In the morning I buried my husband.

He was beautiful, even through the wrinkles and sags of skin. He was the twenty-year-old man I'd met and nursed on the battlefields of Italy. The wild mercenary I followed across every continent. In my heart.

I still had my smooth, pale skin. Still a bright, red haired girl, dusted with golden freckles. Maybe twenty. In the mirror.

I knelt by his grave and waited. I don't know what for exactly. What I got was the pins and needles buzzing sounded that signified a nearby immortal. This was holy ground so I didn't bother to look up to see the other until I felt hands on my shoulders.

"Tinat." He whispered my name into my hair.

"Hello, old friend." I whispered back. I wondered briefly what he was doing here, how he knew to come here. But I couldn't summon the energy to wonder long.

"I'm glad I'm still your friend." At that I stood up and looked at him. Just looked.

He sighed. "I know it's hard. I'll buy you a beer, you look like you could use a few." He held out his hand. A beautiful, clever, young hand. One that will always be young.

I took it. We walked slowly to a bar, holding hands all the way. Like two old people. Why not?

I met him in Babylon when Hammurabi was king, when I still thought I was mortal. He was foreign but they made him chief architect because he was brilliant- I think they found some of his work when they uncovered Babylon again.

His wife had died of one of the summer plagues shortly after he came to our city. He had more than an a thousand summers even then I'm not sure exactly how many he has now, or me. Calendars change. He's tall enough even now, but he was a giant in those days.

Rumored to be one of the mythical giants who survived the Great Flood. And why not? The court ladies and priestesses used to giggle about him. They wondered if he was proportionally . . . large. They said he would have made Ishtar Herself a fine consort. I was the priestess who took it upon herself to find out. Me, lovely and lithe Tinat, whose beauty was compared to the sun herself. I wanted to have him, to bear children as fine and tall and clever as he was. Funny isn't it? I could laugh about it now.

We came together for the first time on the spring equinox, when Dummuzi returns from the underworld to Ishtar's bed and life is reborn. He had not intended it so. It is not a good thing to bed a future student, but I knew nothing of that.

I spent that day preparing for a seduction. I swathed myself in the finest linens, carried from Egypt. I used kohl and perfumes, every weapon in a women's arsenal. Odd the things that have not changed.

After the ceremony in the great temple I looked for him, but he had slipped away. After a through search I found him in the cycad grove in the shadow of the temple's ziggurat. He was alone on this night of love, and he stared at the stars still visible through the clouds as if they held some answer that eluded him. It started raining.

"Hello Tinat." He noticed me and smiled. I watched him brush his fine dark hair from his eyes and willfully resisted the urge to help him.

I saw he was too thin - his face was all hollows. "Can the chief architect himself not find a woman to help him share the Goddess Ishtar's joy this night? I might call that a sacrilege." I teased. He ignored me. "They used to call Her Inanna. When I was youn-" he stopped himself. Started again. I remember that slip now. Remembered it when the time came. "When the Akkidians ruled here. Before the Ammorites came and built their Babylon." He turned his attention back to the stars, but clouds and rain drowned them.

I, bereft, tried to gain it back. "Does the name matter to Her so much? Or the deed?" I reached for him. And captured his mouth with my lips.

"Wait, Tinat, you're still so young. You shouldn't-" He tried to pull back.

"I am a woman and priestess and I know what I want." Then I leaned in and kissed his nose, then his mouth, silencing his objections. The water poured from the sky into the grove and onto our bodies but we did not heed it.

I knew he had taken no woman since his wife. He was lonely and I gave him myself as a balm to that. He wed me soon after. Not in the way they marry now -swearing to stay together until death, though they seldom do. It was a temple wedding, to last a year only. It didn't even last that long. Politics intervened.

I was sent with a message from my temple to a nearby city - the name is lost to history now. On the way my caravan was ambushed by barbarians, who thought nothing of using a priestess in any way they pleased. There were too many and too rough and I died of it. I hunted them down one by one like the animals they were, but that was later.

He found me and saved me not long after I revived for the first time, terrified and raving. He explained what had happened to me and taught me to fight. And understood when I could not bear the touch of a man.

By the time I was ready to take a lover again we had been long separated. We were friends and no more down the long years. I sometimes wondered why I didn't try to win him back. Or why he didn't try to win me.

"What do you want now?" He looked at me from his perch on the bar, eyes serious, face all chisels and angles, he'd lost weight again. Almost as thin as when I first met him. For once he kept his hair out of his eyes - mostly because he'd cropped it all off.

It made him look like a scarlet fever victim. As if. "It's not a question of wanting anything." I breathed in and pushed my own red locks out of my eyes, petitioning the Mother for patience.

"Then what is it a question of?" He kept looking at me. Just looking but that was enough. "You're playing games with me. Trying to get me to react." Of course he was, that was what he did with people. At his age you do just about anything to stay interested in life. I know - I'm at that point myself.

"Maybe I just want to know. Have you considered that?" And maybe the Norse world serpent is about to step out of myth and rise up to swallow us all?

"And maybe the world serpent is about to step out of myth and rise up to swallow us all." I heard myself say aloud. May it be so, I added under my breath.

"Anything is possible." He grinned, suddenly looking ridiculously young.

"I'm tired of this bullshit," I muttered. So damn tired. I think I buried myself in that grave.

"Everyone gets tired - even mortals." Mortals lost their beloved ones everyday, but not so many beloveds. Not through all the centuries.

"And what about you?" He had lost a lover recently. Alexa, was her name. He spoke of her in his bitter bright way. These mortals, they keep us whole I think. While they live. I had left him because I thought he could not keep me whole.

"Who said you were allowed to ask the questions?" He gave me his best know it all grin. It made me want to slap him. I reached forward and kissed him instead.

"Tinat." He whispered against my lips. I felt something stir through the fog of myself.

"Methos. Make me feel again." He nodded. We stood up and moved toward my apartment. It was raining. We grabbed hands and ran. Like two small children. Why not?