When Summer's End Is Nighing, by Sophonisba [folklore challenge]
-title- When Summer's End Is Nighing
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-warnings- AU. Some foul language. Bits of poems. Prequel to my story "Lead Casket."
-characters- Sheppard
-disclaimer- The title is from a poem by A. E. Housman; two other of his poems are quoted in the text.
-word count- 1255
-summary- AU tag for "Rising"; morning-after thoughts. Measuring oneself against a legend is an exercise in masochism.
When Summer's End Is Nighing
John Sheppard, major of the United States Air Force, unlooked-for commander of the soldiers of the Atlantis Expedition, sat on a still-damp balcony off of a not-yet-used room with his arms around his knees and watched the dawn creep across the quadrant of the sky he had decided to think of as "east," for the sake of his own sanity.
His mind seemed to have decided to wander from topic to topic; when it wasn't bringing up the beginning of all the commands he had ever held, from the greatest to the least, it was running through poems he'd memorized long before he'd ever thought they'd be applicable:
Her strong enchantments failing,
Her towers of fear in wreck,
Her limbecks dried of poisons
And the knife at her neck,
The Queen of air and darkness
Begins to shrill and cry,
"O young man, O my slayer,
To-morrow you shall die."
or throwing memories at him that either had little to do with where he was now or all too much.
*
The firelight is dying, and Djón and Melia are tucked into the big bed with their mothers, hearing the end of a story from one before they are sent off to their own room.
"... and so they came to the great hall of Spiral Castle," their blonde mother tells the children she could not love more had she borne them herself, "and beheld the vampire with her fingernails already buried in the duke's veins."
The children shiver in delighted horror.
"Djón knew he had only seconds to act, and he drew the air away from the vampire. She choked and gurgled and died, all the lifeblood she drew unable to sustain her without the breath of life to match, and at once Djón and Tegan leapt forward and drove a silver spike into her heart that she might not rise again."
"Mum," Melia protests. "If he's called Djón, he should be like Djón. Djón's not going to be air."
Djón shoots Melia a dirty look. Of course he's going to be air. She's going to be air, and she's his sister, born of the same egg untimely-split as he himself, who has never been separated from him save for the delay between her birth and his (a time that seemed years instead of days, especially according to the mother that bore them).
Melia shoots him a superior look right back. She's the elder and she's always sure she knows best.
"Your father chose to name you Djón," the gentle brunette who bore them pushes up her glasses as she says, misinterpreting the look. "I had thought of naming you Meredith, but he argued that you should have a name not among the five most common in the area."
The blonde snorts. "Everett may have said that, but really it was because he would have loved to have been Djón Sheppard, even before he signed his life away to the army." She tosses her head, topknot bouncing. "He'd have had a better shot at it if he didn't keep his brains and his pecker in the same sheath as his sword."
"Mu-um!" Melia and Djón protest -- absent their father might be, but they have no wish to hear about, well, that.
"At any rate, once they had dealt with the vampire," she continues, "they turned at once to the duke, stanching the blood."
*
John shook his own head. No matter how his father might have dreamt of it, he could never have wished to be the Djón Sheppard of the stories more bitterly than his son did now, conscious of his own failures.
The fabled Djón would have yanked the water that made up seventy-or-so percent of even a Wraith's body from her form, or called fire(plasma) on her so quickly she would not have had time to react before disintegrating; smashed in her head or cut off her arm or, yes, pulled the oxygen out of her air, or even reached for the energies she drew on and looped them back into Sumner.
He would, at least, have thought of something.
They came and were and are not / And come no more anew...
*
"'It is no use,' the duke told them. 'Leave me be.'
"'You are my sworn lord,' Djón protested. 'How shall I go forth without you?'"
The twins curl into each other tightly, drawing comfort and strength from their skin's warmth.
"'How shall you go forth with me?' the duke snapped. 'I have not the blood in my body to keep me alive, nor the marrow to grow more. Neither can my belly turn food into life's force, nor my humors tame the unseen rays to harmlessness rather than slow flames. Will you condemn me to more torture as well as to death? You are my sworn man; will you sit here while Spiral Castle falls around you, and abandon the last of your charge and mine, to find Tegan the warlord-princess and bring our two hosts safe home?'
