Post by max on Dec 13, 2013 10:32:55 GMT 10
Title: The Fox Boy
Rating: PG
For: Seek
Prompt: 4. Zahir-centric fic. More background on the Bazhir would be appreciated.
Summary: The desert is in the heart of your brother. Vignettes of a life unsought.
Notes and Warnings: I apologise in advance for the bastardisation of two very ancient, very beautiful languages (this especially ;_; ), the gratuitous (and sometimes irrelevant) headcanon, touches of crack, and lack of sequencing herein. There are more useful notes at the end.
And as a general warning, if you're unfond of the discussion in the Zahir thread, you probably won't like this.
The Own had come in place of the army, because the Voice is the Northern King (and at nine and a half, still six years from his first communion, he is allowed to despise the wrongness of this), and the irregulars had been adopted by the Sandrunners some years ago.
Of course, being Bazhir and being a tribesman are separate things, now, and even years later he will marvel at how close to death the Company come that day, unaware of the Sunset Dragon footsoldier, last of the rearguard, who unobtrusively raises his sword-arm high, the red band for truce bright against the foreign colours he wears.
*
It takes the Progress four months to move from Persepolis to Pearlmouth because the court goes once to the White City, then traces their path back east to skirt the edge of the desert, visiting the traitor hill country fiefs en route to the southern port.
This is at the end of the first year, when he has been Jonathan’s squire for three, and he had not questioned the route when it was proposed, because it had been Gareth of Naxen who had checked it with him and not the King. Early on he had discovered that he could not lie to the Voice (terror in his heart and the pain of looking into the sun too long) but he had also learnt that if he didn't say anything, Jonathan would assume there was nothing to be learnt.
Nominal control. In this way eighty years have passed and the Tortallans still do not know even one quarter of the roads through the desert. The Progress does not take the Two Moons road from Persepolis to the Inland Sea because when Gareth of Naxen is astute enough to ask for his “advice on the southern country”, he is able to look the man straight in the eye and tell him that yes, this is the best way to the coast, when the caravans make the journey in half the time.
These are the kinds of omissions all tribesmen make in the time of the Voice-that-is. The Old Voice had lived through two Kings and one Lord forced upon the capital and the night before he was taken north by soldiers his father had told him of the last prophecy made before the Lioness had come to the desert.
(‘Your people or your son,’ the Sunset Dragon man (former man, he had thought, looking at the insignia on his arm) had said, and he had chosen so that his father would not have to.)
*
His father is old enough to remember the last battles with the Tortallan army; his grandfather, old enough to have fought in them. Both of them headmen in their time because Alhaz men were born with the ability to lead and the martial capability precipitating leadership. This is not nobility (whatever qualities the Tortallans believe that word to be vested with) but the lordlings with their pasty skin and ludicrous arrogance disgust him anyway.
It changes when they see him called up to Wyldon’s table, especially to speak with the King. Bile rises in him when he is asked how he knows the man – ‘Are you from the same tribe?’ – ‘Your people adopted him and now he’s your true King, isn’t he?’ – and he spits on the hallway flags to get the bitterness out of his mouth because he cannot refute the allegations like he should or curse the King like he wants to (Bazhir have no Kings. The Bloody Hawk are not my people).
But when he does, one pair of blue eyes defiantly met glow with understanding.
*
He is befriended by Joren because the northern boy hates the King as much as he does, and with nearly as much reason. It’s dangerous to speak of but it’s there, underlying extra time in the library they undertake in the evenings (because letters shift for Joren into unfamiliar shapes, and he has only spoken Common for one year), and the weekends they spend together on the practice courts trading sword forms from home.
He had never considered the northern king might be the southern king to someone else, but in the history classes when they are asked about what resources the Scanrans have at their disposal Joren becomes quieter and quieter as the conquests are glossed over and a fourth year brays ‘Rocks!’ to general laughter. Only three people in the room understand the terrible irony of the joke, but Myles doesn’t even glance in their direction when it is made.
(Newly created northern fiefs are the result of only one thing: even if she were not a girl, Joren would hate the probationer.)
Stone Mountain wealth is in iron mines, and for one hundred years, three quarters of this has gone straight to the Crown.
