“Bahn will find a wife today, in this room. You may chose who he is given.”
“Sire…” Bahn said.
“Bahn, be silent. I like you well enough, and I prefer you as a regent, but I do not like you so much you may take liberties.”
Ribeag stared at Aluese, entertained again as she thought. He truly did not know what she would do, and the not knowing pleased him.
“Why do you care this much, brother?”
“I keep saying it and no-one believes me. My life is dry. The pleasure has run empty. I wish to go into the world, and see it, and the only way I can leave without causing a civil war is to find you a husband whose regency will offend no-one. Bahn is a pompous fool, and fights well enough, and will appeal to all factions. And he is honorable and lawful enough he will give me back my throne if I ask for it.”
“Probably.”
“I shall take the risk.”
“But if I am to be his wife, I will have time to work on him, make him change his ways.”
“I shall warn him against that.”
Aluese sighed. “Could you set her free while I think?”
“No.”
“Stop trying to force me before I am ready, brother.”
“I am trying to force you before your mob arrive.”
“Wait.”
“No.”
Aluese considered.
“Bahn,” Ribeag said. “Go and greet your wife.”
“Very well,” Aluese said. “I will marry him. Set her free.”
“Captain,” Ribeag said, “A priest, if you please.”
“Now?” Aluese said, surprised.
“You think I would give you an opportunity to go back on your word?”
Aluese smiled.
“I would, if I were you. Visit a distant fortress. Send clerks to argue law, to say agreed yes, but not when. Add conditions that become impossible. Gather an army so I cannot compel you. That is what I would do.”
“Set her free.”
“When you are wed. Otherwise, she is raped and maimed and hung to die on the palace walls.”
“Bring a priest,” Aluese said. “And husband, this changes nothing between us. Touch me against my will, speak a word that implies you forget your place, and that my blood outranks yours, and I will have you slain under the Turan tyr’rahn, for an offence against the future honor of my unborn children.”
“We still have those laws?” Ribeag said. “I should abolish them.”
“We have all the laws, you fool,” Aluese said, sharply. “You can abolish none. It is not in your power. It is how I do all I do and are never censured.”
“Oh,” Ribeag said, and was surprised for the second time in a day. “I had wondered about that.”
Perhaps he should stay after all.
“You understand, husband?” Aluese said.
Bahn looked at Ribeag, then said, “I do.”
“Then we shall wed. Welcome husband, now I am yours and you are mine.”
“And pity help you both,” Ribeag muttered.
As it happened, it was done that simply. The priest arrived and the ceremony was done and then the girl was set free. Aluese addressed her mob outside the door, helped Ribeag’s people chase them out the palace, and then spent her wedding night nursing her friend, bathing the welts on her back, while her husband sat in a chair and waited. As Ribeag heard the account afterwards, Aluese told him he need not stay, and he said that if he must do this he would pretend as best he could, and even if she were indisposed or otherwise engaged, he would spent the night with his new wife. Ribeag found such traditionalism refreshing. They might actually make a wonderful couple, he decided.
And Ribeag, finally content, took a ring and a sword and the best steed in the stables and announced to the few who still listened that he would be gone a year or ten and not to seek him. Few heard, but that hardly mattered. The houseguard followed the law, and that was enough. When Ribeag returned, if Ribeag returned, he could be king again, and could displace his chosen regents, or their heirs.
*
A Mote, Amidst a Tide of Darkness
Gaius Iulius Caesar’s death at the hands of a mob is a terrible thing to see. He is kicked and stabbed and beaten to death. He weeps. He pleads for his life. Towards the end he has a seizure, and dies with spittle on his cheeks, shaking and jerking, scattering thick red drops across the cool marble floor.
Gaius had once been a friend. We had fought together in Gaul. A few days ago, asking for help, he called me brother. I knew what was planned, and I had my part in his death, and I will always regret what we did that day.
