Echoes from My Past Lives (Spell Weaver) (3 page)

“Sure,” I said in a neutral tone, “give yourself a rest.”

The great outdoors dissolved, replaced by what was obviously a room in a castle. At least, the stone walls around us and the heavy oak door certainly looked like my idea of a castle. There was a small window, so I walked up and looked out of it. Yeah, definitely a castle. Looking down I could see the stone walls and realized that we were several levels up from the ground. A moat glistened darkly at ground level. Looking up I could see a great distance across villages, fields, and forests. This time, though, the detail work on these distant views was not quite as good. They had a fuzzy quality, almost as if I were viewing them through a mist. Taliesin must have been getting tired.

“I thought it was best to conserve my strength,” said Taliesin, doubtless reading my mind again. “Please have a seat.”

There was a very large table with not particularly comfortable looking wooden chairs around it. I pulled one out and plopped down in it. Taliesin sat on the other side after taking off his sword and putting down his instrument. Looking around the room, it seemed simple for one in a castle. Aside from the table, there was a not very comfortable looking bed, some shelving, a mirror, a basin, a few other instruments, quite a few scrolls and books, some yellowed with age. On the whole, I would have expected more from a room in a castle, especially one so far up.

“I always did prefer a simple life,” said Taliesin, answering my unspoken question. “Oh, I indulged from time to time, but I spent most of my time at Camelot in relatively simple surroundings.”

“This is Camelot?” I asked with less excitement than I felt. I wasn’t really one to read for pleasure, but some of the King Arthur stories had appealed to me when I was a kid.

“Yes, I have drawn on my memory of my room at Camelot. Of course, if you would rather, I can always ‘read your mind,’ as you say, and we can be in your home. I would have done that in the first place, but I was afraid I might…‘freak you out.’” The idea of Taliesin and I chatting in my bedroom at home might have freaked me out just a few days ago, but now the image was just another crazy deviation from real life, so why freak out over it?

“This is fine,” I said, squirming a little as I tried to find a comfortable position on the very hard chair. If only Taliesin had had chair cushions back in Camelot.

Abruptly cushions appeared beneath me and at my back. I jumped a little in surprise.

“This room is based on one of the rooms I had at Camelot, but that doesn’t mean I can’t make a few…modifications, if they make you more comfortable.”

“Thanks,” I said, settling back into the chair, which was now much easier to do. “Now, can you please tell me about what happened earlier?”

“Patience, Tal. There is a little background knowledge I need to give you first.”

Great! I might as well be in school!

“I’ll try to be a little more interesting than that,” replied Taliesin with a chuckle. My cheeks reddened a little, but he pretended not to notice.

“As I started to say long ago, you are familiar with the concept of reincarnation. However, you think of it in connection with religions of the east. In fact, the ancient Celts also believed in a type of reincarnation. They believed that souls came back, not anywhere, but within their own family, or tribe, or at least nation. Our recent experiences convince me that this ancient belief is correct. I know you don’t want to hear this, but I am both your ancestor and yourself.”

I started to protest, but he glared at me before I could. “You promised to hear me out this time.”

“Sorry,” I muttered, settling back into the chair.

“The immediate problem—our problem—is that people aren’t meant to remember their past lives in such detail. Oh, maybe a feeling of what you would call
deja vu
, maybe an odd reaction to something most people would dismiss without a thought, hopefully some occasional bit of wisdom learned in a previous life. Yes, any of those can happen and have happened thousands and thousands of times. But has anyone had the same ability you seem to have to remember every past life in full detail? Not that I know of. What has happened to you is unique.”

“But why has it happened?” I asked, sounding whiny again despite myself. “Let’s say I believe you. Why me? Why do I have to go through all of this?” I leaned forward in the chair. “Taliesin, I used to have a life that made sense. Now I am in a hospital, everyone thinks I’m crazy, and frequently I have so much pain I can’t keep myself from screaming. What did I do wrong?”

