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heliopausa- the public presentation of a report I worked on (which all went very well)
- and followed up by totally unaccustomed amounts of house-cleaning (why? I don't know; it just felt like time, and then one thing led to another...)
- and cooking (one of those winter soups that starts with onion and lentils and carrots and gets more and more omnium-gatherum as it goes on, and an experimental batch of peanut-and-chocolate biscuits)
- and being indecisive about whether to be in the Once Upon A Fic Exchange, and if so, what to nominate
- and in spare corners trying very hard to finish a piece of writing I was doing as an exercise, following on from the NFFR discussions about Peter Pevensie, and whether one could make a main character interesting when his main characteristic was simply being good.
missing scene from The Ivory Merchants - Peter, the night before leaving for the north
"Are you all right about this, Pete? About tomorrow—well, about the whole thing, really."
"The whole thing?" He flashed her a quick grin, half-rueful, half-exhilarated. "I expect... I think the whole thing will be a lot easier than today, at any rate. Are the others in bed?"
"Lucy is. Ed's off scouring the fair for every scrap of information he can scrape up about the Telmarines."
Their eyes met in a moment of shared gleeful appreciation of their younger brother's ways, but gradually the light faded from the king's eyes
" He's much better than I am at that sort of thing. This afternoon, talking with Hoom...I couldn't manage it, Su. I thought I'd explode. I just hate to know that that... vileness... Not just that it's happened, but that someone standing in front of me would... wants to do it again." He looked at her, misery struggling with anger in his eyes. "He wants to play us for fools, to make us party to his revival of the cruelties ...."
She spoke with cool certainty. "He's not going to. We are not fools, and we won't allow those murders ever again."
"No thanks to me. It'll all be up to you and Ed. I just wanted to grab him by the shoulders and slam him against the wall and shout into his smug, self-satisfied face that to kill a thinking being for its skin or its tusks or any part of its body was a vile, vile abomination and I will smash it out not just from our land but as Aslan gives me strength from all lands, to the world's end!"
She heard him out in silence; he scowled, and turned away, saying bitterly, "I know—shouting and crashing people up against walls isn't the way to do it."
"It's one way!" she said, smiling slightly, "Good direct action is what they need in the north. But for the Telmarines, right now, it's not the most useful way."
"I know," he repeated. "It's just—I can see so plainly how wrong it is, and..." He stopped, frustrated, then went on, more calmly. "It's the same with lying. I never know what to say when someone flat out lies to me. I feel... I mean, why? It just baffles me. Lies always come unstuck in the end. And it's... why do I feel ashamed when someone else has told a lie?"
She paused, considering. "Maybe because they don't? Maybe because you feel the damage to the truth so much? You feel it in yourself, maybe? Maybe because lying is so outside of who you are..."
He deflected her words impatiently, waving them away as of no account. "They can stand in front of me, and lie, and I'm the one who's stuck for words. I'm just... stumped. I mean, what on earth can you say? "
She laughed a little. "Oh, that's a much easier question!" Then, in answer to his look— "It depends where you want to get to. I mean, they lied, yes, but... Pete—you might as well say they sneezed! Or they dropped a cup, or trod all over my feet in a dance!"
He shook his head, reflexively, and her voice took on a more gently coaxing tone.
"Human beings do lie, Peter; there's no point in stopping to be unhappy about it. What I think about is how to move from there to where we need to get to, to somewhere that'll do us both good, me and them—and all of us, come to that. If I stop to be amazed at their clumsiness, then we've lost the rhythm of the... dance."
"Yes,"—reluctantly— "I can see that's what you do, but I'm just don't have that skill... And look at Ed— he's not like you, he doesn't work with people the way you do, but lies don't throw him, either. He just stands back and watches, and asks the right questions to be able to know in himself exactly which parts are true and which aren't, and what the liars're trying to hide, and why...."
"Yes, Ed likes to be absolutely certain of his ground. But Lucy is like you, Pete. She sees straight and acts straight."
He looked up, smiling, as she had intended him to, his mind caught and his mood lightened by the vision of their younger sister's warm, fearless simplicity.
"I can imagine," he said. "She'd just say straight out, 'No, that's not true'—helpfully!"
Susan laughed outright. "So there you go! There is a simple way to respond to wrong-doing."
"Yes, there's her way. But I'm not her, either. I feel so.... ah, Su! So baffled. And so dull. Do you remember a game..." He frowned, and went on hesitantly, "that game with little figures, and you moved them on a board. There was a king, and a queen..."
"Chess."
"What?"
"It was called chess. Go on."
He rubbed his forehead in frustration. "I was never any good at it, was I? Well, I feel now as if... Su, what I remember most is feeling confused, because one piece was called the king, but it was the weakest one of them all. The dullest one."
She half-smiled at the sudden vehemence in his voice; he continued, unnoticing. "The other pieces—they all were so alive, moving so unexpectedly—but the king... just went step, step, step, plodding over the board. I hated it."
"I remember. But chess is a game for ... very wily players, Pete, and there's nothing wily about you. You are plainly and simply yourself all the way through."
"Yes," he said resignedly. "I know. Well, I suppose I should get to bed." And turned away.
"Peter!" she said.
