The Immortal Collection (A Saga of the Ancient Family Book 1)

by Eva García Sáenz

  “We buried my father’s belongings, as was the custom, but neither my mother nor I was satisfied. We decided to follow the bear’s tracks until we found my father’s remains. Imagine our surprise when, after a few days’ journey from the camp, we found the remains of the bear but not those of Lür. It was my father who had killed the bear, not the other way round. So we continued to look for him. Lür had taught me to be a good tracker, but he had been careful to cover his traces. We followed the route signposted in the dark by the Milky Way, always heading west, along paths full of engraved rocks, labyrinths, offerings from shamans, and petroglyphs. After a full lunar cycle, my exhausted mother and I found him near the headland at the end of the world, which you call Finisterre these days. That was the first time I walked along the early Camino de Santiago.

  “Lür had joined another clan and changed his appearance. He’d shaved his beard—a symbol of strength in our clan—and had his hair up in a ridiculous bun. At first we thought it was his spirit, but he ended up talking to us. I suppose it was his love for us that drove him to tell us the truth for the first time in his life. ‘I left because I am unable to age. If the two of you want to come with me, we’ll have to move on after a few seasons, and you’ll have to hide what I am.’ My mother got angry with him. She called him a coward, a liar, a madman. She thought my father had tired of her and simply wanted to leave her.

  “I don’t know what transpired between them or how he convinced her. I know they spent many nights talking, while I was also reaching a decision: to believe an honest man who had never lied to me, who had taught me to read doubts and deceit in people’s faces, and in whose face I had never seen anything other than the truth, however inexplicable. Maybe it was easier back then compared with now. We lived with the supernatural on a daily basis. Fire was supernatural; fever was supernatural; an eclipse was supernatural; a man eternally young was supernatural.”

  The bowl of dried fruits I had offered Dana was empty. I picked it up mechanically and continued to speak as I went into the kitchen to replenish it. She remained silent and looked away when I crossed in front of her. Go on, Urko. Finish it.

  “So we kept moving all over the north, the three of us living together, sometimes on our own, sometimes connecting with other clans and, in my case, with other women, but we always ended up leaving. The years passed, and my mother, increasingly handicapped, eventually died despite her own inner strength and our care. My father and I continued on our way, and the years that followed confirmed what we already suspected: I wasn’t aging either.

  “We learned to adapt with the times, despite my reluctance to abandon the lifestyle of the hunter. The Neolithic period came late to our region. I was already five thousand years old when the forests began to be cleared and the land ploughed. Thanks to those changes, everyone began to define their own territory—where they built their house—and to refuse passage across that territory to others.

  “Lür and I headed east, searching for other communities that maintained our way of life. As you know, we were completely mistaken. The only thing we found in the Middle East were settlements of farmers and herders. And shortly after that, the earliest cities. You spent a summer inhaling dust in the Çatal Hüyük, so you know what I’m talking about.” But no, there was no complicity between colleagues. Dana wouldn’t play ball. It was like talking to a statue.

  “That,” I said, propping myself against the windowsill, “was when we began to hear certain legends that changed the course of our little family forever. Do you remember the painted mammoth at the end of the Points Gallery in the Monte Castillo cave? I grew up listening to my father’s stories about that mythical animal. By the time I was born, they’d been gone from these parts for several millennia. They’d moved on when the climate changed, but in Lür’s time it was common to come across them grazing in herds. What you still don’t know is that it wasn’t just size that made them legendary, but also their longevity. Their miniature cousins, the present-day elephants, can live to ninety, but Lür recounts that sometimes the same mammoth would be seen over several generations, which is conceivable, given that it was the norm for members of his clan to live less than thirty years. I admit that I was bewitched by those legends. I thought that maybe if we found one, we’d discover the causes for our inexplicable capacity to stay young.

  “You may not understand this right now, but I grew up in a world where animals were omnipresent. Food, hunting, the shamans’ offerings—they all had to do with some animal. And millennia later, in those parts where the two of us were wandering, they were still talking about hairy monsters with tusks the size of a giant’s legs that lived in the far north, where Herodotus would later locate ‘the tribe that slept for six months.’ The old Greek wasn’t wrong. He was talking about Siberia and about the interminable months of polar nights, I presume.

  “So we decided to set out on a journey toward the north to find them. We were in the Bronze Age by then, and we had all the time in the world. We were going to circle the Black Sea, cross the lands of the Thracians and the Scythians, reach the Volga, and travel beyond the territory of the Hyperboreans. But it didn’t turn out that way—far from it.

  “In Scythia we were taken prisoner and forced to stay as slaves for twenty years, putting our secret in danger for the first time. I have no intention of providing a wealth of detail about that period. I’ll just tell you that my half brother, Jairo, was born there, also after a pregnancy of twelve lunar months, and he was raised with the name of Nagorno, believing himself to be the son of a noble Scythian couple. That happened two thousand seven hundred years ago in what is now Ukraine. A few years ago, an article was published suggesting that there were mammoths on Wrangel Island, north of Siberia, until three thousand five hundred years ago. The legends told the truth, but we arrived almost a millennium too late. It was the most painful anachronism of my life. Once Nagorno also became aware of his longevo nature, the three of us traveled together across those frozen lands until, fed up with not finding any mammoths, we turned back toward the south.

