Spanners - The Fountain of Youth (28 page)

“I do,”
said Adam.

“As you drink, stare at me and make sure that I’m the last thing that you see,”
said Yahíma. “This is so that I’ll be there to help you in your dream. It won’t be
me
, of course; it will be your mind’s creation, but to you I’ll be
there
.”

“I understand,”
said Adam.

The smoke from under his chair was pouring out of its container and had expanded to fill the room. Adam could barely see Yahíma, but she eventually cut through the mist and handed him the cup of white liquid. He noticed that she had her own cup and her own chair
, and they were both now covered in the thick vapor. Adam saw her holding up the cup to her lips, and soon her eyes glowed through the smoke.

“Now drink, Adam,”
she said. “And look straight ahead; make sure that I’m the last thing you see.”

/***/

Her words entered his thoughts, and his thoughts slowly turned into dreams. Adam heard thousands of voices from all around him, as if he were in a crowd of people begging for his attention. The bewilderment passed and soon his mind was as lucid as Yahíma had said it would be.

He looked around and saw that he was floating over fog, and then realized that the fog was clouds made out of the smoke that Yahíma had brought from under his chair. He saw that he was on the inside of a large sphere seemingly the size of the
Earth; he looked above and saw that the mist coated the inside completely. He flew outward to the edge of the sphere and peeked beneath the clouds and saw worlds on the edges below, and recognized them faintly.

He saw a grime-covered
eighteenth-century London, followed by a stone wall patrolled by Roman soldiers.
This is Hadrian’s Wall
, thought Adam.
This is the wall that demarcated the line between British Rome and the Barbarians beyond.

He floated over a marble palace with gold-lined rooms and pathways covered with a hundred different types of animals on the
inside. There were thousands of people walking within its walls, and Adam noticed that some of them appeared to be European; he even noticed himself.
This is when I accompanied Marco Polo,
thought Adam.
This is Kublai Khan’s palace of Xanadu. What are all these places?

“They’re your memories, Adam,”
said a voice behind him as if it was answering his thoughts.

He turned around and saw Yahíma floating next to him, only she had the pale skin of the Fountain. Adam looked closer and saw that her skin was actually
translucent
and that a pure black heart beat within her chest.

“Choose one place, one of your memories, and we’ll visit,”
said Yahíma.

“Which one?”
asked Adam.

“It will come to you,”
said Yahíma.

Her beating black heart entranced Adam
; it pumped rhythmically, spraying out glowing lights through her bloodstream that faded as they traveled outward. He was still lucid, so he turned his attention below to the dreamscape of his memories. He flew forward over Kublai Khan’s gilded city and then passed the outer walls to find a dusty plain near a cave, where a blond boy was lying on the ground.

“That place,”
said Adam, not knowing why. “I want to go there.”

“So be it,”
said Yahíma, and she flew down.

As she flew past Adam
, he took a closer look at her dark heart and noticed that it had a small face of its own.

/***/

They landed on the ground near the blond boy and realized that he was dead. His body had been badly burnt by the sun, and from his severely bruised face, it looked like death might have been a welcome end for him.

“These are the Mines of Capua, second century
BC,” said Adam. “They sent slaves here to work for the rest of their lives.”

“A tough place for anyone, but I understand that the fair-skinned Celtic peoples fared worst of all
in this place,” said Yahíma, kneeling by the blond boy.

“They would last a few months,”
said Adam. “The Romans would send them here as a death sentence.”

“And why were you here, Adam
? Weren’t you a Roman soldier?”

“I was,”
said Adam.

“But you were sent here
. Why?”

“I was sent with my cohort,”
said Adam. “One of our troop had refused an order to set fire to a village, so they condemned him for cowardice.”

“
The punishment for cowardice in the Roman army was cruel,” said Yahíma.

“
Decimation
,” said Adam. “In a sense, the cruelest punishment one can imagine.”

Adam looked beyond the boy; a group of bound men were walking towards
the mines, prodded and beaten as they walked. Adam recognized the men that he had once fought alongside, but only barely. They were bearded, dirty and rail-thin from months of malnutrition.

“Decimation,”
said Yahíma. “When one in your troop is condemned for cowardice, the cohort is split into groups of ten, and one in each ten is picked at random to die. He must be beaten to death by the other nine. He had nothing to do with the cowardice, and yet he dies at the hands of his friends.”

“Yes,”
said Adam. “It was a cruel practice.”

“But it turned Rome’s army into a fearsome machine, did it not?”

“Perhaps.”

“And Rome gave many gifts to the world,”
said Yahíma. “So perhaps the practice of decimation was worthwhile.”

“No,”
said Adam, shaking his head. “No, it wasn’t.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know why not,” said Adam. “It just wasn’t.”

There was a whip crack and then some yelling. A guard was beating one of Adam’s cohorts with a club. Three other prisoners went to defend him
, but they were ineffective; all three of them combined probably weighed less than the guard that wielded the club. Adam looked closer and found that one of the prisoners was his old self, bearded, thin and feigning weakness.

“Your group of ten is here, is this correct?”
asked Yahíma.

“Yes,”
said Adam, “all ten.”

“All ten?”

“We refused the order to kill one of our own,” said Adam. “So we were sent here as a group.”

