by Mon D Rea
She hasn’t put her finger on it yet but a girl with her experience, she isn’t clueless. Nothing makes sense though. Inside the gentle, short and laid-back Chester is the presence of latent danger. Danger poised under the surface, behind a thin veil and just waiting to gobble her up.
She can’t explain how she came to such a conclusion among a number of more rational impressions. She can just feel it. By a strange twist of fate it also has something to do with her past. But the thing about her past is, she’s got selective amnesia that dims the especially bad patches.
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Sephtimus doesn’t know what’s happening to him either. This warm and glowing thing inside him. A very private creature – more like a coffin that’s been nailed shut, chained, cemented and then cast down a river – now he feels the need for something different, for in fact the opposite. He suddenly longs to share. Everything. All the broken mementos of the mortal life he once gave up, the petty concerns and squabbles of humankind that he’s now acquainted with only through a looking glass, and all the lost dreams and fate-balloons floating down River Akheron to the Drain of the World; the lowest of all depths.
It’s rising from the core of him, uncontrollable, resurrecting every cell and cramming every space of his being. His heart has coughed up eons of dust and has started pumping again. At first rusty but creaking faster and faster and gaining momentum. He knows the risks. All the alarms inside his brain are ringing and warning him of the pain of getting burned. But he can’t help it. For the first time since his appointment as the Unbendable Atropos, the Grim One, he’s falling deep into a hole he’s glad to have stumbled into.
PART THREE: The Wyrd One
Chapter XVI: The First Soulmates
Diegis, that was my mortal name. My parents were from Dacia. It was a land in the midst of and surrounding the Carpathians, where Romania and Moldova now lie. But I was born in Puteoli in Campania and didn’t really know anything of my roots. Nor was I aware of how the whole world was changing in those times; every chess-piece, every square being ushered into place by a long arm and a whisper in the dark: Imperium Romanum.
The port city of Puteoli was like a whole country unto itself, certainly world enough for a little boy like me, what of all the merchants, ambassadors, seamen and soldiers from territories as distant and enchanted as Parthia and Aegyptus. On rare occasions but with increasing frequency now, it all comes back to me in a whiff and a faint echo: the smell of sulfur that pervaded the air from the Forum Vulcani and the sound of the whole world speaking all at once, with different lengths of tongue.
Tragically, instead of being born properly into the light of day, I was born feet first into a special structure called the Cavea. You probably know it better through its namesake, the Anfiteatro Flavio, also known as the Colosseo. The Cavea and the Colosseo both played host to the infamous Blood Games.
I fell straight down its secret, dark complex of cells and tunnels. Outside, it was a majestic edifice of stone and marble but it was more than that in the imagination of a child: a prostrate golem where deep down lay a ticking, pumping heart of trapdoors, capstans, chains, and lifts. The lining of its stomach had sluice gates where gallons upon gallons of Neptune’s water poured forth to wash away all the blood, vomit, urine, and excrement. In a word, the stink of fear and death.
The greedy mother that it was, the Cavea did not discriminate. It had all of us trapped inside the hungry maze of its bowels – man and beast, pagan and believer, the living and the dying – all cast together into one laughing, crying, and convulsing heap.
Yes, the giant mother was blind. It didn’t treat you differently because of wizened wisdom or youthful passion. Not because of your innocence or guilt or whether you had two organs hanging on your chest or only one between your legs. She was very consistent in her criteria. She rewarded only two virtues: strength and uninhibited violence. We were all bound by the same oath. Slave or freeman, everyone had uttered the words “Uri, vinciri, verberari, ferroque necari.” (I will endure to be burned, to be tied, to be beaten, and to be killed by the sword).
But who am I fooling? I was unique. At least the hot iron for beasts hadn’t touched my skin. The symbol wasn’t seared on me like on the foreheads of those slaves who had tried to run away. Like the white chalk that my biological mother bore on her foot while she stood naked in front of wealthy, fat Romans. Or the plaque that was hung around my father’s neck detailing his name, abilities, health, and bad character as he crouched inside a wooden pen in the public square. No sooner had the man been purchased out of the market than he led a revolt with the other slaves, who outnumbered their masters five to three. He paid with his life when his co-conspirators shrank away at the moment of truth. He died screaming: “To you, Zalmoxis, I depart!”
