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Something random from the drawer, because I CAN’T start every novel that pushes into my head, and sometimes I write the beginning to shut it up — and now that I can go indie, I wonder “should I?”

If You Stand Before The Fires Of Hell
And Death Is at Your Back…

    I

    Night had fallen, a strange night that painted the deep, dark sky with vivid streaks of violet.  I  didn’t want to think about how night could fall in a world outside normal reality – an Earth with no sun.
            This night was not a natural thing, but a living darkness that advanced liked probing fingers, or like creeping fog.  I felt cold where it touched, as though it leached all warmth from living flesh.
    The four tents we had pitched close together on the grayish, barren ground, were covered with a brittle black frost that let out an odor like old charcoal or frozen ashes.
    As darkness overpowered light, another kind of light became visible: red, roaring, and somehow managing not to add anything to the visibility.  It shone from the East like the forest fires I remembered from when I was a very little girl.  Unlike those fires, though, it would not bring warmth, but a sort of frozen burning and eternal torment.
            If I concentrated and stopped breathing for a moment, I could hear a noise coming from that glow.  It should have been the crackle of fire, but instead it was the moans and cries of a thousand tongues in despair superimposed on the triumphant, gloating cackle that was the battle cry of the legions of hell.  Impossible to say I was not scared.  Old veterans of the legion would be scared by this.  I was terrified.
    I’d have swallowed, but my tongue was almost glued to my palate.  The water, though we’d rationed it for three days, was down to a cup or so per person, and I’d been husbanding my share so that I’d not permitted myself more than a few drops.  And so, we must die, one way or another.  Either of thirst and hunger, on this plane unsuited to human life, or mowed down by the forces of hell.  One way or another, we would die today.
    My squad huddled in a circle, talking.  They were only feet from me, but I couldn’t hear their words.  It didn’t matter, because I could hear their tone, which was almost as lost and scared as that of the damned souls.
    This is how they take us, I thought.  From the inside out.  They couldn’t any other way.
    It was my thought, formed in my mind, but I could almost hear my father’s voice in it and see him glaring at me for allowing myself to be so weak.
    I cast a look at the four tents.  Somewhere in there, Richtofen sat, gripped by a fever that should not infect any mortal.  Marlowe had disappeared on the reconnaissance this morning.  Turned or dead, he would not be back.  The sky above was dark, starless.  The squad – all six of them – looked like children lost in the night.
    I was the ranking officer here.  Right.  I tightened the grey wool cloak of the witching regiments around myself.  It had gotten ripped and burnt a little at the edges, in the last week, but it didn’t mater.  It was still the mark of all I’d learned in basic.  Such as it was.  “Squad, Attention! On your feet.” They shambled to attention, facing me, so fast that I knew they hadn’t even thought, much less realized it was me giving orders.
    A pathetic force to face the uncountable millions the other side could throw at us: a line of twelve, anchored at one end by Jeremy’s pale, too-tall body, and at the other by Dave Black’s squat, glowering figure.  They blinked at me, and I could imagine the rebellious whine forming just behind their eyes.  Particularly Dave’s.  Well, no matter then.
    “We will not sit here and wait for death and eternal damnation,” she said.  “We’re going to attack.”  The words seemed like insanity, even as I said them.

    #

    My name is Lillith Marie Elizabeth Quattermain, and I never meant to be a soldier.  I certainly never meant to volunteer for any fighting outfit.  I fully supported the right of women to fight in combat, even if it left me a little puzzled as to why they would want to.
    Perhaps it was because I was the daughter of a veteran.  Dad had fought in World War two.  Not that he talked about it much.
    I’d been born after all that, mind.  Well after.  And he never said anything to me.  Once, when I was fifteen or so, I’d asked him what it was like to be a member of The Greatest Generation, and he’d just curled his lip and shaken his head and said they’d done what they had to do and most of them were too stupid to realize what they were risking.  And that was that.
    But sometimes, when his friends came over – fewer and fewer of them as time went on – they’d sit around and drink beers and not talk about the war.  Those silences were the most eloquent thing I’d ever heard, and by themselves they gave the lie to all tales of heroism and glory.
    So I’d grown up and gone to college and studied classical music, and toured with my violin all over most of Europe and a good part of the other continents, before that telephone message reached me in a hotel in Paris, in the wee hours of a grey October morning.
    The meeping of the squat grey phone on the bedside woke me and I groped for it without waking.  I only half understood the words that came out of it, “Lilly?  Your dad died.  Funeral day after tomorrow.  Can you get back?”
            The words made no sense.  Oh, sure, I knew dad was old – he was in his late sixties when I was born.  But he never seemed to get any older, either, so that I’d come to regard him as one of those immutable features of the environment, a mountain or a shore.  I started to say “Wha– ” and stopped, because I recognized the voice.  I followed that voice, like a lifeline to the meaning.  “Uncle Mark?”
    “Yeah,” my dad’s oldest, closest friend rasped, from the other side.  “I’m sorry Lilly.”

I need to write this book, which only took 15 years and several blind avenues to make sense in my mind.  Now I have the voice and the central theme and the rest will work itself out:

The Brave And The Free

Screaming In the Dark
His Serenity

I think there was always something wrong with me, something fundamentally broken.

My first coherent memory is of being three or so, a chubby little girl with sandy blond hair, standing with clenched fists, screaming at my trainers that no, I wouldn’t do what they said.  I would have none of it.  And unless they told me why I had to do what they said I would not do it.  They couldn’t control me.

Eventually the paddle and the whip, judiciously and liberally applied brought it home to me that the reason to do what my trainers ordered me to do was simple: to avoid pain.

But that didn’t mean I’d forgotten.  Inside the impeccably trained Guardian, inside the exercise-hardened body, the procedure-following operative, I was still that little girl, three years old, with my fists clenched tight and screaming my rage at the world.

That angry child could neither be appeased nor silenced.  She needed only an opportunity to get out.

She found it with the mission to ensnare Reehat Vorat, his Serenity of Daice.

At least Father had told me that the man we knew as Reehat East was his Serenity in exile, living in disgrace on Earth.  I didn’t believe him.  This man looked nothing like I imagined, nothing like the Vorat men.

As most of you know I consider myself American.  More than that – in a joke you won’t get until A Few Good Men comes out unless you’ve read Darkship Thieves about a thousand times – I consider myself A Usaian.

But there is one think in which I must break ranks with y’all – and that’s when we talk about what I’d like to call deep history.

First of all, I’m going to say I don’t know history like ya’ll know history – by which I mean the US in general.  I don’t know if you realize this, but we probably have more “history hobbyists” than any other country in the universe.  By which I mean someone whose job it is NOT to study history, but who does nonetheless become an expert in a certain time or place.  For instance, my plumber is an expert on the attire, food, guns and what I’d call “daily life” of Colorado in civil war times.

I’m terrified of the various history hobbyists around the US.  I mean, most of them are rather forgiving, but no matter how much research I do, how well I track things, and how many of the hobbyists I enlist, if I write something set no matter in how obscure a time period, I’ll get fifteen letters saying “that shape pot didn’t exist in the fourteenth century.”   Or, “young lady, is this set in DUMAS’ time or the musketeers’ time?”  (Actually I do have an answer to that one and it is – it is set in the world of Dumas’ musketeers, which had bleed through.  In the case of the vampire musketeers, it’s an alternate.)

For five glorious years when we had money (pre-nine-eleven) I belonged to the history book club and one year I managed to spend something like nine thousand dollars in books.  It was a good year.  My husband thought I was insane.

This is not normal in other countries.  People don’t study history, much less THAT detailed a history, for fun.  Professors do, but as we know, they can have fun, but they can’t SHOW it.

So, in that as in so many things the common man in the US is a wonder and compares favorably the creme de la creme of other lands.  I take my hat off to you, and I’m both proud and humbled you let me be one of you.

BUT one thing you’re missing and that has two roots: you are missing the sense of how messy history really is, and how persistent.

There are two reasons for this – one of them is that the country is young and for at least half the people (and probably more) a linguistic barrier with the past intervened.  That is, in almost every American’s history there is one side where the parents had to learn a new language and could or would not ever fully communicate their legends and stories in English to their offspring.    The other part of this is that the country is mobile.  Some of these … what I’d call fossilized history are never fully expressed – they pass on because both parents believe them/know them/use them without thought.  But here, when a person from one part of the country (or another country [grin]) marries someone from far away, you sort of edge away from your crazier beliefs/expressions/traditions.  Many of them don’t live up to the full light of rationality, and when you try to explain them to your spouse, they disappear.

What exactly do I mean?  Oh, I mean stuff like the unexamined assumptions built into language.  For instance, the local slang word for pig and blond man was the same.  It was “Russo” Yep, the Russ Vikings DID raid that portion of the country.  Why do you ask?

And then there was the way that “The ancients said” put an end to any argument about how to do things.  Or charming proverbs like “He who has a mouth goes to Rome.”  (Never figured out if that referred to Catholic Church hierarchy or to ancient Rome.)

When I talked about fossilized faith, it was at that level.  How deep does it go?  Deep.  For instance, on the first of May everyone puts a certain flower in every opening of their house.  Why?  To keep evil spirits out.  If you research (I did) it turns out that the flower was sacred to the Celtic Goddess of Spring.

How deep?  Well…  Judging from the Tiffany Aching series, Pratchett and I share a fund of the same folk superstitions and culture.  And look, yeah, Portugal and the British isles had contact forever, but not that DEEP – not at the level of folk religion/culture.  There is, after all, the language barrier.  And yet…  And yet it’s there, and I suspect goes back to pre-Roman times.

So when people tell me that “human beings are rational” or “they just do things because everyone else does it” they’re ignoring the accumulation of history, the accretion of little meaningless-seeming details that, in their entirety, give form and texture to daily life, and even influence the seemingly-all-rational decisions we make.

The sort of fracture that US culture allows is good in a way.  It allows us to move fast, less fettered with meaningless tradition and history.  (And a good half of it if not more IS meaningless.)  My boys have been known to describe Portugal as a swimmer fettered to a large iron ball.  That iron ball is history.

On the other hand, when it comes to understanding human limitations Americans born and bread bred [stupid auto-complete fingers!] can be (not to say are.  Some aren’t) curiously lacking.  This is good to an extent: to dream the impossible dream and all that.  But it also makes people judge the US far more harshly and come up with bright ideas like the US can’t make war JUST to further its national interests, and if it does so, it’s “evil” – because the people saying this don’t realize every nation throughout history did this, and still does, in fact, when it can get away with doing it.  It leads to people turning on the US because it’s not perfect – because they don’t understand the essential “brokenness” of humanity and therefore of human history.

In the same way when dealing with other countries or expecting other countries to behave in a certain way.  The US can be the kid who sits there going “But that’s not rational!”  And of course it’s not.

I don’t know if there’s any way to get that feel for human history and the try-fail of human attempts at betterment without growing up in an old country.  Some of you have, obviously, managed it.  I know it takes more than the sort of hobbyist history that so many people engage in.  I suspect it takes questioning the texts themselves, looking for primary sources, and always thinking a lot.

To those of you who manage it – I am in awe.  To those who don’t – try to understand not every country is the US.  The US is in many ways uniquely blessed.  It doesn’t even come close to being uniquely evil.  Learn other countries’ history without blinders and without setting different standards for them.  And learn that what is in books is always only half the story.

