backdated 04/13-04/14

The Garde was many things: beautiful, melancholy, peaceful, surprising. What it was not - decidedly - was comfortable, and while on the second trip she had brought in a couple of cheap pillows for the sake of having something to lean against while being lectured, and the third had brought cleaning supplies in subspace, she had made no further efforts to remedy this. Her efforts had been solely in clearing space and opening up choked staircases and passageways.

But things in the real world had gone a bit belly up - that belly being scaled and full of planets - and a pocket dimension in which one could temporarily keep one's head down and wait for everything to blow over suddenly seemed like an advantageous thing indeed, and one to be made use of. But it would require a more strategic attack than her previous desultory efforts at clearing away the worst of debris and getting a mental map of the place - and it would require a dry run, to see what it was even like. Part of her suspected that even falling asleep at the place would bring some sort of trouble down on her head.

Twenty-four hours had passed since the world had seemed to end. Remarkably, even during the power outages, the world kept turning - and since she’d begun preparations before the outages began, it only took one trip out of town to get the rest of her things in order. She got a dogsitter, and she made plans. A day of honest menial labor would be a ******** relief.

Subspace served for food - both her own and Petitcru’s, in case the dog needed to accompany her - and she had already started a stash of shelf-stable provisions. Water could never be wanted, with the broad clear river so close at hand. What remained were other essentials.

So she arrived beneath a blue and grey sky, almost comically laden. The vacuum packed mattress had been a lucky thought, and last week’s morning wrestling with vacuum bags and duct tape had rewarded her, along with her magically-enhanced strength, with the ability to carry over what was essentially an entire bedroom - and a broom - which she dropped on the ground immediately.

Gouvernail, already reaching to make their usual mimed greeting, raised his eyebrows over her offered hand.

“It needs a woman’s touch,” she said sarcastically. “Oh, yeah, and the world nearly ******** ended. It's a long story.”

“I trust that you will tell it,” he said.

“Yeah, yeah.” She reached to pick up her first bag. Gouvernail, apparently compelled by the sheer chivalrous instinct to be helpful, moved in the same moment to intercept her and take it for her, only for his hand to pass uselessly through hers.

She said nothing. Swallowing, she pretended not to have seen what they both knew she had, hoisting the bag over her shoulder.

It was not silent, as it had always been when the storms did not fill the place with noise. Cicadas, she realized, were singing in the trees.

“Turns out it was actually a big ******** snake,” she began.

He interrupted her narrative only once, walking alongside her in silence.

“You had the means of healing, and gave it to a child?”

“Yes. I’m not a ******** monster,” she said, bridling a bit at the insinuation that she would have done anything else.

“Well done,” he said at last, and she despised him for a moment, for making her care that he had given her his approval.

—

“You're going to tell me I'm being sacreligious,” she said, glancing up from her work, aware that she was looking untidy and red-faced from exertion and glad, for some reason, for the cool darkness that mostly concealed the fact.

He was standing near the stairs that led up and out of the chapel, one hand, as usual, folded against his side above where a sword should have been. And she could not make out his expression in the dim light, but she imagined that it was one of disapproval.

The mattress had unfurled with a satisfying pop and hiss, and was now expanding like a set of relieved lungs atop what had once been an altar of some kind and was now, having been scrubbed down, the closest thing she had to a bed. The blasphemy, too, was satisfying, and she felt a bit smug.

But he only said, after a pause: “No.”

“But you're thinking it.”

“No,” he said again.

“Probably never had anything on it closer to God than me anyway,” she said, an attempt at needling him into disgust which, if it succeeded, did not yield any response at all.

She turned back to clearing away the ivy, living and dead, which choked the narrow windows arrayed across the ceiling, poking haphazardly and with more aggression that strictly necessary with the end of the broom, trying to let in more light. By all rights, half-sunk with the open windows, the place ought to have been thick with mold and damp rot. But whether it was magic or engineering, it remained dry.

“Are you gonna tell me I ought to be doing something useful?” She asked, aware that she was being sulky and too annoyed to stop.

“No, Lady,” he said at last, and with an unusual gentleness: “I believe it is enough that you helped to save your world, and that now you are trying to save this one.”

The broom, at last, found purchase. A beam of sunlight from the courtyard above fell through the gloom.

“I'm not saving anything,” she said.

