The Man Who Couldn't Die

“Go away.”

The moon whispered the words into the wind’s ear so that Sigrun might hear them. Or at least, that was what she thought.

In the darkness, amid the slumbering clamor of creatures great and small and the futile struggle of branches and leaves against the wind, Sigrun had heard that mysterious phrase. She allowed herself to imagine that it was merely the wind whispering.

Her small legs trembled with fear. Her father’s heavy bow hung from her shoulder, making her sway from side to side. It was her father’s birthday, and she had hoped that by nightfall she would have completed her first hunt and prepared a meal for him. But she had lost her way in the forest. Not only had she failed to bring him anything, she had left him alone on his birthday. Perhaps she would never see him again.

“Don’t go any farther.”

Sigrun closed her eyes. She could no longer pretend that the moon and the wind were speaking to her. Without any will of her own, she began to run.

Several times, her foot caught on her father’s bow; several more, on the roots and ivy twisting across the ground. She broke through branches, while others struck her with such force that her clothes tore and her body was wounded in a dozen places. But she did not open her eyes. Nor did she stop running. Each time she fell, she rose again with her eyes shut tight, groped blindly through the darkness, and continued on.

She endured it all until her foot came down upon the firm body of some animal. It collapsed beneath her weight. A sticky liquid seeped from it, and Sigrun thought it must be blood. More than anything, she dreaded opening her eyes and seeing what she had done. But before she knew it, her eyes were open.

One hand clutched at her chest; the other gripped her father’s bow, as though holding it tighter might make her stronger—or somehow bring her father to her rescue.

But Sigrun had been mistaken.

What she had crushed beneath her foot was a pomegranate.

Split-open and untouched pomegranates lay scattered across the ground, as though a thousand hearts had grown from the earth. Sigrun was both astonished and terrified by the sight. A ring of small pomegranate trees surrounded her, their leaves glossy and slender. Beneath their branches, lilies of the valley had bloomed like white, humble bells. They were so delicate and sweet that, to Sigrun, they could not possibly be real.

Yet something else appeared even more wondrous than the whole and broken pomegranates, or the fallen and floating lilies.

A perfectly circular spring lay before her. From where Sigrun stood, its water was utterly black and without luster. Some of the pomegranate leaves gleamed silver beneath the moonlight; the pomegranates themselves resembled beating hearts, gathering red and white into a single form. But the spring revealed no gleam, no reflection of the moon or its light.

Sigrun walked toward it as though bewitched. The voice that had warned her to go away seemed to grow louder, yet in her ears it became muffled and indistinct, like the distant roar of the sky. The closer she drew, the clearer the water became—and the calmer its surface. The wind nearly lifted her from her feet, yet it had no effect upon the spring. It raised not even a single ripple.

She knelt beside the water and leaned forward as far as she could. Her hand came to rest, unbidden, upon a pomegranate, her fingers sinking into its soft, ruby-colored seeds.

The pomegranates truly resembled hearts—warm and pulsing. Yet Sigrun felt no fear. She was so utterly absorbed in the spring that she did not even try to pull her hand away from the burning fruit. She pressed down so hard that her hand became stained entirely red. Still, she did not notice. Her eyes and thoughts were fixed upon the water.

Sigrun had imagined that her reflection would not appear upon that clear, dark surface, just as the moon’s reflection did not. She had not been entirely wrong.

There was an image beneath the water—but it was not her own.

A man with black hair and a bony face lay submerged below the surface, his eyes closed. He seemed familiar to her. She knew she had never seen him before, yet she felt certain she knew him.

His face was like that of the dead, with two dark hollows beneath his eyes. He wore a black coat, and the high collar of his garment rose and fell gently with the movement of the water. His long, disheveled hair swayed around him in a dance that, to Sigrun’s eyes, appeared both dignified and magnificent.

Sigrun shifted slightly. Her clenched, blood-red hand released the heart of the unfortunate pomegranate and rose into the air. A strange longing and eagerness filled her small chest, a feeling whose name she did not know. Her entire body, from head to toe, seemed to be aflame. She no longer felt the wind lashing her bare, bloodied skin. It was as though time itself had ceased to move.

She tried to remember to breathe. Even with each deep, drawn-out breath, her chest felt tight and constricted.

At last, she reached into the water and placed her hand upon the man’s cheek. His skin was smooth and firm as marble. Sigrun was trying to decide whether she had touched the face of a corpse or a statue when a force violently pulled her backward.

It felt as though someone had seized her by the shoulder. A cold fire burned through the place where the hand had taken hold of her. Her fingers, still resting against the statue-like cheek beneath the water, clenched involuntarily. Then they were torn away with such force that she felt as though she had ripped a piece of the statue free.

She had no time to discover whether she truly had. She turned her bewildered gaze toward the force that had pulled her back—and her breath stopped.

The man who had been floating beneath the water now stood behind her.

Sigrun was too bewildered to feel afraid. Instead, she was seized by that same strange certainty: the man was familiar. He could not be a stranger. Yet she did not understand why some voice inside her cried out that truth. What use was it to know someone one had never seen?

