Protecteur
Albia’s war with me had ended on the night of the brewing. In the months following she had become a picture of reason and cooperation. Now at four years old, stretched to new heights by a growth spurt, she was hardly recognizable as the fierce little savage who had fought me at every turn.
She swung her bucket insouciantly as we took the path to the stables one early June morning, her wellies gallumphing on the stones. The castle was still asleep behind us, students just stirring.
“Mum, I can ride Sawazar, I really think I can. For a short ride if you take him out first. You ride him, then I will take him when he’s more tired.” Salazar was a powerful, headstrong animal and responded best to a strong manager. I did not allow the younger students or petite girls to ride him.
“Alby, no. You just aren’t strong enough yet. A kid needs long legs to hold him. When you are older.” She was already tall for her age, and I had no doubt she’d be able to ride him in her teens. Not entirely accustomed to my newly temperate daughter, I braced myself for a storm.
“Do you think when I am five? Then can I?”
“No, not until you are at least a third year. Honey, even Libby Wateringcan and Thomasina Way aren’t allowed on Salazar.”
“Mum.” She rolled her eyes. “They are little, little girls.” She was right; they were small twelve year olds who wouldn’t get much bigger.
“You are also a little girl. You are little in your body and you are still quite young. But you are allowed to ride Protecteur and Cadbury.” Only Albia rode the elderly, arthritic Protecteur now, and he had proved a patient collaborator in her development as a rider.
She dropped her eyes sadly and took my hand. “But I really, really want Sawazar.”
“I know. It’s hard to wait. But all you are learning with Protecteur, someday you will put to use with Salazar. And he will appreciate it.”
“I love him, Mum.”
“I know.” How fitting that our strong-willed daughter should fall in love with the fiercest, strongest, proudest hippogriff in the stable -- the one animal she was not allowed.
The stable yard was quiet in the slanting sunlight. The stable cat, who was not a familiar but just an ordinary cat for keeping down mice, sat in the doorway watching sparrows take a dust bath.
We had to pause inside the door to let our eyes adjust to the dark. Something seemed different. There were no cries of greeting, just a restless shuffle of hooves and claws on the boards.
We proceeded, slowed by the strange quiet. Cadbury extended her head over the stall door with a subdued chirrup of greeting and Albia reached up to stroke her. At the far end of the row Serrebrune regarded me gravely. Protecteur’s stall door was hanging open. Albia touched my elbow and had begun to speak when I saw him.
He was lying part way out of the stall, neck extended, beak open, forefoot clenched in the air. His dull, open eye told the whole story.
I couldn’t take a breath. By the jerk of Albia’s hand on my arm, I knew she had seen him too. Then -- “I’ll get Dad!” -- and her bare feet on the boards and their soft thuds on the dirt of the yard trailing away. In the silence one of her boots fell over. Protecteur’s eye stared at nothing.
Time stopped and I stood, body dissolving into space, colder and colder. Up where the air was thin I floated, observing the frozen woman through the stable roof. I heard far off running. Then the hollow sound of his boots on the wooden floor, a rush of black and Severus, turning me round and crushing me against the wool of his coat. The world returned with a roar of sound and light and pain and with it a gruesome howling that I knew must be my own.
Held tightly, face buried in the crook of Severus’ neck, I screamed Protecteur’s name. I could not have stood it without the firm circle of his arms. Within them I thrashed and sobbed. Miraculously he knew to hold me tight, tighter, and let me rage.
I screamed myself hoarse. Finally my sobs grew long and ragged, slowing until I leaned on Severus, shuddering and gasping. It must have been a long time; in releasing me, his arms seemed stiff. I looked into his eyes, darkened by pity and distress.
“Come,” he said, leading me by the hand to Protecteur’s body, then standing aside to let me approach.
I knelt and let my hand hover over the feathered head. Without the animating force, my hippogriff seemed like a beautiful object, formed with a lavish hand for intricacy, pattern, and color. But the liveliness of his eye, the quick movements of head and rufflings of feathers that he used to communicate -- those were gone, and so was he. I stroked him with my fingertips. Fat tears slid down my cheeks. I would never see him again.
“Go on,” I heard Hagrid’s hushed voice from the stable door. He must have been holding Albia; her bare feet touched down then padded toward me. Her hand rested tentatively on my shoulder. I looked up into her face, knotted with worry and stained with tears.
“I’m okay,” I said, but my voice broke. I rested my head against her side. “He’s dead, sweetie.”
Albia patted my hair with her little hand. “Don’t worry, Mummy,” she said uncertainly.
Severus knelt behind us with a hand on each. “I’ll tell the school. Albia, you go with your mother to the house. Make sure she has a cup of tea and lies down, and then you stay with her. You hold her hand.” She nodded solemnly. “Jehane, I’ll cancel your classes and be back directly.”
As I left the stable, Hagrid pulled me to him in a one-armed bear hug and I felt him shaking with suppressed sobs. “’Ee were a marvelous animal,” he managed to squeak out. “I never met one so loyal an’intelligent. ‘Ee loved ye like ‘is own child.”
On the short walk to the house, Albia held my hand tightly, her brow furrowed. That warm little hand comforted me. Once inside she pushed me to the couch and covered my legs with a throw, mindful of her commission, then went into the kitchen to make tea. She couldn’t heat the water, however, and had to bring me the kettle and have me do it with my wand.
The early morning walk to the barn seemed weeks ago. Yet the day seemed not to have begun and ourselves to be suspended in some no-time. Albia climbed up next to me. Her presence was both unreal and vivid. She took my hand again, and hers was a bit grubby.
“Why did he die?” She understood, somehow, that it was good to talk about him. My tears flowed again, but more easily this time.
“He was an old, old man, Alby. His body was used up.”
