Fic: Spin Recovery, Part Six
Nov. 30th, 2007 10:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jeriendhalNotes: Rated PG. Terinu and related characters, plots and images are copyright ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
chaypeta and used here without permission.
Breakfast was quiet that morning. Still short on sleep, Rufus muttered bleary greetings to Bethany and his mother, the latter confining her commentary to a brief, “You shouldn’t stay up so late, Ru Ofanius.” He ate quickly, fortifying himself with several cups of hot tea, before excusing himself and making his way out to the stables.
It was a low slung building with a peaked roof and about a dozen individual cages containing the manor’s grass chasers. Once a proud part Vulpine culture, the beasts were mostly kept nowadays by households or individuals with a bent for either history or anachronism. Actually there was a wide opinion that re-domesticating Grass Chasers after recovering Vulpine Prime from the Varn had been a major case of nostalgia overcoming reason.
Rufus stopped in front of the cage of one them, a male with jet black fur that was about three meters long and a meter and half high at the shoulder, that looked back at him with beady black eyes set above a thick snout with overhanging fangs. Three centimeter long claws designed for snaring and pulling down prey dug into the hay at the bottom of the cage while its long furless tail whipped back and forth in perpetual irritation.
He had read somewhere that Humans had domesticated an animal called a “horse” for purposes similar to what the Vulpine had used Grass Chasers for, mainly personal transportation and hauling heavy loads prior to the invention of the steam cart. Though apparently they were better natured than grass chasers, there being no great history of horses throwing their riders and devouring them, as had happened occasionally in Vulpine history to explorers who made the mistake of not keeping them well fed.
“Good morning, milord,” the stable master called out. “Going for a ride?”
“Yes, I believe I will,” he replied. “I’ll take Bloodyjaw out for a stretch. Has he eaten?”
“Took three kin geese this morning, milord.”
“Excellent. Saddle him up for me, please.” Rufus stepped well back as the stable master popped open the feeding hatch on the cage. Bloodyjaw indeed had to have been fed recently, for instead of ramming his head through to try and reach the nearest food source (ie: the stable master) he stuck his face through the port with more curiosity than menace, allowing the hatch’s neck stock to pin him place so the stable master could fit him with a muzzle over his jaws and then step inside to set his saddle on his back.
“Would you like an extra goose for him, milord? I’ve got a spare.” The stable master's face was a study in nonchalance, but his warning was clear enough. The reins of a grass chaser were difficult enough to control with two working hands, much less one and a fourth goose would be enough to make the beast nearly comatose.
“Thank you, but no,” Rufus replied, stifling the urge to snap at the man. “Bloodyjaw has known me since we were both cubs, haven't you, you vile beastie?” He grinned ferally at his mount, which narrowed its eyes and growled at him. Rufus let the stable master hold the reins while he mounted Bloodyjaw's back and hooked his foot pads in the stirrups, taking them back a half-second before the beast leaped forward, clearing the stable doors in two bounds before charging down the dirt road.
Rufus let out a curse and hauled back hard on the reins, digging his foot claws into Bloodyjaw's sides in warning. The beast let out an annoyed howl, stopping abruptly and nearly pitching Rufus over, even as its neck was bent backward far enough that Rufus could look it in the eyes.
“Look you,” he addressed it, as the beast yowled in annoyance. “I may have been gone for seven years but that still isn't enough time for you to forget my scent, so pay attention. I'm the one in charge of this relationship, so I'll be the one who decides which way we go and how fast. Clear?” He thumped the beast hard between the ears for emphasis and Bloodyjaw let out a surprised snort. But when Rufus loosened the reins again they headed down on the gravel road at a much sedate and stately pace.
They followed the curve of the road, passing fields that had been freshly plowed in anticipation of spring planting on one side and the edges of a virgin forest on the other. On a whim he diverted Bloodyjaw’s path into the forest, following a game path that wound between the trunks of tall blackwood trees, heading in the general direction of a fishing hole he remembered from his childhood. If he’d kept going along the road he would have eventually reached the housing development of the manor’s farmers and staff, and he was in no mood for company right now.
