![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Narnia: The Left Hand of Heaven
Originally posted here. A missing scene can be found here.
The Left Hand of Heaven
Narnia. Edmund, Peter, Lucy, Tirian. PG.
A missing scene from a Last Battle AU in which Edmund, Peter, and Lucy return to Narnia. Mild Lucy/Tirian, though this is mostly about Edmund and Peter and the battles they've fought across two worlds.
“Where’s Peter?” asks Lucy.
And Edmund knows that, fifteen minutes previous, Peter had disappeared through the tree-line like a ghost. (And truly so, for ghosts can’t leave the world where they have unfinished business and Peter, in a way, has never left Narnia.) Peter meant to go unnoticed, but Edmund has followed his brother into battles and skirmishes across two worlds. He knows how to interpret the shape of Peter’s motivations through sudden tensions in the body and to adjust himself accordingly: to catch him, to hold him back, or to fall with him. If you have watched someone’s back through both the madness of the battlefield and the subtle treacheries of the public school hierarchy, you will notice if they disappear from a gathering of friends.
Edmund tells Lucy to stay here, stay with Tirian.
Tirian starts, “Your majesty, allow me to come with you. There is increasing danger as we approach the Calorm—”
“Watch my sister,” Edmund cuts in, and hopes Lucy will not begrudge him for it. Lucy is capable of taking care of herself, but if Peter wanted to disappear without anyone noticing, then Edmund is certain that Tirian will be no help in finding him and no help once they have found him. Besides, Edmund doesn’t think he needs the help; he thinks he has an idea of where Peter has gone.
“Edmund can attend to this, Tirian,” says Lucy. “He’s rather had more experience tracking wayward High Kings than you have, I think.”
He casts a look over his shoulder as he passes the first line of trees and sees that the conversation has already moved on. Tirian puts his hand on Lucy’s shoulder in a gentle sort of way, and Edmund notes the blush and soft smile on Lucy’s cheeks as she covers it with her own.
Always the impetuous ones after my sisters, he thinks. Some things never change.
+
The last time Peter and Edmund were this age, they had also been passing through these woods.
They had been campaigning in a northwesterly direction, pushing against a tide of White Witch sympathizers flowing from the North. Many of Cair Paravel’s soldiers had died at the hands of shadows, for in those days the trees grew thick there and dark creatures knew how to use the shadows to their advantage. In their gnarled hands, shadows became more than an absence of light: they were streams of darkness that flowed through the mouth and ears and eyes. They could blind, drown, and sap the blood from veins.
In the privacy of their tent, the High King said to his brother, “We cannot fight this magic.” And it had fascinated Edmund, the hollowness in Peter’s voice and the defeat already writ into his body, because Peter had become the High King long ago and Edmund had never seen him this weary since those first wars with Calormen. Seeing Peter’s uncertainty again brought back memories of Edmund’s own peculiar path to adulthood, how strange it was to do things like rule a kingdom and lead an army when one was still a boy. Then, Edmund realized that to fight darkness, to care for his people, and to love his family and Aslan, these are not just the things a grown-up does – these are the things everyone does.
“Well, if we can’t defeat them within the next month,” Edmund had replied, “I’ll lose my bet with Lucy, and she’s called our battles twice already. My pride’s in this, Pete.”
“So,” said Peter, “stop gambling.”
“Oh, no no, you’re approaching it the wrong way. I think the correct strategy is to trounce these bastards as quickly as possible, so we can show Lucy’s what’s what.”
Peter did not say more, did not look at Edmund, so Edmund poured them each a drink and took out the layered maps. He talked about routs and ambushes until Peter felt compelled to join in, if only to point out tactical errors. Then Edmund sipped his wine and listened as Peter formulated better strategies.
“You’re right,” said Peter. “I mean, I’m right. The ambush at the southern cross is ill-timed and badly manned. Get Oreius and Longtail, Ed, we need to revise this.”
“Right,” said Edmund, already halfway out the tent.
After the decisive final battle, exactly twenty-six days later, Peter had emerged from the chaos of corpses and death, wiped the minotaur blood from Edmund’s face and said, “Come.” The two kings made their unhurried way through the bodies, letting their minds slowly resurface from the automation of combat. Edmund didn’t ask where they were going; it would be clear soon enough. They walked through the trees until the cries of mourning and the tally of the body count were but faint noises behind them, gossamer on the wind. It had been the first and last time Peter had ever left his troops after a battle; usually Peter ran around getting his hands dirty in everything – the inventory of the dead, the clearing of the battlefield, the logistics of the homeward journey. Edmund watched Peter as they walked, how the weight of victory sat fatly on his shoulders and clung to the corners of his eyes.
