A Traditional New Years Eve...
"A Traditional New Years Eve..."
A Vorkosigan FanFic
By Roger Stenning
Based on the characters, situations, and universe created, set, and owned by
Lois McMaster Bujold. The contents of this story are for personal, non-commercial
use only. Any use of Lois McMaster Bujold's copyrighted material or trademarks
anywhere in this story should not be viewed as a challenge to those copyrights
or trademarks. This disclaimer must remain as an integral part of this file.
The material in this story may be used/abused by other FanFic authors, provided
that credit is given where credit is due - "Turnabout is fair play"!
Copyright 2010, Roger Stenning.
***
This FanFic was inspired by the Winterfair Story Exchange
Story Prompt by utah_yoda
“ Any fic from the perspective of the Vorkosigan Armsmen, with an appearance by Cordelia.”
***
Title: "A Traditional New Years Eve..."
Author: Roger Stenning
Fandom: Vorkosigan Saga (set six months after "Winterfair Gifts")
Rating: G - Suitable for all readers
Word Count: 3985
Summary: Roic manages to get a New Year's Eve tradition taken up in the household...
Many thanks as usual, to my Beta Reading Team, Coalboy, Jekni, Philomytha, and Sharaith, without whom, this story would not have proper grammar or spelling, and would probably still be stuck on the keyboard!
Many thanks also to (in order of submissions) julia_justina , magglenagall, Anonymous, jaxomsride , and gwynnep, who, amongst others, answered a plea for help in finding a few rustic (read: positively nutso) New year rituals to use in the story :-) Thanks, folks :-)
***
Pym was incredulous. Oh-Seven-Thirty in the bleeding morning, and already the craziness was flying at close to hypersonic speeds.
"This has to be the most crazy, insane, and positively round-the-twist memo that I've ever had the misfortune to have to read in this job. You are aware that it's complete bedlam out there just then, surely?" Pym didn't just sound irritated, he was visibly irritated.
"Yes sir, I'm well aware that it's totally nuts at that time. What's in that memo isn't crazy, insane, or even positively round-the-twist though, sir. It's something that's been handed down in my family since before anyone can remember, and is traditional in every sense of the word, sir. All my family do it. Even my brother, the fire fighter."
"Well, that probably explains the fire fighting cadre types, but not you. And what is it that you do, then? Stand on your nose and recite a limerick, while trying to drink a yard of ale, or something?" Pym was starting to hit a sarcastic note now. Last time he'd done that, Roic'd been practically naked, wearing about five kilos of bug butter, with his weapon belt on backwards. Not good.
What t’hell, go for it, he decided, and took a deep breath.
"Five minutes before the Midnight Hour strikes, we're supposed to open every window and door in the place, and let the Old Air out. We close them again five minutes after the hour has struck, sealing in the New Air. It symbolises Releasing Old Luck and Securing New Luck, so my Gran'da said, God rest his soul."
"Oh, really. And there I was, thinking that you were actually a sensible young lad with some rational brain cells behind your eyes. Says here," he tapped the read/write pad, "that you wish to have a 24 hours home leave, so as to attend to this here superstitious guff, and that if the leave can't be spared, that you'd like permission from m'lord Count to perform the damn thing at Vorkosigan Surleau instead, where the family always goes for Winterfair and the New Year, to get away from all the hubbub at that time of year. And so much for household security, by the way. You do remember that that's part of our job, don't you? Keeping things out, and not opening every blasted portal in the place to give them a way in, yes? And you actually reckon that this superstitious nonsense will keep you - and all of us, for that matter - safe for another year, do you?"
"With one exception, it certainly seems to have worked for the last few decades, sir."
Pym raised an eyebrow. He was far from convinced. "Is that so? And what happened on that one occasion, hmm?”
