"Craft Twined From Craft" commentary
Apr. 29th, 2023 12:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chthonic_cassandraAuthor's commentary of Xena fic Craft Twined From Craft.
First, a world about the title. It's an imperfect translation of a phrase from Euripides, ἐκ τέχνης τέχνην /οἵαν ἔπλεξε, of which I have been fond for a very long time. I decided that just using the Greek untranslated was too obnoxious even for me, but my translation doesn't really get the feel of the original, which has a wonderful twisting feeling on your tongue when you say it.
“Sharp-eyed Satrina,” Dameius used to call her. She would feel her skin grow warm under his praise, secure in its truth. They both knew that she missed nothing, not the flicker of a potential ally’s gaze while he lied to them, nor the quivering in Dameius’ own muscles which could signal frustration to be soothed, rage to be extinguished, desire to be quenched. This was her art, and she took pride in it, in finding the knife’s-edge balance which it took to be a perfect consort, an ideal spy.
I adore Satrina, but XWP gives us very, very little about her to on and for this fic I basically excavated every crumb that I could. The way Satrina describes her relationship with Dameius in her big villain reveal speech is intriguing ambiguous - she says that Xena misunderstood their relationship, that she loved him, that he was not simply her master but also her partner, that they were going to conquer the world together, but for me those pieces don't quite fit together to create a whole. I was interested in a writing a Satrina who is canny and astute and skill, but also needs to understand her relationship to Dameius within a particular framework, and can't tolerate what might be outside of it.
I wanted to start with Dameius' voice, which Satrina holds onto and mythologizes, and him giving her an epithet with pinpoints how she sees herself. I also wanted the use of the epithet to put us in a distinctly classical milieu, which I am interested in playing with in XWP's context, and which I will do more with if/when I ever get more fic for this canon written.
One of their favorite games was to have Dameius send her in to serve at table for guests who he did not trust - kings, petty lords, rival warlords. She would go in to them wearing a chiton that barely grazed her thighs, the curls of her dark hair shining with scented oil, and glance blushingly, sidelong through her eyelashes as she filled their wine cups. All the while, she would feel herself inwardly as taut as a new-strung bow, her senses alert and responsive. After, she would tell her lord the secrets the guests whispered behind his back, the plans they let slip. He would laugh, delighted with her cleverness while all the while his hands pulled down her hair and his lips kissed the smoke and wine-stink from her skin.
There are a lot of banquet scenes in XWP with complicated power dynamics and someone presenting as a slave or servant when they actually have access to more power. I was thinking about how many times we see Xena dressing provocatively and flirting in order to get information, and the idea that this kind of strategic use of sexuality is something they share in a complicated way.
It was during those long, languid nights that he taught her everything he knew. He guided her hands across his maps, demonstrating the battle formations he had used, the angles from which he approached the enemy. She excelled when he quizzed her. “My own, my clever girl,” he would say, “you’re the only one I could ever trust my army to. We’ll rule Greece together, one day.”
"Taught her everything he knew," of course, is supposed to echo with Gabrielle, not part of this fic but echoing in every story about Xena's earlier relationships with women.
The first time he said those words to her, they went to her head, making her drunker than wine ever could, even when she was twelve and her master before Dameius had pushed it on her. She let it slip to the other women in the camp the next morning, as they gathered around the cooking fire. Talia, who was twice Satrina’s age and fancied herself wise, laughed. “Do you really believe that, child? You’re a whore, like all of us. Don’t let Aphrodite make you act the fool as well.”
Satrina had the woman whipped for insolence, and ate in her meals in Dameius’ tent afterwards.
This paragraph establishes a few things that matter for the rest of the fic: Satrina's pre-Dameius past, which is very bleak; this part of her that is brittle and vulnerable and wants external validation and will cling to delusion to do it; how harshly she responds to preserve those delusions. We don't see Satrina as part of a group of enslaved women anywhere in the rest of the fic, but I had to establish her that at one point she was, and she rejected the possibility of community and solidarity there in service to holding on to what Dameius had to mean to her.
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Later she would wish that could say she had anticipated Xena and Borias’ victory over him, but the truth was that she didn’t see it coming. Their attack tactics were inconsistent, chaotic, furious. Even as their armies picked off larger and larger numbers of Dameius’ men, Satrina was certain that her master’s calculated and tested methods would succeed. They always had in the past.
On the day he died, she was in their tent. She always readied it for his return, after a battle, ensuring that there was warm water for his bath, fruit and cheese to encourage him back to hunger as the adrenaline of the fight died down. It was their routine to talk through the day’s fighting as she bathed him, hash out what had gone wrong and right, where he needed to strengthen the army’s drills, which soldiers deserved an extra share of the plunder. She loved these evenings, anticipated them with a kind of tickling delight.
Her first indication that something had gone wrong were the voices. The shouts of any victorious army sound much the same, but Dameius’ men were all Greeks, to a one, while this army cried out in a range of accents - Northern, Eastern, some even speaking in languages Satrina could not identify. And, loudest among them, was a woman’s voice, clear even from a distance.
This isn't something that gets made explicit in canon, but given Xena's travels and the likelihood that Borias is from somewhere in the Balkans, I liked the idea that Xena and Borias' army was this more ragtag multicultural group picked up from each of the places they traveled. I imagine that they have soldiers from Chin or from the far north with them.
Something clenched, deep in Satrina’s abdomen. She could not have said whether it was terror, rage, or grief. She could not move. She stayed upon the sheepskin pallet, limbs curled beneath her, waiting, as the shouts and screams came closer and closer.
I wanted to show Satrina in this moment as vulnerable, young, caught off her guard, before she gets her walls back up.
Then, the woman - “All of you, stay out - Borias and I have first pick from Dameius’ tent, you know how it goes.”
She was made of ice.
No - clever girl, sharp-eyed Satrina. Survivor, she told herself. Find your way through. That’s your only task now.
