Chapter Text
2023
Nicky found it in Toronto, on display in a little bookshop with a series of pride flags posted over the awning. The leather-bound cover was supple rather than stiff, a rich navy inlaid with gold leaf for the lettering and the intricate geometric border pattern. The pages boasted gilded edges. The title appeared first in English, and then in Arabic underneath.
Far From the Moon
There was no author name.
Nicky turned the book over, but met blank leather. It wasn’t even embossed with a price; that was printed on an easily removable sticker. Nicky approved; the cover was too pretty to litter with the corporate detritus of the publishing industry. He flipped carefully to the introduction.
Discovered in a trunk in 2012 and dated to the late 16th and early 17th centuries—
“Isn’t it exciting?” came a voice from behind him. Nicky looked up from his reading to find a small bespectacled person in a purple beanie lurking at his elbow, hands clasped behind their back. Their name tag read “Elfaz.” They rocked up on their toes as if unable to contain their enthusiasm. “New Islamic epic narrative poetry, and it’s gay? Come on! Well, not new, but you get me. And only published in English last year. There have been like. Full-on brawls over it. Academically, of course.”
“What is the controversy?” Nicky asked. He flipped through to find Arabic on the left side and the English translation on the right.
“More like what isn’t!” Elfaz crowed. They reached over and picked up another copy of the book. “It’s queer, for one thing, but it doesn’t fit with other depictions of homoeroticism in pre-modern Islamic literature.”
“Not pederasty, you mean,” Nicky said.
Elfaz snorted and grinned up at him.
“Exactly,” they said. “It’s also weirdly in first person and has lesbians and these intense tonal shifts and references to Greek mythology and blah blah blah blasphemy, but the real point of contention is actually pretty boring—some people think it’s fake. No author name and no style markers that could be used to pin on someone known, language use that would have been archaic even for the time it was written, a queer interfaith romance that flies in the face of what would have been acceptable, both of them clearly men not boys, both of them taking the active and passive roles during sex.”
“Hm.” Nicky’s blood was rushing in his ears.
“Why though, you know?” Elfaz went on. “Like, if you wrote it now, wouldn’t you want the money from the sales? And if it’s a broader hoax for whatever reason, then waiting like ten years with no end in sight is playing a serious long game I think most con artists don’t actually have the patience for.
“Yes, that is too long for a marketing stunt,” Nicky said.
“People love a conspiracy theory that allows them to feel like they know something other people don’t,” Elfaz said. “They’ll willfully ignore all evidence that would prove them wrong. I mean, come on! Who beyond a handful of scholars with extremely niche skillsets would even know enough of this dialect to translate it, much less write it? Or how can you fake parchment and inks that haven’t existed in hundreds of years? I’m just a layman, obviously, but all I hear when people come out of the woodwork to spout this stuff is ‘Shakespeare couldn’t have written like that, he was poor!’ Same hat.”
“Ah.” Nicky was losing the plot a bit. “So it has been authenticated?”
“If you read the preface—there.” Elfaz flipped through the copy of the book in their own hands and jabbed a finger at the relevant passage. “This goes through the process if that interests you. Me, I’m just in it for the feels.”
“The…feels.”
Elfaz barked out a laugh and stepped back from the display.
“Sorry, man! Maybe I’m getting old—I used to get so embarrassed when my parents would say like, peachy keen or whatever, and here I am, acting like it’s 2010 again.” Elfaz set the book down and graced Nicky was a careless shrug. “At the end of the day I’m just a simple creature. I want a good tea and a good story. If that’s what I get, what else is there to debate?”
“And if it’s fiction, then what do its origins matter?” Nicky said. He let the pages fan out beneath his thumb.
“Exactly. Exactly!”
“Elfaz!” someone called from the front. “The register!”
Elfaz said some parting words that Nicky let pass between his ears without touching down. In his skimming he had caught sight of a line that made his innards tremble.
If a man can conquer death, can love conquer time?