Pym noticed that Roic’s Mountain folk accent was starting to come to the fore, which was always a sign that he was... er... passionate about something. “Five years back, I didn't do it, an’ wound up havin’ right nasty time of it. Broke m’leg in three places falling off a shed roof chasing a burglar, and had damned horrid luck the rest of t’year. Missed a promotion exam - date was misprinted on the letter, my apartment got broke into while I was on duty t’other side of Hassadar - lost m’nice shiny new entertainment system which was still on hire-purchase - and still had to pay the darn instalments for another year ‘til t’insurance firm coughed up, and so on. Wasn't a good year. Fact, I think it’s all noted in my Guard records, an’ you’ve got copies of those. In any case, it's family tradition dating back from when we lived in the mountains up near Katchagrod - you know I've got mountain folk relatives - and given my experiences, certainly seems to be pretty-well predictive: If I don't do it, I'm screwed for the rest of the year.“
Oh for God's sake. Pym tried a different tack to try to stop this nonsense. “You do remember that you're still the lowest man on the totem pole here, do you not?"
"I know that, sir."
"And you expect me to allow you this, when the others have family and friends to go to, and have probably already made plans?"
"I don't exactly see how this'd affect them, sir - everyone who stays there's going to be up and about at midnight anyhow, after all."
Pym pulled a face. "Quite. Well, as it happens, you're so far ahead of the bloody queue that no-one - including me - has thought to submit any leave applications for New Years Eve yet. I strongly suspect the others are going to be quite put out with you, if I approve this. Who else is normally present in your home when this damn fool stunt is pulled off?"
"A few close friends, and any family who don't own their own homes and are in town, who haven't yet accepted invitations from others.”
"Ah. The loungers and scroungers brigade."
"I wouldn't put it like that, sir."
"It's what my family calls them. God knows where it comes from but, right or wrong, that's what they're called." Pym leaned back in his chair, reading the memo on the read/write pad again, sighed deeply and shook his head. "I really wish you hadn't stuck this on a bloody memo, lad. Now I've got to show the damn thing to m'lord Count." He sounded resigned to having one of 'those' days. Roic knew that Pym's day hadn't started well, as Armsman Kestov had mentioned to Roic that Pym's eldest daughter had been somewhat voluble in the Staff Wing that morning, and that it had sounded like one hell of a family argument between her and Pym regarding some lad or other at the university where she was studying some kind of design course or other. Roic was glad he didn't have kids, and didn't have to worry about such things. Well, not yet, anyhow. Wonder if Taura's planning... hmm. Probably not.
Pym carefully set the read/write pad down, and regarded Roic for a moment. Nuts. The hell with this, he decided. Let's share the misery around, for a change. He nodded, briskly, once. “Right. Fine. Since I'm having a bad day, you can have one too. I know you only got in a few hours ago, but you'll be with me when I present your memo to m'lord Count. You can answer his questions. Be here at ten hundred, and I'll take you on up. Dismissed.”
Oh, hell. “Sir.”
***
During his regency, it had been Count Aral Vorkosigan’s habit to take his daily briefing in his study; it was private enough for him to conduct business uninterrupted by the household goings-on, and he really liked his chair there. It was padded in all the right places, comfortably worn in all the wrong places, and absolutely silent on its wheels and springs. He could lean back in it without fear of going base over apex over the back of it, he could sprawl with a leg hooked over one of its arms, sit upright at his desk in it, the whole shebang. The perfect office chair, it was as familiar to him as his oldest friend in the world. That it was about the most comfortable chair that he’d actually bought for himself, and not for the rest of the house to use as well, was a nice added bonus too.
His study was a tad cramped, however, if more than three people had to be in on a briefing - and having everyone present for what had become known as the ‘MAD Brief’ - the Monthly Affairs of District Briefing (the acronym having been coined by Cordelia, who had rearranged the words to suit from the previous ‘Monthly District Affairs Briefing’), was simply not practical these days. The number of people required to be present for items concerning Hassadar alone, sometimes needed four or five people present for the briefing (more for especially complex or special planning and briefing sessions). As for the rest of his District, well, the monthly briefing could sometimes resemble a small holiday gathering of the available members of the Council of Counts.
