Narnia fic: "Dust in the Air" (8)
Dec. 24th, 2008 02:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardTitle: Dust in the Air 8
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bedlamsbard
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia movieverse/bookverse
Rating: PG-13
Summary: And the end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we started. An AU of The Last Battle, some five years after that book begins.
Disclaimer: The Chronicles of Narnia and its characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to C.S. Lewis. Certain characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to Walden Media. Title and quote from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets: Little Gidding.
Author's Notes: This is part eight, obviously, and this is also the first WIP I've posted since 2006. (And that WIP was abandoned, so one can see I'm understandably nervous about posting another one.) The structure of this lends it to being posted in sections, though, so that's how it's going up. Because of this, however, it's not getting posted to any comms until the whole thing is done.
There’s a flicker of brown among the new greenery of the spring foliage and Jill moves forward carefully, stepping deliberately to avoid alerting her prey. It’s not easy to move quietly in snow, but it’s not impossible either. Moving silently is something else entirely and has less to do with not making noise and more to do with making the sort of noise that’s expected in a forest. Forests are noisy places; it’s the unexpected that will snag an animal’s attention.
Carefully, she raises her bow, drawing the arrow back to her ear. Up ahead, the deer stops to nibble at some of the new growth on a young homewood tree, too small to yet support a home beneath its roots or in its branches. Jill looks down the shaft of the arrow, fixing her aim, and looses.
There’s a roar as a snow leopard leaps out of the undergrowth and the deer springs away, only managing a few feet before a satyr steps out from behind the tree in front of it with a club in his hand. Jill’s arrow is buried in the meaty part of the deer’s shoulder – painful, but no real damage, not the kill shot she wanted. And who the hell are these people?
The snow leopard roars again and the deer shies back, dancing sideways in the snow. Jill nocks another arrow and steps out from behind the tree she’s been using for cover.
“That’s my kill,” she declares.
When the deer tries to flee, the snow leopard dashes to head it off, teeth bared in a savage mockery of a smile. The satyr steps forward with his club in his hand. “Oh, girlie, I don’t think so,” he says. “You’d have to kill it first, and even so, I don’t think you’d be able to take it back to your family.”
“We need this deer!” Jill says. “And you’re scaring it; that’s cruel. Let it die in peace.”
She doesn’t recognize them; there are well over a thousand people at Arn Abedin now, the majority of them strangers. The remainder of the Haven camp had arrived two days ago, most of them disappointed to find that Tirian and Eustace had already left with Peter Pevensie for Cair Paravel, and there are three more new camps here. They’d already burst the bounds of the old Arn Abedin walls, or so Lucy had said. It’s just too many people to keep track of; not at all like Haven, where she’d known everybody’s name and hometown.
“Oh, it will die,” the satyr says, eyeing the deer hungrily. After a moment he transfers his attention to her. “Look at you, all nice and plump. I’m sure you don’t need the food near as much as any of us.”
“I sincerely doubt it,” a woman’s calm voice says from behind Jill. She looks around to see Susan Pevensie step out practically from thin air, her bow in one hand and an arrow held carefully in place by the press of two fingers on the bowstring. “We all need to eat.”
“We’ve been walking for days,” the leopard whines. “All we want is the food; we’re owed that, at least. The High King called and we’re answering, but we’ve got to eat. We’ve got to find this place he’s at, wherever it is.”
“You’ve arrived,” Susan says. “Although my brother’s not actually at Arn Abedin right now.”
The snow leopard blinks, looking startled, then bares its teeth at the deer as the poor terrified creature makes to flee. It freezes, the whites showing all around its eyes in terror.
Susan’s lips thin in displeasure, but she doesn’t comment on that. “Keep going southwest for another three miles,” she says, “and you’ll arrive at the ruins of the castle of Arn Abedin. My brother Edmund and my sister Lucy are there, and they’ll see that you’re taken care of.”
“Queen Susan,” the snow leopard murmurs to itself, its big golden eyes flicking from the red-fletched arrow on her bowstring to the carved ivory horn on her hip.
“Anyone can name themselves,” the satyr says. “Maybe you’re lying. Maybe you just want this deer for yourself!”
“I am not,” Susan says, “lying. Really, it’s far more trouble than it’s worth, especially since the question of my and my siblings’ truthfulness seems to come up fairly often. Given that all of you have dragged yourselves away from your much-needed sanctuaries to trek several leagues after the call of a horn, you’d really think that you’d be less skeptical that we are really who we say we are. It would seem to make more sense to ascertain that before you leave home.”
“It’s not home,” the snow leopard spits. “Our homes are gone, long gone, thanks to the Calormenes.” He pauses. “But we’re still taking the deer.”
“No, you’re not,” Jill insists. “You aren’t the only people at Arn Abedin, you know; there’s not enough food to go around and we need –”
“It’s her shoot,” Susan interrupts, a steely tone in her voice that says discussion over.
The satyr thumps his club into his palm. “Not enough food, you say? Then we’re definitely taking the deer.”
“No, you’re not, you little thieves –”
“There! Narnians!”
Jill spins on her heel, her bow coming up. A pair of Calormene riders regard them grimly through the trees, then turn their horses around and spur them on.
“Don’t let them get away!” Susan shouts. A moment later, a red-feathered arrow sprouts in the back of one of the riders, and he sways in the saddle but doesn’t fall. She dashes forward, fleet as a deer, as a unicorn, and Jill follows.
Susan shoots as she runs, and the only thing Jill can do is marvel at that, because she couldn’t do that, not in a hundred years. The kind of skill that takes – how in the name of Aslan can anyone be that good? Especially Susan Pevensie, who Jill has always assumed thinks of nothing more than boys and her hair and what color lipstick best matches her dresses. Edmund and Lucy had said as much back in England, but she’d thought they were just playing with her, that they weren’t serious, because it’s Susan Pevensie, painstakingly English and very, very much a – well, very much a girl. And English girls don’t really do this sort of thing.
Jill can’t shoot and run at the same time, but she’s just as fast as Susan, and dashes forward past the older girl to grab the horses’ reins as their riders fall. She shies back as one of them starts to rear, striking out at her with its front hooves, and drops her bow to get both hands on the reins. “Come on!” she says. “It’s all right, it’s all right, come on –”
The horses calm after a minute, breathing hard and prancing in place, restless. Jill keeps making soothing noises and petting their noses when she’s reasonably certain they won’t bite her. Behind her, she’s vaguely aware of Susan going through the pockets of the men she’s killed.
“We’re only a few miles from Arn Abedin,” she says, straightening with their swords bundled beneath her arm and their purses in her hand. She crosses to Jill and takes the reins of the leftmost horse from her, murmuring something to it in an unfamiliar language before she tucks her prizes into one saddlebag and pulls herself into the saddle. “They don’t usually come this far west, do they?”
“They haven’t,” Jill agrees, retrieving her bow and mounting the other horse. “And not alone, I don’t think I’ve seen only two Calormenes in...not for years, I think. They tend to meet rather unfortunate deaths if they travel alone.”
Susan smiles a little wryly. “Which means there are probably more around somewhere. Well, let’s go find them.” She looks around. “I don’t suppose that leopard came with us.”
“Oh, no,” Jill exclaims, distraught as she follows Susan’s gaze. They’re all alone in the woods, and they’ve chased the horses at least half a mile from her hunting grounds. She’s a little more interested in food than she is in Calormenes, at least at the moment. “They’ve probably taken the damned deer, and that was the first I’ve seen since we got here. I really wanted fresh meat.”
Susan arches her eyebrows a little, her smile soft with bemusement and something else, and leans down over her horse’s neck. “Where are your herdmates, my friend?” she murmurs in its ear. “So far from your herd, and nearly alone. You must be lonely, and eager to return to your friends and family.”
The horse fidgets a little, hooves stomping against the mushy, dirty snow, and shakes its head, tack jingling faintly.
“You are aware that’s not actually a talking horse, aren’t you?” Jill asks, warily. The horse is one of the small, fleet Calormene ones; talking horses are different, bigger and longer of leg, their tails and manes loose and not close-clipped or bound-up, as the Calormene ones are.
Susan glances over at her. “Just because something can’t talk doesn’t mean it can’t listen,” she says, and pats the horse’s neck again. “Take us to your herd, my friend.”
With a snort, the horse shakes its head, and then it starts walking, veering north and east, towards the roseroad. Jill’s horse follows eagerly.
“Shouldn’t we go back to Arn Abedin for help?” she protests. “The Calormenes never travel in groups of less than nine, and there’s only two of us. Shouldn’t we –”
“Two’s enough,” Susan says calmly. “Shh. They won’t be expecting Narnians. Or women. And we wouldn’t want to tip them off early and spoil the plan.”