2019
Joe arrived in time to pull a São Paolo ’34. After the dust settled and they were ensconced in a safe house outside Stirling, Joe graced Nicky with a sparkly-eyed smile and squeezed his shoulder in greeting. The pang in Nicky’s heart was as familiar to him as the contours of Joe’s absence. He patted Joe’s hand, and then it fell away as he turned from Nicky to greet Booker and Andy with his arms outspread and his chest an entire welcome committee. After dropping Andy back on her feet, Joe introduced himself to Nile with a quip about how he always hated to die in the desert—“Sand in inconvenient places, you know”—especially when he was just having a nice sleep in the tropics at the time. Nile laughed and shook his hand heartily, looking up at him as though he were a meteor shower on a clear night. Nicky knew the feeling.
Booker nudged him with a shoulder and quirked his eyebrows up. Nicky shook his head. He couldn’t begrudge Nile a little crush on the most beautiful man in the world. Joe would leave again soon enough, and then Booker or Andy would tell her it was a lost cause.
Nicky heard snippets of conversation from his vantage point in the kitchen, where he was folding egg yolks into semolina for fresh fettuccine. Joe had been in the Philippines studying batok, a pre-colonial method of tattooing lately experiencing a resurgence, when he received Booker’s SOS.
“I’ve been on a bit of a tattoo kick the last few decades,” he said. “Indigenous practices across the world are the most interesting to me. The art of course, but also the commonalities in method as well as the differences. I can’t get any myself, obviously, and I’d never presume to do one on someone, but these are beautiful art forms that don’t get the kind of attention they deserve.”
“My only tattoo is this dumb toad on a mushroom,” Nile said, and then there was the rustling of fabric. “Me and my best girl walked into a random shop and got matching flash when we were nineteen, and then three months later she stopped talking to me. BFFs since the first grade! Ain’t that a kick in the ass?”
“The lines are clean and his expression is mischievous,” Joe said, voice going even smokier around the edges like it did when he was inspecting something. “There are much worse tattoos to have on your body for eternity.”
“Oh my God I can’t even get a cover up.”
Andy snorted, and there was more rustling. It was her turn to show off an elaborate geometric pattern around her ribcage and under her breasts. The design was as bold and sharp and unyielding as Andy herself, carved into her during a ritual with an obsidian blade.
“Someday you can tell people it was your warrior initiation,” she said. “Gets ’em every time.”
“Wait, was it not your initiation?” Booker asked. “Andy?”
Andy only cackled, and Nicky heard the thump of a bottle of wine landing too hard on the table.
“I think your tattoo is cute, Nile,” Joe said. “Excuse me.” A chair scraped across the floor, and then Joe was crossing into the kitchen, leaning a hip against the other end of the counter. Nicky glanced up to find him gazing at him, arms crossed, a fond look in his eye. “Someday we’ll get you to make pasta from a box and take it easy for once.”
“Fresh takes only a little more effort for a significant improvement in taste and texture,” Nicky said, like he always did. “It’s not as though we don’t have time.”
Joe hummed and cast his eyes over the explosion of flour.
“Do you need any help?” he asked. “Does this safe house have all your little pasta tools?”
“There was a time when all we had were knives and we did just fine.”
Joe’s mouth quirked, the smallest of smiles mostly hidden by beard. Oh, Nicky’s heart hurt, even all these centuries later. He supposed it always would.
“Yeah, yeah,” Joe said. “‘Get out of my kitchen, Joe, you’re distracting me, Joe.’”
“Who said this? Not me,” Nicky said.
Another one of those sad smiles. Nicky tore his eyes away and smacked his dough with the rolling pin a bit harder than necessary.
“How about your sauce, then?” Joe said.
“Try it and add what you will,” Nicky said, waving a hand toward a bubbling pot on the range. “The meatballs are a lamb and beef blend.”
“I suppose it’s too much to ask that you take a break while the pasta’s resting and join us.”
“I need to make a reduction for the salad and put some shortbread in the oven and maybe get started on something special for tomorrow, so yes, I really am too busy, you go have fun.” He rolled his pin across the dough with much vigor and heard Joe sigh.
Out of the corner of his eye, Nicky saw Joe lift the lid off the pot and stirred at what he found. He blew on the wooden spoon and tasted it.
