Brigadoon fic: The Hanged Man's Reel
Jul. 20th, 2005 04:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardEllora, this is for you. Part One of "The Hanged Man's Reel."
“No,” Tommy said, poking dubiously at the ground with the broadsword Charlie had handed him. “I don’t know how to use a sword. It’s not really something we need to know in America.”
“Ye dinna ken how to use a sword?” Charlie said. “Then your land must be a peaceable one indeed – aye, I have had occasion to use my dirk myself, even in a place such as Brigadoon, and my brother fought for the bonnie prince just this past year.”
Tommy blinked, tracing the essence of the phrase out of the Scotsman’s tangle of accent and unfamiliar words. “No, a war just ended – a big war, World War II. I served in France – Jeff and I both did – but we don’t use swords anymore. We use guns now.” He was about to add an explanation about the atomic bomb, but he wasn’t sure if Charlie would understand it.
Charlie’s expression was dubious. “A world war, hmm?” he said. “Now that, surely, is the stuff of tales. I have never heard tell of such a thing. And ye say it was the second one?”
“Yeah. There was World War I in 1914, and then World War II, that just ended last year. The Allies – Britain, America, France – we were fighting the Germans and the Japs.”
“The Japs?”
“The Japanese. They’re on the other side of the world, across the ocean on the other side of America.” Tommy swept an arm out in the direction of what he hoped was west.
“Och,” Charlie said in disbelief. “Well, then.” He raised his broadsword as lightly as though it was a table knife. “Ye still have this, then. Ye must learn it before the wedding, elsewise auld Andrew willna let you marry Fiona.”
Tommy blinked. “Why not?”
“Why, ye willna be able to defend her. Ye said ye were promised to a girl in America, aye? If ye couldna defend her, then how could her father agree to let ye marry her? Or did she no’ have a father?”
“Well,” Tommy said, thinking of the mousy John Ashton, “she definitely had a father. But it was the mother that was the real problem.”
“Aye, it can be like that sometimes,” Fiona said from her seat at the foot of a tall ash. “Mistress Anderson, for example. If she kent half of what Maggie got up to –” Charlie flushed a dark crimson, and Fiona shot him a sharp look.
“Husbands don’t really have to – to defend their wives anymore,” Tommy said. “Or – not in my – my time, anyway.”
Charlie gave him a scandalized look. “Then it is a very poor time to live in,” he said. “Ye will just give your wife to whosoever should ask for her, then? What about bandits? What about British?”
“There aren’t any bandits,” Tommy said. “Most women can take care of themselves; they’ve done it fine for the past couple years, when all the men were away fighting in Europe and the Pacific.”
“But –”
“Ye say that as if we ha’ something to fear, Charlie,” Fiona said dryly. “We live in Brigadoon, remember? It will be a powerful bad evil that should find us here.”
“Still,” Charlie said. “They do come, ye ken. Now and then. Ye hold the sword like this, Tommy. Here.” He showed Tommy his grip. “And ye keep it out in front of ye, like so. Now, wi’ a broadsword, ye’ll want to come down from above, like so –”
“Ye’re doin’ it wrong,” Stuart Dalrymple said, seemingly materializing out of the mists that continuously surrounded Brigadoon. “Aye, ye are, Charlie – dinna argue wi’ me when ye ken I’ve the right of it.”
Charlie shut his mouth with an audible snap. “Ye show him then, if ye ken what you’re doin’ so well.”
Stuart eyed him a minute with those odd blue eyes Tommy had noticed before. For a moment he thought Stuart would refuse, then the older Scotsman reached for his brother’s sword. “Too light,” he muttered, hefting it, “but it will do, I suppose. Ye hold it like this, Tommy – no, not like that, ye look like ye’re tryin’ to hold up a mountain. What d’ye mean by givin’ him live steel his first time, Charlie? Run back to th’ house and get two of the poles Da and I were usin’ for the shop.”
Much to Tommy’s astonishment, the usually argumentative Charlie obeyed without question. Tommy watched him disappear into the mists with his mouth half-open in surprise.
