He Who Cannot Die

by Dan Pearce

  I reached toward his hand and tried to cry out my friend’s name again. A second arrow sank into my armpit and into my shoulder socket. Before I could put any of this into coherent thought, another arrow sliced a thick cut across my belly as it grazed over the top of me. A final arrow split my ribs open and punctured through my lung. It was the last arrow to hit me, and I felt myself start to drown as blood rushed to fill it. “Samantha,” I gurgled as I quickly began losing consciousness. Samantha appeared from the shadows and walked to me. I smiled up at her, thankful that everything would now be okay. She knelt beside my wounded body and began rubbing her thumb up and down my cheek. “This is not how it ends,” she said and began humming a beautiful tune to soothe me. “I am here to fix my Cain.” How does she know my real name? I wondered as I placed a bloody hand around her and let the darkness settle over me.

  I didn’t regain consciousness until the morning sun had begun to flare bright and yellow from the tops of the trees in the distance, and those who had hunted my friend and me carelessly dropped my body onto what felt to be cold flat stone. I could somehow not open my eyes, yet I was very much aware of the sounds and voices I was hearing around me. Several men spoke to one another in a language I thought had long before died. It was the language we spoke when I was with Honoria. I only understood a word here and there, as it had been so long since I spoke in their tongue, but I knew their language.

  That deep thirst I knew all too well was the first thing I noticed. My head throbbed from where I guessed it had just hit against the rock and I felt mental control of my body return to me. Where was Dishon? What had happened? Where were we? My thoughts spun-out as much as my aching head would let them, and it was only then that I remembered the arrows. It didn’t feel like they were still in me. I felt only throbbing numbness where they each had been.

  The voices of the men were just far enough away that I took a chance and cracked open my eyes enough that I hoped they would still appear closed. The first thing I saw was the bright and yellow trees. It was morning. I ever-so slowly turned my face downward and saw that Dishon’s foot was only inches from my face. “Something… something… head move,” one of them suddenly said loudly and in my direction. Determined feet approached, slapping against the stone surrounding me. Instead of freezing my movement, I went against my instinct and let my head keep turning until it flopped completely sideways as if gravity had been to blame.

  A hand full of rough fingers suddenly grabbed hold my face, squeezing my cheeks between them as the person the hand was attached to jerked my head back to where it had originally been. He let go of my cheeks and jammed a thumb and finger into my eye and forced it open. Never in my life had I concentrated so fully on playing dead. I sent every thought I could conjure into my eyes and forced my open eye to remain focused on the sky above the face of the painted man who now stood above to keep my eye from making any sort of movement. “Man dead,” someone told him. He pulled his fingers from my eye and thankfully didn’t seem to notice that it clenched closed so quickly; I had no control of that and was sure he should have noticed. He forcefully pushed my face back toward the ground and stepped away.

  His feet slapped the stone once more as he made his way back to the others in his party, and I made damn sure to keep perfectly still after that. I shallowed my breathing, and along with it my heartrate, to almost nothing and made sure no muscle in my body fought the deadened pull of gravity. I had become quite good at appearing dead in situations where people wanted to kill me, and I summoned all of those skills to get me through that moment. I assumed Dishon was doing the same, not wanting to give any sign of life to any eyes that might be watching.

  As my thoughts found their old paths to the words I once knew so well, the language became clearer to me.

  I didn’t know how these men were not somehow dead already. Instead of choking, and bleeding from their eyes, and collapsing, they seemed somehow immune to that part of our curses which killed any who tried to kill us. These men weren’t suffering at all, it seemed. They just remained several feet away, laughing as they each took turns retelling the story of their hunt for us, of their ambush, and of the arrows they each claimed responsibility for firing.

  Eventually I became so enthralled with their own happy conversation that it seemed they forgot I was there at all. They were definitely unaware that the dead man beside them was now intently eavesdropping. I made out five different voices in all. Some of the men were sitting, some were standing. One man led them, but each freely spoke whatever he wished and without worry of authority. I deciphered all this, among other things, by laying still and listening over the course of thirty long minutes or so.

  I don’t know if they grew bored or had somewhere to go, but eventually their leader announced it was time for the group to move. They all immediately obeyed, and I listened in stillness as they picked-up their weapons and grouped closer to one another. It seemed they had no further interest in our corpses, and within moments their voices all became more difficult to hear as their heads turned in the direction they would be walking.

  I wanted to see these men who wanted us dead for some reason. Finally feeling like the danger of eye movement was minute, I cracked open my eyes once more and caught a glimpse of the backside of their group while they were still close enough to make out some details. They wore gray loin clothes, and their arms were painted from their wrists to their shoulders. Each had different piercings through the skin of his back, and they all were bald except for a single thick and crusty ponytail which hung rigidly from the base of their skulls. I opened my eyes wider in disbelief when I noticed Tashibag’s mark on the left calf of one man. I looked to the next man who also had the same mark. The third man also had it, and I assume the two in front did as well, though their legs were obscured by the bodies of the others.