The path opened up into a clearing that Rufus remembered edging along the shore of the pond. Too his disappointment it appeared his old fishing hole was long gone though. The shallow basin was a dry depression now, the rich mud at the bottom now serving as soil for tall grasses and even a scattering of saplings. Worse from his perspective was that it wasn’t uninhabited either. There was a small group of perhaps a dozen young males and vixens in their early twenties on the opposite side, armed with picks, shovels and hand scanners, digging at a spot about three meters from the lip of the depression. They appeared to be under the direction an older vixen in her sixties, who turned from her work to look across the depression at Rufus and gave him a cheerful Halloo!
Well, it would be rude to just ride off again. He guided Bloodyjaw around the edge of the depression, dreading the need to interact and be properly lordly to folk who were likely Brushtail subjects. His mood brightened however, when he got closer and was able to recognize the vixen directing the younger folk.
The Professora Dame Dorathea Bayard, or Aunt Dottie as Rufus had always known her (and sometimes referred to as “Dotty Aunt Dottie” when his mother was in a less than charitable mood) was a tall, spare, sandy furred Vixen a half generation older than the Countess Brushtail. As the third daughter born to his father’s house, she had managed to avoid the administrative entanglements of her family’s relatively modest holdings, instead pursuing a career in academia and archeology, exploring the ruins of Vulpine culture that had been plowed over by the Varn and piecing together even older history that had never even been discovered previously. Rufus had always been fond of her, admiring her ability to walk her own path, unencumbered by the usual concerns of the farmer nobility.
“Hello, Auntie,” he greeted, dismounting and knotting Bloodyjaw’s reins to a stout overhanging branch where the beast couldn’t rear up and claw at it. “What brings you here?”
“Why hello there, Rufus, you’re an utter fright. Your mother wasn’t joking when she said you looked like you’ve been through Hell,” Dottie said, pushing her straw hat up and peering at him over an anachronistic pence nez with dark lenses clipped to her muzzle. “What happened to your arm?”
“I had an argument with a pressure door,” he replied.
“You should have known better. Doors are unpleasant debaters.” She turned to address the gaggle of younger Vulpines who were staring at them, shovels and scanners temporarily forgotten. “As for the rest of you, get back to work! You’ve all got your assigned quadrants, now get to digging!” The young people all turned with a bit of embarrassment back to a large grid marked out on the ground with cord and stakes and got obediently to turning over the earth.
“Who are all these folk?”
“My loyal minions, who are all trying to complete the Practical portion of their Field Archeology course,” Dottie said with a grin. “I finally persuaded your mother to let me poke for potshards on the grounds, just so long as it was out of her sight. I’ve been going through the Brushtail’s pre-Subjugation archive and I think I’ve found the location of the old servant quarters. Well, the foundations at least.”
“I’d think you’d be more interested in finding the manor itself.”
“Bosh! No point in that. It'd be too neat!”
He raised an eyebrow. “Too neat?”
“Neat houses leave no history! The manor, if what we have from the historical record holds true, had its valuables cleared away and hidden when the Dominion moved it. But if these are the old servant quarters, they would have been abandoned almost intact when the Varn started hauling people away to re-education camps to get their brains washed out.” Her eyes brightened in cheery academic mania. “If we can find the remnants of a home that was left untouched to collapse in on itself, we'd have a picture of a common Vulpine family's life from over fifteen hundred years in the past!”
“I see. Well, good luck on digging then.” He gave her a little half bow and started to turn back towards Bloodyjaw, who was raising his paws up, trying to snag a claw on his reins.
“Oh, haven’t seen your old auntie for almost seven years and you just think you can say a quick halloo and go home?” she demanded, hooking her finger in the collar of his shirt and turning him back towards her.
“It isn’t that Aunt Dottie.” He glanced meaningfully towards the gaggle of students, who were evenly divided between ones that were actually doing work and those who kept looking towards them, apparently trying to figure out who this maimed stranger talking to their teacher was. “Could we go someplace a bit more private?”
“All right then.” She walked with him down the slope to where a skimmer bus was parked on the forest’s rough access road. “What’s the matter?”
He shook his head. “Too many people staring at me. It was making me edgy.”
“Edgy? You look wrung out, boy.”
“I didn’t get much sleep last night,” he said, waving away her concerns.
“Not for several nights, I’d venture.”