“We will not hold a victory feast, I think, when we return,” said Peter. “I don’t think it would be appropriate, considering… considering the circumstances. I don’t think there are enough left alive to celebrate it, besides.”
Edmund nodded. “Fair enough.”
“What do you win?”
“What do you mean?”
“From Lucy. Your bet that you’ve won. What do you win?”
“Oh, um. A case of that wine from Avra that I like,” Edmund improvised.
Peter nodded thoughtfully. “They do make good wine there.”
The trees thinned as they approached the Great River, and upon reaching the banks, they had doffed their armor and their clothes. Peter walked into the water as if into a benediction. Edmund had followed, and together they washed themselves of the blood of enemies and comrades, and soothed their own wounds and bruises in the coolness of the water and each other’s gentle inspection. In Calormen, Edmund remembered, there had been a tribe that deified the water; all springs and streams and oases were declared places of worship, and its adherents bathed not to clean themselves, but to be with their god. Every time they washed was an act of prayer, and every time they drank was a blessing. He and Lucy had stayed with them during some desert espionage, and while Lucy talked to them tentatively of Aslan, Edmund had walked with a shepherd under the stars to the tribe’s sacred well and drunk a mouthful of their sweetest water.
“Now that we are brothers, I would tell you a secret,” said the shepherd, “but I suspect you already know.
Edmund said, “I would be honored to know your secrets.”
“Know this, then,” said the man. “There are no gods in these waters. The world was not created when the dry ground cracked in two to let the ocean out, and it will not end when the Father drinks all the waters of the earth to save his children from drowning. There are old men and women of my tribe who would flog me for saying so, but I know that what we truly love about the water is how, through its scarcity, we are humbled, and, through its mercy, we are reborn.”
Narnia was a lush and verdant land; Naiads and Oceanids would dance and laugh with you and were not the distant deities that populated the desert tribe’s pantheon. The kings of Narnia were humbled not by scarcity, but by providence. You don’t need second chances when you have the persistence of prophecy. It was enough for now to scrub their bodies clean. There was death and dying to return to in a while, but for now it was good enough to count each other’s new scars and make light of how they got them, and enough to splash each other like they were children again, laughing their relief at life. After all, they were children not so long ago, though already their childhood was receding into apocrypha, as the magic of this land took their former lives from them.
So this is where Edmund finds Peter now: in the Great River, washing himself as he had done a decade or two thousand years ago. His clothes are draped over a nearby bush, and even though he faces east with his back towards Edmund, he says, without turning around: “Hello, Ed.”
Edmund is already taking off his clothes.
+
One time in England, he had said to Peter, “It’s strange, how different growing up is here. You expect it would be the same, seeing’s how it’s all the same bodies.”
But they were paler here in Finchley. Their arms were thinner and their legs weaker, because no exercise was quite comparable to races with Fauns, battles with great armies, and celebratory dances with Bacchus and his Maenads. Peter’s commands were unwarranted, Susan’s beauty uneasy, and Lucy’s buoyant faith naïve. Their silhouettes were no longer familiar to each other, and even their scars weren’t the same.
Peter had replied, “It’s not our bodies that make us who we are.”
“What, then?” Edmund could not help the cynicism in his tone. “Our memories?”
Susan said, “The world, of course. The world makes us who we are.”
“It’s not that simple,” he insisted.
“Well, I’m jolly well sick of it all being so complicated,” she snapped at him, and Peter put a hand on her shoulder and changed the subject.
“Sometimes I wonder,” the shepherd had said to Edmund, a lifetime ago, “if we live in the desert just to love the water.”
Together, he and Peter and Lucy watched Susan drift from them, and remembered that in some creation myths, people were created from dust and earth, and to dust and earth they shall return.
+
The Great River in their day had been clear as crystal and refreshing to drink, but now it is murky with the refuse of the Calormene lumber works upstream. There is a smell of coal and sulfur that gets stronger every day and this is how they know they are nearing their target. Everyday they run over the plan, amending little details until Lucy has to interrupt, “Enough! You’ll overthink this. Can’t we just enjoy the walk a little bit?”