Given that this meeting would be hosted by himself, Cordelia, Miles, and however many others present for the ever-increasing size of regular District business, the briefings were now taken in the Yellow Parlour on the second level of Vorkosigan House, which was large enough for everyone to be present, while remaining relatively comfortable in the process, especially as he was now keeping Miles fully up-to-date with things, for the eventual day that he’d have to take up the day-to-day running of the ‘family business’. Holding it in the Yellow Parlour also meant that Miles got a subliminal “Wake up and pay attention: This may be in your section of the House, but like it or not, it’ll be your business sooner or later!” as well.
In the normal course of events, District briefing would take place first thing in the morning, following Aral's daily household briefing, so as to allow for unscheduled overruns of the meetings to be contained to normal office hours. Today, though, things were going to be a little more relaxed. Miles had flown in from his last Auditorial investigation - which hadn’t taken that long, so must have been a fairly simple job on this occasion (hmm... one hanging or ten, this time? he wondered irrelevantly) - very late in the evening, practically the morning in fact, and Aral had decided to allow him to sleep late, rather than risk some Auditorial Snoring half-way through the briefings.
As usual, Aral insisted everyone be ready half an hour before the meetings were due to begin, to give them time to go over the agendas in case of last minute changes, and to briefly note what responses might be required. Aral had come to call this their ‘pre-strategisation time’. Cordelia called it a waste of time, as everyone tended to know what would happen anyway, and what Miles called it was, as expected, amusing, if often unprintable.
A long-standing habit of Aral’s, formed early on in his Regency, was to read the headlines on the local and planetary news feed, so as to warn himself about anything that might affect his attention later on in the day. Nothing sparked his immediate attention this time, thankfully. Aral then turned his attention to the daily agenda. “Hmph.” He leaned back in his chair, and re-read the read/write pad. “That’s a new one. Wonder what that’s all about?”
Miles looked up from his own read/write pad. “Which line?”
“Household item one.”
Miles skipped back; he hadn’t really paid any attention to the Household agenda, he’d been sucking down a coffee to fully wake himself up. The last Auditorial mission had been short, but required a lot of attention to detail and running around from site to site. As a result, he was exceedingly tired, even after a good night’s sleep. He envied Roic sometimes - he got the occasional day off to recover from being his usual combination of Auditor’s batman, spotter, escort, and fetcher-in-chief. It’d be nice if he could have done the same for himself, but being his father’s designated heir had its downsides - like having to get up first thing in the morning after a gruelling assignment, to take part in a regular meeting that’d most likely be as boring as it would be long. He’d been reading the MAD proposal regarding a replacement fountain jet to replace the old, practically worn out one that was currently in the Main Square in Hassadar. Having hit the ‘back’ button a few times, he found what he was looking for. “Got it.” He read it, and blinked in surprise, both his eyebrows rising. “Well. That is an odd one. Very cryptic. Is Pym prone to that at all?”
“Not that I can recall.” Aral shrugged a shoulder, with a slight inclination of his head, much like the Gallic shrugs one often saw in the French Quarter of Vorbarr Sultana, and added “Well, only when he’s embarrassed about something or other, anyway.”
Cordelia, sitting next to Aral, looked up from her pile of mail. “Oh?” She leaned over and looked at Aral’s read/write pad. She raised an eyebrow. “Well, indeed. That is odd. I suppose you’ll find out what it means in a few minutes, when he comes in to deliver his briefing.”
The neurons were firing behind Miles’ eyes now, and he was finally waking up. “Embarrassing, eh?” he mused, a tilted grin on his face. “Something like ‘Zap the cat ate my stunner, and can I have a new one, please?’, do you think?”
Aral snorted a laugh. “That’d certainly be embarrassing, without a doubt.” He shook his head in mild amusement. “I must admit, ‘Staff Request’ is something that I’ve never seen from Pym in all the time I’ve known him. He normally deals with staff matters very well indeed. Must be a particularly extraordinary problem for him to punt it upstairs like this.”
***
At ten hundred, as instructed, Roic was waiting for Pym outside his office again. It felt like he was being hauled in to see the Headmaster at school.
