The Muses

Ines de Montoya stood stock still in the manner she had perfected in her seven centuries as service to the royal courts of Spain. The light from the screen on the kitchen table glowed softly, illuminating her pale skin, a gift of her vampire nature, and dancing off her auburn hair, the inheritance of her Visigothic past. Her companion, Enrique Olivarez, paced in tight circles on the other side of the room, unable to enjoy the abandon of a satisfying stride in the tiny space. The white cloak that marked him as a knight of the Military Order of Santiago, swirled around his legs like a dust devil. The orange cat that was curled on the highest level of the carpeted cat tree in the corner followed his steps and remained watchful, suspicious of these two figures who kept appearing in the house without notice.

“¡Ay! She’s been staring at that one sentence for five minutes,” Enrique growled with impatience.

Ines didn’t look up from where she was reading over the quiet woman’s shoulder. “Querido, it has been less than three minutes.”

On the screen, a single line dangled like a rope end: Enrique moved…

Then nothing. The cursor blinked in a cadence like fingernails tapping on a desktop. The woman’s hands hovered over the keys, hesitant and motionless.

“She’s stuck, again!” Enrique muttered and threw up his hands in exasperation. His unnaturally blue eyes rolled upward in his sun-darkened face.

Ines looked over at her friend with genuine disapproval, and scowled. “She’s thinking,” she corrected him. “¡Dejadla! Let her think in peace!” As she moved, the long skirt of her ropa and the puffed linen sleeves of her camisa rustled and shimmered in the light of the screen.

“She’s been thinking for five minutes.”

“Three minutes and seven seconds, at most.”

Enrique circled the kitchen table where the writer sat, narrowly avoiding rapping his sheathed sword on a chair leg. He leaned over her other shoulder, side by side with the elegant noblewoman. “It’s a fight scene! He comes at me and I catch his sword with my buckler and unbalance him. I throw him against the wall!” He stopped. “Why is this so hard? She writes conversations perfectly. She writes descriptions and intrigue.” He gestured at the screen with a dismissive wave of his hand. “She writes everything else. Why can’t she write a simple fight scene?”

“Pues, because writing action is different,” Ines explained quietly. “And because nothing is simple about writing a fight scene, any more than there is anything simple about battle. It requires movement, precision, like mastering the steps of a dance. She has to see it in her mind before she can write it. And right now,” she nodded at the woman, “she’s seeing it, playing it out in her imagination. The right words will come to her, if you will but wait.”

The woman ran her fingers through her hair, bit her lower lip, and then set her fingers to the keyboard. Enrique lunged at his opponent.

She deleted it.

She typed Enrique’s inhuman speed—

Then she deleted that, as well, groaning as she hung her head and sank her face into her hands.

“See? I was right!” Enrique insisted. “She’s stuck.”

Ines straightened her back and looked at her companion with disappointment. “Que tengas más paciencia. She is searching,” she corrected him, and smoothed the silk of her gown. “She must find the right words, the right verbs that will move the reader along with the fight, the right combination of adjectives that will make their heart race and let them feel the danger.” She paused and arched an eyebrow at Enrique. “And, to put it plainly, she has to find the right way to capture your 300 years of combat experience in a single movement. She’s never fought with a sword, and she isn’t a vampire. You aren’t being fair to her, querido.”

The writer sighed and opened another tab on the illuminated screen and typed in how to write a medieval sword fight.

“Oh por Dios!,” Enrique exclaimed and turned away. “She’s researching again. That means she’s really stuck. All she ever does is research. I can’t watch anymore. It’s too agonizing.”

“But this is how she learns! Be patient!” Ines repeated.

“That’s easy for you to say. I don’t have 750 years of patience like you do.”

“Hmm, clearly.” Ines’s voice carried the faintest hint of amusement.

The struggling writer before them stared at the screen for several minutes, taking notes with a pencil and an old notebook before returning to the document.

The attacker lunged. Enrique sidestepped in a fluid motion.

The knight’s voice rose in alarm. “Sidestepped?” I don’t sidestep. I’m a Knight! A warrior! I have fought armies of Moorish invaders! I was trained by Leovigildo, himself! I don’t sidestep like I’m avoiding a puddle—”

“¡Cállase! She’s just drafting,” Ines raised an elegant hand and cut him off with a sharp look. “The first version doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to get written, to be finished.”

“But it’s wrong,” Enrique persisted. “The motions are all wrong. The— what did you call it? The verb is wrong. I would never do such a thing. No experienced fighter would, especially in those close quarters!”

“And yet, you will do exactly that if that is how she decides to write it. She is your creator, and she knows you better than you know yourself. But stop worrying, Enrique. She knows it’s wrong,” Ines lowered the pitch of her voice, taking on the tone of a teacher. “Mira.”

The writer leaned in again, and, fingers flying over the keyboard, and wrote [Fix choreography in revision. Just get the beats down].

“Ay, Dios mio! She’s skipping it,” Enrique groaned, horrified. “She’s just moving on? Without fixing it? She’s just going to leave me sidestepping like a courtier at a ball?”

