Feet of Clay
Title: Feet of Clay
Author: ubiquirk
Rating: PG13
Genre: genfic: angst, drama
Word Count: ~4000
Character: Giles
Disclaimer: Not mine; no money.
Summary: Sent to determine why a Watcher and Potential stopped communicating with the Council, Giles confronts his own “Conversations with Dead People” in the Old Jewish Cemetery of Prague. Set during early season 7 and just after “Chosen.”
AN: First in the Avengers Series, though each story can stand alone. Written for summer_of_giles 2008. Humongous thanks to my beta,
firefly_124, and Brit-picker, saracen77. The Golem of Prague is an actual folktale that exists in varying versions, but I’ve taken even more liberties with it. Ne - no (Czech). Wer sind Sie? - Who are you? (German). [saracen77made me aware that there's a Discworld novel of the same name, but unfortunately I never read that far into the series, so there's no Pratchett-like humor here.]
He waits for her outside the cemetery’s only entrance, the November evening grown quickly cold and dark.
Eventually, long after the last of the tourists has been herded out, she exits, chatting and shaking hands in farewell with the man who locks the gate. She turns to walk in his direction, the unknown man in the other.
“Eliska,” Giles says, stepping out of the shadows.
She starts and looks around wildly.
He holds up empty hands. “I’m a friend.”
Hope flickers briefly in eyes that return to expressionless. “I have no friends.”
“Crowe sent me.”
She laughs, a bitter sound. “Now I know you lie. Crowe is dead, has been dead for a fortnight.”
“Eliska …” He reaches for her shoulder, but is too slow, fingers closing on the thin material of her jacket before she wrenches it from his grasp, running.
Two shapes hurtle by him, and he catches only the impression of dark-brown hooded robes.
Running, she reaches an area where the solid wall surrounding the cemetery is rough with a series of protruding stones. Her climb is quick and sure.
Unfortunately, so is that of her pursuers.
Giles scrambles to keep up, scraped knuckles stinging on stone.
~
The door lock is easy to pick, so easy in fact that Giles shakes his head at Crowe’s lax security. But isn’t that part of the problem - that none of them thought of danger for anyone but the active Slayer and Watcher?
The average-sized flat is made small by towering piles of books everywhere and the close press of dust thickening air that smells musty and damp.
Opening heavy curtains to let in pale-yellow daylight helps, motes flickering hazily in the beams, Giles turns for a proper look at the room.
Even accounting for Crowe’s extremely bachelor take on cleaning, no one’s been here in weeks.
There are no clues as to what happened to Crowe, but an annoyingly long search for Brixtow’s Compendium yields results nonetheless - Crowe followed proper protocol and underlined only one text from the bibliography: the English edition of Folktales of Prague.
For a change, this book’s conveniently located on top of one of the stacks, so Giles tucks it under his jacket just as he hears a sound at the front door, clamping it to his body with his left arm.
Shouldering past a man made short with old age carrying a large ring of keys, Giles ignores the calls in Czech he doesn’t understand and the ones in German he does, walking quickly down the hall, “Wer sind Sie? Wer sind Sie?!” ringing in his ears.
~
The light of the newly risen moon shines deceptively bright, throwing shapes into shadow and tricking eyes into thinking they understand more than they do of what terrain lies ahead.
His first fall knocks the air from his chest as a leaning headstone taps his solar plexus, and his second sends a white-hot ribbon of pain wrapping upward from his ankle to encircle his entire leg. Giles lies gasping for a quick moment and, when he rises, can only dimly make out three figures moving ever farther from him.
Half limping, half running, he follows, watching with a sick sense of dread as the two robed shapes converge on the smaller one while he’s too far away to be of any assistance.
Eliska fights well, catching one man with a roundhouse that knocks him back to trip over a low headstone. The glint of knife flashes from the hand of the other, and she dodges, grabbing the arm to twirl and embed the blade in the man’s own robed chest. But the first is already upon his feet behind her, having recovered more quickly than one would expect.
Giles struggles closer, tries to yell to her to look out, but he’s panting for breath, so it emerges a croak.
She turns quickly. But hemmed in by headstones on every side, she turns into the knife.
A sharp jerk of his arm upward, the first man guts her, letting her drop to the ground before running off into the darkness just as Giles gets close.
~
The note buried in Folktales of Prague is brief, the writing scrawled sloppily across the page.
I told Eliska to leave school and hide in plain sight. She’s articulate and multilingual, and there’s only one type of job she can readily find in Prague. Look for her in the most popular of places. - Crowe
Not really in code, Giles thinks, but the two-book system using Brixtow’s hasn’t been cracked yet as far as he’s aware.
He begins taking tours, looking for one very specific guide.
Within a few days, he’s seen Prague Castle for the third time and can recite the story of every statue gracing the Charles Bridge in his sleep. The Astronomical Clock, a feat of engineering for its day with its complex dials and dancing figures, no longer holds any allure.
