Commentary: One, But a Lion
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beer_good_foamyA while ago, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
red_satin_doll asked if I'd do a commentary for a fic of my choice. I figured, why not this one? It's not one of my most commented-on fics, possibly because it's an OC fic, but I'm pretty happy with it despite some flaws, so why not. Plus it gives me a chance to philosophise and write meta on some of the points about my reading of Buffy.
Title: One, But A Lion
Author: Beer Good (beer_good_foamy)
Fandom: Buffyverse, very much pre-series
Word Count: ~1200
Rating: PG13
Summary: Egypt, 48 BC. A Slayer and her watcher take a trip and learn that even in ancient times, some things were more ancient still.
Comments in red. Original version here.
One, But A Lion
The title is from Aesop's fables: the vixen brags that she has nine cubs and the lioness only one, and the lioness responds: "You have nine, but they're foxes; I have one, but a lion." (Incidentally, Unus sed Leo used to be the motto of the Swedish submarine fleet.) Of course, in BtVS, lions and other cats are occasionally used as the Slayer's spirit animal - it's in "Graduation Day" ("It's a she. And aren't these things supposed to take care of themselves?"), in "Intervention" ("Hello, kitty."), and of course all over "Restless". This fic is, incidentally, very much a riff on "Restless."
Alexandria, 48 BC
She has to drag him from the burning building.
This takes place during Julius Caesar's invason of Egypt, along with the burning of the Library of Alexandria. Which is a bit of a historical fib I'm not entirely happy with. That Caesar burned the Library is one of those historical factoids that, most likely, isn't entirely true. In reality, while some of the Library probably did get burned during the Roman invasion, it probably wasn't the main library. In fact, so many people over so many centuries have been credited with burning the Library that you have to wonder if the scrolls they kept there were made of the same material that you use to make those gag birthday candles that can't be blown out. But for the sake of this fic, just assume that the building that got burned by the Romans just happened to be the one that housed the most important Ancient Mystical Scrolls Of Watcherdom.
For a while she considers leaving him; he's been her watcher since she was a girl, and for all the times he's sent her out against vampires, mummies, djinns and demons she's never seen him care about anything as much as he cares about those damn scrolls. But Alexandria is in complete chaos, there's Roman soldiers everywhere, and she can't leave an old man with a broken leg alone in this mess. And so, as Egypt falls, as the last pharaoh arranges to have herself snuck into her conqueror's bedroom,
That'd be Cleopatra. Another fascinating historical character where the problem isn't so much lack of information as too much myth surrounding the information we do have; she's been presented as a golddigging femme fatale, a clever politician doing anything to save her people, a weak victim, a ruthless ruler, a great beauty, an ugly harpy, a clueless aristocrat, a black power symbol... And of course, everything written about her was written by others, many of whom had good reason to use her for one political point or another.
as the library of Alexandria burns to the ground, Mkhait the Vampire Slayer
I got "Mkhait" off a list of ancient Egyptian names. It supposedly means "Fight", which sounds like a Slayer name if I ever heard one. Then again, those lists are notoriously incorrect, so for all I know it's just gibberish. But hey, it's a dead language anyway, and short of looking up some linguist specialising in Egyptian, it's probably as close as I'm going to get.
drags the man who's controlled her entire life to safety, back to her cell.
I tried to hint at what kind of life a 48BC Slayer would have and where she came from. Here's one of the first: her "safe" place is something that, when you translate it to modern English, would be called a "cell." I'd say it's more of a monastery cell than a jail cell, but still.
She bandages him as well as she can, expecting them to lay low until things return to normal,but he's adamant; things won't. He orders her to go and take him with her, and as befits a Slayer, she obeys.
Obviously, it's not my opinion that she should obey her Watcher in everything, but to both of them it's the only way this works. I'll confess that I get pretty blatant with the gender roles here, but... he's a well-educated Greek scholar, and as far as he's concerned, she's basically a savage whom he has deigned to educate as far as possible. "Her command of English is such that I understand every other sentence," unfiltered by the centuries. See also what I wrote about Cleopatra above.