“You fought nobly for Rome, battle after battle, and then you committed one more noble act, perhaps the most noble of all,”
said Yahíma. “And as a reward, you were sent here.”

“Yes,”
said Adam.

“It was unjust, but once again
, such actions built Rome,” said Yahíma. “So perhaps it was worthwhile.”

“No,”
Adam said, shaking his head more vehemently. “It was not.”

Adam looked at Yahíma’s heart; it had taken the shape of a small child and was now spreading its dark limbs outwards, emanating beads of light with every breath its host took.

/***/

Later that night it was pouring rain
, and Adam was in an iron cage that held his old self and his cohorts. The prison guards had been instructed by Rome to place the cage outside in the event of rain, and the ten men slept under the downpour. Adam felt it too; though the men in the cage couldn’t see him, this was more real than any dream he’d ever had.

Adam watched his own self, bearded and gaunt, wake up and look around with faintly glowing
eyes. His past self took a small knife hidden in the cloths around his waist, and he proceeded to look for a weak part of the cage. Finding a bar thinner than the rest, he looked around to make sure no guards were on notice, and then proceeded to whittle away at the cage.

“Escape,”
said Yahíma. “Escape always holds salvation, regardless of the indignity around.”

“No,”
said Adam, watching his past self knife through the bar. “That only works if you’re successful. I led them out of the cage, but a week later we were caught.”

“But you didn’t give in to the indignity around you,”
said Yahíma. “History ultimately vindicated you and your cohorts.”

“History did no such thing,”
said Adam. “It never vindicates those it kills.”

/***/

Yahíma snapped her fingers and next thing he knew, he was in a dusty fighting pit, watching his old self battle a man twice his size.

“They caught you and sold you and your nine cohorts to the owner of an arena, on the condition that you all die in the gladiator pit within three months,”
said Yahíma.

“He accomplished that in two,”
said Adam.

“Except for you,”
said Yahíma.

Adam watched the crowd cheer half-heartedly as
the bigger man pummeled his old self mercilessly. Adam’s old self was clean-shaven, but not in much better shape than he had been as a prisoner of Capua.

“They billed you as the man who couldn’t be killed,”
said Yahíma.

“But I ended up as the man who took endless beatings without fighting back,”
said Adam. “It didn’t quite have the draw they wanted.”

“Your dignity survived,”
said Yahíma.

“That, or I never learned how to fight,”
said Adam.

“Either way
, you did the right thing,” said Yahíma. “Of your limited options, you chose the best path.”

“Did I?”
asked Adam, looking grimly at Yahíma.

Adam knew where she was going, and this time snapped his fingers to move them forward. Right before the scene changed, he took one more look at her heart; the child inside her continued to shoot light through her body but was now crying. Its tears were deep red and just barely visible against its dark skin.

/***/

They next appeared a kilometer from the arena, and Adam’s old self was tied and gagged on the ground. There were two other men there, one of them bound next to Adam, and both Adam and his old self looked on helplessly as the third man beat the second.

“The arena owner was given three months to kill all ten of you,” said Yahíma. “This is month three, and Rome’s emissary is set to arrive tomorrow.”

“They were always on time,”
said Adam.

“The arena owner couldn’t make money off you, so he tried to kill you,”
said Yahíma. “Failing that, he killed the man next to you in your stead. He killed an innocent man so that he could survive Rome’s punishment.”

They watched the owner of the arena beat the man until he stopped moving, then the owner drove him through with a lance and the victim was still. The arena owner then took a club and beat the dead man until his face was unrecognizable.

“Rome came and they thought it was me,” said Adam. “I left the arena, but an innocent man had to die for that to happen.”

Adam saw that the black child had been silently crying out in pain, and bloody tears now coursed through her host’s veins, making her pale body glow bright red.

/***/

Yahíma snapped her fingers once more and they were in another cage, this one wooden and open-topped. They were being pulled on a horse’s cart
, and Adam saw that there was another woman in the cage with him; a woman with a mangled leg, holding a child. The woman was in a deep fever and barely conscious. Adam saw his old self walking by the cart with loosely bound feet, and then he stood up in the cart to see that he was in a caravan of thirty people. They were walking in the desert and the heat beat down on them more mercilessly than in either Capua or the arena; there was no one else around, not even animals.

“The owner of the arena sold you to a slaver, and the slaver took you on a yearlong journey across North Africa,”
said Yahíma. “Why?”

“To this day I have no idea,”
said Adam.

“Who was she?”
asked Yahíma, pointing at the feverish woman with the child and the mangled leg.

“A prostitute from the fighting pit,” said Adam. “She had been with one of my cohorts and became impregnated before he died. She was sold to the slaver to be his concubine, and he thought the child was his.”

“She doesn’t look well,” said Yahíma.

“After she had the child, she fell off the cart and broke her leg; the fever that would kill her came soon thereafter.
”

“What happened to her child?”

“The slaver raised him until his face came in, and when he realized the child wasn’t his, he sold the boy at the nearest village.”

“And what happened to the boy?”

Adam crept closer to the mother holding her infant, smelling her sweat as she held onto the child with trembling arms, trying to suckle him.

“He grew up amongst thieves, and was later recruited by Carthage to fight in their Punic wars,”
said Adam. “He became a killer of Roman soldiers, known for slitting their throats while they slept.”