Artichokes - the Saga Continues!

[dolorous_ett]

Well, from now on every time I need helpful advice, I'll turn straight to my Livejournal! All that feedback about the first part of my artichoke story was so helpful that I found myself doing quite a lot to the second part of the tale, just to avoid having to implement any of the changes suggested for the first!

I'm not super-confident about this section - again, concrit and feedback of any kind are much appreciated. I've spent too long thinking it over on my own - can't tell any more if it's basically OK, or if it's just flawed in ways I haven't spotted.

 
The table was laid with elegant silver, fine china and damask napkins, with an elegant Runic place card for each guest. Draco and the guests took their seats (Hermione thanked her lucky stars that she had insisted on studying Ancient Runes at Hogwarts), but Pansy remained by the door, where a tense, hissed conversation was taking place with someone on the far side. Finally, with a muttered "Have it your own way", she sat down, and majicked away one of the place settings with a flick of her wand.
"Narcissa," she said with a rather tight smile at Hermione. "I would so have liked you to meet her but her health… well, you know how it is."
"That’s a pity," said Hermione. "I notice there aren’t any other female guests."
"Ah yes, of course," said Zabini, with charming insincerity. "Dear, dear, where are my manners? Ceridwen sends appols and all that - sick mother… nothing serious, but all the same… sure you’d understand…" He looked her straight in the eye, daring her to call him a liar.
"Urgulanilla’s too ill to come. Not well at all. Sick as a dog in fact. Very sorry…" said Crabbe, staring at his soup plate, and rubbing the back of his neck with vigour.
Hermione gulped, took a deep breath, plastered a sweet smile on her face and turned to the other guest.
"And Madam Snape?" she said. "What’s keeping her away? Nothing too serious, I trust?"
Snape’s expression of outraged fury took Hermione completely by surprise.
"I have no wife," he finally said, after a long, charged pause. "As you are no doubt perfectly well aware."
"Elves!" cried Pansy quickly. "First course! What are you waiting for?"
A pair of house-elves, dressed neatly in their best monogrammed antimacassars, came bustling in, bent almost double under the weight of a magnificent silver soup tureen.
"I do hope you like Turtle Soup," she said to Hermione with a smile.
"You really shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble," said Hermione, reaching for the broad spoon in the innermost layer of the cutlery. Was that a moue of disappointment that Blaise Zabini turned to share with the master of the house, as she passed the first test of Pureblood etiquette, or was she letting her nerves get the better of her? And was it her imagination, or did she hear a faint "tsk" of disappointment from behind the door?
She had noticed when she sat down that the wine had been served in Self-Fulfilling Goblets, enchanted to top themselves up magically whenever emptied. For this reason, she curbed her impulse to grab hers and down the contents in one gulp, contenting herself instead with a cautious sip of her soup.
***
Turtle soup proved to be clear, aromatic and delicious, and Hermione set to with a will. There was a nasty moment when she abruptly remembered a clipping from the scandal pages of the Daily Prophet Ron had sent her with his last owl, about how Professor Snape’s highborn fiancée had eloped with a spotty youth who worked as a conductor on the Knight Bus, but she managed to stop short of spluttering consommé all over the table.
Snape had never been kind to her at school, but she had certainly not meant to humiliate him. During the soup and the devilled badger brains that followed (rich, soft, exquisitely seasoned lumps that melted in the mouth - much nicer than the name had led her to believe), Hermione did her best to put matters right. She complimented Snape on his latest monographs on combining anti-analgesics and emetics, and met only with surly silence. She enquired politely after his Hogwarts colleagues, to learn that, after a serious of incidents ("foolish mollycoddling: potion-making is simply not a suitable occupation for the cowardly and incompetent"), he had been offered the choice between a compulsory sabbatical in Tibet studying meditation techniques, or instant expulsion. He had taken the sabbatical, but with ill grace; and Hermione’s account of how much good Harry’s spell in the lamasery had done his post-traumatic stress disorder was not kindly received.
Hermione was saved from causing worse offence by the arrival of more house-elves bearing platters of larks’ tongues, served on a bed of blanched Devil’s Snare. She took up the silver tweezers traditionally used in the best Wizarding circles for larks’ tongues, and picked away at her dish (tasty, but rather fiddly and surprisingly tough) while listening to Draco Malfoy speaking with great authority and at some length about Quidditich, Quidditch brooms, Quidditch tactics and the Holyhead Harpies - who in his view had been good for nothing since they first allowed women to get involved. Hermione, who was fond of Quidditch, attempted a few questions, which he answered in an indulgently absentminded way, in a voice more suitable for a small child. Hermione wondered whether she should be offended, until she noticed that his manner with Pansy was not so very different. Come to that, he was not particularly civil to Crabbe, either. Still, now she was going to be a part of Geraint’s life, she was going to have to make an effort with his family, and her efforts were not in vain: after several questions about the famous Slytherin Quidditch victory in their seventh year, she was rewarded with a faint, thin smile, before he turned to tug Zabini’s sleeve and direct his attention to the hysterical sight of a house-elf who had become entangled while attempting to carry away the remains of the Devil’s Snare.
Since Hermione was so determined to fit in and not cause any upset, it was perhaps fortunate for her that four more house-elves came in before she had a chance to intervene, staggering under the weight of a vast, silver covered dish, which they placed on the table with a flourish.
"Now here’s something you’ll never get with those M- I mean, here’s a real treat for you, Hermione!" said Pansy brightly. "Roast haunch of young hippogriff - first of the season - reared especially for us, fed on nothing but pedigree chinchillas and long grain rice - not like those awful Montagues, all they can afford are the culls from Hagrid’s litters…"
While she was speaking, one of the house elves swept off the cover with a flourish, to reveal a mouth-watering roast, studded with cloves, star anise and some other spice that gave the surface a strange, oily, rainbow-coloured sheen. He whipped out a carving knife from the folds of his antimacassar and swiftly cut enough slices to feed twelve, so fast that the knife was a blur in his hands, while the other elves served the roast potatoes and six kinds of seasonal vegetables. Then they picked up their comrade - now purple in the face, choking silently on the floor in the grip of the Devil’s Snare - deposited him in the upturned dish-cover and carried it out between them.
"I know," said Pansy, following Hermione’s shocked gaze, "but what can you do? You just can’t get the staff nowadays."

