Fic: "Once Upon A Time in Egypt" (1/1) Spoilers for Moebius Pt1
FIC: "Once Upon A Time in Egypt" (1/1)
by LJ
Spoilers for Moebius Pt1
Warning: Completely unbeta'd, written between midnight and 3am, totally convoluted and probably impossible to follow....
Once upon a time in Egypt, Ra, Sun-God, Husband-Father of Hathor, was displeased. Two slaves were brought before him, called instigators of rebellion. He disposed of the male, an old slave not worth the effort of keeping, and placed his dead, broken body on display for all to see. The female, her skin and eyes and hair as pale as the sands of Kemet and Abydos, he kept for his own pleasure, but when he approached her as her god he felt the naqadah in her veins. She slashed at him with a hidden knife and he slashed back. She fought and he fought her. She claimed to have not been an instigator of rebellion. She died.
Ra, son of Aten, Sun-God of Kemet and Abydos, was displeased.
The Chapa'ai he took with him to Abydos.
Once upon a time in Egypt, slaves rebelled and then were quieted. Their fury was great, their strength not in might but in numbers and hope. The hope died.
Jareth of Kemet did not go forth from the sands of Egypt.
Jareth of Kemet did not leave Egypt. He died there, among the sun-pale sands where once the great god Ra ruled, where the sun-disc shone and once the water-blue Chapa'ai once stood. He had no son. He had no grandson. He had no great-granddaughter called Micha who married a chieftain of the north peoples.
Micha, a daughter of Jareth of Kemet, was never born in the land of the Hellenes.
In the land of the Hellenes there was never a woman named Micha. Micha was tall and carried herself like a rich woman, though she was not. A man named Kanelaos coveted and won her, and he wrote her great songs. A poet, wandering from village to village generations later, heard the songs and learnt them well. He asked the people there, "For whom do you sing these songs?" They answered, "We honor the ancestress for whom they were written, like a goddess she was." The poet took the songs with him, to the places that would be Athens and Sparta and he changed the words and men sang them to Athena and Demeter and Artemis as hymns fitting their divine requests.
But Micha was never born in the land of the Hellenes and her husband's songs never left their valley.
The songs of the husband of Micha never traversed land and time to become songs for goddesses. Other songs took their places, and the goddesses of the Hellenes were never without worship in that day. But those songs were different. A turn of tune, a grace note of a lyre inspired a girl of the Hellenes to dance on a warm spring's day, and she was seen by the ruler of a city further west. He bought her, two thousand years after Ra, from her father and brought her to his home to dance and sing for his wife, who was sickly. She was seen by a sword-master who came to train the wife's only son and he was struck by her movement to create a gesture of blade, of metal, yet unknown.
But the songs never inspired her to dance on a warm spring's day. That gesture of blade came years later to a different man.
That girl was not inspired to dance on that spring's day, and that soldier never knew that movement of sword and arm. He taught it to his sons, and they taught their sons and their grandsons and the sons of the men who carried blades against the barbarians. Generation upon generations learned to carry a blade in that order and in time it came to the land of the Latini, on the shores of Italia. A gladiator was injured when his opponent used it against him and he died. A patrician wife saw him die, pitiously, and when her maid ventured an invitation that evening, she went and soon became a regular participant in the cult of Christos, in time converting her own children and her husband.
But the sword-trick was learned differently. The gladiator was injured in a different way, dying of the infection that crept quickly upon him. The patrician's wife did not convert her husband.
The patrician never converted. The patrician's wife spread the word of Christos, and her children after her and her husband, too. A child of her grandson's great-granddaughter was martyred for her faith and became the patron saint, Saint Anna, of Amerevita, a village of Italian Helvetia.
But her ancestor did not convert. Oh, she was born, and she died young, but it was in childbirth. The child died and her husband Ludvigo remarried. Her town adopted one of the many Annes and Annas as their patroness.
Anna of Amerevita was never martyred. Saint Anna of Amerevita blessed the great-granddaughter of some great-granddaughter of Ludvigo of Amerevita in securing a good husband and she went forth from Helvetia and went with her merchant husband to Istria. Their house overlooked the shore of the Adriatic. She would walk the shore or watch for his ship from the balcony. Their children spoke Italian with Helvetian accents, for her husband was often gone, but their native tongue was the Istrian-Venetian dialect of the coast. Their Latin was only passable and made the priest wince when they came to confession.
