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notasapleasure · 1 year

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Sneak peek: Brassian (Andor) saga AU

Soooo. I thought I'd post the first three chapters here and let everyone just have a say, if they want? I will answer questions on whatever you like, no really, you want an essay, I can give you an essay.

I think probably the key thing is like...in this setting the essential community aspect of Ferrix can't be the Icelandic community as a whole, because to make it a story just about the Norwegian 'empire' coming in would mean either making it the usual 'noble viking pagan vs. xian creep missionaries' story (YAWN) or setting it later, like, several centuries later, which takes it away from the genre I'm playing with most, which can still include monsters and zombies and far-flung adventures at foreign courts. So Brasso and Cassian are outsiders in the Icelandic farming community, as are all the people you'd associate with them in terms of the good guys on Ferrix - Salman and his family (smiths), Bix and her family (wise-women), Maarva and Clem (well. you'll see.). The Ferrix community is the group of weirdos who don't quite fit in. <3

In terms of the kinds of weirdos they are, well, I'm building a lot of it on specific examples from the sagas and tweaking details here and there. Ask me about any of it that piques your curiosity, please!

Thanks to @notfromcold for tagging me in the last sentence meme. This is somewhat more than a last sentence, but hey!

Also - it's first person, because Brasso decided it was going to be first person. And probably needs CW for period/setting typical bigotry and abusive parenting at the least - the trope of the coal-biter (a lazy son who disappoints his good viking parents before growing into a hero in his teens) is a common saga trope, but I've combined it with the 'son of the slave woman' trope (in a way that isn't 'wow I'm secretly a prince'), so Brasso's family isn't the nicest. It's emerged from various collective fanons I think, around his dad maybe/probably being a jerk and him having approximately a million sisters. Also from the saga stuff you can ask about if you want.

The Saga of the Coal-biter and the Skraeling

1. Coal-Biter

I was born the year they discovered Vinland the Good. My father was pleased - at long last he had a son to take his name. He had such high hopes for trade with the new land, and for me. His wife would have liked me more if I'd been hers, but she agreed to raise me alongside her brood of daughters nonetheless, and she was not unkind.

My sisters doted on me and scolded me by turns like the seething flock of geese in the yard - I would be their beloved plaything one moment and a hassle, a cuckoo to be resented, the next. Of course, I didn't know what a cuckoo was as a child, and my mother grew up far beyond the lands where they are found, so I only learned about these birds whose oversized young take over a nest and transplant the sitting chicks when I first travelled to Norway. But it was the same for me, nonetheless - I was disproportionate in that little house filled with fine, willowy people. I grew strong and broad, tall and dark, and my step-mother said I was of the people of Thrall, not like her children, born to the line of Snoer and Erna. Bearing that in mind, I could have done worse than be named as I am - Brastr, from my size and manner, became the more familiar Brasso.

At least, this is what my sisters liked to call me - my father found it babyish and inappropriate. I was still too young to know when his pride turned into scorn, but as I grew and grew, and remained perplexed by his obsession with 'going viking' or great deeds of a 'manly' ilk, he began to curse me and say I would never amount to anything. He would have disowned me, I'm sure, only he had paid handsomely for Sigurd, the priest of Thor, to confirm I was his when I was born, and then he had shown me off to all his peers at the public assembly, as my step-mother later told me. It would have been embarrassing for him to have gone back on such a confident announcement, I suppose.

So he called me Coal-biter. He came in from the yard one morning and, with frost-cold hands, claimed he was trying to wipe the dirt off my cheeks.

"I asked you to sharpen those knives for me boy, and you've spent the morning rolling about in the ash instead!"

I was sitting by the central hearth, away from the draught of the door, close to the good light so I could see what I was doing as I worked. He was right, I had not sharpened his knives. Truth be told, I did one and then realised how good it would be for whittling the small piece of driftwood I'd salvaged from the beach. I used the beautifully clean new blade to follow the contours of the wood, feeling the layers of it soften when I peeled then back as the callus on my thumb hardened. I still didn't know what shape lay within the salvage - something twisty and cunning. A fox, maybe? - but my father stopped me from finding out. He slapped it from my hands into the fire, and the knife landed in amongst the embers too - its bone handle was engulfed by clean new flames.