Restlessness overtakes him, and he finds himself eating beef and dumplings at a small restaurant in Malá Strana while longing for fresh veg and reading the book he took from Crowe’s to occupy his mind. The first chapter tells of the Golem of Prague, and he devours the tale with far more delight than the food, ordering another excellent Budvar so that he can linger at the table to finish both story and beer. When done, Giles realizes he’s missed one of the city’s largest tourist attractions: Josefov, the Jewish Ghetto, with its ancient synagogues and cemetery of bodies buried twelve deep.
He finds her at the third tourist agency he tries.
~
The man - or what looks to be a man with scars instead of eyes - lies thrown over a nearby set of headstones, brown robe ripped and wet where knife protrudes from chest.
Eliska shivers on the ground, all panting breath edged with pain and a spreading pool of blood. Yet when he touches her shoulder, her hands scramble weakly to push him away, and she calls out, “Ne, ne,” fighting to the end.
She would have made one hell of a Slayer.
All Giles can do is move her gently to a tiny sliver of earth free of stones and stroke her hair as her breathing slows, shushing her and humming a nonsense rhyme his mother sang to him decades upon decades ago.
Within a few short moments, she goes still, and he collapses beside her, hands shaking, grief stinging his eyes.
~
Crowe was right - Eliska is quite articulate as she leads the last tour of the day through the Jewish Quarter to finish at the Old Jewish Cemetery, hands punctuating key points, dark hair swirling around a pretty young face wearing a perky smile that doesn’t touch her eyes.
Giles stays behind a large group of chattering Japanese, not wanting to draw attention to himself, yet phrases drift to him nonetheless: “For almost a thousand years, the Jews of Prague were only allowed to live in this one small area called Josefov, which they built walls around for safety. … Although most of the Jewish Quarter was torn down by governmental renovation at the end of the nineteenth century, many historical wonders remain, including Europe’s oldest active synagogue and oldest surviving Jewish cemetery. … It is estimated that up to one hundred thousand people lie buried in this confined space, meaning that in most of the cemetery the graves are ten deep with some areas going as high as twelve bodies layered one on top of the other.”
Drifting off down a side path a little ways, Giles looks around in amazement. Even after decades spent in various graveyards, this one strikes a resonance within him. Headstones of varying heights lean one against many others, making a multitude of small groups, all having come to some kind of balance by supporting the rest. Paths wind where they can amongst the stones, yet there is no place to put his feet that he does not tread on the graves of many.
It is a forest of headstones grown seemingly randomly.
It is death haunted by the chaos of life.
~
A timeless interval passes before Jenny walks from behind him to squat on the other side of the body. “She was a pretty one, don’t you think?”
Adrenaline sending a wash of ice through his veins, he flicks his eyes to the brown-robed form, calculating the odds of obtaining the knife before the vampire can catch him. They aren’t good.
“Drusilla?”
She laughs, eyes dancing with mischief. “Now why would I be a boring old vampire, Rupert? No, it’s me - Jenny. You know, the woman you pushed up against the card catalogue that time while dancing your fingers just under the hem of my shirt and -”
“Enough!”
“You ever tell anyone else about that evening, Rupert? Think anyone peeked through the library doors to watch us have ‘a right proper snog’ as you called it?” She runs her fingers across her lips, eyes hot and daring. “Who else but me would know?”
Giles wants to groan at the bittersweetness of seeing her, knowing it can’t be. “I don’t know how you know about that - it could be any number of ways, such as … such as a surveillance spell of some sort - but you’re not Jenny. Jenny wouldn’t …”
“Wouldn’t what? Lie to you? I think we both know that’s not true.”
“Jenny wouldn’t,” his hand rises to gesture towards those lips, those eyes, “be so cruel.”
Her only answer is to look down at the body before her for a stretched moment, a small smile twisting her mouth. “She has my eyes,” Jenny says, running a hand over Eliska’s face before looking at Giles. “Big brown eyes coated with just the right hint of glassiness. They stare just like mine did when you didn’t save me.”
Her face morphs into the expressionless visage he found waiting in his bed that night five years ago, the one that shadows every nightmare he’s had since first seeing it.
His heart skips its timing to restart with a jittering race of speed, pounding the breath from his lungs, the speech from his throat.
“Just like you didn’t save her.”
~
In the sixteenth century, it came to pass that the Emperor called for the extermination of the Jews of Prague. Closing the six gates of their walled city within a city, the Jews survived in Josefov, but it was a survival of fear. Night after night, the Emperor’s troops assaulted the gates, and food grew ever scarcer.
Desperate for a protector for his people, Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel called two of his most faithful men to him, and every night, when the soldiers raided one gate, they crept out of another to visit the River Vltava. The clay there was rich with organic matter and, when mixed with the urine, sweat, and blood of the men, made a fertile start for the creation of life.
~
Giles stares at her in horror, mouth open and soundless.
Laughing, head thrown back in twisted merriment, Jenny rises to stand over him, growing in height. Her unfamiliar mocking smile, which somehow shines more brightly than moonlight should allow, morphs into one he knows well.
Angelus’s.
“It’s appropriate, don’t you think?” The vampire nudges the body with one foot. “That this one ran to ground in the Jewish Ghetto.”
Scrambling to his feet, Giles takes a step towards the body housing the knife, ankle twinging.
