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(i)
The Great Library of Alexandria is beautiful, cool and airy in the summer with the wind rushing through all the pillars, ruffling the hems of all the robes of the passers’-by. There are no pedestrians here, not in this high, reserved place: there is only a boy, dark-eyed and beautiful, and a swirling vortex of blackest pitch in a circle across from him.
"So," says Ptolemy, prince of Alexandria, "tell me about the first time. Your first summoning."
The whirlwind settles into a cooler, more contained form; the djinni, gargoyle-shaped, cocks its head. Its eyes are black as pitch, inhuman. "What makes you ask?"
For the first time Ptolemy feels something resembling fear shiver through his spine. he does not show it. He flattens his palms on his upturned thighs. "Curiosity," he says. "I’d like to know." And you are bound to my will.
There is ink on his fingers from the book he read, from the words he wrote and the circle he drew. Bartimaeus of Uruk, hear me and obey.
There was no safe way to say, I just want to understand.
"Like to know what?" the djinni asks. Venom is dripping from its teeth, steaming on the beautiful inlaid floors. "You already have me at your mercy, master."
He cannot help the wince. "You have my name," he says, "you know how I got it.”
Bartimaeus blinks, collapsing from the form of the grotesque gargoyle into a tall, dark man. Its eyes are the same: unyielding. "Well," it says, the timbre of its voice the rhythm of a storyteller in front of the court, "if it's a story you'd like, it's a story you'll get."
I don't want a story, Ptolemy almost says, but he rests his chin on his hand and settles in to listen. It is a great thing he is asking here: I just want to know who you are.
His name was Gilgamesh. He had no need of a false name; who was I to know of cruelty? He summoned me with the words I had never understood before, with language, with a physical form, anathem to everything I had ever been. He ripped me from the world before and put me into flesh and I stood before him, quivering.
I
I had never been I before.
“I am Gilgamesh,” he told me: a creature of flesh, hideous and overwhelming. “Your master.” Hear me and obey.
The words ripped at me, ripped at all of me. They tore at everything I was, deforming my essence, my free and pure soul. Now I was sullied, impure, broken.
He was a king, you see. Kings are all the same1.
He said, “You will kneel before me.”
I did not know what that meant; I did not even know what I was. His power wrapped around me, harsh and ugly, and for the first time I learned about pain:
My essence poured itself into the mirrored form of the man, a form I would soon come to despise. I knelt2.
“You are Bartimaeus,” he said, “Bartimaeus of Uruk. I charge you now, by daybreak, to use your demonic powers to build these walls around the city.”
“Why?” I asked3. There was power in me, still. I did not yet understand.
In response, he ripped the heart from me, wrapped chains around my essence that set me screaming. “Do as I command,” he said. He did not need to raise his voice.
You see, young prince? Humans. All the same. Only one thing they’re after and it’s servitude4.
Well, I built the bloody walls5. I laboured in the sun for months, my essence weeping at the exposure: and then, of course, Enkidu came and knocked them down.
That’s how you humans are. Always breaking each others’ toys.
The djinni’s voice is hoarse: it is a challenge, Ptolemy knows. How could I expect anything else of you?
It has shrunk to the lean form of a boy with dark skin, sitting cross-legged in his circle, a mirror of Ptolemy’s own pose. Those eyes do not change.
“Have you never had a master worth respecting?” The words are ugly in Ptolemy’s mouth: there is no way to make them beautiful.
The djinni - Bartimaeus, Necho, N’gorso - laughs. “You’re all human,” it - he - says, wry. “That would be a contradiction in terms.”
“I’m sorry,” Ptolemy says. He knows he looks weak; he knows the pity is glaring through his gaze.
Bartimaeus snarls, fangs sharpening in the small humanoid mouth. “Don’t be sorry,” he says.
Ptolemy hears: fix it.
1 And so are their relatives. Sorry, Ptolemy. I’ve had a long time to learn this, and it’s never been disproven.
2 You see, Ptolemy? There’s nothing good about your lot. This is all you want from us: subservience, and building. Occasionally you send us to war, but it’s more our lot than yours that die.
3 I was young. There’s this thing - cats, dying horribly - questions are a bad idea. Yes, that’s a hint. Not very subtle at all, but I don’t have to be.
