Immortal Beloved

by C. E. Murphy

  Time is not a problem, the patient one whispered.

  -o-O-o-

  She couldn’t remember how thick the walls had been.

  It doesn’t matter, the patient one told her. We have time.

  But I want to remember! she raged back. It seemed likely that it really didn’t matter. The textures of the walls had been changed utterly by the cataclysm that drowned the city; almost certainly the depth of the walls had been changed by the same events.

  Neverless, as she scraped and tore away fragments of stone, she tried to remember. As deep as her forearm was long? Leaning in the door, did the stone stretch wider than the breadth of her shoulders, to encompass her safely in the carved structure? Had there been windows she could reach through?

  Had there been windows at all? The wedge of stone slipped from her hands as she drifted in the water, struggling to bring the memory of the original room to mind.

  No doors! No windows! Always smooth, always safe, keeping us here inside! the frightened one insisted. Always here.

  No. She shoved the voices away, trying desperately to focus. She curled on her side, catching her hair over an arm to prevent it from wrapping around her face. Had there been windows? The wide floor she could envision, from eons of testing it with fingertips. The walls, she knew, had never been so smooth, but they had curved into the arched roof in the same essential structure of her prison.

  The door had been deliberately simple. The memory came back to her in a rush, and faded away again into fog. She pressed her eyes closed, trying to rebuild the vision. Wide, a double door, it swung inward, and was carved along the inner edges with symbols of thirteen Houses. The idea teased her, first with the belief that the door had not been deep enough to outstretch her shoulders, other times asserting with an almost physical shock that she’d fit neatly between the sides of the doorjamb.

  It might be a childhood memory, she realized after hourless drifting. Perhaps the door had surrounded her when she was smaller, but time had shifted her perception.

  Time. She laughed into the faintly gritty water. How much time had passed? How long had she been damned to the watery hell already? How much longer would it be until she broke free?

  It doesn’t matter, the patient one whispered again. What matters is release. We’ll have release soon.

  She uncurled, angling towards the floor, to collect her hammer again. Stone chips lay scattered around the room, providing texture she reveled in. Small fingers lifted a sharp stone, and slid it across her cheek. The pain was thin, fading almost before she tasted the blood in the water. With a giggle, she let the piece go, searching for her wedge. Finding it, she pushed upwards again, feeling for the hole she drilled with mindless perseverance. She could fit her whole head in it now. Eventually she would break through to the other side. In time, there would be freedom.

  In time, the patient one promised, there will be revenge.

  -o-O-o-

  The rock made a different sound when she snapped through the final layer, a thin report that echoed into other waters, no longer contained within her prison. A few more frantic blows gave her an opening large enough to stick her fingers through. She flailed them against the water outside, shouting at the top of her voice, as if someone beyond was waiting for her in the drowned city.

  Withdrawing her hand from the hole brought fresher water into the room, a wash of salt much heavier than she was accustomed to after the long years. It tasted wonderful. With renewed energy, she swam for her wedge, and began again to pound at the rock.

  It seemed to go faster now, with the greater circulation of water and the taste of freedom. Stone cracked away, bigger pieces knocking out to fall to the floor of the oubliette. Only hours had passed before she was able to push her whole hand, all the way up to her forearm, out into the water beyond.

  It seemed no time at all until she had a hole big enough for her head, then her head and one shoulder, and, finally, both shoulders.

  It was not until then that panic struck. She knew she would fit through the hole, visible only to impatiently seeking fingers. What was on the other side? Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing is there, all is here, here is safe, here is where to stay.

  She curled into a small ball again, hair drifting around her as deadly as a jellyfish’s tendrils.

  What was on the other side? Drowned Atlantis, the shell of her home. The sea, and eventually sunlight. She remembered the idea of sunlight, the brightness that colored the world, but the world itself, those colors, were gone, lost in thousands of years of darkness. Would she be able to see at all, or had her eyes atrophied entirely, leaving her blind to the world she had once known?

