He Who Cannot Die Read online

  After departing Ker, I had exhausted my options at too many of the nearest villages, so I took my journey far into the North where the land was colder, but the entire population had been replaced twice over since I was last there. I would be unknown, which was what I needed.

  I eventually found the welcoming and large village of Ghab. I traded the freshly cut pelt of a buffalo in exchange for a place to stay while I got a feel for the land and built shelter for myself.

  “I know you,” a filthy and scrawny man said to me one day from within the shadows of the wall he was sitting against. He wore an animal skin which was mostly worn-through, and he looked as though he hadn’t eaten for some time.

  “You don’t know me,” I replied, not wanting to disrupt my new sense of anonymity. The more I studied him, though, the more familiar he seemed.

  The woman who lived in the hut I was passing appeared in her doorway. “Ignore that man,” she instructed me. “He thinks he knows everyone. We feed him what little is left on our bones in exchange for his labor, that is all.”

  The man against the wall wheezed out a laugh. “Oh, I know you. How many winters has it possibly been now?” I stared him down, trying to place him at some point in my relatively recent past. “Think back much, much further than you are,” he said, deciphering where my thoughts had naturally taken me.

  Now my curiosity was really piqued. I told the woman it was fine, and she grumpily disappeared from sight again. I crossed the street and stood closer to the man, so as to keep our conversation private.

  “Hello again, Cain,” he said with a familiar crooked and charismatic smile. My confusion deepened and he seemed to greatly enjoy watching it spread through my expression. “Surely you did not think our curses would not bring us together after enough time,” he said as he pulled his animal skin away from his chest, revealing the mark Tashibag had placed upon him.

  “Dishon?”

  He laughed and eyed me, waiting for more of a response than that.

  My thoughts raced. How had I not expected this moment to one day come? Where had this man been all this time? What was his story? What had he seen and experienced? Were we able to actually discuss our curses with one another?

  My mind dizzied with anxiety and excitement over finding one of my own. His crimes and actions of the past for some reason held no carried-over significance to me. Judging by the state in which I found him, the man had long ago paid whatever price he owed for any crimes he once committed. “Come with me to the hut I am building, and where curious ears cannot overhear our words,” I told him. “I will feed you, and you must tell me many things I suddenly find myself desperate to know.”

  He nodded in consent, and I helped him to his feet. We began the short walk to the end of the village where my new dwelling stood partially constructed. “I have not been able to speak of the curse to anyone lest they should meet death straightaway,” I said. “Are you and I able to speak of it freely?”

  “It is the same for me,” he said. Dishon didn’t seem to have the energy to keep up with my pace, so I slowed down to match his. We walked together for a moment in silence. “I have met two others who were also cursed by Tashibag,” he told me. “We were able to discuss it without worry.”

  I became excited at the simultaneous thoughts of finally having a confidant to discuss my greatest burden and the new knowledge that there were others like us out there. “Two others? Are they here in Ghab?”

  “No. They live in distant lands.”

  My excitement was perhaps a little too apparent, but Dishon didn’t seem to mind. “Tell me of your curse,” I told him. “Tell me what occurs. Tell me what it has brought upon others. Tell me why you are starving and filthy and why you wear skins so worn I can see through them. Tell me why you are in Ghab. Tell me…”

  He cut me off, and with good reason. I had begun vomiting my thoughts onto him and was showing no signs of pausing long enough for him to process a response to any of my questions. “Give me some food and I will tell you any answers you wish to know. I am so hungry. I am always so hungry, Cain.”

  My excitement became bathed in curious pity. I had thought of his curse many times, but I had never really thought of what his life might have turned into. Little except for his own loose skin covered his skeleton. His eye sockets were sunken and dark. What I could see of his legs were square and thinner than my wrist. The man was starving. “Yes, of course. Food first,” I said.

  Before barraging him with more questions, I fed Dishon all the food he could eat, which wasn’t much at all. When finished, he rubbed his stomach and thanked me as he followed it down with several long gulps of water. “Each of our curses is greatly different, though they all are greatly the same,” he said. “Tashibag has her method which she takes delight in following. Now tell me of your curse, Cain, and I will tell you of mine.”

  We swapped stories back and forth until all that remained of the day was a pink and orange afterglow left behind by the freshly departed sun. I had to admit that upon hearing of the difficulty Dishon’s life truly was, his curse was far more arduous for him than mine almost ever had been for me. From what he told me, it sounded like the same was true of the other cursed people he had encountered.

  Tashibag’s formula for her vigilante justice was to force immortality upon those she found guilty, and to make those she cursed suffer endlessly from something specific to their deeds. Their sufferings were each based on either the consequences their victims experienced, or by that which moved them to commit atrocities in the first place.

