Between the sand-hills and the sea

Mavramorn was there before her, a grey-haired figure with bent head pacing slowly among the sand-hills as Nerienne hurried down through the shore pines. All her tumult of fears: that he mightn't be there; that she might have seemed too nosy or too forward or just too squinting; or that he might have regretted telling her all that he had, or found her troubles tiresome; or that King Caspian might have found something else for him to do; or just that she might have missed him; all those anxieties lifted in a joyful rush like a flock of gulls clearing from the shore.

Then they hovered, like the same flock of gulls, wheeling and waiting overhead. Because Lord Mavramorn was – different. They met differently, it was true, seeing each other come through the sand-hills. He bowed, and she curtseyed, and then they walked on, along the shore, in and out of the winding valleys of sand, avoiding the tangling roses, but it seemed to Nerienne that they talked differently, too. There was – something; some barrier, that seemed to make it impossible to say more than common-place remarks. And between the common-places, were silences. Not bitter ones like yesterday, just the silences of not knowing what to say.

She tried again, with something from yesterday when it had been possible to talk. "Did it take long for enough sailors to say 'No sir, Excuse me sir, and Not there, sir'?"

"What? Oh, no..." Mavramorn shook his head. "I did not trouble to find out. I felt I could say those to myself without delaying the readying of the ship by my presence. I came to here, to the shore, instead."

"I see," said Nerienne, and the silence came on again. How long had he been here? She had guessed he might be walking here, waiting, when he did not join the party of Narnians returning to the palace for lunch from their morning's work on The Dawn Treader; but what about breakfast? All the Narnians except the Queen had been gone down to their ship first thing, for they must sail on the early tide the next morning and King Caspian was eager, so the Queen had said, to see that all was ready – but had Lord Mavramorn joined them then at all?

Nerienne glanced sideways at him. That same grave, sad spaniel expression had not lifted once in all their walk. Not even when they had met, and she had said, quite truthfully, 'I am glad to see you!' She had been glad: the thought of someone to talk with on the shore today had stayed with her like a small, bright candle-flame all through yesterday; but if anything, Mavramorn had looked for a moment more sad, more desolate, as she had said it.

Perhaps it had only been her imagination. Or perhaps he was only being polite in accepting her company, and his regret in being disturbed had shown for a moment, before he had hidden it behind the courtly bow and patient conversation. Nerienne searched for something more interesting to say, hunting back in her mind for the sort of bright, cheerful things King Caspian had talked to her about in the golden summer last year. Narnia, mostly: the Animals, the Trees, the new castle; and then his voyage, and the six lords he could remember and the one he was always forgetting; and then the entertainments the Galmians had laid on.

She skimmed back over the picnics and hunts and the great tournament at the end, a vague feeling of them all having been a lot longer ago than just last summer. But then, all her memory seemed to be playing tricks over the time spans. How much she had fluttered over the idea, unsaid but all too known, that her father was hoping Caspian might be pleased to marry her. How badly she had minded – was it just four days ago? – the arrival and the beauty of his Queen. It seemed somehow, walking now between the sand-hills and the sea, as if all that emotion had belonged to somebody else, to some much younger sister. To go on, just walking here, for evermore, would be perfect – if only she could think of something to say. That mattered a lot, for this was, of course, the last conversation. Tomorrow would be only the formal leave taking between the Narnian Royal party and the Duke and his family. A polite bow, a polite curtsey, and then Mavramorn would be gone.

Strange that you could be sorry to part from someone who had been the last person in the world you had wanted to see, only the day before – but at this point, the here-and-now silence seemed to have gone on just too long, and Nerienne hauled her thoughts well away from the empty future and back to the urgent need to find something to say. Her mind coughed up the kind of remark usual to the day before a departure before she could stop it:

"I suppose this time the day after tomorrow, you will be back in Narnia."