"'O my lord duke!' Djón wept, and loosed his makeshift bindings before bearing the old man on his back, following Tegan from the hall even as Furd shouted that they must come now before the entire castle came down on their heads."
"If he was that badly hurt," Melia says thoughtfully, "they shouldn't have kept him talking when he'd asked for it to be over."
"You see these things differently when you see them with your own eyes," their older mother tells her gravely. The blonde reaches over and rubs circles between her shoulderblades.
"I'd have been faster and killed the vampire right away," Djón says belligerently, "and then he wouldn't have been so badly hurt in the first place."
"You do that," his younger mother tells him.
*
And he hadn't, of course. It wasn't as if he hadn't already known he was no sort of hero, but to have it driven home like that here in the Silver City, the Lost City on the Sea...
Jinto had called it "the silver city" last night, and John wondered when he'd mentioned that in front of the boy. Stupid, that. Stupid and sloppy -- the pretense might have grown arms and legs and feet and layers and layers of identity, but a careless word could still wreck it, especially here where most of the population was alive to certain possibilities and fully a third of them scholars with scholars' minds, even if they were no Meredith au-Kei au-Kenoor.
John was no hero, and he was a lousy excuse for Djón Sheppard -- or even for Master Djón Rosmarin Sheppard von dem Bielefeld, not with the lack of his family, of Melia, a wound that had never properly healed -- but he was a damn' good pilot and he had commanded men in war and he was, unbelievable as it might seem, what the new inhabitants of Atlantis had.
And he thought perhaps he could make peace with that, if the memories and the poetry would calm down.
If here to-day the cloud of thunder lours
To-morrow it will hie on far behests;
The flesh will grieve on other bones than ours
Soon, and the soul will mourn in other breasts.
The troubles of our proud and angry dust
Are from eternity, and shall not fail.
Bear them we can, and if we can we must.
Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.
nota bene:
The other two poems are here and here.
Melia is named for an Ancient.
Cei ap Cenwr is the Welsh name for King Arthur's foster-brother, the one who became seneschal (and was one of his greatest warriors before the medieval poets decided to show off how strong each new character was by having him beat up Sir Kay).
"rosmarin" means "rosemary." Because I am easily amused.
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-warnings- AU. Some foul language. Bits of poems. Prequel to my story "Lead Casket."
-characters- Sheppard
-disclaimer- The title is from a poem by A. E. Housman; two other of his poems are quoted in the text.
-word count- 1255
-summary- AU tag for "Rising"; morning-after thoughts. Measuring oneself against a legend is an exercise in masochism.
When Summer's End Is Nighing
John Sheppard, major of the United States Air Force, unlooked-for commander of the soldiers of the Atlantis Expedition, sat on a still-damp balcony off of a not-yet-used room with his arms around his knees and watched the dawn creep across the quadrant of the sky he had decided to think of as "east," for the sake of his own sanity.
His mind seemed to have decided to wander from topic to topic; when it wasn't bringing up the beginning of all the commands he had ever held, from the greatest to the least, it was running through poems he'd memorized long before he'd ever thought they'd be applicable:
Her strong enchantments failing,
Her towers of fear in wreck,
Her limbecks dried of poisons
And the knife at her neck,
The Queen of air and darkness
Begins to shrill and cry,
"O young man, O my slayer,
To-morrow you shall die."
or throwing memories at him that either had little to do with where he was now or all too much.
*
The firelight is dying, and Djón and Melia are tucked into the big bed with their mothers, hearing the end of a story from one before they are sent off to their own room.
"... and so they came to the great hall of Spiral Castle," their blonde mother tells the children she could not love more had she borne them herself, "and beheld the vampire with her fingernails already buried in the duke's veins."
The children shiver in delighted horror.
"Djón knew he had only seconds to act, and he drew the air away from the vampire. She choked and gurgled and died, all the lifeblood she drew unable to sustain her without the breath of life to match, and at once Djón and Tegan leapt forward and drove a silver spike into her heart that she might not rise again."
"Mum," Melia protests. "If he's called Djón, he should be like Djón. Djón's not going to be air."
Djón shoots Melia a dirty look. Of course he's going to be air. She's going to be air, and she's his sister, born of the same egg untimely-split as he himself, who has never been separated from him save for the delay between her birth and his (a time that seemed years instead of days, especially according to the mother that bore them).
