Meeting again
As could be expected, the harvest took some days to deal with. But it was all finished before the weather turned worse, and rain clouds gathered above the Sanctuary.
"What a pourdown! Imagine if we had needed to bring in the last part of the wheat in this rain!" Kanon commented when he and Saga woke up from the rain outside the window.
"...still need to help Grandma and Mom with the animals no matter the weather…" the older brother groaned, half-asleep as it was still early morning, rolling over under his blankets as Kanon jumped down from the top part of the bunk bed.
"Boys? You will likely have indoor lessons today with His Holiness due to the weather. Not ideal for training outdoors with the risk of slipping and getting badly injured," Agyrios reminded his sons, before walking over to the bunk bed and gently dragging Saga out from his warm nest of blankets so they could dress for the day.
"Yes, Dad…"
Still, even with a nice breakfast made by their mom and grandmother, there were some chores needing to be done before they could leave the farm.
~X~X~X~X~X~X
Even without training outdoors, there were other lessons that they needed to learn, despite that Shion could not overwatch the lessons himself. World history had suddenly gotten a lot more interesting thanks to meeting the older Gemini twins, because even if they had not always witnessed important historical events thanks to coming to the Sanctuary and serving Athena, there was still information to explain some of their mindsets and beliefs.
"Daria and Irina would count as Russians today because that is where their birth city Novgorod are, even if they may have seen themselves as more…Swedish due to where their family came from?"
One good example was the 10th century Gemini sisters from Kievan Rus', and since their story was next to be told, Saga and Kanon had wanted to see what sort of information they could find about the Viking culture in the written records.
"I think we should ask the sisters when we return to the spiritual temple."
"Sounds fair."
Of course, there were some lessons that they still needed to do with the other children. Team-work, for example, where Shion had pointed out that the twin brothers needed to be able to work with others apart from the other twin. They could not always be expected to be sent out on missions together, after all.
"Helping to do basic house cleanings and everyday chores seems like an odd idea of team-working…"
But those among the boys who were complaining, quickly shut up when they were ordered to help clean out a building for textile production.
"Watch those wall hangings!" one of the maid servants warned in a dangerous voice that promised painful punishment for those who were careless with the older stuff, "Some of them are ancient and frail, so if you are not handing them carefully, you will ruin a piece of history!"
Beating the dust out of the wall hangings had to be done very carefully, and for this, Saga and Kanon reminded themselves of how their grandmother would always carefully handle the inherited family embroideries at home. She had always mentioned the fine lace which really couldn't be washed anyway because it was so delicate.
"Quite a lot of different styles here on the decorations, now when we are looking closer. Given how multi-cultural the Sanctuary has been over the centuries…"
"Oi, Saga, look at this wall hanging! It is more like a portrait that is made from weaving on a loom and then embroidering the finished length! And it is the Gemini Cloth in the middle between the people, in the bright yellow thread here!" Kanon called to his brother, gently pulling out the wall hanging into its full width and length on the floor.
"Blacksmith toys and the sort of leather bag that a doctor would carry with him on sick visits…it must be from the era of Seti and Ramses in 1246!"
Indeed, it looked like a stylized image of the Egyptian twins, in whatever style that the weaver must have been familiar with.
"Saga? Kanon? Are you done over there?"
"One last wall hanging to dust off, madam!"
Finally, the school day was over and Shion joined them at the Gemini Temple.
"We have about two hours before you need to return home for the evening. Should be enough time to hear about the Russian sisters and the Egyptian brothers if we are planning this well."
This time, the pull on their souls into the Gemini Cloth was less of a surprise.
~X~X~X~X~X~X
It was quite a sight that met the three arrivals.
"Oh? What is this?"
Amir and Azel were showing off the horseback-based warfare of their Mongol origins, while Daria and Irina were dressed like Viking shieldmaidens, weapons and all. In fact, it seemed like they were having a duel to test how well their respective cultures would flare against each other, though they naturally used the classical Gemini attacks and Cosmo out of habit from their lives as Saints of Athena.