  Blind, the frightened one encouraged. Blind, we’ll be blind, stay here where the blackness can’t hide anything from us. Stay. Stay. Stay. There’s nothing left of the world we knew. Nothing’s there. Just the sea, just the water, just blackness forever.

  The thin wail that escaped her was a sound unlike any she had made in hundreds of years. It vibrated through her, forcing tears from her eyes as she shivered, clutching her knees closer to her chest. Changed, all changed utterly, the frightened one chanted at her. Nothing recognizable. Our people drowned, our language lost. No one to talk to, no one to understand our words. Stay in the safe place.

  She lay in the nest of her hair for three days, images of a world she could not fathom holding her captive in the prison that was her home.

  We didn’t choose prison, the patient one whispered eventually. Sea and stones, captured forever, captured because of his actions, his inactions, not ours. Outside is different. Outside is frightening, the patient one agreed. Outside is freedom.

  Strands of hair drifted across her face, brushing her mouth and nose, and the patient one made her shake her head at the feeling. Outside is better than being mummified by our hair. Languages can be learned. Give us the chance. If we stay, we accept his prison. If we stay, we can’t make him pay.

  The wash of courage was tenuous, at best. She twisted free of her hair, the strands unwinding in graceful slow motion. She dove again, a final time, and located her wedge of stone, dulled now to a much smaller size, but familiar in her hands. Clutching it one hand, she pushed up to the wall, and through the hole as quickly as she could, before her grasp of boldness eluded her again.

  Several feet beyond the wall of her prison she stopped. Yards of hair billowed out after her, clouding around her like a blanket of fog.

  The blackness was still completely. She could not even see the ruins of the city, and realized she’d expected to be able to. For a while, she drifted in the darkness. Then, tentatively, she tilted her face up, and began to kick towards the surface.

  Very gradually, she became aware of light. It stopped her where she was, hovering in the water, trying to define the nebulous changes in the sea around her. Only when a fish darted by her face, a shadow in the shadows, did she realize vision was beginning to return.

  The next fish that swam by brought to her attention a sudden, vicious hunger. For time unknown, she hadn’t eaten. Further thought was delayed until she chased down one of the slipper animals, smashing its head in with her stone. Floating in the water, she gobbled it down, sucking blood from her fingers before it had time to wash away.

  For days she stayed at the faintly grey level, drifting where the current took her, chasing fish with wild shifts and twists in the water. She snatched them by their tails, bashing her stone into their brains. While she ate she sat in a protective, cross-legged position, her stone resting between her thighs. Fish of all sizes where her prey, and, indiscriminate, she left only bones for the water. Eventually, her body stopped demanding food, and she was able to think again.

  The nutrients in the water must have been bare, she realized. Long, blank periods of time ending in pain were many deaths and rebirths. Her Immortal body must have taken what it could out of the waters, over years of time, recreating life out of death. Hunger was such a way of life that until food was presented directly to
her, she had not recognized the sensation.

  Waking memory was far too long. If immeasurable time had been spent dead, trying to gain life-sustaining nutrients from the water … how long might it have been? With a shudder, she pushed the frightened voice away, holding her stone tightly enough that her hands cramped. Still clinging to it, she began to kick upwards again.

  It took longer than she expected, partly due to convulsive hunger pains that would send her after schools of fish. The water became less murky only very slowly, and in time she was able to see that fish seemed to like nibbling on her hair. She started drawing them in that way, sitting silent in the water, rock in her lap, waiting until she’d pulled her hair close enough to bash a fish’s head in. It was more effective than chasing them. She knew that she slipped deeper into the water, and was carried where the current would bring her, but the journey to the light was secondary to feeding five thousand years of hunger.

  When it became bright enough, the light slowed her. The gradual increase never quite pained her eyes, but she realized abruptly that she could see herself when she looked down. It was a young woman’s body she saw, painfully thin. She was relieved she hadn’t seen herself before days of gorging in the deeper seas, before her body was able to add and redistribute some of the weight that had wasted away over the years of captivity.