  The motivation to remain with and protect the woman I loved is what led me to kill Abel, so the first part of my curse was that I must not just lose every love eventually, but I must be able to find it repeatedly throughout my life. My curse, after all, would hardly be a curse if my heart wasn’t the kind of heart it has always been. The next part of my curse was to be unable to fully protect any woman I love, at least not long term. Either she would die because of the curse, or I would eventually lose her and be unable to protect her thereafter.

  Dishon’s crimes, which he freely told me began long before he ever arrived in Itzbi, left people desolate and sometimes homeless. He had been a true scam artist, a swindler, and a hustler. He had that charisma people somehow immediately trusted, and he used it to his advantage. He was clever and could plan out the future maneuvers of his hustles before ever meeting his victims, just as he had done when Sem sent him away to bring back proof of his hidden land of fat colorful stones and fat women. “I took terrible pleasure in watching good and powerful men fall,” he told me, with a saddened sad rasp in his voice.

  The curse Tashibag placed on Dishon had fully humbled the man to the point he had no guile left in him. His curse made it so that he could not physically possess anything except for the clothes he was currently wearing. He could wear no jewelry or adornment. He couldn’t carry with him skins or furs to stay warm once the sun stopped offering its heat for the day.

  At first it was hard to believe the level of absolute nothingness he described was his curse. He told me to give him something, anything, and to truly give it to him. The curse, he said, somehow knew whether something in his hands was meant to be his or not.

  I had collected a hefty stack of hare pelts, which I intended to stitch together. I handed him the biggest of them and told him I wished him to have it and keep it. We had built a fire for ourselves, and when I handed him the pelt nothing happened. “You didn’t give this to me,” he said.

  “Of course, I did; you’re holding it aren’t you?”

  He handed it back and instructed me to truly give it to him instead of furnishing it to him expecting a show. “You expected to get that back if nothing happened, did you not?”

  I nodded and offered it to him once more. “This skin is yours to keep, Dishon. I want you to have it.”

  He reached out and took it from my grasp. His mundane expression did not change when the pelt immediately disintegrated into a sandy ash an
d slipped through his fingers, spilling into a scattered mess upon the ground.

  I gasped in horror. “You are telling me that no matter how great or how small, this is what happens when you are given anything at all to possess for yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  I handed him a stone from the rim of my fire pit. “This is for you,” I said. He took it, and it also became ash.

  “What about food? I gave you food, and you held onto it.”

  “I can always hold and eat only what I can eat right then. I cannot carry or store any food.” The focus in his eyes faded as he became lost in heavy thought. “I am always hungry. That is my real curse.”

  I began throwing conceived loophole after loophole his direction, insisting there must be ways past his curse, if he only had friends willing to help him around it.

  He waved each suggestion off. “The curse cannot be tricked,” he finally said. “Believe me, I have tried.”

  “That is all so terrible. How do you live through the end of each day?” I asked, feeling that his lot in life would be completely unbearable.

  “I beg, of course. And hardly a person there is in this world who will give to a beggar as pitiful as me,” he said. “I offer my labors in exchange for a meal wherever I can find someone in need and willing. That is where I get most food, but it is never filling since I have not the strength to offer much.”

  “Can you not hunt?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I cannot possess weapons. I cannot possess traps. I cannot even possess a spot of ground to drop a stone onto a passing animal.”

  “What about fish? There are places you can pull them from the river using your hands.”

  He sighed. “Any fish slow enough to pull from the river is more than I can eat, and so it turns to dust when I am able to grab hold of one.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. Dishon’s words brought me a deep desire to bring more ease into his life. “I will always feed you and shelter you in exchange for whatever small amount of work you can give. Stay near me, friend.”

  He shrugged. “Owning nothing is only part of my curse. I cannot sleep in the same place twice. I cannot ever have a home.”

  “What happens when you do?”

  “I wake elsewhere.”

  My heart sped. Dishon’s curse also displaced him in his sleep. “Elsewhere?”

  “If at any time I sleep in the same place twice, I awake the third day far from where I just slumbered.”

  “How far?” I asked, wondering if he was also displaced at the same great distances I had been.

  “Never far. A day’s journey at most. I can always find my way back.” That sounded much better than being displaced at such a distance I would have to wander decades or centuries to find where I last was.

  Additional parallels became apparent as Dishon told me more of the requirements and consequences of his curse from the witch. He could copulate, but only twice with anyone. If he attempted to fool around with someone a third time, she would die an instant and terrible death. I didn’t ask him that night what that sudden death looked like; I suppose because I knew I would have to tell him the same. I had no desire of reliving those memories in a moment we both felt so heavy and vulnerable, so we quickly moved on to other topics.

  Just like me, he also could not discuss his curse with any uncursed person. To share those details brought to that person what Dishon called “the cruelest death one can imagine.” Again, I did not ask for more detail. The thought of competing for the definition of cruelest death was better saved for another day.

