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The first time Nile sees her, it’s on a rainy morning, perhaps a month after the London disaster. The young woman is lying on an Ardennes’ road. She’s in so much pain it’s hard to notice anything except the trees and the sky above her. She also has difficulties breathing and thinks she broke her spine. Rain falls on her face, but Nile is too afraid to close her eyes. She’s angry too. It’s a stupid way to die. She knew it was stupid when she climbed into that car’s backside. They were chasing a dangerous man, and Nile found him first. She had a few moments to act before he disappeared, but she should have waited for the other. They’re going to yell at her. For now, she’s glad the man only thrown her out to the roadside with a few bullets in her torso. At least he didn’t bury her in the middle of the forest. She doesn’t want to wake up in a grave. Andy said it happened to her once.
When she gets better, Nile’ll walk to the nearest village and call the others. Unfortunately, her phone broke when she fell. If only she could die faster. Nile doesn’t know which is worse, the complete lack of feeling below her ribs, the pain in her twisted arm, or the sharp rock under her shoulder.
She hears footsteps behind her. At first, Nile thinks it’s Andy, but the footsteps are lighter. A shadow appears above her. The rain stops. Nile looks up and sees a young black girl with a magnificent afro and an umbrella. She wears ripped black jeans and a tank top with a strange cross across her chest. She’s beautiful.
The woman gives Nile a soft, sad smile. Her face is oddly familiar.
“Do I know you?” she wants to ask.
She can’t speak. Too much blood in her lungs. If she tried, she would choke and die faster. Funny. Nile would gladly get rid of her immortality, but right now, her brain is screaming she didn’t want to die. It has never been so slow.
“Don’t struggle,” the girl says. She kneels beside her. “It won’t be long, this time, but you’ll also have to wait a long, long time, I’m afraid.”
Her smile’s sadder now. Nile tries to ask what she means with only her eyes, but the girl shook her head apologetically. She puts her hand on Nile’s burning forehead, who feels her whole body arch to meet her. The girl’s hand is icy. It’s just what she needs.
Nile smells something nice, a mix of rain, grass, and her mother’s kitchen on Sunday morning. She would never sit at that table, never talk to her mother again. But she has that smell to comfort her. Nile closes her eyes to keep it in her mind. The rain still falls around them, but the umbrella protects her. It’s peaceful. Nile founds she wasn’t afraid anymore. She smiles and breathes painfully one last time. The pain disappears, and everything fades to black.
She breathes again, torn between relief and disappointment. She’ll live, she’s still immortal. Nile should probably rejoice: if she lives, she can save lives and help people. It doesn’t make it easier. She’s already tired of immortality, even if she had that “gift” for only a few weeks. It will be a hundred times worse when she’s as old as Booker, Nicky, or Joe. Better not to think about Andy’s age. Nile sighs and keeps her eyes closed.
“Welcome back to the living,” Andy greets her.
Nile opens her eyes to find it’s still raining. She’s cold. Andy, Nicky and Joe are here now. The first looks tired and angry; the other two don’t show him but probably are. As expected. Nile will accept her fate and her punishment. She’d been stupid, and the risk hadn’t paid off. But, for now, something else bothers her.
“Where is she?”
“Who?”
“There was a woman. She stood there until I died. How long was I out? She can’t have gone far.”
They look at each other. They do not seem to worry someone might have discovered their secret.
“What did she look like?” Joe asks.
“Young. Pretty, brown skin. A bit punk, a bit gothic, and a weird cross around her neck.”
“An Ankh,” Andy says, drawing the shape in the hair. “A symbol of eternal life in ancient Egypt. Did you see which way our target went?”
Andy avoids the subject and gives her a hand to get up. They all climb into the car they parked near Nile’s lifeless body on the road. Nile summarizes what she learned and where she thinks they’ll find their target. Aside from a reluctantly “nice job”, Andy stays quiet.
Finally, they found the man’s car deeper in the woods and stop near it. They walk in silence, ready to attack, behind Andy.
“Sometimes she looks different, you know,” Joe says suddenly.
Nile looks at him, but he’s focused on the path.
“What do you mean?”
“When I see her, she’s a woman dressed in black veils with pale brown skin, like bones abandoned for too long in the desert. Her veils never not move, even in a strong wind. She looks young, but her eyes are older than ours. She was already old the day the first man was born. Booker says her skin’s whiter than milk. She wears rags with a red ribbon around her neck. When he sees her, he’s always thinking of those women guillotined in Paris.”