She heard the rattle of the woman’s headdress as she ducked into the tent. Her cheeks were flushed with battle-fever, her boots muddy, her sword wet with blood. The man stood half a step behind her, though, as they both saw Satrina and stopped, his hand went to the woman’s shoulder.
I do love Xena's headdress from this period.
“Oh,” Xena said, “Dameius must have had a concubine.”
This isn't a particularly dialogue-heavy story, but I had a hell of a time trying to capture Xena's voice, which is so distinctive and great in the show. When I wrote a line that I could really hear in Lucy Lawless' voce I felt very pleased with myself.
Satrina drew her legs closer in. “Where is he?” she asked. Her voice quivered; she let it.
“He’s dead,” Xena answered, her head tilting a fraction to one side, “I’ve killed him.”
Satrina realized she was crying, and that her breath was coming in rough, erratic sobs. “I want to see him. I want to see his body.”
The man - Borias - stepped forward, and knelt down in front of Satrina. “Xena, she’s hardly more than a girl. Hush, child - Dameius can’t hurt you anymore.”
Borias is a weird presence in this fic, but I wanted to show him well on the way in his arc of softening that we see on the show, so he's the first one here to buy into Satrina's emergent ruse and express sympathy to her.
There was a half-smile on Xena’s face. “We can take you to see the body, if you want to be certain that he’s dead.” Borias held out a hand to Satrina, and, when she did not at once take it, Xena’s voice acquired an edge of impatience. “Don’t worry, we don’t give women to be shared out among the soldiers in our armies. You’ll get better treatment than that here.”
Early seasons Xena (and Xena on HTLJ) has a whole thing about not having harmed women and children even during her warlord days, which I don't ever really buy and which is definitively confirmed to have at least had some major exceptions, if not to be a wholesale absurdity. I do think that Xena always had some moral codes she tried to follow, but also that she bent them all over the place. One of those sites of pending is that I do think warlord Xena was complicity and a perpetrator of the systems of sexual violence that we see operating throughout the show. So, maybe Xena and Borias don't allow group rape of female captives, but soldiers in their army are totally taking concubines.
Satrina took half a second, and offered a prayer to Hades, that Dameius’ soul might be welcomed among the heroes. And then she exhaled; there was nothing more that she could do for him now. She took the hand Borias offered, and stood. She saw, in the edges of her vision, that Xena’s eyes lingered upon Satrina’s bare shoulders, upon the swell of her breasts. “Thank you,” she said, “for saving me.”
Ahhh. I love Satrina.
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There is an art to making oneself indispensable, and Satrina was skilled at it. It starts with observation, with keen attunement. From this process, one can begin identifying the needs of the object of one’s observation, and from there, to anticipate those needs, to fulfill them before they have formed as desires in that object’s mind.
From the moment Satrina took Borias’ hand, she turned the prodigious force of this attention upon her new masters. There was much to observe. It was common knowledge, Satrina quickly learned, that Xena and Borias were lovers, but the nature of their partnership was obscure. Who commanded, between the two of them, and who obeyed? And if they meant to rule as equals, then what was the tension between them which emerged and then dissipated, the times when one’s orders countermanded the other’s?
I mean that this thought process should partially just be revealing about Satrina's own assumptions about power and relationships, but also to some extent these are questions we all must have about Xena and Borias.
Satrina lingered and listened, as was her way, and in so doing heard stories that confused more than they revealed. One grizzled soldier, who said he had been with Borias since the beginning of his conquests, described Xena as a seducer who had lured his commander away from a loving wife; a different man told of Borias tricking and trapping Xena, leaving her, crippled and injured, in the hands of their enemies halfway across the world. There were other stories that Satrina didn’t know how to credit, tales of dark magic, evil bargains, and trees strung up with bleeding bodies. These stories seemed to have little to do with the warlords Satrina now served; she held them in the back of her mind, but didn’t know what to do with them.
Can you imagine trying to make sense of Xena's backstory received piecemeal? I love this show and I think it's so fun to imagine how other people understand what the hell Xena's deal is.
It wasn’t until some weeks had passed that she acquired information that she knew how to make use of.
Xena and Borias had stayed true to their word and had not given Satrina to their men, but neither had either of made real use of her themselves. She served in their tent, brought food and drink and hot water, but was always dismissed before the beginning of the meal or bath. This baffled her; she could see that both of them appreciated her beauty, but yet she felt herself held at a remove, just out of reach of some secret.
Satrina, concubine since at least age 12 is concerned because who could be having sex with her aren't. Right there with you my love.
A proper Satrina/Xena/Borias threesome fic would be fun but it wasn't what this fic was and I'm not really good enough at smut to be the person to write it.
And then, one evening, as Satrina laid out a meal before Xena, she noticed something; an odd ungainly quality to the warlord’s movement as she settled down to eat. Xena stumbled slightly, as if caught off-balance, and, for a second, in a reflex she didn’t quite hide, her palm went to the front of her abdomen. Satrina, watching from the edges of her downcast eyes, saw a curve there, beneath Xena’s palm, hidden normally beneath her voluminous coats. Her mistress was pregnant.
I know this reveal is a little bit clumsy, but I couldn't figure out a better way and this felt tonally in keeping with the series. The implication that we get in canon, of Xena desperately trying to conceal the pregnancy from her army and to some extent from herself, really gets to me.
Satrina thought, quickly - should she keep her realization to herself, to be used against Xena and Borias at another time? Or should she reveal it? She watched the tension on Xena’s face, the deep weariness, and she made her choice. This was a woman who was very alone, a woman who longed desperately for a confidante.
Waking softly and briskly on the pads of her feet, Satrina fetched a cushion from the other side of the tent and brought it to Xena, kneeling down next to her. “My aunt used to tell me,” she said, her voice determinedly neutral, “that it was best for women to have more support on their backs, when they’re carrying. It’s harder to sit up without it. May I show you?”