Angelus breathes in, deeply, audibly. “It still smells of it, you know, the stink of fear, of desperation, the rot of too many bodies in too small a space.” He inhales heavily again. “And not just World War II - no, I’m talking centuries of it. Gives it quite the atmosphere.”
As the vampire looks around at the packed landscape of tombstones and twisting trails, Giles takes another step and reaches to quickly pull the knife from unresisting flesh, hiding the hand that clutches it behind his back.
“I mean, everyone knows convents are my thing, but if you have to go with a graveyard,” Angelus throws his arms wide and turns to face Giles, “then what a graveyard this is, huh?”
Whipping his right arm forward, long muscles of the legs bunching and releasing, Giles launches himself at the vampire, a shout ripped from his throat. Yet impact, when it comes a split-second later than expected, jars of flesh on stone. He’s gone straight through Angelus.
Wheezing through the sharp slashes of pain of what seems a cracked rib, Giles pushes off the tall headstone enough to turn around and place his back against it.
The smile appears as mocking as ever, the voice even more so. “Come on, Giles. What exactly is the point of becoming a monster if you’re not going to be very good at it?”
His voice rasps harshly through gritted teeth, and he tastes blood, cloying and metallic. “Unlike you, I am not a monster.”
“No, you got me there. You’re not like me.” Angelus leans in close. “But that doesn’t mean you’re not a monster.”
~
In the deep, deep dark, the Rabbi’s men toiled, adding layer upon layer of worked clay while the Rabbi chanted, writing words of power and control upon the air. Before each dawn, Loew uttered spells of confusion and hiding over the still shape before they left it to harden in the sun of a small clearing. Each night they returned to create their small amounts of clay enlivened with the fluid of their bodies.
Within a week, their work grew into a form resembling that of an incredibly large man.
Within two weeks, it was as perfect as they could make it - fingers and toes, ears and eyes, and a crude nose over a mouth that gaped wide, empty of tongue.
~
“I’m no monster - I’m a Watcher.”
Angelus laughs, yet the sound changes as it progresses, growing deeper even as the volume lessens somewhat. The voice that eventually replies rings with the most condescending tones of home. “And you consider the two to be mutually exclusive, do you?”
The previous Head of the Council stands before him, the man who originally trained him, one smirking Marcus Travers. Giles had forgotten just how much the son takes after the father, all of Quentin’s pompous arrogance a weak imitation of the even more obnoxious original.
“Aren’t they? I mean, isn’t that the point, that the Council fights the monsters of the world?”
“Rupert, Rupert, Rupert.” Travers shakes his head, tsking. “What a black and white view of things. Quite surprising, really, coming from a man who is himself so very, very grey.”
“I … I don’t know what you mean.” He wipes an annoying tickle of blood from his forehead.
“Don’t you? Well then, do you know that I almost didn’t allocate you for duty with an active Slayer? That you’re the only Watcher in the history of the Council to have been considered for the wet-works team?”
“No.” It leaves his lips with little conviction.
“Oh, yes. You can feel that I’m right.” Travers paces before him, stepping over Eliska repeatedly as if she were no more than another stone to avoid. “It wouldn’t have taken much - a few prods here, a couple of pushes there - and your psyche would have been shaped into the perfect assassin.”
“You bastard. You utter bastard.” He feels his teeth grind.
“By all means, Rupert, blame me. Nothing could be simpler. The dead make excellent scapegoats - we so rarely have the chance to speak back.”
Travers stops pacing to slide a book out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket, flipping pages seemingly at random. “But it’s not quite the truth, is it? The monster lurked inside of you when you joined the Council, already created by your own hands.” He holds up a page, the Mark of Eyghon somehow discernable and very, very black in the cold moonlight.
“No,” he breathes it out, clears his throat, and repeats more loudly, “No.”
“Oh, I may have shaped, molded the clay as years passed, but then, what did you expect when you gave me such perfect material to work with?”
The book snaps shut, disappears, and the hand that held it now points to Eliska’s body lying still on the ground. “Do you know how I found her? I had my harbingers looking for weeks and weeks, and nothing.” Travers grins. “Then you arrived and led them straight to her.”
Giles shakes his head violently, yet the words remain, the nauseating knot in his stomach clenched tight. Pushing against the stone to fully stand, he ignores the sharp jab of ribs grinding, the nerve-bright flash of his protesting ankle.
“All these little girls running, persecuted, all their Watchers too weak to fight. And you think you’ll be their Golem, their monster created by the Watchers Council to protect and protect and protect, no matter what you must do.” Travers smiles, a sharp, cutting thing. “Do you know the full story of Prague’s Golem, Rupert? The ending?”
“A lie. Nothing but a lie.”
~
When it was made, Rabbi Loew wrote emet, the word for life, upon its brow with his own blood, calling his golem to action.
And what action he received.
The sun had hardened the golem until neither sword nor arrow could pierce it. Its great size and mass gave it incredible strength such that one blow from its arm could lay low a good ten soldiers. Every night the golem fought at the direction of the Rabbi, battle after battle, continuing long after a human would have grown weary. And every morning, more and more unmoving bodies lay strewn across the ground it had walked.