My mother said my father was a real Dacian, unafraid of death. I didn’t think my father was a brave man, only foolish. That was how most people remembered him anyway – if they remembered him at all. I would’ve filled my mind with more practical matters. For instance, if my mother had only become a freewoman, then by relation I would’ve also been freed. But she had remained a non-person to the day she brought me into the world. She also cut her throat with the master’s razor, leaving me at my tender age to pick up the pieces.
I remember, over the loss of one of his chattels and apparently his favorite, not to mention the sudden acquisition of liability in me, the old master was furious and inconsolable –that is, until another slave offered to buy me to become his slave. This was Petipor, a fellow Dacian who knew my father and felt a kinship with people of the same natio.
I wasn’t like the celebrated Secutores or Retiarii. They were born to fight. But there were others like me, too, inside the stifling belly of the Cavea. For instance, Petipor was a musician who would sometimes teach me how to play the aulos. This was a double-reed pipe that you played in pairs. It looked like a flute, but it was really more of an oboe or a bagpipe in sound.
Among us, there were dancers, jugglers, acrobats, a magician, a jester, a dwarf, and a hunchback. We were the freaks, the weaklings. The invisible and indispensable. The people in the shadows, behind the walls and under the floors, who made sure doors opened and locked with perfect timing and the beasts got fed right before they went berserk.
In the morning, we took care of the parades, the tame circus acts, the skits, and the simulated hunts. We made varieties of entertainment possible to keep the inured voyeurs calm before the Games themselves. We put on shows that pitted bull against bear, bull against lion, bull against monoceros; lion against tiger, lion against bear, lion against elephant, and so forth. And then there was the beast called man, unmatched in his brutality, who rattled the cages of these natural predators and made them fiercer and fiercer in addition to being starved and whipped for days. This Beast Master would then place himself before bull, before lion, before bear, and the whole cycle was repeated.
Finally, for shows that featured the hunters, the whole place would be transformed overnight into a grandiose killing-field. In the middle of the harena, rolling hills and glistening streams would rise, complete with trees and bushes. I learned there was no end to the imagination of man when it came to killing.
But no matter how far each of us marched, in the end we all still ended up in the same place. Like we had been dancing non-stop to the same tune; dancing till our bodies dropped in exhaustion but the music still played. Like a broken record. For years, this tune tortured me. I couldn’t put my finger on it and it haunted me.
But then all at once, there it was playing to me one day, clearer than I had ever heard it and more beautiful than I had ever imagined: Mussorgsky’s Trepak. Across the millennia, a poet found the words and the Russian composer added the beautiful melody to them, but the music had attempted many times over to emerge in my inadequate mind. I suppose if I was ever meant to be an artist, I was a frustrated one and failed to nurture the gift of music to its full potential.
It was towards the incoheren
t sounds of the beasts that I gravitated. It was to them I felt the closest; to the wolves and the great cats, boars and bears, apes and reptiles. Some of them were born in captivity like me and had never learned to survive in the wild. All we had to do was survive the harsher environment of the Cavea.
I was a cageboy, the youngest in all of Italia. Apart from me, there was only one other soul who silently protested against the organized slaughter of the animals. Aquilia, a free-born and a free spirit. She was the Roman girl with the lightest-blue eyes and the most infectious laugh; who, in her long immaculate tunic, often stole away from home and lingered around the cages with me to feed and heal the innocent – the peacocks and elephants from India, the cameleopards and monoceroses from Africa, the lynxes and camels from Asiana. She saw a kindred spirit in those beasts as well. She felt cooped up in the crowded and dirty city and longed to travel, to sail across the vast sea, and to gain more knowledge even though she was a girl. She felt suffocated by her father who pronounced everything in her family, including the man she would someday marry. She wanted to grow wings and to live.