Xena grasped Satrina’s wrist, and she tried not to let herself wince at the strength of the other woman’s fingers. “What do you know?”
Satrina schooled her expression, and exhaled before she spoke. “I know nothing, my lady, only what I’ve noticed. A woman - we see these things.” She paused, not wanting to push her luck, and then continued. “I wouldn’t speak of it, I swear it by the gods.”
Satrina is very, very good at what she does. She makes a snap decision about this soothing-confidante-female solidarity persona and just goes for it. And it works.
Xena lifted her chin and uttered a low grunt of suspicion. “How do I know that? How can I be sure you won’t go to my enemies and tell them that Xena, Destroyer of Nations, is a weakened, pregnant woman?”
“Why would I want to cause you harm? You’re my savior.” Satrina swallowed the bile that rose, unbidden, in her throat, and kept an edge of breath in her voice, like a shocked, naive young girl. “You rescued me from Dameius. I will be loyal to you, I swear.” She bent her head to where Xena’s hand still clutched at her wrist, and delicately pressed her lips to Xena’s rough, dirty fingers.
Good job Satrina! Xena would not at this point admit it, but we all know she has a soft spot for a beautiful young woman who sees her as a hero.
Was it too much? No, she didn’t think so. By the time she lifted her head again, the fingers had loosened their grip. She continued to speak, emboldened. “I would - I would like to help you, if I can. My aunt was a midwife, and she taught me things - about herbs, what relieves pain, and what staunches bleeding, massages, other things that could help.” This was a lie, though only partly. Satrina couldn’t remember her family. There had been an older slave woman, when she was with her first master, who helped her induce a miscarriage. She had taught her other things, too. “Would you let me?”
Xena took the pillow, and positioned it at her lower back. She leaned backwards, with a sigh. “Huh. I could use a woman with those skills. We’ll see.” She took a sip of the wine Satrina had laid out for her. “You can do massages, you say? Try my shoulders, then - they’re like stone.”
Xena's love of massages is, of course, canon.
In these skills, at least, Satrina felt confident. She positioned herself behind Xena and gingerly began. The woman’s smell, of sweat and leather and horses, reminded her suddenly of Dameius. She quelled the thought, and focused instead on the fall of Xena’s hair down her back.
Much to Satrina’s surprise, when Borias pulled aside the flap of the tent and saw Satrina’s hands on Xena’s shoulders, he cried out, his voice loud with frustration, “Xena!”
Jealousy? Satrina hadn’t expected that between them, and thought quickly. But Xena only laughed. “What? The girl’s giving me a massage - she’s quite good. Maybe you should try.”
I cracked myself up with this line. I think it's my best match on character voice in this fic.
Borias voice dropped to a furious whisper. “We spoke about this. I won’t have you tangling another innocent girl up in one of your schemes. Not after what happened with that woman.”
Satrina could feel Xena’s shoulders tense under her fingers. “It isn’t like that, Borias. She’s not Anokin.” Satrina’s mind was working so furiously, trying to gather facts for later analysis, that she was almost unprepared when Xena removed her hands from her shoulders and took one of them in hers. “She realized about the child. She’s willing to keep the secret, and she could help.”
I name Anokin here because I didn't want to assume every reader would be as obsessed with these characters as I am, but the passage would read better without the name. I think Anokin is very very important and it drives me crazy that the show didn't come back to her (I am of the opinion that she's who AFIN should have been about). We really don't know what the fuck happened there, but it was sexual, it was ugly, and Borias doesn't want it to happen again. Writing fic about her is definitely definitely on my list.
Borias looked directly at Satrina, and spoke to her, taking her aback, “Is this true, Satrina?”
Satrina nodded. “Yes. My aunt was a midwife, and I just thought - I’m so grateful to the both of you, if there’s anything I could do to repay you…”
Borias’ face changed, and he laughed with what sounded like delight. “That’s just what we need! What a gift from the gods, to make sure our son is well. Satrina, come sit beside us as we eat.”
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From then on, Xena and Borias no longer sent her away so quickly. She was with them at every mealtime, and attended Xena during her baths. Borias, she quickly learned, was eager to talk about the pregnancy. He asked every question he could think of to Satrina, and she tried to come with answers that were at least partly true. During the evening meals, he sometimes spoke of the type of wistful things that any ordinary couple might discuss - baby names, and what the child might look like, and other such nonsense. Xena was more circumspect. She seemed more eager to talk about battle plans and tactics than domestic fantasies.
Often, as Satrina knelt a careful distance away, her eyes on the rugs that Xena had stolen from Dameius’ tent, she wished that Borias would shut up and talk to Xena about their conquests. Xena’s mind was fascinating - her intuitive leaps in her logic, the way she seemed to strategize across a diagonal, anticipating her enemies' moves according to assumptions that Satrina could barely follow. She wanted to hear everything she had to say.
I was pleased with "strategize across a diagonal" as a description about how Xena's mind works.
But Xena wasn’t interested in talking to her. As the months went on, Satrina could tell that her mistress was beginning to trust her, but it wasn’t the kind of trust she had shared with Dameius, who delighted in the cleverness of her mind. Instead, Xena seemed to be trusting her body. She began ordering Satrina to stay to attend her as she bathed, and as Xena disrobed before her, revealing both her muscular warrior’s body and the growing, undeniable signs of her pregnancy, Satrina could feel that Xena was watching Satrina watch her, as if taking in the fact that one other person was seeing her in her physical vulnerability, in these changes that were taking place within her outside, of her control.
I was interested in thinking through why the Satrina we meet in canon is so angry at Xena, what it is that got under her skin about her enough to try the long-game destruction through imitation thing we see in the show. We know from canon that Xena underestimated Satrina, but I liked this idea of Satrina just feeling so fundamentally unseen by her in her intelligence, and the kind of seething resentment that comes out of that.
