Work Text:
1.
Marwa is twenty years old, sitting alone in her childhood bedroom on the eve of her wedding day. Tomorrow, she is going to marry one of the greatest warriors of the empire, the indomitable Nandor, whose exploits echo in stories throughout the steppes. She’s thankful to her parents for finding her someone that desirable, can’t wait for the privilege to be his faithful servant and consort. She yearns to comfort her husband when he comes back from yet another adventure, laying his weary, beautiful head on her bosom. She will cook for him and sing to him, and bear and raise his children, just like her mother did for her father, and their home will be just as happy as the one she grew up in (happier).
Earlier today, she said goodbye to her teachers and tutors, accepting well-wishes and congratulations with carefully crafted dignity that hid her unbecoming inner squealing. Her favourite teacher, the old, unmarried woman who taught her about stars, has teared up for the first time in Marwa’s memory.
“You’re so bright, my darling,” she whispered, pressing her dry, old lips to Marwa’s forehead. “Promise me you won’t neglect your studies.”
Marwa promised. Tomorrow she will forget that promise, and the old woman, for the next twenty years.
After the wedding night, Marwa lays on her back, looking at the ceiling. Nandor (her husband and her master, she reminds herself) snores next to her in the huge, marital bed in his personal chambers. She doesn’t know when she will be allowed here again - from what she heard, her husband likes to sleep alone most of the time he’s home, and he rarely is - so she decides to remember every second.
The act itself was… disappointing, she thinks and immediately scolds herself. It’s just that the poems she read, ones she hid from her mother, they all spoke of pleasures, sensations, of eating ripe fruit and flowing juices, tasting lips and gazing eyes, not a few perfunctory moves in the darkness of a dusty chamber, barely used in between pillaging. But they must’ve been lying. Just empty, enticing words to entrap young, inexperienced girls. The reality, she tells herself, is more precious than even the most beautiful imagining.
2.
Sixteen years later, Nandor leaves. He disappears one day, rides out and doesn’t come back. They wait for him, all thirty-seven of them, all dutiful and obedient. Marwa tells herself that she’s sad and grieving, throws herself into taking care of the younger wives, hugs them and wipes their tears. Some of them are barely out of adolescence, lanky bodies and idealistic minds, still full of dreams and beautiful ideas.
It’s hard, losing the thing one defines oneself through.
Years pass, and some wives start leaving the Palace, some to return to their families, some to seek fortune somewhere else. They don’t have to do that; they’re still Nandor’s, they could live out their lives here, honourably, forever awaiting.
Is that all we are, she wonders, somebody’s wives? Do we not exist separately, are we not humans as well?
She tries to remember who she was, before. A daughter, a student. A girl, first and foremost. Good at maths. Poetry reader. She catches these scraps and holds them, tightly, forcefully, sews them back together with a bright red thread, a pathetic patchwork of a person. But it’s whole. She feels whole.
Even more years pass, and Marwa is changing - she smiles more. She wears her hair up, her clothes are no-nonsense and practical. They still live in the Palace complex, she and a few other women. They no longer refer to each other as anybody’s wives.
They spend their time together, united in work and leisure. They maintain a garden, an orchard. They have a library, an observatory, an art studio.
Sometimes Marwa thinks how different this life is from what was planned for her. There’s no kids, no duty to a husband. Instead, she has a duty to her companions - to put in her share of work so they can live comfortably. To comfort them when they lose it sometimes, still, after all those years.
Her mother came to visit, once, at the beginning. Marwa still remembers her dignified silence, her radiating disapproval.
“What will your husband think, when he comes back?” she asked, and Marwa wanted to scream. To yell out all the indignities, to make her mother see the hurt and confusion of those past years and how she was finally, finally making something for herself.
Still more years pass, and still Marwa is changing - her skin thins and wrinkles, her back bends, her joints stiffen. She can no longer work in the gardens, so she takes to teaching instead. She enjoys it - shaping young minds, making girls see that they’re people, they’re whole as they are and can be happy. Sometimes it feels like fighting the wind, like trying to turn the river with a stick, but she perseveres.
It’s an early morning, and Marwa is dying. She’s at peace, in her simple but comfortable bed, her favourite student at her side. Outside the window the chatter starts - tens of young girls, going to school, their breath and laughter making the world go round.
Marwa sleeps.
3.