  “At that stage many parts of Europe were dotted with large numbers of Celtic tribes. My father had another daughter who didn’t age, Boudicca, or Boadicea as you’d know her, and when she was already several centuries old, we settled on the southeastern coast of the British Isles in what was then called Britannia. My sister Boudicca is the only one of us to appear in the chronicles of the time and in contemporary history books. Cassius Dio, and Tacitus in his Annals, spoke of her quite accurately. Boudicca kept us united like we’ve never been since. She was the youngest of us all, but she was a woman for whom family was very important. She became the maternal figure we’d all lost.

  “It was in that period that we also found Kyra. She was born in the bosom of the La Tène culture in ancient Gallia, or Gaul, at the height of the Iron Age. She was tiny at birth and a frail child. Apparently, even among our kind there are premature births. Héctor abandoned that hearth before anyone suspected anything unusual, just as I have done so many times. Occasionally stories reached us of a woman with marks on her face that made her cursed. Sometimes they’d speak of Dyra, at other times Eyra, and even Nyra, but her original name was Lyra. It took quite a few years and many bribes before I found her in Lugdunum, applying herself to eking out a living and taking advantage of the trade routes to conceal herself. After a considerable effort I managed to convince her to join the family. For the first time the five of us lived together with a degree of stability.

  “But Boudicca died a few decades later, in the year 60 of your Christian era. That was a watershed for us. Up until that point we didn’t know whether or not we were immortal; we simply knew that we didn’t age beyond thirty years. Since Boudicca, we know that we are merely longevos, Ancients, or long-lived, although we’re not frozen in time. My father has aged somewhat during my ten thousand three hundred and ten years of life. I, in fact, look a bit older than Nagorno and Lyra. They’re still y
oung compared to me and Héctor; they’re not even three thousand years old. I have a theory that once we reach thirty, we age one year for every two thousand years.”

  I dared to look at her out of the corner of my eye. Dana was keeping her promise not to interrupt me, although I now realized that extracting that promise from her had been a mistake. I would rather have heard her firing questions at me, seen her putting her hand up like a keen student searching for more information. But that most definitely was not what was happening in my living room.

  Come on, Urko, you’re almost there. Get to the end. Why stop now?

  Yes, why stop if there was no alternative?

  “Before you ask me about our investigations, I ought to fill you in on what happened a few years ago. Lyra was happily married, but a car crash put an end to that. For her it was a crisis. We were afraid she was going to commit suicide; she lost all desire to live, and we had to keep a really close eye on her. That was when Nagorno came into the equation.

  “You see, like many Scythians, he’s infertile, maybe because he spent his early youth on horseback. In any event, he didn’t have any children for two thousand seven hundred years, but when medical science began to offer assisted reproduction, that possibility opened up to him, too. When Lyra’s tragedy happened, he suggested that we find the reason for our longevity so that we could then select only embryos that carried that gene and have only longevo offspring. Neither of them wanted to repeat the trauma of having children and then seeing them die.

  “My father and I were absolutely clear right from the start that we didn’t want to search for the longevo gene. The two of us have had both longevo, or long-lived, and efímero, or short-lived, offspring. I apologize for the term efímero; it’s how Nagorno refers to people like you.

  “Héctor and I have both suffered the death of a longevo child, and we know full well the suffering that comes with it. The fact that the child carries our gene in no way ensures that he or she won’t die through a quirk of fate; it simply means they won’t age. But I guess Lyra and Nagorno share the naïve hope that their longevo offspring will live for millennia and be able to have families of their own. However, we also realized that they would find a way of carrying out their research without us, so we pretended to agree to their proposal.

  “Nagorno came up with the perfect plan. He reopened his old indiano house, converted it into a museum, and put me and my father in charge of it. He knew we wouldn’t be able to resist a few years in Santander, and archaeology was the icing on the cake. And so began the great farce. I had already studied biology, so I only had to become a specialist in genetics. Lyra had to get her degree first, which is why she joined the MAC later and didn’t pass herself off as our sister.

  “Usually, either the identity each of us assumes is not linked to the rest of the family, or two of us are related, or, at most, three. If we always pretended to be four siblings, we would be easier to trace. Yes, paranoia comes in waves when you’re an Ancient.

  “As far as the research goes, all I do is torpedo any theory that might lead to a positive outcome, though I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to do that. Within a few decades everything will be much simpler, and Lyra won’t need my help. Héctor and I are trying to gain time in the hope that she’ll change her mind, but I fear it’s a lost cause.”

  And that was that; I’d finally finished.

  It was crystal clear that Dana was no longer looking at me with the same eyes as before; I’d lost her. The admiration, the attraction, even the fascination—all those shades of expression in her eyes had been switching off as I worked my way through the millennia of my tale.

  Now what, Dana? Didn’t you want the truth? So what now, then?