I was also interested her in Xena's relationship with her own body, which is something that fascinates me throughout the show and I think is particularly fraught during the period of her pregnancy. I liked the idea of Xena using Satrina in this instrumental way that doesn't have much to do with Satrina herself as an individual (which of course is what drives her crazy about it), but as a safe witness, as someone who can see the body Xena values so much changing in these ways that are out of her control.
Of course, as vulnerable as Xena’s secret might make her, she was still Satrina’s mistress, who could have her whipped or killed or tossed out as sport for her army as quickly as she could snap her fingers. There was an edge, then, in Xena’s bold undressing, in exposing herself only to one who was under her control.
And eventually, as Satrina had been anticipating for weeks upon weeks, Xena took her to her bed.
The show, of course, doesn't (can't) directly confirm for us that Satrina was Xena's concubine, and I don't actually know what other viewers thought since no one but me seems very interested in talking about Satrina. But to me it was the obvious reading of what's going on in the episode, and I think it makes for a really interesting entry in the show's tangled nexus of messaging around sexuality and slavery and gender. Xena's a warlord; warlords take concubines; hence, Xena takes concubines. I think pre-Gabrielle Xena wants so many different things out of sexuality; she wants these different kinds of partnership with Caesar, Borias, Lao Ma, Cyane; she wants whatever kind of gratification and indulgence Alti is offering her with Anokin. But she wants sexuality as an exercise in power. And I read that as an edge that's always there in the show when she and Gabrielle play with concubine disguises (one day I will write my Xena and Gabrielle concubine role play fic. One day). This is something Xena has done; in the present, it's not something she feels good about. But it comes with the territory.
First, all she wanted was for Satrina to pleasure her, which she treated as she had treated the massages; an efficient way to relieve her stress. But it was more difficult for Satrina than she had anticipated. She had never belonged to a woman before, and though Dameius had once, in a particularly bacchanalian night after a major victory, wanted to watch her with a newly captured female slave, the experience was hardly the same.
This is stylistically so me, the glancing reference to something really quite horrifying.
She felt ashamed at her inexperience, and angry with herself and Xena for the fact of the shame, for making her feel less than perfectly skilled. But Xena didn’t seem to mind. She was good-natured and appreciative, guiding Satrina in what she wanted from her without rancor or cruelty. The simplicity of it, as if Satrina was any dispensable whore, infuriated her, but it was a fury curiously absent of cause.
This piece of Satrina's experience was important to me to convey, and I hope I did; this particular humiliation which is feeling sexually unskilled when you've had to learn to use sexually strategically to survive.
After a few instances of this, Xena instead led Satrina to lie down upon the cushions. “Come on,” she said, “let me give you a good time for once.”
The requirements of this were more familiar; the combination of the rigid self-control needed in order to sigh at just the right moments, arch her back and neck aesthetically, while at once letting herself go enough to genuinely and convincingly feel pleasure, to let Xena feel herself successful. As she did, though, she thought of Borias’ baffling reaction to seeing her with her hands on Xena’s shoulders, his references to some girl tangled up in Xena’s schemes. Satrina thought for an instant that she would like to be more tangled up with Xena than she was, that she wanted to learn the way she thought and the way she schemed, that she wanted to get inside Xena’s skin and her mind. Then pleasure came in a sharp wave, and she remembered to cry out for her mistress, and lost the line of her thoughts.
Wanting to be inside Xena's head is what passes for Satrina for attraction. Callisto/Satrina fic one day? Or Alti/Satrina? But, in all seriousness, I'm very pleased with the above paragraph.
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Xena and Borias talked about taking Corinth, and Satrina began to make plans. She had more to learn from Xena, and she wasn’t going to learn it if Xena and Borias settled down with a gurgling infant. She had leverage - her herbs and her soft hands and her soothing voice. She had secrets.
Satrina thought about the muscles in Xena’s back bunching and then smoothing as she twisted to wash her hair, lamplight reflecting in her bathwater. Satrina thought about her own body - thin, brittle, ornamental. Her arms which could carry a wine jug but not a sword, her thighs which looked beautiful spread across a bed but had never had the strength to kick away an enemy, not when she was a girl and not now.
She thought that she could never be Xena, never do what she did. But once she had dreamed of ruling Greece by Dameius’ side. And that dream had not been an idle one. Her mind and eyes were as sharp - sharper - than the of the warlords whose beds she had warmed. She could survive. She could win.
Satrina doesn't quite want to be Xena, but there's a very potent envy here, of what Xena gets to have that she doesn't. And actually, she does win!
First, a world about the title. It's an imperfect translation of a phrase from Euripides, ἐκ τέχνης τέχνην /οἵαν ἔπλεξε, of which I have been fond for a very long time. I decided that just using the Greek untranslated was too obnoxious even for me, but my translation doesn't really get the feel of the original, which has a wonderful twisting feeling on your tongue when you say it.
“Sharp-eyed Satrina,” Dameius used to call her. She would feel her skin grow warm under his praise, secure in its truth. They both knew that she missed nothing, not the flicker of a potential ally’s gaze while he lied to them, nor the quivering in Dameius’ own muscles which could signal frustration to be soothed, rage to be extinguished, desire to be quenched. This was her art, and she took pride in it, in finding the knife’s-edge balance which it took to be a perfect consort, an ideal spy.
I adore Satrina, but XWP gives us very, very little about her to on and for this fic I basically excavated every crumb that I could. The way Satrina describes her relationship with Dameius in her big villain reveal speech is intriguing ambiguous - she says that Xena misunderstood their relationship, that she loved him, that he was not simply her master but also her partner, that they were going to conquer the world together, but for me those pieces don't quite fit together to create a whole. I was interested in a writing a Satrina who is canny and astute and skill, but also needs to understand her relationship to Dameius within a particular framework, and can't tolerate what might be outside of it.
