A Luten in the City

Life to the mortal, love to the immortal.

Photo by Charles Lamb on Unsplash

A warning to all immortals: never go to Doveham!

Folk will tell you it’s a merry place, what with its plays and taverns, its bawdy women and rich ale.

They lie.

I could blame those jettied gable buildings, those packed thoroughfares, and the verdant, folding countryside. But it’s not the place, I’ve learned — Doveham may be the bottle, but its people are the gin. Take a swig, and you’ll never forget. Reach the dregs, and you’ll nearly be human.

Never go to Doveham. That place will take your purse, then your clothes, then your heart. In that order.

Alas, nobody warned me of this when I found myself on that ferryboat being hauled up the icy Gafflyn River by the wintry morning light. At the time I was masquerading as a young Gultrish poet – a pretentious persona, but with my naturally youthful features, slight frame, bright white hair, and pallid skin, it fit the part. The ferry passed into the city’s haze and the scent of a hundred hearthfires as the buildings of Doveham enfolded us on either side. We passed beneath the portal of one mighty stone bridge with tall houses upon its deck, and reached the city’s heart.

Took nary an hour, nary a minute for Doveham’s hues to show. Scarcely had I disembarked afore a gang of cotty-haired mollies surrounded me, smote me in the groin, and stole my purse! I limped off to the next square and paused beneath an icicled awning to rest my wounded manhood when a young fellow who might have been a university student sidled up to me. “You’re not Dovish,” he whispered.

I wasn’t, I said.

“Might we agree the Vicar lies?”

With a condition so broad, who could disagree?

He seemed pleased. “It’s about more than present affairs, friend. It’s about our immortal souls.”

From his pocket he drew a fat bundle of pamphlets and pushed one into my hands. I foolishly raised it to the light when a watchman shouted. My pamphleteer vanished so quickly and completely I shouldn’t be amazed to learn that he too was mythical.

I spent the rest of the morning and much of the afternoon detained in a chilly Dovish barracks among drunkards and petty thieves. Eventually I was dragged before a massively mustached man sitting behind a table in the courtyard. He harangued me regarding this most offensive pamphlet, its incriminating presence on my person, and the shockingly deep excrement puddle into which I’d apparently waded… all the petty, ephemeral affairs of his present age that I knew would blow over within a century.

He finished, finally. Offended by my silence, he commanded I speak.

I asked him, politely, if he was perchance aware that there was in fact a mark’ed distinction between an interrogator and a homilist.

His chair shot back and his palms hit the table. His finger stabbed at a scaffold upon the wall whereon four hanged figures in diverse states of decay slowly turned in the wintry wind like chimes, stiff and barefooted. They were all four Lumineers, he told me, and their rejection of the Creed was by extension a dispute of the sovereign authority of Thrisland’s king. Some looked upon these hanged men and thought them traitors. Others, martyrs.

I thought they looked cold.

“They perished for their God,” my interrogator said. “Now tell me: what would you perish for?”

“Nothing,” I answered quickly, “nor will I ever.”

“Then answer me further: why are you in Doveham?”

“I came here for a jolly romp, Sir. But given this greeting, I promise you I’ll be quitting your province as swiftly as you and nature permit. And may I hang between those fellows if ever I miss this place.”

***

When I was finally released, the dead Lumineers were ragged silhouettes against a pink evening sky. Stervis prayer bells were ringing. I found my way to a tavern where I intended to souse myself, then catch the next ferry out and abandon this hovel.

The tavern was crowded, but a bright-eyed lass working there who was the owner’s niece pitied me and said she’d allow me a few cups of ale for free if I could beat her at a game of quarsk.

These were immensely agreeable terms; I cannot overstate my skill at quarsk.

I nursed my beverage and made my moves automatically – with my mastery of the game, thought was unnecessary. Besides, after my detention this tavern had a cozy feel and my opponent was pleasant to the gaze. How old, nineteen? Those creases at the edges of her mouth spoke of perennial merriment, and they deepened as her eyes rose to look at me. “I win,” she said.

