Fic: Guinevere of the High Seas (Merlin)
+ Title - Guinevere of the High Seas
+ Fandom - Merlin (BBC)
+ Pairing - Gwen/Morgana
+ Warnings and Spoilers - Violence, mourning, a death that was also in canon, a potential death that was not.
+ Summary - A pirate AU, but not a very cheerful one.
I stand on the deck, the sun bright in my eyes. I squint to see the white sail that Cribbs sang out about. He's still shouting and pointing even as the ship explodes into activity around me. I can't see a thing in the horizon. I look for Morgana instead. Her eyes meet mine, worried, yes, but then there's also something there that she can't suppress - excitement.
Morgana. You were made for this. You, who always had to have things the right way, your way. No apology, no surrender.
I look up again and then I do see the vessel bearing down towards us. Tibbs has already declared it The Syren of the Royal Navy. Their lookouts are as good as ours and must have recognized us by now, too.
'Run, lads, run like the devil's at your tails!' the first mate, Mr Shaka, bellows, and turns to me, 'Nor'-nor'-west, do you reckon?' he asks. I squint at him, and nod.
How strange that he should turn to me for guidance! Have the pirates begun to believe their own stories? Two weeks ago they were laughing at Guinevere, Queen of the Seven Seas.
I draw my sword.
-
It all began with death, with blood.
I remember is the sight of my own hands rubbed raw on rough-hewn rope. I kept calling for God and for father. God and father. One had taken away the other, and I couldn't then quite say if it didn't work either way. My father was dead, and my fingers were bloody from trying to hold him up, to rescue him as he hung by the neck for a crime he didn't commit.
Let me explain.
We were slaves on the plantation of General Pendragon. He was a hard man and had no patience for mouthy blacks, less and less as the new legislation from London kept coming in, sanctions on his brutalities, seen only as stratagems to hold back his success. His success depended on hard labour, on raw backs, on the deaths of men and women, on high sugar cane and higher production levels. My father lost three of his fingers in the refinery, working with boiling, sticking sugar. He used to be a blacksmith. My mother escaped - one of the very few to do so - on the night I was born, the night of the slave revolt on Camelot plantation.
I stayed on. I was made use of in the house, cooking and cleaning and helping the ladies that came to stay, my hands free of sores until the day they hung my father for my crime. I was Morgana's maid and almost exclusively that since the day she arrived to Jamaica, the little fatherless thing that she was, from the other side of the world.
I guess I'd grown complacent with Morgana's protection; with the advantages she bestowed upon me, with the freedom she afforded me. When my father was hurt, I took medicine and bandages for him. They hung him for it, calling him a thief. They killed him for my conceit. Even Morgana, the General's protegé, could not save him.
The pirates came that night, fell upon Camelot's sea-side flank like a tidal wave of cutting edges and stinking men. I was still holding up my father when his executioner was cut down next to him. Blood splattered warm on my cheek. It barely registered. My father was too heavy. It was useless, either way - his neck had already snapped.
I sank to my knees. He hung like a scarecrow in the wind, turning on the noose. I did not look up at his face. I'm glad I didn't.
I didn't know why they spared me until I was yanked to my feet and dragged along. I heard Morgana cursing and when I looked up I saw her there, held by two gigantic men and still fighting. I started screaming then.
-
Uther is likely dead, or so Morgana tells me. I agree; too many would have been glad to stick a knife in him in the confusion. It hardly matters now. We were taken aboard the pirate ship and have had no more sight or sound of Camelot. If it's true, Arthur must be the lord of the plantation now. I wonder what kind of a master he will make?
Whoever is the master now, the pirates are reckoning on bartering Morgana back to him still marriageable, with her virginity intact. That and her spirit were the only things that saved me, too, from the men's cruelty. I remember how brave and pale her face looked, like a slice of the moon seen through dark curtains, as she brandished the knife and begun to gather up her skirts. I think she would have done what she threatened, too - would have taken her own maidenhead had they taken mine.
Morgana. Oh, Morgana. If virginity is more than a piece of skin between your legs, you have already made a gift of yours to me, and had mine in return. How easy it was for her to say she wanted her maid by her side at all hours, that she was ravaged by nightmares (only too true), that she would not go to sleep save with me in her bed. How easy it was to not mention our kisses, our confidences; how easy, for me, to melt into the shadows when someone entered who was not prepared to see me!
She was raised in England for the first ten years of her life, and always looked me square in the eye, like Uther Pendragon never did, not even once.
-
Pirates. It's a fearsome term, and they are a filthy lot, but not that much worse than most of the townsfolk of Kingston. They are like soldiers - kill one moment, rape another, laugh a third, and lend you a mug of ale to warm your belly for a gulp or two. The one who killed the executioner and grabbed me has a beautiful singing voice, and cries when he has had a few and remembers his mother. The captain is dead now, but the first mate, Shaka, has a big voice and a big laugh and, he says, seven wives, all of whom he describes in loving detail.
