Theatrical Muse 168, Fragile

[singindemonhq]

Some humans deny that they’re fragile. They are. Humans are very fragile, in some ways – they can be incredibly tough in others, of course. It’s something I was trained to keep well in mind, during the Gigs. It can be useful then.

It’s something to keep in mind anyway.


Of course, I’ve got my own weak points too, though I’m counting on the wards to protect me when I write about them. First impressions really count where I’m from. They can set the tone for the whole relationship. That cuts both ways, too. I didn’t realise the extent of it when I was starting out, and that set me up for complications that lasted for a while.

I remember one of my earliest Gigs. I can’t remember the town but it was one of those places that got hit around the time of the Grecian wars. It might even have been Troy, but I don’t think so, somehow. Crete, maybe, after the earthquake that brought down the labyrinth - but then the city was sacked. Maybe the slaves revolted or there was a seige ... I just don't know. I can’t even remember why the priest had me called, to stabilize the dying regime, I think! Man, did he get the wrong operative!

The only part of it that I do remember clearly was the Talisman wearer.

I still wonder if they’d thought she was going to be a sacrifice. She was chained to the altar when I got there and after the Minions got her loose I realized she was small, not just small-made but a starveling, all bones and eyes. I figured she was a young kid, maybe not all that far past infant. I was just starting out (and now, by hindsight, I guess I’ve always been a laid-back type) but at the time I felt that putting my talisman on something like that was the worst I’d ever been insulted in a long and touchy life - and I hadn’t been in too good a mood to start with.

It was a bad Gig with too many tone-deaf types. That didn’t improve things and nor did the smells of swamptide and decay. When we finally did strike the set I grabbed the kid’s arm to bring her back through the dimensions. The bones in her wrist grated nastily under my hand, and that somehow made things worse.

I didn’t want anything to do with her and, once we were home I passed her straight on to the Healers and told them to do what they could and notify whoever was supposed to take over on this one. I didn’t bother putting it in the kid’s language. There’d been no problem taking her through the portal so I figured she probably qualified as a Gig-prize under the rule about taking a first-born – once those are collected it’s not my problem. I just forgot all about her for quite a while.

If I’d thought it through – if I’d thought about it at all - I might have realised that the girl hadn’t understood what was going on from first to last and that the priest might have had some reason for selecting an undersized, scarred brat to wear my talisman in the first place. It hadn’t endeared him to me and most priests have sense enough to be very aware of that kind of thing.

Anyway, life went on. I did a couple of bad Gigs and then got sent on a trip to Winterholme - and that was really different. I came back kind of wrung out to find a woman waiting for me.

She’d put on some years and some weight and she’d lost that spider-monkey look. I didn’t recognise her at first but there was a Healer-Minion along to explain that as soon as she'd picked up enough of our language to carry on a simple conversation she’d asked them about the Gig. Then she'd thought it through and started insisting that she was my wife. Ienia was never a fool and she was sticking out for her rights under Lore.

I got the gist of how it had gone, later. She was the daughter of the guy who’d been the king back there. That’s not as fancy as it sounds, but she was legitimate enough. A real princess, in a way - but out of the harem, of course, and not by a favorite wife. Humans can breed like mice and the king might not have known all his brats by sight, but she’d have been traded off to make some kind of an alliance when she was old enough if the city hadn’t fallen. She’d been reared to know it and she'd never expected to know her husband before the day. They didn’t do things that way, in her world.

At that, she’d been better off than any woman in the laboring class and she knew that, too - if she hadn’t learned it in the harem she’d have found that out fast enough when the town was sacked, even before the priest got hold of her and decided she was still princess enough to be a sacrifice. She was used to being cared for, too – no, that’s not quite it - she was used to being valued for what she was, up to a point, and she’d been gently reared by what standards they had.

From her viewpoint I was no weirder than the things the nurse had told her about the Medes and Persians, and I was a lot less threatening than a Hittite. She wasn't an empath by any stretch of the imagination and she'd seen me order the Minions to take off her chains. I could even have been angry on her behalf when they took her off that altar and I’d got my first clear look. She'd heard the tone, but she hadn't understood what I'd sung at the priest and when I’d handed her over to the Healers I’d been snarling orders.

Quain medical care would have looked fit for a deity by Bronze Age standards and what she concluded about it was logical enough in the terms she'd been taught. For all she knew I could have been telling them to give her the best possible care because she was to be my wife.

