IN WHICH THERE IS AN EXCHANGE OF NAMES

[little_lady_d]

Narcisse tried to understand his daemon. He watched it, as they walked through Harlem, though no one else saw anything remarkable. Eyes fixed on the shift of shadow and iron in a city cluttered by both, he must’ve looked lost in thought.

The daemon moved beside him, step for step, with gliding grace. The heavy bars of its golem-body drifted in the air like windchimes.

Was it ‘it’? ‘It’ felt inhuman, but some daemons reveled in their inhumanity. Or else they reveled in their ambiguity, as they slipped between the boundaries of ‘he’ and ‘she’ — Narcisse did the same, sometimes. The speakeasies and alchemy dens were new hat, but Narcisse first felt at home in Harlem during a drag ball, in a black and gold robe de style and draping jewels.

He liked his tail-coats and cufflinks, too, but they said something different. A garment, he felt, was only an agreement. It didn’t mean anything on its own, except for how it made people see you, made you see yourself.  Narcisse had his own theory: the magic of gendering was like the magic of naming. It was a convention, sure, shorter than summoning up the history of the human race and human relations and showing where each person emerged as an individual — and that’s all it was, to say this person was so-and-so, from such-and-such family, son or daughter or otherwise. A name was at times a lock, at times a key. It put you in place, and a place could rise around you and trap you, or it could give you somewhere to go when you were alone and wandering.

The right name meant recognition, meant understanding. But some names you held in secret, before ever speaking them aloud, and those names were power. That’s why the old theurgists wrote grimoires using the true-names of daemons, why city witches went by monikers like the Sphinx of Sixth Avenue, and why Narcisse smiled a private smile whenever a stranger stuttered between sir and ma’am.

“Hold on,” he said, and he stopped on the sidewalk and patted down his pockets, as though to remember something he forgot. An extravagance of flappers passed and parted around him, like waves parted before the prow of a ship. One girl shivered as she stepped around the daemon, but she couldn’t say why; there was something there she shouldn’t see, shouldn’t touch, by the compact of Harlem. Her friend called back get-an-ankle-on and she sped up, away.

The streets weren’t empty, but there was enough sound on either side for Narcisse to have a nice, low conversation with himself and not be noticed. New Yorkers, he found, preferred not to notice anyone. “Listen,” he said. “I know I brushed you off in a hurry, back there. I tried to be graceful about it, but the grace wasn’t in me. Let me try again.”

“I take no offense,” the daemon intoned.

“Ever, or …?” Narcisse waved a hand. “Never mind. Manners are manners, in this realm and the next. I should introduce myself, at least.”

“I know you. You are the one I am bound to. Our contract is sealed in blood.”

“You say that, but I was thinking something less sanguine. Let’s start with my name is Narcisse —  what’s yours?”

Courtesy. Convention. Could be the daemon’s appearance, its star-like eyes or eye-like stars, but Narcisse thought constellation. He thought of star maps spread on the floor of his father’s study, and a daemon-tutor with the face of an owl who gave long and soothing lectures on astronomy.

Call this star polaris because it sits in the north. Call these stars septentrio and it will help you to orient yourself. Tell yourself a story you’ll remember, seven stars for seven oxen driving the plough of heaven, or — if you prefer — Zeus swinging the bear by the tail and flinging it into the sky. These are the conventions. They exist to show you where you stand.

It would be better, Narcisse thought, to start off on the right foot.

“I am the Hunter On High, the Hum of the Bow-String, Attendant to the Sixty-Sixth House of Kimariis. If you call on me, I will be the arrow in your enemies’ throats.”

Narcisse winced. Yes, that did sound like one of his father’s contracts. Some daemons tutored your children, others waged your wars, and old Léonide Decoudreau had fought a world’s worth of war with daemons at his hand.

So why should Narcisse be surprised to hear his father set up some secret hunter, some sniper in the shadows, to watch over his heirs?

