The Sons of Adam: The sequel of The Immortal Collection (A Saga of the Ancient Family Book 2) (6 page)

8

I want it to hurt

IAGO

I checked the time on my cell for the third time. I'd arranged to meet Dana at the restaurant forty minutes ago and I was still practicing how I was going to apologize for our argument that morning to an empty chair.

To tell the truth it was the first time that my wife had stood me up like that, so I ended up ordering a grilled monkfish and went back to the MAC to look for her. She'd be buried under a pile of documents, or maybe still upset about our argument.

I went up to Dana's office, but her desk was tidy and she wasn't there. Adriana was reasonably tidy, although I had to admit that more so at work than at home. I guessed that she had already left, maybe she had gone to have lunch at the BACus or maybe she was with a colleague.

She hadn't answered her cell all morning and I'd left several messages, although she hadn't bothered to answer them. She must have been much angrier than I'd thought.

At around four o'clock I went to look for her at BACus, but there were only a few employees there having a coffee before starting the afternoon shift. I went over to the most probable suspect, the colleague Dana and I shared many meetings and spare time with.

"Salva, did you have lunch with Adriana today?" I asked the head of the Ancient Period.

Salva took his baseball cap off and rubbed his hand over his recently shaved head, a gesture that he repeated several hundred times a day and of which he wasn't fully aware.

"No, I saw her go upstairs to her office first thing this morning, but she must have left for some kind of emergency, because we had a video conference with the Bibat team and she didn't come to get me.

Emergency? What kind of emergency could she have had?
I wondered, intrigued.

"Thanks anyway, I'll see you later," I said, going up to the bar.

"Jose, was Adriana here this morning?" I asked the waiter. Jose had that special kind of memory that I often saw in bars: he always remembered what each customer ordered, what time they came through the door and who they came in with.

Jose shook his head, noting my concern with the precision of a psychologist.

"Ok. If she comes in, tell her that something urgent has come up and to call me asap."

"Is everything alright, Iago?" he asked, while polishing a glass with the MAC logo on it.

"Everything's fine, Jose. But don't forget to tell her, ok?"

I started up my car and headed home, but Dana hadn't been there all morning. Everything was just as I'd left it before leaving for Altamira. Our life together suspended in a moment that I could make out in an instant. The bed was reasonably made. The books were in their unstable pile next to the armchair. I grabbed the keys for her old house and took the freeway to Santander. A few minutes later I was at her parent's apartment in the Plaza Pombo, but it was so cold and soulless that I didn't stay for more than a minute. Just enough time to see that Dana hadn't visited her memories in months.

I left another voicemail, slightly longer, slightly more anxious than the last.

I checked my cell, her Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Archaeologists accounts, were she often spent hours, in case she had updated her status. Nothing at all.

7pm. I decided to go back to the MAC. Where else could she be? I took a deep breath and went from office to office, asking everyone if they had given her a ride to Santander, or to our house. Chisca, Nieves and Onofre hadn't seen her, none of the interns had, or the new guy in Restoration. I took another deep breath and knocked on the door to Elisa's office. She was the most improbable of all the possibilities, but I still had to try.

"Elisa, by any chance have you seen Adriana today?"

She looked up in surprise. Since Jairo del Castillo had entered her life like the fire of Hades, burning her like any other citizen from the 21st century, she'd been wandering around the museum with an absent look on her face. She'd cut her hair and dyed it black, adding another twenty years to the black circles that pulled her eyes downwards. She always looked at me for slightly longer than necessary. I think she was trying to find some trace of my brother in me, as if she was trying to convince herself that he had once existed and what she went through with him a year ago —that humiliating episode in the Real Hotel with the handcuffs and the iron bars— had actually happened.

After hearing her negative grunt, I felt someone touch me on the shoulder and I turned around with a start.

"Boss, have you found Adriana yet?" asked Salva, who had been waiting patiently in the doorway. "The guys from Vitoria are pretty pissed because she didn't turn up for the video conference."

"No, I haven't seen her!" I shouted. "And stop asking me! Show a little initiative and sort it out on your own!"

Elisa, still sitting in her office, lifted her head, as if my shouting had roused her from a daydream. Salva, on the other hand, took a few seconds to react. He tugged on his cap and turned around, ready to go down the stairs.

"Ok, boss. Fine," he managed to say, drooping his shoulders.

I felt bad and ran down the stairs after him.

"Salva, I owe you an apology. I shouldn't have shouted at you, you were just doing your job."

"Don't worry about it, boss. Bad day?"

Good question
, I thought.

"I'm still not sure. An empty day, if anything."

"Well, then I hope it gets better soon."

"Me too," I said, almost begging.

9pm. I now faced the disconcerting reality that no one had seen her all day, but at least I knew that Dana had gone to the MAC, given that her car was still parked there.

At that point I was sure that something had happened to her, or that she was more upset with me than I had originally thought, or maybe I had hit a nerve, one that should never be hit if you didn't want to hurt someone that you cared so much about.

Once again, I punched in the nine digits that separated us and I recorded my concerns.