And so they wind up on the deck of a grain transport headed upriver. It's certainly not the first time, but all the other times she could be certain that it would end either with her dead or back in Alexandria waiting for the next time. This time, she's not so sure. She looks over the side, down at the reflection of her scarred face in the water.
I hint that she's been doing this for some time - she's in her late teens, so she's been an active Slayer for maybe 4 or 5 years. It's left traces both on and in her.
The moon is up, shattering silver over the Nile, but this is no romantic cruise for the passengers or the sailors; just a hard slog up the world's mother river.
Apparently, when the ancient Egyptians sent explorers as far north as Mesopotamia (thousands of years before this story takes place), they were perplexed to find that rivers (the Tigris and the Eufrates) could flow the "wrong" way (north instead of south). Egypt was founded around the Nile, a straight line flowing in one direction, and overflowing regularly. Egyptian society was based around farming (that's the reason the Romans invaded them in the first place), and thus around the cycles of the Nile. "Revolution" means "full circle."
"Where are we going?" Mkhait asks.
He looks up, as annoyed with her as ever, but clearly bothered by the pain in his leg. "Giza." He uses the old name for it, and as always his Egyptian is flawless. It used to make her so angry that the old Hellene clearly knows every tongue in the world and yet insists that they speak nothing but "civilized" Greek to each other – a language which, to her, will always be a blunt, foreign tool.
Writing Mkhait's dialogue was a bit tricky, and I'm not entirely happy with it. I wanted to give the hint that she's speaking in a language she doesn't have complete command of; her lines are mostly in the present tense, a bit clumsy. It's not intended to give the impression that she's stupid or unteachable; Mkhait, like Kendra 2,000 years later, was taken in by her Watcher at a very young age, and he's set about "civilizing" her; that entails teaching her a "proper" language, even though he could easily use her own. Which means she ends up speaking no language fluently - robbed of her own, and taught a simplified version of his. It's a time-honoured way of keeping people in line: make sure they can't even articulate any dissent - at least not in a way "polite and civilized" people need to take seriously.
Now he's been mumbling under his breath constantly since they left the city, often in languages she's never heard, if they're even languages at all.
"The Romans attack, and we flee to Giza? Why?"
"You'll see soon enough." He's quiet, breathes shakily as he tries to shift his weight, then inexplicably laughs. "Why? Because it's lost. All of it. Thousands of years of accumulated knowledge, gone in an instant, pffft." He rattles off a quick sentence in something she thinks might be Babylonian. "I'm the only one who'll ever know that now."
Exactly why the Watchers would allow such precious writings to only be stored in Alexandria, rather than wherever their true base is... Hell, for all I know, ol' Whatshisname (I very deliberately don't name the Watcher in this fic) is mistaken about this and his bosses have copies of everything. But it's one of those classic questions surrounding both the loss of the Alexandria Library and the following 2,000 years - just how much knowledge, how much writing, has been irretrievably lost to carelessness or deliberate destruction? One of the best ways of controlling the world is to make sure that your stories, your truths, are the ones that count, and the conflicting stories are reduced to fairytales ("children's stories" or "old wive's tales") if they survive at all. This is, of course, part and parcel of "Restless" as well. (Coincidentally, one classic (and most likely false) myth surrounding the Library was that the last remnants of it was burned during the Muslim invasion of Egypt in the 7th century, when the commander supposedly ordered it burned because "If the writings there are in conflict with the Qur'an they're blasphemous; if not, they're redundant." It probably didn't happen exactly like that, but the sentiment has been uttered many times before and after by all sorts of different people interested in power.) So basically, what I was trying to get to was that this is one of the central points of this fic, and the reason it's set at the moment when one hugely influential empire crushes another.
Also, go read Umberto Eco's The Name Of The Rose.
"We will make them pay. Egypt will -"
"Egypt will do nothing. Your people are done.
The Watcher may be channelling Julius Caesar in Asterix Goes To Egypt here... He's not entirely wrong, though; Egypt ceased to be a major, independent power with the arrival of the Romans (if not much earlier - Cleopatra was Greek).
