Fic: Soothsayer - 1/1 (BBC Sherlock)
Title: Soothsayer
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 4.5k
Betas: vyctori, seijichan, lifeonmars
Disclaimer: Do not own.
Summary: “They said you were a soothsayer, before the city was taken, except no one ever believed you,” the soldier says. “How does that work?” (Cassandra!lock AU)
Warnings: discussion of past and future violence, some sexual; character death
“They said you were a soothsayer, before the city was taken, except no one ever believed you,” the soldier says. “How does that work?”
Their cargo-his charge, his king’s prize-throws back his dark head and laughs. The sound lifts the hairs on the back of the soldier’s neck and he shivers in the stifling humidity of the ship.
“Are you mad?” the soldier asks as reasonably as he can.
“Not yet,” the soothsayer replies. “I will be soon.”
The soldier smiles reflexively at the joke. “From what? The captivity isn’t so bad, you’ll see. You’ll be well-treated among us.”
“You’re simply uncertain why. Most of the human booty is obviously slave material or was already raped half to death during the sack. I’m untouched and it confuses you.”
“Er… yes,” he admits. “A bit.”
The soothsayer smiles. “No one may touch me. No one may believe me. These are the conditions of my curse.”
“All right…” the soldier says slowly. He wants to sit across from their captive but he is on guard duty. He continues to stand. “Why not?”
“I’m a very attractive man. You’ve noticed. I’ve seen you looking. Imagine what I look like properly fed and bathed.”
As the soldier imagines, his mouth turns dry. “Modest, aren’t you?”
“My intellect is superior to my face, of course,” the soothsayer continues. “He didn’t care, obviously.”
“He?”
“A god. I won’t name him. He comes to me if I name him.”
The soldier laughs. “If you could summon one of the gods at will, why remain our prisoner?”
The soothsayer rolls his eyes. “Because he’s annoying. He returns to ask me to reconsider, and when I don’t sleep with him, he storms off in a huff. If I anger him again, the curse will worsen. The last time, he took away touch. Another time, and no one will so much as listen to me.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” the soldier says, playing along. “You’ve a lovely voice.”
“Too lovely,” the soothsayer replies.
“You could keep talking,” the soldier invites. “If you liked.”
The soothsayer sits up straighter upon his bench. Such a long body on this one, long and lean with fingers to match. His hands look as soft as his lips. “I’ll speak my fill with you,” he says. “I won’t be speaking again, after, not enough to matter.”
Unsettled yet intrigued, the soldier smiles politely.
“Tell me if I speak true,” says the soothsayer. “You are tired and weary, leaving no wife or parents behind, only a sister. You are a soldier, raised to it, and yet a healer, born to it. Your gifts could have made you a poet, had you an ear to match your memory of words. Instead, you only remember what greatness and horror you have seen and recite dull mumblings into greater offerings. You have been pierced through by a fierce arrow and the sickness nearly took your arm. You struggled back to life after coins were laid upon your eyes and here you stand, a miracle without the aid of the gods.”
The soldier blinks at him. “Are people gossiping about me? Who would gossip about me?”
“Did I speak true?”
“Who told you?”
With a sudden groan, the soothsayer tugs viciously at his own hair.
“Oi, no, none of that,” the soldier urges. He steps forward but he does not touch. “Don’t hurt yourself.”
The soothsayer flings down his hands and lifts his eyes. “It’s not myself I intend to hurt.” He studies the soldier in the dim light below deck. His eyes widen. “Oh. Nor you.”
Such a strange statement deserves a cautious answer. “I’m glad to hear it.” When the soothsayer doesn’t look away or even blink, the soldier adjusts his stance. A moment longer and he clears his throat. “Something the matter?”
“I’m deciding.”
The soldier looks at him oddly. “Yes…?”
Though the unreadable intent behind it flows and changes, the soothsayer’s grey graze remains constant. His is the pressure of a stream upon the twig damming it. “I’m deciding,” he repeats.
“What to tell me?”
He rolls his eyes. “No, what will happen.”
The soldier laughs at the sarcasm. Strange and unnerving this may be, it’s still the best guard duty the soldier could have asked for.
The soothsayer regards him a moment longer before leaning back upon his bench and gesturing for the soldier to join him. “I’ve decided. Sit with me.”
“I’m on duty,” the soldier declines.
“Presently. If I tell you a story, will you remember all of it?”
The soldier nods. “My memory is good.”
“Then I will tell you all. You will sit with me before I have finished.”
The soldier doubts that. Even so, he humours the man. “A long story, is it?”
“Most are.”
“All right, then. It’ll pass the time.”
The soothsayer’s mouth feigns friendliness. “Oh, if it will pass the time...!” He groans and again tugs at his hair. “All the insight of an age and every lackwit willing to listen for the sake of entertainment!”
“Look, stop that.” The soldier doesn’t reach for the soothsayer’s wrists, doesn’t prevent the damage he does to himself. He knows in his bones that it isn’t his place to do such work. Instead, he sits. “There. I’ve sat with you before you’ve begun. Happy? Your prophecy came true.”
Sharp grey eyes pierce him. The laugh, sharper by far, skewers him. “Your kindness was to come later, soldier. I dislike it so soon. Unfair of you, to whet an appetite that shall go unsated to the last.”
“How do you mean?”
