The Sons of Adam: The sequel of The Immortal Collection

by Eva García Sáenz

  When I reached what seemed to be the main floor, the light coming through the windows allowed me to get my bearings. I looked for the exit, and found a large door. The castle remained silent, as if it were uninhabited. I prayed that Gunnarr had forgotten about me and that Nagorno was in a deep sleep. I prayed that I would never have to see them again.

  Just as I had feared, the door was locked, so I tried all the windows until I found one that opened without making any noise. I jumped down without giving it a second thought. The ground was barely three meters below me and I landed as best I could.

  And then I ran. I ran to the stables and when I got there I went straight to the Akhal Teke block. I went over to the mare, saddled her, whispering words that only she understood and mounted her in silence.

  I knew a lot about horses, and I knew that they could find their way in the dark if they had travelled the path before. But she went in the opposite direction to the track that Gunnarr and Nagorno had taken me on our morning stroll. I wanted to find out if there were other routes that the mare had travelled previously that would take me to civilization. Maybe a ferry, to the house of a distant neighbor, or somewhere I could hide from my captors.

  The mare found her way and began to trot, with the elegance of a purebred. The animal knew full well where it was headed.

  Perhaps my imprisonment was about to reach its end.

  25

  The patriarchs

  LÜR

  Current Europe, 20.000 B.C.

  Lür was in his hut when he saw them leave with harpoons and spears. They had painted their faces with white ash and some were just children who didn't even want to go to the Solstice. They belonged to the Warrior branch, which was a decision Adana had made and that hadn't gone done well at all.

  "Are you coming, Lür?" He heard the sweet whispers of his companion, claiming him from under the albino fox furs.

  He closed the door and silently followed her call.

  Adana was waiting for him, naked and ready. He let her lick his neck and suck his fingers, he let her straddle him. She whispered the Ancient Words as they reached climax, but Lür's heart wasn't in it that time. For a long time now, sleeping with Adana had been like owning a beautiful landscape, a sunset, a never ending valley surrounded by mountains.

  Overwhelming.

  It was impossible to even try.

  Lür was aware that Adana had lost interest in him. After losing so many young children, Adana had gone back to seeking casual companions. Sometimes her daughters or great-granddaughters brought her companions to the camp. On other occasions, she went hiking without Lür, hidden by various members of the Guard branch, who were in charge of always escorting her and keeping her safe.

  The Sons of Adam clan was organized in branches. Every family was specialized in a trade: Interpreters, Fishermen, Weavers, Explorers, Hut builders, Skin tanners, Spear carvers, Figure carvers, Tattooists, Cooks, Hunters, Rock Painters, Midwives, Healers, Wet nurses, Traders and Writers, among others. After so many generations, every member of the Sons of Adam was an expert at their job, so much so that the figures made by the Carvers were sold by the Traders to any camp in any clan. The Midwives were always called upon to oversee the most difficult births, having been trained by Adana since they were young. She always insisted that they returned with cowrie shells in exchange for their services. The white hut, guarded day and night by the Guards, contained millions of shells, which Adana gave to her sons to trade with. With patience and over many generations, Adana had managed to get most clans to agree to trade with shells.

  But Lür was worried that day.

  "Why did you send them, Adana?"

  "You know why, none of the clans wanted to share their daughters and we have many more young men than women. If I don't sort this out now, the next generation will lack children and it will be difficult for us to survive as a clan."

  "Share their daughters? Is that what you call it now? Better to say that they lose them, that they never see them again."

  "We take them in, we look after them, we make them a part of our clan, isn't that a gift?"

  "It would be if you let the ones who don't adapt go back to their families, but the same thing always happens when we spend too long in the same valley. The other clans turn their backs on us when they hear stories about the destiny of the children who wanted to run away from you. It's pretty obvious why nobody wants to mix with the Sons of Adam anymore," said Lür, lifting himself off the bed and putting his pants and white shirt back on.

  "If that's how you feel, we'll leave this land as well," she replied, distracting herself with a leather bracelet that one of her sons had woven for her.

  "Yes, maybe it is time to leave," muttered Lür, turning his back on her.

  "What do you mean?" said Adana, standing up naked and embracing Lür from behind.

  He didn't even have to think about it. He'd known for centuries that there would never be a right time.

  "You won't let me leave, will you?" he said, knowing the answer but feeling good about himself for the first time in ages.

  "Nobody leaves our clan until they die," replied Adana, calmly. "And you don't want me to exile you."

  "But I can't die."

  "So you can't leave."

  "And what if I've already made a decision, what if I'm not asking for your permission?"

  "You can't leave, I would send the Sons of Adam after you and they would bring you back to me."

  "And you'd force me to be with you."

  "We are the patriarchs of the Sons of Adam."

  "Maybe I don't want to be anymore."

  "What other destiny could you possibly have? Roam the Earth on your own again?"

  I'm starting to miss that. But without you, without you, Adana.