After Gaius, I have had enough of Rome. I am old. I have lived these years well. I have some influence, and help Octavian seize his throne, but there seems little point. I know how it ends for this family. I have already marched with the legions that the boy Caligula will one day befriend along the Rhine, and I will hear of Nero’s last night from those who see it with their own eyes. Rome is little more than a great effort wasted. A year after Octavian takes power, I find a cliff, and step from it, and leave them to their decline. They were but a moment in the span of the world, I suppose, but it was sad. I was fond of them.
I step from the cliff and fall and die and find myself somewhere new. Naked, cold, and alone. My gut is empty, as it always is, as if I have not eaten for a day. I have a raging thirst, and I am tired, as if desperately lacking sleep. Death for me is never death. I simply go somewhere else, somewhen else, to another life. I do not know why, and I do not know how, this is simply how it is.
I look around. I am in an alley, in a noisy town, with stench all around. There is dirt beneath me, cobbles where the alley opens into the street. There are buildings of brick and stone. This could be anywhere in the world, after cities are thought of. I listen. There is a distant hammering, metal on metal, and the clatter of hooves on stone. I breathe in, and among the stench of open sewers and rotting rubbish, the smoke in the air is acrid wood-smoke, not dusty coal. I do all this without thinking. I am somewhere before industrialization changed the world. I usually am. There are more times and places before than after. I read when I can, when I am in a place with libraries, and know a little of the stages of architecture and fashions and other useful things. I can sometimes work out where I have arrived by those details.
Not this time. Everything is functional and uniform, and there are no people around.
I stand. I always awake clumsily sprawled, as if having fallen in a drunken stupor. I look at my hands, at my chest, see slightly-tanned skin, darker on arms than on torso. It tells me little. A place where people are outside, and sometimes bare-chested when working.
I do not know the mechanisms of how this works. I remember nothing of the change. One moment I am dying, and then I am in the next place. There is no memory of death. I use a cliff when I can, because a cliff is a good way to die, for me. One moment I am floating downward, and the next I awake somewhere new, and there is nothing unpleasant in between.
As well as hungry, I always arrive somewhere out of sight, although not necessarily private. A room with a closed door. An alley. A clump of trees. I always look like the nearby people, and my face changes with my skin and build, every time. An average seeming, undistinguished face by whatever the local standard is. Always a man, which may mean something or may not. Always aged in my mid-twenties, unblemished by scar or callus, but with feet hardened enough to walk. I assume that is planned, by whoever makes this happen. I have teeth, but no hair. It begins to grow as soon as I appear. My belly aches, but not more than simply going hungry for a day would cause, as if I am created, but the contents of my gut are not. I am unmemorable, average in most ways for the place that I am. Besides the hunger, the worst thing is that for a few days I am a little taller or shorter or stockier than I think myself to be, and I occasionally bump into lintels or catch on branches. I soon adjust, for these are all cosmetic changes, outward only. My mind remains as it is, my own, my memories intact. I mus
t learn the languages of new places, but once learned, the words stay. Equally the ways of war and trades. I have mastered many odd skills, and practiced many trades, and what I know grows each time I live, and seems not to fill up my head.
I am old. Inwardly, behind those ever-remade faces, I am old. I cannot recall how long I have been doing this. As much because I lose the points of reference of other lives, I think, than because of tampering. I have wondered if it is a kind of reincarnation, a possession of an existing person, but I think it is not. There could not be that many fit young men wandering about in isolated places, and I have never had someone walk up to me and greet me as a long-lost acquaintance. The only people who recognize me are those I have met since I arrive. I think in some way I am made anew each time, or reshaped to fit. That some testing occurs, some measuring of people nearby, and some examination of the local environment to find a suitably discreet place to appear. I am always very local. When I have stayed long enough to understand these things, I am clearly a man of a particular city or valley or shire. I do not know what that means either.
I also do not know why I am here. I think it has something to do with my companion, but I do not know.
