Immortal Lycanthropes (11 page)

“I don’t think I’m supposed to believe in stuff like that.”

“What you’re supposed to believe in doesn’t matter much.”

“But why, then—why did you bother picking me up?”

“You looked like you needed help. Time will tell if I made a mistake or not.” He stood up. “Put snow on the embers, we should get moving.”

“Where?” Myron asked, but he got on mooseback anyway, and was off.

The days blended together into an endless panorama of ice fishing, snow forts, and winterberries. Spenser told Myron, at times, stories from the inexhaustible store of his life. He had been an elk, as he styled it, in what is now Scotland, for millennia, occasionally traveling south through Britain or swimming, for variety, to Ireland. It was there he learned, from the Tuatha dé Dannan who ruled the island at the time, that he could change into a human. As a human he watched Stonehenge built. As a human he saw exiles from a land they called Egypt beach in Ireland and found the new ruling dynasty—and this was the first he had heard of lands beyond the islands he knew. As a human he fought alongside Finn mac Cumail and his warrior band, across Great Britain, Ireland, and the Isle of Man. But mostly, to escape from what he characterized to Myron as “incessant human sacrifice,” he returned to the uninhabited wilds of Scotland.

It was there that the Roman general Agricola found him, while marching the length of Britain, driving the natives in their war chariots before his unconquerable might. Agricola either pressed or accepted the wild man into his legion. His beard was shaved, for the first time ever, and he learned to drill with a long spear. Rome, when he reached there, was certainly impressive, but it didn’t take him long to realize that the Romans were not much of an upgrade from the barbarities of the druids. They were just more efficient. Emperor Domitian’s hands were stained red with the blood of fellow Romans, and everyone else wallowed in the blood of Rome’s neighbors.

Later, in Dacia, on the shores of the Black Sea, Spenser’s company (a
century,
he called it) got singled out for cowardice, and was scheduled for a
decimation
—a process by which the company was divided into groups of ten, and each group drew lots; the one who drew the bad lot was supposed to get bludgeoned to death by the other nine. Spenser didn’t draw the bad lot, but he got up and left anyway. “Say it was me, say you beat me to a pudding,” he told the other nine in bad Latin. It was one thing to kill Dacians, which was just the kind of thing you did back then, but he balked at turning on his own comrades. An elk ran into the woods.

“The Romans make desolation and call it peace,” General Agricola’s grandson wrote. For a century, the borders of Rome were an orgy of bloodshed, after which the reign of the “five good emperors” ended, and things, predictably, got much, much worse.

Anyone’s life story takes a long time in the telling, and a story that spans several hundred lifetimes much longer. Spenser jumped around a lot, and focused on the stuff Myron would like, the stuff found in his adventure novels. Pirates and crusaders and frontiersmen; bravery and bloodshed. But in Spenser’s accounts, every act of bravery was, ultimately, futile, every heroic action a waste of time, and every story an incipient tragedy. The bloodshed, not the bravery, was the real point of his stories.

The ancient Celts were bound, each individual was bound, by a complicated series of
geasa,
or taboos. In this way, Munremar son of Gerrchenn (with whom Spenser was, two thousand years ago, acquainted) was placed under
geis
not to cut his beard until he had slain the witch woman Cailleach Beara; later he learned that Cailleach Beara was under a
geis
such that she could not be killed except by a bare-faced man. And so Munremar, to resolve this contradiction, held his head in the fire until the beard burned away, and only then, with scarred and bubbling face, was he able to slay the witch. In one sense, this was an action of the most selfless devotion to a cause. But the way Spenser told the story, it became a tale of how one man ruined his face and his health in order to murder a helpless crazy woman.

Myron told stories, too, but they were mainly stories from books he had read. He did the plot of
Treasure Island
over three nights, and he fancied that Spenser was held in rapt attention by the production. Or he went over again and again the strange events of the last few months, looking for clues. Spenser hated and feared the Nine Unknown Men, but he finally revealed, as they sat around the campfire one night, that he had once had occasion to ask them a riddle himself. He had asked, “What animal is it that hath a tail between its eyen?”

“What are eyen?” Myron said.

“It’s an old way of making something plural, like
children
or
brethren.
It means
eyes.
”

“Oh. Why don’t you talk old-fashioned like that more often, if you’re so old?”

“You learn to adapt to that kind of thing. If I spoke old-fashioned, you wouldn’t be able to understand a word.”