Real history is a story of trying and failing.  Of falling to get up again.  Of keeping trying and keeping faith.  And sometimes you have to have great patience and work in increments to a goal.

No one is perfect, not even us.  Perfection is a goal to aim towards, but it can rarely be achieved.

By the by, guest blogging today at Vampchix and Bite Club

*If you don’t read vampires, please don’t read further.  Also, fair warning because this blog is normally PG — there is EXPLICIT sexual stuff in the prologue (not quite sex) — so if you shouldn’t be reading that stuff, don’t.  Or just page down or search for “Ruins and Fallen Angels.  This is the first book of the Vampire musketeer trilogy.”*

This book, Sword And Blood, under Sarah Marques is available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble and probably your local bookstore, though you might have to order it.  The prequel novella, First Blood, is available in eformat from Naked Reader Press  and Amazon.

PROLOGUE

Paris, Wednesday, April 9, 1625

His captors dragged and pulled him past the ruined marble archway, the ropes on his wrists too tight, the ropes on his ankles loosened only enough to allow him the small steps he must take to avoid falling. They had stolen his sword. His blond hair was matted with blood, but he didn’t know whose.

Three of them held him on either side, their supernatural strength making it impossible for him to escape.

Still he struggled, his fevered mind knowing only that he must break free from the hands gripping his arms like vises. He must defeat the bone-crushing grasp of fingers on his waist.

Pulled into the shadows of the defiled church—with its broken cross, its holy statues scribbled with obscenities and painted with leers and fangs—he twisted, suddenly. The frantic hands tightened on him. He managed to sink his teeth into one of the implacable fingers holding his arm.

The metallic taste of blood filled his mouth. The one he was biting—a coarse-haired man, who in life must have been a peasant—pulled his hand free and grinned widely, displaying long fangs that sparkled in the guttering light of the candles surrounding the bloodstained altar.

“Oh, good effort!” the bitten man said, speaking as though Athos were a puppy or a kitten. Then, looking up, he said in quite a different voice, “We’ve brought him, milady.”

Athos turned—and his mind stopped.

She stood by the altar, as she had stood by quite a different altar, fifteen years ago, when she had given him her hand in marriage. You could say she was tall and beautiful and slim and blond—but that omitted much of everything she truly was. The first time he had seen her, in the humble cottage that the priest of Athos’ parish was given as a prerogative of his office, he’d thought her an angel descended from heaven.

Whatever had happened to her in fifteen years since he had last seen her had changed neither her countenance nor her figure. She retained the perfect oval face with large, expressive violet-blue eyes. Her hair was still that shade of blond on the edge of silver, still a straight, glimmering cascade down to her waist.

She wore simple clothing, albeit much more expensive than it had been when he met her—a white overdress made of velvet with a collar outlined in ermine shining like ice around her neck. A silver belt delineated a waist that could still fit the span of his two hands.

She stepped down from the altar platform, down the marble steps, between the candles, her steps so graceful and lovely that Athos, unable to breathe, could only think he was seeing her ghost—that she had descended from heaven to redeem him. To forgive him for his horrible crime against her.

The last time he had seen her, he’d left her for dead after hanging her by the neck from the branch of a young tree. He looked anxiously at her neck for signs of the ordeal, but by the light of the candles it looked white and perfect, and he wondered if all this were a dream.

Or had the other been the dream? An evil nightmare, conjured by a demon? Perhaps the whole world they lived in was a nightmare. Perhaps none of it was true. Perhaps vampires didn’t fill half the world and more, maybe France wasn’t at war in all but name. Perhaps he and this exquisite beauty were still married and their lives were whole back in Athos’ domain of La Fère.

He felt his dry lips move, and heard himself rasp out, “Charlotte!”

She spoke in the voice he remembered, the musical tones that fell on the ears like the caress of soft fingers upon the skin. “Did you miss me, Raphael?”

Looking like she was dancing in air, she drew near, until she was standing close by him, her scent enveloping him. So near that were he not still held immobile, he could have leaned down and kissed her. “Yes,” he told her, struggling to embrace her. “Oh, yes.”

And then the fact that she was here, and that he had been brought to her by Richelieu’s guards penetrated his mind, and he knitted his brow. “Did they . . . ” He was about to ask if they’d captured her too, then he remembered one of those holding him had talked as if she’d ordered it. They had called her milady. An English term, but proof they held her in respect. He looked at her in horror. “Charlotte!”

She grinned, displaying sharp fangs he had never seen. They glimmered brightly on either side of her mouth. “What else, Raphael?” she said. “How else do you think I could have survived that noose?” She stared up at him, her eyes gleaming. Then, looking away, she told the men holding him, “Strip him!”

Athos twisted, pivoted, trying to avoid them, but a hand reached out and ripped his doublet, then his shirt, and finally his breeches and undergarment, leaving him shivering in the spring night in his stockings and boots. Those too were torn from him.

She said, “The altar.”

Two of the vampires lifted him and laid him down on cold marble. They tied him down, arms and legs twisted and bent, to the columnar supports.

Athos and his friends had found corpses tied like this. Blood masses they called these rituals, though Aramis had said no masses were celebrated. There was no ritual, just a group of vampires all feeding on the human victim until he was dead. A communion, perhaps, but not holy.

The cold, hard altar leeched the heat from his skin and thought from his mind. He was immobilized, hand and foot, atop, he was sure, old bloodstains. They tightened a rough rope across his torso, biting into his flesh. This was his last hour. He would die here, bound so he could not move. He would die here, and his friends would find him, dead and pale and defiled.

He licked his lips and managed to summon voice to his dry mouth, “Listen, Charlotte, I don’t . . . I don’t blame you for wanting your revenge.”

She checked the knots at his hands, her light fingers just touching his skin as she adjusted the rope. “Oh, good,” she said. “I would hate to think you withheld your forgiveness from me.”

One of the watching male vampires laughed, but stopped abruptly as Charlotte glanced down at him.

Athos shook his head. Before he died, he must make her understand. “It isn’t that,” he said. “I just . . . I realized afterwards I judged you too quickly. Just because you . . . just because you were branded with the fleur-de-lis, it didn’t mean you were a Judas goat or that you served the vampires. I should never . . . I should have asked you first. Before . . . executing you. Trying to execute you.”

She smiled at him and did not say anything. Her fingers moved idly from his wrists, as if of their own accord tracing the contour of muscles on his arm, sculpted and strengthened by his sword fighting day after day for fifteen years. “I think you’ve grown more muscular, Raphael,” she said, smiling a little. “You were too thin when we were married.” Her fingers, at his chest now, moved slowly down, cool and velvety soft, tracing his flat stomach.

“And I see I can still make you react,” she said as her hand traced the edges of his burning erection.

He shivered. She was a vampire. Other vampires watched them. Yet it took all his will to clamp his lips together to keep from begging her to touch him, to forget it all, to be his wife again.

But no matter how much he still needed her—through the horror and fear and remorse, and the mind-snapping craving of his body—the Comte de la Fère would not beg.

And yet . . . and yet, his bound back lifted fractionally off the marble, attempting to arch his body upward toward her touch.

She looked up at his face, and smiled slowly, knowingly, as though she guessed his thoughts and knew the extent of his need. Then she pulled her hand away and leaned in so close to his face that he could smell the familiar lilac scent she wore. “You are right, you know?” she said, confidentially. “I wasn’t a Judas goat.”

“No?” he said, relieved and crushed at once, because that meant he had tried to hang an innocent woman, a woman he’d adored with his whole heart, a woman who had survived only to become this. If only he hadn’t been so quick to judge. If he hadn’t been so proud. If he—

“No,” she said, smiling widely, her soft, moist lips glistening, sensuous and inviting. “I was already a vampire.”

With that she withdrew and struck, her fangs biting deep into his neck and forcing a scream out of him. Pain burned into his muscles and propagated like fire along his nerves, descending, tortuously, down his spine. He screamed until he could scream no more. Tired and wrung out, he lay still in a puddle of his own sweat and looked up at Charlotte’s eyes dancing with amusement.

He tried to speak, but could not find the strength.

Then the feeling changed and instead of pain, bliss radiated from her mouth on his neck, sucking his life away. A tingle of pleasure like nothing he’d ever felt—an overall caress, skin-enveloping, nerve shattering—took him completely and soothed him. Transported on its wings, he felt his body react again, excitement gathering, coursing along his veins—pounding, demanding release.

She bit deeper and his mind fogged. He plunged into the darkness of death.

 

Ruins and Fallen Angels

 

Grief carried D’Artagnan to Paris. Like a tidal wave swelling from shock to anger, it propelled him across the devastated country, riding on lonely roads amid denuded fields.

As the anguishing surge receded, it left him sitting on an ornate chair in the private office of Monsieur de Tréville, Captain of the Musketeers.

“I don’t know what you heard in the provinces,” the captain said. He was a small man, a Gascon, like D’Artagnan. Even though silver threads mingled with the dark in his long straight hair, he didn’t look old. No wrinkles marred his mobile olive-skinned face and his eyes remained bright. He stood behind a great armchair facing D’Artagnan. His long thin fingers clasped the frame tightly, flesh dark against the white-painted wood and the threadbare blue-gray velvet of the cushions. “But France is not England. We are not at war with the vampires. Our king and the cardinal have signed a truce between them. His Eminence might have been turned, but he still wants what’s best for France. Neither the king, nor the cardinal—nor I, myself—want to experience here the slaughter and mayhem that engulfs the other side of the channel.”

All the energy drained from D’Artagnan’s body, leaving his arms nerveless and his legs feeling as though they lacked the strength to support his body. He had run to Paris to fight the vampires, and to stand for king and queen. To support the forces of the light. To avenge his parents who’d been turned and had chosen to die as humans rather than live as vampires.

“My father said,” he heard his own voice echo back to him, aged and flat, “that I should come and offer my sword to you. That no matter who else had made peace with evil, you never would. That you knew darkness when you saw it.”

“Your father.” For just a moment, there was a flash of something in Monsieur de Tréville’s eyes. What it was, D’Artagnan could not tell. It flickered and vanished. In a changed voice, the captain said, “Your father and I fought side by side thirty-five years ago, when the first vampires came to France from Germany.” He sighed deeply. “Other times, my boy, other times. Now there’s a treaty in place. Daylighters are not to hunt vampires and vampires are not to turn the unwilling. Those turned must register promptly and become subjects of the cardinal, restrained by his laws. Only undeclared vampires, the ones in hiding, could be a danger, and we don’t have those.” He opened his hands. “Different times demand—”

Behind D’Artagnan, the door opened. A voice said, “I’m sorry to interrupt you, Captain, but you said you wanted to know when the inseparables came in.”

Turning, D’Artagnan saw a thin man in threadbare livery that seemed too big for him, looking in through the half-opened door. Just like all other Parisians, he looked starved, ill-dressed, and not so much worried as anxious. Ready to run at a sound like a hare amid wolves.

D’Artagnan knew no intelligent Parisian could take the truce or the treaty seriously. Monsieur de Tréville did not look that stupid.

In fact, he did not look stupid at all, as his fingers released their death grip on the back of the chair, and his eyes filled with an eager curiosity, leavened by hope and fear. His voice trembling with what appeared to be near-maniacal relief, he said, “All three? Athos, Porthos, Aramis?”

The servant shook his head and looked away as he spoke, as if afraid of seeing the reaction to his words. “Porthos and Aramis, only, sir. Should I send them away?”

Monsieur de Tréville’s face froze, the skin taut on the frame of his skull—as though he’d aged a hundred years in that moment and only iron will kept him alive. He licked his lips. “The two?” His expression became impenetrable. He drew his mouth into a straight line and crossed his arms at his chest. “Send them in, Gervase.”

The gentlemen had apparently been waiting just outside the door, because as Gervase opened it, they immediately entered.

They were splendid. There was no other word for them. D’Artagnan, who had waited in the captain’s antechamber, had seen the rest of the musketeers as something very close to immortal gods. He had listened to them jest about how many vampires they had killed, and taunt each other with the latest court gossip. How—fearless and unabashed—they called evil by its true name—vampire. Yet, admirable though they were, they admired others. They too had idols they looked up to.

All through the other musketeer’s chatter—like a touchstone, a prayer—he’d heard the names of the inseparables: Athos, Porthos, Aramis.

They were, according to their own comrades, the best and the bravest. It was said that in one night, the three of them alone had killed a hundred vampires. It was whispered that if France still had a human king, if the throne still belonged to the living, it was to the credit of none but the three noblemen who hid under the appellations of Porthos, Athos, and Aramis.

D’Artagnan, a Gascon and therefore inclined by nature to discount half of what he heard as exaggeration, and the other half as mere talk, now felt his mouth drop open in wonder at the sight of Porthos and Aramis. He thought that, if anything, the rumors had been an understatement.

Though their clothes looked as worn and their bodies as thin as those of other Parisians, the two inseparables were so muscular and broad-shouldered, and stood with such pride, that they lent their humble threadbare tunics, their frayed doublets, their mended lace and worn cloaks an air of distinction. Pride was an attribute one would have thought departed from mortals since the vampires had taken control.

The smaller of the two—just taller than D’Artagnan—had dark-golden hair and the flexible body of a dancer—or an expert sword fighter. His features were so exactingly drawn that they might have graced a well-favored woman. However old his clothes might be, they looked well matched and even better fitted. Made of dark blue velvet, no mended patches were visible. The ringlets of his hair fell over his shoulders, disposed in the most graceful of ways, with a longer love-lock caught up on the side of his head by a small but perfect diamond pin. Other than that pin, he wore no jewelry save for a plain, flat silver cross on a silver chain around his neck, and an antique signet ring on his left hand.

The other musketeer stood at least a head taller than any man D’Artagnan had ever seen. His chestnut brown hair was shoulder-long, his beard and moustache luxuriant; the bare patches on his tunic had been sewn by an expert hand and embroidered in what looked like gold thread. D’Artagnan only noticed they were skillfully covered rents because there was no other explanation for the haphazard nature of the embroidery, which meandered over his broad torso with the abandon of a gypsy caravan on an endless jaunt. He wore a ring on the finger of each massive hand—most of them ornamented with stones too large to be anything but paste or glass—and on his chest lay a thick gold chain, with a cross composed of rubies and garnets—or their counterfeits—dazzling in its splendor.

This would be Porthos, D’Artagnan surmised. He had heard the man was a giant. Indeed, he had arms like tree trunks, legs like logs, and the most terrified brown eyes that D’Artagnan had ever seen.

His gaze darted around the room in skittish anxiety and, alighting on D’Artagnan, it made the Gascon wish to make his excuses and leave. But the musketeers blocked the path to the door. Porthos’ gaze moved on, immediately, to stare in abject fear at his captain, whom Porthos outweighed by at least half again as much.

Looking at Monsieur de Tréville, D’Artagnan could understand at least part of the fear. The captain’s face had hardened, and his gaze threatened to bore holes in the two musketeers, if it could. Settling on Porthos, the hard gaze then dismissed him, focusing instead on Aramis, who bowed correctly. D’Artagnan had heard how valiant Porthos was and could only imagine his fear in this instance was that common malady known as timidity or shyness in social situations.

Here stood a man who could destroy vampires with a smile but who would be forever in fear of offending another human or committing a faux pas.

“Aramis,” Monsieur de Tréville rasped. “Where is Athos?”

Aramis smiled, as if he had expected this question all along. “He’s indisposed, sir. It’s nothing serious.”

“Nothing serious,” the captain said. He turned his back on them and stared out of his window. Through it one could just glimpse the broken cross atop the cathedral, the marble stark white against the lowing sky. “Nothing serious,” he said again, his voice heavy, like the closing of a tomb. “The cardinal bragged at his card game with the king last night. He said that Athos had been turned. That Athos was now one of them. The rumor is all over Paris.”

“It is . . . not so serious,” Aramis said.

“Not so serious,” the captain turned around. “So is he only half turned? You men and your careless ways. How many times have I told you not to wander the streets at night after your guard shift? Never to go into dark alleys willingly? And if you must go into them, to guard yourselves carefully? Do you have any idea what Athos will become as a vampire? Do you not know your own friend well enough to know what a disaster this is?” His voice boomed and echoed. Doubtless, the musketeers massed in the antechamber were eagerly drinking in every word he said.

Porthos and Aramis shifted their feet, looked down, and let their hands stray to their sword pommels. It was obvious that had anyone but their captain given them such a sermon, he would have paid dearly for it.

Porthos, who had been squirming like a child in need of the privy, blurted out, “It’s just . . . that . . . sir! He has the smallpox!”

“The smallpox?” the Captain asked, with withering sarcasm, even as Aramis gave his friend a baneful, reproachful glance and a minimal headshake. “The smallpox, has Athos, who is over thirty years of age? Do you take me for a fool, Porthos?” His voice made even D’Artagnan—over whom he had, as yet, no power—back away and attempt to disappear against a wall-hung tapestry that illustrated the coronation of Henri IV. “I’ve given the three of you too much freedom because I thought you’d at least defend each other. How can you have allowed Athos to be taken? From now on, I am making sure that none of my musketeers go anywhere, save as a group. Not after dark. And if I hear of any of you starting a fight with a vamp—”

He stopped mid-word, as steps were heard rushing outside, followed by a man’s voice calling out, “I’m here.”

A blond man burst through the door. He was taller than Aramis, almost as tall as Porthos, though of a different build. It was not so much that he appeared lithe and lean, though he was both, but on that leanness was superimposed a layer of muscle. D’Artagnan had seen similar bodies in a book of drawings by someone who had visited Greece. The ancients had excelled in the creation of sculptures of ideal men, which they placed as parts of their temples, supporting whole buildings on their backs. The buildings and the men were both a harmony of perfect proportion. Though D’Artagnan imagined this man must be Athos, and that he must, therefore, be over thirty, he looked like a young man in the early prime of his days. It was as though he had halted at the peak of golden youth and from its summit looked through the ages unafraid, carrying the best of his civilization upon his powerful shoulders.

Like most of the other musketeers, he did not exactly wear a uniform. Instead, he wore the fashion of at least ten years before—a black doublet laced tightly in the Spanish fashion and with ballooning sleeves; black knee breeches, beneath which a sliver of carefully mended stockings showed, disappearing into the top of his old but polished riding boots.

But it was his face that attracted and arrested one’s gaze as he threw back his head, parting the golden curtain of his hair as he did so. He said, “I heard you were asking for me, Captain, and, as you see, I came in answer to your call.”

He looked like the angel guarding the entrance to a ruined cathedral; beautiful, noble, and hopeless. The mass of hair tumbling down his back might have been spun out of gold, his flesh resembling the marble out of which such a statue’s features might be chiseled. The noble brow, the heavy-lidded eyes, the high straight nose, the pronounced cheekbones, and square chin, and the lips—full and sensuous, as if hinting at forbidden earthly desires. All of it was too exquisite, too exact; perfection that no human born of woman should be entitled to.

He also looked cold, unreachable, lost, and—except for still standing on his feet and moving—as if he’d died waiting for a miracle that had never come.

Monsieur de Tréville’s mouth had remained open. He now closed it with an audible snap, and advanced on the musketeer, hands extended. “Athos! You should not have come. You look pale. Are you wounded?”

Athos shook his head, then shrugged. “A scratch only, Captain,” he said. “And you’ll be proud to know we laid ten of them down forever, D’Alene among them.”

“D’Alene? The Terror of Pont Neuf?” Monsieur de Tréville asked, suddenly gratified.

Athos bowed slightly, and in bowing, flinched a little. His eyes, which had looked black at first sight, caught the light from the window—as he turned his head—and revealed themselves as a deep, dark jade green.

The captain squeezed the musketeer’s hands hard. Athos bit his lips, looking as if the touch pained him, though not a sound of complaint escaped him. “As you see,” he said, “we do what we can to defend the people of Paris.”

“Indeed. Indeed. I was just telling your friends how much I prize men like you, and how brave you are to risk your lives every night, in defense of the people, and how . . . ”

Athos, who looked pale and wan as if he were indeed wounded, and, in fact, as if he only remained standing through sheer will, didn’t seem able to withstand the barrage of words, or perhaps the additional pain of what must be the captain’s iron grip on his hands—so tight that Monsieur de Tréville’s knuckles shone white. He made a sound like a sigh, his legs gave out under him, and he began to sink to the floor.

His friends managed to catch his apparently lifeless body and ease him onto the carpet.

Bewildered, D’Artagnan suddenly perceived that the captain must be playing some deep game. The man who’d told him musketeers didn’t fight guards clearly was pleased that musketeers did. Which must mean D’Artagnan’s father was right and that Monsieur de Tréville fought against the vampires still—only carefully enough to not be caught at fault under the treaty.

D’Artagnan took a step forward to help with the fallen Athos, but the musketeer’s two comrades moved, obstructing his path.

The young man stopped, staring. It seemed to him that, as Athos fell—awkwardly caught by Aramis around the chest and Porthos by the shoulders to ease what would otherwise have been a floor-shaking collapse—his hair moved away from his neck revealing two deep, dark puncture marks on his neck.

Athos would not be the first to be bitten by a vampire and live to tell the tale. There was a time, D’Artagnan’s father had told him, that this was the basic requirement to become a musketeer—to have felt the bite of the vampire—and his allure—and to have survived it. But the bite mark combined with Athos’ pallor seemed to indicate a vampire might have gone too far. Far enough, in fact, that the human thus bitten turned into a vampire within twenty-four hours, and would be prowling the streets for living blood by the next evening.

D’Artagnan moved closer. He was barely breathing as he strove to see the musketeer’s neck. Surely, if he had been turned, his friends would not hide it. They were musketeers. Surely—

The two musketeers knelt, one on either side of their comrade, while the captain stood nervously at his feet. Aramis was unlacing Athos’ doublet, a sensible action indeed if he was wounded and needed air. With his movements, Aramis had also artlessly pulled Athos’ hair to hide what might be punctures on his neck. Perhaps it had indeed been by chance, but D’Artagnan found it hard to trust anyone.

“Sangre Dieu,” Porthos thundered, looking up and noticing that a crowd had come from the antechamber and gathered at the still-open door, to watch the excitement. “Back, all of you. Can’t you see the man needs to breathe?”