“Perfetta, as always,” Joe said. “What’s ‘something special?’”
“Khoresh-e beh and tahdig,” Nicky said, refusing to look at him. The dough was easing into the shape of a rectangle under his efforts.
“Nicky—”
“Let me do this, Joe.” Nicky said to the mess on the counter. “Nile’s adjusting, we need to lie low, Andy’s—” He bit back the words. He set his rolling pin down and leaned his hands on the edge of the counter. “Don’t disappear so quick. Give us a few days. Let me make you this meal before you fuck off for another ten years.”
The lid clattered as Joe set it back down. In the absence of a chitarra, Nicky picked up a pizza cutter and set to cutting the dough into precise strips.
“Nine hundred and fifty years old and still holding everything together for a bunch of people who never asked for it,” Joe said. “Do you ever do anything for yourself, Nicolò?”
“Don’t.”
Another sigh, and Joe retreated back into the sitting room.
2023
Nicky read Far From the Moon first in Arabic—peppered liberally with Greek, Genoese, and Latin—and then in the English translation and then both line by line. Many pages were limned with footnotes explaining this or that antiquated term, some dating back as far as the 11th century. It told the tale of two knights who meet during the fall of al-Quds in 492, 1099 by the Gregorian calendar. The unnamed speaker is a Muslim from Mahdia, a merchant by trade called to take up arms when he finds himself in the holy land during the Frankish invasion that became the First Crusade. Invictus, a disgraced Catholic monk from Genoa who was promised salvation for taking the cross, begins as his enemy but, through a series of adventures and mishaps, becomes his confidante and, finally, his lover. For many years they roam the Mediterranean and beyond, their love ever deepening despite differences as grand as culture and as domestic as housekeeping.
Towards the middle of the tale, the speaker and his beloved encounter a pair of Amazons and the exploits of two become the exploits of four. Alke and Creusa lead them toward a destiny aiding the less fortunate but often manage to embroil them in an outsized share of trouble. They are frequently called upon to pose as married couples, the speaker with Creusa and Invictus with Alke, which results in mix-ups and crossdressing and genderbending discombobulation. Nicky reread these passages countless times and laughed loud enough to raise Andy’s fist against the wall between them in the middle of the night.
Two thirds of the way through the poem, Creusa is lost to them, and Alke shatters like a brittle vase. The remaining three perform inhuman feats in an attempt to restore Creusa to their side, but God is indifferent to their pleas. The speaker’s tenuous relationship to his faith snaps entirely, and he is cast adrift in a void of loss and fear, where even Invictus cannot reach him. After one last damning argument, the speaker leaves the Amazon and the beloved, and seeks to forge a new destiny alone.
The final passages occur deep within the speaker’s interiority, where first he excoriates Invictus for sacrificing himself at the altar of Alke’s pain, then rails against God for stripping them of not only Cresua but also of peace and joy, then at last he turns his hatred inward and berates himself for discarding his greatest love and his only companions, for being too weak to face the material loss of Creusa and the threat of the loss of Invictus. Far From the Moon ends with the speaker contemplating suicide outside of the surety of God, Invictus, and the Amazons, but even that is rejected as a reprieve the speaker does not deserve.
Four hundred some years after the words were written, five hundred after Quỳnh's loss, and six full rereads later, Nicky stood at the bay windows of the Doe Lake safe house, forehead pressed against the glass as he stared unseeing over the shore, book dangling precariously from his right hand. The door opened behind him and Nile walked in with groceries and a lot to say about inflation only to cut herself off upon seeing Nicky,
“Nicky?” she asked. “Are you okay?”
“I am a fool,” Nicky said. He snapped the book shut and clutched it to his heart.
“Okay,” Nile said, drawing out the vowels. “Any particular reason? Only, I’m pretty sure you’re the least foolish guy I’ve ever met, and my great-grandpa was a sharecropper who thought the laughter of children was a sign of moral decay.”
“I am a fool because I can fight in a thousand battles but I cannot fight for what is important.”
Booker stepped up beside him and looked out the window. Andy was floating on her back in the lake even though it was only April. Behind them was the quiet bustle of Nile putting the groceries away.