The man’s dark eyes were open now. Unlike Sigrun’s bewildered gaze, they were steeped in horror.

She turned back toward the spring. She wanted to know what had become of the man whose cheek she had touched.

There was no corpse beneath the water. Nor was there even the faintest reflection of her own face.

Instead, something gleamed in her small hand: the bare metal of a long spear.

It was cold as ice and dark as night—as dark as the stagnant water of the spring. And this time, upon the spear’s polished surface, Sigrun saw her own bewildered face, as well as the horrified face of the man standing behind her.

The spear seemed to claim her. It weighed heavily in her hand, though it was not truly heavy. She disliked its coldness and feared its forked tip, which opened like the wings of a dead butterfly. Even in her confusion, she began to feel that she had not picked up the spear at all. Rather, it had fastened itself to her hand.

All those unpleasant feelings, piling one upon another, made Sigrun begin to weep again. The tears were more painful than the ominous spear that had appeared from nowhere and clutched at her hand.

She was only fourteen years old, and yet she rarely cried. She was a thick-skinned, troublesome girl. Now that she had burst into tears, she imagined the world was about to end.

Through the blur of her tears, Sigrun could not see what the man was doing. She did not want to be left alone in the forest, so she pulled herself toward him and clung to his leg.

Startled, the man tried to step backward, but the spoiled, weeping child had caught hold of him and left him with nowhere to go. He tried once more to seize her by the shoulder and push her away, but he was no more capable of overcoming her stubbornness than she was of overcoming his strength.

In the end, he was forced to stand there and wait until Sigrun grew tired of crying and let him go.

In truth, Sigrun had grown tired of crying long before that. But she still wanted to hold the man’s attention. At last, when she had no tears left and her wails had become so artificial that they inspired pity rather than compassion, she abandoned the pretense.

She did not release his leg.

She knew that if her father had been there, he would probably have dragged her away by the ear and made her stand up and apologize to the man. The thought made her glad, for the first time that night, that her father was not there—and that her slender neck would be spared his usual affectionate smack.

She coughed and raised her head to see what the stranger was doing. Was he still staring at her in horror? Or was he glaring at her with bloodshot eyes, like the others in the village?

Seeing his face before releasing him mattered greatly. If he was one of those simple village folk who had fallen for her performance, with traces of pity still lingering on his face, she could manage everything easily. But if he was already plotting how to beat her black and blue, with fury surging across his features, Sigrun would have to flee with all her strength.

Her gaze traveled from the gold-embroidered hem of his garment to the long, loose sleeves emerging from beneath his coat. He wore thin, cream-colored gloves, and his cufflinks were so exquisite that Sigrun could not even begin to guess their worth. She knew only that they must be expensive—and, of course, very beautiful.

Everything about his clothing was beautiful and refined, though it appeared worn and dust-covered. The man was so tall that no matter how far Sigrun tilted her head back, she still could not reach his face.

When at last her eyes met his, she realized that he had been watching her all along.

But not with a look Sigrun recognized.

He was neither angry nor pitying. There was something in his face that she could not comprehend, yet she decided she liked his mysterious gaze.

At last, the stranger stirred. He removed the strange black coat from his shoulders and draped it over Sigrun. Then he looked at the spear, and afterward at her injured leg.

With some hesitation, he asked, “Is your leg wounded, too? Can you not stand?”

His voice was hoarse and deep, as though it had not emerged from his throat in years. It was low and rasping, and Sigrun had to strain to understand him.

Her leg was wounded, but she was accustomed to wounds. She could stand; she simply preferred to pretend that she could not. Besides, she wanted to know how long the stranger could maintain that calm, mysterious composure.

So she nodded.

The stranger sighed, and Sigrun immediately regretted her lie. She wanted to leap to her feet, but he moved first and lifted her into his arms.

Because of him, Sigrun discovered how cold and bitter his beautiful coat smelled. There was smoke in it, too.

She turned red from ear to ear, and her entire body seemed to catch fire. It was strange that she could remain so silent, but the stranger kept doing things that made her retreat further into herself and prevented her from breaking her silence.

Because of his reluctant kindness, Sigrun understood, for the first time, how sweet silence could be.

The stranger, too, after years of silence, had discovered its sweetness—and remembered how to breathe.

Fortunately, Sigrun could not understand this small truth. Had she known, she might have fainted from sheer excitement.

Sigrun was small for her age. She was more trouble than three children put together, which was why the old woman next door always complained, “That one has fire in her heels!”

Even so, with her father’s bow in her arms, she should not have been lifted from the ground as easily as the stranger had lifted her.

Sigrun thought:

“He’s strong, too…”

The thought took on even greater meaning when she felt the stranger’s chest continue to rise and fall in a steady rhythm.

She no longer heard the wind or the eerie whispering of the night creatures. No rustle or snap of branches reached her ears. That calm, gentle rhythm had become her entire world, inviting her to close her eyes and step into the realm of dreams.

Sigrun did not know that this would be the last sweet dream she would have.

Not for another six years—not until she was twenty, when she would wander through that forest once more, searching for the strange spring and the stranger.