“Yes, she wears rags,” Nicky says, “and she has bone-white skin, but for me, she wears a nun’s veil. You would have seen her, eventually.”
“Who is she?”
“You know her name,” Andy says, eyes on the road. “Now, focus.”
They do not speak of the woman again, even when they return to the hotel, a cold body left behind. Nile’s left alone with her questions. She misses Booker. He was more talkative than her friends. She wonders how the woman looked to Andy.
Nile dies twice more that month. Both times, she sees the young woman with her eternal smile that hid so many secrets. Both times, the Old Guard said nothing. Nile doesn’t know if they saw her.
It doesn’t matter. Nile knows who she saw now.
Death follows them.
The other already knew her, of course. How could they not? Immortality’s a curse, but it opened their eyes. On the day Nile saw Death for the first time, Joe and Nicky went to bed together and hugged each other tightly. After that, they didn’t talk about it. Some subjects no one wants to dwell on.
They saw her, too, at the beginning. Neither of them could tell how many they died before, how many times they killed each other. Maybe ten times, or twelve, or thirteen. One day, they died in each other’s arms on some battlefield, maybe Jaffa or Acre. It was the first crusade. They were sure of that. They were still known as Nicolὸ di Genova and Yussuf Al-Kaysani.
Here’s what they remembered: Nicky pushed his sword into Joe’s chest as Joe’s scimitar ripped Nicky open. Then, falling backwards, Joe grabbed Nicky’s tabard, determined to take him with him.
He succeeded. Joe died almost immediately, but Nicky’s wound killed him more slowly. Then he saw her for the first time. At first, he believed she was a nun who joined the crusade to comfort the dying. Nicky wanted to tell her to help someone else, someone who could still go to Heaven. He tried to say he was like the Wandering Jew, cursed by God or Satan, to wander and suffer until he got his redemption by killing the Saracen. Only a rattle came out. He died soon after. Her amused smile was the last thing he saw.
Joe woke before him, only to find the Frank’s cold blue eyes looking at him. He was still dead. If Joe found those eyes scary when the man was alive, it was worse now. Nicky’s body was crushing him. His armor was too heavy for Joe to push away. He had to wait for the other to wake up, praying to Allah the nightmare was finally over, and the Frank had joined his people’s Hell from which he should never have come out. He moved his head to look at the battlefield and see who was winning. Then he saw her. She was sitting on a large rock and smiled while the battle still raged around them. He wanted to run, but couldn’t.
Never had he been so relieved to see the Frank waking up. The man grimaced when he saw him and reached for his sword, already ready to kill him again. He stopped when he saw the woman, effortlessly jumped to his feet, even with his armor, and crossed himself before beginning a prayer in Latin. Joe mimicked him, invoking God’s name and reciting a sura to protect himself. He knew who she was, instinctively, and never had been so scared in his life.
They both wanted to run away when she came to them. They stayed still, mostly to not run before the other would. She stopped two steps away from them and smiled. They felt something close to shame. That smile was full of sadness and disappointment, as if they hadn’t lived up to the hopes she placed in them. She kissed the tips of her fingers and touched their foreheads. Both moved back, burned by her icy touch. She passed between them and when they turned around she had disappeared.
For the first time, they didn’t look at each other with hate. They knew they saw Death, and she refused to take them with her. Awkwardly, they picked up their sword, still soaked in each other’s blood. Then only they faced each other, embarrassed.
“Al-Ḥamdu lillāh”, the Saracen said.
“Deo gratias,” replied the Frank.
They hadn’t killed each other again that day. Neither spoke the other’s language, but they understood well enough. They had gone their separate ways, seeking death and victory elsewhere on the battlefield. Almost ten centuries later, they couldn’t say who won that day.
They saw her again and again after that, for Death followed in their footsteps. Sometimes they see her on a battlefield or in a hospital, holding the hand of the dying and taking them into her shadow where they disappeared. Every time she smiles and tilts her head in their direction to show that she knows they saw her. She always tries to be near them when death takes them and threw them away. When they don’t see her, they know she just couldn’t be there in time. Just as they know she would take them if she could, or that Quyn’s seeing her face sometimes when water fills her lungs and that she’ll be there for Booker whenever he dies far away from them during his hundred years of penance.
