The Parson's Planet (for sg1danny)
Title: The Parson's Planet
Author: boosette
Recipient: sg1danny
Pairing: Gen
Words: ~4300
Rating: PG/K
Summary/Prompt/Notes: Season Three team spends Christmas offworld.
Obviously takes place during season three, before The Devil You Know/Jolinar's Memories. Thanks to almightychrissy for the superquick beta.
Also, there are shout-outs to Geoffery Chaucer, Neil Gaiman and Connie Willis within the text itself.
***
Bob-Up-And-Down did not, technically, exist.
And it had Christians.
Damnably devout, those Christians.
It had belonged to Sokar once upon a time, before Sokar lost the world to a Goa'uld called Quetzal. Quetzal in turn brokered a deal with the trickster Urisk, trading Bob-Up-And-Down for a pleasantly tropical but strategically malplaced planet. When Sokar conquered Urisk, Bob-Up-And-Down was not yet recorded as part of Urisk's realm, Quetzal and the other two witnesses to the trade were long dead and Sokar did not know he had reacquired his lost rock.
Which was good.
Bob-Up-And-Down was just four days by hyperspace from Netu, close enough to get to in a pinch and far enough away to remain unnoticed and it was supposed -- supposed -- to have a Stargate.
Which would be helpful if Crauley ever found the blasted thing. Which had mysteriously vanished. Or gotten buried. Or been dismembered and scattered across the globe. Could a stargate even be dismembered?
Were bodies dismembered and things dismantled?
In the mean time, anyway, Crauley planned to lay low and enjoy being a god again.
Lord.
King.
God.
Divine-right-ruler: God put him in charge and the Bobbers treated him like he was divine himself; Crauley never was much of one to bother with semantics, not when it was luxury or a stake out in the capital square with his name on it.
They'd burned Christians at stakes like those, back in the good old days. Thrown them to the lions. Had them fight bloody battles against well-armed gladiators with nothing but a papery shield and a butter knife to defend themselves. Long live the days of bread and circuses. Except for the part where circuses were more human politiking than gladiatorial gore, although the crashes had frequently proved quite entertaining.
He had liked the Romans. The Romans knew how to party in a way that even the people on that planet that belonged to that Goa'uld who wanted to do the super high-speed evolution thing could not match. Because the Romans, well, they had partied for its own sake, not just because they were going to die in three months.
The stakes thing, though, in hindsight, had probably been more than a little stupid: something about watching people and get crisped up and cut up and torn up in pieces with songs on their lips had inspired more conversion than it did fear. Couldn't have your prisoners going around converting your torturers, now could you?
Best to avoid all that this time around.
Because Crauley wasn't stupid, after all.
***
After a moment's hesitation, Selmak dipped his head and Jacob continued, "-- Crauley, well. Crauley's a tough nut to crack. He's sort of the Tok'ra's big brother, the last of Egeria's living offspring from before she turned against the Goa'uld. Crauley's low-grade evil; he would rather be unobtrusive and safe indefinitely than powerful and potentially dead very quickly. He has his own set of contacts, and every now and then he throws us a bone. This one was supposed to be big, except that now he's dropped off the face of the galaxy."
"Obvious question," Jack said, twirling his pen idly in one hand. Even this far underground, July was setting in and fighting the air conditioning in earnest. Every surface above Level Thirteen was covered in a sticky film of damp. The levels below Thirteen wouldn't be safe much longer. "Why not track him down yourselves?"
"We have," Selmak replied, "Four operatives have come back in stasis pods, one each for symbiote and host, in order to humiliate them. Crauley refuses to speak with us, and we believe you may have better luck." Jacob added, "I never said he wasn't the kind of brother who gives you atomic wedgies and puts worms in your bed, but the information he has could change the course of our work against Sokar. That he's hiding out only confirms that this is big."
***
The Gateroom on P8X-847, and it was a Gateroom, even covered in the gold wallpaper mockup that the snakes and 1975 both loved, lit up around them as soon as the wormhole disengaged.
It took twenty minutes to find the control panel for the rings, hidden behind an extremely dusty gold throne. One of the throne's legs was about two inches shorter than the other three. The rings themselves popped up and back down again in a whoosh of dust.
"Alright, kids," Jack said, motioning to the platform and stepping over. There was no other way out of the room, just the walls, throne and gate. It was planned like this, the positioning of everything laid out in a way that all but shouted it was meant to be held.
Daniel punched another set of commands into the control pad and the four of them clustered together in the center of the rings --
***
-- "There does not appear to be a control for the ring device on this end," Teal'c said, a moment after they were transported outside into a crunchy, winter-brown field by the side of a dirt road.
And there wasn't. A controller. There were cows, though, and a lot of them. Big black and white heifers, lots of the dead-brown grass, a treeline half a mile away close to the road and a fence.
A cow mooed and ambled over.
"Well, I can see why Crauley chose this planet to hide out on," Daniel said. The cow turned at the sound of his voice and tipped her head to one side, probably completely at a loss what to make of them.
"We have twelve days to work with before we have to check back in," Jack said as he glanced around. Nothing indicated, implied or otherwise warned against danger; there was nothing so much as a farmhouse within eyeshot. "Plenty of time to find whatever ruins the controller is in."
