#sicania

You see many people tend to think that Sicily began with only the Greeks and Romans, which just isn’t true. Before even the Phoenicians had established trade on the island, it’s natives had lived there -- the Sicani, Sicels, and Elymi. These three tribes were closely related in culture, though still separate. Little is recorded about them, which is perhaps why it’s common thought that the Greeks were the first people there.

These tribes were very likely Moorish, people that had come from North Africa to Iberia, and then later migrated to Sicily around 2000-1600 BCE. Again, little is recorded, so a lot of things are vague and vary.

But the biggest thing is that were Moorish; that means dark skin, dark curly hair, and dark eyes - which you can see up above, is presented very clearly. And well.. this is Marianna’s father. But that’s not the only reason she has dark features; you see, a majority of the Siclian population is ethnic. That’s why it’s common to see brown/tan skin tones, dark brown eyes, and dark curly hair among the Sicilian (and really, generally southern Italian) population. “Sicilian” is a mixed, diverse race, as Sicily was once considered the boiling pot of Europe, so it’d be unfair to give her light skin, hair, or eyes.

(Note: her mother is Ancient Greece, whom I also drew but posted to my Romano ask blog, since she’s his mother, too - but Sicania is not his father.)

I’ll be posting more here about her father once I can finish his full design.

But the woman that she finds collapsed on her shore during her rounds one day is Troy, could be nobody else.

Sicania approaches Troy cautiously and prods her with her spear, but she does not move.

“Finally faded, did you?” Sicania huffs. “Inconvenient, even in death.”

She eyes the deceased Nation warily as she skirts around her, but Troy stays still. Well, good, Sicania thinks. That’s one less person to try to colonize her shores and absorb her people into their own.

And then the baby starts crying.

The baby that she had not initially noticed.

‘By the gods, why?!’

She stalks back towards the baby, which she now realizes is nestled among the reeds by Troy’s head. It is a boy child, and Sicania hates boys, but she can’t just leave it now that she’s turned around and looked at it.

“Oh stop that,” she grumbles at the baby-creature as she picks it up. “I’ve got you. Be quiet.”

The thing eventually does stop crying, after she rocks it for a while and then just gives up on calming it and begins to walk. She’s going to leave it with humans, she decides. When she gets to Syracuse, probably. With any luck, Greece will find it and put it down.

She pauses in that train of thought and winces.

She’s always been harsh, as a matter of necessity. The world is harsh. Sicania has seen Nations destroy each other in their constant bids for realization, and has, in her own right, had to scratch and scrabble to maintain her own. In a world where tribes and empires determine the future, Sicania is determined to continue to exist at any cost.

But maybe…

She glances down at the baby and thinks that maybe “any cost” is going too far. She had no love for Troy, but she didn’t particularly hate the elder Nation, either, and this is, presumably, Troy’s son. Handing it over to Greece seems cruel, even for Sicania. Easier, yes, but cruel.

“Are you a punishment?” she asks the baby.

It…he, she must start making herself think of the baby as a person, just makes gurgling noises at her, which are not only unhelpful but also supremely unattractive. She already doesn’t like him.

But she doesn’t do the sensible thing and turn him over to humans when she reaches Syracuse. She should, and continually tells herself that she should, but she doesn’t. She finds herself, instead, settling down in the ridiculous house (practically a palace, to her eyes) that Greece had built for her.

“You’ll be comfortable here, Sicania,” Greece told her the day that it was finished, proudly showing the girl around.

“There will be slaves to run your errands and help with your house, and I will take care of you. Civilization knocks at your door,” she added. “And now you must answer.”

Sicania just sullenly peered into rooms and around corners. She didn’t trust Greece’s pretty words and expensive houses, and already missed her little flock of sheep. Greece was an Empire, though, and Empires dictated the way of the world, and Greece had dictated that Sicania would have a home in Syracuse.

“You will come to like this, I promise that you will. We will greet the coming era together, you and I.”

“Maybe,” Sicania allowed. “Who really knows?”

This didn’t seem to particularly please Greece; that dark look that Sicania had seen on Phoenicia and Egypt’s faces before came over her, but it passed quickly. Greece was a kinder Nation than most, in many ways.

Sicania couldn’t wait to see her fall.

She almost lashes out at the slaves when they ask her about the baby. She hasn’t thought a whole lot about what she’ll do with the baby when Greece inevitably comes knocking, and a paranoid little voice in the back of her mind insists that the slaves know this.

Then she tells that voice to be quiet; she knows what she’s doing. She always does.

The baby is settled in quickly, and Sicania finds herself in a position that she has never before been in: motherhood. Oh, Nations have children all the time; Greece alone has several. But Sicania, herself, is young, younger than even her tribes, the personification of an entire place rather than fragmentary parts of it.

“My, but you’re unusual,” a stranger had murmured the day that she found Sicania in the fields. “It usually takes longer for our sort to be born. Or were you created, little shepherdess? Born of the earth, like my kin and I?”

 At the time, the girl that would become Sicania hadn’t known that others like her and her brothers existed. She had just woken up not long before to a calm, golden face looming over her. The woman-Greece, she’d introduced herself as-hadn’t been perturbed when Sicania shot up and protested to her being so close to the sheep.

“You’ll startle them!” she had protested.

Greece just laughed and gestured to the sheep.

“Only you are startled. I was, too, the first time one of our kind visited me. Do you have a name, little one?”

She could only blink and shake her head; she understood the woman, but, for once, she had no words. Greece laughed and clasped an arm around the girl’s shoulders.

“How do you like Athanasia?”

She doesn’t like that name, actually, and only Greece has ever used it. She would prefer that nobody uses it, but Greece says that having human names helps them keep perspective, and remember that humans are more important than them.

Or some such nonsense.

Maybe she’ll understand it one day, but right now she has to deal with the irritating little boy-child, why won’t he sleep?!

She tries to not think too much about what she’s been reduced to as she awkwardly hands the child off to a hastily summoned nurse.

Sicania, one of Gaia’s own brood, adoptee of Greece, unlikely personification of an un-unified land, mother to the most dangerous child in the Mediterranean.

No, she decides resolutely. She is to be nobody’s mother. She will raise him as a sister, like her tribes raised her.