VS fic, redux
May. 12th, 2003 01:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petroniaWrite 300 words a day - so the saying goes - and at the end of a year you'll have quite the hefty novel. That's plain arithmetic. The part that trips me up is all the words I have to write, to get 300 that work.
There was something about Marco Polo here: the historical one, Italo Calvino's, and mine (I had a Marco Polo too, in a years-ago story where he was shanghaied by a flying saucer to intergalactic immortality, not so much Arthur Dent as Trillian - he had the psychic resources to face a traumatic expansion of horizons, did Signor Polo). But that may as well wait for a more coherent night. Meanwhile, tonight's 300+ words.
III.
He sees her: a fountain in the town centre, where cool water splashes in streams from marble lions' heads, their gaping maws discoloured by lime, into a dark pool. Women swathed in black crouch over their washing basins, their rhythmic movements like those of a flock of feeding birds. The clatter of wood, and water hissing on hot cobblestone. It nears noon, a white noon with no shadows at all.
There are no other passers-by. The city dwellers are readying for siesta, and windows have begun to shutter around the square. The young man draws his sea-cloak about him, as if it could confer shelter from the merciless light, and steps back into the recessed alcove of a doorway. He watches, one hand absently tracing worn lines in the stone. The woman straightens, perhaps sensing his gaze; it weighs on the brown curve of her nape, the light-swallowing swathe of her skirt. Her back arches. She rotates her shoulders back, stretching, and stands in an abrupt graceful movement, her skirt falling unevenly to her shins. She is very young, a mere girl. Her brown arms gleam with soap and water in the sun.
One of the other women lifts her head, shading her eyes with one hand, and says something in a cajoling voice. She speaks in dialect, not the Valendois of the capital, but the young man shivers, hearing a word repeated twice, with emphasis. The patois of this region is as old as Lea Monde herself, and he guesses at the meaning of the syllables. On the wall his fingertips run blind over the sign of them: the curve and the downward slash, chiselled into the stone with marks neither sun nor wind could erase. The pause before one of countless incantations interwoven. It could be, speak; it could be, begin this spell.
The girl smiles. She bends down and lifts the edge of her washbasin, tossing dirty water out onto the cobbles with one easy motion. Then she straightens, and uses a wooden pail to dip from the fountain. As the rinsewater splashes into her basin she lifts her head, dark eyes closing to the noonday sun, and begins to sing.
***
This post has been brought to you by chocolate truffles and port. I'm not a chocolate junkie by nature, but mmm.
There was something about Marco Polo here: the historical one, Italo Calvino's, and mine (I had a Marco Polo too, in a years-ago story where he was shanghaied by a flying saucer to intergalactic immortality, not so much Arthur Dent as Trillian - he had the psychic resources to face a traumatic expansion of horizons, did Signor Polo). But that may as well wait for a more coherent night. Meanwhile, tonight's 300+ words.
III.
He sees her: a fountain in the town centre, where cool water splashes in streams from marble lions' heads, their gaping maws discoloured by lime, into a dark pool. Women swathed in black crouch over their washing basins, their rhythmic movements like those of a flock of feeding birds. The clatter of wood, and water hissing on hot cobblestone. It nears noon, a white noon with no shadows at all.
There are no other passers-by. The city dwellers are readying for siesta, and windows have begun to shutter around the square. The young man draws his sea-cloak about him, as if it could confer shelter from the merciless light, and steps back into the recessed alcove of a doorway. He watches, one hand absently tracing worn lines in the stone. The woman straightens, perhaps sensing his gaze; it weighs on the brown curve of her nape, the light-swallowing swathe of her skirt. Her back arches. She rotates her shoulders back, stretching, and stands in an abrupt graceful movement, her skirt falling unevenly to her shins. She is very young, a mere girl. Her brown arms gleam with soap and water in the sun.
One of the other women lifts her head, shading her eyes with one hand, and says something in a cajoling voice. She speaks in dialect, not the Valendois of the capital, but the young man shivers, hearing a word repeated twice, with emphasis. The patois of this region is as old as Lea Monde herself, and he guesses at the meaning of the syllables. On the wall his fingertips run blind over the sign of them: the curve and the downward slash, chiselled into the stone with marks neither sun nor wind could erase. The pause before one of countless incantations interwoven. It could be, speak; it could be, begin this spell.
The girl smiles. She bends down and lifts the edge of her washbasin, tossing dirty water out onto the cobbles with one easy motion. Then she straightens, and uses a wooden pail to dip from the fountain. As the rinsewater splashes into her basin she lifts her head, dark eyes closing to the noonday sun, and begins to sing.
***
This post has been brought to you by chocolate truffles and port. I'm not a chocolate junkie by nature, but mmm.
Congratulations ^-^
Date: 2003-05-13 01:15 am (UTC)Rietta
TheCasualSpectator.net
Re: Congratulations ^-^
Date: 2003-05-13 07:24 am (UTC)I have been reading the novella you posted on your website, but have not yet finished. I am enjoying it, though I suspect I'll have some horridly meta-textual comments to make by the end. ^^; Do comment on what I write as much and as freely as you like (you may as well treat the fanfiction as original, it may be the best approach to a number of said stories, and lud knows no one else will see them that way); it's always nicer not to be writing in a vacuum.
Re: Congratulations ^-^
Date: 2003-05-13 09:38 am (UTC)The stuff I have posted at my site is actually some forty pages in print. An artist friend of mine is working on the colour cover and will bring me the roughs to look at soon. ^^
Re: Congratulations ^-^
Date: 2003-05-13 10:22 am (UTC)In fact I am extremely clear as to what is going to happen next, which is not often the case when I write, but I have been plotting this one out for ten months off-and-on. Remains only presentation. *sighs*
Re: Congratulations ^-^
Date: 2003-05-13 11:24 am (UTC)Rietta
TheCasualSpectator.net