Though they wear human faces neither are human, and the cold will not – cannot – kill them. They have known far harsher ills than these: fire, gunshot and gutshot, blown asunder, limbs severed from body with ancient claymores in the Highland uprisings and newer claymores in the heart of Vietnamese and Cambodian jungles. They survive, they abide, they live on.
Sometimes, eternity grows tiresome.
They still feel it, though – not the weather, but the cold inside. It’s a hard thing to bear, sometimes, and the knowledge that they can never die, never love, never live a life in the span of the people they live within, can be a heavy, uneven weight across their shoulders.
In the Boxer rebellion, the coldest of these two – the one who likes the ice inside men which makes them war upon each other – once wore a Chinese man’s face. The man had been old when he’d taken that face, and the Chinese man had a long wisp of a moustache people called Fu Man Chu at some time or another. In China, he spoke Chinese and he knew of dragons and heard their stories as heroin burned in his pipe and sweet, thick smoke swirled around his head. It was shortly after China that he, the pale, unbound man, hunted the greatest beasts of the sea with a harpoon and a snarl on his face.
They saw each other perhaps every century or more. Once was in Africa before the British shod the continent in iron, and later in a civil war. They saw and fought the Spanish as marauders along the coasts of the South Americas where they knew immense wealth, yet at other times these two men had not a coin to their name. They knew of Cibola, but such things as fables and truth or poverty and wealth never, ever mattered. What wealth is there in gold when you are undying?
They’re kin because they are of a kind, and no more than that. They wear borrowed faces until those faces wear thin or grow tired or slew from the creatures that hide underneath. Face-shedders, changelings, or perhaps the elf-kin: They don’t know what they are any more than man does. They know, at least, that they are among us, apart from us, above us. Perhaps once, long ago, they’d been the mythical Aes Sidhe, left behind before their kind travelled below the earth to live out their lives in barrows away from the people above.
Seithe, thinks the dark-skinned man. It’s a better word. It’s similar, the Irish, or at least it is to a man who has seen the evolution of many, many languages.
‘Seithe’ means skin and hide, both.
It’s a good word.
While those skins and hides they wear change, their teeth do not. The paler changeling has only two long, needle-sharp teeth, white and young (it’s the face outside that changes, not the beast within).
One feeds on blood; the other, flesh.
Kin. Never brothers. Just two things who recognise each other and feel nothing. Not love, not hate.
Nothing.
“Eternity drags, though, doesn’t it?” says the pale man with the long needle teeth to the man in the chair.
The man in the chair nods. “I understand.” His words are slurred a little, because his long teeth are for rending flesh, as are all canids’ teeth.
Canids: Dogs, jackals, foxes, wolves.
***
The man in the white-skinned face has blue eyes so bright they’re nearly white. The black-skinned man has one tan eye – a brown bordering on yellow – and one of a heavy, deep-sea blue. They can change the colour of their eyes just as easily as the faces they wear, then wear out.
Life is different now, with cameras and computers which are able to read men’s faces and sort them like the index cards they used to have in libraries. Once, a man could walk the breadth of a country or continent as he pleased, or board a ship and travel far over clean seas to distant lands where people were almost alien, not all joined-up and shared like they are now. Now, everyone is tied together with technology and travel is harder. Faster for most, but slower for these two creatures because they cannot board planes or pass x-rays or scanners or be searched or held in a jail. Once, the black-skinned man was in a jail, but the walls were thin and the people had slow guns that didn’t matter. Now, humans have scalpels and bunkers underground where fey things disappear.
Times change. Travel in 1759, or 1459? Slow, but better, in ways humans might not understand. Then, it meant something. Now, thinks the man with too many teeth for a man, is it any different to the way they send their shit along a pipe?
The man in the black face – he with the teeth like a wolf – misses the things that came before. Both hunt, of course, but one likes his prey close, in the cities and the houses. A short walk. A lazy kind of hunter. The wolf, with his odd eyes and perfect teeth, likes to run. Plains and fields, forests and mountains, long soft beaches beneath hard grey cliffs with sea mist on his skin and in his lungs. If these changelings were human at all, he would be the one to camp, to boil water from a stream, to keep away from the cities. The long-toothed pale man would take a hotel and order room service, feed in dark corners away from streetlights and never know the phase of the moon, or the season, because those things don’t touch him as they do the other.
Three years, they’d sought each other.
They are not bound by mobile phones with their invisible wires, or the Internet and social media and televisions and mortgages and commutes. Those are the bonds of humanity. It is a skein of history which holds these two.
Now?
Now the black-skinned man is held down, wire wound all around him and a heavy chair beneath him. Through his mismatched eyes he watches the other. The other is not tied to his chair, but that skein is there for both men, heavier than a rope that might be seen. Some bonds are for life, severed only by death.
***
The pale one nods. “You call yourself something now?”
“Carlos,” says the darker man. He’s not afraid. What can a man do to another man, or a changeling do to another changeling? For some reason, human lives, short as they are, seem to matter more.
Carlos does not care. He is not immortal, perhaps. Just… longer.
“It’s a good name. You were in Brazil?”