The Romans are barbarians, but they'll be very successful barbarians, with swords and walls and everyone marching in time to simple slogans. They don't care for philosophy or astronomy, and mathematics only concerns them if it helps them calculate trajectories. They didn't even burn the library because they're afraid of it – they did it by accident, because the notion that it might be valuable didn't even occur to them. They're the future." He returns to his mumbling, reciting texts to himself in words an Egyptian farmer's daughter has no chance of understanding, so she's alone to wonder just how much of that is true and how much is just him needing to hear himself speak.
...I get ranty. Take of this what you will, apply it to contemporary debates however you will.
I will point out, though, that the word "barbarian" comes from Greek and pretty much means "Someone so subhuman they don't even speak Greek."
When they get off the ship the next day, his leg has swollen to twice its normal size and Mkhait has to carry him. She offers to find him a surgeon, but he refuses; the fever has already started, there's nothing anyone can do. She hires a donkey cart.
This fic, of course, also takes place 2,000 years before the invention of antibiotics.
"We are here." She shakes him awake carefully; at first she thinks he might be dead, but then he groans and manages to sit halfway up. The moon has risen again and the pyramids loom blackly a few hundred cubits away, larger by night than by day; huge, ancient, everlasting. "What is it?"
"What is what?"
"You said everything is lost. You bring me here. You want me to slay something before you..." Funny, her entire life has been about killing, yet she doesn't know any words in Greek for how an old man dies.
He nods, slowly. "Have I told you how old these things are?"
"Old." She shrugs. "Gods themselves -"
"Two thousand five hundred years." He knows that means little to her.
Not because she cannot count, but because, let's face it, 2,500 years is a completely incomprehensible age. Our sense of history tends to be woefully disproportional - there's stuff that happened recently, there's stuff that happened "in the past" (say, the last 100 years), and then there's antiquity where, presumably, Charlemagne and Caligula and Alexander and Qi Shuangdi and Khufu were more or less contemporary to each other. I wanted to note that to characters in ancient Rome, the pyramids are already as ancient as they are to us. Probably more, given the difference in how we teach history today. And even that pales next to the knowledge that the first major settlements around the major rivers are 10,000 years old, and that we'd been knocking around Africa for about 500,000 years before that. In all these stories we tell ourselves, in all the ideas we still build our lives and our societies and our laws on, how much remains of the stories we told around a campfire down by the Cape half a million years ago? How much of it still controls us?
"Fifty lifetimes. And they were built by men, for men – powerful magicians seeking immortality, at which some were successful, but still men."
One good reason why we never saw Egyptian mummies in Buffy: obviously, they were taken care of thousands of years ago by other Slayers.
"So what -"
"You are not here to slay. You are here to see." His voice is shaking, she feels the fever coming off him in waves. "Time is a funny thing. Once something is old enough, it's easy to think it's always existed. But the pyramids were built by men.
"This is the way women and men have behaved since the beginning..." - Rupert Giles
"... because a bunch of men who died thousands of years ago made up that rule." - Buffy Summers
There was a time when they were not here. There was a time when there was only her."
At first she doesn't understand what he's talking about, then... "'Her'? The Sphinx?"
He nods towards the giant statue, its body half-buried in sand but its head held high. "The Lioness. One of those old kings put his face on her, built his grave beside her to live forever, but it's borrowed power; she was here long before that. Since the old gods were driven from this plane, she's stood guard. Even if everything else disappears, she'll always be here."
This is actually a real, if very speculative theory that some historians have; that the sphinx is really several thousand years older than the pyramids, and that its head was originally a lion's head to match its body. It's cryptoarchaeology, and I don't think it's very well supported by actual historical facts, but it's one of those ideas that really jog the imagination: what if the sphinx, rather than being just something the old pharaohs put next to the pyramids, was actually the remnant of something much older? What if the sphinx, and what it symbolized, was the reason they put the pyramids there in the first place, the way modern churches tend to be built in the same spots heathen temples once stood? What if all of history is a palimpsest where the old writing is never completely wiped clean?