“Plan?” Jill protests faintly, because as far as she’s seen, the Pevensies don’t do plans; they just hare off wildly at their slightest whims. It’s hardly what she expected from the legendary kings and queens of summer that the Narnians tend to go on about. She’d known them back in England, of course – Lucy and Edmund best, Peter and Susan rather less well. Edmund had been prone to going off on tangents about back in their day this, Lucy answering him with back in their day that, and Peter had just smirked when he’d been there at all. She doesn’t particularly like Peter; he’d made her nervous for a long time before she’d seen him in Narnia, and now there’s something worse about it, about him. Like he’s not exactly friendly, to her or to anyone, and there’s a hint of barely controlled violence about him – had been long before, but now it simmers closer to the surface, and she’s seen people like that in Narnia: the killers, the madmen, the ones who get themselves killed or captured by the Calormenes because they’re too rash, too bloodthirsty, too hell-bent on vengeance. She’s learned that that gets people killed fast.
As for Susan, well – the others hadn’t talked about her very much. Peter had been more prone to than Edmund or Lucy, but even that hadn’t been much, especially since he seldom actually seemed to notice that she or Eustace had been there; most of what he said had been directed towards his siblings. Jill would have been hurt if she hadn’t been so relieved. By the time Eustace had taken her to meet his family, there had already been a falling out between Susan and the others. She remembers that Peter had just returned from his tour of duty in Burma during the War and been reassigned to England; Edmund and Lucy had both been bitingly angry about something related to Susan. They’d seldom spoken of her except in passing, and that hastily muffled, forgettable and easily forgotten. All Jill has to go on in regards to Susan are the scraps of Narnian legend about the Queen of Spring and the afterthoughts Peter and Edmund had tossed out during their few meetings.
Still, she’s seen enough of Susan these past few days – more than a week now – to be wary of her. The woman’s the best archer she’s ever seen, and Jill’s been in Narnia for five years now; she knows a lot of good archers. There’s also something of that same unnerving air to her that her sibling share: measured, calm, tightly controlled – leashed, maybe, is a better word, although it’s her own hand that holds the leash and no one else’s. She scares hell out of Jill – they all scare hell out of Jill, to be perfectly honest.
It’s a good enough reason as any to follow her on this madman’s mission.
The horses are moving at a fairly good clip, snow melting into dirty yellow-green grass beneath their hooves as the trees grow scarcer and scarcer around them, and Jill fingers her bow, trying not to look around too much. She doesn’t like being out of the western woods after so long. The Calormenes aren’t scared of the woods, precisely – the trees seldom rise against them anymore, because that vengeance ends in renewed logging or worse, fire – but the western woods are the last stronghold of free Narnians in Narnia, and the Calormenes face certain death at the hands of the roving bands of Narnians should they go too far west. Jill has been here for five years; she’s used to the woods. They’re safe. Oh, they’re not really safe – Calormene patrols, unhappy Narnians, bandits, monsters – but they’re far safer than the rest of Narnia, at least for her, and for Eustace and Tirian.
Briefly, she wonders where they are, if they’ve arrived at Cair Paravel yet and if they’re safe. If Peter knows what he’s doing. Don’t you dare get them hurt, she’d wanted to say to him, but she hadn’t. Maybe Lucy or Edmund had said as much, but – somehow she doubts it. Do they even see them as people? Or are they just pieces on a chessboard, like some of the Narnians say? Move them around, make sacrifices for the betterment of Narnia –
Not Eustace. Not Tirian. Surely not.
“Pole,” Susan says softly, leaning over to catch the reins of Jill’s horse and bring the gelding to a halt.
Jill looks around at her. Carefully, Susan tilts her head forward and Jill sees one of the wide empty camping spots just off the roseroad ahead of them. It’s filled with Calormene soldiers, at least three dozen of them. Maybe more. A full troop at the very least.
Susan regards them thoughtfully for a moment in silence, while Jill holds her tongue and tries not to breathe, the fear seizing hard in her throat. Not again, not again – she won’t be taken by the Calormenes again. After a moment, Susan nods and nudges her horse around and they retreat back into the woods, until they’re out of sight of the Calormenes. And if they can’t see the Calormenes, then chances are fairly good that the Calormenes can’t see them, either.
“God help us,” Jill whispers as soon as they’re clear, hearing the anxiety warring with panic in her voice. “We can’t fight that many. We’ve got to go back for help –”
“No, we don’t,” Susan says, absurdly calm. “At least, we’re not going to immediately. I want to know why they’re here first. The roseroad joins up with the stoneroad into Archenland a league or so to the south; maybe they just want to cross the border, or follow the roseroad into the Western Waste, Old Telmar, and from there into Shoushan.”
Jill forces the panic down with some effort. “How likely is that?”
Susan gives her a faint edge of a smile. “Not very, I’m afraid. Still, we have to find out; by the time we get back here with troops they could have moved on and we’d have no idea where they’d gone. Better to find out now and quickly than be left wondering.”
“Are you just going to walk in there and ask?” Jill demands, a little more sharply than she means. She doesn’t like Calormenes, and she doesn’t like being this close to them without a fairly large number of people she trusts at her back. Although that hadn’t gone particularly well the last time, to be fair. At least Susan is probably fairly unlikely to hand her over to the Calormenes and go off whistling.
This time Susan really does smile, not just hint at it. “As amusing as that would be, no. We just need to lure one or two of them out, and here’s how we’re going to do it.”
Jill listens with no little dismay. “But –” she begins at one point, and Susan shushes her absently and continues explaining.
When she finishes, looking at Jill expectantly, Jill says the only thing she can think of. “Are you out of your mind?”
Susan laughs a little, softly. “That depends on which of my siblings you talk to,” is all she says before she turns her horse away.
This is suicide, Jill thinks frantically, wanting to do nothing more than turn the horse around and leave, ride back to Arn Abedin and let Ourente and Jewel know about the Calormene troop here – too many people for just a patrol, this is an advance party before the rest of the army follows – but she doesn’t dare leave Susan alone here.
Jill isn’t a strategist. She’s learned a little about strategy over the years, but not really all that much or of the type to be much help in a situation like this, or any situation outside of either straight-out bashing or the hit and run type. Susan - Susan obviously knows strategy. Suicidal strategy, which is one of the least reassuring things that Jill has thought of since the last time they were in Narnia, and there have been a lot of things that could take that particular position.
But at least Susan doesn’t talk to her like she’s an idiot; her instructions are clear and sensible, aside from the suicidal aspect. Jill understands what she’s being asked - no, ordered - to do. Susan gives orders in a way that Tirian has never been able to do, and as much as Jill loves the man - and she does, in a hundred inexplicable ways - he’s not a leader, not the way all four of the Pevensies are. She hates to admit it, but it’s easy to see why people follow them and not Tirian.
She watches as Susan dismounts and bends the horse’s head down to hers, whispering in its ear before she sends it off with a slap on the rump. She stands still for a moment, fingering the bow in her hand, and then slides it into the quiver on her back, weighing the scimitar she’d taken off the dead Calormene in one hand.
“Are you sure –” Jill begins, dismounting herself. She ties the horse’s reins to a nearby tree, one that’s a little more bushy than the others, and arranges herself behind a tree beside the path the horse has just taken to the camp.
“Not at all,” Susan say, settling in behind another tree. “But where’s the fun in that?”
Jill makes a strangled sound. She’s sure she’s entitled; after all, it’s her life on the line, and she’s not inclined to spending the rest of it in a Calormene slave-collar, probably spreading her legs for camel-herders in Tashbaan. Not an attractive prospect, and all she’d had to look forward to when they’d been betrayed and captured on the raid-turned-ambush.
“Don’t worry,” Susan says, smiling at her encouragingly. “I do have this.” She holds up the horn slung across her shoulder, the carved ivory mellowed and darkened with age.
“Oh,” Jill says. “Excellent. The Calormenes will know just where to find us, then. All due respect, Susan, it’s not my legend.”
“It’s not mine either,” Susan says. “It’s my life. But let’s try not to get into the type of situation where we’d have to use it, shall we? Peter will be rather annoyed with me if I end up calling him back from Cair Paravel, especially since Edmund’s all that much closer. Shh.”
Jill looks up at this last, her gaze flickering back towards the Calormene camp. There’s a trio of mounted Calormene scouts making their way through the woods, muttering to each other in Calormene. Jill doesn’t speak much Calormene beyond “Hello?”, “How much?”, and “Go bugger yourself on a fire-arrow, arsewipe,” but evidently Susan does, because she listens for a moment with her brows drawn together, then sheathes the scimitar and draws her bow, nocking an arrow and pulling it back to her ear.
Jill draws too, aiming carefully at the last soldier as she glances around the tree she’s hiding behind. She glances over at Susan as the Calormenes draw closer, sees the other woman’s incremental nod, and fights down a pang of sharp regret before she looses, dropping her bow and darting out from behind her tree to catch the reins of the two rearmost horses. They’re battle-trained, apparently used to their riders suddenly going limp in the saddle, because they don’t panic and run, just freeze where they are, although they do snort and prance a little bit as their companion dies with two of Susan’s arrows in its neck, trapping its rider beneath its body as it falls. There’s no time for any of them to cry out, not before Susan steps out from behind her tree, bow drawn and an arrow pointed straight between the man’s eyes as she says something in the liquid rolling syllables of Calormene.