“Well, that’s true.” He rubbed his muzzle in agitation. “How much did my mother tell you about me?”
“She just said that you’d come home after being badly hurt in an accident. Is there more to it than that?”
“Yes, but… I’d rather not discuss it right now.”
She nodded. “I thought there might be. Your mother has this habit of making Significant Pauses in her speech when she comes close to something she’d rather not discuss, and I was hearing, or not hearing rather, plenty of them when I chatted with her a few days ago. But that’s your business and none of mine, so I’ll leave you to it.”
“Holy Den Mother bless you for that, Auntie.” He paused, gathering his thoughts, then asked, “How do you do it?”
“Do what?”
He waved a hand vaguely at her and then up towards the students by the pond. “This. Your life. Following your own path. Being a teacher instead of a noblevixen. Not getting tangled up in… in… the damned system we have.”
Dotty looked at him in sympathy. “Not feeling all that noble, Viscount?”
He let out a sharp, mirthless laugh. “I’m no noble, Aunt Dorathea. I’m not anything right now, except a drag on my House’s resources. I’m…” He bit down on the word broken. “This isn’t the life I wanted.”
“Well, I was lucky. I was the third daughter of a small Farmer Lord family. My elder sisters and now their children handle running things well enough, no one cared all that much if I left everything in their hands. You, on the other hand had the bad luck of being born into a big House with a small family. Damn your father, if he’d had kept the good sense the Den Mother had given him and not tried to be so stoic about his troubles, I might still have my brother and you might have a few more sisters to carry the load.”
“Yes, well, I don’t. I thought I could forge my own path, like you had, by joining up with the military and then buying my own fighter, but… that didn’t work out very well.” He shrugged his shoulder. “But now I don’t know what to do with myself. I’ve no experience in administration and if my mother starts waving young marriageable vixen in my face I may very well scream. Not that I’m exactly a hot marriage prospect right now.”
She clapped him gently on the back. “Heal up first, Rufus. After that, you’ll have the time and the strength to find your path.”
“And if I don’t?”
Dottie grinned. “Then when you get your arm replaced I’ll hand you a shovel and you can explore a brand new career in ditch digging.”
He smiled briefly. “You’re all heart, Auntie.”
TBC
chaypeta and used here without permission.Breakfast was quiet that morning. Still short on sleep, Rufus muttered bleary greetings to Bethany and his mother, the latter confining her commentary to a brief, “You shouldn’t stay up so late, Ru Ofanius.” He ate quickly, fortifying himself with several cups of hot tea, before excusing himself and making his way out to the stables.
It was a low slung building with a peaked roof and about a dozen individual cages containing the manor’s grass chasers. Once a proud part Vulpine culture, the beasts were mostly kept nowadays by households or individuals with a bent for either history or anachronism. Actually there was a wide opinion that re-domesticating Grass Chasers after recovering Vulpine Prime from the Varn had been a major case of nostalgia overcoming reason.
Rufus stopped in front of the cage of one them, a male with jet black fur that was about three meters long and a meter and half high at the shoulder, that looked back at him with beady black eyes set above a thick snout with overhanging fangs. Three centimeter long claws designed for snaring and pulling down prey dug into the hay at the bottom of the cage while its long furless tail whipped back and forth in perpetual irritation.
He had read somewhere that Humans had domesticated an animal called a “horse” for purposes similar to what the Vulpine had used Grass Chasers for, mainly personal transportation and hauling heavy loads prior to the invention of the steam cart. Though apparently they were better natured than grass chasers, there being no great history of horses throwing their riders and devouring them, as had happened occasionally in Vulpine history to explorers who made the mistake of not keeping them well fed.
“Good morning, milord,” the stable master called out. “Going for a ride?”
“Yes, I believe I will,” he replied. “I’ll take Bloodyjaw out for a stretch. Has he eaten?”
“Took three kin geese this morning, milord.”
“Excellent. Saddle him up for me, please.” Rufus stepped well back as the stable master popped open the feeding hatch on the cage. Bloodyjaw indeed had to have been fed recently, for instead of ramming his head through to try and reach the nearest food source (ie: the stable master) he stuck his face through the port with more curiosity than menace, allowing the hatch’s neck stock to pin him place so the stable master could fit him with a muzzle over his jaws and then step inside to set his saddle on his back.