So in my Buffyverse, it's pretty simple: there was a hellmouth here. At some point very very long ago, the annals of which may have just burned in Alexandria, some nameless Slayer faced the old gods here and shut it down, and the people left a monument of it. (We know from s7 that the Scythe spent enough time in Egypt to be mentioned in hieroglyphs.) It's almost forgotten at this point (when Europeans started "discovering" Egypt in the 18th century, the sphinx itself was almost a myth - almost completely buried in the sand), and it's been appropriated by other rulers in the thousands of years since, but it's still there. Waiting.
He puts her hand on her shoulder and suddenly speaks to her in her own language. "I know you've never liked me much. I've made a soldier out of you, because it was my job. I hope you'll forgive me for that someday. I cannot offer you anything more than this: Things changed here once. Sooner or later, they will change again. And there is still some magic left here. Now go."
This... may have been written while watching the protests on Tahrir square during the Arab spring. The idea that you can suppress ideas, you can bury them, you can appropriate, subvert and replace them, but if they're valid, they will pop up again when you least expect it.
I do think I could have set the Watcher and his actions up a bit better, the reveal that the reason they're here is because he knows that he's deliberately kept her ignorant and wants her to know where she's coming from, and why he does that when he's basically seemed like an authoritarian asshole so far. It's not that he doesn't care for his Slayer, even if he may not consider her his equal. Whether that makes him justified is another matter, of course.
A dozen different curses she's been storing for years and couldn't have spoken to him five minutes ago occur to her (you son of a, you arrogant, you self-serving, you uncaring, you fucker of) before she remembers that he's dying.
Whether "fucker of" should be taken literally... I'll leave up to the reader. Again, their power dynamics are pretty messed up by modern standards.
And she's suddenly noticed a light under the Sphinx's head.
It's a campfire, she discovers. There's a girl there. She's nubian, dressed in rags and bone, at once younger than her and so, so much older. And she speaks Mkhait's language – not her watcher's well-schooled city speech, but the dialect she didn't think she remembered from back home. They talk all night.
Is there any better place to run into the First Slayer than here? Exactly what they talk about I'll leave up to the reader, but the fact that they do it in her own language is pretty much the point.
In the morning, Mkhait carries her watcher to the Nile and sets his body afloat. She never knew what gods he worshipped, but she knows that the river carries anything to the sea, and Greece is somewhere far beyond that on the other side of the world; let them find him if they want, if he needs guidance.
He dominated her entire life so far, and he never shared anything about himself. Why would he? She's just a soldier. So exactly how affectionate her farewell here is... again, I wish I'd set up the Watcher a bit more, not to make him more of a villain or more of a wise guide, and setting a slave free as your last act doesn't outweigh enslaving her in the first place. But he's just as trapped by the story as she is, even if he's at least allowed to make his own choices.
Also, of course, we think Greece and Egypt are pretty close, geographically speaking. But to someone who's been kept in servitude their whole life, it might as well be on the other side of the world.
She stands there for hours, watching the river flow, constantly changing, renewing and rewriting itself. Then she turns and continues walking up the river. She doesn't know where she's going, but she has an idea about who she is now, and just being the one who's going will have to be good enough for now.
The river is a constant. The river is ever-changing. Yada yada.
This is also, for some reason, a nod to one of my favourite Bob Dylan songs, a 17-minute song about age and regained purpose he wrote in 1997 called "Highlands", which ends:
Well, my heart’s in the Highlands at the break of day
Over the hills and far away
There’s a way to get there and I’ll figure it out somehow
But I’m already there in my mind and that’s gonna have to be good enough for now
...Though he did also write a happy little song many years earlier called "Watching The River Flow", based on Hesse's Siddharta. Ever-changing, constant.
And speaking of song choices, World Party's "Curse of the Mummy's Tomb is very much an inspiration throughout this.
...There is no curse!
It's just a mummy's tomb.
Written records of her end here.
