The Tale of the Immortal Woman

There is a small village in the middle of nowhere which sits beneath a mountain. At the top there is a castle with a curly-whirly little path leading down to the bottom and to the village below. Living in this castle is a woman of about twenty who has the wind and the birds for company. She lives without other people, choosing instead to make the birds and the animals her friends.

In the village below the mountain the people there have known nothing but peace for the past two hundred years. Such is the effect that the twenty year old woman (who, in fact, is a couple of Millennia older than she appears) has upon everything around her. They do not have cars as they have no desire to drive down to the city beyond the mountain range. There the people kill each other and consume their children upon each full moon. There rape and murder is perfectly acceptable as the average pass-time. The city is ruled by a very foolish politician indeed who will remain nameless to protect the guilty. So the villagers live out their lives safe in the knowledge that they are nothing like the blasphemous city-dwellers below them, and that they have no crime rate at all. They are also all vegans, but nobody's perfect.

Once a year the woman who lives at the top of the mountain comes down into the village to buy provisions for the year. She catches up with the local gossip while she is there (as I have said before, nobody is perfect, and even the villagers have their foibles). She even goes to the small café opposite the village green for an espresso and a hot, toasted bagel. This is prohibitively expensive but she has the wealth of two millennia behind her.

It is nearly Mayday in the village, and the wise lady is due for her yearly visit for provisions. The villagers are excited at seeing their leader, as the woman is their temporal ruler, and she is very good at it indeed. So banners are erected across the village green and the May Pole is stood up in its traditional place in its centre. The shop fronts are washed down and re-painted in the traditional dark green of the Victorian style, and fresh doilies are placed upon all the tables in the café. The dignitaries of the village polish up their gold chains of office and brush down the ermine-lined gowns, ready for wearing on Mayday.

This year she doesn't arrive at the village, and the dignitaries are rather worried by this occurrence. So they send one of the many young men to go up to the castle and see if everything is all right with her. The young man chosen for the job is John, the local wood-cutter, and he is respected by all in the village. During lambing season he also helps out the local farmers, and is considered as a jack of all trades who can turn his hand to anything. All the village girls love him, even though they know that he'd never marry any of them, and that they are all wasting their time in pursuing him.

So John begins the long climb to the top of the mountain first light the next morning. The birds are tweeting excitedly as this is a very rare occurrence for anyone to visit the castle. Even the small mammals skitter and jibe about his feet, safe in the knowledge that they will not become anyones next meal (they are all vegans, after all). He stops on occasions to catch his breath and pet the small mammals following him, but he doesn't stay resting for long as he knows that he still has a very long way to go. He walks through the night until at last he reaches the top of the mountain.

He reaches the castle gates at dawn to find them left wide open. The normally manicured lawn has turned into a wild meadow and the gravel path is very overgrown. Ivy hangs upon the gates along with half a dozen other climbers and John enters the castle grounds with one eye peering over his shoulder. He finds that the woman sitting upon the throne has turned to stone, and this doesn't surprise him in the slightest. She has been known to do this before several hundred years ago, and despite her immobile state she is still perfectly alive and well.

Suddenly he hears her speak, even though there is no audible sound and her lips haven't moved. She is speaking directly into his head, which is a new experience to him and not entirely comfortable. She says that she has become lonely up here all on her own, and that she desires a mate to share her life for the next fifty years or so. John looks away bashfully with the feeling that he has just been set up for the job, but nevertheless he is flattered by the offer. So he kisses her upon the forehead and she melts back into a flesh and bone woman instead of the woman of stone that she had just become earlier in the year.

John picked her up and carried her upstairs to the bed-chamber. He knew where it was, even though he had never been to the castle before in his lifetime and by rights he shouldn't have know where it is. He slept the night downstairs. They married the next day at the village church. Everyone was there at the wedding. The village shop did a special two-for-one offer on long grain rice that day. They preferred not to use paper confetti as it was a waste of natural resources.

Years pass after the wedding, and each year John and the immortal woman would go down to the village to get their yearly supplies on Mayday. John is ageing while the woman stays the same. They have no offspring as she chooses to remain infertile. His hair is growing greyer each year, and there is a stoop to his step and a crick in his back, and he is getting older and older until eventually he dies of old age.

There is a massive funeral at the village that year to give John a good send-off. The woman speaks of her love for him in front of the village church altar, and how she would miss him for at least another two millennium. Then there is the burial of John's mortal remains in the woman's family crypt followed by a wake at the village hall. Everyone gets drunk and tell stories about how they remember him when he was still a young wood-cutter. Tales are told of how all the village girls loved him despite the fact that he showed not the slightest bit of interest in their advances.

The woman has returned to the castle and is slowly becoming lonelier and lonelier, only returning each year to the village to buy provisions for the coming year. Life goes on in the village, and stories are still being told about the blasphemous city below them. Incest has become the latest fashionable pass-time in the city, along with bestiality and serial killing. All the villagers gasp in amazement and disgust whenever they hear the latest news from down there.

Meanwhile, the immortal woman has turned into stone, and this Mayday the villagers are going to have to send someone up there to investigate.