Fic: Edinburgh Two-step and Reel (1/2) (HL, DM/M)
Don't get too excited, there's just no way I can top Misrule! Next year, maybe.
Anyway, here's the first part of Edinburgh Two-step and Reel, with the second to come shortly after Hogmany. I've written half of it, we'll be fine. Posting first to LJ - the whole will go on the website when done, if you'd like to wait.
unovis_lj was kind enough to beta the first draft of this, and gave me some very helpful comments. Edinburgh Two-step is of course written for
darthhellokitty, who lent me a book I have wanted to read for years - across the Atlantic!
I've been meaning to write Edinburgh for ages. This isn't the lovely sweeping political fiction I'd envisaged, but it's still Scotland, and I hope sufficiently new to be of interest. Characters of course belong to to Panzer-Davis productions. DM/M - I suspect, R when it's done.
Edinburgh Two-step and Reel: Two-step
“Dr Johnson has allowed the peculiar merit of breakfast in Scotland.”
Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D.
London, 1785.
Skeins of fog blew tattered across the medieval shop frontages. In the dark he could see twenty yards, no more, and his city shoes slipped on the cobbles. It was late, the shops were closed, and only the lights of a single, empty burger bar broke the darkness. Below him on Hunter Square a lone piper played on - Flowers of the Forest, what else, dropped piece-meal and ungodly into the lull between gusts of wind. He was cold, collar pulled up round his ears, hands deep in his pockets, his ears prickling with chill and his toes damp.
Not lost, but aimless, a wandering fool in search of a bed for the night; a bar, or a friendly face in this land of barley broth and hairy beasts and rain on parchment, blurring azure paint into grief -
St. Giles loomed out of the mist heavy with fretwork and a promise of shelter. He stumbled into the porch with the wind at his back, rain shattering on the garbardine of a coat meant for Mediterranean showers and not Scottish winters.
Heart of Lothian, this place. He had forgotten how much he hated the cold. His nose was burning, and his fingers were stiff, and if he ever found any the beer would be thin. They made soup of potatoes in Scotland, and meal. He remembered it with a shudder that was half unwelcome flashback and half convulsive shiver, brushed by memories as old as the stones of the cathedral. Older.
History was gone in the blink of an eye. He blew on his fingers, and looked up. Green baize notice board with photocopied flyers, stone bench, worn sisal carpet, and the murmur of voices from the cathedral itself. The bells were tolling. Here, in the shelter of the porch, they sounded cold and clear and for a moment they spoke to him not of advent but of sanctuary, and the beat at the base of his spine was not presence but stuck cast steel.
Then it was presence, urgent as now, familiar as the hilt of a sword in his hand. His heart knew it before he, holding him sealed in place when every instinct called for flight. The door opened: shock flushed his skin without warming. He was tongue-tied and heavy limbed and without his control he was, he knew it, smiling, with the raindrops cold on his skin and dripping down the back of his neck.
Duncan MacLeod. Looking good, dressed for the weather in a down jacket and a pair of sturdy boots, with a summer tan worn into winter that suggested he hadn’t been spending all his time under the pale sun of a Scottish sky. Stopped in the doorway with his eyes wide and the start of a smile pulling at the corners of his mouth as if old friends tumbled out of the storm every day of the week, and were welcome.
He’d stayed silent too long. He opened his mouth to say, hello, good to see you again, how are you? - I must go - and instead it was Duncan who was walking towards him with his hands stretched out and his face brightening, as if they were friends, as if all the story between them was nothing but myth.
“Suppose we are strangers,” Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod said, urgent and soft with the gentle burr of a Highland accent stronger under the words here on his native soil. “Suppose we meet here, now.”
Close, he smelt of candle wax and oranges, and there were voices and footsteps beyond the door where the carolers said their goodbyes.
“Suppose I say to you, foul night, no? - and you say, yes, and I say -”
Duncan’s hand on his shoulder, turning him round, they were walking.
“There’s a bar just down High Street with a blaze to warm your bones, and you say -”
Wind blew away the rest of his words, pouncing around the corner of the porch with freezing malice.
But Duncan did not let go, and did not stop talking, propelling the pair of them bent into it. Methos caught, “Ale. Soup. Storm -” Rain stung his face, but Duncan’s hand on his shoulder was not warm but hot and would not let go.
