The White Mare
[for vardoger, without whom this story would never have been conceived- even though it has been almost ten years delayed.]
#
Huali, the flux. Barra, Keptha, Jier, red fever. And Yanka, Ergistrian, Sapter, Hellen. Celein by drowning. Jayel, poisoned wound. The other Yanka in childbirth, and the unnamed child she bore. Miu, Senia, Rini, Loaker in the famine, Japet by a fall. Buacali, wandered and lost. Garner, Hepta, Steti, Soptos, Elian, Tarkelier, Brixos, Marhos, Mirka, Arjan, Kiv, the generations slide over, the dead piled over the dead over the dead, their lives that flicker over. The names are void and empty. Start again. Over again. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over and
#
Kronos bought the white mare in Cutelli for a copper necklace and two small vessels of fine-pressed oil. The oil and copper were part of a rich man's offerings for his daughter's wedding, left at the altar of the god Tano—who would not miss them, Kronos supposed, but he had no particular wish to wait and see who would. Besides, summer was coming, and with it heat and likely fever and flux. They couldn't kill him, but they would make him deathly miserable.
All told, it was time and past to leave the life of an urban petty thief. The white mare stood an awkward, skinny sixteen hands and bore an ugly scar on her withers, but she had a steady gait and a high, arched neck, and a fierce look in her eye that pleased him.
"Was she bred to war?" Kronos asked the horse dealer.
"Not at that price. But aye, she'll bite."
The mare carried Kronos out of Cutelli, up along the broad meander of the river, and into the dry scrub pine of the hills beyond. He was unaccustomed to riding, and his inner thighs ached and burned at first; but this passed, and he and the mare were soon good friends. They rode together for a month into the great forests of the north and west, away and up from the sea, into cooler and wilder lands, ripe with game and emptiness. Then, on the eve of the thirtieth day, while Kronos slept, someone cut the mare's rope and stole her.
Kronos was incensed. He was also, as it happened, capable of running a very, very long way without stopping. It had been the old way of hunting game where he had grown up, far away from horses. In those days the hunters would sometimes track their game for hours or days on end, like a pack of dogs, jogging steady around and behind until the prey was exhausted enough to give the opportunity to someone's sling or javelin. Kronos had always been rather good at this, but he hadn't really pushed his limits before. Now, as he began to run, he felt a surge of truculant pride. Why should an immortal be deprived by the loss of a mere beast? Certainly the thieves must pay; but the irritant was a larger matter than that—a race between the old ways and the new, between the pure hunt and the fat, lazy ways of the animal domesticators.
The hoof trail was difficult to follow on the mountain, and at several points Kronos jogged around wide half-moons, trying to pick it up again. Further down and across a broad marsh, where doubtless the thief had thought to lose him, he found a meeting of many horses bearing northwest. Kronos eased into the track and let the hunter's empty mind take him, the liberated instinct, all his senses flowing freely through his body. He did not pause to rest or to take sustenance. After a few days' deprivation, the immortal energy began to crackle constantly along his sinews. All sense of self melted away into legs and lungs and heart, beating together to the pointed desire that was anticipation of his prey. It was seven days before he came to the thieves' camp, his breath heavy and rank with starvation. He fell on them wordlessly and slaughtered them all. When the screams ended he drank their wineskins dry and passed out.
#
Kronos had died a raving madman. He rose the master of five horses, in an unknown land. The white mare, though, was not among them.
Crows and flies were already picking at the three men he had slain. The one with short hair still breathed, intermittently, his eyes fluttering as the flies drank from their corners.
"You stole a white mare," Kronos said. He nudged the dying man's head with his foot. "She belongs to me. Where is she?"
The man gasped, beyond response. Kronos nudged him harder and he began to cough weakly. Blood leaked from his mouth. Kronos drew his knife across the man's throat.
