[Fic] "Visiting Narnia" -- Chronicles of Narnia, fragment

[edenfalling]

I mentioned last summer that the story I ended up writing for FiKate in the 2014 Narnia Fic Exchange was not the story I first tried to write. I'd forgotten how close that failed attempt came to reaching the minimum word count, though, and I think it's fairly cute in its own right, so I'm posting it for the sake of completism.

Summary: Aravis, Cor, and Corin visit Narnia for the Summer Festival. Fragment. (900 words)

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Visiting Narnia
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One of the great frustrations of stories is that they must come to an end. A particularly good tale will often have an ending that makes you feel that you have reached a comfortable stopping point, like coming home after a long day's journey to see warm light in the doorway welcoming you in for supper and a good night's sleep. But even so, I do not doubt that you have often found yourself wondering what happened to the people whose adventures you have followed, though the storyteller has closed up shop and declared himself done with them and their lives.

Fortunately the world is full of storytellers, and if you know where to look you may find one who will tell you what happened next, as I am about to do.

Two weeks after Prince Rabadash attempted to invade Archenland and was turned into a donkey for his troubles, which is a tale you may have read in a book called The Horse and His Boy, a raven flew in through a window in the castle of Anvard and landed on King Edmund's shoulder while he took breakfast with the royal family and their friends. This was a great surprise to the Lady Aravis and Prince Cor, since Talking Beasts were unknown in the land of Calormen, where they had grown up. Aravis reached for a knife and Cor prepared to throw the tablecloth, but fortunately they stopped themselves before they did anything rash.

"Greetings, Catchlight," King Edmund said. "What news do you bring us?"

"The Tisroc has forbidden any open retaliation by arms," the Raven said in her scratchy, pebbled voice. "There will be no war this year. I can't speak for the next."

"Our thanks," King Edmund said.

Catchlight hopped down onto the table with a little flutter of her wings and lifted a sausage from the serving plate, neat as you please. She was somewhat less tidy about eating it, but made sure to hold the food over a napkin out of politeness.

Meanwhile, King Edmund turned to address King Lune at the far end of the table. "Sir, with your leave I shall prepare the army to move out on the morrow, and remove our burden from your house and lands."

"What burden? 'Tis a joy to have good company, however unexpected, and Narnia and Archenland shall ever be friends," King Lune answered. He wiped his hands on a napkin and added, more thoughtfully, "Hast a moment, though, sir? There is a favor I would ask of you."

"Of course," said King Edmund.

"I must leave Anvard and see to the establishment of defenses in the Southern Marches," said King Lune. "Twill be long and tedious work, and I would not leave my sons and the Lady Aravis alone so soon after these great events. Canst bring them with you into Narnia for a time? Corin's pledge to visit Master Tumnus for the Summer Festival yet stands, and I think 'twould do Cor and the Lady good to live in a livelier court than mine will be these next weeks."

"Oh!" said Prince Corin. "Yes, let's. You'll like the Summer Festival. It's all bonfires and dancing and the Fauns tell the most incredible stories."

"Well, my lords and lady?" said King Edmund. "I for one am in favor. What say you?"

Cor and Aravis exchanged a look that seemed to say, I'll go if you'll come with me. For though they both liked the North a great deal, they still felt they were in a strange country and ought to watch each other's backs as they had done in their escape from Calormen.

After a moment Aravis asked, "If we go, might we see Hwin and Bree?"

"I think it unlikely that anyone could prevent such a reunion," King Edmund said, "and also I will have messengers sent to inform them of your arrival."

"Then I say yes," Aravis declared.

"So do I," added Cor, who missed his friends very much and wondered if the Horses felt as awkward in Narnia as he did in Archenland.

"Then we are decided," said King Edmund, and went to make arrangements.

The next day Aravis, Cor, and Corin rode out with the army, northward into Narnia. Corin spent the journey telling them tales of his previous visits to Narnia, all of which seemed to end with him falling out of a tree, falling into a stream, or knocking somebody down. It sounded very exciting, and also somewhat alarming.

"Do you ever do anything quiet?" Cor asked.

"Whyever would I want to?" Corin asked in return, and laughed.

"For contrast," said Aravis.

"That sounds dreadfully dull," said Corin. "I'd rather be loud. But if Cor is quiet, perhaps we're just meant to be contrasts for each other!"

Cor thought there was something askew about his newfound brother's logic, but as he couldn't put his finger on the problem (and didn't especially mind not being as loud as Corin anyway), he didn't bother to argue the way he would have done with Aravis.

In short order they had crossed the pass and the cliff, and were riding down into the broad green hills of southern Narnia. Cor pointed out the little cottage where he had spent the night with some Dwarfs before the battle, but soon they were in land unfamiliar to both him and Aravis.

