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The desert takes. It takes and takes and takes.
She is a creature of water. Her childhood is spent by a river, framed by lush mountains and green forests. She grasps at slippery fish with her hands, builds lithe muscles as she dives and swims. In the water, she is at home. She is weightless. She is free.
When she lays on the burning sands, her whole body alight with agony, she feels every press of her skin against the ground.
She is no stranger to heat, but not like this. Home is warm but humid. Sometimes the water lays so heavy in the air, she feels as if she is swimming instead of walking. It clings to her hair, slides down her skin, fills her mouth. And the rain. Oh, the gloriously, blessed rain.
She is cursed. A water spirit, trapped to wander where there is no water. Only heat. She falls. She dies. She wakes. She rises.
Again and again and again.
She cannot mark days, cannot reliably track the slide of day to night to day again. How long does she stay dead? How long does she lay there, face pressed to the sand? She wakes, sand instead of air in her lungs. It does not matter, she always wakes.
The shadow is welcome. Shade is a half formed memory. A dream. This is a dream.
She is a dream. She is her dream. The dark hair, light eyes, sharp cheekbones. This woman has haunted her dreams and the space between life and death. She is an angel.
They share no words, no languages in common. But the soft questioning touch of comfort and the shouldering of her weight, these are universal. These are human. I have you. Lean on me. You are not alone.
The woman of steel and stone presses her hand to her chest. Andromache.
The woman of rivers and water replies. Quỳnh.
----
The thoughts are dizzying. Too much. Too many.
Blood is a familiar sight now. She knows the smell of it, the slick hot touch between her hands. But this is overwhelming. It flows between her hands. It does not stop. She cannot remember how to make it stop. She presses and he moans and she screams.
Andromache, help me!
She has spilled this blood before. Through action and inaction, time and time again. What does it matter? The skin knits. He washes clean. He draws his hands along her in soft, determined motions. Tonight, tonight they will laugh around the fire. They will kiss. They will love. It will be as the hundreds of nights before. It will be as the thousands of nights yet to come. They cannot die.
But he is dying. She can see it in the tremor of his limbs, the shake in his voice. Her fingers slide against Andromache’s yet they cannot fuse him back together.
It's time. It's time.
That evening, they fuck. It cannot be called making love when they bite and tear and grip to bruising. They are feral in their grief. They are rough in their terror. Mine, she screams at the universe, mine. They are trying to crawl inside one another's skin, burrow in one another's hearts. She cannot leave marks on the alabaster skin and it enrages her. How dare this blessing, this curse, give her this woman and that man and not let her claim them. Mine mine mine.
The pyre crackles long into the night. Andromache is finally calm and sated in her arms. But she cannot rest, her mind is reeling. She sees the cuts, the bruises, and the deaths she has marked upon Andromache’s skin. Time has wiped them all away. Death came for them and it could not hold them.
But it seems death is not done taking from her. She had forgotten and it took Lykon. And some small, vicious, hateful part of her is thankful. Because she had forgotten and she needed to be reminded. Because if death can still touch them, truly and forever, then death could have taken Andromache instead. That thought drags the air from her lungs.
Please. She feels broken, as though there is a great chasm in her chest. No more. She clutches at Andromache. No more.
---
He is singing to himself. A tune she can barely place as one he sings around the campfire. She does not know the words. She's not sure any of them know the words, not even Nicolò. She has no doubt Yusuf has taught his lover many words in his mother tongue, but there are some things that one keeps for themselves.
Not knowing the words is of no importance. The melody is sweet and his voice only slightly off key. She feels the tension drop from her shoulders. Yusuf is here. She can hear him. Which means she is not too deep and that he could hear her.
She shifts slightly, feels the earth move and rearrange. A trickle of dirt brushes past her cheek, sticks in the corner of her mouth.
Panic bubbles up in her chest but she tamps it down. She was lucky, when she fell. Her body had curled upon itself by instinct. Centuries of gasping alive after every death had still not trained out the sense of preservation that is innately human. It's how she finds herself bent like a child in her mother's womb, earth and darkness wrapping her.