This last line wasn't in the fic when I first posted it, it struck me (as improvements to fic often does) a couple of days later. The records of her life have just burned, the one man who knew what she was is dead, and so she steps into the fog of history, no longer trapped in a story she wasn't allowed to control. I have no idea what happened to her afterwards, and that's the way I like it.
red_satin_doll asked if I'd do a commentary for a fic of my choice. I figured, why not this one? It's not one of my most commented-on fics, possibly because it's an OC fic, but I'm pretty happy with it despite some flaws, so why not. Plus it gives me a chance to philosophise and write meta on some of the points about my reading of Buffy.Title: One, But A Lion
Author: Beer Good (
beer_good_foamy)Fandom: Buffyverse, very much pre-series
Word Count: ~1200
Rating: PG13
Summary: Egypt, 48 BC. A Slayer and her watcher take a trip and learn that even in ancient times, some things were more ancient still.
Comments in red. Original version here.
One, But A Lion
The title is from Aesop's fables: the vixen brags that she has nine cubs and the lioness only one, and the lioness responds: "You have nine, but they're foxes; I have one, but a lion." (Incidentally, Unus sed Leo used to be the motto of the Swedish submarine fleet.) Of course, in BtVS, lions and other cats are occasionally used as the Slayer's spirit animal - it's in "Graduation Day" ("It's a she. And aren't these things supposed to take care of themselves?"), in "Intervention" ("Hello, kitty."), and of course all over "Restless". This fic is, incidentally, very much a riff on "Restless."
Alexandria, 48 BC
She has to drag him from the burning building.
This takes place during Julius Caesar's invason of Egypt, along with the burning of the Library of Alexandria. Which is a bit of a historical fib I'm not entirely happy with. That Caesar burned the Library is one of those historical factoids that, most likely, isn't entirely true. In reality, while some of the Library probably did get burned during the Roman invasion, it probably wasn't the main library. In fact, so many people over so many centuries have been credited with burning the Library that you have to wonder if the scrolls they kept there were made of the same material that you use to make those gag birthday candles that can't be blown out. But for the sake of this fic, just assume that the building that got burned by the Romans just happened to be the one that housed the most important Ancient Mystical Scrolls Of Watcherdom.
For a while she considers leaving him; he's been her watcher since she was a girl, and for all the times he's sent her out against vampires, mummies, djinns and demons she's never seen him care about anything as much as he cares about those damn scrolls. But Alexandria is in complete chaos, there's Roman soldiers everywhere, and she can't leave an old man with a broken leg alone in this mess. And so, as Egypt falls, as the last pharaoh arranges to have herself snuck into her conqueror's bedroom,
That'd be Cleopatra. Another fascinating historical character where the problem isn't so much lack of information as too much myth surrounding the information we do have; she's been presented as a golddigging femme fatale, a clever politician doing anything to save her people, a weak victim, a ruthless ruler, a great beauty, an ugly harpy, a clueless aristocrat, a black power symbol... And of course, everything written about her was written by others, many of whom had good reason to use her for one political point or another.
as the library of Alexandria burns to the ground, Mkhait the Vampire Slayer
I got "Mkhait" off a list of ancient Egyptian names. It supposedly means "Fight", which sounds like a Slayer name if I ever heard one. Then again, those lists are notoriously incorrect, so for all I know it's just gibberish. But hey, it's a dead language anyway, and short of looking up some linguist specialising in Egyptian, it's probably as close as I'm going to get.
drags the man who's controlled her entire life to safety, back to her cell.
I tried to hint at what kind of life a 48BC Slayer would have and where she came from. Here's one of the first: her "safe" place is something that, when you translate it to modern English, would be called a "cell." I'd say it's more of a monastery cell than a jail cell, but still.
She bandages him as well as she can, expecting them to lay low until things return to normal,but he's adamant; things won't. He orders her to go and take him with her, and as befits a Slayer, she obeys.
Obviously, it's not my opinion that she should obey her Watcher in everything, but to both of them it's the only way this works. I'll confess that I get pretty blatant with the gender roles here, but... he's a well-educated Greek scholar, and as far as he's concerned, she's basically a savage whom he has deigned to educate as far as possible. "Her command of English is such that I understand every other sentence," unfiltered by the centuries. See also what I wrote about Cleopatra above.
