Tag Archives: fantasy fiction

103. Mud 2

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Here are the second two of six installments of the novel Mud.

Merchants never came to the common; the diversions of that place were beneath their station, but their soldiers, herdsmen, clerks, and servants flocked there every evening to take their crude and colorful pleasures. A grown Chamarana would be beaten if found there, except after midnight when they went to clean the grounds, but Chamarana children hung from the trees and hid in the bushes to watch the excitement.

Mostly, I watched the women.

I could always look at Chamarana women, working, always working, in their thin, torn clothing, washing themselves naked in the Renal, or relieving themselves in the bushes. There was no part of a woman’s body that was not familiar to me.

This was different. These women were soft and rounded. Their breasts were not flat. They were clean, powdered, and perfumed. They were beautiful; more important, they knew they were beautiful, and showed that knowledge in every graceful movement. They walked across the common, swaying their hips with a half-smile that said, “I know you are looking. Go ahead. Enjoy.” It was a pleasure to watch them walk. It was a burning torch in the heart to watch from concealment as they shed their clothing and opened their legs to their lovers.

As a child, I could look. If one of the men caught me they would kick me and laugh and let me run away. But in a year or so, when I was just a little older, they would beat me unconscious for daring to look at a woman who was not a Chamarana. So I looked, and looked, and then looked again.

——————–

When I was surfeit with watching the women, I would watch the warriors at play. It was practice, of course, with blunted weapons. Often enough it left them bruised and bloodied, but they enjoyed themseves so hugely, that it looked like play to me. And why not? They were powerful men, with bulging thighs and masses of muscle in their arms and shoulders. Their bodies spoke of plenty of exercise, plenty of food, and plenty of rest. Our lean, slat-like Chamarana bodies spoke of little food, unending work, and rest that rarely came.

If I had a body like that, I thought, I could have women like that. But it wasn’t true, because I was Chamarana.

If I weren’t Chamarana . . . but that was a dream that couldn’t even be dreamed.

3

In the summer of my twelfth year I quit going to the common. I had been beaten twice in one month, and the second beating had left me unable to move for three days. Clearly, I had grown too old to be tolerated there.

Never again to look upon a beautiful woman – it was too much to bear.

The world is wide, and only Renth has Chamarana. I had heard this from the mouths of foreign sailors in the common, when I was young enough to listen from hiding. If I were a sailor, I could sail away. If I were a warrior, I could ride away. But I was Chamarana, and all I could do was carry away the waste too foul for a man to touch, grow food for others to eat, become leaner every year, and die.

102. Mud 1

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Here are the first two of six installments of the novel Mud.

1

They call me Mud, but don’t be fooled. It is a greater insult than it seems.

The word is Wauk and its symbol is embossed on one of the counters of the runeboard. As it is from the Godtongue, it has entered every language. In the Inner Kingdom, so a traveler once told me, it means the basic stuff from which all the world is made. Not so in my city.

In Renth, mud is that stuff into which all foul things come to rest. Blood and feces, urine and menses, all come back to the earth at last. A Renthian merchant will not say the words for those things – he hardly admits that his body produces them – and so he says wauk, thus staining a good word.

My people are Renthian, but outcasts. We are the Chamarana, who live in the swamp, and carry away those unpleasant things that the nobles will not speak of. I was born in the mud and of the mud. The smell of the mud was the first thing in my nostrils. My mother smelled of mud; most of my siblings died of the mud’s contagion.

The Chamarana breed freely and die early. It is a joke to the merchants. But those of us who survive, grow strong. And angry.

——————–

2

The river Renal curves sharply just as it nears the Inner Sea. Renth is built on the high right bank between the river and the sea. Overflowing waters in spring cover the lowlands off the left bank, forming a vast inland swamp. We Chamarana live at the edge of the swamp, and enter Renth only to do our work.