Blaise Zabini turned towards her.
"Pansy’s been telling me all about your whirlwind romance!" he said. "Too crushingly romantic - just like the books my poor dear mother used to read. Now, please, you must tell us absolutely everything," he continued, leaning confidentially towards her. "How did you meet? Which of you popped the question? What do his parents think - such lovely people - have you met them yet?"
As they munched their way through enough roast hippogriff to feed a family of twenty in Nubia, Zabini kept up a running series of questions in an ingratiating, solicitous voice, black eyes lively in his smooth, handsome face. He appeared to be genuinely captivated by her story of their love snatched from the doors of death, and equally fascinated by all that she could tell him of Muggle life ("So your parents are dentists? How utterly fascinating. Is it true they use drills and hammers?").
All through the hippogriff course he asked and she answered, pleased to be able finally to contribute something to the conversation. As a result, it took Hermione longer than it should to have done to notice that all Zabini’s artless questions were framed in terms calculated to show her up as a mercenary gold-digger of questionable morals, and her parents as ludicrous simpletons. Once she had spotted this, it was difficult to miss the playful glances of delighted horror he kept exchanging with Draco. She avoided his eye and gave short answers, but he either did not notice or did not care. Finally, faced with a wide-eyed, innocent enquiry about whether Essex girl jokes had any foundation in reality, Hermione lost patience.
"Why, Blaise, I’d no idea you took such an interest in Muggle things!" she said sweetly. "Why don’t you visit my parents’ surgery one weekend? They’re fascinated by our world - my father loved the owl Pansy sent me - and I know he’d love to tell you all about it. Bring your wife if she can get away - I’m sure there’ll be enough room in the bungalow for both of you."
Zabini bridled, huffed and subsided into an appalled, sulky silence.
She thought she might have heard a choked snort from Snape, but when she turned to look at him he was staring morosely into the bottom of his Self-Fulfilling Goblet. He caught her glance, glowered at her and took another swig of wine.
Across the table, Crabbe cleared his throat.
"’Scuse me," he said though a mouthful of Hippogriff and caramelised parsnip. "Did you say your pa liked the owl? I thought Muggles hated owls."
Hermione looked in him in surprise: he had barely spoken so far, except to ask for second helpings.
"Of course we don’t hate owls," she said. "Most of us live in towns, and we hardly ever get a chance to see them, that’s all. My dad had never seen a live eagle owl before, and he was over the moon - said he’d never seen anything so beautiful."
"Eagle owl, was it?" said Crabbe with interest. "That’d be one of mine - I’ve gone into owl farming, y’know. I bet it was Otto. Missing left primary, very nice markings, a bit on the dark side?… it might’ve been Ulli, or even Gretel, but they’re more long-haul birds..."
After five minutes of intense cross-examination, Crabbe had made a positive identification of Otto the owl. By this point Malfoy was looking fractious, and Zabini was yawning delicately behind his hand.
"Really, Vincent!" said Pansy sharply, as Crabbe paused to draw breath. "Hermione’s a Mu- … a professional cursebreaker - she doesn’t want to hear about your silly old owls."
"Well, what else can he talk about? It’s not like he left school with any other qualifications, is it? Care of Magical’s the only OWL he left school with… as it were," said Malfoy, delighted with his own wit. Zabini sniggered appreciatively. Crabbe blushed and hung his head.
"Not at all," said Hermione encouragingly. "It must be fascinating to run an owl farm. What breeds do you keep?"

