Генри Каттнер: A Cross of Centuries

They called him Christ. But he was not the Man who had toiled up the long road to Golgotha five thousand years before. They called him Buddha and Mohammed; they called him the Lamb, and the Blessed of God. The called him the Prince of Peace and the Immortal One.

His name was Tyrell.

He had come up another road now, the steep path that led to the monastery on the mountain, and he stood for a moment blinking against the bright sunlight. His white robe was stained with the ritual black.

The girl beside him touched his arm and urged him gently forward. He stepped into the shadow of the gateway.

Then he hesitated and looked back. The road had led up to a level mountain meadow where the monastery stood, and the meadow was dazzling green with early spring. Faintly, far away, he felt a wrenching sorrow at the thought of leaving all this brightness, but he sensed that things would be better very soon. And the brightness was far away. It was not quite real any more. The girl touched his arm again and he nodded obediently and moved forward, feeling the troubling touch of approach­ing loss that his tired mind could not understand now.

I am very old, he thought.

In the courtyard the priests bowed before him. Mons, the leader, was standing at the other end of a broad pool that sent back the bottomless blue of the sky. Now and again the water was ruffled by a cool, soft breeze.

Old habits sent their messages along his nerves. Tyrell raised his hand and blessed them all.

His voice spoke the remembered phrases quietly.

“Let there be peace. On all the troubled earth, on all the worlds and in God’s blessed sky between, let there be peace. The powers of—of——” his hand wavered; then he remembered—”the powers of darkness have no strength against God’s love and understanding. I bring you God’s word. It is love; it is understanding; it is peace.”

They waited till he had finished. It was the wrong time and the wrong ritual. But that did not matter, since he was the Messiah.

Mons, at the other end of the pool, signaled. The girl beside Tyrell put her hands gently on the shoulders of his robe.

Mons cried, “Immortal, will you cast off your stained garment and with it the sins of time?”

Tyrell looked vaguely across the pool.

“Will you bless the worlds with another century of your holy presence?”

Tyrell remembered some words.

“I leave in peace; I return in peace,” he said.

The girl gently pulled off the white robe, knelt, and removed TyrelI’s sandals. Naked, he stood at the pool’s edge.

He looked like a boy of twenty. He was two thousand years old.

Some deep trouble touched him. Mons had lifted his arm, summoning, but Tyrell looked around confusedly and met the girl’s gray eyes.

“Nerina?” he murmured..

“Go in the pool,” she whispered. “Swim across it.”

He put out his hand and touched hers. She felt that wonderful current of gentleness that was his indomitable strength. She pressed his hand tightly, trying to reach through the clouds in his mind, trying to make him know that it would be all right again, that she would be waiting—as she had waited for his resurrection three times already now, in the last three hundred years.

She was much younger than Tyrell, but she was un­mortal too.

For an instant the mists cleared from his blue eyes.

“Wait for me, Nerina,” he said. Then, with a return of his old skill, he went into the pool with a clean dive.

She watched him swim across, surely and steadily. There was nothing wrong with his body; there never was, no matter how old he grew. It was only his mind that stiffened, grooved deeper into the iron ruts of time, lost its friction with the present, so that his memory would fragment away little by little. But the oldest memories went last, and the automatic memories last of all.

She was conscious of her own body, young and strong and beautiful, as it would always be. Her mind...there was an answer to that too. She was watching the answer.

I am greatly blessed, she thought. Of all women on all the worlds, I am the Bride of Tyrell, and the only other immortal ever born.

Lovingly and with reverence she watched him swim. At her feet his discarded robe lay, stained with the mem­ories of a hundred years.

It did not seem so long ago. She could remember it very clearly, the last time she had watched Tyrell swim across the pool. And there had been one time before that—and that had been the first. For her; not for Tyrell.

He came dripping out of the water and hesitated. She felt a strong pang at the change in him from strong sureness to bewildered questioning. But Mons was ready. He reached out and took Tyrell’s hand. He led the Messiah toward a door in the high monastery wall and through it. She thought that Tyrell looked back at her, with the tenderness that was always there in his deep, wonderful calm.

A priest picked up the stained robe from her feet and carried it away. It would be washed clean now and placed on the altar, the spherical tabernacle shaped like the mother world. Dazzling white again, its folds would hang softly about the earth.

It would be washed clean, as Tyrell’s mind would be washed clean too, rinsed of the clogging deposit of mem­ories that a century had brought.

The priests were filing away. She glanced back, beyond the open gateway, to the sharply beautiful green of the mountain meadow, spring grass sensuously reaching to the sun after the winter’s snow. Immortal, she thought, lifting her arms high, feeling the eternal blood, ichor of gods, singing in deep rhythm through her body. Tyrell was the one who suffered. I have no price to pay for this—wonder.

Twenty centuries.

And the first century must have been utter horror.

Her mind turned from the hidden mists of history that was legend now, seeing only a glimpse of the calm White Christ moving through that chaos of roaring evil when the earth was blackened, when it ran scarlet with hate and anguish. Ragnarok, Armageddon, Hour of the Anti­christ—two thousand years ago!

Scourged, steadfast, preaching his word of love and peace, the White Messiah had walked like light through earth’s descent into hell.

And he had lived, and the forces of evil had destroyed themselves, and the worlds had found peace now—had found peace so long ago that the Hour of the Antichrist was lost to memory; it was legend.

Lost, even to Tyrell’s memory. She was glad of that. It would have been terrible to remember. She turned chill at the thought of what martyrdom he must have endured.

But it was the Day of the Messiah now, and Nerina, the only other immortal ever born, looked with reverence and love at the empty doorway through which Tyrell had gone.

She glanced down at the blue pool. A cool wind ruffled its surface; a cloud moved lightly past the sun, shadowing all the bright day.

It would be seventy years before she would swim the pool again. And when she did, when she woke, she would find Tyrell’s blue eyes watching her, his hand closing lightly over hers, raising her to join him in the youth that was the springtime where they lived forever.

Her gray eyes watched him; her hand touched his as he lay on the couch. But still he did not waken.

She glanced up anxiously at Morn.

He nodded reassuringly.

She felt the slightest movement against her hand.

His eyelids trembled. Slowly they lifted. The calm, deep certainty was still there in the blue eyes that had seen so much, in the mind that had forgotten so much. Tyrell looked at her for a moment. Then he smiled.

Nerina said shakily, “Each time I’m afraid that you’ll forget me.”