by Dan Pearce
CHAPTER 16
Just sixteen years into our search, Dishon and I rather serendipitously arrived in a village where a young woman, maybe 16 years old, had just been cursed by Tashibag. She left the village only twenty or so minutes before, once again riding upon the back of a great bear, while the white-haired man led the way on foot. According to those who witnessed it, the bear was jet black this time around, with eyes as blue as the witch’s. We hastily followed their trail and caught sight of them as they disappeared over a distant hill, but that was as close as we would get to them for another eighty years or so.
Dishon and I searched for Tashibag over the course of the next nine centuries, and somehow the closest we ever got to her was the opposite side of a large root field. We were so close that we could have yelled out and our voices would have carried across the field to her. Instead we found ourselves dodging and diving to keep our legs from being blown off. Tashibag apparently didn’t want to be followed, and with a wave of her hand, the plant roots began exploding like small land mines all around us. We couldn’t take a step in any direction but away from her without bits of root and dirt violently blasting into the air, creating small craters where turnips and carrots just had been growing. That little trick must have been a new one because we had never heard rumors of such trickery before, and we had heard many stories of Tashibag’s magic as we searched for her. I still don’t know whether she knew it was Dishon and me attempting to accost her in the field that day, but I always have assumed she did.
I do know that she became much harder to track with time. As the world’s population grew, the clues which had once been easy for us to find and follow became scarcer. We never gave up hope that we would eventually find her until the very end of that particular span of centuries, when my ten years with a new lover named Mila officially came to an end. There was something about that whole ordeal which discouraged me to the point I decided to take a nice long break from hunting the witch, whom it seemed couldn’t be found. It had been so long since we had seen any real proof of her, that I not-so-secretly wondered if she was even still alive.
Time had more or less lost all meaning to me by the time Mila and I found each other and fell in love. The past had become such a large blur, and the future was becoming too unceasing, that ten years might as well have been a week, and a week might as well have been a century. The only periods when time meant much of anything were those brief periods in which I occasionally loved another.
None of those loves derailed Dishon’s and my search the way love with Honoria did the first time, though. We learned to recognize when I was falling in love, and to embrace the small reprieve those ten years would offer us from our great search. Dishon always stayed somewhere relatively nearby during those times. He and I kept frequent correspondence with one another, and we supported each other all the way through. With my help, he was still able to live somewhat comfortably. I was able to see love, and what happens at the end of love, from an entirely new perspective.
In those nine centuries together, Dishon and I had developed quite a system around his curse to keep him well-taken care of, and we had become very skilled at giving others the impression that he had a place to call home and a life to call normal. He was able to remain well-clothed and well-fed. His curse was still very much in place, as every time we got complacent in our system things began falling apart for Dishon in a hurry, but we had our ways around it for sure. Around the time rafts and boats first showed up, for example, we learned that he could sleep in the same bed twice, so long as he did so upon an object that had moved locations since the night before.
We had our ways around my curse, as well. I still couldn’t ever be with a woman beyond ten years, but since Dishon was always so in and out of our lives any time I did run the course with a lover, he was able to check-in on each of them after I was forced to leave them behind. He became close friends with those whom I loved while I was with them, and while he couldn’t tell them anything about my disappearance or my whereabouts, or even that he knew I was still out there somewhere, he was able to look in on them from time to time and carry supplies and gifts of sustainment to them from me. Somehow his curse was aware when an object or a possession was not his and was not meant for him, and he could hold and transport anything meant for another. Dishon was always willing and caring enough to help me look after those I left behind, for as long as we remained nearby.
I experienced many different loves during that span of time.
There was Fox. Her father nicknamed her that after he returned from a three-year fox trapping and trading expedition to discover a young girl he never knew was growing in her mother’s womb. He always told her she was his sneaky little fox, and the name stuck.
After Fox there was Lana. She was the doe-eyed blonde mother of two who captured my heart at the Ogd River after insisting there was a better way for me to clean my fish. Lana was the first blonde woman I ever loved, and she would be the last for the next couple millennia at least.
Then there was Ruoa. The gatherer’s daughter. And then Ingril. The warrior. And then Patu. The vagabond. Dozens or even hundreds of years passed for me between them all, and they each showed up at a time when love had once again become one of the most distant things on my mind. As had always been the case for me, they each stole my heart with authority, just as Fox, Lana, Honoria, Annia, and every other lover had done, all the way back to my very first love, Racheele.
My sweet Racheele. I had less time with her than almost any of the others, and to this day she is the one I think back to most often. It was with her that I first discovered this messy thing called love. It was with her I first learned how badly it hurts to lose a love that is real and honest and good. It was with her that I understood just how much more incredible life could be with the right person lying beside me at night.