  “I have used that part of it before, you know,” he told me while we discussed it. “I have used that part of the curse to bring death to another when the desperation of the moment called for such extremes.”

  At first the thought horrified me, as I thought of playground bullies being murdered by Dishon for teasing or taunting. Then flashes of my greatest tormentors, and attackers, and torturers flickered through my thoughts, and I knew that the man was not bragging or gloating. He was simply sharing his sad truth with one of the few others in existence who would understand. “I imagine more than one moment certainly has called for it,” I told him.

  I changed the subject again. “And what of love, Dishon? Have you ever found it?” Before I even finished asking the question, I knew how absurd an inquiry it was to ask to a man who could neither know a woman repeatedly or sleep in the same place as he did the night before.

  He didn’t answer that question for some time. He was made more pensive and thoughtful, as if he had never before considered the possibility of love for himself. “Someday I suppose I would really like to know this thing that is called love,” he finally whispered, more to himself than to me. “Someday.” That was all we spoke of love during that conversation.

  Over the course of that night, Dishon and I developed the beginnings of a profound friendship as the deepest and most desperate parts of us connected to one another in so many greatly-needed ways. We talked and shared our stories and our theories with each other late into the night. We only finally called it quits and went to sleep after we had come up with a plan to leave Ghab the next day and begin a search together for the same witch who placed these curses upon us. We would not leave the side of one another, we declared, until we had found resolution with Tashibag.

  I slept so soundly that night. For the first time in many moons I was able to drift to sleep without first needing to stare upon the portrait of one of the many women I had loved. Instead, the idea of a possible future, free from all of this, brought a peace I hadn’t felt in some time. “Tomorrow we will plan what we must do tomorrow,” I said to my new friend, who may have already been sleeping since he did not reply. “We will find the witch, Dishon. We will find her. And we shall both love a woman until we die.”

  CHAPTER 13

  For more than three centuries Dishon and I wandered from village to village, searching for Tashibag together.

  He was right. There were no real loopholes around his curse that we could ever find, but I was able to carry whatever I wanted with us, so he almost always had food and water. There were times food was scarce for us both. We ate well together, or we went hungry together. With time, a normal layer of fat and muscle formed more fully on Dishon’s bones until he was healthy again.

  Since Dishon could not ever sleep in the same place, which included any spot within a forty-or-so foot radius, we remained constantly on the move to keep him from being displaced. Sometimes our inability to stay put was good a good thing, as it kept us from becoming complacent in our search. Other times it was tedious or annoying, especially when circumstances required us to stay in one location for a while to follow through on the leads that took us there. There was always a place nearby to setup camp for the night, so life wasn’t bad. For the most part we found a sustainable rhyme and rhythm to it all.

  Occasionally we came across willing women who gave themselves to us for the night, even in the grimy and odoriferous states we generally kept ourselves. To keep our friendship and partnership stronger than any lustful desire, Dishon and I agreed early on that neither of us would take a woman into our bed unless there was either a woman for us both, or a woman willing to give herself to us both. I didn’t make love to any woman during the centuries I traveled with Dishon, but I fucked plenty of them. Shaking-off my lonely and chronic desire of fully loving one person, and only one person, became easier with each encounter.

  Trouble had a way of finding Dishon and me. Our curses brought us more of the same torment from curious magic seekers that I had occasionally encountered on my own. Some villages were less than welcoming to dirty vagabonds, and occasionally the inhabitants became violent in their attempt to keep us from entering. There were several times Dishon saved my ass, and many times I had to save his. Only once did we use our curse to protect ourselves from the ruthless cruelty of a captor. We both despaired any life lost due to the darker magic in our curses
, so we did not use such a weapon lightly.

  The brunt of our time together was productive and engaging. Most villages welcomed us and freely answered our queries, as we sought to find any new clues which would lead us to Tashibag. The rumors were frequent and new information was easy to find, but most of it led us to dead-ends or new gossip-founded leads which were born from someone’s wild imagination. Seven different times, the leads we were given did lead us to a place Tashibag had recently been, but we always arrived too late.

  After hastily following one well-timed and reliable lead, we missed her by no more than a couple hours as we arrived to a city freshly abuzz with talk over the curse and the mark Tashibag had just placed on a woman who had been caught stealing infants and selling them to rich women with barren wombs. We didn’t stick around to see the cursed woman for ourselves, but instead made haste in the direction the witch was said to have gone. We scouted the area and questioned neighboring villages for weeks, and somehow never turned up another lead. By the time we returned to the village where the woman had been cursed, she was already long gone. “I assure you we will meet the woman eventually,” Dishon told me. “And hopefully we don’t meet her for such a great amount of time yet.”