Poul Anderson - The Boat of a Million Years

Rufus crouched back.

Lugo laughed. “That’s better. Don’t be so damned edgy. I really don’t want to cause you any harm. Let me repeat, if you’ll be honest with me and do as I say, the worst that will happen to you is that you leave Burdigala in disguise. Aurelian owns a huge latifundium; it can doubtless use an extra workman, if I put in a good word, and the senator will cover up any little irregularities for me. At best—well, I don’t yet know, and therefore won’t make any promises, but it could be glorious beyond your highest-flying childhood dreams, Rufus.”

His words and the lulling tone worked. Also, the wine had begun to. Rufus sat quiet a moment, nodded, beamed, tossed off his drink, held out a band. “By the Three, right!” he cried.

Lugo clasped the hard palm. The gesture was fairly new in Gallia, maybe learned from Germanic immigrants. “Splendid,” he said. “Just speak fully and frankly. I know that won’t be easy, but remember, I have my reasons. I mean to do well by you, as well as God allows.”

He refilled the emptied cup. Behind his jovial facade, tension gathered and gathered.

Rufus drank. His vessel wobbled. “What d’you want to know?” he asked.

“First, why you got into grief.”

Rufus’ pleasure faded. He scowled beyond his questioner. “Because my wife died,” he mumbled. “That’s what broke the crock.”

“Many men are widowed,” Lugo said, while memory twisted a sword inside him.

The big hand tightened around the cup till knuckles stood white. “My Livia was old. White hair, wrinkles, no teeth. We’d two kids what grew up, boy and girl. They be married, kids o’ their own. And they’ve gone gray.”

“I thought this might be,” Lugo whispered, not in Latin. “O Ashtoreth—”

Aloud, using today’s language: “The rumors that reached me suggested as much. That’s why I came after you. When were you born, Rufus?”

“How the muck should I know?” The response was surly. “Balls! Poor folk don’t keep count like you rich ‘uns. I couldn’t tell you who be consul this year, let alone then was. But my Livia was young like me when we got hitched— fourteen, fifteen, whatever. She was a strong mare, she was, popped her young out like melon seeds, though only the two o’ them got to grow up. She didn’t break down fast like some mares.”

“You may well have reached your threescore and ten, then, or gone beyond,” Lugo said most softly. “You don’t look a day over twenty-five. Were you ever sick?”

“No, ‘less you count a couple times I got hurt. Bad hurts, but they healed right up in a few days, not so much as a scar. No toothaches ever. I got three teeth knocked out in a fight once, and they grew back.” The arrogance shriveled. “People looked at me more and more slanty. When Livia died, that broke the crock.” Rufus groaned. “They’d been saying I must’ve made a deal with the Devil. She told me what she heard. But what the muck could I do? God give me a strong body, that’s all. She believed.”

“I do too, Rufus.”

“When she fell bad sick at last, not many ‘ud speak to me any more. They’d shy from me in the street, make signs, spit on their breasts. I went to a priest. He was scared of me too, I could see it. Said I ought to go to the bishop, but the bastard stalled about taking me to him. Then Livia died.”

“A release,” Lugo could not help venturing.

“Well, I’d gone to a whorehouse for a long time,” Rufus answered matter-of-factly. Fury flared. “Now they, them bitches, they told me go away and don’t come back. I got mad, raised a ruckus. People heard and gathered around outside. When I came out, the scumswine yelled at me. I decked the loudest mouthed o’ them. Next thing I knew, they were on me. I barely fought free and ran. They came after me, more and more o’ them.”

“And you’d have died under their feet,” Lugo said. “Or else presently the rumors would have reached the prefect. The tale of a man who never grew old and was dearly no saint, therefore must be in league with the diabolical. You’d have been arrested, interrogated under torture, doubtless beheaded. These are bad times. Nobody knows what to expect. Will the barbarians prevail? Will we have another civil war? Will plague or famine or a total collapse of trade destroy us? Heretics and sorcerers are objects to take fear out on.”

“I be none!”

“I didn’t say you were. I accept you’re a common man, as common as I’ve ever met, aside from— Tell me, have you known or heard of anyone else like you, whom time doesn’t appear to touch? Kinfolk, perhaps?”

Rufus shook his head.

Lugo sighed. “Neither have I.” He mustered resolve and plunged forward. “And I have waited and tried, searched and endured, since first I came to understand.”

“Uh?” The wine splashed from Rufus’ cup.

Lugo sipped out of his own, for what comfort it could give. “How old do you think I am?” he asked.

Rufus peered before he said at the bottom of his throat: “You look maybe twenty-five.”

A smile quirked on the left side of Lugo’s mouth. “Like you, I don’t know my age for certain,” he answered slowly. “But Hiram was king in Tyre when I was born there. What chronicles I have since been able to study and figure from show me that that was about twelve centuries ago.”

Rufus gaped. The freckles stood lurid on a skin gone white. His free hand made a sign.

“Don’t be afraid,” Lugo urged. “I’m in no pact with darkness. Or with Heaven, for that matter, or any power, any soul. I am your kind of flesh, whatever that means. I have simply been longer on earth. It is lonely. You have had the barest foretaste of how lonely it is.”

He rose, leaving staff and cup, to pace the cramped floor, hands behind back. “I was not born Flavius Lugo, of course,” he said. “That is only the latest name I have taken out of—I’ve lost count of how many. The earliest was— never mind. A Phoenician name. I was a merchant until the years brought me to trouble much like yours today. Then for a long time I was a sailor, a caravan guard, a mercenary soldier, a wandering bard, any number of trades in which a man may come and go little noticed. That was a hard school I went through. Often I came near dying from wounds, shipwreck, hunger, thirst, a dozen different perils. Sometimes I would have died, were it not for the strange vigor of this body. A slower danger, more frightening as I began to perceive it, was that of drowning, losing my reason, in sheer memories. For a while I did have scant use of my wits. In a way that was a mercy; it blunted the pain of losing everyone I came to care for, losing him and losing her and losing, oh, the children. ... Bit by bit I worked out the art of memory. I now have clear recall, I am like a walking library of Alexandria—no, that burned, didn’t it?” He chuckled at himself. “I do make slips. But I have the art of storing what I know until it’s wanted, then calling it forth. I have the art of controlling sorrow. I have—”

He observed Rufus’ awed regard and broke off. “Twelve hundred years?” the artisan breathed. “You seen the Savior?”

Lugo forced a smile. “Sorry, I have not. If he was born in the reign of Augustus, as they say—that would have been, m-m, between three and four hundred years ago—then I was in Britannia at the time. Rome hadn’t conquered it yet, but trade was brisk and the southern tribes were cultured in their fashion. And much less meddlesome. That’s always a highly desirable feature in a place. Damnably hard to find these days, short of running off to the wild German or Scoti or whatever. And even they—

“Another art I’ve developed is that of aging my appearance. Hair powder, dyes, such things are cumbersome, unreliable. I let everybody talk about how young I continue to look. Some people do, after all. But meanwhile gradually I begin to stoop a little, shuffle a little, cough, pretend to be hard of hearing, complain of aches and pains and the insolence of modern youth. It only works up to a point, of course. Finally I must vanish and start a new life elsewhere under a new name. I try to arrange things so it will be reasonable to suppose I wandered off and met with misfortune, perhaps because I’d grown old and absent-minded. And as a rule I’ve been able to prepare for the move. Accumulate a hoard of gold, learn about the home to be, perhaps visit it and establish my fresh identity—”