*
A section from the histories of the Voice-that-was:
There are winds a shaman may call up in battle only when there is no other option left for the payment they exact. The Majlis al Ghilan, last used in the first assault by the Tortallan King, a year before the outbreak of true war: a spiralling wind that will pull the armour and then the flesh from those it encircles, devouring a battalion in moments to leave only bones. The Ahi Tīkā, a wall of sand which evaporates all the water it touches including the wetness of a man’s mouth and eyes. Known to cause permanent blindness. The Mudajjan, the forgetter, which eats the thoughts of men to leave them huddled stupefied, blankly waiting to be cut down.
Sometimes he is heartsick enough to long for blood but he has seen what the hill country has become, and knows Jonathan’s wrath to be more terrible even than his grandfather’s, with the dark stone in his hand and the burning brightly one at his side. The first night he serves the King and Queen in their private dining room his hands shake so much during the first course Jonathan beckons (orders) him over and touches his temple, hands aflame.
This is the only thing Zahir remembers afterwards: terror of the blue-radiant fingertips before they meet his skin illuminating his face in their bright glow and in his mind’s eye his whole tribe massacred in the morning.
When his eyes refocus he is holding an emptied fruit platter and the Queen is smiling gently at him, saying ‘You don’t need to be so nervous around him, Zahir. He is your knight master now before he is your Voice.’
He ignores the inflection she gives the possessive in his relief to have been thought awestruck, rather than simply stricken. It has been fifteen years since Jonathan’s inheritance and until he was brought to Corus only half his tribe (just enough of them to avoid arousing suspicion) had ever partaken of communion – he himself is the one that tipped this balance – unable not to, not while he remained in the palace – but in the current of souls he does not dare search for his family or anyone else because Jonathan’s too-blue gaze is upon him even in the submission.
(Your people or your son?)
*
In his tribe, the shamans have always been women.
When a girl in Weeping Jackal green smiles at him, her large eyes lined in kohl under the play of a Persepolis fountain the sun stops moving in the sky.
It is the first contact he has had with a member of his family in seven years and he cannot speak to her – but he sees the tattoo on his sister’s chin and understands then that their grandmother is dead. Riding behind the King’s Council, he wraps his reins around his sword-hand because it is the only sign he can give and Yasmina pulls her veil over her face and melts into the crowd.
In his castle chamber that night he grieves in all his biology.
In the morning he attends Jonathan on the tour of the “Meron grounds” and does not once falter in his duties.
*
When he finds the pages of the Common manuscript that deal in his own tribe’s history, the longing swells inside him to the point that he becomes unable to speak in more than just disjointed words for the weight of it.
He comes to love Aly Mukhtab without ever having known the man. The one Bazhir voice he has in the capital, preserved only on thin vellum pages that crackle when he turns over the carefully incomplete stories. There is no mention of topography anywhere in the notes. No mountain ranges, no secret oases. No roads or prevailing conditions. It dawns on him when they take the Great North Road that these were neglected as a safeguard: there is no practical use in knowing the incantation that will summon a freshwater spring from beneath the earth if one does not know this spring lies exactly twelve days along the spice road between the frankincense groves and Tyra. The information in the first written history of the Bazhir unable to be turned and used against them.
When he rises and dresses in the blue and gold, he thinks of the last prophecy and the charms desert children wear to avert the evil eye. The way, once, he saw his grandmother raise her hand at just the right moment to deflect a sandstorm.
(And in preparation for war, Mukhtab had written, omitting at least as much as what he set down, Do not forget that the desert is in the heart of your brother. But Bazhir and tribesmen are no longer the same thing.)
*
He goes into the chamber expecting to be killed.
Only a day ago, Joren had died there in the dark, and what he had felt for Jonathan paled to insignificance against what Zahir has been forced to swalllow for half his life. He lies in the ritual bath while the King and his Prime Minister intone words they do not live by over his naked body and imagines the time it will take for word to reach his family – will the Voice distinguish from the thousands of tribesmen which to tell of his death or will King Jonathan rely on the Bazhir among the Own or the two knights a year older than him (both of the Bloody Hawk, so in three years of mutual page training he never spoke to either of them) to take word back to the desert more slowly, passed from friendly to hostile tribes until it comes to the southwestern edge of the Inland Sea where the Weeping Jackal tribe guard the salt flats which are their wealth.