Every morning the tichan are driven out of their pens down the main avenue of the town to the swamp to graze. Every night they return to the safety of the pens, and twice a day we Chamarana with our crusted buckets and wooden scoops go out to clean the road after their passing. Dumped onto the fields at the edge of the swamp, and composted carefully into the stronger waste from the merchants cesspools, it fertilizes the crops we raise to feed Chamrana and merchant alike.

When I was five years old, I was given a scooop and put to work alongside my mother. When I was eight, and could lift a bucket, I began to work alone. But no one works the day round, not even a Chamarana. My mother had only enough energy for her work and to care for my little sister. She had none left for me, so I was free when my work ended to head for the common.

The land which stood above the highest floods was packed tight with warehouses, dwellings, barracks, and shops belonging to the merchants. On the land which flooded yearly, we planted our crops. Above the fields, we built our temporary huts, and rebuilt them every time the Renal rose higher than ususal. Between merchant’s houses and Chamarana huts lay the common.
more tomorrow

101. Mud, prolog

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“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

I don’t claim to be an Emerson, but I am going to shake things up. When I began this website, I intended Serial to be a presentation of my writings and A Writing Life to be mini-essays. This will be my largest deviation from that intention, because Serial is tied up with the fragment Voices in the Walls.

For five weeks I have been writing posts on issues that began with race in America and morphed into a consideration of world wide hierarchies based on race, gender and caste. I’ve written enough essays on that subject, but I have some more fiction to share.

I spent five years studying caste in India and overseas Indian colonies, and wrote my first master’s thesis on the subject. That is the kind of deep knowledge that informs everything I write, even when the subject seems to be something else. While writing a dragon short story (The Best of Lies), I needed a description of the city of Renth. Renth was part of the back-story of three novels I have written, but had never been fleshed out. This is what fell out of my keyboard.

As we went on up the mountain, I thought of Renth. I remembered how she spread out on both sides of River Renal from the crowded waterfront to the first fingers of the great inland swamp. I remembered how herdsmen drove in their herds of tichan every evening to keep them from the night predators. All of the sidewalk vendors would close up shop and congregate on the rooftops until the sound of passing-bells carried by the herdsmen proclaimed the streets safe again. Then the chamarana would come out with their crusted baskets to clean the streets and haul the manure to fertilize their rich gardens.

There are temples in Renth where Encaritremanta is still worshipped instead of the bloodless Septs, and where the ritual dancers proclaim to the world that the Fern of the Deep Forest is still fertile and ripe. There is Bread Street where the bakers from the whole city congregate and the smells are sweet beyond description.

In the morning, the sun falls slantwise on the whitewashed houses, catching the sleepy merchants in their rooftop boudoirs. The boys from the waterfront crowd onto the high roofed warehouses to look across the city at first light when the women take their baths. And some of them look back, insolent and insulated by their station, posturing and laughing and waving.

The chamarana in this bit were Chamars, borrowed whole from India. Later, when I needed a long story to flesh out a too-short novel, and needed it to be set in Renth, I began to consider writing from the viewpoint of one of these outcastes.

This was just before I began this website, when everything was fluid. I considered writing the story and publishing it in short segments as they were written, in Serial. It was a foolish idea, completely out of step with my writing style. I wrote the first six short segments, fell in love with the story, and decided to write it in a more normal fashion. It is on my short list of what-to-write-next.

Here are those segments, to be presented two per day for the rest of the week. It isn’t Black History, but you’ll find that it tastes a little like black history. The novel is tentatively titled Mud.

Prince of Exile, 12

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5.

A brazier stood on iron legs at the foot of the King’s bed. Croayl the priest sprinkled sandalwood on the coals. As the scent spread through the room the King opened his milky eyes and said, “Do not bury me while I am still breathing.”

Croyal moved closer to the King, touched his dry cheek, and laid his hand on the King’s hand. Both hands were long and bony, darkened and weakened now with age, but they had both been strong hands in their youths. Croyal said, “For weeks I have asked you, as your priest, to repent. I fear for your soul if you do not. Now I ask as your brother. Do not go into that cold night unclean.”