  What I saw was most definitely the mark of Tashibag, but it was different, too. It was the same ring and the same serpent circling in and out of it, but their marks were made purely of black. Both the ring and the serpent were colorless, which was very different from the vibrant colors of every mark I had seen before.

  I wanted to leap to my feet and talk to Dishon about this discovery, but he remained still, which I knew was the sensible thing to do since the men were still close enough for their words to be heard through the trees. I kept my head stationary until the only sounds around us were the breeze through the leaves above and the occasional forest wildlife making itself known. “Enough of that bullshit,” I said as I finally sat up. “Did you see any of that?”

  Dishon couldn’t answer. He lay face down against the flat stone slab, still unconscious. The snapped-off shaft of an arrow jutted from the back of his skull. “Fuck,” I said. “I’m really glad you won’t be able to feel this.”

  I knelt in front of him and grabbed hold of the broken arrow with both hands. I pulled firmly on it, but the arrow didn’t budge. I apologized to my friend for what I was about to do and began violently wiggling the shaft back and forth and then side to side to loosen it. I tried not to care about the sounds coming from the wound as the arrowhead turned a section of his brain to soup, but I felt sickened by it. The arrow finally loosened enough to yank it from his head, and I tossed it aside. “It’s been a long time since one of us had to do that,” I said to my unaware friend who now had a very messy hole in the back of his noggin.

  I gathered the softest foliage I could find and made a crude pillow for Dishon’s face to rest against while he healed. His body would have eventually worked the arrow out on its own, but that could take a day or more, which was time we didn’t have. His other wounds had already mostly healed and there were no more arrows to pull from either one of us. I assumed our attackers had pulled them all from us, not wanting to leave perfectly good weapons behind. I was happy for that, since my wounds had already taken care of themselves.

  I didn’t know why our bodies had been carried to this giant slab of rock, but it had to have taken considerable effor
t to do so. We were now at an elevation a couple hundred feet higher than the road through Ausangat, which I could make out below as I looked to the bottom of the mountainside upon which we had been discarded.

  I needed water and knew Dishon would also be suffering from the terrible thirst whenever he did awake. I would find the place we last were and see if the backpack was still there. If not, I would find a way to carry water from the river. First, I needed to process what had happened as I hadn’t properly done so just yet.

  I hadn’t been displaced while I was unconscious. Surely that was a good sign that the attack hadn’t messed up my plans to get back to Samantha even if all this was for naught. Actually, I had no idea if the magic of the curse would consider passing out from blood loss sleep at all. I hoped to never find out. Also, what were those marks on the men? Why were they different than ours? What did they mean and why would Tashibag mark entire groups? Obviously, those men were somehow immune to death by retaliatory magic. Was that mark their immunity?

  Dishon moaned. He was far from finding consciousness, but he moaned, which made me ecstatic. “Heal quickly my friend,” I said as my thoughts drifted to the attack which took place the evening before. I thought of Dishon’s eyes when he first looked at me after being shot. I thought of the arrows sinking into him and then into me. I thought of Samantha showed up and how she…” I smiled and shook off the thought. Samantha obviously wasn’t there, yet my memory of her was vivid. This wasn’t the first time my mind attempted to cope by inventing a beautiful reality to help usher me out of life.

  Dishon moaned again. I leaned over his head and took a look at his arrow wound, which had already covered-over with a fresh layer of thin rosy skin. If I watched closely enough, I could see the bone of his skull slowly grow together below the surface of the new covering. Dishon had always healed so much faster than me, and I knew he’d probably be awake within the next three hours; four, tops. “I’ll be back soon with water,” I told him. “Try not to do anything stupid while I’m gone.”

  CHAPTER 26

  As I made my way down to the road, I lost my footing. I placed my weight where the ground was loose, the earth gave way, and my knees slammed into the gravelly mountainside before I had time to catch myself. I slid several feet before catching hold of a small bush to end my skid. After coming to a stop, I pulled my pant leg up and examined the knee that hurt most. The skin had been scraped off and tiny bubbles of blood were beginning to surface. It burned like hell. “’Tis but a flesh wound,” I said, quoting an old Monte Python movie as I pulled my pant leg back over it. I knew the scrape was minor enough that it would heal itself in minutes.

  Samantha only witnessed my abnormal healing abilities one time, and once had been enough to freak her out enough that I was overly careful to hide any injury from her thereafter. It was the first winter after we met. She wanted to take me ice skating, an activity I had never much enjoyed, but we were in those stages of courtship where we did whatever the hell the other person wanted to do.

  I’m not entirely sure how it happened, but I found myself in a tangled fallen heap with a couple of teenage girls. The three of us had collided, skates slipped, feet and shoulders traded places, asses crunched, and the sharp blade of someone’s skate sliced through the full length of my palm. It was a mess. My hand was gushing blood, the rink had to shut down until it could clean up the area, and Samantha felt truly terrible about it. She sacrificed her scarf and wrapped it tightly around my hand when the pressure from my own closed fingers wouldn’t stop the bleeding. She repeatedly told me in her cute little bossy way, to keep pressure on it as we sat against the wall of the rink, our asses freezing against the ice.