“Well, I’m not calling you Hunter On High, Hum of the Bow-String, Attendant to Et Cetera every time.” As usual, Narcisse improvised. Another way to use conventions: like a jazz band playing the standards, syncopating solos, making each song their own.  “How about,” he asked, “Orion?”

“Orion,” the daemon repeated in that calm vacuum of a voice.

“The Hunter On High.” Narcisse pointed into the sky, held his fingers up a-one a-two a-three for the three stars of Orion’s belt. Once found, the rest of the Orion spilled easily into view — the stars of Orion’s broad shoulders, Orion’s lean hunter’s legs. All those lessons must have meant something, in the end. “How does it hit you?” he wanted to know. “It’s your name I’m constellating.”

“It will serve.”

“Good. Now,” Narcisse continued, “you said something about the sons and daughters of your house — the Sixty-Sixth House? — defending me and mine. Does that make you a son of the House of Kimariis, then? A daughter?”

“I am in the form you conjured me in. I do not know whether its features,” smooth, shimmering blackness, silhouette come to life, “should be ascribed masculine or feminine.” At least the daemon understood what Narcisse was angling at. Put like that, he saw the difficulty.

“That’s the trouble of the human realm. Believe me, we humans can get conjured into forms that don’t fit us, too — it’s a conjuring that happens at birth. I like to let folks make their own ascriptions.”

“Then …” The daemon paused, and thought, as though it were unused to thinking about itself. “I ascribe neither to myself.”

“Then neither’s what we’ll call you.” A quirk of a smile. “As for me, I’ll let you know what I feel. Tonight I’m Monsieur Vivant, but friends just say Narcisse. Let’s be friendly, Orion.”

Ae, aes, aer. Narcisse fixed the formalae in his mind like an incantation. Ae is Orion. Aes form is the form of the stars above Harlem and arrow-fall from rooftops. What else can I say about aer? What else can I learn? Learn a little, learn a lot, and maybe (Narcisse hoped) this mess will have meant something — something for the both of them. They didn’t need a contract for that.

“Friendly,” ae echoed, as though the word were more foreign than the tongues of daemon-realms.

“Surely you have friends,” teased Narcisse. “Why can’t I be one of them?”

“We are legion, my brothers and sisters. Our bond is the bond of our victory. Yet I am young, among my kin, and my victories are fewer than theirs. You need not fear my skill,” ae insisted, before Narcisse could think to. “I was born to be skill itself. I was born with one thought, and the thought was to overcome. I am sworn to you, to overcome your enemies, until no enemy can stand against us.”

“My enemies, again! You keep asking after strangers when there’s a new friend in front of you. But I’m starting to see the picture. Do you want a victory so you can impress me?” That quirk of a smile spread. “Orion, Orion,” purred Narcisse, in a voice like butter, “you’ve impressed me already. You’re my knight in shining armor. You swept me off my feet!”

“You would have fallen if I did not catch you.” Literal as a bargain in a fairy-tale, this one. “I do not think your mortal frame would withstand the fall.”

“Neither my frame nor my heart. No,” laughed he, “but I’ve been there. I didn’t get out much, when I was a littler Narcisse, so my sister and I were each other’s friends and allies. The two of us were born together, you know — I a few minutes before, like a herald before a queen. We were raised regimental, like you and your legion, military corners on our beds, daily drills, duels ‘til our father called a victor. We fed on strategy and martial history, morning, noon, and night. I remember arguing Pericles with my sister at the dinner table, because she thought it was stupid to praise a leader for being persuasive when persuasian meant making his men agree to a bad plan. ‘Better orator than a strategist, indeed.’ I don’t know what I argued — or why I cared! But she was my sister, my twin. She’d never been easy to impress.”

“Do you no longer care?”

“About being the better strategist? You saw my showing on the roof. And you know — I’ve never been prouder to flee, to fall. Fighting wasn’t my first instinct. Not like my father’s.”

“But Monsieur Decoudreau,” Orion said, “is a commander, is he not? That is why he taught you strategy — for when you need not be the one to fight. Your instinct was to call on me. Your instinct was to command.”