Knowing only that it protected them, kept by the Rabbi from any knowledge of deaths done, Prague’s Jews welcomed the golem as one would a simple child. They spoke gently to it, patting its great arms in affection when it tried to reply, nothing but nonsense sounds emerging from its roughly made mouth. Children brought it flowers and the occasional sweet.
In the city proper, things were quite different with people cowering in their homes and businesses barely functioning. After a fortnight of having troops and property decimated by what most citizens referred to as a monster, the Emperor repealed his order of pogrom, sending a letter to Loew suing for peace.
Rejoicing into the night, the Jewish people of Josefov barely noticed that the golem was missing, as it had been ordered by the Rabbi to wait alone in the synagogue. Then suddenly, a loud garbled yell shook their houses to the very foundations. Havoc broke loose. The golem, grown used to constant action and attention, rampaged through the streets, smashing walls and doors, trampling anyone who could not remove themselves from its path quickly enough.
Fear returned to Josefov.
~
“A lie? You’d like that, wouldn’t you? To write this all off as nothing. But the truth is …” He morphs, voice altering, features flowing into those of Ben. “The truth is that the truth is always better than a lie.”
Giles’s hands spasm into clamped fists, driving nails into palms. The pain barely registers. “I did nothing more than what I had to do.”
Ben continues as if he doesn’t hear, voice light and friendly. “The truth cuts so very sharply, deeply. Everything you don’t want to see about yourself ripped from within and held up, exposed, bleeding the red of denial. Oh, no - I have no need of lies. You are the one who needs them. And every time you create them, every time you lie to others or to yourself - actually, especially to yourself - you are the one who makes evil in this world.”
Throat closed tight, he rasps, “Who are you?”
“You may not know who I am yet, but I know exactly who you are.” Ben spreads his hands wide before fading gradually from view, final words lingering. “Congratulations, Rupert Giles. You are my greatest disciple.”
Alone, Giles collapses to the ground again, protest of rib buried under a numb layer of shock, little more than the word ‘no’ echoing through his mind.
~
The blood upon the golem’s forehead remained wet, never drying, never soaking into the clay. It gleamed in the torchlight a red that now looked of sin instead of justice, the word of life shining with a primal vitality. And since humanity has long judged the amoral as immoral, this would not do.
Twelve men - the strongest of all Josefov - cornered it in an alley and held the monster down, allowing Rabbi Loew to approach. Some say the look on the golem’s face was akin to fear, to hope, to hurt and confusion and rage. If so, it moved the Rabbi not at all. With one broad sweep of his thumb, Loew smeared the ‘e’ from the front of emet, leaving only the word of death, only a statue of unmoving clay.
The Jews of Prague entered into a time of prosperity and peace, the like of which they had never known.
Yet instead of destroying it, Loew stored the golem in his synagogue’s attic, vowing to bring it to life whenever he willed, whenever he deemed a need had arisen.
Legend has it that it waits there to this very day.
~
~
~
Closing the cheap motel door on the sounds of excited Potentials - no, make that Slayers - reacting to the sugar high of late-night, convenience-store Skittles and Coke, Giles leans his forehead against its peeling paint.
It’s the first time he’s been alone since the fall of Sunnydale thirteen hours ago. The quiet, if anything, quickly becomes more disturbing than the noise since it allows Buffy’s words to ring through his head over and over.
Her voice, her face held no recrimination when she told him, yet it gives him little comfort as he slumps to the dirty brown carpet, mouth opening and closing soundlessly, shaking with horror at what he and Robin almost did.
~
“Buffy.” He finally catches her alone in the hospital corridor outside Robin’s room, laying a hand on her arm. “Buffy … the Hellmouth. I need to know for certain …”
She places her fingers over his and gives a little squeeze. “It’s closed for good, Giles, not just covered with rubble. I felt it.”
“Closed. That’s … well, that’s fantastic. But how?”
Her smile shines luminously, even through watery tears. “It was Spike, Giles. Spike! He destroyed the Turok-Han and closed the Hellmouth. He sacrificed himself to save us all … to save the world!”
~
At breakfast the following morning, Buffy waves him over to the booth she’s taken with Xander and Willow. “Giles! We’re going to eat obnoxious amounts of pancakes with too much syrup and talk about what to do next.”
“We saved you a seat.” Willow pats the bench beside her.
“Yeah,” Xander says, hitching a thumb toward the booths filled with new Slayers and Dawn and Andrew, “and do you know how many people we had to fight off to do that? You’re in with the in crowd, bub.”
He looks at their trusting faces smiling up at him, sadness tinged with relief haunting their eyes, and Giles takes off his glasses, pretending to clean the lenses on his shirt hem, needing to not see them when he says, “I was … I was just going to check on Robin in hospital. We’ll talk later.”
With one quick turn, he walks out the door, ignoring the twisting in his gut that jellies his knees, the pain in his chest that longs to curl his body inward around it. The hot California sun stings his eyes, allows their imagined hurt expressions to rise in a mirage before him.
He knows he’ll return to help them - he’ll always help them. But he must not - cannot - allow himself to get close again.
Speeding up, Giles almost runs across the pavement to throw himself inside his rented car, slamming the door hard enough that the air echoes with the thump of an old, heavy attic trapdoor closing.