My cheeks burning - from the cold of his fingers, from the shame I felt whenever he wiped my face like that, from the anger at losing my project - I glared into the features of this old man who had once been a fearsome pirate and warrior. He didn't scare me, not even then, and I think that's why he came to hate me so much.

"Ash-boy! Coal-biter!" he barked, pinching my cheek and slapping my forehead. "You sit here in the dust all day with the women, getting under their feet while they do the work they need to do. Your skin is filthy with it, your hair is black as soot!"

I made some meagre complaint - "That's just its colour. You liked my mother's black hair!"

Naturally it got me another slap to the face.

"Pick it up," my father seethed, pointing to the metal blade glowing among the flames.

I shook my head and set my jaw. He loved to make impossible demands and I had learned to just ignore them.

He repeated himself, his green eyes bulging, his beard yellow from fire smoke, his mouth stinking from his rotten teeth.

"I already sharpened that one," I told him, reaching for the next knife and the whetstone.

I don't know how the stalemate might have ended - with him forcing my hand into the flames, with me stabbing him with the blunt old blade? - had my eldest sister not stepped in with the tongs and plucked the blade from the fire. She said nothing to either of us, but dropped the ember-red knife onto one of the flat stones they used for kneading bread and walked back to her weaving with a sigh.

Oh, our father would bawl and hollar at her too, but he wouldn't lay a hand on her, not when he hoped to find her a husband at the next local assembly. He left me to sharpen the knives, but he only ever called me Coal-biter after that.

A nickname like that spreads - he didn't spread it himself, that would be too shameful as well, but the serving men and women knew that gossip like that could get them an extra measure of cheese or milk or meat when they were on an errand to the nearby farms.

Have you heard about old Ásbjörn's son? He's a Coal-biter they say, yes - slow to speak, disobedient, spends his whole time lazing about the hearth, never does the jobs he's asked to do. No doubt it's down to his mother - what did Ásbjörn expect from such a creature? He might as well have fucked his horse.

I've heard them say it - I've pointed out that it takes a certain kind of imagination to come up with fucking a horse as an alternative to a serving woman, and asked them how they came to know so much about it. There's not much point picking on the servants though - I can let them take their entertainment where they find it.

So what if I was called Coal-biter? I preferred working at the fire to working out in the fields with Ásbjörn - the fire transforms things, it takes matter and makes it something else, turning wood to charcoal and rock to metal. In the fields it's damp and windy. You have to ride to get there, and I outgrew these little horses before I reached my teens. I feel top heavy on them, exposed and awkward.

I started spending time at Pakkur's forge whenever possible - he taught me how the fire worked, but I didn't really want its mysteries explaining. Instead I made myself useful scavenging old iron for Pakkur to reforge: I pulled the clinkers from wrecked boats and scoured the assembly grounds for lost items. It's amazing what the great and good leave behind after their courts are done and the silver has been exchanged - I've found brooches and pins, coins and buckles. Even a sword knop once - it had a little gold on it, Pakkur said, so we pierced it and looped a thong of leather through the back and I gave it to my step-mother to wear around her neck.

Maybe I should have given it to my birth mother, but I didn't think she'd be allowed to keep it. We don't have slaves anymore in Iceland - you hear that a lot. But when, like my mother, that's what you were before you were brought here, the freedom doesn't mean much. She's a servant, she could maybe be a servant in another household, but even now she doesn't like to speak the language - unless it's to complain about the cold - and she doesn't socialise with the others. I know so little about her - only that she was brought to this place that is so far from her home and so different to it, and the anger she holds in her heart about this isn't dimmed even when we exchange brief, shy smiles across the yard.

What could I do? It's my step-mother who was equipped to deflect my father's attention away from my work at Pakkur's, it's my step-mother who made sure I was dressed well and fed well. I knew she would appreciate the necklace, too - she learned that her position was in no way threatened by me or my mother now, and it meant she felt able to pity me somewhat. So when my father threatened to hand the farm over to his son-in-law she persuaded him to wait.