She could have bitten her tongue out the next moment, but there is no way to call words back. They just hung there, evidence that she was nothing but stupid and freckled with a squint. Mavramorn's face did not change. "Aye," he said gravely. "The Lord Drinian said we should be in sight of land tomorrow evening, and then – I presume Narnia will be glad to see its king after a whole year away."

"You presume?" said Nerienne, puzzled. Independent Galma had been delighted to see King Caspian back. Surely his own country-?

"I presume," Mavramorn repeated. "Because I cannot imagine it." He raised and dropped his hands in a sort of empty, hopeless gesture. "A land of fauns and walking Trees and talking Beasts and this strange golden glory that our King bears – I cannot picture it." He swallowed. "Only the dwarves."

Nerienne clutched her hands together tightly. It was all too clear what he was remembering, and the pain in his voice made her want, rather desperately, to put one hand on his arm again and try to comfort him. But that had been yesterday, and the strange barrier of today made it impossible; not to mention that it was her own fault for reminding him. "What is it that you will do, once you are back?" she asked hastily, searching for some positive aspect of the future.

"Do?" Mavramorn echoed. "I shall be welcomed and greeted and fêted with the rest of them, and I shall be glad with every fibre of my being that the Queen is with us, and so will distract matters, as it were. And after that?" He raised his shoulders in another dull shrug. "My friend's son will provide for me and honour me as a noble-hearted king does his father's friends – and I shall fear every day that he is wrong to do so, that I am … pollution of some kind. But he will do so, no matter what. And thus I shall live out my days – a useless ornament at court, save for any function as a warning to other foolhardy adventurers."

"Are adventurers foolhardy?" Nerienne queried, trying to find some way to defend his voyaging against this harsh self-judgement, but she did not seem to have found the right words. Mavramorn smiled bitterly.

"To seek to seize by force the lands beyond the sunrise which I am now told are Aslan's country alone?" For a moment, the bleakness of yesterday showed on his face. "Aye, foolhardy does not really seem a strong enough word, does it?" Then the bright, bitter barrier came back. "So, that is what I shall do."

"I shall stay here," said Nerienne, not knowing quite why she said it, unless it was that his bitterness had uncovered her own again. "I shall stay here," she repeated, all too aware her voice was growing petulant and quite unable to stop it. "And squint and have freckles and be alone above the snow-line! And someday when I am too grey and middle-aged to care any longer, I shall be married off, to some wealthy guildsman or merchant trader who wants the connection to the ducal house too badly for his business to mind about the squint or the freckles!"

There was silence from her companion, and it seemed about a century or two before Nerienne dared to lift her face and look at him. They had stopped walking, and Mavramorn was standing, quite rigid, his gaze fixed out on the sea. Nerienne blushed. Hadn't she said yesterday she wouldn't shout? And now she had burst out afresh, with things you did not shout at anyone, certainly not a visiting Narnian Lord and especially not one with troubles of his own to face, nor one-

"I know," said Mavramorn suddenly, and his hand clenched into a fist on the folds of his tunic. "I know."

His voice shook slightly, but what he said made no sense.

"Know what?" Nerienne asked, forgetting yet again any resolution to be less inquisitive and more lady-like.

Mavramorn carried on staring out to sea. "That when I sat on this shore two days ago and thought in comfortable, self-pitying ignorance – nay, arrogance! – that life could not be any bleaker, I was wrong."

"I didn't mean – that my life was – bleak – I mean – not bleaker than – yours," Nerienne stammered out hastily.

"Nor did I mean that!"

Nerienne blinked, for something in her foolish words seemed to have breached some reserve in Lord Mavramorn. The dull, bitter voice was suddenly gone. He turned sharply, caught her hands so tightly that they hurt, and his face – in his face was something, not the same as but akin to, the way Nerienne had seen King Caspian look at his Queen. She stared at him, and the candle-flame of warmth from yesterday seemed to grow and grow – into something huge – glowing – unbelievable – and real.

