Father Christmas' Dagger - for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
anachronisma
Aug. 20th, 2011 06:03 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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narniaexchangeTitle:Father Christmas’ Dagger
Author:linneasr
Recipient:anachronisma
Rating: PG
Possible Spoilers/Warnings:early Golden Age; one act of studied violence; set in rth_stewart’s Not-My-Children’s-Narnia-verse; somewhat dark and grim
Summary: Father Christmas gave Lucy a dagger, too. This is the first time the purpose for which it was given is called upon, and while battles are still ugly affairs, sometimes they have an unfolding beauty as well.
AN: Many thanks tolady_songsmithfor her keen-eyed last-minute beta work, while the clock ticked towards midnight on July 30!
******
Year 4, Golden Age
Lucy stands on a grassy rise, looking over the plain before her. It is empty now, here in the moonlight; behind her, the horse stamps. She can hear Bryony’s breath, but the Guard stays near the horse, as the Queen requests. The Wolf and the horse stand ready behind her back, ready to turn around and go home. From farther away, much farther away, the Eastern Seas mark their ceaseless rhythm against the shore. The repetitive noise frames the picture and does not intrude upon its composition.
Lucy has only been here once before, on a hot, sunny, dirty afternoon full of violence and blood. Moonlight casts a different light. Suddenly, she cannot recall the sounds of the wounded as she walked across the field and she bites her lip in dismay. She is suddenly afraid that she will lose the wisdom she gained if she cannot remember the circumstances from which it came.
“Your Majesty?” The Wolf notices every change, even the interior ones to which lesser nostrils are oblivious.
“Briony. Do you remember Gern?” The Queen murmurs without turning, knowing her Guard will pick up the words. The silence stretches long and far, enough so that the memory has time to fit into the space between them.
“Yes.” The susurration of sand tells Lucy that her Guard sits down, perhaps under the weight of that memory or perhaps in understanding of the reason for their presence, which is more insight than her mistress has. Freed from the demands of speech, the inner landscape again gains the Queen’s attention; its topography, sculpted with four years as the Valiant, is not yet sure where to place Gern.
She remembers every moment of their acquaintance: her first view of him lying on the ground, relatively composed but for the dark welling of blood from the thrust of some blade through his ribs. She had been following in the wake of her fighting brothers, close enough to be in time but far enough away not to be engaged in the battle itself. Her cordial had been in her hand and at the ready; she had used it more than once as the sun fell from its noontime height. The Satyr had watched her approach; she remembers seeing the instant he had noticed her, and that she had had a momentary expectation of his wiping away the blood and standing to bow in greeting. The smile she had awarded him was filled with approval, but his eyes had shifted away, a great preoccupation claiming them. He did not return her smile.
She remembers the thump of her knees on the ground, as she prepared to bring the cordial to his lips, and the way her breath caught in shock, when he grabbed her wrist to prevent its red drop from spilling, is vivid in her body. It feels like she has not taken a deep breath since that moment. The Wolf Guard had arrived, snarling and ready to defend her Queen, while the Queen in question was mentally catching up with being seized and prevented from administering her cordial. The Satyr’s wound made him unlikely to rise up in attack, though, and the Valiant’s free hand told the Guard to wait. Lucy learned later from Briony that the Satyr’s offside hand, the one she couldn’t see, was missing, and that the stump rested in a congealing pool of blood.
They stayed in that dancer’s pose, Lucy unwilling to wrench her wrist away and he unable to initiate another movement.
“What’s your name?” asked the Queen.
“Gern,” came the response. It might have been a breath, but for the word.
“Don’t you want to get better? That is what the cordial is for, especially for wounds like these,” she had said. She put a little pressure into his grasp, signalling him to free her wrist. He did not. She could have broken his grip, but she, also, did not. Sometimes people were confused, when they were severely wounded, and in those cases, it was often easier to flow with their wandering thoughts than to fight for the healing. And the strength of adult male Satyrs, even when wounded, is greater than that of thirteen-year-old Human girls.
“No,” he said. It had been so quiet between them that she had seen the word on his lips more than she had heard it. He had looked away, again, and downwards, and she saw him see something else. She glanced down to the ground between his body and her knees, finding only dirt and a few tufts of bloody grass.