"My darling Dana, this is the eleventh message that I've left. Many hours have passed and it's not funny anymore. I understand that you're angry, and I hope that we can talk about this calmly, or not so calmly, tonight, about everything that's been left unsaid. We'll talk about the Neolithic Age, about the battle of Kinsale and the fall of Rome, if necessary.  I promise that I'll draw you a color map of a bedroom at Çatal Hüyük, of the public buildings and the town square. What I want to say, Dana, after this clumsy attempt of reconciliation with information as bait, is that I am sorry about the way this morning's conversation went. Look, I don't know if this is our umpteenth first great crisis, but we work it out together, ok? What I'm asking you is that you please give me a sign that you're alive, that you're breathing or walking around this world that we still dwell on. I promise to be patient."

11pm. I was mad, I admit it, but would she really behave like this, not come home at night without letting me know? And leave her car at the museum? I absentmindedly stirred the soup I was having for dinner.

But what are you doing, Urko? She's not like that and you know it.

I left the Swiss spoon in my soup, I left the soup in the bowl, I left the bowl on the table. I put a warm parka on, preparing myself for the cold I would face that night, and once again, drove to the museum.

I had a spare set of keys to Dana's car, and after parked my car alongside it, I got in, expecting to find something out of the ordinary, but I didn't. I crossed over to the building, which at that time was deserted and quiet. I had an uneasiness in my stomach that wouldn't allow me to digest the damn soup, and I was about to throw up as I walked into my office, searching for some comfort on my couch to think calmly.

And that's when I saw it: the dagger, the engraved runes, the piece of paper.

Carved on my desk were a few words in the old runic alphabet, the Younger Futhark, which was the variation used by the Danish.

I quickly translated the message that my son had left:

DOES IT HURT, FATHER?

BECAUSE I WANT IT TO HURT.

Next to the last rune, Gunnarr had rammed an old Viking dagger into my desk. It might not have been a thousand year old original, but it was worn and it was obvious that it had had frequent use. The small piece of paper that had been run throught with the knife contained the continuation of the message in the carving, but in a crude Castilian Spanish written in the Roman alphabet:

"I need it to hurt in order to be able to consider you as my father once more.

It will be quick, start looking for us.

You will reach her by air or water.

Will there be thousands, will they be beautiful?

It won't be big, you will find Massacres and Cathedrals."
 

I stifled a scream and bent over. Gunnarr
The Trickster
, son of Kolbrun, son of Nestor, had taken Dana to God knows what remote place and he had had the nerve to leave me a clue.

I pulled the dagger out of the desk and jabbed it into his words, beside myself. Splinters of wood were flying about, some embedding themselves in my hand. I didn't feel anything, other than the warm splash of blood that hit my sweater, just above my wrist.

I turned the light off and walked over to the window. Mother Moon had a dangerous look to her. Both of us knew what we had to do. I covered up the mess on the table with several heavy copies of catalogs and returned to our home with just the piece of paper and the dagger sticking out of my pocket.

Two hours later, unable to sleep, I wandered the deserted streets of a dark, cold, hostile Santander.

I looked at the city in bewilderment, as if an earthquake had destroyed our landmarks, the Paseo Pereda, the Eastern Market, the Stone Crane, the Monument to the Santander Fire...

We had boiled Dana's existence down to its mere exchange value.

I'm on the verge of breaking into a thousand pieces and the universe won't even notice,
I thought.
It's going to ignore me again. It will turn its back and tomorrow a new Sun will rise in this part of the world
.

I couldn't breathe properly, as if I had to breathe through a keyhole. My senses were numb and I hadn't felt the cold or heat for a while. I couldn't smell the salty sea breeze, I couldn't hear the crashing of the waves against the promenade, the buildings all looked the same, so impersonal that they could have been built during any period I had lived through. Or maybe it was the fact that every human being looked the same to me that night. A beast that I had raised had kidnapped my wife and had ordered me to find them, as if we were playing hide and seek.

"Ok, Gunnarr. Do you want it to hurt?" I shouted at the air, facing the dark Cantabrian sea. "Well, here you have it, son. It hurts, of course it hurts. You've got what you wanted. Now what?"

The sea just laughed at me, it ignored me and the tide continued to rise, oblivious to my distress.

9

The Sons of Adam

LÜR

Sungir, in what is now Russia 23,000 B.C.

Lür opened his eyes, trying to remember something from the last few days. The red poison from the root kept him in a world of pleasant dreams.

And that was better than the reality, than the cold, than the loneliness.

He had descended the side of the snowy mountain at night, in the dark, with his sights set on the tiny dots of light. He had fallen down a thousand times, in a thousand different ways, and he had gotten back up a thousand times, singing like a madman, like the happiest crazy person on earth.

There are more survivors, I'm not alone.

The first thing he made out was a robust face, with a beard like his. The man smiled at him, placed his muscular arm between Lür's legs and lifted him onto his shoulders, wrapping him around his neck.

"You weigh less than a child," he said.

"I thought that I was the last man on Earth," Lür managed to answer.