Unbearable

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  Mairead nodded toward the crevasse at the back of the cavern, barely seen in the light from our flashlights. “This cave system runs for miles through the crags and down deep, too. Craigencallie was a natural fortress in Roman times, that the tribes used to hide from the legions who ventured north of the wall.”

  “Hadrian’s Wall,” Nick murmured, frowning. He had his sword out and was studying the fissure ahead of us. If he thought it a good idea to draw, then I would follow his lead. He was sometimes almost prophetic with his hunches.

  Mairead moved around us and took the lead, as Tally and I both drew our swords. She led us deeper and deeper into the crag, moving with confidence even when the path clearly split and ran in different directions. The floor of the caves was generally even, worn smooth by thousands of feet over the centuries. Even though there was no one but us in the caves at that moment, the smooth footing spoke of other humans and made me doubt all over again. Gargoyles would not choose such a well-trafficked cave to hide in. The more isolated and difficult to reach caves were their preferred nests.

  We moved on, the echoes of our passage reverberating in the cold air around us. Otherwise, it was utterly silent and very dark beyond the beams of our flashlights.

  The way grew rockier and less friendly to human feet, telling me that we were reaching the more distant areas. Mairead lifted her flashlight and let the beam play on the smooth granite section of the wall we were passing. Ancient figures had been painted there, showing stylized animals and symbols that once meant something to the Celts who ventured here.

  “They figure these are from the second or third century,” Mairead murmured. Her voice ran whispering back into the caves around us, the sibilants hissing eerily. “No one likes to go far beyond this main chamber. It’s not well known at all farther on.”

  “I’ll remember the way back,” Nick said firmly.

  “Me, too,” I added.

  Mairead nodded and kept going. We stayed bunched together and I kept my sword up just as Tally and Nick were doing. My heart was stirring unhappily and because I didn’t know why, I kept my guard up. My own gut instinct usually serves me well.

  Mairead came to a halt, playing the beam of light over the area ahead. She was frowning heavily. “I don’t remember this section being like this at all.”

  “How well do you remember it?” Nick asked. It was a pertinent question. Humans had notoriously faulty memories and often had to be tricked into recalling facts properly.

  “Well enough,” she said. “That section over there is as it should be, but not this slope, here.” She picked out the sharp incline with her flashlight. The slope was thick with rocks and rubble.

  “It looks very loose,” Tally said slowly.

  “Like a section has collapsed?” I suggested.

  “Or been pulled down?” Nick finished. He headed for the slope, where the rock floor turned into a field of pebbles and dirt. He edged around the lose stuff, heading deeper, beyond the fall.

  We followed.

  “Be careful!” Mairead whispered and the air picked it up and repeated it. “No one has been here before. You don’t know what you might find.”

  Nick was standing just ahead of us, moving the beam of his flashlight around. “Oh, I think there have been people here before,” he said as we reached him.

  The area we were standing in had a flat, dusty floor and walls that ran vertically.

  “Man-made,” Tally breathed, looking around.

  “A passage,” Nick confirmed.

  “It must have been blocked off, ages and ages ago,” Mairead murmured. “Maybe centuries ago.”

  I thought of the ancient symbols on the wall in the main chamber. Likely, her guess was right.

  “Why block it off?” Tally asked.

  “Let’s find out,” Nick said and moved ahead, down the wide passage.

  “Is that…? It looks like daylight ahead,” Mairead said. She was at the end of the file, now.

  Nick lowered his light and we looked ahead. It was dim light, certainly, yet it wasn’t the glow of artificial light. Daylight, then. I already knew the sun had not set. Some of the ancient instincts still remain with us. Sensing sunrise and sunset was one of them.

  We moved forward more quickly, heading for the light. There was a room built off the end of the tunnel and we stepped into the light, which seemed almost dazzling after the darkness of the caverns behind us.

  Nick backed up almost instantly, cannoning into Tally. Both of them pushed up against me. I looked over Tally’s shoulder.