I got most of what I learned about her from the Healers. We didn’t spend non-quality time together and I wasn’t asking her too much directly, after I'd thought things through a bit. Ienia hadn’t been reared to expect a man to answer questions either, and that way I was under no obligation to put her straight about things. She saw me as very powerful and I went along with that - and that made her even less likely to cross-examine me.

We might have been happy enough, but it didn’t last. She still had nightmares about the fall of the city and what happened after that, but not as often and they faded in time – but then something seemed to go wrong and she started to have dreams that seemed to be about how her father and his court would have reacted to the way her life had gone. After a while those were worse than the eariest nightmares had been.

She didn’t remember the dreams when she woke and if I asked her about them she acted calm and serene and loving – and underneath she was bottling up a damned volcano! It was way inside, where even she couldn't get at when she was awake - and that ain’t safe, especially around me. Nowadays if that happened I might call in a Song Healer and listen to advice. Even now – I don’t know. Then, though, I was younger.

Years had gone by even on Quain and decades had passed in her old dimension. When I checked I found that her old city was down, ruins weathering into the mud that was burying them. Her father’s palace was a few columns spiking out of a swamp close to where earthquakes had shifted the bounds of the harbour. Frogs were mating in the great painted courtyard where the Harem eunuchs had played dice in the hot afternoons.

I took her back to see. I thought it would lay her ghosts and stop the dreams before she maybe burned.

It did, in a way. She looked at the place in puzzlement and wrinkled her nose at the smell, but when I gestured her on she walked warily down the broken paving, treading delicately over a cracked mosaic of Leda and the swan until she came to the point where the white wings vanished under black mud. She stared at the broken columns and then back at me, not quite believing.

Then she saw the statue of the weeping woman. The marble was tilted and half buried in the muck and the smooth stone was marred with dirt and the trails of unseen things. The mosquitos made a haze above the curve of a sloping shoulder, as though they were still hoping to bite the mottled skin. Ienia peered at it for a moment and then kilted her robe up to her waist, stepped into the muddy water and went to the half-submerged shape, circling around it to look at the face. Then she beckoned me over, batting at the mosquitoes that swirled about her before she lowered her hand,

“It is Niobe Weeping,” she said, in her over-precise, oddly accented Quain. “I know her well, that statue. That marble came in tribute from those who captured it and the Niobe was one of my father’s prides. She was carved so well, she looked so real, but small as me. When I was ten summers out of the nursery and past the woman's spring I painted her with my mother’s cosmetics. They soaked into the marble and discoloured it – look, it’s still there, just a little.” She touched a trace of blue in the carved lashes at the corner of the statue’s eye and then wiped her fingers on her robe.

“When my nurse beat me she said it would never come off - and she was right; look! My father was angry every time he saw me, after that. The nurse said he would sell me - but my mother told me that still they meant to marry me away and I might be well-treated in a good alliance. I did not know who to believe and when the soldiers came I thought he had sold me, at first. I still wonder if he did, sometimes, or if I was left to slow them when the wives were taken away?” She touched the statue’s face as she spoke, fumbling as though she was blind and learning it with her fingers, running her hand down from the colored eye, feeling her way across the carved stone as the tears streaked down her own face, unregarded.

“Look at Niobe now," she murmured, "She is over and down in the dirt herself, now. Perhaps she fell from favour. Who broke her nose away like that, I wonder? Would the soldiers have done that? They broke so much, so very much - but this is the Palace ... wasn't it?" She looked back to the halfsubmerged paving. "I saw the mosiac on the floor of the great hall, I think - and this is Niobe. She was worth so much, much more than a live woman. they said I was bad because I marked her - but look at all the marks on Niobe now!”

She looked at the statue as though it was an enemy brought low, but her hand was gentle as it brushed the marred stone and the tears still streamed down her own cheeks. Then she looked me in the face, and said, as simply as a child,

“Will you sell me or send me back and take another wife, if I have no son?”

When I shook my head she still looked solemn, looking back toward Niobe almost doubtfully. Then she came back toward me, smiling the practiced smile of a wellbrought up harem lady, ignoring her own tears, and she said,

“It smells so bad here. Can we go home, now?”

I don’t know if it would have worked. She seemed happier when we returned, but she raved about Niobe when the fever rose in her, three days later.

The Healers didn’t let me near her, after that. They said that delirium could make a human more vulnerable.

Not that it would have made much difference.

They told me afterward that mosquitoes carry disease. Those little insects have probably killed more humans than any other creature in that dimension.

Humans can be very fragile.

Muse; Sweet the singing demon.
Fandom, BTVS
Words, 2,100