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And that is where I stalled out and could not manage another hundred words for love nor money. I think the main problem is that I had no plot. I mean, the general thrust was Aravis and Cor having polite culture shock about various things in Narnia, but there wasn't a strong narrative arc, and a more general "hey, let's explore Narnia for a while" milieu story would have required at least another two thousand words to feel properly weighted and balanced, and if I couldn't manage another hundred, twenty times that was clearly out of the question.

The other takeaway lesson, of course, is that the narrative voice Lewis uses for the Chronicles does NOT come naturally to me, and I should probably not try to force it unless I have a very good reason. *wry*

(I am not entirely sure that this fragment meshes with These bringing with them unknown gods and rites. It fits all right with Any Sentry from His Post, which is set one week after the Battle of Anvard, but I'd expect Aravis to at least make passing mention of a trip to Narnia when thinking about the trouble of settling in to a new country and culture. Still, if the first full moon fell, let's say, the night before this fragment opens, and the trip to Narnia only lasts two or three weeks, she could perfectly well be back in Anvard for the next full moon.)

Comments

[transposable_element]

You could have Aravis get drunk. That's what I did. :-)

I enjoy the nod to C.S. Lewis's narrative style, but since you say you don't have a specific reason for using it here and that it doesn't come naturally to you, I'm wondering whether dropping it might help you get further.

[edenfalling]

I feel uncomfortable about getting a roughly thirteen-year-old girl drunk, though... *twitches awkwardly*

I was getting even less of anywhere without the narrative voice, though, so I'm not sure dropping it and attempting a wholesale stylistic rewrite would actually help much. *sigh*

[transposable_element]

I'm not sure why the idea of a 13-year-old getting doesn't bother me, except that I was 13 the first time I got drunk, and I had such a bad hangover afterward that I didn't get drunk again for a very long time. It was a Learning Experience. Classic, really. Same for Aravis. Actually, now I come to think of it, the friend that I got drunk with on that occasion (she was sleeping over at my house on New Year's Eve while my parents were out at a party) reminds me in a lot of ways of Aravis. Hmmm....

[edenfalling]

I got drunk for the first and only time when I was 17, since I was in Germany that summer and it was therefore legal. I did it mostly For Science!!, concluded that I hated the loss of self-control, and used the experience to make sure I have never gotten past tipsy again.

I reacted particularly badly to the "what inhibitions??" effect because I'd spent the preceding decade very carefully training myself to HAVE inhibitions in the first place -- or at least inhibitions related to violence -- and the idea of undoing all that work with a few drinks absolutely horrified me. Not to mention that, while drunk For Science!!, I decided it made perfect sense to also have sex For Science!! and propositioned somebody else's boyfriend. *headdesk* I am eternally grateful he said no.

[transposable_element]

Oh dear, that sounds bad. It's unfortunate that by definition we come to these situations inexperienced.

I'm curious about what you say about training yourself to have inhibitions. I think everybody has to learn some inhibitions, but it's different for each person. For me, it was "don't just say whatever you're thinking." To this day, I blush to think of how I unthinkingly betrayed confidences. It's not that I deliberately broke a promise not to tell anybody, but the people who said these things to me assumed that I understood that I wasn't to tell other people about them. Dumb.

[edenfalling]

When I was young, I had no circuit breakers between frustration and physical violence. If something or somebody annoyed me, I jumped straight to anger, and from anger I jumped straight to hitting people -- with my hands and feet, or with nearby objects like hardcover books. This is not a viable form of social interaction!

My parents tried a lot of not-especially-successful methods to teach me control, like counting to ten when I got mad, or clutching a talismanic necklace charm to give my hands something else to do instead of punching people. They were very clear that anger itself wasn't a bad thing -- that everyone gets angry -- and that my violence was the actual problem... but that's hard to get across to a little kid and I wound up trying to suppress/repress any anger whatsoever for several years, which. Well. It sort of worked some of the time, but the side effects included really violent explosions when I lost my grip on the lid keeping my temper locked down -- like the time I threw a chunk of wood into another kid's eye, or the time I tried to stab my sister with a fork -- and a lot of misery and self-hatred that I carried around constantly with no way to express or process.

What actually worked, ultimately, was learning to disconnect annoyance/upset from anger -- to just let stuff roll off without triggering red-acid rage in the first place. Then, once I wasn't furious all the time, I could finally teach myself some different tools for channeling the anger itself. These days, my default reaction when I'm angry is a sort of frozen icy disdain until I can exit the situation, at which point I get the shakes and do a sort of guided meditation to release the remaining fury. I picture it as a corrosive acid that fills up my body, and I let it all drain downward into the earth.