“Ye look a bit like a frog,” Stuart teased, reaching to pry Tommy’s fingers off the huge basket-hilt of the sword. “Ye dinna need one of these, though ‘tis good to good to know how to use. A dirk should suit ye just as well. Ye willna be goin’ far, I think, and I or my brother or some of the other lads will come at a shout. Give me one of those when Charlie returns, aye? And if he doesna, well, then I dinna doubt his lady wife’s got him in her clutches.” He gave Fiona a courtly bow and walked away, both swords firmly in hand as though they weighed nothing.
Tommy looked uncertainly back at Fiona. “Is it me, or is he –” he searched fruitlessly for a word and finally settled for the one that came first to mind, “– spooky?” It was something he’d been wondering since he’d come to Brigadoon.
Fiona smiled at him, fingers busy in that arcane ritual she called needlework. Or maybe it was knitting, or spinning, or something equally bizarre. Tommy frowned suddenly. “Oh, aye, he’s spooky,” she said, patting the grass beside her. Tommy sat down where she’d indicated, leaning over to kiss her self-consciously. “He was supposed to be dead, ye ken.”
“What?” Stuart, however spooky he might be, had always seemed pretty alive to Tommy. He looked back at the treeline where Stuart had vanished. “But he’s –”
“Oh, he’s alive,” Fiona said confidently. “But he has one foot in the otherworld and one set in Brigadoon. They thought he was dead when they asked for the Miracle, and he wasna here when we woke up to the mists.”
Tommy blinked. “So he – he’s – is that possible?”
“Well, there are no proper rules for such a thing.” She frowned. “I dinna know the facts of the matter – I doubt e’en Master Lundie does – but he shouldna ha’ been able to return. He went off to fight, ye see,” she added at Tommy’s look of confusion. “In the Rising, that was.”
“The ’45?” Tommy said, trying to remember what he knew of Scottish history. It wasn’t much. “Jacobites and the Bonnie Prince Charlie and all that?”
“I dinna know about bonnie, but aye, the prince. Tearlach mac Seamus.”
Tommy blinked at the incomprehensible Gaelic syllables. “…what?”
Fiona sighed. “We shall ha’ to teach ye the Gaelic. It means Charles, son of James. James would be the king – the Scots king, not the English king.
“So Stuart went off to join the army,” Tommy prodded.
“Yes, he did – well, no, that’s not entirely right. He ran off, ye see. In the dark o’ the night. And he took his father’s sword. His da had forbidden him to go, since the family business was to be his, but it must ha’ seemed very romantic to Stuart – he was all of sixteen at the time. Prince Tearlach’s men had come through a few days past, askin’ for volunteers, but the men o’ Brigadoon were loath to commit to such a thing.”
Tommy was thinking of the war he’d just fought. “Yeah,” he said. “I can see why.” Then he paused. “Wait. If the ’45 was in 1745, and it’s 1746 – or whatever – now, and Stuart was sixteen – I mean, he’s not sixteen now. Or even seventeen.”
“Well, that is one o’ the odd things about the Miracle. I dinna think it works exactly as Master Lundie explains it. Stuart was twenty-four when he returned, which was almost a year gone. And the Miracle has been in place since the English king’s army came toward Brigadoon – a year and a half, for us.” She paused with her head cocked to one side, but her fingers kept moving, bright colors flashing against her skin. “But eight years for Stuart. Time passes differently, I think, in Brigadoon and in the outside world. Not every hundred years, but it is a good number. Brigadoon appears when it’s needed, or wanted – it came to you, ye see.”
“What about Stuart?”
Fiona shook her head. “I dinna ken exactly what happened. I was half in love wi’ him when he ran off, ye see, but no one kens what happened to him in the years since he left and when he returned. He fought in the war, o’ course, but I dinna ken where he went or what he did in the years after. There was a lady, I think – Maggie Anderson says it was a British lady and she died, but Maggie is a gossip and doesna ken what she’s talkin’ about.”
“There was a lady,” Stuart said, strolling back into view. “And I’ll thank ye not to speak of her in vain. Ye dinna ken what ye’re speakin’ of, and it does nothing but make you seem as much a gossip as Maggie Anderson.”
Tommy turned toward him, drawing his knee up by his chest. “You know,” he said, “my parents didn’t want me to fight in the war either.”