I wanted to start with Dameius' voice, which Satrina holds onto and mythologizes, and him giving her an epithet with pinpoints how she sees herself. I also wanted the use of the epithet to put us in a distinctly classical milieu, which I am interested in playing with in XWP's context, and which I will do more with if/when I ever get more fic for this canon written.
One of their favorite games was to have Dameius send her in to serve at table for guests who he did not trust - kings, petty lords, rival warlords. She would go in to them wearing a chiton that barely grazed her thighs, the curls of her dark hair shining with scented oil, and glance blushingly, sidelong through her eyelashes as she filled their wine cups. All the while, she would feel herself inwardly as taut as a new-strung bow, her senses alert and responsive. After, she would tell her lord the secrets the guests whispered behind his back, the plans they let slip. He would laugh, delighted with her cleverness while all the while his hands pulled down her hair and his lips kissed the smoke and wine-stink from her skin.
There are a lot of banquet scenes in XWP with complicated power dynamics and someone presenting as a slave or servant when they actually have access to more power. I was thinking about how many times we see Xena dressing provocatively and flirting in order to get information, and the idea that this kind of strategic use of sexuality is something they share in a complicated way.
It was during those long, languid nights that he taught her everything he knew. He guided her hands across his maps, demonstrating the battle formations he had used, the angles from which he approached the enemy. She excelled when he quizzed her. “My own, my clever girl,” he would say, “you’re the only one I could ever trust my army to. We’ll rule Greece together, one day.”
"Taught her everything he knew," of course, is supposed to echo with Gabrielle, not part of this fic but echoing in every story about Xena's earlier relationships with women.
The first time he said those words to her, they went to her head, making her drunker than wine ever could, even when she was twelve and her master before Dameius had pushed it on her. She let it slip to the other women in the camp the next morning, as they gathered around the cooking fire. Talia, who was twice Satrina’s age and fancied herself wise, laughed. “Do you really believe that, child? You’re a whore, like all of us. Don’t let Aphrodite make you act the fool as well.”
Satrina had the woman whipped for insolence, and ate in her meals in Dameius’ tent afterwards.
This paragraph establishes a few things that matter for the rest of the fic: Satrina's pre-Dameius past, which is very bleak; this part of her that is brittle and vulnerable and wants external validation and will cling to delusion to do it; how harshly she responds to preserve those delusions. We don't see Satrina as part of a group of enslaved women anywhere in the rest of the fic, but I had to establish her that at one point she was, and she rejected the possibility of community and solidarity there in service to holding on to what Dameius had to mean to her.
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Later she would wish that could say she had anticipated Xena and Borias’ victory over him, but the truth was that she didn’t see it coming. Their attack tactics were inconsistent, chaotic, furious. Even as their armies picked off larger and larger numbers of Dameius’ men, Satrina was certain that her master’s calculated and tested methods would succeed. They always had in the past.
On the day he died, she was in their tent. She always readied it for his return, after a battle, ensuring that there was warm water for his bath, fruit and cheese to encourage him back to hunger as the adrenaline of the fight died down. It was their routine to talk through the day’s fighting as she bathed him, hash out what had gone wrong and right, where he needed to strengthen the army’s drills, which soldiers deserved an extra share of the plunder. She loved these evenings, anticipated them with a kind of tickling delight.
Her first indication that something had gone wrong were the voices. The shouts of any victorious army sound much the same, but Dameius’ men were all Greeks, to a one, while this army cried out in a range of accents - Northern, Eastern, some even speaking in languages Satrina could not identify. And, loudest among them, was a woman’s voice, clear even from a distance.
This isn't something that gets made explicit in canon, but given Xena's travels and the likelihood that Borias is from somewhere in the Balkans, I liked the idea that Xena and Borias' army was this more ragtag multicultural group picked up from each of the places they traveled. I imagine that they have soldiers from Chin or from the far north with them.
Something clenched, deep in Satrina’s abdomen. She could not have said whether it was terror, rage, or grief. She could not move. She stayed upon the sheepskin pallet, limbs curled beneath her, waiting, as the shouts and screams came closer and closer.
I wanted to show Satrina in this moment as vulnerable, young, caught off her guard, before she gets her walls back up.
Then, the woman - “All of you, stay out - Borias and I have first pick from Dameius’ tent, you know how it goes.”
She was made of ice.
No - clever girl, sharp-eyed Satrina. Survivor, she told herself. Find your way through. That’s your only task now.
She heard the rattle of the woman’s headdress as she ducked into the tent. Her cheeks were flushed with battle-fever, her boots muddy, her sword wet with blood. The man stood half a step behind her, though, as they both saw Satrina and stopped, his hand went to the woman’s shoulder.
I do love Xena's headdress from this period.
“Oh,” Xena said, “Dameius must have had a concubine.”
This isn't a particularly dialogue-heavy story, but I had a hell of a time trying to capture Xena's voice, which is so distinctive and great in the show. When I wrote a line that I could really hear in Lucy Lawless' voce I felt very pleased with myself.
Satrina drew her legs closer in. “Where is he?” she asked. Her voice quivered; she let it.
“He’s dead,” Xena answered, her head tilting a fraction to one side, “I’ve killed him.”
Satrina realized she was crying, and that her breath was coming in rough, erratic sobs. “I want to see him. I want to see his body.”
The man - Borias - stepped forward, and knelt down in front of Satrina. “Xena, she’s hardly more than a girl. Hush, child - Dameius can’t hurt you anymore.”
Borias is a weird presence in this fic, but I wanted to show him well on the way in his arc of softening that we see on the show, so he's the first one here to buy into Satrina's emergent ruse and express sympathy to her.
There was a half-smile on Xena’s face. “We can take you to see the body, if you want to be certain that he’s dead.” Borias held out a hand to Satrina, and, when she did not at once take it, Xena’s voice acquired an edge of impatience. “Don’t worry, we don’t give women to be shared out among the soldiers in our armies. You’ll get better treatment than that here.”
