Bloodsoaked and grinning, the Soldier climbs to the summit of the ruins. The wind is mountain-top fast. It grabs the strands of her hair that have escaped her ponytail and sticks them to her ecstatic mouth: the slick surface of teeth, the gloss-wet of lipstain. She stands up straight and the wind lights her up. Clouds shoved aside just for her. Left hand: a sword, bloody. Right hand: empty as your heart when you watch her. Her feet wide on the cracked marble. To her left, the fallen corpses of statues, dismembered by gravity. The curls of stone on their heads are perfect. They were gods. Their eyes are pitted rounds.
The Soldier lifts her empty right hand. You lean forward, your elbows on your knees. You stop your breathing. She scrawls a message in the air, words falling out of her fingers the same grey-shot gold as the light she’s bathing in.
THEY ONLY CALL US USURPERS BECAUSE THEY KILLED ENOUGH OF US
HOW’S THIS FOR LOYALTY
Then she grabs her ponytail, yanks her face up, and cuts off her own head with her sword.
It floats above her message, grinning and laughing and bleeding and dead, until you gasp air and blink five times to clear your stinging eyes and by the time you look back at your screen to check if you saw that for actual it is a hum of static and also you’ve been banned for fourteen days from participating in mass story events, as has everyone else whose identitirecord was verifiably present in the virtual environment during a hostile infiltration incident.
Your local chat goes predictably berserk because you curated your local chat to be the kind of person who hangs out in time-delimited set-character storyworld infotainment virtualities, and no one has ever seen the Soldier do that before, and no one knows who was running her, the whole point of watching this instance of the game was to see an unknown take a crack at it, and most of you have never gotten banned even once in your life and have no idea what to do with yourselves in your free time for a fortnight and also aren’t sure if this is banned like the game is full of malware and we want to make sure you’re not bringing it in with you or banned like so much for your career enjoy your chat with the nearest representative of the state police see you never.
You know which one it is, which is why you unjoin the chat.
You still see her when you close your eyes. How the light was just for her, and she did that with it.
Okay.
Okay okay okay, let me explain.
Here’s a story. A version of this story happened. A version of this story I’m telling to you now.
A historiographical text is, at its very simplest, a description of events that happened, organized in some deliberate fashion by its producer or producers. Each historiography also possesses, by virtue of being a text, an audience; and that audience receives the deliberately organized account of events as being more or less believable, true-to-life, or explicatory of real occurrences ‘on the ground.’
Stratis Papaioannou wrote: “I understand history to be the transformation of the past into narratives, images, and ritual: a past objectified, defining identities and cultural habits, and at once, a subjective past, remembered, adopted, rejected, or forgotten.”1 Beginning here—with history as a transformation of the past, subjective and determined to reify identity and ‘cultural habit’—suggests also that most historiographies are normative if not specifically written to be otherwise. A historiography presents a view of events-which-happened which is acceptable or understandable to the larger culture-complex, even when that view is meant as an intervention into the current state of affairs—a historiography which means to rehabilitate a ‘bad’ emperor, for instance, is still engaged in normative narrative-making, as it uses the values which already exist in the culture to make new claims about events which have occurred in the past.
History provides a pattern which allows for reality to be observed in a selective way.2 To narrate history is to give it some sort of sequential logic, to follow a pattern—to “invest a part of the past with a plot,”3 and thereby tie it to deep narrative structures which match narrative concepts in the larger culture-complex. Because in historiography the ‘past has a plot,’ there is a gap between ‘events-which-happened’ and ‘events-as-conveyed.’ The shape of this gap therefore results from the historian’s conscious selection, whether guided by practical considerations (what sources are available, the scope of the writing, etc.) or by a chosen narrative structure which produces a ‘plot’ that makes sense of the ‘events-which-happened’ for the reader/perceiver of the historiography.4
Thus: historiographic production, when ‘enplotted,’ becomes disproportionately valuable to a human mind seeking to make sense of ‘events-which-happened,’ especially when those events may be traumatic, challenging, or liminal.
Historians are liars.
Here’s what happened. It happened a long time ago. You can put in names if you feel like it.
