Cain

The Penitents were led to a wide ruin of broken pillars and tumbled walls outlining what may have been a temple, or a palace, perhaps even a vast indoor market. In its center was a massive yurt, bigger than any complete building either had yet seen on Nod, a small palace of cloth and wood lattice. Naamah walked behind them as they were led in by a guard in full-body steel lamellar, the Mark of Cain etched onto the brow of his helmet and a polearm with a long curved blade in his hands. Though all its walls has thin, this massive tent had interior divisions, and an elderly woman waited in an antechamber to greet Naamah.

“My mother.” she introduced the hunched, wrinkled woman not a day younger than eighty.

“Naamah… how old are you?”

“Yuya,” Grant whispered sharply, “don’t you know it’s impolite to ask a woman’s age?”

Naamah giggled slightly. “Under my circumstances, and given the number of questions my father and I are about to assail you with, I am happy to say I am a youthful sixty-three years. My mother has much the same lifespan as you descendants of Seth, as do my husband and most of the people of Nod, but the direct progeny of Cain are… greater than his descendants in a long line. Taller, as you can see, and stronger, and if I dare presume to call myself such things, wiser and more beautiful, as a general rule. We live many centuries, as well, and since my husband is not here to blush…” she leaned in and whispered, “we are fertile for no smaller a proportion of our whole lives. The man had better be careful, lest our tent still be bursting with small children when he is too old and tired to chase them.” Yuya felt warmth in his cheeks, and Naamah’s giggle confirmed he had reacted much as Abutai might.

“Does the curse do that?” Grant asked. “Or the… blessing?”

She shook her head. “I do not think it as anything to do with the Ban from the Ground, nor the Sevenfold Vengeance. I suspect Seth’s children were much the same as I. Man simply… diminishes with the generations.”

“Oh, don’t let my little girl keep you.” Yuya was a full head taller than the old woman, himself over half a head shorter than Grant, who barely came up to Naamah’s collarbone. “Patience does not come as naturally to Cain as you might assume, despite his generations-spanning plots and plans. Go in, go in!”

The door to Cain’s audience chamber was an ornate blanket strung between two standing partitions. A guard parted it, and they passed into a dimly-lit space, a faint red glow permeating the tent-roof from the light of dusk. The only illumination besides was an ember in a pipe carved from a stag’s antler, reflecting from a face that seemed at once profoundly, archetypally human, and yet made monstrous by its innate perfection, even to the point its Mark could not be said to mar it even as it completed its terror.

Trying to say one nation, tribe, race or bloodline looked more like Cain than any other would have been the most bold-faced of lies. Some science fiction Yuya had read described the coming of a Beige Man, a perfect blend of all Earth’s peoples, and Cain was the perfect inversion of the idea, the whole masterpiece of which all his children and Seth’s were only a broken, faded part. The close-cropped hair of his head and beard shimmered in the dim light, usually dark but blazing one moment fiery red when the pipe caught it just so, now glowing golden when, in his study of them, he raised it high toward the filtered sunlight. Reflecting also, glinting madly red, was the Mark upon his brow, as though with masterful calligraphy the primeval symbol of Envy had been freshly painted in glistening blood. His eyes only reflected in their whites, the irises a deep, absorbing red. The pupils probed and prodded like those of a stalking predator. They were nearly level with Yuya’s, for which reason he only now realized Cain was seated. Standing, the man would have been… two and a half meters, easily. His proportions were superhuman, more like a classical Greek statue than any real person Yuya had ever met. What he felt in that moment, he intuited, was among the nearest sensations a created being could produce to that of seeing the face of God.

He hoped God’s eyes would not be so vicious.

Without much of an idea what else to do under that gaze, Yuya bowed after the example he had gotten in Jalabarta. Hesitantly, Grant followed his lead. When they came up, Cain inclined his head ever so slightly, indicating two simple wooden chairs across from his, separated by a small table. They sat, and Cain took a deep draw from his pipe. It smelled only of tobacco, no musk of cannabis nor tang of opium. Laid out for them too were pipes, bowls with all three leaves, cups and a pitcher of airag, even a bowl of some tree nut that didn’t grow on Earth. Yuya caught the message– get comfortable, you’ll be here awhile– but doubted he could wholeheartedly oblige with those crimson eyes boring into him.

To his surprise, it got easier when Cain finally opened his mouth. “What are your names, Penitents?” His voice was strong and deep, but had a rich musicality to it, soothing in the way every father hopes to be when reassuring a scared, doubtful child.

“Y-Yamamoto Yuya, my lord Cain.”