"No!" said Mavramorn, his voice hoarse and desperate. "No! I did not mean to tell you! I have walked here all morning steeling myself that I must not tell you – that it is not for me to say that had I my old estate, or the meanest rag of the poorest landless freeman in all Narnia, or even nothing but the share in his ship that a sailor has – would I ask you to come with me! Not out of pity! Out of love – because you understand! Because I love you!"

The fair ladies of legend and the Galmian belles with no freckles accepted their suitors with gracious and charming words. They did not struggle frantically through the strange joy filling their minds with wool, and say: "But I tripped over you … and shouted."

Perhaps he had been right when he said he had forgotten whatever courtliness he ever knew, for the noble suitors of the same legends did not laugh. But Nerienne found she did not mind, for Mavramorn's laugh was a thing like a burst of sunshine – before the cloud of desolate misery rushed back across his face.

"Don't!" he said, desperately. "Don't! Because it cannot be!"

A single gull cried, a harsh, wild cry; and Nerienne's mind was suddenly clear, even empty and a little echoing. "Why?"

Mavramorn looked down, at where he still held her hands. "Because – because I have nothing, my Lady," he said quietly, too quietly, after a moment. "Nothing but the King's bounty, and even that on the strength of a friendship one generation removed."

There was a long silence. Then Mavramorn shook his head. "Nay, that were a lie – and you know it." He raised his head again, and looked at her, bleaker and greyer and more desolate than she had ever seen. "You know," he said. "You know why."

Nerienne took a step towards him. "But I would come," she said softly. "I would come!"

His grip on her hands tightened. "Have I not even now proved myself to be yet a man hasty and impetuous, to bring sorrow on his friends as well as himself by it?"

There was a long pause. Then Nerienne swallowed carefully, for you cannot refute someone's claim to have brought sorrow on you by crying. "So you must go?"

Mavramorn turned to stare out at the sea. "Aye. Take my guilt and go; while you bide here, alone. And live out my days knowing that though a man and a woman may be made and meant for each other, despite the leagues of sea between them – and that is not a dream, for I have seen Their Majesties – it is not possible for someone who has done what I have done." He slipped one hand free of Nerienne's and looked at the palm. "It was cold," he said. "I knew that for one moment, before that enchanted sleep came on us. Cold, and black, and evil."

"But you didn't know," Nerienne protested.

He laughed, that mirthless bitter laugh again. "I should have done. Is that not the greater crime? And if it was only ignorance-" Mavramorn broke off to gesture round at the empty shore line. "Why? Why?"

In itself, the question made no sense. In relation to yesterday, it did. Nerienne swallowed again. "Should I not have asked you to come back here today?"

Very, very gently, Mavramorn raised her hand and for the briefest moment, kissed it. "Nay," he said gravely. "I ought not have told you, and I would give anything to have done, just for once, that which I ought and not rushed on in haste – but though the sky falls and the world ends because of it, I would not have not told you!" Then his bitter smile crept back. "Not, 'tis true, that the old world ends. It goes on and on, and there is no new world, whatever a man may dream."

"There is a new world," Nerienne objected, thinking of Caspian and his Queen, and that new land of Narnia – which she, like Mavramorn, could not quite picture. "There is," she repeated, blinking to not cry. "It is just that the door is shut to you and I."

And a Voice, deep and great and terrible and golden, spoke behind her: "The door to the new world is always open."

The speaker was a lion.

Nerienne had never seen a lion, not for real. Large cat, mane, golden, was the general gist she had gathered from the highly stylised lions on the shields and banners of the Narnians and woven in the palace tapestries. By that description, it could have been any lion – except there were no lions on Galma – and any lion would have made the description totally inadequate. But no other lion would have such a voice, that seemed to shake the earth; nor the strange golden radiance about Him, that made the sunshine dim by comparison; nor the majesty in His eyes. Beyond all doubt, the Great Lion stood before them.

