The Walk

I was one of his wives. I still define myself that way, a hundred years later.

One of the three. I was youngest. We lived together in the castle. For most of my life, I had never been out of the castle's shadow. He found me on the battlefield that the castle's outlying grounds had become, weeping over my father's corpse by night. He himself had impaled my father's head on the castle battlements. I had not eaten in three days. Just knelt there in churned mud rich with old blood, clutching at my father's grey body. He taught me how to feed.

We lived in the castle's basements, going abroad on the land when we thirsted. Were we happy? I have no idea. We existed in some kind of contentment. There was never a sense of time passing. Never a sense of progression.

I am five hundred years old.

An Englishman came to us, to deal with our husband's business. This was my first intimation in some considerable period that the world outside had altered even slightly. His clothes were different. Business involved protracted handwriting, money that was intangible notion, marks moved on paper.

He came to the basement. We assumed our husband had sent him. He was young, smooth. Scented. We discovered later that he had found us by accident, exploring the castle by night. I remember distinctly his pulse on my lips, racing with his surprise, and the speed with which he hardened against me as my tongue pressed to his neck.

Our husband discovered us without warning, and cast us from him. We huddled in confusion. This made no sense, even by the yardstick of his mercurial moods.

Later, of course, we found the picture of the Englishman's wife, and understood. We knew her face from drawing he had made of the woman he knew before he married the first of us. By the time we found this, he had gone. He had flown east, to England, to find her.

We had lived in the dark for five hundred years. We knew nothing but him. And so the three of us left the castle in pursuit. Within weeks, we realised why our husband, the paranoid soldier, had taken us for his wives. We had no skills. We had no experiences of battle, or survival, or even of genuine success through perseverance. We could never be a threat.

I am alone now. I have learned survival through witnessing the ultimate deaths of the only two friends I have known in five hundred years. I have walked here by night. Across Europe. Because this was the path he took. To London. To her.

I have spent a full century walking to England to find my husband - to discover that he died a full century ago.

And I have nowhere left to walk.


(c) Warren Ellis 2001





(This is an old piece, from my book AVAILABLE LIGHT, that I felt like sharing. See you on the other side of Xmas. Unless I decide to use that phoneblog thing for something.)