The rest of his team noticed the weird air of safety, too. Carter was already filling her little jars with the local dirt. That would be a great conversation starter: oh yes, we went to -847 and found many, many piles of naqahdah-enriched manure while we were there. No fortresses or runaway Tok'ra semi-sortof-part time-operatives, at least yet, but bullshit: that there was plenty of.
***
On the road, after a cursory recon of the immediate area, they followed what Daniel described as the smell of civilization: that was to say, the mix of woodsmoke, cow and a vague overnote of garbage and rapidly spoiling meat that usually led to the nearest town. The road itself at least was dry, high in the middle between wagon-ruts. They wouldn't be getting any useful technology from the people here.
A while afterwards, the sound of voices drifted over to them. Teal'c, on point, caught it first, stopped and waited.
It was singing.
Singing?
"Is that -- ?" Daniel began, straining to hear the chords with his eyes narrowed and his brows drawn inward in concentration.
"Ave Maria?" Carter finished, looking equally puzzled.
Teal'c half asked, half said, "The prayer has been set to music?"
How Teal'c had learned that it was a prayer but avoided finding out it was a song was beyond Jack. Before Daniel could give his already-prepared lecture about Latin music and prayers and other stuff Jack knew he had squirreled away in his head somewhere, he signaled his team back to the treeline and that he would go check the singers out himself. He heard the beginnings of a whispered history as he moved off through the trees.
The voices turned to shouting by the time Jack could see the people in question, all dressed like something out of a low-budget medieval reenactment.
"Oh no," one of the men said, "Oh no no no no no ... " He was speaking to a girl and a boy, both teenagers.
"It is true, father, I would never lie about something so grave," the girl said. He was close enough to see the enormous grin on the girl's face.
"Isobel!" the boy said, and when he did, his voice cracked, dropping very low on the 'o' and rising again almost to a falsetto on 'bel.'
"Oh, piss," the man said, and turned around once, then back, and kicked the side their wagon hard enough that it shook. Something inside the wagon fell with the crash of shattering glass.
The other members of the party watched the scene from a safe distance.
"Lord Crauley wouldn't even notice, father, and I know all of the Mary line--"
"Stop! There will be none of that nonsense," the father said, and stalked off. A moment later he shouted at the assembled crowd to stop staring and make themselves useful, damn everything.
***
The Magpie Tavern was crowded full of the afternoon's minstrels, apparently one big extended family that traveled around the country performing Corpus Christi plays. Around Easter, the kids' father and de facto leader of this branch, had said that they would meet up again in the capital to perform everything from the birth through the passion as well as a specially commissioned rendition of the apocalypse as it occurred in the Book of Revelation.
Assuming the nativity play went well this Christmas.
It was not looking to go well at Christmas, what with no Mary and all.
"We have no Mary!" he had very close to wailed into his mug of beer. The beer was decent, but after one smell of the town Jack had decided they were sticking to MREs on this mission. No one had objected.
"That kinda sucks," Jack had said seriously.
"This shall be our end!"
"Can't anyone else play Mary this year?" Jack had asked, and the man, Thomas, had glared at him.
"My daughter knows the lines, and for any other performance would have been adequate, but this is for our Lord Crauley. Tis not appropriate for a woman to stand and play before such a man as our Lord! John was the best Mary we've had in years!"
Jack had contemplated his own beer for a long while, then, letting Thomas think he had no idea what to do. Just when the minstrel had looked like a sixteen ton anvil had fallen on his head a la Wile E. Coyote, Jack had said, "I could loan you a Mary, if you want. I mean, get me and my people in to see Lord Crauley, and my Mary is all yours."
Which was why Carter was sitting across the room with Isobel, John, and the man who had played Mary before John, pretending to be a eunuch and having lines drilled into her head.
"Not like that," Isobel snapped, "You're not playing Herod, by the Holy Cross!"
Oh, he had had to order her to do it, but once Carter found out that "backstage" in the royal performance constituted most of the palace compound, and that the play took almost six hours, and that there was probably some neat techy stuff hidden away in Crauley's drawers and cabinets she hadn't been anywhere near as disgruntled at the idea as when Jack first came up with it.
***
Four days into the eight-day trip to the capital, Carter had already surprised everyone by already knowing, essentially, three of the four songs Mary was supposed to spout out in front of Crauley, and by having an okay voice. She had muttered something about mass and Christmas songs and Latin always being the same no matter what part of the world Jacob had been stationed in and quickly excused herself to continue learning her spoken lines.
It was trying to snow and failing, most of the flakes melting before they hit the ground and the ones that hadn't lasting less than a second once they made contact with solid earth. The road twenty yards away from the camp would be a long, twisty stream of mud by morning or, on the off chance it froze, iced-over. The cold wet stood just to one side of being really, really uncomfortable and every so often, usually with a wind-chill that felt like minus thirty but couldn't have been less than minus ten, stepped over and back.
Cold, wet, Medieval English Christmas planet with apparently friendly locals who probably liked them definitely beat mosquito-infested, blast-furnace hot, foggy tropical planet with cannibalistic locals who didn't like them at all hands down.
