There was a light.
Drifting away.
The screams.
Falling to silence.
The rough bark against his hands growing sodden. The bob of waves. The bright blight of sun. Salt. Stinging eyes and piecing wounds. The jeer of birds.
I remember.
The screams. He remembered the screams and he remembered the light exploding through the dark, blinding him as he fell away, drifting deeper into the vastness.
Time dissolved as the sky was swallowed by light.
Grit on his cheek. Between his toes and fingers.
I remember.
His thoughts became a thin fabric yet he could not tear through them. He believed he was dreaming, that all had been a dream, that he might wake at home, alive and whole. But he could not open his eyes.
Open your eyes.
He tried but he could not find his body. He drifted in the vast expanse of nothing. The nothingness surrounded and consumed him as he lay there feeling the sand and hearing the gentle lap of waves and the jeering birds.
The burn of the sun and the scrape of the wind and the screaming trapped within him. The screams rose and rose and he tried to open his mouth to let it all flow out of him but only a torrent of coughing came.
I remember.
He was alive. He could not open his eyes but the coughing told him his body remained. He coughed and wondered if he had drowned but nothing came with the coughing. His lungs felt shallow, his chest swollen, and he turned inward trying to focus on his breathing.
He would not die here in the blind dark with halffull lungs.
A softness. His hands. Slowly, his body returned to him with each new touch. The softness gripped his hands and pulled, dragging him over the sand, scraping his flesh. Still, he could not move. Could not pull himself free from the hands that tugged him along.
The screams echoed in his skull and vibrated through his teeth.
He had seen so much. Too much.
A weight on his chest and that softness on his cheeks and then a gentle touch of lips on lips and the eruption of light flushing through his body. His fingers and toes and arms and legs all returning to life while the screams, for the briefest moment, hushed.
And then it was gone and he opened his eyes.
He wondered if he still dreamt or if he had died.
Died a long time ago, back at the foot of those walls or perhaps at any number of times between. For his vision returned like a haze, like a fog. The drifts of mist coalesced like clouds to form a face with tendrils of fog twisting away like smoke from the face staring down at him. And the face appeared layered as if there was a face inside the face or beneath it or perhaps deeper into the fog.
A beautiful woman with dark skin catching and holding the sunlight like she nearly glowed, and her eyes open wide were the saddest he’d ever seen. A broken, wounded beauty that made his heart ache for this image, this wondrous dream. But deeper, beyond this perfection, a monster prowled ready to consume him.
“You’re alive.” Her voice like honey dripped down his throat and smeared over his flesh. Tears flooded her eyes and the layers of her face resolved into this beautiful woman with the saddest eyes.
He raised a trembling hand and pressed his palm to her cheek.
She leaned into his hand like a cat, tears rolling down her cheeks. “You’re real.”
Such simple words. They wrapped round him, held him tight. A fount of emotion and pain and hope all rising at once like a storm swirling round him, containing him, holding him. His heart splintered for her and tears came to his own eyes, the loss of everything swelling within him, threatening to hold him down and drown here at this unlooked for shore.
Throwing her arms round him, she fell on top of him and wept in his chest.
And he wrapped his arms around her. The press of her body, the warmth, the softness of this simple human contact.
Long ago and far away, he remembered the shepherds knapping flint into knives. The sharpest blades he’d ever touched. They’d slice you just for looking at them, his father had always said. He never smiled when he said and so few understood the joke of it and instead thought he meant there was something of the gods in it.
He held her tight, feeling his body splinter.
Those old shepherds took a broken antler in hand and used it like a hammer to chip away at the flint to reveal the blade within. The flint flaked away, layer by layer.
In her arms, her tears wetting his skin, he understood the knapping process for the first time. As a child, he tried to replicate and imitate, but never quite could. To think how impatient he had been.
He had believed them, then.
Blessed by the gods.
His lip trembled and he squeezed her harder.
“You’re real,” her breath hot on his neck wet with her tears.
“Are you?” He tried to speak but the words came out as a broken sob. He wanted to push her away as the memories flooded him once more.
I remember.
But instead he held her still tighter. “I’m real.”
The sun shined and the wind blew and the waves lapped and he lay there beneath her on the sand staring up at a bleary blue sky while he wept for all that had come and gone, for all the death and destruction he’d caused, for six hundred men, for the mausoleum of years burying him.
When she sat up, still straddling him, she smiled down at him. Pulling the hair out of her face and smoothing the hair from his face, she giggled. “I dreamt for my whole life of this happening.”
Her eyes danced across his face and he knew she waited for him to speak. She bit her lip and twisted her hair and though he knew what she needed to hear from him, the only thing he could think to say was that this had always been his nightmare.
To end up friendless and alone, far from home.
The sorrow beneath the beauty of this woman was a weight that would crush him if he let it. It was how he knew he yet lived. There were times when he felt he’d let his humanity die since he left home.
“Who are you?”
Her smile returned, radiant, nearly overpowering. He wanted only to make her smile, to keep her smiling.
And he knew he asked the right question. The one that she most wanted to hear, for this sorrowful woman only wanted someone to love her, to care about her.
He felt the monstrousness within him rising to the surface. So cunning and clever, he pushed and pulled on kings and queens, monsters and gods, to carve his own path while letting them believe he walked theirs.
Even here, after everything, after all his failures, he could not stop.
She whispered her name to him, like it was a secret, but it meant nothing to him. He gave her one of the many names he’d used before but not the real one. Not his true name.
“I thought you were dead and feared that the only gifts left for me were cruel.”
“I thought I died.” A long time ago. He tried to pin the moment where it all fell apart. For all his cleverness and cunning, here he lay with nothing and no one.
I remember.
He shut his eyes tight as if that could keep the memories at bay, as if that would quiet their screams.
“What is it?” She touched his face and he winced away, grabbed her wrist, wrenching it away.
He could snap her bones. The fury roared within him and it quieted the tears, the splintering, the shivering.
He let her go. Let his hand drop to the sand.
But she picked it up, held it gently, and opened his palm. She pressed her cheek into his palm and closed her eyes.
I remember.
The last time he held his son, he held him just like this. His tiny baby body cradled in his arm while his open palm held that tiny skull.
Everyone told him that his son was a mirror of himself.
He didn’t see it and hoped it would never be true. When he turned to his wife, he wanted only to see her reflected in every child they’d ever have.
“Thirteen years,” the words scraped from him.
She opened her eyes. “You’re like me.”
And he supposed he was.
Together, they wept on the beach until evening. Until the wind died and the stars woke once more and then she led him away from the beach, hand in hand.
Her steps light and airy, his trudging with despair.