“Far be it from me to tell you what’s important,” Booker said, “but I think we’ve got it pretty covered.” He nodded toward Andy, who was flicking water into the air to land on her skin, which was in one piece again thanks to some stitches Nicky sewed up after their last job in Quebec.
Nicky, who was not only a fool but a son of a bitch, hadn’t been thinking of Andy at all. At least not Andy, mortal and vulnerable in the 21st century. Without glancing over, Nicky slapped the book into Booker’s chest. Booker grunted but took it and leafed through. The moment he realized what he was holding, the air in the cabin shifted.
“Where did you—what—”
“I saw it in a bookshop last week,” Nicky said. “It’s caused quite a stir in academic circles, apparently.”
Booker flipped it over and frantically scanned the front matter.
“Does he—”
“I don’t know,” Nicky said. “Feels like if he’d known then he could have stopped it getting published, so.”
Nile’s head appeared under Booker’s arm.
“What are we talking about?” she asked. Booker tilted it at her but she couldn’t have known what she was looking at.
“Poetry?”
“Joe’s poetry,” Booker said. “About Nicky.”
Nile’s mouth snapped shut and her eyes went huge. She stood up straight and in doing so left Nicky’s field of vision and took the book with her.
“Do you want me to call him?” Booker asked.
Nicky took a deep breath. His mind was somehow both crowded and blank. A still lake, he thought as he watched Andy, with life and all its attendant dramas teeming beneath the surface.
“It should be me,” Nicky said. “If we call him at all.”
“If? Nicky, you have to—”
Nicky turned and looked Booker in the eye for the first time that day. Whatever Booker saw in his face stole his words.
“He wrote this more than four hundred years ago, Sébastien,” Nicky said in French. “It was buried in some ruin in Iran who knows when. He obviously never meant anyone to see it, much less me.”
“But does it say he still loves you?”
Nicky scoffed and turned back to the window.
“Nicky, I’m serious,” Booker said. Nile squawked as he snatched the book back from her. He flipped to the final pages and tapped frantically at the Arabic side. “Look at this, look. I am half a man outside the light of his love / in an exile of my own making O moon.”
“A lot can change in four hundred years, Booker. Our time has passed.”
Booker staggered back with a shake of his head.
“It’s funny,” he said. “I never thought you a coward until today.”
He left Nicky standing there, book passed off to Nile. Nicky clenched his jaw and held out his hand.
“He texts me sometimes,” she said.
“Really.”
“Just things he thinks are funny,” she said. “Bumper stickers he sees or fruit shaped like body parts.”
Nicky could feel his face pinching inward to squint at her. She placed the book in his palm.
“This week it’s been funny place names in the UK. Did you know there’s a Twatt in Orkney?”
“There are lots of twats in Orkney,” Nicky said.
Nile grinned at him.
“Maybe there could be one more?”
1571
Nicolò washed up on the Dorset shore surrounded by sun-leathered fishermen and Yusuf. The crowd of fishermen broke into cheers at his gasp of breath, and Yusuf visibly slumped in relief.
“Praise the lord, he is alive!” Yusuf said in his best approximation of a native English accent, and took turns shaking hands and clapping the backs of the fishermen. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he said. Hurriedly he hauled Nicolò to his feet and took the bulk of his weight. “Come along, Nicholas. You’ve given your wife such a scare! She will be missing your head to be smacking upside!”
The fisherman laughed as Nicolò passed through the gauntlet of hands slapping his shoulders. Yusuf half-dragged him down the pier. At the road, their old mare was waiting. Yusuf helped him onto her but didn’t join him. Instead, he walked beside her, reins loose in his grip.
“Andrine?” Nicolò asked when he had recovered enough to sit up without listing to one side.
“Fine,” Yusuf said in clipped Arabic. “She returned none the worse for wear three days ago. Only your absence has stayed her hand in chartering another boat.”
“Give me a day and we can.”
Yusuf shook his head. His beard was short enough for Nicolò to see the way he clenched his teeth.
“What is it?” Nicolò asked.
“Did you hear me?” Yusuf demanded. “Your boat capsized three days ago. You were gone for three days, Nicolò.”