I shrank from the men, attempted to vanish, but Morgana could not be more in her element. She shook off her corset and changed it for a shirt and trousers, and was up in the mainmast by the end of the week. She changed me into trousers as well, soon enough, and tied my hair back like a man's, and it seemed to help. We no longer had to hold on to each other to keep the men from grabbing at our skirts or pinching our arms. Clothes make the man? Clothes tell you who is an acceptable target? No - they had boys on board too for the same purpose they wanted me. Clothes make alike, perhaps - make it easier to respect another, to look them in the eye.
Shaka put the captain's hat on my head one day when the men were dancing and singing, laughed his big laugh and said they should file my teeth and make me a pirate queen - oh, how they laughed. They put a fine, old-fashioned, slightly threadbare coat on my shoulders, saying it was the captain's, and had me parade around the deck, even gave me a sword. Shaka waved his at me, shouting that he was a royal marine and I was to be hanged and quartered. He fell silent quick enough when I sent his weapon flying over the side. Morgana laughed and hooted, and soon so did the men. Even Shaka forgave me when he saw what a good joke it was.
They gave me a sword to keep, and Morgana as well, and we practiced our swordmanship for the amusement and eventual awe of our shipmates. There, with sweat on my brow and their surprise thick in the air, I almost felt joy again.
We stopped at a small port in one of the islands not long after, and most of the men went on shore to drink and find themselves bunkmates to rob them blind by morning. Morgana and I lay curled up together in our hammock, whispering assurances, talking of home. We soon grew quiet though. What was waiting for us at home? What did I have left there, now my father was gone?
The men came back still laughing about Guinevere, the pirate queen.
In the next friendly port we found our fame had preceded us. The Syren had been hiding behind a harbour building, and had it been but a few minutes quicker in turning about, or had we not had the weather-gage, we might have gone down then and there. But we got away. Just about. Neither Morgana nor myself could say if we were happy about it or not. I could not be happy at all, with grief so fresh on my tongue, but I could not deny it - she had been more alive these past few weeks than I had ever seen her, trapped as she had been all her life in fine clothes in a fine house, free only when her bower's door was locked and bolted.
Now the ship stands on the horizon. Blood is about to flow, and I have a sword in my hand. It seems my choice has been made for me.
+ Fandom - Merlin (BBC)
+ Pairing - Gwen/Morgana
+ Warnings and Spoilers - Violence, mourning, a death that was also in canon, a potential death that was not.
+ Summary - A pirate AU, but not a very cheerful one.
I stand on the deck, the sun bright in my eyes. I squint to see the white sail that Cribbs sang out about. He's still shouting and pointing even as the ship explodes into activity around me. I can't see a thing in the horizon. I look for Morgana instead. Her eyes meet mine, worried, yes, but then there's also something there that she can't suppress - excitement.
Morgana. You were made for this. You, who always had to have things the right way, your way. No apology, no surrender.
I look up again and then I do see the vessel bearing down towards us. Tibbs has already declared it The Syren of the Royal Navy. Their lookouts are as good as ours and must have recognized us by now, too.
'Run, lads, run like the devil's at your tails!' the first mate, Mr Shaka, bellows, and turns to me, 'Nor'-nor'-west, do you reckon?' he asks. I squint at him, and nod.
How strange that he should turn to me for guidance! Have the pirates begun to believe their own stories? Two weeks ago they were laughing at Guinevere, Queen of the Seven Seas.
I draw my sword.
-
It all began with death, with blood.
I remember is the sight of my own hands rubbed raw on rough-hewn rope. I kept calling for God and for father. God and father. One had taken away the other, and I couldn't then quite say if it didn't work either way. My father was dead, and my fingers were bloody from trying to hold him up, to rescue him as he hung by the neck for a crime he didn't commit.
Let me explain.
We were slaves on the plantation of General Pendragon. He was a hard man and had no patience for mouthy blacks, less and less as the new legislation from London kept coming in, sanctions on his brutalities, seen only as stratagems to hold back his success. His success depended on hard labour, on raw backs, on the deaths of men and women, on high sugar cane and higher production levels. My father lost three of his fingers in the refinery, working with boiling, sticking sugar. He used to be a blacksmith. My mother escaped - one of the very few to do so - on the night I was born, the night of the slave revolt on Camelot plantation.
I stayed on. I was made use of in the house, cooking and cleaning and helping the ladies that came to stay, my hands free of sores until the day they hung my father for my crime. I was Morgana's maid and almost exclusively that since the day she arrived to Jamaica, the little fatherless thing that she was, from the other side of the world.