The man stares blankly.
“Aslan’s mane, I hate language drift,” Susan says, and then says in English, “Don’t shout. I will kill you.”
“Narnian witch!” the man spits in Narnian, but he says it softly. His gaze is fixed on the arrow he’s staring down; sweat beads up on his forehead.
“Sixteen hundred years and you’d think someone would come up with something a little more original,” Susan says, sounding a little sad. “And here you had me killing a good horse. Now that’s a pity. Pole,” she says without looking away, “hobble those horses and get over here.”
Jill obeys in silence, looping the horses’ reins over a nearby branch and kneeling down to get the dead horse’s bridle off. She binds the Calormene’s hands with the reins, tying the leather tightly, and cuts off the excess with her knife to make a gag. There’s more than a little vicious pleasure in how tight she ties the bonds; hopefully they’re tight enough that his hands fall off.
Susan lowers her bow and walks over to one of the fallen bodies, leaning down to pull the man’s turban off. She winds the long strip of fabric around her wrist before she turns back to Jill, and together they manage to drag him out from beneath the dead horse. He doesn’t make any effort at helping them, but he doesn’t fight, either, seemingly torn between not wanting to be trapped here and not wanting to be subjected to whatever they have in mind.
“Get him on one of the horses,” Susan orders, glancing over her shoulder at the Calormene camp. There’s no sound of voices, which Jill chooses to take as a good sign.
The Calormene struggles a little as Jill and Susan drag him to his feet, and resists more when they force him over to the horse.
“Wait,” Susan says, and unwinds the fabric to wrap it around his head, covering his eyes. Then she draws the Calormene scimitar on her hip and puts it against his throat. “Mount up,” she orders. “Pole, help him.”
Jill does, not bothering to hide her moue of disgust from Susan, then goes off to find the horse she’d tied up a little ways away. When she comes up, Susan is mounted on the second horse, the Calormene’s reins tied to the pommel of her saddle. She nudges her horse into a trot without waiting for Jill, the bound Calormene’s horse following easily. Jill follows, wishing that she was a good enough rider to manage her horse with her knees so that she could have her bow in her hands. She has a bad feeling like this. The Pevensies are just too – too confident, like they’re underestimating the Calormenes. Which is stupid, stupid; Jill has been here for five years and even she hasn’t stopped being surprised at what the Calormenes can do. It’s not even like they’re stupid and their cruelty is what surprises her; it’s that they’re smart and they just keep out-thinking Tirian and the rest of the Narnians.
Susan keeps them riding for longer than Jill really cares for – she doesn’t like riding, she doesn’t have much practice at it, and she’s now completely lost – before she stops and dismounts, dragging the Calormene off his horse and pushing him up against a tree with the scimitar pressed against his hips.
“Pole, there should be ropes in one of the saddlebags,” she says, and nothing else, but that more or less makes the point clear. Jill ties the Calormene to the tree as Susan holds him there. After that, she makes a point of tying up the horses, because even if Susan hasn’t thought of it, Jill is damned if she’s going to let their one chance of escape wander off into the woods to get eaten by monsters. Eventually, though, she has to turn back to Susan and the Calormene, pulling her bow off her back and nocking an arrow, though she doesn’t draw the bow and she keeps it pointed at the ground. She’s not staring down a Calormene without a weapon in her hands.
She watches Susan lean forward and put her lips against the Calormene’s ear, saying softly. “I’m going to take the blindfold and the gag off. Scream all you want; we’re a long ways away from anyone, Narnian or Calormene. But I’d really prefer you not scream.” She trails the tip of the scimitar a little lower, and the Calormene nods incrementally.
“Good.” She pulls the blindfold off, then the gag.
The Calormene blinks at her, expression set and sullen. “Narnian witch,” he says again.
“Names are just words,” Susan tells him. “Sorry to disappoint you.” She sheathes the scimitar. “Do you have a name?”
The Calormene just glares at her in silence.
“All right then,” Susan says. She taps her fingers idly on the ivory of the horn at her hip. “I’m just going to ask you a few other questions. I’ll assume you know enough Narnian by now to answer them, because I think we’ve already seen that my Calormene isn’t quite up to the task. It’s been almost two thousand years since I had to speak it, and I haven’t exactly been practicing.”
She waits for a moment, maybe expecting a reply. Her head is cocked to one side and her expression is thoughtful, but her body is utterly relaxed. She could be back at Arn Abedin, leaning into Peter as they go over maps in the henge at the heart of the ruins, or back in England, in her own bedroom. The Haven Narnians don’t usually bother with interrogations; they just go straight to killing Calormenes when they happen to find them. Jill doesn’t know if this is how interrogations are supposed to go.
“All right,” Susan says again. “You and your friends. Why are you out here? It doesn’t exactly seem like the opportune place for a nice walk in the woods. Something might come by and eat you.”
“Only more of your Narnian magic, witch,” the Calormene spits. His Narnian is heavily accented; it takes Jill a few moments to place the words.
“That’s not an option,” Susan says, smiling blindingly.
Jill bites her lip and looks away. She has no idea what Susan’s doing, but she doesn’t like it, and it makes her uncomfortable. Then she looks back, because she doesn’t like the idea of looking away; it’s too much like leaving Susan alone with the Calormene, even though she hasn’t moved an inch, and Jill has the vague idea that neither Tirian nor Peter would approve.
Susan’s wearing one of her old Narnian dresses, part of the wardrobes the Pevensies have produced seemingly from thin air, beneath a long green jacket that looks like it’s made of either suede or leather; Jill can’t quite tell. The jacket’s split down the back so that Susan can ride easily; she can’t quite tell, but she thinks the dress may be as well. It’s fine blue-grey wool, handsome and pretty, with a high-collared leather jerkin over it that fits like a glove and shows off every curve of Susan’s body.
Right now she draws a thumb idly down from her shoulder along the curve of her breasts, leaning in as though she wants to have a quiet, intimate conversation with the Calormene. “Why are you and your men so far away from your forts, tesinvada? This is a dangerous place for a human to be.”
“Are you not human yourself?” he returns. “You look like a woman, and yet, I have seen many of the Narnian beasts that also bear the faces of men and women alike. Some are friends to Prince Bahadur. Some are foes. You seem to be of the second party.”
“One might get that idea, yes,” Susan says. “And not without reason, I’m sure. And I assure you, I am a Daughter of Eve. Do you understand what that means? There’s an island to the east of here, just off the coast, not far from the city of Cair Paravel. On that island, there are the ruins of a great palace, what used to be the castle of Cair Paravel sixteen hundred years ago. And at the heart of those ruins there are the bases of four thrones and one of those thrones is mine.”
The Calormene makes a choking sound and Jill glances at Susan’s face. The other woman doesn’t look quite so serene anymore. She’s still leaning in towards the Calormene, one hand braced on the tree trunk beside his head, the other lingering lightly on the curve of her horn. Her voice has been soft, intimate, but the last words are a bitten off snarl, more savage than most of the Narnians Jill knows, the majority of whom are the very example of pained civility in exile. Not so Susan Pevensie; the civility is a mask she’s wearing, and she’s just let it drop for a bare second.
The mask is back up again a heartbeat later as she smiles, sweet and full of promises. “So, my Calormene friend,” she says, “what brings you to these parts of Narnia?”
Jill knows how to read people – she’d needed it at Experiment House, if only to know how to hide before the first time she’d come to Narnia, and afterwards, as a kind of curiosity. It had been one of the things Edmund Pevensie had tried to teach her and Eustace. Read a person, he’d said once, and you know more about them than they do themselves, because they don’t have to think about what they’re doing. They just do it. But if you know what they’re going to do before they do it, then you have something. You can act to counter them, and that’s an advantage that no one can deny. It works on a battlefield or in a negotiation. It works in a classroom, for that matter. Reading people in Narnia is different than reading people in England; there’s something indefinably different. Not just the fact that half the Narnians aren’t human, but that there’s something about the way they carry themselves, something about their words and body language – it’s like reading the Pevensies. It’s...wrong. Half of what she learned in England doesn’t apply.
But people are people, and one thing that’s easy to read on anybody is fear. What flickers briefly over the Calormene’s face when he looks at Susan Pevensie – that’s fear. Jill doesn’t blame him.
“You Narnians,” he says. “You do not understand that this land is the Tisroc’s now, every league of it from the Great Eastern Ocean to the Western Waste. You must be made to understand.”
“Translation,” Susan says, “you have orders to come out here and find whoever did for the supply caravan that went missing. Is that about right?”
He glares at her in silence.
Susan glances over her shoulder. “You have a whetstone, Pole?”
“Yes,” Jill says, surprised, “of course.” She digs in her belt-pouch for it and tosses it over; Susan catches it in the air, running her thumb over the curve of it briefly before she straightens and reaches to pull a curved hunting knife off the back of her belt. Jill has seen that knife before; that’s Peter’s knife. He must have given it to Susan before he left for Cair Paravel.
Then she realizes why Susan has a knife in her hand now.