At that moment, Aramis lifted a reddened hand that he had just dipped beneath his friend’s doublet. “He’s all over blood,” the musketeer said. “He was badly cut in the fight last night.” As he spoke, he undid Athos’ doublet altogether, and showed the red-soaked shirt beneath. There was a sound of relief from bystanders as they released long-held breaths in a collective sigh.

Clearly if the musketeer could bleed still and in such quantity, when he could not have fed as a vampire yet, the rumor of him turning would be just that. Yet D’Artagnan was not so sure. Such things could be falsified.

Aramis pulled back the gory shirt to reveal a cut on the pale, burly chest beneath—a cut smeared in blood, some of it dried.

“My surgeon,” Monsieur de Tréville said.

“No, please, sir,” Aramis said. “Athos wouldn’t even let us bandage him last night. You know how private he is and how proud. He wouldn’t like it if it was known he suffered such a wound.” He looked toward the crowd with worried eyes. “I hope no one speaks of this.”

The mass of musketeers backed a step, then two, under his steely gaze.

Porthos stood, then bent down to pick up his unconscious friend. “I’ll take him to his lodgings, sir. His servant will bandage him up, been with his family since Athos was a baby. Athos cannot resent him. Yes, Grimaud will look after him.”

“Yes,” Monsieur de Tréville said, his gaze heavy on the bloodied shirt. “Yes. Do. Take care of my brave Athos.”

“We will, sir,” Aramis said, bowing a little.

But D’Artagnan had discerned two things. First, the appearance of Athos’ chest and the blood on it was wrong. If he had bled so copiously, most of the blood would have crusted around the wound. Instead, it was smeared around the pale skin in irregular streaks looking like it had gone from the shirt to the wound, and not the other way around.

Second, Athos wore no cross. While there was no requirement that musketeers—or indeed anyone—wear a cross, almost everyone did. A cross or some other chosen symbol of their faith that not only stood between them and the vampires, but which showed to the world that they were, indeed, still free men.

Had a vampire managed to get into the ranks of the musketeers? And were his friends hiding him?

When the three inseparables left the room, D’Artagnan slipped out and followed them.

 

The Destiny of Fools

 

 

Athos woke up held in living arms. For a moment, he did not know whose arms, only that they were strong and too warm and alive. That last truth communicated itself to him through smell and temperature, through feeling and his own quickened heartbeat and a desperate lust to feed, which made it hard for him to think.

He was being held like a child—which even his sluggish brain knew meant that the arms belonged to Porthos. But more important, more urgent, was that his head rested on Porthos’ shoulder, close enough to hear his friend’s heartbeat, close enough to feel the song of living blood through Porthos’ neck veins. Close enough to thirst.

Athos tightened his hands into fists and bit his lips together to keep his fangs from extruding. They had already appeared once today, while he was smearing the shirt. Even though he had used sheep’s blood, the smell had been enough for the fangs to descend from his gums, alien and demanding, in front of his teeth.

With his lips sealed together, Athos found that he could not speak; he opened them, but kept his teeth clenched. The voice that emerged sounded like something from beyond the grave even to him. “Put me down, Porthos. For the love of—” He remembered in time not to stain the holy name with his cursed tongue. “Put me down.”

Porthos looked down at Athos, startled. “Are you sure?” he asked. “You don’t look—”

“Down. Now.”

Porthos started to lower him, and Athos threw himself at the ground and away. He half tumbled, half ran out of Porthos’ embrace, to press his back flat against a wall. The support of stone behind him helped. Its coldness seeped through his clothes to steady his mind with icy sanity. They were in an alley just like the ones he had used to get to Monsieur de Tréville’s office. Narrow ancient alleys surrounded by buildings so tall that the bottom floor never saw the light of day. Daylight was only a mild bother here. Not a danger. He could hardly feel its faint sting on his skin. On the way to Monsieur de Tréville’s he had ensured that his hair and the lace of his sleeves covered every exposed inch of his skin as well. It was only in the captain’s office that he had felt sunlight on his face. Even the attenuated light, coming through the window with its half-drawn curtains, had been enough to fill him with panic and make him want to writhe in pain. That and the temptation to feed when the captain touched him had overwhelmed his senses and caused his faint.

“Athos!” Aramis said. “You are wounded. You bled. Perhaps they didn’t take enough to turn you, perhaps—”

Athos heard something between a gasp and a cackle tear through his lips, behind which, and despite all his will power, the fangs were now displaying fully. “It was from mutton,” he said. “I cut myself and squeezed the meat Grimaud had in the kitchen. I folded it in my shirt and pounded. I assumed the rumors would have started and you two fools . . . ” He shook his head, unable to go on. “Grimaud will never forgive me.” He pressed his palms back, flat against the stone, trying to will its coldness into him, trying to find his fast-evaporating control.

Heat rose through him like a fever, and he could smell his friends as he had never smelled anyone before. Blood rushing through their veins spoke of health and strength, filling Athos with an almost uncontrollable yearning.

It wasn’t hunger, though the mouth-watering need for bread after a long afternoon of work was contained within it; it wasn’t thirst, though the pounding of the blood sounded like the singing of a stream on a hot afternoon when he had been hunting all day. It wasn’t desire, but his entire body strained with the need to bite, to suck blood, just as his whole body had once lusted to join with the woman he loved.

He kept from striking only by desperate strength of will, by near-insane force of rationality. He would never bite Porthos and Aramis. They were his friends. He could not wish this hell on them. And he couldn’t bite anyone—anyone—without surrendering his immortal soul, or his remaining honor. He had abandoned his name, his lands, his home—all for the sake of fighting vampires—but he was still the Comte de la Fère. He would not stain that ancient dignity by becoming a bloodthirsty monster, stalking innocents and condemning them to death or damnation.

He controlled his breathing, as it hissed, ragged, between his teeth. He shook his head. “You do me no kindness,” he said in a voice tinged with the pain of holding back from feeding, “to refuse to grant me the true death. I beg of you . . . ”

“We don’t know that you’ll become a vampire,” Aramis said. “We cannot kill you simply because you’ve been bitten. Half the musketeers . . . ”

Athos’ laughter barked out, startling him. “Aramis,” he said. “My friend. Don’t delude yourself. You wouldn’t have chosen these alleys as the way to take me home, if you did not know how it stood with me.” He looked up at the distant sky, lost in the shadow between buildings, and decided there was enough light here. Just enough. “I wasn’t bitten. After . . . after I parted from you in that fight, they surrounded me. Fifteen of them. They tied me up before I even knew they were there. I was taken to a lair and there . . . ” He couldn’t bring himself to tell them what he’d found there. The wife he’d thought dead for fifteen years, still alive, or at least in that form of death in life that was vampirism. It wasn’t that he didn’t wish to. He couldn’t. He lacked the strength to pronounce Charlotte’s name. “And there I was drained,” he said. “Very thoroughly and carefully, to be at that point of almost full depletion at which one becomes a vampire, before the complete emptiness at which one dies.” He shook his head, as the sound of her laughter echoed in his memory, her musical voice telling him, as he woke from human death to vampire life, that his only way out, now, was to kill himself. “I was turned, Aramis,” he said, lifting his upper lip to reveal the glint of fangs.

Aramis took a step back and crossed himself, paling as he did so.

“Yes, do cross yourself,” Athos said. “Pray for me, Aramis. But give me mercy.”

“Mercy?” Aramis asked, stunned, his usually agile tongue stumbling over itself.

“Death, Aramis, death. While my soul is still unstained. I’m controlling myself by an effort of will. A . . . great effort of will. I came to that office to avoid you or Porthos being suspected of abetting a rogue vampire and being branded as Judas goats because it might be heard you . . . helped me to my lodgings last night and I have neither registered nor submitted to the cardinal’s authority—I’d see him in hell first. People would think you knew. You should have known. Now kill me, and go back. Tell them that you found out I was turned after all, and tell them that you killed me cleanly.”

Aramis took a breath, the noise of it so loud it seemed to echo inside Athos’ brain. He crossed himself again, but shook his head.

“Aramis,” Porthos said. “We are doing him no kindness. He asked for death when we found him yesterday. We should have given it to him. It’s the last duty of every musketeer to his comrade to keep him from becoming . . . ”

Athos looked up at Porthos, who was now far enough away that Athos did not have to concentrate so hard to avoid to tearing into his veins to satiate his unnatural need. From within his darkening heart and soul, Athos fished a word he wasn’t used to uttering, and turning his eyes to his friend, said, “Please.”

“Aramis,” Porthos said, looking sideways, a panicked expression in his dark brown eyes. “We must grant him final mercy.”

But Aramis shook his head again and, looking up, spoke with the sting of his usually sarcastic pronouncements. “Why tell me that, Porthos? You have a sword. You want to give him mercy, do so.”

Porthos’ eyes changed, softening into a sad mix of horror and fear. “I can’t,” he said. “I . . . I did it when I had to, Aramis. To those I loved. Until I came to Paris, I thought my heart dead to all friendship and love. Without your friendship—the friendship both of you offered me—I’d have become worse than the vam— the things we kill. You two have kept me alive and human. I could not . . . I cannot kill him. No more than I could kill you. Unless . . . unless I had to. To defend myself.”

“Well, then,” Aramis said, tartly. “Why do you think I could?”

Athos calculated the distance to his friends. He could charge them. He could grip one of them, maybe both. He could feed. Then they would kill him, and then—

His heart, straining in his chest, scarcely sustained by insufficient blood, made a noise that sounded like a drum in his ears. His body, his mind, his need, all told him to attack. But once he let himself go, he would no longer be able to control himself. Once he allowed himself strike, he would be a beast, intent only on getting what he needed. He knew how to fight, and he had his sword by his side.

Closing his eyes, to blot out the two of them—standing there, like fools, side by side—he could picture it all like a series of paintings behind his closed eyelids. He saw himself jumping out at them, stabbing Aramis through the heart and seizing Porthos . . . Once he closed his fangs on Porthos’ neck, he doubted his friend would fight. Or kill him. Beneath the brazen and admittedly larger than life exterior, Porthos was a shy, gentle creature. Not deficient in courage, but not able to withstand his friend’s will. It would end with Porthos dead, or turned.

Once Athos let go of himself, this outcome would follow, as easily and surely as a river flowed downhill. There would be no recall. Oh, they could fight other vampires and win against great odds. But he’d fought by their side for years. He knew their weaknesses. He could get in under their defenses.

“Traitors!” A loud voice called out, to Athos’ right side. “Traitors all! You’d allow a vampire to live and call himself a musketeer?”

Athos pivoted to face the voice, and saw a very young man running toward them. Small and slight, he had the olive skin of Gascony, an expression of rage on his face, and his sword drawn. By instinct, Athos drew his own sword, so that as the man came close enough to strike, he found Athos’ sword already raised in defense.

The vampire’s reflexes were faster, of course, but the boy seemed to have been made of the skin of the devil himself. He countered every one of Athos’ attacks, and attacked again, like fury incarnate. Something in the back of Athos’ mind whispered, you should let him give you quietus. It would end this and not stain your friends with your death.

But his mind raced ahead of the wishful voice. If this boy killed him, he would denounce his friends as Judas goats. They would be branded as such and banned from all lawful contact with humans. Marriage contracts would no longer apply to them. Even simple commerce with humans would be interdict. Their only choice would be to deal with vampires and to serve them. And, if they lied to hide their disgrace from their fellow men, and were found out, they would be killed. Aramis and Porthos would be at the very least dishonored and barred from free society. At the worst, dead.