Near the end of his reign, the Emperor again faced a revolt in the East led by people who had once been important and loyal members of his own imperial administration: the Sword, once the hero of the Emperor’s Western campaigns and now appointed as a general for the Armies Situated East; and the Twist-Neck Seal, the child of the Rose Seal, who had in decades past also rebelled against the Emperor and been put down. Accounts of the Twist-Neck–Sword revolt appear in histories in all the major languages of the Eastern Empire. It was a story about a globally significant event.
Like all revolts, it was also a story about legitimate rule. The Emperor was growing old; he had no clearly designated heir. When people wrote down what happened during the Twist-Neck–Sword revolt they were writing about uncertain imperial transition and what an ideal Emperor ought to look like.
I’m getting away from what happened again. Aren’t I.
The Sword and the Twist-Neck Seal sought to unseat the Emperor while the Emperor was on military campaign against the Most-Eastern Kings, who had failed to hand over their territory and possessions to the Emperor when the last Most-Eastern King had died, even though—as the Emperor would tell you—the Last Most-Eastern King had said the Emperor could have them. They’d said it in the treaty they’d signed with the Emperor after the last rebellion, the one that the Rose Seal instigated when the Emperor was young and weak from newness, instead of old and weak from people thinking about a future that didn’t have him in it.
So the two periods of rebellion are doubly linked: despite being separated by some years (and all of the Emperor’s great successes), they both involve members of the Seal family, and they both concern the fate of the Most-Eastern principality. In that first revolt, the Rose Seal had allied with the Most-Eastern King, who had provided many of the soldiers the Rose Seal had used to rebel against the Emperor’s authority. But that revolt failed, and was subdued, and the Most-Eastern King was compelled to promise that all the Most-Eastern Kingdoms would be the Emperor’s upon their death. Treaties are stories, too.
But the Last Most-Eastern King was dead, and the Now Most-Eastern King didn’t care about that treaty (is a treaty a treaty when it’s made under duress? Do you have to consent to something like that?). So the Emperor had come to take the Most-Eastern Kingdoms by force, which has never gone well for Emperors.
All the stories about the beginning of the revolt of the Sword and the Twist-Neck Seal—the ones written in the language of the Empire and the ones written in the language of the Most-Eastern Kingdoms and the ones written in other languages besides—are the same. They say that the powerful landholding aristocrats of the imperial East felt that the Emperor had neglected and abandoned them. They thought the Emperor mistrusted them, because it is always the East that rebels against the Emperor, and hadn’t taken them or their scions along with him on his campaign against the Most-Eastern Kingdoms and denied them the riches of conquest thereby. And so they did what they always did, and threw themselves behind the idea of a champion—a rebel—a new Emperor who would be theirs and theirs alone—and joined the revolt that the Sword and the Twist-Neck Seal instigated. The Emperor was weak, and old, and they thought about a future without him in it, a future where one of their own was Emperor instead.
I did say landholding aristocrats. I didn’t say noble lumpenproletariat or champions of democracy or anti-colonialist uprising. What kind of story did you think I was telling you?
Of course, it didn’t last. The revolt was put down within a year. One of the historians who told it to me said that it “was not prolonged, but was rather like a structure built on sand and that quickly falls into ruin from the blows of a flood.”
How did it end? Oh. Sure.
The Twist-Neck Seal and the Sword quarreled over who should be Emperor hereafter, or who should have what part of which territory, or whose God was actually God. And the Emperor took advantage of their quarreling, and sent them both letters in his own hand, identical enticements to give up rebellion, return to loyal service, and betray one another. The Sword was persuaded (swords are things that desire wielding, at their deepest heart) but the Twist-Neck Seal was not. And when the Sword, turning from one sort of betrayal to another, enticed the Twist-Neck Seal to meet with her to discuss how their war would go? He came. She had him murdered.
His decapitated head was displayed to the Emperor’s troops.
Beheading is a humiliation ritual. A spectacle that makes a body into a toy. A grotesque. An unpersoned thing that can be stuck on a stick and laughed at.
