Birth of a King
Summary: "You destroyed my village and took me away from my family! I can never be whole again, and for that, I will never forgive you." His fate sealed from the start, his life was nothing more than an endless sea of rage and revenge... or was it?
Rated: T
Genre: Angst/Hurt/Comfort
Paradocs: This is actually an idea I've been toying with for a while now. Because we all know that Bakura isn't 'evil', and he never was... right? Anyway, this is my first semi-canon story that isn't a one-shot. And it's where I'm throwing my muse when I can't think about Hikari no Kage.
Disclaimer: I still don't own Bakura, or anything vaguely resembling this series. But someday... Someday.
Beginnings
Adjo looked at his surroundings from the safety of his brown stallion's back. He didn't like this area. It was bad for trade. Every merchant from Memphis to Cairo knew that. Journeying this far from the Nile's banks, this far into the Red Land...
There was a reason we were taught that the desert was home to demons. He glanced at the armed men surrounding his caravan. He'd hired them, fighters, all of them, to protect his goods.
It hadn't occured to Adjo at the time to hire a navigator. The trip to the Southern Lands was supposed to be swift, easy. And Adjo had never thought that a boat up the Nile would be safer than trekking across the land with his caravan of goods.
So now his party was here, with a wagon loaded with precious goods: incense, ebony, mahogany, gold. Lost in the middle of bandit country, and with no idea which way the sacred river lay.
Easy pickings, thought the wild-haired man watching from the top of a cliff nearby. Those merchants were soft, foolish, greedy things. It almost hurt Nebibi to watch the young merchant wander around the desert with his men and treasures.
"Someone," the man said to no one in particular, straightening up from his crouched stance, "should go down there and help them with that cart. After all," the Egyptian turned to the group behind him. "We wouldn't want them to have to worry about their precious goods, now, would we?"
The group laughed, a harsh, cruel sound. Most of them wore rough cotton kilts, with vicious blades tucked into the rope belts that held their only clothes up. Many had the weathered, grizzled faces that suggested a rough life; a few were younger, but their faces held the same eagerness as their elders. Nebibi smirked as he eyed his band. Bandits, the lot of them, with the quick minds and cruel hearts that were a requirement of the trade. They were more clever than any scribe, though many of them couldn't read more than a few glyphs; they caused more harm than any soldier of the Pharaoh might have in the bloodiest war.
And of the entire gang, Nebibi's mind was fastest, his heart the most bloodied by battles. He was the leader of the thieves, the King of their village of Kul Elna.
"Well?" He barked suddenly, the smirk vanishing. "What are you waiting for?" The gang scrambled on to their own horses, the white-haired King mounting his own jet-black steed far more calmly than they did. "There's treasure ahead for us, loves," he laughed as they rode down the secret paths they knew too well. The men laughed with him as they closed in on the party, all in high spirits. This was what they lived for, after all.
"Do you know when you've been cheated, merchant?" Nebibi asked the man kneeling in front of him, one guard on either side of him. Adjo swallowed nervously, afraid to answer the well-muscled thief king. "Well?" Nebibi's voice began to lose its amused tone. Usually, he liked toying with his quarry before he killed them; occasionally, he'd let one member of the raided group survive, just to watch them die later in the desert, lost and afraid. But today, he was anything but happy. The bounty from this merchant's cartel had been shoddy, the wood barely worth anything, the gold the only thing worth more than a copper.
When Adjo still didn't answer, the tanned man turned away, disinterested.
"Kill them." He said off-handedly to his men, as though the matter was of no more consequence than the day's weather. Nomti and Odji, the two men standing on either side of Adjo, grinned, picking up the shocked man in their calloused hands and nodding back towards their comrades, who'd held their blades to the other captives' throats during Nebibi's 'conversation' with the merchant.
A swift movement of their well-muscled arms, and the men lay dead, the sand absorbing the crimson streams that poured forth from their necks. Odji nodded to his younger companion, who, with a devlish grin, stood Adjo up so that they were face-to-face.
"We don't have to kill you, you know," he said comfortingly, clapping a hand on the man's shoulder. Adjo looked at him, wide-eyed in shock at his sudden display of camaraderie. Nomti continued, keeping his voice friendly, soothing, even. "We won't let you die like your guards. We promise."
"What are the promises of thieves worth?" Adjo said bitterly. The young bandit feigned hurt.
"Why, I'm shocked, friend! We may be thieves, sure as sand is sand, but you won't find any more honest men than us in the whole world! Ain't that right, Odji?"
The elder man nodded sagely, shoving his knife between Adjo's shoulder blades. "Right you are, young'n. We never go back on our word." Pulling out his blades, he wiped them casually on Adjo's headcovering, letting the corpse fall into the sand without any display of respect. "C'mon, now. Let's get this back home, eh? Sure the women're waitin' for us to bring 'em somethin' nice out of this lot, right?"
Nomti grinned, climbing onto his horse's back lithely. One man tossed him the end of a rope that was tied to a line of horses: a common bounty for them, but they were still worth a good deal. "Aye, and the men're waiting for us, too." The young thief said with a wink.