  She hung in the water, studying herself. Her fingertips were scarred, which surprised her. Perhaps the healing skills of her Immortal body had their limits. Certainly the trauma of scrabbling at the stones in futile attempts to escape had left their mark. The bronze of her skin had faded to pasty white, emphasized by the dead-colored scars.

  Even as the light grew brighter, she could not really see the end of her hair. It drifted too much, and seemed to fade into the water instead of ending. The vague plan to sell it formed in her mind. In Atlantis, wig-makers created wigs out of real human hair. Surely the world would not have changed so much that she could not find someone to buy the masses of endless hair that was her legacy of imprisonment.

  It could have changed so much, the frightened one whispered. She thrust it away, and kicked upwards.

  Not until the sea lit blue with the sun’s light above did she suddenly appreciate the visual acuity Immortality had granted her. She had no idea what depth Atlantis had descended to, but her vision had begun to return at a level she was sure no ordinary human would have been able to see in. To discern such detail in such complete darkness was a marvel; what would full light bring? She looked up at the sun, visible through twenty yards of sea, a distorted ball of white fire that colored the ocean and her hair. Schools of fish flitted above her, shadows against the blue.

  What kind of world am I returning to?

  She kicked upwards. Only seconds later, her head broke the surface and she inhaled, fresh sea air, for the first time in centuries. Instinctively, she squinted her eyes shut against the light bouncing off small waves, wincing with anticipated pain. It wasn’t as bad as she feared. She could still see, the light coloring her vision crimson until she dared peek through lashes pushed almost all the way closed.

  Wherever the currents had brought her, it wasn’t close to land. Quiet, open sea filled all the horizons, brilliant white and vivid blue, the sky scarred with thin, idle clouds.

  Nothing at all, the frightened one hissed. Go home. Go back to Atlantis. It’s safe there. Go back. There’s nothing here.

  We’re in the middle of the ocean, the patient one said. Of course there’s nothing here. Swim. We’ll find land and people again. We’ll rebuild a life and then we will find the one that did this to us and we will have revenge.

  Go back to Atlantis, the frightened one said plaintively.

  Revenge, she thought, and then Atlantis reborn. That would be the way of it. She lifted her stone, her single legacy of her drowned home, out of the water to inspect it.

  It was quite ordinary: white and wedge-shaped still, and scarred around the edges, much as her fingers were. She hugged it to her, then turned around in the water, her hair tangling about her body. A second inspection of the horizons provided her with no landmarks, and so she glanced at the sun, judging which direction land might be. She had never visited the lands to the north of Atlantis. To the south and east, though, lay Egypt. Surely Egypt had survived. The Sphinx must still be there. It would be a beginning, even as it had been in her mortal life.

  She turned on her back, her stone resting protectively against her chest, otter-like, and began kicking her way south.

  -o-O-o-

  A few hundred miles to the north, Europe went to war. They called it the Great War, and the War to End All Wars, and, in time, World War I.

  Chapter 4

  Methos edged his way around a class of third-graders to stand uncomfortably close to Duncan, letting grey-haired dignitaries squish past him towards the stage. “I hate crowds,” he muttered in MacLeod’s ear. He stepped backwards, and a woman yelped as his heel landed squarely on her toes. With a patently apologetic and utterly insincere smile over his shoulder, Methos leaned forward again, hovering at Duncan’s shoulder. “Please tell me our seats are near an exit so we can bolt out of here.”

  “Down there.” Duncan pointed absently towards stage left, near the front of the auditorium. “There’s an exit behind the end of the row, so there’s your escape route. I had no idea so many people would be here. We should have gotten here earlier.”

  “Really,” Methos said sarcastically. Joe, just in front of the two men, laughed.

  “C’mon, Adam,” the Watcher said. “You must’ve expected a lot of interest in Atlantis. It’s everybody’s favorite legend.”

  Methos lifted a finger. “One,” he said, “you’re discounting the entire Eastern half of the world with that statement, and two, I always thought King Arthur was everybody’s favorite legend.”

  “Don’t be difficult.” Joe grinned over his shoulder at the oldest Immortal. “Pretend you’re having a night out with the old man. Look at us. You two could be my kids.” Merriment glinted in Joe’s eyes as he looked back at the aisle, edging his way through the crowd.