“Can you?”

The King’s voice was hoarse and weak. Croyal leaned closer and asked, “Can I what?”

“Can you, for one hour, be my brother again, and not a priest?”

“I cannot stop being what I am. Either part of what I am.”

“Nor can I. As my brother, I have loved you even when it was not easy. As a priest, I would spit in your face if I had the strength.”

“I know.”

“I, too, can only be what I am. I repent of nothing. I abjure nothing. I have lived my life with all my heart and I only regret leaving it. I regret no part of it.”

“Is there nothing you would change?”

The King was silent for a while. The numbness had reached his stomach, and within minutes it would no longer matter that the brother he loved was also a priest who ranted at him. His hand tightened on Croyal’s and he said, “I would give anything to see my wife’s face again.”

*****

We were unseen as Croyal held the King’s dead hand. Greyleaf stood a little apart. That which was corruptible lay cooling on the bed. We watched as the incorruptible and timeless essence of the King rose up and looked around bemused. He beheld Greyleaf; there was shock in his eyes, then tears. She moved forward into his arms. I could not hear what was said, but I could see their faces. I would gladly die to feel the happiness I saw there – if the dead could die again.

Their bodies were melting together; going smoky; gone.

I turned to the Prince and caught a look of longing on his face. I said, “I thought . . .”

The Prince replied, “The King’s exile was ending, not beginning. It started the day she died. He will never be one of us, and Greyleaf will no longer be tortured and half complete. They have found their peace in one another – again.”

“And you? And the rest of us?”

For a moment I glimpsed broad vistas of eternity and deep valleys of pain in his lean, handsome face. Then he restored his customary look of calm and said, “For each of you, your exiles will end. But I am the Prince of Exile.” finis

Prince of Exile, 11

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In the morning, he was gone. And she was pregnant, although it took her a month to discover it.

“Any sensible girl would have been frightened or furious, but Mara had lost the capacity for facing life in its raw state of truth. She decided she was not pregnant; she had merely miscounted the days.

“By the time three more months had passed, even her capacity for invention could not explain away the thickening of her belly. But there were other inventions. Her man had been called away on a dangerous mission, or kidnapped by bandits. As the stories grew, she grew; and her parents grew angry with her fantasies. Now, too late, they demanded that she face the truth.

“As the months moved by, her parents turned away from her. The people of the village had been weary of her voice long before her downfall, and would have nothing to do with her fabrications. She withdrew into her room and into herself. There she stayed through the hot month of August, swollen huge with child and without one human soul who was willing to listen to her.

“She sought out the memory of her lover, but she could not recall his face. The man had faded, displaced by the fantasy she had made of him. Now that fantasy faded as well, displaced by a still greater fantasy.

“She had lain with God himself.

“All that burning August, she sprawled in misery on her narrow bed and told herself the story again and again until it blotted out her shame, blotted out her pain, blotted out the heat, blotted out her parents screaming disbelief, blotted out the disgust of the villagers.

“She bore a son and raised him alone in a small hut behind her father’s inn. All day long she rocked him in her arms, crooned to him, and told him of his impending greatness. She called him Isus, and she raised him to believe that the world would love him and believe in him.

“Isus went out to tell the world of his divinity, but the world was impatient. It turned on Isus and killed him. Mara stood at the foot of the scaffold where they hanged him, and the last words she heard him say were, ‘You foolish men, I have brought you a vision, and you have turned it aside.’

“Mara’s spirit was shattered — for a little while. Then she turned from the village where she had been born, and went out to raise up a religion in her Son’s name.”

*****

The Prince leaned back against a rock, content for the moment. He said, “An ugly story. Disjointed; lacking in balance.”

“The true ones often are.”

“Yes. I saw Mara recently, still up to her old tricks.”

The ragged stranger laughed and said, “Mother never learns.” more tomorrow

Prince of Exile, 10

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We rode through the afternoon, ever higher, and at the crest of the mountain range, in a little sheltered space beside the pass, we found another traveler sitting beside his campfire. The Prince rode up to him and asked, “What is the ultimate truth?”

