Arthurian Fic - "Foreign Languages"
Title: Foreign Languages
Fandom: Arthurian Legend
Characters: Sagramore, Bedwyr, references to sundy others
Word Count: 1,904 wds.
Rating: PG
Author's Notes: For Soujin.
The pain. The pain is worse than any he’s ever known - worse than falling off his horse as a child, worse than getting beaten by the Saxons when he first arrived in Britain, worse than -
Shouting in the distance in a language he cannot understand. Not his own, and not that of Arthur’s court. And a cry, and loud wail that starts in sorrow and ends in rage. More shouts them, of men in fear for their very souls, each cutting short in mid-work until there is silence again.
He had a fit once when he was with Mordred. One moment he felt the rough, sword-calloused hand in his and was looking into the dark eyes that sparkled with the light and fury of the North Sea. Then it was dark, and the hand was beneath his head, and the muffled voice was calling his name over and over through the thick wall of black. A song had drifted over him, wrapping around him and pulling him back from the black and into concerned sea-storm eyes. He remembers that moment now as he listens through the same black wall for more shouts - for his name, or anyone’s name, for a language he can understand. He tries to call, but even to words that rise to his own lips are foreign.
And then the pain, and then the darkness.
Banners lay crumpled beneath the bodies of the men who once carried them. There is no standard that is not stained now with blood. Those who still walk ignore them, ignore the bodies that cover the ground more fully than a snowstorm ever could. One man walks among his dead companions and gathers the token they carried from their wives and sweethearts so he might return them. One man, really no more than a boy, whispers the Latin prayers for the dead and the Gaelic incantations against evil in almost a single breath.
And one man trudges back from the water, soaked in the blood of his brother, his cousin, his dearest friend, his king, and all their enemies beside. His eyes scan the ground and see the faces of the men who even the night before had drunk ale and gambled on the bones with him.
And the one of them who lies as though dead, but still breathes.
*******
There is a voice floating above him, a soft tenor lullabye in a language he does not know. It seems to come closer, lower to him, surround him, until Sagramore realizes that he had been asleep, and now is awake. The sound is another person, somewhere in the room. With all the strength he can will himself, Sagramore opens his eyes.
He is in a crude hut, the wall above his head formed by a solid stone, perhaps the side of a cliff. The planking of the other walls is solid wood, but there is mud daubed in the crevasses in the way of the forest dwelling folk. Somehow the low wooden bed beneath him is padded; his fingertips brush a silky film and make out straw beneath.
Blinking, Sagramore tries to take a deep breath, but his chest is tight. The last fog of darkness clearing, he realizes his ribs are bound tightly. The ache begins to wash over him in a dull throb; not so much a pain as merely a presence in his body. Gingerly, he turns his head to see the rest of the room.
A table and chair, a trunk that looks far to ornately carved to belong in a place like this, bundles of herbs, sacks of grain and ale-barrels, a small fire in the corner, and a man. The man sits in a second chair by the doorway of the hut, the skins pulled back to let in the light and air. His back is to Sagramore, and even so the sunlight is too bright for Sagramore to make him out, so instead he listens to the man’s son. Now he can tell that the man’s voice is rough and the melody falters, as with someone who is unused to song. The words are still foreign, but as the last vestiges of sleep pass away, he begins to remember a song, someone singing through the dark.
Mordred? But even as the faint word escapes, he knows the figure is too tall, too broad-shouldered to be Mordred. The song is wrong too - not one of the sea-songs sung in Mordred’s clear high voice, something in a rougher tone, something of the forest.
But now it stops, and the man turns. Sagramore can’t see his face, not until he stands and pulls the skins back over the door and carries the chair back to the table. He pick the chair up with one hand and tuck it under his arm, and when he turns Sagramore can see why. And then he recognizes the man.
Bedwyr? Without thinking, Sagramore starts to sit up, but a sudden, violent pain shoots through him. He cries out, and in an instant Bedwyr’s hand is under his head, easing him back against the padded bed, speaking to him softly in the language of the song. Welsh, he thinks through the pain, Bedwyr is a Welshman. But why does he not use English, or Latin even, something I can understand. And then, as before, the darkness.