—

If he was unusually kind, it may have been from what she had to tell of what had taken place since her last visit, or it may have been simply because he was attempting to avoid raising her ire. He asked her no questions, and it somehow did not occur to her to simply dismiss him. It felt right that he should stand there by the worn stone stairs, guarding her from a threat that would never come and that he was powerless to stop if it did. Perhaps it would have been kinder to send him away; perhaps pretending that he served a purpose there was no better than pretending that he had not reached to help her carry her burdens and been unable to.

But cruel or kind, to send him away was unfathomable. So she worked while he watched her in pensive silence - feeling oddly self-conscious, oddly ashamed of her sweaty brow and red face and disheveled hair. As she squirreled a few books away on a shelf that had once housed relics or candles or offerings, she recounted Chretien to him, glossing through Cliges as best as she could remember, simply for the sake of having something to say. To her vague surprise, he listened.

Satisfaction came as it always must, in watching the dusty desolation of the chapel give way to order. She told him about the Eternal she had met in the park more fully than she had before, tempering the memory of her pain with a grim joke that she'd like to have magical soap-summoning abilities right about now, whisking away dirt as easily as she could reach into subspace and extract the things she had packed it with. Into the cupped hands of nameless stone saints she placed candles in jars. The juxtaposition of ancient carvings and a stash of extra batteries made her smile without any amusement in it, and she strung fairy lights up by the slanting light of evening sun.

The floor was swept clean, the rotted threads of ancient rugs cleared away to expose mosaic tiles in colors that had once been bright, and became nearly so again under her scrubbing.

On a space of wall where no tapestry now remained, she hung up the carving she had gotten from Myth - Nis - and said: “I told you I’d bring seagulls.”

“I never doubted you,” he said, very quietly.

She should resent him for the burden - did - but to neglect him was unfathomable. He had, after all, no one else to get kindness from.

—

Cricket noise came with dusk, and she was driven at last from the chapel and into the fresh air, to clear the windows more fully from the outside and let that same air into the half-buried room below.

She could not get into the water soon enough; she barely had the patience, as he silently turned his back, to dress. The thought of simply throwing herself naked into the river occurred to her, and brought with it a strange sensation of shyness.

She floated peacefully beneath a sunset so exquisitely beautiful that it seemed almost artificial, listening to the crickets. Running her hands through her hair and dislodging a millennia of dust that had accumulated in it, she almost started when Gouvernail began speaking - and then a second time, when it was clear that he spoke to tell her of nothing more pressing than of a story he had heard once as a boy, which was shaped a bit like the story of Yvain. They compared notes, she from the water and he from the pebbled shore.

She swam until the darkness came, amidst the peaceful sounds of the water and the crickets. She ached with the satisfying ache of a day of honest labor, and while it occurred to her that she could probably magically dry herself, she found an odd pleasure in changing into the slinky nightgown she’d brought with her, wrapping herself in a towel and padding in bare feet back across the courtyard. He had told her once that he did not have so many good things that he could simply give them to her at her asking; the memory of it, as the cool air touched the wet hair at her temples, seemed a reproach to her for every small joy she had ever neglected to be grateful for.

She stepped into the now nearly-total darkness of the chapel, and fumbled for the switch that lit the fairy lights. A couple of hours with the windows cleared had brought in fresh air and the scent of leaves and night-blooming flowers. The scene should have had other trappings - tapestries and embroidered linen; rabbit furs and goose down. But she was grateful for the modern convenience of a lighter as she made her way to the candles, and as she turned to survey the scene, the salvage-store polycotton velvet wasn't as wholly out of place as she had anticipated. She had often fantasized about sleeping in some opulent bed in some beautiful castle. This wasn't quite it, but it was close enough.

“Home sweet home,” she said, but before she could even laugh he cut in with strange vehemence.

“No. This is not your home.”

All morning she had tried, in her sour mood, to nettle him. Now, when she had been basking in a sense of accomplishment and feeling almost friendly towards him, he was finally angry. Her frustration, as it always seemed to do after a day with him, rose with the red in her cheeks.

“So now you're possessive? It's mine too now, it's not -”

“No. No, it is no one's home. Elaine,” he said, enunciating for the first time and with a strange emphasis her name. “You remember when you said that you would not relinquish that name. That is a name from a living world. Do not give yourself more reason to chain yourself to a dead one.”