“Would you like an extra goose for him, milord? I’ve got a spare.” The stable master's face was a study in nonchalance, but his warning was clear enough. The reins of a grass chaser were difficult enough to control with two working hands, much less one and a fourth goose would be enough to make the beast nearly comatose.
“Thank you, but no,” Rufus replied, stifling the urge to snap at the man. “Bloodyjaw has known me since we were both cubs, haven't you, you vile beastie?” He grinned ferally at his mount, which narrowed its eyes and growled at him. Rufus let the stable master hold the reins while he mounted Bloodyjaw's back and hooked his foot pads in the stirrups, taking them back a half-second before the beast leaped forward, clearing the stable doors in two bounds before charging down the dirt road.
Rufus let out a curse and hauled back hard on the reins, digging his foot claws into Bloodyjaw's sides in warning. The beast let out an annoyed howl, stopping abruptly and nearly pitching Rufus over, even as its neck was bent backward far enough that Rufus could look it in the eyes.
“Look you,” he addressed it, as the beast yowled in annoyance. “I may have been gone for seven years but that still isn't enough time for you to forget my scent, so pay attention. I'm the one in charge of this relationship, so I'll be the one who decides which way we go and how fast. Clear?” He thumped the beast hard between the ears for emphasis and Bloodyjaw let out a surprised snort. But when Rufus loosened the reins again they headed down on the gravel road at a much sedate and stately pace.
They followed the curve of the road, passing fields that had been freshly plowed in anticipation of spring planting on one side and the edges of a virgin forest on the other. On a whim he diverted Bloodyjaw’s path into the forest, following a game path that wound between the trunks of tall blackwood trees, heading in the general direction of a fishing hole he remembered from his childhood. If he’d kept going along the road he would have eventually reached the housing development of the manor’s farmers and staff, and he was in no mood for company right now.
The path opened up into a clearing that Rufus remembered edging along the shore of the pond. Too his disappointment it appeared his old fishing hole was long gone though. The shallow basin was a dry depression now, the rich mud at the bottom now serving as soil for tall grasses and even a scattering of saplings. Worse from his perspective was that it wasn’t uninhabited either. There was a small group of perhaps a dozen young males and vixens in their early twenties on the opposite side, armed with picks, shovels and hand scanners, digging at a spot about three meters from the lip of the depression. They appeared to be under the direction an older vixen in her sixties, who turned from her work to look across the depression at Rufus and gave him a cheerful Halloo!
Well, it would be rude to just ride off again. He guided Bloodyjaw around the edge of the depression, dreading the need to interact and be properly lordly to folk who were likely Brushtail subjects. His mood brightened however, when he got closer and was able to recognize the vixen directing the younger folk.
The Professora Dame Dorathea Bayard, or Aunt Dottie as Rufus had always known her (and sometimes referred to as “Dotty Aunt Dottie” when his mother was in a less than charitable mood) was a tall, spare, sandy furred Vixen a half generation older than the Countess Brushtail. As the third daughter born to his father’s house, she had managed to avoid the administrative entanglements of her family’s relatively modest holdings, instead pursuing a career in academia and archeology, exploring the ruins of Vulpine culture that had been plowed over by the Varn and piecing together even older history that had never even been discovered previously. Rufus had always been fond of her, admiring her ability to walk her own path, unencumbered by the usual concerns of the farmer nobility.
“Hello, Auntie,” he greeted, dismounting and knotting Bloodyjaw’s reins to a stout overhanging branch where the beast couldn’t rear up and claw at it. “What brings you here?”
“Why hello there, Rufus, you’re an utter fright. Your mother wasn’t joking when she said you looked like you’ve been through Hell,” Dottie said, pushing her straw hat up and peering at him over an anachronistic pence nez with dark lenses clipped to her muzzle. “What happened to your arm?”
“I had an argument with a pressure door,” he replied.
“You should have known better. Doors are unpleasant debaters.” She turned to address the gaggle of younger Vulpines who were staring at them, shovels and scanners temporarily forgotten. “As for the rest of you, get back to work! You’ve all got your assigned quadrants, now get to digging!” The young people all turned with a bit of embarrassment back to a large grid marked out on the ground with cord and stakes and got obediently to turning over the earth.
