“What are you going to do with it?”
“Is that what you want to talk about?” I probe Peitho's eyes with mine. Their emeralds have hardened, dimmed with defiance.
“So what if it is?”
I look down at the Rod in my lap, nodding to myself, my lips turning themselves inward. Something roils in my stomach, some distant alchemy of emotions I want to ignore, I want not to feel: Disappointment, acceptance, should-have-known-ation. I can feel a sneer pulling at the edges of my nostrils, flaring them. There's something pinching at the back of my eyes and my throat is tight. But I'm staring at the Rod.
S – I hate you, I think as hard at the serpent wrapped around the Rod of Wadjet as I can. This is your fault.
You cannot even admit to yourself why you are upset, Wadjet challenges me, and my throat catches.
I glare at Peitho. “We're taking it back,” I say. “Isn't that what we agreed – to take the Rod back to your family – your Matere?”
Peitho's eyes are emerald ice. “Is it?”
“Of course you would say that. You've deceived everyone else at every other juncture – why not the one deception by which no one can be surprised?”
I am unsure of the look on Peitho's face. It is none of the faces I might have expected her to make. Then she sighs – and I do not believe the vulnerability which bows her shoulders.
“It is my nature,” she says to the floor.
“To deceive? Horseshit.”
I cannot help the... tenderness which I feel for Peitho, despite my words. Words must be said – emotions need not by their very nature be shared.
As much as I want to harden my heart against her – I do not want to harden my heart at all, against anyone. Perhaps I am speaking out of turn to over-explain my younger self and in that way again missing the lessons in my errors. But if my life and the choices I will make and have made since can be summed up with one core philosophy, it is that which softened my anger and opened that place in my heart which I only then knew I wanted Peitho to occupy in a meaningful way – and it is that to which I will go to my utter dissolution defending: I would watch the world burn to give its arsonists more than ample opportunity to be honest with themselves.
Whatever evils she had done to me, I agreed with Iesu when he said to turn the other cheek time and again no matter what. Or I wanted to. And if wanting to believe— If believing is doing – where had I heard that? – then I had to be willing to let Peitho deceive me again if I were ever going to hear her utter the Truth. Which means I have to listen to her speak and I have to believe – or be willing to believe – that it is her Truth – or some version thereof – which she speaks. For how long must I do this with her? What retribution could assuage the injury I do myself by causing her harm or by allowing harm to come to her?
In a much later century, someone will say that although they disagree with an argument, they will fight til their death to defend the right to have and share an erroneous idea. Your century might learn much from this. None of this, other than as tumblers in a sort of ideological lock falling into place in my mind, was conscious. There was not even a full second between my choosing to ask genuinely – rather, my choosing to take the chance to verbally assault her – and Peitho's reaction. For it was the assault to which she reacted.
Again, I may and must be speaking out of turn for you to know these things of me. But this is not, as I must keep reminding myself, for you. Why did I do what I did? If I want to know, I must speak the answers – especially those I would most like to keep hidden only to myself. If, as they say, I lead, others will follow.
And the answer to that – whether you want to know it or not, because I do – is that in that less-than-singular second my mind and my thoughts and everything which is my consciousness were caught like the needle of a gramophone in the faintest groove – only the last echo of an echo of an echo of an echo of maybe the greatest lesson any child can learn on their path to adulthood; something the Master told me once and only once – the moment I met him.
He held me, a more-than half-starved boy of nine winters, by the wrist, nearly lifting me off the ground. I didn't resist. There was no point. I'd chosen the old man because I'd thought him, hunched on his gnarled staff, his beard nearly dragging the ground, slow and feeble – in other words an easy mark. Whether I was starving and desperate or not are irrelevant details: I'd thought wrong. He caught my hand well before it neared his coin purse.
I met his eyes.