She wakes, back in her thirty years old body. She looks at herself in the mirror, naked, eyes sliding over shapes both familiar and foreign. All the traces of the years that she lived, gone. No calluses on her hands from gardening, no wrinkles from the sun, no scars, no dry elbows - she’s as she was, before. She doesn’t know if she likes it.
For a minute, she wonders if the djinn altered the timeline - if he plucked her, fresh and beautiful, from the past, leaving an empty space in an empty Palace. She still has her memories up until her death, so she hopes not. The boy called Guillermo has shown her something called the internet, where all the knowledge resides, but she dares not check what became of her school. How meaningless her life was in the grand scheme of things.
Anyway. Now it has a new meaning. Or an old one, again.
Marwa is not stupid. She saw what was happening almost instantly, how a spouse after a spouse disappeared without a trace, usually after some one-on-one time with Nandor. For a minute, she considered making him kill her purposefully. She doesn’t need a second chance, a do-over. She is satisfied with the first one. But something makes her cling to this life, to the plethora of new experiences that she tells herself await her, if she’s chosen. If she wins. So she keeps her head down and focuses on not being seen. A good, dutiful wife, a comfort and a servant, never a burden. Somehow, all her mother schooling, quiet for the last forty (seven hundred and forty) years, returns, now as a defense mechanism, a tool, a path to her goal.
She hopes that maybe this time Nandor (Her future husband, she reminds herself. And past, and current.) will like science and maths. Maybe he’ll enjoy conversation. She remembers how much she has changed in her relatively short life. Seven hundred years must make a completely different man.
At the end, she succeeds and ends up alone. She walks the foreign corridors, the only human from her time, the only one who remembers the language, the grasses, the wild winds of the steppes. Her husband keeps her close, apart from the times when he doesn’t. He is sweet, apart from the times when he isn’t.
She tries to talk to the boy, Guillermo, about maths. Teach him, maybe, or get him to teach her. He looks at her weirdly and shows her something called WolphramAlpha on a computer. Marwa spends an evening clicking around, trying to absorb all the knowledge humanity gained in seven hundred years. Nobody approaches her.
The next day, the computer is not where she left it. She doesn’t seek it out.
4.
They’re preparing for the wedding. At the beginning, she tries to still be quiet, docile. But the danger of being snapped out of existence is behind her, and she feels all the years of being her own person tumble and swirl inside. Her soul, fed on them, demands to be heard, to be let out.
She starts slow - a small disagreement about flowers. Nothing too much. She even carefully researches the topic beforehand, watching the moving pictures on the small box in the den. In all the wedding-themed ones, it’s the bride who has the last say in everything.
Overall, in most of them, the women seem to be their own people, with opinions and agency. It makes her feel cautiously hopeful.
She feels when something changes - at first, it’s difficult to say what it is. It’s a sudden gust of cold and a feeling of something snapping away, a curtain falling and a light coming on on stage. It’s a sudden fondness for colour black and a weird game with a ball and two baskets, a buried but not forgotten, never forgotten want for violence and blood on the end if her (his?) sword.
There’s yearning for freedom, too. For galloping on the steppes on a faithful horse, wind in long hair. For the lack of expectations, for being enough, for tomorrow never coming. She doesn’t know if this one is hers or his.
Her parents are back for the wedding - one of the demands, little acts of personhood that cost her that much (everything). She sees them from the podium, sitting in uncomfortable, wobbly chairs of this cold time made of metal and this weird material they call plastic; time of wan light, white as the sun but with none of it’s warmth. Her mother is there, as usual, cold and dignified, an extension of her husband, watching her daughter become an commodity.
Marwa remembers her mother words about being a faithful servant, a obedient wife. A comfort, a home. Couldn’t one find a comfort in one’s equal, she wonders, a pleasure in one another’s differences, in a respectful discourse, an exchange of opinions? Do men have to erase another to love them?
Marwa wonders if becoming a wife was as hard for her mother as it is for her.
After the wedding, she sees Guillermo sitting alone. She feels an inexplicable fondness for him, an urge to touch and pet him sweetly. She’s not stupid - she knows where that comes from. She ’s heard the jeers, the pointed comments from other vampires.
She thinks she should dislike Guillermo, treat him with a cold and dignified tolerance like her mother had towards father’s numerous extramarital pursuits, but she can’t.
