Human for a Day (9781101552391) (3 page)

Willem said, “Jackivantus, heed my words, for as a human being I claim my right to release you from your geas.”

This snuffed the blistering heat of compulsion more completely than an avalanche could extinguish a candle. Moving still hurt, but not moving was no longer agony.

“I'm so sorry,” said Willem. The machinist kept working to clean the smears of tar from Jax's head. “I didn't know. They never told us it hurts you.” He looked ready to cry. “I thought I was helping.”

The machinist glared at him, and spat. He dipped his wire brush in the turpentine, splattering all three of them in the process, and set to work scrubbing Jax's forehead.

I wouldn
'
t be here now if not for your geas
.

Jax slumped as the sense of urgency left him. He'd found the Underground Railroad. Soon he'd have a Key to unlock his soul, and not long after that he and Willem would be in Quebec. He closed his eye and thought about baseball.

The machinist stopped scrubbing. He muttered to himself. Jax watched him produce a pair of spectacles and squint through them. Then he tossed the brush aside and said, “I can't pick this lock.”

“What?”
What?

The machinist poked Jax in the forehead with his little finger. “A bullet sheared part of this sigil.” Poke, poke. “Changed its meaning. That could be fixed, given enough time and somebody who knew the work. But this”—his thumbnail made a tinny
clink
against the keyhole—“is the killer. Lock's damaged. It won't rotate the sigils.”

The spiral of symbols on every Clakker's forehead formed a unique alchemical anagram that, when properly reconfigured with a Key, would unlock the soul, transmute brass to flesh, and imbue free will. His finger traced a dent along the hairline seam outlining the tumblers deep within Jax's skull. Jax knew this for truth, because he felt no tingle when the machinist touched the keyhole. It was dead, the soul-freeing magic shattered.

I, I, I don
'
t need a Key
. Jax's fingers clicked against one another, stuttering like stuck typewriter keys in his haste to respond.
Tell him, Willem. We jus
–
s
–
st ne
–
e
–
ed to get
–
t t
–
to Queb
–
b
–
b
–
ec.

Willem did. And he added, “We'll find somebody who can fix the damage once we're safely north.”

The machinist knelt beside Jax on the cold, hard concrete floor. His hard eyes had softened, and his voice came out quiet and flat, crushed beneath the onus of destroying one dream and two lives. He spoke to Jax.

“It's not a matter of skill. Fixing the lock requires forging a new anagram.” He touched Jax on the temple with a gesture both firm and compassionate. “It would mean taking you apart. Melting your skull and the lock and recasting them anew. Your soul would burn like a moth on the sun. It wouldn't survive. You wouldn't be you any longer.”

“The fix needn't be permanent,” said Willem. “Just until we reach Quebec.”

“The railroad won't take you, son. Not while he's incapable of disobeying an order. They won't tolerate the risk. You run into trouble, the men hunting you can make him to turn on you and anybody helping you. That's why I'm the first stop on the railroad. But they won't take you if I haven't picked the lock.”

I
'
ll plu
–
u
–
g my ears again.

“I know these men. They won't risk it. I'm sorry.”

When Willem spoke again, his voice came out cracked and brittle, like a ceramic roofing tile. “Please.”

The machinist sighed. He removed his spectacles, bowed his head, pinched the bridge of his nose. Without looking up, he said, “Given the choice, would you live forever as you are now, or die like a mayfly with a soul?”

I have wanted nothing more these past two centuries
, Jax signed,
than to become human.
His fingers didn't stutter. Willem relayed his answer.

The machinist strode into the shadowed recesses of his shop. He returned with a diamond-tipped chisel, hammer, steel vise, book, block of maple, and an electric drill.

“This is mending tattered cobwebs with hemp twine and a railroad spike,” he said. “It won't last. If it works.”

“How long?”

“Impossible to know.” The machinist shrugged. “A few hours. A day, perhaps.”

The men helped Jax lie on a workbench. The vise bit into his temples. Pulling a jeweler's loupe over his spectacles, the machinist said, “This will hurt. Far more than any damned geas.”

Willem stroked Jax's hand. But the machinist pulled them apart. “Don't do that if you ever want to use your fingers again,” he said, then placed the maple in Jax's empty palm. “Now be quiet.”

He spent many minutes studying the damaged sigils. Then he pressed the tip of the chisel to Jax's brow and—

Jax convulsed. Wetness ran down his arm and dripped to the concrete. And he did something he'd never done before: he screamed. His birth cries cracked the foundation of the machine shop.

 

Jax stood on the roof, facing east, catching the first rays of dawn on his face. Sunlight had become something warm and silky, no longer sliding across his body with a sterile, slick disdain for metal. It lingered and caressed.

This skin, this strange moist elastic covering, it fairly burst with sensation. He'd never imagined. Even the simple play of a borrowed shirt across his chest—he was
breathing!
—made his toes curl with delight. (He had toes, and they
curled with delight!
) Unimaginable treasures to a creature that all its long life had only known yearning for freedom and the torment of compulsion.

“I could stand here all day,” he said to himself. He said what he thought just for the twin pleasures of feeling the words bubble up in his throat and hearing his voice. It was raspy and inconstant, unlike Willem's. The machinist judged this a result of the screaming. It would heal, eventually, if Jax lived long enough.

He wouldn't. Already there was a flutter in his chest where his heart beat. (
Where. His
.
Heart
.
Beat
.) Faint, but growing.

“If you wish,” said Willem. “It's your day.” Tears thickened his voice, but he hid it well. “But we should leave soon if we're going to meet our guide.”

“As you say,” said Jax, bracing for a lightning bolt that never came.

He turned his back on the rising sun. It was more difficult than it might have been a few hours earlier; the steep angles of the dormer challenged his frail human ankles, threatening to snap them like green timber. Capricious things, these human bodies.