Daniel came to take over watch just after one of those winds finished passing by. "I've been talking to John," he said.
"Oh?" John was, Jack had learned, fifteen years old and had spent the last five days with his head hidden beneath a ghoulish cowl, sulking.
"He's replacing one of the shepherds, Alyn. Alyn has no voice to speak of right now. He's very upset about it; John, I mean. Alyn is trying to convince the royal goldsmith to take him on as an apprentice. He's glad he'll have some time to actually do it."
"And this is a problem, because?"
Daniel shrugged. "I don't think it's anything to be worried about, but John was apparently friendly with one of Crauley's human servants, last time they were here. I don't think it's nothing, but I don't necessarily think it's something, either."
Jack thought about that for a moment. He had had a girlfriend in high school who was involved in theater, and even though the worst he'd experienced was being commandeered for stage crew against both his free will and better judgment, he had still seen and heard enough about the stuff that happened in that black box to know it was one big bucket of drama. And this felt a lot like that. "We'll keep an eye on him," Jack replied, moving off, "Make sure he doesn't do anything stupid."
***
Lord Crauley did not look like a goa'uld. Didn't deck his halls much like one, either, past the matching but unbroken throne to the one from -847's Gateroom.
Sometime in the afternoon of the third day it had started snowing for real. Isobel's mother, a tiny woman with a large voice, had fallen in beside him an said that her brother had told Thomas that Jack wanted to know how long they would actually be in the capital, and how long the minstrels needed Carter for. The woman had said three days with three performances each, including the grand performance before Lord Crauley on Christmas Day, immediately following Christmas Eve's midnight to dawn marathon mass.
That night, after talking with a failed monk among the travelers, Daniel had taken to calling -847 The Parson's Planet. Which probably fit in a convoluted, towering pile of wobbly Janga blocks sort of way, but Jack didn't claim to have known enough English literature to get the heart of the reference, only the source. "Canterbury Tales, right?" he had asked, and Daniel nodded and grinned.
"Never read it," Jack had gone on. Although, if Daniel ever wanted to name a planet after a fourteenth-century Spanish naval stratagem, he would be right there. They really just needed the right planet, and when it hit, he was pretty sure Daniel's face would stick in the expression he made in response.
The first eight performances had gone well, although Carter had started digging around in her tak vest halfway through and come out with a package of cough drops. There was lots of cheering and lots of whispering after the show about the new Mary, and who "he" could possibly be, and could he possibly be from Ainswell? which must have been a town on the minstrels' route.
Crauley's eyes went wide and flashed, just a little, when he finally noticed Jack, Daniel and Teal'c, all still in uniform, in the middle of the assembled crowd. He was short for a snake, in the kind of body that could slip away unnoticed in a tight spot, and that said a lot about the personality hiding away in his head. It was the kind of thing the Tok'ra did, but from his speech he was pretending to be a divine-right king.
"And now," Crauley announced with a sweeping wave of his scepter, "I shall announce the name of the man who will be Lord of Tomorrow!"
"That's strange," Daniel murmured.
"Indeed," Teal'c replied, "No Goa'uld would ever cede his power, even for one day. I do believe Jacob Carter's description of Crauley as 'half-Tok'ra' was an accurate one."
"Half-Tok'ra, guys," Jack said back, lowly, "We still can't trust him."
"Not that," Daniel said, motioning to the dais where Crauley was placing his own crown on John Beck's -- the minstrels' John Beck's, the former Mary's -- head. Daniel continued, "on Earth, the tradition of making a local subject king for the day is linked to April Fool's Day, not Christmas."
John knelt and removed the crown. Crauley stared straight at the three members of SG-1 present, his eyes narrowed and his lips curled down. John spoke, saying how he could not accept the crown from such a great lord as Crauley, et cetera and so forth repeat until nauseas, with Crauley arguing back and the two of them finally coming to an agreement that John would be king for an hour in exactly three days.
"I must fulfill my duty, my Lord," John said, "For my brother's health has deserted him and I am to be a shepherd in his place this fine afternoon!"
"Yes, yes!" Crauley shouted, reclaiming his crown and turning toward the audience. "There is a performance set for just now! Let young John be at my right hand in spirit and let this re-acting of the Nativity begin forthwith!"
***
The first few minutes of the play were okay, actually. Wise Men being decent astronomers; Herod making a gigantic, NID-esque ass of himself; livestock on the stage. (Where did the camel come from, anyway? Jack did not remember a camel with their caravan.)
The second after Carter stepped into view, though, Isobel stood from her place in the back of the audience and came at the stage at a full run. "That is no man!" she shouted, pointing at Carter, "She is a woman! There is a woman on the stage. A woman! This is not proper!"
Then the guards came, and of course they grabbed the three guys in the funny (relatively speaking) clothes in addition to taking Carter off stage, and of course they had some weird chemically stuff that knocked them all unconscious for the several hours it took them to wake up in Crauley's dungeon.
***
"Who are you?" Crauley demanded. "What do you think you're doing here? You don't need to be here!"
