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fiction: serial fiction
the crown, book one: chapter 2
James woke up slowly, his eyes straining to focus in the dim light. His brain slowly began to receive telegrams from his perception. He was on the kitchen floor in his apartment. Okay. The kitchen light was turned off, and wan illumination drifted into the room from the torchiere lamp in the living room ("makeout lighting" James' dad had joked once, a strange tidbit to drift into his consciousness just then). Tonya, clad only in one of James' button shirts, her braids tied up in a ponytail, leaned over him, a look he couldn't decipher resting on her sable features.
"I fell down ..." James began gamely, but discovered he didn't have much to follow it with. "What happened to me?"
Tonya sighed and averted her eyes. "I think I know. I should go."
Before she could get up, James grabbed her arm. "Whoa, whoa, hold on a minute here!" he said excitedly, leaning on an elbow to get some altitude. "You show me one of the most passionate nights in my life, and now you wanna break camp? Naw, dawg, that ..."
"It's not that," Tonya interrupted, her voice quiet and reserved. A whole lot was going on behind her cognac-colored eyes, but James couldn't penetrate her secrecy. "It's ... damn. Let me help you up, come sit on the couch with me."
James made it to his feet (feet ... what happened involving his feet? It was almost coming back to him ...) and walked over to sit down with Tonya. She sat, knees tightly together, staring down at her hands as she turned them over and over, almost as if she expected to have answers written on her palms. "James, there's a lot you don't know about me," she started, "a lot that it might not be safe for you to know about me."
His first instinct was to make light of it, but sensing the gravity in her, James said nothing, watching her intensely.
"I'm ... I can't believe I'm having this conversation again, after so long. I'm gonna tell you some things that will seem impossible, some things that won't make sense, but they're true. I am telling you because I've really, really come to care about you over the last few months, and I think I can be open with you. I hope I can."
"Baby, you can tell me anything," James offered, setting a hand on her right knee, feeling the warm vitality beneath his touch. "The last four months have made me so happy, I just want ... oh, shit, you're married. Some big collard-green eatin' brother is about to bust in here and kick my ass ..." James looked towards the window nervously.
"No, I'm not married," Tonya sighed, her lip upturned slightly. "This isn't that easy. Okay. I'm gonna tell you, and please just let me finish, before you ask me any questions, because it's been so long since I told anybody, I just need to get it all out without crying. Okay?"
James, brow furrowed, nodded assent.
"Okay. Whew. Well, as near as I can figure, I was born sometime around 6500 BC, a little bit south of the country called Ethiopia." She paused to look at James, his expression steady without a sign of mockery. "I say this with all seriousness. I'm over eight thousand years old. I saw Christ at Calvary, I watched them erect the Great Pyramid at Giza, and I've witnessed more wars and death and pain than you'd ever believe could exist in the world. I told you I hadn't been with anybody in a while, remember? Well, you're the first man I've spent any serious time with since the 1600s, when my husband was killed in Madagascar and I ran away to the Australian outback, just to get away from the world. I grew up speaking a language that nobody in the world even remembers, I watched my parents and my children and their children grow old and die around me. When I was twenty-two, I just stopped aging. I haven't aged a day since."
She paused again to watch James, who remained as he was, paying rapt attention to her.
"You're probably thinking, 'she's crazy,' but it's all true, and I can answer any question about anything I've seen. I know you'll have questions. I don't really know much about why I am the way I am, why I can go more than a month without food or water and be all right, why I can do the things I can. I just know that I can, and that if I don't stay quiet about it, bad things can happen to me. I've been hung twice. I've been chased out of more villages and towns, called a witch, than I can remember."
Tonya paused to take a breath and consider, once again keeping her eyes on her hands, before continuing.
"The first time I fell in love was after my first marriage. Love wasn't a requisite to get married and have kids, in those days, and my parents arranged a marriage for me with another boy in my tribe. Anyway, we grew up, got married, had five kids, he got old, I didn't. This was weird, but people had a way higher tolerance to weird back then. He died, and my kids were all grown and married when I met Ktenge. His tribe had been wiped out by a bad storm, and he was the only survivor he knew of. He was tall, a lot taller than my people, and he was very clever and very sweet. Our elder accepted his offer to come and be a hunter with our tribe, and he became one of us. It took us about two years for him to get over his superstition, losing all his people like that, but he courted me, and got all the right permissions, and I really began to care for him. We got married after harvest one year, and that's when it all started to happen.
