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Alexei drove sideways, shoulder against one rail of the wagon, feet propped up on the other. The horse was a quiet creature. His feet hurt like love turned sour.
"What are you doing, Grandfather?" he called back.
"Changing. Is there a problem?"
"I'm bored."
"Alexei Vladimirov! You are forty-nine years old! Entertain your damned self!"
Alexei grinned. Grandfather was in fine spirits today--first time in a long time. First time he'd been this happy since Grandmother died. "But you don't like it when I get creative," Alexei replied.
Grandfather sighed heavily. "Sing a song."
"I only know songs when I'm drunk."
"And you don't know them then, either. Make up a traveling song. I'm busy."
Alexei thought for a moment. "This horse has a fat rump," he sang to the rhythm of its hoofbeats. "The birds are fucking in the trees! It's a lovely day to be on the road!"
"I've changed my mind! Be silent and miserable," Grandfather said.
Alexei shifted in his seat. He wanted Grandfather to distract him--he needed it, in fact, if he was going to keep going. "I can't," he said finally. "I can't be silent."
"Are your feet still paining you?" Grandfather climbed out of the wagon onto the seat behind Alexei.
"Yes--" Alexei turned to face him and stopped dead.
"I'll rewrap them," Grandfather said, with his unwrinkled mouth, casting down his unlined eyes. His beard and hair were close-cropped and brown, not long and grey. Grandfather was young again. Younger than Alexei, even--just a boy.
But he looked up, and Alexei saw his age, there in the heaviness of his eyes. "You should call me Afanasii in public, not Grandfather," Grandfather said.
"Yes," Alexei said, barely able to hear himself.
Grandfather unwrapped the bindings from Alexei's feet. "I met her when she was young. I loved her enough to stay with her for sixty years. But this is my true face, Alexei."
"I know. I knew. I never saw." Alexei took a deep breath. "Am I still bleeding?"
"No. You're healing." Grandfather bent down and retrieved a flask of water and a cloth from the inside of the wagon. The water was frigid, excruciating against Alexei's raw flesh, but he gritted his teeth and rode it through.
Grandfather rewrapped his feet in silk and lambswool. "I'm sorry you had to run so hard, darling boy."
"We had to. Blame Lord What's-his-name."
"Give me the reins." Grandfather slid Alexei's legs onto his lap and took the reins from his hands. Alexei pillowed his head on his arm, watching the silhouette of his grandfather's nose bob against the sky, trying not to think about his feet.
Thinking instead about his grandfather--a young man, which seemed impossible. He had always been so old--at least, acted so old. Looked so old. Now his eyes were bright and shining--and the color of the river, which Alexei had never noticed--and his shoulders were broad and strong. All of that, an act? All of that, for Grandmother?
He had loved her a great deal.
"Grandfather?"
"Hm?" Grandfather's smile was changed, as well. There were still lines in his face, but slight rather than deep.
"Where do we come from?"
"Moscow," Grandfather said, quirking one side of his mouth. Alexei stuck his tongue out and Grandfather looked up at the sky. "I don't know. Many people have ideas, but nobody truly knows."
"But you're old. You're the oldest, aren't you?"
Grandfather shook his head. "The oldest is Methos. I have a few years, child, but there are others who are wiser--but I have not yet met any who knows how we come to be. We are not born of woman; we are not born of each other. We are not created by any conscious means. We are always found alone, naked and newly born."
"Where were you found?" Alexei was found under a bridge not far from the Kremlin, and kept by a mad old washer-woman. After she died he became a thief, first a pickpocket and then a burglar, until he ran afoul of Black Guba and dared do nothing more than beg.
He wasn't a very good beggar, so he froze: first his feet, then himself.
"My teacher went down to feed his goats. He crossed to the end of the pen, and when he returned, I was lying at the side of one of his nannies, sucking the milk from her teat."
"You appeared from nothing?"
Grandfather shrugged. "He saw nothing. Someone could have stolen in behind him. But..." Grandfather rested his hand on Alexei's leg. "I believe we are created by the spirits of the earth. We are a natural part of the world. We are not evil, any more than men are, and we have been here throughout the entire history of men."
"If we're natural, why aren't I whole?" The frostbite had taken his feet, first--and when he became Immortal, the dead parts remained dead. They fell away, leaving him with raw flesh that refused to heal. It seemed wrong that God would create a man who had to fight and leave him with wounds that made him so weak.
"Many men are born weak," Grandfather said. "The weakness of your body need not dampen the ferocity of your soul."
"Will I ever heal?"
"You have healed partially. You're better than you were." Grandfather patted his knee. "I had my leg bitten off by a bear once. It grew back."
"You told me, Grandfather. You were an Immortal already then."
"And when I was a child, my face and chest were tattooed," Grandfather said, raising an eyebrow at Alexei. "I'm not Russian, you know. I come from wilder places. When I became a man, I was tattooed with the mark of the snake. The fangs." He traced a shape between his eyes, over his forehead and down his beard to the point of his chin.
Alexei pushed himself up and touched Grandfather's face, searching out the marks.
His fingertips were so rough it was hard to know what he was feeling. He switched and searched with the softer skin on top of his fingers, and then he found it--patches of slightly raised skin along Grandfather's jaw. A broad stripe where his beard had been. And then between his eyes--the line--no, two lines, arcing upwards just as Grandfather had shown him. "How do you make a tattoo?" Alexei asked.
"You dip a sharp bone needle in black ash and tap it into the skin. You're feeling the scar left behind by the needle."
Alexei sat back. "How long did it take for them to fade?"
Grandfather looked down. "Almost a thousand years."
"A thousand years! And you're not the oldest?"
Grandfather shook his head.
The pain in his feet was fading; when he wiggled his remaining toes, he could feel the fragile, baby-soft skin covering the wounded parts. "Will I see a thousand years, Grandfather?"
Grandfather still watched the horse as it walked steadily along the road. "Perhaps."
"Will you see another thousand?"
Grandfather laughed. "Definitely."
"I will also," Alexei said. "All you have to do is avoid being killed. That's easy."
Grandfather patted his knee. "Very easy," he said.
THE END.
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