“Damned if I know, Prince. Get down and eat.”

The Prince grinned at the apparition who sat so casually beside the fire. He was skinny and ragged with a body much scarred, but insouciant humor danced in his eyes.

The Prince stepped down and walked up to the fire, extending his hands to the warmth, and said, “If you have no wisdom, how will you pay for my company?”

“I’ll tell you a story.”

“Good,” the Prince said, seating himself and reaching for the stewpot. “Stories are better than wisdom, and sometimes better than food.”

“But never,” the stranger suggested, “better than women or wine.”

The Prince shook his head, unconvinced, and said, “That would depend on the woman.”

“You have already heard my story!”

“I have heard all the stories, but never mind. Tell me again.”

*****

“This is the story,” the stranger said, “of Mara and Isus . . .

“There once was a young woman who could not tell truth from fantasy. She was loved by her parents, but no one could love her half so much as she loved herself. She felt that she was beautiful. She felt that she was a princess, stolen away in her infancy and given to peasants to raise. She felt that a fine knight would come to take her away. She felt that somewhere in the wide world there was one man – but only one man – fit to be her mate and that when he came into her life, he would fall passionately in love at the mere sight of her beauty.

“I do not know if she was beautiful. Had she been truly stunning, she could not have matched the visions she had of herself.

“She spun tales of glory about herself and told them to her parents. Surely she knew at first that they were fantasy.  But her parents indulged her, laughed with her, praised her imagination, and never forced her to see what was true and what was false.

“Ultimately, she met a young man who was passing through her village. She fell in love with him, not truly knowing what love was. She took passing affection and a bit of lust and built, on that foundation, huge cathedrals of imaginings of what their love would be.

“The man was not a liar, but he was no more truthful than any other man. When he spoke of love in those moments while their bodies were locked together, he did not expect to be taken so seriously. But Mara had no judgment, only illusions. To her, their passion was like the first man and woman. He was too kind to voice his disappointment that she was a clumsy virgin, and in the kindness with which he held his tongue, she saw a love so deep that it struck him dumb.

“In the morning, he was gone. And she was pregnant, although it took her a month to discover it. more tomorrow

80. And Don’t Begin With And

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yol 8This is the last of eight how-to posts on writing. I haven’t exhausted the subject, but I want to quit before I exhaust my readers.

Your Own Language:
And don’t begin with and

Here is a rule that was strictly enforced in the antediluvian days of my youth. I think today’s teachers have largely given up, and thank goodness. The rule is: Don’t begin a sentence with a conjunction.

This sentence is acceptable:     “Every morning he saddled his horse carefully, and every evening he wiped him down with equal care.”

According to the rule, this construction is not acceptable:     “Every morning he saddled his horse carefully. And every evening he wiped him down with equal care.”

And yet, this third version is “correct” again.     “Every morning he saddled his horse carefully. Every evening he wiped him down with equal care.”

What? This makes no sense – unless you first accept the fallacy that each sentence should be complete in itself. This is the same completeness fallacy that leads teachers to teach paragraphs in isolation (see yesterday’s post).

In any story, essay, letter, email, or post, the writing flows from the first word to the last. How we break up that writing – where we put periods, commas, paragraphs, dashes, colons, and semicolons – is entirely a matter of pacing.

Whether you prefer eighteenth century novels with sentences a hundred words long and a paragraph break every other page, or something modern with rapid fire, disjointed chattering, every story has to engage the reader at its beginning, then carry through to some reasonable level of closure.

It’s that simple.

Children have no problem with closure in their stories. At the end, the hero wakes up. Hemingway usually had no problem either; at the end of a typical Hemingway novel, the hero dies. But even that isn’t complete closure. When Robert Jordan is lying on the hillside at the end of For Whom the Bell Tolls, the enemy is closing in and there is no doubt he’s about to die. But what will happen to Maria? Will his coming sacrifice save his comrades? We don’t know.

