Ahasuerus

Ahasuerus used to have a store of his own. He had a family… he had a life. Then Jesus took everything from him. Now he’s on the run, never knowing when he’ll be caught, or where his enemies will turn up. He’d stop at nothing to get back what was his, except, well, that was a long time ago, and Jesus is dead now, and he’s immortal and maybe his family were kind of jerks, anyway.

He used to run into Longinus from time to time.

Ahasuerus

He doesn’t worry about the frauds, time always sorts them out, and at this point what’s the rush? He can wait a lifetime to see, and really where is the harm anyway.

It’s the real ones that spook him, even now, because you never know when you’re going to walk around a corner in Addis Ababa and bump into that surly prick, and the thing about that is that after a while you sort of get used to running into folks every few decades or centuries or so. The world’s big, but it’s not that big, and when you’ve got nothing but time you get to where you expect it, that’s all.

So it starts to gnaw at him when he hasn’t seen one of the others in a while, like maybe they’ve gotten off the ride and he’s the only one left on it, like maybe he’s missed last call somehow. He doesn’t sleep much these days; ever watchful, ever ready, ears strained for the soft footfall of a thief in the night.

In that sense it’s a relief when he’s picking his way through the fox-haunted forests where Chernobyl used to be and there he is, getting gnawed on by a lynx, glowering up at the rain. “You’ve looked better,” he tells the Roman, and Longinus has the decency to laugh.

(credit for this version of Longinus as always to Brendan Adkins)

Beyond Reasonable Doubt

He made good on his promise: he said he’d return before the current generation had died and he meant it. That was, what, fifteen, maybe twenty years? A lot of the old gang had gotten killed by then, admittedly—life’s rough out there for a revolutionary schismatic—but many were in exile or prison, and that he could do something about.

All prisoners freed, all bonds released; for a moment everything seemed and was possible.

But time wears on and one by one they die and he is alone. The empire endureth, human misery seems constant; he watches his words taken up by the Romans and weaponized against his people. The crucifixions continue. He gets martyred himself a dozen more times, renamed into various saints, it’s fairly dispiriting.

Centuries later, he’s made his way south past the desert to where no one knows his name, no one has even heard of the Romans, when an old man comes trudging down the road, hair wild and clothes ragged, and it’s a piece of his old home so potent that it takes his breath clean away.

The old man squints at him, says in an Aramaic he hasn’t heard in generations, let alone spoken, “Don’t I know you?”

“I don’t think so,” says Jesus, and Ahasuerus shrugs and continues down the road.

Orlando

Orlando wakes from a dead sleep at three in the morning, yanked into consciousness by the sudden vivid memory of the time they reached across the table to pour a glass of wine for the Comte de Saint Germain and farted so loudly that the entire dinner party fell silent for a second. They can hardly breathe for the mortification; it has been three and a half lifetimes since the incident, and two centuries since the last time anyone mentioned it, but the feeling is as fresh as ever it was.

It’s a long dark night until morning.

They take their coffee black and their eggs runny and try to shake off the mood, but each memory is replaced with another, equally discomfiting. An unwelcome declaration of love during the French revolution, too-loud laughter in the Berlin opera house during the mass protests of the 1840s, holding McKinley’s hand just a little too tightly and a little too long in that last reception line. None of it matters anymore, but all the old wounds have reopened, like a bout of emotional scurvy.

They live too quietly these days.

It’s always hard, in that uncomfortable period when they’re too young to live their old life, and too old to reemerge as their own child. Their last spouse—a wife, this time—is five years dead and gone, and their friends have nothing to talk about except their own aging, the senescing of body and mind uncompelling to someone untouched by the passage of time. Orlando is firm, fit, and supple, an eternal 32, with only multiple lifetimes of embarassments and inelegancies for company.

Digestion

When he’s eaten everything else he can and the snow is coming down thick and fast, Orlando eats the chyme.

“Now, I did research on this,” he says earnestly over his shoulder to the empty room he’s built into a rock face. “These musk ox, they live on grass. We can eat grass too—grass is edible—but we don’t have the right teeth to get all the nutrition out of it. But the ox, man, he does. He chewed up all that grass out there, and swallowed it down, and spit it up so he could chew it again.”

It’s dark but it’s early. Too hungry to eat, to cold to move, too dark to play dice, and he doesn’t carve. “It’s my birthday today,” he says flatly, “and my mother died. Here I am, in a hole, eating grass, nobody to talk to but you. Shoulda gone to the funeral but didn’t. Shoulda gone to her before she died but didn’t. I don’t know. Shoulda done a lot of things but didn’t.”

His knife cuts into the bag of the stomach he’s been saving for over a month. Deep breath. “Smells sour. That’s good, that means it’s fermented, and that means it’s edible. They got special bacteria in their stomachs to help break everything down like that.” He pulls out a handful of semi-digested grass and shows it to the empty room. “This is dinner tonight. Arctic kimchi. Polar pickles.”

He heats it in a tin can he found on the beach. “We didn’t get along, her and me, once I got a little older. Didn’t get along with either of them, really, but her in particular I just— I know she probably did her best, and I respect that, but—” He chews the chyme meditatively for a few minutes, wondering at the taste. “Sour milk,” he mutters.

Ahasuerus

He’s west of Constantinople and there’s a scholar battle brewing outside Salonica. Some visiting doctor from the capital got sniffy about the quality of the intellectuals in the city and one of the young students isn’t having it.

“Come out to the field,” the hothead shouts to a delighted crowd, “and let us compete in our knowledge of the Bible, the Mishnah and the Talmud, Sifra and Sifre and all of rabbinic literature!”

He’s been haunting the town for months, wandering the streets between the marbles and lemon sellers, from the synagogues to the mosques, and he can feel the old gravity dragging him elsewhere. “Let us strive in secular sciences—practical and theoretical fields of science; science of nature, and of the Divine!” He’d stay if he could—he hasn’t felt so at home for centuries. It’s a cramped, unsettled town, a hick town by Ottoman standards, choked with plague in the summer, the sort of place that gets assigned to disgraced courtiers because they keep getting run out of town, but it’s lively. “Let us wrangle in logic—the Organon, in geometry, astronomy, physics!”

“In your profession as well, that of medicine, IF IN YOUR EYES IT IS A SCIENCE—” thrilled oooohs from the crowd at that dig— “we consider it an occupation of no special distinction!” He tries the old trick of circulating through the mob, never still, but his doom can be put off no longer, dammit. “Try me, for you have opened your mouth and belittled my dwelling-place, and you shall see that we know whatever can be known in the proper manner.”

He wonders how it all worked out for decades.