Nerienne swept a curtsey, but Aslan did not look at her. His great, unfathomable eyes fixed on Lord Mavramorn. "Son of Adam?"

Lord Mavramorn had not bowed. He simply stood there, and stared at Aslan, his face seeming even greyer in comparison to the Lion's golden mane. There was silence; a great, expectant silence in which it seemed all noise had ceased, and all movement had stopped, except for the steady breathing of the Lion. He said nothing more, but it seemed to Nerienne as if He had, in some way; as if some huge question hung in the air, far greater than those three, simple words.

Then Mavramorn shook his head, slowly, slowly. "It is impossible," he said, hollowly. "Impossible."

"You sought a land fairer than that of Miraz," said Aslan, his voice deeper and sterner than before. "You have sought again on your return. Now you have found, will you refuse? You have held the relic of the price that was paid – will you say anything is impossible for Me?"

The gulls cried, the sea murmured, and there was another great silence while Aslan and Mavramorn looked at each other, as still as the stone statues of the White Witch Nerienne remembered being told of in the old tales. It was told also, in those old stories, of how the two Queens and the High King saw their brother and betrayer Edmund talking with Aslan – but the stories did not tell of the fear of that watching for those three who loved him; fear that wrung your hands and made a lump in your throat and filled your eyes with tears, until you could not see the man and the Lion, standing motionless between the sand-hills and the sea...

And then, through the mist of tears, Nerienne saw Mavramorn move. He did not bow like a nobleman; nor salute like a soldier; he simply dropped to his knees and dropped his head onto the Lion's paw, and his shoulders shook with a storm of weeping in the way of a sailor who has been shipwrecked and has despaired of land, and has returned at last to his home port.

Aslan bent His head over Mavramorn, but whatever He said, Nerienne did not hear. It felt, quite suddenly, as if she was a thousand leagues away from them. Her mind vaguely registered that she should have been glad. She should have been glad, yes … but Nerienne felt numb. Lord Mavramorn had found what he sought, and she-? She was alone, again. Ignored, forgotten, side-lined with her squint and her freckles. Looking alone at the closed door to a new world through which everyone else has gone…

And now the one person who had understood that, the one whose words those were, had gone and left her too. As he had said, 'it makes some kind of barrier between them and myself … this strange voyage where men meet their god.'

Their god?! A tiny, angry flicker sprang up in Nerienne. The Telmarines had known nothing of Aslan! They had forgotten, while Galma had remembered – as Mavramorn himself had said, there you know far more than I did! Had he not asked her 'What do you know of this Aslan?'!

He had not even known of Aslan, and now – here and now Mavramorn had done nothing! He had not even bowed! And she had curtseyed; a proper, courteous greeting! And yet – and yet the Lion had looked at him! Not a glance at herself!

Nerienne blinked away a few hot, angry tears. Squints and has freckles, poor girl – yet again! But the Lion had made her with the squint and the thousand freckles, as her old Nurse had said so many wearisome times. He had no reason to brush her aside because of them! Had she not believed in the new world of restored Narnia, even as Mavramorn denied it?! As for Mavramorn – what did he know-?!

What do you know of this Aslan?' asked the echo in her mind, even as the Lion Himself stood before her. And Nerienne's mind stopped as abruptly as she had done crashing into Lord Mavramorn two days ago. What did she know? Of 'this Aslan'?

She had known of Him, spoken of Him in the proper times and places, grown up listening to the old tales of the Golden Age of Narnia. But – but – but that was all. That was all...

Nerienne's breath felt as if it was coming very much more slowly, as if some anxiety smothered the very air around her. And maybe it was her squint, or maybe those hot, angry tears – but she seemed to be looking at everything from very far away; seeing a strange tableaux on the shore from a great distance. The Lion stood on that shore, and two people stood before him: one crying out in humility and longing and self-despair; the other proper and courteous and indifferent.