Kul Elna was a small village, tucked away among the high cliffs on the southernmost border of the kingdom and well out of the reach of even the influence of the Pharaoh's laws. The townsfolk were mainly thieves, although there was a craftsman or two scattered throughout the small population. To the uneducated eye, Kul Elna wasn't anything special. The houses were made of the same mud-bricks of every other peasant house in Egypt, the people as inconspicuous as anyone you might run into on the streets of some other town or city along the Nile. In fact, the only things that could be thought of as vaguely odd about Kul Elna were the high number of horses in the city and the lack of any temples on its streets. Instead, there was a stairway built into the face of a cliff, leading down, down, into the darkness of the underground. Otherwise, though, it was nothing noteworthy in its appearance.
In name, however, Kul Elna was the most infamous village in the Black Land.
It was said that demons lived in the village, humans who had so violated the gods that there was nothing good left in them. They stole horses, gold, wood, women, anything they could get their hands on. They murdered good and noble citizens, stole from Pharaoh's caravans, and, rumor had it, worshipped Apophis, the snake who tried each and every night to kill the Sun God Ra. Mothers told their children to stay close to the Nile, kept their daughters inside the walls of their own villages, and fathers swore to kill any thief who dared show their face near their homes.
But, as was said before, these methods did nothing to help, for who could tell one of Kul Elna's inhabitants from a traveller, a passing stranger with goods too heavy for him to carry, so he must sell them? For, while they were thieves, the people of Kul Elna had no use or desire for much of what they stole, and so, sold it in towns, so that they could buy what was truly necessary for their existence.
Nebibi sat astride his horse on the cliff above his beloved town, and smiled. He was not happy because of the raid he and his gang had pulled off a few hours before; that had been a weak one, and most certainly not their best take, not after all the years of fine plunder they'd recieved from those miserable worms who called themselves "merchants". No. Kul Elna's leader was happy for another reason, one that would, in the future, be the cause of much chaos throughout Egypt, though of course, he had no idea of this at the time.
For, from where he and the thieves stood, they could hear the lusty cries of a newborn baby.
"A boy, huh?" Odji said with a devilish grin, pulling up beside the Thief King. But the man said nothing, merely nodding and, with a whistle, urged his horse down the cliff and into the city, the rest of the group following him. Nomti caught up to his partner, looking puzzled.
"You'd think he'd be glad he's got a kid," the young thief muttered. The elder shrugged.
"He's worried, Nomti. Wants to make sure Amisi's alright." He grimaced. "Y'know how it is with 'im." Nomti paused, then nodded, saying nothing further.
Nebibi listened to the conversation, saying nothing. They were right, of course. He stopped his horse outside the doorway where the crying was loudest, leaping off his mount with the agility of his namesake, the panther, and strode inside to see the two people he'd worried over all day: his wife and, now, his newborn son.
Amisi was a pretty young woman, with skin that was barely tanned and long ebony hair. Her eyes were the blue of the lotus, and reminded her husband of the town where they'd met, of the place where she'd followed him until he'd turned around to find this pretty young girl who'd been enchanted by the carefree manner in which he'd traded with her father, by his muscular chest and long pale hair. They'd eloped, of course, not bothering to even go through the custom of getting her parents' approval; they wouldn't have let her wed such a roguish-looking young man, after all. Now, she smiled at him, a tired, but triumphant, expression, turning her magical eyes from his hard face to the little human she held in her eyes.
"Look," she whispered, as he came around so that he could kneel beside her bedside. "A little manchild, as strong and powerful as his father before him."
Nebibi smiled, brushing a stray strand of hair out of her face and tucked it behind her ear. "Aye, and as beautiful as his mother, if I'm any judge." The new parents smiled as they looked at their son, who'd stopped his crying now to look at the newcomer into his life.
"I want to name him," Amisi said suddenly, breaking the silence. Nebibi raised an eyebrow, but said nothing, just nodding for her to continue. "How does 'Baraka' sound?"
The man snorted. "No," he said, though not unkindly. "That's not right for him. Too common for our son. He'll be King of Thieves one day, Amisi, not some peasant garbage. No..." the thief thought for a moment, calculating a way to appease his wife and still get his way.
"What about Bakura?" He suggested. "It's similar enough to Baraka, but different enough to let him make his own mark on the world with that name." The woman hesitated for a moment, then nodded. Nebibi smiled, brushing her cheek with one hand, then rising and going to the little household altar that stood in the corner. Taking a pinch of incense (the finest quality, stolen from a caravan of priests a few months before), he lit and laid it before the statue of Nut, the goddess of the nightsky and protector of mothers during childbirth. Then, almost as an afterthought, he lit another pinch before their statue of Set, to give his son strength like the god had, and Taurt, to protect Bakura during his infancy, when so many babies might die. Amisi watched this, allowing Bakura to suckle while her husband made sure that his fate was in order, that the proper gods were thanked and invoked.
"Bakura," she murmured, watching the babe whose wisps of hair were as pale and white as his father's, and whose eyes were a grey-blue, the color impossible to tell yet. "My little Bakura. You'll always be safe here, my son, in Kul Elna, in my house, with us."
Nebibi heard her words, and smiled. As he finished his prayers before the altar, he muttered, "Always."