Silence. Narcisse began to walk, again, head up and breathing in the city air. Now he needed to be moving, needed to find a crowd to drown himself in. “They say thaumaturgy’s the stuff of will.“ He philosophized as he walked. “A hand outstretched — that’s the elegant example you’ll find in all the textbooks. The Decoudreau library was brimming with books like them. They say we’re all familiar with working our will through our own bodies, with thinking of raising a hand, and raising it. Working your will through the world is a trick, but it’s the same sort of trick, if you try it: the trick of taking whatever’s in your mind and turning it to reality. You make your will known in inscriptions and incantations, just like you made your will known when you put out your hand to take the pen. Thaumaturgy’s taking your own little sphere of control — the sphere we’re all well used to — and flinging it outward with a spell, into the unknown unfamiliar. Through will alone, forgetting the physical, you can reach even farther than before. You can set a fire without ever touching a match. Easy, right?” Down the block, the shade trees shook their leaves off in the wind, and Narcisse stopped to see how they spun as they fell. “But if you’ve ever watched a lover leave, you know it’s not so simple. You tell yourself all you have to do is raise a hand, reach out — but your body betrays you. Or you think I’ve got to let him go and your hand’s gone ahead and grabbed his shirt-sleeve. So what’s that say about you? What’s your true will?”

“Where are we headed?” Orion asked. “Direct me.” Aim me.

“Do they have trumpets in that legions of yours?” Without sparing a look over his shoulder. “Drums?”

“That is not a direction.”

“It’s what the first horns were for, for hunters to sound to hunters, soldiers to sound to soldiers — to speak without words, say come find me and follow. I think that’s why you sit up, whenever you hear the trumpet blaring in a band. Even with the mute on, you know it’s got something to say, somewhere to lead you. And the drums, the drums’ll never leave you. They’re the beat your heart marches to when it’s about to get good, or they’re the flutter and roll that makes your heart stand still. They’re the flourish of the fife-and-drum corps, drumstick spinning in the air, who knows when it’ll land. And it sounds to you, you know?” Narcisse smiled to himself, where no one would see. New Yorkers tried not to notice. “It seizes you by the soul and takes it dancing. There’re musicians I’ve heard, and their music caught me like kindling. Sure as thaumaturgy, it set something in me afire. There’s more than one way to reach someone, more than one way to pass on a dream, and dreams flow like wine when the band plays. But it’s not,” Narcisse said, “the same as command. It’s not the same as control. I’m not going to command you, Orion.”

Silence again. The silhouette of Orion shivered, uncertain, stars spinning in the void of aer.

Then, slow as decision, Orion’s shadow-shape crumbled, metal revolving and resolving into another form. Still bound by broken bars, a ring of them like ribs where a belly would be, but now ae resembled the shadow of a sleek coursing hound.  Ae paced beside Narcisse, pressed aer iron-plated head to his hand.

Cold to the touch — not cold like iron, cold like a void someone happened to brush by. Like the rivers of forgetfulness leading down to oblivion, and Narcisse in the boat, skimming his fingers on the surface.

“Command or no,” ae pronounced, “I will follow.”

Narcisse laughed — he had to. In that chill of forgetfulness, he remembered: he didn’t come here to brood. “Then come with me, if you’d like,” he said. “Where we’re going, there’s dancing.”

 

Comments

[ernest]

Oh, the magic of naming and gendering is so lovely as you explore it through Narcisse! And "Literal as a bargain in a fairy-tale, this one." is such a great description of Orion, and then aer form as a hound fits so well.

"Then come with me, if you'd like," he said. "Where we're going, there's dancing." !!! of course that's where his priorities lie.

[little_lady_d]

!!! thank you for reading and commenting!

i’m pleased you can already tell a thing or two about narci’s priorities. and that you liked the explorations of naming and gendering — that was one of the first things i wrote for november, and one of the easier things. i’m always up for some character-centered musings on societal concepts and constructs, and if there’s a magic system, so much the better!