“I could understand,” said Myron, who had read Walter Scott. “I know all those
thee
s and
thou
s and things.”

Spenser looked grim. “You still don’t really understand what all this means. Have you ever met anyone who’s only a hundred and fifty or two hundred years old?”

Myron conceded he had not.

“There are a few around, necromancers and alchemists mainly. And they’re always stuck in a world that ended a century ago. I mean, they can’t adapt to anything modern. They hate automobiles and telephones, they flip out in the motion pictures, and in the end they retreat more and more into the trappings of their childhoods—panopticons and hornbooks or whatever. But my childhood was spent among elks. The only things around were trees and hills. Forget automobiles, I had to get used to walking on two legs, and then wearing pants, eating with my hands, and then eating with a knife. Old-fashioned talk? I can barely remember the human language I first learned, but . . . it was something like . . .” And here he produced a few tongue-twisting sentences so bleak and alien that Myron dropped the stick he was holding. The bat on the end of it landed in the fire, and its wing membranes went up like tissue paper. Myron scrambled to save dinner, and only later, as he was getting ready to go to sleep, did he ask Spenser what the terrifying sentences were.

Spenser was still stirring the fire up. “An invocation to the fourteen chthonic gods of Hatheg-Kla,” he said.

“Fourteen? Why fourteen?” asked Myron.

After a long pause, Spenser said, “Because the fifteenth died.”

Myron thought this all sounded so cool. “That thing you said, can you,” he asked, “say it again?”

Spenser could not help but smile as out of the terrifying and oppressive darkness behind the campfire he intoned, “Pax sax sarax . . .”

One morning Myron woke up with a start. Spenser was missing. He stumbled out of the lean-to and saw two moose; one was obviously Spenser, the other had no antlers. Myron made a guess about what was up and ducked back into the lean-to. Later, when Spenser was making breakfast, Myron quizzed him about it. “Was that a lady moose?” he asked.

“What? No, he was male.”

“Then how come he had no antlers?”

“Moose shed their antlers for the winter.”

“Oh yeah?” Myron crowed. “Then how come you still have antlers?”

“I travel around too much some years, it interferes with the rhythms. They’ll fall off sooner or later.” He looked worried, or perhaps guilty and guarded about something.

But Myron didn’t believe him. Every once in a while, as he rode that day, he’d tweak Spenser about having a girlfriend, until Spenser bucked him off, onto and through the thin ice of a frozen pond. They spent the rest of the day drying Myron out by a fire. Spenser fretted about the delay and tried to look grim-faced, but when he saw Myron’s hair, wetted and then frozen onto crazy shapes, he couldn’t help smiling.

Myron glowered at him, and spread in front of the fire his meager possessions. The cardboard tube he’d been carrying was sodden through the tape, and he went to open it, but suddenly Spenser kicked it out of his hands.

“Lene larbar, longeur baith lowsy in lisk and lonye!” Spenser shouted, his Scotch accent indecipherable.

“Are you insane?” Myron shouted back. “That’s a doomsday device!”

“Are ye insane to open such a thing? Dinna ye ever open that; there be wraiths in the wood.”

“What does that mean?”

“All right, all right,” Spenser said. “The moose I saw, he says they’re something in the forest, something big and terrifying he’s no seen here before.”

“Moose can talk?”

“Of course they cannae talk, but ye can tell. Ye can smell their fear. There’s something out there, and two shillings say it means ye nae guid.”
No good,
he meant. The word
lion
neither one mentioned, but the lion was out there, somewhere. Myron hoped that lions hated snow.

They dried the cardboard tube out as well as they could without opening it. It came out warped and stained. And then they traveled for two days straight, like fugitives. Afterward, the moose pretended nothing was different, but as he walked he moved his giant head, always, back and forth. At times he would stand stock-still and listen. Myron held his breath. The branchings of the sensitive antlers conducted sound very well, and a moose in full display has hearing far better than a human’s.

These were the days of fear. Every day Spenser combed the surrounding countryside for sinister tracks, but there were only the usual things: rabbits, deer, hikers. Once Myron caught a glimpse of a bald eagle gliding directly overhead, there in the dead of winter.

“I’ve never seen one of those before,” Myron said, in awe.

“We’ve got to get a bow,” Spenser said, his eyes narrowing suspiciously.