“What is it?” The question was both for what he had found during his glance and for his refusal of the cordial’s healing powers. Unexpectedly, however, it seemed that she had become the source of his answers, for his eyes now searched her face. A Queen becomes accustomed to being viewed by strangers, but Gern’s search was neither admiring nor respectful, nor made in any manner Lucy had experienced before. It was greedy, shocking, almost violent in its intensity. As his eyes moved across hers, Lucy had come to understand he was demanding something from her, wanted it desperately. She tried again to extract her wrist from his hand.
“No!” he whispered again, more fiercely.
“If you do not want the cordial’s gift, what is it?” Lucy had found herself whispering back, almost hissing at him and bending into his face, caught in that moment and unable to overcome his intensity with her own personality. It had not been fear that she was feeling, not quite, for the Satyr was unable to physically impose upon her; it was the Wolf’s growl beside her ear, though, that had given her the means to look away from Gern. Briony was snarling again, standing in blood. Gern’s blood. Lucy steeled herself and looked back at him. Aslan, help me here.
“What is it that you desire from me?” The Valiant Queen’s question had commanded without harshness, but in full expectation of an answer. A Queen of four years had learned how to command, even a young Queen, and Gern’s own strength was fading. His eyes fell away again. To her hip.
“The dagger,” he had murmured. When his eyes lifted to hers again, it was less of a demand that she saw within them and more of a plea.
“The dagger?” She had glanced at Briony, whose look had seared across hers in a moment of molten non-comprehension before glaring again at the Satyr on the ground before them. Her other hand had reached for and found Father Christmas’ dagger, riding at her hip since the happy moment of its gifting. There was ample cutlery at Cair Paravel and, while she had trained in its defensive uses, the Valiant Queen had only used it once, back in the early days of their monarchy. “The dagger?” she said again, but this time shaping it into a Queen’s question once more.
“I want,” Gern had had to take a shallow breath after two words, Lucy remembers, “Aslan’s country.” Another breath. “From you.”
The realization of what he wanted from her had come as incrementally as the dawn. But with the light of understanding had come denial, fear and anger.
“No!” Her moment of passion was sharp, not shouted, any more than Gern’s had been. “No, I will not. Father Christmas intended for me to heal people, and you are a soldier of Narnia.”
“Y’r Majesty.” Gern mouthed the words, the sound nothing more than a catch of consonantal air. “You. Not them.” His eyes had flicked up and over his head, in the direction that the battle had passed, and then found hers again. “M’ready.”
“Gern,” she said, “you can be made well, fully recovered. Aslan will still be waiting for you at the end of a long life, and Narnia needs you.” She had held his gaze, commanding his attention, willing him to accept the promise of life. They could have been mistaken for long-time intimates, murmuring with each other, but for the blood. His eyes, though, had closed against her words. When they opened again, she had needed to brace herself against the naked pain they carried.
“I don’t want,” he breathed, “to die again.” He licked dry lips. “I want to go on.” Another breath. “Now.”
The word hung in the air, an urgent red plea. Lucy had bared her teeth against it, afraid of what it asked of her.
“My Queen,” the low, rasping voice of the Wolf Guard had spoken, “the Satyr asks for field mercy.”
“Briony!” The young Queen had been sharp in her distress, “Do you understand what he wants me to do?”
“Yes. He asks for you to end his suffering, Queen Lucy, and until the gift of your cordial, such requests were not unknown among us.” The Wolf had not been fierce or fiery anymore; she had sounded stern, almost remote. As though she had not wanted to influence Lucy’s decision.
Lucy had heard the sound of her own breath whistling through her nostrils as she had stared at the Satyr on the ground and thought about the nature of compassion. His grasp on her wrist had grown weak; he was frowning, she had noticed, and watching her. He had not tried to speak again. She had swallowed, and had felt the sticky dust of the afternoon in her throat.
“Gern.” She had spoken his name as she turned her arm in his grasp, grabbing his hand as it slid away. She had placed it carefully on his breast and had given it a little pat before continuing on to the sheath at her side. He had squinted at her, and had followed her gaze with his own down to the dagger pointed at his heart. When their eyes had met again, the relief in his had given her enough courage to say “Give Aslan my love,” and lean onto the pommel.