She manages to carve out a small pocket of air in front of her lips, one hand cupped against the onslaught of dirt. She draws a deep breath, knowing she has one chance. The edges of her vision darken. Her lungs ache. There is not enough air. It will have to do, it must do.
She screams. Then she passes out.
There is air. There is air. She draws it in, choking on dust but she doesn't care. Something presses on her face, her back. It's warm and solid and not dirt. She draws in more air.
She opens her eyes to Yusuf. Her brother speaks often and freely; words of poetry, words of anger, words of love. Words spill from his lips as easily as breath. And the universe's grand joke is that they do not need to. For one can read the entirety of Yusuf al-Kaysani’s mind in his face. Fear, love, tiredness and exasperation flash before her eyes as tangible as his warm skin beneath her fingers. Emotions that crash against her last wall of resistance. The stoicism that blanketed her as surely as the earth she had slid upon and tumbled into, crumbles now. She allows herself to shake apart in his arms with great, wracking sobs.
An hour later, after she washes the dirt from her face and arms in a freezing stream, he cards the debris from her hair and plaits it. He teaches her the words to the song he was singing and when the nightmares come, as they always do, she whispers it to herself till she calms.
---
Her captors do not seem to follow any rhythm or schedule, but she marks the passage of time by the growing gauntness of her frame. She has begun to die, she thinks, waking still tired and hungry and cold. Her body is exhausted. She can barely crawl to the corner she has designated as her privy, not that there is much to expel. She tries to rest as her body tries to replenish what was lost but some days she wakes with the deep, painful gasp that follows her heart stalling in the night. She guesses many weeks have passed, at least.
She wishes to tell them of her immortality. That their plan to beat and starve information out of a human woman would have failed many times over. She wishes to tell them their rods and whips have no effect on her. Their sting has fled from her skin before the echoes of her cries drop from the air. Her clothes hang off her and smell of sweat and blood and piss. She is, somewhat, thankful she is not allowed to bathe so they cannot see the whole skin beneath the grime. She counts her ribs with her fingers, as she lays on the dank floor of her cell. She closes her eyes and imagines the cold brush of skin on skin is Andromache’s hands, piecing her back together.
Her eyes feel weak in the torch light and it takes her a moment to recognise the man. He has grown a beard, a small scruffy thing that barely hides the line of his jaw of the beauty mark on his cheek. His hair is longer, pulled back from his face. His lips are tightly pressed and almost white. There is the tightening of his jaw. It undoubtedly looks like disgust or anger to those around them, but not to her. They have had over a century together and she knows all the emotions Nicolò hides behind a face of impassivity.
If she could muster up enough energy to open her mouth, she may laugh. But there are no reserves left to draw upon so she hangs limply between the two men holding her. The other’s plan is startling in its simplicity. It is almost too simple.
I am a priest, he says, in rather abysmal spanish, I am here for your confession. She does laugh at that and falls into his arms as the men at her side crumple. It is so fast, she almost does not see him move. Her guards certainly do not. She blinks back tears as he takes her face in his palms and kisses her forehead. There is a smear of blood up his cheek and over his eyebrow. She tells him so and he wipes it with the underside of his stole.
His eyes are clear and deep as the ocean and she wishes to fall into the endless warmth she sees there.
He marches her out, taking all of her weight for his own. His hand forms a tight band around her arm. If she could bruise, she would. She says nothing to him. She is lightheaded with fresh air that does not smell of rotting straw and her own decay.
He whispers to her under his breath. He slides through various languages with the ease of practice; hers, his, Yusuf’s, Andromache’s, dialects long dead and languages known to so few. They have long perfected this manner of speaking to ensure they are not overheard, but she struggles to keep up with him. He must notice her effort and the words melt away for a moment. He loosens the grip on her arm and soothes his palm down her shift instead. An apology.