“But you do live,” I would tirelessly remind her. “You are a rich, free, legitimate, smart, and… ah… lovely citizen of Rome.” Certain words faltered in my throat every time I spoke to her. “What more do you wish?”
“It isn’t the same at all. Living and existing are two completely different things. It’s like when you gaze into the eyes of any of these animals, I dare you to say I’m wrong, do you not recognize the glimmer of a soul? Something beyond all this, something that yearns to be free.”
“I’m just a slave. There’s no life or peace for me outside these walls, outside the Cavea. If I can’t see things happening for myself, how can I see them for these animals?”
“This is why it has to start from within you, Diegis. You have to know what your worth is to the world. Only then will people around you see and respect you for who you really are…
“You’ve already glimpsed it: a man–sized Tityrus looking away and breaking into tears every time the Gladiators step out of those arches to the Games. An elephant bending the bars of his cage, fighting and dying side by side with his mate. A she-wolf howling over the death of her offspring. If animals can show this measure of compassion and decency towards others, then what does that make of us? What does that make of all of us?”
She believed in me. That was perhaps the original sin. Because the tiny seed of a dream could grow a sprout, and then roots. Before I knew it, I was entertaining newer and bigger ideas in my head. Dangerous ideas of a whole life with Aquilia outside the Cavea, outside Puteoli. I started scrimping and tucking away my wages in a pouch that was slung around my neck even when I lay sleeping in the horses’ stalls. I had giddy fantasies of buying my freedom and becoming a libertus, a freeman.
But to be a freeman wasn’t in the cards for me. I was to be a showman of the Cavea to the very end, to star in the least popular noontime portion of my unnatural mother’s show: Objicĕre bestiis, meaning devoured by beasts. They tied me to a post atop a small chariot, very like a wheelbarrow, and then they pushed me out onto the harena.
I had become noxii. Because I attempted to escape and, worse, to elope with a Roman minor. Aquilia and I intended to stow away in one of those giant Alexandrian grain ships moored to the docks but we were caught. It was the story of a forbidden young love.
From the post to which I was bound, stripped of everything save for a loincloth, I gazed across the hot sand at a lioness, befuddled with hunger and not recognizing the smell of the boy who had fed and cared for her for years. I locked gazes with her like Aquilia had asked me to once, but in those fierce eyes I saw nothing of what she saw and I was even more disappointed with myself.
In the eyes of the beast, there were only the pangs of hunger, the urge to slay, and the law of nature taking over. Artaxias was one of those trained man-eaters from Parthia. The mob thought she was a male in her ferocity and named her thus.
She was a true State Executioner. As soon as she had pounced on me she made sure to end me. She locked her vice-like jaws on either side of my neck and I made only the softest whimper, the tiniest sigh as she pressed my windpipe shut.
I felt her latch on my throat till the last breath of life escaped me. Onto the other side, she was the perfect doula, or midwife, that a newborn could ask for.
Chapter XVII: Atropos Reborn
And so it was that I left the stage in the same precarious way I had entered it. The Cavea was my entire world and the only life I ever knew, but I wasn’t the only child she survived. Half a million other men and a million beasts had come before me and would still come after me.
I watched my lifeless body being dragged with a hook. It was an eerie and disorienting sensation. I saw my troupe standing and crying in the shadows; there was nothing they could have done. Even the tribe of chimpanzees fell quiet and somber in that moment, consoling each other inside their cages. Barrus the Indian elephant slipped his trunk between the bars and tried to reach me while the seals taken all the way from Ultima Thule in the frozen North wailed in hair-raising anguish.
Petipor, my guardian and employer, walked with my body all the way into the mortuary, where I was laid on a pile of fresh corpses. He took out his aulos, the only pair he had, and tucked it under my crossed arms because he knew it was my favorite. He bent down to whisper in my ear: “You’re free now, child.”
He felt a shiver as he walked out, and it must’ve been the premonition of his own end that passed him by because not long after that day, he would hang himself from one of the sturdier platforms that carried elephants and hippopotami to the surface.