“Away the street -”
They stumbled through a doorway in a welter of cold and sleet. A small bar with an Art-Deco finish like so many of the bars in this city, glass glinting cleaner among mahogany than ever it did when the lawyers breakfasted on oysters and port among the drovers up from the south. Smell of woodsmoke and wet coats and spilled beer, fairy lights strung among the carvings.
“And you will take your coat off - sit down, man, you’re half frozen!”
He was. He did sit down, ease himself out of the wet garbardine folds, and by the time he had there was a pint and a whisky chaser sitting on the table in front of him and Duncan opposite, stretching his legs to the fire in the tiled hearth.
“Or perhaps not strangers but men who knew each other once, a long time ago. Slainte,” Duncan said, and raised his glass. He was smiling. “I was thinking of you, tonight,” he said. “And the wind blew you here. Although we are almost strangers: I will smile at you over the whisky, and think, we might be friends, this man and I, although you will know different.”
“Duncan-”
“MacLeod. Of the Clan of that name, although that’s not something I lay claim to often, here in the lowlands. Yourself?”
He waited, but Methos could not for a moment recall who he was, although the name was on his passport and his boarding card and both were in his coat.
“Then we shall talk. You’ve books in your pocket and the airport is closed and half the town shuttered up for the night. You’re a long way from home and lonely, forbye, and I’m harmless enough. They’ll vouch for me here at the bar if you’ve a mind.”
Duncan, sitting easy in lamplight.
“I’ve a fire laid ready, and a potful of stew on the stove, and a new-made bed turned down waiting,” Duncan said. “Will ye no come home with me?”
Methos considered the hospitality of the Highland race, drank the last of his beer and said, “Aye.”
Had he come here for this? If he had, he didn’t know it, but the cold had crept through to his bones and he was tired of the faces of strangers. Time was not his friend and the wind knew all his names and never said them aloud: he wanted someone who knew the shape of his thoughts in the dark.
Duncan’s hand on his wrist was warm.
Home was a flat in the New Town, high ceilings and sash windows with the night pressing black against the glass. Walls stacked with pictures, kitchen table piled high with letters, books, a white paper on the Arbroath fishing industry, three ball point pens, a capercaillie’s tail feather in a dry inkwell, a goldfish bowl with two fat fan-tailed fish. Spice-warmed kitchen with the light gold on oak and skin alike. Duncan served him a bowl of brose with oatmeal and carrots, with a flavoursome shank of lamb somewhere in the making of it and a fine Speyside malt to wash it down beside.
“If we’d met in summer I’d have served you crowdie and raspberries, and a Traquair ale to sink with it, sitting out on the garth in sunshine. Cricket’s a game for the English - we’d play boules, you and I, and chess in the evening. Winter’s for whisky and stories. Come through.”
Peat stacked on hearthstone, cut pine on the mantelpiece, clustered candles on the sideboard between the Jacobean crystal and the hallmarked silver. Heavy stuffed sofas and a Persian rug by the fire pitted with scorch marks: half-empty bookcases and two broadswords hung within reach on the wall and a claymore propped in the corner with the harness still on it. Nothing temporary, this. Duncan’s home, and a space by the fire tonight that was his. He could lay down roots in front of that fire.
“I’ve a cottage on the coast for weekends, for when the herring come back, and a permit for fishing the Tay, come September. A godson. A job. I’ll not mention the state of the Union.”
History’s intimacy threaded down through the years. Duncan’s smile was more intimate still, as if presence was a promise made years ago and kept. Faith made Methos uneasy, but flesh was real. They’d never been lovers, but he knew Duncan’s bed to be warm by the heating blood in his veins.
They were alone.
He was beginning to warm.
“The oil will last long enough, if we’re careful,” Duncan said. “You’ve no idea of the lure of the kilt.” He was smiling still. “Half of Asia is Scottish, come Burns Night.”
“You can’t fund a country on tourists.”
“We’ve a bit more to offer than that. Move over.”
Near as close as skin on skin: not the breathless tumult of first bedding, but the easy acquaintance of lovers long met and merry known. Easy as striking a flame, without words. Flames marigold-bright against soot-blackened stone, whisky in his hand, woman’s voice on the stereo rich and strange - “Who knows / where the time goes ...”
Duncan at his back, sword-arm heavy against his shoulder. They’d lie in the same bed tonight, he knew it.
