Marion came rushing over to us with the tickets in her hand as soon as she saw us. My father said a brief goodbye and I watched him leave, as Marion turned slighter pale.
"Isn't Lür coming?" she asked, frowning.
"Something's come up at the museum, a rather messy subject, Marion. We may be in problems with the law and it's not good for us to be exposed in that way," I said, pretending that it mattered to me. "He'll come as soon as it's resolved. Come on, let's not waste anymore time. We're on our own here."
36
Hundred and fifth massacre
LÜR
Current Japan, 18,000 B.C.
Lür no longer remembered that he had once been called Lür. He had abandoned his Real Name thousands of years ago, considering it to be cursed. He had also abandoned his appearance: he generally dyed his hair using boiled leaves and sometimes even shaved his head and eyebrows. He had become an expert in the art of disguise. The most discreet man on earth, always silent, always alone.
Until he went into that widow's piling hut. Two ghosts fishing for years along the shore of the lake, without seeing a soul for seasons at a time.
He didn't leave her alone very often, she wasn't dealing well with the pregnancy and she fainted every morning, but the river that flowed into the lake was freezing and he had to search for the fish further up stream. He promised her comforting kisses and hugs upon his return, and went off fishing with wicker baskets on his shoulders.
He was only gone for the time that it took the sun to move West, into the highest point of the sky, but when he returned, the Sons of Adam had already killed her and had also made sure that the child she carried in her stomach wouldn't survive either.
The man once known as Lür chopped the hut to the ground with his axe. That time he didn't even cry, he no longer remembered what it was to have emotions and he didn't know how to react to a loss.
Keep going, just keep going, an inner voice that he always listened to ordered him.
The 21st century archaeologists found the bones of a young woman from the Jomon culture hugging her stomach with two cowrie shells at her feet. They speculated about long distance exchanges, of incongruous objects, separated by too many millennia to be related.
Hector del Castillo stole the remains and gave them a decent burial.
37
If I'm going to die tomorrow
ADRIANA
They were the worst days. Slow days, frozen days, days of silence.
I didn't hear anything else about Nagorno. Gunnarr didn't come to my cell at nights.
They'd forgotten about me or they were already punishing me, perhaps for the death of Nagorno. Maybe Gunnarr preferred to kill me like this, leaving me in a cell where I'd never be found, dying from thirst and starvation. A bad death, in any case, but what would have been a good way to die at his hands?
It was night when I heard the metallic sound of the lock.
Gunnarr came in with a harsh look on his face. He tried to hold my gaze, but I looked away, feeling uncomfortable.
"What's happened to Nagorno?"
"He's good, stedmor, he's really good. In fact right now he's like he was before, he's got his strength back and he feels young and strong again, but his heart's unstable. He could die at any moment. The doctors don't dare to treat him and my father doesn't know what to do."
"There's a new deadline for me, isn't there?"
"Less than twenty-four hours."
He sat down next to me on the bed. We sat there in silence for a long time.
"Nagorno told me that he taught you to look for a beautiful moment in every day, a hedonistic moment," I said, trying to think of something else to say.
"He did, I see that my uncle has told you a lot about himself."
"Well, you have been my moment, every night, with your stories."
"And I have to admit that you have been mine," he said, almost smiling. "My uncle hasn't been the best of company these last few days, and there's really not much to do around here. The nights are very long and monotonous."
"I should never have got mixed up with you lot, with the longevos. Even if I do survive this, this will happen again. Maybe you're right and you're not just people, maybe you're forces of nature, elements, or as Nagorno's always thought, demigods."
He nodded, but he was somewhere else.
"Stedmor, there's a code for these kinds of situations, a threat to fulfill."
"No, be clear: a sentence to execute."
"I can't let my father think that he can get away with killing his brother, that he inject him with a failed cure, and then think that Uncle Nagorno will hand you back over anyway. Do you understand?"
"Don't ask me to alleviate your guilt for my murder, you'll have to deal with that yourself. You don't have my forgiveness, I'm not going to indulge you. You have a choice and you're choice is to execute me. You're just a plain murderer, Gunnarr. Get over it and stop expecting me to understand. I'm not going to make this easy for you. That's why have you haven't been back the last few nights, while you were making a decision, not even you're heartless enough to kill someone you know."
"Did you do it on purpose?" he said, with a hoarse voice, as if he was finding it difficult to swallow. "Was it a survival strategy?"
"What the hell are you talking about?"
"This, that you and I connected like this, stedmor."
"Stop calling me stedmor." I shouted, tired of everything, and standing up.
"At least call me Adriana."
"No, stedmor.
"Why not, Gunnarr? Why not?"
"Because I'm better than my father!" he burst out, jumping up and standing in front of me, red with rage. "Because I constantly need to remind myself that you're my stedmor? I can't think of you as Adriana, because otherwise..."
"Otherwise what, Gunnarr? Otherwise what?"
He didn't say anything and left without saying goodbye, focusing on something that wasn't in that damn cell.