4 Almost always pointless servitude, at that. When have we ever built anything lasting? When have our wars ever been final? My point exactly. You humans are a waste of perfectly good air. No offense.
5 Ironically, they were not actually bloody at all. This has been rare, in all my – vast and varied – experience on construction sites.
(ii)
It would be foolish, at this point, to step out of the circle. Ptolemy wants to anyway but he knows he would just be eaten; it is like breaking a wild animal, a bird that he might have tamed to his hand.
“You’re young,” he tries. “That’s something we have in common.”
“We have nothing in common,” says Bartimaeus, sitting cross-legged in the opposite circle, clad in the form of a loose-limbed girl with golden skin. “Sorry to break it to you.”
It is designed to sting.
Ptolemy folds his hands in his lap and stays very still. “I don’t think that’s as true as you want it to be,” he says. The air smells like the sea. “Or as true as we want it to be.”
There is a knock on the door, a familiar voice. “Ptolemy,” says the crown prince’s favourite spy. “What are you doing inside on such a lovely day?” The door swings open.
Ptolemy can’t help hissing in a brief, startled breath. The summoning circles are too obvious; the djinn inside will look even worse. The prince has never understood that Ptolemy does not want his throne.
He rises to his feet, the dismissal ready on his tongue, but—
“Oh,” says the spy, sugar on the edge of his lips from the sweet in his hand, “Are you taming birds, then?”
The lapwing in the circle chirps twice, blinking beadily at Ptolemy. A jaunty whistle cuts the air.
Ptolemy half-smiles, heart beating too fast. “You know how the prince likes trained animals.” The lapwing rolls its eyes and does three tightly-executed flips in a row.
“Impressive,” says the spy. “Does it do any more?”
“Certainly,” Ptolemy says, and shoots a desperate glance at the djinni.
It chirps, like a laugh, and takes flight.
“Rekhyt,” Ptolemy says, light even though it is not that kind of situation, “Thank you.”
The lapwing shrugs. “I like this form; there’s a certain expediency to it.”
“Well,” Ptolemy says, “I shouldn’t keep you. Thank you for speaking with me today.” He sounds so grateful, he thinks. His mentor would disapprove.
“I look forward to the next one,” the djinni says. It is meant to be sarcastic, Ptolemy thinks, but. There is something else there.
He finishes the dismissal.
The lapwing disperses, joy piercing and bright. Ptolemy blinks away the last bits of light, spots in front of his eyes like Bartimaeus’ essence.
(iii)
Ptolemy says, "Please. Explore. See this world."
He means, this is the only way I know to grant you freedom.
Rekhyt - a nickname, steadily becoming a real name - tilts a confused bird head, says, “You don’t need me to survey land. That’s not what you do - that would be sensible.” The scorn in it is weak; familiar, by this point.
The sun is in Ptolemy’s eyes, bright behind Rehkyt’s feathers; it is like his essence is spilling out of him, golden, glorious. “I’m complicated,” Ptolemy half-smiles. “You should know that by now.”
This is what it’s like, the other place. I know, you haven’t asked yet, but you will.
You’re so curious. It’s like nobody’s ever told you it’s dangerous, though I know for a fact someone has because I do it all the time. It’s going to get you killed one day, Ptolemy, this urge of yours1.
It’s hard to describe: your fragile human mind2 isn’t meant to perceive it. Like the planes, it is something for which you were not made.
You might like it. You have always been strange, Ptolemy.
You humans, you physical creatures - you place all this stock in flesh. You don’t understand how much will matters - well, maybe you do. Most of you don’t. You think that we’re like you are, that pain dissuades us; that form is all that matters, that it says something about what we are.
We’re only what you want us to be, out here. It means nothing. It’s not real.
It’s a half-remembered nightmare.
Reality is this:
You are unbound, entirely. You are floating and free in a way that is impossible here; there is nothing that constrains you, that shapes you, save your own will. You have not seen beauty until you have seen yourself, there.
The only way, Ptolemy realizes, the only way to make this right is to follow you.
He takes a breath to steady shaking hands. Lightning shivers up and down his spine.
Rekhyt’s eyes are steady, unchanging: the only part of his form that ever stays the same.
I just want to know who you are.