Outside the gaol, there is a carriage waiting. She only sees a flash of the driver before Nicolò bundles her inside. She sees enough to recognise the tanned skin and bright teeth against a dark beard and sags with relief. Nicolò tucks her head against his shoulder and holds her tightly against him. She must smell but he makes no mention of it.
She fiddles with the stole about his shoulders, the ties of his alb. She idly wonders, out loud, where he managed to get a priest’s outfit. The dark flush of his cheeks and the flick of his gaze to where Yusuf is sitting say enough. She instantly knows that the costume was not acquired for this mission. The laugh that startles out of her only makes him blush harder.
She quivers with laughter. Tears stream down her cheeks until she hiccups and even then she can barely catch her breath. The absurdity of it all. Nicolò, dressed as a priest, merely walked into her cell, killed two guards, and walked them back out. She is free. Her brothers have come for her and they are taking her to Andromache. She rubs her face into Nicolò’s shoulder and he strokes her back. She sleeps.
---
Her first death, millennia ago, had been to the water. A flood through her village that had caught her unawares and swept her away. She had drowned.
She drowned. She is drowning. She will drown, again.
In the moments, mere moments, of clear thought, she remembers her childhood home. She thinks of the river, carving a wide path through the plains. She hikes the mountains, carpeted with green. She laughs with her sister as they splash through the shallows. She brings Andromache and Lykon here, centuries after her death. Their bedrolls lay out beneath the trees, overlooking a valley both familiar and foregin to her. The sunlight dapples across their skin as they tangle together.
She gnashes her teeth and slams her hands against metal. It does not bend. She cries. It makes no difference. The whole of an ocean presses down upon her. She drowns.
In a cruel twist of fate, she dreams of the desert, of the warm sand and blinding heat. She dreams of the land where she first saw her Andromache. She sees the bloodied sand where Nicolò and Yusuf spilled one another’s blood. She feels the warm air of a different desert, where they came together for the first time. Andromache and her awoke from the dream together, blood pounding in their ears. They made love. When they finally meet her brothers, Nicolò blushes as she mentions the dreams with a waggle of her eyebrows.
She laughs, but there is no sound. There is no air. There is only water. It pours into her mouth and into her lungs. She drowns.
She tries to count the seconds. How many before her chest aches? How many before the pounding in her head becomes unbearable? How many before the world goes black? Her body learns not to gasp awake. She holds on for longer and longer. She dies. She wakes. Nothing changes. She opens her eyes, but there is nothing to see. The salt stings her eyes. She heals. It stings again. She keeps her eyes closed for hundreds of seconds, thousands. She begins again.
She drowns.
Her thoughts and memories and dreams blend together. Nicolò laughs with Lykon. Yusuf speaks the language of her youth fluently and teases her in her grandfather’s voice. They crowd around a fire. She sits in Andromache’s arms, but when she looks, they are Lykon’s. She feels a hand on her shoulder. But it is cold and slimy. It slithers. Yusuf was warm, so warm. Is warm. He is alive. He is dead, trapped in earth and rotting away. No, Lykon burns on the funeral pyre. He opens his eyes and they are Nicolò’s eyes. She reaches out for him. The fire is cold. It is hard steel. It is wet. Her hand scratches till her nails bleed.
She drowns.
Time has lost all meaning. There is no day and no night. There only is. The moments she counts. The lives she beats and screams. The lives she lays still. The lives she dreams of Andromache. Andromache fighting. Andromache laughing. Andromache kissing. Andromache touching her. Touching Andromache.
She drowns.
She forgets the feeling of sunlight and fire. She forgets warmth, the feeling of skin against her own. She forgets Yusuf’s song. She forgets the colour of Nicolò’s eyes. Lykon’s laugh.
She drowns.
And then, she wakes and she cannot remember anytime but this, anywhere but here. There is a name on the tip of her tongue and it floats away with salt water. She forgets.
She is alone.
She screams.
She drowns.