They bought one. Spenser wove Myron a kind of mask out of pliant branches, then stuck small deer antlers he’d dug up in it, and Myron made a sign out of garbage that read
MOOSE RIDES
: $5. They spent several days by the highway, and took a trip to town and spent all the money at a pawnshop on a children’s compound bow and several hunting arrows. They also got a decent meal and a sleeping bag that could roll up into a small pouch; which was the better purchase, as the eagle never returned. But Spenser taught Myron to shoot, and bade him keep the bow, and an arrow with a broad, jagged head, ever ready.

For there was danger in the forest. Previously, they had been spending a few days at one campsite, collecting enough food that they could march, or moose-ride, for a couple of days without stopping to forage; but now Spenser pushed them to move every day. Snow was all they drank. “It’ll get easier in the summer,” Spenser said. But Myron feared nothing now, and he was living a life of woodcraft and adventure and having a ball.

“Wait,” he said suddenly, “did they guess your riddle?”

“Did who guess my riddle?”

“The Unknown Men. Did they figure out the riddle you gave them?”

“They always figure out the riddles. They have a brazen head that answers all questions.”

“Okay. So what animal has a tail between its eyen?”

Spenser said, “It is a cat, when it licketh its arse.”

Myron laughed and laughed. If only, he thought, it hadn’t been so freezing cold. Also, they ran out of toothpaste.

Spenser’s hair had grown so long and wild that Myron taught him how to wrap it around his waist like a belt, after the fashion of old mountain men and explorers he’d read about. Book learning was good for something, at least.

One day, as Myron was untangling some fishing line, Spenser put a hand on his shoulder. Moments later, Myron felt a new prickling sensation. Spenser pulled him up by his shirt and dragged him over, through quite a few burrs and thorns, to a low fork in a dogwood tree. Peering between the two trunks, Myron saw, ambling among some pines, what looked like an enormous armadillo, ten feet long. Its gigantic shell taller than a man looked like a turtle’s, and armor plating covered its shaggy forehead and its tail, which was tipped with a spiked club like a morning star. Ponderously it moved, plowing deep furrows in the snow, and it browsed on pine needles.

“So that’s what the moose was worried about. But she’s harmless. She just doesn’t usually come this far north,” Spenser said.

“Does it know we’re here?” Myron asked.

“Of course, she just doesn’t care. She never talks to anyone.”

“She must be very lonely,” Myron said. He watched until with excruciating slowness the enormous bulk trailed out of sight.

That beast, last of an extinct species, was a relic of the past. But around the campfire, started with their soda-can mirror or, on cloudy days, with a book of matches from a convenience store, Spenser’s stories moved closer to the current age and finally entered what he called the Time of Troubles. He circled around the issue for a while before finally plunging into it. All times were times of troubles, after all, but at some point in the seventeenth century, “our people” (immortal lycanthropes, he meant) began to realize how things worked. At best the squirrel may have known for thousands of years that a fox and a beaver passed beneath his trees that were different from other foxes and beavers, and the squirrel may even have known that they were, like him, capable of assuming human form, but it was not until now that immortal lycanthropes pieced together that there was one of us for each species of animal (the idea that animals had species, as scientists use the word today, was still nascent); that we could only be killed by another of our kind; that the presence of another could be perceived from twenty or thirty yards; that only the beasts, as opposed to the birds or the cold and slimy things, were represented. No marsupials, either, and no egg-layers, like the platypus or the spiny echidna. All this we were finally piecing together.

The result was panic. Creatures who for millennia thought they were unique discovered they were only slightly unique; creatures who for millennia thought they knew all five or six similarly special beings now learned there were untold thousands more out there. An orgy of bloodletting followed. The tiger killed the tapir, the onager, the lynx and the leopard, the porcupine, the sloth bear, several monkeys, no one knows how many mice and shrews and hares and hedgehogs, and, in a fight that lasted three days on and off, the Indian elephant. Then he began to travel and killed the badger, the Javan rhinoceros, the wolf, the gnu, the quagga, the snow leopard, the spectacled bear, the impala, the chamois, the raccoon dog, the genet, the eland, the orangutan, and a dozen others, many of which Myron had never heard of. And then he crossed over to the Americas. The porcupine and the badger were dead, but there were still New World porcupines and badgers, many New World monkeys, and strange species that had never known something like a tiger had even existed. The puma went down fighting, and the pronghorn went down running. The two-toed sloth just went down.