The news of Joren was brought to Jonathan when he was serving the King his breakfast and not waiting in the chapel. He set down the coffee unevenly and the bitter liquid spurted from the pot to leave a black-brown stain in the white tablecloth which Jonathan did not notice. Joren had been his first friend in the palace – had known the same hopeless anger – hadn’t understood that Zahir had had no choice when his knight master had picked him, and – the worst was over was all he could think, over and over again.
It has been 8 and a half years since first company of the King’s Own rode into Weeping Jackal territory and were not slaughtered – and for a moment disappointment engulfs him like its own bitter wind – to have lived this way and his tribe still be endangered! – but then he remembers his sister’s dark eyes and the rainbow spray of light and water that had fallen over her (it is the women of his tribe who keep the knowledge of the hidden springs. It has always been) vanishing although no one else in Persepolis had the right to wear Jackal green, and as long as one tribesman lives, all do.
(Your people or your son? The emissary had said, and it is not a choice anymore.)
The door closes behind him and he waits for death – only to hear a voice (the whisper under a sandstorm) sigh.
It is not what he had been taught to expect.
And then the Chamber tells him yet another fact the King is unaware of.
*
In the end, they had had no choice but to paint a weeping Jackal on his shield, because the college of heraldry had refused to invent a device for a Bazhir knight who had not been ennobled. In the crowd who attended his knighting ceremony, though, only Seaver of Tasride had frowned slightly when he was presented with the bright shield and Seaver of Tasride, grandson of tribesmen, would not have given it away.
Nominal control: once it had been like looking into the sun, but he had kissed Jonathan’s hand and known that, even as King, the man was too arrogant to ever wonder what the Bazhir could have gained from Mukhtab’s sacrifice.
*
The sea winds that hit Dana’a (named for the black lip pearls that gave the town its wealth even before Jessamine married the Tortallan King dripping with them) are not as clean as he would wish but the taste of ozone floods his body and it feels like he hasn’t breathed in ten years.
When he sees his father beyond the western gate of the city, he realises this is not, in fact, that far from the truth.
*
*
*
*
Notes:
Words
Dana’a should mean something like pearl city. As an original Bazhir name for Pearlmouth.
Majlis al Ghilan is a mush of Arabic and Persian – something like but not necessarily ‘Meeting place of the ghouls’.
Mudajjan in Arabic means ‘tamed, domesticated’
Ahi Tīkā is Māori for whistling fire.
Artistic licence
The times Tammy gives for travel through Tortall are practicably stupid for the modes of transportation actually used, so I’ve made them more realistic. Basically the Huns are the only army in the history of the world who could cover like a hundred miles in a day, and the Tortallans never travel like they did.
Also I couldn’t remember which tribe Raoul+the Own were adopted into, so I guessed. And I couldn’t remember the progress timeline so that might have been mucked up too.
And you may have noticed I sort of went against canon Bazhir stuff a wee bit, but the way I justify this is that ethnography tends to be hugely ethnocentric and very generalised – which is, funnily enough, what the Bazhir stuff seems to be in canon.
Nearly every custom I touch on has a rl equivalent, if not from a nomadic Saharan society then one from the horn of Africa or the Arabian peninsula. Just with more magic pumped in.
Irrelevant headcanon
I decided that Stone Mountain was originally a Scanran fief and this is why Joren was killed because by the time he was 18 he was actually plotting treason which would have come off and so the chamber decided to nip that in the bud because it is at the end of it a tool to ensure loyal knights of Tortall.
BUT:
Crack
Zahir wasn’t put through much of an ordeal at all because Jonathan’s adoption into the Bazhir, and assumption as Voice negated the chamber’s power. Being one as many. A he-can’t-have-an-ordeal-against-his-own-loyalty-to-himself kind of a deal. Tortallan court mages are unlikely to realise this for a while because they don’t seem to have any interest in Bazhir “wild” magic, it only happens like this to the Bazhir knights and there are only a handful of them, and everyone’s under oath never to speak of their ordeals anyway so who’s going to find out?
This relationship might also maybe affect Jon’s ability to wield the Jewel but I didn’t have to consider it for this story so I didn’t and it’s crackalackin anyway.
References
The title is taken from the epithet given to a Maori boy who was “rescued” in the 19th c wars and raised as a British gentleman until he reached adulthood, when he promptly returned to his own people.
The war winds thing was inspired by passages of The English Patient (a book which makes my heart slow down because the writing’s so beautiful)
The summary line is, ofc, Eliot (holla), though y'know, taken literally, rather than in the way he actually meant lol.