"Oh, nothing much," Jack said, "We were just in the neighborhood, thought we'd drop in and tell you the Tok'ra say you never write, never call, probably don't even care about them anymore. The High Council wants to know what kind of a big brother you think you are, ignoring them like that." Close up, Crauley reminded Jack of the guy from the Ernest movies. Jack half expected the snake to reply with 'whaddya mean, Vern?'
Crauley replied, instead, with a flounce of his red and gold brocade over-robe and, "The Tok'Ra are dead to me! They leave me in Sokar's loving hands without so much as a cargo ship in reserve to come to my aid, and when the mission all goes horribly wrong they expect me to turn aroung and come back to them without offering up so much as an apology? I’ve had it with them!" Crauley stalked off, leaned in and said something in what sounded vaguely like the Latin from the play and vaguely like Goa'uld to the guard.
The dungeon was actually in a tower, with hay on the floor, a bucket of water on one end and another, empty bucket for a latrine on the other, and a single slit in the wall for a window. The room itself took up half the tower, with two guards and a set of iron bars to keep them in, and a hole in the floor between their cell and another cell across the walkway that must have been the only exit.
Daniel turned around once, then said, "Yep. Definitely The Parson's Planet."
The guard regarded Crauley briefly, nodded once, glanced back at SG-1, snorted and turned around to continue guarding.
"What'd he say?" Jack asked once Crauley was gone.
"I can't be sure," Daniel replied, "but I think it was something like, 'These are the four who are feared by the false gods who would enslave you. I must pray to Our Lord Jesus Christ to know what I must do with them.' Judging by his choice of demonstrative pronoun, I don't think Jesus is going to tell Crauley to give us a fruitcake and send us home," Daniel replied.
Teal'c looked so completely impassive that it was obvious to anyone who had known him for more than five minutes that he was also completely disgusted.
The guards changed over every eight to ten hours, giving them between five and fifteen minutes to plan. On the third change-over, Carter pulled a small crystal out of her bra and tossed it to Jack, saying, "I didn't have the chance to look at it closely, but whatever Crauley learned about Sokar, it's on that. Merry Christmas, Sir." She gave a half-grin.
They got three minutes into hashing out their plan to escape when the new guard showed up.
***
After two days in the cell they weren't really doing that well, as far as daring escapes went.
Plan A: Get in, talk to Crauley, return with vital information re: Sokar's plans in time for the Annual NORAD/SGC Fourth of July Barbecue. Plan A had included a cookoff between NORAD's General Gaines and General Hammond; Gaines insisted that his own North Carolina style barbecue was superior in every way to Texas style barbecue. This could obviously only ever end one way.
Plan B: Find Crauley, talk to him, find the ring-device controller and get home just in time to miss the barbecue but hear all about it anyway. Plan B had started with singing and ended pretty poorly, for all that they still had their GDO and that they’d gotten information they came for in the first place.
Plan C: Pick the lock to the cell door, tie and lock up the guard, proceed with Plan B. Get home before anyone attempts a rescue and gets themselves ringed into the middle of a cow field.
Jack figured they would come up with Plan D when they needed it, sometime in the middle of Plan C falling apart.
***
They waited out the remaining guard's shift uncomfortably, each trying by turn to sleep and each failing for the most part. Not looking too suspicious was easy; the guard was the same one who had take the first guard's place, which made this what? Day three?
The guard kept his head cocked to one side, listening carefully for the church bell that marked the time here, and when it began ringing noon, he stood up a tiny bit straighter and looked extra-attentive.
Then the door in the floor opened, a gold-crowned head emerging first, followed by a young man in what had to be a set of oversized royal robes. "Come on," John said, "I'm only Lord for an hour." John motioned for the guard to go; the guard hesitated.
"You know," Daniel said, "He is your monarch right now. Lord John could have you executed for failing to obey, if this world is anything like its Earth-analogue, which it appears to be."
"Don't think I won't, not for a moment," John said, drawing the sword he definitely didn't know how to use from his belt. When the guard hesitated again, John pressed the tip to the guard's throat and glared. It wasn't a very frightening glare, but combined with, "Obey your lord!" it got the guard to head off, if only for reinforcements.
John did not, however, have the key to the cell.
"Don't just stand there, Carter," Jack said, motioning to the lock.
***
The worst of the heat wave had passed over by the time they ringed back to -847's Gateroom and stepped through the gate back to Colorado. The recycled air was dry and cool, and smelled like oil and something else that could only be smelled this far underground, without so much as a hint of cow or rotting food. Refrigeration-free planets always reminded Jack exactly how much worse the commissary's fare could be.
"-- was a ring device in the same group of room where I found the crystal. John told us they shuffled around a few people and let him play Mary one more time, " Carter finished at the end of the briefing. "I guess he wanted to help us out, Sir."
General Hammond nodded to that, thankfully. "I'm just glad you got back when you did, and that you found the information we were looking for. We were about to send another team in to get you."
After a short silence -- Jack didn't even want to think about the kind of rescue effort retrieving a team from that planet would take -- he asked, "So, Sir, who won the Fourth of July Cookoff?"