“That's a hell of a thing to say for a man who's been lecturing me about not taking the name of the Joyeuse Garde seriously enough -”

“The Joyeuse Garde is dead,” he said bluntly, and rather than grief or anger there was an air in it almost of pleading. “I would see you do honor to its memory, rather than try to make a home of it, as I once did. I speak of - of the name - as much as -”

She looked at him, helpless and numb in the realization that he was attempting - in defiance of everything that he had done to that point - to dissuade her from immersing herself in her title. Perhaps all day his unusual silence had only been his battling against these exact words.

“I thought you wanted me,” she said, strangely timid in her defiance, “to use my weapons to fight the wars of God.”

“And I do,” he said, and while he attempted to master that tinge of pleading, it crept through, desperate. “Only - do not lose yourself to it. There is nothing to be gained. Live in a world that you have already, once, helped to save, and which is already your home.”

She was silent for a long moment. “If you don't want me to come here -”

He made a convulsive movement, as if disturbed by the very idea. “No. I do. Forgive me, Lady, if my words contradict themselves. They are no less a true picture of my feelings for it. But do not - pray, do not let it be a homecoming. Be a visitor - be even a guest, if it pleases you - but do not call it your home.”

She looked at the product of her work: the bright tiles, the benevolent saints cupping their candles, the makeshift bed which she had in her head nearly called homey. The sound of the crickets came in through the unglazed windows, unbroken by any other noise. The Garde, after all, was a dead place.

“I chose my words poorly,” she said at last, feeling odd and numb. It felt childish, now, to stand with a towel around her shoulders, her wet hair pulled into its loose and unbound braid - a little girl suddenly homesick as she watched the sun set on a beach vacation, longing for nothing so much as her own bed. “It was a joke, that's all.”

He was silent, and after a moment turned, to post himself at the stairs.

She could leave. The dogsitter would be gone by now, and not back til morning. She could crawl back into her own bed, in her living world, barely saved, with the noise of traffic and late-night pedestrians and distant music coming in through her open windows as power returned to the city that kept on living, oblivious, right through its near-death. He could not sleep, she realized; perhaps he might do nothing but stand in futile silence at the post he could not defend and had no need to defend, while she, cruelly, indulged in the luxury of sleep. She knew, somehow, that he was too tactful to simply watch her, and the knowledge that he would be wandering up the stairs and into the dark alone - to walk the river he could not swim in, amidst a breeze he could not feel - made her feel vaguely sick.

She had often let him pretend to kiss her hand; she had pretended not to see when it had passed through her own in a futile attempt to help her. He would not acknowledge his own weakness. She would not acknowledge it for him. When the spider had run across his had, it had probably instilled in him something like unasked-for hope.

It was, still, a cruelty she could not fathom. There was no one else to be kind to him.

She blew out the candles she had just lit, and switched off the string of lights. In darkness, the silent saints and carved figures made the place look as haunted as it was.

“I'm visiting,” she said at last, stubborn and childish. She shed the towel, banishing it back into subspace and trying to appreciate with every ounce of sensation the feeling of fresh bedding on her nearly-bare skin - a small joy she did not want to take for granted. And then she sat up, spiteful and remorseful at once, and she held out her hand.

He hesitated. But he approached at last to engage in their habitual make-believe, bending over her offered hand. Vividly, she imagined the tableau (her bare arms from beneath the velvet, his nearly-bent knee before what was after all an altar) from the eyes of some imaginary watcher, and its bizarre, hollow intimacy turned her stomach. She was grateful for the darkness, feeling her own sudden pallor in the coldness of her face.

“Sleep well, then,” he said, with a return of that unusual gentleness, which made her strangely afraid.

“I always do,” she said, “when I'm away from home.”

—

When she awoke, it was to a grey light that she knew somehow accompanied a morning fog, rising from the river and swathing the Garde, although the chapel, still, remained dry and comfortable.

She had, in fact, slept well, and had awakened to the instinctive knowledge that she was not wholly alone. She reclined in peaceful silence and watched Gouvernail, who was standing before the carving of seagulls and - unaware of her watching - making as if to run his fingertips over its surface.

Suffused with sudden guilt at what felt almost like the witnessing of a hidden weakness, she pretended to stir. When she opened her eyes again, he had turned towards her, with a little bow of acknowledgement that she disregarded as she luxuriated in a catlike stretch.

The morning unfolded in its eerie silence. She let him pretend to kiss her hand, and with scarcely another word to him, went home.

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