He Who Cannot Die

by Dan Pearce

  Many villages and cities did exist. Many pockets of population did spot the land. And I lived-in and experienced a great number of them. Of course, I would always move-on after spending too much time in any one place, hoping to find Dishon, looking for any sign of Tashibag. Other times I moved-on because the self-healing natures of my curse were discovered. Very occasionally I moved on because my finite number of years with a new lover came to an end, and I left before time could displace me.

  Many new languages had developed since I lost Honoria, and with time I am fairly certain I learned to speak them all. Additional languages really aren’t that difficult to learn once one has learned a handful of them. The human mind seems to turn the switch on to something that stopped working at a young age for all of us. It turns on its ability to both store away and to easily retrieve every new word that enters it. Since just about every language in existence has at least some fragments of other languages built into it, the more languages a person knows, the easier other languages will be to decipher and memorize with very little effort at all.

  And because my mind was already so easily adaptive to new languages, and because I had many human lifespans to absorb and learn so many of them, my communication and translating skills came to be in extremely high demand in any city or village which existed at a crossroads for foreign travelers, merchants, and traders. At a time when on any day a dozen different strangers might arrive at these places, speaking half a dozen different languages, communication and trade was difficult without having someone like me around.

  The richest men in some of these cities also collected those who were starving or those who had committed crimes in surrounding villages and used them to complete hard or tedious labor. These laborers usually spoke many different languages among the lot of them, which was quite burdensome for the handful of taskmasters who had great difficulty relaying proper orders or instructions.

  Because of all this, I was able to ask nearly any price for my employ, and I was tasked by the wealthiest men in many different cities to oversee the exchanging of goods or the managing of the taskmasters.

  I built quite a lot of wealth for myself in those days, and rarely did I find any woman with whom love might become an encumbrance. As I mentioned, it did happen from time to time, and it was a wonderful thing when love did find me, but it became easier with each love to create some reason I must ditch-out before the ten-year mark hit. The amount of time between each love grew each time I had to leave a love behind.

  Before I found Dishon again, it had been at least two hundred years since I last loved a woman, and life had become too interesting and too prosperous to go out looking for it any time soon.

  In retrospect, I had become quite bitter about so many things during that span of my life, and about love especially. I had come to blame love for all of my life’s greatest difficulties, and for the curse itself. I blamed love for my brother’s murder, and I blamed love for the times I was displaced. I blamed love for the times I starved, and for the times I wandered. I blamed love for the death of those lovers who died because of it. I blamed love for the others who died because of it. Rarely did I give love credit for any of the beautiful and incredible parts of my life that certainly had existed. Love, it seemed, was the root of all difficulty, and I stopped wishing I could somehow have it and keep it. My attempts to find Tashibag became half-hearted at best. This was the state of my heart and the level of my bitterness when I finally found Dishon.

  I was living a wealthy life in the city of Tutzca. At the time, I managed a team of three taskmasters who oversaw the various stone construction projects within Tutzca, as well as those taking place in many surrounding villages. I traveled from project to project, imparting the wishes of the wealthy men who hired me, instructing laborers in their various languages, bargaining and completing transactions with those hiring us, and making sure all was going according to plan and as efficiently as possible.

  I had recently taken the half-day journey to the neighboring village of Bo, where a taskmaster by the name Marlo was overseeing the construction of their leader’s new harem house. We sat down to dinner and he excitedly told me of his laborer who had been crushed beneath a falling wall two days before.

  “Cain, it is something you had to witness to believe,” he told me. “A sudden monster of a wind came and blew our wall over. It landed violently on this man, who always seems to be one day away from starving. The wall covered nearly all of him, and when we removed the stones, his brains were spread upon the ground. He was dead.”

  He was far too excited as he recounted it to me. “This is not something which should bring you joy, Marlo,” I said.

  He nearly leapt from his seat. “This would never bring me joy, Cain,” he almost shouted at me. “But the man somehow lived again and is whole once more!”

  My heart sped. Could it be Dishon? Another cursed man, perhaps? “What did this man look like?”

  Marlo gave me the description of the man, describing Dishon in every way. I grew more excited as he gave me more details. “Does this man have any markings of any kind?”

  “That’s a strange thing to ask, and yes, he does. A serpent upon his shoulder. Do you know this man?”

  “It is not likely, but I am curious. Where is he now?” I asked, attempting to hide my sudden excitement. I pulled my skins tighter to make sure my own mark was fully hidden from Marlo, lest he make an unfortunate connection.

  “He is tied against the hog’s pen.”

  “Tied? Why did you tie the man? Is he dangerous?”

