have you known or heard of anyone else like you, whom time doesn’t appear to touch? Kinfolk, perhaps?”
Rufus shook his head.
Lugo sighed. “Neither have I.” He mustered resolve and plunged forward. “And I have waited and tried, searched and endured, since first I came to understand.”
“Uh?” The wine splashed from Rufus’ cup.
Lugo sipped out of his own, for what comfort it could give. “How old do you think I am?” he asked.
Rufus peered before he said at the bottom of his throat: “You look maybe twenty-five.”
A smile quirked on the left side of Lugo’s mouth. “Like you, I don’t know my age for certain,” he answered slowly. “But Hiram was king in Tyre when I was born there. What chronicles I have since been able to study and figure from show me that that was about twelve centuries ago.”
Rufus gaped. The freckles stood lurid on a skin gone white. His free hand made a sign.
“Don’t be afraid,” Lugo urged. “I’m in no pact with darkness. Or with Heaven, for that matter, or any power, any soul. I am your kind of flesh, whatever that means. I have simply been longer on earth. It is lonely. You have had the barest foretaste of how lonely it is.”
He rose, leaving staff and cup, to pace the cramped floor, hands behind back. “I was not born Flavius Lugo, of course,” he said. “That is only the latest name I have taken out of—I’ve lost count of how many. The earliest was— never mind. A Phoenician name. I was a merchant until the years brought me to trouble much like yours today. Then for a long time I was a sailor, a caravan guard, a mercenary soldier, a wandering bard, any number of trades in which a man may come and go little noticed. That was a hard school I went through. Often I came near dying from wounds, shipwreck, hunger, thirst, a dozen different perils. Sometimes I would have died, were it not for the strange vigor of this body. A slower danger, more frightening as I began to perceive it, was that of drowning, losing my reason, in sheer memories. For a while I did have scant use of my wits. In a way that was a mercy; it blunted the pain of losing everyone I came to care for, losing him and losing her and losing, oh, the children. ... Bit by bit I worked out the art of memory. I now have clear recall, I am like a walking library of Alexandria—no, that burned, didn’t it?” He chuckled at himself. “I do make slips. But I have the art of storing what I know until it’s wanted, then calling it forth. I have the art of controlling sorrow. I have—”
He observed Rufus’ awed regard and broke off. “Twelve hundred years?” the artisan breathed. “You seen the Savior?”
Lugo forced a smile. “Sorry, I have not. If he was born in the reign of Augustus, as they say—that would have been, m-m, between three and four hundred years ago—then I was in Britannia at the time. Rome hadn’t conquered it yet, but trade was brisk and the southern tribes were cultured in their fashion. And much less meddlesome. That’s always a highly desirable feature in a place. Damnably hard to find these days, short of running off to the wild German or Scoti or whatever. And even they—
“Another art I’ve developed is that of aging my appearance. Hair powder, dyes, such things are cumbersome, unreliable. I let everybody talk about how young I continue to look. Some people do, after all. But meanwhile gradually I begin to stoop a little, shuffle a little, cough, pretend to be hard of hearing, complain of aches and pains and the insolence of modern youth. It only works up to a point, of course. Finally I must vanish and start a new life elsewhere under a new name. I try to arrange things so it will be reasonable to suppose I wandered off and met with misfortune, perhaps because I’d grown old and absent-minded. And as a rule I’ve been able to prepare for the move. Accumulate a hoard of gold, learn about the home to be, perhaps visit it and establish my fresh identity—”
Some of the weariness of the centuries fell over him. “Details, details.” He stopped and looked into one of the blind windows. “Am I going senile? I don’t usually gabble this way. Well, you’re the first like me I’ve found, Rufus, the very first. Let’s hope you won’t be the last.”
“Did you, uh, know about others?” groped the voice at his back.
Lugo shook his head. “I told you I never did. How could I? A few times I thought I saw a trace, but it gave out or it proved false. Once I may have. I’m not sure.”
“What was that ... master? You want to tell me?”
“I may as well. It was in Syracuse, where I based myself for a good many years because of its ties with Carthage. Lovely, lively city. A woman, Althea was her name, fine to look on and bright in the way women sometimes got to be in the later days of the Greek colonies—I knew her and her husband. He was a shipping magnate and I skippered a tramp freighter. They’d been married for over three decades, he’d gone bald and pot- bellied, she’d borne him a dozen children and the oldest of them was gray, but she might have been a maiden in springtime.”
Lugo fell silent a while before finishing, flat-voiced: “The Romans captured the city. Sacked it: I was absent. Always make an excuse to clear out when you see that kind of thing coming. When I returned, I inquired. She could have been taken for a slave. I could have tried to find her and buy her free. But no, when I’d tracked down somebody who knew, insignificant enough to’ve been left unhurt, I learned she was dead. Raped and stabbed, I heard. Don’t know if that’s true or not. Stories grow in the telling. No matter. It was long ago.”
“Too bad. You should’a got in there first.” Lugo tautened. “Uh, sorry, master,” Rufus said. “You don’t, uh, don’t seem to hate Rome.”
“Why should I? It’s eternally the same tale, war, tyranny, massacre, slavery. I’ve been party to it myself. Now Rome is on the receiving end.”
“What?” Rufus sounded aghast. “Can’t be! Rome is forever!”
“As you like.” Lugo turned back to him. “Apparently I have, at last, found a fellow immortal. At least, here is someone I can safeguard, watch, make certain of. Two or three decades should suffice. Though already I have no real doubt.”
He drew breath. “Do you see what this means? No, you scarcely can. You’ve had no time to think about it.” He surveyed heavy visage, low forehead, dismay yielding to a loose-lipped glee. I don’t expect you ever will, he thought. You are a moderately competent woodworker, nothing else. And I’m lucky to have found this much. Unless Althea—but she slipped through my fingers, away into death.
“It means I am not unique,” Lugo said. “If there are two of us, there must be more. Very few, very seldom born. It isn’t in the bloodlines, like height or coloring or those deformities I’ve seen run in families. Whatever the cause is, it happens by accident. Or by God’s will, if you prefer, though I’d think that makes God out to be sheerly capricious. And surely senseless mischance takes off many immortals young, as it takes off ordinary men and women and children. Sickness we may escape, but not the sword or the runaway horse or the flood or the fire or the famine or whatever. Possibly more die at the hands of neighbors who think this must be a demon, magician, monster.”
Rufus cowered. “My head’s all a-spin,” he whimpered.
“Well, you’ve had a bad time. Immortals need rest too. Sleep if you wish.”
Rufus’ expression was glazing over. “Why couldn’t we say we was, uh, saints? Angels?”
“How far would you have gotten?” Lugo gibed. “Conceivably a man born into royalty— But I don’t suppose that’s ever happened, as rare as our kind must be. No, if we survive, we learn early on to keep our heads low.”
“Then how shall we find each other?”
Rufus hiccoughed and farted.
3
“Come our with me into the peristyle,” said Lugo.
“Oh, gladly,” Cordelia sang. Almost, she danced at his side.
It was an evening mild and clear. The moon stood over the eastern roof, close to full, in a sky still violet- blue. Westward, heaven darkened and stars trembled forth. City sounds had mostly died out; crickets chirred. Moonlight dappled the flowerbeds, shivered on the water of a pool, brought Cordelia’s young face and breast out of shadow into argency.
She and he stood hand in hand a few minutes. “You were so busy today,” she said at length. “When you came back early, I hoped— Of course, you had your work to do.”
“I did that, unfortunately,” he replied. “But these next hours belong to us.”