And so they wind up on the deck of a grain transport headed upriver. It's certainly not the first time, but all the other times she could be certain that it would end either with her dead or back in Alexandria waiting for the next time. This time, she's not so sure. She looks over the side, down at the reflection of her scarred face in the water.
I hint that she's been doing this for some time - she's in her late teens, so she's been an active Slayer for maybe 4 or 5 years. It's left traces both on and in her.
The moon is up, shattering silver over the Nile, but this is no romantic cruise for the passengers or the sailors; just a hard slog up the world's mother river.
Apparently, when the ancient Egyptians sent explorers as far north as Mesopotamia (thousands of years before this story takes place), they were perplexed to find that rivers (the Tigris and the Eufrates) could flow the "wrong" way (north instead of south). Egypt was founded around the Nile, a straight line flowing in one direction, and overflowing regularly. Egyptian society was based around farming (that's the reason the Romans invaded them in the first place), and thus around the cycles of the Nile. "Revolution" means "full circle."
"Where are we going?" Mkhait asks.
He looks up, as annoyed with her as ever, but clearly bothered by the pain in his leg. "Giza." He uses the old name for it, and as always his Egyptian is flawless. It used to make her so angry that the old Hellene clearly knows every tongue in the world and yet insists that they speak nothing but "civilized" Greek to each other – a language which, to her, will always be a blunt, foreign tool.
Writing Mkhait's dialogue was a bit tricky, and I'm not entirely happy with it. I wanted to give the hint that she's speaking in a language she doesn't have complete command of; her lines are mostly in the present tense, a bit clumsy. It's not intended to give the impression that she's stupid or unteachable; Mkhait, like Kendra 2,000 years later, was taken in by her Watcher at a very young age, and he's set about "civilizing" her; that entails teaching her a "proper" language, even though he could easily use her own. Which means she ends up speaking no language fluently - robbed of her own, and taught a simplified version of his. It's a time-honoured way of keeping people in line: make sure they can't even articulate any dissent - at least not in a way "polite and civilized" people need to take seriously.
Now he's been mumbling under his breath constantly since they left the city, often in languages she's never heard, if they're even languages at all.
"The Romans attack, and we flee to Giza? Why?"
"You'll see soon enough." He's quiet, breathes shakily as he tries to shift his weight, then inexplicably laughs. "Why? Because it's lost. All of it. Thousands of years of accumulated knowledge, gone in an instant, pffft." He rattles off a quick sentence in something she thinks might be Babylonian. "I'm the only one who'll ever know that now."
Exactly why the Watchers would allow such precious writings to only be stored in Alexandria, rather than wherever their true base is... Hell, for all I know, ol' Whatshisname (I very deliberately don't name the Watcher in this fic) is mistaken about this and his bosses have copies of everything. But it's one of those classic questions surrounding both the loss of the Alexandria Library and the following 2,000 years - just how much knowledge, how much writing, has been irretrievably lost to carelessness or deliberate destruction? One of the best ways of controlling the world is to make sure that your stories, your truths, are the ones that count, and the conflicting stories are reduced to fairytales ("children's stories" or "old wive's tales") if they survive at all. This is, of course, part and parcel of "Restless" as well. (Coincidentally, one classic (and most likely false) myth surrounding the Library was that the last remnants of it was burned during the Muslim invasion of Egypt in the 7th century, when the commander supposedly ordered it burned because "If the writings there are in conflict with the Qur'an they're blasphemous; if not, they're redundant." It probably didn't happen exactly like that, but the sentiment has been uttered many times before and after by all sorts of different people interested in power.) So basically, what I was trying to get to was that this is one of the central points of this fic, and the reason it's set at the moment when one hugely influential empire crushes another.
Also, go read Umberto Eco's The Name Of The Rose.
"We will make them pay. Egypt will -"
"Egypt will do nothing. Your people are done.
The Watcher may be channelling Julius Caesar in Asterix Goes To Egypt here... He's not entirely wrong, though; Egypt ceased to be a major, independent power with the arrival of the Romans (if not much earlier - Cleopatra was Greek).