Early seasons Xena (and Xena on HTLJ) has a whole thing about not having harmed women and children even during her warlord days, which I don't ever really buy and which is definitively confirmed to have at least had some major exceptions, if not to be a wholesale absurdity. I do think that Xena always had some moral codes she tried to follow, but also that she bent them all over the place. One of those sites of pending is that I do think warlord Xena was complicity and a perpetrator of the systems of sexual violence that we see operating throughout the show. So, maybe Xena and Borias don't allow group rape of female captives, but soldiers in their army are totally taking concubines.
Satrina took half a second, and offered a prayer to Hades, that Dameius’ soul might be welcomed among the heroes. And then she exhaled; there was nothing more that she could do for him now. She took the hand Borias offered, and stood. She saw, in the edges of her vision, that Xena’s eyes lingered upon Satrina’s bare shoulders, upon the swell of her breasts. “Thank you,” she said, “for saving me.”
Ahhh. I love Satrina.
-
There is an art to making oneself indispensable, and Satrina was skilled at it. It starts with observation, with keen attunement. From this process, one can begin identifying the needs of the object of one’s observation, and from there, to anticipate those needs, to fulfill them before they have formed as desires in that object’s mind.
From the moment Satrina took Borias’ hand, she turned the prodigious force of this attention upon her new masters. There was much to observe. It was common knowledge, Satrina quickly learned, that Xena and Borias were lovers, but the nature of their partnership was obscure. Who commanded, between the two of them, and who obeyed? And if they meant to rule as equals, then what was the tension between them which emerged and then dissipated, the times when one’s orders countermanded the other’s?
I mean that this thought process should partially just be revealing about Satrina's own assumptions about power and relationships, but also to some extent these are questions we all must have about Xena and Borias.
Satrina lingered and listened, as was her way, and in so doing heard stories that confused more than they revealed. One grizzled soldier, who said he had been with Borias since the beginning of his conquests, described Xena as a seducer who had lured his commander away from a loving wife; a different man told of Borias tricking and trapping Xena, leaving her, crippled and injured, in the hands of their enemies halfway across the world. There were other stories that Satrina didn’t know how to credit, tales of dark magic, evil bargains, and trees strung up with bleeding bodies. These stories seemed to have little to do with the warlords Satrina now served; she held them in the back of her mind, but didn’t know what to do with them.
Can you imagine trying to make sense of Xena's backstory received piecemeal? I love this show and I think it's so fun to imagine how other people understand what the hell Xena's deal is.
It wasn’t until some weeks had passed that she acquired information that she knew how to make use of.
Xena and Borias had stayed true to their word and had not given Satrina to their men, but neither had either of made real use of her themselves. She served in their tent, brought food and drink and hot water, but was always dismissed before the beginning of the meal or bath. This baffled her; she could see that both of them appreciated her beauty, but yet she felt herself held at a remove, just out of reach of some secret.
Satrina, concubine since at least age 12 is concerned because who could be having sex with her aren't. Right there with you my love.
A proper Satrina/Xena/Borias threesome fic would be fun but it wasn't what this fic was and I'm not really good enough at smut to be the person to write it.
And then, one evening, as Satrina laid out a meal before Xena, she noticed something; an odd ungainly quality to the warlord’s movement as she settled down to eat. Xena stumbled slightly, as if caught off-balance, and, for a second, in a reflex she didn’t quite hide, her palm went to the front of her abdomen. Satrina, watching from the edges of her downcast eyes, saw a curve there, beneath Xena’s palm, hidden normally beneath her voluminous coats. Her mistress was pregnant.
I know this reveal is a little bit clumsy, but I couldn't figure out a better way and this felt tonally in keeping with the series. The implication that we get in canon, of Xena desperately trying to conceal the pregnancy from her army and to some extent from herself, really gets to me.
Satrina thought, quickly - should she keep her realization to herself, to be used against Xena and Borias at another time? Or should she reveal it? She watched the tension on Xena’s face, the deep weariness, and she made her choice. This was a woman who was very alone, a woman who longed desperately for a confidante.
Waking softly and briskly on the pads of her feet, Satrina fetched a cushion from the other side of the tent and brought it to Xena, kneeling down next to her. “My aunt used to tell me,” she said, her voice determinedly neutral, “that it was best for women to have more support on their backs, when they’re carrying. It’s harder to sit up without it. May I show you?”
Xena grasped Satrina’s wrist, and she tried not to let herself wince at the strength of the other woman’s fingers. “What do you know?”
Satrina schooled her expression, and exhaled before she spoke. “I know nothing, my lady, only what I’ve noticed. A woman - we see these things.” She paused, not wanting to push her luck, and then continued. “I wouldn’t speak of it, I swear it by the gods.”
Satrina is very, very good at what she does. She makes a snap decision about this soothing-confidante-female solidarity persona and just goes for it. And it works.
Xena lifted her chin and uttered a low grunt of suspicion. “How do I know that? How can I be sure you won’t go to my enemies and tell them that Xena, Destroyer of Nations, is a weakened, pregnant woman?”
“Why would I want to cause you harm? You’re my savior.” Satrina swallowed the bile that rose, unbidden, in her throat, and kept an edge of breath in her voice, like a shocked, naive young girl. “You rescued me from Dameius. I will be loyal to you, I swear.” She bent her head to where Xena’s hand still clutched at her wrist, and delicately pressed her lips to Xena’s rough, dirty fingers.
Good job Satrina! Xena would not at this point admit it, but we all know she has a soft spot for a beautiful young woman who sees her as a hero.
Was it too much? No, she didn’t think so. By the time she lifted her head again, the fingers had loosened their grip. She continued to speak, emboldened. “I would - I would like to help you, if I can. My aunt was a midwife, and she taught me things - about herbs, what relieves pain, and what staunches bleeding, massages, other things that could help.” This was a lie, though only partly. Satrina couldn’t remember her family. There had been an older slave woman, when she was with her first master, who helped her induce a miscarriage. She had taught her other things, too. “Would you let me?”