Author: ubiquirk
Rating: PG13
Genre: genfic: angst, drama
Word Count: ~4000
Character: Giles
Disclaimer: Not mine; no money.
Summary: Sent to determine why a Watcher and Potential stopped communicating with the Council, Giles confronts his own “Conversations with Dead People” in the Old Jewish Cemetery of Prague. Set during early season 7 and just after “Chosen.”
AN: First in the Avengers Series, though each story can stand alone. Written for summer_of_giles 2008. Humongous thanks to my beta,
firefly_124, and Brit-picker, saracen77. The Golem of Prague is an actual folktale that exists in varying versions, but I’ve taken even more liberties with it. Ne - no (Czech). Wer sind Sie? - Who are you? (German). [saracen77made me aware that there's a Discworld novel of the same name, but unfortunately I never read that far into the series, so there's no Pratchett-like humor here.]
He waits for her outside the cemetery’s only entrance, the November evening grown quickly cold and dark.
Eventually, long after the last of the tourists has been herded out, she exits, chatting and shaking hands in farewell with the man who locks the gate. She turns to walk in his direction, the unknown man in the other.
“Eliska,” Giles says, stepping out of the shadows.
She starts and looks around wildly.
He holds up empty hands. “I’m a friend.”
Hope flickers briefly in eyes that return to expressionless. “I have no friends.”
“Crowe sent me.”
She laughs, a bitter sound. “Now I know you lie. Crowe is dead, has been dead for a fortnight.”
“Eliska …” He reaches for her shoulder, but is too slow, fingers closing on the thin material of her jacket before she wrenches it from his grasp, running.
Two shapes hurtle by him, and he catches only the impression of dark-brown hooded robes.
Running, she reaches an area where the solid wall surrounding the cemetery is rough with a series of protruding stones. Her climb is quick and sure.
Unfortunately, so is that of her pursuers.
Giles scrambles to keep up, scraped knuckles stinging on stone.
~
The door lock is easy to pick, so easy in fact that Giles shakes his head at Crowe’s lax security. But isn’t that part of the problem - that none of them thought of danger for anyone but the active Slayer and Watcher?
The average-sized flat is made small by towering piles of books everywhere and the close press of dust thickening air that smells musty and damp.
Opening heavy curtains to let in pale-yellow daylight helps, motes flickering hazily in the beams, Giles turns for a proper look at the room.
Even accounting for Crowe’s extremely bachelor take on cleaning, no one’s been here in weeks.
There are no clues as to what happened to Crowe, but an annoyingly long search for Brixtow’s Compendium yields results nonetheless - Crowe followed proper protocol and underlined only one text from the bibliography: the English edition of Folktales of Prague.
For a change, this book’s conveniently located on top of one of the stacks, so Giles tucks it under his jacket just as he hears a sound at the front door, clamping it to his body with his left arm.
Shouldering past a man made short with old age carrying a large ring of keys, Giles ignores the calls in Czech he doesn’t understand and the ones in German he does, walking quickly down the hall, “Wer sind Sie? Wer sind Sie?!” ringing in his ears.
~
The light of the newly risen moon shines deceptively bright, throwing shapes into shadow and tricking eyes into thinking they understand more than they do of what terrain lies ahead.
His first fall knocks the air from his chest as a leaning headstone taps his solar plexus, and his second sends a white-hot ribbon of pain wrapping upward from his ankle to encircle his entire leg. Giles lies gasping for a quick moment and, when he rises, can only dimly make out three figures moving ever farther from him.
Half limping, half running, he follows, watching with a sick sense of dread as the two robed shapes converge on the smaller one while he’s too far away to be of any assistance.
Eliska fights well, catching one man with a roundhouse that knocks him back to trip over a low headstone. The glint of knife flashes from the hand of the other, and she dodges, grabbing the arm to twirl and embed the blade in the man’s own robed chest. But the first is already upon his feet behind her, having recovered more quickly than one would expect.
Giles struggles closer, tries to yell to her to look out, but he’s panting for breath, so it emerges a croak.
She turns quickly. But hemmed in by headstones on every side, she turns into the knife.
A sharp jerk of his arm upward, the first man guts her, letting her drop to the ground before running off into the darkness just as Giles gets close.
~
The note buried in Folktales of Prague is brief, the writing scrawled sloppily across the page.
I told Eliska to leave school and hide in plain sight. She’s articulate and multilingual, and there’s only one type of job she can readily find in Prague. Look for her in the most popular of places. - Crowe
Not really in code, Giles thinks, but the two-book system using Brixtow’s hasn’t been cracked yet as far as he’s aware.
He begins taking tours, looking for one very specific guide.
Within a few days, he’s seen Prague Castle for the third time and can recite the story of every statue gracing the Charles Bridge in his sleep. The Astronomical Clock, a feat of engineering for its day with its complex dials and dancing figures, no longer holds any allure.
Restlessness overtakes him, and he finds himself eating beef and dumplings at a small restaurant in Malá Strana while longing for fresh veg and reading the book he took from Crowe’s to occupy his mind. The first chapter tells of the Golem of Prague, and he devours the tale with far more delight than the food, ordering another excellent Budvar so that he can linger at the table to finish both story and beer. When done, Giles realizes he’s missed one of the city’s largest tourist attractions: Josefov, the Jewish Ghetto, with its ancient synagogues and cemetery of bodies buried twelve deep.