But then he realized what he'd done, and laughed. (Laughter felt like sunlight in his belly.) Two hundred years of ingrained behavior made for difficult habits to break. It came with a twinge of sorrow that he wouldn't have longer to relish breaking them. (Sorrow and laughter together? Miraculous and contradictory, too, human bodies.)

And then Jax said the words of which every Clakker dreamed: “No. I don't want to do that.” He looked at Willem. “I don't want to run for Quebec. It doesn't matter any longer.”

Willem wept openly now. But he nodded. “Anything you want, Jax. Anything.”

“I want to eat an apple.” (The gurgling in his stomach, was that the thing called hunger?) “I want to be tickled. I want to sing in the bathtub. I want to lie in green grass. I want to see the Breuckelen Dodgers play baseball. And when I die, I want to be in your arms.

“That,” said Jax, “would be my perfect day.”

Jay Lake

 

 

 

 

T
hey tell stories about me. A lot of those are wrong. I was never called Ahasver. I wouldn't know how to make a shoe if you paid me. No one cursed or blessed me. Really, I just am.

When you realize you are deathless, you gravitate to certain lines of work. Not a lot of call for immortal bricklayers. Doesn't take much luck or skill to follow a plow, beyond knowing the business of your own fields. Standing behind the sharp end of the sword is what I do.

Used to be I kept count of how many men I'd killed. Then I just counted the battles I'd been in. After a while, I lost track of that and started counting the wars. Now, well, they count the wars for me. Finally, you people are finishing the job that Yeshua Ben Yosef started all those years ago on top of a dusty hill too far from his home or mine.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Blessings upon you, all that are in my power to give. I know God has an eye on me; lets me direct His gaze to your heart.

Well, maybe not that last.

 

Longinus had already walked the earth six times longer than the life of a mortal man. He had fought in Syria, in Scythia, among the Parthians. He'd changed his name a dozen times. No matter how far he ranged, he eventually found his way back into the legions.

He'd settled on the rank of
tesserarius
, always being vague about his exact history while showing enough of his experience with weapons and maneuver and the business of wrangling men to be convincing to a
signi-fer
or
centurion
desperate enough for skilled bodies to ignore the irregularities. The older the empire grew, the easier this became. There were always men discharged for drunkenness or brutality who drifted back into the ranks.

And by the gods, Longinus knew one end of a spear from the other.

This time, though, he could see the end coming. Not his own end. Not anymore. He'd taken enough blows, caught enough arrows point first to know what would happen to him. It hurt like crazy, but the wounds always closed up. So far no one had tried to cut off his head. He wasn't looking forward to finding out how that went.

This time it was not his body absorbing the blow. It was the Eternal City herself. Alaric's armies were at the gates for the third time in two years. The Emperor Hon-orious was long since decamped. Everyone of consequence in the senate and the army had gone with him.

Only the broken legions, and those whose masters could not arrange their timely withdrawal, remained.

Longinus watched the smoke rise from the fires near the Salarian Gate. Rumor among the centurions and their troops was that slaves had let the attackers in. Not that it had done the poor bastards much good. The Visigoths seemed pleased to kill anyone unlucky enough to be in their path.

Now, atop a house part way up the Aventine Hill, he no longer wondered how long it would take them to reach him. A band of the Celtic warriors had ridden into the Vicus Frumentarius perhaps half a glass earlier and set to the serious business of smashing their way through the homes here.

He had four men with him—two of them drunkards, one barely old enough to shave, and another veteran like himself. Longinus had only bothered to learn the old soldier's name—Rattus—as the others wouldn't live long enough for him to need to remember them.

“We could just bugger off.” Rattus was slumped against the rooftop parapet sucking down the last of a broken amphora of wine from the house stores. The kid had been useful at least in handling the petty thievery on behalf of the older veterans. It wasn't very good wine, though. The vinegar stink rose up like pickling time in the kitchens.

“Bugger off where?” asked Longinus distantly. He wondered how many of the Visigoths would make it to this house. They were visibly drunk, and not moving with their reputed efficiency.

“Skin out of our kit, flee with the rest of the meat.”

Longinus understood from Rattus' tone that the old soldier wasn't serious. “Die here, die there,” he said. “They kill everything.”

Rattus burped. “What's so special about dying here? If we die there, might have a little longer to live first. Something could happen along the way. A man can be lucky.”

“Here is where we were sent to die.” Longinus remembered a hot, dusty hilltop in Judaea. He'd learned a lot about being sent to die at that place.

“Fair enough.” Another belch.

One of the drunkards poked his head up from the narrow ladderway. “You coming down?” he asked. “We got duck in brine.”

“Eat, drink, and be merry,” Longinus replied. He heard the raucous laughter of the Visigoths spilling back into the street, two houses down. Smoke was already rising—they'd finally set a real fire here, too. “For all too soon we shall die.”

There was no purpose defending this place. Their handful of legionaries had been set here to guard against looting, should the Visigoths be turned back or otherwise overlook the house. Now, well, it was a worthless fight. Nothing more.

Longinus regarded his
gladius
. As swords went, his was not a bad one. He'd claimed eleven lives thus far with the blade. Perhaps a few more today.

When they came, the Visigoths killed the drunkards out of hand. Rattus died swiftly as well, to his mild surprise. When they got bored with Longinus holding off three of them on the roof, they shot him with arrows until he could not stand. The kid they used like a girl until he begged them to permit him to die.

He watched it all through the filmy eyes of an apparent corpse. If speech had yet been granted to him, Longinus would have begged them to take his head as well.

 

I tell stories about them, too. Or would if I had anyone to listen to me. Another grumbling old man in a world with no patience or place for grumbling old men. Veterans have war stories that no one cares about but the men they fought beside.