Work Text:
“China! Fine China! Wares from far-off Cathay!”
The scholar in tweed peered curiously at the stall. He was quite well-traveled himself; he wasn’t even born in England, but in one of the colonies, between the Boer Wars. Now he was among the English scholars of Oxford, and sat in a well-worn booth at the Eagle and Child.
Plain. Dull. Unremarkable. Nothing caught his eye, except — a bead, polished, made of volcano glass or some other material.
“D’you like it? It’s nephrite. Jade, the locals call it.”
“I thought jade was supposed to be green,” said the professor off-handedly. It was a polite reminder not to cheat a man just because he didn’t look like he did manual labor.
“Green, it usually is, but there are darker and lighter shades. Some’s so dark that it’s basically black. This is that kind.”
“It should be cheaper, then. They value fair and bright colors in their semi-precious stones over there. Dark colors are sold at a loss. How much?”
The hawker named a moderate price. It was a bit high, certainly higher than what the bead had sold for in Cathay, but the scholar suddenly found he was in no mood to haggle.
“I’ll take it.”
He stared at the bead more and more. Hours passed, lost in its inky depths. Sometimes, he imagined he saw something. He knew it was like looking at an inkblot — he saw only what he wanted to see — but what man could resist the sight of what he wanted to see?
Sometimes, he imagined a great glassy orb, through which wizards saw for leagues in any direction. They, too, would stare into its depths, transfixed, insensate to the world around them yet seeing more deeply than any mortal.
He wrote these ideas down.
Lewis was a jovial fellow, when he was not busy marrying widows who then died abruptly. This morning, he could scarcely repress his chuckles as John held forth.
“And one must bear the relic forth, carrying the weight of it like the weight of Original Sin. Into the Mountains of Doom they shall go, and the hopes of men and elves — which is to say, spirits of light, man-shaped, but not sharing in the covenants of man — the hopes of all free peoples shall go with them.”
“Yes, yes I see.”
“And a great and terrible task it shall be, and it shall weigh upon him heavily. For, deep within his gut, within his very bowels, churns a dark and terrible power! The bearer of the anal bead will be chased by the Wraiths of the Bead — “
“Wait, hold on, I’m sorry. Did you say ‘the bearer of the anal bead’?”
“Well, yes. That is the relic.”
“And this bead, it sits in his arse, and generates monsters?”
“The Wraiths of the Bead are those who sought to possess it in the past, but lost out to its power, and failed to maintain their humanity,” said John very seriously. “They were once human, but are now less than human. Still, they are deadly combatants. They are drawn to the bead, as they were in life, and harass its bearer.”
“Look, don’t take this wrong, mate, but — why anal beads? What’s the, erm, what’s the fascination?”
“Termed Ben-Wa beads in the Far East, to carry one is a great tribulation. And I wanted a main character to undergo a great and terrible tribulation, to carry a weighty task — “
“Yes, yes of course, but don’t you think that audiences — don’t you think the relic could be anything? Clearly you’re inspired by tales of the fragments of the True Cross, but people had those worked into all sorts of other relics. They could be sword hilts from broken swords with the blade missing — “
“The shattered sword Narsil!” John scribbled something hastily on a paper.
“Yes, they could be small caskets with the object inside, phylacteries, rings… why anal beads?”
John looked crestfallen. “This just happened to be my vision. I really did not want to compromise on my art. Do you think — this is a necessary change?”
Lewis put an arm around his drinking companion. “Look, all things told, it really is a minor detail in a great story. I would just hate to see readers tripped up over a detail and miss the wider story!”
“I… I suppose instead of the Fellowship of the Anal Bead, it can be the Fellowship of the Ring.”
“There you go,” said Lewis. “That’s the spirit!”
And thus, the Fellowship was born.