This both made me sad, and filled me with a sense that this was how things must be. Poor Caspian ... he had some hard years there at the end...

Thanks so much for writing!

I suppose heart-break could be considered a sort of incurable illness.

Isn't he in his 80s though? I thought that Eustace had been gone seventy Narnian years plus however old Caspian was during VotDT.

Lovely story, bittersweet and remeniscent of him having to leave World's End behind because it was not his time, except that now it is his time.
I take it that the Captain is Drinian...

Shire Rose

Sunset and evening star, and one clear call for me...
Girls,what can I say? This fic flows with the winds and the waves around that ship, with the beauty and the sorrow. Your title, above all, is a perfect fit. All I can do is quote poetry back at you:
For though from out our bourne of time and place, the flood may bear me far; I shall see my Captain face to face, when I have crossed the bar.
Bless you.

Poor Drinian. He's one of my favorite characters from the whole Chronicles. He did, after all, show extraordinary patience with three royals mucking around on his ship!

That would make sense. Caspian was rather young. (Relatively speaking.) It is possible that heart-break might have had something to do with it as well.

The poem is perfect. It has long been one o my favorites, achingly beautiful in its simplicity.

I liked this. I suppose there was a time when people were regarded as old in their fifties, but only because of a high death rate amongst the younger age range, and I don't think Caspian's Narnia was that harsh a place, so this makes such a lot of is also extremely poigiant.

Very lovely and sad. I too have thought that Caspian was too young to die-at least going by the chronology that Lewis seemed to imply. So your idea of his being ill seems workable. I don't know when Stevenson wrote that poem, but it's fitting because he also died quite young, I think in his forties. Like Caspian, Stevenson loved the lands far from his homeland. I feel very flattered that he spent time in America, and I love that he went to live in Samoa.

It's often struck me that Caspian is the only Narnian character whose entire lifespan was made part of the books. Yet Lewis also left a lot of spaces for us to fill. Did Caspian go on other voyages? What was his life like with the star's daughter? Did she travel with him? Thereby hang many tales.

As always, you give a wonderfully evocative and vividly detailed portrait of a ship. And it only took you a paragraph!

Good point: I always wondered about how feeble Caspian was in "The Silver Chair"...it indeed seemed off, time-wise. And I love classic poetry. It gives me hope for the future to see that love of poetry (REAL poetry) is not dead. This, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is very like RLS's:

"Stop, Christian passer-by!-Stop, child of God,
And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod
A poet lies, or that which once seem'd he.-
O, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C.;
That he who many a year with toil of breath
Found death in life, may here find life in death!
Mercy for praise-to be forgiven for fame
He ask'd, and hoped, through Christ. Do thou the same!"

You and Rose are such good story-tellers...do you ladies have Celtic blood in you, by any chance? The story telling "gene" runs deep in us. :) By the way, did you know what Taliesin said about Jesus? He said this:

"Christ, the Word from the beginning, was from the beginning our teacher, and we never lost His teaching. Christianity was in Asia a new thing; but never was there a time when the Druids of Britain held not its doctrine."

This was so bittersweet, Drinian knowing he can't do anything to stop his friend and King from dying, and not being able to give him the hope he so desperately wanted. This was a very poignant line: "he had been dying for many years." I always thought Caspian had died at long last from a broken heart, and this really sums up the cumulative effect of the great sorrows of us life so well. The poem at the end was truly perfect.

I've heard thar poem. In a story, I once read, the character read it on a tombstone. Its sad, but I think this story has a sweet-ending (britter-sweet for Drinian, maybe) but a very nice SC story. I've wondered what what Aslan said to Caspian on that final (or vice-versa) during that final voyage. I believe you got the gist of it down well!

This is not something written of often and I really liked your choice of topic and character. I especially like that the King was ordered home and the sailors see it as funeral barge. The writing, like the ship, flows well.

Caspian's timeline, if based upon that very odd Wiki thing, is very peculiar. It's always fun to see how people try to spackle/fill/correct it, and this is one very good idea. Poor Caspian. His life was so sad.

A broken heart is what killed him I feel in the end - the lose of his wife and his son. The cares of ruling Narnia has made him old before his time. (Look at Obama and the colour of his hair he looks much older than his years to me)

But I agree he did die too young.

Ah. That catches like a wound. There were so many lines in here that were filled with that painful sort of beauty. "...what they were aboard was a funeral barge." The repeat of "The King was dying." The way you described the tendrils of death. And of course, that last line, "Bring me home and there will I die." I've been studying the importance of word order for a class on writing, and let me tell you, that sentence alone is a masterpiece.

And of course, Robert Louis Stevenson simply adds to the glory of this piece. That's a lovely poem. I quite agree about Caspian not being old enough to die by the time SC rolled around. There was certainly something other than old age that caused his death, unless he simply grew old quickly because of the loss of the Queen and Rilian. But tis an interesting point.

There's a line in Voyage of the Dawn Treader about something Lucy heard/felt at the end of the world that she said "would break your heart, but not from sadness". This story /will/ break your heart from sadness, but from that something else too. I very much enjoyed it, bittersweet though it be.

I liked it! It showed how tired and weary Caspian was, but that he was truly ready for Aslan to take him home. And so Rilian and Drinian should rejoice that he went to Aslan.

Sniff. So sad, and yet a lovely kind of sadness. The poem at the end is perfect. And, yes, I've often wondered how Caspian could be so old if Rillian is still a young man when they find him. I mean, he would have been gone for over thirty years if Caspian was that old, unless Rillian was born reallyreallyreally late in the marriage. Caspian was only seventeen or so when he married Ramandu's daughter, and if Rillian was born a year or two later, or even five years later, that means that Rillian would have been close to fifty when he was freed from the Witch. So, anyways, I liked this and I think it's quite possible that he had a disease (which might mean that Lucy's cordial had been all used up before he found out about the disease, otherwise someone would have given it to him in his sleep, even if he didn't want them to).

That's sad, yet touching. I am glad that Caspian saw his son for that brief moment before he passed, but he was indeed coming home to die. It's an interesting perspective, seeing it from his Captain's point of view, but I like it.