I still work very hard not to get angry, because even with my little collection of cobbled-together coping methods, I still can't process anger constructively. I probably won't ever be able to. (That is, incidentally, why I stay the hell away from most activism.) And the idea of voluntarily giving up the self-control that I worked so hard to gain makes me extremely uncomfortable.

[transposable_element]

Thanks for explaining this. I hope it didn't seem like too intrusive a question. It sounds like a very difficult process, and I can understand why anything that interferes with those carefully-built inhibitions would be a non-starter.

I don't think I deal with anger constructively, either, though for completely different reasons. For me, it's just paralyzing. I know people who say that anger fuels their activism, but I don't find that it works that way. I don't seem to be able to channel the anger in a positive direction. I envy people who can do that!

[edenfalling]

Nah, don't worry! I'm okay talking about all that, partly because my anger issues were vital to shaping who I am as an adult and yet they're basically invisible to anyone I met after, say, age 15, so I feel the disclosure is like correcting an inadvertent dishonesty. I actually wrote a post a few years back which goes into a little more detail if you're curious.

[branchandroot]

Lewis' narrator's voice really is a hard one. It's the "reading aloud to children" voice, but it's a particular one.

*thinks* It feels a little as though the plot may be about the different peace Cor may reach with Narnian customs from his perspective versus Corin's. Corin is cool with it because he bonds with the loud, boisterous aspect of Narnia. This seems like it could be a moment for Cor to find his own common point, after he's worked through being shocked.

[edenfalling]

I have a handful of "reading aloud to children" voices, but none of them quite match Lewis's, alas. But I will learn it one day, just see if I don't! (I had the same problem trying to imitate the narrative voice Patricia Wrede uses for the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, which I still don't think I quite have down, but I did finally manage a close-enough facsimile after a few years of experiments.)

Hmm. Yes, I think that would work as a plot. I'd probably have to tweak this opening section a little to play that theme up some more, but that's at least something with an actual endpoint instead of a series of and-then, and-then, and-then that just drags on forever in a structureless line.

[marmota_b]

Ouch. Corin must come, too, because the summer festival.
... you see, I have this idea for way ahead in The Peridan Chronicles that Aravis and Cor visited Narnia, just beyond the borders mostly - actually going there with Hwin and Bree, though, who would have stayed with them in Anvard for a while. :-) And now you reminded me of Corin and the summer festival, so my idea that they visited on their own is falling apart... although maybe the summer festival was later.

I like branchandroot's suggestion, too. What with Corin telling those kinds of stories and Cor's reaction to them, it feels like a natural progress. Perhaps he and Aravis can have a talk with a centaur or someone like that about their experiences with Aslan? That, I think, is something they might need to sort through a bit at this point.

[edenfalling]

The thing about a "summer festival" is the marvelous vagueness of the name; you can set one anywhere from solstice in June through the end of August. You could even set one at the end of May if you want, depending on the climate of the region holding the festival. For example, Memorial Day in America acts as the beginning of summer for social and meteorological purposes, though it falls a good three or four weeks before the official calendrical start of that season.

Talking with someone about Aslan would definitely be a good thing to include, thank you! *makes note*

[marmota_b]

I would hesitate to move it that early in Narnia, because so much is made of it being in the "North", and the general descriptions of it definitely point towards a mild climate. The mention of Bacchus makes me think "wine harvest, maybe late August".
Ha! Wikipedia to the rescue. Czech law states that burčák (newly fermented grape juice) can only be sold from August 1 to November 30. Where wine-growing in Narnia-the-northern-country is concerned, Czech Republic is a good example! I'm a bit stumped that there's no English word for it. I may have to invent one for Narnian purposes!

[edenfalling]

The lack of a compact English word for newly fermented grape juice is probably because England has not historically been a wine-growing country. Wine-drinking, sure -- the wine trade between southwestern France and England was huge in the middle ages -- but transport times rendered the concept of "fresh" wine inapplicable.

[marmota_b]

Ah, of course! Having grown up on stories of wine being grown here since the Middle Ages, I find it a bit hard to remember that part. Probably more so because there's nothing in the books to suggest that Narnia doesn't grow at least some of its own wine.

[edenfalling]

I think the Fauns are mentioned as making some kind of alcoholic beverage, though I don't remember the details. And the presence of Bacchus and the Maenads during PC does suggest that Narnia has a suitable climate for growing grapes. Actually, given the heavy Greek mythology elements of Lewis's world-building, perhaps Narnia adopted the Greek term for burčák, whatever that may be?

[marmota_b]

Yes, nothing to suggest "no" and several things to suggest "yes".

That would be great, thank you for the idea! And it would be fun for The Peridan Chronicles, due to my choice of protagonist... Alas, Wikipedia isn't helping. Although I get Hebrew. :D