“Tal, none of this is your fault, and no, I don’t know why this happened to you in particular. Your memories don’t suggest that magic is very common in the world anymore, but I have to think some kind of dark magic is involved one way or another. Right now, though, our most pressing concern is not why it happened, but how to keep it from destroying you. Would you not agree?” I nodded. Did Taliesin see a way to solve this problem?

“Stop thinking of him as real!”
demanded some part of me.

“Screw you!”
I shot back abruptly.
“If he doesn’t exist, I’m not losing anything by listening. If he does, if he really is me from a former life, then maybe he can fix this.”
As soon as the thought crossed my mind, I realized I wanted it to be true. Why had I been fighting him so hard? Did I want to be crazy? No! So why not at least check out other alternatives?

“I’m not experiencing your past memories, though, am I? I get little bits and pieces, but none of them seem to be connected with Camelot or anything like that.”

“No, my memories are not the problem. Remember, I said you are remembering your past
selves
.” Well, I had missed that the first time, perhaps because I wanted to.

“You have lived other lives,” he continued, “not just mine. Many of them. I can’t count very easily, but I would say hundreds. It was the work of some of those lives you saw earlier in that redness. Their raging makes it hard even for me to sustain a coherent environment.”

“Hundreds?” I asked, much more shakily than I had intended. Taliesin nodded solemnly. Clearly, he was not much happier about the situation than I was.

“You mean I have…hundreds of other people…in my brain?” The voice was still shaky, but I couldn’t help it.

“No, not exactly. This is not like possession by demons, or something like that. You don’t really have hundreds of other souls inside of you. What you have is the memories of all of your past lives.”

“But you aren’t just a memory! We are sitting here,” I said, with a sweeping arm movement, “wherever here is, having a conversation.”

“And that, Tal, is the problem.” Taliesin leaned forward, and his voice became quieter, as if he feared someone else overhearing. “It is unusual enough that you can remember all of your past lives in the first place, but you aren’t even just remembering them, as you would with your own memories. You are re-experiencing them, and in a very random way, as far as I can tell. What I believe is happening is that, when the memories of those lives were re-awakened within you, they somehow shattered the barrier between memory and reality in your own mind. Unable to understand the relationship between the memories of your earlier lives and the memories and experiences of your current one, your mind has created a separate consciousness for each of those lives. Nourished by their old memories, the various consciousnesses thus created behave much as their originals would have, except that many of them are in some kind of shock, either reliving their deaths over and over, as you have noticed, or crazed by the unfamiliarity of their surroundings.”

Great! So I really do have multiple personality disorder!

Taliesin shook his head at that. “This is no…psychological problem, as such things are defined in your world. It is more like otherworldly, or you would say, ‘supernatural.’ However, that might actually be good news.”

“How so?” I asked. Whether the mess in my head was natural or supernatural didn’t seem to make much difference. Either way, it was still a mess.

“Ah, but not an irreparable ‘mess.’”

“I really wish you would stop doing that!”

“It is precisely because I can do it that I know I can make the situation better,” said Taliesin patiently. “I have already told you that your previous selves are creations of your own mind, not truly separate beings. If they had somehow become separate, I can’t think of a way to force them back together. Fortunately, there must still be some ties, however frayed. How else can I know your thoughts? For that matter, how can I speak modern English? You have noticed I have to struggle for words a little, but for the most part I do pretty well, considering I did not speak the language in my own lifetime. I suspect you could read my thoughts and speak my language if you would let yourself. Even as things are now, you have picked up a word or two, and a little poetry, have you not?” I stiffened a little at that. During the last few days I had occasionally had odd moments of recognizing words I didn’t remember knowing, and once I had absent-mindedly scribbled a few lines of poetry onto a napkin. Faced with such overwhelming problems, I had easily forgotten those little moments, but now that Taliesin mentioned them, I had to admit he was right.

“Okay, so something still connects me to you and to my other past selves. How does that help?”