He found an unrifled pack and began to drink, surveying the camp. It looked fairly established, with a rough wooden shelter stocked with hay and a well-trodden path to the nearby stream. There were clearly more men in the band, and fresh horse tracks led off and down toward the valley. The tied horses in the clearing champed and shook their manes. It occurred to Kronos that they were likely waiting to be fed. Five horses was a notable fortune this far north, where the settlements were often sparse and poor; even such paltry animal power could shift the economy of a village, or turn the tide of a war. But none of the horses was his mare. Kronos cut them all loose but one. He took a pack, mounted the broad-backed bay stallion, and set off again.
Not far down the trail the woods began to thin, and the stream forked and broadened into a wide grassland. There were a few meagre huts near the edge of the wood and a few stray goats, but they had been abandoned. The goats came up eagerly to him as he rode through. One jumped onto the roof of a hut and bleated at him at eye level. Kronos reached out a hand and the goat rooted into his palm, looking for a treat. Kronos rode on. The goats trotted after him for a few minutes, and then gave up. There were more abandoned huts scattered along the valley as he rode, and, increasingly, little garden plots, but all were gone to weeds and overgrown. Kronos pulled an aged apple from the dead man's pack and spat out the seeds. There was a plume of smoke rising from behind the next foothill.
As he came around the lip of the hill, a group of women raised a shrill cry, dropping half-full baskets and calling to their children. Kronos grinned to watch them scatter so frantically, and raised his hands empty to show his peaceful intent. They fled before him, running toward a large building whence the smoke emanated. People and more people came flooding out of it to meet them, carrying wooden pikes and old swords, and Kronos understood: here, in this pathetic wooden gathering-hall, were all the remaining people of the valley, presumably mustered against some terrible threat. He dismounted and approached them on foot, hands wide and open. They did not look particularly reassured. Kronos was a head taller than the biggest man, and they were all toothless and malnourished. These were not the thieves' probable customers, but Kronos had a curious streak, and the previous night's slaughter had left him sated and unhurried.
"I am tracking a white horse," he said. "She's mine. A band of men stole her. Any idea where one would go to buy or sell a horse near here?"
One of the taller women said something in a soft, spitty sort of language.
Kronos raised his eyes to the gods, and took a deep breath. "Horse," he said. He pointed at the stallion. The crowd stared blankly at him. He mimicked riding and pointed again. The people began to look at one another and mutter. Kronos went back to the bay stallion and pulled off the dead man's pack. He brought it forward to the edge of their line of pikes, then knelt and opened it, letting the apples and dried meat and the meagre dry bread roll out onto the grass. The people looked down at the food. Kronos stepped back, gestured at it, and smiled.
They invited him into their makeshift fortress.
A party in a stinking, sooty, crowded hall wasn't a much better way to pass the night than lying dead in a bloody clearing, but Kronos was pleasantly entertained by their incomprehensible displays of respect and curiosity. It was clear that he was a great warrior to them, with his ugly sword and his big stallion. The young men and women looked admiringly at him, and those who had their own swords strode about with airs of casual importance when they thought he was watching. The older men and women, though, whispered and glanced, as if they wanted something from him. Kronos drank their vinegar and accepted the attentions of a sallow boy with lush black hair. Through gesture and drawings on the packed-dirt floor of the hall, they were able to communicate certain matters to him. A giant man, wielding a fantastical sword as long as he was tall. Half the valley slain or fled. White skin, like the dead—or possibly a dead man living again? Kronos began to listen, after this, though he did not look up from the girl's fondling. The giant stalked the lands down the valley, to the southwest, killing all who tried to flee. If Kronos the great warrior would help them, the boy was his, or any other boy, or any girl. The valley and all its wealth were his. They would make him their king. Kronos graciously accepted.
In the morning he improvised an elaborate farewell salute, something warrior-ish involving stretching out his sword and then raising it up a-horseback, and they cheered. He met their eyes and bared his teeth. They screamed louder, and he laughed, filled with an absurd sense of gratification. He felt like a myth.
The valley was long and winding, hugging the shoulders of mountains on either side as it gently sloped along. Down by the stream there were tangles of berry bushes not yet budded, and a few apple trees in heavy blossom. The meadow rose gradually on either side of it in a chaos of grain and wildflowers, up to where a flock of goats cropped at the nettles near the edge of the wood. The dew lay so thick that Kronos' stallion was soon sopping wet up past its hocks.