I chortled most ungraciously. “You haven’t won, lass. You…”

I looked at the board. She had.

She was smiling. Those bright eyes.

“Wha… how in God’s name–”

“Pay up! That ale costs a hanner!”

“Nobody beats me at quarsk!”

“It seems someone does!”

“The last human I lost to was Lothbrok Nakrtooth of Ustum!”

“What’s Ustum?”

“A faraway city long gone, you’ve not heard of it.”

“Well… regardless, you owe a hanner.”

I ran my fingers through my white hair. “Nay. Another game.”

“That’s not what we–”

“Damn it wench, another game! If I lose, I’ll owe you a swyn!”

We played again. I won. She stared at the board. I gloated. “I’ll take that next ale now.”

“You’re fantastic!”

“Yes, well.”

“You must play with me!”

“I already have. And won.”

“No, play with me! As a team!”

“Quarsk is a two-man game, lass.”

“No, see? In the taverns, we play two-on-two. You win a piece, you give it to your partner. There’s a tourney tonight, dozen of players and a handsome victory pot! But my second fell sick.”

“I’m in no support of dueling.”

“It’s not that! Come! You must come!”

She was out of her chair and veritably hovering above the floor and her eyes were giddy and the ale was strong. But the ferry would be departing at…

“Hang the ferry! Come with me, it’s starting soon! Come on! Come on!”

She dragged me out of the tavern, shouting to her uncle that she was out for the night.

“Come on! Come on!”

“I’ve left my coat!” I complained, though I knew her vivacity had already bewitched me and in the moment I would have followed her into Hel itself. She told me her name was Bess. I told her to call me Rhis.

The next tavern we entered was even more packed. Two quarsk boards sat side-by-side in the room’s center. Win a piece, pass it to your partner. Play until one table wins. I grumbled, but she bought me another ale and told me not to hold back.

Nine moves. I won in nine moves. The room fell silent. I laughed. Then I heard someone else laughing and it was Bess.

We won every game following. By the ringing of noctis prayer bells Bess was waving a pouch of coins and standing on her chair dancing. Then she kissed me.

I stayed in Doveham. I found her each evening at the tavern, and buoyed by our prize money we’d stake out the city and claim the night. We frolicked across the bridges and raided the taverns and earned a small fortune and fearsome reputation on wagers of quarsk. I sang tunes not heard by man in centuries and Bess’ eyes simply glowed. I told her of places exotic and remote in lands afar and long gone. We kissed at the cathedral, the markets, and out in the fields when I walked her back to her families’ hamlet in the Dovish neighborhood of Peltonshire. I would walk away, warmed by an intoxicating swell not entirely of drink.

A month into this reverie with ale burning in my limbs and head I stopped her at the threshold of another tavern. She turned with a perplexed look. “What is it, Rhis?”

Right then and there, I nearly told her what I was. Nearly told her everything, and made that immense and terrible offer. Perhaps I should have. “Wait for me in there while I make water,” I said instead.

She rolled her eyes. “Make it quick.”

I stumbled away to a darkened corner away from the din. Partway through my relief several shadows appeared around me, occluding the starlight. “There’s a fee for this privy, friend. Surrender your purse.”

When I swung to regard him, so drunk was I that I brought my golden stream with me and blessed the highwaymen’s shank with its warmth.

Which was a mistake.

They fell upon me. Kicks and strikes and bootheels on my face and then knifepoints and then nothing.

***

An open eye brought the sunlight, and the sunlight brought the pain. God, how it burned!

I lifted my head. My skull squelched free of the silt, half of my body still encased in frigid muck. The Gafflyn’s waters lapped against my exposed skin. Fragile ice in my hair and mouth. Taste of mud.

Doveham was gone. I must have been dumped in the river and floated far downstream. How many days ago?

I looked down over myself. Not two feet from my head a gull perched on a smooth white rock. When I moved it leaped back shrieking with something darkening its beak, then took flight.