"Get them, Irina! Get them!" Elena called, showing a side of herself that no one in the Sanctuary of her time would have seen.
"Are you suddenly finding Daria more scarying than her sister, guys!?" Lydia added in, from where she was seated on Amari's shoulders for a better view. The other pairs of twins were also cheering from a safe distance, and showed no behavior that suggested that this was anything new.
"Welcome back! If you just wait until the training match is over, we can restart the story telling…" Tiernan greeted the visitors, before noticing something with his good eye, "Watch out for that huge waraxe Daria just threw around with the use of her Cosmo!"
The axe was thrown with such force that a nearby pine tree, resting against the temple wall to become firewood later, was split in half before the axe got stuck into a large stone further away.
"Eh…I thought that Saints were not allowed by Athena to use real weapons unless the Cloths had one?" Saga asked nervously to Shion, looking quite scared over whether it was real weapons both the 10th century sisters and 15th century brothers used, Azel now aiming with an arrow on his war bow which he shot against the round shield that Daria lifted to protect herself.
"What Athena does not know, she can not complain about. Besides, it is not like she can ease out the customs and traditions of their birth cultures out of their minds either," Aspros responded, as if that was the most simple answer to the question. Shion only nodded, knowing that Sansa would never have done anything such to them back in the 18th century even if she may have guessed something. After all, Athena was the Goddess of fighting smart in battle, which did sometimes involve dirty tricks to ensure a victory against an enemy. If a surprise attack with using something unexpected was the key to winning, well, simple as that.
"And we used stuff from our civilian professions to take Speacters by surprise. Master Irina was very insisting on that during our training," Seti smiled, patting one of his smithing hammers in his belt, while Ramses calmly threw a scalpel into the head of a training dummy without even looking.
"Oh, Daria and Irina are winning this round!"
With the hard-won match over, in the form of Irina and Daria managing to pull Amir and Azel out of their saddles and then a quick wrestling match on the ground, it did not take much time.
"Just give us a few minutes to wash off and change clothing, please, so we are ready."
Tiernan and Owen helped with caring for their ponies, while Azel and Amir also checked over themselves for any injuries.
"Daria may be the sweet-natured sister, but she sure can hit just as hard as Irina if she needs to...ow!"
Bruises and a few cuts, which Ramses treated with a soothing cream and bandages.
Finally, they were all seated in the story chamber again.
"Here is the scroll."
Rolling to a drawing of the orange-haired sisters as babies under the Gemini sign and the date of 6th June in the year 974 AD, Irina started the tale:
"Our first contact with the Sanctuary was in the autumn following our eighth birthday, when one of the female Silver Saints was passing through after finishing a mission. We learned afterwards that she had seen the Gemini marks on us after being in the sauna alongside the women in our household, and told Pope Anshu about it when reporting about her mission. At hearing that we was two daughters of a well-off merchant family, he realized that it would not do with merely requesting us as handmaidens for the yet unborn Athena, but that our father and mother may demand a payment in money or other valuable goods because normally, we would need a dowry to attract suitors when we was old enough for marriage."
Daria smiled when thinking back on that day when they first met the Grand Pope.
"It was quite an impression we left on him and the Saints acting as his escort to bring us along, despite our young age…because a small group of common foot soldiers of Hades was brazen enough to show up right on the meadow where we had just trained with real weapons of iron against some of the local boys from the families around."
And they started the tale of their own time as the Gemini twins serving Athena in the Holy War of the year 996.
~X~X~X~X~X~X
Author note: Being clean and well-groomed was an important part of Viking culture, so they would bathe once every week and comb their hair everyday. They would have bath-houses with steam-baths that reminded about traditional sauna, so the idea of a female Saint spotting the Gemini symbol on Daria and Irina as a marking of them being the future Gemini Saint, is quite logical in a place where everyone is naked