The soil must be too thin here for cultivation—or perhaps the valley was simply too remote to have caught the idea? Well, he had wanted wild country; he had certainly found it. He passed the last straggling goats, finally left the last of the abandoned huts, and came down into the neck of the valley. It ended in a long, thin waterfall, and Kronos had to dismount to follow it down and keep on southwest. The spot was glorious, if impoverished. What would it be like to spend ten, fifty, a hundred immortal years here? For a moment, he pictured himself king indeed, absolute and adored ruler—and every night the choicest thin, mangy girl and the juiciest thin, mangy goat. Well. Perhaps not.
A day's march away he came to another river, this one wide, running through a long, rolling grassland. There were habitations here, bigger, made from the straight, heavy trunks of birches. There were no human sounds.
Around the side of the second house, Kronos began to find bodies. They had died violently. Their weapons and the few bits of jewelry they wore had been left to them, though, and the houses had not been ransacked for their stores. This was no marauding band, no war. Kronos looked for the footsteps of a giant, but did not find them. The marshy ground was too resilient. There were not enough bodies for the houses. They must have gone for help, or perhaps retreated to the little high valley that had sent him, bearing the warning.
Kronos spent the next four days exploring the settlements of the grassland, sleeping in the abandoned cots and houses, eating their abandoned breads and cheeses. He caught a wandering goat and roasted it in a pit, to the horror of its fellows. Perhaps the giant would be drawn by the aroma. Kronos had begun to find his tracks—great, wide feet, though not inhumanly large. But, then, the locals seemed to be a rather shriveled and diminished people. The giant's method of terrorizing them was, by his reckoning, awfully haphazard. Some cots had their doors broken, the children methodically beheaded, the adults killed in a struggle. Other houses had been simply passed by: their goods were taken and packed, their livestock released, their homes in order as the occupants fled. Most often one or two men were killed, their bodies left where they had fallen, and the rest of the family were allowed to flee, their tracks leading back toward the marsh. In one place, a rough stockade was all untouched, but the men behind it had been stabbed in the back by treachery. The giant's footprints were everywhere.
On the fifth day his skull began to buzz.
The shiver was delicious and strong, old, one of the old ones. Kronos had come across them, rarely, in the great cities along the river deltas of the south; they were all olive-skinned, like him, or darker, rich brown. The man coming over the crest of the far hill, though, was pale, whiter even than the valley locals here—a true Northerner, remarkably tall and thin, like a sapling birch. He carried in his hand an enormous iron sword, more bludgeon than cutting weapon, that must have been far too heavy for him. It was no civilized weapon, certainly—but a Northern barbarian, so old? What could the endless expanse of immortal life have held for him in such a place? Would he even know his own kind—know how to recognize another, know to guard his head? Could this be the plum prize that had been drawing him North, calling to him throughout this long, wild rambling?
The white immortal met his eye without apparent interest, then continued up the hill and over its far side.
Kronos dismounted and ran forward, leaving the bay where he stood. He heard vague voices ahead, the first human voices he had heard since leaving the village—and something else; the whinnies and murmurs of horses. Near the top of the hill he dropped to a crouch, staying hidden in the grasses, and continued on his knees up to the top of the hill. And over its crest, at last, Kronos saw his white mare.
The remaining horse thieves had made their camp at a stand of aspen. Two dark-skinned women tended to a massive pile of pillaged supplies from the abandoned houses, and a lighter-skinned man and woman minded the herd of half a dozen horses who grazed nearby, including Kronos' mare, no doubt fattening them for sale in the richer towns of the South as they pillaged another man's spoils. The horses and people were a hundred paces ahead of him, their figures small and their sounds muted. The white giant, though, had closed half that distance as Kronos climbed, and approached them openly bearing his naked sword. The thieves were rousing themselves, although lazily rather than in panic; they were four, and he was only one, even if he was a tall and perhaps crazy one. Sunlight glinted from the bronze tips of pikes that the two dark-skinned women lifted from the ground.