Anything else that needs clarifying, ask
Rating: PG
For: Seek
Prompt: 4. Zahir-centric fic. More background on the Bazhir would be appreciated.
Summary: The desert is in the heart of your brother. Vignettes of a life unsought.
Notes and Warnings: I apologise in advance for the bastardisation of two very ancient, very beautiful languages (this especially ;_; ), the gratuitous (and sometimes irrelevant) headcanon, touches of crack, and lack of sequencing herein. There are more useful notes at the end.
And as a general warning, if you're unfond of the discussion in the Zahir thread, you probably won't like this.
The Own had come in place of the army, because the Voice is the Northern King (and at nine and a half, still six years from his first communion, he is allowed to despise the wrongness of this), and the irregulars had been adopted by the Sandrunners some years ago.
Of course, being Bazhir and being a tribesman are separate things, now, and even years later he will marvel at how close to death the Company come that day, unaware of the Sunset Dragon footsoldier, last of the rearguard, who unobtrusively raises his sword-arm high, the red band for truce bright against the foreign colours he wears.
*
It takes the Progress four months to move from Persepolis to Pearlmouth because the court goes once to the White City, then traces their path back east to skirt the edge of the desert, visiting the traitor hill country fiefs en route to the southern port.
This is at the end of the first year, when he has been Jonathan’s squire for three, and he had not questioned the route when it was proposed, because it had been Gareth of Naxen who had checked it with him and not the King. Early on he had discovered that he could not lie to the Voice (terror in his heart and the pain of looking into the sun too long) but he had also learnt that if he didn't say anything, Jonathan would assume there was nothing to be learnt.
Nominal control. In this way eighty years have passed and the Tortallans still do not know even one quarter of the roads through the desert. The Progress does not take the Two Moons road from Persepolis to the Inland Sea because when Gareth of Naxen is astute enough to ask for his “advice on the southern country”, he is able to look the man straight in the eye and tell him that yes, this is the best way to the coast, when the caravans make the journey in half the time.
These are the kinds of omissions all tribesmen make in the time of the Voice-that-is. The Old Voice had lived through two Kings and one Lord forced upon the capital and the night before he was taken north by soldiers his father had told him of the last prophecy made before the Lioness had come to the desert.
(‘Your people or your son,’ the Sunset Dragon man (former man, he had thought, looking at the insignia on his arm) had said, and he had chosen so that his father would not have to.)
*
His father is old enough to remember the last battles with the Tortallan army; his grandfather, old enough to have fought in them. Both of them headmen in their time because Alhaz men were born with the ability to lead and the martial capability precipitating leadership. This is not nobility (whatever qualities the Tortallans believe that word to be vested with) but the lordlings with their pasty skin and ludicrous arrogance disgust him anyway.
It changes when they see him called up to Wyldon’s table, especially to speak with the King. Bile rises in him when he is asked how he knows the man – ‘Are you from the same tribe?’ – ‘Your people adopted him and now he’s your true King, isn’t he?’ – and he spits on the hallway flags to get the bitterness out of his mouth because he cannot refute the allegations like he should or curse the King like he wants to (Bazhir have no Kings. The Bloody Hawk are not my people).
But when he does, one pair of blue eyes defiantly met glow with understanding.
*
He is befriended by Joren because the northern boy hates the King as much as he does, and with nearly as much reason. It’s dangerous to speak of but it’s there, underlying extra time in the library they undertake in the evenings (because letters shift for Joren into unfamiliar shapes, and he has only spoken Common for one year), and the weekends they spend together on the practice courts trading sword forms from home.
He had never considered the northern king might be the southern king to someone else, but in the history classes when they are asked about what resources the Scanrans have at their disposal Joren becomes quieter and quieter as the conquests are glossed over and a fourth year brays ‘Rocks!’ to general laughter. Only three people in the room understand the terrible irony of the joke, but Myles doesn’t even glance in their direction when it is made.
(Newly created northern fiefs are the result of only one thing: even if she were not a girl, Joren would hate the probationer.)
Stone Mountain wealth is in iron mines, and for one hundred years, three quarters of this has gone straight to the Crown.