  Valdeg sat hunched on the floor of the roughly-carved room. He was a motionless rock, still held by his stone-sleep. The hewn roof above was punctured by a hole that clearly drilled through the crag to the air above, for that was the source of the daylight.

  “God almighty, Mary Blessed Virgin….” Mairead breathed.

  “We don’t have any sledgehammers,” Tally pointed out. “We’ll have to wait for sunset and take him as he changes.”

  “That will be soon,” I estimated.

  Mairead moved closer to the gargoyle. “He’s a teeny one, isn’t he?” she said. “This be the one they call Valdeg? The sport with the deformity that lets him talk.”

  “They all talk,” I pointed out. “They just use a language that can be spoken by them alone. They can’t speak human languages, most of them, because their jaws and tongues are too rigid.”

  “Valdeg can speak English,” Tally said softly, staring at him. The pulse at the base of her throat was throbbing frantically. “He spoke to me, once.”

  Mairead looked impressed. “And ye lived to tell the tale?”

  Tally pressed her lips together. She didn’t answer.

  Nick had moved beyond Valdeg, into the patch of dazzling light spilling on to the floor from the pothole above. In the middle of the irregular and patchy circle of light sat a stone box upon a stone plinth. There was no carving on the sides or the lid, yet I knew what it was, anyway. It was a burial casket. Someone powerful had been laid to rest here.

  Nick looked up at the pothole, frowning.

  “What is it?” I asked, moving over to where he stood. I looked up, too. The hole was as irregular as the rest of the room’s walls and roof. I suspect that the humans who had laid their kin here had picked a cavern that already existed, reducing the work needed to make it a suitable resting place. Then they had carved out the passage to reach it, a passage wide enough for a stone casket to pass through.

  The pothole had the same rough walls. Boulders had fallen into it sometime in the past and were blocking most of the light, which peeped around the edges of the blockage, still bright enough to bathe the room and us in very welcome daylight.

  I turned back to the casket and smoothed my hand over the plain top, wondering who lay beneath.

  Nick moved to the end of the casket and put his hands on the lid there. “With me,” he said.

  I moved to the other end.

  “Hey, no!” Mairead cried. “Ye can’t be ruinin’ a find like that!”

  “They’re just looking,” Tally assured her. “We’ll put it all back after.”

  Nick nodded and we both heaved. I doubt two human men would have been able to lift the stone lid, but we weren’t human. We turned it and rested it very gently on the floor, leaning up against the plinth and straightened up to look at the remains.

  It was a whole, unmarked human male. His flesh was as rosy as Tally’s and just as pliable. He didn’t look dead in the slightest. His eyes were closed as if he were sleeping.

  Yet the casket lid had been grimy with centuries of dirt and dust.

  “Lord save us!” Mairead breathed. Her eyes were very wide. She crossed herself, quite unaware of the gesture.

  Tally came closer and tilted her head to look at him. “The clothes are nearly dust around him. He looks quite alive, though.” She glanced at Nick. “Vampire? One of the ancients that were nocturnal?”

  “If he was, he would still be among humans during t
he night.” Nick shook his head. “A lot of people went to a great deal of trouble to lock him away in this vault and seal it up behind them. There must have been a reason.” He reached out his long hand, lowered it tentatively and pushed against the man’s shoulder.

  Nothing happened, except that the garment he was wearing crumbled under Nick’s fingers.

  Nick looked at me. “If they buried him in his best, what do the clothes suggest to you?”

  I studied what was left of the garments. I have passed through more ages and lands than anyone I know, including Nick. How a man dresses says more about him than what he speaks. I studied the tunic, the fur-edged cloak over it, the leggings wrapped with bindings on the lower calves. The war boots that any Roman soldier might have worn. The thick black hair and beard that disguised most of the man’s face. The pale flesh of his cheeks.

  “Celtic,” I decided. “He knew the Roman legions, though.” I looked up at Nick. “Second or third century.”

  “Ye mean he’s been lying there breathin’ for nearly twenty centuries?” Mairead asked, looking from one to the other of us.