“Susan, you can’t,” she protests. “We don’t need the information that badly, we just don’t, it doesn’t matter –”
“Pole,” Susan says without turning around, “you are not one of the very few people who can tell me what I can and cannot do, so you’d be better off not trying. Why are you here, soldier? Tell me right now, because I need to know for the good of Narnia and there are all number of things I might do to find out.” Her gaze flickers downward, lingers on his crotch, and she scrapes the blade of the knife smoothly over the whetstone.
Jill flinches. So does the Calormene. “Narnian witch!” he says again. “Tash will eat your soul for breakfast and take the rest of this land afterwards. He will not rest until all of Narnia bows to him –”
“Tash will have to get in line,” Susan says. “Behind my brother,” she adds significantly. “And Aslan.”
Jill bites off her protest. She doesn’t think Susan will appreciate it. But Susan must know Aslan even better than she does, so why she’d think that speaking so lightly of him is acceptable – she doesn’t want to think about it. Easy enough to add that to the list of things she doesn’t want to know.
“Why are you in the rosewood?” Susan asks again, softly. She runs the blade over the whetstone again, tests it on the ball of her thumb. “What do you think, Pole?” she asks, glancing over her shoulder. “Sharp enough to cut?”
She has to force herself to say, “Just about.” The rest of her is gibbering, I don’t want to see this! I don’t want to see her do this!
Susan leans forward and puts the tip of the knife against the Calormene’s crotch. There’s a rough sound of tearing fabric as she starts to cut the groin off his trousers.
Jill winces and looks at the back of Susan’s head, not at the Calormene.
“Baleh!” the Calormene exclaims, high-pitched. “Baleh, baleh – all right, I will tell you! We, we, we came at Prince Bahadur’s order, because the Narnian king had been taken from the guardhouse at Whitetree and the supply caravan had been ambushed and robbed, all its guards murdered and left for the crows. The Tarkaan Javaid is commanding the west at Bearshome, there are whispers that all the Narnians in the west have begun to move, that someone has called them and that they are answering, and he wants an end put to this business, he does not want –” He stops, breathing hard, and looks down at the knife Susan is still holding.
“Where are you going, soldier?” Susan asks.
“One of the Narnian outlaw camps, the rumors say that the Tarkaan has whisperers there –”
“Pole, what camps are in that direction?” Susan asks, inclining her head to the north.
Jill swallows hard. “Haven,” she says. “The Lantern Waste camps. The camp in the wolfswood. Others –”
“Where did you come from?” Susan asks the Calormene.
“Bearshome, the garrison at Bearshome –”
“That’s right on the Archenland border,” Jill says, or means to say – starts to say, at least, because the next thing she knows is a searing pain in her shoulder.
“Pole!” Susan shouts, whipping her right arm back in a smooth motion. The knife in her hand goes sailing past Jill’s head.
She lets out a strangled breath, looking down at the dirty ground. She’s dropped her bow. She shouldn’t have dropped her bow, she should never drop her bow, that’s clumsy, that’s stupid – Tirian would – Tirian would tell her –
“Pole, look at me!” Susan snaps, grabbing her shoulders.
Jill forces her head up to look at the taller woman. Her shoulder feels like it’s on fire. “I dropped my bow,” she hears herself say. “Tirian said that I should never drop my bow unless – unless –”
Susan snatches the bow up and shoves it into her hand, dragging her sideways to the nearest horse. “Get up,” she orders, untying the reins.
Jill reaches dreamily to touch her right shoulder, the movement awkward left-handed. “Am I hurt?” she asks.
“Yes,” Susan says succinctly. “I’m going to give you a boost up. Grab onto the saddlehorn.”
She more or less shoves Jill into the saddle, and Jill grabs for the saddlehorn with both hands, her right arm screaming protest. There’s a whistling sound, an arrow thunking into the tree they’d tied the horses to, and then another one that hits her horse.
“Go!” Susan shouts, pulling out her bow and an arrow. She draws and looses in the same motion, already reaching back for another arrow. “They followed us!”
Jill is still holding on awkwardly to her bow. She tries to reach back for an arrow and almost falls out of her saddle; God in Heaven, it hurts, it really, really hurts. She’s never hurt this badly before, what can possibly –
Her horse rears, screaming in pain, and Jill does fall out of the saddle, lying winded on the dirty snow. From her new vantage point on the ground, she can see the Calormene riders emerging from the trees on all sides.
“Stay down!” Susan barks, shooting over and over again. Her gaze flickers around, frantic, and then she tosses her bow aside and draws the Calormene scimitar on her hip as a horseman charges down on her.
Jill is a little surprised to realize she’s good – she ducks the rider’s sword and ducks low to hamstring the horse, sending it crashing screaming to the ground as she dispatches the rider with a swift slash across his unprotected face, and then she does something complicated with her left hand and suddenly has her horn in her hand.
The sound of it splits the air.
It makes Jill want to scream, want to cry, but somehow puts strength in her veins as well. She forces herself up from the ground, reaching to pull the arrow from her back, and scrambles for her bow and an arrow. She puts an arrow in the nearest Calormene’s eye, but her injured right arm doesn’t have the strength for her usual draw. She forces the pain aside, and when Susan blows her horn again, that makes it a little easier to ignore.
Out of the corner of her eye she sees Susan fend off another Calormene, impossibly striking an arrow from the air with her sword, then throw the sword the same way she did the knife, enough weight behind the throw that it knocks a Calormene out of the saddle and pins him to a tree like a stuck pig. Susan throws herself into a somersault, coming to her feet with her bow in her hand and an arrow already on the string.
Jill doesn’t bother trying to get to her feet, because that means moving, and shooting is more than enough movement already, thanks very much. It’s – mechanical, but without the sound of Susan’s horn, the pain is starting to come back, and Jill’s draw is getting weaker and weaker. Then she reaches back for another arrow and finds nothing but empty leather beneath her fingers.
Out of arrows.
“Susan!” she screams, turning, and sees the hilt of a Calormene scimitar collide with the other woman’s face.
She drops like a rock, crumpling to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut, and all Jill can do is stare in horror.
A rough Calormene hand grabs her by her bad shoulder and drags her to her feet, and Jill tries to scratch and kick at him, to fight back, but he squeezes, and God above, her shoulder hurts, it hurts, nothing has ever hurt so badly in her life.
It’s a mercy when the world spins and goes black around her.
Part One 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17
Part Two 00 | 000 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | Interlude | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31
Author:
bedlamsbardFandom: Chronicles of Narnia movieverse/bookverse
Rating: PG-13
Summary: And the end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we started. An AU of The Last Battle, some five years after that book begins.
Disclaimer: The Chronicles of Narnia and its characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to C.S. Lewis. Certain characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to Walden Media. Title and quote from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets: Little Gidding.
Author's Notes: This is part eight, obviously, and this is also the first WIP I've posted since 2006. (And that WIP was abandoned, so one can see I'm understandably nervous about posting another one.) The structure of this lends it to being posted in sections, though, so that's how it's going up. Because of this, however, it's not getting posted to any comms until the whole thing is done.
There’s a flicker of brown among the new greenery of the spring foliage and Jill moves forward carefully, stepping deliberately to avoid alerting her prey. It’s not easy to move quietly in snow, but it’s not impossible either. Moving silently is something else entirely and has less to do with not making noise and more to do with making the sort of noise that’s expected in a forest. Forests are noisy places; it’s the unexpected that will snag an animal’s attention.
Carefully, she raises her bow, drawing the arrow back to her ear. Up ahead, the deer stops to nibble at some of the new growth on a young homewood tree, too small to yet support a home beneath its roots or in its branches. Jill looks down the shaft of the arrow, fixing her aim, and looses.
There’s a roar as a snow leopard leaps out of the undergrowth and the deer springs away, only managing a few feet before a satyr steps out from behind the tree in front of it with a club in his hand. Jill’s arrow is buried in the meaty part of the deer’s shoulder – painful, but no real damage, not the kill shot she wanted. And who the hell are these people?
The snow leopard roars again and the deer shies back, dancing sideways in the snow. Jill nocks another arrow and steps out from behind the tree she’s been using for cover.
“That’s my kill,” she declares.
When the deer tries to flee, the snow leopard dashes to head it off, teeth bared in a savage mockery of a smile. The satyr steps forward with his club in his hand. “Oh, girlie, I don’t think so,” he says. “You’d have to kill it first, and even so, I don’t think you’d be able to take it back to your family.”
“We need this deer!” Jill says. “And you’re scaring it; that’s cruel. Let it die in peace.”
She doesn’t recognize them; there are well over a thousand people at Arn Abedin now, the majority of them strangers. The remainder of the Haven camp had arrived two days ago, most of them disappointed to find that Tirian and Eustace had already left with Peter Pevensie for Cair Paravel, and there are three more new camps here. They’d already burst the bounds of the old Arn Abedin walls, or so Lucy had said. It’s just too many people to keep track of; not at all like Haven, where she’d known everybody’s name and hometown.