The soothsayer shifts on the bench. Beneath him, the slither of chain over wood rises over the constant groaning of the sea. “We could have met again, you and I,” the soothsayer states. “On a dusty road, years hence, you and your firstborn son find me in a ditch, broken, drugged and near to death. You remember my face, distorted though it has become through time and mistreatment, as all faces distort beneath the pain of living. Moreover, you recall my voice and you recognise my groaning. This time, you remember to ask my name before it’s too late.
“From there, you send your son on to market alone-he’s old enough, a strong boy, and his cousins will meet him without incident-and you take me upon your shoulders, broken though they have been, broken though you are.
“Yes, you touch me then. Years hence, when I can again be touched. I’ll give in, you understand. The god sought my body and my love and when he could not have them, he stole contact and credibility from me. I’ll give in before I lose my looks. There are worse decisions. I’ve already made one today, for us, much worse, though better for you, I think.
“I’ll give into him and he will make me touchable once more. My hardened heart, he will have nothing of. My punishment will continue, sore of arse and unbelieved. But I will be able to touch bodies again, if not minds.
“More will come before I surrender to him, of course. Boredom. The killer of the soul, the destroyer of the mind. I will be kept as a spectacle by your ruler, his talking dog, a diamond wrested from the crown of a defeated king. I will be carted through the city streets in a cage as if my body were dangerous and not my words. Though your ears are blunt, my tongue remains sharp. Of that, have no doubt.
“But the boredom will rot me and no man will kill me, and thus I will summon a lustful god and pray his interest in my arsehole has yet to wane. It won’t have, but it might. A mortal may not always prophecy the behaviour of the gods, and certainly not their whims.
“With my protection removed and my meanings still silenced, I will be cast out. I will face harm. I will avoid most, but many decisions rest between what is bad and what is worse. You know this.
“You will know this when you find me. You will know this when you carry me home, a limp and dirty creature. You intend to bury me soon, for you expect me to die. When I live instead under the care of your wife, you decide to keep me. Your younger children take to me as a tutor, fear me for my madness, and respect me for my knowledge of arithmetic and the sciences. You will call me a philosopher, then, not a soothsayer, although I am both and so have always been.
“Your wife will die before your youngest daughter is grown, but the girl will grow strong nonetheless. She’s my favourite, you know. Biting sense of humour, worse even than yours. She walks like you and has your eyes, framed by your wife’s hair. She’s a lovely girl and when her first husband attempts to beat her, she’ll kill him and walk free. We raise her well, the three of us.
“You do not marry again. For two years and eighty-three days, you touch no one, seek no one, and then upon the night of that day, you turn to me and you set your lips just below where my shoulder becomes my neck. When I tremble, you release me. I shout at you. You retire for the night enraged and I slip into your bed behind you. I find my pleasure in you.
“We continue on this way, your children grown, our joints aching. You often joke I ought to take up weaving, but I prefer my bees and their natural tapestry. You come to watch me the day I realise I love you, and Aphrodite herself intervenes before that jealous god blasts you from the glade. You look upon her splendour with awe, as most mortals do, and this assuages her pride when I am unimpressed. She forces permission from my curser. He offers me the choice. I may love you without seeing you harmed or I may be believed. I choose, curiously, to love you. The offer is a test, of course, and had I chosen otherwise, I might have received nothing at all. I cannot prophecy the whims of the gods.
“For the rest of our days, we live together in this way, raising our voices with anger and laughter, sharing one bed and coveting the blanket. You do not believe me-you never believe me-but you will humour me. The examples are beyond count.
“I will tell you to stoop for no coins when you journey to the market, and you will refuse the counsel with complaints of your back and your knees. You’ll ask why such a warning is necessary. You will dismiss me. That day, you will see a flash of gold upon the street. You will, in time, recall your joints and aches soldier. Immediately after, you will watch as a boy of eleven is trampled to death in his attempt to reach the coin.
“You indulge me but never believe me. We argue. Never enough to cause separation, never enough to tarnish my sight of you, because, you forget, I know this is to happen. I recognise your limitations while I hate them. Our bodies give way beneath the years and yet we aren’t unhappy.”
The soothsayer falls silent as abruptly as he had begun. His ancient eyes, sunken, brighten fractionally into sullen youth.
With great effort, the soldier manages to breathe. “You’re... an incredible speaker.”
“But clearly quite mad,” the soothsayer says.
“Well, yes.”
The soothsayer grins, his expression indulgent, fond. “Not yet. In due time, yes.”
The soldier shifts uneasily beneath the unearned intimacy. “You’re not actually saying any of that will happen.”
“No,” the soothsayer replies. His eyes wander from the soldier’s face. He tilts his head and studies his hands. “No, I have decided against that path.”
“Path?”
The soothsayer nods. “There are many roads, and all are straight to me. None curve behind the hills, none vanish behind the woods. I see each to its end and, when I can, I choose where to walk.”
“If you could do that, why did your city fall?” the soldier asks. “I-sorry, I don’t mean to be cruel.”
“You don’t. How curious.” The soothsayer shrugs to the ceiling. “There are places no path runs to. It’s that simple.”
The soldier hums at the piece of sophistry. “What have you chosen, then? If we’re not going to grow old together.”
A smirk pulls his lips into a grotesque shape. He holds the expression for a long moment before laughing. “You don’t believe, and you still ask?”
“You want to talk. I like to listen.”
“And you will remember every word I say,” the soothsayer says. He sighs. “I’ll have that from you at least. That much is certain.”
The soldier smiles more nervously than he’d like. “What else would you have of me?”
The soothsayer looks at him, looks him up and down. His eyes no longer contain the chill of the sea but the danger of heated lead. The soldier’s mouth dries and the soothsayer smiles. “Yes, I could have that of you.”
