The Sons of Adam: The sequel of The Immortal Collection (A Saga of the Ancient Family Book 2) (30 page)

I bored her for a while with trivial stories until she opted to ignore me, taking out her notebook and writing her daily five hundred words. I took advantage of the moment to put an earphone in the ear that she couldn't see and opened the file my father had sent me.

'You know as well as I do the value of omissions, those that keep the people you love safe. We have both kept quiet about certain things and hidden embarrassing secrets. But this secret that I'm finally going to tell you is truly disgraceful. Son, it's about the most basic of instincts: survival of the family, survival of the clan. All the members of the Ancient Family were born under the threat of a curse that has been following me since long before you were born. I've protected you for many thousands of years, all of you, my children, my descendants, my blood, more important than any sacrifice and crime. She is a threat, don't ever trust her.

First of all I'm going to give you instructions, in case you don't have time to listen to the whole story:

When you meet her, show her my amulet. If I managed to pull it off earlier, it should be in your pocket'.

I carefully patted my pants pockets, but didn't find anything. Then my shirt pocket, but there was no prehistoric figurine there either.

Marion looked up and smiled at me. I smiled back.

Then I put my hand inside my jacket. I could feel the bulge of the bison man that my father took everywhere with him, the one that he lent to Dana so that she would believe us. I didn't take it out of my pocket, I didn't want Marion to see it and find out what I was doing.

"Are you listening to music?" she asked.

"Yes, theme songs to epic movies. They relax me," I commented distractedly.

She went back to her writing and ignored my comment.

'It belonged to her companion Negu, who I considered to be my brother," my father continued, whispering in my ear. 'It may help to buy you some time. Propose a truce, tell her that we want to negotiate, that it's time to let it go. She won't listen to you, she won't back down, but pretend that you believe that it's possible. Beg her to think about it, that will give you a few hours.

I'll come with backup to even out the battle. Trust me, son. You'll know what to do. You just need to trust me'.

A young flight attendant came over with his trolley and offered us his beautiful bottles of liquor.

"No, thank you," I said, winking at him, "or the missus will throw them overboard without giving it another thought."

Marion laughed at our private joke and the boy left slightly flustered, not having a clue what I was talking about.

Marion and I exchanged a knowing look, and each of us went back to being lost in our own affairs.

'And now the story', continued the voice of my father.  'TSOA is the acronym of The Sons of Adam.

Although I don't want to start with something so modern.

There was a legend... No, there was a woman, thousands of years before I was born. Her name was Adana, they called her Mother. She was a matriarch, the matriarch of the Sons of Adam. As you've probably guessed by now, she didn't age. She lived surrounded by several generations of her descendants, all of them ephemerals. They all worshiped her, she was as Old as Time and knew how to protect them. They were organized into professions and her way of leading them was effective but inflexible. The Sons of Adam lived under her power, adoring her but without having any real freedom, protected but tied by chains of blood in exchange for favors and missions. We were companions for thousands of years. Let me tell you what she did to all the children I had after I left her...'

I listened one by one to all the massacres that Mother had ordered, hour after hour.

I looked at Marion out of the corner of my eye and a drip of cold sweat ran down my spine, underneath my shirt. Above the Atlantic Ocean, the plane repeated the same route that we had taken four centuries ago, from Europe to the northeast coast of the United States. This time it was different, this time I knew who Marion Adamson was. A Daughter of Adam, a soldier sent to use me.

'Marion is a Daughter of Adam', my father's voice had confirmed minutes earlier. 'A Writer is a good profession. It wasn't one of the worst branches, they've shared the wisdom of the old stories with the whole world and they've survived until today. Novelists are still useful in this world, don't you think? We still need evasion. As far as she's concerned, she's been sent to hand us over to Mother, but we have to wait and see what her final role will be in this manhunt. Maybe she will bring us more surprises. Don't judge her yet, I think that she's rather independent'.

I listened to my father's story right up to the end, to the last massacre of all.

'I know that you've heard about the Sudanese site of Jebel Sahaba, in the Nile Valley.

You'll remember that I forbade you from traveling there when you showed interest in the remains of the first known war, 14,000 years ago. I didn't want you to look into the DNA of the bodies, which matched yours. Many of the fifty-nine men, women and children riddled with stone tipped spears were my children, your siblings.

Let me tell you about one of them. I called him Ilur and he lived for three decades. He knew my secret and we were inseparable.

And that's not all, we even looked the same, we was my spitting image.

You know that it happens sometimes between parents and children, or between grandparents and grandchildren. Twins separated by a couple of generations, natural clones. Features that we sometimes see repeated when we return to a village, decades or centuries later.

It was the same with Ilur, his mother's blood didn't mix with mine, he wasn't mixed-race. His skin, his hair and his eyes were exact copies of mine.

When the Sons of Adam came and slaughtered them, they asked for Lür, and he pretended to be me.

I couldn't stop him.

I've never seen a corpse like his.

Each Son of Adam launched various arrows into him. They had to. They each had to leave their mark, prove their active participation in the revenge to Adana. Ilur's body had hundred of arrows in it, there wasn't a centimeter of free skin, and they only stopped when the arrows couldn't find any more flesh to pierce and they fell to the floor.

They took his body, I guess to show Adana.

But it worked, my son's sacrifice worked. After that massacre I never heard any more from the Sons of Adam. They obviously thought I was dead.