Above them the twilight beckons to the evening, and the sky is shades of ochre and mauve in a way they will never see in England, even with the plumes of familiar industrial smoke. The river reflects the colors in a dull and hopeful way, rippling as he and Peter wash and swim and laugh. Edmund has almost forgotten how beautiful Narnia is, even when she is not his Narnia anymore, and it makes his heart ache for pasts long gone and futures that might have been.
Peter hoists himself onto a rock and the sunset reflects off wet skin, casting him in a golden light. Edmund floats on his back a few yards away, and he can almost pretend that it’s a decade and two thousand years ago. That they have just won against the White Witch sympathizers, and that Peter sitting on that rock is thinking about the long journey back east to Cair Paravel and the embrace of their sisters. Now that this campaign is over with, Peter is perhaps thinking, there is the matter of the unraveling alliances in Redhaven to sort out. And the High King might at any time turn to Edmund and suggest that Tumnus be deployed to the Seven Isles, perhaps with Susan, to investigate the situation.
Peter says instead, “Do you think I would be able to do this, to do all this, if it weren’t for the prophecy?”
“When Adam’s flesh and Adam’s bone/Sits at Cair Paravel in throne,/The evil time will be over and done.” The words had been sung and chanted hundreds of times during the first years of their rule, in both times of celebration and ceremony, and Edmund doesn’t think he could forget them if he tried.
“How much of it is destiny, do you think, and how much of it is just me?”
“But it’s not just you,” says Edmund, as he paddles to a nearby flattish rock. “You have us.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I don’t think you can separate destiny from this,” Edmund replies, resting crossed arms on the rock. “It just fits and that’s the whole point, isn’t it? You are how you are, and that’s why you’re here. That’s why you’re doing what you do. Round peg into round hole, and stuff like that.”
“What about Susan?”
“What about her?”
“There are four thrones at Cair Paravel.”
He shrugs. “There were, but it’s only one now that only Tirian is king, and who knows what has been going on since the Calormenes seized it.”
Peter looks down, kicks up a splash of water. “Lucy would give me an earful if she heard me saying this, but I do wish Aslan would show up.”
“Things never hap—”
“Don’t,” Peter snaps.
So Edmund doesn’t.
Peter has lost Narnia twice now and Edmund three times, and in a way he secretly envies Susan for never having to lose Narnia again. She has made her choices and found her peace. It’s just that for the rest of them it has never been a choice. The thing about believing in the rationality of an irrational god is that it's like waiting for history to happen: you won't be able to justify anything until the moment has long gone. You can’t make choices if you’re not given any, but Susan has managed to, somehow.
Once a King or Queen of Narnia, always. That is what Aslan has promised them and that is what they (minus Susan) have always held onto, even now with their scrawnier arms and their shorter haircuts, their different conversational tics picked up from school friends and serials on the wireless, their bodies so free of war wounds you’d think they have never built a Golden Age with their bare hands and the blood of their people.
“We should get going soon,” says Peter.
The twilight is dying, and the shadows of the northwestern woods still make him uneasy.
+
“Move?” The shepherd had laughed. “Where to, my friend? The desert heat parches our throats and its sandstorms blind and bury us where we lay. Its scorpions and snakes take the lives of our sheep and children, and its mirages lead our brothers astray to wander the dunes for days before they die. We love the desert as no one can. What else is there for a people like us? What else is there for the desert?”
+
“Peter!” Lucy cries out when she sees her brothers between the trees. “Edmund, oh thank goodness. Where have you been?”
“Come on, Lu,” says Peter with a smile, opening his arms as she runs to embrace him. “I can take care of myself, you know.”
Lucy kisses him on the cheek. “Usually that’s my line to you. Come, we’ve caught enough rabbit for all of us. We’ll have a fine supper. Your hair’s quite wet – fall down a well?”
“No, Ed did,” Peter shrugs. “I had to rescue him.”
“Ha!” says Lucy, taking Peter’s hand and leading him to the fire. “You boys keep your secrets. I shall have mine.”
“We keep no secrets from you, Lucy,” Edmund smiles.
“This is what all big brothers say when they wish to lie,” Lucy declares.
“Don’t think you’re wise because you can make generalizations about big brothers,” says Peter.