They never show their rage and their anger when they see her offer blissful oblivion to sick children and unrepentant murderers. Andy herself, Andromache the Scythian who had been there for so long, wouldn’t have dared to question her. She shows her some mercy and they talk on rare occasions. Death even comforted Nicky when Joe took so much time to come back the first time a cannonball killed him, promising he wouldn’t be left alone in this world. Joe knows that Death, like him, mourned how much the souks’ smells had altered over the centuries. Andy knows they both love Italian opera but have very different opinions on modern music.
Why not ask her the reason for their fate? Maybe they fear her answer. Because if Death tells them she does not know the reason for their torture any more than they did... It’s already hard to be denied her reassuring embrace. To learn that they’re nothing more than tools of a blind Fate would be far, far worse.
Andy, Joe, and Nicky have other reasons to be reluctant to discuss that subject with Nile. They were different reasons.
Joe and Nicky were afraid the first time they met Death. The next time, it was a bit more complicated. They hated her because she refused to take them. Even worse, she refused to take the other, the enemy, the one who deserved so much more to die for their crimes. They despised her.
And then, everything changed between them.
They were more reluctant to fight each other. Their duels were more infrequent, their blow less brutal. Something held their hand and constrained their hatred. Maybe another Endless was guilty of this change. Maybe someone wanted to play with their hearts as another was already playing with their lives. Maybe. Only one being could answer this question. It didn’t matter, anyway. One day, Joe held back his arm and turned away, or maybe it was Nicky. Both insisted that the other had made the right choice first, but that it was their own heart that had beaten faster first. Joe and Nicky had found each other and loved each other. The how or the why didn’t matter in the face of the thousand years of love that had followed.
But with their love, Death had become an even more ominous shadow. Because one day she would take one away and leave the other alone for a second eternity, longer than the first. Before, they would have welcomed Death with tears of Joy. Now, thinking of leaving the other behind is torture. Despite their fate, neither Joe nor Nicky had lost faith. Their most regular prayer, in Latin or Arabic, is the same for both of them.
“Take him first. Let me suffer this fate rather than inflict it on him.”
They pray while kissing each other’s forehead in the morning and when they hold the other’s bleeding body on a battlefield. They would not confess they had another plea in their minds.
“My God, please don’t leave me alone. Don’t deprive me of his smile, his laughter and his body. I will survive since I must, but my soul will perish that day. You gave his love to me, my God, please don’t take it back. If it’s you who punishes me again and again, leave me that consolation. Don’t take him away.”
A thousand years and a thousand billion prayers later, they still fear each other’s death as on the first days they learned to love. Every time they meet, Death is a blow to their hearts. Joe dies a little every time Nicky stops breathing. His heartbeat under his trembling hand brings him back to life. It’s the same for Nicky. So no, they do not want to talk about Death and her silent promise. It would be good to die, but death would separate them. They could not talk such a cruel fate. Only two things were worse than death: Quyn’s fate and this.
They never talk about it among themselves. They don’t need to. Both know that their nightmares too often include the vision of their loved one’s body, desperately motionless in a pool of blood. Talking about it would just make it more real.
Things are different for Andy. She hadn’t had someone to hold on to for a very long time. Quyn had been her anchor, her love, her reason to continue to survive her long years on Earth and now, she’s lost to her. Quyn’s too far away for her to reach. All the gold and all the time in the world would give no guarantee Andy would find her, even with the rapid scientific advances of the past few centuries. And even if she found her,
There’s no way Quyn would come out unscathed. Sometimes, in her dreams, Andy can see Quyn’s eyes. As the lights disappear from them, she reads the ugly truth, again and again. Until Death frees her, she’ll belong to Delirium.
Death.
Andy sees her more often since she found herself mortal again. Death is often on the periphery of her vision, waiting. Mostly it happens whenever Andy’s hurt. She was there when Andy cut herself accidentally in a pub and when a bullet grazed Andy’s scalp, when they took that Mexican cartel. It happens again when she sprains her ankle pursuing human traffickers in Libia.
It’s a constant reminder of her mortality. Andy doesn’t know what to think of it. In a few days, months, years or decades, Death will take her hand. Andy will walk into her unfamiliar domain. She hoped for that mercy for so long. To know Death is so close, to see her smile full of promises, is a real balm to her wounds. And yet... Andy’s nervous when she sees her. For the first time in millennia, her time’s running out. Like any human, she wants to postpone her fate. Each time she nearly dies, the same thoughts run in circles in her head.
