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astronicht · 1 year

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whumptober day 5: “you better pray I don’t get up this time around” + pinned down | original historical fantasy with lesbians? sarai/ketil | 1.8k, rated T

i don’t love posting original stuff but by god i didn’t want to look like i skipped day 5. will be deleted in November??

“There are two things human beings tend to do in caves: sing or die pinned,” Sarai Al-Baramikah muttered, her hand brushing the soft limestone wall. Outside, a hot wind whipped off the nighttime ocean. In the long low mouth of the cave behind them, the wind did its own singing. They were not so deep that they could not distantly hear the breakers off the beach market of Bal'harm.

Ketil watched the passage of Sarai’s hand. “The kids said there are old carvings in here,” she said.

“Yep,” Sarai said. Her voice was rough, wrecked. What an awful night it had been. “Smart kids. I found them too.”

“The carvings?” Ketil asked. “They’re Roman after all?”

What an inane thing to say, when a little girl was dead not an hour ago.

“…No. I don’t think so,” Sarai said. “Come look.”

Ketil shifted her weight and planted her feet in her doeskin boots. She had blood under her fingernails and splattered brown on the sleeve of her tunic, up above her elbow in some awkward and inexplicable spot. She did not come look. “What are you doing here?” she asked, her lazy voice gone hard, which was what she should have been asking for days, for a week. “Why are you on this island playing at being a bookbinder, Sarai? Why are you planning to get on my ship.”

“I am a bookbinder. A little alchemy too. Everybody needs work.” Sarai did not even turn around.

“You have twelve rings on your fingers, Sarai,” Ketil yelled. Sarai looked almost startled. She looked at her hand on the wall in the torchlight. Her other hand went unconsciously to the sword on her belt, which must have been ancient when Sarai’s father had been born. She had come from a good merchant family when they were young, but not the sort of family that wore treasures like a parakeet wore green.

“It’s not an interesting story, Ketya,” Sarai gritted out, as if that were relevant. “I’m not just saying that. It’s short and common and sad.”

“Fuck off,” Ketil rasped.

“I’m sorry,” Sarai said. “Ketil.”

Sarai’s face was awful, just for a second, before it went smooth.

“Thanks for— you saved the rest of the kids,” Ketil said. She rubbed her face with the hand not holding the torch.

Sarai snorted, tired. “I kept them calm until you could show up,” she said.

“Yeah,” Ketil said. She meant: yes, exactly.

“You know, no one else I know thinks of me as reliable,” Sarai observed, wry. Ketil blinked; this did not seem relevant. Who else was with her on this side of this night? If Sarai was there, it would be Sarai. “Come see the carvings. I found more of them.”

Ketil watched as her little souls skittered forward before her body did. Sarai’s soul was burning low in her belly, inescapably part of the body even when Ketil’s were not. Ketil stepped forward. The torch in her hand lit up Sarai’s face a bit more, the slope of her nose, her wild hair beneath the headcloth.

“Do you want the torch?” Ketil said, a reflexive banality.

“No,” Sarai murmured, even though she could not see Ketil’s four little souls skittering down the tunnel like mice, or stolen bright moonlight, or wil o’ the wisps. In here it was dark, to her. “You keep the light, darling.”

Ketil’s stomach went hot, but the hair on the back of her neck prickled and rose.

The walk down into the mountain was not a walk but a scramble. Ketil hated small spaces. She fought to keep her breathing steady, steady, as if she was breathing through pain.

They came to a little opening, another little room of sorts. Ketil could not control where her glowing souls went, of course, so only one helpfully approached the wall that Sarai was looking at in the dark. Ketil had to bring the torch over to really see. At first she did not know what she was looking at. It was just scratches on the wall, person-shaped, flowing lines that made chest, buttocks, thigh, calf. The lines trailed off instead of forming hands or feet; what the hands clutched was lost to some memory.

They were certainly not Roman, old Rome or new, and not Carthiginian either. All across the Jórsalahaf, all across three continents, Ketil had lived and traveled and traded in the ruins and new heights of southern empires; she knew the great city where two seas met which was the new Rome. No one carved figures like this.

Ketil had no magic in her bones, but she was, every day, a witness for the dead. And here they were speaking, pinned in a cave above Bal'harm, with its thousands of books and scholars and artists, its ruined Greek statues and its strange coins from Carthage and its memories of Rome when it was a young and angry goatherders republic and when it had god-kings and called an entire sea its own.

This, the Emirate of Siqilliya where Bal’harm had sat under different names for millenia was after all the first overseas conquest of Rome, was it not? So it made sense, in a way, that layers of people would go back and back here in its dry stone.