The door was slammed shut and I felt free at last from a life of toil and violence. The mortuary was completely dark and quiet save for a few beams of daylight coming in and some sand trickling through the timber floor of the games above that made hissing noises. Intermittently I could hear the muffled roar of the crowd floating from the seats through the porta libitinaria down the tunnel. Habet, hoc habet! they screamed. And Ure! Ure! Burn him up!
Without warning, everything fell into a deafening hush as though all the breath in the hall had been sucked away by a fiery explosion. I was astonished to find a strange visitor standing before me, hunched like a vulture, hooded and mysterious. At first I thought it was the executioner who had stayed behind amidst all the dead but he was not attired in his usual costume of bird mask and leather boots. He had also discarded his tunic for a cowl that was the very color of flames, fading from hues of deep orange to light yellow.
He was still the Etruscan Charun, the underworld daemon, but instead of a mallet to deliver finishing blows, this person carried on his back a pair of then folded wings that seemed to be made up of a thousand iron feathers; like those armor-piercing arrowheads of the sagittarii, only each one of them is intricate and polished to razor-sharpness.
I have heard of such a creature only in rumors, this Avalerion. Larger than an eagle and lord over all birds. Plumage the color of fire and wings and talons that could cut through flesh and bone. Only a pair is said to exist at any one time. It was little wonder that the heralds would portray it as a bird without a beak – and without feet! It dawned on me that this being didn’t belong in the Cavea or in the world of the living, and a great coldness rushed through me.
“You are a man among men, Diegis. I have searched far and wide for someone like you,” the outsider spoke in a soft but resonant voice, only gray humanoid lips and chin visible from under hood and shadow. To my surprise, both the voice and contour of the lips suggested a feminine owner. “I have drifted across many worlds, and I am… bone-weary.”
I stood rooted to the spot as though in my insubstantial form I had become the sorceress’ puppet. Like a wisp of jinn trapped inside an unseen bottle.
“I have come to make you an offer. A trade that can only be freely undertaken. I will grant you immortality for an equal lifespan of service. If you so desire, no more will you suffer
pain, sickness, death or grief. No man will command above you. You shall have the whole world to roam as your kingdom, and you shall hold power over all life, to match creation with destruction.
“You shall be the Grim Tyrant: unbending, unseen, unchallenged. The Great Equalizer. You shall humble the proudest ruler and bring relief to the lowliest servant.”
She pointed a clawed, long, bony finger at me. And as the sleeve of her robe fell, the rest of her calcified arm was revealed.
“But you must heed this warning: What I speak of is nothing like your paltry human oaths. Once you enter your name into this contract, you shall forsake all vestiges of your mortal existence and all other bonds that come with it. You shall know only the life of a death angel, bereft of company and untouched by nature for all eternity.”
I felt incredulous and undeserving more than anything else, to be chosen among countless others. What was it in me that had drawn her, I wondered. Still I ruled out the possibility of a trick and judged the creature to be free from human guile and to be above malice. There was something in her words that told me she was incapable of lying. At that very moment it also occurred to me that I had lost faith in my own kind, and Death was as pure as the beasts but more intelligent than them. I felt myself warming up to the otherworldly ambassador.
Perhaps it was because she was bound by the same terms of the covenant she spoke of. I was, in essence, to trade one life of servitude for another under a different set of rules. Different and more just. It gave reward to good service and probably meted out an equal dose of punishment for failure and attempts of breach.
Thoughts of immortality didn’t tempt me. In spite of all the injustices I had witnessed and borne in my expired life, I wasn’t embittered. It might seem hard to believe but I had a fairly good idea of what human existence was in its entirety. It was sufferings and triumphs, peaks and troughs. They were halves of a whole; one could not exist without the other. I had my own stolen moments of happiness – with my friends in the circus, my guardian Petipor, all the animals in the Cavea, and of course Aquilia. And though I passed away so young, I had been taught well by my extreme circumstances during the brief sixteen years that was given me. The stark difference had made everything clear in my consciousness.