Mons said, “We always give him back his memories of you, Blessed of God. We always will.” He leaned over Tyrell. “Immortal, have you truly wakened?”
“Yes,” Tyrell said, and thrust himself upright, swinging his legs over the edge of the couch, rising to his feet in a swift, sure motion. He glanced around, saw the new robe ready, pure white, and drew it on. Both Nerina and Mons saw, that there was no more hesitancy in his actions. Beyond the eternal body, the mind was young and sure and unclouded again.
Mons knelt, and Nerina knelt too. The priest said softly, “We thank God that a new Incarnation is permitted. May peace reign in this cycle, and in all the cycles beyond.”
Tyrell lifted Nerina to her feet. He reached down and drew Mons upright too.
‘Mons, Mons,” he said, almost chidingly. “Every century I’m treated less like a man and more like a god. If you’d been alive a few hundred years ago—well, they still prayed when I woke, but they didn’t kneel. I’m a man, Mons. Don’t forget that.”
Mons said, “You brought peace to the worlds.”
“Then may I have something to eat, in return?”
Mons bowed and went out. Tyrell turned quickly to Nerina. The strong gentleness of his arms drew her close.
“If I never woke, sometime—” he said. “You’d be the hardest thing of all to give up. I didn’t know how lonely I was till I found another immortal.”
“We have a week here in the monastery,” she said. “A week’s retreat, before we go home. I like being here with you best of all.”
“Wait a while,” he said. “A few more centuries and you’ll lose that attitude of reverence. I wish you would. Love’s better—and who else can I love this way?”
She thought of the centuries of loneliness be had had, and her whole body ached with love and compassion.
After the kiss, she drew back and looked at him thoughtfully.
“You’ve changed again,” she said. “It’s still you, but—”
“But what?”
“You’re gentler, somehow.”
Tyrell laughed.
“Each time, they wash out my mind and give me a new set of memories. Oh, most of the old ones, but the total’s a little different. It always is. Things are more peaceful now than they were a century ago. So my mind is tailored to fit the times. Otherwise I’d gradually become an anachronism.” He frowned slightly. “Who’s that?”
She glanced at the door.
“Mons? No. It’s no one.”
“Oh? Well . . . yes, we’ll have a week’s retreat. Time to think and integrate my retailored personality. And the past—” He hesitated again.
She said, “I wish I’d been born earlier. I could have been with you—”
“No,” he said quickly. “At least—not too far back.”
“Was it so bad?”
He shrugged.
“I don’t know how true my memories are any more. I’m glad I don’t remember more than I do. But I remember enough. The legends are right.” His face shadowed with sorrow. “The big wars ... hell was loosed. Hell was omnipotent! The Antichrist walked in the noonday sun, and men feared that which is high. . . .“ His gaze lifted to the pale low ceiling of the room, seeing beyond it “Men had turned into beasts. Into devils. I spoke of peace to them, and they tried to kill me. I bore it. I was immortal, by God’s grace. Yet they could have killed me. I am vulnerable to weapons.” He drew a deep, long breath. “Immortality was not enough. God’s will preserved me, so that I could go on preaching peace until, little by little, the maimed beasts remembered their souls and reached up out of hell.. . .“
She had never heard him talk like this.
Gently she touched his hand.
He came back to her.
“It’s over,” he said. “The past is dead. We have today.”
From the distance the priests chanted a paean of joy and gratitude.
The next afternoon she saw him at the end of a corridor leaning over something huddled and dark. She ran forward. He was bent down beside the body of a priest, and when Nerina called out, he shivered and stood up, his face white and appalled.
She looked down and her face, too, went white.
The priest was dead. There were blue marks on his throat, and his neck was broken, his head twisted monstrously.
Tyrell moved to shield the body from her gaze.
“G-get Mons,” he said, unsure as though he had reached the end of the hundred years. “Quick. This … get him.”
Morn came, looked at the body, and stood aghast. He met Tyrell’s blue gaze.
“How many centuries, Messiah?” he asked, in a shaken voice.
Tyrell said, “Since there was violence? Eight centuries or more. Mons, no one—no one is capable of this.”
Mons said, “Yes. There is no more violence. It has been bred out of the race.” He dropped suddenly to his knees. “Messiah, bring peace again! The dragon has risen from the past!”
Tyrell straightened, a figure of strong humility in his white robe.
He lifted his eyes and prayed.
Nerina knelt, her horror slowly washed away in the burning power of Tyrell’s prayer.
The whisper breathed through the monastery and shuddered back from the blue, clear air beyond. None knew who had closed deadly hands about the priest’s throat. No one, no human, was capable any longer of killing; as Mons had said, the ability to hate, to destroy, had been bred out of the race.
The whisper did not go beyond the monastery. Here the battle must be fought in secret, no hint of it escaping to trouble the long peace of the worlds.
No human.
But another whisper grew: The Antichrist is born again.
They turned to Tyrell, to the Messiah, for comfort.
Peace, he said, peace—meet evil with humility, bow your heads in prayer, remember the love that saved man when hell was loosed on the worlds two thousand years ago.
At night, beside Nerina, he moaned in his sleep and struck out at an invisible enemy.
“Devil!” he cried—and woke, shuddering.
She held him, with proud humility, till he slept again.
She came with Mons one day to Tyrell’s room, to tell him of the new horror. A priest had been found dead, savagely hacked by a sharp knife. They pushed open the door and saw Tyrell sitting facing them at a low table. He was praying while he watched, in sick fascination, the bloody knife that lay on the table before him.
“Tyrell—” she said, and suddenly Mons drew in a quick, shuddering breath and swung around sharply. He pushed her back across the threshold.
“Wait!” he said, with violent urgency. “Wait for me here!” Before she could speak he was beyond the closing door, and she heard it lock.
She stood there, not thinking, for a long time.
Then Mons came out and closed the door softly behind him. He looked at her.
“It’s all right,” he said. “But ... you must listen to me now.” Then he was silent.
He tried again.
“Blessed of God—” Again he drew that difficult breath. “Nerina. I—” He laughed oddly. “That’s strange. I can’t talk unless I call you Nerina.”
“What is it? Let me go to Tyrell!”
“No—no. He’ll be all right. Nerina, he’s—sick.”
She shut her eyes, trying to concentrate. She heard his voice, unsure but growing stronger.
“Those killings. Tyrell did them.”
“Now you lie,” she said. “That is a lie!”
Mons said almost sharply, “Open your eyes. Listen to me. Tyrell is—a man. A very great man, a very good man, but no god. He is immortal. Unless he is struck down, he will live forever—as you will. He has already lived more than twenty centuries.”