Rusted Memory: A Wanderer's Tale Read online

  “I think you may have confused me with my predecessor,” I tell him. “He was my grandfather, you see, and I have often been told I was cut from the same mold. That had we been born in the same year, we would have passed for identical twins.”

  He doesn’t have to turn around. I can tell by the stiff straightening of his shoulders he does not believe me and before I can stop myself I am rambling history I penned for myself to explain the many ages I’ve walked this world eluding Death.

  It is a well-practiced story.

  It is quite common for a tradesman to pass his name and his work on to his apprentice and send him forth into the world to succeed him.

  Morovio is a title, more than a name, only achievable when the apprentice has learned the master’s history and tales and the master himself is ready to retire.

  Only I am always both apprentice and master, and never once have I actually retired from this trade in any real capacity. A few years of silence to leave the world to wonder, of course I have taken time off. I’ve disappeared from the roads, taverns and the halls of great kings to give the world time to forget my face, or when it seemed I was too popular for my own good.

  But retiring entirely is not an option since I cannot die, and I would grow incredibly bored were I to give up this trade entirely.

  It is the only thing I know how to do, and thus it is a part of who I am at my very core.

  He cuts me off, saying in a rather simple and dismissive tone, “You do not have to pretend with me, Morovio. I have had more than enough time to put this all together, as strange and senseless as it seems.”

  And then he turns around, one hand withdrawing from the inside pocket of his leather. It’s dark, but for the solitary sliver of a dully red moon illuminating the pitch and turning the trees around us to frightful shadows. Over the horizon I see the silver promise of the largest of the three moons rising and I know it won’t be long before she’s reunited with her sister in the sky. Unfortunately, I could really use her light at this moment to make out the details of this worn canvas he’s just thrust into my hand.

  It is old, the creases of its fold so familiar I can tell it has been carried through generations, perhaps tucked into the pocket of this man’s father before him. It is just shy of a miracle it is still intact, it seems.

  I unfold that frail work of art, but there is not enough illumination to make out the details sketched across the surface.

  Unfortunately, I have spent ages studying my own features and I do not require light to see the man in the portrait is as close to my own likeness as I’ve ever seen captured on canvas.

  Inwardly, I swear in tongues this world has not uttered for ages.

  It is a rare thing I allow my person to be captured in this way, but from time to time it does occur. Result of my own carelessness, or the impeccable memory of one who admired me just a day or two longer than I should have allowed. Unfortunately, I cannot control a person’s memories once I’ve taken to the road again and the image on that well-worn canvas is a clearer memory of myself than I have ever seen.

  It is for this reason I never stay in one place long enough to leave impression beyond the telling of my tales. Morovio the traveling bard. He is legend, yes, constantly remade in the image of the man who came before him. The memory if his tales, this practice has been in place the world over since the dawn of the bardic college itself, but I can’t expect this man to know the way of the bard. Perhaps, I think, I can use this to my advantage and make insistence once again, but before I’ve even half a chance to make excuse and insist once more I am the spitting image of my own grandfather, Rust leans back and stares at me, shaking his head as if to deny me opportunity to spin lies to convince him.

  “My great grandmother was quite an artist,” he explains. “Wasted talent, if you ask me. She spent the days of her life making sketches of a man she insisted fathered her child. A man who ruined her,” and here he pauses, as if to allow guilt to fill me, but I do not cater to such emotions often enough to feel even the slightest twinge of its presence in my heart. “A man she called Morovio.”

  “Once more I assure you…”

  “Do not try to fill my head with lies. I am no woman, and therefore I am immune to your charms, bard.”

  Something in my throat tightens, as though an unseen spectre curls its fingers around my neck to squeeze. I could not speak, even if I had words, and when I make no further attempt to explain Rust finds his voice again.

  “That is the only one left, the others lost with the years, just like the man who fathered her child. My grandfather stole that portrait, you see, and wiled away the days of his youth searching for the man who broke his mother’s heart.”

  “You were baiting me back there,” I point out.

  “Perhaps I was, and with that bait I learned plenty about the kind of man you are. A soulless cur, an abomination with the no heart inside his chest. Skipping from town to town, drawing young women into his bed and filling their heads with fancy dreams he has not intent on making true.”

  “You said yourself there were plenty of women in the world,” I remind him. “That you had three in your bed this week.”

  Ignoring my point entirely, he is back in the past, talking of a man he probably never knew. “My grandfather made it his life’s work to find you. He wiled away the days of his youth searching and when at last he’d found you, sitting in a tavern with a lovely lass upon your knee, he was shocked to discover you were several years younger than he, that you had not changed at all even though he misspent the years of his life searching in vain for someone who did not exist. He went to his grave thinking he’d been fooled. That his mother was a madwoman, just like everyone claimed she was.”