It was a kind gesture, though I didn't want the farm - I didn't really want any of it. I dreamed of worlds beyond my homeland where there were other things to do, things that weren't farming or feuding. Where I could go to the places called towns and see new faces on every turn, not the same old cast of petty smallholders.

2. Skraeling

Speaking of new faces, I was a teen when Maarva and Clem returned from Greenland with their curious cargo. It gave the whole island something new to talk about.

How should I describe Maarva and Clem? I hadn't known them terribly well before, they left Iceland first when I was young, excited by the prospects of the new land Leif Eiríksson had discovered.

As a kid I heard the rumour that Maarva had been a chieftain's daughter - somewhere remote and peculiar and filled with giants, like Gotland - and she'd certainly been married before Clem, but I imagine she'd have been terribly young. She'd travelled, so probably her first husband had been a trader in the east. At the summer assembly she used to tell us stories of elephants and lions, giant gold-hoarding ants and men with dogs' heads. She said she'd seen it all.

At some point she must have been widowed and left reliant on the mercy of a Norse colony far away, east and south, down near the centre of the known world. It was here she'd met Clem.

With his deep black skin, Clem was an enigma to most of us - he spoke Norse well, but saved his words for Maarva by and large. He was handy with the law, which he memorised as soon as he got here, and a fast friend of Pakkur's. He valued the old and the new equally, because in our society all was novel to him. He found our gods quaint and never tried to explain his own. He wasn't quick to violence, but the first guy who called him blámaðr to his face lost his leg below the knee in the duel that followed. After that, everyone was just happy to call him Clem.

Clem didn't tell stories of exotic animals or ferocious gladiators, but sometimes, in a wistful moment, he would describe stranger wonders: great round buildings shining inside beneath gold ceilings, like each one had a sun captured in the rafters. Lands where sweet fruit grew to the size of your fist, not like the fingernail-sized blueberries we foraged for, and where the air was as warm as our hot springs but scented with exotic flowers and perfumes rather than sulphur. Regular days and nights, good weather and plentiful food - it all sounded as absurd as Maarva's cynocephali and Blemmyes. I don't know that any of us believed Clem and Maarva's stories - few of the adults took this odd couple entirely seriously, and we tacitly picked up on that. But I've since seen those things Clem described, and I've ridden an elephant just as Maarva told me was possible. There was more of the world on their little farm, it turned out, than on the whole of my island home.

And there was even more of it when they came back from Greenland.

The stories had been coming back about skraelings for years, and we all knew them and repeated them and embellished them:

Don't play at the harbour, I heard a skraeling stowed away and it lives in the rocks and eats children!

They have one giant foot and they hop from stone to stone! They use them to crush grapes as big as your head and make wine that doesn't give you a hangover!

Their eyes are big and black like a seal's and if you look into them you'll fall under their spell!

Well. That last one might have been true.

Maarva and Clem brought back a skraeling child, or so we all supposed. When he finally chose to tell his story it went beyond the borders of even our knowledge of the world and our imaginative capacities. But for the first while, he was a skraeling to us, a boy rescued from his own land following some kind of disagreement at a trading meet.

Maarva's version of the story was all breeze and bluster; Clem's was cagey and lacking in detail. But what I first heard from our servants when they came back with timber bought and cut from Maarva's woodland, was this:

Our settlers had travelled from Greenland to Leif's trading outpost in Vinland. The skraelingar came with cloth, hide and food to swap for iron. On the occasion Maarva and Clem went with a party to trade, someone had resolved to swindle someone and soon blows were exchanged - no two people agreed on which side started it. The locals used flying rocks and sharp stone arrows with deadly precision, but they had no swords, and even those who weren't proud of it didn't deny that the Norse colonists had the upper hand.

In the telling, our servants claimed it was a blood-bath - the children who heard the story had nightmares for weeks. With relish, the servants described a boy abandoned amidst the carnage, sitting bewildered among dead bodies, too astonished to flee or fight back. Maarva had taken pity on him and adopted the child rather than leave him to starve in the forests of Vinland.