Then she realized what the figures in the center of the crowd of people were doing.

Sarai smiled, quick and sharp. Ketil stepped back.

“Who’s the prude now?” Sarai said.

Ketil didn’t bother to reply. She tipped her head back and really looked. They were supposed to be two men, going by the sharp little etched lines of their erections. The lines of their bodies were more tense than the other wavering curves of the figures around them. One was tied neck to ankles like a hog for the autumn slaughter, when families sent sons and daughters into the wild woods to round up the sows and hogs which had been left to wild forage for the long summer. The slaughter season was a time of chestnuts. Ketil could almost smell them roasting.

The bound man was being fucked, because of course he was, his cock hard and proud beneath him.

Ketil knew this feeling too, better than she knew chestnuts. She knew it in her belly, in the sweating palms of her hands. Sarai was standing behind her, and so still it was as if she was holding her breath. As if she could not stand behind Ketil and breathe and look at this.

When Sarai stepped to the side and spoke she sounded even rougher than before. You could almost pretend she was a man. “You always said that a soul looks different depending on the god,” she rasped, and it sounded like the beginning of one of her long theories.

Ketil didn’t know how this fit into the rock carving of the bound man, who was a joy or a sacrifice or something else. There was no way to know. Just like if she and Sarai died here suddenly in a rockfall, died here with their bones turning slowly to stone, no one would know anything about who they were or who they had once been to each other or why Ketil had gone back for her in this shitty cave. No one would ever know from their bones, and certainly not from the scraps of memory they might leave behind: Sarai bound books and Ketil sold them like cattle and no poet sung any story about them among the skalds of Jorvik or the ghazal writers of Ishbiliya or even in the lands east of Constantinople, where maybe someone should remember what it had been like, once, when they were young on the banks of the Black Sea. There was no memory here. It would be a rupture, a forgetting.

It did not matter, probably, that Ketil didn’t get it yet. Sarai had likely figured something out already.

Sarai said, “So the giant, or the elf, or the man— whatever we think he is. He killed Gudrun because we didn’t understand what was happening. It was foreign. We spend our lives being foreign, so we should’ve guessed that it was going to be different. His soul was different. His magic was different. No one remembers what it was like, except.” The cave wall loomed larger, somehow. “Maybe someone wrote it down.”

Ketil swallowed.

“I want to go meet the man,” Sarai said, confident now. “Gudrun went to go kill him and got herself killed, fuck. She was just a kid. We’re older now. We’re bigger now.” She met Ketil’s eyes. “So I think I should go meet the man.”

Ketil had been trying not to think about it: that whatever it was that had killed Gudrun was not gone.

“Most things can’t follow us over salt water,” Ketil said. “The man probably can’t.”

“I thought you said you have a responsibility,” Sarai said. Her voice was not kind, but it was a kindness: what Ketil felt was relief.

Ketil was silent. Then she said, quickly, “Something was done to him, I think.”

“Yep,” Sarai said, looking at the carving. “I think he was killed.”

“Not like that,” Ketil said, about the carving, the two men embraced. “He was hunted by… by someone with a bow and arrow. And he didn’t know what a bow and arrow was. To him it was like… elfshot.”

Sarai turned to her slowly, eyes bright. “Elfshot. What are elves, Ketil?”

Ketil sensed that this was rhetorical. She shrugged anyway and said, “They’re just elves, the same way bears are just bears. You sacrifice to them and hope they won’t throw invisible elfshot at you or your horses.”

“Hm,” Sarai said. “I need you to tie me up like that.” She laughed, dry in the echoing dark. “Don’t worry, you don’t have to fuck me.”

Ketil’s hands felt numb. She wished she did not know that they would be steady anyway. Her hands never shook when she thought they should be allowed to shake.

“Give me your belt,” Ketil said thickly, and Sarai undid the silver eagle clasp and slid it off her hips like nothing. When she handed it to Ketil, the sharp and ancient sword was still strapped there in its scabbard. “And pin me down.”

When Ketil still hesitated, Sarai said, “I’m no fool, you know. I know I haven’t got any magic in my hands. I’m not trying to do what Gudrun could do, what any of the kids could do. I’m just going to— remember, really hard. That’s not magic. That’s just— mind. A thought experiment, like when Ibn Sina wrote about the well in the Khitab al-Shifa. But I need to know what it feels like in order to remember it.”

I know what it feels like, Ketil thought, but could not say. Her calm hands raised the belt around Sarai’s throat.

#my fic #sarai and ketil #delete later #whumptober ‘23

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