The bodkin-sharpness in voice caught him as he was turning away. He looked, doubtingly, into her suddenly-stormy eyes.
"What is it?"
"Do not ..." She stopped, and began again. "Peter, when you ride out tomorrow,and everyone will be looking up to you, and knowing you are our High King, and trusting you to set straight the wrong-doing in the north, you will be magnificent. And not because of any cleverness or smoothness or daring or for any other separate quality but because you are yourself, and you see things as they are, and you know right from wrong and unswervingly are for the right. And that's what we look up to, and what we trust. Do not ever think that's dull." She stopped again, as if to allow him to respond.
His lips parted, but no sound emerged. When she spoke again, her fierceness had ebbed, and the slight smile was once more on her lips, if a little tremulously now.
"The chess, Pete. It was only a game, not a prediction. But if you want to take it to heart, remember this: the king in the game—those other pieces have their moves, but he carries in himself what holds the kingdom together. And so do you. We need who you are, your plain goodness, not any special skills or talents. What you're good at is being Peter. If you stop being that, we're lost. And now—now you can go to bed!"
Problem of Peter
Date: 2015-01-26 01:19 am (UTC)It's very poignant that he sees himself as dull.
Re: Problem of Peter
Date: 2015-01-26 09:42 am (UTC)Yes, it's a young Peter, less than two years after the arrival in Narnia - so, yes, still with a lot to learn. The "dull" aspect was partly my trying to meet the terms mentioned in the original discussion (for which, many thanks! See where your talk of poor Peter needing to be shaken up has led! :D ) of the difficulties of writing a character defined mostly by simple goodness, and not by any other gifts. So this was a fumbling towards that idea. It didn't of course get to where I'd want it to go - but that would be for a full-blown story, not a talk-heavy sketch.
And speaking of full-blown stories... where's that shaking up you talked about? :)
Re: Problem of Peter
Date: 2015-01-27 12:16 am (UTC)Shaking up -- you mean Susan in mourning? Sigh... I have gotten bogged down in backstory of minor characters. The next chapter is all about Susan sitting down to Christmas dinner with Harold and a lot of people who are separated from and/or estranged from their families -- Peggy's boarders, Diana and her brother, and Lucy's friend Marjorie. But I'm not sure how much of the reasons for those separations/estrangements I should work into the story, because that would take the focus away from Susan. And with Pearl I would have to actually get into her head, and there's only one other place in the story, aside from the epistolary section, where I've deviated from Susan's POV. I might solve that with a backstory chapter posted separately.
I've also realized that there are really two parts of the chapter, the first part being about how this motley group come to be together on Christmas Day and the second part being about the day itself. If I want to keep doing things in strictly chronological order I would have to go back and insert the first section as a new chapter before the Midnight Mass chapter. So I'm trying to figure that out. I've already considered and discarded the idea of inserting little flashbacks throughout the chapter. Suggestions welcome....
Re: Problem of Peter
Date: 2015-01-27 02:15 pm (UTC)And no, I meant something you said elsewhere about wanting to "shake [Peter] up a bit"! (Or was that Aslan?) But since you've mentioned "In Mourning"... :)
...that'll be great, to hear more! Intriguing, that you say you'll be using Pearl as POV character - I look forward to finding out why.
The reasons they all have come together - do you need to do it in detail? Could you just have someone (Susan?) looking around the table and thinking in passing, in just a very few words, something to hint at backstory? Or as they actually come to the table in their various ways, which variously and very lightly hint at who they are?
Re: Problem of Peter
Date: 2015-01-30 08:08 am (UTC)Shaking up Peter...I did a little bit of that in some of my earliest fics -- I think one of the first things I ever finished was a story about a middle-of-the-night argument between Edmund and Peter, and the consequences thereof. But I'm not sure I like it any more. It probably needs a lot of rewriting. That whole story-line flowed from my musing about why none of the Pevensies got married during the Golden Age. It's a basic requirement for a successful ruler, to provide an heir. My answer to this involved a lot of sexual frustration for everybody except Susan.
And then of course in In Mourning I gave Peter some awful war experiences, culminating in his disillusionment with the modern army and in many ways the whole modern world. Poor Peter.
Re: Problem of Peter
Date: 2015-02-03 12:39 pm (UTC)But just as I leave: I think the importance of a Pevensie marriage is greatly over-estimated by fandom (partly due to too much attention to how the British monarchy worked in the twentieth century). It's a basic requirement for monarchs (or any leader) to sort out the succession, but it doesn't have to be through parenthood; orderly successions have achieved via remoter connections, by adoption, by election. Examples from history on request. :)
Re: Problem of Peter
Date: 2015-02-03 09:19 pm (UTC)Still, from what little we hear about Narnian history, it appears that the succession has traditionally been dynastic. King Lune says he has no choice about which of his sons will be his heir, that by law it's the elder son. Given the kinship of the Narnian and Archenlandish monarchs, you'd think the Narnian practice would be the same. It seems to me that there would at least be some pressure on the kings and queens to provide an heir of the flesh; not to mention that one or the other of them might want to marry for personal reasons.
There are lots of reasons for a ruling queen not to marry, of course. But Susan seriously considers marrying Rabadash, so apparently she at least has no objection in principle to the idea of getting married.