Spike, Dru and Samarkand!

October 16, 2026

Dear Juliet

Slow start today and I'm set to go out soon (helping the frail and elderly etc.) so, as you like history I'll just go off at a historical tangent and talk about casual research I did over the years for Spike & Dru : the Graveyard of Empires.

'Dirty old white and yellow Toyotas trundled past them as they searched out Mazār’s downtown bazaar. A huddle of market stalls hiding under grey canvas stretched between shops’ awnings by the Blue Mosque. Faded carpets jostled with potatoes and onions for sale or barter, and Spike and Dru both smelt the stink of hopelessness in the humans slouched around them. As bad in its way as London’s Great Stink of 1858. Quiet murders in the backstreets of a city once perceived as an oasis of peace. The killing of Pashtuns by Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazari. The Taliban enclaves waiting in the hills, intent on retaking the town they’d conquered in 1998 when the few remaining NATO and ISAF soldiers at Camps Marmal, Northern Lights and Nidaros shipped out.

Once the vampires would have revelled in the decay swirling around them, just as they had during the Boxer Rebellion. 1900. 2019. The fear tasted the same as it always had, but they themselves were all too different, and it choked them.

“You were right, you know,” Spike said quietly, all braggadocio gone, as they stood and surveyed the waste of human life before them. “They are a race to fear.”

“I never told you...”

“You’re not the only one who can read minds, love. We were together for 120 years, near enough. Even if we didn’t love so wisely without our souls, I knew your ev’ry move and blink. I still feel ev’ry syllable of what you think.”

He stopped, looking a bit surprised.

Dru felt the same. For a moment she even forgot the sights and scents of an awful world crowding in.

“You’re a better poet than I thought you were,” she whispered.

“And you’re a better woman than I ever knew.”

The surrounding world seemed to fall away.

“Spike...”

William the Bloody drew back, dropping his eyes from his lady and looking elsewhere.

A sudden memory of the slayer he’d killed in China. Sharp and clear as the thought of Dru’s hands on Buffy’s throat.

“What a bloody awful mess I made,” he muttered under his breath.

“Spike?”

Damn you, Dru, he thought to himself. You’re right. You’re always right. You think you’ve made your peace with it, but it’s always there. Nobody gets to go home.

But I’m damned if I’ll break either. Not yet.

“Over there,” he said, changing the subject desperately. “There’s a dress you’ll want over there.”

Her head snapped round, and with Drusilla’s dizziness of old her attention fixed on a scarlet Indian sari hung like a dazzling diadem in the centre of a tatty merchant’s stall.

Silk rose-red as Petra, Spike found himself thinking, half as old as time. He’d been a bit of a dunce during his Oxford days, but he remembered John Burgon’s poem well enough.

Dru exchanged gold coins from her belt with the aged merchant, talked with him a little, then smiled at Spike and signalled him to follow.

She had rented the old man’s shabby room for a few short hours. It was a sad single studio in a chill concrete apartment block. No more than a squared circle of lace curtains, floor cushions and faded wall carpets all centred on a Qur’an. But the old man owned an even older Singer sewing machine, and with the Singer came a sewing kit.

They trooped upstairs in silence, and Spike stood by the window while Dru calmly stitched and hemmed until the sari fitted like a sensual glove.

She glanced at him now and then, but he seemed to have withdrawn so far into himself even she could not see his thoughts.

But she was glad he was there.

Soon she stood before him, and the sari recalled the silk she’d worn in Sunnydale the night they’d raised the Judge.

His dear old Dru, there before him once more.'

(Graveyard)

Mazār-e Sharīf is just near the border with Uzbekistan, and years ago I came across actual colour photos of Uzbeks in Samarkand in 1910. Real snapshots of history, and here they are: