A/N: Well here we are again! So this started out being about the Gnostics, but then it sort of...deviated. Still! I'm happy with it.
No, I do not own Jane and the Dragon.
The Gnostics, Jane thought to herself while she listened to Gunther weaving the story, were fascinating.
She came to this decision when he began to tell her about the additional Gospels they had. She had been a bit suspicious of the Gospel of Judas Iscariot, but the Gospel of Mary Magdalene certainly caught her in a web.
"And women hold positions in their churches?" she asked, looking up from her book to the boy, who nodded, not looking up.
"So long as you believe, anyone can," he said. "At least, that is how I have come to understand it." Jane smiled smugly to herself. She wasn't crazy for thinking women weren't useless. Whole religious branches agreed with her.
"I like them," she declared.
"I thought you did not."
"When did I say that?"
"Sometime around the Gospel of Judas Iscariot."
"Well…well I learned I was wrong," she said. Sure that part had made her feel uncomfortable, but the idea of Mary Magdalene being the one that Jesus trusted to tell about the journey of the soul into Heaven…yes, she liked them indeed.
They fell mostly into silence after that, each squire reading what they had been assigned. Jane, though she did pick apart the words, spent a lot of her thoughts on the boy she was sitting near. The crucifix he had brought her was tucked underneath her tunic, and she began to wonder, why was she wearing it anyway?
Well…he had brought it for her from Rome, from just outside St. Peter's Basilica. But she could have easily turned it down. He was a bog weevil and they both knew it. Though bringing her two obviously expensive gifts hadn't been overly weevilish. She could wear his gift if she wanted. And it was really very nice, and since their conversation about it, they had begun to develop something like a friendship. Why should she let it wither away?
"You learned all about the Gnostics from that one merchant?" asked Jane, making him look up.
"Yes. My father does a lot of trade with him," he explained. "So long as I make the purchases I am told to make, it does not matter if I talk to him. I have gone swimming and he has not noticed."
"You and your father have a lot you need to work through." And a bark of laughter escaped from Gunther, a strangely real laugh that spoke of a hundred different stories, a thousand emotions, a million thoughts.
"You have no earthly idea."
"Well…help me have an earthly idea then." He looked at her with shock clearly written across his face. "It just seems like there is too much bad air in between your father and yourself. What with everything he has done and all the things you did in response to them…"
"You really do surprise me, Jane. Last year you would have never put a second thought to what my father and I do. Not unless your morals started shouting to you."
"People can change, Gunther. People do change." He said nothing, returning to his book with a pensive look on his face. They lapsed into a long silence, neither speaking.
Gunther kept to himself when he was not in knight's training or working. He liked the sailors, yes, and they liked him well enough, but he had become a solitary creature in self defense. It allowed him a rest and they didn't come often enough for his tastes.
Wandering through fields was what he usually did, some of the farmers were kind enough to him (in that they didn't say cruel things to him or loud enough for him to hear, they would acknowledge his presence and return to work and he really appreciated that) and he was kind in return. That day, wandering through Alexander and Guinevere's field of cabbage, he found himself humming one of the songs he had been amusing himself in writing. It was to practice his French (though his father always said he didn't need to practice French or any other language, he should just focus on working) and he was actually pretty proud of it.
But thinking about it, he found that there was a lot more to it than a simple song to practice his second language. It almost frightened him now that he thought about it. Danse, danse, danse ses yeux, j'ai vu le feu qui vous condame. J'étais le fou dans ses yeux, d'un geste elle a brûlé mon âme.
"To dance in her eyes, I saw the fire that damns you. I am the fool in her eyes, with a gesture she burned my soul," he murmured aloud to himself. "Saints preserve me, I am stuck with that girl." And a half-laugh escaped him, aborting in his throat as most did and emerging as something ugly. "I truly am stuck with her."
