Author Note (added as of fourth chapter):
This story begins in 457 A.D. which means that it takes place ten years before the events of the movie.
It will progress, with time, up to 467 A.D. and the events that takes place during the movie this fanfic is based on. There will be OCs both of the 'townsfolk' and the 'knight' variety (but the knights will go down to the canon characters by the time we get to the movie) so you have been warned.
About the ages I will repost part of what I wrote at the end of the fourth chapter:
Looking at the movie, I would say that the boys departed Sarmatia when they were from the age of 12 to the age of 18, I'll hazard (Galahad is conspicuously younger than, let's say, Bors but they are treated as if they've all been serving the same time, which is stupid but I'll go with it anyway). Let's say a year of time, more or less, to get them to Britain and they are from 13 to 19, more or less. Which, given 17 years of service under Rome, puts them in the 30 to 36 range by the time of the movie.
In this fic, at the moment, they go from 20 (Galahad, as the youngest) to 26 (Bors, as the oldest). Since Bors has eleven children by the time of the movie, that means he must already have at least a couple. That is, unless Vanora pops out one for year, in which case he should have only one, but I'm going with him being already a father of more than one kid.
I've decided to make Galahad as younger in age and, as such, having been kept in training for longer so that he has seen less battlefields than the others.
For more detailed musings, look no further than the end of chapter four.
Be warned: there will be Historical Notes with period-related trivia at the end of most chapters.
-§-break-§-
Year: 457 A.D.
-§-break-§-
Arthur Castus's Briton sucked ass.
The place was smelly, muddy and a dangerous hazard for far too many reasons Isobel cared to think about.
Once upon a time, back in the twenty-first century, a friend (with many years of experience playing with both the character and the master part of role play games) had given her a sage piece of advice, while trying to helping her learn how to play.
Every single period in history, except for our contemporary time, sucked for those involved. No matter the class, there was always suckage for most of those involved whether they realized it or not.
They had been on the topic of historical RPG's, discussing which kind of époque appealed best to Isobel.
Just to put it out there? Not this one, at all.
But that had been a lifetime ago, when Isobel was still in the twenty-first century. When she worked in places kept warm through judicious use of electricity, women had earned many rights (above all the right to be vocal about any perceived absence of those rights without consequences) and life had been easy and comfortable.
Now, instead, she was in Arthur Castus's Briton, which sucked ass.
You know, just in case someone was wondering about it.
Isobel strived to live in the now, instead of dallying on the then, because it was the now that counted. Especially when one had to worry about the coming winter, keeping her head intact on the shoulders and keeping her stomach full too.
Twenty-five years old, unmarried, without children and stuck in Arthur Castus's Briton for almost five months, Isobel had long since stopped wondering about how the hell she had gone to bed one day and found herself the next one waking up under the debris of a house in a destroyed village of Arthur Castus's Briton (she had grown fond of the definition, so what?).
While her language degree helped little (no use for Russian in this part of the world and in this time and God knew how people talked in Spain, which still was of no use to her since no one spoke Spanish in Briton) her high school learned Latin (classical studies, who knew it would really come handy in her life?) had been far more helpful in getting her understood.
It had sure helped in making her pass off as a Roman, which was already quite a feat mind you, and she had managed to grab enough of the local language to be able to have basic conversations with most people around her.
To be fair, things hadn't gotten any better until she had stumbled upon the caravan that had taken her to Hadrian's Wall and Arthur Castus's fort. Up until that point she had just been blindly stumbling around, dressed with a dress she had scavenged from a not-too-burnt house (while desperately trying to shut out the half-burnt corpses of the people that had once inhabited it).
It had been quite the shock, finding herself speaking a tongue she hadn't thought would ever come useful for anything (except reading original Latin's tests and dissertations). Not as much as coming to terms with the fact that no, she wasn't being carted around by a group of period-revival's fanatics (to the point of an unhealthy indifference towards cleanliness), but it had still been a shock.
Now, striving to live in the now remember?, Isobel was putting her cooking ability at the service of the men of the fort and her sewing ability too, mending clothes when she wasn't helping cooking food. Occasionally she also lent a hand in the Healing Rooms whenever they needed more hands able to stitch a wound without the person doing the stitching baulking or being nauseous. at the sight of blood (it happened, damn troubled époque and damn enemies far too good for Isobel's tastes).
Her grandmother would have been proud that her lessons in cooking and stitching had come to something, a useful thing at that too. She had always put her niece to work, all the time they had been under the same roof. From Isobel's five to her sixteen's years she and her grandmother had lived two months every summer together and God knew that now she had reason to be grateful for it.
There was food to be cooked and laundry to be mended at the Fort and not as many hands as were needed, which had turned out to be good for Isobel since she now had a roof over her head, work to keep her fed and busy plus money to prepare for the coming winter (heavier clothes were needed and they didn't came cheap).