Lucy says, “Come and eat your rabbit.”
Tirian stands up and bows when they enter the circle of firelight, and Peter and Edmund doesn’t even try to stop him anymore, although Lucy still cries out, “Oh, Tirian, really you don’t have to!” The rabbit is as fine a meal as can be expected in these times, and a hard day and a tired body do wonders for the appetite. At the end of the meal there is nothing left but bones. Lucy bids Tirian tell them stories of the Golden Age and Tirian laughs saying, “Oh, lady, I think you can tell stories about the Golden Age better than I.”
“Let us hear yours,” says Lucy. “It would be good for a laugh.”
It’s Lucy’s favorite game, to listen to how the passage of time has warped the truth of things, and she delights in correcting him and telling how it really happened. That is, when she’s not telling him to continue, do continue.
“Tirian,” says Edmund, after Lucy recounts the real reasons behind the downfall of the Felimathian barony. “Tell us a story about the people of the desert, the ones who worship the water and dance in the dawn to keep the sandstorms at bay.”
Tirian frowns. “I know of no such stories, your highness. There is no one who lives in the desert. The environment is so hostile there, so dry and hot that it would be quite impossible to.”
“Friend,” Peter says softly, “you are too quick to name what is impossible.”
Tirian and Peter’s gazes waver at each other for a moment, and then Tirian bows his head and nods deferentially. “Forgive me. Perhaps,” he says, “it would please your majesties to tell us a story about these desert people.”
Peter and Edmund exchange glances, and Peter says, “Look, it’s getting quite late. Let’s turn in for the night, shall we?”
After a pause, Tirian ventures, “Your majesty, if I have said something that has offended—”
“I am tired, your highness,” says Peter. “We’ll speak no more of it tonight.”
“Perhaps we should ease up, eh?” Edmund says as they settle onto the hard ground, although it may be feather beds for all they’re used to it by now. He speaks quietly so Lucy and Tirian can’t hear, even though they are already in their own murmured conversation on the other side of the dying fire. “He doesn’t mean anything by it – Lucy just goads him so. At the very least of it, we’re home. We’re home again, Pete.”
Peter curls an arm under his head, says, “That’s what we said the last time.” And closes his eyes.
The Left Hand of Heaven
Narnia. Edmund, Peter, Lucy, Tirian. PG.
A missing scene from a Last Battle AU in which Edmund, Peter, and Lucy return to Narnia. Mild Lucy/Tirian, though this is mostly about Edmund and Peter and the battles they've fought across two worlds.
“Where’s Peter?” asks Lucy.
And Edmund knows that, fifteen minutes previous, Peter had disappeared through the tree-line like a ghost. (And truly so, for ghosts can’t leave the world where they have unfinished business and Peter, in a way, has never left Narnia.) Peter meant to go unnoticed, but Edmund has followed his brother into battles and skirmishes across two worlds. He knows how to interpret the shape of Peter’s motivations through sudden tensions in the body and to adjust himself accordingly: to catch him, to hold him back, or to fall with him. If you have watched someone’s back through both the madness of the battlefield and the subtle treacheries of the public school hierarchy, you will notice if they disappear from a gathering of friends.
Edmund tells Lucy to stay here, stay with Tirian.
Tirian starts, “Your majesty, allow me to come with you. There is increasing danger as we approach the Calorm—”
“Watch my sister,” Edmund cuts in, and hopes Lucy will not begrudge him for it. Lucy is capable of taking care of herself, but if Peter wanted to disappear without anyone noticing, then Edmund is certain that Tirian will be no help in finding him and no help once they have found him. Besides, Edmund doesn’t think he needs the help; he thinks he has an idea of where Peter has gone.
“Edmund can attend to this, Tirian,” says Lucy. “He’s rather had more experience tracking wayward High Kings than you have, I think.”
He casts a look over his shoulder as he passes the first line of trees and sees that the conversation has already moved on. Tirian puts his hand on Lucy’s shoulder in a gentle sort of way, and Edmund notes the blush and soft smile on Lucy’s cheeks as she covers it with her own.
Always the impetuous ones after my sisters, he thinks. Some things never change.
+
The last time Peter and Edmund were this age, they had also been passing through these woods.