*******
He trades the weight of his armor for the weight of the man and begins to walk - away from the battle, away from the destruction, away from every reminder of how they tried to change the world and failed. He stops as he passes the remains of a camp, makes a sling of a banner and fills it with food and drink to tie against his chest as he walks. The press against his chest, the body against his back reminds him of another time and place, a life before this one. That life ended in blood also, ended with him covered in blood, with a body against his back and another on his chest, walking away from the ruins to bury a past and build a future. He will go now where he went then. He walks, out of another nightmare and into the trees that speak in the language of his birth.
*******
Sagramore can sit up now. He leans against a cushion and lifts his arms again to scrape the knife along his jaw. The hair falls into the bowl of warm water on his lap. He has spent all morning trying to shave himself, but has so stop often. His arms are heavy, hard to hold up, but they no longer hurt when he puts them down, just throb. He refuses to let Bedwyr help when he already has to do everything else.
His broken ribs are almost healed, and the gash in his side is now holding together without the help of stitches. He saw the stitches only once; Bedwyr usually changed his bandages when he was asleep. Or perhaps it wasn’t Bedwyr - the stitches had looked too neat and clean for a one-handed soldier. He didn’t ask, and one day he woke up and they were gone.
Bedwyr and Sagramore do not talk. Bedwyr sings snatches of songs, always in Welsh. Once, Sagramore thought he heard two voices outside the hut, Bedwyr and someone else, but it could have been the trees. The trees talk more than the men do. Sagramore for his part does not need to talk, not yet. He remembers enough without asking questions.
He thinks he talks in his sleep though, in Hungarian. He has dreams about his mother, yelling at her, trying to make her understand about the companions and the Matter and the boy with sea-storm eyes who loved him and betrayed him without ever stopping loving him. He wakes up and the words still hang in the air, so he knows that sometimes he must say them out loud.
One day he looks down and realizes that the silky material that makes the straw into a mattress for him is a knight’s standard. He shifts as much as he can manage to see the design on the azure field - the sight of keys, argent, startles him. The standard is Cai’s. There are dark stains on the blue fabric, and Sagramore realizes they must be blood, his blood and others, maybe even Cai’s own.
He wishes he could weep, but there are no tears.
*******
He wishes he could weep, but there are no tears.
*******
It starts when Sagramore finds he can finally get up out of bed and walk around. He looks Bedwyr in the eye and says, in English, that it isn’t right that Bedwyr is doing all the work and has sleeping on the dirt floor all this time. So, there are two options - either he will take half the work, or Bedwyr will take half the bed. Bedwyr replies, in English, that Sagramore is not well enough to do anything but fuss like a mother hen and that he should sit down before he falls over. That night, Bedwyr crawls in next to him under the rough-woven blanket, and they fall asleep. No one sleeps on the floor again.
*******
It was not like Mordred,
It was not like Mairghread,
nothing would ever be that again,
nothing would ever be that again,
but the language of loss
but the language of loss
and the language of love
but the language of…
were not so different.
were the same to everyone.
*******
“…Un, dou, tri pheth sy'n anodd i mi,
Yw cyfri'r ser pan fo hi'n rhewi,
A doti'n llaw i dwtsh a'r lleard,
A deall meddwl f'annwyl gariad.”
Somewhere in the back of Sagramore’s mind the memory stirs. The faint tenor drifts into the hut from the forest, as faint as it was when it first hovered over the injured man a long time before, a lifetime before.
He leaves the hut and follows the voice through the trees, half-wondering if he is only hearing the trees themselves again, speaking to each other. He finds he is climbing up the hill which make up the stone side of the hut. The trees get thinner the higher he climbs, and the song pulls him nearer. When the trees break, he sees that it is not a hill, but a cliff - one side falls away to the forest and the hut below, the other reaches over the sea. He had not realized they were so close to the sea all this time.
At the very edge of the cliff, is a great pile of stones, a cairn. Bedwyr sits on top with his face turned out to the sea. Sagramore stays at the edge of the trees and listens to the broken melody that the wind carries to him. He closes his eyes.
The song stops, and when Sagramore opens his eye he sees that Bedwyr is looking at him. He goes slowly to the pile of stones but does not touch them. Bedwyr turns away and starts to speak, in English now, I’m terrible, I know, I’m sorry, it’s an old song that she used to sing to our-
Sagramore stops him - Később; értem. And Bedwyr just replies diolch yn fawr.
*******
…and the language of love
…but the language of…
were not so different.
were the same to everyone.
Secondary note: For those of your curious, this is the song Bedwyr is singing. The complete lyrics and an English traslation are on the side.