“I--” The soldier swallows. He looks away and fails to clear his head. “I thought you said no one could touch you. You’re not making sense, soothsayer.”
He rolls his eyes. “No, I said no one could touch me. I didn’t say I couldn’t touch another.”
The soldier nods at the loophole. He should have predicted so much. Not even so imposing a lunatic would have been able to achieve fame and repute without being consistent with himself, as much as a lunatic can be. The soldier tries to smile and he tries to laugh. “And your jealous god wouldn’t smite me?”
“He would,” the soothsayer disagrees, flirtation in the threat. “But I could kiss you first. I might even have enough time to take you.”
“Or enough time for me to take you?” the soldier counters.
“Ugh, you’re still not paying attention.”
“I’m paying attention, I just don’t--”
“You don’t believe me, yes, I know.” He groans again, dropping his head into his hands to grind his brow against his palms. “This is so tedious. I’d rather die than suffer this.”
“We’ll treat you well,” the soldier promises. “You’ll be fed better once we’re off rationing, and everyone and their uncle is ready for a bath. You’ll have one of those as well. Should help you feel human again.”
The soothsayer straightens abruptly upon the bench. “Try to touch me. Go on. Try.” He leans forward, dirty and mad and still absurdly tempting, but the soldier has his orders.
“I’m not permitted,” the soldier says.
“Yes you are. I’m permitting you.”
He shakes his head. “I’m under orders.”
“You’re not meant to sit with me either, and here you are.”
“I’ll stand before another man comes to relieve me.”
“You won’t,” the soothsayer replies.
“If no one can touch you, how did we take you prisoner?” the soldier asks. “Explain that.”
“I was led at arrow point. No direct contact. Loophole. I’m still mortal. I can still be killed.”
“I didn’t take you for a god,” he agrees.
“You might if I were better dressed.”
The soldier laughs. The soothsayer grins back. “You’re a strange one,” the soldier praises.
“Mm, yes.”
“Go on, then. Tell me about this future. The real one.”
“The one I’ve chosen?”
“That would be the one, wouldn’t it?” the soldier says.
The soothsayer’s grin pulls at the corner of his mouth. “It would.”
“How do we meet again in that one?”
The grin pulls in on itself until it vanishes. “You’ve hit upon the crux of the matter.”
“Oh?”
“Mm.” The soothsayer nods. He looks at the soldier with what might be sadness, and his eyes are again old. “We won’t meet again after this.”
Reflexively, the soldier grins a bit. “It’s not a large ship, you know. Small ship, me one of the men assigned to you... I don’t see how we could avoid meeting again.”
“No, you don’t, do you? You will, tonight. You’ll remember my words but think primarily of my voice. You’ll be confused, even worse than you are now.”
“Somehow, I find that unlikely.”
“You would,” the soothsayer agrees. “It’s hardly important. My only concern is that you remember and that you discuss me. As much as it pains me to say it, you’re my last chance to be believed.”
“If anything you say makes sense, I can try to believe it,” the soldier offers. It’s not the most sincere of offers, but the urge to give the man something cannot be resisted. “Or if I see something come true, I suppose.”
“Even then, you won’t.” The soothsayer waves a dismissive hand. “You won’t believe me for years, whatever I say. Not until long after we would have met again. Your second wife.”
“I don’t even have a first wife.”
“But you will. You will find each other, she will give birth to four children and then she will die. You will mourn. Then a day will come when you love again and she will marry you the second time you ask. Not the first, the second. The successful attempt will be in the shade of an olive tree. She will speak of your persistence and you will be tempted toward bluster, as you were upon the first attempt. This time, however, you will be sincere. She will agree.
“She enjoys stories and will expect one at night, like a child. Your memory for conversation will amaze her and she will praise you as a man of great intellect. Your younger son will dislike her. Your daughters will take to her slowly. Your older son will take to her as to a new sister, and so lead his sisters into her friendship.
“After your youngest daughter marries and kills the husband who would have killed her, had he his way, you will mention my saying so. You will have thought your son-in-law a true and virtuous man. You will have been deceived. You will believe, without question, that my prophecy regarding your child’s fate is nothing more than the rambling of a lunatic kept as a prize of war. Articulate rants, you find them, but merely rants. You are wrong but will never see it.
“At first, your wife will think it a coincidence. She will ask for more of what I have said to you. You will tell her about the shadow of the olive tree as it fell across her hair and made her eyes shine all the brighter in comparison. You will tell her that I first told you of it, and you ignored me.
“She will ask you, and she will ask you, and she will ask you. She will ask of the events of this day, this night. You will tell her how I said you would sit and you sat. You will tell her how you said you wouldn’t be caught sitting and how you were, despite your best intentions and being forewarned.
“She will want to know how I could not be touched. She will fixate on how I could touch, should I be willing to doom another to divine vengeance. You won’t understand why, not until she explains it to you. She’s too clever for you, you know. Then again, so am I.
“She will ask if I spoke of her, and you will certainly tell her this. When she asks, she will be lying upon your bed, her head upon your chest, her fingers upon your scar. The one on your shoulder, the one from the arrow. She traces the circle until it tingles, even though you tell her not to. Not maliciously: she forgets and does this idly. In time, you accept it. You don’t think you will, but you learn to ignore the sensation.
“The night will be in summer, the moon gibbous and low. She will ask with a drop of sweat dripping down her brow and along her nose. It will fall like a tear onto your bare chest.
