Immortal Lycanthropes

chapter 2.


The days blended together into an endless panorama of ice fishing, snow forts, and winterberries. Spenser told Myron, at times, stories from the inexhaustible store of his life. He had been an elk, as he styled it, in what is now Scotland, for millennia, occasionally traveling south through Britain or swimming, for variety, to Ireland. It was there he learned, from the Tuatha dé Dannan who ruled the island at the time, that he could change into a human. As a human he watched Stonehenge built. As a human he saw exiles from a land they called Egypt beach in Ireland and found the new ruling dynasty—and this was the first he had heard of lands beyond the islands he knew. As a human he fought alongside Finn mac Cumail and his warrior band, across Great Britain, Ireland, and the Isle of Man. But mostly, to escape from what he characterized to Myron as “incessant human sacrifice,” he returned to the uninhabited wilds of Scotland.

It was there that the Roman general Agricola found him, while marching the length of Britain, driving the natives in their war chariots before his unconquerable might. Agricola either pressed or accepted the wild man into his legion. His beard was shaved, for the first time ever, and he learned to drill with a long spear. Rome, when he reached there, was certainly impressive, but it didn’t take him long to realize that the Romans were not much of an upgrade from the barbarities of the druids. They were just more efficient. Emperor Domitian’s hands were stained red with the blood of fellow Romans, and everyone else wallowed in the blood of Rome’s neighbors.

Later, in Dacia, on the shores of the Black Sea, Spenser’s company (a century, he called it) got singled out for cowardice, and was scheduled for a decimation—a process by which the company was divided into groups of ten, and each group drew lots; the one who drew the bad lot was supposed to get bludgeoned to death by the other nine. Spenser didn’t draw the bad lot, but he got up and left anyway. “Say it was me, say you beat me to a pudding,” he told the other nine in bad Latin. It was one thing to kill Dacians, which was just the kind of thing you did back then, but he balked at turning on his own comrades. An elk ran into the woods.

“The Romans make desolation and call it peace,” General Agricola’s grandson wrote. For a century, the borders of Rome were an orgy of bloodshed, after which the reign of the “five good emperors” ended, and things, predictably, got much, much worse.

Anyone’s life story takes a long time in the telling, and a story that spans several hundred lifetimes much longer. Spenser jumped around a lot, and focused on the stuff Myron would like, the stuff found in his adventure novels. Pirates and crusaders and frontiersmen; bravery and bloodshed. But in Spenser’s accounts, every act of bravery was, ultimately, futile, every heroic action a waste of time, and every story an incipient tragedy. The bloodshed, not the bravery, was the real point of his stories.

The ancient Celts were bound, each individual was bound, by a complicated series of geasa, or taboos. In this way, Munremar son of Gerrchenn (with whom Spenser was, two thousand years ago, acquainted) was placed under geis not to cut his beard until he had slain the witch woman Cailleach Beara; later he learned that Cailleach Beara was under a geis such that she could not be killed except by a bare-faced man. And so Munremar, to resolve this contradiction, held his head in the fire until the beard burned away, and only then, with scarred and bubbling face, was he able to slay the witch. In one sense, this was an action of the most selfless devotion to a cause. But the way Spenser told the story, it became a tale of how one man ruined his face and his health in order to murder a helpless crazy woman.

Myron told stories, too, but they were mainly stories from books he had read. He did the plot of Treasure Island over three nights, and he fancied that Spenser was held in rapt attention by the production. Or he went over again and again the strange events of the last few months, looking for clues. Spenser hated and feared the Nine Unknown Men, but he finally revealed, as they sat around the campfire one night, that he had once had occasion to ask them a riddle himself. He had asked, “What animal is it that hath a tail between its eyen?”

“What are eyen?” Myron said.

“It’s an old way of making something plural, like children or brethren. It means eyes.”

“Oh. Why don’t you talk old-fashioned like that more often, if you’re so old?”

“You learn to adapt to that kind of thing. If I spoke old-fashioned, you wouldn’t be able to understand a word.”

“I could understand,” said Myron, who had read Walter Scott. “I know all those thees and thous and things.”

Spenser looked grim. “You still don’t really understand what all this means. Have you ever met anyone who’s only a hundred and fifty or two hundred years old?”

Myron conceded he had not.

“There are a few around, necromancers and alchemists mainly. And they’re always stuck in a world that ended a century ago. I mean, they can’t adapt to anything modern. They hate automobiles and telephones, they flip out in the motion pictures, and in the end they retreat more and more into the trappings of their childhoods—panopticons and hornbooks or whatever. But my childhood was spent among elks. The only things around were trees and hills. Forget automobiles, I had to get used to walking on two legs, and then wearing pants, eating with my hands, and then eating with a knife. Old-fashioned talk? I can barely remember the human language I first learned, but . . . it was something like . . .” And here he produced a few tongue-twisting sentences so bleak and alien that Myron dropped the stick he was holding. The bat on the end of it landed in the fire, and its wing membranes went up like tissue paper. Myron scrambled to save dinner, and only later, as he was getting ready to go to sleep, did he ask Spenser what the terrifying sentences were.

Spenser was still stirring the fire up. “An invocation to the fourteen chthonic gods of Hatheg-Kla,” he said.

“Fourteen? Why fourteen?” asked Myron.

After a long pause, Spenser said, “Because the fifteenth died.”

Myron thought this all sounded so cool. “That thing you said, can you,” he asked, “say it again?”

Spenser could not help but smile as out of the terrifying and oppressive darkness behind the campfire he intoned, “Pax sax sarax . . .”