PERSONA NON GRATA

giuliana & eskander / altaïr

Become, it was a verb that had haunted him for as long as he could remember, taunting him with the dreadful satire that was his life. As a child he wanted to become, something, he never knew what, but he knew what he didn't wanted to become, neither a politician nor a robber. But somehow he had become both. Twenty five years had come and gone since the Sack of Portya, yet the thought of it still tied a knot in his guts. As his men were plundering random mansions, he was ransacking his own home, his own parents, his own brother, his own sisters, and therefore a part of his soul. That was it. When he was faced with the revelation of what he had become in the twelve years he had passed in this depraved exile, something opposite of all he would have wanted back then, yet he was proud of it. The tables had turned for him, passing from aristocracy to pirate, from Eskander to Altaïr. For the best, he thought. And still, some part of him couldn't stop thinking that if the child he was could see him now - sitting in a brothel, a whore squirmming on his lap as he patiented for potential new partners for his latest project - he wouldn't understand, even if he was told all that had passed since, and he would be digusted at what he had become. A persona non grata, an unacceptable person, both from the mighties and the wretched.

Under the discord of foreign tongues and laughters, the music seemed almost peaceful, despite it high fluting and drums. He could even hear some dialect in a corner of the room. Natives from here, he thought, as he started to listen what was said. He spent his childhood in a assieged city, he knew that such dialect were only used by two types of people : the plebs - and those men weren't part of it - and those who didn't want foreigners to understand their conversation. The wretched will join them. It has started. The rest he couldn't hear, as the whore started to complain. If he didn't wanted to fuck her, he souldn't make her waste her time. So he told her to go to another man. As she stood up and leave, a part of him wanted her back on his lap, it had been a long time on the sea to come here, and he had missed the touch of women. But as much as wanted her, he could not have her now, he had something to do first, and so he continued what he started with the men on the corner of the room. Were they the men he was supposed to meet tonight ? He listened to them for quite some time. And what a waste. They weren't the men he was looking for. And they weren't men he would ever look for, as they wouldn't be alive for long. Despite their precaution by not using the common tongue, they weren't precautious enough, even he, a simple pirate, could understand what they were saying, so why some men of the queen couldn't. Even the whore were watching them, with some pity in their eyes. These men were damned, by themselves.  

The men he wanted to see would not come this evening or else they would already be there. What a waste of time, he thought, immediatly regretting to have said no to the young whore he nearly had earlier. He started to look for her, but she seemed to have vanished, probably in her bedchamber, with another man. He didn't had time to finish his toughts that another sat on his lap. She was nothing like the earlier whore. A bit older but not less beautiful, quite the opposite, he found her even more charming than her counterpart. And she seemed more experienced somehow. He could imagine that many had run their fingers through that fire-kissed hair and ravished that teasing smile off her lips, wich make him wanted her even more. « Would you want to come upstairs ? » he said, as one hand was searching for his coins and the other was already strocking her cheek.