“What's your name?” he asked. I had been awake and unusually alert. The pain was mostly gone, it floated just below my attention, so that any too quick movement brought it up, but sitting still or moving carefully I did not notice it much.
What was my name? I stared into the fire. I sat on the straw, back leaned against the wall. He on a stool a few feet away. My name.
As the silence stretched he asked, “Do you have a name?” It was a simple answerable question. Why was I reticent to speak? I never thought of myself as anyone but myself. Who was I? A question of metaphysics. My old master, the old dead bastard, had called me 'whore,' an appellation that made no sense, except as insult, as he had never paid me. I then was a cynical and obedient slave. I now was, what? A slave still? A disobedient slave? Not even that, not even bold as that. A hesitant slave? Or not a slave at all? No tool, whether a tool for murder or masturbation, had will itself. I had no will perhaps. But hesitation, in hesitation there was at least the implication of will. Is there such a thing as will, or is it a fairy tale we amuse ourselves with?
“What are you thinking?” he asked. He had been studying me as I didn't speak.
“Is will? Rather, if, or should, will exist, does will exist? Or is everything, or anything, any moment, a mechanism, an inevitable if infinite, nearly infinite, a mechanism of great complication but utter predictability. If I am a slave is my master not also a slave? His will a fairy tale, himself an equation, of great, great complexity, but an equation none the less? Do I exist in any sense except as right now? As I do right now? My past a narrative I am now telling myself? If I disobey is it inevitable? Or do I disobey, or.” I stopped suddenly. He was looking at me carefully, as if afraid any reaction would be the wrong one.
“I always repeat repeat.” I went on needlessly. “Circles upon circles of thought, ideas re-parsed, re-contextualized and repeated, conclusion washed away with each new turning. All a hopeless muddle.” I trailed at and we sat in silence for a long moment.
“I recognize myself in that.” he said gently. I looked at him but he looked into the fire.
I hadn't spent much thought on him, but he was another thing that didn't make sense. His pretension that he was above us slaves and masters roiled me. But also there was something there. Something. I didn't know.
“I believe you are the strangest person I have ever met,” he said. “And I've met some strange ones.” He looked at me more closely. “A tar addict without a name who kidnaps babies, casually ignores more pain than would cripple the most disciplined soldier, and struggles with obtuse metaphysical questions as another would brood over a lost lover.”
Was there venom in his voice? A touch of sarcasm or something. My ire raised against him to speak of me so. It wasn't rational, but resentment smoldered in me. He looked back to the fire and seemed to study it.
“Okay” he said after a while, giving me a small smile. “That answers the question. Is it likely your former or possibly current master will come looking for you?”
“Look, no,” I said.
“Okay.” He rose and stepped towards the door. “I will leave you be now. If anyone, if you meet anyone you are my cousin from the countryside by Asgyth. Your family was slain and you were raped by soldiers wearing blue and white. Your name is,” he paused, considering. “Your name is Kara.” He smiled very slightly and sadly. “I was going to name a daughter that once.” His face returned to its carefully controlled neutrality. He turned to leave.
“He does not need to look,” I said, “he knows I'm here.”
He spun quickly and looked hard at me.
“How?” he demanded, his voice harsh. Then, “I'm sorry. How?” more gently.
“He comes to me in my dreams” I said. “I am here so that he might punish me.”
He looked at me for a long time with great intensity. After a while he said, “okay,” and left.
That night I dreampt that I was walking in a river of blood. And down it flowed feet and hands and arms and then a man's headless limbless torso. And then a woman's head and she was screeching “you are the evil, you are the evil!” which seemed absurd. I did not believe in evil. My master was there then, in his massive form, but his body was all of black, sucking in the light around him and the color beyond that. He blocked out the sun and leaning drank from the river, chewing the bits of gore and stroking his obscene erection.