  Marlo looked at me with confusion. “Cain, his brains had spilled upon the ground. My laborers set his body aside while they dug a hole to put him in, and when they returned to retrieve him, his bones had repaired, and he was breathing and moaning. There is obviously some kind of black magic within him. We cannot let him loose while we still know nothing of how this all came to pass.”

  Anger boiled within me. I wanted to punch the man. I wanted to drag him to the hog’s pen myself and tie him to it so tightly that his wrists bled. I wanted him to experience torture and starvation. I wanted him to understand the difficulty of being so greatly misunderstood. But I did none of that because this man Marlo was simply a man who took action based on what little amount of information he had, and I forced myself to remember that. “Bring me the man,” I said. “I want to question him myself.”

  Marlo disappeared into the impending night and returned some ten minutes later, forcefully nudging my skeleton of an old friend back in through the entrance. Dishon’s eyes were locked on the ground, defeated and emotionless when he entered. His hands were tied, and only strips of hole-filled skins spotted with freshly-dried blood covered his loins. I contained my elation at finally finding my dear friend once more. “So, you are the man who cannot die,” I said.

  Dishon’s eyes were already wide when he lifted his gaze to mine. He instantly knew my voice, even after so much time apart, and knew it would be my face he saw. He said nothing, but his chest began heaving with heavy breaths, and his posture straightened. His lips pursed and his eyes began to well. Emotion also filled me, but I somehow kept them at bay. “Leave this man here with me, Marlo,” I instructed. My taskmaster looked at me as if to protest, but quickly obeyed when I firmly nodded toward the door. Moments later, I was alone with Dishon.

  “Where have you been all this time, Cain?” he immediately asked me in a language no outside ears would be able to translate.

  I no longer could contain my emotions. “I have looked,” I began to say, but could not form the words that needed to follow. I tried again as I released him from the ties which bound his hands. “I wandered the Earth for so many…” again, I could not form a full statement before my throat constricted and my vocal cords failed.

  “Just stop,” Dishon said, once his hands had been freed. He rushed at me and fully embraced me. “My oldest and dearest friend.” The embrace I returned was equally as strong, and we just held each other so tightly
for what must have been minutes, letting our silent tears tell our stories and our feelings far better than either of us was capable of doing in that moment.

  That embrace. That hug.

  It would be silly of me to attempt a description of just what it was for us. A mind doesn’t exist which could fully comprehend what an embrace with one’s closest friend really is like after well more than two thousand years apart. The wealth and level of emotion which surfaced after so long, each of us having witnessed the entirety of the Earth’s population be replaced so many fucking times over since we last saw one another… That feeling was something beyond this realm. The immediate forgiveness and the indissoluble bond, which was firmly spoken, though completely unspoken in that moment, could be physically felt. It was as if all of life suddenly made sense to us for the first time, ever. All of that, and much more, was communicated to one another through our wet cheeks and our whitened knuckles as we pulled each other so close that it felt we might actually become one and the same person.

  I took Dishon with me back to Tutzca the next morning. During our journey, we filled each other in on all of our different wanderings. We pieced together all the events which led to us finding each other once more, and which kept us from finding each other for so long. We learned that there were times when our paths had come very close to crossing, but somehow hadn’t. We learned just how many places we each had been as we searched for each other. Dishon also told me of how close he had come to finding Tashibag on many occasions, and how he always assumed I was doing the same. I admittedly felt guilt for more or less giving up my great desire to find the witch on my own. I realized as we walked that the search certainly would have brought the two of us together much sooner.

  That journey back to Tutzca was healing for both of us, though, and beautiful. As slow-going as it was, due to Dishon’s malnourished condition, it felt as if we somehow had never been apart. Things picked right back up where we once were, and before we even arrived back to my home, we decided it was time we find Tashibag once and for all. Working side by side, as we had for so long together, was our best bet.

  Back in Tutzca, I helped my friend bathe and I supplied him with the beautiful new skin of a jaguar which was just one of many exotic skins I had recently purchased. Dishon and I ceremoniously tossed what was left of his current skins into the fire and watched them burn until they had become nothing but flaky glowing ash. As we sat against the fire, I looked around the walls of my lavish and large home, surrounded by comforts that were quite amazing for a time that was still so primitive compared to what life is for people now. I looked at my emaciated friend and was filled with fresh sorrow as I compared the ease of my current life with the difficulty of his. “Tell me, Dishon,” I said. “Tell me the truth of just how difficult life has been for you.”