“Is that so?” Stuart said. He was staring off into the mists.
“I went off and enlisted the weekend they went to Washington on business,” he said. “I ended up in the same battalion as Jeff, and we got shipped off to France. We ended up with a bunch of Brits, and some Frenchmen – some Scots, too,” he added. “I’ve never been so scared in my life. After D-Day, the Pacific War was still going on, and there was a rumor we’d be shipped out to Hawaii to fight the Japs, but then President ordered the bomb dropped, so they shipped us home instead.”
“It sounds a wee bit more exciting than my war story,” Stuart said dryly. “Most of the Highland army died on Culloden Field, and I dinna ken why I wasna one o’ them. So many brave men met their ends that day – and I lived. I wished I’d died, though.” He sat down slowly, broadswords crossed on the ground in front of him. He pulled his dirk out of his belt and laid it carefully across his lap, letting his fingers stroke down the worn leather of the sheath. “The years followin’ the Rising were not a good time to be a Scotsman, and a worse time to be a Scots soldier. I still dinna ken why the English didna shoot me like they did most o’ the survivin’ Scots. They shot the officers. I heard the gunshots, and I saw the pyres where they burned the dead.”
Quietly, Tommy said, “They buried the bodies in mass graves. Jeff and I went to Culloden when we were stationed in Scotland, and the stones are still there. Worn, a little faded, but still there. People put heather and white roses on the stones.”
Stuart closed his eyes. “That’s good to know,” he said. “It’s good to know what we did wasna forgotten, even after – what was it, Tommy? Two hundred years?”
“1946.”
“It’s good to know,” he repeated. “Aye, well, I wasna shot, much as I wished it.” He touched his leg. “Death would ha’ been a relief, I think. They were goin’ t’ take it off.”
Fiona touched one hand to her mouth. “Oh, Stuart!” she said. “How –”
“I dinna ken for sure,” he murmured, staring down at the crossed swords in front of him. “I was fevered at the time, and the next time I woke and kent what was what I was in prison. They say the walls of Ardsmuir Prison are four feet thick,” he said suddenly, eyes bright and sure. “I would say they are five.”
“No,” Tommy said, poking dubiously at the ground with the broadsword Charlie had handed him. “I don’t know how to use a sword. It’s not really something we need to know in America.”
“Ye dinna ken how to use a sword?” Charlie said. “Then your land must be a peaceable one indeed – aye, I have had occasion to use my dirk myself, even in a place such as Brigadoon, and my brother fought for the bonnie prince just this past year.”
Tommy blinked, tracing the essence of the phrase out of the Scotsman’s tangle of accent and unfamiliar words. “No, a war just ended – a big war, World War II. I served in France – Jeff and I both did – but we don’t use swords anymore. We use guns now.” He was about to add an explanation about the atomic bomb, but he wasn’t sure if Charlie would understand it.
Charlie’s expression was dubious. “A world war, hmm?” he said. “Now that, surely, is the stuff of tales. I have never heard tell of such a thing. And ye say it was the second one?”
“Yeah. There was World War I in 1914, and then World War II, that just ended last year. The Allies – Britain, America, France – we were fighting the Germans and the Japs.”
“The Japs?”
“The Japanese. They’re on the other side of the world, across the ocean on the other side of America.” Tommy swept an arm out in the direction of what he hoped was west.
“Och,” Charlie said in disbelief. “Well, then.” He raised his broadsword as lightly as though it was a table knife. “Ye still have this, then. Ye must learn it before the wedding, elsewise auld Andrew willna let you marry Fiona.”
Tommy blinked. “Why not?”
“Why, ye willna be able to defend her. Ye said ye were promised to a girl in America, aye? If ye couldna defend her, then how could her father agree to let ye marry her? Or did she no’ have a father?”
“Well,” Tommy said, thinking of the mousy John Ashton, “she definitely had a father. But it was the mother that was the real problem.”
“Aye, it can be like that sometimes,” Fiona said from her seat at the foot of a tall ash. “Mistress Anderson, for example. If she kent half of what Maggie got up to –” Charlie flushed a dark crimson, and Fiona shot him a sharp look.