She thinks she would like to hate him. She would like to hate all the others, too.
Wrapping him in a hug and whispering sweet nothings in his ear, kissing the plump cheek, she only hates herself.
5.
The wedding night comes and goes. She tries to compare it to the first one in her mind, but she can’t. She’s not even able to tell if she enjoyed it or if it was all a spill from his brain, his pleasure entering her body and making a nest for itself in her stomach.
She lays there, looking at the ceiling, again. She thinks she would like to split her skin at the seams and crawl out of it. She could leave the bloody husk here, for Nandor to stuff with flowers and touches and his favourite things.
Nandor leaves for his hunting trip and Nadja invites her for a “girls night”. Marwa doesn’t know why, if it is some awkward overture to friendship or just pity, but she accepts. Anything is better than sitting alone in Nandor’s room, full of decor she’s forced to like. It’s as different from what she enjoyed before as possible. She fantasises about taking a hatched to the (comfortable, luxurious) coffin, tearing down all the (beautiful, important) pictures, throwing a lit match on the dusty turkish carpet (a precious memento).
They are watching a movie called Mamma Mia on the tv, the small box which lied to her before. She’s drunk, maybe. The alcohol is different that what she’s used to, hitting her hard and fast, making her head spin. The question pops up in her mind if Nandor would like the movie, but she doesn’t want to wonder. It’s something he never experienced, apparently, so maybe she can have it for herself. Maybe the rest of her life will be exactly that, carving scraps on the edge of Nandor’s world to remind herself that she too can feel.
She decides the movie is good. She likes the singing.
The mancave stuff is petty, just a little, but after all day of being forced to agree with every word Nandor said, she’s sick of it. It’s unbecoming, and her mother would never abide by her daughter acting out like that, but Marwa finds she doesn’t care much about what her mother thinks anymore. There’s a dark tide building beneath her skin, wrapping around her organs, threatening to drown whatever is left of the girl that was.
Had her mother ever felt like this? Locked in a cage of a man, forced to bend and fold until she fit perfectly to the edges of his life?
If she did, she never said. Marwa thinks she’d like to say it. She’d like to scream it from the rooftops, yell it in Nandor’s face, put her teeth to his throat and tear it out.
+1.
His name is Freddie. He is a junior associate at an auction house. He thinks he must’ve studied for it, at an university somewhere. He enjoys it, looking at art, especially from the Ottoman Empire. He likes reading academic journals, there’s something beautiful in all that knowledge, available to him, at his fingertips.
He has a boyfriend, and he supposes he must like him, too. Nandor treats him well, if maybe with a bit too much condescension for Freddie’s taste. But he listens to him, or at least pretends, and let’s him do his “art thingy”, and he’s not a chore to kiss.
There are feelings crouching at the edges of Freddie’s mind that he doesn’t know what to do with. A sort of proto-surprise when he looks in the mirror every morning, like his lizard brain expects to see something (someone) else. A fondness for horses, despite never riding. A dream of teaching, buried long ago. A yearning for freedom. A freedom to what? (from what.)
He has a talent for math, as long as he doesn’t try to think about it. When he attempts to focus on the numbers it disappears, ones and zeros and commas dancing around the page and laughing at him, trying fruitlessly to figure them out.
It frustrates him, this liminality. Sometimes it even scares him - there’s this guy, Guillermo, Nandor’s manservant or PA or whatever, always scurrying on the edges of his vision with teary eyes and crestfallen expression. Freddie doesn’t care about him, not really, apart from the times when he wants to kill him, tie him to four horses and tear apart, drag the bloody scraps of him through the dust of grassy plains. Or sometimes Nandor says something especially patronising or self-centered, or ignores him for too long, and Freddie feels this rising tide of resentment and hatred in his chest, a chant of grievances running hundreds years into the past, of injustices and lives squandered. He doesn’t know what to do with those feelings. They’re not his. They could never belong to a man.
Nandor sends him away. Freddie doesn’t understand why, or what he did wrong (this time). Did Nandor somehow see the monstrous wrapped in his skin, this nameless fury he tries so hard to contain?
In the end, it doesn’t matter. Freddie is a charismatic young man with a good degree, and apparently a british citizenship, which is enough to build a life for himself overseas. He dates. He earns money. He lives.
The problem with stories is that some are never allowed to finish.