Fingers I could not feel traveled to that strange white rock and found it was soft like a bag, and torn, the insides a mess. It was my abdomen, punctured in a dozen places, the insides shredded. That damned gull was eating my organs.

Pain. Cold. Numbness. Where does one end and the next begin? I unadvisedly rose to my feet and stood nude and ruined on that bank. Something slopped and splashed at my feet. My organs were spilling out the knife wounds. I stared at the jaundiced intestines running into the water like an engorged navel-string. I stared a long time.

A hundred feet out on the water a ferry passed by. Its passengers witnessed me in horror, which gave me some amusement. Suffer me, oh mortals, I tried to scream, for ‘tis I, the golem of the Gafflyn! Cast salt upon thy mantles and sills henceforth, lest thy eggs be addled and thy members shriveled!

Only a gurgle left my lips. My throat had been cut.

Cold. So cold. So tired.

I laid back down.

***

No dreams attend such sleep. Only darkness, then wakening. So when the latter came it was late spring and my wounds were healed and the fields were green and the sun felt pleasant. Nary a scar remained.

I should have left right then, and perhaps my troubles would have ended. Fool that I was I stole some clothes from a nearby hamlet and made back for Doveham to see her again. She wasn’t at the tavern, so I went to her family’s farm in Peltonshire.

“Bess…”

She was older. She’d grown into her body in the most wonderful ways. The gaiety of her eyes had given way to a depth of beauty, brightness into lushness. She turned this fearsome gaze upon me and my faculties of language left me.

“Rhis…” she said, and the sound was something sublime.

“How long has it been?”

Three years, it turned out. In the next ten minutes Bess spun through emotions: shock, anger, sadness, joy… in sooth, I felt awash with relief. Somehow, I feared she wouldn’t remember me. So many didn’t. She asked where I’d vanished to that night. I evaded. Then she sat right where she was and told me of her life as though we’d known each other for centuries. I couldn’t stop staring at her and the way her expressions glided from beauty to beauty.

Then I heard her mention a wedding.

“Hold, Bess. A wedding?”

“Aye! Next week!” Effervescence, then the expression fell. She must have read my disappointment.

“Bess, don’t wed. It’s not a path for the wise.”

Now she looked injured.

“Do you love this man?”

“I do, but…”

The light wasn’t there. “You don’t.”

“… The harvests have been scarce. My da says it’s better this way.”

“Can he even play quarsk?”

“There are more important things than quarsk, Rhis.”

“You’d sell yourself, then. Like a whore.”

Instantly her eyes turned fiery.

“I didn’t mean that! Here, listen, there might be another way… let’s speak somewhere quieter.”

***

We found a hill to sit upon overlooking the city. The Gafflyn ran quite nearly down its center and the mighty bridges girdled the water like outsized belts or iron bands.

There, I told her what I was.

“A luten? Truly?”

“Aye.”

She was quiet, calm as the breeze touching the fields she stared pensively out upon. Both Rancroft and Umfrey Counties were beautiful in the spring air.

“Are you here to kill me, then?”

“What? No! Why would I do that?”

“Well, that’s always what happens in the stories…”

“The stories are straw, Bess. I’m the real stuff.”

“Then you’re immortal.”

“Aye.”

“You’re certain?”

“I am deadly certain.”

“Was that a pun?”

“Perhaps. Did you think it witty?”

“It lacked inspiration.”

“Hmph. I tried.”

“Can you do magic?”

“Not a hex. Unless you count quarsk.”

“Where were you born?”

“That’s complicated.”

“Have you ever met an elf?”

“Many. I learned their language, after all.”

“You know elvish?!”

“Did you think me jesting when I sang in the taverns? Would I lie to you?”

“Aye, you would.”

“I… I suppose I deserve that.”

“But do you speak elvish, or do you just know the ditties?”

“There are many elvish languages, Bess–”

“Answer directly.”

“Well… candidly, I’ve forgotten much of it. I haven’t seen an elf in centuries.”

She sighed and looked up at the splendid sky. “This life of yours sounds dreadful lonely.”