Pansy’s shoulders slumped, and Snape let out an audible groan. Crabbe, on the other hand, beamed at Hermione, and launched into a interminable description of life as an owl-farmer, with digressions into the merits of human-imprinted owls versus wild ones (wild ‘uns are a lot harder to train but they don’t try to mate with your head in spring), the best kind of owl for work in the desert (scops and burrowing owls don’t mind the heat, but a barn-owl’s a classic, one of those’ll get you anywhere) and an endless series of anecdotes about his favourite birds.
Under cover of Crabbe’s enthusiastic monologue, Hermione had no need to do more than smile and nod as they worked their way through the mahogany-smoked viper (which she correctly flaked off the bone with her fish-knife, to Blaise’s palpable disappointment and her own much better concealed triumph), and the roast peacock in its feathers that followed it. By this time, the food was starting to bother her. The exotic nature of the dishes was not a problem - when she was trapped in the pyramid with Geraint, they had been hungry enough at one point to give serious consideration to eating a six-thousand-year-old mummified crocodile; besides, no curse-breaker who was squeamish about what they ate managed to survive past their first meal at the Goblins’ high table. But Nubia was a poor and barren country: Hermione’s usual supper consisted of flatbread, chickpeas, lentils and goat’s milk, and the rich food was beginning to have an effect on her insides.
The pumpkin and nasturium sorbet that followed, though far too sweet for her taste, went some way to ease the discomfort, and she hoped very much that this signalled the end of the food. But it seemed that there was one last treat in store.

As Crabbe was telling her all about Henry the Great Grey Owl, who had strenuously resisted all attempts to breed it until it unexpectedly laid an egg, and Blaise was regaling Pansy of with an account of what Evadne Greengrass had said to Zacharias Smith about Millicent Bulstrode, another bevy of house-elves came tripping in, bearing more plates. Several had welts on their hands or necks from the Devil’s Snare, and all were sporting cuts and bruises.
"Aha!" cried Blaise gaily, with a playful glance at Hermione. "We are honoured! Aggressive Artichokes - straight from the Malfoy greenhouse, if I’m any judge!" He exchanged a laughing glance with Malfoy. Across the table, Professor Snape took another swig from his goblet, and stared morosely at his plate.
In front of her, nestling in a bed of exotic leaves and drenched in aromatic oils, sat a large, plump, golden artichoke. It looked so ripe and tender that Hermione almost thought she could see its flanks moving up and down.
She looked up, and realised that everyone was watching her. She reached for innermost knife and fork in her now depleted table setting.
"Well," she said. "You shouldn’t have bothered - and I’m so full - these look almost too good to eat…" and lowered her fork to the tawny scales of the artichoke.
The artichoke appeared to flinch out of the path of the fork, and rolled unharmed to the side of her plate. Hermione blinked, attempted to regain her composure, and stabbed down with her fork at the prone vegetable.
The artichoke let out a shrill wail, rolled out of the path of the fork, snapped upwards, and Hermione felt many sharp, pointed little teeth meet in the fleshy part of her palm. She shrieked, and dropped her fork.
"Oh dear," said Blaise, turning laughing dark eyes on Draco, "now she’s made it angry."
"They should’ve told you," said Crabbe. "You’ve got to peel off the petals of the Aggressive Artichoke, disarm it before it wakes up. Have to use your hands - they’re very sensitive to metal. Why didn’t you tell her, Pansy? How’s she going to catch it now, eh?"
He pinned down his own artichoke with one large, meaty hand, while the other grasped its snout, and wrenched it firmly backwards. The plant convulsed, and went limp. He ripped off the leaves, which he dipped into a bowl of rich, smoking blood-red sauce in the centre of the table.
"There!" he said with a reassuring smile at Hermione. "That’s the way to do it. Quick and simple." He scraped the insides of one of the leaves off with his teeth. "M’wife always says it’s like waxing a leg - quicker you do it, the less it hurts." He caught Draco’s eye, blushed and fell silent.
The golden globe on Hermione’s plate shifted and gave a little whimper. Hermione looked at it, her already uncomfortably full stomach roiling at the prospect of having to strip the petals off a living thing and then devour its quivering insides. Sensing weakness, the creature cocked its snout at her, and snarled.