Ines clucked her tongue and looked up at the insulted knight. “Or you could be sidestepping like a graceful Andalucian stallion. Why are you so sensitive? She’s trusting herself, trusting the process,” Ines continued. “She knows she can’t choreograph perfectly in the first draft. So she’s getting the emotional beats down: what you’re feeling, what you’re trying to accomplish, what the fight sounds and smells like. She’ll fix the physical movements later.”

The attacker lunged. Enrique sidestepped—no, that’s wrong, fix later—and grabbed the man’s arm. Twisted. The attacker went down hard.

Enrique stabbed his finger at the screen in disbelief, “She wrote ‘that’s wrong’ in the draft.” The tone of disdain was unmistakable. “She actually wrote ‘fix later’ in the middle of a swordfight. She’d be dead three times over if this were a real fight.”

“Sí, sí,” Ines agreed, with growing impatience. “Because she knows if she stops to correct the fight choreography now, she’ll lose momentum, possibly even lose the emotional thread. She doesn’t want to dwell so much on the mechanics of the scene that she forgets why the fight matters in the first place. Every scene has to mean something.”

The attacker scrambled back. Enrique pursued, too fast for mortal eyes, and pinned his foe against the wall. “Who sent you?” His voice was cold, belying the rage burning in his chest.

“There,” Ines indicated, her voice tinged with a note of triumph. “That’s what matters. Not the exact choreography of the sidestep. The mystery in the question and the plot twist it reveals. That’s why you’re fighting in the first place, querido.”

“But it’s still wrong,” Enrique muttered.

Enrique slammed the attacker against the wall again, harder this time, his head hitting the cold stone. “Who. Sent. You.” Not a question anymore. A demand.

The man spat blood at him, and crimson stained the white wool just above the scarlet cross of Santiago on his surcoat. “You’re already dead, Vese. You just don’t know it yet.”

The sudden smell of copper and salt filled his nostrils, the blood awakening the caged beast that paced just beneath the surface of his being. Enrique’s vision went red with fury, and he felt his hand tighten on the man’s throat, as though it had a will of its own. One squeeze. That’s all it would take. The pulse at the trapped man’s throat sang in his ears, calling him to kill, drink, feed. So close. So effortless.

“Enrique, no.” Ines’ voice stopped him. In an instant she appeared silently behind him, and she placed a hand on his shoulder to calm him. “Don’t do this. Don’t forget who you are.”

“Oh,” Enrique straightened and breathed in quickly, his eyes wide. “It’s you. Why are you in my scene?” He leaned closer to the screen. “Ah, you’re the reason I hold back, not because I can’t kill him, but because you’re watching, you’re with me.”

Ines smiled at her companion, and placed a comforting hand over his. “Yes, querido, as I always am. That’s the purpose of the scene. Not the mechanics of the fight, but to highlight the choice you made.” She paused, her eyes growing gentle as she remembered their time together in Rioja. “How you found the strength once again to overcome the monster within you and cling to the humanity you’ve been struggling to preserve, even after all these centuries.”

Enrique squinted at the screen, taking in the words with its bracketed notes and yellow highlights…and that damnable imperfect choreography.

“It’s still wrong,” he mumbled.

“It’s still a draft,” Ines countered. “She’ll come back to it,” she assured him.

“How do you know?”

His companion paused and thought, looking with kindness at the writer before her, and reached out as if she could touch her. “Because she cares deeply about getting it right. Can’t you see that? She wants to get this scene right for you, but she also knows she can’t get it right in the first draft. That’s wisdom, not a failure.”

“You really believe that,” Enrique stated. “And you really do believe in her, don’t you?”

“Por supuesto, I do,” Ines answered. Then she turned her brilliant smile at him, her eyes crinkling with unspoken mischief. “And if you knew what was good for you, querido mio, you would believe in her too.”

Enrique saw the way Ines looked down at the writer, her face beatific with faith and patience. Through their centuries together, he had watched, time and again, as the elder vampire proved that she was never wrong in her observations of others, human or vampire.

“Fighting seems much easier than writing. You just do it,” he said begrudgingly. The ancient knight stood quiet for a long moment, his attention passing between Ines and the writer. “Vale, you win. I’ll be patient and trust her.”

“Good,” Ines said, her voice heavy with seven centuries of experience. “Because she’s trusting herself. And that’s the hardest part.”

Enrique laid his large, strong hand on the writer’s left shoulder, a quiet benediction and recognition of a fellow warrior, one who wielded words rather than swords, and murmured in his low rumbling voice, “Animate, amiga.”

Beside him, Ines laid her own slight hand on the writer’s right shoulder, and whispered to her, “Don’t give up, hija mia.”

The writer sighed and started again, the keys beneath her clicking as she built the scene word by word. The clacking continued, sometimes flowing, sometimes halting, but never failing. And the large orange cat yawned and stretched, and tried again to sleep peacefully on his cat tree.