But the wife of the Istrian merchant did not have a native of Amerevita as her patron saint. Saint Anne, mother of Mary, was her protectress. Her Amerevitan pride was not so great. Her children spoke Italian with Istrian accents and were more welcomed by their peers. Their Latin improved. The priest did not wince often when they confessed.
The priest did not wince or shudder when the merchant's children came to church. They never spoke of grievous sins, or great heresies, and their Latin was good, and he offered to their mother to instruct them further in the language of the Church. The eldest son improved greatly, though his entire life he was shy to speak it even in such intimate settings as with his siblings or the village priest. The priest sent him to Rome, and the boy dallied with the idea of becoming a priest. But then he met Bianca.
But the priest winced when they came to confession. The eldest son still went to Rome, but he wooed Bianca in Italian, not Latin.
Bianca was wooed in Italian. She was greatly moved by the almost religious attention she was given in his Latin poetry, how he likened her to the female martyrs and the mother of Christ, and at the same time the goddesses of old. She felt worshipped. But she was already promised to another, and her father would not break the engagement. All her life, and her daughters greatly noticed this and wondered about it from time to time, she dreamt of the boy from Istria, whose Latin poems had moved her so, and dreamt of what her life would have been like with him. And those yearnings her daughters passed on for five generations, to the daughter sent with colonists to Maryland from England to marry the son of an English nobleman. She, too, wondered how life would have been different if she had stayed in England.
But Bianca was not wooed in Latin. The Istrian boy's words were somehow clunky, ungraceful in Italian and the dialect of his homeland. Only once did she wonder if her life could have been different with him, and this moment passed without audience. In the fifth generation, the girl sent to Maryland did not wonder how life could have been if she'd stayed in England.
The girl sent to Maryland did not wonder how her life may have gone at home in England. She daydreamed, and the milking-girl saw her daydreaming out a window one day. The milking-girl learned to daydream. She began to make stories in her head and she shared her little harmless fantasies with others who worked for the girl from England and her husband, and the woman who spun wool took the stories home to her children and her husband. Her husband took it to the tavern and there a young man heard them and took them with him into the army of Washington, where they were passed among the ranks, to a soldier named Albert, who wrote one of them down and put it in his coat pocket.
But the girl in Maryland did not wonder, and the milking-girl did not daydream. Albert heard different stories.
Albert heard different stories which he wrote down and put in his pocket. He took the milking-girl's stories home with him and told them to his children and then his grandchildren by the fire, and they passed them down three generations, where they were told around another fire in a different war. A Yankee soldier took one of the stories with him to California, where he told it to his mining partner. When a year passed and their fortunes did not improve, his mining partner traveled south to Los Angeles, occasionally chuckling at the stories the old Yankee soldier used to tell. His wife would ask why he sometimes laughed, and he wouldn't tell her, but she liked his jovial temperment.
But Albert didn't pass on the stories because the milking-girl never told him. The miner didn't laugh inexplicably in Los Angeles and his wife liked his serious temperment.
The miner never laughed inexplicably when he came to Los Angeles and his wife was happy to have such a serious husband. She enjoyed his odd laughter and so did their children and neighbors. One neighbor's son would sometimes think back on the strange old man of that neighborhood and it would distract him when he tried to drive his new fangled automobile. Occasionally he would almost crash into something, letting his mind wander, but no impact ever actually occurred. He came to believe that automobiles were invincible, and so did his son and grandson. They lost their money in the stock market crash and in his later years, the grandson stooped to employment as a taxi driver in San Diego.
But the miner lived out his days a serious man. The neighbor's son was serious, too, but that did not prevent him from crashing his automobile on a foggy morning. He lost his money in the stock market, but he taught his son to drive well and his grandson took pride in his employment as a taxi driver in San Diego.
The taxi driver felt invincible. He did not swerve.