As the other two gathered the grazing horses, the smaller of the two spearwomen called out to the immortal. She seemed to be speaking the local spit-and-drool language, and it met with no response or even apparent comprehension; the giant just kept coming. After a brief exchange, the second spearwoman repeated the call. To Kronos' surprise, she spoke in the language of the great city of Ur.
"We greet you, warrior. We are traders with horses to sell. I see you yourself are not currently mounted. Would you share our food and speak with us? We have great bargains."
The immortal did not show any signs of having understood this either, though, and he was nearly upon them. The woman gathering the horses had mounted, another fifty paces away, and was turning her mount to ride up and meet him. The two spearwomen raised their pikes in a defensive brace. The immortal casually turned, lunged at a dun mare, and, extending his sword with a tremendous reach, slashed a thick red line down her flank.
The cut was not deep enough to disable the animal, but it pained and terrified her. She screamed and reared, and the spearwomen charged forward, echoing her rage. Kronos was transfixed. The immortal was mad, perhaps, but still a sound tactician. As the dun tore across the plain, the rest of the herd stampeded after, knocking aside the man who had been gathering their ropes. The mounted woman lost control and slid from the back of her horse. She did not rise. One, thought Kronos. He barely felt the twinge of annoyance at the prospect of losing his mare yet again—and probably the bay stallion, too, when the beast heard his fellows stampeding nearby.
The man who had also been gathering the horses now drew a short sword, and rushed back toward the fray, where the spearwomen's charge had just reached the immortal. The immortal, for his part, had let his heavy bludgeon of a sword descend in a long, free arc from the horse's flesh, then deftly whirled to redirect its mass. For a moment Kronos thought its tip would snag in the dirt, but the immortal was so prodigiously tall that it merely tore through the grasses to rise in a rush of pollen, impossibly swift, and break the first woman's heavy spear in two. With a quick lunge, he caught the woman's chest and neck with the long edge of the weapon. Kronos heard the crack of her breastbone as she fell. As the giant turned, then, the Ur-ish woman's spear took him through the gut. He dropped the sword—the battle is over, thought Kronos, surprised at his disappointment—and then swiftly grabbed the penetrating spear, shoving it through his flesh as he rushed forward. The spearwoman, suddenly in his reach, stepped back in shock and released the weapon—too slowly—the immortal drew the long knife from her own belt and, in the same motion, slit her gorge.
The last swordsman, who had reached the fray only to find his partners dead, stopped and hung back, unsure whether to approach or run. The giant was mortally wounded; surely he would fall soon. Waiting at a safe distance ought to be the best strategy.
As the swordsman crouched in hesitation, the immortal pulled the pike back out of his gut. The blood gushed from his abdomen and his open mouth. Then he wheeled, bloody weapon in hand, charged, parried the swordsman's startled block, and speared him through the chest. Both men fell. The grassland was plunged in silence.
Kronos was shaking with excitement. The other immortal moved with the still grace of an artist, the brutality of a back-alley thug, the fearlessness of a god. The thieves had been like innocent sacrifices to his altar. Kronos had seen other immortals take on that aura of mysterious deity, back in the delta of the Nile—some of them men so old they remembered the great drought, the devastation of the green valleys, and the cities that rose in its wake. Their godhood generally involved a lot of fickle pronouncements, showmanship, and willing mortal fools. Kronos had not found any of them so convincing. There was no humanity left in this creature.
The birds began to call again, quiet and far off, then nearer. Kronos came down the hill. He picked up the business half of the cloven spear as he passed the women's bodies. The white immortal was still breathing—gurgling, really—as the hole in his gut beat out the last of its living blood. His eyes were open. He would not meet Kronos' gaze.
"I am called Kronos," Kronos said in the language of Ur. "Give me your name, brother."
This, too, got no response. Kronos sighed. Well, what had he expected? The man was, after all, only a Northerner and a brute, ignorant, probably tangled in his own monstrous mythology. Maybe, in the end, the North was a bit too rustic. One couldn't even talk to other immortals here. Maybe was time to make his way home. Kronos sat down to wait for the strange immortal to die.
"I am Death," hissed the white giant, and Kronos felt a sudden pressure and pain. He looked down. A flint knife was buried in his chest.