He finds her at the third tourist agency he tries.
~
The man - or what looks to be a man with scars instead of eyes - lies thrown over a nearby set of headstones, brown robe ripped and wet where knife protrudes from chest.
Eliska shivers on the ground, all panting breath edged with pain and a spreading pool of blood. Yet when he touches her shoulder, her hands scramble weakly to push him away, and she calls out, “Ne, ne,” fighting to the end.
She would have made one hell of a Slayer.
All Giles can do is move her gently to a tiny sliver of earth free of stones and stroke her hair as her breathing slows, shushing her and humming a nonsense rhyme his mother sang to him decades upon decades ago.
Within a few short moments, she goes still, and he collapses beside her, hands shaking, grief stinging his eyes.
~
Crowe was right - Eliska is quite articulate as she leads the last tour of the day through the Jewish Quarter to finish at the Old Jewish Cemetery, hands punctuating key points, dark hair swirling around a pretty young face wearing a perky smile that doesn’t touch her eyes.
Giles stays behind a large group of chattering Japanese, not wanting to draw attention to himself, yet phrases drift to him nonetheless: “For almost a thousand years, the Jews of Prague were only allowed to live in this one small area called Josefov, which they built walls around for safety. … Although most of the Jewish Quarter was torn down by governmental renovation at the end of the nineteenth century, many historical wonders remain, including Europe’s oldest active synagogue and oldest surviving Jewish cemetery. … It is estimated that up to one hundred thousand people lie buried in this confined space, meaning that in most of the cemetery the graves are ten deep with some areas going as high as twelve bodies layered one on top of the other.”
Drifting off down a side path a little ways, Giles looks around in amazement. Even after decades spent in various graveyards, this one strikes a resonance within him. Headstones of varying heights lean one against many others, making a multitude of small groups, all having come to some kind of balance by supporting the rest. Paths wind where they can amongst the stones, yet there is no place to put his feet that he does not tread on the graves of many.
It is a forest of headstones grown seemingly randomly.
It is death haunted by the chaos of life.
~
A timeless interval passes before Jenny walks from behind him to squat on the other side of the body. “She was a pretty one, don’t you think?”
Adrenaline sending a wash of ice through his veins, he flicks his eyes to the brown-robed form, calculating the odds of obtaining the knife before the vampire can catch him. They aren’t good.
“Drusilla?”
She laughs, eyes dancing with mischief. “Now why would I be a boring old vampire, Rupert? No, it’s me - Jenny. You know, the woman you pushed up against the card catalogue that time while dancing your fingers just under the hem of my shirt and -”
“Enough!”
“You ever tell anyone else about that evening, Rupert? Think anyone peeked through the library doors to watch us have ‘a right proper snog’ as you called it?” She runs her fingers across her lips, eyes hot and daring. “Who else but me would know?”
Giles wants to groan at the bittersweetness of seeing her, knowing it can’t be. “I don’t know how you know about that - it could be any number of ways, such as … such as a surveillance spell of some sort - but you’re not Jenny. Jenny wouldn’t …”
“Wouldn’t what? Lie to you? I think we both know that’s not true.”
“Jenny wouldn’t,” his hand rises to gesture towards those lips, those eyes, “be so cruel.”
Her only answer is to look down at the body before her for a stretched moment, a small smile twisting her mouth. “She has my eyes,” Jenny says, running a hand over Eliska’s face before looking at Giles. “Big brown eyes coated with just the right hint of glassiness. They stare just like mine did when you didn’t save me.”
Her face morphs into the expressionless visage he found waiting in his bed that night five years ago, the one that shadows every nightmare he’s had since first seeing it.
His heart skips its timing to restart with a jittering race of speed, pounding the breath from his lungs, the speech from his throat.
“Just like you didn’t save her.”
~
In the sixteenth century, it came to pass that the Emperor called for the extermination of the Jews of Prague. Closing the six gates of their walled city within a city, the Jews survived in Josefov, but it was a survival of fear. Night after night, the Emperor’s troops assaulted the gates, and food grew ever scarcer.
Desperate for a protector for his people, Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel called two of his most faithful men to him, and every night, when the soldiers raided one gate, they crept out of another to visit the River Vltava. The clay there was rich with organic matter and, when mixed with the urine, sweat, and blood of the men, made a fertile start for the creation of life.
~
Giles stares at her in horror, mouth open and soundless.
Laughing, head thrown back in twisted merriment, Jenny rises to stand over him, growing in height. Her unfamiliar mocking smile, which somehow shines more brightly than moonlight should allow, morphs into one he knows well.
Angelus’s.
“It’s appropriate, don’t you think?” The vampire nudges the body with one foot. “That this one ran to ground in the Jewish Ghetto.”
Scrambling to his feet, Giles takes a step towards the body housing the knife, ankle twinging.