They had been campaigning in a northwesterly direction, pushing against a tide of White Witch sympathizers flowing from the North. Many of Cair Paravel’s soldiers had died at the hands of shadows, for in those days the trees grew thick there and dark creatures knew how to use the shadows to their advantage. In their gnarled hands, shadows became more than an absence of light: they were streams of darkness that flowed through the mouth and ears and eyes. They could blind, drown, and sap the blood from veins.
In the privacy of their tent, the High King said to his brother, “We cannot fight this magic.” And it had fascinated Edmund, the hollowness in Peter’s voice and the defeat already writ into his body, because Peter had become the High King long ago and Edmund had never seen him this weary since those first wars with Calormen. Seeing Peter’s uncertainty again brought back memories of Edmund’s own peculiar path to adulthood, how strange it was to do things like rule a kingdom and lead an army when one was still a boy. Then, Edmund realized that to fight darkness, to care for his people, and to love his family and Aslan, these are not just the things a grown-up does – these are the things everyone does.
“Well, if we can’t defeat them within the next month,” Edmund had replied, “I’ll lose my bet with Lucy, and she’s called our battles twice already. My pride’s in this, Pete.”
“So,” said Peter, “stop gambling.”
“Oh, no no, you’re approaching it the wrong way. I think the correct strategy is to trounce these bastards as quickly as possible, so we can show Lucy’s what’s what.”
Peter did not say more, did not look at Edmund, so Edmund poured them each a drink and took out the layered maps. He talked about routs and ambushes until Peter felt compelled to join in, if only to point out tactical errors. Then Edmund sipped his wine and listened as Peter formulated better strategies.
“You’re right,” said Peter. “I mean, I’m right. The ambush at the southern cross is ill-timed and badly manned. Get Oreius and Longtail, Ed, we need to revise this.”
“Right,” said Edmund, already halfway out the tent.
After the decisive final battle, exactly twenty-six days later, Peter had emerged from the chaos of corpses and death, wiped the minotaur blood from Edmund’s face and said, “Come.” The two kings made their unhurried way through the bodies, letting their minds slowly resurface from the automation of combat. Edmund didn’t ask where they were going; it would be clear soon enough. They walked through the trees until the cries of mourning and the tally of the body count were but faint noises behind them, gossamer on the wind. It had been the first and last time Peter had ever left his troops after a battle; usually Peter ran around getting his hands dirty in everything – the inventory of the dead, the clearing of the battlefield, the logistics of the homeward journey. Edmund watched Peter as they walked, how the weight of victory sat fatly on his shoulders and clung to the corners of his eyes.
“We will not hold a victory feast, I think, when we return,” said Peter. “I don’t think it would be appropriate, considering… considering the circumstances. I don’t think there are enough left alive to celebrate it, besides.”
Edmund nodded. “Fair enough.”
“What do you win?”
“What do you mean?”
“From Lucy. Your bet that you’ve won. What do you win?”
“Oh, um. A case of that wine from Avra that I like,” Edmund improvised.
Peter nodded thoughtfully. “They do make good wine there.”
The trees thinned as they approached the Great River, and upon reaching the banks, they had doffed their armor and their clothes. Peter walked into the water as if into a benediction. Edmund had followed, and together they washed themselves of the blood of enemies and comrades, and soothed their own wounds and bruises in the coolness of the water and each other’s gentle inspection. In Calormen, Edmund remembered, there had been a tribe that deified the water; all springs and streams and oases were declared places of worship, and its adherents bathed not to clean themselves, but to be with their god. Every time they washed was an act of prayer, and every time they drank was a blessing. He and Lucy had stayed with them during some desert espionage, and while Lucy talked to them tentatively of Aslan, Edmund had walked with a shepherd under the stars to the tribe’s sacred well and drunk a mouthful of their sweetest water.
“Now that we are brothers, I would tell you a secret,” said the shepherd, “but I suspect you already know.
Edmund said, “I would be honored to know your secrets.”
“Know this, then,” said the man. “There are no gods in these waters. The world was not created when the dry ground cracked in two to let the ocean out, and it will not end when the Father drinks all the waters of the earth to save his children from drowning. There are old men and women of my tribe who would flog me for saying so, but I know that what we truly love about the water is how, through its scarcity, we are humbled, and, through its mercy, we are reborn.”