Fandom: Arthurian Legend
Characters: Sagramore, Bedwyr, references to sundy others
Word Count: 1,904 wds.
Rating: PG
Author's Notes: For Soujin.
The pain. The pain is worse than any he’s ever known - worse than falling off his horse as a child, worse than getting beaten by the Saxons when he first arrived in Britain, worse than -
Shouting in the distance in a language he cannot understand. Not his own, and not that of Arthur’s court. And a cry, and loud wail that starts in sorrow and ends in rage. More shouts them, of men in fear for their very souls, each cutting short in mid-work until there is silence again.
He had a fit once when he was with Mordred. One moment he felt the rough, sword-calloused hand in his and was looking into the dark eyes that sparkled with the light and fury of the North Sea. Then it was dark, and the hand was beneath his head, and the muffled voice was calling his name over and over through the thick wall of black. A song had drifted over him, wrapping around him and pulling him back from the black and into concerned sea-storm eyes. He remembers that moment now as he listens through the same black wall for more shouts - for his name, or anyone’s name, for a language he can understand. He tries to call, but even to words that rise to his own lips are foreign.
And then the pain, and then the darkness.
Banners lay crumpled beneath the bodies of the men who once carried them. There is no standard that is not stained now with blood. Those who still walk ignore them, ignore the bodies that cover the ground more fully than a snowstorm ever could. One man walks among his dead companions and gathers the token they carried from their wives and sweethearts so he might return them. One man, really no more than a boy, whispers the Latin prayers for the dead and the Gaelic incantations against evil in almost a single breath.
And one man trudges back from the water, soaked in the blood of his brother, his cousin, his dearest friend, his king, and all their enemies beside. His eyes scan the ground and see the faces of the men who even the night before had drunk ale and gambled on the bones with him.
And the one of them who lies as though dead, but still breathes.
*******
There is a voice floating above him, a soft tenor lullabye in a language he does not know. It seems to come closer, lower to him, surround him, until Sagramore realizes that he had been asleep, and now is awake. The sound is another person, somewhere in the room. With all the strength he can will himself, Sagramore opens his eyes.
He is in a crude hut, the wall above his head formed by a solid stone, perhaps the side of a cliff. The planking of the other walls is solid wood, but there is mud daubed in the crevasses in the way of the forest dwelling folk. Somehow the low wooden bed beneath him is padded; his fingertips brush a silky film and make out straw beneath.
Blinking, Sagramore tries to take a deep breath, but his chest is tight. The last fog of darkness clearing, he realizes his ribs are bound tightly. The ache begins to wash over him in a dull throb; not so much a pain as merely a presence in his body. Gingerly, he turns his head to see the rest of the room.
A table and chair, a trunk that looks far to ornately carved to belong in a place like this, bundles of herbs, sacks of grain and ale-barrels, a small fire in the corner, and a man. The man sits in a second chair by the doorway of the hut, the skins pulled back to let in the light and air. His back is to Sagramore, and even so the sunlight is too bright for Sagramore to make him out, so instead he listens to the man’s son. Now he can tell that the man’s voice is rough and the melody falters, as with someone who is unused to song. The words are still foreign, but as the last vestiges of sleep pass away, he begins to remember a song, someone singing through the dark.
Mordred? But even as the faint word escapes, he knows the figure is too tall, too broad-shouldered to be Mordred. The song is wrong too - not one of the sea-songs sung in Mordred’s clear high voice, something in a rougher tone, something of the forest.
But now it stops, and the man turns. Sagramore can’t see his face, not until he stands and pulls the skins back over the door and carries the chair back to the table. He pick the chair up with one hand and tuck it under his arm, and when he turns Sagramore can see why. And then he recognizes the man.
Bedwyr? Without thinking, Sagramore starts to sit up, but a sudden, violent pain shoots through him. He cries out, and in an instant Bedwyr’s hand is under his head, easing him back against the padded bed, speaking to him softly in the language of the song. Welsh, he thinks through the pain, Bedwyr is a Welshman. But why does he not use English, or Latin even, something I can understand. And then, as before, the darkness.