“Athos,” Aramis said, his voice full of anguish. “He’s just a boy. What are you doing?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Athos asked. “I’m fighting for all our lives. I would allow him to kill me, but I cannot allow him to condemn you as Judas goats. Do you see what you’ve done?”

As he spoke, he saw the expression of alarm and realization in the boy’s eyes. He also saw the boy’s chin jut out in determination. He was, what, a mere youth? From the incipient moustache on his upper lip and the still-childish roundness of his cheeks, he could not be more than nineteen, and Athos would guess closer to sixteen. Full of righteousness and fury. Doubtless, he came to the capital full of innocent eagerness, to fight the evil of vampires. Now he must futilely end his life here, at the hands of Athos, who would truly be much better off dead.

“Halt, in the name of the cardinal,” a voice called out behind Athos.

Athos, his sword raised, in the act of parrying the boy’s sword, glanced quickly over his shoulder. He could feel and smell and sense Porthos and Aramis, already moving into position behind him, between him and the boy and the guards of the cardinal. He could smell the guards too—the heavy musk that spoke of vampire. The smell he could now detect on his own clothes, though he knew the living could not.

The man who had spoken was Jussac, one of the most feared guards of the cardinal. He had his sword drawn and his fangs bared, his speech almost slurping, as if he were trying not to drool. “What have we here? A rogue vampire and a nice juicy pack of conniving abettors. Best surrender, gentlemen. You’ve more chance at living with our side.” Jussac was accompanied by other vampires whom Athos had met in combat and had been good enough fighters to escape with their heads still attached to their shoulders: Bisarac and Cahusac, and two other nameless adversaries.

“Surrender?” Aramis said. “Never.”

“Not while we live,” Porthos said.

“And you?” Jussac said, looking directly at Athos. “You at least must see it’s in your interest to come with us.”

Athos spun around. The boy wasn’t trying to fight him—he had gone utterly still, probably dazed by the presence of so many vampires, which had that effect on the living that hadn’t become immunized by long habit—nor was he the kind to strike by stealth. Glaring, Athos shook his head at Jussac. “I am not one of yours,” he said. “I was not willingly turned.” Something very much like a giggle escaped him. “I don’t hate vampires less for being one.”

Jussac leered at him, displaying his fangs. “Is that so? And you’d fight us? When you’re a fledgling of less than a night, and you have not fed yet?”

Athos, thinking the greatest mercy possible would be for him to die here and not at his friends’ hands, though he felt as though he were teetering on his legs and staying upright by sheer resolve, sneered back, “I would fight you with my last ounce of strength.”

“Oh very well then,” Jussac said, “if that is so. But the stranger, the boy, there . . . The cardinal needs to at least appear to observe the pact, and I don’t think that boy is of legal age to consent. I don’t think he’s of a legal age to be away from his mother’s apron. You, boy—scamper. You’re free to go back where you belong. And stay away from dark alleys in Paris, even during the day. That’s our territory.”

Athos heard the boy draw breath, sharply, as if wounded, and wondered what had brought it about—was it the mention of his mother? Or the idea that he could not walk where he pleased?

And then, breath was drawn again; Athos heard the boy’s heart speed up, and the faint rustle as he lowered his sword arm. Was he going to run? Athos thought at the boy’s age, he would have. As good as the boy was, how could he face these odds? He had survived one vampire, but only a single vampire who was very weak and who, in truth, did not want to kill him. The guards of the cardinal would not have such compunctions.

A hand dropped on his shoulder, hot even through doublet and shirt. “Sir?” the boy’s voice said, hesitantly.

Athos turned around, shaking his shoulder, to flip the hand away. “Yes,” he said. He wished the boy would not touch him, but preferred to endure the temptation of living contact than to show his weakness in front of the monsters.

The boy looked curiously shy, and all the younger because of it. He was gazing down, his slick black hair half-hiding his face. He looked up at Athos, at his word. “Sir, I heard what you said, and if you hate vampires . . . That is . . . It would do me great honor if you would allow me to fight by your side.”

“No,” Athos said. “Save yourself. Do you see how many of them there are? They have been vampires for years, faster and more cunning than any human being I know of. Even were I a true vampire, I wouldn’t be a match for them, I don’t have my strength. My friends and I will likely meet our death here. It’s only two musketeers and a lamed man against five.”

The boy shook his head, his face grave. “No. Two musketeers, a lamed man, and a boy against five,” he said, and allowed a little smile to appear.

“You don’t have to. You’re not a musketeer. Go, go and fight another day.”

The boy threw his head back, and looked up. His face seemed to age years in a moment. “When my parents were turned and chose to stand in the sun and die, rather than feed,” he said gravely, his voice cracking, “I decided I would be a musketeer and fight vampires. I might not be a real musketeer yet, but in my heart, I am. I must fight by your side.”

Athos read the pride and the pain in the boy’s face. He thought of the moment when he himself had made the same decision. He had been twenty. The boy looked much younger. But grief was the same at any age. As was courage. “Very well,” he said. He turned to his other friends and, though it cost him in self-control, clasped their hands, drawing them together in his strong hand. “Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and . . . what is your name, my friend?”

“D’Artagnan.”

“Very well, Athos, Porthos, Aramis, D’Artagnan, All for one—”

His friends answered, “—and one for all.” D’Artagnan smiled, clapping his hand atop theirs.

“How touching,” Jussac said mockingly. “Have you made a decision then? Any chance of a surrender?”

“Oh, we’ve made a decision,” Athos said and grinned, knowing it displayed his fangs. “We’re going to have the pleasure of charging you.”

 

First, calm down.  I know it’s become fashionable for people to announce broken relationships casually on their blogs, when you had no clue anything was wrong.  This is not what I’m doing.  My marriage is fine.  We have, at various times, threatened to divorce the kids, or at least to run away from the kids and the house for some more or less extended period.  I think normal people call this “vacation.”  It sounds like a lovely idea – and maybe we’ll have enough money to, sometime.

What I’m going to talk about, though, relates to running away from the kids, and the house, and also to breaking a habit almost as old as our marriage, and one which I always assumed I liked.

I’ve been working at home – working as defined as making money or having expectations of making money – for fourteen years.  I worked at home before that, but there is a different mind-set when you NEVER expect to be published than when you know you can sort of, almost, make what could be called a living.

My offices have varied.  When we lived in Manitou Springs, I had the entire third floor with a bathroom of its own.  This worked very well.  To an extent it was like being “at work.”  I went up sometime at eight am when I dropped the last kid off at school, and came down at five or five thirty when Dan came off work.  I even had a coffee maker there, so I didn’t need to come down to the kitchen.  Oh, okay, there was picking up the kids there as an interruption – until they were old enough to walk home alone – and the office wasn’t impervious to kids.  When I started out, and the first two years as a pro, Marshall usually played at my feet while I worked.  But those are minor adjustments.  The important thing is that “third floor = job” to me.  This was set firmly in my mind, so when I started reading blogs, I’d bring the laptop down to the living room or movie room for that.

Then we moved.  And we THOUGHT the arrangements here would be similar.  We have a third floor, though not with a bathroom.  I figured I could afford the occasional run down the stairs for bathroom breaks.  Only it didn’t work that way.

Look, the house is really well built and insulated.  If I’m up there, I can’t hear anything.  This started by being an issue because I couldn’t hear the kids (8 and 12 by the time we moved here) and I realized I was used to keeping a “sweep” for “trouble” while writing.  I couldn’t write without it.  Paranoia just mounted till I had to come down every five minutes.

And now that frankly I can trust them on their own (except they’re likely to come to the bottom of the stairs and mumble, “Mom, is it okay if we set fire to the neighbor’s political sign?” and then swear up and down I gave them permission) I can’t write up there because I’m still sweeping the house with my mind: for intruders; for kitteh breakage; for…

So four months after moving in, I setup half the bedroom as an office.  It has worked… sort of.  The bedroom is a double room, and I separated it with a curtain.  I also use the nook downstairs as an art nook, and the TV room for publishing and…

If you’re frowning at the page… yeah.  See, the thing is I know our work doesn’t quite fit in this house because at this point Dan and I have two offices each, and one shared, and none of them is QUITE right.

Again, let me emphasize I LOVE working at home.  It allows me to be here for emergencies.  It allows me to put a load of clothing in while I finish a blog.  It allows me to pet cats while working.  It allows me to answer the door, take messages, and keep the family running.

And if you’re frowning at the page… yeah.

The problem is exactly that.  For the last five   years I’ve found that if I spend 2 hours a day writing, it’s a lot. And it’s not uninterrupted writing – oh no – it’s five minutes here, ten minutes there.

In the past I found when my time becomes fragmented like that, I end up having to go to a hotel for a week to just get the books RIGHT in my head.  And then I can finish.  But that, even at a cheap hotel (can’t be too cheap.  Bed bugs are, pardon me, a right bugger when you’re trying to write) runs to $500 or so.  And it became very expensive to take these writing retreats every month, which – now that I’m trying to finish indie stuff too – is what I’d need.

Also, I became aware of … “pressure”.  I was never off.  Particularly now with Indie stuff and with having assumed the duties of cover director at Naked Reader Press.  There was always something I HAD to do.  I’ve always worked the occasional weekend or evening, but now it was EVERY one of them, so I never had time for my family and I felt like I was under the gun 24/7.

I always know when I’m about to blow a psychological gasket, because I start daydreaming of kidnaping Dan and vanishing to Denver for a long weekend.  (Which still wouldn’t be a bad idea.)

I also, being somewhat self-aware, started sweeping craigslist for offices for rent.  The problem was something in a relatively safe neighborhood (not the best in the world, but I’d not get raped coming out late afternoon in Winter) and at a price I could reasonably expect to make back.  And still I hesitated, because, dang it, I LIKE working at home.

For a few months I had what I call Office-ish.  Someone was allowing me to borrow a cube at their company and it was convenient because Dan could drop me off on the way to work.  It worked relatively well – I finished three books – but because the arrangement was ad-hoc and temporary I could not make the space mine, and also I was there very unofficially and people working around me got curious.  It wasn’t “my place” and I felt like I was imposing.

That no longer operates as that particular space has closed, as the company downsized.  So…  I was back at home and scanning craigslist.

Last week, unexpectedly, I found an add for an office that looked like it fit expectations, at a price I could reasonably hope to make back if I wrote even ONE indie novel a year in excess of what I have to deliver.  I went to see it.  I’m not going to say it is the thing poets sing of.  It is, to be blunt, a closet.  A walk in closet, with a window, but a closet nonetheless.  About the size of your average cube.

However, I can hang pictures on the wall, I can bring in my desk and tea things, the bathroom is just down the hall, and it is a very quiet building.  (Most of the time, there’s sudden eruptions of clapping from the Black Ribboners down the hall, but that’s survivable.)  More importantly, it’s within easy (and cheap) driving distance.  And it has plenty of daylight (which makes a difference.  It’s the reason I’ve rejected most other offices I could afford.  I’m photo-voltaic.)