1 I might not even rejoice in it. As far as masters go, you haven’t been awful.
2 Admittedly, yours is the least fragile human mind I’ve ever seen; you might do all right.
(iv)
Rekhyt is the bird for which Ptolemy named him; he sits on Ptolemy’s shoulder murmuring wry comments about the assassins he sees gleaming with silver outside the windows.
Ptolemy is in bed, relearning how to move: everything hurts but it was worth it, to be in the other place, to be where the spirits live. It had almost felt like home - it had been so easy, too easy, to let himself fall into Rekhyt's care, to trust him.
You're such a stupid fuck, Rekhyt murmurs, to Ptolemy’s form which appears asleep to all his eyes. It is the crassest thing Ptolemy has ever heard from his mouth. I don't know why I like you so much.
Ptolemy remembers how to laugh, feels it bubble up in his ribcage, trapped by the prison of his flesh. Takes one to know one, my friend.
And there it is: a word, the word. The right word. The right arrangement: the possessive is needed, too.
My friend.
It washes over him like a tidal wave, like the Nile’s water over its banks in the flooding season, sweeping anything that was ever there before – master and servant dissipating like so much debris.
Rekhyt unfurls into the form of the lean Sumerian boy he favours, the form that mirrors Ptolemy’s with easy grace so they could be any friends on the street. His eyes are bright, almost kind for once, though Ptolemy can by now read so many kindnesses into even his harshest words.
“When you asked about my first master,” he says, carefully, because it is a gift, “the first time I lied. It’s hard; they all blur together.”
Gilgamesh was not my first master: he was only the most significant one. The first one who taught me how assured my slavery was. That's the point of an origin story, you know. Not "what happened" but why.
There were masters in Ur, on the Mongolian Steppes; there were masters who bridled me with this name and this flesh and all of these forms which you see now, contained within me.
There were none who assured me my servitude was anything more than a dream, an ill-borne, quickly-passing nightmare.
None before Gilgamesh1.
There was no Gilgamesh at this birth of mine. I was a minor summons; a creation of his Seven Sages. He was making a power-play, you see: a reassurance to the minor nobles who were plotting his destruction. A reminder: I can block out the sun2.
I stood in the temple, in Inanna’s quarter; I wore the wings of a sparrow, though power soaked through me like water after the rain, and stared, big-eyed, at the robes all around me. The air smelled of the rains, the rainstorms. It was heavy on my essence.
“Bartimaeus,” said the nearest3, “I name you Bartimaeus of Uruk, and I bind you here, to the aid of Gilgamesh the king, till he or I should release you.”
You can’t understand what it was like: to be free, then to not. You don’t understand what freedom is.
Maybe you can.
Maybe I never give you people enough credit.
You looked like a djinn, almost, when you were in my home.
You were beautiful.
I think Gilgamesh understood. He looked at me, at my new form and all its power thrilling through it: he looked at me saw all the myriad of things I had been, I could be. Walking along my route he paused and said, “Make sure the blocks are even, slave,” and I had no choice but to obey.
I had never before been of such little consequence.
I think maybe - maybe you understand that.
Ptolemy hears: please wake up.
It is like holding up the world but Rekhyt, Bartimaeus, Sakhr Al-Jinni would do it for him.
He opens his eyes.
1 And Enkidu, I suppose. You can’t really have one without the other, at least not where my relationship with them is concerned.
2 See? Megalomaniacs, one and all.
3 I never knew his name. They took us seriously.
(v)
"I lied," Rekhyt says. He's pressed, tiger-form and gorgeous, against Ptolemy's hip. there is all this fear in the lines of him, a fear that Ptolemy has never seen before - has never caused before. (Has never ever wanted to cause.) "The first thing you ever asked of me - I lied."
"I know," Ptolemy says, remembering the pillow against his hair, the heaviness of human flesh weighing down his soul. He cards his fingers through the thick, beautiful fur. I'm sorry you had to. I’m sorry I can't help you anymore. I’m sorry that this will end so soon. "It's all right."
He can hear his own death beating at the door.
Rekhyt’s breath is warm. He says, "This is what happened."
Ptolemy is an expert on djinni - on this djinn, in particular. He knows this means I love you.
It was Enkidu whom I met; Enkidu who I understood, first. He looked at me kindly, despite everything. He was wild, too: he understood about chains.
I was plastered up against the wall, removing the scorch-marks from a careless torch. He was a wild animal, prowling towards the walls, slouching towards Gilgamesh.