Angelus breathes in, deeply, audibly. “It still smells of it, you know, the stink of fear, of desperation, the rot of too many bodies in too small a space.” He inhales heavily again. “And not just World War II - no, I’m talking centuries of it. Gives it quite the atmosphere.”
As the vampire looks around at the packed landscape of tombstones and twisting trails, Giles takes another step and reaches to quickly pull the knife from unresisting flesh, hiding the hand that clutches it behind his back.
“I mean, everyone knows convents are my thing, but if you have to go with a graveyard,” Angelus throws his arms wide and turns to face Giles, “then what a graveyard this is, huh?”
Whipping his right arm forward, long muscles of the legs bunching and releasing, Giles launches himself at the vampire, a shout ripped from his throat. Yet impact, when it comes a split-second later than expected, jars of flesh on stone. He’s gone straight through Angelus.
Wheezing through the sharp slashes of pain of what seems a cracked rib, Giles pushes off the tall headstone enough to turn around and place his back against it.
The smile appears as mocking as ever, the voice even more so. “Come on, Giles. What exactly is the point of becoming a monster if you’re not going to be very good at it?”
His voice rasps harshly through gritted teeth, and he tastes blood, cloying and metallic. “Unlike you, I am not a monster.”
“No, you got me there. You’re not like me.” Angelus leans in close. “But that doesn’t mean you’re not a monster.”
~
In the deep, deep dark, the Rabbi’s men toiled, adding layer upon layer of worked clay while the Rabbi chanted, writing words of power and control upon the air. Before each dawn, Loew uttered spells of confusion and hiding over the still shape before they left it to harden in the sun of a small clearing. Each night they returned to create their small amounts of clay enlivened with the fluid of their bodies.
Within a week, their work grew into a form resembling that of an incredibly large man.
Within two weeks, it was as perfect as they could make it - fingers and toes, ears and eyes, and a crude nose over a mouth that gaped wide, empty of tongue.
~
“I’m no monster - I’m a Watcher.”
Angelus laughs, yet the sound changes as it progresses, growing deeper even as the volume lessens somewhat. The voice that eventually replies rings with the most condescending tones of home. “And you consider the two to be mutually exclusive, do you?”
The previous Head of the Council stands before him, the man who originally trained him, one smirking Marcus Travers. Giles had forgotten just how much the son takes after the father, all of Quentin’s pompous arrogance a weak imitation of the even more obnoxious original.
“Aren’t they? I mean, isn’t that the point, that the Council fights the monsters of the world?”
“Rupert, Rupert, Rupert.” Travers shakes his head, tsking. “What a black and white view of things. Quite surprising, really, coming from a man who is himself so very, very grey.”
“I … I don’t know what you mean.” He wipes an annoying tickle of blood from his forehead.
“Don’t you? Well then, do you know that I almost didn’t allocate you for duty with an active Slayer? That you’re the only Watcher in the history of the Council to have been considered for the wet-works team?”
“No.” It leaves his lips with little conviction.
“Oh, yes. You can feel that I’m right.” Travers paces before him, stepping over Eliska repeatedly as if she were no more than another stone to avoid. “It wouldn’t have taken much - a few prods here, a couple of pushes there - and your psyche would have been shaped into the perfect assassin.”
“You bastard. You utter bastard.” He feels his teeth grind.
“By all means, Rupert, blame me. Nothing could be simpler. The dead make excellent scapegoats - we so rarely have the chance to speak back.”
Travers stops pacing to slide a book out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket, flipping pages seemingly at random. “But it’s not quite the truth, is it? The monster lurked inside of you when you joined the Council, already created by your own hands.” He holds up a page, the Mark of Eyghon somehow discernable and very, very black in the cold moonlight.
“No,” he breathes it out, clears his throat, and repeats more loudly, “No.”
“Oh, I may have shaped, molded the clay as years passed, but then, what did you expect when you gave me such perfect material to work with?”
The book snaps shut, disappears, and the hand that held it now points to Eliska’s body lying still on the ground. “Do you know how I found her? I had my harbingers looking for weeks and weeks, and nothing.” Travers grins. “Then you arrived and led them straight to her.”
Giles shakes his head violently, yet the words remain, the nauseating knot in his stomach clenched tight. Pushing against the stone to fully stand, he ignores the sharp jab of ribs grinding, the nerve-bright flash of his protesting ankle.
“All these little girls running, persecuted, all their Watchers too weak to fight. And you think you’ll be their Golem, their monster created by the Watchers Council to protect and protect and protect, no matter what you must do.” Travers smiles, a sharp, cutting thing. “Do you know the full story of Prague’s Golem, Rupert? The ending?”
“A lie. Nothing but a lie.”
~
When it was made, Rabbi Loew wrote emet, the word for life, upon its brow with his own blood, calling his golem to action.
And what action he received.
The sun had hardened the golem until neither sword nor arrow could pierce it. Its great size and mass gave it incredible strength such that one blow from its arm could lay low a good ten soldiers. Every night the golem fought at the direction of the Rabbi, battle after battle, continuing long after a human would have grown weary. And every morning, more and more unmoving bodies lay strewn across the ground it had walked.