Later, when I was cynical enough to reconsider the context for Maarva's pity, I also heard a version where she single-handedly drove the skraelingar out of the camp. Something about beating a sword against her bare breasts, advancing upon the enemy and nearly tripping over the boy who had been knocked unconscious by one of the flying weapons. I was never brave enough to ask her about that take on events.

They called the boy Andar, claiming he stopped breathing when they found him and that Clem returned his breath, andar, to him. The boy soon made it clear he already had a name and it was Cassian. The nickname Kass - locked box - was a compromise he made with reluctant Norse tongues, but Clem was careful always to articulate the full word, and Maarva did try, when she remembered.

Cassian brought trouble to the Norse settlement in Greenland. He had not asked to be adopted or rescued, and presumably saw his new situation in a rather different light to how it was intended. Apparently, he made such a noise with his screaming and fighting that livestock miscarried and milk turned. The other colonists said he was a curse and he was the source of skraeling magic that was going to bring about their ruin. Maarva and Clem stood by him, but when, in an inarticulate fury, the boy smashed up a boat and an outhouse, they had no choice but to move away - or face the harsh vengeance of their neighbours.

So Maarva, Clem and Kass the skraeling came back to Iceland, and the unwary among us fell under a spell.

3. Tern

As a teen I'd grown tall, but hadn't yet fully broadened out, and I felt like there was nowhere on the island I could hide - I towered over most of the scrubby birch trees and spindly rowans, and no matter how poor the summer weather was, my skin darkened like roasted rye under the long hours of daylight. I was still a Coal-biter to the other boys, to my father and his friends, but when my sisters had visitors the women would gather behind their looms and giggle at me, whispering things behind their long white fingers. It made me uneasy, and I didn't know why, so despite the weather I resigned myself to staying in the outfields with the sheep, or I combed the rocky river beds for lost fish hooks I could take to Pakkur.

Pakkur was dark, maybe like me, though he claimed not to know where his family came from before settling in Iceland. He preferred to say that black was the colour of the forge: it was fitting that his hair and beard should be charcoal black and steely silver, and of course his skin tanned like leather in the blast of the furnace. He said it was a sign I should learn the craft too, but I never did respond well to anyone suggesting a path for me.

I was capable of all I had been tasked with, but it all somehow felt hopeless. I didn't understand where it was meant to lead. Wandering the riverbeds took me away from future concerns - farms and families and all sorts of distasteful responsibilities - where all I did was let my eyes comb over the different coloured rocks, seeking a tell-tale anomaly in the texture or tone that would bring my attention to a lost twist of iron.

During one such meditation I had wandered far from my father's lands, meandering inland through the lava-fields that ringed Clem and Maarva's farm. Maarva Kerski had a great big wolfhound called Bí, and when I heard barking I flinched, assuming I was about to be scolded for trespassing.

I knew Bí couldn't outrun me anymore - he'd been an old dog when they'd left for Greenland with him, and no one had expected him to return with them. But he still had a bark that could cause landslides - and maybe I had finally learned a guilty conscience from my father's strict lessons. I stood still as a tree in the middle of the stony beach and scanned the grey, craggy landscape for a grey, craggy dog.

When I finally spotted him, Bí wasn't even looking at me. I saw his long tail wag urgently by his shaky legs. He was poised at the edge of the lava field, facing into the uneven terrain with single-minded intent. Again he barked, and I saw when he did that a bird rose up from the rocks with a scream. It hovered momentarily and Bí barked again, and then the bird dove with fury and the small yell that followed was muffled by the breeze.

Without hesitation, I struck out towards Bí, eyeing up the furious bird as cautiously as he did. It was summer, and the terns had been nesting along the river. I knew the spots they used and I knew how to deflect their attention when I was egg-hunting. I also knew when it was better to avoid these areas because the eggs had hatched and the adults would defend their chicks like a hail of spearheads.

Someone in the lava field had not known about this, apparently. The tern dived again, and again I heard a miserable cry.

By now I think I'd guessed who it was, and I pitied the stranger who had come to this land full of murderous birds and abrasive, treacherous rocks. Until then I hadn't seen the boy. I'd heard all the stories and listened with weary exasperation - at least they'd found someone more peculiar than me or my mother to gossip about. I wasn't introspective enough to draw a deliberate parallel between this abducted boy and my mother's own past, but maybe I linked them subconsciously.