  "You're changing, you're not the sweet Adana I used to know, Negu's wise companion. Or maybe you're beginning to reveal yourself now, is that it? Bloodthirsty, cruel, heartless?"

  She looked at him without seeing him. Her eyes looked straight though Lür's stare and didn't stop, focusing on something greater than the patriarchy. He stroked her long face for the last time. What was going on inside that head of hers?

  He would never know, she never gave him a direct answer to anything when they argued. The truth was, she never considered him, he had been a longer companion than the others, but Adana had always decided on the path of the Sons of Adam, and Lür was well aware of that. None of them were his descendants. He was still just a guest, someone from outside the clan. His blood had never mixed with theirs.

  He didn't want to leave like a coward, without saying goodbye. He spoke to each child, each mother, each elder. They were all silent and gave him a look of great sadness, as if they were looking at the corpse of a person they had loved dearly. Once, a long time ago.

  Adana put a curse on Lür, and he left the white huts, never looking back.

  26

  True means

  IAGO

  A buzz from the doorbell woke me with a start. I ran to the door, where the voice of a deliveryman told me that a rather large package had come in my name. I threw on the first pair of jeans I found and a grey shirt and ran down the stairs to find the source of the interference.

  In the entrance hall I found several workers carrying different sized packages and Marion checking the order list, with the same decisive wave of a hand that I had seen four centuries earlier in the port of Southampton.

  "What is all this, Marion?"

  "A strain of lab rats with their cages, bags of feed and water," she said, pointing to some boxes. "A transparent board for us to gather our theories and make notes of the formulas. Do you want me to continue, or are you going to let us in so as we can get started as soon as possible?"

  I ran my hand through my scruffy hair, still half asleep.

  "No, that's fine. Tell them to leave everything on the fourth floor," I said in the end.

  An hour later we had finished unpacking the animals and we had found them a h
ome at the end of my laboratory. Marion had bought herself a white lab coat, and she held another one out for me. "Let's put the transparent board in front of the window and grab a couple of white markers."

  The game had begun again: how much should I tell her? How much should I hold back?

  Marion pretended to be as calm as always, but I knew that she had been waiting for that moment for quite some time.

  I sighed. The performance had started.

  "I'm going to be honest with you: I haven't found the cause of why we are longevos," I lied, watching her reaction. "But when I read your reports, I suspected that it had something to do with our ability to maintain the telomerase gene active, or generates it ourselves."

  "That's what I thought, but I haven't been able to make any progress." "Go on."

  "The truth is that I used my brother Nagorno for a dual purpose: I injected him without knowing what the outcome would be, but I wanted to see what would happen to a body like ours when we inhibit the telomerase. I needed a guinea pig, and he had won the right to be it."

  "You must really hate your brother to use him like that," she said, sitting on a bench in front of the board.

  "One day I'll tell you our sweet story," I replied, with no intention of giving away any more details. "What we need to do now is reverse that effect."

  I left out all the details of my discovery, that longevos actually have genetic mutations: firstly, the gene that maintains the telomerase active, and secondly, the gene that inhibits any type of cancer.

  "And is that as far as you got after going through our studies with a fine toothed comb?" she asked, crossing her arms.

  "Well it's a good start! Right now I know that the telomerase is the reason, otherwise this wouldn't have happened to his heart and he wouldn't have aged a hundred years in one year."

  "And do you know where you're going to go from here?"

  "I'm hoping that you'll help me with that," I said, holding out a marker.

  Marion stood up and began to write on the board.

  "We have an organ, which is your brother's heart, artificially aged. Let's say that you had to clean out this telomerase inhibitor from every cell in his heart."

  "And reactivate it, as if nothing had ever happened."

  "Yes.”

  "The only thing I can think of is to do tests on these mice, injecting them with a genetically modified virus. You see, this year at the Kronon Corporation, we discovered that when the oncolytic virus is injected into the body of a cancer patient, it replicates within the tumor cells and kills them off. Right now your brother doesn't have any telomerase, so we can work at modifying one of these viruses, although rather than cleaning the tumor cells, we eliminate the telomerase inhibitor you injected him with."

  "Are you suggesting that we treat my brother with a viral therapy?" I asked, frowning. It wasn't an option that I'd ever considered, it was risky and it was a field that hadn't really been explored.

  "I know, it sounds like a rather desperate measure," she agreed, "and the side effects will be totally unpredictable, given the exceptional case."

  "So you're saying that we get hold of a virus that replicates within Nagorno's heart cells and kills of the telomerase inhibitor, turning everything back to how it was before," I thought out loud.

  She nodded. We were just about to start an improbable and disastrous research, and we both knew it, although we both pretended that everything was fine.

  "Ok, so we've got just the right amount of time to work with the mice and do a maximum of one or two tests before sending Nagorno his damn cure." I said.

  "Don't get ahead of yourself, Iago. First we have to extract cells from your brother, cultivate them for ten days and then do a blood transfusion."

  "I've got his samples, I asked him for them as soon as he called to tell me about the conditions of my wife's kidnapping."