“Oh, it will die,” the satyr says, eyeing the deer hungrily. After a moment he transfers his attention to her. “Look at you, all nice and plump. I’m sure you don’t need the food near as much as any of us.”
“I sincerely doubt it,” a woman’s calm voice says from behind Jill. She looks around to see Susan Pevensie step out practically from thin air, her bow in one hand and an arrow held carefully in place by the press of two fingers on the bowstring. “We all need to eat.”
“We’ve been walking for days,” the leopard whines. “All we want is the food; we’re owed that, at least. The High King called and we’re answering, but we’ve got to eat. We’ve got to find this place he’s at, wherever it is.”
“You’ve arrived,” Susan says. “Although my brother’s not actually at Arn Abedin right now.”
The snow leopard blinks, looking startled, then bares its teeth at the deer as the poor terrified creature makes to flee. It freezes, the whites showing all around its eyes in terror.
Susan’s lips thin in displeasure, but she doesn’t comment on that. “Keep going southwest for another three miles,” she says, “and you’ll arrive at the ruins of the castle of Arn Abedin. My brother Edmund and my sister Lucy are there, and they’ll see that you’re taken care of.”
“Queen Susan,” the snow leopard murmurs to itself, its big golden eyes flicking from the red-fletched arrow on her bowstring to the carved ivory horn on her hip.
“Anyone can name themselves,” the satyr says. “Maybe you’re lying. Maybe you just want this deer for yourself!”
“I am not,” Susan says, “lying. Really, it’s far more trouble than it’s worth, especially since the question of my and my siblings’ truthfulness seems to come up fairly often. Given that all of you have dragged yourselves away from your much-needed sanctuaries to trek several leagues after the call of a horn, you’d really think that you’d be less skeptical that we are really who we say we are. It would seem to make more sense to ascertain that before you leave home.”
“It’s not home,” the snow leopard spits. “Our homes are gone, long gone, thanks to the Calormenes.” He pauses. “But we’re still taking the deer.”
“No, you’re not,” Jill insists. “You aren’t the only people at Arn Abedin, you know; there’s not enough food to go around and we need –”
“It’s her shoot,” Susan interrupts, a steely tone in her voice that says discussion over.
The satyr thumps his club into his palm. “Not enough food, you say? Then we’re definitely taking the deer.”
“No, you’re not, you little thieves –”
“There! Narnians!”
Jill spins on her heel, her bow coming up. A pair of Calormene riders regard them grimly through the trees, then turn their horses around and spur them on.
“Don’t let them get away!” Susan shouts. A moment later, a red-feathered arrow sprouts in the back of one of the riders, and he sways in the saddle but doesn’t fall. She dashes forward, fleet as a deer, as a unicorn, and Jill follows.
Susan shoots as she runs, and the only thing Jill can do is marvel at that, because she couldn’t do that, not in a hundred years. The kind of skill that takes – how in the name of Aslan can anyone be that good? Especially Susan Pevensie, who Jill has always assumed thinks of nothing more than boys and her hair and what color lipstick best matches her dresses. Edmund and Lucy had said as much back in England, but she’d thought they were just playing with her, that they weren’t serious, because it’s Susan Pevensie, painstakingly English and very, very much a – well, very much a girl. And English girls don’t really do this sort of thing.
Jill can’t shoot and run at the same time, but she’s just as fast as Susan, and dashes forward past the older girl to grab the horses’ reins as their riders fall. She shies back as one of them starts to rear, striking out at her with its front hooves, and drops her bow to get both hands on the reins. “Come on!” she says. “It’s all right, it’s all right, come on –”
The horses calm after a minute, breathing hard and prancing in place, restless. Jill keeps making soothing noises and petting their noses when she’s reasonably certain they won’t bite her. Behind her, she’s vaguely aware of Susan going through the pockets of the men she’s killed.
“We’re only a few miles from Arn Abedin,” she says, straightening with their swords bundled beneath her arm and their purses in her hand. She crosses to Jill and takes the reins of the leftmost horse from her, murmuring something to it in an unfamiliar language before she tucks her prizes into one saddlebag and pulls herself into the saddle. “They don’t usually come this far west, do they?”
“They haven’t,” Jill agrees, retrieving her bow and mounting the other horse. “And not alone, I don’t think I’ve seen only two Calormenes in...not for years, I think. They tend to meet rather unfortunate deaths if they travel alone.”
Susan smiles a little wryly. “Which means there are probably more around somewhere. Well, let’s go find them.” She looks around. “I don’t suppose that leopard came with us.”
“Oh, no,” Jill exclaims, distraught as she follows Susan’s gaze. They’re all alone in the woods, and they’ve chased the horses at least half a mile from her hunting grounds. She’s a little more interested in food than she is in Calormenes, at least at the moment. “They’ve probably taken the damned deer, and that was the first I’ve seen since we got here. I really wanted fresh meat.”
Susan arches her eyebrows a little, her smile soft with bemusement and something else, and leans down over her horse’s neck. “Where are your herdmates, my friend?” she murmurs in its ear. “So far from your herd, and nearly alone. You must be lonely, and eager to return to your friends and family.”
The horse fidgets a little, hooves stomping against the mushy, dirty snow, and shakes its head, tack jingling faintly.
“You are aware that’s not actually a talking horse, aren’t you?” Jill asks, warily. The horse is one of the small, fleet Calormene ones; talking horses are different, bigger and longer of leg, their tails and manes loose and not close-clipped or bound-up, as the Calormene ones are.
Susan glances over at her. “Just because something can’t talk doesn’t mean it can’t listen,” she says, and pats the horse’s neck again. “Take us to your herd, my friend.”
With a snort, the horse shakes its head, and then it starts walking, veering north and east, towards the roseroad. Jill’s horse follows eagerly.
“Shouldn’t we go back to Arn Abedin for help?” she protests. “The Calormenes never travel in groups of less than nine, and there’s only two of us. Shouldn’t we –”
“Two’s enough,” Susan says calmly. “Shh. They won’t be expecting Narnians. Or women. And we wouldn’t want to tip them off early and spoil the plan.”
“Plan?” Jill protests faintly, because as far as she’s seen, the Pevensies don’t do plans; they just hare off wildly at their slightest whims. It’s hardly what she expected from the legendary kings and queens of summer that the Narnians tend to go on about. She’d known them back in England, of course – Lucy and Edmund best, Peter and Susan rather less well. Edmund had been prone to going off on tangents about back in their day this, Lucy answering him with back in their day that, and Peter had just smirked when he’d been there at all. She doesn’t particularly like Peter; he’d made her nervous for a long time before she’d seen him in Narnia, and now there’s something worse about it, about him. Like he’s not exactly friendly, to her or to anyone, and there’s a hint of barely controlled violence about him – had been long before, but now it simmers closer to the surface, and she’s seen people like that in Narnia: the killers, the madmen, the ones who get themselves killed or captured by the Calormenes because they’re too rash, too bloodthirsty, too hell-bent on vengeance. She’s learned that that gets people killed fast.
As for Susan, well – the others hadn’t talked about her very much. Peter had been more prone to than Edmund or Lucy, but even that hadn’t been much, especially since he seldom actually seemed to notice that she or Eustace had been there; most of what he said had been directed towards his siblings. Jill would have been hurt if she hadn’t been so relieved. By the time Eustace had taken her to meet his family, there had already been a falling out between Susan and the others. She remembers that Peter had just returned from his tour of duty in Burma during the War and been reassigned to England; Edmund and Lucy had both been bitingly angry about something related to Susan. They’d seldom spoken of her except in passing, and that hastily muffled, forgettable and easily forgotten. All Jill has to go on in regards to Susan are the scraps of Narnian legend about the Queen of Spring and the afterthoughts Peter and Edmund had tossed out during their few meetings.
Still, she’s seen enough of Susan these past few days – more than a week now – to be wary of her. The woman’s the best archer she’s ever seen, and Jill’s been in Narnia for five years now; she knows a lot of good archers. There’s also something of that same unnerving air to her that her sibling share: measured, calm, tightly controlled – leashed, maybe, is a better word, although it’s her own hand that holds the leash and no one else’s. She scares hell out of Jill – they all scare hell out of Jill, to be perfectly honest.
It’s a good enough reason as any to follow her on this madman’s mission.
The horses are moving at a fairly good clip, snow melting into dirty yellow-green grass beneath their hooves as the trees grow scarcer and scarcer around them, and Jill fingers her bow, trying not to look around too much. She doesn’t like being out of the western woods after so long. The Calormenes aren’t scared of the woods, precisely – the trees seldom rise against them anymore, because that vengeance ends in renewed logging or worse, fire – but the western woods are the last stronghold of free Narnians in Narnia, and the Calormenes face certain death at the hands of the roving bands of Narnians should they go too far west. Jill has been here for five years; she’s used to the woods. They’re safe. Oh, they’re not really safe – Calormene patrols, unhappy Narnians, bandits, monsters – but they’re far safer than the rest of Narnia, at least for her, and for Eustace and Tirian.