  She insisted that we would go immediately to a hospital and get the wound sewed shut. I told her no such thing was necessary. She pressed the point, assuming I was just acting like a typical man. I informed her that I had been blessed with an incredible ability to heal quickly. She said she didn’t care how quickly I healed, I needed medical attention. I told her it was already halfway there; this was fifteen minutes after it happened. She laughed at the thought. We made our way to the benches outside of the rental shop where she untied her skates and pulled them off. “Almost healed,” I told her, knowing I wouldn’t be able to hide it.

  She slipped her tennis shoes on and knelt in front of me to assist me with the removal of my own ice skates since my hands were otherwise occupied. “We’re going to a hospital, you ding bat,” she said as she yanked at my middle laces to loosen them. “Don’t be stubborn. You won’t win this one.”

  I started to pull the scarf loose. “Look,” I said.

  “Don’t do that! Keep the pressure on it!”

  I’m not sure why I thought my hand healing itself would be something she could hopefully take in stride. I knew we no longer lived in a day and age when I could simply tell the other person “some people just heal faster and nobody can explain it.” Now we had evolved science, and evolved education, and people really didn’t like what seemed to go against what they knew to be natural or normal.

  I pulled the scarf back and it fell to the ground. Samantha gasped, first that I would do it, then again at what she saw when I did. The abrasion on my palm had fused together, and though swollen, there was now a fat pink line where the cut had just been. “What… the fuck,” she almost angrily said. “That’s not possible.”

  Her expression as she grabbed my hand and studied my palm said it all. She did not like what she was seeing. I tried to lie my way out of it. “I have a rare condition which makes my skin cells replicate at an incredibly fast pace,” I said.

  She shook her head. “What… the fuck, Anthony.”

  I picked the bloody scarf up off the ground and wrapped my hand with it again. “Let’s go get food,” I said, as I grabbed my own shoes and pulled them on.

  On the drive home, she wanted to know what the condition was called so that she could Google it. I told her it was called epidermotisis and informed her it was so rare she probably wouldn’t find anything on it. She still searched and was frustrated when she found nothing. This was the biggest reason I hated lying so much. One lie always seemed to clear the way for more lies.

  As if the quick fusing wasn’t enough for her to wrap her mind around, my palm was completely restored by the time I dropped her off at her place. There was no scar. There was no sign that anything had happened at all.

  It was all she could think about and talk about for the next week and I finally told her my condition was something I was actually quite sensitive about it and asked if we could not talk about it with other people, or even with each other. After that, I did my best to hide any cut or puncture or scrape from her until it had healed. She eventually stored it away as something weird and interesting about me, and thankfully it didn’t affect our relationship for too long because we were already head over heels for each other when… Well, when I went head over heels in the ice rink.

  I first met her backstage at my ballet, where she showed up to open auditions hoping for a place in my dance company. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that I met her after chasing her down when she ran from the stage crying. My asshole of a director had been brutally honest in his opinion of Samantha’s audition, and he let her know just how ready she wasn’t for a dance company of this caliber. She stayed on stage through his berating and held back her emotions until the point he informed her he’d rather cast a gay duck in tights than to bore our patrons with her midget legs and lifeless grand jetés. The man brought magic to my stage, but it came at a price.

  “André, must you really?” I said, as I pulled myself from the seat next to him and made my way through the curtains behind which Samantha had just disappeared.

  I had first fallen in love with the ballet in the sixties when I was invited to attend Salute to Italy in New York’s State Theater, and even though I had never been involved administratively with any type of performing arts (unless you count pushing the storyteller Grub into the bo
ar pit), I founded my own dance company three decades after finding ballet, at the same time I established the first professional-level ballet school in the region.

  I had moved to this city sixteen years before meeting Samantha to live where I would be able to walk outside at any time and look up to see the mountains of my youth. It greatly saddened me to learn that for how big the city was, there was no professional ballet company or thriving program established to teach it. In a world where technology had brought with it so much more noise and loudness, the need to escape life’s tangled mental thickness before it drove me to do unhealthy things was more important than ever before. The ballet was my favorite place to do just that. I could sit amidst a sea of silent watchers while I got lost in the instrumental masterpieces, rising from the live symphony below. Watching ballerinas and danseurs forced me into a form of peaceful meditation, as my thoughts became appreciatively focused on the impossibility of what their bodies and feet were accomplishing. A single night at the ballet always had a way of giving me an escape that could unwind me for weeks. And since there was no ballet company in this city, I started my own.

  Hidden behind the ruse of what I claimed was a sea of wealthy donors who collectively wished to remain anonymous, I personally granted as much funding as it took to draw enough of the world’s most noteworthy talent to my stage. My director, the famed André Sokolov, was among those recruited, and once the talent was brought together, he had everything he needed to fill our company and begin rehearsals for our first performance. He built the show while I built a venue worthy to host such a cast. We opened to a sold-out crowd, and the company has garnered international attention ever since. It’s amazing what a lot of money can do.