  35

  ADRIANA

  Friday, June 1, 2012

  By the time Iago finally stopped talking, the sun had just hidden itself on the other side of the bay, leaving ever-darker strips of cloud in its wake. I was still sitting on the white sofa, wrapped up in the fur of some animal I couldn’t identify. I was hugging my knees, concerned not to let go of the computer in my lap. He continued to pace barefoot up and down the green living-room carpet, constantly looking toward the windows as if, by highlighting the direction of the outside world, some force of nature would come to corroborate his story. I knew it was my turn to say something, but for once no words emerged. In their place, irritation, disappointment, and rage had been piling up like heavy rocks inside my head.

  Another part of me was trying to sketch out some sort of explanation that would justify this incredible senselessness. I rejected the possibility that it was simply a joke, a bit of nonsense between friends, a practical joke between colleagues. I could see the gravity of the matter in his face. I tried to imagine the motives someone might have for coming up with such a ridiculous smokescreen. It had to be linked to what I’d overheard in the tunnel. Something he had to hide from me at all cost. Maybe to protect himself, or to protect me from finding out the truth. Maybe someone else was behind it: some government, a group of lobbyists, a pharmaceutical company, private capital, industrial espionage, whatever. I was on the outside, and Iago wanted it to stay that way.

  Fine.

  Message received.

  What I found humiliating was that he would need to invent a lie of such magnitude in order to keep me away from the truth. There were simpler ways. I would have understood. But the truth is that, at that moment, more than any other emotion, I felt insulted—as an expert in archaeology, and as a casual partner for one night, or whatever it was we had been.

  “And so?” he pressured me.

  “And so what?” I answered, in a foul mood.

  “Now it’s your turn to speak. Say it, whatever it is, please. Just give me something.”

  And I did. I looked at him with a blind, crushing fury.

  “You’re angry,” he whispered, dejected. It wasn’t a question.

  “Listen, I’m going to ask you just one thing. I don’t want you to see me really angry, and you’re one second away from that, so I don’t want to hear one more word of that absurd ‘immortals’ story.”

  “Ancients,” he corrected me.

  “Stop doing that!” I shouted at him, unable to control myself.

  “Doing what?”

  “What you’re doing: continuing to persist with your story, extending the lie.”

  “Oh, you wouldn’t want to see me extending a lie, believe me!” he let fly, almost without intending to.

  There was something in his tone that made my hair stand on end, because I sensed he was sincere. And for the first time I asked myself if I really knew Iago at all or if, up to now, I had just been dealing with a magnificent disguise.

  “Look, Iago,” I said finally, “I won’t say anything about what I’ve just heard. I never had any intention of doing so. Period. What you’ve just told me was in very bad taste.” I inhaled deeply to calm myself down. It didn’t work. “I’m exhausted, disillusioned, frustrated, and a thousand things more. Don’t walk me to the door.”

  I expelled it all and then got up, laptop in hand, without waiting for his reaction.

  Then he exploded. “Do you honestly believe that I’m capable of inventing everything I’ve told you?” he asked, beside himself. “All of it? What would be the point if it weren’t true? Do you have any idea how much I just exposed myself? Do you have any idea how few people we’ve ever told about our situation?”

  He bit his knuckles in despair. “I guess you want proof, right?” he snapped, turning toward me.

  I didn’t say a word. I refused to play along with his game.

  “Do you want proof?” he repeated, shouting.

  “Do you have any?” I replied, trying to sound as skeptical as I could as I returned to the couch.

  Okay. Game on, I thought, changing my mind.

  “We have objects that we’ve been
preserving for various reasons over the millennia. We could let you have them so you could analyze them, but what use would that be? Would that convince you?”

  I thought it over for a moment. We exchanged looks, and for once we were in agreement. I shook my head in silence.

  “Even then you wouldn’t believe me, would you?” he said in a somber voice. “You’d think we’d got them from archaeological digs or on the black market, or that we had a lucky find in some antique store. Nothing could prove to you that they’re ours.”

  “True enough. I don’t need a display of relics. I still wouldn’t believe you,” I was forced to admit. Then it occurred to me: “Give me a sample of saliva from each of you. I’ll send them to be analyzed. When I worked at El Sidrón on the Neanderthal Genome Project, I was in contact with the team of geneticists. I didn’t work directly with them—I was on site removing the bones—but at our meetings, we pooled our results. I’m not an expert in genetics, but I know several laboratories worldwide that offer ancestor searches and searches of family migration routes. You send them your sample in a kit they deliver to your house, and you get back the migration routes of all your ancestors. Do you want to prove your story? Then let me send off samples from the four of you. It would be interesting, wouldn’t it?

  “If I haven’t got lost following your convoluted family history, the results would tell us that Héctor’s parents arrived in northern Spain at least twenty-eight thousand years ago, that your maternal line originated in Denmark about ten thousand years ago, that Jairo’s line comes from the Russian steppes two thousand seven hundred years ago, and that Kyra’s line was in France two thousand five hundred years ago. If I see those conclusions, I’ll believe you.”