"Where is he, Bí?" I stumbled over the crumbly boulders until I could see what Bí could see. Curled in a crevasse, arms over his head, was the boy I had heard called Kass. It was too far to see if he was injured or trapped, but the tern attacked him so relentlessly I could see he wasn't going to get up even if he could.

I pulled my sheepskin vest up over my head and shoulders, thinking of Maarva's story about the Blemmyes whose faces were in the middle of their chests. Had she told the story to the boy? Is that what he'd make of this tall, brown-skinned stranger stumbling headlessly towards him?

Slowly, carefully, I picked my way over the rocks, taking care not to step on fresh moss that would slip away under my weight, or to rely on thin, brittle spires of lava that would disintegrate if touched. No one in their right mind came out in a lava field, ever - where had Kass even been going?

As I drew near, I proved a more alarming prospect for the tern, and it changed tack to dive at me. I cursed as I felt its weight on my vest, its beak plucking at the sheep's wool, wings battering my hands and head. I shook it off and it came again, catching the skin of my hands with its claws or its beak.

"Bugger off!" I snarled, and when I was next able to concentrate I saw the boy Kass staring up at me with those dangerous big eyes the stories had warned us about. He was a handful of years younger than me I guessed, with sallow skin like mine and round, deep irises of a brown so dark it seemed black when I first looked. There was blood on his face, but the cuts were on his arms. His trousers had torn and his knees and palms were grazed, but he still looked like he might run rather than go anywhere I told him to. One small hand tightened on a fistful of gravel and stones and I stood still and shrugged beneath my ridiculous shield. Getting a handful of grit in the face for my heroics wasn't exactly what I'd bargained on. The tern battered me again, and again I flapped around to drive it off.

To my surprise, the boy's distant, fearful expression shifted slightly - like a glacier in the weeks before it calves, when something is about to slip. His lips twitched and he laughed. He pointed to his neck and said something in a strange, melodious language and laughed again.

"No, I don't have a neck," I said, with less good humour than I should have. "The terns pecked it away. Are you coming, or not?"

His eyes narrowed mistrustfully again, and to my surprise he repeated some of my words: "Coming? Not with you." He shook his head.

"Back to your home," I said in exasperation, expecting another collision with an angry bird at any moment. "To Maarva and Clem." There was a bark from behind, and I belatedly added, "To Bí!"

He winced, and I knew to expect the tern again, so I mostly deflected its blow this time. Kass studied me with more seriousness than I think anyone in my life had shown me to that point.

"Home," he said gloomily, and then reeled off a list of words that might have been synonyms - or curses. "Coming to Bí, ok," he finally stood up and brushed the dirt from his clothes, and I slipped off my vest and held it out to him, squinting up at the sky nervously as I did.

"Wear it - it's thick, their beak doesn't go through the leather."

His skinny arm dipped with the weight of it when he took it, but he held on and looked up at me piercingly. "Me..." he swung it over his head as I'd worn it. "But you?"

I shrugged again and waved my arms for good measure as the tern circled. It gave an angry shriek and swooped close to my hand, but not close enough for me to knock it away.

Kass watched and then beckoned me down to his level with a gesture.

I didn't follow at first, but when I finally crouched down, trying to explain that the bird would attack anyway, he put his foot on my leg without asking and scaled me like I was one of my father's horses, wrapping his wiry limbs about my neck and chest and making sure the sheepskin covered both our heads.

"Hup!" he laughed in my ear, and I had to laugh too as I got to my feet. He didn't weigh much back then and I was already strong, so I hooked my arms under his knees and hoisted him to a more comfortable position before beginning to pick a way back to Bí at the edge of the lava field.

That was my first lesson in how he got away with so much - he'd do what he wanted without asking, and be so utterly charming (not to mention right) that you couldn't be mad about it after the fact.