*
A section from the histories of the Voice-that-was:
There are winds a shaman may call up in battle only when there is no other option left for the payment they exact. The Majlis al Ghilan, last used in the first assault by the Tortallan King, a year before the outbreak of true war: a spiralling wind that will pull the armour and then the flesh from those it encircles, devouring a battalion in moments to leave only bones. The Ahi Tīkā, a wall of sand which evaporates all the water it touches including the wetness of a man’s mouth and eyes. Known to cause permanent blindness. The Mudajjan, the forgetter, which eats the thoughts of men to leave them huddled stupefied, blankly waiting to be cut down.
Sometimes he is heartsick enough to long for blood but he has seen what the hill country has become, and knows Jonathan’s wrath to be more terrible even than his grandfather’s, with the dark stone in his hand and the burning brightly one at his side. The first night he serves the King and Queen in their private dining room his hands shake so much during the first course Jonathan beckons (orders) him over and touches his temple, hands aflame.
This is the only thing Zahir remembers afterwards: terror of the blue-radiant fingertips before they meet his skin illuminating his face in their bright glow and in his mind’s eye his whole tribe massacred in the morning.
When his eyes refocus he is holding an emptied fruit platter and the Queen is smiling gently at him, saying ‘You don’t need to be so nervous around him, Zahir. He is your knight master now before he is your Voice.’
He ignores the inflection she gives the possessive in his relief to have been thought awestruck, rather than simply stricken. It has been fifteen years since Jonathan’s inheritance and until he was brought to Corus only half his tribe (just enough of them to avoid arousing suspicion) had ever partaken of communion – he himself is the one that tipped this balance – unable not to, not while he remained in the palace – but in the current of souls he does not dare search for his family or anyone else because Jonathan’s too-blue gaze is upon him even in the submission.
(Your people or your son?)
*
In his tribe, the shamans have always been women.
When a girl in Weeping Jackal green smiles at him, her large eyes lined in kohl under the play of a Persepolis fountain the sun stops moving in the sky.
It is the first contact he has had with a member of his family in seven years and he cannot speak to her – but he sees the tattoo on his sister’s chin and understands then that their grandmother is dead. Riding behind the King’s Council, he wraps his reins around his sword-hand because it is the only sign he can give and Yasmina pulls her veil over her face and melts into the crowd.
In his castle chamber that night he grieves in all his biology.
In the morning he attends Jonathan on the tour of the “Meron grounds” and does not once falter in his duties.
*
When he finds the pages of the Common manuscript that deal in his own tribe’s history, the longing swells inside him to the point that he becomes unable to speak in more than just disjointed words for the weight of it.
He comes to love Aly Mukhtab without ever having known the man. The one Bazhir voice he has in the capital, preserved only on thin vellum pages that crackle when he turns over the carefully incomplete stories. There is no mention of topography anywhere in the notes. No mountain ranges, no secret oases. No roads or prevailing conditions. It dawns on him when they take the Great North Road that these were neglected as a safeguard: there is no practical use in knowing the incantation that will summon a freshwater spring from beneath the earth if one does not know this spring lies exactly twelve days along the spice road between the frankincense groves and Tyra. The information in the first written history of the Bazhir unable to be turned and used against them.
When he rises and dresses in the blue and gold, he thinks of the last prophecy and the charms desert children wear to avert the evil eye. The way, once, he saw his grandmother raise her hand at just the right moment to deflect a sandstorm.
(And in preparation for war, Mukhtab had written, omitting at least as much as what he set down, Do not forget that the desert is in the heart of your brother. But Bazhir and tribesmen are no longer the same thing.)
*
He goes into the chamber expecting to be killed.
Only a day ago, Joren had died there in the dark, and what he had felt for Jonathan paled to insignificance against what Zahir has been forced to swalllow for half his life. He lies in the ritual bath while the King and his Prime Minister intone words they do not live by over his naked body and imagines the time it will take for word to reach his family – will the Voice distinguish from the thousands of tribesmen which to tell of his death or will King Jonathan rely on the Bazhir among the Own or the two knights a year older than him (both of the Bloody Hawk, so in three years of mutual page training he never spoke to either of them) to take word back to the desert more slowly, passed from friendly to hostile tribes until it comes to the southwestern edge of the Inland Sea where the Weeping Jackal tribe guard the salt flats which are their wealth.
The news of Joren was brought to Jonathan when he was serving the King his breakfast and not waiting in the chapel. He set down the coffee unevenly and the bitter liquid spurted from the pot to leave a black-brown stain in the white tablecloth which Jonathan did not notice. Joren had been his first friend in the palace – had known the same hopeless anger – hadn’t understood that Zahir had had no choice when his knight master had picked him, and – the worst was over was all he could think, over and over again.