“When this happens, when you tell her I told you this would happen, you won’t be certain whether you imagined the moment to match the words or imagined the words to match the moment. But your wife, she will know. She will learn to be aware before she asks, because she suspects that I know when she will ask. She knows I know her face, the traces of amber within the brown around her pupils. The birthmark on the side of her left knee, yes, I know it.
“This way, small proof by small proof, trusting in your words more than my prophecy, she will know that all I say is true, and I will be believed.” He sits tall as he says his, straightening his back and squaring his shoulders. “Nothing will change from it, of course. I will be quite dead and you old. But I will be believed, thanks to you, even if you yourself never trust my words. This is why I spare you.”
“Spare me?” the soldier echoes. “I’m the one who’s armed.”
The soothsayer rolls his eyes. “And I am the one who could bring down the wrath of a god upon you, yes. As much as I would enjoy the process, I refuse to die without ensuring that someone believes me.”
“Look, we’re not going to kill you.” The soldier shifts on the bench but doesn’t let their knees touch. “I know it looks bad, but you are going to be treated well. The king might want to, you know, with you. A bit. But the rest will be all right.”
“The king wants to,” the soothsayer agrees, “and he will.” He grins at the soldier as if inviting him to see some private joke. The expression refuses to fade regardless of how blankly the soldier returns his gaze.
“I don’t understand,” the soldier says.
“It’s quite simple,” the soothsayer assures him, perfectly serious. “I’m going to commit regicide with my penis.”
The soldier manages to hold the soothsayer’s gaze for approximately three seconds before bursting into laughter. He shakes with it until he can barely breathe.
The soothsayer watches him with amusement shining up from the depths of the stone wells of his eyes. When the soldier nearly recovers from his merriment, the soothsayer adds, “It’s hardly my instrument of choice, of course.”
The soldier laughs and laughs, his face aching, his stomach hurting. What good pains. “You’re absolutely mad.”
“I keep telling you, not yet. I won’t be living that long, anyway.” He lifts one hand before the soldier can try to explain the soothsayer’s position to him yet again. “Shh. No. You can’t believe me, but you can listen. Don’t contradict me.”
Slowly, the soldier nods. “All right.”
The soothsayer regards him with a smile both faint and vicious. “It’s truly remarkable, poet. The forks in the road that occur regardless of which road. I must always choose.”
“At least you can see where you’re going,” the soldier teases, still ill at ease. “Most of us don’t get that much.”
“You don’t understand. You never do.”
“That’s not fair. We’ve only just met.”
“I know,” the soothsayer says, the words mournful. “That isn’t fair at all.” With that, he shifts on the bench, planting one knee upon the wood. “I would have enjoyed knowing you as a younger man.” He sways forward, the motion beginning at the centre of his chest. His lips very nearly touch the soldier’s ear. “You will dream of me. Not frequently, but consistently. You will remember me until your dying day. When the nightmares of the battlefield rise into your mind, you will see me walking among the corpses, forever untouched. On some nights, you will see me shouting and you will never hear me. On others, I will stand silent before you. On your favourite nights, I kneel, my mouth full. Though you will dream of me for guidance and comfort, you will never have either of me. If you believed me, you would resent me for this. What small mercies we find in ironies.”
The soldier tries to reply, tries to speak, tries to breathe. The air freezes in his chest, solidified warmth beneath flustered skin and stoic bone.
“Goodbye,” the soothsayer murmurs just above his cheek. His eyes, bright and alert, whisper of some terrible joke at someone else’s expense. They flick down, a heavy gaze upon the soldier’s mouth.
Permission implicit, the soldier lifts his face. He’s been at war too long. He’ll call that his excuse. He’s been at war too long, and this man is mad and beautiful and wants him. Soft breath touches his lips, but nothing more.
“Oi, get off him!”
At the cry from the relief guard, the soldier jumps back on the bench, but the soothsayer barely moves.
“The fuck are you doing?” the guard demands.
“Sorry,” the soldier says and stands, confused and angry and aroused. “Sorry, I--”
“He belongs to the king, you traitorous--”
“Stop,” the soothsayer instructs.
As one man, they stop, both soldiers to the core.
“If you mean for me to be fucked, let your king have me,” the soothsayer instructs the relief guard. “If you mean for me not to seduce my keepers, station different men. Ugly ones, for a start. You’ll do.”
Before the soldier can protest, his post is changed. As he leaves the cabin, he could swear the soothsayer winks at him. He fumes over the gesture all through the afternoon, more sullen than a grown man ought to be. It’s not uncommon for men to be transferred from one ship to another in the fleet, but the soldier recognises a demotion when he sees one. It sits poorly with him. He’d worked hard to serve on the king’s ship. To leave the flagship for not so much as a kiss... this is a fate worth cursing.
He curses it until nightfall, certainly. He curses it until the roar and the blast. Then he runs from his new bunk to stand upon the deck with his fellow soldiers. A cry goes up. Some stand silent. Some wail. All mourn.
After a decade of war, the flagship has fallen, not by mortal hands but by some unholy blow from the heavens. The timber burns upon the water, extinguished only as it sinks. Corpses bob in the waves, some burnt beyond recognition, some merely dismembered by a great, impossible explosion.
His mind quiet, the soldier watches the bodies sink under the water. He understands that his king is dead without knowing why. He looks instead for a madman, for a prisoner with dark curls and a voice as deep as the waters which have swallowed him whole. He does not find the man amidst the wreckage and he does not expect to.