The Romans are barbarians, but they'll be very successful barbarians, with swords and walls and everyone marching in time to simple slogans. They don't care for philosophy or astronomy, and mathematics only concerns them if it helps them calculate trajectories. They didn't even burn the library because they're afraid of it – they did it by accident, because the notion that it might be valuable didn't even occur to them. They're the future." He returns to his mumbling, reciting texts to himself in words an Egyptian farmer's daughter has no chance of understanding, so she's alone to wonder just how much of that is true and how much is just him needing to hear himself speak.
...I get ranty. Take of this what you will, apply it to contemporary debates however you will.
I will point out, though, that the word "barbarian" comes from Greek and pretty much means "Someone so subhuman they don't even speak Greek."
When they get off the ship the next day, his leg has swollen to twice its normal size and Mkhait has to carry him. She offers to find him a surgeon, but he refuses; the fever has already started, there's nothing anyone can do. She hires a donkey cart.
This fic, of course, also takes place 2,000 years before the invention of antibiotics.
"We are here." She shakes him awake carefully; at first she thinks he might be dead, but then he groans and manages to sit halfway up. The moon has risen again and the pyramids loom blackly a few hundred cubits away, larger by night than by day; huge, ancient, everlasting. "What is it?"
"What is what?"
"You said everything is lost. You bring me here. You want me to slay something before you..." Funny, her entire life has been about killing, yet she doesn't know any words in Greek for how an old man dies.
He nods, slowly. "Have I told you how old these things are?"
"Old." She shrugs. "Gods themselves -"
"Two thousand five hundred years." He knows that means little to her.
Not because she cannot count, but because, let's face it, 2,500 years is a completely incomprehensible age. Our sense of history tends to be woefully disproportional - there's stuff that happened recently, there's stuff that happened "in the past" (say, the last 100 years), and then there's antiquity where, presumably, Charlemagne and Caligula and Alexander and Qi Shuangdi and Khufu were more or less contemporary to each other. I wanted to note that to characters in ancient Rome, the pyramids are already as ancient as they are to us. Probably more, given the difference in how we teach history today. And even that pales next to the knowledge that the first major settlements around the major rivers are 10,000 years old, and that we'd been knocking around Africa for about 500,000 years before that. In all these stories we tell ourselves, in all the ideas we still build our lives and our societies and our laws on, how much remains of the stories we told around a campfire down by the Cape half a million years ago? How much of it still controls us?
"Fifty lifetimes. And they were built by men, for men – powerful magicians seeking immortality, at which some were successful, but still men."
One good reason why we never saw Egyptian mummies in Buffy: obviously, they were taken care of thousands of years ago by other Slayers.
"So what -"
"You are not here to slay. You are here to see." His voice is shaking, she feels the fever coming off him in waves. "Time is a funny thing. Once something is old enough, it's easy to think it's always existed. But the pyramids were built by men.
"This is the way women and men have behaved since the beginning..." - Rupert Giles
"... because a bunch of men who died thousands of years ago made up that rule." - Buffy Summers
There was a time when they were not here. There was a time when there was only her."
At first she doesn't understand what he's talking about, then... "'Her'? The Sphinx?"
He nods towards the giant statue, its body half-buried in sand but its head held high. "The Lioness. One of those old kings put his face on her, built his grave beside her to live forever, but it's borrowed power; she was here long before that. Since the old gods were driven from this plane, she's stood guard. Even if everything else disappears, she'll always be here."
This is actually a real, if very speculative theory that some historians have; that the sphinx is really several thousand years older than the pyramids, and that its head was originally a lion's head to match its body. It's cryptoarchaeology, and I don't think it's very well supported by actual historical facts, but it's one of those ideas that really jog the imagination: what if the sphinx, rather than being just something the old pharaohs put next to the pyramids, was actually the remnant of something much older? What if the sphinx, and what it symbolized, was the reason they put the pyramids there in the first place, the way modern churches tend to be built in the same spots heathen temples once stood? What if all of history is a palimpsest where the old writing is never completely wiped clean?