“From what I can tell from your mind, this… ‘dissociative identity disorder’ you were thinking about can’t be easily cured. On the other hand, I believe I can rebuild that barrier between memory and reality.”

I almost jumped out of the chair. “You can make me like I was before?”

A chilling silence greeted this question. Finally, Taliesin answered, even more quietly than he had been speaking. “Tal, I can do many tricks with memory, but you have so many memories within you now, I couldn’t possibly make you forget them all. What I can do is fully reunite them, myself included, with you. They and I will become just memories again, so that you can go back to having a normal life.”

At that moment, something within me snapped. “You mean…I have to continue to live with my head stuffed with every stupid detail of every life of mine for centuries? How will I keep it all straight? How will I even be able to think? I’ll be—I’ll be some kind of freak! You, you said you could fix this!” I was shouting again.

Taliesin did not at first react to my outburst except to sigh loudly. Finally, he replied, “I can do much, Tal, both with music and with magic, but there are limits to what even I can do, and this situation is like no other. I wish there were some spell, some ritual, for this predicament, but there is none. I believe it would be beyond Merlin himself to solve it, and his understanding of magic dwarfs mine as the wisdom of an old man dwarfs that of a child.

“Yes, you will remember your other lives, but you won’t keep reliving them, and you will have no trouble keeping them distinct from your current life memories. That may not be enough for you right now, but it is as much as I have to give.”

I managed to avoid crying, I really did, but there was no preventing my body from shaking a bit. “But I don’t want to remember all those other lives. I just want to remember my own.”

“I know what you want,” said Taliesin gently. “Maybe some day, you will find a way to get what you want. For now, though, let me help you as much as I can.”

“No!” I shouted, jumping up and backing away from him. “Can’t you see I can’t stand this any more? You can free me from it—I know you can!”

Taliesin shook his head sadly. “I have told you, and I will swear an oath to that effect, that I can help your mind deal with all of those memories, but I cannot take them away. Have you not considered that those memories could be a gift, not the curse you seem to think they are? Tal, once I have done what I can do, you will be able to know anything any of your previous selves knew if you concentrate hard enough. You will naturally have to practice the skills your previous selves acquired, but you will know how to do what each and every one of them could do. How good a musician could you become from knowing everything I know? How good an athlete from gaining the knowledge of countless athletes? And what about magic, Tal? Once you have my memories, you could gain the ability to work magic, just as I could once work it. Surely that has some appeal? In my own time there were many who would have killed to have the facility with magic that I did, and I am offering to hand it to you. You could have it this minute if you wanted to.”

He had me going a bit when he mentioned music and sports—just a bit, but he did get me listening. The magic part, though, I wasn’t so sure about. It was one thing to read stories about King Arthur’s court and enjoy them. It was another thing to want to live one of those stories. I flopped down in the chair dejectedly, embarrassed by my earlier loss of control, but unwilling to just accept his offer, at least not yet.

“I have to think about this some more,” I finally replied.

Taliesin’s tone remained gentle, but now he was frowning. “Tal, I know this is much to grasp in such a short time, but we do not have very long. The drugs you are being given reduce my control over what is happening, and you cannot take very much more of a beating from your earlier selves. You have realized it is partly my influence that is holding them at bay?”

“No, I don’t realize that. I can’t seem to read your mind the way you read mine.”

Now Taliesin’s frown deepened, and his patience was clearly wearing thin. “Don’t you see yet? We are the same person, and that means you can ‘read my mind,’ any time you want to. You just don’t want to. Unfortunately, you are not only stubborn but powerful. You may not think of yourself this way, but you have tremendous mental strength. I can influence most of your past selves comparatively easily if I put my mind to it, but I have a hard time reaching you at all. It took days just to get a message to you. Without even consciously being aware of what you were doing, you were blocking me, despite my magic. For the most part you block the others as well, but there are so many of them, and some of them are so intensely agitated, that they break through from time to time. They would break through more often if I were not working actively to restrain them, but without your mental toughness, you would already have collapsed, despite my best efforts.”