It will haunt him all his life.
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 4.5k
Betas: vyctori, seijichan, lifeonmars
Disclaimer: Do not own.
Summary: “They said you were a soothsayer, before the city was taken, except no one ever believed you,” the soldier says. “How does that work?” (Cassandra!lock AU)
Warnings: discussion of past and future violence, some sexual; character death
“They said you were a soothsayer, before the city was taken, except no one ever believed you,” the soldier says. “How does that work?”
Their cargo-his charge, his king’s prize-throws back his dark head and laughs. The sound lifts the hairs on the back of the soldier’s neck and he shivers in the stifling humidity of the ship.
“Are you mad?” the soldier asks as reasonably as he can.
“Not yet,” the soothsayer replies. “I will be soon.”
The soldier smiles reflexively at the joke. “From what? The captivity isn’t so bad, you’ll see. You’ll be well-treated among us.”
“You’re simply uncertain why. Most of the human booty is obviously slave material or was already raped half to death during the sack. I’m untouched and it confuses you.”
“Er… yes,” he admits. “A bit.”
The soothsayer smiles. “No one may touch me. No one may believe me. These are the conditions of my curse.”
“All right…” the soldier says slowly. He wants to sit across from their captive but he is on guard duty. He continues to stand. “Why not?”
“I’m a very attractive man. You’ve noticed. I’ve seen you looking. Imagine what I look like properly fed and bathed.”
As the soldier imagines, his mouth turns dry. “Modest, aren’t you?”
“My intellect is superior to my face, of course,” the soothsayer continues. “He didn’t care, obviously.”
“He?”
“A god. I won’t name him. He comes to me if I name him.”
The soldier laughs. “If you could summon one of the gods at will, why remain our prisoner?”
The soothsayer rolls his eyes. “Because he’s annoying. He returns to ask me to reconsider, and when I don’t sleep with him, he storms off in a huff. If I anger him again, the curse will worsen. The last time, he took away touch. Another time, and no one will so much as listen to me.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” the soldier says, playing along. “You’ve a lovely voice.”
“Too lovely,” the soothsayer replies.
“You could keep talking,” the soldier invites. “If you liked.”
The soothsayer sits up straighter upon his bench. Such a long body on this one, long and lean with fingers to match. His hands look as soft as his lips. “I’ll speak my fill with you,” he says. “I won’t be speaking again, after, not enough to matter.”
Unsettled yet intrigued, the soldier smiles politely.
“Tell me if I speak true,” says the soothsayer. “You are tired and weary, leaving no wife or parents behind, only a sister. You are a soldier, raised to it, and yet a healer, born to it. Your gifts could have made you a poet, had you an ear to match your memory of words. Instead, you only remember what greatness and horror you have seen and recite dull mumblings into greater offerings. You have been pierced through by a fierce arrow and the sickness nearly took your arm. You struggled back to life after coins were laid upon your eyes and here you stand, a miracle without the aid of the gods.”
The soldier blinks at him. “Are people gossiping about me? Who would gossip about me?”
“Did I speak true?”
“Who told you?”
With a sudden groan, the soothsayer tugs viciously at his own hair.
“Oi, no, none of that,” the soldier urges. He steps forward but he does not touch. “Don’t hurt yourself.”
The soothsayer flings down his hands and lifts his eyes. “It’s not myself I intend to hurt.” He studies the soldier in the dim light below deck. His eyes widen. “Oh. Nor you.”
Such a strange statement deserves a cautious answer. “I’m glad to hear it.” When the soothsayer doesn’t look away or even blink, the soldier adjusts his stance. A moment longer and he clears his throat. “Something the matter?”
“I’m deciding.”
The soldier looks at him oddly. “Yes…?”
Though the unreadable intent behind it flows and changes, the soothsayer’s grey graze remains constant. His is the pressure of a stream upon the twig damming it. “I’m deciding,” he repeats.
“What to tell me?”
He rolls his eyes. “No, what will happen.”
The soldier laughs at the sarcasm. Strange and unnerving this may be, it’s still the best guard duty the soldier could have asked for.
The soothsayer regards him a moment longer before leaning back upon his bench and gesturing for the soldier to join him. “I’ve decided. Sit with me.”
“I’m on duty,” the soldier declines.
“Presently. If I tell you a story, will you remember all of it?”
The soldier nods. “My memory is good.”
“Then I will tell you all. You will sit with me before I have finished.”
The soldier doubts that. Even so, he humours the man. “A long story, is it?”
“Most are.”
“All right, then. It’ll pass the time.”
The soothsayer’s mouth feigns friendliness. “Oh, if it will pass the time...!” He groans and again tugs at his hair. “All the insight of an age and every lackwit willing to listen for the sake of entertainment!”
“Look, stop that.” The soldier doesn’t reach for the soothsayer’s wrists, doesn’t prevent the damage he does to himself. He knows in his bones that it isn’t his place to do such work. Instead, he sits. “There. I’ve sat with you before you’ve begun. Happy? Your prophecy came true.”
Sharp grey eyes pierce him. The laugh, sharper by far, skewers him. “Your kindness was to come later, soldier. I dislike it so soon. Unfair of you, to whet an appetite that shall go unsated to the last.”
“How do you mean?”
The soothsayer shifts on the bench. Beneath him, the slither of chain over wood rises over the constant groaning of the sea. “We could have met again, you and I,” the soothsayer states. “On a dusty road, years hence, you and your firstborn son find me in a ditch, broken, drugged and near to death. You remember my face, distorted though it has become through time and mistreatment, as all faces distort beneath the pain of living. Moreover, you recall my voice and you recognise my groaning. This time, you remember to ask my name before it’s too late.