It occurs most often during genocides and other forms of total war.
The next time you see the Soldier, Beheaded, she’s been made into iconography. She comes to you as a targeted advertisement. The second of three pull-cards from a new-release divination deck, a holograph splashed across your eyes when you walk past the shop downtown that sells only three things: divinatory tools, cacti, overpriced lost-wax cast jewelry. On her right, advertised card number one, a bloodied Rose, red as death; on her left, advertised card number three, the Desert as Ruin, all empty sand and hollow palaces. Between them, designed just to appeal to you, she looks up from the crook of her arm, obliterated and triumphant.
You do not go into the shop. You do not buy the deck. (You wish you had, but you wish a lot of things, and not being seen so clearly by machine learning is one of them.)
You take the long route home, the one which avoids the protest in the plaza you were thinking about joining. Refugee right-to-shelter, even if the refugees are from countries you’re not supposed to think had people in them, only terrorists or druggies or blank-eyed eminently photographable dying children. Not exactly the world’s most outré protest. Probably only the normal amount of cops. But you’d have to ditch your phone and your contacts, and while you’ve got glasses in your backpack, contacts with full enhanced reality and myopia correction are expensive as shit.
(You have extras under your bathroom sink. You’re not exactly hurting for cash. You’re just spooked.)
The Soldier, Beheaded should have been disappeared, blanked out. Removed from public consciousness except for samizdat, maybe some stupid kid with a physical-media zine. Weird cosplay. That’s what you’d expect to have happen when a mass story event gets purged from the public record. You only see the Soldier, Beheaded in dimming memory. You’re not even sure you’ve got perfect recall on those two minutes any more. Human brains rewrite what they witness, you know that. For comfort, or for illusion.
But there she was, number two in an advertised three-card draw. Blood dripping out of her neck, vocal cords severed, ready to tell you again that it isn’t usurpation if it worked. If it had worked. If you could win enough power that power is legitimate—
Targeted advertising made of a banned dream shouldn’t happen to anyone, let alone you. It makes you feel like you’re being watched. Like you’re special enough to be watched.
And you didn’t even go to the protest, which would give them something concrete to watch you about, did you.
Tropic work can also be used interpretively depending on the desires of the author of the historiography, emphasizing a particular event by assigning it to a known tropic narrative sequence.5 Using the audience’s awareness of narrative sequencing which belongs to that trope—audience knowledge of the storyworld-encyclopedia—the author of a historiography can cast a particular emperor, dynasty, general, or official in good or evil lights.6 The historiographers tended to rely on the assumption that the success and failure of their protagonists was divinely ordained, and also that this divine providence was linked to the adherence of the protagonist to ‘good’ models of being an actor in the world.7
You’ve played the Soldier. Everyone tries it, once or twice. (Everyone who gets into mass-story games, at least. There’s people out there whose lives are very boring and don’t contain narrative experiences at all. You’ve met them at work.) The Soldier is difficult—there’s a section in the middle third of the story where you have to work out battle tactics on the fly, and no one’s ever managed not to trigger it—and kinda unrewarding, emotionally. At least for you. She doesn’t have that many choices, if you’re playing her well. There’s a confined space she can move in. Does she desert, or not. Does she get out of the trap that ends in battle tactics alive, or not. Do you, the player, feel like there’s anything to say about trudging along inside a system and maybe having a minute of glory while you get yourself and all your friends messily killed.
Or not.
There’s a couple famous Soldier runs. The Soldier, Triumphant is the gold standard that most players try to hit: she refuses to desert, survives the ambush, grits her teeth and exercises her limited influence on her superior officers, commits some genocidal actions and refuses others and when the story’s over she has a medal and a disabling wound and a life that extends outside the bounds of the storyworld. It’s harder to achieve than it sounds. It usually gets less-clever, less-determined players killed early, or else bores them to tears in the second half of the game, which is an endless grind.
The Soldier, Excised was your favorite as a kid, because the player who ran her during that game played her like a star going nova, a suicide grin and a speech before the ambush that she knew she wouldn’t survive. The Soldier, Excised’s player is one of the great mass-story artists. He writes events now, mostly. You’ve even played one of his, a minor part in a second-tier premiere, no one who’d ever played that sequence before in the mix, everyone discovering the shape of the story together.