Then I was falling falling and I was alone and naked and curtains opened as if I were on a stage, and a thousand people were laughing at me and jeering, and on my chest where my breast had been was a black and cancerous mass that pulsed with every beat of my heart, and a woman's voice whispered inside me but I could not make out the words. As I was trying to figure out where to hold my hands she whispered again, “a thousand statues, all gray stone and marble. Athena hunting. All chiseled stone. Athena hunts!” And I was looking at the man at the cabin and he wrapped me in a white sheet and I said, “No, I cannot I am not pure,” and he said “You are pure.”
“No, I have fucked and I have murdered and found joy in the spilling of blood.”
“I am not asking it of you but telling you it is so. You are pure. You have locked yourself deep deep deep you have locked yourself deep deep, a thousand shards of glass, a thousand selves inside you, cutting cutting cutting but buried deep deep deep deep. I do not ask I tell it. I see it and I tell it.”
And then I was falling away from him and he was calling out my name, a name I didn't know, but he could not find me, and my master was there and his slimy arms held me where the man had held me, and my master pressed into my hand a knife, a long knife with green emeralds and a black black blade.
And then before me was the baby. I held the knife to its screaming throat. I cut the child's hand and blood poured from my own hand. I cut my arm and the baby shrieked in pain. Then darkness had eyes and reached down to take my child and hissed sharp fangs at me, and I reached for the child to save it but I could not reach I could not reach I could not reach.
I woke sweating and panting. I lay still on the pallet calming myself. I heard voices, the man's and a woman's I didn't know. They were in the other room and too muffled for me to hear. The woman sounded angry, the man defensive. I closed my eyes but couldn't fall back asleep. I could actually understand them if I concentrated.
“So you brought her home?” the woman's voice asked.
“Yes,” the man answered simply.
“Typical!” she said, exasperated. “Argyl, you're in hiding. That means nobody is supposed to know where you are. Bad enough you went into town, but bringing back some stray puppy isn't good. What do you know about her?”
She didn't actually sound angry. Or rather, it was the anger of concern, not malice. I wondered how I could tell that. Something about the voice I think, the tone. I missed whatever he said but it had been brief.
“Well, I should talk to her,” the woman's voice.
They must have rose for I heard footsteps coming to the door. I found my pulse quickened somewhat. Odd, that I should care. I felt that I wanted to stay her anger towards him, defend his decision. Odd that I should care. I decided not to care. Better that way.
The door opened and the woman entered first. She was thin and dressed in plain brown. She wore a sword.
“What's your name?” Her voice was soft now, trying to be kind.
“Kara,” I said. The woman looked significantly at the man.
“Do you have a real name?” she asked.
“It's okay, this is my wife,” the man said.
She studied me. I looked at her legs. After a long moment she laughed.
“Come sit down,” she said, still mirthful. She turned and walked into the other room. I followed, keeping my eyes down. I kneeled on the floor before her but she said “no, on the chair hun.” I looked at the stool.
“I should not sit higher than you mistress.” She laughed at this.
“Okay, here,” she shoved a few jars our of the way on a table and hopped up to sit on it.
“Careful,” he said snarkaly as he collected the jars and redistributed them to a shelf and another table.
“Has Argyl told you anything of the situation here, oh nameless one?”
I didn't respond.
“Talkative isn't she?” the woman asked.
“Jade, please,” he said.
“Okay,” she said, “here's the important part. Argyl here is in hiding. We're all in hiding but he's in hiding here. Do you care why?”
I shook my head.
“Good. It's good for us for you to be incurious. Now I need to know a few things about you to make sure we're safe. Then I need to tell you a few things. Okay?”
Stupid question. Her face was very angular and her nose was too large. She had a scar on her left check. Not too bad; it made her look tough. Her eyes were very sharp.
“Are you listening to me? I'm glad you can look me in the eye.”
“Sorry mistress,” I said, not meaning it at all. She laughed.
“Keep calling me 'my mistress,' I like that.”
“Jade, please.” Argyl, I finally remembered his name now, said. His tone was sharper now.
“Oh shut up.”
“Hmph.”
“Okay, listen this time. Does anybody know you're here?”
I thought about this. I didn't know how to answer. What did she mean by anybody?
“Don't think, just answer.”
“What do you mean by anybody?”
“Is that a metaphysical question?”
I didn't know how to answer that either.