It’s been almost a week (I started Wednesday) since I’ve been going there, and here’s what I found: a) I get a lot more done.  Five to six hours uninterrupted work really accomplishes a lot more than five minute increments amounting to the same time.  b) it gives me permission to not work at home, or at least not work at writing.  When I come home, I’ve usually written everything I CAN write, so I’m free to hang out, do crochet (which I haven’t had time to do in years and yeah, it’s my one feminine gift.  No, I don’t do wool.  I do miles and miles of fillet crochet.)  

More importantly though, it’s the sense that I can RELAX when out of the office.  When I’m there, I work VERY intensely.  When out of there, I don’t have to.  (Mind you, I still will for two nights a week or so, on publishing or NRP stuff.  But it’s not every night, and there is no feeling of “my work is never done.”)

Mind you, it means I’m gone most of the day, so if you’re sending urgent emails and no one answers, I’m not actually ignoring you.  I’m just at the office.  Again, if you’re the kind of person likely to have an emergency I CAN do something about, you have my cell number.  Send me a text.  Depending on the emergency, I’ll either tell you when I can deal with it, or call one of the kids to get into my computer and deal.

I’ll keep you posted on how it works out, ultimately, but for now it promises to be a boon to production and to permit me to make back several times the price of the office – as well as perhaps improve my mental health.  (Of course, if it doesn’t, I give it up after a year.)

Again, we’ll see.  But one week in, I see the virtues of making a separation between my main work and my part time jobs and family.

Now, if I can start writing these posts at the office the day before, I can leave for the office at a decent hour.

When I posted about having sold our – storytelling – birthright for a mess of pottage, a few people rightly said that we still have a great storytelling tradition, which is historically relevant and available (mostly for free on Gutenberg [fixed spelling.  I MUST remember.  FIRST drink coffee, then put on glasses THEN write blog.  Sigh]) in electronic as well as in traditional formats.

They are, of course, right.  When I reference an historical tradition and the fact that we can’t throw away our culture, I’m implicitly if not explicitly admitting the existence of those books and even their availability.

The problem is this: while I despise people who say that Heinlein is not “accessible” for today’s kids, and while I think a thousand deaths (slow, employing a foam hammer, so I get to enjoy it) should be visited on the utter idiots who have gone around modernizing Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and Adventure series –there is an “aesthetic language” of story telling – there is a way to say and do things so that they fit with the time.

Look, this is very easy to understand with painting.  Let’s forget the impressionists or heaven help us the cubists.  My taste froze sometime during the baroque era (Yes, of course I was alive then sonny.  Prove otherwise) so cubist, abstract, it’s all funny shapes to me.  Let’s look at a retrospective of medieval painting through the baroque era.  Some of the medieval painting is incomprehensible to us right now, and I suspect so would a lot of baroque be to them.  There are codes and ways to make the eye accept that the shapes on the canvas are tri-dimensional objects.  Or not.  At its worse, we end up staring at the canvas and wondering what the funny blob of color is, when it’s supposed to be a cape or something, and its essential cape-ness would be obvious to contemporaries.

There is a reason that, at some point I was scouring the nets for a good annotated version of the Torah – I still am.  I have a decent/middling one – because not being a Hebrew scholar myself (I have trouble learning languages with different alphabets.  Ancient Greek is giving me issues as is) I want to know where the translator made a judgement call.  And I want to know what story and word-of-mouth tradition, what interpretation and what philosophy attaches to this or that verse.

My younger son at one point had four annotated versions of the Odyssey, one of them scored for the nose flute… er… I mean, one of them very odd.  On our trip to NYC… three?  Four? Years ago he spent his time on the plane comparing three of them and making notes.  I think his seat mates thought he was a very odd child.  (Which is of course wrong.  For THIS FAMILY he’s perfectly normal.)

What I mean by this is that any ancient text needs anotation and explanation.  No?  Well, let’s forget Chaucer.  Try La Mort D’Arthur.  Or Shakespeare, even (which is modern, by any definition) without some modicum of learning about the time, you’ll miss a whole level of meaning.

But let’s look beyond that: Jane Austen.  I love Pride and Prejudice.  I love Pride and Prejudice like I love chocolate.  I like Sense and Sensibility.  I’m moderately fond of the rest though Mansfield’s Park morality appears twisted to modern eyes.

HOWEVER I like all sorts of “difficult” genres and I grew up reading really odd stuff.  Most people reading Pride and Prejudice grow bewildered.  For one, they have no clue what the character looks like.  For another, Jane wasn’t – of course – writing historical fiction.  She’ll call something a “well appointed drawing room” and doesn’t describe.  Part of this is because her readers would have a mental image of what a well-appointed drawing room looks like.  Part of it is because her narration is not that visual.  Go look if you don’t believe me.  I’ll wait.  Back?  See?  She describes what is inside people, as it were, not their external appearance.  Which is wonderful in many ways.  It’s also a fail for modern readers,w ho want to know what they’re “looking” at.

I don’t know if it’s the influence of movies and television, or the fact that we have greater variety in our culture, but we seem to need more PHYSICAL description of setting and people to stay with a story.  I’d say it’s probably a variety of both, plus the fact we’re simply used to more description.

There are a dozen of these little things, that are culture/time sensitive.  That was what I was referring to in terms of needing to reinvent a tradition, because story telling has been rendered into a flat ground in the last fifty years.  Not that there aren’t people practicing good traditional story telling.  There are.  But they’re only a few, and a whole tradition remains to be reinvented.

Will we be more or less description?  Longer or shorter?  More or less internal character development?

Well, we live in a scientific age, don’t we?  At least our time owes much of its prosperity to science.  And look we can submit things directly to the public via the internet.  So… How’s about we experiment and learn?

Write a better story, and the world will beat a path to your internet account…  It’s worth a try, isn’t it?

Horse and Bull save us from night everlasting and ice eternal.

From ice, night, and nothingness, Horse was spun, and Horse’s hooves ignited the stars.  From the fire in Horse’s heart Bull was born, and in the plenitude of his might, Bull gored Horse.  From Horse’s blood gods were created, from Horse’s life gods drew their power, and in the fullness of time, the gods killed Bull.  From Bull’s blood men were born, and from Bull’s spirit ghast was given them.

Life from death.  Death from life.  

Tanis and Taris, the goddesses of death and birth, are twins, never parted.  Two faces of the same being.  I must remember; I must believe there is a cycle and a reason for all the sacrifice and toil, that joy must be waiting.

That, dear hearts is the beginning of the pre-Minoan saga, which shall never see the light of day in any form resembling that.

“But then why, Oh Critter, are you making us read this?”

Because I’ve been thinking – and you know how dangerous this is, about belief, religion, myth, mystery and science fiction and fantasy writing.

At some point we were talking in a panel, and it hit us that most sf/f either has no religion at all, or it is a central point of the story (the gods are aliens in sf, or they really exist in fantasy.)  And we looked at each other in shock, because this makes our worlds really different from the real world.

Noises were made about – snort – our people (SF/F people) being more “rational” or less credulous than other people.  Snort!  People, I read their facebook postings.  Leave alone their political eructations, our people are in fact where urban myths go to die.  We like stories, we like good stories, and we will tell stories and believe stories that wouldn’t fool a two year old.  Our disbelief is dangling from the neck and its face is blue.  (Actually of course by “our people” I mean the normal science fiction writers/readers, present company always excepted.  Stop glowering and keep reading.  I have something to say beyond insulting you.)

The truth I think is much simpler.  We – both readers and writers of science fiction – as a rule (there are always exceptions, of course)  aren’t joiners.  In fact, we look upon all forms of groups with a jaundiced eye.  Possibly because ever since we can remember we were the odd kid who stuck out like a sore thumb.  Possibly because the same thing – whatever it is – that attracts us to Science Fiction makes us not fit in easily.  We’ll call the it the sf-gene for ease. (Not that I’m proposing it’s genetic, though what leads us to read and enjoy this stuff might very well be.  It often runs in families.)

The sf gene comes with a non-joining gene.  And while we have any number of atheists, I’d bet we don’t have more than the normal, organized religion.  But I would bet (it’s hard to tell.  All I have is con-going experience) that we also have a higher number of non-denominational believers, or of believers in various religions who don’t attend often, or feel marginally attached to their denomination.  (For one I know a couple of people who have confessed to their reading tastes to church friends only to find they were the object of stares.  Seeing as I get this at normal social gatherings, that makes perfect sense.)

So when we write we tend to think our characters’ beliefs are their own.  It’s none of our business.  And we tend to write societies where religion (always excepting the ones that hit the plot, like, oh Tombs of Atuan) is a private matter.  We assume they exist, we just don’t bother with them.

This creates a very inaccurate picture of human society, since – of course – all societies have religion, even those in which religion is officially forbidden.  It also seems to have very little to do with the correlation between science and technology or with widespread education.  Something in the collective human mind believes in the unseen and the unexplained.  Partly, I think, because it orders what is otherwise a chaotic system in a similar way to what fiction does.  (I’m a believer myself – not a secret – so I’m not implying religion is fiction.  Please, keep the religion wars out of my comments.)  In places like Europe, where religion is discouraged by being considered profoundly uncool and also old fashioned, a whole pop culture religion is arising, resembling to an extent the most primitive religions we have traced: a worship of the Earth and of natural processes, filled with irrationality and fraught with rituals to avert bad luck in personal life.

I will say it again – the human brain craves mysticism, the unexplained, mystery (in the sense of touching the sacred.)  The human brain craves truths larger than ourselves, the feeling of permanence after a life we know is all too brief.  And we crave sense in the world.  It also craves togetherness and a sense of sharing something beyond space and time and  before ya’ll say “But Sarah, you just said we’re not joiners,” I have one word: conventions.  Over time they’ve become fraught with ritual, they have shared beliefs and shared legends, and even shared relationships that exist only at cons.  My theory is that we’re joiners, within our own subset.  We are, after all, as human as the rest of them.

So…  How to get that into science fiction and fantasy.

It’s difficult, of course.  Why of course?  Well, because religion and religious thought is not straight forward and rational.  And in books we have to make things so that they are at least understandable by the people reading, which means in our turn we insert a certain amount of order, in what is often quite chaotic.  Take any religion and even the most rational believer will cling as desperately – or more desperately – to stuff he KNOWS doesn’t make sense even within his belief system.  Take Jorge Luis Borges’ quote “I pray the rosary because my mother asked me to.  I have no idea if I’m speaking at one end of a disconnected telephone.”

And how many, self-consciously agnostic or disbelieving people do we know who cling to one or two rituals because their mother or father did it when they were little?

That’s the other thing – religion is generational.  Which means when an entire population converts, accretions from past ritual still remain, sometimes with new justifications. We know this about the Catholic church – but we often forget it’s all religions, including the more primitive we know.

So… how do I propose to write religion?  Well, in the snippet above the novel IS about religion.  Or at lest their beliefs are inextricably linked to their ability to use Ghast – a supernatural symbion – which in turn is linked to other things, including the invasion they’re fighting.  But note that their religion already shows signs of two belief systems that collided and melded – the world was created by Horse and Bull, but there’s also Tanis and Taris (and a pantheon of gods.)

Even in this novel – which is about religion – I tried not to explain too much.  There are big, important rituals (a couple of them very unsavory or cleaned up unsavory – at the back of all our big rituals is blood, sex and death.  It’s being human that does it.) But there is also a folk religion with the equivalent of “knock on wood” and “don’t spill salt.”