Narnia was a lush and verdant land; Naiads and Oceanids would dance and laugh with you and were not the distant deities that populated the desert tribe’s pantheon. The kings of Narnia were humbled not by scarcity, but by providence. You don’t need second chances when you have the persistence of prophecy. It was enough for now to scrub their bodies clean. There was death and dying to return to in a while, but for now it was good enough to count each other’s new scars and make light of how they got them, and enough to splash each other like they were children again, laughing their relief at life. After all, they were children not so long ago, though already their childhood was receding into apocrypha, as the magic of this land took their former lives from them.
So this is where Edmund finds Peter now: in the Great River, washing himself as he had done a decade or two thousand years ago. His clothes are draped over a nearby bush, and even though he faces east with his back towards Edmund, he says, without turning around: “Hello, Ed.”
Edmund is already taking off his clothes.
+
One time in England, he had said to Peter, “It’s strange, how different growing up is here. You expect it would be the same, seeing’s how it’s all the same bodies.”
But they were paler here in Finchley. Their arms were thinner and their legs weaker, because no exercise was quite comparable to races with Fauns, battles with great armies, and celebratory dances with Bacchus and his Maenads. Peter’s commands were unwarranted, Susan’s beauty uneasy, and Lucy’s buoyant faith naïve. Their silhouettes were no longer familiar to each other, and even their scars weren’t the same.
Peter had replied, “It’s not our bodies that make us who we are.”
“What, then?” Edmund could not help the cynicism in his tone. “Our memories?”
Susan said, “The world, of course. The world makes us who we are.”
“It’s not that simple,” he insisted.
“Well, I’m jolly well sick of it all being so complicated,” she snapped at him, and Peter put a hand on her shoulder and changed the subject.
“Sometimes I wonder,” the shepherd had said to Edmund, a lifetime ago, “if we live in the desert just to love the water.”
Together, he and Peter and Lucy watched Susan drift from them, and remembered that in some creation myths, people were created from dust and earth, and to dust and earth they shall return.
+
The Great River in their day had been clear as crystal and refreshing to drink, but now it is murky with the refuse of the Calormene lumber works upstream. There is a smell of coal and sulfur that gets stronger every day and this is how they know they are nearing their target. Everyday they run over the plan, amending little details until Lucy has to interrupt, “Enough! You’ll overthink this. Can’t we just enjoy the walk a little bit?”
Above them the twilight beckons to the evening, and the sky is shades of ochre and mauve in a way they will never see in England, even with the plumes of familiar industrial smoke. The river reflects the colors in a dull and hopeful way, rippling as he and Peter wash and swim and laugh. Edmund has almost forgotten how beautiful Narnia is, even when she is not his Narnia anymore, and it makes his heart ache for pasts long gone and futures that might have been.
Peter hoists himself onto a rock and the sunset reflects off wet skin, casting him in a golden light. Edmund floats on his back a few yards away, and he can almost pretend that it’s a decade and two thousand years ago. That they have just won against the White Witch sympathizers, and that Peter sitting on that rock is thinking about the long journey back east to Cair Paravel and the embrace of their sisters. Now that this campaign is over with, Peter is perhaps thinking, there is the matter of the unraveling alliances in Redhaven to sort out. And the High King might at any time turn to Edmund and suggest that Tumnus be deployed to the Seven Isles, perhaps with Susan, to investigate the situation.
Peter says instead, “Do you think I would be able to do this, to do all this, if it weren’t for the prophecy?”
“When Adam’s flesh and Adam’s bone/Sits at Cair Paravel in throne,/The evil time will be over and done.” The words had been sung and chanted hundreds of times during the first years of their rule, in both times of celebration and ceremony, and Edmund doesn’t think he could forget them if he tried.
“How much of it is destiny, do you think, and how much of it is just me?”
“But it’s not just you,” says Edmund, as he paddles to a nearby flattish rock. “You have us.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I don’t think you can separate destiny from this,” Edmund replies, resting crossed arms on the rock. “It just fits and that’s the whole point, isn’t it? You are how you are, and that’s why you’re here. That’s why you’re doing what you do. Round peg into round hole, and stuff like that.”
“What about Susan?”
“What about her?”
“There are four thrones at Cair Paravel.”
He shrugs. “There were, but it’s only one now that only Tirian is king, and who knows what has been going on since the Calormenes seized it.”
Peter looks down, kicks up a splash of water. “Lucy would give me an earful if she heard me saying this, but I do wish Aslan would show up.”