“She told me her master did, but she also said her master visited in her dreams,” Argyl said.
The woman regarded me for a moment.
“So you're a slave then. Who is your master?”
A demon, I didn't say. Would that betray him? Better not to say.
“Don't think speak,” she said again. I didn't respond.
After an awkward moment Argyl spoke softly. “I think we don't have to worry about a dream master Jade.” She's crazy is what he didn't say, but it hung in the air. Jade looked at me for a while. Brown hair. I didn't look at her eyes. The difference between seeing and noticing something. Certainly I had seen that her hair was brown before. But it hadn't registered or seemed important. It still didn't seem important. How much was like that? What color hair did the woman who I murdered have? Mine had been black, but how long ago was that? When I was a child? Had Archmagio changed my hair as well as my body?
“It isn't my breast,” I said. My voice startled myself. They were both looking at me now. The woman, what had her name been? She had been mid sentence.
“What?” asked Argyl.
“The breast, it wasn't mine. It was another woman's. He sewed it to me. He sewed her hips and breasts to me, and cut out her heart and veins and filled them with sand and broke open my chest and put them in, and now the sand muddles my blood and blunts my purpose. Not my purpose, my function. Blunts my function. I cannot, I am not what I had been. I am never what I had been anyway but particularly so now. I have no self. I am no self. There was never myself, only their body, their mind, their tool.”
They were both looking at me very carefully now. The man, Argyl? Was that a real name? Argyl. I liked how it sounded. Argyl. Argyl. Agravaine or Artigal. Argyl.
“Um dear?” the woman said.
“Yeah?” he said, eyes fixed on me.
“I think you're in over your head here.”
“Yeah.”
It was quiet a moment.
“My master, he knows where I am. But I don't think he cares about you. I, well, I think I am here so he can punish me. He comes in my dreams and tells me things and makes me see things. I have murdered for him. I choked her? Stabbed her? I can't remember. It was all like a dream. Vague and black and black. It's hard, I come and go. I, earlier I was here all, I wasn't thinking at all, but you both seem so far away now. Like I am in a cloud. Like you are behind a thick and dirty glass. I am lost always. I have so little. I am nothing, I am nothing, I am a tool of my master. But I didn't, I hesitated. No piece of iron or wood or glass would hesitate. But I hesitated. I am less than iron.”
“Shh,” said the man. He came to me and held his hand on my shoulder as if to steady me. I looked up at him. Then I lowered my eyes very quickly.
“I'm sorry master.”
The woman snorted at this and laughed without much real mirth.
“I'm not your master,” he said quietly. “I am nobody's master. What they've made you, it is a terrible crime. Not against me but against you. Against humanity. To be a slave, it is terrible. But to be so beaten down, to have your spirit so wrecked, it is, it is evil.”
I didn't look at him. Evil? I didn't believe in evil. “I don't believe in evil,” I said.
“You're the strangest person I've ever met,” he said after a moment. I looked down still. A slave never meets her master's eye. He was not my master, but close enough now. Why had I spoken aloud? A slave keeps her thoughts to herself. I had not spoken like that since they beat me for it as a child. Spoken openly, without a filter, without a simple yes master no master. I felt very tired and weak. As if I had released a poison into my blood. Speaking was no unburdening. It only deepened my disobedience. Only made things less certain.
“Why don't you lay down hun?” The woman asked. What was her name? Jade?
“Yes mistress” I mumbled, standing and walking slowly to the bedroom. Argyl supported my arm. I didn't really need him but let him. The fire burned low when we made it through the door and it was cool. That didn't make sense for some reason but I left it. He helped me down the pallet and I pulled the blanket over me.
I closed my eyes. When I opened them he was gone but the fire was burning brighter. It seemed as if no time had passed, but obviously it had. I lay thoughtless for a time, dread overwhelming me, a heavy weight on my soul that I don't believe in. I felt wrecked. I hated the fire for its warmth and turned away from it. Black black black black. A horrible and empty black. Bah. Does depression make a bad poet of you as well? I slept, or almost slept, and then slept.
I woke suddenly to the sound of great commotion in the other room.