I hope the font doesn't go all wierd on me this time. No idea what that was all about.

Other news: I'm going to have my name in lights - a publishing company has accepted my introduction to a dictionary, and they've sent me the proofs. I wrote this introduction about 6  months ago, and went through so much stress that I vowed Never Again, but with a bit of judicious editing and all nicely typeset it looks surprisingly plausible. I'm feeling quite smug.

Comments

[a-t-rain.livejournal.com]

"Basically OK"? It's roll-on-the-floor hilarious, especially Snape losing his fiancee to Stan Shunpike (smart woman!), Pansy's nonchalant "You can't get the staff nowadays," and Crabbe and his owls ("wild ‘uns are a lot harder to train but they don’t try to mate with your head in spring"). You really do have to finish this!

Couple of little things:

"after a serious of incidents..." = "After a series of incidents"? "After a serious incident"?

Paragraph breaks are a Good Thing. Preferably with double returns -- reading a large chunk of text on-screen is hard on the eyes.

[dolorous-ett.livejournal.com]

"wild ‘uns are a lot harder to train but they don’t try to mate with your head in spring"

This is actually a verbatim quote from a very nice bloke who used to run a Birds of Prey Centre in North Yorkshire.

"after a serious of incidents..." = "After a series of incidents"? "After a serious incident"?

Ouch. Well spotted. It was meant to be "after a series of incidents". I can only assume that the monster that ate all my paragraph brakes scrambled that sentence as well - it all looked perfectly well formatted in Word on my home computer. I suspect it's one of the odd glitches you get when you try to combine Chinese and English word processing software. But next time I'll put in all the paragraph breaks by hand if I have to.

Many thanks for your kind words - and I'm very glad you spotted Stan! I felt he needed a bit of fun - and I've always found it odd that a man as difficult as Snape never seems to get jilted in fanfiction.

[dolorous-ett.livejournal.com]

Erratum: for brakes read breaks. Sigh.

[lareinenoire.livejournal.com]

First of all, Snape's fiancée running off with Stan was...brilliant. Just classic.

Loved Pansy's interactions with the staff, though I feel terrible for those poor house-elves. Descriptions of the food were fantastic. Poor Hermione! I know I'd be extremely perturbed if an artichoke snarled at me.

And thank you for giving Crabbe something to say! ::snickers:: An owl-farmer. That's great.

I actually can't see anything problematic, outside of the paragraph breaks (which a_t_rain has already remarked upon). You do need to post this!

[dolorous-ett.livejournal.com]

*blush* *simper*

Thank you for your kind words! I'm glad you liked the food - I had a lot of fun with that, trying to work out combinations of odd ingredients that might actually taste good.

And thank you for giving Crabbe something to say! ::snickers:: An owl-farmer. That's great.

Glad you liked him. I've always felt there's a lot of blank spaces with Crabbe and Goyle, which could be filled in all sorts of ways. And for some reason, the very few people who write about them always plump for writing about Goyle.

[hannahmarder.livejournal.com]

Hi! Congratulations on your dictionary intro getting accepted! Is it for a Chinese dictionary? The story is brilliant, I don't think I have anything to add from what everything else has said. I'm looking forward to reading more.

[dolorous-ett.livejournal.com]

The story is brilliant, I don't think I have anything to add from what everything else has said. I'm looking forward to reading more.

*basks in warm glow of praise* Thank you!

Glad you liked the story - I'm hoping to get Part 3 up in a day or two, though winding it up is proving a little harder than I thought. I'm also a bit concerned I might have gone a tad over the top in the article of artichoke aggression.

Congratulations on your dictionary intro getting accepted! Is it for a Chinese dictionary?

Yes, it's for a Chinese-English dictionary. There are several publishers working on such things at the moment, actually - it looks like people over here are finally waking up to the fact that there are a lot of Chinese in the world, even if most of them aren't over here. Yet.

I was an absolute martyr to lousy dictionaries as an undergraduate and after (while still deriving a lot of fun from ludicrously politicised example sentences from mainland Chinese dictionaries, such as "She has performed immortal feats from the Revolution". As you do...) So it's nice to think I can do a bit to make things better. And get paid for it!

[a-t-rain.livejournal.com]

I was an absolute martyr to lousy dictionaries as an undergraduate and after (while still deriving a lot of fun from ludicrously politicised example sentences from mainland Chinese dictionaries, such as "She has performed immortal feats from the Revolution". As you do...)