He hasn’t been on the player side in a long time. Sometimes you wonder if he can’t figure out any way to play the Soldier better, so he quit before he was sure she was stuck—
The Soldier, Beheaded is like no other trip through the mass-story that you’ve ever imagined. She shouldn’t be possible. You’re pretty sure her player has to be dead now, or banned forever, or co-opted to write stories for the government.
Flat on your back in your bed, lights off, no sound but the street outside. People laughing somewhere in the dark. The wind ricocheting down the valley. You close your eyes and try to reconstruct the earlier parts of her run, how she played the Soldier before you knew what she planned to end with. You could log onto the forums and see if there’s anything left from those two weeks she was just playing, before the climax, when everyone you knew couldn’t stop analyzing her—your posts were there too—
It’s probably deleted, like the records of the game itself. All you have is memory, and a hollowness in your chest that might be longing.
You wish you could ask her how she found enough cracks in the game to stand up on the mountain of dead gods and declare that the whole shape of being trapped was a lie all along. You wish you could ask her if it felt worth it, when she did.
One ending of the story goes like this:
The Sword’s own soldiers, dissatisfied, betrayed her to the Emperor, and she was forced into the exile of religious contemplation.
It’s an expected ending. It lets everyone off the hook a little. Maybe the Sword finds inner peace. Forgets all those heads she lopped off. Forgives herself for choosing to be the instrument of someone else’s rough justice, someone else’s normative fix to a world slipping less normative with every new frontier.
You don’t like that ending. You want me to pick another.
Okay. You’re not going to like this one either.
Here’s an interesting problem. In some versions of the revolt of the Twist-Neck Seal and the Sword, the Sword isn’t in the story at all.
In the best-known version written in the language of the Most-Eastern Kingdoms, the Sword has been replaced, whole cloth—her role, ironically, usurped—by the figure of the Beloved of Princes. In this version of the story the Beloved of Princes is a child of the Most-Eastern Kingdoms, but the sort of child who has been in service to the Empire for a long time, and on purpose. (Why else would they be called by their name? There is something in empire that battens most closely to the throats of the ones who went willing.)
So. The Beloved of Princes does what the Sword does: they join the revolt along with the Twist-Neck Seal. But their motivations are both chronologically and logically confused: at first the story tells us that the Beloved of Princes was promised the rulership of the Most-Eastern Kingdoms by the Twist-Neck Seal, and this enticed them into revolt. But then the story says that the Beloved of Princes had always been loyal to the Emperor, and was never truly a usurper; that they woke up from the drunken stupor of rebellion when the Twist-Neck Seal made them an offer of true power. They slip between loyalty and disloyalty in a line: are they the Sword, to be persuaded into service? Are they the Beloved, always a traitor twice over, never quite anyone’s? A collapse of persons. As if the story had twisted on itself, trying to find a way out.
It ends the same, though. Really it does.
No cajoling letters needed this time. The Beloved of Princes marches right over to the Twist-Neck Seal and murders him. Cuts his head off. Brings his head to the Emperor like a kitten with a prize mouse.
Beheading is beheading. Annihilation of possibility. The Emperor displays the Twist-Neck Seal’s head to all the imperial troops, in this version of the story, to show them what happens to rebels.
It ends the same every time so far. Sorry.
Try again.
Even providential justice, however, is narrativized: it is written, it is part of the way that events surrounding usurpation and insurrection are made understandable. It is a normalizing act. It provides reasons for what is occurring to have occurred. And because it is written, it is also changeable, reusable—historiography rewrites the events of an usurpation or insurrection to fit the narrative structure of one: it can “impose over them a perverse meaning”8 if that meaning fits a new way of interpreting events-on-the-ground which supports the legitimacy claim of a sitting emperor, or literary patron, or new dynasty.
