The Two-Headed Calf

Merimna is the City of the Two-Headed Calf. All living things in it are made in pairs, and so are not full, but half things. When one being is born, another is too. When one dies, or falls ill, or feels elated, another does as well. One cannot swat a fly without another one — maybe close by, maybe round the corner, maybe on the other side of the city — falling out of the sky as if struck by an invisible god. When a woman is trampled by a horse, or falls down a well, or is struck by lightning, priests try to get to her lover as soon as possible in order to receive his confession before it is too late — for, it is believed in Merimna, even the afterlife is governed by the rule of doubles.

I didn’t stay there long. When I was preparing for departure, a man asked to come with me. He could not stand the threat of death that could come from behind any corner, even one he didn’t turn himself. Of his lover he spoke with disdain, as if she were an unsightly growth he was cursed with. The journey from the city was long and we stayed in many different places: sometimes there were beasts in the forest and we ate fresh meat; other times we had to beg locals for scraps of food and they, who had so little for themselves, always acquiesced. Perhaps they sensed that my friend (we had journeyed for too long for me to still consider him only a companion) had escaped some grave misfortune which befell him. They were not incorrect.

It was very far away from Merimna when suddenly my friend fell gravely ill. I used the money saved while travelling — somewhere deep in my subconscious, I had anticipated this turn of events — and tried to get a doctor to look at him, but the money was foreign to the villagers and they did not understand my language; they stared at me, uncomprehending, maybe unwilling to comprehend. Finally, one of them took a look at the patient, who at this point could not speak nor move nor eat. Upon examining him, he called for guards and I was placed in a cramped prison for reasons explained to me many times, but which I would only understand later: the doctor had supposed that I had been the one to infect my friend with this unknown malady and branded me a murderer. I was sentenced to exile from that accursed place; on the way through the town square, pelted by numerous objects by the citizenry, I enquired once more by gestures as to my companion's fate. One of the townspeople understood and pointed at his feet with his left hand while moving his right palm down. From this I supposed that he had been interred out of fears of the malady spreading.

Many years later, when I had already forgotten the contours of my friend’s face, an old man told me of a fellow whose story sounded remarkably similar. This one however ended with an amulet of the Two-Headed Calf, hanging from a silver chain, being found on the man’s body. Once it was destroyed, he miraculously recovered and left the town. Of his current whereabouts the old man knew aught.

There are reasons to doubt his story (some minor discrepancies between the biographies of the two men which could be attributed to lapses of memory), but the chief reason is the amulet. A magical object which caused all of the man’s ills and the destruction of which cured him is at once too simplistic and too fabulous for it to be believable. It could perhaps be read as metaphorical: a man gives up the final memento of his homeland, thus being finally freed of its beliefs and superstitions. I relayed this story and my interpretation of it to wise men in all the cities I passed through, from Ashka to Grinam-Abb; one of them asked facetiously whether a drifter, being untethered to any particular place or its customs, would, by that token, be completely exempt from the rules enforced by the Gods.

That argument convinced me and I've ceased to search for him; still, at night, when I try to remember the face of my old two-headed friend, my imagination always places a silver chain in one of his pockets.