You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?
I
had met my son only once, but not as his father. It had been right before leaving Oresziah; he had been playing on the docks, the evening before my departure. He played alone, as children did in peacetime. I found I could not settle my unease, to see him so close to the water of the sea. I wanted to warn him against the beasts that would drag him in. A lifetime had prepared me for that consequence; a lifetime had told me, the water is where men die. The symbol of my triumph—my own bastard son, safe at the shore—ought to have been rewarding. It ought to have filled me with elation instead of strange, sick dread.He had been all too-long limbs and too-wide eyes. He had a fake wooden sword and as I passed him by, to discuss with Locust the nature of her fare, I hesitated. He saw the hesitation and turned to me, only a little shyly.
“You’re Vercingtorix! You won the war! I—I have never met a hero before. I’ve only seen you all from so far away, in the parades—can you tell me about it?”
He looked at me with my own eyes, but brighter than mine had ever been. He looked at me with raw, childish optimism—and in that moment I thought of my own childhood, glancing at my own father in that way, and how quickly my spirit had been crushed by his responses. I knew I ought to have continued walking; I knew I ought to have ignored him. Instead, I lingered. Instead, I told him the stories that he wanted to hear of the war, the stories of nobility and sacrifice, of Bondike pulling me from the sea to save my life, of how ferocious the Last Prince had been. I did not mention anything of the white surrender flag that thad fallen from the cliffside with the Prince and I; I did not tell him Bondike had become Boudika the Betrayer, only that I had been saved by my most sacred companion; I did not tell him of how lonely it was to be a hero, how senseless, once the war had be won—
“And what is it you hope to do, when you are grown?” I had asked him, after he eagerly thanked me for my time. I found it unnerving, the guileless nature of his stare. He had some of the island’s older symbols tattooed onto his horn and cheeks, in the same way I wore my golden sun totem upon my horn. The slashes were for bravery, I knew—
“I want to be like you,” he said, brightly.
I had said nothing to that. Only smiled.
Now, I wish I had said: No. Choose anything else.
Anything else, I think, as I am met by a woman with golden slashes on half her face. I do not expect to meet someone here that reminds me of the son I never claimed and fully abandoned, but I do. And when she asks me what I would like painted, I say in a too-soft voice, “A sun, please. Right between my brows.”
I appreciate her quietude, but know that it cannot last. I close my eyes as she rises the brush she had dipped so carefully into the bowl; I feel the first cool press of the paint and in the darkness of my closed lids it only manages to evoke more somber memories. Bondike had always applied my war paint, and I his. It felt like a betrayal when I came to Novus and learned that Boudika had become a dancer, and each night some cheap entertainer had painted her anew—when it had been my right, as her companion.
Perhaps, however, this is penance for leaving a child. The branding ceremony, for his marks of bravery, would have been celebrated by my entire family, had I ever claimed him. But I never did.
I never did.
I open my eyes to regard her, quietly. I am not so lacking in superstition to deny fate her due, or the uninterpretable complexities of lives that collide with other lives. Something had brought the pair of us here, into this moment. I recognize the utilitarian make of her body; the scars; the way the marks on her cheek are something other, something that cannot be asked about.
“Why are you here?” I ask, as she continues to complete the sun. It is so familiar to me, even years later—
And yes, I realize.
It has been years.