You take your rig out into the scrub desert. Just you and your little car, bottle-green hatchback with four hundred kilometers of charge left on it. Tent for car-camping and cooler with sandwiches and beer shoved in the back next to the full-surround goggles and the extra batteries to keep the console running for a weekend’s worth of game. The air is full of some kind of loud birdsong. You spot one setting up your campsite. It’s a dull blue color, bright against the dry ground but vanishing instantly when it flies up between the empty sky and the twisted low curves of the pine branches it lives in.
You’ve done this before. You’ve done this a lot. Really sinking into a new mass-story, especially when you’re playing a character—it’s better out here in the wide places. You’re not the only one, either. On the forums you used to trade tips on where to buy portable batteries that weren’t remarketed and relabeled by a sales aggregator. The remarketed ones always crap out on you at the worst moments. Yanks you right out of the story.
Petrichor, somewhere.
You think of the card that came after the Soldier, Beheaded in the advertisement. The Desert as Ruin. Maybe it is. Maybe it all is.
You’re not playing the Soldier in this run. You thought about it. You considered. You asked yourself if you were just spooked, or just lazy. Or both. You’re both, too often. But not this time. This time, you’re sure. If someone asked you directly, you’d tell them that repetition isn’t always the best way to make a point. Besides, you’ve never been a fighter-type specialist. This run of the story, you’re playing the Rose. The woman in the heart of the labyrinth, the secret-keeper, sometimes the spy. Sometimes the first death, sometimes the only survivor.
How’s this for loyalty, you think, setting up your rig, strapping in. Saying the Soldier, Beheaded’s words to yourself. Trying them out. You think of where in the run you can leave a mark. You think about (the state police, all your ransacked files, your skipped shift at work) how not to get caught. You think of how you will lace the Soldier, Beheaded’s message into every part of the story you are about to play: in the Rose’s mouth, pressed into every piece of her correspondence, every hidden clue. You think about who will play the Rose after you, and who will play the Soldier, and the Sword, and how the story will—
It’s not going to be very important. It’s not going to matter for real.
It’s going to matter some, you’re probably fucking your access clearances forever. And people will be watching. People will see.
They only call us usurpers because they killed enough of us. A beheading is an annihilation. Right? Right. Except the Soldier, Beheaded isn’t over. She’s loose in the memetic soup of targeted advertising, of course she isn’t over. She isn’t over and neither are you.
The light is slanting, silver and bone-white. You pull the goggles over your eyes and lie down in the middle of it. Your fingers shivering on the keys and your heart bloody in your throat where it would be cut.
Begin.
1Papaioannou, S. “Byzantine historia”, in Thinking, Recording, and Writing History in the Ancient World, 2014. 298.
2Fulda, D. “’Selective History: why and how ‘history’ depends on readerly narrativization, with the Wehrmacht Exhibition as an example”, in Meister, J. C. (ed.) Narratologia: Narratology beyond literary criticism: mediality, disciplinarity. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2005. 173-194. 178.
3White, H. Metahistory: the historical Imagination in nineteenth century Europe. Baltimore/London, 1973. 30.
4Doležel, L. “Fictional and historical narrative: meeting the postmodernist challenge” in D. Herman (ed.). Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 247-273. 259.
5Scott, R. “Text and Context in Byzantine Historiography”, in A Companion to Byzantium, ed. Liz James, Wiley-Blackwell 2010. 251-262. 252.
6Some examples include Akropolites’s attempts to cast the current emperor and his ancestors favorably and damn the memory of opponents to the dynasty; Psellos’s attempts to criticize policies and cultures which had failed to benefit he himself; Anna Komnene’s assertion of claims on histories of the near past in a situation of present turmoil; Choniates and Attalietes to explain what went wrong in a period of decline. This is not in any way an exhaustive list.
7Magdalino, P. “Byzantine Historical Writing, 900-1400” in The Oxford History of Historical Writing, Volume 2: 400-1400, ed. Sarah Foot and Chase Robinson, 2015. 227.
8Kazhdan, A. and Franklin, S. Studies on Byzantine Literature in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. Cambridge University Press, 1984. 27.
(Editors’ Note: Arkady Martine is interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim in this issue.)
© 2024 Arkady Martine