Carlos nods. Now, they’re in Argentina, inside an old wooden house not far from the disused Transandine railway near Puente del Inca, and miles and miles from anywhere else. The owners of that house are dead and propped against the wooden wall outside. They won’t stink when the time comes that bodies usually start to smell. It’s high in the Andes, this place; it’s never warm. It’s the kind of place where wet bodies just dry out and stick where they fall.
Carlos had been hunting through mountains and arid, endless dull plains and steppes.
The pale man smiles. “I was in Russia for a long time. I heard tales of you… I took a boat to the USA, then I walked. 1992? USA, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras… you know. Long time, long walk, but it’s better here. Like back when. More people,” says the pale man. “But less eyes.”
Carlos nods. His arms, chest, and legs are bound, not his head. He can nod and talk just fine and his face is expressive.
“I am called Michael, now. Biblical, I think. There, Mihael; here, Miguel. It’s a good name. Travels well,” says the pale man, who calls himself Mihael and Miguel and Michael.
“How long,” asks Carlos, “since we last spoke? How long do you think?”
“French Indian war? 1760? ‘61?”
“Thought it was longer,” says Carlos. “Saw you in Africa… maybe we didn’t speak.”
Michael laughs, smiles. “I remember you, what, a thousand years ago? Ninth, tenth century, was it? You bathed in blood. Ireland!”
“Yes,” said Carlos, and smiles despite himself. “Better then, in a way. More… alive? I liked the Norsemen. The fighters.”
“Better?” says Michael. “Mad bastards and swinging balls, wasn’t it?”
Carlos smiles, a shallow thing, but he guesses Michael’s right.
Michael shrugs, kind of see-saws his hands before he lays those pale thin fingers back on his knees. “More honest, perhaps. It is the same now, but with their guns. Their guns.” Michael shakes his
head and spits to one side. A tidy man, and somehow the gesture’s obscene.
Wear whatever face he might, the man’s just as much a barbarian as those who sacked Rome.
But Carlos is watching. He misses the open skies already, tied in this house and away from the night. But he can’t fidget, and probably wouldn’t even if he could.
He is long-lived, possibly immortal, and patient.
“You ever get tired?” asks Carlos.
“Of the faces?”
“Of us.”
Michael thinks about it. “No,” he says. “I don’t think so. We are us, they are not.” He shrugs. “Does it matter?”
Carlos nods. He nods often, but he is tired, and talking to this pale man is tiring. Carlos finds most of the things people do, they do to an unnecessary degree: talking, feeding, killing.
Carlos does the things he does and nods more than he talks. He’s wolven, a predator, but, like the wolf, he feels he is just a thing which hunts to feed. Carlos knows he’s a changeling, a face-shedder, but whatever he might be called by men, Carlos’ nature is set.
Michael is not the same. His teeth need the blood. Perhaps something of humanity bled into him, through his throat, over so many long years. Michael’s apart, sure, like Carlos. But Carlos thinks Michael’s closer to human than he.
“Why did you hunt, bring me here? You could have just…”
Michael understands Carlos’ meaning well enough. He nods, this time. “Why? What? Why are you doing this?” Michael mocks softly, and smiles. Those two needle-sharp teeth hang over his bottom lip nearly all the time. “You sound like them. I do it because I can. I hunt… and I kill everything, Carlos. Everything. You ask if I tire. I say I do not. But sometimes I grow…” Michael pauses, searches for the right word in a vocabulary made of many languages both old and new. “Bored. Not quite bored. Restless?”
“I understand,” says Carlos. He does. He and Michael have plenty in common; some days, nights, months, years, maybe as long as decades here and there, he’s grown tired and restless and unsettled. It’s a long life. Like a human might have a bad night with nightmares and tossing and turning, such endless creatures have nightmares that span generations.
They sit, watching each other for a time, until Michael slaps his knees and smiles. “Shall we?”
“How’s it to be?” asks Carlos. “You going to drink me, taste me, like food?”
Michael laughs. “Really? Thousands of years between us and we should just stab and bite, like those Vikings, the Moors? We shall swing swords and see whose arm is strongest?” Michael laughs again, genuinely amused. “No.”
Carlos smiles too, but his smile is guarded. “You want to know who is better, stronger, though? Like, we compete? What for? We are who we are. Stronger, faster – does not matter. You mock, but you wish to fight that which cannot be fought because you are bored? Like a child? Shall we keep score with medals, or stickers?”
“No,” agrees Michael. “You’re right, of course. But wrong, too, Carlos. Nothing matters. But I tire, yes. I bore. We see who is strongest, but like we do with them.”
This time Carlos does laugh, and though the bonds of thin wire round his chest cut his borrowed skin, he can’t stop his body from shaking.
“You want a contest of our will?”
Carlos laughs again, and Michael joins in until, with those long fingers of his, he reaches forward and dips into the blood running from the place at Carlos’ wrist where his changeling blood leaks. Then Michael puts the bloody finger into his mouth. He sighs, like Carlos is a rare treat.
“Yes,” says Michael, abrupt and full of business. “We ask. I ask, you ask. Then, we take… the losing face.”
“But what end?”