“He will never know anything more about me,” she said sadly. “He will not see me grow up.”
“No, he won’t. But you will remember him and you will imagine what he would think when you grow up.”
“I rather would see him.”
“Me too.”
+++++
We disposed of Protecteur’s body in the traditional way, on a high platform on a bare hill of glacial rock, far out in the moors. Domesticated hippogriffs, friends and allies of wizards since before written history, have always been honored this way. Hagrid insisted on building the structure without help and we brought the body to it next day.
We were a sorrowful sight, a heavy-headed band of thirty-five young witches and wizards, the girls wiping tears from their faces, the boys with grim expressions, Severus and myself, and Hagrid with Albia on his arm, following the levitating body. I had wrapped Protecteur in my best cloak, as if I truly believed it would warm him in the afterlife. The sky was brilliant blue, filled with small clouds.
As we came around a grove of trees, we gave a collective gasp at the structure. The slatted platform stood twenty feet high on beautifully joined poles of stripped birch, carved with wizardly runes of protection and praise. “Graceful flyer,” said one. The poles were sunk deep into the hard earth and decorated with bunches of feathers on leather ties. The feathers rattled and danced in the spring wind.
High above, each pole bore the head and skin of a ferret. Hagrid, too, had thought of supplies for the afterlife.
Severus said a few words about Protecteur’s strength, patience, and intelligence, and that he had been a founding hippogriff of the Hogwarts’ riding program and a faithful friend to our family.
Then we gave him up to the sky.
+++++
The first time I returned to the barn, the empty stall was like a hole in my heart. I stood inside. Bits of his old straw clung to the corners; in time that straw would mix with the new and we would fork it out. Someday nothing of him would remain but what I remembered and then I, too, would pass away.
I stood there every day and as the weeks went by I grew accustomed to his absence. Someday, the stall would be just another part of the barn. It saddened me and I wanted it, both.
+++++
“Your little friend Pierce has agreed to take Albia riding this Saturday afternoon,” Severus said, snapping open the Prophet and reaching for the marmalade pot.
“My little friend? Why isn’t he your little friend?”
“In matters of babysitting he is your little friend. In academic matters he is my student, but he is never my little friend.”
“If it’s a matter of babysitting, why are you talking to him anyway?”
He looked at me over the top of the paper.
“I hoped we might take an unencumbered walk on the moors. The weather is supposed to be fine on Saturday.”
“Oh,” I said, chastened.
“I’d like to have my wife to myself for a change,” he said, more softly, “And I’d hoped you might feel that way about your husband.”
“Yes, I do. I’d love to take a walk.”
“Good then, it’s settled.”
Saturday was the third of June, and the weather was, in fact, fine. The air was like a lukewarm bath, with feathery breezes that teased my skin. At the gates we turned away from the Hogsmeade road onto the moors. I had a picnic basket in my pocket.
We walked for some time in companionable silence, enjoying the quiet and letting the concerns of the school retreat. I wondered if we’d be having serious talk or an idle one or perhaps remain silent. All directions seemed equally good.
“Your hippogriff,” Severus said abruptly. “Are you -- grieving -- still?”
I glanced over to show that I was considering his question. A bird burst from the scrub by the path and winged toward the horizon.
“Not as much as I thought I would. I do miss him; I miss him so much. But I know his life was complete and our friendship was complete. I could see that he didn’t enjoy himself as he had. The arthritis -- it hurt him to fly. I was wondering if eventually he wouldn’t be able; that happens sometimes, you know.
“We were so close. I think he saved me. And I saved him. We kept faith with each other, always; that’s what I mean by complete. It hurts like Hell that I’ll never see him again. But it couldn’t end differently. That’s the way it is.”
Severus nodded. He knew he needn’t say anything. We continued on silently for a while.
“It’s funny how the moors change color,” I said. “June is greener than May, and May greener than April, but it’s hard to find just which tiny blades or leaves are making the difference. Subtle.”
“Not really green,” he said. “Something between green and gray. One could equally say that it gets less gray.”
I took his arm.
“Are we complete?” he asked.
“Not in the sense of being ready to die! But yes. For now.”
“For now,” he groused.
“Oh, come on, you know how it goes. We’re good and then we’re not. Then we come round again. We find our way back.”
“Hm.”
We came to the glacial rocks, gray and eternal, crusted with curly lichen. I liked to think that some of the bare patches had been made by our scrabbling feet over the years -- courting, married and then hauling our baby up to catch the view.
What were we now? I looked sideways at my husband, his black and silver hair caught up by the passing breeze, his face still ugly-beautiful but more deeply etched, lips thinner, the hooked nose even more prominent. Illness had not been kind to him, yet when I looked at his face I saw the whole story of how he had anchored me here.
He leapt to the lowest rock, pausing a moment to catch his balance, then up again, and again. At the top he leaned down to offer his hand. Wedded. No more thoughts of going our separate ways, no calculation of benefits versus losses. We had fought our way to the place where all benefits were to both and all losses as well. I had impressed myself deeply on him as he had on me, not for power or possession but to realize ourselves fully, as human beings, in relation to each other.
We stood on the highest rock, looking out over the land. The path we had taken wended its way between scrub oaks and tussocks back toward the Hogwarts gates. In the other direction it stretched to the horizon.
Severus sighed and leaned lightly against me.
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s beautiful.”
The End
Note
I fell in love with fanfiction when I read my first one -- Rickfan37’s Snape in Love. I was incredibly lucky that she agreed to beta my own attempt.
Rickfan has been my ideal reader, my mentor, cheering squad, critic and handholder. I knew nothing about the fanfiction world and she taught me. She has been more than a beta and more than she knew when she signed on. And because Jehane Desrosiers was a big part of my life for three years, she’s given me a great gift.
Thank you, Rickfan.
3/9/06