  “I don’t think he’s breathing, but yes, I trust Damian’s judgment on this,” Nick told her.

  She stared at the man in the casket, her eyes widening.

  “Nick,” Tally said sharply. She was standing in front of Valdeg once more, the point of her sword right under his chin, ready to thrust the moment he shifted from stone to hide and she saw life light up his eyes. It was a single critical moment, just before a gargoyle could move freely and had to be very nicely judged. I knew Tally would judge it perfectly.

  Nick moved around to stand with her, studying the creature.

  “How close to sunset are we?” she asked.

  “Very,” I warned them. The glow around the casket wasn’t fading, because it had not been strong to begin with. The blockage in the pothole was holding most of the light at bay and the cloudy day beyond the hole was doing the rest. The light just seemed dazzling to us because we’d been moving through total darkness.

  Mairead pulled herself away from studying the man in the casket and joined us in front of Valdeg. She had correctly identified the priority in the room. “Should we surround it?” she breathed.

  “There’s no need,” Tally said shortly. “This will all be over in a minute. Watch his eyes. As soon as you see light, I can thrust.”

  We were all watching him closely now. I have seen gargoyles shift at sunset only a handful of times and I’m still not sure of how the change takes place. I have watched what was essentially a lump of marble-hard stone I could break my knuckles upon change to a warmer, malleable hide with muscle, tissue and organs beneath. There is no single moment when the change takes place. It happens right in front of me, so gradually that I tend to miss when the change has completed. It is like watching snow melt in spring. One day there is a pile of snow and a day later, there is only puddles. I might watch that pile of snow most carefully, yet I would still miss the transformation because it isn’t a single moment.

  That was why we watched the eyes. They were the most significant signal that the shift had taken place. Once the outer lids lifted, the light would glow from behind the inner lids.

  I waited, watching, my sword in my hand. “Sunset,” I breathed as the sun touched the horizon. I couldn’t see it, yet I knew without doubt the moment had arrived.

  I could hear Mairead’s heart starting to race, ragged and afraid. Nick’s didn’t stir and Tally’s never wavered from its slow, steady pace.

  The sun kept lowering, close to the very last of the fiery disk slipping below the horizon, signaling twilight.

  “Something’s wrong,” Tally breathed. “He should be about to move by now.”

  What did move was something else. There was a scrabbling, scraping sound from the pothole.

  “The hole! Lirgon! Lirgon is the blockage!” Nick cried. He vaulted over the casket, his hand on the edge, to look up into the pothole.

  It made me look away, toward Nick and his alarm. I shouldn’t have, but I’m rusty. That is the excuse I gave myself later.

  “Watch out!” Mairead screamed.

  I didn’t even look. I recognized instantly my mistake and shoved my hand out toward Tally, knocking her off her feet. She staggered to one side, fighting for balance, her sword dropping.

  Valdeg rose on his haunches, his talons flicking out into the space where Tally had been standing. I barely avoided the claws myself.

  Then Valdeg opened his eyes. Both lids lifted, revealing the muddy orange glow. He had kept them closed deliberately, to lull us. It had very nearly worked.

  He leapt backward in a balletic movement. He was the scrawny runt of the clan and his size meant he could move in smaller spaces, more quickly and with more maneuverability. Valdeg landed on the casket, his clawed feet gripping the stone edges and digging furrows in the dusty fragments of cloth of the man lying there.

  “Nick, move!” I yelled.

  Nick backed away from the casket, his sword raised.

  We had missed the moment when Valdeg was vulnerable. I knew that. He was too wily to let us get close to him now he was awake. Indeed, he hunched over the casket, hissing his pleasure that he had fooled us. The open mouth and lolling tongue was his version of laughter. Then he looked up, assessing his escape route.

  Above him, Lirgon was still rattling and clawing his way to the top of the pothole, where he would be able to escape into the night.

  That was when the man in the casket sat up. His arm shot up and out, to grip Valdeg by the throat. The muscles in his arms flexed powerfully as he held his grip, while Valdeg squirmed and tried to hiss. What emerged was a squawk, as his leathery wings back-winged, trying to draw him out of the man’s grip.