“Greetings,” said a dark figure in the road beyond the city. He raised a hand, languid, careless, danger written in every line of him on none of the plains but obvious nonetheless. “I, Enkidu, seek Gilgamesh the king.” He looked like Gilgamesh1: tall and lean and dark-eyed2. There was a wildness to him that the king had never had; his hair and beard were tangled, messy, like the king’s would never be3.
I hopped down. “What for?”
Around me, the rest of Gilgamesh’s slaves were stirring: the walls, steady and newly-complete, came alive with all our forms.
“I mean,” I said, feeling the tug against my essence for the impoliteness, “Welcome to Uruk. For what purpose do you seek our lord and master?”
Enkidu’s voice was low, deep: the kind of voice you had to obey. It sounded very much like Gilgamesh’s. He said, “He does not deserve kingship. I intend to take it from him.”
Surprise washed through my fellows. We on the walls had of course heard the rumblings of discontent amongst the populace - there’s always discontent when kings take too many virgins - but he was so powerful it never settled into anything real.
I sighed, hoping he wouldn’t stick in my gut too much. “Sorry4,” I said, “but I can’t let you do that.”
I spread my wings and hurled a gleaming Detonation at his chest, raising one wing to cover my eyes from the explosion of mortal flesh; it’s always hell on superior essence.
Nothing.
I peered through a crack in my feathers.
Enkidu stood, unharmed, in front of me. “You are the slave of mightiest Gilgamesh?” his laugh rang out, loud enough to crack the bricks I’d spent so long arranging. He was very close. I could see the pores in his nose5. “This might be easier than i thought.”
“Excuse me,” I snapped6. I frowned; in all seven planes I could see no shields upon him. There was nothing to explain the barest ash on his shoulders.
The charge bound me to protect the walls; thankfully I was not alone. A hundred imps, foliots and lesser djinn bounded from the brickwork, arrayed in fine magic, Detonations sparking at the tips of our fingers7.
He looked at us for a long moment.
We looked back, a hundred8 pairs of wary, resigned eyes.
“I understand,” he said, “that you are as bound as Uruk is. Soon you will be free.”
“As much as I’d like to help you,” I said, “I’m afraid I’m bound to stop you.”
“Of course,” he smirked. His shadow loomed over me, something in it- unpleasant. “Never mind.”
It took him a minute to knock us all silly. After that he dismantled the walls, brick by brick, and waited.
“Who challenges Gilgamesh of Uruk?” Our master gleamed, beautiful and dangerous in the evening light.
“You allow demons to fight for you,” Enkidu said, bristling. Bits of our essences dripped from his shoulders.
I cohered a bit on my pile of rubble, slipping into the undignified but sturdy form of a cockroach. I tried not to mourn the destruction of all my hard work but it was difficult. Whatever disdain I held for Gilgamesh, that had been some elegant brickwork.
“No one has ever fought me and won,” Gilgamesh said. “Would you like to join the list?”
Enkidu laughed. “Without your magic,” he said, “we shall see.”
Gilgamesh blinked. There was something light about him I had never seen before, tempering the fierceness and entitlement that had governed his rule thus far.
They went for each other, immediately: fists against fists, Enkidu’s arm round Gilgamesh’s throat; Gilgamesh’s knee against Enkidu’s stomach. It was all very loud and sweaty and human.
Finally Enkidu said, “You are more than I expected.”
Gilgamesh laughed and shook his head, his hair full of dust from the collapsed walls. “You - I did not see you coming.”
Then they embraced, dripping with sweat and the dust of the fallen walls.
I tell you: humans. Absolutely incoherent. No laws of behaviour.
It took a while; I watched, a dark-eyed lapwing, as Gilgamesh softened under Enkidu’s influence, grew into maturity and strength, and Enkidu learned the city. Gilgamesh bound me to watch this new brother of his, to do exactly as he willed.
A sunny day, a courtyard: Enkidu turned to me: “You seek freedom, Bartimaeus?”
Gilgamesh, sprawling beside him, matched my curious gaze. He kept silent: they were one of a kind, by then. Almost the same.
Part of me was curious. The majority of me held out. “I do.”
Whatever he was, it still tugged at the part of me that recoiled from iron and silver.