Mind you, not all of the calls to the Head’s Office were entirely bad, he recalled. The last time that he’d been hauled into that office, he’d been 15, playing five-a-side touch-rugby in the school playground during lunch break, and kicked the ball so hard that not only had it cleared the makeshift crossbar with miles of room to spare (an imaginary horizontal line six feet above and between a pair of coats dumped on the grass of the playground), it had continued on sailing through the air in a beautifully ballistic curve, and crashed - loudly - through the not-very-much-liked Headmaster’s office window (double glazed, no less), landing on his desk as he tried to eat his lunch of pasta twists and meatballs in a tomato-based sauce. The result was exceedingly messy, and for the rest of the school, highly amusing. The Headmaster however, had one heck of a sense of humour failure over it, and when Roic was called into the office, the desk looked like someone had been murdered on it - the Headmaster wasn’t that far behind in the appearance department either, come to that - and Roic had narrowly avoided being expelled. He had fond memories of the incident.
Pym collected his coat, and motioned Roic to follow him. “We’re meeting in the Yellow Parlour - m’lord’s got the MAD Briefing as well, today,” he explained. “You’re item one on the household agenda.”
Roic nodded his understanding. Oh well, at least it’ll be over quickly enough.
They walked up the back stairs to the ground floor, then up the great circular staircase to the first floor, then over to the East Wing to the Yellow Parlour. It was a habit of all the Armsmen never to use the lift tube, in case of power failure. That this had never happened was immaterial: they were there to aid and defend, and you couldn't do very much of that from inside a trapped lift tube. Besides, using the stairs helped keep them fit. Before walking in, Pym turned to Roic. “Wait here.” He nodded to the side of the door, which would be out of sight to those inside. “I’ll call you in when you’re needed.”
Roic did as instructed. Pym paused, coughed, straightened himself up, quickly checked his uniform in the mirror beside the doors - placed there, Roic assumed, for that very purpose - knocked once, and opened the door, walking in. He left the door slightly ajar.
***
Pym paused inside the room, nodded a formal “Good Morning, m’lord Count”, and came to a relaxed form of parade rest, spine straight, legs shoulder-width apart, arms relaxed behind his back, but with his hands linked at the thumbs and held flat atop one another, and waited. Normally, he would have been required to formally greet all in the room in order of precedence, but the Count hadn’t nearly enough patience for that, and had placed an instruction to the entire household staff quite early on in his Countship, that only the senior Vorkosigan in the room should be formally greeted when only family were present. At all other times, when others were present, the more formal rules were back in force, of course. Appearances were everything to the Vor.
Aral looked up, nodded acknowledgement, and without delay nodded to his read/write pad. “Problem, Pym? You’re Household Item one, I believe?”
“Yes, and no, sir. It’s one of the Armsmen who has a... um... request to make of you. The original request memo’s attached at annex ‘A’ to the household briefing notes.”
Aral and, Pym noted, Miles, both fiddled with their read/write pads. Miles eyebrows matched the Count his Father’s in reaching altitude speed records.
Count Vorkosigan’s face bore a rather stunned, if bemused, expression. Lord Vorkosigan was trying to hide a grin. Lady Vorkosigan, peering over her husband’s shoulder, was trying, and failing, to suppress a giggle. Pym stood at parade rest, face like stone, all right and proper. The only problem with that was that his ears were bright red, and the flush was now spreading from the back of his neck. He hated days like this. He politely coughed once.
“I have Armsman Roic waiting in the corridor, m’lord. Shall I bring him in to explain it himself?”
Aral snorted a chuckle. “By all means. This I have to hear.” Miles managed, with supreme effort, to suppress his belly laugh into a kind of strangled snort, but his eyes were alive with anticipation. Cordelia was holding back a massive set of giggles, and barely managing to drink her tea without snorting it all down her nose.
Roic, having been called in, greeted the Count, and then, after a small amount of highly amused snorts from the assembled peanut gallery - at least, he assumed that’s what they’d been - explained what he wanted to do, and why. And then waited. The Count looked somewhat bemused, almost cross-eyed, even. Lord Vorkosigan was biting into one of Ma Kosti’s chocolate cream tart things and trying not to laugh - even Roic knew the look the hyper little git gave him just then, he’d seen it often enough over the last few months - and Lady Vorkosigan was looking anywhere but at Roic, managing to hold her amusement in check, it appeared.