“You’ll stay for Hogmany, no?”
He was thawing.
End 1/2.
Anyway, here's the first part of Edinburgh Two-step and Reel, with the second to come shortly after Hogmany. I've written half of it, we'll be fine. Posting first to LJ - the whole will go on the website when done, if you'd like to wait.
unovis_lj was kind enough to beta the first draft of this, and gave me some very helpful comments. Edinburgh Two-step is of course written for
darthhellokitty, who lent me a book I have wanted to read for years - across the Atlantic!
I've been meaning to write Edinburgh for ages. This isn't the lovely sweeping political fiction I'd envisaged, but it's still Scotland, and I hope sufficiently new to be of interest. Characters of course belong to to Panzer-Davis productions. DM/M - I suspect, R when it's done.
Edinburgh Two-step and Reel: Two-step
“Dr Johnson has allowed the peculiar merit of breakfast in Scotland.”
Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D.
London, 1785.
Skeins of fog blew tattered across the medieval shop frontages. In the dark he could see twenty yards, no more, and his city shoes slipped on the cobbles. It was late, the shops were closed, and only the lights of a single, empty burger bar broke the darkness. Below him on Hunter Square a lone piper played on - Flowers of the Forest, what else, dropped piece-meal and ungodly into the lull between gusts of wind. He was cold, collar pulled up round his ears, hands deep in his pockets, his ears prickling with chill and his toes damp.
Not lost, but aimless, a wandering fool in search of a bed for the night; a bar, or a friendly face in this land of barley broth and hairy beasts and rain on parchment, blurring azure paint into grief -
St. Giles loomed out of the mist heavy with fretwork and a promise of shelter. He stumbled into the porch with the wind at his back, rain shattering on the garbardine of a coat meant for Mediterranean showers and not Scottish winters.
Heart of Lothian, this place. He had forgotten how much he hated the cold. His nose was burning, and his fingers were stiff, and if he ever found any the beer would be thin. They made soup of potatoes in Scotland, and meal. He remembered it with a shudder that was half unwelcome flashback and half convulsive shiver, brushed by memories as old as the stones of the cathedral. Older.
History was gone in the blink of an eye. He blew on his fingers, and looked up. Green baize notice board with photocopied flyers, stone bench, worn sisal carpet, and the murmur of voices from the cathedral itself. The bells were tolling. Here, in the shelter of the porch, they sounded cold and clear and for a moment they spoke to him not of advent but of sanctuary, and the beat at the base of his spine was not presence but stuck cast steel.
Then it was presence, urgent as now, familiar as the hilt of a sword in his hand. His heart knew it before he, holding him sealed in place when every instinct called for flight. The door opened: shock flushed his skin without warming. He was tongue-tied and heavy limbed and without his control he was, he knew it, smiling, with the raindrops cold on his skin and dripping down the back of his neck.
Duncan MacLeod. Looking good, dressed for the weather in a down jacket and a pair of sturdy boots, with a summer tan worn into winter that suggested he hadn’t been spending all his time under the pale sun of a Scottish sky. Stopped in the doorway with his eyes wide and the start of a smile pulling at the corners of his mouth as if old friends tumbled out of the storm every day of the week, and were welcome.
He’d stayed silent too long. He opened his mouth to say, hello, good to see you again, how are you? - I must go - and instead it was Duncan who was walking towards him with his hands stretched out and his face brightening, as if they were friends, as if all the story between them was nothing but myth.
“Suppose we are strangers,” Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod said, urgent and soft with the gentle burr of a Highland accent stronger under the words here on his native soil. “Suppose we meet here, now.”
Close, he smelt of candle wax and oranges, and there were voices and footsteps beyond the door where the carolers said their goodbyes.
“Suppose I say to you, foul night, no? - and you say, yes, and I say -”
Duncan’s hand on his shoulder, turning him round, they were walking.
“There’s a bar just down High Street with a blaze to warm your bones, and you say -”
Wind blew away the rest of his words, pouncing around the corner of the porch with freezing malice.
But Duncan did not let go, and did not stop talking, propelling the pair of them bent into it. Methos caught, “Ale. Soup. Storm -” Rain stung his face, but Duncan’s hand on his shoulder was not warm but hot and would not let go.