He knew he was not invincible, and he was a careful but proud driver. On his last day as a driver for the Checker Cab Company of San Diego, he picked up a Mrs. Jacob Carter from the airport at the request of her husband, an officer with the Air Force. He was running late and couldn't get her in time. The driver found it strangely fitting that his last pickup of his career would take such a nice lady home to her family, to be where she belonged, as he now belonged at home with his family himself. He chatted with her, made the appropriate comments to her mention of children, but kept his eyes always on the road. He swerved quickly to the right and held his tongue. It would not do to use coarse language around a nice lady like Mrs. Carter, who was probably plenty rattled by their near-miss. "Don't worry, ma'am," he said. "We're all right. Let me stop at the next gas station to report that fellow driving the wrong way down that street."
Mrs. Carter nodded.
She hugged her children and her husband when she got home, and Jacob apologized again and again that he wasn't able to pick her up. The incident spooked him and he asked for reassignment. They did not briefly relocate to Colorado Springs, where Jacob was reunited with an old Academy buddy of his named George Hammond, and Hammond did not take note of teenaged-Samantha Carter. He had not met her in 1969, and would not encourage Jacob to push his daughter toward her astronaut dreams. But then he hadn't really the first time around, because Mrs. Carter's death had done it for him.
Samantha Carter did not join the Air Force.
Samantha Carter joined the Air Force.
Once upon a time in Egypt, Ra, Sun-God, Husband-Father of Hathor, was displeased. The slaves that began the rebellion could not be found, and still those instigators rallied the support of the Tau'ri slaves. He did all that he could do, for he knew himself to be a Goa'uld and not a true god - there are no true gods - and when all hope was gone, he took his most loyal Jaffa with him and escaped in his pyramid ship. There was no time to take the Chapa'ai with him, for the Tau'ri were devious and he had underestimated them. On Abydos, he sent slaves back through the Chapa'ai but when they never returned, he gave up and took some pleasure in the fact that Hathor was sealed in her tomb, never to bother him again.
But his priests worried him greatly, telling of the rebellion of the Tau'ri in sketches and fashioned words on clay. He banned reading and writing and within a hundred years, his slaves were again as he wished them to be.
Ra, son of Aten, Sun-God of Kemet and Abydos, was greatly pleased.
Jareth of Kemet went forth from the sands of Egypt.
The girl of the Hellenes danced.
Anna of Amerevita was martyred.
Bianca dreamed of the boy from Istria.
The milking-girl daydreamed.
The miner laughed.
The cab driver believed his car to be invincible.
Samantha Carter joined the Air Force.
[fin]
by LJ
Spoilers for Moebius Pt1
Warning: Completely unbeta'd, written between midnight and 3am, totally convoluted and probably impossible to follow....
Once upon a time in Egypt, Ra, Sun-God, Husband-Father of Hathor, was displeased. Two slaves were brought before him, called instigators of rebellion. He disposed of the male, an old slave not worth the effort of keeping, and placed his dead, broken body on display for all to see. The female, her skin and eyes and hair as pale as the sands of Kemet and Abydos, he kept for his own pleasure, but when he approached her as her god he felt the naqadah in her veins. She slashed at him with a hidden knife and he slashed back. She fought and he fought her. She claimed to have not been an instigator of rebellion. She died.
Ra, son of Aten, Sun-God of Kemet and Abydos, was displeased.
The Chapa'ai he took with him to Abydos.
Once upon a time in Egypt, slaves rebelled and then were quieted. Their fury was great, their strength not in might but in numbers and hope. The hope died.
Jareth of Kemet did not go forth from the sands of Egypt.
Jareth of Kemet did not leave Egypt. He died there, among the sun-pale sands where once the great god Ra ruled, where the sun-disc shone and once the water-blue Chapa'ai once stood. He had no son. He had no grandson. He had no great-granddaughter called Micha who married a chieftain of the north peoples.
Micha, a daughter of Jareth of Kemet, was never born in the land of the Hellenes.
In the land of the Hellenes there was never a woman named Micha. Micha was tall and carried herself like a rich woman, though she was not. A man named Kanelaos coveted and won her, and he wrote her great songs. A poet, wandering from village to village generations later, heard the songs and learnt them well. He asked the people there, "For whom do you sing these songs?" They answered, "We honor the ancestress for whom they were written, like a goddess she was." The poet took the songs with him, to the places that would be Athens and Sparta and he changed the words and men sang them to Athena and Demeter and Artemis as hymns fitting their divine requests.
But Micha was never born in the land of the Hellenes and her husband's songs never left their valley.