Briefly, she wonders where they are, if they’ve arrived at Cair Paravel yet and if they’re safe. If Peter knows what he’s doing. Don’t you dare get them hurt, she’d wanted to say to him, but she hadn’t. Maybe Lucy or Edmund had said as much, but – somehow she doubts it. Do they even see them as people? Or are they just pieces on a chessboard, like some of the Narnians say? Move them around, make sacrifices for the betterment of Narnia –
Not Eustace. Not Tirian. Surely not.
“Pole,” Susan says softly, leaning over to catch the reins of Jill’s horse and bring the gelding to a halt.
Jill looks around at her. Carefully, Susan tilts her head forward and Jill sees one of the wide empty camping spots just off the roseroad ahead of them. It’s filled with Calormene soldiers, at least three dozen of them. Maybe more. A full troop at the very least.
Susan regards them thoughtfully for a moment in silence, while Jill holds her tongue and tries not to breathe, the fear seizing hard in her throat. Not again, not again – she won’t be taken by the Calormenes again. After a moment, Susan nods and nudges her horse around and they retreat back into the woods, until they’re out of sight of the Calormenes. And if they can’t see the Calormenes, then chances are fairly good that the Calormenes can’t see them, either.
“God help us,” Jill whispers as soon as they’re clear, hearing the anxiety warring with panic in her voice. “We can’t fight that many. We’ve got to go back for help –”
“No, we don’t,” Susan says, absurdly calm. “At least, we’re not going to immediately. I want to know why they’re here first. The roseroad joins up with the stoneroad into Archenland a league or so to the south; maybe they just want to cross the border, or follow the roseroad into the Western Waste, Old Telmar, and from there into Shoushan.”
Jill forces the panic down with some effort. “How likely is that?”
Susan gives her a faint edge of a smile. “Not very, I’m afraid. Still, we have to find out; by the time we get back here with troops they could have moved on and we’d have no idea where they’d gone. Better to find out now and quickly than be left wondering.”
“Are you just going to walk in there and ask?” Jill demands, a little more sharply than she means. She doesn’t like Calormenes, and she doesn’t like being this close to them without a fairly large number of people she trusts at her back. Although that hadn’t gone particularly well the last time, to be fair. At least Susan is probably fairly unlikely to hand her over to the Calormenes and go off whistling.
This time Susan really does smile, not just hint at it. “As amusing as that would be, no. We just need to lure one or two of them out, and here’s how we’re going to do it.”
Jill listens with no little dismay. “But –” she begins at one point, and Susan shushes her absently and continues explaining.
When she finishes, looking at Jill expectantly, Jill says the only thing she can think of. “Are you out of your mind?”
Susan laughs a little, softly. “That depends on which of my siblings you talk to,” is all she says before she turns her horse away.
This is suicide, Jill thinks frantically, wanting to do nothing more than turn the horse around and leave, ride back to Arn Abedin and let Ourente and Jewel know about the Calormene troop here – too many people for just a patrol, this is an advance party before the rest of the army follows – but she doesn’t dare leave Susan alone here.
Jill isn’t a strategist. She’s learned a little about strategy over the years, but not really all that much or of the type to be much help in a situation like this, or any situation outside of either straight-out bashing or the hit and run type. Susan - Susan obviously knows strategy. Suicidal strategy, which is one of the least reassuring things that Jill has thought of since the last time they were in Narnia, and there have been a lot of things that could take that particular position.
But at least Susan doesn’t talk to her like she’s an idiot; her instructions are clear and sensible, aside from the suicidal aspect. Jill understands what she’s being asked - no, ordered - to do. Susan gives orders in a way that Tirian has never been able to do, and as much as Jill loves the man - and she does, in a hundred inexplicable ways - he’s not a leader, not the way all four of the Pevensies are. She hates to admit it, but it’s easy to see why people follow them and not Tirian.
She watches as Susan dismounts and bends the horse’s head down to hers, whispering in its ear before she sends it off with a slap on the rump. She stands still for a moment, fingering the bow in her hand, and then slides it into the quiver on her back, weighing the scimitar she’d taken off the dead Calormene in one hand.
“Are you sure –” Jill begins, dismounting herself. She ties the horse’s reins to a nearby tree, one that’s a little more bushy than the others, and arranges herself behind a tree beside the path the horse has just taken to the camp.
“Not at all,” Susan say, settling in behind another tree. “But where’s the fun in that?”
Jill makes a strangled sound. She’s sure she’s entitled; after all, it’s her life on the line, and she’s not inclined to spending the rest of it in a Calormene slave-collar, probably spreading her legs for camel-herders in Tashbaan. Not an attractive prospect, and all she’d had to look forward to when they’d been betrayed and captured on the raid-turned-ambush.
“Don’t worry,” Susan says, smiling at her encouragingly. “I do have this.” She holds up the horn slung across her shoulder, the carved ivory mellowed and darkened with age.
“Oh,” Jill says. “Excellent. The Calormenes will know just where to find us, then. All due respect, Susan, it’s not my legend.”
“It’s not mine either,” Susan says. “It’s my life. But let’s try not to get into the type of situation where we’d have to use it, shall we? Peter will be rather annoyed with me if I end up calling him back from Cair Paravel, especially since Edmund’s all that much closer. Shh.”
Jill looks up at this last, her gaze flickering back towards the Calormene camp. There’s a trio of mounted Calormene scouts making their way through the woods, muttering to each other in Calormene. Jill doesn’t speak much Calormene beyond “Hello?”, “How much?”, and “Go bugger yourself on a fire-arrow, arsewipe,” but evidently Susan does, because she listens for a moment with her brows drawn together, then sheathes the scimitar and draws her bow, nocking an arrow and pulling it back to her ear.
Jill draws too, aiming carefully at the last soldier as she glances around the tree she’s hiding behind. She glances over at Susan as the Calormenes draw closer, sees the other woman’s incremental nod, and fights down a pang of sharp regret before she looses, dropping her bow and darting out from behind her tree to catch the reins of the two rearmost horses. They’re battle-trained, apparently used to their riders suddenly going limp in the saddle, because they don’t panic and run, just freeze where they are, although they do snort and prance a little bit as their companion dies with two of Susan’s arrows in its neck, trapping its rider beneath its body as it falls. There’s no time for any of them to cry out, not before Susan steps out from behind her tree, bow drawn and an arrow pointed straight between the man’s eyes as she says something in the liquid rolling syllables of Calormene.
The man stares blankly.
“Aslan’s mane, I hate language drift,” Susan says, and then says in English, “Don’t shout. I will kill you.”
“Narnian witch!” the man spits in Narnian, but he says it softly. His gaze is fixed on the arrow he’s staring down; sweat beads up on his forehead.
“Sixteen hundred years and you’d think someone would come up with something a little more original,” Susan says, sounding a little sad. “And here you had me killing a good horse. Now that’s a pity. Pole,” she says without looking away, “hobble those horses and get over here.”
Jill obeys in silence, looping the horses’ reins over a nearby branch and kneeling down to get the dead horse’s bridle off. She binds the Calormene’s hands with the reins, tying the leather tightly, and cuts off the excess with her knife to make a gag. There’s more than a little vicious pleasure in how tight she ties the bonds; hopefully they’re tight enough that his hands fall off.
Susan lowers her bow and walks over to one of the fallen bodies, leaning down to pull the man’s turban off. She winds the long strip of fabric around her wrist before she turns back to Jill, and together they manage to drag him out from beneath the dead horse. He doesn’t make any effort at helping them, but he doesn’t fight, either, seemingly torn between not wanting to be trapped here and not wanting to be subjected to whatever they have in mind.
“Get him on one of the horses,” Susan orders, glancing over her shoulder at the Calormene camp. There’s no sound of voices, which Jill chooses to take as a good sign.
The Calormene struggles a little as Jill and Susan drag him to his feet, and resists more when they force him over to the horse.
“Wait,” Susan says, and unwinds the fabric to wrap it around his head, covering his eyes. Then she draws the Calormene scimitar on her hip and puts it against his throat. “Mount up,” she orders. “Pole, help him.”
Jill does, not bothering to hide her moue of disgust from Susan, then goes off to find the horse she’d tied up a little ways away. When she comes up, Susan is mounted on the second horse, the Calormene’s reins tied to the pommel of her saddle. She nudges her horse into a trot without waiting for Jill, the bound Calormene’s horse following easily. Jill follows, wishing that she was a good enough rider to manage her horse with her knees so that she could have her bow in her hands. She has a bad feeling like this. The Pevensies are just too – too confident, like they’re underestimating the Calormenes. Which is stupid, stupid; Jill has been here for five years and even she hasn’t stopped being surprised at what the Calormenes can do. It’s not even like they’re stupid and their cruelty is what surprises her; it’s that they’re smart and they just keep out-thinking Tirian and the rest of the Narnians.
Susan keeps them riding for longer than Jill really cares for – she doesn’t like riding, she doesn’t have much practice at it, and she’s now completely lost – before she stops and dismounts, dragging the Calormene off his horse and pushing him up against a tree with the scimitar pressed against his hips.