As the holy men told the Prince of Exile, “Every true story ends in death, but no true story ever ends.” Closure is necessary, but never complete.

How much closure do you need? Thomas Anderson has said twice in reviews that the endings of my novels leave him feeling unsatisfied. Fair enough, yet they satisfy me. It is entirely a matter of taste.

Of course, there are limits. I once read a novel by an otherwise reputable author who ended it in mid-sentence because, just as his character has come to understand the meaning of life, he gets hit by a bus. That’s cheating.

There are more novels and blogs yet to write, and that’s closure enough for now.

Prince of Exile, 9

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We crested a rise and dropped into a tiny, high cirque, sheltered from the wind, south facing, and filled with grass and flowers. There we found another Holy Man. He sat beside the road, winding a necklace of roses, carefully breaking off each thorn. His clothing was finely spun wool, woven in a clever pattern, that strained to cover his bountiful girth. He had no hut, but had planted bushes to enclose a space of sweet grass for his sleeping.

The Prince leaned down from his mount and studied the Holy Man. Sweet fragrance rose up around him. He said, “I am a traveler from a far, strange place. Who are you?”

“One who lives fully,” the Holy Man replied.

The Prince asked, “What is the ultimate truth?”

The Holy Man replied without hesitation, “No true story ever ends.”

The Prince paid the man for his wisdom with a flask of sweet wine. We moved on, only a little enlightened.

*****

We came into a high meadow. There beside the road was a small house of native stone, cunningly built, strong against the harsh winters of that place. There was a man in the yard, scraping the skin of some hairy beast with a knife. His face was familiar, but we had not seen sweat on it until now. He looked up from his work, stretched, and walked over to the low fence that separated his land from the wild lands around him. The Prince saluted him politely and smiled. The man smiled back and said, “I see questions in your face. You have seen my two brothers, of course?”

“Many times, in many places,” the Prince replied.

The man sighed and said, “No doubt.”

“Are you a Holy Man?”

The man answered, “Those who say they are, are not. Those who say they are not, frequently are. I’ll just say, ‘Not particularly’.”

The Prince smiled widely and asked further, “What is the ultimate truth?”

The man replied, “Every true story ends in death, yet no true story ever ends. Both statements are correct, and all wisdom lies in trying to reconcile them. If there is more Truth than that, I have not discovered it.”

There was silence for a space as the autumn wind blew through the yard. The man went on, “Prince, for I see who you are, will you step down and break bread with me?”

The Prince shook his head a little sadly. “Would that I could, but my duties are many and my time is not my own. You do not need me.”

“Not needing you, I would welcome your company all the more.”

“And I yours. But it is not to be.”

We moved on, with our spirits a little lightened. more tomorrow

79. Death to the Five Part Paragraph

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yol 7 If you are a writer, a teacher, a parent, or a student, don’t back off because the title seems beneath your interest. This is Basic BS 101.

Your Own Language, 7:
Death to the five part paragraph!

Here is your zen koan for the day – how do you teach that which cannot be taught?

Answer: you make up arbitrary rules which seem to cover the situation, then teach the rules instead of the unteachable thing.

I speak, of course, of the five sentence paragraph, a structure found in every middle school classroom, but which exists nowhere in nature.

At one point in my teaching career I was preparing a program which was to teach writing by analyzing the writing in students’ science and history textbooks. I performed an experiment to confirm a suspicion. I went to my bookshelf, chose five non-fiction books at random, chose a page and a paragraph in each at random, and analyzed the result.

The only book that followed the format taught in middle school was How to Hang Drywall. It was written by a drywall contractor and was probably the only book he ever wrote. I could visualize him digging out his old textbooks for guidance before beginning to write. To be fair, it was full of accurate information. I had followed his instructions (that’s why the book was in my library)  and my drywall stayed up; but it was excruciatingly dull, and it didn’t need to be.