Xena took the pillow, and positioned it at her lower back. She leaned backwards, with a sigh. “Huh. I could use a woman with those skills. We’ll see.” She took a sip of the wine Satrina had laid out for her. “You can do massages, you say? Try my shoulders, then - they’re like stone.”
Xena's love of massages is, of course, canon.
In these skills, at least, Satrina felt confident. She positioned herself behind Xena and gingerly began. The woman’s smell, of sweat and leather and horses, reminded her suddenly of Dameius. She quelled the thought, and focused instead on the fall of Xena’s hair down her back.
Much to Satrina’s surprise, when Borias pulled aside the flap of the tent and saw Satrina’s hands on Xena’s shoulders, he cried out, his voice loud with frustration, “Xena!”
Jealousy? Satrina hadn’t expected that between them, and thought quickly. But Xena only laughed. “What? The girl’s giving me a massage - she’s quite good. Maybe you should try.”
I cracked myself up with this line. I think it's my best match on character voice in this fic.
Borias voice dropped to a furious whisper. “We spoke about this. I won’t have you tangling another innocent girl up in one of your schemes. Not after what happened with that woman.”
Satrina could feel Xena’s shoulders tense under her fingers. “It isn’t like that, Borias. She’s not Anokin.” Satrina’s mind was working so furiously, trying to gather facts for later analysis, that she was almost unprepared when Xena removed her hands from her shoulders and took one of them in hers. “She realized about the child. She’s willing to keep the secret, and she could help.”
I name Anokin here because I didn't want to assume every reader would be as obsessed with these characters as I am, but the passage would read better without the name. I think Anokin is very very important and it drives me crazy that the show didn't come back to her (I am of the opinion that she's who AFIN should have been about). We really don't know what the fuck happened there, but it was sexual, it was ugly, and Borias doesn't want it to happen again. Writing fic about her is definitely definitely on my list.
Borias looked directly at Satrina, and spoke to her, taking her aback, “Is this true, Satrina?”
Satrina nodded. “Yes. My aunt was a midwife, and I just thought - I’m so grateful to the both of you, if there’s anything I could do to repay you…”
Borias’ face changed, and he laughed with what sounded like delight. “That’s just what we need! What a gift from the gods, to make sure our son is well. Satrina, come sit beside us as we eat.”
-
From then on, Xena and Borias no longer sent her away so quickly. She was with them at every mealtime, and attended Xena during her baths. Borias, she quickly learned, was eager to talk about the pregnancy. He asked every question he could think of to Satrina, and she tried to come with answers that were at least partly true. During the evening meals, he sometimes spoke of the type of wistful things that any ordinary couple might discuss - baby names, and what the child might look like, and other such nonsense. Xena was more circumspect. She seemed more eager to talk about battle plans and tactics than domestic fantasies.
Often, as Satrina knelt a careful distance away, her eyes on the rugs that Xena had stolen from Dameius’ tent, she wished that Borias would shut up and talk to Xena about their conquests. Xena’s mind was fascinating - her intuitive leaps in her logic, the way she seemed to strategize across a diagonal, anticipating her enemies' moves according to assumptions that Satrina could barely follow. She wanted to hear everything she had to say.
I was pleased with "strategize across a diagonal" as a description about how Xena's mind works.
But Xena wasn’t interested in talking to her. As the months went on, Satrina could tell that her mistress was beginning to trust her, but it wasn’t the kind of trust she had shared with Dameius, who delighted in the cleverness of her mind. Instead, Xena seemed to be trusting her body. She began ordering Satrina to stay to attend her as she bathed, and as Xena disrobed before her, revealing both her muscular warrior’s body and the growing, undeniable signs of her pregnancy, Satrina could feel that Xena was watching Satrina watch her, as if taking in the fact that one other person was seeing her in her physical vulnerability, in these changes that were taking place within her outside, of her control.
I was interested in thinking through why the Satrina we meet in canon is so angry at Xena, what it is that got under her skin about her enough to try the long-game destruction through imitation thing we see in the show. We know from canon that Xena underestimated Satrina, but I liked this idea of Satrina just feeling so fundamentally unseen by her in her intelligence, and the kind of seething resentment that comes out of that.
I was also interested her in Xena's relationship with her own body, which is something that fascinates me throughout the show and I think is particularly fraught during the period of her pregnancy. I liked the idea of Xena using Satrina in this instrumental way that doesn't have much to do with Satrina herself as an individual (which of course is what drives her crazy about it), but as a safe witness, as someone who can see the body Xena values so much changing in these ways that are out of her control.
Of course, as vulnerable as Xena’s secret might make her, she was still Satrina’s mistress, who could have her whipped or killed or tossed out as sport for her army as quickly as she could snap her fingers. There was an edge, then, in Xena’s bold undressing, in exposing herself only to one who was under her control.
And eventually, as Satrina had been anticipating for weeks upon weeks, Xena took her to her bed.
The show, of course, doesn't (can't) directly confirm for us that Satrina was Xena's concubine, and I don't actually know what other viewers thought since no one but me seems very interested in talking about Satrina. But to me it was the obvious reading of what's going on in the episode, and I think it makes for a really interesting entry in the show's tangled nexus of messaging around sexuality and slavery and gender. Xena's a warlord; warlords take concubines; hence, Xena takes concubines. I think pre-Gabrielle Xena wants so many different things out of sexuality; she wants these different kinds of partnership with Caesar, Borias, Lao Ma, Cyane; she wants whatever kind of gratification and indulgence Alti is offering her with Anokin. But she wants sexuality as an exercise in power. And I read that as an edge that's always there in the show when she and Gabrielle play with concubine disguises (one day I will write my Xena and Gabrielle concubine role play fic. One day). This is something Xena has done; in the present, it's not something she feels good about. But it comes with the territory.