  Marion nodded, although I saw a sad shine in her eyes, as if my last words had really hurt her. But she hid it like a trooper and we spent the next ten hours lost in complicated calculations, only taking a break to go down to the Paseo Perda and eat some tapas at noon.

  Late afternoon, with our heads full of information, I invited her down to the third floor and we sat on Lyra's sofa. I barely noticed, but after a while Marion was lying down, looking at the ceiling, as my daughter had done so many times before. And we talked for hours about other times, and we laughed with nostalgia like two old people. I was on the verge of stroking her cheek, as I used to do to Lyra, when I realized what I was about to do and stopped myself.

  "It was difficult for me to bring you out of mourning in New England, I'm glad that you've finally managed to shed your black clothes," I said, pointing at her white lab coat.

  She smiled, accepting the compliment.

  "You're not a widow, are you? There was never a Mr. Adams."

  "No, he never existed. Over the last few millennia, especially in Europe, it was much easier to pretend that I was a widow. Being a single woman, a virgin, always brought complications. But being a widow gave me a certain sense of worth, certain experience, and above all, enough freedom to not have to take a husband over and over again, with the obligation of motherhood, with the risk that every pregnancy brought with it."

  "What did you do afterwards, when you left our farm in Duxbury?"

  "I roamed the area, and decades later I ended up in Salem," was all she said.

  "Are you telling me...?"

  "I don't want to talk about that right now."

  I understood perfectly, what was the point in bringing up old memories? Lyra also suffered in 1610 and I never made her tell me how she escaped from that horror. I felt too guilty for not having looked after her, for being lost in County Cork because of alcohol.

  "Part of my family had to live through the trials of Zugarramurdi, in Navarre. Allegations from farmers and maids led to an infamous auto-de-fe , in Logroño. Forty people were accused and twelve were burned alive on the stake," she said.

  "Could Adriana ever understand that, Iago?" she asked me, suddenly sitting up. "The terror of being accused by your neighbors. Weren't you ever afraid of being involved in a witch hunt? Didn't you ever get scared when the Inquisition got a little too close?"

  "I've been scared many times, Marion."

  "And you know that she'll never be able to understand that."

  "I think that she can understand it, at least intellectually. She can process it, empathize with me. But obviously, she was never there." I looked out the window, the sun was setting over the bay and the clouds were blocking out what was left of the day.

  I was in no hurry to get off that couch, I just needed to rest my brain for a while.

  "Before, we weren't allowed to have post traumatic stress, there were no psychologists we could go to, or therapies to help us get over the horrors that we have seen," Marion continued, as if she was talking to herself. "I only listened to what I knew. Just keep going, grind your teeth, keep going and start a new life. Forget the faces of the bad people who tormented us and wait a few decades for death and old age to take care of them."

  "I know, I've also rejoiced many times with that secret triumph: all our enemies grow old and die, while we remain young and alive."

  "Can't I go back to calling you Ely? It's really weird calling you Iago."

  "No, Marion, that part of my life is over."

  Don't let yourself get caught up in the past, I repeated to myself.

  "There's something I have to ask you, which I haven't been able to get out of my head since the day I saw you in Paris. Why do you say that we are longevos, but not immortal? Have you ever actually seen any of your family die? Your son, Gunnarr, who you thought was dead was actually alive. In Plymouth you saw that scurvy didn't affect us. We've both lived through epidemics and famines, a thousand accidents, wars and natural disasters. We have been exposed to pathogens from other continents, to rotten food, and here we are, still in one piece. The twist to the story is, how do I know if I'm im
mortal? I can only know that I'm not moments before my death, when I understand the inevitability of time."

  "We're not immortal, Marion," I said, cutting her off.

  "How can you be so sure?"

  "I had a sister, Boudicca."

  "Boudicca, the British leader? She was one of you?" she asked, as if she had a special interest in her that I wasn't able to work out.

  "Yes, she died."

  "Are you sure? Did you see her die?"

  "We saw her body, she stole the poison that I kept on me for suicides, and we found her body, eaten by the beasts of the forest."

  "Are you sure that it was her body, and not a lookalike?"

  "Marion, I saw her body, or what was left of it. Her hair, her long braids..."

  "Is that all? Could you put your hand in the fire and swear that it was her and not remains of other bodies?"

  And the scar on the back of my hand began to burn again. It was them, Boudicca and Lyra again, warning me of the danger. Something very powerful was threatening the Ancient Family, otherwise they wouldn't be turning in their graves like that.

  "I had a longeva daughter. Her name was Lyra. Her first identity was Celtic. She died last year, in my arms, after I spent the longest twenty-two minutes of my life trying to resuscitate. I saw her lifeless body. It was connected to a cardiac monitoring machine. There's no doubt about it, Marion. My daughter died, her heart stopped beating and her remains are resting in a cemetery just a few kilometers from here."

  "Are you sure? Have you checked to see whether there is actually a body in that grave?"

  I stood up, tired of the interrogation that did nothing more than hit painful nerves, the most painful ones I had.