  “I think, perhaps, you have been fooled as well,” I curtly inform him. “You see, as I explained, my grandfather…”

  He starts walking again, expecting me to follow, I assume, and so I do, but for a time neither of us says anything else. There are several paces between us again before he finally stops.

  That image in my hand, I still can’t make it out with any great clarity, but even in the shadows I know it is my face, a young woman nestled close as if her nearness alone will hold me with her.

  I wonder what her name was. Dear gods, there have been so many I rarely remember them longer than a week, and yet this pretty young thing in the portrait stares back at me with such love in her eyes I almost allow the twinge to become a stab. The guilt nearly wins for the first time in years.

  I glance up at my traveling companion, wonder what he’s thinking. His back is still to me, the black of the leather blending with the night, except his hair, roguishly tied at the nape of his neck with a leather cord, shines like copper as it catches the red moon’s light.

  “While I listened to your story,” he starts, “the way you spoke about the lass you took into your bed because she reminded you of someone else, someone you loved long ago…” He pauses, tilting his face toward the sky and rolling the back of his head along the breadth of his shoulders. “I don’t know, for a minute I thought maybe it was her, somehow. That the woman you still pined for was my great grandmother. But now I am convinced you forget them all. All of them except Olivia.”

  “Illavia,” I correct him. “Her name was Illavia.”

  “What does it matter in the end what her name was? She’s gone, been gone a thousand years for all I know.”

  If only it had been a thousand years, it might not feel so long had the years been so few as that.

  “It is all that matters to me,” I whisper.

  “That, more than anything, is quite clear to me, sir.”

  There is an edge on his tone that brings me more than guilt. I fear it in the same way one fears a knife pressed against the sternum with threat of its passing through skin and bone to find the heart. And, perhaps, you’ve concluded I have no heart, I’m afraid you would be incorrect.

  “You care for none but yourself and the ghost that haunts
you. You seek out women in her likeness, promise them the moons and stars and then you shatter their spirits.”

  He brings his hands together, knuckles cracking in that sinister fashion that always precedes a physical altercation. I wonder what he plans to do. He drew me from the tavern to get me out here alone, but for what purpose? To teach me a lesson in heartache? To fill my soul with guilt over something I cannot remember no matter how I rack my brain for memory of it.

  There have been so many women, so many faces and voices, so many arms around me. What kind of genius would I have to be to remember them all?

  “She died alone,” he goes on. “Anxious and afraid, my father told me. She kept calling for him as she hung from the last threads that tied her to this life. Her son, her Vanden. Where’s my Vanden?”

  “That is an awful memory for a child,” I start, but he isn’t about to let me tarnish this moment with an interruption, no matter how sympathetic it seems.

  He has waited too long for this, to corner me and make me pay for generations of suffering I clearly never intended to cause.

  By all rights, if the story he tells is even true, it is an impossibility made possible by some means I do not understand. The gods were quite specific in this curse, that it should be mine and mine alone to bear, and because they knew my proclivity for lovely women there would be no offspring. Yet this man who stands before me claims I lay with his great grandmother, filled her womb with a son, and it would seem that child was born afflicted with my wandering spirit in his blood.

  Rusten’s hand lifts, pale white fingers catching the light of the second moon now cresting over the treetops at my back.

  “Vanden couldn’t come home, bard. Not to his mother or his young wife, already swollen with his child. And when my father was born, surely you must know this same curse ruined him as well. He met his own father only once. Piss-drunk in a tavern halfway across the world, they spoke only long enough for the man to pass that image onto him and tell him not to wander far from home, else he’d never be able to find his way back again.

  “As I’m sure you’ve guessed it was much too late for that.”

  “Rust…”

  “I haven’t finished,” he assures me. “The story doesn’t end there.”

  “Perhaps not, but I confess I’ve no idea where you are going with this. I’ve already told you that man was my grandfather, and I can hardly be held accountable for his deeds.”

  “Do you think me a fool? That like my father before me, I will believe your lies?”

  “Think about exactly what it is you are implying…”

  “I have thought about it! I’ve thought on it a thousand times, and yes, it is pure madness, but there is no other explanation. You… you are the man in that image.”

  And as I glance down, the silver moon finally offering enough light that I can see the sketch in my hands, I know I have been caught.

  I am stunned speechless, breath caught in my throat and heart speeding up beneath my breast.

  Captured in perfect likeness, drawn from memory beside a lovely young woman who I can almost assure you broke my heart far more painfully than I ever broke hers.

  Oh, cruel memory, you vex me so.

  FIVE

  Desperation