I touched her hand. “It needn’t be.”

Her eyes shot to mine.

“Bess, I can make you live forever… make you immortal like me. I can free you from this.”

“From what?”

“This!” I laughed, waving at the city. “This yoke! Those buildings! The tired turning of the wheel! From toil and decay. You and I could fly, go anywhere, be anyone!”

“… Or be no one.”

“Be rational! Is your course so preferable? Bonded to an illiterate bumpkin to make his babies?”

“Is it such a poor future?”

“Future… I know this ardent future of whom you speak. Let’s say more…”

So I did. I told her of strife, of war, of starvation, of death. That was the cup from which she would soon drink. It was like a game of quarsk, I said: it had its permutations, its varied openings, its strategies and tactics, but the patterns were consistent. And it ended the same way. It always ended the same way.

I had seen it before, and would see it again.

She was quiet for some time. I sprawled in the sward next to her and watched the languid clouds. A few birds.

“Before I decide…” she said finally, “come to the banquet.”

“The what?”

“The banquet. We’re having a prenuptial banquet tomorrow evening. Our families will be there. Everyone will be there.”

“What good would that do?”

“You… you might see. You might understand.” She went to me and took my hand. “Come, come and see! Do it for me.”

Before nightfall, I’d quit the city.

***

When I returned again over a decade later, it was after a famine.

Some of humanity’s afflictions come sudden and unreckoned. Not starvation. She drifts in slowly, from seasons away – black wings, caved cheeks, thin eyelids. But her eyes are keen. And searching. She searches for the children.

It’s not in winter they die, but spring. The cold months their parents spend watching supplies dwindle, praying to God for deliverance, whispering fears to one another when they think the young ones cannot hear. Their children grow thinner. They cry for food. Then they cry in their sleep. Then they don’t cry or smile at all. Their spirits die before their bodies.

It ends in the spring, after the frost and first sewing, when the wheat and barley are still green in the field, a month or two . That’s exactly when they die. God’s cruellest joke.

I returned to Doveham by road, with that first harvest budding to my right and the neat, serried graves being dug to my left. No people are more generous than farmers. If a neighbor requires something, the whole community will support. Therefore if one child is starving, then all of them are.

Believe me, I didn’t know I’d see her there. But there she was among the mourners, her beautiful body enervated and eyes wan. She looked like a flower after it’s gone to seed, a husk of what once was. The children were in the holes, and three of them were hers.

She saw me, then looked away again. She and the other families of Peltonshire gathered at her small dirt-floor house following the burial. I waited outside, sitting on a fence like a migratory bird.

In late evening I watched the last of the guests exit and her husband wander off toward the tavern pushing his palms into his eyes. I went to the door, and saw her sitting at a table where she’d arranged a quarsk board. I sat across from her. We began to play in silence.

“Why have you come?” she asked.

I didn’t know what to say. Truth be told, I’d never left the Thrislish peninsula, caught in Doveham’s riptide.

“Have you come to gloat?” she asked.

“No.”

“Have you come to kill me?”

“You’ve asked me that before. Again, no.”

Her eyes were ragged and her mouth clamped shut, a dam for her grief. From the empty rooms to the painted cups upon the shelf, every still and silent object screamed of the children who should have been there. “Are you offering immortality again?”

I paused, sighed, moved my piece. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Do you desire it?”

“No.”

“Then why does it matter?”

“Are all luten this enigmatic?” She made her next move. A brilliant little position. I couldn’t help but smile.

“You… you truly are superb at this game, Bess.”

“Is that why you came then? For quarsk?”

“… I suppose, in a manner, it is.”

I made my move and looked at her, and I swear if her jaws were any tighter she’d have burst a tooth. “You came out of boredom.”

“No. No. Not merely boredom.”

“Not merely boredom?”

“Aye, something else…”

“You’re surfeit with dissipation?”

Now she was staring at me, her eyes afire. The mirth was out, or perhaps it had gone underground with her loved ones. I cleared my throat. “It’s your move.”

“I see that.”