The brute force needed to pierce his ribcage all the way to the heart had shocked the Queen, and once she was sure he was dead, she had crawled away from the body and vomited. The Wolf had been beside her, she remembers, leaning into her and supporting her as she staggered from the killing field. Lucy looks down at the same field in moonlight and cannot find the place where Gern had lain. His corpse had been burned with the other dead.
She shivers, standing there in the night breeze, and feels the moment of cool perception come to her again: give him what he asks, extending his life is no kindness to him. She is young, and Father Christmas’ gift of the healing cordial allows her to avoid a deep consideration of the relationship between life and death. She knows, though, as she turns to the horse and her Guard, that in requesting her to use Father Christmas’ dagger, Gern has given her something else that is valuable. A treasure that is found in a still and quiet place on the map of her self.
Original Prompt:
What I want: Lucy during the wars of the Golden Age. I love proactive military Lucy -- the more "knightly" she is, the more awesome.
Or: The Pevensies dream of Narnia and it's as if they return there while asleep. Waking/sleeping, reality/unreality.
Or: The stories Narnians tell their children.
Prompt words/objects/quotes/whatever: Knight. Golden. War. Family. Courage. Adult. Woman King. Dreams. Fairy tales. Reality. Memory. Forgetting. Home.
What I definitely don't want in my fic: Pevencest, romance, sex, graphic violence.
Author:
linneasrRecipient:
anachronismaRating: PG
Possible Spoilers/Warnings:early Golden Age; one act of studied violence; set in rth_stewart’s Not-My-Children’s-Narnia-verse; somewhat dark and grim
Summary: Father Christmas gave Lucy a dagger, too. This is the first time the purpose for which it was given is called upon, and while battles are still ugly affairs, sometimes they have an unfolding beauty as well.
AN: Many thanks to
lady_songsmithfor her keen-eyed last-minute beta work, while the clock ticked towards midnight on July 30!******
Year 4, Golden Age
Lucy stands on a grassy rise, looking over the plain before her. It is empty now, here in the moonlight; behind her, the horse stamps. She can hear Bryony’s breath, but the Guard stays near the horse, as the Queen requests. The Wolf and the horse stand ready behind her back, ready to turn around and go home. From farther away, much farther away, the Eastern Seas mark their ceaseless rhythm against the shore. The repetitive noise frames the picture and does not intrude upon its composition.
Lucy has only been here once before, on a hot, sunny, dirty afternoon full of violence and blood. Moonlight casts a different light. Suddenly, she cannot recall the sounds of the wounded as she walked across the field and she bites her lip in dismay. She is suddenly afraid that she will lose the wisdom she gained if she cannot remember the circumstances from which it came.
“Your Majesty?” The Wolf notices every change, even the interior ones to which lesser nostrils are oblivious.
“Briony. Do you remember Gern?” The Queen murmurs without turning, knowing her Guard will pick up the words. The silence stretches long and far, enough so that the memory has time to fit into the space between them.
“Yes.” The susurration of sand tells Lucy that her Guard sits down, perhaps under the weight of that memory or perhaps in understanding of the reason for their presence, which is more insight than her mistress has. Freed from the demands of speech, the inner landscape again gains the Queen’s attention; its topography, sculpted with four years as the Valiant, is not yet sure where to place Gern.
She remembers every moment of their acquaintance: her first view of him lying on the ground, relatively composed but for the dark welling of blood from the thrust of some blade through his ribs. She had been following in the wake of her fighting brothers, close enough to be in time but far enough away not to be engaged in the battle itself. Her cordial had been in her hand and at the ready; she had used it more than once as the sun fell from its noontime height. The Satyr had watched her approach; she remembers seeing the instant he had noticed her, and that she had had a momentary expectation of his wiping away the blood and standing to bow in greeting. The smile she had awarded him was filled with approval, but his eyes had shifted away, a great preoccupation claiming them. He did not return her smile.