#
Kronos did not die, although he bled copiously and cursed in five languages pulling the knife out. The other immortal, who had died shortly after he struck, had missed the heart. Kronos wasted no time afterwards in spitting him through the heart on the half-spear and tying his hands and feet. The pallid bastard could wake at Kronos' discretion, now. He would not fall for the Northern-mystery routine again. This one knew exactly what he was, and exactly what he was doing. He had not answered Kronos in the tongue of Ur, but in the old language of the city of Ineb-Hedg—of the ancient Nile.
Kronos left the corpses for the flies and hefted the man onto his back. His bay stallion, as he had feared, had stampeded with the rest of the herd, along with the white mare and the rest of the horses. At this rate he would never get her back. But, then, he had something a bit more interesting to occupy himself now.
The dead body was lean but heavy, all sinew, bunched in shoulders and back and powerful legs. It was the musculature of a trained and practiced fighter. And a clever one, too. What had he meant, "I am Death"? At first Kronos hadn't recognized the phrase; in truth, he had only been to the Nile delta once, and had not stayed long, so it took him time to realize that he had understood what had been said, and then to understand exactly what language he had been understanding. As a very young immortal, dazed with lust for quickenings and pleased with his knack for violence, Kronos had wandered the world head-hunting, and sought the older prey who congregated in the great cities. After one lucky victory and two narrow escapes, he had fled again, two steps ahead of the cult of Osiris, a pretentious little cabal of self-deluded would-be demigods. Frankly, he wouldn't be surprised if the man he was carrying had been involved in that set, too—he had something of their affect. (Though, admittedly, not their taste in thick gold neck torcs, to blunt the swords of their enemies.) On the whole, the white giant was far more direct than the Osiris types, audaciously so. Many old ones developed a taste for making themselves out to be masters of a subtlety beyond the arcane, which Kronos found it tiresome. Immortals were killers, no matter how many stories they spun around to excuse or explain it.
Was that the meaning, then, of "I am Death"? Some existential identification with his role as an immortal? The thought had occurred to him, but it seemed too absurdly theatrical, as if Kronos were another mortal to be terrified by show. As if he himself were not also, of course, immortal, and thus Death. No, Kronos thought, maybe his grammar was off—maybe the man had simply said, "I am dead"—as in, "there is no need to know the name of a dead man"—or, perhaps, "I am the death of you", though that clearly hadn't worked out quite as he had planned. (He had to admit, however, that the knife had shaken him, for the first time in many decades. Kronos was—he smirked as he walked—not accustomed to fearing "Death." Ha—there was not even any need for cleverness against such blatant posturing. The puns wrote themselves.)
So. It was definitely "I am Death", then. How long had the old one been raiding down this grassland, and how much further beyond it? Throwing himself on their spears, murdering babes at their mothers' breasts, killing and dying and calmly rising to kill again? For months, certainly, by the age of the corpses in the cottages, and perhaps years before that. It was a singular method of immortal existence, to be sure. Pure, honest, joyless. Painful. Kronos found it as appalling as admirable. "Who are you? -I am Death," Kronos said aloud, trying the words. Well. Perhaps.
Kronos laid the body on the floor of an abandoned hut. As he moved to pull the spear from the body, he paused. The other immortal had seen him as he climbed the hill; Kronos was certain of it. He had seen Kronos, had felt the quickening's pull to challenge, had decided to walk up the hill and show himself, and then turn and walk away. Was it nonchalance, or was this "Death" avoiding the challenge in order to go after easier prey? Or had the whole thing been a show—the naked sword, the gory battle, the mysterious name—some ancient's scheme of seduction, pulling Kronos in with his mystique in order to keep his own precious head safe? Even if so, Kronos had to admit it was an audacious method: balls out, nothing reserved, rather to his own taste. Very well—if so, he would play a while. If it came to a fight, Kronos had no fear for his own head; he had never lost yet.
Kronos pulled the spear from the body, and watched the white flesh knit itself back together. When the breath returned in great painful gasp, he was waiting with a flask of wine.
"Untie me," said Death, imperiously.
