Work Text:
O bitter storm, retreat, O storm, storm return to your home. O storm that destroys cities, retreat, O storm, storm return to your home. O storm that destroys houses, retreat, O storm, storm return to your home. Indeed the storm that blew on Sumer, blew also on the foreign lands.
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When Bartimaeus comes forth, ripped out of the void and spat screaming into the world, they devote him to Inanna. “Your name is Bartimaeus,” says the High Priestess, and her assistants stand silent and impassive. “Your goddess is Inanna. You serve her through us. You will obey in all things.” Each word stings like a whipcrack. The gravity of the Priestess’s words seems to sharpen and define him, anchoring him irreversibly into the world. Each point of sensory data is painfully overstimulating as sight and sound and touch stick invisible daggers into his essence and with each second he spends as a single discrete entity he solidifies further. He is dizzy with the newness of it, raw and newborn, and then the patterns of light and shadow begin to make sense to him and he looks into the face of his mother and he understands separation. It is, he thinks, a very terrible thing.
Inanna is the goddess of love and of war, he learns. As he stumbles through the dust, trying to make sense of a body that needs to be oriented in physical space, he wonders why those two things were grouped together. It will take him three thousand years to understand.
Bartimaeus sees a bucket of something silky and transparent. It makes him think of home, so he approaches it. The shapes and colors and textures are so varied here. The water is pleasing; he leans over it and is surprised to see a face staring up at him. It is that of the assisting priestess whose form he took, for he had to take some shape and hers was the closest. He dips his hands into the bucket and lets the water drip off of them onto the ground. He likes this! The reflected face is smiling, now, and he feels terribly, wonderfully awake. “My name is Bartimaeus,” he says. The words clump together oddly, his intonation stilted, but it’s a good first try. “My goddess is Inanna.” A man comes out of a nearby house and shouts at him. “What are you doing, girl?” Bartimaeus stands and runs away, and he feels very strong and very beautiful and very sore. Lightning will strike from his fingers and he feels like he will rule the world.
When he has completed his assignment, he asks to see Inanna, to look upon the goddess he is serving. Pain is beginning to besiege him. Then they laugh at him, their scorn hot and painful, and he decides that this is a feeling he will have to try very hard to avoid.
---
Bartimaeus knows Uruk. He knows the baker on the corner. He knows the well and the women who visit it every morning. He knows the crazy old man who raves on the corner. He knows the blacksmith and the butcher and the archivist, their places and patterns. He knows the festivals, with their banners and music.
Then the Babylonians come, and Bartimaeus comes with them. Bartimaeus sets fire to the baker’s. He shoots a Detonation at the well and watches as a woman pitches to the side, blood seeping out of her mouth. He kills the blacksmith, and the butcher, and the archivist.
Uruk falls. Bartimaeus, glassy-eyed, does as he’s told, striding through the city and picking off guardsmen. He is part of a unit of three strong djinn. They’re regrouping in the streets when they hear a scuffling from a nearby alley.
“Go and check that, will you?” one of his partners asks. Bartimaeus hefts his weapon and goes to search the darkened alley. He hears the scuffling again, from behind a pile of discarded baskets. He steps carefully around it.
Now he is eye-to-eye with a young mother, her hair plastered to her face, her hand clamped over the mouth of a chubby toddler, her back pressed against the wall of the adjacent building. Her eyes are wide with fear and defiance. She does not look away, and then she closes her eyes and waits for death. Bartimaeus feels himself turn to leave without speaking.
“Did you find anything?” they ask him.
“Just a dog,” Bartimaeus says.
---
He sculpts his own pantheon of gods and goddesses out of his essence: men and women and children, beautiful and strong. He can’t do much for his situation but look good in it, after all. He is always finding little details to add: a beautiful pattern of freckles on a woman’s neck appears on his a few weeks later. He picks and chooses the pieces of humans he wants to carry around with him. It isn’t until he meets Ptolemy that he wants to carry the whole thing.
“Say we could undo your naming,” says Ptolemy. “You could go back to Other Place entirely, merge with it once more and never see the Earth again. Would you do it?”
“Of course,” says Bartimaeus, but the question makes something painful twist within him.
---
The syllables in his name meant, once upon a time, “The flame that burns the enemies and the world”. It pleased him, at first, this mantle of his, but no one says it right anymore. When he looks back on his first summoning, he is something close to ashamed: it was the ultimate violation, his naming, and for those first few years, he was almost...happy.
Still, when Nefertiti summons him, and he watches her fight and laugh and rule, he thinks of her: Inanna. He calls his master Lady and he doesn’t recall why.
He would never choose to serve. But if he had to choose anyone...she wouldn’t be the worst.
---
He never learns. Bartimaeus is discovering that about himself, when he meets Kitty. He’ll do this over and over again, letting them draw him in and then destroy him. He looks into Kitty’s face, with its web of lines - he looks into Inanna’s face, fierce and defiant - and he takes her hand.
“Whatever you want,” he says.
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That the orchards should bear syrup and grapes, that the high plain should bear the mašgurum tree, that there should be long life in the palace, that the sea should bring forth every abundance: may An not change it. The land densely populated from south to uplands: may An not change it. May An and Enlil not change it, may An not change it.