Immortal at the Edge of the World (41 page)

“We knew of many other tribes around us, of course. Mankind was still rare and unusual and competing for the future with other things that eventually lost that competition. And because of this competition we also knew violence. But mostly we were left alone, because while we prayed to our gods for an understanding of sickness and aging and death, the other tribes prayed to us. And we were better gods, for when asked, we answered.

“Our children spread out across the land, teaching what we knew to the people they came to lead. We knew much by then, for we had been living off of the land for so very long. We knew hunting, and planting, and the order of the seasons. We knew the stars. We had words but no written language because we never died, so we had no need to preserve our wisdom for others to recover.

“We knew peace. The savage tribes of mankind seemingly knew only war and bloodshed and covetousness and lust, but we and our children’s tribes knew brotherhood and culture and
polis
, and how to mollify the savages without violence.”

She took a breath and then met my eyes again with a look that was unmistakably hateful. “And then you came along.”

“Was I one of you?” I asked.

“Did you come from us, you mean? Were you one of our children? No. And at first we thought that you were only one more savage, another tribal Caesar destined to consolidate your forces and have it all fall apart when those forces became too large and disparate for you to control. Or for age, infirmity, or disease to strike you down, as it had for all the others that came before you. But none of those things happened, because even though you did not come from our stock you
were
like us. And like us you had some around you who were also long-lived. You also whelped children. Those children were no more immortal than were ours, but the lessons you imparted to them were very different. You learned your ways of living from the savages, and you treated peace like a weakness.

“We were unprepared for the likes of you. Never before had we seen such a combination of animal ferocity and human intelligence. You could not be reasoned with, for you did not speak in our words and you seemed only interested in death and spreading your seed. You could not be outsmarted, for you had tactics and weapons we had never imagined. And you would not die.

“Your kind swept across our lands. It may have been ten years, or a hundred, or five hundred, but eventually your children came to fill the niches we had held as ours for a thousand years or more.

“And then came the great battle.”

She stopped for a time, still playing with Paul’s hair gently, not looking much like someone about to harm him. It was like I wasn’t even there anymore.

I was trying to remember the battle she was talking about, but it was too long ago. I recalled war on many scales, but not in a real coherent sense. It was all mostly just a lot of brutality and blood and things nobody really ever wants to see. I didn’t remember being in charge of a vast army at any time, but vastness has a different meaning depending on the period. Fifty people could be an army under the right circumstances.

Mostly, I was having trouble with the idea that I once shared the Earth with people who were like me and also didn’t age. That seemed like something I shouldn’t have forgotten.

“I have told the story of the great battle many, many times before,” she said. “What did the faery call you? When you appeared before him yesterday in the shadow realm, did he have a name for you?”

“He called me Bres,” I said.

She smiled. “That is one of your names. To his folk you are Bres of the children of Domnu, and I am Brigid, mother-god of the children of Danu. You and your kin were the offspring of darkness and evil, and mine of light and goodness. You slew Nuada in a great battle before your army fell to their greatest god-warrior, Lugh. Bres returned to lead the children of Mil and drive the children of Danu from the earthly plane to where they now reside. So you see, you are a part of their creation story. And in that same sense you are also Seth, and Loki, and Yala. You are the Jester, the wild card. You are also Cain.”

“The man who invented murder,” I said.

“It’s an exaggeration, I know, but all mythology is. Dionysos would know this better than any man. The truth is there
was
a battle, and it may not have been a great one but it was a final one, for when it was over all of my people were slain, including the real man who is named by the faeries Nuada. He was my love and my mate, and he had been that to me for a millennium. You, a half man with a grunt for a name, sliced his belly open before my eyes. And then it was these eyes that spared my life, for you liked the look of them. It did not appear to matter to you that they were filled with hatred.”

There was a lengthy silence, a moment of respect for the vast thing that was not being said. But the truth was in that time and place I would not have just kept her around because I liked her eyes. I may not remember what I did to her, but I knew what happened to women after wars.

“I would likely have died then as well,” she said, “but one of the folk from the realm of the faery took kindly to me, and spirited me away. It was he who taught me how to walk the shadow realm alone. I thought it was the world of the dead for a long time, and spent many years looking for my love there. And when I wasn’t doing that I was watching you.

“It was a while before I realized time passed differently in their world than it does in ours. By the time I understood this and decided to return to this world, many thousands of Earth years had passed. I had taken on the pallor of my faery friends—as would you if you lived there for long enough—and my hair had become red. I used to claim it was red from the blood of my tribe, but I think I just willed it, in the same way we alter our skin. By the time you laid eyes upon me once more after many thousands of years had gone—for you—I am sure I was unrecognizable.”

“What are they?” I asked. “The faery folk.”

“They are a people, like us, but from a different kind of world. Despite their own mythology, I do not believe they ever lived on Earth. But they can visit, and they can watch. It’s an easy thing, watching. If you travel to the edge of this world you can see without being seen, and you are nearly in time with all that is here. When you traversed the veil yesterday you encountered it. Travel deeper and this world fades and theirs comes into focus. It is a good place, but in many ways they covet the richness of this realm more than their own. The things they eat, the places they build, are all taken from here or copied from here. In some ways their creation myth, and the notion that they were banished, is all that keeps them out. That, and their fear of you.”

“They’re afraid of
me
? They’re terrifying.”