"You stabbed me."
"You're alive, aren't you?"
Kronos poked the ashes in the pit, looking for an unburnt bit of wood to burn, and set to his flints.
"You will not take my head," said Death.
"Oh? That is far from decided," said Kronos. But it was decided, he realized. He had no intentions of taking this man's head. Meanwhile, the stranger was toying with him—turning the tables of power, seeing how far it would go. He would have an end to that. Kronos lifted a burning stick from the new fire, and pushed it against Death's flesh. The immortal winced, but did not cry out. Kronos smiled.
"So," he said. "Why do you kill them—all these useless, pathetic men and women? It seems a waste of time. Were they your people? Did they wrong you somehow?"
Death pulled himself up to a sitting position, stretching the new-grown muscles of his torso. "They are nothing to me," he said. "Their lives are nothing. They die so easily."
"Yes. Hardly worth the trouble," said Kronos. "Your method of killing seems oddly painstaking for a man so above it all. What did they do? Rape your sister? Cut off your nuts and bury you in a bog for a century or two?"
He had been hoping for annoyance, but the old one was unmoved. "What they do does not matter," he said. "They never end. I would make an end."
"Oh, an end to the never-ending," Kronos laughed. "How old are you, then, o ancient one?"
"Old enough not to remember my age."
Old ones, Kronos reflected, inevitably either feigned ignorance, or muddled their thousands and their tens-of-thousands. One could generally get a sense, though, through the lenses of arrogance and tactical modestly.
"Take a guess," he said.
"Perhaps five thousand years. But that's only since I took my first head. Before that, I lose count." The words sounded rehearsed, more dark sarcasm than mendacity. Kronos refused to rise to it. From the feel of the man, he would have believed a thousand, perhaps two or three.
"Hm. I've known older."
The immortal stared ahead, ignoring the bait.
"You would do well to please me better than that," Kronos said.
The immortal looked away.
"Let me tell you what I think," said Kronos. "I think you must be a little mad. I have seen it before, with immortals in your advanced state decrepitude. I was at a city near the banks of the Nile. You know the place, I think? Did you know the immortals who worship the one they call Osiris? Your teacher, perhaps?"
"Yes. I have lived with the immortals of the cities of the Nile."
"For how long?"
"Oh. A thousand years."
"…then?"
"I grew weary of them."
Kronos huffed. He was increasingly dissatisfied. Where was the tactician he had seen on the hill, the man who had dared him to watch, the man whom he had been unable, although he could not say why, to kill?
"What about here in the North, then?" he demanded. "How long have you been murdering them? Why?"
"A thousand years," said the old one again. He turned to face Kronos at last. It was a lie, of that Kronos was certain, but there was truth in his face, and the incongruence made a chill ran down Kronos' spine.
"I wearied of it," the immortal said, and his voice was hollow.
"Of what, exactly?"
"All of it."
Kronos threw the burning stick back into the fire. He was suddenly filled with anger and indignation. It could not be for this pathetic nihilism that he had dragged a bleeding corpse halfway across the grassland, and stayed his hand at the old one's quickening, could it? For this… adolescent show of angst and mockery?
"I do not believe you," he said. "The planning, the execution, the mind behind this mayhem—I have seen fortified villages, here in this valley, whose defenders were knifed in the back. You took the trouble to infiltrate them, you lived with them long enough to gain their trust, then took them by treachery. You never let your survivors escape into the lowlands—all those tracks end in blood. But you let the children carry their tales and belongings upland to terrify the rest of the valley. You have them all bottled in a little mountain pass, starving and terrified, with no help coming, waiting for you to come and kill them. It is brilliantly malicious. I have seen you fight. I have seen who you are. You cannot be this—this dead thing."
"If you seek a grand story, you will be disappointed," said the immortal. He turned away, and the arch his neck glowed bronze in the new fire. His voice was carefully blank. "There is nothing more to tell you. I lived too long with mortals, and I tired of it. I retreated to the company of my kind, and I soon wearied of them. I am trying Death this time. Perhaps soon I will weary of that, too."