  Methos snorted. “Old man.”

  “There’s not much family resemblance, Joe,” Duncan pointed out, grinning.

  “I guess you boys must’ve had a good-looking mother. Sure didn’t get it from me.” Joe grinned again, pushing his cane forward to secure a small pathway down the aisle. The grin acknowledged his unfair assessment of himself; despite the greying, brush-cut hair and the slightly awkward gait from artificial legs, Joe still had the spark of charm and the rough good looks he’d had twenty years earlier. At six feet in height, and, in his fifties, still with the build of the football player he’d once been, Joe looked very much as though he could be his companions’ father.

  The tattoo concealed on his left wrist made the relationships more complicated than that. After a crippling injury in the Vietnam War, an Immortal had saved Joe Dawson’s life, and by doing so, changed it forever. The Watchers recruited the young man into their ranks, and much of his life had come to revolve around the secret society, and his charge, Duncan MacLeod. For fifteen years, he’d Watched the Highlander, learning almost as much about Duncan as Duncan himself knew. Their paths had crossed only in the last few years, and a friendship had grown up between Watcher and Immortal, against all regulations.

  That friendship lead Mac to tell Joe that research Watcher Adam Pierson was in truth the legendary Immortal, Methos. Joe kept the ancient man’s secret, first for reasons that even he couldn’t define, and over time, to protect the man with whom he’d developed a wary friendship. Immortals would not be the only men after the oldest Immortal’s head, if the Watchers were to learn of the secret Adam Pierson had harbored for a decade.

  They finally edged their way down to the seats, and Duncan gestured Joe in. “You first, Dad,” he grinned. Joe chuckled, and stepped down the aisle.

  “Not bad seats,” Methos said approvingly. “How’d you get us right up next to the stag
e?”

  “Called in a favor,” Duncan admitted. “I thought it might be busy. “Not,” he added, looking over the auditorium, “this busy. They should have held this somewhere larger.”

  “This way it looks like more people are interested. ‘Record crowd attends Atlantis lecture’, along with a picture of people overflowing the aisles.” Methos dropped into the seat next to Joe, doing his best to stretch long legs out in the narrow aisle. “I suppose I should thank you for thinking to get good seats.”

  “Don’t strain yourself,” Duncan suggested dryly.

  “Okay,” Methos said, more cheerfully.

  Joe shook his head. “What do you do when Mac’s not around for you to irritate, Adam?”

  “Pick on myself,” Methos said. “It’s not nearly as much fun. I don’t get half as outraged as he does.” He smiled innocently at Duncan, who waved a hand, implying he was above the need to respond as he took the seat next to Methos. Still grinning, the oldest Immortal turned back to Joe. “How’s the bar? I haven’t been by in a while.”

  Joe’s eyes lit up. Aside from the Watchers, the other love of Joe’s life was his gin joint, a blues bar that filled up nightly with blues fans, musicians and listeners alike. “Good,” he said. “There’s a new bass player who comes in at least a couple times a week to jam. He’s good. You should come by and listen. Both of you.”

  Duncan nodded. “When we get back,” he promised.

  The auditorium lights dimmed, turning all three mens’ attention to the stage. A small round man with a gleaming head came out, blinking into the lights. “Good evening, everyone. If you can just take your seats, we’ll get started.” He squinted against the lights, judging the crowds. “Looks like we have quite a turnout this evening. It’s nice to know archaeologists can grab the general populace’s attention every once in a while.” As his eyes adjusted further to the light, he frowned. “Perhaps we can get some extra chairs in … ?” Light bounced off the top of his head in a hard reflection as he turned to talk to someone offstage, the microphone picking up scattered syllables. After a minute’s discussion, he turned back to the microphone, nodding. “We’ll bring some more chairs in for the back rows. If everyone who can’t be seated yet could step back to give the crew some room … thank you. I’ll go ahead and begin my introduction while they’re doing that, so we’ll get started on time.” He cleared his throat, straightened his tie, and put on a rehearsed smile.