“That they are. But their legends also call for a time when Bres will raise another army and cross the veil into their world and drive them away once more. Your encounter yesterday was with a scout who was there specifically to protect their world from you. They would do the same regardless of who crossed over on the assumption that he who did so alone was the legendary Bres. That it happened to actually
be
you who made that journey is enough to make one rethink the inaccuracy of predictive mythology.

“But then you spoke the word, and the word was relayed to he whom the word belonged to, and then to your friend, and he knew of only one man who could have known the word. This is how you were rescued by a people who believe you are their destroyer-god.”

“What do they think of you?”

“They are afraid of me as well. I did not stay longer with the one who rescued me than it took for me to learn how to travel unassisted, so we have little association. To them I am another sort of god, in the same way I am also Artemis, and Eve, and Danu, and Ganga, and Isis. And sometimes I am Kali, and Hel. You are not the only death-bringer here. I do not live with the faery folk. I do not live anywhere. The place I belonged ceased to exist some sixty thousand years ago. You and your kin killed it and replaced it with this world, and I do not like this world half as much as you do.”

“I’m not really all that fond of it myself.”

“So you often say. But you’ve lived every second of your life here in this sluggish plane, and you keep going even when you’ve seemingly run out of a reason to. This is your place, and I’m envious of you for having it, as much as I’m angry for the loss of what could have been if you had not come along.

“And I suppose I could have simply ended it all. It was a consideration, many times. When we last spoke it was after I had allowed myself to be a captive, and I had done so partly because I no longer cared if I lived. I only lacked the courage to die by my own hand. When you risked your life to save me it’s true I was in no real danger, but that doesn’t mean I would not have died without your intervention.

“There were other times when I felt the only appropriate way for me to die was
at
your hands, but I couldn’t bring myself to allow that either. So I am stuck. The only thing I know for sure is that I needed you to feel the pain you gave me, in some small way, for at least a little while. And once that was finished, maybe you would feel strongly enough about what I had done to end my life for me.”

Her remarkable eyes lifted from the sleeping child in her lap back to me. “But that isn’t going to happen, is it? I know that now.”

“You mean am I going to kill you? No, of course not.”

“What if I gave you no choice?”

“Honestly, I don’t know.” I didn’t, either. I couldn’t see myself hurting her, but if it was between her and Paul, I wasn’t really sure what I’d decide. I had no real emotional connection to him, and if fatherhood came with some kind of overriding brood-protection instinct, I either didn’t have it or that sort of thing only kicked in for people who had met their children sometime before they were required to protect their lives. On the other hand, an adult was threatening the life of a child, and as a member of the human race—so far as I knew—I did feel like I should be doing whatever I could to save his life.

If I had to, I could probably signal Mirella and she could kill Eve for me. It would be just about the same thing, provided one allows for the idea that Mirella is akin to a weapon I can control. That was sort of true. Eve would take it that way, certainly. The actions of my tribe were the actions of me in her eyes. And since my tribe had supplanted hers, the actions of every man and woman on Earth were
de facto
my fault. That was a crazy way to look at the world, but it was how she saw it, and I guess if I had had the capacity to check out of this reality like she did, for centuries at a time, I might see a more straight line cause and effect.

She was right about a lot of things, though. She would never get the satisfaction of seeing me remember and be ashamed of what I’d done. I, of course, felt awful about what happened to her, and I don’t doubt that I was both directly and indirectly responsible for it, but I was having a lot of trouble imagining a world with a dominant humankind that was also run the way she described her own tribe. If I hadn’t come along when I did, someone else would have eventually, and they probably wouldn’t have needed to be immortal.

That was how history worked. The new always destroyed the old eventually, whether it was Eve’s idealist tribe or the Roman Empire. And it wasn’t anybody’s fault. The old systems just stopped making sense eventually. They were either too large to sustain or relied on things being true that were no longer true. What happened to her was what I saw happen to Athens, and Constantinople, and Alexandria, and countless other places that used to be brilliant and beautiful. History was by definition one long chaotic, violent mess sometimes interrupted by magnificent eras of peace that reminded everybody life occasionally wasn’t awful.

“But you aren’t going to kill him,” I said. “That isn’t who you are.”

“No, it’s not. It’s who
you
are.”

“It’s who I once was. I’ve grown a little.”

She grinned a tiny bit. “Maybe a little.”

She pulled Paul to her breast and stood slowly. I did the same, and remained still until she had walked him over to me. “He’s starting to wake up,” she said, as she gently handed him over.

He was heavy in my arms. It had been a very long time since I’d held a child for any reason other than the child had just picked my pocket and I wanted my wallet back. I was inclined to ask her how she’d kept him sleeping so soundly through what had to be a scary time, but decided to leave it alone.

“Tell me something else, then, Urr, since you are neither going to kill me nor give me the satisfaction of dying. What is it that has kept you going? For while I am older than you, I have lived many of those years in the accelerated time of the faeries. I don’t see what there is here worth staying alive for.”

“I think before you can judge the merits of this tribe you need to join it,” I said. Paul was indeed waking up. Very obviously being in Eve’s arms had been a factor in his sleeping. “Get to know some people, see some art, take a crappy job somewhere, and rent an apartment.”

“Drink too much, like you do?”

“Sure, why not? Drinking can be a participatory act if you do it right. Just take part for a little while, and then come find me again and we can talk without threatening children.”

It was easily the most inspirational thing I’d ever said while standing in someone else’s blood.

Eve looked around the corpse-strewn compound, perhaps appreciating the irony as much as I was. “When I look at this world, this is all I ever seem to see.”