For all his journeys, for all his languages, for all he had seen, he was stuck with an infuriatingly noble girl from a corner of the world no one paid mind to, he was forever to be with the only Christian woman to ever take up arms. And yet he didn't feel upset by this at all. Part of him felt that he should perhaps be not so fine with it, yet he had spent all his time in Frankia imagining what it would be like to travel with her.
"Were you being honest?" Gunther asked abruptly when the two squires were alone, sent to the monastery near the castle to receive a book the king had commissioned. It was to be an illuminated history of the kingdom, and thus it cost enough to make Jane's father nearly have a heart attack.
"When?" asked Jane, turning to him. He looked distinctly uncomfortable, but he said,
"When you told me that you wanted to have an idea about all the bad air between my father and I. You said 'help me have an earthly idea.'"
"Yes." The blunt honestly was custom from Jane, and Gunther looked at her for a long time before he simply nodded. They walked in silence for a long time, listening to the sound of the dull thumps of their feet against the ground. "Will you tell me, then?"
A sigh. "It is a very long and very complicated story. It doesn't start happily, it is rarely happy in the middle, and as far as I can see, it will end unhappily as well."
"Jester has been singing too many comedic ballads anyway." Gunther's lips twitched as if wanting to twist into a smile but not quite able to.
"I killed a man for him," Gunther finally said. "Near Milan. I just swung my sword and I cut deep enough into his stomach that he bled to death right there in front of me. That was the closest my father and I have ever been. I killed a man for him and…by the time we got to Venice it was like it never happened. Sometimes I wonder if I dreamed it but it is difficult to forget the sound a man makes when he knows he is to die in a few moments."
"You killed someone for your father?" echoed Jane, incredulous.
"Bandits are common in Frankia, especially in the Italian peninsula. Usually we hire mercenaries but there were none in Turin that time." He could feel Jane staring at him, but he kept his eyes fixed on the ground just ahead of him, not wanting to trip over something and end up looking an idiot. "Father did not want to wait."
There was a very long silence before Jane said very quietly, "He…he does not seem to be willing to listen to anyone."
"Did you figure that out all by yourself?" the dry tone of voice was familiar to Jane, but she couldn't bring herself to snap back as she normally would.
"So the closest you have ever been to your father was after you killed for him. I…I remember once he spoke to me, on Jubilee Day, well our Jubilee Day, not the Jubilee Day the church has, but he, your father he…he seemed to think you were…well, lacking?" she didn't mean it to sound like a question, but it was a difficult thing to say, that someone's father was openly discussing his son's shortcomings with someone both had shown nothing but distain for in the past.
"Most people do. That my father does is not altogether surprising."
"But he is your father!"
"Jane, my father and I do not have a relationship as you have with your father. He refuses to speak on some topics and I do not tell him other things. He has no idea that I've spoken to Petronas. The Gnostic." And here he began to kick a stone down the path.
"Every time I speak to your father I always think that you need a new one. You just reaffirmed that." Gunther smiled to himself, the twitch of the lips barely there.
They didn't speak any more about it until after they had collected the book from the brothers and had made their payment, heading back with the heavy book in Jane's arms. However, as they walked, Jane said softly, "Has your father been like that all your life?"
"Yes. "
"I am sorry."
"Do not pity me." And they walked in silence the rest of the way home.
A/N: So, the French comes from the song "Maniaque" performed by Mathieu Carnot in the musical "1789 les Amants de la Bastille" (the lovers of the Bastille). If you look it up, you'll find video of it being a duet between Mathieu and Louis Delort, who the role was passed to after Mathieu's vocal chord surgery.
As for Jubilee Day and the distinction Jane makes between the kingdom's and the church's, there was a Jubilee Year every fifty years, when prisoners and slaves were released, debts were forgotten, so on and so forth. This was originally set forth in Leviticus. Technically, the first Jubilee Year was 1300, but there was a concept of such a thing before then-the Hebrew "yovel" for instance-and many people believe that there was some regional Jubilees, Pope Boniface VIII merely instating the first one that was all encompassing.