“From there, you send your son on to market alone-he’s old enough, a strong boy, and his cousins will meet him without incident-and you take me upon your shoulders, broken though they have been, broken though you are.
“Yes, you touch me then. Years hence, when I can again be touched. I’ll give in, you understand. The god sought my body and my love and when he could not have them, he stole contact and credibility from me. I’ll give in before I lose my looks. There are worse decisions. I’ve already made one today, for us, much worse, though better for you, I think.
“I’ll give into him and he will make me touchable once more. My hardened heart, he will have nothing of. My punishment will continue, sore of arse and unbelieved. But I will be able to touch bodies again, if not minds.
“More will come before I surrender to him, of course. Boredom. The killer of the soul, the destroyer of the mind. I will be kept as a spectacle by your ruler, his talking dog, a diamond wrested from the crown of a defeated king. I will be carted through the city streets in a cage as if my body were dangerous and not my words. Though your ears are blunt, my tongue remains sharp. Of that, have no doubt.
“But the boredom will rot me and no man will kill me, and thus I will summon a lustful god and pray his interest in my arsehole has yet to wane. It won’t have, but it might. A mortal may not always prophecy the behaviour of the gods, and certainly not their whims.
“With my protection removed and my meanings still silenced, I will be cast out. I will face harm. I will avoid most, but many decisions rest between what is bad and what is worse. You know this.
“You will know this when you find me. You will know this when you carry me home, a limp and dirty creature. You intend to bury me soon, for you expect me to die. When I live instead under the care of your wife, you decide to keep me. Your younger children take to me as a tutor, fear me for my madness, and respect me for my knowledge of arithmetic and the sciences. You will call me a philosopher, then, not a soothsayer, although I am both and so have always been.
“Your wife will die before your youngest daughter is grown, but the girl will grow strong nonetheless. She’s my favourite, you know. Biting sense of humour, worse even than yours. She walks like you and has your eyes, framed by your wife’s hair. She’s a lovely girl and when her first husband attempts to beat her, she’ll kill him and walk free. We raise her well, the three of us.
“You do not marry again. For two years and eighty-three days, you touch no one, seek no one, and then upon the night of that day, you turn to me and you set your lips just below where my shoulder becomes my neck. When I tremble, you release me. I shout at you. You retire for the night enraged and I slip into your bed behind you. I find my pleasure in you.
“We continue on this way, your children grown, our joints aching. You often joke I ought to take up weaving, but I prefer my bees and their natural tapestry. You come to watch me the day I realise I love you, and Aphrodite herself intervenes before that jealous god blasts you from the glade. You look upon her splendour with awe, as most mortals do, and this assuages her pride when I am unimpressed. She forces permission from my curser. He offers me the choice. I may love you without seeing you harmed or I may be believed. I choose, curiously, to love you. The offer is a test, of course, and had I chosen otherwise, I might have received nothing at all. I cannot prophecy the whims of the gods.
“For the rest of our days, we live together in this way, raising our voices with anger and laughter, sharing one bed and coveting the blanket. You do not believe me-you never believe me-but you will humour me. The examples are beyond count.
“I will tell you to stoop for no coins when you journey to the market, and you will refuse the counsel with complaints of your back and your knees. You’ll ask why such a warning is necessary. You will dismiss me. That day, you will see a flash of gold upon the street. You will, in time, recall your joints and aches soldier. Immediately after, you will watch as a boy of eleven is trampled to death in his attempt to reach the coin.
“You indulge me but never believe me. We argue. Never enough to cause separation, never enough to tarnish my sight of you, because, you forget, I know this is to happen. I recognise your limitations while I hate them. Our bodies give way beneath the years and yet we aren’t unhappy.”
The soothsayer falls silent as abruptly as he had begun. His ancient eyes, sunken, brighten fractionally into sullen youth.
With great effort, the soldier manages to breathe. “You’re... an incredible speaker.”
“But clearly quite mad,” the soothsayer says.
“Well, yes.”
The soothsayer grins, his expression indulgent, fond. “Not yet. In due time, yes.”
The soldier shifts uneasily beneath the unearned intimacy. “You’re not actually saying any of that will happen.”
“No,” the soothsayer replies. His eyes wander from the soldier’s face. He tilts his head and studies his hands. “No, I have decided against that path.”
“Path?”
The soothsayer nods. “There are many roads, and all are straight to me. None curve behind the hills, none vanish behind the woods. I see each to its end and, when I can, I choose where to walk.”
“If you could do that, why did your city fall?” the soldier asks. “I-sorry, I don’t mean to be cruel.”
“You don’t. How curious.” The soothsayer shrugs to the ceiling. “There are places no path runs to. It’s that simple.”
The soldier hums at the piece of sophistry. “What have you chosen, then? If we’re not going to grow old together.”
A smirk pulls his lips into a grotesque shape. He holds the expression for a long moment before laughing. “You don’t believe, and you still ask?”
“You want to talk. I like to listen.”
“And you will remember every word I say,” the soothsayer says. He sighs. “I’ll have that from you at least. That much is certain.”
The soldier smiles more nervously than he’d like. “What else would you have of me?”
The soothsayer looks at him, looks him up and down. His eyes no longer contain the chill of the sea but the danger of heated lead. The soldier’s mouth dries and the soothsayer smiles. “Yes, I could have that of you.”