It is important to resist the temptation to explain or to tell us how this came about.  In real religions, one rarely knows (or cares.)

But Sarah, you say, what if my novel is NOT about religion?  Can I just leave the things undercover where they belong?

Well… yes and no.  Yes, you can, and you’ll be as “real” as the next sf/f world – which, mind, can be plenty.  Or you can introduce brief, puzzling bits, and say “Oh, that’s because he’s a Yonolarian, thrice divided.  They worship on every third Monday.”  And let it go.  Or as I did in Darkship Thieves make the casual reference to Gaian religion.  Or Usaian religion (just you wait, I found that in A Few Good Men half the zanies are Usaians, which is part of what brought about this post.)

Alternately you can use it as a plot point: such as Heinlein in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, where part of the reason Wyo is accepted so quickly is that she goes to church with them.

Or you can use it in the sense of Now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t way that seems to inform most people’s belief in the supernatural.  No?  Take ghosts for instance.  Most of us will say “We don’t believe in ghosts” but most of us could also point to one or two instances where we cover up with “Of course it wasn’t a ghost” but we’re not quite sure.  Evoke that, and it will have a very powerful effect on your reader.

Oh, also, please, please, please, rid yourself of the Marxist fallacy (Marx was just such a warm bucket of Epic Fail, in every realm his mind touched) that religion was invented by priests to keep the masses quiescent.  At every period of history you’ll find devout priests and disbelieving peasants, the same as every other type of people.  Don’t patronize your ancestors.  They weren’t that stupid, and half of what you do would strike them as very dumb too.  Not to say the state didn’t use or try to use religion for their ends, of course.  The state uses everything for their ends.  BUT religion is bigger than any state.  Yes, even ancient Egypt.

So…  I’ll finish with some rules for what to do with religion in writing spec fic:

1 – There should be multiple religions, unless it’s a totalitarian state that only allows one religion officially.  (Though even then there will be proscribed religions or sects, some of which still operate underground.)

2 – It shouldn’t make sense.  NOT perfect sense.  Because religions are accretions of age-old belief and ritual, they’re often at internal odds.

3- Most people believe in something not quite rational.  If it’s not religion, then it’s superstition.

4 – In the ultimate analysis, most religions seem to be a way to account for the fact we know we’re mortal and that our mind is infinite but our body all too brief.  (And I’m not saying that religions are/aren’t truth.  As I said, I’m a believer, myself.  I’m just saying that’s how our mind works with religion.)  So, at the center of our religious/superstitious belief is death/sex and always blood as a link to both.

5 – Religion exists even when forbidden.

6 – Religion can serve the state or oppose the state or yes.

7 – Even in a religiously uniform society, there’s ALWAYS dissenters and secret practitioners of forbidden faiths or at the very least of forbidden branches of faiths.

8 – Not all religions are benign.  Not all are malign.  In any fight for freedom, some religions will oppose and some help.

9 – Not all religions believe in eternal life.  Some are just a “rule of conduct” for “proper living.”

10 – The easiest way to preserve the mystery of religion is to give us bits and pieces with NO explanation.

11 – Respect your character’s beliefs.  One man’s religion might be another man’s belly laugh, but it’s deadly serious to the believer.

This post went through a lot of titles, including “Let Yourself Go” and “Working On What’s Been Spoiled By The Father” also “Be The Tall Poppy.”

I realize by now I’ve confused you more than you were by that title.  So be it.  I’ve found I write these posts the same way I write books.  I have a vague idea of the question, and then I have a lot of impressions and thoughts, of poetry and images and feelings which I feel are in some way related to the question.  Writing posts and stories is like assembling all those bits and pieces, so that in the end it stands complete and I see the picture.  And hopefully so do my readers.

The question here started with an excellent series of posts Serdar Yegulalp has been doing over here, each of them his unpacking/unfolding and his own counterpoint of my Human Wave Post.  It’s an excellent series of posts, and I urge everyone to read them.

The particular point he was spinning from was this: You will write in language that can be understood.  You will have an idea of what your story is about, or at least of its beginning, middle and end.  And so will your reader, once he reads it.

And a brutal summarization of his counterpoint – which like a translation is always betraying a little – is that while he believes you should write to reach an audience, he doesn’t think any writer deliberately sets out not to.  (He hasn’t gone to the same writer gatherings I have, but never mind.)  In the middle of making this point, he says something about the thrill of wanting to try new forms, not wanting to tell stories in the same hackneyed way.

Something about his post bothered me, at a sub-rational level, just like a minuscule pebble under your sock bothers you, though you’re not even quite sure you feel something.  But other than commenting on the fact I’d heard writers express the idea that not to be understood by themselves or others was their goal, I left it alone.  There was more than that, though.  However, it was a moving dot upon the page, and I couldn’t put my finger on it.

Throw into that the Reiner Kunze poem, which again I’m going to quote from my memory of (translated) and therefore probably not faithful, but I can’t find it on the net: “The trees grow, top on top ….. to the wind they all whisper the same.”  In the middle is phrasing I won’t attempt to reproduce because I don’t remember it with any exactness.  Something about filtering the sun and the rain in exact amounts, so none knows the cruelty of thirst.  It applied to his situation – a poem against communism – but not so much to this one.  What I quoted does — that last haunting line in particular “to the wind they all whisper the same.”  Which we’ll agree is the very definition of “establishment publishing.”

Also, last night we watched Prince of Egypt, and my older son, halfway through it, said “why don’t thy just walk out one by one?”  Which, of course, was right.  They could have.  Why “Let my people go” till Egypt was on its knees, the innocent with the guilty alike?  And then I thought, “but one on one, they’re just runaway slaves, hunted down into the desert and most of them dying there.  They’re not a people.  They’re not a movement.”

And then, because I was already in a biblical mood, the story of Esau selling his birthright for a mess of pottage came to mind.  At this point I was starting to get glimmers of what bothered me about Serdar’s post.  It was followed by a recollection of a line that often seems to come up in the I-Ching (don’t ask.  I have a friend who will do I-Ching readings at the drop of a hat) “Work On what has been spoiled by the Father; No blame.”

This morning I found myself singing Leonard Cohen’s song “Show me the place” and struck by the lines “Show me the place; I’ve Forgotten, I don’t Know.”

At which point what bothered me about Serdar’s post came to mind.  He talks of the inscrutable, precious exercises in “literature” – which, yes, I too can enjoy if I’m in the right mood – as being a reaction against the “hackneyed” and “easy” way of telling things.

This – with due apologies – makes as much sense as high school kids today talking about being multi-tattooed and wearing their pants falling off their butt as a reaction against the “suit and tie” establishment.  Are there still people who wear suits and ties?  Sure, mostly stock traders, strictly while at work.  But they’re not in any way a “block” or an establishment.  I bet even there inroads have been made and there are establishments that operate in slacks and unbuttoned shirts.  Everywhere else, casual has won the day.  Don’t believe me?  Go to your doctor, see how he’s dressed.  Likely in jeans and t-shirt.  And my older son has managed to get quite a rise out of his jean-and-t-shirt clad professors by wearing shirt, tie and slacks to class.

So, in effect, these kids are rebelling against an establishment that no longer exists – and which they know only from the movies, which in turn are made by people who are the establishment – by adopting the extreme forms of the establishment today and the “de rigeur” rebellion to be taken seriously by today’s establishment.

In the same way, talking about popular literature that follows some “hackneyed” pattern is curiously dislocated in time.  Oh, sure, some popular authors have a formula.  This falls under “if it works, keep doing it” – but is their formula universal or the way to be successful?  Even more importantly, is it enforced by “the establishment” and are you given perks for it?

Hardly.  Romance is a different thing, to an extent, though even then, until new-publishing came in and woke up publishing, the real establishment was trying to drag romance the way of other genres.

I submit to you that there was a time in which experimenting with new ways of telling stories was refreshing and liberating.  There was a time when starting with a shocking or scatological scene was fresh.

This is no longer so.  Go look at “highly acclaimed” science fiction and find one that isn’t “experimenting” or doesn’t “break the conventions”[ that no longer exist.]

The transgressive is now the norm.  Even Hunger Games straddles the fine line between conventional teen romance and what the establishment enforces.  To succeed, to be pushed, it HAD to bring in social injustice (which tags it as worthy of promotion) and children killing children (which tags it as “transgressive.”)

The exceptions had to be smashing hits in Britain before the Americans were allowed to buy them.  Harry Potter and of course Pratchett.  And for a course on what the establishment is and how hard it holds the line, listen to Pratchett tell of all the years when he was a mega blockbuster bestseller in England and was lucky to sell five thousand copies a book here.  I was a fan of his back then, and I want to tell you, finding his books required devotion and patience.  (Pre-Amazon.)

This is where we are now.

Inventing ever more outre forms of telling a story might give you some sort of satisfaction – it might even get you promoted by the establishment.  But remember the establishment, though still very strong, is having to cope with reality, and with the fact that the choices they made over all these years, choices often made against the market (hence the falling circulation rates) are becoming more and more apparent as competition surfaces.  Also, realize that at this point metaphorically speaking just wearing a mini-skirt to school is not going to be viewed as the approved rebellion.  You’ll need at least the style of lip piercing that resembles “boar tusks” and which in turn will make it hard for you to get a job when school is over.  Or it will make it hard for you to sell to those people out there, in the street, beyond the group think of the establishment.  (Again the falling circulation rates.)

The problem as I see it is this: we sold our birthright for a mess of pottage.  Instead of keeping the best of the story telling tradition built up since the Iliad, we went searching in the wilderness for the rebellion, the startling and the shocking.  This is fine in moderation.  It’s how literature grows and changes.  The outre becomes integrated and accepted and moves the establishment in another direction.  But for the last five decades we’ve been engaged in something quite different – an orgy of tearing down and chewing to pieces, that proposed nothing but chaos as an alternative.

The rebels who became the establishment were not — it turns out — pushing an alternate way of doing things.  Just the continuous tearing down of the old way.  They brought no trowels or spades, only wrecking balls.

Literature is how people think of themselves.  Mystery is how we think through problems of justice and order.  Romance is how we think of the relationship between the genders.  Science fiction is our dreams of the future.  Fantasy is our dreams of the unseen and the supernatural.

Of these romance and fantasy lost their way perhaps the least.  But the others have been – now – thoroughly torn down.  Kicking the fragments to pieces takes no daring and it achieves nothing except rubble.

So am I proposing to go back to the way it was before the great unlearning?  No.  We’re not the same people.  Heck, when the rebels started getting hold of the seats of power, I was learning to speak and walk.  Without the tear down, things would have evolved, but now there’s nothing left of them, and we’re different.  We’re like a sixteen year old who hasn’t read anything since kindergarten and picture books and must now find something that speaks to him, only it doesn’t exist so he must invent it/write it.

Writing another “transgressive” piece is easy.  We’ve read hundreds of them.  Writing a piece that will actually appeal to people without the massive promotion and push that used to be brought to bear (and still is – coff – Hunger Games) by the establishment is difficult.  We’re working on what has been spoiled by the metaphorical father, and while there might be no blame, we also don’t have a lot to work with.  Some people manage it, and become bestsellers on Amazon, but they’re still flukes.  A literature with broad appeal has yet to be invented.  We sold our birthright for a mess of (transgressive) pottage, and now we must create another, letter by letter, word by word, book by book.