  I already knew the answer, but I needed to hear it. I knew I was far too attached to my wealth and to my things at this point to simply leave it all behind. I needed the sting of his hardships to snap me back to a purpose in life, which I knew was far more important to the two of us than anything else could be. And, perhaps more than anything, I needed to hear it because I knew my heart had become hardened and bitter about so many things over the centuries.

  “Life always is a burden for me; that is my curse. You know that,” he said.

  I wasn’t satisfied. “Yes, but tell me just how hard. I need to know.”

  He became very pensive and sat in silence for some time. “If I am to be honest, a day hasn’t passed in nearly all this time that I haven’t wished my current breath would somehow be my final breath,” he said quietly.

  My heart broke for the man, knowing he was being anything but dramatic. In the extremely brief moment of silence which followed his statement, I thought back to all of my time since we last saw each other. I exchanged my sufferings for his, and I imagined what longing for death on an endless basis must have truly been like. Sure, I had my own moments of great depression. I had had my own moments where death was more than welcome and greatly desired. But those moments… They came and went. For the most part, life had been fairly good to me. “Tell me more,” I said.

  He sighed. “I am always hungry, Cain. You know that. Always hungry. Painfully hungry. Even when I am able to get food, I am hungry. Every part of my body aches for food almost all the time. My sleep is shallow because of it. The only reprieve from the hunger I have found were the moments my mind blackened as I watched my own blood spill from me.”

  “You mean when injury has broken your skin?”

  He sighed again. “Yes, that. Sometimes. Far more often, I found that reprieve by breaking open my own skin.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I have done that a few times. I know the feeling.”

  “I have done it hundreds of times.”

  “Hundreds?” The thought humbled me greatly.

  “Yes.”

  “When was the last time?”

  Dishon reached into his thoughts for an accurate answer. “Twenty winters past, at least. I finally decided the reprieve was not worth the thirst.”

  I thought back to the great and painful thirst I had experienced during the times after my own blood was drained from me. “I know that thirst.”

  Dishon nodded. “The only thing worse than the pain of the hunger was the pain of that thirst,” he said. “The thirst just isn’t worth the wonderful blackness in which I neither have to feel nor dream.”

  I had never looked at the blackness as something wonderful until he said it in such a way. I tried to envision life for Dishon but found it difficult to imagine it at the true scale he had experienced it.

  “Tell me Cain, does your heart still love?” he said, changing the subject.

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “I mean no. Love is always a great burden only.”

  Dishon looked at me in disgusted disbelief. “You are a fool, Cain.”

  I laughed. “What I say is true. Love has never brought anything to my life but misery and more problems.”

  I stopped laughing when Dishon’s eyes began to water. “My curse is to be miserable. I can do nothing about that. Your curse is to love. And you are spitting on that.”

  “My curse is to lose love,” I corrected him.

  “No,” he replied. “Your curse is to love again, and again, and again. The witch knew your heart, Cain. She knew yours was a heart built for love when she cursed you. She knew this well before you even did.” I didn’t respond, unsure what to say or even what to think about the idea he was presenting. “The witch gave you a great gift buried within the punishment of your curse.”

  I tried to brush it off. He persisted. Dishon labored for more than an hour to burrow through the bitterness that had encrusted my heart, reminding me of just how incredible love had always been for me when I did have it. “You dishonor every woman you have loved,” were the words he finally said to get through to me. “You dishonor each of them when you believe the time you spent together wasn’t worth what happened in the end.”

  It wasn’t just those words that broke me down. It was all of them to that point, and they were simply the final straw. It was those words being said to me, by a man who knew what it was like, more than any person who ever lived, to have nothing. It was the sudden forced recounting of many beautiful and worthwhile memories which I had somehow stored away behind those closed doors of bitterness. It was the sudden realization that I was no longer a man who resembled anything close to the man I once was. It was all of this that made me break-down completely and admit to my friend just how hard it had been for me, and that my heart truly was built for love. It was all of this which made me suddenly admit, with great sorrow, just how lonely I actually was, and had been for some time.

  As if he had finally found the real version of his long-lost friend, Dishon embraced me once more. “I didn’t previously know what love was,” he told me. “But I have witnessed it enough times now to know that it is always a good thin
g while it lasts.”

  “Have you ever found love?” I asked him, suddenly curious if such a thing had become a possibility for Dishon.

  Another sigh. “No. It is the only thing I long to experience more than death.”

  I held my hand against his shoulder. “We will stay in Tutzca until your bones are covered in meat, and you can forget for at least a brief moment just how much hunger hurts,” I said. “Then let’s leave this place. We will find our witch, Dishon.”

  He nodded in half-happy agreement.

  “You are right, wise friend,” I said, lost in contemplation. “Love is always worth it.”