“Who are all these folk?”
“My loyal minions, who are all trying to complete the Practical portion of their Field Archeology course,” Dottie said with a grin. “I finally persuaded your mother to let me poke for potshards on the grounds, just so long as it was out of her sight. I’ve been going through the Brushtail’s pre-Subjugation archive and I think I’ve found the location of the old servant quarters. Well, the foundations at least.”
“I’d think you’d be more interested in finding the manor itself.”
“Bosh! No point in that. It'd be too neat!”
He raised an eyebrow. “Too neat?”
“Neat houses leave no history! The manor, if what we have from the historical record holds true, had its valuables cleared away and hidden when the Dominion moved it. But if these are the old servant quarters, they would have been abandoned almost intact when the Varn started hauling people away to re-education camps to get their brains washed out.” Her eyes brightened in cheery academic mania. “If we can find the remnants of a home that was left untouched to collapse in on itself, we'd have a picture of a common Vulpine family's life from over fifteen hundred years in the past!”
“I see. Well, good luck on digging then.” He gave her a little half bow and started to turn back towards Bloodyjaw, who was raising his paws up, trying to snag a claw on his reins.
“Oh, haven’t seen your old auntie for almost seven years and you just think you can say a quick halloo and go home?” she demanded, hooking her finger in the collar of his shirt and turning him back towards her.
“It isn’t that Aunt Dottie.” He glanced meaningfully towards the gaggle of students, who were evenly divided between ones that were actually doing work and those who kept looking towards them, apparently trying to figure out who this maimed stranger talking to their teacher was. “Could we go someplace a bit more private?”
“All right then.” She walked with him down the slope to where a skimmer bus was parked on the forest’s rough access road. “What’s the matter?”
He shook his head. “Too many people staring at me. It was making me edgy.”
“Edgy? You look wrung out, boy.”
“I didn’t get much sleep last night,” he said, waving away her concerns.
“Not for several nights, I’d venture.”
“Well, that’s true.” He rubbed his muzzle in agitation. “How much did my mother tell you about me?”
“She just said that you’d come home after being badly hurt in an accident. Is there more to it than that?”
“Yes, but… I’d rather not discuss it right now.”
She nodded. “I thought there might be. Your mother has this habit of making Significant Pauses in her speech when she comes close to something she’d rather not discuss, and I was hearing, or not hearing rather, plenty of them when I chatted with her a few days ago. But that’s your business and none of mine, so I’ll leave you to it.”
“Holy Den Mother bless you for that, Auntie.” He paused, gathering his thoughts, then asked, “How do you do it?”
“Do what?”
He waved a hand vaguely at her and then up towards the students by the pond. “This. Your life. Following your own path. Being a teacher instead of a noblevixen. Not getting tangled up in… in… the damned system we have.”
Dotty looked at him in sympathy. “Not feeling all that noble, Viscount?”
He let out a sharp, mirthless laugh. “I’m no noble, Aunt Dorathea. I’m not anything right now, except a drag on my House’s resources. I’m…” He bit down on the word broken. “This isn’t the life I wanted.”
“Well, I was lucky. I was the third daughter of a small Farmer Lord family. My elder sisters and now their children handle running things well enough, no one cared all that much if I left everything in their hands. You, on the other hand had the bad luck of being born into a big House with a small family. Damn your father, if he’d had kept the good sense the Den Mother had given him and not tried to be so stoic about his troubles, I might still have my brother and you might have a few more sisters to carry the load.”
“Yes, well, I don’t. I thought I could forge my own path, like you had, by joining up with the military and then buying my own fighter, but… that didn’t work out very well.” He shrugged his shoulder. “But now I don’t know what to do with myself. I’ve no experience in administration and if my mother starts waving young marriageable vixen in my face I may very well scream. Not that I’m exactly a hot marriage prospect right now.”
She clapped him gently on the back. “Heal up first, Rufus. After that, you’ll have the time and the strength to find your path.”
“And if I don’t?”
Dottie grinned. “Then when you get your arm replaced I’ll hand you a shovel and you can explore a brand new career in ditch digging.”
He smiled briefly. “You’re all heart, Auntie.”
TBC
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Date: 2007-11-30 05:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-30 08:57 pm (UTC)