“I--” The soldier swallows. He looks away and fails to clear his head. “I thought you said no one could touch you. You’re not making sense, soothsayer.”
He rolls his eyes. “No, I said no one could touch me. I didn’t say I couldn’t touch another.”
The soldier nods at the loophole. He should have predicted so much. Not even so imposing a lunatic would have been able to achieve fame and repute without being consistent with himself, as much as a lunatic can be. The soldier tries to smile and he tries to laugh. “And your jealous god wouldn’t smite me?”
“He would,” the soothsayer disagrees, flirtation in the threat. “But I could kiss you first. I might even have enough time to take you.”
“Or enough time for me to take you?” the soldier counters.
“Ugh, you’re still not paying attention.”
“I’m paying attention, I just don’t--”
“You don’t believe me, yes, I know.” He groans again, dropping his head into his hands to grind his brow against his palms. “This is so tedious. I’d rather die than suffer this.”
“We’ll treat you well,” the soldier promises. “You’ll be fed better once we’re off rationing, and everyone and their uncle is ready for a bath. You’ll have one of those as well. Should help you feel human again.”
The soothsayer straightens abruptly upon the bench. “Try to touch me. Go on. Try.” He leans forward, dirty and mad and still absurdly tempting, but the soldier has his orders.
“I’m not permitted,” the soldier says.
“Yes you are. I’m permitting you.”
He shakes his head. “I’m under orders.”
“You’re not meant to sit with me either, and here you are.”
“I’ll stand before another man comes to relieve me.”
“You won’t,” the soothsayer replies.
“If no one can touch you, how did we take you prisoner?” the soldier asks. “Explain that.”
“I was led at arrow point. No direct contact. Loophole. I’m still mortal. I can still be killed.”
“I didn’t take you for a god,” he agrees.
“You might if I were better dressed.”
The soldier laughs. The soothsayer grins back. “You’re a strange one,” the soldier praises.
“Mm, yes.”
“Go on, then. Tell me about this future. The real one.”
“The one I’ve chosen?”
“That would be the one, wouldn’t it?” the soldier says.
The soothsayer’s grin pulls at the corner of his mouth. “It would.”
“How do we meet again in that one?”
The grin pulls in on itself until it vanishes. “You’ve hit upon the crux of the matter.”
“Oh?”
“Mm.” The soothsayer nods. He looks at the soldier with what might be sadness, and his eyes are again old. “We won’t meet again after this.”
Reflexively, the soldier grins a bit. “It’s not a large ship, you know. Small ship, me one of the men assigned to you... I don’t see how we could avoid meeting again.”
“No, you don’t, do you? You will, tonight. You’ll remember my words but think primarily of my voice. You’ll be confused, even worse than you are now.”
“Somehow, I find that unlikely.”
“You would,” the soothsayer agrees. “It’s hardly important. My only concern is that you remember and that you discuss me. As much as it pains me to say it, you’re my last chance to be believed.”
“If anything you say makes sense, I can try to believe it,” the soldier offers. It’s not the most sincere of offers, but the urge to give the man something cannot be resisted. “Or if I see something come true, I suppose.”
“Even then, you won’t.” The soothsayer waves a dismissive hand. “You won’t believe me for years, whatever I say. Not until long after we would have met again. Your second wife.”
“I don’t even have a first wife.”
“But you will. You will find each other, she will give birth to four children and then she will die. You will mourn. Then a day will come when you love again and she will marry you the second time you ask. Not the first, the second. The successful attempt will be in the shade of an olive tree. She will speak of your persistence and you will be tempted toward bluster, as you were upon the first attempt. This time, however, you will be sincere. She will agree.
“She enjoys stories and will expect one at night, like a child. Your memory for conversation will amaze her and she will praise you as a man of great intellect. Your younger son will dislike her. Your daughters will take to her slowly. Your older son will take to her as to a new sister, and so lead his sisters into her friendship.
“After your youngest daughter marries and kills the husband who would have killed her, had he his way, you will mention my saying so. You will have thought your son-in-law a true and virtuous man. You will have been deceived. You will believe, without question, that my prophecy regarding your child’s fate is nothing more than the rambling of a lunatic kept as a prize of war. Articulate rants, you find them, but merely rants. You are wrong but will never see it.
“At first, your wife will think it a coincidence. She will ask for more of what I have said to you. You will tell her about the shadow of the olive tree as it fell across her hair and made her eyes shine all the brighter in comparison. You will tell her that I first told you of it, and you ignored me.
“She will ask you, and she will ask you, and she will ask you. She will ask of the events of this day, this night. You will tell her how I said you would sit and you sat. You will tell her how you said you wouldn’t be caught sitting and how you were, despite your best intentions and being forewarned.
“She will want to know how I could not be touched. She will fixate on how I could touch, should I be willing to doom another to divine vengeance. You won’t understand why, not until she explains it to you. She’s too clever for you, you know. Then again, so am I.
“She will ask if I spoke of her, and you will certainly tell her this. When she asks, she will be lying upon your bed, her head upon your chest, her fingers upon your scar. The one on your shoulder, the one from the arrow. She traces the circle until it tingles, even though you tell her not to. Not maliciously: she forgets and does this idly. In time, you accept it. You don’t think you will, but you learn to ignore the sensation.
“The night will be in summer, the moon gibbous and low. She will ask with a drop of sweat dripping down her brow and along her nose. It will fall like a tear onto your bare chest.