During those nine centuries, my curse forbade me from giving any of the women a single believable reason for abandoning them. Thanks to Dishon being my eyes and ears, I stressfully learned that lack of answers and lack of any good reason for my disappearance, broke each of their hearts far more than I could have imagined. My love with all of them was so real while we had it, and so it never had good reason to end. The reports from Dishon each time around was that their hearts ached ceaselessly, and most of those women had become closed-off and bitter toward the idea of love with any other person.
Those were always the hardest parts of his reports for me to hear. Dishon was honest to a fault, and he held nothing back from me of their heartache or misery. He kept me grounded in his rationality, he assured me that time would eventually heal them all, but he always refused to paint a prettier picture than what existed.
Patu’s heart broke worse than any of them. As the first man who had been overly kind to her, perhaps in the whole of her life, she latched onto me and trusted me in such a complete way that I hadn’t before experienced. There was an energy we had when we were together that made the world, and everything in it, seem unbreakable to us. Then, just as they always had and always would, our ten years together came to an end. Our tenth autumn had run its course, and I knew snow would soon be appearing on the mountains of my youth. With Patu, I didn’t opt for an excuse to leave or some goodbye conversation saturated on false pretense. I simply told her I must leave her for another land. I did so while she was still in a groggy, waking state. I kissed her forehead. I left. I don’t know why I gave her nothing more than that. I only know that the departing conversation with her would be unbearable for her more than any other, and so I felt as if I was somehow sparing her of that pain. I was wrong.
Dishon visited her many days after I had abandoned her, doing so under the guise that he was there looking for me. He reported back that she had become severely despondent and grief-stricken and had for some reason cut herself many times across her arms and legs. She desperately begged Dishon for answers which he obviously could not give her, and she eventually demanded he leave her to her sadness. At my
request, Dishon returned to the village ten days later, only to learn that Patu had become so depressed that she took her own life.
I blamed myself for it for some time. I had broken her heart and her trust so badly that she felt life was not worth living. How was that in any way not my fault?
It was many average lifetimes later that my thinking expanded enough to understand that it actually wasn’t my fault at all. Patu had a sickness. After she was gone, I began watching many others more closely, and would see signs of depression among some friends and even some strangers. Depression didn’t have a name or a face in our world yet, but it affected people then just as it did now. I began to notice many ways certain people thought and behaved a bit differently, just like my Patu. It was obvious to me then that there was more to some people than just sadness over any singular sad event. There was something heavy and consuming which took over their minds, just as had been the case with me in those earliest days, and just as had been the case with Dishon hundreds of times. With certain people, something in the mind got knocked off-balance, and the nothingness of death for some reason began to look like such a beautiful alternative to the dreariness that life seemed to be.
I had nothing if not a lot of time to study the portraits I made of Patu after she died, and of the others in my book leading up to Mila, the woman who came next. I contemplated often of the good times we all had shared together and also of the broken hearts I certainly inflicted upon most of them. I contemplated future love as I studied the beautiful faces of my past. I wondered often what would hurt my next lover more… To think I was dead or to have no real answers as to why I was suddenly gone. I became consumed with those thoughts and told Dishon that the next time love finds me, I wanted him to help me stage my death. I believed grief may be easier for the next woman to find her way out of than heartbreak without closure would be.
We debated the subject many times, but in the end Dishon had never loved and did not know just how painful a broken heart was, let alone how difficult it could be to heal from one. I told him I wanted to do it my way one time just to see if it was easier for her. He agreed to back me up on it whenever that time eventually came. We had both long before stopped believing future love for me wasn’t always an eventual certainty. The only question always became when, not if.
Why I chose death by drowning at the end of my time with Mila is one of the greatest questions I have carried with me throughout my life. I could have staged my death in easier ways. I could have left for a hunt with Dishon and simply sent him back to Mila with a terrible tale of a great wild beast snapping my neck and dragging me into the woods. I could have “accidentally” impaled myself on the tip of my spear, fallen into the river, and let it carry me away. I could have fallen to my death over the edge of a cliff, where my body could not possibly be retrieved. Instead I chose to stage my death as an accidental drowning. I chose to loop a large stone around my ankle and sink to the bottom of a river while my Mila watched me disappear below the surface forever.
It seems so stupid looking back at that odd choice, but at the time it seemed to make more sense than anything else. In order for her grief to heal as quickly as possible, I wanted my body to be gone and lost in a place it could not be retrieved again. I felt she needed to see it happen so that lingering questions of whether or not I was actually dead didn’t keep getting in the way of her moving on and eventually finding love again. I felt like I had thought through the best options and drowning in the river was the best of them all. Of course, before that I had never experienced drowning. I had no idea how tortuous it really was or that I would have to live out that torture for the better part of twenty minutes, still conscious. It was one of those moments in my life that was born from good intentions, but which really made me feel like the world’s greatest cretin when it was over.
