. The room was dark but appeared merely gray to his eyes. He felt the high thread count of the sheets; saw the modernist design on the wall; the chunky, faux-custom furniture. Hotel room. Not a cheap one, either.

  David saw her in the chair across the hotel room, watching him, her eyes reflecting the dim light like a cat’s.

  “Take it easy,” she told him. “We’re in no danger. You’re safe. We have plenty of time.”

  With her voice, it came flooding back: the panic; the gunfire; Max, with his cruel smile, stepping calmly from the crowd and leveling the pistol at him—and then the terrible, crushing pain, like someone put a fist through his chest. And the blood. So much blood.

  He touched the skin above his heart gingerly. If this were a dream, this is the part where his fingers would come away red and he would remember he was dead.

  There was nothing. No blood. He looked down. No wound. Not so much as a scar. He was bathed in sweat, but it was panic rather than pain. He took another moment to run an inventory of himself. Nothing hurt. Nothing ached. Despite the adrenaline pulsing through him, he almost felt as though he could hop out of bed and run a marathon.

  “You’re safe,” she said again. “Just breathe.”

  He felt his own chest again. Whole and unmarked. “What happened?”

  Even in the dim light, he could see the white of her teeth as she smiled. “I think you know,” she said.

  “He shot me.”

  “Yes.”

  “He shot me through the heart. I saw the gun, I felt it, I was dying—”

  “Easy. Just breathe.”

  “Why?”

  “Now, that is a very long story. The short version is you’ve just seen the true face of Simon Oliver and the men around him.”

  Words failed David for a moment. “No, I mean—I mean—why?”

  “Why are you alive?”

  David swallowed. He didn’t really want to think of it like that. But he nodded.

  “Because I saved you, David.”

  “The Water.”

  She nodded. “The Water.”

  “What’s going on? Who are you? Who are you really?”

  “Hush,” she said. “Your body is healed. Your mind is going to take a little more time to deal with the trauma.”

  David realized he was shaking. “The trauma of being dead, you mean.”

  “If that’s how you want to put it.”

  “I had a great big goddamn hole in my chest where my heart was supposed to be, what else am I supposed to call it?”

  She just looked at him. He realized he was shouting. He struggled to take a deep breath. Then another. The hotel room smelled like jasmine and jet fuel.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “It’s fine. As I said. You need a little more time.”

  “Can they find us here?” David rubbed his chest again. He was not particularly interested in seeing if he could rise from the dead twice in the same night.

  “You’re safe,” she said for the third time. “No one will disturb us here. This hotel charges a great deal for privacy and security. And no one is even looking for us here.”

  “All right,” David said. He slid back into the pillows, relaxing a fraction of an inch at a time.

  She stood and crossed the room to the bed. He realized she was still wearing what remained of her gown from the party. The scent of cordite and blood still clung to it.

  She recognized his discomfort immediately and slid out of the dress, tossing it far across the room. She drew the sheets back and straddled him.

  Despite everything, he was already rising to meet her.

  Before his mind shut down completely and his body took over, he had one last question. “Who are you?”

  She smiled again, but this time it looked sad to him.

  “Shako,” she said. “My name is Shako.”

  WRAPPED IN THE SHEETS afterward, sweat cooling on their bodies, she told him the story.

  A young Indian girl, Spanish conquistadors, and an impossible secret to keep. An inevitable betrayal. And then slaughter.

  “I should have seen it coming,” she said, fingers playing lightly over his chest. “I was young. It was the last time I was young.”

  CHAPTER 23

  FLORIDA

  1528

  SHAKO SAW THE Uzita die—everyone she’d ever known, her entire life—right before her eyes.

  She forced herself to watch every moment from her hiding place in the trees, at the edge of the village. If she had arrived a little sooner, she might have warned her people. She was never far from the Uzita, even though she was no longer one of them. She could not bring herself to go too far.

  Something between Shako and her father had broken when she pleaded for Simon’s life. The rage that had spilled out of him vanished, only to be replaced with a grim and relentless disgust. He would not speak to her for days afterward. No one else did, either. She was an outcast living in their midst.

  He tried to explain it to her once. It was late at night, and they were alone in the ceremonial house, the place where no one lived but the spirits. He brought her inside. Shako wondered if he would finally hear her apologies.

  But Hirrihigua wanted to speak, not to listen. He wanted to explain.

  Her father said that when he learned the invaders were coming—the first time they heard rumors of strange, pale men with exotic weapons and animals, arriving in huge boats at their shores—he knew that it would be a fight for survival. Whatever else those weird visitors were, they were men. And men always behaved in the same way. They took what they could and they would not be satisfied until they had it all. As chief, Hirrihigua had seen years where famine threatened the Uzita. He’d made hard choices long before Shako and her siblings were born. There were times when he could see their future extinguished by too many hungry mouths. In those times, he had led his people against neighboring tribes and taken whatever they had, so that his own children might live. He knew why people looked to conquer others. He knew that no one ever left his home without looking to take something back to it. If the strange men had come all the way across the world, far
ther than anyone had ever gone before, then they must, naturally, expect to take more than anyone had ever taken before.

  Given the chance, he knew they would find the Water. And they would drink it, and then they would swarm across the land, undying and eternally voracious, consuming everything in their path.

  Hirrihigua would not allow that. Like all of the other chiefs before him, he knew that the Water was too dangerous. He swore, as they did, to protect it—which meant to keep the world safe from it, as well as keeping it from the world.

  But he could not do that alone. This was why he’d promised her to Yaha. His tribe had to be stronger, had to be united, against the threat that was coming. Her happiness, her desires, they were small sacrifices to make for another generation of Uzita children. Shako hadn’t seen it because she did not want to believe in anything more than the immediate future. She was young. That was her failing. That alone might have been forgivable.

  But to lie down with one of the invaders? To reveal to him their secrets? To betray everything she’d been since the day she was born?

  “You brought him into our world,” he said. “You gave him yourself, and you gave him all of us as well.”

  In her father’s eyes, she had become inhuman. There was no forgiving that.

  She tried to speak, but he left her in the ceremonial house alone.

  Her father’s last words to Shako came in front of the entire village. He gathered them all to hear.

  He told her to go. To disappear. She had separated herself willingly from the Uzita, and so she could no longer be a part of them. She cried and pleaded. He would not answer her, even when tears began to roll down his own face. The other men and women—even her own brothers and sisters—threw rocks at her when she would not leave.

  Despite her father’s order of exile, she could not bring herself to go very far. She lived in a small camp less than a mile away, hidden in a pocket of cypress and mangroves. Perhaps she still held out some hope of reconciliation, if not actual forgiveness. And there were those who left food out for her, and clothes, and other things she needed to survive. She learned to steal into the village in the dead of night, when her father’s sentries would deliberately look the other way.