Melia shoots him a superior look right back. She's the elder and she's always sure she knows best.
"Your father chose to name you Djón," the gentle brunette who bore them pushes up her glasses as she says, misinterpreting the look. "I had thought of naming you Meredith, but he argued that you should have a name not among the five most common in the area."
The blonde snorts. "Everett may have said that, but really it was because he would have loved to have been Djón Sheppard, even before he signed his life away to the army." She tosses her head, topknot bouncing. "He'd have had a better shot at it if he didn't keep his brains and his pecker in the same sheath as his sword."
"Mu-um!" Melia and Djón protest -- absent their father might be, but they have no wish to hear about, well, that.
"At any rate, once they had dealt with the vampire," she continues, "they turned at once to the duke, stanching the blood."
*
John shook his own head. No matter how his father might have dreamt of it, he could never have wished to be the Djón Sheppard of the stories more bitterly than his son did now, conscious of his own failures.
The fabled Djón would have yanked the water that made up seventy-or-so percent of even a Wraith's body from her form, or called fire(plasma) on her so quickly she would not have had time to react before disintegrating; smashed in her head or cut off her arm or, yes, pulled the oxygen out of her air, or even reached for the energies she drew on and looped them back into Sumner.
He would, at least, have thought of something.
They came and were and are not / And come no more anew...
*
"'It is no use,' the duke told them. 'Leave me be.'
"'You are my sworn lord,' Djón protested. 'How shall I go forth without you?'"
The twins curl into each other tightly, drawing comfort and strength from their skin's warmth.
"'How shall you go forth with me?' the duke snapped. 'I have not the blood in my body to keep me alive, nor the marrow to grow more. Neither can my belly turn food into life's force, nor my humors tame the unseen rays to harmlessness rather than slow flames. Will you condemn me to more torture as well as to death? You are my sworn man; will you sit here while Spiral Castle falls around you, and abandon the last of your charge and mine, to find Tegan the warlord-princess and bring our two hosts safe home?'
"'O my lord duke!' Djón wept, and loosed his makeshift bindings before bearing the old man on his back, following Tegan from the hall even as Furd shouted that they must come now before the entire castle came down on their heads."
"If he was that badly hurt," Melia says thoughtfully, "they shouldn't have kept him talking when he'd asked for it to be over."
"You see these things differently when you see them with your own eyes," their older mother tells her gravely. The blonde reaches over and rubs circles between her shoulderblades.
"I'd have been faster and killed the vampire right away," Djón says belligerently, "and then he wouldn't have been so badly hurt in the first place."
"You do that," his younger mother tells him.
*
And he hadn't, of course. It wasn't as if he hadn't already known he was no sort of hero, but to have it driven home like that here in the Silver City, the Lost City on the Sea...
Jinto had called it "the silver city" last night, and John wondered when he'd mentioned that in front of the boy. Stupid, that. Stupid and sloppy -- the pretense might have grown arms and legs and feet and layers and layers of identity, but a careless word could still wreck it, especially here where most of the population was alive to certain possibilities and fully a third of them scholars with scholars' minds, even if they were no Meredith au-Kei au-Kenoor.
John was no hero, and he was a lousy excuse for Djón Sheppard -- or even for Master Djón Rosmarin Sheppard von dem Bielefeld, not with the lack of his family, of Melia, a wound that had never properly healed -- but he was a damn' good pilot and he had commanded men in war and he was, unbelievable as it might seem, what the new inhabitants of Atlantis had.
And he thought perhaps he could make peace with that, if the memories and the poetry would calm down.
If here to-day the cloud of thunder lours
To-morrow it will hie on far behests;
The flesh will grieve on other bones than ours
Soon, and the soul will mourn in other breasts.
The troubles of our proud and angry dust
Are from eternity, and shall not fail.
Bear them we can, and if we can we must.
Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.
nota bene:
The other two poems are here and here.
Melia is named for an Ancient.
Cei ap Cenwr is the Welsh name for King Arthur's foster-brother, the one who became seneschal (and was one of his greatest warriors before the medieval poets decided to show off how strong each new character was by having him beat up Sir Kay).
"rosmarin" means "rosemary." Because I am easily amused.