“Ah.”
Yusuf scoffed and picked up the pace so he was properly leading the mare now rather than walking beside Nicolò. Exhausted, Nicolò could do nothing but watch the rocky coast pass them by. The sun slanting over the cliff faces and illuminating the cresting waves made for a staggering view, but he could not appreciate it. The beauty of the sea hid its terrible power; it would not do to forget it. None of them could ever forget it.
Andrine was tending her labrys when Nicolò and Yusuf returned. The longsword and the saif were propped beside her, waiting their turn. With a flick of her eyes she looked Nicolò over.
“Did you drown?” she asked.
“Many times,” Nicolò said.
“Some say it’s a peaceful death.”
“What mortal could know enough to speak of such things?” Nicolò said. “These soft lies—it is how they comfort themselves.”
“I have had worse,” Andrine said.
“Starvation,” Nicolò said.
Andrine pressed her blade to the whetstone again and bent over her work.
“I have had better.”
“Falling from a great height,” Nicolò said.
“This is perverse,” Yusuf said with a sneer. “I will be at the market—do not follow me.”
He trudged off to the east. Nicolò sank onto a bench and let his thoughts drift into nothingness as Andrine honed all their blades.
“He is angry at me,” Nicolò said as the sun kissed the horizon and Andrine finished up oiling the saif. “He’s always angry at me of late.”
“He’s scared for you,” Andrine said. “But it’s easier to be angry than afraid.”
“It was only three days.”
“And seventy-eight years ago, Quỳnh was gone for three days,” Andrine said. “And then it was four. And five. And ten. And thirty-nine. And twelve-thousand six hundred and fifty-two.” She nicked her palm deliberately on Yusuf’s blade. She curled her hand into a fist and pressed the bloody run of knuckles to her heart.
“It’s different,” Nicolò said. “I was unbound. Our location was known. We were not too far out when the storm struck.”
“I still came home to him without you,” said Andrine.
Nicolò worried at the corner of his thumb nail with his teeth. He wanted to go looking for Yusuf, but if he didn’t get started on the stew, he would have nothing to feed Yusuf when he returned, which would not be long, God willing.
That night Yusuf did not speak to him and made no show of enjoying the food Nicolò made. Andrine sucked down three bottles of mead by herself and shambled toward the cliffs after dinner, waving away Nicolò’s admonishments to exercise caution. Nicolò was cleaning up when Yusuf closed his hands around Nicolò’s wrists and forced him to set the dishes down. By the dim light of their single candle, Nicolò met Yusuf’s eyes with a question writ into his brow.
“How long are we going to do this?” Yusuf asked, voice gruff.
“I but await your forgiveness, Yusuf,” Nicolò said. “If you tell me how to make amends, I will do so, and then we can be as we were.”
“No.” Yusuf made a wordless sound of frustration. “How long are we going to spend every moment of every day looking for Quỳnh?”
Nicolò stared at him. Yusuf’s eyes were huge and pleading in the dark.
“Yusuf, you cannot think we would stop.”
Yusuf pulled away from him and stood abruptly, turning his back to Nicolò. He planted a hand on a hip and wiped his mouth before facing him again.
“It’s been almost eighty years,” he said. “Meticulously and methodically we have combed the coasts of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal. We have plagued unto death anyone who might have even a glimmer of information. We have ranged as far as Iceland and Cabo Verde, we have drowned and frozen and dashed our brains against rocks. We have been whittled down to, to mechanisms, motions, a series of automations empty but for the crank of our hearts as if by damnable habit. We are no longer people, can you not see?”
“We are doing what we must, tesoro—”
“When you were gone, I—Nico, I thought I had lost you as surely as Andrine has lost Quỳnh. I thought I’d never see you again, never touch you, never hold you. The sea had swallowed you and I thought you must be drowning and drowning and drowning with no end in sight because I couldn’t find you and fuck me, Nicolò, I was right! I was right!”
Nicolò was in front of him in two strides, seizing both his hands in his own. Skin to skin, he could feel Yusuf shaking. Yusuf slumped against him, resting his forehead against his, breath ragged against Nicolò’s lips.