“Not now. Not so soon. Not when I still have so much to do. Nile’s still a child, she doesn’t know enough, I have to teach her to fight, to be strong. I can’t go when we’re not sure they’ll be safe, they’ll never by locked up again for experiences. Not when I can still help. And please, not stupidly. I don’t want to die of sickness or old age, not after all this time. Let me die fighting for a cause.”
Humanity. Always ready to negotiate with the Endless. Andy’s like everyone else now, fearful before Death. And against all logic, she founds that thought comforting. It means she’s still human.
Strangely, Death looks different now. For more than a millennium, Andy saw a woman with bone white skin, braided hair falling below her waist, her half-naked body covered in war paint, the same people wore when Andy was young. She wears the same face now, but her hair’s short, and she’s wearing black jeans and a tank top. You could confuse her with any other young gothic girl in town.
Death’s an Endless. She doesn’t change, everyone else does. If she looks different, it’s because Andy changed, after all these centuries frozen in time. Yes, Andy changed clothes, weapons and mannerisms to conform to the century she lived in, but she still was Andromache the Scythian. Mortality seems to make her more capable of change. At least, it’s the only explanation she can manage. She’s changing because she’s preparing for her death. She’s Andy now, a normal human being who could die at any time, but still gets up in the morning to do her part in making this world a little better.
She can roll with that.
A few weeks after Nile saw Death for the first time, she makes a second encounter. They’re on a humanitarian mission in a war zone, found for them by Copley. They’re all exhausted. Andy pushes them to take mission after mission. The woman’s a little ashamed to push them to their limits, but she needs to do as much as she can. Time’s running out for her. They all know that, so they don’t protest, but they’re still drained, seeing the world’s misery day after day, without a break.
Right now, they’re in a ruined hospital, making sure the volunteers bringing medicine and providing care stay alive. It’s hard to bear the smell of the dead and dying piled up on the stretchers. They may do everything they can to help, but it seems as effective as pouring water on sand. There would never be enough food, medicine, hands and time to help these people.
Sitting next to Nicky, Nile suddenly bends forward, frowning, then goes back to her watch.
“What?” Nicky asks, one finger already resting on his gun’s trigger.
“Nothing. Well, I think it’s nothing. I thought I saw a woman sitting over there next to the stretchers.”
Nicky peeks and shudders.
“Yes. I see her too. Don’t let her see that you noticed her.”
“Why? Who is she?”
“You saw Death. There are others like her. The one here is Despair of the Endless.”
Joe, watching a doctor’s work from a distance, frowns.
“Believe in our long experience. Soon enough, you’ll be walking in all of their domains. Despair will lay her nails on you sooner or later, and you don’t want that to happen so soon. Look what she did to Booker.”
“What are you talking about?”
Joe and Nicky exchange a look. Nile doesn't know what they do about immortality, and it’s time for her to lear more. They never wanted to hide things from her, but they know how hard it is to accept immortality. They wanted to let her take her time without the knowledge of all the legendary creatures that roamed the world. Andy, Nicky, Joe, and Booker had all seen them many times in their too-long lives. The first meeting’s always a shock, especially for the more religious among them, those who had been taught that there was only one true God and that everything else was just idols.
Unfortunately, Despair is an all too familiar face. She was there when Booker’s youngest son had spat his hatred in his face, no longer seeing in him the father, but the man who deprived him of immortality. She was by Joe’s side the day he had to pose as his own son to attend the funeral of his last living brother and the day Nicky learned of the sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders and lost all love and loyalty in his brothers in faith. She was there when Andy saw Quyn disappear forever and each time one of them tried to end their lives by a rope or a pistol, well aware it wouldn’t work. When they rose unharmed, crying and cursing, she was still there. Despair was an old companion and an old enemy.
Destruction was an old companion, before. The battlefields were his domain, and the Old Guard had roamed so many of them they all blended together. Actium, Cannes, the Red Cliff, Baekang, Didao, Antioch, Jerusalem, Ascalon, Damascus, Jerusalem again, Saint-Jean d’Acre, Constantinople, Baghdad, Malta, Constantinople again, Varna, Vienna, Valmy, Waterloo, Gettysburg, Omaha Beach... From absolute defeats to Pyrrhus victories, he stood there watching the battles and his sister who indiscriminately seized the dead of both sides. They had respected him once, understanding that he was a necessary evil, just like Death was. Then he had deserted his post and now they despise him. By what right could he refuse to perform his duty when they could not lay down their burden? It’s hard to swallow.