She remembers the thump of her knees on the ground, as she prepared to bring the cordial to his lips, and the way her breath caught in shock, when he grabbed her wrist to prevent its red drop from spilling, is vivid in her body. It feels like she has not taken a deep breath since that moment. The Wolf Guard had arrived, snarling and ready to defend her Queen, while the Queen in question was mentally catching up with being seized and prevented from administering her cordial. The Satyr’s wound made him unlikely to rise up in attack, though, and the Valiant’s free hand told the Guard to wait. Lucy learned later from Briony that the Satyr’s offside hand, the one she couldn’t see, was missing, and that the stump rested in a congealing pool of blood.
They stayed in that dancer’s pose, Lucy unwilling to wrench her wrist away and he unable to initiate another movement.
“What’s your name?” asked the Queen.
“Gern,” came the response. It might have been a breath, but for the word.
“Don’t you want to get better? That is what the cordial is for, especially for wounds like these,” she had said. She put a little pressure into his grasp, signalling him to free her wrist. He did not. She could have broken his grip, but she, also, did not. Sometimes people were confused, when they were severely wounded, and in those cases, it was often easier to flow with their wandering thoughts than to fight for the healing. And the strength of adult male Satyrs, even when wounded, is greater than that of thirteen-year-old Human girls.
“No,” he said. It had been so quiet between them that she had seen the word on his lips more than she had heard it. He had looked away, again, and downwards, and she saw him see something else. She glanced down to the ground between his body and her knees, finding only dirt and a few tufts of bloody grass.
“What is it?” The question was both for what he had found during his glance and for his refusal of the cordial’s healing powers. Unexpectedly, however, it seemed that she had become the source of his answers, for his eyes now searched her face. A Queen becomes accustomed to being viewed by strangers, but Gern’s search was neither admiring nor respectful, nor made in any manner Lucy had experienced before. It was greedy, shocking, almost violent in its intensity. As his eyes moved across hers, Lucy had come to understand he was demanding something from her, wanted it desperately. She tried again to extract her wrist from his hand.
“No!” he whispered again, more fiercely.
“If you do not want the cordial’s gift, what is it?” Lucy had found herself whispering back, almost hissing at him and bending into his face, caught in that moment and unable to overcome his intensity with her own personality. It had not been fear that she was feeling, not quite, for the Satyr was unable to physically impose upon her; it was the Wolf’s growl beside her ear, though, that had given her the means to look away from Gern. Briony was snarling again, standing in blood. Gern’s blood. Lucy steeled herself and looked back at him. Aslan, help me here.
“What is it that you desire from me?” The Valiant Queen’s question had commanded without harshness, but in full expectation of an answer. A Queen of four years had learned how to command, even a young Queen, and Gern’s own strength was fading. His eyes fell away again. To her hip.
“The dagger,” he had murmured. When his eyes lifted to hers again, it was less of a demand that she saw within them and more of a plea.
“The dagger?” She had glanced at Briony, whose look had seared across hers in a moment of molten non-comprehension before glaring again at the Satyr on the ground before them. Her other hand had reached for and found Father Christmas’ dagger, riding at her hip since the happy moment of its gifting. There was ample cutlery at Cair Paravel and, while she had trained in its defensive uses, the Valiant Queen had only used it once, back in the early days of their monarchy. “The dagger?” she said again, but this time shaping it into a Queen’s question once more.
“I want,” Gern had had to take a shallow breath after two words, Lucy remembers, “Aslan’s country.” Another breath. “From you.”
The realization of what he wanted from her had come as incrementally as the dawn. But with the light of understanding had come denial, fear and anger.
“No!” Her moment of passion was sharp, not shouted, any more than Gern’s had been. “No, I will not. Father Christmas intended for me to heal people, and you are a soldier of Narnia.”
“Y’r Majesty.” Gern mouthed the words, the sound nothing more than a catch of consonantal air. “You. Not them.” His eyes had flicked up and over his head, in the direction that the battle had passed, and then found hers again. “M’ready.”
“Gern,” she said, “you can be made well, fully recovered. Aslan will still be waiting for you at the end of a long life, and Narnia needs you.” She had held his gaze, commanding his attention, willing him to accept the promise of life. They could have been mistaken for long-time intimates, murmuring with each other, but for the blood. His eyes, though, had closed against her words. When they opened again, she had needed to brace herself against the naked pain they carried.
“I don’t want,” he breathed, “to die again.” He licked dry lips. “I want to go on.” Another breath. “Now.”