“Things never hap—”
“Don’t,” Peter snaps.
So Edmund doesn’t.
Peter has lost Narnia twice now and Edmund three times, and in a way he secretly envies Susan for never having to lose Narnia again. She has made her choices and found her peace. It’s just that for the rest of them it has never been a choice. The thing about believing in the rationality of an irrational god is that it's like waiting for history to happen: you won't be able to justify anything until the moment has long gone. You can’t make choices if you’re not given any, but Susan has managed to, somehow.
Once a King or Queen of Narnia, always. That is what Aslan has promised them and that is what they (minus Susan) have always held onto, even now with their scrawnier arms and their shorter haircuts, their different conversational tics picked up from school friends and serials on the wireless, their bodies so free of war wounds you’d think they have never built a Golden Age with their bare hands and the blood of their people.
“We should get going soon,” says Peter.
The twilight is dying, and the shadows of the northwestern woods still make him uneasy.
+
“Move?” The shepherd had laughed. “Where to, my friend? The desert heat parches our throats and its sandstorms blind and bury us where we lay. Its scorpions and snakes take the lives of our sheep and children, and its mirages lead our brothers astray to wander the dunes for days before they die. We love the desert as no one can. What else is there for a people like us? What else is there for the desert?”
+
“Peter!” Lucy cries out when she sees her brothers between the trees. “Edmund, oh thank goodness. Where have you been?”
“Come on, Lu,” says Peter with a smile, opening his arms as she runs to embrace him. “I can take care of myself, you know.”
Lucy kisses him on the cheek. “Usually that’s my line to you. Come, we’ve caught enough rabbit for all of us. We’ll have a fine supper. Your hair’s quite wet – fall down a well?”
“No, Ed did,” Peter shrugs. “I had to rescue him.”
“Ha!” says Lucy, taking Peter’s hand and leading him to the fire. “You boys keep your secrets. I shall have mine.”
“We keep no secrets from you, Lucy,” Edmund smiles.
“This is what all big brothers say when they wish to lie,” Lucy declares.
“Don’t think you’re wise because you can make generalizations about big brothers,” says Peter.
Lucy says, “Come and eat your rabbit.”
Tirian stands up and bows when they enter the circle of firelight, and Peter and Edmund doesn’t even try to stop him anymore, although Lucy still cries out, “Oh, Tirian, really you don’t have to!” The rabbit is as fine a meal as can be expected in these times, and a hard day and a tired body do wonders for the appetite. At the end of the meal there is nothing left but bones. Lucy bids Tirian tell them stories of the Golden Age and Tirian laughs saying, “Oh, lady, I think you can tell stories about the Golden Age better than I.”
“Let us hear yours,” says Lucy. “It would be good for a laugh.”
It’s Lucy’s favorite game, to listen to how the passage of time has warped the truth of things, and she delights in correcting him and telling how it really happened. That is, when she’s not telling him to continue, do continue.
“Tirian,” says Edmund, after Lucy recounts the real reasons behind the downfall of the Felimathian barony. “Tell us a story about the people of the desert, the ones who worship the water and dance in the dawn to keep the sandstorms at bay.”
Tirian frowns. “I know of no such stories, your highness. There is no one who lives in the desert. The environment is so hostile there, so dry and hot that it would be quite impossible to.”
“Friend,” Peter says softly, “you are too quick to name what is impossible.”
Tirian and Peter’s gazes waver at each other for a moment, and then Tirian bows his head and nods deferentially. “Forgive me. Perhaps,” he says, “it would please your majesties to tell us a story about these desert people.”
Peter and Edmund exchange glances, and Peter says, “Look, it’s getting quite late. Let’s turn in for the night, shall we?”
After a pause, Tirian ventures, “Your majesty, if I have said something that has offended—”
“I am tired, your highness,” says Peter. “We’ll speak no more of it tonight.”
“Perhaps we should ease up, eh?” Edmund says as they settle onto the hard ground, although it may be feather beds for all they’re used to it by now. He speaks quietly so Lucy and Tirian can’t hear, even though they are already in their own murmured conversation on the other side of the dying fire. “He doesn’t mean anything by it – Lucy just goads him so. At the very least of it, we’re home. We’re home again, Pete.”
Peter curls an arm under his head, says, “That’s what we said the last time.” And closes his eyes.