Hammond gave him a look that said the General did not want to talk about it.
Author: boosette
Recipient: sg1danny
Pairing: Gen
Words: ~4300
Rating: PG/K
Summary/Prompt/Notes: Season Three team spends Christmas offworld.
Obviously takes place during season three, before The Devil You Know/Jolinar's Memories. Thanks to almightychrissy for the superquick beta.
Also, there are shout-outs to Geoffery Chaucer, Neil Gaiman and Connie Willis within the text itself.
***
Bob-Up-And-Down did not, technically, exist.
And it had Christians.
Damnably devout, those Christians.
It had belonged to Sokar once upon a time, before Sokar lost the world to a Goa'uld called Quetzal. Quetzal in turn brokered a deal with the trickster Urisk, trading Bob-Up-And-Down for a pleasantly tropical but strategically malplaced planet. When Sokar conquered Urisk, Bob-Up-And-Down was not yet recorded as part of Urisk's realm, Quetzal and the other two witnesses to the trade were long dead and Sokar did not know he had reacquired his lost rock.
Which was good.
Bob-Up-And-Down was just four days by hyperspace from Netu, close enough to get to in a pinch and far enough away to remain unnoticed and it was supposed -- supposed -- to have a Stargate.
Which would be helpful if Crauley ever found the blasted thing. Which had mysteriously vanished. Or gotten buried. Or been dismembered and scattered across the globe. Could a stargate even be dismembered?
Were bodies dismembered and things dismantled?
In the mean time, anyway, Crauley planned to lay low and enjoy being a god again.
Lord.
King.
God.
Divine-right-ruler: God put him in charge and the Bobbers treated him like he was divine himself; Crauley never was much of one to bother with semantics, not when it was luxury or a stake out in the capital square with his name on it.
They'd burned Christians at stakes like those, back in the good old days. Thrown them to the lions. Had them fight bloody battles against well-armed gladiators with nothing but a papery shield and a butter knife to defend themselves. Long live the days of bread and circuses. Except for the part where circuses were more human politiking than gladiatorial gore, although the crashes had frequently proved quite entertaining.
He had liked the Romans. The Romans knew how to party in a way that even the people on that planet that belonged to that Goa'uld who wanted to do the super high-speed evolution thing could not match. Because the Romans, well, they had partied for its own sake, not just because they were going to die in three months.
The stakes thing, though, in hindsight, had probably been more than a little stupid: something about watching people and get crisped up and cut up and torn up in pieces with songs on their lips had inspired more conversion than it did fear. Couldn't have your prisoners going around converting your torturers, now could you?
Best to avoid all that this time around.
Because Crauley wasn't stupid, after all.
***
After a moment's hesitation, Selmak dipped his head and Jacob continued, "-- Crauley, well. Crauley's a tough nut to crack. He's sort of the Tok'ra's big brother, the last of Egeria's living offspring from before she turned against the Goa'uld. Crauley's low-grade evil; he would rather be unobtrusive and safe indefinitely than powerful and potentially dead very quickly. He has his own set of contacts, and every now and then he throws us a bone. This one was supposed to be big, except that now he's dropped off the face of the galaxy."
"Obvious question," Jack said, twirling his pen idly in one hand. Even this far underground, July was setting in and fighting the air conditioning in earnest. Every surface above Level Thirteen was covered in a sticky film of damp. The levels below Thirteen wouldn't be safe much longer. "Why not track him down yourselves?"
"We have," Selmak replied, "Four operatives have come back in stasis pods, one each for symbiote and host, in order to humiliate them. Crauley refuses to speak with us, and we believe you may have better luck." Jacob added, "I never said he wasn't the kind of brother who gives you atomic wedgies and puts worms in your bed, but the information he has could change the course of our work against Sokar. That he's hiding out only confirms that this is big."
***
The Gateroom on P8X-847, and it was a Gateroom, even covered in the gold wallpaper mockup that the snakes and 1975 both loved, lit up around them as soon as the wormhole disengaged.
It took twenty minutes to find the control panel for the rings, hidden behind an extremely dusty gold throne. One of the throne's legs was about two inches shorter than the other three. The rings themselves popped up and back down again in a whoosh of dust.
"Alright, kids," Jack said, motioning to the platform and stepping over. There was no other way out of the room, just the walls, throne and gate. It was planned like this, the positioning of everything laid out in a way that all but shouted it was meant to be held.
Daniel punched another set of commands into the control pad and the four of them clustered together in the center of the rings --
***
-- "There does not appear to be a control for the ring device on this end," Teal'c said, a moment after they were transported outside into a crunchy, winter-brown field by the side of a dirt road.
And there wasn't. A controller. There were cows, though, and a lot of them. Big black and white heifers, lots of the dead-brown grass, a treeline half a mile away close to the road and a fence.
A cow mooed and ambled over.
"Well, I can see why Crauley chose this planet to hide out on," Daniel said. The cow turned at the sound of his voice and tipped her head to one side, probably completely at a loss what to make of them.
"We have twelve days to work with before we have to check back in," Jack said as he glanced around. Nothing indicated, implied or otherwise warned against danger; there was nothing so much as a farmhouse within eyeshot. "Plenty of time to find whatever ruins the controller is in."