The word hung in the air, an urgent red plea. Lucy had bared her teeth against it, afraid of what it asked of her.
“My Queen,” the low, rasping voice of the Wolf Guard had spoken, “the Satyr asks for field mercy.”
“Briony!” The young Queen had been sharp in her distress, “Do you understand what he wants me to do?”
“Yes. He asks for you to end his suffering, Queen Lucy, and until the gift of your cordial, such requests were not unknown among us.” The Wolf had not been fierce or fiery anymore; she had sounded stern, almost remote. As though she had not wanted to influence Lucy’s decision.
Lucy had heard the sound of her own breath whistling through her nostrils as she had stared at the Satyr on the ground and thought about the nature of compassion. His grasp on her wrist had grown weak; he was frowning, she had noticed, and watching her. He had not tried to speak again. She had swallowed, and had felt the sticky dust of the afternoon in her throat.
“Gern.” She had spoken his name as she turned her arm in his grasp, grabbing his hand as it slid away. She had placed it carefully on his breast and had given it a little pat before continuing on to the sheath at her side. He had squinted at her, and had followed her gaze with his own down to the dagger pointed at his heart. When their eyes had met again, the relief in his had given her enough courage to say “Give Aslan my love,” and lean onto the pommel.
The brute force needed to pierce his ribcage all the way to the heart had shocked the Queen, and once she was sure he was dead, she had crawled away from the body and vomited. The Wolf had been beside her, she remembers, leaning into her and supporting her as she staggered from the killing field. Lucy looks down at the same field in moonlight and cannot find the place where Gern had lain. His corpse had been burned with the other dead.
She shivers, standing there in the night breeze, and feels the moment of cool perception come to her again: give him what he asks, extending his life is no kindness to him. She is young, and Father Christmas’ gift of the healing cordial allows her to avoid a deep consideration of the relationship between life and death. She knows, though, as she turns to the horse and her Guard, that in requesting her to use Father Christmas’ dagger, Gern has given her something else that is valuable. A treasure that is found in a still and quiet place on the map of her self.
Original Prompt:
What I want: Lucy during the wars of the Golden Age. I love proactive military Lucy -- the more "knightly" she is, the more awesome.
Or: The Pevensies dream of Narnia and it's as if they return there while asleep. Waking/sleeping, reality/unreality.
Or: The stories Narnians tell their children.
Prompt words/objects/quotes/whatever: Knight. Golden. War. Family. Courage. Adult. Woman King. Dreams. Fairy tales. Reality. Memory. Forgetting. Home.
What I definitely don't want in my fic: Pevencest, romance, sex, graphic violence.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-20 10:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-08 09:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-21 02:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-08 09:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-21 04:24 am (UTC)You are absolutely right that Lucy's cordial lets her evade a lot of questions about the nature and inevitability of death, and yet, not everybody wants to be healed. It's even more interesting in a world where they know that death means going to Aslan's country; that complicates the ethics of the situation. I think it is selfish and cruel of Gern to ask Lucy to finish him, but I can see why he did -- simply waiting until his existing wounds killed him would be hideous, battlefield mercy is far from an unknown concept, and as his queen, it is her duty to care for him. (Additionally, perhaps Aslan considers suicide a sin?) Interesting that Lucy is able to see this act as sending him on instead of murder -- she can say, "Give Aslan my love" -- but she still vomits and needs to be helped away.
I like the way Lucy wavers between a shocked girl and a young queen, and how she struggles to fit that incident into her understanding of herself and her world.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-08 09:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-21 11:45 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-08 09:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-22 12:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-08 09:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-22 12:43 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-08 09:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-23 12:09 pm (UTC)This was not what I expected out of my request, but it was an interesting and challenging response. A wonderful consideration of the complexities of Narnian theology, which I hadn't anticipated, but love! I love it when something "simple" about Narnia is taken and made more complex -- and especially when it's a thoughtful challenge about the way the readers themselves see the world. You've done something really interesting here, and I'll be mulling over it for a while.
Thank you so much, anon, for this thoughtful and startling fic. <3
(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-08 09:27 am (UTC)Thank you.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-24 11:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-08 09:30 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-26 01:02 am (UTC)Good job! Thanks for sharing this!
(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-08 09:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-27 10:57 pm (UTC)