I stood looking at the door for quite some time, with a lost look. I had a lot to take in that night.
Gunnarr suddenly returned, agitated. He marched back into the cell and locked the door behind him.
"If I'm going to die, at least tell me what happened at Kinsale," I said. "You owe me that much."
He ignored me, like he always did when I asked him to talk about Kinsale. Like Iago, they both refused to share that memory with me.
"Do you really still believe that I'm going to kill you?" he asked me, and this time he held my gaze.
"Admit it Gunnarr, this isn't looking too good."
"Perhaps there are now other plans for you," he muttered.
We looked at each other again and I could tell that he was making snap decisions.
"Come upstairs and have dinner," he said in the end. "You don't deserve to be in this cell."
I never deserved it.
We dined in silence, the three of us, quiet and lost in the herb soup we each had in front of us. Nagorno greeted me with a cold nod of his head, young again and beautiful, but back to being glacier-like.
"Tell our guest that she should eat," he ordered Gunnarr, after I had spent too long pushing my soup around the bone china bowl with the silver spoon.
"Don't treat her like that, she saved your life."
"You heard me," was all Gunnarr said in reply.
"Don't treat her like that!" Gunnarr suddenly shouted. A hoarse sound escaped from Gunnarr's throat. It sounded like a roar, not like a human scream.
"My host is right," I calmly put in. "I should eat something. This dinner is important, I want you to remember it, I want you to remember it for a long time. Gunnarr, bring me some of that wine from my birth year. I could never toast with Iago."
Gunnarr went off to the wine cellar and came back after a while with a bottle.
He was about to come over and serve me the wine when he lifted his head, saw something behind Nagorno, and the bottle fell to the floor, smashing against the flagstone. His face was exp
ressionless, empty.
Nagorno and I turned around in alarm. Standing in front of the chimney, Lür was watching us in silence.
38
Ilur
IAGO
We had an almost eleven hour flight ahead of us. We walked down the plane until we reached our first-class seats and Marion sat in the aisle and I sat next to the window.
I bored her for a while with trivial stories until she opted to ignore me, taking out her notebook and writing her daily five hundred words. I took advantage of the moment to put an earphone in the ear that she couldn't see and opened the file my father had sent me.
'You know as well as I do the value of omissions, those that keep the people you love safe. We have both kept quiet about certain things and hidden embarrassing secrets. But this secret that I'm finally going to tell you is truly disgraceful. Son, it's about the most basic of instincts: survival of the family, survival of the clan. All the members of the Ancient Family were born under the threat of a curse that has been following me since long before you were born. I've protected you for many thousands of years, all of you, my children, my descendants, my blood, more important than any sacrifice and crime. She is a threat, don't ever trust her.
First of all I'm going to give you instructions, in case you don't have time to listen to the whole story:
When you meet her, show her my amulet. If I managed to pull it off earlier, it should be in your pocket'.
I carefully patted my pants pockets, but didn't find anything. Then my shirt pocket, but there was no prehistoric figurine there either.
Marion looked up and smiled at me. I smiled back.
Then I put my hand inside my jacket. I could feel the bulge of the bison man that my father took everywhere with him, the one that he lent to Dana so that she would believe us. I didn't take it out of my pocket, I didn't want Marion to see it and find out what I was doing.
"Are you listening to music?" she asked.
"Yes, theme songs to epic movies. They relax me," I commented distractedly.
She went back to her writing and ignored my comment.
'It belonged to her companion Negu, who I considered to be my brother," my father continued, whispering in my ear. 'It may help to buy you some time. Propose a truce, tell her that we want to negotiate, that it's time to let it go. She won't listen to you, she won't back down, but pretend that you believe that it's possible. Beg her to think about it, that will give you a few hours.
I'll come with backup to even out the battle. Trust me, son. You'll know what to do. You just need to trust me'.
A young flight attendant came over with his trolley and offered us his beautiful bottles of liquor.
"No, thank you," I said, winking at him, "or the missus will throw them overboard without giving it another thought."
Marion laughed at our private joke and the boy left slightly flustered, not having a clue what I was talking about.
Marion and I exchanged a knowing look, and each of us went back to being lost in our own affairs.
'And now the story', continued the voice of my father. 'TSOA is the acronym of The Sons of Adam.
Although I don't want to start with something so modern.
There was a legend... No, there was a woman, thousands of years before I was born. Her name was Adana, they called her Mother. She was a matriarch, the matriarch of the Sons of Adam. As you've probably guessed by now, she didn't age. She lived surrounded by several generations of her descendants, all of them ephemerals. They all worshiped her, she was as Old as Time and knew how to protect them. They were organized into professions and her way of leading them was effective but inflexible. The Sons of Adam lived under her power, adoring her but without having any real freedom, protected but tied by chains of blood in exchange for favors and missions. We were companions for thousands of years. Let me tell you what she did to all the children I had after I left her...'
I listened one by one to all the massacres that Mother had ordered, hour after hour.