“Then move.”

“No,” she said, “I mean I see that, on your face, Rhis. Your pity. Keep it.”

“No. Not pity. It’s your move.”

“I know pity when I see it.”

“It’s your move.”

“If not pity, then anger, though I can’t reckon why.”

“How could I pity you when you chose this? I warned you! We luten may only grant immortality once in our existence. I offered you a way out. You refused me. So here you are.”

The window shutters made a small clatter from an outside breeze, right above a loom with an unfinished child’s kirtle.

“You wait for an apology?” I pressed on. “You’ll need to wait longer. I told you, Bess. I told you. I warned you of this. All of it. If you hate me, it’s because I was right.”

“You’re wrong,” she whispered, her eyes falling.

“I’m wrong?… Who will agree with you? Not your buried children.”

If silence was a weight, I would have been crushed.

“What’s this life of yours?” I asked. “What sense is it?”

“Get out.”

The game stood unfinished between us, but I turned to the door.

This time I did leave Thrisland. And I went far. So very far.

***

The years drain like the burning sand gathering around my body. Grains in my nose. Skin like rawhide. Unbearable heat rising from the flat, hard ground.

I’d been decapitated. Well-nigh a millennium since that had last happened. Still wearing clothes, be they rags frayed and thinned by the heat of a thousand suns born and died, and then some. That means my body regrew my head. Is my true self in my heart then? Yonder lies a jawless skull — mine, or another’s?

My head rose and I looked out across the cruel desert. A flat reg, hard as rock, mirages swimming in the evening heat. A bloody sun melting on the horizon. Not a speck of life. One day, we immortals know… one day the world will be naught but this empty twilight, our memories, and dust.

How long had I been gone this time?

I rose and shambled away, breath dry as oven air, limbs grinding in their sockets, pursuing that decaying sun. If that was sunset, then that was west.

An hour to the yardangs, those stone obelisks carved into massive fins by the tireless wind, like monuments to time itself. An hour more and nearly dark when I stumbled on the remains of our caravan. Everything gone. Silk bolts and salt slabs scavenged long ago. Only desiccated wood remained. Where were my companions? Were they killed? Enslaved? Moved on and perished from age?

Under one cart I spied a stubby wooden nub the size of my thumb protruding from the sand. A gourd, perhaps of water. I pulled it free, and with it came a scorpion so white it nearly glowed. It skittered away.

I shook the gourd. Water inside, thank God. I pulled the stopper to drink when I saw it.

A man. Standing within an alcove of the yardang’s stone face some forty feet away. The stature of a soldier, the resolution of a god.

I called out to him, asked who he was. He said nothing. Perfectly still. Staring.

My throat burned for it, but I spoke to him there. I told him I was a luten, and that we were over a hundred miles from the nearest well, and that he should drink this gourd or he would die. I would survive, but he could not. No matter his constitution the desert would exact its price, for even in the night the reg still issued its heat. Then I told him of the lands I’d visited, the women I’d bedded, the streams I’d drunk from. Then I spoke of Bess, the woman never far from my thoughts, though I knew not if she even lived.

But as I spoke and as my eyes adjusted, I knew the truth: ‘twasn’t a man to whom I spoke. ‘Twas a statue, carved into that niche in some past aeon, to what identity or purpose none left could say, for who would remember?

Yonder stands a statue – mine, or another’s?

***

Doveham in the summer. The city had grown again. Golden wheat in the tilled fields and dandelions in the fallow. Life everywhere, people of all sorts.

My heart thrummed as I marched toward Peltonshire. I stopped myself from running, then let go and allowed myself to trot down the streets and up the highways. I was all out of breath when the buildings thinned and I came within view of her farmhouse.

“I know you,” said a small voice nearby.

I turned, and gasped, for a girl with brightest eyes addressed me.

I knew those eyes.

“She’s been waiting for you,” the child said. “Come on! This way!”