The songs of the husband of Micha never traversed land and time to become songs for goddesses. Other songs took their places, and the goddesses of the Hellenes were never without worship in that day. But those songs were different. A turn of tune, a grace note of a lyre inspired a girl of the Hellenes to dance on a warm spring's day, and she was seen by the ruler of a city further west. He bought her, two thousand years after Ra, from her father and brought her to his home to dance and sing for his wife, who was sickly. She was seen by a sword-master who came to train the wife's only son and he was struck by her movement to create a gesture of blade, of metal, yet unknown.
But the songs never inspired her to dance on a warm spring's day. That gesture of blade came years later to a different man.
That girl was not inspired to dance on that spring's day, and that soldier never knew that movement of sword and arm. He taught it to his sons, and they taught their sons and their grandsons and the sons of the men who carried blades against the barbarians. Generation upon generations learned to carry a blade in that order and in time it came to the land of the Latini, on the shores of Italia. A gladiator was injured when his opponent used it against him and he died. A patrician wife saw him die, pitiously, and when her maid ventured an invitation that evening, she went and soon became a regular participant in the cult of Christos, in time converting her own children and her husband.
But the sword-trick was learned differently. The gladiator was injured in a different way, dying of the infection that crept quickly upon him. The patrician's wife did not convert her husband.
The patrician never converted. The patrician's wife spread the word of Christos, and her children after her and her husband, too. A child of her grandson's great-granddaughter was martyred for her faith and became the patron saint, Saint Anna, of Amerevita, a village of Italian Helvetia.
But her ancestor did not convert. Oh, she was born, and she died young, but it was in childbirth. The child died and her husband Ludvigo remarried. Her town adopted one of the many Annes and Annas as their patroness.
Anna of Amerevita was never martyred. Saint Anna of Amerevita blessed the great-granddaughter of some great-granddaughter of Ludvigo of Amerevita in securing a good husband and she went forth from Helvetia and went with her merchant husband to Istria. Their house overlooked the shore of the Adriatic. She would walk the shore or watch for his ship from the balcony. Their children spoke Italian with Helvetian accents, for her husband was often gone, but their native tongue was the Istrian-Venetian dialect of the coast. Their Latin was only passable and made the priest wince when they came to confession.
But the wife of the Istrian merchant did not have a native of Amerevita as her patron saint. Saint Anne, mother of Mary, was her protectress. Her Amerevitan pride was not so great. Her children spoke Italian with Istrian accents and were more welcomed by their peers. Their Latin improved. The priest did not wince often when they confessed.
The priest did not wince or shudder when the merchant's children came to church. They never spoke of grievous sins, or great heresies, and their Latin was good, and he offered to their mother to instruct them further in the language of the Church. The eldest son improved greatly, though his entire life he was shy to speak it even in such intimate settings as with his siblings or the village priest. The priest sent him to Rome, and the boy dallied with the idea of becoming a priest. But then he met Bianca.
But the priest winced when they came to confession. The eldest son still went to Rome, but he wooed Bianca in Italian, not Latin.
Bianca was wooed in Italian. She was greatly moved by the almost religious attention she was given in his Latin poetry, how he likened her to the female martyrs and the mother of Christ, and at the same time the goddesses of old. She felt worshipped. But she was already promised to another, and her father would not break the engagement. All her life, and her daughters greatly noticed this and wondered about it from time to time, she dreamt of the boy from Istria, whose Latin poems had moved her so, and dreamt of what her life would have been like with him. And those yearnings her daughters passed on for five generations, to the daughter sent with colonists to Maryland from England to marry the son of an English nobleman. She, too, wondered how life would have been different if she had stayed in England.
But Bianca was not wooed in Latin. The Istrian boy's words were somehow clunky, ungraceful in Italian and the dialect of his homeland. Only once did she wonder if her life could have been different with him, and this moment passed without audience. In the fifth generation, the girl sent to Maryland did not wonder how life could have been if she'd stayed in England.
The girl sent to Maryland did not wonder how her life may have gone at home in England. She daydreamed, and the milking-girl saw her daydreaming out a window one day. The milking-girl learned to daydream. She began to make stories in her head and she shared her little harmless fantasies with others who worked for the girl from England and her husband, and the woman who spun wool took the stories home to her children and her husband. Her husband took it to the tavern and there a young man heard them and took them with him into the army of Washington, where they were passed among the ranks, to a soldier named Albert, who wrote one of them down and put it in his coat pocket.