Proper. Proper stood on one side and was angry – and afraid. And as slowly and steadily and truly as the joy had grown when Mavramorn had said he loved her, the truth grew coldly clear in her mind. To know that He existed was not the same as knowing Him – even the Calormenes believed in the existence of the Great Lion of Narnia!

To know Him meant something more – something that lent this golden radiance to the hearts and faces of those who did. And to find that, meant to search and to look and to act on what you knew, as Mavramorn had done on the cliffs of the Lone Islands and she had never done, in her grumbling about the squint and the freckles. Squints, and has freckles! She had always felt as if that was all anybody she met cared about, brushing her aside as the Duke's daughter with the squint and the freckles. But was it all that she had ever cared about? A great burden she had clung to, ignoring all that did matter as the Lion was now ignoring her? A barrier – except there wasn't a barrier – not now. Only this narrow, three-foot gap – between herself and the Son of the Emperor Over the Sea – and it felt like a mile.

There was a new world. But the door was-?

It would be improper to interrupt, to speak without being spoken to. "Aslan," said Nerienne, "I didn't bother. I never thought. I- I-"

Perhaps it had not been too improper to speak, for the Lion's eyes as He turned at last to look at her seemed not angry or displeased, only waiting. Nerienne held out her hands. "I – I think I have been as much a fool as that Horse in the old stories."

"Happy the one who learns that, be they Horse or Human, Daughter of Eve."

And quite suddenly it was clear to Nerienne why Mavramorn had fallen to his knees, that there was no other way to agree that the impossible was possible. And the Lion's voice was very gentle as His great head bent towards hers: "Daughter of Eve, do you know what has come of your waiting?"

She looked up, into that great golden face, where her face was reflected in His eyes; and beyond that the roses on the sand-hills; and somehow, beyond them, or through them, a life was reflected. A life dull, and shallowly content, and empty, clinging to its grudges and walking blindly, and yet there was a path in it she had not noticed before, running like a golden thread from the Lion's mane. To the sand-hills and the sea; to the Lion Himself; to the man beside her who had needed and would always need someone else who had not – before that time – found the new world and the open door to it; the man whose hand took hers even as she said "Yes."

And there was a sound in the Lion's voice that could only be a purr. "Remember: the way is always open for all who truly seek it. For I am the Opener of the Door. Go through it together." One great, golden paw with its terrible, terrible claws in the deepest of velvet sheaths was laid upon their joined hands, and the movement seemed to release the magic that had held their gazes on Him. Nerienne looked at Mavramorn as he looked back at her, and saw the golden shining-ness of the Lion reflected on his face as it must be on hers.

And then the weight on their hands was gone, and Aslan was gone, and the faint goldenness still lingered on Mavramorn's face where it had before been bleak and grey. "My lady," he said after a moment, or maybe it was a minute, or maybe hours, in this slowness of joyful time the Lion had left behind him. "My lady, I spoke of having nothing but the King's bounty..."

"And it was true," said Nerienne softly.

"Aye." Mavramorn stopped. "For both of us."

Both of us. Both of us. It seemed – surprising, somehow, since nothing was impossible for Him, that there should be room for more joy than that of looking into the Lion's eyes – but there was. And Mavramorn seemed to read her mind in her smile, and drew her hand to his lips. "Will you come, Nerienne? To this new world?"

And it mattered not the least that she squinted, or had freckles.

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Historical Note: In the records of Narnia, it is clear that The Dawn Treader sailed from Galma for Narnia a week later than had been planned. As Lady Mavramorn said ever after, it was debatable whether the Queen or the King had been more radiantly and sympathetically delighted at the reason for the delay.

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A/N: And so, that is the end of the story, though obviously only the beginning for Lord and Lady Mavramorn! Also, lest anyone thinks the roses on the beach were romantic embroidery, I must explain that I borrowed the beach (roses, dunes and shore-pines) from a little island in the Funen archipelago of Denmark, where I spent my childhood holidays between the sand-hills and the sea.

Thank you, everyone, for reading!

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