“I’m here,” Nicolò said. “I’m here now. You found me. I know you’ll always find me, my Yusuf.”
Yusuf shuddered and then his mouth was on Nicolò’s, a succor Nicolò missed as much as he’d missed the breath in his lungs while waves crashed over his head over and over. Yusuf’s hands curled into Nicolò’s hair, demanding and proprietary just how Nicolò needed it. He melted against him, helpless but to open wide and let Yusuf sweep inside and make Nicolò his once more.
“I was a base and disconsolate thing, reduced to nothing without you,” Yusuf murmured into his mouth. “I am not a man but a beast, Nicolò, Nico, never leave me, please, please, my heart, I cannot take it.”
“Tesoro, it was only three days,” Nicolò said.
Yusuf swore and jerked from Nicolò’s arms.
“How many days would be too many, then?” Yusuf snarled, hands flying outward. “How many days of my terror, my heart in pieces, my utter panic until it means something to you? Ya Rab, Nicolò, do you feel nothing?”
“Yusuf, that’s not what I—”
“Andromache I understand!” Yusuf shouted. “I have felt now a vanishing fraction of what she has felt these last eight decades! I know what it is that drives her, I know why she is blind to all else! But you? Nicolò, how can you not see that this is how we destroy ourselves? If we keep going after Quỳnh day after endless day, we will be useless for the very destiny you convinced me we have! We will lose ourselves, we will lose each other, we will lose the world! Worse, the abyss will claim each of us one by one until we are nothing but wreckage at the bottom of the ocean for the rest of time! Between our lonely, torturous deaths we can comfort ourselves: ya Rab, but once I had love!”
Nicolò staggered back, mouth agape. He felt as though he were drowning again.
“I would tear the world apart and everyone in it besides if it were you in that coffin,” he said. “It wouldn’t matter how many centuries or how many deaths it took, I would not give up. And now you tell me it’s not the same for you. You tell me you would leave me to Quỳnh's fate because, what—you tire of sailing?”
“That’s not what I—you deliberately misunderstand me! It is because I would never stop that we must, can’t you see? It’s only a matter of time until more of us fall to this futile endeavor. We are now faced with an unhappy choice: one gone or all four? Worse—three of us gone and one left to wander in wretched solitude until the sun swallows the Earth. How can you look me in the eye and say that is the better option, Nicolò?”
“That’s a very neat argument for you,” Nicolò said, lip curling. “You can dress it up however you like, poet of my heart, but I hear what you do not say: searching for our sister is boring and inconvenient, and so you stand before me asking me to abandon both Quỳnh and Andromache when they need us most. I will not do it, Yusuf.”
“Oh, Nico.” Yusuf huffed out a brittle laugh. “We couldn’t exorcise that streak of Catholic martyrdom from you after all.”
“What the devil does that mean?”
“My love for you is catastrophic, do you know that?” Yusuf’s voice broke. “You have unmade me.”
Disquiet quivered through Nicolò’s body. His heart knew what his brain could not yet grasp.
“Yusuf…”
“I’ve lost you already. Ya Allah, saeeduni! I could not see it.” Though his eyes were wide and astonished, the candle threw shadows across Yusuf’s face that rendered him haggard, defeated. Nicolò’s great and towering love: a ruin. He turned from Nicolò and began making a nest of blankets away from the cot they shared. “I’ll leave at first light.”
“Leave? Why would you— You can’t mean that. You can’t mean that, Yusuf.”
Yusuf wouldn’t look at him. He busied himself with his unnecessary task.
“I must learn to be alone,” he said.
“How can you say this to me? Yusuf!”
Nicolò seized Yusuf by the arm, but Yusuf wrenched out of his grasp hard enough to make Nicolò stumble into the table.
“I would rather be alone far from you than alone at your side,” Yusuf snapped.
In the centuries to come, it was his own silence that would haunt Nicolò most. He would take the memory of that night out and inspect it on particularly self-punishing days, worry over it like a stone, seeking cracks and nicks that did not exist for him to slip into as he scoured for a reason he had been too proud to sink to his knees and beg Yusuf to stay.