Dream is more sympathetic to them, especially since he’s been replaced by another aspect of himself. He’s the most compassionate one, offering them the only thing that could make a difference: the possibility of dreaming of days long gone. When Joe forgets the taste of the old Cairo souk’s pastries he ate at the turn of the 11th century, Dream comes to him, dressed in a long tunic and a black turban and they seat on the sand of the desert or on thick carpets in the shade of the walls of his hometown to enjoy them together. Sometimes Nicky wakes up to the voice of his mother singing his childhood’s prayers, and he knows he had to thank the man he saw in his dreams walking in a street that did not exist, wearing a garment that everyone had forgotten existed. Andy knows that when she’s forced to go back to the lands of her youth, disfigured by industry and wars, she’ll see them again in a dream still untouched. Of course, Dream is also the one who gives them the dreams that help them find each other and the one who keeps the memories of their most traumatic deaths away, even if they still must bear awful nightmares here and now.
Of Delirium and Desire, the Old Guard does not say much. The first terrifies them, much more than Despair. So far, they always overcame the despair that so often overwhelmed them, but if they succumbed to madness, they felt they would not recover. Desire sometimes tried to play with them in their cruel way. No doubt they cause the attraction that had arisen between Nicky and Joe, this mad desire that fueled their hatred even more in the beginning. It doesn’t matter, because they chose to built love and trust above it. In the end, Desire wasn’t a threat to them, although it was best not to say so in their presence. Desire couldn’t offer them anything that would tempt them, because the one thing they really wanted, only Death could give them.
“And Destiny?” Nile finally asked.
Destiny, they don’t talk about. They know of him. Sometimes, they hear a page slowly turning. He alone knew the reason for their prolonged existence. If anyone was to blame, it was him. If anyone knew how to undo the situation, it was him. But even the Endless dared not ask Destiny about their fate.
“We’re immortal,” Joe concludes, “and the world is bigger, stranger and more dangerous than one could have ever imagined. There are things more surprising than people spitting bullets out of their mouths. You, me, the mortals, we all walk in the gardens of the Endless. We live, dream, desire and destroy under their gaze. Our destiny is written in Destiny’s books. Immortality, believe me, is only the first of our worries. To know that we are not in control, that we are only toys between the Endless fingers, can be unbearable. Everything is written, nothing changes and especially us. Mektoub.”
Nile stays quiet. A chasm had just opened under her feet. Across the room, Despair groans and lacerates her skin as refugees stare at the wall with wide, blank eyes. Nicky leans down to kiss Joe, who clutches his fingers like Nicky’s the plank keeping him from drowning. They held this role for each other for almost a thousand years. Love’s their salvation. Maybe the knowledge they can use their long life to do good will be Nile’s.
Andy looks away, refusing to see Despair and those who quiver under her grip. Yes, mortals and immortals belong to the Endless, but at least the former had hoped that the curtain would fall and Death would take them away. Now she too had that hope. All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women are merely players, said good old William, they have their exits and their entrances. For her, the exit is near, at last. The others, alas, would continue to live seeing the theater in its entirety, with the machinery and those who held the strings of the puppets.
No, even if she fears the approach of death and what would come next, Andy does not envy them.
On the other side of the wall, sitting on a bed holding the hand of a man in constant agony, Death sighs. She does not envy them either, she who only once a year tastes the bitterness of mortality. Eventually, the dying man breathes for the last time and Death welcomes him into his embrace. He was the last one she came to help here. Duty calls her elsewhere. Before she goes, she whispers a few words and her promise floats in the air for a few beats.
“Soon,” Death promises Andromache of Scythia. She didn’t hear her, but suddenly, she feels more alert and more confident.
“One day,” Death promises Nile Freeman. Her throat tightens a little more, and she tries to hold back her tears. She needs to be strong for the centuries to come and the work which needs to be done.
“Together”, Death promises Nicolὸ di Genova and Yussuf Al-Kaysani. They tilt their two heads against each other.
Together, they promise each other silently. Together, we’ll endure centuries and millennia. Together, we’ll defend the weak and the just from the strong and the fanatics’ madness. Together.