*
My companion. Sooner or later I meet her. I look forward to it and dread it equally. She is like me, except that her face never changes, and she appears to know who I am. We meet, and sometimes talk, and usually one of us kills the other. We do not live in the same sequence of arrivals. She knows things of me I do not know myself, and equally the other way around. I used to think she simply knew more, but then I caught up, and events occurred she had spoken of, and I realize we are simply adrift on separate journeys, connecting by chance.
But connect we do, as if we are locked together. I do not know how.
In a way she is my only friend. I live out whole lives, I marry and love and make lifelong friends, but I do so in a way that is somehow false. The people I know are not like me, and do not know all I have to tell. She is the only one like me I have ever come across. My only constant. She always appears, and one of us dies, and it seems once we have lived in one place and time we can never go back. In Rome I had her slain and was left in peace for a lifetime. In other times and places, she is first and I am gone and she, presumably, is untroubled. I know not what she does when she is alone, but I, I do nothing. There seems no point to this other than being, and do not know why.
Part of me wishes to test this, to simply walk from one place to another where I know myself to have been at a certain time. The opportunity has not arisen, yet. I have always been out of reach, or unclear as to where I was. The world is a large and empty place, and in the distant past it is full of tiny villages and people with an imperfect knowledge of the world around them.
Whenever I see my companion, I slay her. I kill her as quickly as I can, because she knows what I am and knows to expect it from me, and will kill me if I do not. I know not who started this. Perhaps we both did, an earlier her murdering a later I, then my revenge striking her in advance, before her deed was actually done. Perhaps it is nonsensical, and we should both stop, but there is anger between us, and memories of past injustices. Her mood changes strangely, too, as if there are lives we share were I have wronged her, and lives when we are companionably close, and to her these lives occur in a different order to my own. At times she speaks as if we were once lovers, or perhaps great friends, but I do not remember this, and think, over time – her time – she has stopped speaking of this, because it causes her distress. It is difficult to tell when our lives are out of pattern, and I face her wrath now for an act I will not commit for a century.
Despite this, I am fond of her. Companionship is a precious thing, and loneliness a terrible one, and when we are the only two like us in the world, we share a bond, despite making war on one another. And war we do, sometimes in actuality. Once she led a thousand men to burn the village where I dwelled. In other lives, we fight on horse, or march in rival armies, or fire cannon between ships.
*
In my alley, I look around. I need food, drink, clothing and sleep. I need to learn which language is used hereabouts and learn it if need be, and to grow my hair and beard, if it is the custom where I am. I may already speak the language. More often than not I do, one that makes me understood, at least. There are a surprisingly few that are very widely understood. Some care is needed, though. A man who looks twenty but talks like your grandfather is memorable, and peculiar.
I go to the end of the alley, and crouch behind rubbish. I am cold and shivering and naked. I peer out. The street is quiet. The buildings have facades the same as their sides. No-one is about. It is the middle of the day, the sun is directly above, warming my chill skin. Perhaps this is a place where one sleeps in the middle of the day.
I wait and watch. I can see no landmarks. No castle on a hill or cathedral spires rising above the rooftops. This city is older, which is sometimes good. In some, the pattern of streets can remain unchanged for a thousand years, and I can find my way about. Not this one, I think. It does not seem familiar. I am still hungry and weak, but now warm. I must decide if it is better here to beg my clothes, or steal. It is often easier to steal, but in most places and times the punishment for petty theft is sudden and brutal for a man with no name or family. The decision rests on how likely I am to be caught, for often it is better to beg, to claim to be victim of a robbery myself, stripped by the thieves. People tend to assume a naked hungry man in an alley is speaking the truth, and any oddity is assumed the result of a blow to the head.
There is a broken barrel a little way into the alley. Its top, lying flat, has collected a little water. It seems safe enough to drink. I do, then wait again.