It has been 8 and a half years since first company of the King’s Own rode into Weeping Jackal territory and were not slaughtered – and for a moment disappointment engulfs him like its own bitter wind – to have lived this way and his tribe still be endangered! – but then he remembers his sister’s dark eyes and the rainbow spray of light and water that had fallen over her (it is the women of his tribe who keep the knowledge of the hidden springs. It has always been) vanishing although no one else in Persepolis had the right to wear Jackal green, and as long as one tribesman lives, all do.
(Your people or your son? The emissary had said, and it is not a choice anymore.)
The door closes behind him and he waits for death – only to hear a voice (the whisper under a sandstorm) sigh.
It is not what he had been taught to expect.
And then the Chamber tells him yet another fact the King is unaware of.
*
In the end, they had had no choice but to paint a weeping Jackal on his shield, because the college of heraldry had refused to invent a device for a Bazhir knight who had not been ennobled. In the crowd who attended his knighting ceremony, though, only Seaver of Tasride had frowned slightly when he was presented with the bright shield and Seaver of Tasride, grandson of tribesmen, would not have given it away.
Nominal control: once it had been like looking into the sun, but he had kissed Jonathan’s hand and known that, even as King, the man was too arrogant to ever wonder what the Bazhir could have gained from Mukhtab’s sacrifice.
*
The sea winds that hit Dana’a (named for the black lip pearls that gave the town its wealth even before Jessamine married the Tortallan King dripping with them) are not as clean as he would wish but the taste of ozone floods his body and it feels like he hasn’t breathed in ten years.
When he sees his father beyond the western gate of the city, he realises this is not, in fact, that far from the truth.
*
*
*
*
Notes:
Words
Dana’a should mean something like pearl city. As an original Bazhir name for Pearlmouth.
Majlis al Ghilan is a mush of Arabic and Persian – something like but not necessarily ‘Meeting place of the ghouls’.
Mudajjan in Arabic means ‘tamed, domesticated’
Ahi Tīkā is Māori for whistling fire.
Artistic licence
The times Tammy gives for travel through Tortall are practicably stupid for the modes of transportation actually used, so I’ve made them more realistic. Basically the Huns are the only army in the history of the world who could cover like a hundred miles in a day, and the Tortallans never travel like they did.
Also I couldn’t remember which tribe Raoul+the Own were adopted into, so I guessed. And I couldn’t remember the progress timeline so that might have been mucked up too.
And you may have noticed I sort of went against canon Bazhir stuff a wee bit, but the way I justify this is that ethnography tends to be hugely ethnocentric and very generalised – which is, funnily enough, what the Bazhir stuff seems to be in canon.
Nearly every custom I touch on has a rl equivalent, if not from a nomadic Saharan society then one from the horn of Africa or the Arabian peninsula. Just with more magic pumped in.
Irrelevant headcanon
I decided that Stone Mountain was originally a Scanran fief and this is why Joren was killed because by the time he was 18 he was actually plotting treason which would have come off and so the chamber decided to nip that in the bud because it is at the end of it a tool to ensure loyal knights of Tortall.
BUT:
Crack
Zahir wasn’t put through much of an ordeal at all because Jonathan’s adoption into the Bazhir, and assumption as Voice negated the chamber’s power. Being one as many. A he-can’t-have-an-ordeal-against-his-own-loyalty-to-himself kind of a deal. Tortallan court mages are unlikely to realise this for a while because they don’t seem to have any interest in Bazhir “wild” magic, it only happens like this to the Bazhir knights and there are only a handful of them, and everyone’s under oath never to speak of their ordeals anyway so who’s going to find out?
This relationship might also maybe affect Jon’s ability to wield the Jewel but I didn’t have to consider it for this story so I didn’t and it’s crackalackin anyway.
References
The title is taken from the epithet given to a Maori boy who was “rescued” in the 19th c wars and raised as a British gentleman until he reached adulthood, when he promptly returned to his own people.
The war winds thing was inspired by passages of The English Patient (a book which makes my heart slow down because the writing’s so beautiful)
The summary line is, ofc, Eliot (holla), though y'know, taken literally, rather than in the way he actually meant lol.
Anything else that needs clarifying, ask