I guess I'd grown complacent with Morgana's protection; with the advantages she bestowed upon me, with the freedom she afforded me. When my father was hurt, I took medicine and bandages for him. They hung him for it, calling him a thief. They killed him for my conceit. Even Morgana, the General's protegé, could not save him.
The pirates came that night, fell upon Camelot's sea-side flank like a tidal wave of cutting edges and stinking men. I was still holding up my father when his executioner was cut down next to him. Blood splattered warm on my cheek. It barely registered. My father was too heavy. It was useless, either way - his neck had already snapped.
I sank to my knees. He hung like a scarecrow in the wind, turning on the noose. I did not look up at his face. I'm glad I didn't.
I didn't know why they spared me until I was yanked to my feet and dragged along. I heard Morgana cursing and when I looked up I saw her there, held by two gigantic men and still fighting. I started screaming then.
-
Uther is likely dead, or so Morgana tells me. I agree; too many would have been glad to stick a knife in him in the confusion. It hardly matters now. We were taken aboard the pirate ship and have had no more sight or sound of Camelot. If it's true, Arthur must be the lord of the plantation now. I wonder what kind of a master he will make?
Whoever is the master now, the pirates are reckoning on bartering Morgana back to him still marriageable, with her virginity intact. That and her spirit were the only things that saved me, too, from the men's cruelty. I remember how brave and pale her face looked, like a slice of the moon seen through dark curtains, as she brandished the knife and begun to gather up her skirts. I think she would have done what she threatened, too - would have taken her own maidenhead had they taken mine.
Morgana. Oh, Morgana. If virginity is more than a piece of skin between your legs, you have already made a gift of yours to me, and had mine in return. How easy it was for her to say she wanted her maid by her side at all hours, that she was ravaged by nightmares (only too true), that she would not go to sleep save with me in her bed. How easy it was to not mention our kisses, our confidences; how easy, for me, to melt into the shadows when someone entered who was not prepared to see me!
She was raised in England for the first ten years of her life, and always looked me square in the eye, like Uther Pendragon never did, not even once.
-
Pirates. It's a fearsome term, and they are a filthy lot, but not that much worse than most of the townsfolk of Kingston. They are like soldiers - kill one moment, rape another, laugh a third, and lend you a mug of ale to warm your belly for a gulp or two. The one who killed the executioner and grabbed me has a beautiful singing voice, and cries when he has had a few and remembers his mother. The captain is dead now, but the first mate, Shaka, has a big voice and a big laugh and, he says, seven wives, all of whom he describes in loving detail.
I shrank from the men, attempted to vanish, but Morgana could not be more in her element. She shook off her corset and changed it for a shirt and trousers, and was up in the mainmast by the end of the week. She changed me into trousers as well, soon enough, and tied my hair back like a man's, and it seemed to help. We no longer had to hold on to each other to keep the men from grabbing at our skirts or pinching our arms. Clothes make the man? Clothes tell you who is an acceptable target? No - they had boys on board too for the same purpose they wanted me. Clothes make alike, perhaps - make it easier to respect another, to look them in the eye.
Shaka put the captain's hat on my head one day when the men were dancing and singing, laughed his big laugh and said they should file my teeth and make me a pirate queen - oh, how they laughed. They put a fine, old-fashioned, slightly threadbare coat on my shoulders, saying it was the captain's, and had me parade around the deck, even gave me a sword. Shaka waved his at me, shouting that he was a royal marine and I was to be hanged and quartered. He fell silent quick enough when I sent his weapon flying over the side. Morgana laughed and hooted, and soon so did the men. Even Shaka forgave me when he saw what a good joke it was.
They gave me a sword to keep, and Morgana as well, and we practiced our swordmanship for the amusement and eventual awe of our shipmates. There, with sweat on my brow and their surprise thick in the air, I almost felt joy again.
We stopped at a small port in one of the islands not long after, and most of the men went on shore to drink and find themselves bunkmates to rob them blind by morning. Morgana and I lay curled up together in our hammock, whispering assurances, talking of home. We soon grew quiet though. What was waiting for us at home? What did I have left there, now my father was gone?
The men came back still laughing about Guinevere, the pirate queen.
In the next friendly port we found our fame had preceded us. The Syren had been hiding behind a harbour building, and had it been but a few minutes quicker in turning about, or had we not had the weather-gage, we might have gone down then and there. But we got away. Just about. Neither Morgana nor myself could say if we were happy about it or not. I could not be happy at all, with grief so fresh on my tongue, but I could not deny it - she had been more alive these past few weeks than I had ever seen her, trapped as she had been all her life in fine clothes in a fine house, free only when her bower's door was locked and bolted.
Now the ship stands on the horizon. Blood is about to flow, and I have a sword in my hand. It seems my choice has been made for me.