She half shaped a reply, aborted it, and sat cat-watchful, too wise to exclaim, “Flatterer!”
He calculated his grin. “I daresay your … callers … number some with various peculiarities. You gratify them or not according to your inclination. It must have been a cruel struggle to win this independence. Well, then, will you indulge my whim? It is perfectly harmless. I only wish to talk for a short span. I would like to tell you a story. You may find it amusing. That is all. May I?”
She failed to quite hide her tautness. “I have heard many stories, Kyrie. Do continue.”
He leaned back and let the words flow easily while he looked before him, observing her from the corner of an eye. “Call it the kind of yarn that sailors spin during calm watches or in taverns ashore. It concerns a mariner, though afterward he did numerous different things. He thought himself an ordinary man of his people. So did everybody else. But bit by bit, year by year, they noticed something very odd about him. He never fell sick and he never grew old. His wife aged and finally died, his children turned gray and then white-haired, their children begot and raised children and likewise fell prey to time, but everything in this man since the third decade of his life stayed changeless. Was that not remarkable?”
He had her, he saw, and exulted. Her gaze was utterly intent.
“At first it seemed he might be blessed of the gods. Yet he showed no other special powers, nor did he do any special deeds. Though he made costly sacrifices and later, approaching despair, consulted costly magicians, to him came no revelation, nor any solace when those he loved went down into death. Meanwhile the slow growth of awe among the people had, with equal slowness, become envy, then fear, then hatred. What had he done to be thus condemned, or what had he sold to be thus spared? What was he, sorcerer, demon, walking corpse, what? He barely evaded attempts on his life. Finally the authorities moved to investigate him and he fled, for he suspected they would question him under torture and put him to death. He knew he could be wounded, although he recovered fast, and felt sure that the worst injuries would prove as fatal to him as to anybody else. Despite his loneliness, he kept a young man’s desire for life and the savoring of it.
“For hundreds and hundreds of years he was a rover on the face of the earth. Often he let his yearnings overcome him and settled down somewhere, married, raised a family, lived as mortals do. But always he must lose them, and after a single common lifetime disappear. Between whiles, which was mostly, he plied trades where a man can come and go little remarked. His old seamanship was among these, and it took him widely across the world. Ever he sought for more tike himself. Was he unique in the whole creation? Or was his kind simply very rare? Those whom misfortune or malice did not destroy early on, they doubtless learned to stay hidden as he had learned. But if this be the case, how was he to find them, or they him?
“And if his was a hard and precarious lot, how much worse must it be for a woman? What could she do? Surely none but the strongest and cleverest survived. How might they?
“Does that conundrum interest my lady?”
He drank of his wine, for whatever tranquility might lie within it. She stared beyond him. Silence lengthened.
At last she drew breath, brought her look back to engage his, and said slowly, “That is a curious tale indeed, Kyrie Cadoc.”
“A tale only, of course, a fantasy for your amusement. I do not care to be locked up as a madman.”
“I understand.” A smile ghosted across her countenance. “Pray continue. Did this undying man ever come upon any others?”
“That remains to be told, my lady.”
She nodded. “I see. But say more about him. He’s still a shadow to me. Where was he born, and when?”
“Let us imagine it was in ancient Tyre. He was a boy when King Hiram aided King Solomon to build the Temple in Jerusalem.”