But the girl in Maryland did not wonder, and the milking-girl did not daydream. Albert heard different stories.
Albert heard different stories which he wrote down and put in his pocket. He took the milking-girl's stories home with him and told them to his children and then his grandchildren by the fire, and they passed them down three generations, where they were told around another fire in a different war. A Yankee soldier took one of the stories with him to California, where he told it to his mining partner. When a year passed and their fortunes did not improve, his mining partner traveled south to Los Angeles, occasionally chuckling at the stories the old Yankee soldier used to tell. His wife would ask why he sometimes laughed, and he wouldn't tell her, but she liked his jovial temperment.
But Albert didn't pass on the stories because the milking-girl never told him. The miner didn't laugh inexplicably in Los Angeles and his wife liked his serious temperment.
The miner never laughed inexplicably when he came to Los Angeles and his wife was happy to have such a serious husband. She enjoyed his odd laughter and so did their children and neighbors. One neighbor's son would sometimes think back on the strange old man of that neighborhood and it would distract him when he tried to drive his new fangled automobile. Occasionally he would almost crash into something, letting his mind wander, but no impact ever actually occurred. He came to believe that automobiles were invincible, and so did his son and grandson. They lost their money in the stock market crash and in his later years, the grandson stooped to employment as a taxi driver in San Diego.
But the miner lived out his days a serious man. The neighbor's son was serious, too, but that did not prevent him from crashing his automobile on a foggy morning. He lost his money in the stock market, but he taught his son to drive well and his grandson took pride in his employment as a taxi driver in San Diego.
The taxi driver felt invincible. He did not swerve.
He knew he was not invincible, and he was a careful but proud driver. On his last day as a driver for the Checker Cab Company of San Diego, he picked up a Mrs. Jacob Carter from the airport at the request of her husband, an officer with the Air Force. He was running late and couldn't get her in time. The driver found it strangely fitting that his last pickup of his career would take such a nice lady home to her family, to be where she belonged, as he now belonged at home with his family himself. He chatted with her, made the appropriate comments to her mention of children, but kept his eyes always on the road. He swerved quickly to the right and held his tongue. It would not do to use coarse language around a nice lady like Mrs. Carter, who was probably plenty rattled by their near-miss. "Don't worry, ma'am," he said. "We're all right. Let me stop at the next gas station to report that fellow driving the wrong way down that street."
Mrs. Carter nodded.
She hugged her children and her husband when she got home, and Jacob apologized again and again that he wasn't able to pick her up. The incident spooked him and he asked for reassignment. They did not briefly relocate to Colorado Springs, where Jacob was reunited with an old Academy buddy of his named George Hammond, and Hammond did not take note of teenaged-Samantha Carter. He had not met her in 1969, and would not encourage Jacob to push his daughter toward her astronaut dreams. But then he hadn't really the first time around, because Mrs. Carter's death had done it for him.
Samantha Carter did not join the Air Force.
Samantha Carter joined the Air Force.
Once upon a time in Egypt, Ra, Sun-God, Husband-Father of Hathor, was displeased. The slaves that began the rebellion could not be found, and still those instigators rallied the support of the Tau'ri slaves. He did all that he could do, for he knew himself to be a Goa'uld and not a true god - there are no true gods - and when all hope was gone, he took his most loyal Jaffa with him and escaped in his pyramid ship. There was no time to take the Chapa'ai with him, for the Tau'ri were devious and he had underestimated them. On Abydos, he sent slaves back through the Chapa'ai but when they never returned, he gave up and took some pleasure in the fact that Hathor was sealed in her tomb, never to bother him again.
But his priests worried him greatly, telling of the rebellion of the Tau'ri in sketches and fashioned words on clay. He banned reading and writing and within a hundred years, his slaves were again as he wished them to be.
Ra, son of Aten, Sun-God of Kemet and Abydos, was greatly pleased.
Jareth of Kemet went forth from the sands of Egypt.
The girl of the Hellenes danced.
Anna of Amerevita was martyred.
Bianca dreamed of the boy from Istria.
The milking-girl daydreamed.
The miner laughed.
The cab driver believed his car to be invincible.
Samantha Carter joined the Air Force.
[fin]