As far as I was concerned – really as far as anyone watching was concerned – I may as well already have been dead. He had at that moment absolute power over me. Trash as I was, it would have been nothing to anyone if he had killed me – or fucked me – or fucked me and eventually killed me. Whatever order. Really, any choice of what to do with me was his.
And I met his eyes. Not for mercy. I don't know why. I just did.
Maybe it was him. Maybe he made me. But I don't believe that.
What else was there to do? Was I going to look away? I'd defied greater odds than one old man.
I'd never seen anything like his eyes, though. It was probably that. They were all gray – even the pupil. That is, there was no pupil. Just one colorless gray circle the color of London fog in the center of his too-big eyes. The wrinkles at their corners bunch and I realize that he's smiling – and that he's not squeezing my wrist tightly enough to hurt me. No. He's inspecting me like my father used to inspect the sheep.
He'd been speaking, I think. But now my hand is free and he's kneeling down to me and I'm as afraid as I have ever been. Even though I could easily run. I've seen what smiling men do to boys like me. Men who kneel and make themselves small, make themselves appear weak for us. Distinctly I am aware that I want to urinate and that I have to be braver than that if anyone is ever going to believe I'm destined to be a hero.
The old man puts his hand on my shoulder and pulls me into his colorless gray robes. I'd expected his body to be angular and sharp, but he's muscular, almost soft. He's... hugging me. I can hear that he's talking through his chest, but not over the steady rhythm of his heart. He's glad for something. I'm just glad for the touch.
I haven't been touched by another person since— He says something I can't hear, and then he pulls me away from him to look me in the face again. His eyes have pupils now – but they're still as gray as gray is gray. With his hand on my arm, he says:
“It is decided, then. You will be coming with me to learn. Does this sound good to you?”
I nod, dumbly. Anything is better than more-than half-starving on these streets. Even if it's— But maybe he won't be that kind of smiling man. I don't know what learning means. But I also feel safe with him. So it can't be that bad. It can't be worse than dying.
“Good,” he says, still smiling his warm smile inside his mustaches. “Then your first lesson – and your most important, you hear me?” I nod again, still not knowing what the hell this old man is talking about; but still lowering my eyebrows in every child's focused face. “Good,” he laughs, squeezing my arm.
“There is a moment before every choice you make, you understand, where you can choose to make any other choice than that you are destined toward. You could have chosen the pocket of anyone in this street to loot for your bread, but you chose mine. No other little boys were brave enough to attempt my pockets. Because they know what you do not from having been born on these streets? Or because you were called to do what no one else either would or could?" His eyes shine in a way I have never seen before, and I can't know how he knows that I wasn't born to the streets of London/ but... "Whether that was the correct choice remains to be determined, my new young ward. But if you are going to survive this world, you must be mindful of this: the choice is always yours, no matter how things may appear. Use that moment wisely, yes?”
S – So much for using that moment wisely.
Peitho lifts her eyes to mine. They glisten with tears I want to mistrust. “I know that you could understand.”
“I could understand? What do you mean?” I ask.
“What it is to be made.”
I wish that I didn't – know what it is to be made. I wish also that her eyes couldn't see so far into me. Nodding, I drop my gaze to the floor and assume a concentration face.
“And yet you choose not to.” She meets my eyes. Her pupils are all but invisible. “Do you know what it is – your nature?”
“Do I know my nature?” I parrot, stupidly.
“Yes – your nature. Do you know what it is? What you are – what it is, fundamentally, to be you?”
“Do you?” I ask.
She winces visibly. “You ask me questions you have no asked of yourself first, Robert Longshore, Fulcrum of Fate? You believe of yourself that you know all that there is to believe, and yet—“ She stops, glares at me for her word choice, then – “You have not asked of yourself the most fundamental questions? Fine. I will tell you what it is, my nature.