“A game. You play games? I like games,” says Michael. “They pass long hours.”
Carlos stares back at the pale-faced man, his mismatched eyes narrowed and bright. “I don’t like games.”
***
The changeling’s power is not in brawn, but knowledge, perhaps, or just in their gaze. A glamour, a spell, a kind of cunning bred in creatures of such immeasurable age. To a human, their gaze is stronger than any charismatic man’s ever was, more powerful than a grandparent watching a young child and waiting for the truth that follows a lie. Undeniable, to something mortal.
To each other, something else entirely.
Great armies across a plain. Immense, heavy bodies waiting to move, the Sumo of Japan, or celestial bodies waiting for the right moment – an eclipse – when a winning stroke can slide unseen in the one dark moment in decades, or centuries.
“You want to give me your face,” says Michael.
Outside, those bodies he left leaning against the wall of the farmhouse are desiccated, mummies, their moisture frozen and then evaporated.
Moments, for an immortal. Seasons for the corpses left staring at the high, cold plateau where the changelings battle.
Carlos doesn’t want to lose.
He thinks, slowly, eyes narrow and hard and cold as the ice that covers the Andes outside, that Michael is right.
Nothing matters.
Perhaps nothing ever mattered.
Nothing matters.
Is that my thought, he wonders, or Michael’s?
Carlos knows how this works. The Norsemen knew. The Celts, they knew. But then time sprawls so long and wide that people forget those old things which came before man. They disbelieve, they move on in their minds to thinking about the next thing, not the last thing. They watch planets that revolve around the sun, and they think in angles, and Pythagorean theorems and Doppler effects and CPUs.
The Norsemen knew.
Science is real, the world is real, the things people can see and feel: all real.
The things people forget, though – they’re real, too. Thin, perhaps, or shallow now. But the old ones live long lives and while they are not seen, it does not mean they are not real or cannot come back. A door closes, but it can open again. A myth can return through a door just as it can leave, and those kinds of doors never lock, never warp, never rot and turn to dust.
Such doors are eternal.
Changelings do not take. They never did.
Myths are flexible. The elf-kin steal children in the night. The Romany, they do the same. The vampire. The wolf.
Blood and moon, people think.
But they’re all old ones, and they never take. They ask, and they’re beguiling, aren’t they? Those creatures that come unwanted in the night and ask for a husband or wife or child. And you give them because you want to, don’t you? Or you give yourself when asked. You take your face off and give it away, and after so many borrowed faces how can a man or creature know who or what it is any longer?
No, thinks Carlos, I don’t want to give you this face. This is my face.
“Is it, Carlos? Is it yours any more than this is mine?”
Though they stare, unblinking, through the stretch of seasons such as they are in the high mountains, and though they stare in bright sun and black, moonless nights, Carlos’ eyes do not tire.
Michael doesn’t believe that at all.
If he did, then what would it matter if he took my face? Or what would it matter if I just gave it to him?
But Michael is strong. He’s strong, Carlos thinks, because he does this more than I.
“Of course it doesn’t matter, and you can give it to me. It doesn’t matter at all, Carlos. Nothing does.”
Michael takes what he does not need because he wants it. Something of humanity has seeped in, and along with it came greed.
“I do,” says Carlos. He doesn’t want to give his face to Michael, but his words are just as strong as the pale man’s imprecations.
“I do,” says Michael.
It’s glamour, but only as seen in a mirror.
***
The face in the mirror won’t ever be the same, thinks Carlos, staring back just as hard as Michael.
Won’t be the same. Won’t be human, will i
t?
It’s just a reflection. It’s just an image. Flat, unthinking. No more than a copy of a man.
Changelings ask for a face and sometimes they’re given it. Maybe three, four times in more than a thousand years has a man said no. And in saying no, that man walked on to live in his own face. Those men are rare indeed. Men who never wanted to be elsewhere, or be anyone or anything else. Truly content, perhaps. Men who don’t look for someone else in a mirror at all.
Are you content, Michael?
Are you who you want to be? Or is there a man in a mirror that you can never, ever reach?
Men who live eons and change with generations – are they truly content with who they are when they can simply wear whomever they want to be?
“Clever, Carlos,” says Michael. “You? Are you who you want to be, Carlos?”
As they speak their voices are preternaturally persuasive, and their thoughts are as loud as a shout.
They remember Stalingrad and St. Petersburg. They remember Mao and Cambodia under Pot. Time and memory and blood skips around. Earlier, monks writing the false words of prophets in a cold monastery with coloured, laboured scripts. The first printing of the Gutenberg bible, the earnest Protestants on distant shores of an old, old America. Pizarro, Cortez. Incans, Aztecs, and, earlier still, Olmecs. Boats and ships that sailed before men thought to write about their voyages to new worlds. Viking boats on Iceland and an Ottoman empire and Roman, first, second, and the many falls of great nations. Alexander, the Macedonians. Things before Christ and in the years since.
Such a long time, thinks Carlos.
“Just give me your face, brother. Rest now. It has been so long. So long.”
“You do not wish your face, Michael. You do not wish the face you wear nor mine. You wish to see what lies beneath, don’t you? The thing within, to know what you are…”
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