"You probably fell down when you realized you were floating. You can float now, along with a lot of other really interesting things. It was probably too much of a shock for your mind to accept. Anyway, Ktenge went out one morning, happy and content after making love to me, and was about two feet off the ground, not even noticing before he was half way across the village commons. Again, higher tolerance for weird, so it was fun for him to discover what he could do. He was stronger, he could move faster, he could float off the ground and even fly a little bit. With a word he could command men and animals, calm down a raging lion with his voice. He was next to impossible to hurt -- a whole stampede of gazelles ran over him and he didn't have a scratch."
James finally broke his silence. "Why?"
Tonya took a deep breath, looked James in the eye, and responded nervously, "Because I was in love with him."
They sat, silent for a moment, looking at one another. Tonya kept searching his face for a laugh, a sneer, something that would shatter the fragile, crystalline affection she'd been fighting for months. He only watched her, serenely. He was so patient, so gloriously patient with her. She looked away from him, got up to walk around some, and continued.
"Ktenge became the greatest hunter in our region. We had two children, who were very well loved, even though one died in that same stampede. He lived more than sixty years after we met, which was unheard of in those times. Finally his body was just too old, underneath his powers, to keep going. His funeral was huge, people traveled from all over east Africa to say goodbye. When he was gone, our tribe was a lot less interesting and we kind of fell into obscurity. From the outside, nobody knew much and nobody made the connection. Our elder finally came to me and asked me to, as soon as I was ready, seek a new mate. She realized that I was the reason Ktenge was so impressive. She left instructions for the next tribal elders on how to deal with me and what to watch for.
"About sixteen years later I met Sanu. Oh god, he was so beautiful. When I met you, I was scared for a minute, because you look very much like him. Smooth, dark skin. Incredible smile, a lot like yours. Sanu was a Kemite, from what's now called Egypt. He was a priest and a scholar, and he found tales of Ktenge in some archive in Hetkanebthet, which is a city that no longer exists. He wanted to make a history of Ktenge, as some northern Kemites were starting the first debates on race, they were more like modern Arabs in complexion. Anyway, so he came, and people pointed him to me, as Ktenge's wife, and he couldn't believe I was the same Kayet -- that's the first name I went by -- that was married to Ktenge. He interviewed me and we talked, his voice was like rushing water, and he kept finding more reasons to stick around, and we fell in love. Then he began floating, and everybody figured it out around the same time."
Tonya paced around the living room a bit, fidgeting with the buttons on the shirt. "After a year or so, he talked me into going to Kemet with him, because he wanted to learn more about what we had together, and why it was. He loved knowledge, just like you. So I said good bye to my little village, and promised to send back presents, and we set off for Kemet.
"It was so beautiful, James, even then, before the dynastic period. I was taken to a Vizier of the Mysteries School, which is a long story, but he was like a master magician and elder. Anyway, he studied me and listened to me and Sanu, watched Sanu do some things and we found out I could do a lot of the same stuff. I can't fly, I can't run as fast, I'm not as strong, but it's nearly impossible for me to be injured, and I heal very fast, faster than Sanu or Ktenge could. I can see and smell and hear really well, better than most people. The vizier met with some of the other teachers and came to the conclusion that when I love somebody, that energy is strong enough to do this for the man. He compared it to the way the royal system there worked, which was the foundation of the dynastic system. The king was able to rule because the queen gave him the power. In the medu neter, the language and religion of Kemet, they showed it by showing the queen of the gods Auset or Isis, having a symbol of a throne. She was the base of the power, though she let her man wield it, so they said I had The Crown ... am I talking too much?"
James shook his head and sat back, arms crossed. "No. Go on, I wanna hear all of this."
"You're not buying this at all, are you?," she asked forlornly.
"Right now, I'm gathering information," he replied coolly. "I do, now, remember floating, which should be impossible. If this is the explanation, I wanna know as much about it as I can. Plus, it's hella fresh that I look like an ancient Egyptian. Go on, I have tons of questions when you're done."
Tonya opened her mouth to continue, but James said, "Oh, before you do, I should tell you -- I love you too. Just to get that out of the way, no matter what this story ends up saying, even if you're a raving nutball. Go 'head."
Tonya grasped her hands together in front of her mouth as her eyes began to tear up. Sweet spirit singing, he loves me, she thought to herself. Unable to stop herself, she melted into a waterfall of sobs.
James leapt up and ran over to her, taking her in his arms as she descended to the floor, ending up with both of them on their knees, side by side. "Baby, shh, baby, don't cry," he whispered into her braids as he rocked her. Tonya clung to him, crying with relief and joy.
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