First, all she wanted was for Satrina to pleasure her, which she treated as she had treated the massages; an efficient way to relieve her stress. But it was more difficult for Satrina than she had anticipated. She had never belonged to a woman before, and though Dameius had once, in a particularly bacchanalian night after a major victory, wanted to watch her with a newly captured female slave, the experience was hardly the same.
This is stylistically so me, the glancing reference to something really quite horrifying.
She felt ashamed at her inexperience, and angry with herself and Xena for the fact of the shame, for making her feel less than perfectly skilled. But Xena didn’t seem to mind. She was good-natured and appreciative, guiding Satrina in what she wanted from her without rancor or cruelty. The simplicity of it, as if Satrina was any dispensable whore, infuriated her, but it was a fury curiously absent of cause.
This piece of Satrina's experience was important to me to convey, and I hope I did; this particular humiliation which is feeling sexually unskilled when you've had to learn to use sexually strategically to survive.
After a few instances of this, Xena instead led Satrina to lie down upon the cushions. “Come on,” she said, “let me give you a good time for once.”
The requirements of this were more familiar; the combination of the rigid self-control needed in order to sigh at just the right moments, arch her back and neck aesthetically, while at once letting herself go enough to genuinely and convincingly feel pleasure, to let Xena feel herself successful. As she did, though, she thought of Borias’ baffling reaction to seeing her with her hands on Xena’s shoulders, his references to some girl tangled up in Xena’s schemes. Satrina thought for an instant that she would like to be more tangled up with Xena than she was, that she wanted to learn the way she thought and the way she schemed, that she wanted to get inside Xena’s skin and her mind. Then pleasure came in a sharp wave, and she remembered to cry out for her mistress, and lost the line of her thoughts.
Wanting to be inside Xena's head is what passes for Satrina for attraction. Callisto/Satrina fic one day? Or Alti/Satrina? But, in all seriousness, I'm very pleased with the above paragraph.
-
Xena and Borias talked about taking Corinth, and Satrina began to make plans. She had more to learn from Xena, and she wasn’t going to learn it if Xena and Borias settled down with a gurgling infant. She had leverage - her herbs and her soft hands and her soothing voice. She had secrets.
Satrina thought about the muscles in Xena’s back bunching and then smoothing as she twisted to wash her hair, lamplight reflecting in her bathwater. Satrina thought about her own body - thin, brittle, ornamental. Her arms which could carry a wine jug but not a sword, her thighs which looked beautiful spread across a bed but had never had the strength to kick away an enemy, not when she was a girl and not now.
She thought that she could never be Xena, never do what she did. But once she had dreamed of ruling Greece by Dameius’ side. And that dream had not been an idle one. Her mind and eyes were as sharp - sharper - than the of the warlords whose beds she had warmed. She could survive. She could win.
Satrina doesn't quite want to be Xena, but there's a very potent envy here, of what Xena gets to have that she doesn't. And actually, she does win!
no subject
Date: 2023-04-30 03:20 pm (UTC)This story really hit me deep. I wanted to write about it since I first read it soon after you posted it, and then had trouble finding words, time, focus, and then time just went on and on and on. So this commentary is giving me life and motivation to try again.
I saw Xena on and off when originally aired but never in its entirety. Not sure why or how, given that I always liked the bits I saw. After reading this fic, I found this particular episode and watched it. I don't have anywhere close to the depth of background understanding you have here, yet I also felt very strongly that the little details you insert make up for it very well.
So many aspects of Satrina make me feel seen in ways nothing else ever did.
My teenage years were Russia in the 90s: After the collapse of the Soviet Union, as power and social structures were falling apart and reconstituting. Although the Soviet Union did champion women’s education and career advancement, there was much somewhat hidden sexism that came exploding after its fall. It felt like men had the power, money, and opportunity, and this was a truth weaved through the entire cultural narrative as I was growing up, stated sometimes in hints and sometimes bluntly. My mother always felt that her own parents never educated her about the realities of the world and she was left to discover them on her own after entering University. That experience shocked and scarred her. So she wanted to protect me from that, and went a bit overboard. The result was that there was never a specific predator doing the grooming - but I was effectively groomed nonetheless by the combined messaging all around me. I needed to be intelligent, ambitious, do very well at school, build a great career - and equally, I needed to become very good with men because otherwise, I could never truly advance in life.
At 12, I read the historical novel about Thais of Athens, a hetaira, like a life manual. At least from that age, sex was something I had a genuine curiousity about like any teenager - but I also thought about it as a skill I needed to master. Satrina’s vision of herself with Dameius - as a lover, support, and partner to a great man - reflects that initial role model I had. And while some of it reflects general patriarchal roles, typical patriarchal narratives seem to emphasize chastity - whereas the emphasis on sex and seduction as skills is what sets this whole thing apart. Your description of Satrina preparing for Dameius’s return from battle could literally describe my teenage fantasies.
It took me decades to understand not only the toxicity, but also the lies of it (e.g., the partnership and equality part - which are incompatible with this very type of cultural power structure). Satrina’s story has both survival and desire for power. I have a complicated relationship with applying the notion of “survivor” to myself due to the lack of physical violence. I could more directly relate to her quest for power; and in hindsight that took years to develop - to the way it undermines solidarity.
The way the story develops further is also amazing to me in many ways. Yet I would need to come back to articulate it.
no subject
Date: 2023-06-17 12:11 pm (UTC)I am very moved to hear how this story resonated for you, and I very much appreciate you sharing these parts of your experience with me. While my own experiences growing up are somewhat different than yours, I can connect with the feeling of believing that a certain sexualized role is your only option, and working to adapt yourself to it. I am so so glad that my Satrina made you feel seen, and thank you for letting me know. <3
no subject
Date: 2023-06-19 11:44 am (UTC)(for writing all your stories, checking in, responding, everything)