Aprilis 11-14, 1991 AC
It wasn’t usually a good sign when they wheeled far-viewers into the classrooms, Zaya knew, and slid down in her chair a little. She, Maccis, and Eisa had Classical Literature this hour, in a room filled with two dozen other students. Fifteen of those students were Judean, and the boys wore skullcaps, though the girls, mostly still unmarried, still wore their hair loose and uncovered. There was one hveðungr student, Ava, at the back of the class; she required a special, jotun-sized desk and chair, and was one of the Matrugenas’ neighbors; her mother was a fenris and her father a lycanthrope, just as she was, herself. There were three nieten with blond hair—one with antlers, one with lindworm scales in red, and one with a light coat of wolf fur all over his body. A harpy boy named Spiro, a dryad named Chara—who wore the bare minimum required by the school—and one Nubian boy, whose father was in the space program, rounded out the class. It was an eclectic and often loud mix of students, but at the sight of the far-viewers, everyone in the room went silent. Not that Maccis and Eisa hadn’t already been; they hadn’t said two words so far this morning.
Their teacher, a middle-aged Judean woman who wore a turquoise tichel, turned on the far-viewer, and told them, “After we watch this report, we’re going to review school safety procedures.”
A chorus of groans. Zaya sat up, however, at what she could see on the screen. What looked like five or six vast columns of smoke and fire moved in on a city in the dimness before dawn, and pale blue columns moved out to meet them, tangled, fought. “This was the scene at Palmyra in West Assyria this morning,” the announcer said, as a wall exploded on the screen, hit by some kind of artillery shell. “Persian forces embarked over the Caspian Sea and marched through the foothills of the Caucuses to make a lightning strike at the city, which is located a hundred and twenty-six miles northeast of Jerusalem. Carthaginian and Judean levy troops and the regular legions have engaged the enemy . . .” A view of a JDF bomber swooping over the column of Persian troops and tanks and loosing a payload of destruction, only to be chased off by a Persian ornithopter, “but indications at this time are that the Persians are raising all of the dead they find as ghul, in contravention of the 1901 Accord of Maximus that prohibits the raising of civilians as ghul . . . .”
It was bad enough looking at what were surely efreeti like her father attacking the city. She’d seen it before, of course. And she’d seen her father and mother and Sigrun fighting them, too. The artillery, well, that was a fact of life. But the notion of being killed, and her body rising up to fight again, without her conscious will? Against the people that she loved? That horrified her on a primal level. There were people who didn’t have to worry about that, at least. For some reason, the ghul process didn’t work on spirit-born or god-born. No one had ever yet seen a jotun or a fenris rise as a ghul, either, for which everyone was grateful. Centaurs, harpies, and dryads seemed to be equally immune. A dead sorcerer, unbound summoner, or ley-mage could become a ghul, but the powers and mental gifts that the spell-caster had once held, were gone. A ghul, therefore, it was argued, had to come from the body of someone who had no permanent soul-bond to a god or spirit . . . but that left people with many questions about the nature of “monstrous humanity.” Were they, therefore, all god-touched?
All of that was interesting information, and Zaya read and catalogued the reports and articles on it for the Magi library, dutifully, but she didn’t feel any less exposed and vulnerable.
The teacher turned off the far-viewer, and briskly began to review what they all needed to do in the event of a summoning attack on the school. “All students will move to the designated shelter on each floor, where a protective circle has been inscribed into the tile, and wait there until a teacher or gardia member comes for them—”
“And what happens,” Maccis muttered, “if an efreet or stone elemental destroys the floor under the circle, and we all fall through? The circle breaks, we’re all defenseless.”
“Not entirely,” Eisa muttered back. Zaya could hear them, clearly, as they sat on either side of her, whispering behind her head to each other. “I could probably cover everyone’s retreat.”
“You’re going to conjugate verbs at it?” Maccis asked his sister, raising his eyebrows.