I found myself again being towed irresistibly down a Dovish lane by a vivacious lass. “He’s here! He’s here!” she shouted and folk looked up from their work and children stopped their games to stare at me. I am not given to shame but never have my cheeks burned so red as beneath their gaze. I don’t know why.

“Grandma!” my guide shouted, “He’s here!”

I entered that same house, little changed, but no more draft of grief. I was led to a bedroom, where a middle-aged man sat by a bed whereupon lay an ancient-looking woman.

The man looked from me to the woman. “Ma, is this…?”

“It’s alright,” rasped the woman, her body scarcely meatier than the sheets that covered her. “You… may go,” she whispered between labored, open-mouthed breaths.

Man and girl left. I stood at the entrance watching her frail chest rise and fall. The sounds of playing children, tweeting birds, and lowing kine drifted in through the open window.

“Rhis.”

“Bess.”

Her wrists and neck were naught but skin and sinew. But how she was smiling! Like the day we met.

“I’m… I’m so pleased you’re here! Come close!”

I did, and took the chair nearby.

“I… wanted to tell you. I found an answer… to your question.”

I instantly knew which one. I couldn’t yet reply.

“It’s a queer thing… I’ve learned that… that you were wrong! You said… life was like quarsk. You were wrong. Wonderfully wrong. Quarsk is… is understood from beginning to end… but life is only understood from end to beginning! I couldn’t see it in my youth. But now I can.”

“I’m… I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Bess.”

“It’s all this!” she gazed up at the smoke-blackened rafters, but her old eyes saw past them into some eternity. “Can’t you hear it? Can’t you see it everywhere, Rhis? You said my cup was misery. There was some misery in there, aye… but that wasn’t all!” Her voice was rising giddily, her spirit scarcely contained by her aged coil. “This! This, Rhis! This is my cup! This is what I choose!”

“Your children… they died!”

“And I’ll see them again soon! And look: God gave me more! And even if he hadn’t… he’s made me a place for them! A place to belong!”

I couldn’t contain myself. I wept into her parchment palm like a child.

Her opposite hand came to rest on my head. “There there, Rhis. It’s alright. You’ll understand… one day… when you’re my age.”

I could hear the humor in her tone. It did nothing to staunch my tears. “I could have made you live forever!”

“But if I’d lived forever… how could I have lived at all? I have… so much more now! So much more! But… no more of that. We’ve one last affair… to settle.”

I looked up. She gestured across the room, where stood a quarsk board.

“Bring it here.”

I did, and began to arrange the pieces for a new game.

“No, not like that. We’ve an unfinished game… don’t you recall?”

I didn’t, for she referred to the game we’d abandoned all those years ago on the day she’d buried her children. She told me how to arrange the board. She remembered the position of every last piece.

We played over the next half hour. I moved. She moved. Sometimes she’d lie back and close her eyes, but her hand would always rise to make the next move. I wish that game could have never ended, but I saw its conclusion approaching. Though my eyes were misty I had to laugh as I played again. “You know, I’ve said this for years, but you truly are incredible at this, Bess. The best player I’ve ever met, and likely ever shall. I suppose that’s why I first fell in lo…”

I looked at her, and her eyes were closed. I momentarily thought her dead, but then saw her still breathing. She wouldn’t be here much longer.

I looked back at the board, and realized she was a half-dozen moves away from inevitable victory. Her win would be forced. I’d been defeated again.

I didn’t wake her, but laid my strongest pieces sideways on the board, the signal of forfeiture.

Then I departed.

***

The Gafflyn’s waters flow on. They eddy in the shallows and rile the silt beds and babble among the stones that form the bank. But each runnel turns downstream to join the others in its time.

Would that I was a drop of water, to join in that proud current. I could be lost among the others, no longer on my own charter, indiscernible from any other mote. Away I could be borne unto the endless ocean, and happily would I journey there, and further still towards the seamless horizon where the whales are singing and the stars are drowning and God alone may wist. There would I be, partner to the tides and player in the swells, somewhere in the aeons whither she has gone to rest.

My purse. My clothes. My heart.

My God, my heart…

Never go to Doveham.

***

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