In the end, grief over my death was really no different or better than overcoming heartache would have been, at least in the short term. Losing the person one loves most… It just fucking hurts, no matter how that loss occurs. Mila loved me most. And I did love Mila, just as much as any woman who came before her.
I met her on the road to Grath. Dishon and I were headed there after hearing rumors that the witch had passed through their village.
Dishon and I kept a fast pace compared to most travelers, and we would often pass others as we journeyed well-known routes. When we first encountered Mila, she was still far ahead on the road. She caught sight of us, and perhaps hoping we hadn’t yet seen her, dove behind a tall nearby tree to wait for us to pass. The roads could be very dangerous for women traveling alone. They so often became sexual objects and commodities for merchants and wealthy men who would capture them and trade them to other men.
We neared the spot she was hiding and called out to her. She remained hidden and did not reply. I called out again. Again, she did not reply. I repeated myself in a few of the different languages of the region, but nothing drew her out of hiding, so I finally told her we were kind men who had no interest in taking, knowing, or hurting her. “I am sure you are hungry. Here is food,” I said as I pulled a large strip of dried boar meat from the leather bag which I carried around my neck next to the glowing necklace. “Be safe, woman,” I said as I laid it upon a rock, and we took up our journey once more.
Mila stalked us for many miles after that, gauging for herself whether we were actually safe men or not. Believing she was being much stealthier than she was, she would vary her strange pace that ranged from walking to sprinting any time our backs were turned, and then would quickly jump off the road to hide herself whenever our pace slowed or halted. Dishon and I shared many laughs at her behavior, and at just how easy she was to spot.
“Come out, woman. We have seen you many times. We know you are following behind us,” Dishon eventually yelled to her.
There was a long pause. “Are you safe?” she finally yelled back to us from behind another large tree trunk.
“Come meet us and decide for yourself,” Dishon replied.
Hearing only the three words she did speak, something about the high soft pitch of her voice titillated me. “Join us as a companion only. The roads are safer in groups,” I called to her. “We can all take care of each other.”
She poked her head out little by little so that she could see us more fully. “If you ever touch me, I will kill you,” she said. I would later tease her about that as we made love. She meant it so sincerely in that moment, as was evidenced by the sharpened stick she held pointed toward us as a weapon.
I hadn’t even seen more than a flash of her at that point, but there was something about Mila that drew me to her. Something about her somewhat humorous behavior made both Dishon and me want her company on our travels, which was evidenced by both of our attempts to gain her trust.
She finally trusted us enough to step fully into the open and ask our names.
“I am Cain.”
“I am Dishon.”
“I am Mila,” she replied. “I travel to Grath.”
“We also travel to Grath. Join us. We swear to you no harm will come to you by our hands,” I told her.
She agreed and kept a safe distance behind us for the first hour or so, still deciding if joining our band was a sensible thing to do. Formalities in conversation led to discussions of homelands, which led to dialogues only sincerely interested and trusting people would have with one another. Eventually she walked side by side with us, and our real friendship was born.
Mila was dark-skinned and covered with even darker freckles. Her eyes were as black as tourmaline. Her legs were short, and her frame was stalky. Her arms and legs were thick with powerful muscle. Her hair was ratted into dreadlocks. She had overly large breasts for her small size and her areolas nearly spanned the width of them. She had pierced both of her nipples with sharp bones and had used dry pine needles to press the colors she found inside insects and flowers deep into her skin to create pictures and patterns which never washed off her. I had never seen pie
rcings like hers, and she was the first person I encountered who was marked with tattoos, though I would learn later that tattoos and piercings had been common in her tribe for generations.
Love just kind of happened between Mila and me. She was nothing like the usual type of woman I was attracted to, and so love took a bit longer to develop with her than with most others. Our friendship grew more deep and profound after we arrived in Grath. It was only when Dishon informed me that I was falling in love that I realized it had possibly started to happen, though I pushed the thought away.
“Don’t worry, Cain. I will not ask you to leave this place,” he told me a few days after we had arrived. The lead we followed to get us to Grath was dry, and usually that was the time we tended to pack up and leave in search of more information elsewhere.
“What do you mean? Of course, I will leave.”
“How do you, the original lover, not know when love has slapped you across the face?” He looked amused.
I laughed. “Mila? We are friends, nothing more.”
“Friends. Sure.”
“It is true. And we can depart, Dishon. Surely, she may even like to join us. She has no home here.”
Dishon shook his head. “You know that is too dangerous. You know we cannot ever take a woman you love on our journeys with us.”