I looked at Marion out of the corner of my eye and a drip of cold sweat ran down my spine, underneath my shirt. Above the Atlantic Ocean, the plane repeated the same route that we had taken four centuries ago, from Europe to the northeast coast of the United States. This time it was different, this time I knew who Marion Adamson was. A Daughter of Adam, a soldier sent to use me.
'Marion is a Daughter of Adam', my father's voice had confirmed minutes earlier. 'A Writer is a good profession. It wasn't one of the worst branches, they've shared the wisdom of the old stories with the whole world and they've survived until today. Novelists are still useful in this world, don't you think? We still need evasion. As far as she's concerned, she's been sent to hand us over to Mother, but we have to wait and see what her final role will be in this manhunt. Maybe she will bring us more surprises. Don't judge her yet, I think that she's rather independent'.
I listened to my father's story right up to the end, to the last massacre of all.
'I know that you've heard about the Sudanese site of Jebel Sahaba, in the Nile Valley.
You'll remember that I forbade you from traveling there when you showed interest in the remains of the first known war, 14,000 years ago. I didn't want you to look into the DNA of the bodies, which matched yours. Many of the fifty-nine men, women and children riddled with stone tipped spears were my children, your siblings.
Let me tell you about one of them. I called him Ilur and he lived for three decades. He knew my secret and we were inseparable.
And that's not all, we even looked the same, we was my spitting image.
You know that it happens sometimes between parents and children, or between grandparents and grandchildren. Twins separated by a couple of generations, natural clones. Features that we sometimes see repeated when we return to a village, decades or centuries later.
It was the same with Ilur, his mother's blood didn't mix with mine, he wasn't mixed-race. His skin, his hair and his eyes were exact copies of mine.
When the Sons of Adam came and slaughtered them, they asked for Lür, and he pretended to be me.
I couldn't stop him.
I've never seen a corpse like his.
Each Son of Adam launched various arrows into him. They had to. They each had to leave their mark, prove their active participation in the revenge to Adana. Ilur's body had hundred of arrows in it, there wasn't a centimeter of free skin, and they only stopped when the arrows couldn't find any more flesh to pierce and they fell to the floor.
They took his body, I guess to show Adana.
But it worked, my son's sacrifice worked. After that massacre I never heard any more from the Sons of Adam. They obviously thought I was dead.
For centuries I traveled all the trading routes, asking about the Sons of Adam. Nobody knew anything, I thought that the family had died out or that Adana was finally satisfied. Four thousand years passed and nothing happened, and I finally dared to live again like a normal man and find a woman. That was when I met your mother and you were born, Urko'.
Those were the last words that my father had recorded for me. I listened to the whole message several times, until I knew it by memory. I didn't want to forget a single detail.
The plane finally touched down and I let Marion guide me towards my destiny.
39
Only the truth
ADRIANA
"How did you get here, father?" Nagorno asked, jumping up from his chair and standing in front of him.
"I have a private plane waiting for us in Edinburgh," Lür replied, without moving a millimeter, sticking his hands in his pockets. He didn't seem to share Nagorno and Gunnarr's alarm, who looked at each other, giving silent instructions.
"Waiting for us? Do you really think that we're going to hand over Adriana that easily, or do you have another cure?" Gunner asked.
"Neither. I've come to get the three of you. Adriana," he said, turning to me. "Do you know where you've been this whole time?"
It felt so good to have L?
?r there. It was one against two, but his presence made me feel safe, he didn't seem to be worried about his son or grandson's reaction.
"I think that we're in an archipelago off the Scottish coast, some place where the clans have lived, and by the construction of the castle, I'd say that it's from the 17th century. I'm not sure if we're in the Orkneys, the Shetlands or the Hebrides. Maybe on the island of Arran, Iona, Skye..."
"Very good, Adriana," he said, satisfied. "I didn't expect any less from you. We're on the island of Eigg, one of the Small islands, in the Inner Hebrides of the west coast of Scotland. Sufficiently isolated and anonymous amongst a swarm of hundreds of almost uninhabited islands, but sufficiently close to Scotland and London, where the best specialists are monitoring you and can be reached in less than half an hour, isn't that right, Nagorno?"
I wasn't expecting that his son would reply and he moved over to where Gunnarr and I were.
"We managed to work out your puzzle, Gunnarr: You will reach her by air or water. Will it be thousands, will they be beautiful? It won't be big, you will find Massacres and Cathedrals." It won't be big, because they're the Small islands. You will find Massacres and Cathedrals, due to the caves that marked the history of this island. You came here after what happened on the Irish coast of Kinsale, didn't you, Gunnarr? When the island was still uninhabited following the McLeods massacre. You hid here. You built this castle and hid it from the world, I haven't been able to find any trace of it."
"And you never will. Where are you going with all this, grandfather?"
"I've contracted a private flight from Edinburgh to New York. And there's no time to lose. Your father is in grave danger, we all have to go together, as the family we are. That's the only way we will have a chance."