“I was born to be this, Robert. Peitho – temptation, deception—“ she spits this pair— “It is not... my... fault – that I am this way. I know that I—“ she rolls her head on her neck. I cannot tell whether it is a lingual barrier or whether she is trying not to say something; I do know that trying to guess will be why I guess wrong; but she is growing rapidly more visibly agitated. Then she levels her gaze on me and the blacks of her pupils are as fathomable as the ocean and as empty as the starless sky. “I didn't have a choice.”
“You didn't have a choice?” If I sound skeptical, I don't mean to.
“No. Not in becoming... this – me – Peitho. I'd never had a choice. Not until....” Her eyes fall away from mine.
“The man in the black robe.” Her eyes lift to meet mine, hooded with shadows.
“Yes.” There's a desperation in Peitho's face, then a dam breaks. “I haven't been truthful with you about him. He... I didn't first learn about you from my mother. I – He first said your name to my ears.”
My ears perk up.
I'm more shocked by my non-reaction than I am by her deception. Then, no so much – this isn't what I want to talk about. She's either circling around to get away or she doesn't know how to get in to what she wants to say. Do I interrupt? Do I wait? How long do I really have with her? How long, really, is two weeks – if it will all be spent like this?
“He said that if I wanted to be free that I needed to find you, Robert Longshore – Fulcrum of Human Fate, Philalitheia, Seeker After Truth, The Son, Born to Lift The Skirts of His Mother and Reveal Her Great Mysteries.”
“Wait.” I hold up a hand, frowning more inwardly than at her. “That's what he called me?”
“That's what he called you.”
I blink.
“May I?”
I shake my head to rattle whatever is happening in there loose. “Yes – please.”
“He said that you are one of the Old Gods sent to live in the world, to judge it, and to set it to rights.”
I can't help scoffing. Me? She's lucky I don't shout. She's lucky I don't stop Ted and get off this crazy carriage.
“Is something funny?”
I can't tell whether Peitho is piqued or not – and I don't particularly care.
“You believed him?” I answer with a question – like everyone likes.
“Robert, I am—“ and suddenly she is more serpent than woman, her tail more than filling the available space in the floor of the carriage, pinning my legs to the wood and spilling over into my lap— “the product of the Old Gods' magick. I am Peitho, dedicant to Lamiya, a woman who pulled so much of the goddess Wadjet's magick into her self that she and her attendant priestesses were permanently altered. I am the offspring of that magick. Do you think that the claims about you are any wilder, any stranger, than my own reality? And do you really think that I would be all that concerned with you revealing my secrets when that was my very goal – to reveal the secrets of my sisters and our Reality?”
Her voice never raises above a whisper. Maybe it's the literal weight of her that punctuated her words – seeing as they are said almost directly into my mouth.
I swallow hard in response.
With a sigh, Peitho falls weightlessly – quite literally: the cart is left unrocked – back to her seat and is human again. I am surprised to see that her gifted dress is undamaged by her change. Why, then, did she abandon her clothing?
R – Because a skirt around a snake's waist should look stupid in a combat situation.
S – Well, yeah – sure – but fighting nude—
I – Is traditional. Either she survives to retrieve her clothing or she does not. Shame of nudity is nothing compared with relief of survival.
S – All right. But that means—
R – That she underestimated Metus, yes.
S – ...That she genuinely didn't know what Metus was.
R – Right. Because only a fool would believe she could win that fight.
Somehow I feel like Metus wasn't surprised by what she turned out to be.
Probably because Metus had been telling me the whole time in none-too-subtle language.
“Yes,” Peitho says, suddenly, startling me a little. “I believed him. Robert—“
“What was it like?” I ask, meeting her eyes and leaning forward to reach for her hand.
She does not give it to me.
Peitho's face deflates and she falls back into her bench, speechless.
“You must have wanted out so badly for him to have heard your prayers,” I say, searching her eyes as they look to be anywhere but where I would go – or with me.
Peitho frowns. “Do you know who was under that hood?”
“I think I might,” I allow with a nod. “Sort of. Not his true identity. But I think I know one of his titles: The Grand Magus of the Venatores Maleficarum.”
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