  The man tilted his head, looking at Valdeg with almost a puzzled expression. Then he raised his other hand. There was a long, jeweled knife in it. He thrust the knife up under Valdeg’s chin, deeper and deeper until Valdeg jerked and grew still.

  The man tossed him aside. As Valdeg landed on the rocky floor, he disintegrated into sand and pebbles.

  “Oh my God!” Mairead breathed, staring at the man sitting in the casket.

  He was looking at us with the same astonished expression. He spoke quickly. It wasn’t a language I knew, yet I recognized the cadences and patterns. It was a Celtic dialect of some sort—a very old one.

  It brought back memories. An arena, a roaring crowd, a hot sun.

  That gave me an idea. I stepped forward. “Do you understand me?” I asked him, using Latin.

  His mouth opened. “Yes!” he said. His voice was hoarse. “You are not Roman, though.”

  “There have been no Romans for a very long while,” I told him.

  “Latin,” Nick said softly, with a sigh that sounded a lot like he was chiding himself for not having thought of it first.

  The man looked down at himself, at the dust that was covering his body where his clothes had once been. He lifted his hands, the one with the jeweled knife, the other thick forearm bearing a deep scratch that oozed blood. “This is what woke me?” he asked.

  “I don’t think you were asleep.”

  “I was bitten….” he said wonderingly. “Gargoya…..”

  Gargoyle.

  I moved forward, to stand at the foot of the casket. “You were bitten by a gargoyle? Why did you not die?”

  “I don’t know.” He was still frowning. “I remember wanting to sleep, which my kind cannot do.”

  “Your kind?”

  “What is he saying?” Tally demanded.

  I held up my hand, silencing her, without looking away from the man. “Your kind,” I repeated. “Vampires?”

  His frown didn’t shift. “The kern,” he replied.

  I recognized the Gaelic, even though it was older than me. The dark ones.

  I let my incisors descend and raised my lip. “Vampires, we are now called,” I told him.

  “He’s vampire?” Nick breathed, coming
forward.

  The man looked at him sharply. The knife didn’t quite lift, but it was already held up too high for my liking.

  “This man is called Nicholas,” I told the one in the casket. “I am called Damian.” I pointed toward the two women, who were standing together. “Mairead. Natalia.”

  He glanced at them and gave a short nod.

  “What do we call you?”

  He looked around at everyone once more, taking in our clothes, our appearances. “Nyanther,” he replied absently. Then he frowned once more. “What year is this? What time? How long have I slept?”

  I let out my breath slowly. “As far as I can calculate it, I think you have been lying here in the casket for nearly two thousand years.”

  His mouth opened. Then he shut it. He dropped the knife with a clatter onto the ground by the plinth, gripped the edges of the casket and lifted himself out with a flex of his powerful arms. He landed on the floor lightly.

  Mairead giggled and hid her face against Tally’s shoulder.

  Tally raised a brow. “We should probably get him some clothes,” she pointed out, as the last fragments of his ancient robes fluttered to the floor around his feet, on top of the remains of the leather sandals.

  * * * * *

  Nick wore a coat long enough to cover the essentials, which he gave to Nyanther. I donated my sweater. Nyanther was vampire and wouldn’t feel the cold, so we didn’t bother with any more layers. We only needed to get him to a more private room with a locked door, while we figured out what to do with him. The coat would stop him from being arrested for indecency.

  I had to show Nyanther how to put the garments on. Sleeves were a novelty for him. He fingered the fabric of the coat curiously and took huge delight in the concept of buttons, which he kept toying with.

  “Here,” Tally said, holding out a strip of silk from the hem of her shirt. “He needs to tie his hair back. He’ll just look laid back if you trim off the worst of the beard.”

  “I don’t understand anyone except you,” Nyanther said, pushing his hands in and out of the pockets of the coat experimentally. He rolled his eyes, trying to see what I was doing as I pulled the silk strip under his hair and tied it back.