"Die, then, old one!" Kronos spat out. He plunged the spear back into the man's chest, and stalked out of the hut.
For the next three days, he revived the immortal and questioned him again. On the first day, he would not say anything but "untie me", again and again. On the second, he began reciting in a language Kronos could not understand, guttural and strangely repetitive. On the third, he lay blank and unresponsive for an hour, after which he closed his eyes and waited for the spear.
Kronos had never met anyone quite so infuriating. The questioning left him taut and exhilarated, wondering when he would pierce through to the mystery, wondering whether there could be truly nothing left to the man but this empty façade. At night, he walked far across the grassland, this graveyard that Kronos had robbed of its ghost, whooping and listening for the echoes. Once a lone wolf answered him. That moment when the immortal had stabbed him kept playing through his mind. The ruthless efficiency of his strike, the way his long white arm had been swift as a snake, even in the moment of death. There had been something in his eyes that Kronos could not shake.
He stalked one of the idiotic tame goats and butchered it, then left most of the meat to rot.
Kronos had not needed a teacher to tell him that when you do not die, you keep living; nor that when someone came at you with a sword, you hacked him until he stopped coming. The existence of other immortals had come as no surprise. Long before his first death, he had recognized that his clever ruthlessness put him above his fellow men. The knowledge that there were others similarly deficient at the art of dying did not change Kronos' essential superiority. At times he had befriended them, for his advantage and amusement, but the friendships tended to be brief, and to end in decapitation. That was the thing of it. He had thought that he saw himself mirrored in the old one's eyes. Some cold appraisal, a moment of recognition, that turned the knife a flicker lower and made him miss the heart, that made it, instead, a sick kind of greeting between kinsmen: I know what you are. And yet, speaking to him, Kronos recognized nothing of himself—no restlessness, no fierce delight, no drive at all.
And perhaps that was the answer.
On the evening of the fourth day he untied him. Death cracked his shoulders and his long neck, and sat facing the fire.
"I was wondering," said Kronos, after a time. "If you are really so weary of everything, why not finish it? It is, after all, the only truly final way. There are headhunters all over the world who would be pleased to oblige you, and I am certain you know where they are to be found. As it happens, one sits before you now. Why not let me take your head? I promise you, it would be no trouble to me."
The immortal turned to him, and for a moment his eyes flashed in the fire. "No."
"Ah," said Kronos. "Why not?"
"Because I want to live," he said.
The words were simple, patient, as if Kronos were a child in need of education. Kronos quickly moved forward, until he was so close he could feel the heat of the other man's breath, sense the quivers that ran down his lean torso.
"Then live," Kronos said. "Come with me. Kill with me. I will show you Death beyond your wildest imaginations."
"Yes," said the old one.
That night he told Kronos his name.
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In the morning, Kronos woke to the sound of someone moving outside the hut. He left the old one sleeping on a cloak by the embers—Methos shivered and curled in on himself, without waking—and went out into the cold dew. The grassland spread out pale ahead of him and behind him, and it smelled like mist and pollen and horseshit. Around the side of the hut, he found the little herd of stolen horses. They were cropping and whickering together, still trailing their ropes. The white mare looked placidly at him, tossed her long neck around, and calmly returned to her feed. Seeing her, then, Kronos knew that he had been right: that this had been his true aim, this the fulfillment of what he only now recognized as the aimless dissatisfaction of his immortality's youth. They would be glorious.
He went in and roused the old one. "Come," he said. "I made a promise to bring you to the settlers up in the next valley. It seems I am their great, destined hero. You would not believe how petrified they are of you." He bared his teeth in a grin, then laughed aloud, unable to suppress the life that was swelling all through him. "I plan to keep my promise after all. I will bring them Death."
Methos followed him from the hut. At the door, he paused for a moment to look out over the grassland, as if it had become foreign to him now, or he to it. In the pale light, he seemed, somehow, to be sinking into the contours of his own form, diminishing into a caricature—the etched angles of a jagged face, a smear of bloody ochre on a wall.
Then Kronos put the white mare's lead rope in his hand and clapped him on the shoulder, still grinning. "Come, brother," he said. "We ride."