“Pole, there should be ropes in one of the saddlebags,” she says, and nothing else, but that more or less makes the point clear. Jill ties the Calormene to the tree as Susan holds him there. After that, she makes a point of tying up the horses, because even if Susan hasn’t thought of it, Jill is damned if she’s going to let their one chance of escape wander off into the woods to get eaten by monsters. Eventually, though, she has to turn back to Susan and the Calormene, pulling her bow off her back and nocking an arrow, though she doesn’t draw the bow and she keeps it pointed at the ground. She’s not staring down a Calormene without a weapon in her hands.
She watches Susan lean forward and put her lips against the Calormene’s ear, saying softly. “I’m going to take the blindfold and the gag off. Scream all you want; we’re a long ways away from anyone, Narnian or Calormene. But I’d really prefer you not scream.” She trails the tip of the scimitar a little lower, and the Calormene nods incrementally.
“Good.” She pulls the blindfold off, then the gag.
The Calormene blinks at her, expression set and sullen. “Narnian witch,” he says again.
“Names are just words,” Susan tells him. “Sorry to disappoint you.” She sheathes the scimitar. “Do you have a name?”
The Calormene just glares at her in silence.
“All right then,” Susan says. She taps her fingers idly on the ivory of the horn at her hip. “I’m just going to ask you a few other questions. I’ll assume you know enough Narnian by now to answer them, because I think we’ve already seen that my Calormene isn’t quite up to the task. It’s been almost two thousand years since I had to speak it, and I haven’t exactly been practicing.”
She waits for a moment, maybe expecting a reply. Her head is cocked to one side and her expression is thoughtful, but her body is utterly relaxed. She could be back at Arn Abedin, leaning into Peter as they go over maps in the henge at the heart of the ruins, or back in England, in her own bedroom. The Haven Narnians don’t usually bother with interrogations; they just go straight to killing Calormenes when they happen to find them. Jill doesn’t know if this is how interrogations are supposed to go.
“All right,” Susan says again. “You and your friends. Why are you out here? It doesn’t exactly seem like the opportune place for a nice walk in the woods. Something might come by and eat you.”
“Only more of your Narnian magic, witch,” the Calormene spits. His Narnian is heavily accented; it takes Jill a few moments to place the words.
“That’s not an option,” Susan says, smiling blindingly.
Jill bites her lip and looks away. She has no idea what Susan’s doing, but she doesn’t like it, and it makes her uncomfortable. Then she looks back, because she doesn’t like the idea of looking away; it’s too much like leaving Susan alone with the Calormene, even though she hasn’t moved an inch, and Jill has the vague idea that neither Tirian nor Peter would approve.
Susan’s wearing one of her old Narnian dresses, part of the wardrobes the Pevensies have produced seemingly from thin air, beneath a long green jacket that looks like it’s made of either suede or leather; Jill can’t quite tell. The jacket’s split down the back so that Susan can ride easily; she can’t quite tell, but she thinks the dress may be as well. It’s fine blue-grey wool, handsome and pretty, with a high-collared leather jerkin over it that fits like a glove and shows off every curve of Susan’s body.
Right now she draws a thumb idly down from her shoulder along the curve of her breasts, leaning in as though she wants to have a quiet, intimate conversation with the Calormene. “Why are you and your men so far away from your forts, tesinvada? This is a dangerous place for a human to be.”
“Are you not human yourself?” he returns. “You look like a woman, and yet, I have seen many of the Narnian beasts that also bear the faces of men and women alike. Some are friends to Prince Bahadur. Some are foes. You seem to be of the second party.”
“One might get that idea, yes,” Susan says. “And not without reason, I’m sure. And I assure you, I am a Daughter of Eve. Do you understand what that means? There’s an island to the east of here, just off the coast, not far from the city of Cair Paravel. On that island, there are the ruins of a great palace, what used to be the castle of Cair Paravel sixteen hundred years ago. And at the heart of those ruins there are the bases of four thrones and one of those thrones is mine.”
The Calormene makes a choking sound and Jill glances at Susan’s face. The other woman doesn’t look quite so serene anymore. She’s still leaning in towards the Calormene, one hand braced on the tree trunk beside his head, the other lingering lightly on the curve of her horn. Her voice has been soft, intimate, but the last words are a bitten off snarl, more savage than most of the Narnians Jill knows, the majority of whom are the very example of pained civility in exile. Not so Susan Pevensie; the civility is a mask she’s wearing, and she’s just let it drop for a bare second.
The mask is back up again a heartbeat later as she smiles, sweet and full of promises. “So, my Calormene friend,” she says, “what brings you to these parts of Narnia?”
Jill knows how to read people – she’d needed it at Experiment House, if only to know how to hide before the first time she’d come to Narnia, and afterwards, as a kind of curiosity. It had been one of the things Edmund Pevensie had tried to teach her and Eustace. Read a person, he’d said once, and you know more about them than they do themselves, because they don’t have to think about what they’re doing. They just do it. But if you know what they’re going to do before they do it, then you have something. You can act to counter them, and that’s an advantage that no one can deny. It works on a battlefield or in a negotiation. It works in a classroom, for that matter. Reading people in Narnia is different than reading people in England; there’s something indefinably different. Not just the fact that half the Narnians aren’t human, but that there’s something about the way they carry themselves, something about their words and body language – it’s like reading the Pevensies. It’s...wrong. Half of what she learned in England doesn’t apply.
But people are people, and one thing that’s easy to read on anybody is fear. What flickers briefly over the Calormene’s face when he looks at Susan Pevensie – that’s fear. Jill doesn’t blame him.
“You Narnians,” he says. “You do not understand that this land is the Tisroc’s now, every league of it from the Great Eastern Ocean to the Western Waste. You must be made to understand.”
“Translation,” Susan says, “you have orders to come out here and find whoever did for the supply caravan that went missing. Is that about right?”
He glares at her in silence.
Susan glances over her shoulder. “You have a whetstone, Pole?”
“Yes,” Jill says, surprised, “of course.” She digs in her belt-pouch for it and tosses it over; Susan catches it in the air, running her thumb over the curve of it briefly before she straightens and reaches to pull a curved hunting knife off the back of her belt. Jill has seen that knife before; that’s Peter’s knife. He must have given it to Susan before he left for Cair Paravel.
Then she realizes why Susan has a knife in her hand now.
“Susan, you can’t,” she protests. “We don’t need the information that badly, we just don’t, it doesn’t matter –”
“Pole,” Susan says without turning around, “you are not one of the very few people who can tell me what I can and cannot do, so you’d be better off not trying. Why are you here, soldier? Tell me right now, because I need to know for the good of Narnia and there are all number of things I might do to find out.” Her gaze flickers downward, lingers on his crotch, and she scrapes the blade of the knife smoothly over the whetstone.
Jill flinches. So does the Calormene. “Narnian witch!” he says again. “Tash will eat your soul for breakfast and take the rest of this land afterwards. He will not rest until all of Narnia bows to him –”
“Tash will have to get in line,” Susan says. “Behind my brother,” she adds significantly. “And Aslan.”
Jill bites off her protest. She doesn’t think Susan will appreciate it. But Susan must know Aslan even better than she does, so why she’d think that speaking so lightly of him is acceptable – she doesn’t want to think about it. Easy enough to add that to the list of things she doesn’t want to know.
“Why are you in the rosewood?” Susan asks again, softly. She runs the blade over the whetstone again, tests it on the ball of her thumb. “What do you think, Pole?” she asks, glancing over her shoulder. “Sharp enough to cut?”
She has to force herself to say, “Just about.” The rest of her is gibbering, I don’t want to see this! I don’t want to see her do this!
Susan leans forward and puts the tip of the knife against the Calormene’s crotch. There’s a rough sound of tearing fabric as she starts to cut the groin off his trousers.
Jill winces and looks at the back of Susan’s head, not at the Calormene.
“Baleh!” the Calormene exclaims, high-pitched. “Baleh, baleh – all right, I will tell you! We, we, we came at Prince Bahadur’s order, because the Narnian king had been taken from the guardhouse at Whitetree and the supply caravan had been ambushed and robbed, all its guards murdered and left for the crows. The Tarkaan Javaid is commanding the west at Bearshome, there are whispers that all the Narnians in the west have begun to move, that someone has called them and that they are answering, and he wants an end put to this business, he does not want –” He stops, breathing hard, and looks down at the knife Susan is still holding.
“Where are you going, soldier?” Susan asks.
“One of the Narnian outlaw camps, the rumors say that the Tarkaan has whisperers there –”
“Pole, what camps are in that direction?” Susan asks, inclining her head to the north.
Jill swallows hard. “Haven,” she says. “The Lantern Waste camps. The camp in the wolfswood. Others –”
“Where did you come from?” Susan asks the Calormene.
“Bearshome, the garrison at Bearshome –”
“That’s right on the Archenland border,” Jill says, or means to say – starts to say, at least, because the next thing she knows is a searing pain in her shoulder.
“Pole!” Susan shouts, whipping her right arm back in a smooth motion. The knife in her hand goes sailing past Jill’s head.