“When this happens, when you tell her I told you this would happen, you won’t be certain whether you imagined the moment to match the words or imagined the words to match the moment. But your wife, she will know. She will learn to be aware before she asks, because she suspects that I know when she will ask. She knows I know her face, the traces of amber within the brown around her pupils. The birthmark on the side of her left knee, yes, I know it.
“This way, small proof by small proof, trusting in your words more than my prophecy, she will know that all I say is true, and I will be believed.” He sits tall as he says his, straightening his back and squaring his shoulders. “Nothing will change from it, of course. I will be quite dead and you old. But I will be believed, thanks to you, even if you yourself never trust my words. This is why I spare you.”
“Spare me?” the soldier echoes. “I’m the one who’s armed.”
The soothsayer rolls his eyes. “And I am the one who could bring down the wrath of a god upon you, yes. As much as I would enjoy the process, I refuse to die without ensuring that someone believes me.”
“Look, we’re not going to kill you.” The soldier shifts on the bench but doesn’t let their knees touch. “I know it looks bad, but you are going to be treated well. The king might want to, you know, with you. A bit. But the rest will be all right.”
“The king wants to,” the soothsayer agrees, “and he will.” He grins at the soldier as if inviting him to see some private joke. The expression refuses to fade regardless of how blankly the soldier returns his gaze.
“I don’t understand,” the soldier says.
“It’s quite simple,” the soothsayer assures him, perfectly serious. “I’m going to commit regicide with my penis.”
The soldier manages to hold the soothsayer’s gaze for approximately three seconds before bursting into laughter. He shakes with it until he can barely breathe.
The soothsayer watches him with amusement shining up from the depths of the stone wells of his eyes. When the soldier nearly recovers from his merriment, the soothsayer adds, “It’s hardly my instrument of choice, of course.”
The soldier laughs and laughs, his face aching, his stomach hurting. What good pains. “You’re absolutely mad.”
“I keep telling you, not yet. I won’t be living that long, anyway.” He lifts one hand before the soldier can try to explain the soothsayer’s position to him yet again. “Shh. No. You can’t believe me, but you can listen. Don’t contradict me.”
Slowly, the soldier nods. “All right.”
The soothsayer regards him with a smile both faint and vicious. “It’s truly remarkable, poet. The forks in the road that occur regardless of which road. I must always choose.”
“At least you can see where you’re going,” the soldier teases, still ill at ease. “Most of us don’t get that much.”
“You don’t understand. You never do.”
“That’s not fair. We’ve only just met.”
“I know,” the soothsayer says, the words mournful. “That isn’t fair at all.” With that, he shifts on the bench, planting one knee upon the wood. “I would have enjoyed knowing you as a younger man.” He sways forward, the motion beginning at the centre of his chest. His lips very nearly touch the soldier’s ear. “You will dream of me. Not frequently, but consistently. You will remember me until your dying day. When the nightmares of the battlefield rise into your mind, you will see me walking among the corpses, forever untouched. On some nights, you will see me shouting and you will never hear me. On others, I will stand silent before you. On your favourite nights, I kneel, my mouth full. Though you will dream of me for guidance and comfort, you will never have either of me. If you believed me, you would resent me for this. What small mercies we find in ironies.”
The soldier tries to reply, tries to speak, tries to breathe. The air freezes in his chest, solidified warmth beneath flustered skin and stoic bone.
“Goodbye,” the soothsayer murmurs just above his cheek. His eyes, bright and alert, whisper of some terrible joke at someone else’s expense. They flick down, a heavy gaze upon the soldier’s mouth.
Permission implicit, the soldier lifts his face. He’s been at war too long. He’ll call that his excuse. He’s been at war too long, and this man is mad and beautiful and wants him. Soft breath touches his lips, but nothing more.
“Oi, get off him!”
At the cry from the relief guard, the soldier jumps back on the bench, but the soothsayer barely moves.
“The fuck are you doing?” the guard demands.
“Sorry,” the soldier says and stands, confused and angry and aroused. “Sorry, I--”
“He belongs to the king, you traitorous--”
“Stop,” the soothsayer instructs.
As one man, they stop, both soldiers to the core.
“If you mean for me to be fucked, let your king have me,” the soothsayer instructs the relief guard. “If you mean for me not to seduce my keepers, station different men. Ugly ones, for a start. You’ll do.”
Before the soldier can protest, his post is changed. As he leaves the cabin, he could swear the soothsayer winks at him. He fumes over the gesture all through the afternoon, more sullen than a grown man ought to be. It’s not uncommon for men to be transferred from one ship to another in the fleet, but the soldier recognises a demotion when he sees one. It sits poorly with him. He’d worked hard to serve on the king’s ship. To leave the flagship for not so much as a kiss... this is a fate worth cursing.
He curses it until nightfall, certainly. He curses it until the roar and the blast. Then he runs from his new bunk to stand upon the deck with his fellow soldiers. A cry goes up. Some stand silent. Some wail. All mourn.
After a decade of war, the flagship has fallen, not by mortal hands but by some unholy blow from the heavens. The timber burns upon the water, extinguished only as it sinks. Corpses bob in the waves, some burnt beyond recognition, some merely dismembered by a great, impossible explosion.
His mind quiet, the soldier watches the bodies sink under the water. He understands that his king is dead without knowing why. He looks instead for a madman, for a prisoner with dark curls and a voice as deep as the waters which have swallowed him whole. He does not find the man amidst the wreckage and he does not expect to.
It will haunt him all his life.