When we reached Bí the boy made no effort to get down but laughed delightedly as the old dog barked and bounced stiffly about my feet. He shouted "Hup!" again and I had to indulge him like I indulged my nieces and nephews - I broke into a lumbering run across the riverbed, moving quickly enough to make Kass shriek with happiness but not so quickly that Bí was left behind. We staggered and giggled our way like that back to Maarva and Clem's homefield, and I set him down to check the cuts the tern had given him. Bí circled around and then flopped in a dusty patch of earth in the doorway, his pink tongue lolling and his tail patting happily against the ground.

A house-keeper came out with a paste to clean the scratches and grazes Kass had suffered, and he turned sullen and wooden-faced until I took the stuff from her and she went inside with a sigh. He was a stoic patient, watching me flick grit out of the frayed skin of his knees and palms and not flinching at all (I noticed his eyes well up, but pretended not have seen it). By way of distraction, I gestured to myself with the rag. "Brasso. That's me. I live over there," I flailed an arm in an unhelpful manner. "Ásbjörn's farm," I added, out of grudging, cultivated habit.

His eyes flicked to the horizon and then he tried the word out: "Brasso." It was refreshing to hear my name spoken without reprimand or warning, and the pronunciation gave him no trouble.

I wasn't as cosmopolitan as this young thing, though. He pulled his grazed hand from my grip and pointed firmly at his sternum, holding my eyes with determination. "Cassian," he said.

It had an unfamiliar cadence, and it took me a few tries - "Kass-een. Kassa-en. Kass. Í. An. Cassian."

It was worth the embarrassment of getting my tongue tangled when he beamed and nodded at my eventual success.

Clem rode into the homefield while the boy was still laughing at my pronunciation, and the first I knew of this was the way Cassian's face stilled again and he turned silent and watchful. It didn't have the same sullenness as when the house-keeper had come out, though, rather it seemed a silence of waiting, of respectful curiosity.

"Hullo, made a friend have you, Cassian?" Clem dismounted and wandered over to us, his horse trailing after. He was tall, but he nevertheless always looked regal on the little horses. "You're Ásbjörn's son, aren't you?"

I stood and blurted out, "That's what he paid the priest to say, yes sir." I wasn't always so good at keeping my mouth shut in my teenage years - I was too accustomed to winding up my father, because it was so easy to do.

Clem just blinked politely. "Brastr, isn't it?"

To both our surprise, Cassian got up and stood between us. "Brasso," he corrected Clem.

Before I could explain that it was just a nickname, Clem opened his palms in apology. "Brasso. Of Harkastadur."

I nodded, wary of Clem's gentle expression and his scrupulously polite accent. I supposed he expected me to explain myself, so I shuffled and glanced at Cassian. "The terns were attacking him. I heard Bí barking and went to help."

Clem did not ask me how I came to be on his land, he just looked at Cassian and sighed. "Did you try to run away across the lava field again?"

The boy dipped his chin and scowled. Something possessed me to intervene, and I said quickly: "He was just by the river. The nests are well hidden this year. I guess...they don't have terns in Vinland?"

Clem smiled generously at my clumsy attempt to cover for a boy who probably didn't even realise that's what was happening. "They do have terns in Vinland. Leif's 'lucky' camp was plagued with them in the first year. Some artisan made a bunting of their corpses and we had to endure the smell of wind-dried sea-bird all summer."

I did what I did with my father and doubled down on a stubborn expression that defied the reality presenting itself to me. Unlike my father, it made Clem laugh and shake his head ruefully. "Look, as you're here and you helped Cassian out, I have some scrap iron you can take for Pakkur."

I glanced at Cassian, who studied me with renewed curiosity, perhaps wondering how I had managed to deflect a scolding he figured he was due.

"At least I know if he makes it across the lava field next time he'll find someone who'll take care of him," Clem said softly, noticing some frisson of hesitation.

I nodded dumbly, offered Cassian a little wave and followed Clem to the back of the longhouse. I was halfway home before I realised I'd left my sheepskin vest behind.

#brassian saga au #brassian #andor fic #andor au #au fic #my fics #my writing #saga au #wip: brassian saga fic #wtf am i doing 🙃#i am a medievalisn't #my wips #draft fic #brasso x cassian #cassian x brasso #sunday six #replacement for sunday six anyway

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