“I could probably superheat a stone elemental. The point is, someone would stay and fight, and everyone else could get away.” Eisa threw him a slightly superior glance. “Besides. What are you going to do to an efreet, brother? Bite it in the wind?”
“Actually,” Zaya whispered, softly, “I have a ring that might help. It works like a soul-trap. Get close to a spirit, push the button, and it should bind the spirit into the gem in the housing.”
“That’s only going to be a one-shot deal, though, isn’t it?” Maccis muttered, shifting his legs under his desk.
At that point, the harpy boy, Spiro, turned around at his desk to give her a dark look. “Good for you, princess,” he told her, ruffling his wings. “Must be nice to come from money. Not to mention from a sorcerer’s family.” The glitter in his eyes spoke of hate, and Zaya shifted away. Not all of the students who’d come from Hellas were as well-adjusted as the jotun and the fenris. Some of the Hellene students had only been what they were for four years or so. And some of them had been mad and run through the countryside until Saraid found them and fixed their minds . . . like Spiro, apparently. He’d been adopted by a Judean family. Whatever had happened to his real mother and father, he’d never told anyone at school. Zaya wasn’t asking. At all.
But his constant comments about her family’s money and her mother’s magic got on her nerves. “Well, fine,” Zaya muttered. “I can . . . forget to use it till after you’ve already . . . burned to death . . . .” But insults like those took delivery and timing, and her words limped out and turned flat in the air. And Spiro laughed at her.
Eisa reached over and put a hand on her shoulder, lightly. “Ignore him. He’s an idiot.”
The teacher cleared her throat and gave them all a dark look. “Eyes front, everyone. Now, in the event of a ghul attack, everyone will report to the classrooms around the central block. These are the rooms with green-tiled floors, which do not have windows, and have heavy metal doors, with a peephole. Every grade level has three class monitors. Know who your class monitors are; these are the people who, in the absence of any teachers, have the responsibility for looking through the peephole and letting new people into the room . . . or the responsibility for keeping the door closed, if there are ghul in the hallway outside.”
Zaya swallowed. She’d been appointed one of the class monitors for grade ten. Maccis was another. Crysanthe, a dryad girl who’d moved here three years ago, was their third. They each had a key that unlocked the doors to the central block classrooms, and had to carry it at all times. Most of the students grumbled that the class monitors should have been elected, and Zaya wasn’t sure, some days, that she wanted the job. On the one hand, she could guarantee that she’d be safe in one of the bunker-like classrooms, if ghul did start rampaging through the school. On the other hand, she might be the one peering out through the peephole and trying to decide if it were safe enough to let someone in the room. She could already imagine the pressure from people all around her if someone they liked happened to be trapped in the hallway . . . and how they’d try to take the key from her to let the popular person in, to keep them from being torn apart by the ghul.
After a refresher on ducking under their desks in the event of earthquake, and on fire evacuation routes, they were able to continue on with the day’s actual lessons, which revolved around the classic Latin novel, The Golden Ass, by Apuleius. It revolved around a mortal man fascinated by magic, and who wanted to become a witch, and instead accidentally turned himself into an ass, which allowed the upper-class narrator to see the suffering and degradation of lower-class life in the period, as the ass was enslaved to this master or that. There were a variety of short stories embedded in it, told by other speakers, and the
ass was abused in many ways, though a rich woman fell in love with him and took the donkey into her bed. It culminated when the Great Goddess—here shown as being the same goddess, regardless of Name, be it Isis, Demeter, Juno, or Venus—appeared to him and told him that he could regain the form of a man if he worshipped her, and eventually showed his conversion to a priest dedicated to Osiris and Isis. “Who would like to make the first comment?” the teacher asked them.
Hands shot up, Zaya’s among them. “Ah, yes. Zaya. What do you think of the work?”