“So,” spoke up Count Vorkosigan, after a few moments. “Let’s see if I have this aright, Roic. You want to get the twenty-four hours over the New Year off to visit your relatives in the District; and failing that, you want to perform some kind of archaic ritual involving opening every portal in the place to the elements, for about ten minutes. Have I got that right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I see.”
Miles managed not to sound like he wanted to roll on the floor laughing his backside off, and piped up. “As Traditions go, it’s quite a mild one, I think. have you ever visited Silvy Vale at New Year?”
Aral looked over at Miles. “No. Why?”
“You remember I did a couple of years back?”
“Vaguely. If I recall, you were given an invitation to attend their New Year festivities?”
“That’s the one. Quite a remarkable night, as it happens. Did I tell you what they got up to?”
“If you did, I forgot what it was. Either that, or you tried to tell me over breakfast: it amounts to the same thing, after all.”
Miles snorted amusement. “Indeed. Short version, they set a bunch of those native Dry Bark bushes in a bonfire - not the Tri-Spine ones, though, they react explosively to fire, you will remember - and watch the resulting changing colours of the flames, while a bunch of the village lads in animal costumes - sheep and horses are the most popular, apparently - run door to door, making a heck of a load of noise, and snatching snacks and gifts from each home in turn. The piece de la resistance, so to speak, is the burning of the effigy of the Baba-Yaga. All done to the drinking of much maple mead, of course.”
“I’ve heard worse,” opined Cordelia, smiling broadly.
“Oh?” enquired a slightly surprised Aral, “Pray tell?”
“I heard this from one of my trainee doctors at Hassadar General. Nu Kamchatka is a small hamlet to the west of the district farm belt; seems they play ‘Corner The Hopper’: Anyone being bitten by one is said to have good luck for the rest of the year.”
Aral looked aghast, Miles guffawed, and Pym and Roic looked somewhat confused. Cordelia relented a little. “The Hopper, gentlemen, is a native Barrayaran field rodent, one of the few things that can actually eat the Earth-based crops that they grow over there, like corn, potatoes, and so on. It’s an exceptionally annoying little pest to them at the best of times; thankfully, it’s not that plentiful, so they don’t have to make any special effort to eradicate them. It’s about a half metre in length excluding its tail, and is normally as timid as any creature you care to name - tends to flee at the first hint of someone coming along. When cornered, however, it changes temperament to become an aggressive and vicious little thing, and it’s been know to be able to use its two-and-a-half-centimetre-long teeth to bite through steel toe caps. Get bitten by one of those things, and assuming you survive the blood loss and any viruses it may be carrying, the rest of your year can only get better!”
Aral blinked. “I’m not surprised - those Hoppers can carry the most nasty little germs. A training platoon on a cross-country exercise a few years back had one of their number bitten - poor devil stuck his foot down a Hopper hole by accident. Never bothered to get his foot checked, thought he’d scratched it on something. Lost the blasted leg a week later. Tragic.”
Miles brought the talk back on-topic. “So, this is a mild request by comparison to some we know of, then?”
Aral leaned back into the sofa, nodding confirmation. “Indeed”. He tapped his knee with his forefinger a few times as he thought it over, then nodded once as he made his mind up. “Alright. Roic, I can’t grant you the shift off, I’m afraid: it’s an 'all hands on deck' kind of thing. That said, and given the lack of burning or exploding bushes, revolting rodents, and costumed kids, I think we can probably stand to introduce a small amount of annual ceremony into the household. I don’t think there’s much risk of a security breach - the place is in the middle of practically nowhere, after all, and any problems would be detected by the security sensors long before they become a threat anyhow. Pym, take note: Roic’s leave request is declined, but his secondary request is hereby granted.”
Pym blinked, somewhat surprised, to say the least. “Yes, m’lord.”
Roic was equally as surprised, but managed to hold it in. “Thank you, m’lord.”
Aral nodded once in dismissal. “Right, item two: the week’s menus from Ma Kosti. She's proposing a weekly 'Galactic Cuisine Night', and for the first offering is suggesting something from Earth, a Lamb Phaal, whatever that is...”
Fin