The new establishment is losing power by the moment, and it’s possible to “let yourself go” – it has to be done that way, anyway, one by one, writer by writer.  But we’ll still be only voices crying in the desert, unless we’re all sort of pointed in the same direction – the direction here being appealing to the largest possible number of people and telling them who they are.  More importantly, telling them who they can be.  All without attempts to drag them down into the mud, or tear down what they need to live day by day.

It’s not easy.  We have no templates, really.  A few, perhaps.  Pratchett is a rather large beacon.  But there are few others, working today, and most aren’t taken seriously.

And – pardon me, but on the weekend of Passover and Easter allow me to say this – we might very well wander for a generation in the desert.

But I believe it’s an endeavor worth trying.  A civilization unable to think about itself without putting itself down and demeaning its individual members  – or hating humanity in general (there’s a whole subgenre I call human-extinction porn) is by definition ill.  No, healing it is not the job of literature – but literature is PART of that job.  Working on that is a worthy endeavor – or at least it seems so to me, and I refuse to believe I am alone.

And again, given what weekend this is, forgive me for quoting Leonard Cohen again in this way: “Show me the place; Help me roll away the stone; Show me the place; I can’t move this thing alone.”

*My excuse for being late this week is that I’m on the final phase of the second book of the vampire musketeers.  And as such, I had trouble focusing on Witchfinder.  Sorry!*

*This is the Fantasy novel I’m posting here for free, one chapter every Friday.   If your conscience troubles you getting something for free, do hit the donate button on the right side.  Anyone donating more than $6 will get a non-drm electronic copy of Witchfinder in its final version, when it’s published.
There is a compilation of previous chapters here  all in one big lump, which makes it easier to read and I will compile each new chapter there, a week after I post.  When the novel is completed and about to be edited the compilation page will probably be deleted.

Oh, this is in pre-arc format, meaning you’ll find the occasional spelling mistake and sentence that makes no sense.  It’s not exactly first draft, but it’s not at the level I’d send to a publisher, yet. *

For previous chapters, look here:  https://accordingtohoyt.com/witchfinder/

 

Straying

Caroline hadn’t left the path.  She was sure of it.  She set her jaw in what a young man once had told her was a very daunting expression.  Not that it thought it was true, only the young man had strayed from a ball held at Darkwater and had found her in the garden area just outside the nursery.  Caroline supposed that this meant he had thought her an easy mark, since she was only fourteen and not yet come out.

Afterwards, Seraphim had told her the gentleman was a desperate fortune hunter, his pockets prodigiously to let, and had been trying to seduce a girl he thought was a naif, and also had a pretty fortune.  He’d been wrong on both counts, and Seraphim and Caroline had ended the night by laughing over cups of hot chocolate in the governess’s rooms, about the surprise the fine young dandy would have got, had he managed to seduce Caroline.

But of course Caroline was not a fool and knew better than to believe claims that she was the fairest woman this man of the world had ever seen, or that, in her plain muslin frock, with the ribbon trimming, she eclipsed the belles of London.  She might have been fourteen, but she’d never been stupid.  She’d set her jaw just like so, her teeth clenched against all his compliments, and she’d carefully set a don’t-touch spell between herself and the young man.  As it happened it had been the yelp he gave when reaching for her and meeting the painful barrier which felt rather like a bite, which had got Seraphim’s attention, and Seraphim had escorted him off the grounds, with stern words, before coming to speak to Caroline.

Caroline wondered if Seraphim had fought the man.  It seemed hardly worth it, as he had not in fact touched her, but he might have.  The code of honor of men was a closed book to the young woman.

She scratched her nose.  But the one thing that was absolutely sure was that Seraphim could not in fact fight a duel with all of fairyland for having led her astray.  Though doubtless he would try.  He could be very foolish that way.

Caroline felt like she wanted to cry, and instead set her teeth hard and rehearsed her wrongs.  She had not strayed from the path, nor left her mother.  They’d heard a cry – from a woman they thought – and they’d made it a point of going to help her.  This made perfect sense.  What made no sense whatsoever was for her to now find herself alone, her mother nowhere in sight.

“Mother?” she essayed.  And then “Your grace?” just in case other rules applied here that didn’t apply in the normal world.  And then again, in a high, hopeless voice, “Mother!”

But her mother didn’t answer, and Caroline set her jaw again and determined she would be brave.  After all, fairyland might very well be able to take her tears and do something horrible with them.  She couldn’t tell.  She’d once heard a conversation between Gabriel and Seraphim.  She’d been hiding – or at least not quite hiding, but in a place she couldn’t be seen – in the library.  She’d wiled a snowy afternoon away there, in a window seat half-hidden in the shadow of the fireplace.  Wrapped in a woolen shawl, she’d read all afternoon, and then woken to find that Seraphim and Gabriel were there and talking, and that neither of them had any idea she could hear them.

She supposed she should have said something; given the alarm in some way.  But the truth was that listening to the two men talk, when they thought she wasn’t about, had been like opening a window into a vista that she’d never been allowed to gaze upon.  

She supposed she’d always known that Gabriel was their brother.  At least she couldn’t remember not knowing.  He was the son of their father, and a fairy lady.  The same scary fairy lady who’d come around when Caroline was very small.

But she’d never seen Seraphim and Gabriel behave as brothers, as they did that afternoon.  There was nothing much to it.  Or at least, most of their conversation went above her head.  But it was clear that Gabriel was teasing Seraphim by making comments about Seraphim’s magic that she supposed would be a terrible insult in anyone else.  And Seraphim laughed at them and, in return, called Gabriel “Penny”, a nickname that Gabriel said was utterly revolting.  In the middle of the conversation she remembered, most of which might have been more understandable if it had been spoken in Chinese, she’d heard a sentence clearly uttered and ever afterwards remembered, “Fairyland feeds on emotion.”

If that was true, she would do her best to control hers.  Let them starve.  She assumed by some magic, they’d taken her from one path and onto the other, and left her mother upon the other.  She hoped her mother would be well, then smiled at the thought that she was worrying about someone who had far more magical experience and power than she did.  Yes, she’d been helpless before her magical doppelganger, but that didn’t mean that the Duchess didn’t very well know how to take care of herself.

She continued following the path – difficult as a rosy fog grew with every step.  She had to feel about with her foot, until she found the edge of the path.  At one point, for just a moment, the path cleared, and what she saw through the fog made her more determined than ever not to stray.  Because what she saw through the fog was nothing.  Not darkness, not a chasm, but nothing – a howling emptiness such as must have existed before creation.

And then the path veered and widened, and suddenly she was before the person crying.  Person was a matter of speaking, in this case.

Caroline took a step back, hastily, barely managing to stay on the path, and gulped hard.

She was in what would otherwise be a charming clearing – a broad opening in between low trees that looked rather like a gardener had just got down trimming them.  It was carpeted in soft, even grass.  On the grass lay…  She blinked.

A dragon.  It was enormous, and reddish-orange.  Now more red, now more orange, the colors chased each other across its sparkling scales, giving it the look of a lake ruffled by the wind.  Its huge paws were stretched in front of it, to accomodate a massive head.  It was crying.  From its fanged mouth came distinctly feminine sobs.

Caroline didn’t even know that dragons could cry, much less that they could shed tears, and now, having found out, she was torn between empathy and fear.  

After al, what would make a creature this size cry?  And if he was one of the tree she was supposed to help on her path, what could she do to help this outsized grief.  

She stepped back and must have made a sound, because the dragon looked up, and its tiny, stubby wings fluttered upon its back.  “Oh,” it said, in a distinctly feminine and lady like voice.  “I did not mean to…  I beg your pardon.  I must have alarmed you.”

Which was when Caroline realized that its wings were not short and stubby.  Well, not naturally.  Instead, they had been cut across, crudely, with some sharp instrument.  The ragged edges still bled.

“Oh,” she said.  “Does it hurt?” The dragon had the most disconcerting violet-blue eyes, fringed by dark lashes which looked at Caroline in absolute incomprehension.  “Your wings?

The dragon sniffed.  “I beg your pardon,” it said again.  “I’ve forgotten myself.”  And then, like that, it set up and… shifted.  It was the only way that Caroline could put it.

In front of Caroline and completely naked, and seemingly not caring, was a very pretty young woman, her hair the color of the dragon scales, and rippling with color in the same way.  She sat herself in the sort of pose one expected of mermaids waiting for wayward sailors, and smiled through her tears at Caroline.  “I’d like to put a frock on, only I don’t have one here, and I’m afraid I can’t leave here.”

“Why can’t you leave?”

“Because of my wings,” the woman said, and her voice went all watery again.

“Who cut your wings?  And why?”

“For trying to leave fairyland,” she said.  “The king said I should never do so.”

“But I thought elves could leave and… and possibly elf dragons too,” Caroline said, confused.  Because the truth was that she’d never heard of shifter dragons in fairyland.  Most shifters were completely human, even when their forms were mythological.  But she’d heard that there was such a thing as fairy horses, so perhaps there were fairy dragons, too.  She refused to speculate further.

“Oh, yes, but you see, I… I went out and I became pregnant, and the kind punished me by saying I couldn’t leave fairyland.  And when I tried to leave anyway, he cut my wings and confined me to this clearing.”

Caroline gulped.  “Why would you try to leave, against the king’s will?”

“To find my baby.”  The woman’s arms made a cradling motion.  He was thrown out as a newborn, and I thought I could find him, if …  I thought I might find him before he died, abandoned, on the street.  But now it’s been two weeks and–” she gulped.  “If he’s not been found, he’s dead.”  She sighed and the tears started again.  “I just realized it and I…”

“Don’t cry.  Very few children are left to die on the street.” Though homes for magical orphans were often not much better.  “Don’t cry.  Tell me, instead, what help can I give you.”

The woman controlled her tears with an effort.  “I see.  You’re walking the path, then?”

Caroline nodded.

The woman bit her lip.  “You can give me my wings back and then, before the king finds that they have grown, I can go out and find my baby and raise him.  I don’t care what I have to do.  I don’t want him raised by strangers.”

And that at least was something Caroline could understand and approve of.  “I can’t take a look at your wings – or at your back, I suppose, in this form, without leaving the path.  If you approach and turn around.”

The dragon lady did so, facing away from Caroline.  On her back there were two cruel gashes, just starting to scab over.  And Caroline had a problem.  She had used healing spells before.  And she could make these wounds close and stop paining the woman.  What she couldn’t do – had no idea how to do – was make the lost parts of skin which she supposed became the dragon wings, grow back.

She started explaining her predicment to the woman, but the dragon-lady interrupted, “Oh, please.  You have to be able to.  There must be something you can do, or the paths wouldn’t have brought you to me.”

Caroline considered the possibility the paths had been wrong, but in her experience magic rarely went wrong that way.  Instead, she thought, best think of what she could do that would serve.

A glimmer formed in her mind, something that she’d once watched Gabriel do to a still-live bird the cat had brought in.  Gabriel had told her, then, that such a spell was dangerous, more so for full-humans and that if he ever caught her doing it, he would give her the hiding of her life, even if the dowager Duchess killed him for it.

Caroline set her jaw and ground her teeth.  Well, then, Gabriel wasn’t here, and neither was her mother.  She would do what she had to do to get Michael out of captivity in fairyland.