Snerk. It's funny what the examples from textbooks can tell you about a culture.

I studied Czech, rather unsuccessfully, for a year, from a textbook written back in the Iron Curtain era when it was assumed that the only English speakers coming to Czechoslovakia were academic types. Accordingly, the sample sentences ranged from the very scholarly ("A symbol interests us not only for what it represents, but for what it is." "The visionary view of reality characteristic of the novel was completely alien to Havlicek, as it was to most critics of the period*") to the very paranoid ("Be careful what you say!")

* Yes, this is an actual sentence from an introductory textbook. In the very same lesson, you learn how to tell time. Go figure. (Of course, telling time in Czech is about as complicated as the visionary view of reality, so maybe the author wasn't completely insane.)

[dolorous-ett.livejournal.com]

Then you know what I'm on about.

There are some killer textbooks for Chinese - the one I started Chinese with was already out of date when I started it - from the late 70s - and featured an appalling pair of goody-goody overseas students called Gubo and Palanka (this being the writer's idea of Western names). This rebarbative duo did everything right, spent all their time working hard and never ruffling any feathers (an impossibility if half of what I hear about being a Westerner in China then is anything to go by), and learned stupid sappy folksongs to delight their Chinese hosts (what use has a beginner for the sentence "The Xinjiang Grapes Are Ripe"? Unless they are a spy in want of code words, of course). To this day, Gubo and Palanka are loathed by Chinese-speakers the world over.

And the scary thing is that a successor to this book has just been brought out - featuring, among other fairly gruesome characters (who are not Gubo and Palanka and are therefore a vast improvement) the offspring of Gubo on Palanka's drippy exchange partner Ding Yun. Which rather begs the question what did they do with Palanka???

I have a series of speculations on this, each more lurid than the last. And I'd write a fanfic and tell the world, if I thought anyone would be interested.

Oooo, when did this turn into a rant? I've plainly got some serious Unresolved Issues on this one. Well, thanks for listening - I feel a lot better now.

[a-t-rain.livejournal.com]

Heh. I did a Google search on Gubo and Palanka, and apparently you're not the only one to speculate about this.

We didn't have any characters in the Czech textbook -- the sample sentences and dialogues just sort of sat there, disembodied of any context, and you wondered what on earth could have inspired them. (There must have been some sort of story behind "Every day he follows me to my house! He even asked me to introduce him to my sister! If you see him, tell him I don't want anything more to do with him.")

There were also no songs in the textbook, but my professor made up for it by having us translate Czech popular music. I picked a song that sounded like a pretty little folk-pop tune, and ended up with this. (My professor helped with the translation. Left to my own devices, I would have translated the second line as "Half the day I discipline in the room," which actually makes a lot of sense in context.)

Er, yeah. Rather far afield from attack artichokes, so I hope you don't mind my rambling.

Gubo & Palanka (since you mention them...)

[dolorous-ett.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link. Scary to realise I'm not the only one out there. And yet strangely reassuring.

Curiously, I'd forgotten all about the beach scene. But I always thought there was a strange lack of warmth in their relationship. Right from the first lesson, when Gubo meets Palanka at the station. No effusive greetings, no smiles, just stilted "Hello." "Hello". "Are you well?" "I am very well. And you?" "I'm very well too". Don't tell me that's natural after a long separation. So the cracks were already starting to show, for those who have Eyes to See.

It's my personal opinion that after Gubo and Ding Yun formed their guilty connection, they did their best to frame Palanka for a crime she didn't commit, and fled to a life of smug, wedded bliss in Canada. What Gubo (who is still alive, though he's lost his looks and now sports a comb-over) and Ding Yun don't know is that a pregnant Palanka managed to escape justice, and made it to Britain, where she raised her daughter (Lin Na, who also appears in the new textbook) to find those who did her mother wrong and seek a gruesome revenge.

And that's the nicest version. You really don't want to know what Palanka's fate could have been.

I liked the song - in a sick sort of way. Did you know it was going to mean that, or did you think it was a Czech "I should be so lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky"?

Re: Gubo & Palanka (since you mention them...)

[a-t-rain.livejournal.com]

Did you know it was going to mean that, or did you think it was a Czech "I should be so lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky"?

Well, the professor did put a note on the CD to the effect that the song was "a little bit weird," but I didn't know in which way it was weird, no. (Naturally, I chose it because I wanted to find out.)

I like it too, but I don't expect to find many occasions to use my ability to rattle off "I will tie your hands to the bed" in fluent Czech.