For centuries I traveled all the trading routes, asking about the Sons of Adam. Nobody knew anything, I thought that the family had died out or that Adana was finally satisfied. Four thousand years passed and nothing happened, and I finally dared to live again like a normal man and find a woman. That was when I met your mother and you were born, Urko'.

Those were the last words that my father had recorded for me. I listened to the whole message several times, until I knew it by memory. I didn't want to forget a single detail.

The plane finally touched down and I let Marion guide me towards my destiny.

39

Only the truth

ADRIANA

"How did you get here, father?" Nagorno asked, jumping up from his chair and standing in front of him.

"I have a private plane waiting for us in Edinburgh," Lür replied, without moving a millimeter, sticking his hands in his pockets. He didn't seem to share Nagorno and Gunnarr's alarm, who looked at each other, giving silent instructions.

"Waiting for us? Do you really think that we're going to hand over Adriana that easily, or do you have another cure?" Gunner asked.

"Neither. I've come to get the three of you. Adriana," he said, turning to me. "Do you know where you've been this whole time?"

It felt so good to have Lür there. It was one against two, but his presence made me feel safe, he didn't seem to be worried about his son or grandson's reaction.

"I think that we're in an archipelago off the Scottish coast, some place where the clans have lived, and by the construction of the castle, I'd say that it's from the 17th century. I'm not sure if we're in the Orkneys, the Shetlands or the Hebrides. Maybe on the island of Arran, Iona, Skye..."

"Very good, Adriana," he said, satisfied. "I didn't expect any less from you. We're on the island of Eigg, one of the Small islands, in the Inner Hebrides of the west coast of Scotland. Sufficiently isolated and anonymous amongst a swarm of hundreds of almost uninhabited islands, but sufficiently close to Scotland and London, where the best specialists are monitoring you and can be reached in less than half an hour, isn't that right, Nagorno?"

I wasn't expecting that his son would reply and he moved over to where Gunnarr and I were.

"We managed to work out your puzzle, Gunnarr:
You will reach her by air or water. Will it be thousands, will they be beautiful?
It won't be big, you will find Massacres and Cathedrals
."
It won't be big
, because they're the Small islands.
You will find Massacres and Cathedrals
, due to the caves that marked the history of this island. You came here after what happened on the Irish coast of Kinsale, didn't you, Gunnarr? When the island was still uninhabited following the McLeods massacre. You hid here. You built this castle and hid it from the world, I haven't been able to find any trace of it."

"And you never will. Where are you going with all this, grandfather?"

"I've contracted a private flight from Edinburgh to New York. And there's no time to lose. Your father is in grave danger, we all have to go together, as the family we are. That's the only way we will have a chance."

"Does it have anything to do with my cure? Has he got into trouble because of me?" asked Nagorno, looking concerned.

"In part, it is, son. But at this point it's not just about you. Now it's about the Ancient Family, and if we're not together, we won't survive. None of you, I can promise you that. I've hidden the most terrible of truths from you since you were born, from all of you. But the day I was afraid of has arrived, the day I have to tell you what happened, because the truth has caught up with us and has put us in danger."

"Just say it!" shouted Gunnarr impatiently. "What's going on and why is my father in danger?"

"Because we're not the only longevos, Gunnarr. Because there is another clan, called the Sons of Adam, whose matriarch wants to see me dead, me and all my descendants."

"What?" Nagorno whispered. "There are more longevos, more longevos in the world?"

"That's right."

"And you were able to hide that from me for three thousand years?" he shouted, furiously. “You know how I've longed to find others like me, other longeva women who didn't share my blood. Women I didn't have to write off just because they were ephemerals."

He stared at him, and for a moment I think that he regretted his words, but he was too distraught.

"That's exactly why I hid it from you. Because you would have ignored my warnings and you would have gone to the Sons of Adam. And that, son, would have killed you."

"Why do you say that they're a threat to us, grandfather?" Gunnarr was keeping his cool, his brain always worked faster than others. "What's the background story to all this?"

Lür sat down and told us about his first millennia, the time when he wandered alone, running away from his longevity. He told us about his coming across the Sons of Adam, he told us about Mother, the matriarch who protected her descendants. He told us about their time together, of the children they had.

"So, many of the Sons of Adam are your descendants," Gunnarr interrupted.

"No, none of them. All of our children died, one after the other, without reaching puberty. None of them had the chance to have children, so there was never a real link between Mother and I."

I knew what Lür was holding from Nagorno and Gunnarr, and that was that longevos didn't necessarily have longevo children. They also needed to pass down the cancer inhibitor gene to overcome the tendency of creating tumors from the activated telomerase. All those children had died from thousands of tumors. But only Lür, Iago and I knew about that part of the research.

Lür continued with his story. He told us of the fear, of the massacres that followed, that all the descendants and companions that Lür had, ended up dying in the worst possible way. Millennium after millennium, relentlessly.

How could Lür go through all of that and still want to live?

And finally, he told us the story of Ilur, the son who pretended to be him. He told us that Mother thought he was dead and the carnage had ended.

In the castle's huge dining room, Nagorno had sat back down in his chair and Gunnarr, without even realizing, had sat on the table we were eating at. Both had listened to Lür totally engrossed and with a serious face, aware of the severity of the situation.