“Away the street -”
They stumbled through a doorway in a welter of cold and sleet. A small bar with an Art-Deco finish like so many of the bars in this city, glass glinting cleaner among mahogany than ever it did when the lawyers breakfasted on oysters and port among the drovers up from the south. Smell of woodsmoke and wet coats and spilled beer, fairy lights strung among the carvings.
“And you will take your coat off - sit down, man, you’re half frozen!”
He was. He did sit down, ease himself out of the wet garbardine folds, and by the time he had there was a pint and a whisky chaser sitting on the table in front of him and Duncan opposite, stretching his legs to the fire in the tiled hearth.
“Or perhaps not strangers but men who knew each other once, a long time ago. Slainte,” Duncan said, and raised his glass. He was smiling. “I was thinking of you, tonight,” he said. “And the wind blew you here. Although we are almost strangers: I will smile at you over the whisky, and think, we might be friends, this man and I, although you will know different.”
“Duncan-”
“MacLeod. Of the Clan of that name, although that’s not something I lay claim to often, here in the lowlands. Yourself?”
He waited, but Methos could not for a moment recall who he was, although the name was on his passport and his boarding card and both were in his coat.
“Then we shall talk. You’ve books in your pocket and the airport is closed and half the town shuttered up for the night. You’re a long way from home and lonely, forbye, and I’m harmless enough. They’ll vouch for me here at the bar if you’ve a mind.”
Duncan, sitting easy in lamplight.
“I’ve a fire laid ready, and a potful of stew on the stove, and a new-made bed turned down waiting,” Duncan said. “Will ye no come home with me?”
Methos considered the hospitality of the Highland race, drank the last of his beer and said, “Aye.”
Had he come here for this? If he had, he didn’t know it, but the cold had crept through to his bones and he was tired of the faces of strangers. Time was not his friend and the wind knew all his names and never said them aloud: he wanted someone who knew the shape of his thoughts in the dark.
Duncan’s hand on his wrist was warm.
Home was a flat in the New Town, high ceilings and sash windows with the night pressing black against the glass. Walls stacked with pictures, kitchen table piled high with letters, books, a white paper on the Arbroath fishing industry, three ball point pens, a capercaillie’s tail feather in a dry inkwell, a goldfish bowl with two fat fan-tailed fish. Spice-warmed kitchen with the light gold on oak and skin alike. Duncan served him a bowl of brose with oatmeal and carrots, with a flavoursome shank of lamb somewhere in the making of it and a fine Speyside malt to wash it down beside.
“If we’d met in summer I’d have served you crowdie and raspberries, and a Traquair ale to sink with it, sitting out on the garth in sunshine. Cricket’s a game for the English - we’d play boules, you and I, and chess in the evening. Winter’s for whisky and stories. Come through.”
Peat stacked on hearthstone, cut pine on the mantelpiece, clustered candles on the sideboard between the Jacobean crystal and the hallmarked silver. Heavy stuffed sofas and a Persian rug by the fire pitted with scorch marks: half-empty bookcases and two broadswords hung within reach on the wall and a claymore propped in the corner with the harness still on it. Nothing temporary, this. Duncan’s home, and a space by the fire tonight that was his. He could lay down roots in front of that fire.
“I’ve a cottage on the coast for weekends, for when the herring come back, and a permit for fishing the Tay, come September. A godson. A job. I’ll not mention the state of the Union.”
History’s intimacy threaded down through the years. Duncan’s smile was more intimate still, as if presence was a promise made years ago and kept. Faith made Methos uneasy, but flesh was real. They’d never been lovers, but he knew Duncan’s bed to be warm by the heating blood in his veins.
They were alone.
He was beginning to warm.
“The oil will last long enough, if we’re careful,” Duncan said. “You’ve no idea of the lure of the kilt.” He was smiling still. “Half of Asia is Scottish, come Burns Night.”
“You can’t fund a country on tourists.”
“We’ve a bit more to offer than that. Move over.”
Near as close as skin on skin: not the breathless tumult of first bedding, but the easy acquaintance of lovers long met and merry known. Easy as striking a flame, without words. Flames marigold-bright against soot-blackened stone, whisky in his hand, woman’s voice on the stereo rich and strange - “Who knows / where the time goes ...”
Duncan at his back, sword-arm heavy against his shoulder. They’d lie in the same bed tonight, he knew it.
“You’ll stay for Hogmany, no?”
He was thawing.
End 1/2.