“Husbands don’t really have to – to defend their wives anymore,” Tommy said. “Or – not in my – my time, anyway.”
Charlie gave him a scandalized look. “Then it is a very poor time to live in,” he said. “Ye will just give your wife to whosoever should ask for her, then? What about bandits? What about British?”
“There aren’t any bandits,” Tommy said. “Most women can take care of themselves; they’ve done it fine for the past couple years, when all the men were away fighting in Europe and the Pacific.”
“But –”
“Ye say that as if we ha’ something to fear, Charlie,” Fiona said dryly. “We live in Brigadoon, remember? It will be a powerful bad evil that should find us here.”
“Still,” Charlie said. “They do come, ye ken. Now and then. Ye hold the sword like this, Tommy. Here.” He showed Tommy his grip. “And ye keep it out in front of ye, like so. Now, wi’ a broadsword, ye’ll want to come down from above, like so –”
“Ye’re doin’ it wrong,” Stuart Dalrymple said, seemingly materializing out of the mists that continuously surrounded Brigadoon. “Aye, ye are, Charlie – dinna argue wi’ me when ye ken I’ve the right of it.”
Charlie shut his mouth with an audible snap. “Ye show him then, if ye ken what you’re doin’ so well.”
Stuart eyed him a minute with those odd blue eyes Tommy had noticed before. For a moment he thought Stuart would refuse, then the older Scotsman reached for his brother’s sword. “Too light,” he muttered, hefting it, “but it will do, I suppose. Ye hold it like this, Tommy – no, not like that, ye look like ye’re tryin’ to hold up a mountain. What d’ye mean by givin’ him live steel his first time, Charlie? Run back to th’ house and get two of the poles Da and I were usin’ for the shop.”
Much to Tommy’s astonishment, the usually argumentative Charlie obeyed without question. Tommy watched him disappear into the mists with his mouth half-open in surprise.
“Ye look a bit like a frog,” Stuart teased, reaching to pry Tommy’s fingers off the huge basket-hilt of the sword. “Ye dinna need one of these, though ‘tis good to good to know how to use. A dirk should suit ye just as well. Ye willna be goin’ far, I think, and I or my brother or some of the other lads will come at a shout. Give me one of those when Charlie returns, aye? And if he doesna, well, then I dinna doubt his lady wife’s got him in her clutches.” He gave Fiona a courtly bow and walked away, both swords firmly in hand as though they weighed nothing.
Tommy looked uncertainly back at Fiona. “Is it me, or is he –” he searched fruitlessly for a word and finally settled for the one that came first to mind, “– spooky?” It was something he’d been wondering since he’d come to Brigadoon.
Fiona smiled at him, fingers busy in that arcane ritual she called needlework. Or maybe it was knitting, or spinning, or something equally bizarre. Tommy frowned suddenly. “Oh, aye, he’s spooky,” she said, patting the grass beside her. Tommy sat down where she’d indicated, leaning over to kiss her self-consciously. “He was supposed to be dead, ye ken.”
“What?” Stuart, however spooky he might be, had always seemed pretty alive to Tommy. He looked back at the treeline where Stuart had vanished. “But he’s –”
“Oh, he’s alive,” Fiona said confidently. “But he has one foot in the otherworld and one set in Brigadoon. They thought he was dead when they asked for the Miracle, and he wasna here when we woke up to the mists.”
Tommy blinked. “So he – he’s – is that possible?”
“Well, there are no proper rules for such a thing.” She frowned. “I dinna know the facts of the matter – I doubt e’en Master Lundie does – but he shouldna ha’ been able to return. He went off to fight, ye see,” she added at Tommy’s look of confusion. “In the Rising, that was.”
“The ’45?” Tommy said, trying to remember what he knew of Scottish history. It wasn’t much. “Jacobites and the Bonnie Prince Charlie and all that?”
“I dinna know about bonnie, but aye, the prince. Tearlach mac Seamus.”
Tommy blinked at the incomprehensible Gaelic syllables. “…what?”
Fiona sighed. “We shall ha’ to teach ye the Gaelic. It means Charles, son of James. James would be the king – the Scots king, not the English king.