So in my Buffyverse, it's pretty simple: there was a hellmouth here. At some point very very long ago, the annals of which may have just burned in Alexandria, some nameless Slayer faced the old gods here and shut it down, and the people left a monument of it. (We know from s7 that the Scythe spent enough time in Egypt to be mentioned in hieroglyphs.) It's almost forgotten at this point (when Europeans started "discovering" Egypt in the 18th century, the sphinx itself was almost a myth - almost completely buried in the sand), and it's been appropriated by other rulers in the thousands of years since, but it's still there. Waiting.
He puts her hand on her shoulder and suddenly speaks to her in her own language. "I know you've never liked me much. I've made a soldier out of you, because it was my job. I hope you'll forgive me for that someday. I cannot offer you anything more than this: Things changed here once. Sooner or later, they will change again. And there is still some magic left here. Now go."
This... may have been written while watching the protests on Tahrir square during the Arab spring. The idea that you can suppress ideas, you can bury them, you can appropriate, subvert and replace them, but if they're valid, they will pop up again when you least expect it.
I do think I could have set the Watcher and his actions up a bit better, the reveal that the reason they're here is because he knows that he's deliberately kept her ignorant and wants her to know where she's coming from, and why he does that when he's basically seemed like an authoritarian asshole so far. It's not that he doesn't care for his Slayer, even if he may not consider her his equal. Whether that makes him justified is another matter, of course.
A dozen different curses she's been storing for years and couldn't have spoken to him five minutes ago occur to her (you son of a, you arrogant, you self-serving, you uncaring, you fucker of) before she remembers that he's dying.
Whether "fucker of" should be taken literally... I'll leave up to the reader. Again, their power dynamics are pretty messed up by modern standards.
And she's suddenly noticed a light under the Sphinx's head.
It's a campfire, she discovers. There's a girl there. She's nubian, dressed in rags and bone, at once younger than her and so, so much older. And she speaks Mkhait's language – not her watcher's well-schooled city speech, but the dialect she didn't think she remembered from back home. They talk all night.
Is there any better place to run into the First Slayer than here? Exactly what they talk about I'll leave up to the reader, but the fact that they do it in her own language is pretty much the point.
In the morning, Mkhait carries her watcher to the Nile and sets his body afloat. She never knew what gods he worshipped, but she knows that the river carries anything to the sea, and Greece is somewhere far beyond that on the other side of the world; let them find him if they want, if he needs guidance.
He dominated her entire life so far, and he never shared anything about himself. Why would he? She's just a soldier. So exactly how affectionate her farewell here is... again, I wish I'd set up the Watcher a bit more, not to make him more of a villain or more of a wise guide, and setting a slave free as your last act doesn't outweigh enslaving her in the first place. But he's just as trapped by the story as she is, even if he's at least allowed to make his own choices.
Also, of course, we think Greece and Egypt are pretty close, geographically speaking. But to someone who's been kept in servitude their whole life, it might as well be on the other side of the world.
She stands there for hours, watching the river flow, constantly changing, renewing and rewriting itself. Then she turns and continues walking up the river. She doesn't know where she's going, but she has an idea about who she is now, and just being the one who's going will have to be good enough for now.
The river is a constant. The river is ever-changing. Yada yada.
This is also, for some reason, a nod to one of my favourite Bob Dylan songs, a 17-minute song about age and regained purpose he wrote in 1997 called "Highlands", which ends:
Well, my heart’s in the Highlands at the break of day
Over the hills and far away
There’s a way to get there and I’ll figure it out somehow
But I’m already there in my mind and that’s gonna have to be good enough for now
...Though he did also write a happy little song many years earlier called "Watching The River Flow", based on Hesse's Siddharta. Ever-changing, constant.
And speaking of song choices, World Party's "Curse of the Mummy's Tomb is very much an inspiration throughout this.
...There is no curse!
It's just a mummy's tomb.
Written records of her end here.
This last line wasn't in the fic when I first posted it, it struck me (as improvements to fic often does) a couple of days later. The records of her life have just burned, the one man who knew what she was is dead, and so she steps into the fog of history, no longer trapped in a story she wasn't allowed to control. I have no idea what happened to her afterwards, and that's the way I like it.