The rest of his team noticed the weird air of safety, too. Carter was already filling her little jars with the local dirt. That would be a great conversation starter: oh yes, we went to -847 and found many, many piles of naqahdah-enriched manure while we were there. No fortresses or runaway Tok'ra semi-sortof-part time-operatives, at least yet, but bullshit: that there was plenty of.
***
On the road, after a cursory recon of the immediate area, they followed what Daniel described as the smell of civilization: that was to say, the mix of woodsmoke, cow and a vague overnote of garbage and rapidly spoiling meat that usually led to the nearest town. The road itself at least was dry, high in the middle between wagon-ruts. They wouldn't be getting any useful technology from the people here.
A while afterwards, the sound of voices drifted over to them. Teal'c, on point, caught it first, stopped and waited.
It was singing.
Singing?
"Is that -- ?" Daniel began, straining to hear the chords with his eyes narrowed and his brows drawn inward in concentration.
"Ave Maria?" Carter finished, looking equally puzzled.
Teal'c half asked, half said, "The prayer has been set to music?"
How Teal'c had learned that it was a prayer but avoided finding out it was a song was beyond Jack. Before Daniel could give his already-prepared lecture about Latin music and prayers and other stuff Jack knew he had squirreled away in his head somewhere, he signaled his team back to the treeline and that he would go check the singers out himself. He heard the beginnings of a whispered history as he moved off through the trees.
The voices turned to shouting by the time Jack could see the people in question, all dressed like something out of a low-budget medieval reenactment.
"Oh no," one of the men said, "Oh no no no no no ... " He was speaking to a girl and a boy, both teenagers.
"It is true, father, I would never lie about something so grave," the girl said. He was close enough to see the enormous grin on the girl's face.
"Isobel!" the boy said, and when he did, his voice cracked, dropping very low on the 'o' and rising again almost to a falsetto on 'bel.'
"Oh, piss," the man said, and turned around once, then back, and kicked the side their wagon hard enough that it shook. Something inside the wagon fell with the crash of shattering glass.
The other members of the party watched the scene from a safe distance.
"Lord Crauley wouldn't even notice, father, and I know all of the Mary line--"
"Stop! There will be none of that nonsense," the father said, and stalked off. A moment later he shouted at the assembled crowd to stop staring and make themselves useful, damn everything.
***
The Magpie Tavern was crowded full of the afternoon's minstrels, apparently one big extended family that traveled around the country performing Corpus Christi plays. Around Easter, the kids' father and de facto leader of this branch, had said that they would meet up again in the capital to perform everything from the birth through the passion as well as a specially commissioned rendition of the apocalypse as it occurred in the Book of Revelation.
Assuming the nativity play went well this Christmas.
It was not looking to go well at Christmas, what with no Mary and all.
"We have no Mary!" he had very close to wailed into his mug of beer. The beer was decent, but after one smell of the town Jack had decided they were sticking to MREs on this mission. No one had objected.
"That kinda sucks," Jack had said seriously.
"This shall be our end!"
"Can't anyone else play Mary this year?" Jack had asked, and the man, Thomas, had glared at him.
"My daughter knows the lines, and for any other performance would have been adequate, but this is for our Lord Crauley. Tis not appropriate for a woman to stand and play before such a man as our Lord! John was the best Mary we've had in years!"
Jack had contemplated his own beer for a long while, then, letting Thomas think he had no idea what to do. Just when the minstrel had looked like a sixteen ton anvil had fallen on his head a la Wile E. Coyote, Jack had said, "I could loan you a Mary, if you want. I mean, get me and my people in to see Lord Crauley, and my Mary is all yours."
Which was why Carter was sitting across the room with Isobel, John, and the man who had played Mary before John, pretending to be a eunuch and having lines drilled into her head.
"Not like that," Isobel snapped, "You're not playing Herod, by the Holy Cross!"
Oh, he had had to order her to do it, but once Carter found out that "backstage" in the royal performance constituted most of the palace compound, and that the play took almost six hours, and that there was probably some neat techy stuff hidden away in Crauley's drawers and cabinets she hadn't been anywhere near as disgruntled at the idea as when Jack first came up with it.
***
Four days into the eight-day trip to the capital, Carter had already surprised everyone by already knowing, essentially, three of the four songs Mary was supposed to spout out in front of Crauley, and by having an okay voice. She had muttered something about mass and Christmas songs and Latin always being the same no matter what part of the world Jacob had been stationed in and quickly excused herself to continue learning her spoken lines.
It was trying to snow and failing, most of the flakes melting before they hit the ground and the ones that hadn't lasting less than a second once they made contact with solid earth. The road twenty yards away from the camp would be a long, twisty stream of mud by morning or, on the off chance it froze, iced-over. The cold wet stood just to one side of being really, really uncomfortable and every so often, usually with a wind-chill that felt like minus thirty but couldn't have been less than minus ten, stepped over and back.
Cold, wet, Medieval English Christmas planet with apparently friendly locals who probably liked them definitely beat mosquito-infested, blast-furnace hot, foggy tropical planet with cannibalistic locals who didn't like them at all hands down.