“Grant Herrera, sir.” Grant, at least appearing unbothered, took a deep gulp of the airag, made a face, and set it down in favor of a pipe.

“Ah. A son of Jimmu and… yes, you would have to be part of the legacy of Cortés, but also have some of Hengist’s and Horsa’s blood. I believe I can guess where those lines came together. The last time an American survived Nod long enough to speak with me, your two countries were at war. She was a Penitent of Envy, marked much as I am, but she passed her test with surprising ease. The last Japanese Penitent not to die almost immediately… the Ashikaga Shogunate was well on its way to falling when he arrived. He roamed for some time before he settled in Xinqian, which in hindsight was a poor decision for a Penitent of Gluttony. He called himself Konoe, at first, but all of Nod knows him as the Eternal Emperor now.”

Yuya raised an eyebrow at that. “The emperor of five hundred years is Japanese? With what your daughter told me about how long she expected to live, I assumed the whole alchemy thing was a hoax, that he was a son or grandson of yours.” He glanced back to the entrance. Naamah was seated on a cushion by an interior partition, listening unobtrusively, and a similarly tall, ageless-looking man had quietly slid in to sit beside her. A brother, or other close relative.

“He wishes desperately for the legitimacy that would give him. I did found Lugo’s First Dynasty, not long after the Great Flood cut us off from Earth, though I abdicated to my son Weihan within a century. In terms of heredity, any peasant, or even a slave from Jalabarta or Vetania, would have a stronger claim than he, though their political philosophy considers more factors than blood alone. Even so, he was Abutai's chief competing suitor, and many of Naamah’s older half-sisters born in the last five centuries have rejected his advances, as well. But enough of what the Japanese have been about on Nod; tell me what has happened of late in the Land of the Rising Sun.”

A lump caught in Yuya’s throat. This man had seen his world’s whole history firsthand, knew it better than any Earth historian could match. Yuya was not a historian; he hardly gave a shit about history after the Edo Period, and all his care for the world before then was a byproduct of liking fiction inspired by it, rather than interest in the history for its own sake. Cain would want to discuss recent history, and discuss it at more than a surface level.

“I, uh… well, if you know about the war, and you know about the nuclear standoff of the decades that followed, there’s not much more to say about Japan. We made peace after the atom bombs fell, recovered and became prosperous through manufacturing and trade, and for the last few decades have been a quiet but active contributor to advancing technology– computing, stuff like that. Do you know about computers?”

“There is a Russian man, I believe he is still alive on Nod, who came here about thirty years ago. He spoke in brief of the Earth-year two thousand, how some feared certain machines used to track and manage complex systems might begin to act erratically as an indirect consequence of how they kept time, with some small chance of devastating results. Are these machines what you speak of?”

Yuya smiled and leaned forward, finding to his very pleasant surprise he was now, despite the dark tent, despite the enormous man before him with his evil eyes and evil history, back in his element, for the first time since his death to Earth. “They are indeed, my lord Cain. I was a student, studying how to put them to new and novel uses. Let me tell you about a little something called the Internet, that’s come to shape how Earth’s society operates over the last thirty years…”

The conversation on computing stretched for hours, from the minimal details of the hardware Yuya knew, to the workings of software, to the immediate and second-order consequences, good and ill, for human society on Earth. While there was far too large a technological gap between their societies for Cain to make any practical use of this information, it fascinated him nonetheless, as reading or watching a show about Nod might have captivated Yuya a few months ago. Grant got his fair share of talking in, as well, filling Cain in on the details of world events Yuya had followed less closely, telling him of changing political landscapes and wars in Eastern Europe and the Levant. Somehow, despite neither Yuya nor Grant thinking highly of the stuff’s taste and Cain only belatedly pouring himself a cup, the airag pitcher was drained and refilled by a servant at least once. Likewise, Grant and Cain burned through the pipe tobacco like kindling, and Yuya discovered a fondness for the oddly-shaped nuts that had been laid out.

Family and trusted retainers of Cain’s came to listen and went their ways at their leisure, most never interjecting, a few asking well-thought-out questions to further clarify the picture of Earth the two Penitents were painting. That surprised Yuya, then he chastised himself for being blindsided by it. Just because these people weren’t at Earth’s technology level, were living a life that might have been called barbaric even by the great realms of their own world, they were no dumber than the typical Earth human, and perhaps on average a little smarter.

The burning light of dusk faded to the cool glow of the Turquoise Throne, then the blackness of midnight took the room, and the planet’s glow was starting to return by the time the conversation turned from the past to concern itself with the future.