It had been easy, at her arrival at the fort, to spin the story of a Roman maid who had lost her employers and her husband in the destruction of her village (at the hands of the Saxons because you could pin anything on the Saxon without people questioning you on it in the now). No one had made a fuss about it, what with her speaking Latin and being actually able to act like a maid. She had told Arthur the name of the village (she had heard it from the people of the caravan, nodding when they asked if she had come from it) and a vague tale about an attack and getting knocked out by the debris she had woken up under.
She been welcome by the Romans, if not by the Samartian's Knights that worked for Arthur.
Oh, she had nothing against them, really. And they had nothing against her, per se. It was more of a despise for all Romans on their part, which she didn't care to challenge (they were right on the general concept, after all) since it led to them leaving her alone (except for the occasional leer, eyeful or offer were she to meet them in the halls of the Fort when they were inebriated and alone but they never pressed the issue and allowed her to scurry away undisturbed).
Isobel had heard about them, back in her time, studied the stories that had surrounded the Arthurian myth. She knew their names and that some of them would die and that Lancelot would end up cuckolding Arthur with Arthur's own wife. She wasn't an Arthurian Legend fan by any stretch but she had been a rabid reader (but now she wasn't and she couldn't afford to concentrate on anything but the now, especially when most of the time she had to care about things like making the effort of translate from Arabic numbers to Roman ones in her head).
She thought it better if she stuck to herself and her life without mixing up with history and changing something that was probably fundamental to the evolution of the world as she had once known it.
So yes, she was trying to live in the now (but she couldn't stop caring completely about the then because the then was were her family was and where her friends were and she couldn't think about the consequences for them without feeling nauseous and dizzy).
She tried not to, she tried to live her life (in the now, avoiding thoughts of her own then) and let them live theirs, avoiding them because she didn't wanted to get involved nor think about the fact that they were going to die. That the shirts she stitched and they wore, the meals she cooked and they ate, the wounds she closed and they wore too were all for men that she knew where dead men walking.
It was a normal human condition, that one. Every single person walking the earth had always been, and was always going to be, a dead man (or woman) walking. She was one too, after all, as much as them.
But … she wasn't going to die soon, not that she knew anyway. She wasn't ill and yes, it was a troubled time and she risked to die a gruesome death (whether by attack or illness there wasn't a nice way to go, discounting old age), but she knew things were going to turn out for the better eventually and she just needed to keep to herself, play it safe and she was going to survive (and live to the aforementioned old age).
Avoiding them made things easier. It was the coward way, no doubt about it, but Isobel wasn't a fighter suited for that period of time, had no way to become one without training and no one to turn to in order to get trained.
She knew how to punch and how to kick and how to combine the two to make someone hurt really bad (thank you, years of lessons in Muay Thai). She knew how to climb a wall, how to swim, how to dive and how to skate (Isobel had never settled more than two years in any kind of sport, until muay thai, driving her mother's mad and acquiring a bunch of basics in many sports).
And those things were all fine and dandy but she had no archery training, had never gotten any fencing done and she was quite useless in a knife fight (though she knew that the pointy end went into the other person's flesh, thank you very much). It made her useless, especially in Arthur Castus's Briton, especially when she didn't know how to ride a horse (she had gotten to experience being in the saddle once but the costs for a proper course were prohibitive for her family so no dice on learning that one).
So she had no useful skill in period-appropriate fighting and, even if she had them, she had no conceivable way to claim them as part of any kind of background she could think of (she had a story ready to justify muay thai but she doubted that would ever come up).
On top of that, there was no way she could convince the Knights to avoid fighting, even if she decided to. Because, you know, still thinking a little of what could become of the then was she to change the now.
She hadn't claimed to be a seer (which could always be discounted as the crazy rambling of a traumatized woman) and she had no intel to show that could sustain her claims.
Most of all, these people were knights, who fought because they had to at the Roman's bidding and they weren't going to listen to her anyway.
So when the knights lumped her with the other Romans and made no move to befriend her, Isobel had taken a deep breath of relief and started thinking about the now, obliged herself to think of her now and her life and how to keep it safe the best she could in the troubled times she had found herself in.
It was all fine and dandy if not for the fact that Fate didn't agreed with her and was, instead, quite determined to throw a wrench in her carefully constructed (and repeatedly justified, if only in her own mind) plans.
Which was how, one morning, Isobel found herself entrusted with the care of a testy falcon with a broken wing while the owner was too busy being passed out from blood loss in the Healer Rooms, along with a few of his brother in arms (it had been a bloody battle, apparently).
It was not because of some affinity with the animal or any particular kind of bond with the owner (if the Samartian's knights didn't cared for her, Tristan didn't appear to care for humanity in its entirety). She had just been the nearest maid to the healer and the one with fewer things in his hands at the moment.
The other knights were busy doing whatever they had to do, the ones in the Healer Rooms weren't in condition to care for themselves less of all for the bird and everybody at the Fort knew that Tristan could probably be brought over the edge and drove to murder if something happened to the beast.
So the healer washed his hands of it, gave to her the bird and told her to "Take care of it until someone comes to claim the thing".
Arthur Castus's Briton sucked ass, had Isobel mentioned it?