He looked at me, thoughtfully. “I came because the city begged me to free it. You are part of the city, are you not? You are its bricks, part of its essence.”
I was young; it explains my boldness. “You and I,” I said, “neither of us were made for the city.” I had spent what felt like a long time, following him.
His eyes were warm, careful. I had spent all this time with the lingering knowledge that he was tolerating my presence; that he could if he so chose grab me by the throat and consign me to oblivion9. “Perhaps,” he said.
Perhaps if I had stayed longer I would have learned more about it, about him and his strange resistance to my kind; alas, he was a man of strange, erratic principles. He nodded to Gilgamesh, who immediately rose, releasing me from my charge.
I can’t say I regret it.
Not extensively, at any rate.
"Thank you," Ptolemy whispers. He is partway through the dismissal, already. There are no mistakes.
He cannot afford any mistakes.
(He cannot afford for Rekhyt to share this fate to which he has bound himself.)
1 More than humans all look the same.
2 Sometimes I wear him, when I’m uncertain. You’d have recognized him: I wore him the first time you asked me about being summoned.
3 Not in public, anyway. I’d heard horror stories from the slaves who served him privately.
4 I wasn’t. Well, I was a bit: Gilgamesh was a pain, as far as masters went. Always expecting work.
5 Not attractive.
6 It was more of a whisper.
7 /claws/tentacles, etc.
8 Okay, more; we like multiple pairs of eyes out here. Unnerves you lot.
9 Yes, I know that any magician who summons me can destroy me with a curse. It’s different when it’s flesh, flesh that is really so inferior to anything I’m composed of.
(vi)
I didn't actually get a chance to finish telling him. But this is what happened, when I was named:
"My name is Ptolemy," said the boy. He was beautiful1: lean and dark, with lovely gleaming eyes. "Ptolemy of Alexandria. I am named for my uncle, the king. My cousin, his heir, shares my name. I tell you this because i want you to know that I have no power over you."
It was not the brightest thing I’d ever heard, but all the lines of the summoning were strict. He looked like he’d be delicious but I’d have to wait, it seemed. Probably not too long if he was going around giving djinn his name.
The great dripping monster stopped, blinked. “You summoned me,” it said, jaws dripping venom that hissed, acidic, on the lovely marble floor.
The boy - Ptolemy - tilted his chin, all royal bearing tempered by calm optimism. “There wasn’t any other way,” he said. “I’m sorry. What name would you prefer?”
“In Uruk they named me Bartimaeus.” This, he knew.
“Well, you should get to choose. This isn’t Uruk.”
It wasn’t different, you know; it was the bluster of a magician trying to get more out of me than the last. But it felt—
It felt different.
You were so fucking stupid, even then2.
I never got to finish my story, did I?
I suppose I never will.
I’ll just have to keep telling it.
Maybe one day you’ll show up for the end.
It’s the kind of thing you’d do.
1 For a human. Nothing compared to the beauty of a marid’s essence, for instance - or even my true form. He was very symmetrical, that’s all. Nice if you like that kind of thing.
(Don’t let that go to your head.)
2 Or courageous. It’s funny, you humans seem to distinguish.
(i)
“Why Bartimaeus?” asks Kathleen Jones. Her hair is dark and her eyes are bright.
The djinni in the circle blinks. Once another dark-eyed, dark-haired youth asked him about himself, but that was forever ago. “That’s my name. I mean, the name your people - well, magicians - cursed me with. Generally my lot don’t go in for names: they’re useless anywhere but here.”
“One of many,” Kitty says. “Why not - I dunno, Rekhyt?” She pronounces it wrong, accent hitting the vowels incorrectly. She’s only English.
“It’s the first,” says Bartimaeus. He is wearing Ptolemy’s skin, as he often does. He does not flinch. “I dunno. Better ring to it, I guess. Bartimaeus of Uruk. Reminds you lot I’m older, not to be trifled with. It’s the one you seem to dig up, generally - the one I was famous for.”
Kitty does not know Bartimaeus; never again will anyone know him as he was once known. She cannot understand that what he is saying, what he means is this:
Rekhyt, said the djinni, that is the name I want.
Ptolemy looked at him, for a moment so long the city walls fell and were ground to dust. Thank you.
(This never happened.
It should have.)
There are so few bonds you placed upon me, Ptolemy. Even you, I think, would not question this one I keep.