“Well, obviously, Apuleius was working from folkloric accounts of magic, which wasn’t as well-documented in the Roman Empire at the time as it was in Persia,” Zaya said, with a certain detachment. “He refers to magic as witchcraft, for example, the pejorative term. Also, the uses of magic as shown are inaccurate. A sorcerer cannot change his or her shape in that fashion. The sorceress he observes at first turns herself into a bird, which is completely contrary to the principle of mass conservation. The donkey is a little more possible, but a sorcerer attempting to carry that out on himself or herself, would probably be in so much pain that they’d stop midway through the process with organs still hanging out in the wrong places.”
Ava, the hveðungr girl at the back of the class, began to laugh, her tail beating the wall behind her. Maccis began to chuckle, reluctantly, himself. Their teacher closed her eyes and rubbed at her temples for a moment. Zaya wasn’t entirely sure why. “All right,” the teacher said, after a moment. “We’ll put that down as historical bias and misinformation, over here on the board, under author. Anyone else have any other first impressions?”
Taharqa, the Nubian boy, raised his hand. “Yes, go ahead.”
“I could not help but notice,” the young man said, in his exquisitely cultured Latin, “that a Roman author of the classical period, writing in the second century AC, and thus before the Edict of Diocletian, actually advocates for his people to convert to the worship of Isis and Osiris. These are the gods of my people, as much as those of Egypt, so I find this somewhat puzzling. A hundred and fifty years later, the Edict allowed everyone to worship their own gods freely, so long as respect was given to Rome, and no one was allowed to attempt to convert others. Is this book not an attempt to proselytize? If so, why is it still taught?”
“Is that actually what Apuleius is advocating?” their teacher riposted quickly, clearly trying to get ahead of the conversation.
Maccis raised a hand. “No. He’s saying that all gods are one god, and all goddesses are one goddess. It’s similar to the arguments made by advocates of the Atenist Revival. In this case, it’s probably a politically-motivated effort to homogenize all of the gods and goddesses into a form that was currently popular in Rome. I’m going to guess that the gods and priests of the various provinces didn’t take kindly to this.”
Chara held up a green-tinted hand, shyly. “The foreword said that Apuleius was prosecuted for witchcraft, for trying to enchant a rich widow into marrying him.”
“Correct. He was acquitted after he made a case suggesting that the charges against him were completely ridiculous.” Their teacher acknowledged her with a quick smile. “The cult of Isis in Rome flourished in the main near Pompeii, and was permitted to continue worship after the Edict of Diocletian, but with the provision that they could not actively recruit new members. Thus, yes, The Golden Ass was suppressed for about two hundred years after the Edict. Very good, everyone.”
Zaya was dimly aware that something was being passed from desk to desk, and she could hear a certain amount of surreptitious giggling, but she blocked it out, concentrating intently on the lesson, until a piece of folded paper crept onto the corner of her desk. After a moment, she registered the Latin block letters written on it: pass it on. When she opened it, there was a rather breathless pause around her . . . and then comprehension dawned.
It was one of the woodcuts from their textbook, and showed the ass, Lucian, mid-copulation with the rich woman who had fancied him. That didn’t bother her. The fact that the woman had been labeled as Zaya, and the donkey had been labeled as Maccis, however, did. She stared down at the image, her face starting to burn, and tears prickling at the corners of her eyes. He sees this, and he’ll never so much as look at me again—and then the damnable thing was scooped out of her hands, by Maccis himself. A low sound, a dark harmonic that she didn’t recognize, crept through the classroom, and crawled down her spine, chilling her. And when Maccis’ lips pulled back from his teeth, and she suddenly realized that he was growling.
“Was there something, Master Matrugena?” the teacher asked, clearly an old hand at dealing with his family.
“I’d like to report that someone in this classroom has a defaced book,” he said, through his teeth, and handed the picture over to the teacher. Zaya wanted nothing more than to sink down through the floor at this point, but that would just show whoever had done this, that they’d won. They’d hurt her. So she kept her shoulders straight and looked directly ahead.