Knowing only that it protected them, kept by the Rabbi from any knowledge of deaths done, Prague’s Jews welcomed the golem as one would a simple child. They spoke gently to it, patting its great arms in affection when it tried to reply, nothing but nonsense sounds emerging from its roughly made mouth. Children brought it flowers and the occasional sweet.
In the city proper, things were quite different with people cowering in their homes and businesses barely functioning. After a fortnight of having troops and property decimated by what most citizens referred to as a monster, the Emperor repealed his order of pogrom, sending a letter to Loew suing for peace.
Rejoicing into the night, the Jewish people of Josefov barely noticed that the golem was missing, as it had been ordered by the Rabbi to wait alone in the synagogue. Then suddenly, a loud garbled yell shook their houses to the very foundations. Havoc broke loose. The golem, grown used to constant action and attention, rampaged through the streets, smashing walls and doors, trampling anyone who could not remove themselves from its path quickly enough.
Fear returned to Josefov.
~
“A lie? You’d like that, wouldn’t you? To write this all off as nothing. But the truth is …” He morphs, voice altering, features flowing into those of Ben. “The truth is that the truth is always better than a lie.”
Giles’s hands spasm into clamped fists, driving nails into palms. The pain barely registers. “I did nothing more than what I had to do.”
Ben continues as if he doesn’t hear, voice light and friendly. “The truth cuts so very sharply, deeply. Everything you don’t want to see about yourself ripped from within and held up, exposed, bleeding the red of denial. Oh, no - I have no need of lies. You are the one who needs them. And every time you create them, every time you lie to others or to yourself - actually, especially to yourself - you are the one who makes evil in this world.”
Throat closed tight, he rasps, “Who are you?”
“You may not know who I am yet, but I know exactly who you are.” Ben spreads his hands wide before fading gradually from view, final words lingering. “Congratulations, Rupert Giles. You are my greatest disciple.”
Alone, Giles collapses to the ground again, protest of rib buried under a numb layer of shock, little more than the word ‘no’ echoing through his mind.
~
The blood upon the golem’s forehead remained wet, never drying, never soaking into the clay. It gleamed in the torchlight a red that now looked of sin instead of justice, the word of life shining with a primal vitality. And since humanity has long judged the amoral as immoral, this would not do.
Twelve men - the strongest of all Josefov - cornered it in an alley and held the monster down, allowing Rabbi Loew to approach. Some say the look on the golem’s face was akin to fear, to hope, to hurt and confusion and rage. If so, it moved the Rabbi not at all. With one broad sweep of his thumb, Loew smeared the ‘e’ from the front of emet, leaving only the word of death, only a statue of unmoving clay.
The Jews of Prague entered into a time of prosperity and peace, the like of which they had never known.
Yet instead of destroying it, Loew stored the golem in his synagogue’s attic, vowing to bring it to life whenever he willed, whenever he deemed a need had arisen.
Legend has it that it waits there to this very day.
~
~
~
Closing the cheap motel door on the sounds of excited Potentials - no, make that Slayers - reacting to the sugar high of late-night, convenience-store Skittles and Coke, Giles leans his forehead against its peeling paint.
It’s the first time he’s been alone since the fall of Sunnydale thirteen hours ago. The quiet, if anything, quickly becomes more disturbing than the noise since it allows Buffy’s words to ring through his head over and over.
Her voice, her face held no recrimination when she told him, yet it gives him little comfort as he slumps to the dirty brown carpet, mouth opening and closing soundlessly, shaking with horror at what he and Robin almost did.
~
“Buffy.” He finally catches her alone in the hospital corridor outside Robin’s room, laying a hand on her arm. “Buffy … the Hellmouth. I need to know for certain …”
She places her fingers over his and gives a little squeeze. “It’s closed for good, Giles, not just covered with rubble. I felt it.”
“Closed. That’s … well, that’s fantastic. But how?”
Her smile shines luminously, even through watery tears. “It was Spike, Giles. Spike! He destroyed the Turok-Han and closed the Hellmouth. He sacrificed himself to save us all … to save the world!”
~
At breakfast the following morning, Buffy waves him over to the booth she’s taken with Xander and Willow. “Giles! We’re going to eat obnoxious amounts of pancakes with too much syrup and talk about what to do next.”
“We saved you a seat.” Willow pats the bench beside her.
“Yeah,” Xander says, hitching a thumb toward the booths filled with new Slayers and Dawn and Andrew, “and do you know how many people we had to fight off to do that? You’re in with the in crowd, bub.”
He looks at their trusting faces smiling up at him, sadness tinged with relief haunting their eyes, and Giles takes off his glasses, pretending to clean the lenses on his shirt hem, needing to not see them when he says, “I was … I was just going to check on Robin in hospital. We’ll talk later.”
With one quick turn, he walks out the door, ignoring the twisting in his gut that jellies his knees, the pain in his chest that longs to curl his body inward around it. The hot California sun stings his eyes, allows their imagined hurt expressions to rise in a mirage before him.
He knows he’ll return to help them - he’ll always help them. But he must not - cannot - allow himself to get close again.
Speeding up, Giles almost runs across the pavement to throw himself inside his rented car, slamming the door hard enough that the air echoes with the thump of an old, heavy attic trapdoor closing.