Daniel came to take over watch just after one of those winds finished passing by. "I've been talking to John," he said.
"Oh?" John was, Jack had learned, fifteen years old and had spent the last five days with his head hidden beneath a ghoulish cowl, sulking.
"He's replacing one of the shepherds, Alyn. Alyn has no voice to speak of right now. He's very upset about it; John, I mean. Alyn is trying to convince the royal goldsmith to take him on as an apprentice. He's glad he'll have some time to actually do it."
"And this is a problem, because?"
Daniel shrugged. "I don't think it's anything to be worried about, but John was apparently friendly with one of Crauley's human servants, last time they were here. I don't think it's nothing, but I don't necessarily think it's something, either."
Jack thought about that for a moment. He had had a girlfriend in high school who was involved in theater, and even though the worst he'd experienced was being commandeered for stage crew against both his free will and better judgment, he had still seen and heard enough about the stuff that happened in that black box to know it was one big bucket of drama. And this felt a lot like that. "We'll keep an eye on him," Jack replied, moving off, "Make sure he doesn't do anything stupid."
***
Lord Crauley did not look like a goa'uld. Didn't deck his halls much like one, either, past the matching but unbroken throne to the one from -847's Gateroom.
Sometime in the afternoon of the third day it had started snowing for real. Isobel's mother, a tiny woman with a large voice, had fallen in beside him an said that her brother had told Thomas that Jack wanted to know how long they would actually be in the capital, and how long the minstrels needed Carter for. The woman had said three days with three performances each, including the grand performance before Lord Crauley on Christmas Day, immediately following Christmas Eve's midnight to dawn marathon mass.
That night, after talking with a failed monk among the travelers, Daniel had taken to calling -847 The Parson's Planet. Which probably fit in a convoluted, towering pile of wobbly Janga blocks sort of way, but Jack didn't claim to have known enough English literature to get the heart of the reference, only the source. "Canterbury Tales, right?" he had asked, and Daniel nodded and grinned.
"Never read it," Jack had gone on. Although, if Daniel ever wanted to name a planet after a fourteenth-century Spanish naval stratagem, he would be right there. They really just needed the right planet, and when it hit, he was pretty sure Daniel's face would stick in the expression he made in response.
The first eight performances had gone well, although Carter had started digging around in her tak vest halfway through and come out with a package of cough drops. There was lots of cheering and lots of whispering after the show about the new Mary, and who "he" could possibly be, and could he possibly be from Ainswell? which must have been a town on the minstrels' route.
Crauley's eyes went wide and flashed, just a little, when he finally noticed Jack, Daniel and Teal'c, all still in uniform, in the middle of the assembled crowd. He was short for a snake, in the kind of body that could slip away unnoticed in a tight spot, and that said a lot about the personality hiding away in his head. It was the kind of thing the Tok'ra did, but from his speech he was pretending to be a divine-right king.
"And now," Crauley announced with a sweeping wave of his scepter, "I shall announce the name of the man who will be Lord of Tomorrow!"
"That's strange," Daniel murmured.
"Indeed," Teal'c replied, "No Goa'uld would ever cede his power, even for one day. I do believe Jacob Carter's description of Crauley as 'half-Tok'ra' was an accurate one."
"Half-Tok'ra, guys," Jack said back, lowly, "We still can't trust him."
"Not that," Daniel said, motioning to the dais where Crauley was placing his own crown on John Beck's -- the minstrels' John Beck's, the former Mary's -- head. Daniel continued, "on Earth, the tradition of making a local subject king for the day is linked to April Fool's Day, not Christmas."
John knelt and removed the crown. Crauley stared straight at the three members of SG-1 present, his eyes narrowed and his lips curled down. John spoke, saying how he could not accept the crown from such a great lord as Crauley, et cetera and so forth repeat until nauseas, with Crauley arguing back and the two of them finally coming to an agreement that John would be king for an hour in exactly three days.
"I must fulfill my duty, my Lord," John said, "For my brother's health has deserted him and I am to be a shepherd in his place this fine afternoon!"
"Yes, yes!" Crauley shouted, reclaiming his crown and turning toward the audience. "There is a performance set for just now! Let young John be at my right hand in spirit and let this re-acting of the Nativity begin forthwith!"
***
The first few minutes of the play were okay, actually. Wise Men being decent astronomers; Herod making a gigantic, NID-esque ass of himself; livestock on the stage. (Where did the camel come from, anyway? Jack did not remember a camel with their caravan.)
The second after Carter stepped into view, though, Isobel stood from her place in the back of the audience and came at the stage at a full run. "That is no man!" she shouted, pointing at Carter, "She is a woman! There is a woman on the stage. A woman! This is not proper!"
Then the guards came, and of course they grabbed the three guys in the funny (relatively speaking) clothes in addition to taking Carter off stage, and of course they had some weird chemically stuff that knocked them all unconscious for the several hours it took them to wake up in Crauley's dungeon.
***
"Who are you?" Crauley demanded. "What do you think you're doing here? You don't need to be here!"
