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.
“COME our with me into the peristyle,” said Lugo.