She was aware, peripherally, that the hveðungr girl, Ava, was reacting to Maccis’ snarl with a growl of her own. The teacher looked down at the woodcut, not changing expression, and said, flatly, “Everyone please open your books to page one hundred and three. And hold them up.”
To Zaya’s lack of surprise, Spiro’s book was missing the page, which he protested that he didn’t know how that had happened. His protestations were ignored, and he was sent to the office, and the teacher unleashed a blistering lecture on the rest of the class. “I would have thought that one of you would have had the courage and conviction to bring this to me, instead of participating in the ‘big joke,’” she said, grimly. “Being a coward and just passing on the ‘joke’ makes you just as culpable as Spiro, for starting it. It’s hurtful, and it’s cruel, and I am ashamed of all of you.”
There was a lot of silent shifting in the chairs after that, and then class, which had been shortened by the evacuation details, was dismissed, and Zaya moved on, silently, to Biology, where Maccis was her partner for dissections and such. She’d long been accustomed to dealing with the fact that Maccis spent most of each dissection pinching his nose shut and trying to breathe shallowly. This class, however, he barely even looked at her, and she could only interpret that as embarrassment. Humiliation, maybe, because of the stupid woodcut.
So by lunch, she was in a fine roil. She’d been friends with him since they were eleven, and she really didn’t want to give that up. She liked him, but she had no idea how to convey that to him without risking the friendship, because, well, she was pretty sure he didn’t like her that way, and she didn’t know how to . . . encourage him to do so. Enchantment didn’t work, no matter what the classical authors had thought. She’d thought, a little hopefully, that the usual invitation to go with his family to the bonfires over the equinox a few weeks ago would help. It had been the first year her mother had let her go without either of her parents being there. But while there had been circle dancing, being passed to and from a dozen different partners, Maccis hadn’t pulled her out of the circle of firelight, off into the shadows where people found sheltered alcoves to kiss. Clear message: He’s not interested. That had hurt a bit. But losing the friendship would hurt worse.
She put it out of her mind, ate her lunch hastily, and met a couple of her nieten friends in the courtyard behind the school. They talked about the invasion of Palmyra, wide-eyed, but the sky overhead was clear and blue, and the air was crisp, so one of the girls sat down with a drum, and another with a flute, and the others began to practice their dancing. The nieten girls didn’t have a culture that emphasized individual dance like this; they’d all picked it up from seeing Egyptian and Chaldean dancers, growing up. Zaya had, of course, been classically trained in it, starting from an early age, but she was aware that she couldn’t possibly move the way that some them could. One of her friends, Kelda, had glistening red lindworm scales over about eighty percent of her body, leaving her head and upper torso free,
and she seemed to be able to detach and rotate her vertebrae individually. Zaya sighed in envy every time she saw Kelda’s inhuman grace.
Some of the dryads had started joining them; they stayed out in the sun for practice sessions like this, and the dryads appreciated that. They tended to be a little stiffer in their movements, and Zaya knew it was because of the compositional changes in their bodies, compared to that of a normal human, but they still enjoyed the company. She was going to miss most of these girls next year. Regular students quit after grade ten, and went into apprenticeships. University-bound students stayed on an additional two years, for college preparation.
There were planters at all corners of the courtyard, filled with trees. Most of them were in bloom, and students milled here and there, most of them talking amongst themselves, a few watching the dancers. Zaya did her best to ignore them. The point was to move correctly, and feel the flow and the music. What other people thought of it wasn’t the point; she wasn’t dancing for them, but for herself, and to have fun with her friends. She did, however, notice that Crysanthe, one of the dryads, had grabbed Maccis out of a group of people. The white hair stood out in a crowd. Now the dryad dragged him over to one of the planters, and seemed to be pointing up at a tree—the only one that hadn’t bloomed. Maccis looked reluctant, then finally leaned over the planter edge, rested a hand on the bark of the tree, and looked away again.
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