"Oh, nothing much," Jack said, "We were just in the neighborhood, thought we'd drop in and tell you the Tok'ra say you never write, never call, probably don't even care about them anymore. The High Council wants to know what kind of a big brother you think you are, ignoring them like that." Close up, Crauley reminded Jack of the guy from the Ernest movies. Jack half expected the snake to reply with 'whaddya mean, Vern?'
Crauley replied, instead, with a flounce of his red and gold brocade over-robe and, "The Tok'Ra are dead to me! They leave me in Sokar's loving hands without so much as a cargo ship in reserve to come to my aid, and when the mission all goes horribly wrong they expect me to turn aroung and come back to them without offering up so much as an apology? I’ve had it with them!" Crauley stalked off, leaned in and said something in what sounded vaguely like the Latin from the play and vaguely like Goa'uld to the guard.
The dungeon was actually in a tower, with hay on the floor, a bucket of water on one end and another, empty bucket for a latrine on the other, and a single slit in the wall for a window. The room itself took up half the tower, with two guards and a set of iron bars to keep them in, and a hole in the floor between their cell and another cell across the walkway that must have been the only exit.
Daniel turned around once, then said, "Yep. Definitely The Parson's Planet."
The guard regarded Crauley briefly, nodded once, glanced back at SG-1, snorted and turned around to continue guarding.
"What'd he say?" Jack asked once Crauley was gone.
"I can't be sure," Daniel replied, "but I think it was something like, 'These are the four who are feared by the false gods who would enslave you. I must pray to Our Lord Jesus Christ to know what I must do with them.' Judging by his choice of demonstrative pronoun, I don't think Jesus is going to tell Crauley to give us a fruitcake and send us home," Daniel replied.
Teal'c looked so completely impassive that it was obvious to anyone who had known him for more than five minutes that he was also completely disgusted.
The guards changed over every eight to ten hours, giving them between five and fifteen minutes to plan. On the third change-over, Carter pulled a small crystal out of her bra and tossed it to Jack, saying, "I didn't have the chance to look at it closely, but whatever Crauley learned about Sokar, it's on that. Merry Christmas, Sir." She gave a half-grin.
They got three minutes into hashing out their plan to escape when the new guard showed up.
***
After two days in the cell they weren't really doing that well, as far as daring escapes went.
Plan A: Get in, talk to Crauley, return with vital information re: Sokar's plans in time for the Annual NORAD/SGC Fourth of July Barbecue. Plan A had included a cookoff between NORAD's General Gaines and General Hammond; Gaines insisted that his own North Carolina style barbecue was superior in every way to Texas style barbecue. This could obviously only ever end one way.
Plan B: Find Crauley, talk to him, find the ring-device controller and get home just in time to miss the barbecue but hear all about it anyway. Plan B had started with singing and ended pretty poorly, for all that they still had their GDO and that they’d gotten information they came for in the first place.
Plan C: Pick the lock to the cell door, tie and lock up the guard, proceed with Plan B. Get home before anyone attempts a rescue and gets themselves ringed into the middle of a cow field.
Jack figured they would come up with Plan D when they needed it, sometime in the middle of Plan C falling apart.
***
They waited out the remaining guard's shift uncomfortably, each trying by turn to sleep and each failing for the most part. Not looking too suspicious was easy; the guard was the same one who had take the first guard's place, which made this what? Day three?
The guard kept his head cocked to one side, listening carefully for the church bell that marked the time here, and when it began ringing noon, he stood up a tiny bit straighter and looked extra-attentive.
Then the door in the floor opened, a gold-crowned head emerging first, followed by a young man in what had to be a set of oversized royal robes. "Come on," John said, "I'm only Lord for an hour." John motioned for the guard to go; the guard hesitated.
"You know," Daniel said, "He is your monarch right now. Lord John could have you executed for failing to obey, if this world is anything like its Earth-analogue, which it appears to be."
"Don't think I won't, not for a moment," John said, drawing the sword he definitely didn't know how to use from his belt. When the guard hesitated again, John pressed the tip to the guard's throat and glared. It wasn't a very frightening glare, but combined with, "Obey your lord!" it got the guard to head off, if only for reinforcements.
John did not, however, have the key to the cell.
"Don't just stand there, Carter," Jack said, motioning to the lock.
***
The worst of the heat wave had passed over by the time they ringed back to -847's Gateroom and stepped through the gate back to Colorado. The recycled air was dry and cool, and smelled like oil and something else that could only be smelled this far underground, without so much as a hint of cow or rotting food. Refrigeration-free planets always reminded Jack exactly how much worse the commissary's fare could be.
"-- was a ring device in the same group of room where I found the crystal. John told us they shuffled around a few people and let him play Mary one more time, " Carter finished at the end of the briefing. "I guess he wanted to help us out, Sir."
General Hammond nodded to that, thankfully. "I'm just glad you got back when you did, and that you found the information we were looking for. We were about to send another team in to get you."
After a short silence -- Jack didn't even want to think about the kind of rescue effort retrieving a team from that planet would take -- he asked, "So, Sir, who won the Fourth of July Cookoff?"
Hammond gave him a look that said the General did not want to talk about it.