*******
He trades the weight of his armor for the weight of the man and begins to walk - away from the battle, away from the destruction, away from every reminder of how they tried to change the world and failed. He stops as he passes the remains of a camp, makes a sling of a banner and fills it with food and drink to tie against his chest as he walks. The press against his chest, the body against his back reminds him of another time and place, a life before this one. That life ended in blood also, ended with him covered in blood, with a body against his back and another on his chest, walking away from the ruins to bury a past and build a future. He will go now where he went then. He walks, out of another nightmare and into the trees that speak in the language of his birth.
*******
Sagramore can sit up now. He leans against a cushion and lifts his arms again to scrape the knife along his jaw. The hair falls into the bowl of warm water on his lap. He has spent all morning trying to shave himself, but has so stop often. His arms are heavy, hard to hold up, but they no longer hurt when he puts them down, just throb. He refuses to let Bedwyr help when he already has to do everything else.
His broken ribs are almost healed, and the gash in his side is now holding together without the help of stitches. He saw the stitches only once; Bedwyr usually changed his bandages when he was asleep. Or perhaps it wasn’t Bedwyr - the stitches had looked too neat and clean for a one-handed soldier. He didn’t ask, and one day he woke up and they were gone.
Bedwyr and Sagramore do not talk. Bedwyr sings snatches of songs, always in Welsh. Once, Sagramore thought he heard two voices outside the hut, Bedwyr and someone else, but it could have been the trees. The trees talk more than the men do. Sagramore for his part does not need to talk, not yet. He remembers enough without asking questions.
He thinks he talks in his sleep though, in Hungarian. He has dreams about his mother, yelling at her, trying to make her understand about the companions and the Matter and the boy with sea-storm eyes who loved him and betrayed him without ever stopping loving him. He wakes up and the words still hang in the air, so he knows that sometimes he must say them out loud.
One day he looks down and realizes that the silky material that makes the straw into a mattress for him is a knight’s standard. He shifts as much as he can manage to see the design on the azure field - the sight of keys, argent, startles him. The standard is Cai’s. There are dark stains on the blue fabric, and Sagramore realizes they must be blood, his blood and others, maybe even Cai’s own.
He wishes he could weep, but there are no tears.
*******
He wishes he could weep, but there are no tears.
*******
It starts when Sagramore finds he can finally get up out of bed and walk around. He looks Bedwyr in the eye and says, in English, that it isn’t right that Bedwyr is doing all the work and has sleeping on the dirt floor all this time. So, there are two options - either he will take half the work, or Bedwyr will take half the bed. Bedwyr replies, in English, that Sagramore is not well enough to do anything but fuss like a mother hen and that he should sit down before he falls over. That night, Bedwyr crawls in next to him under the rough-woven blanket, and they fall asleep. No one sleeps on the floor again.
*******
It was not like Mordred,
It was not like Mairghread,
nothing would ever be that again,
nothing would ever be that again,
but the language of loss
but the language of loss
and the language of love
but the language of…
were not so different.
were the same to everyone.
*******
“…Un, dou, tri pheth sy'n anodd i mi,
Yw cyfri'r ser pan fo hi'n rhewi,
A doti'n llaw i dwtsh a'r lleard,
A deall meddwl f'annwyl gariad.”
Somewhere in the back of Sagramore’s mind the memory stirs. The faint tenor drifts into the hut from the forest, as faint as it was when it first hovered over the injured man a long time before, a lifetime before.
He leaves the hut and follows the voice through the trees, half-wondering if he is only hearing the trees themselves again, speaking to each other. He finds he is climbing up the hill which make up the stone side of the hut. The trees get thinner the higher he climbs, and the song pulls him nearer. When the trees break, he sees that it is not a hill, but a cliff - one side falls away to the forest and the hut below, the other reaches over the sea. He had not realized they were so close to the sea all this time.
At the very edge of the cliff, is a great pile of stones, a cairn. Bedwyr sits on top with his face turned out to the sea. Sagramore stays at the edge of the trees and listens to the broken melody that the wind carries to him. He closes his eyes.
The song stops, and when Sagramore opens his eye he sees that Bedwyr is looking at him. He goes slowly to the pile of stones but does not touch them. Bedwyr turns away and starts to speak, in English now, I’m terrible, I know, I’m sorry, it’s an old song that she used to sing to our-
Sagramore stops him - Később; értem. And Bedwyr just replies diolch yn fawr.
*******
…and the language of love
…but the language of…
were not so different.
were the same to everyone.
Secondary note: For those of your curious, this is the song Bedwyr is singing. The complete lyrics and an English traslation are on the side.