She lets out a strangled breath, looking down at the dirty ground. She’s dropped her bow. She shouldn’t have dropped her bow, she should never drop her bow, that’s clumsy, that’s stupid – Tirian would – Tirian would tell her –
“Pole, look at me!” Susan snaps, grabbing her shoulders.
Jill forces her head up to look at the taller woman. Her shoulder feels like it’s on fire. “I dropped my bow,” she hears herself say. “Tirian said that I should never drop my bow unless – unless –”
Susan snatches the bow up and shoves it into her hand, dragging her sideways to the nearest horse. “Get up,” she orders, untying the reins.
Jill reaches dreamily to touch her right shoulder, the movement awkward left-handed. “Am I hurt?” she asks.
“Yes,” Susan says succinctly. “I’m going to give you a boost up. Grab onto the saddlehorn.”
She more or less shoves Jill into the saddle, and Jill grabs for the saddlehorn with both hands, her right arm screaming protest. There’s a whistling sound, an arrow thunking into the tree they’d tied the horses to, and then another one that hits her horse.
“Go!” Susan shouts, pulling out her bow and an arrow. She draws and looses in the same motion, already reaching back for another arrow. “They followed us!”
Jill is still holding on awkwardly to her bow. She tries to reach back for an arrow and almost falls out of her saddle; God in Heaven, it hurts, it really, really hurts. She’s never hurt this badly before, what can possibly –
Her horse rears, screaming in pain, and Jill does fall out of the saddle, lying winded on the dirty snow. From her new vantage point on the ground, she can see the Calormene riders emerging from the trees on all sides.
“Stay down!” Susan barks, shooting over and over again. Her gaze flickers around, frantic, and then she tosses her bow aside and draws the Calormene scimitar on her hip as a horseman charges down on her.
Jill is a little surprised to realize she’s good – she ducks the rider’s sword and ducks low to hamstring the horse, sending it crashing screaming to the ground as she dispatches the rider with a swift slash across his unprotected face, and then she does something complicated with her left hand and suddenly has her horn in her hand.
The sound of it splits the air.
It makes Jill want to scream, want to cry, but somehow puts strength in her veins as well. She forces herself up from the ground, reaching to pull the arrow from her back, and scrambles for her bow and an arrow. She puts an arrow in the nearest Calormene’s eye, but her injured right arm doesn’t have the strength for her usual draw. She forces the pain aside, and when Susan blows her horn again, that makes it a little easier to ignore.
Out of the corner of her eye she sees Susan fend off another Calormene, impossibly striking an arrow from the air with her sword, then throw the sword the same way she did the knife, enough weight behind the throw that it knocks a Calormene out of the saddle and pins him to a tree like a stuck pig. Susan throws herself into a somersault, coming to her feet with her bow in her hand and an arrow already on the string.
Jill doesn’t bother trying to get to her feet, because that means moving, and shooting is more than enough movement already, thanks very much. It’s – mechanical, but without the sound of Susan’s horn, the pain is starting to come back, and Jill’s draw is getting weaker and weaker. Then she reaches back for another arrow and finds nothing but empty leather beneath her fingers.
Out of arrows.
“Susan!” she screams, turning, and sees the hilt of a Calormene scimitar collide with the other woman’s face.
She drops like a rock, crumpling to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut, and all Jill can do is stare in horror.
A rough Calormene hand grabs her by her bad shoulder and drags her to her feet, and Jill tries to scratch and kick at him, to fight back, but he squeezes, and God above, her shoulder hurts, it hurts, nothing has ever hurt so badly in her life.
It’s a mercy when the world spins and goes black around her.
Part One 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17
Part Two 00 | 000 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | Interlude | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-24 03:15 pm (UTC)Book nitpick, if I may: Jill is a good rider (Silver Chair) and experienced with horses, although Eustace is not.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-27 01:54 am (UTC)*frowns* Damn, I'd forgotten there was riding in SC. But it has been a while since they've been able to do any riding (given that the talking horses are horrendously opposed to the idea), and she's probably never had combat equestrian training.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-24 05:27 pm (UTC)In other news, love:
The language drift! makes Susan's job just a little bit harder
Edmund passing knowledge down to Eustace and Jill! Especially that it's reading people, which is something that Peter and the others may do automatically but would never really think about.
The fact that Jill things about what the grim realities will be if they are caught. The Pevensies never really think like that.
Jill is unnerved by all the Pevensies, but she'd really never want to be left alone in a room with Peter. Whatever mood he's in, it would still be terrifying. Outsider POV for the win.
I really want to know how the timeline in this matches up with Dust 7, because I'm betting that if Susan blows that horn, wherever Peter is he will wake up with sword in hand (whether or not that sword was anywhere near him before that. That's just the way it works).
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-27 02:00 am (UTC)Jill has been in Narnia for a long time at this point, and it's been a long five years. And Calormene-occupied Narnia is, in some ways, worse than Narnia during the Long Winter. She knows what the Calormenes do to Narnian prisoners. It's not good. It's not pretty. She got lucky the last time she was a Calormene prisoner.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-25 12:51 am (UTC)This is fabulous! I'll definitely be following it and reading some of your other stories.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-27 02:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-25 09:24 pm (UTC)I feel like Edmund needs to come save them now, seeing as he's more likely to hear the horn than Peter.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-27 02:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-27 02:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-27 02:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-27 03:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-27 03:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-27 03:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-27 04:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-26 08:25 am (UTC)“It’s not mine either,” Susan says. “It’s my life.
<3
“Aslan’s mane, I hate language drift,”
<33!
Half of what she learned in England doesn’t apply. & other moments of culture shock of yay
KEEP IT UP, BIG BOY.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-27 02:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-27 04:56 pm (UTC)It's like reading A Song of Ice and Fire!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-27 11:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-27 06:05 pm (UTC)I really liked reading from Jill pov She gives insights in the characters of the Pevensies that they can't provide themselves. And I don't think they know how scary other people think they are. Which is kinda cool. I also liked how she thinks of Peter. (For some reason I want some Peter/Jill now...)
And Susan is all kinds of awesome in this one. The interrogation/torture is brilliant. And how Calormen language has changed. (But if it has changed how could she sit and listen to them and still understand what they were saying to each other?)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-27 11:36 pm (UTC)Everyone knows how I love me my outsider POVs, so I'm glad Jill's is working here.
Just because Jill says that Susan understood the Calormenes doesn't mean that she actually could.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-30 12:35 pm (UTC)And I want to smack the Leopard. Argh.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-30 05:11 pm (UTC)*curious* Why?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-30 08:42 pm (UTC)She's... such a know it all. She actually bought that Susan was a vapid bimbo, without questioning it (which says a lot about her knowledge of humanity... NO ONE is like that, really). In the same breath she'll criticize the Pevensies in an area she freely admits to knowing nothing about. She KNOWS that they have decades more experience in Narnia than her, and yet she still expects them to do things her way (at least mentally, even if she daren't speak it).
I think the biggest thing is that just because she had an adventure in Narnia, she thinks she's a part of their family.
Eustace can be forgiven what little he shares in her perception (though he isn't nearly, nearly as bad as Jill) due to being their cousin and knowing them long before Narnia. She never met them until AFTER she'd been to Narnia, AFTER she knew they were Kings and Queens, and Saviors, AFTER she knew that, for all intents and purposes, they were old enough to be her parents!
*argh*
And Tirian and Eustace are both way to good for her. *eye twitches*
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-30 09:39 pm (UTC)The main thing with the Jill characterization -- at least my Jill characterization -- is that she never knew the Pevensies in Narnia. It's one thing for Eustace to tell her, "Oh, yeah, they were kings and queens and heroes," but it's hard to believe if you haven't seen it yourself. Like Caspian, sort of, although Caspian kind of had the benefit of not knowing them in England. Hard to look at a schoolgirl and see a warrior queen, after all, even if you know that that's what they should be. And she didn't grow up with the kings and queens of old legend drummed into her head the way the Narnians did. You may know something, but it's not always so easy to believe it unless you have the evidence drummed into your head, especially when what you see is completely counter to what should be.
And then there's a pretty hefty dose of bitterness, too, because she and Eustace both tend to (unconsciously, I think, at least at this point) look at the Pevensies as being called in as the heavy guns. After all, they were the ones who were brought to Narnia first, but they've failed, screwed up; Narnia's still been taken over by Calormenes and they never managed to do a damn thing to help it. The Pevensies have essentially been brought in to fix the problems they made in the first place (whether or not they're actually responsible for them). And they've essentially been brought in by Aslan (whether or not Aslan, you know, actually brought them back or not; what matters is how Jill and Eustace think of it), which means that Aslan no longer trusts them to save Narnia.
Plus there's the, you know, Pevensies just taking over without asking permission or deferring to Tirian (who, after five years, she's going to think of as THE king of Narnia; she's never had it beaten into her head that Peter is the High King and so forth).
Not to defend her or not, just what I was thinking about when I was writing this chapter and working on other bits of Jill and Eustace characterization.