I believe my body is an artifice of some kind. I am a little stronger and faster than others, but not by any great measure. As if I am the best that I can be in a hundred tiny ways, all of which combine, but not magnificently better in any. I can eat what others sometimes cannot, and I have not often fallen ill during the countless plagues I have lived through. I am clever. Not to boast, but I have a knack for languages and for remembering faces and I am good with my hands, clever at making machines I have seen elsewhere. I know I have spread ideas such as windmills and stirrups far more widely than perhaps I should have, but it is done.
It is not a bad way to exist. I have more time than most people do, and I am curious to meet others, and see how they are, and move on once we are done. Whatever it is controls me, it is unhurried. I am never rushed along. Sometimes I end up pleasant places and when I do, I linger as I wish. Once, an island in a sunny place where people fished all day. I could not tell when, but it seemed a long time ago, and there was nothing there that could not be manufactured from the materials of beach and sea and forest. I stayed there a long time, but there was a plague, and many friends died, and I remembered again what I was and moved on. Sometimes I wonder whether they mourned me, or whether they blamed me for their misfortune.
I wait in my dank alleyway, growing increasingly hungry and weak. I hope the midday stillness will end soon, but am wary of walking about when no-one else does. I am still in the alley, waiting, when my companion appears.
I hear a footfall, but am distracted by my hunger. It sounds like small foot, a woman or child, and I am not overly concerned.
I ought to have been.
She walks into the alley, looking directly at my corner. She rarely appears so soon, more commonly she is somewhere in the world, and we take months or years to find one another.
“You,” I say, utterly surprised to see her here.
“Wait,” she says.
But I am feeling threatened, am unsure what to make of her appearance so soon after my own. I react too quickly, leap to my feet and lunge towards her, snatch her neck with what strength I have and twist. I am weak. Inattentive. As I kill her she slips a dagger from somewhere about her person, unnoticed, and twists it into my side.
She is dead, but now so am I, although it t
akes me some time to go. I sit beside her body at the mouth of the alley and wait, resigned, until the oily oozing of my lifeblood becomes a seep, then a trickle. I am dead. This does not look like a place with much medicine, and a gut wound will be fatal. I wonder about hurrying matters along, but do not bother. It is happening on its own. The wound does not hurt overly much, and has helped me forget my hunger. Dying hungry does not make me any more hungry in the next life. I do not know why that is.
I become drowsy, and cold, and fall asleep. It is not sleep. I know dying well enough by now.
I arrive a new place, another alleyway on the outskirts of another city. Or for all I know a different part of the same one. The buildings are similar, the climate also. Woodsmoke still, but also an acrid chemical tang. It could be a different age, or simply that a tannery is nearby.
I stumble to the end of the alleyway, and look out into a cobbled plaza. As I watch, my companion appears again, this time not alone. A half-dozen men follow her, all wearing baggy sleeves and trousers, with brightly colored, floppy hats. All have swords and pikes as well, and they spread out and search for me, poking into the alley mouths and beneath some stunted trees. My companion seems to know where I am, she calls and points, and they surround me.
Even tired and weak and hungry I am dangerous. They try to prevent me killing her, but are no match for me. I have marched with many, many armies and fought in many wars. I take a dagger from one, and slip through their circle, and stab my companion in her chest. As I do, pikes piece my back and I feel the sharp pain of the stabbing, and then I die, and then I am gone.
The next place seems an early age, a time of bronze and flint. I see many of these, for there are more years of human history lived in such a way than in cities and factories later. This may be early Britain, for there are moors and heather, a nearby sea, and a bitter cold wind from the north. I am unsure, it could be many places. My companion does not appear, and there is a war with a neighboring tribe, eventually won. It is an interlude, pleasant enough, but not one to linger in. They have a hard, toil-filled life of hewing and digging and weeding. They worry about flood and crop-failure and enemy attack, and almost any disease can come and steal their lives. After a time, as there are cliffs nearby, I step off one and move on.