There is another related old chestnut: tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you just told them. This is the five part paragraph with pontoons on both sides to keep it from sinking.

I don’t see this in print too often: if you do, maybe you’re reading the wrong kind of book. I do see it every Saturday morning on PBS in the show Woodsmith Shop. Like the drywall book, this is the product of intelligent men – professionals who are not professional writers – presenting what they know, but following rules that are not serving them well..

The wonder is that the book and the TV program work as well as they do, given the teacher generated chestnuts they had to work with.

Here is a five sentence paragraph following a format popular in middle schools:

  • topic sentence
  • supporting sentence
  • supporting sentence
  • supporting sentence
  • recapitulation or close

I got ready for school this morning. I brushed my teeth. Then I took a shower. Finally I put on my school clothes. Then I was ready for my day.

Wow, exciting! Actually, that wasn’t a paragraph at all. It was a mini-essay, and an exceedingly boring one at that.

A paragraph is a piece of a larger work. It tells part of the story. It should have some internal consistency, but it is not independent. It introduces a thought or carries on the thought begun in earlier paragraphs.

That’s it. There are no other rules.

You can’t teach a student to write a paragraph. A paragraph does not and cannot exist. When teacher’s try to teach a paragraph, they are actually teaching mini-essays, and doing a poor job of that.

Take a two page essay, sans indentation. Break it into four paragraphs. Now take the same essay and break it into ten paragraphs. The former will sound formal, the latter will sound breezy.

Paragraphs can determine tone, can help keep our thoughts and understandings organized, and give us places to breathe. Where we break essays and stories into paragraphs is determined by the tone we want to achieve, and by the content of the work.

There are no other rules. Teachers who create artificial formulas to give themselves something to teach strangle the minds of their students.

Prince of Exile, 8

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4.

When we left the inn the next morning, I avoided Satyr so I would not have to look at his self-satisfied face. As we were preparing to mount, Greyleaf said to the Prince, “Is it not yet time? Has he not yet passed your tests?”

“They are not my tests,” the Prince answered.

“I feel his pain every day.”

“So do I.”

“It is not right!”

“Many things are not. But life is . . . incisive. Nevertheless, I think you are right. We will turn in that direction.”

Harrow came out with a horn of ale to drink a stirrup cup with the Prince. When they had made a toast of easy journey and swift return, the Prince said, “You wear a troubled face, old friend. What is the matter?”

“T’slalas, the young man who came in with you yesterday, is ill. His face is blotched with fever and he breathes like a man at the end of a race.”

The Prince nodded.

“You understand, Prince, that illness is an innkeeper’s greatest enemy. Any guest that comes through my door may carry death for all.”

Satyr raised a hair-winged eyebrow in irony, but the Prince simply said, “Harrow, I give you my word, the illness that T’slalas carries is not contagious. At least, not in any sense that you would understand. That which taints him, you and yours will never suffer from, good old man.”

“Can you help him?”

“Whatever I have for him, I have already given.”

*****

For three days we crossed the plain, heavy with harvest, sweet with the smell of new mown hay, rich with peasant life.  The Prince did many things I have not his leave to record.

On the fourth day we reached the foothills, and on the eighth day we were high among tortured boulders where the trees are sparse and twisted.

There we came upon a Holy Man. He sat clad in rags and half cured skins, announcing his holiness at a hundred paces by the smell of him. He had erected a hut of bones, and sat moving his dirty fingers over the crown of a skull, as a maid would polish a fine brass bowl.

The Prince leaned down from his mount and studied the Holy Man, showing no discomfort at the miasma that surrounded him. He said, “I am a traveler from a far, strange place. Who are you?”

The Holy man did not answer. He only polished the skull and stared at the Prince out of hollow eyes.

The Prince said, “What is the ultimate truth?”

The Holy Man replied without hesitation, “Every true story ends in death.”

The Prince nodded politely and paid the man for his wisdom with an ornate dagger. We moved on, only a little enlightened. more tomorrow