“So Stuart went off to join the army,” Tommy prodded.
“Yes, he did – well, no, that’s not entirely right. He ran off, ye see. In the dark o’ the night. And he took his father’s sword. His da had forbidden him to go, since the family business was to be his, but it must ha’ seemed very romantic to Stuart – he was all of sixteen at the time. Prince Tearlach’s men had come through a few days past, askin’ for volunteers, but the men o’ Brigadoon were loath to commit to such a thing.”
Tommy was thinking of the war he’d just fought. “Yeah,” he said. “I can see why.” Then he paused. “Wait. If the ’45 was in 1745, and it’s 1746 – or whatever – now, and Stuart was sixteen – I mean, he’s not sixteen now. Or even seventeen.”
“Well, that is one o’ the odd things about the Miracle. I dinna think it works exactly as Master Lundie explains it. Stuart was twenty-four when he returned, which was almost a year gone. And the Miracle has been in place since the English king’s army came toward Brigadoon – a year and a half, for us.” She paused with her head cocked to one side, but her fingers kept moving, bright colors flashing against her skin. “But eight years for Stuart. Time passes differently, I think, in Brigadoon and in the outside world. Not every hundred years, but it is a good number. Brigadoon appears when it’s needed, or wanted – it came to you, ye see.”
“What about Stuart?”
Fiona shook her head. “I dinna ken exactly what happened. I was half in love wi’ him when he ran off, ye see, but no one kens what happened to him in the years since he left and when he returned. He fought in the war, o’ course, but I dinna ken where he went or what he did in the years after. There was a lady, I think – Maggie Anderson says it was a British lady and she died, but Maggie is a gossip and doesna ken what she’s talkin’ about.”
“There was a lady,” Stuart said, strolling back into view. “And I’ll thank ye not to speak of her in vain. Ye dinna ken what ye’re speakin’ of, and it does nothing but make you seem as much a gossip as Maggie Anderson.”
Tommy turned toward him, drawing his knee up by his chest. “You know,” he said, “my parents didn’t want me to fight in the war either.”
“Is that so?” Stuart said. He was staring off into the mists.
“I went off and enlisted the weekend they went to Washington on business,” he said. “I ended up in the same battalion as Jeff, and we got shipped off to France. We ended up with a bunch of Brits, and some Frenchmen – some Scots, too,” he added. “I’ve never been so scared in my life. After D-Day, the Pacific War was still going on, and there was a rumor we’d be shipped out to Hawaii to fight the Japs, but then President ordered the bomb dropped, so they shipped us home instead.”
“It sounds a wee bit more exciting than my war story,” Stuart said dryly. “Most of the Highland army died on Culloden Field, and I dinna ken why I wasna one o’ them. So many brave men met their ends that day – and I lived. I wished I’d died, though.” He sat down slowly, broadswords crossed on the ground in front of him. He pulled his dirk out of his belt and laid it carefully across his lap, letting his fingers stroke down the worn leather of the sheath. “The years followin’ the Rising were not a good time to be a Scotsman, and a worse time to be a Scots soldier. I still dinna ken why the English didna shoot me like they did most o’ the survivin’ Scots. They shot the officers. I heard the gunshots, and I saw the pyres where they burned the dead.”
Quietly, Tommy said, “They buried the bodies in mass graves. Jeff and I went to Culloden when we were stationed in Scotland, and the stones are still there. Worn, a little faded, but still there. People put heather and white roses on the stones.”
Stuart closed his eyes. “That’s good to know,” he said. “It’s good to know what we did wasna forgotten, even after – what was it, Tommy? Two hundred years?”
“1946.”
“It’s good to know,” he repeated. “Aye, well, I wasna shot, much as I wished it.” He touched his leg. “Death would ha’ been a relief, I think. They were goin’ t’ take it off.”
Fiona touched one hand to her mouth. “Oh, Stuart!” she said. “How –”
“I dinna ken for sure,” he murmured, staring down at the crossed swords in front of him. “I was fevered at the time, and the next time I woke and kent what was what I was in prison. They say the walls of Ardsmuir Prison are four feet thick,” he said suddenly, eyes bright and sure. “I would say they are five.”