Writing Right Out There In Public: Filling In

[ecosophia]

The third scene of my novel-in-progress The Road to Amalin came together yesterday and this afternoon, so here it is. This comes before the last one posted, which you can read here...

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Later that same day, when work in the fields was done, half a dozen sons and husbands and brothers of women who’d been at Sullamy’s birthing picked their way up the trail to Embery’s shack with birthing-gifts on one shoulder. Rapping on the door, pleasant words exchanged, and something worth having set down on the table without anything being said about it: that was the way Embery’s afternoon went. Then, precise as the monastery bell, old Gedda tapped on the door with her stick, come to drink tea and gossip and have Embery tend the old hurt inside her shoulder with salve warmed over the stove. Before she left, she pressed a copper coin into Embery’s hand—her youngest son served in the king’s army and sent money home when he could—and that went into a little leathern bag Embery kept under her bedstead.

With all that, the chicken to stew, and dough to set rising for bread, Embery scarcely noticed how late it had gotten by the time the latch rattled again and Tay came in. He wasn’t half so muddy as he’d been the day before, but the same faraway look was in his eyes, and that left Embery feeling troubled. Still, they had stewed chicken for dinner that night, the first flesh they’d tasted in most of a month, and enough firewood to keep the pot simmering quietly on the back of the stove all night so the rest of the stew would be fine the next day. When Embery put out the lamp and settled under the quilts for the night, no worries darkened her dreams.

The next day the great iron bell of the monastery started tolling at dawn and didn’t stop. That was familiar enough; Embery put on her best clothes and got Tay as presentable as cold water and a comb would permit.  The two of them headed down the trail to the village in plenty of time to join the long line of villagers heading through the open gates to the great dark hall near the center of the monastery complex. There they knelt side by side on the cold flagstones of the floor along with the other villagers, while local dignitaries and the well-to-do knelt on velvet cushions up front.  Beyond them hung a great black banner bearing holy symbols, and in the midst of them a blank space in the shape of a standing figure in robes of ancient cut.

The service began with the sound of a high shrill chime. With the others, Embery repeated the second and fifth Litanies of Penitence, making sure that her face stayed suitably sorrowful all the while. After that came the readings from the Holy Law, and after that a sermon read out by the abbot, a lean man with a spray of white hair around the edges of his scalp and loose skin below his chin that hung there like a vulture’s wattles.

Embery put an attentive look on her face, glanced at Tay to make sure he’d done the same, and then let her thoughts wander off to one of the old tales of Amalin, one she meant to tell her son sometime soon. Kendath, she thought. Kendath of the four gates, and how the four sons of Ruon  the Tall came to conquer the city and their half-brothers, the four sons of Ardaman, defended the gates against them, until all eight were dead and the half-sister they had all forsaken and betrayed became Kendath’s queen. It was a grand story and a sad one, and it would take her a week of nights at least to tell it all to Tay. She had begun to rehearse it in the silence of her mind when suddenly the old man standing in front of them all spoke of her secret thoughts.

“The sons of Ruon and the sons of Ardaman,” his voice rang out, shrill with loathing. “The wanderings of Eremon and the ship of fools that sailed from Golin. All the worthless follies of an age that is gone, all the foolish tales of gods and goddesses who are dead. Plowmen mutter them to themselves as they till the soil, women repeat them to one another as they spin and weave, even the ears of innocent children are defiled by them—and all the while they could be gladdening their souls with the words of the Holy Law.”

Embery made sure her expression was duly shocked, wished she could risk a glance at Tay to make sure he’d done the same. It was a risk telling the stories to a child, so old Neely had warned her, but ever since Tay’s birth she’d longed to share them with him, and so she’d taught him the ways of silence from the cradle up. Was it enough? She knew better than to think that she had any way to know.

The abbot’s sermon veered off in a different direction then, berating the villagers for some other moral failing. Embery tried to pick up the pieces of the story she’d been telling herself, but the words fluttered away in her mind like bats in twilight. All it would take, she knew, was one stray sentence from Tay’s lips, and she’d face the bitter choice between punishment and desperate flight. She shoved the thought away from her, but it kept circling back.

The sermon wound to its end. Everyone joined in the Litany of Praise and Thanksgiving, and then the abbot spoke the words of dismissal. Embery pulled herself to her feet, felt the familiar pain lance through her legs as the cold hard flagstones exacted their inevitable toll, took Tay’s hand and led him, not too fast, toward the sunlight outside. He had a solemn look on his face, as though some thought turned back behind those dark eyes. That set a chill down her, and it didn’t help that a big straw-haired farmer named Anner gave her a quick wary glance she couldn’t read at all.

Still, she and Tay left the monastery grounds without incident, walked in silence up the narrow trail to their shack. Wind in the gorse and heather chased off the cold tolling of the iron bell, reminded her of a scene in the story she’d called to mind during the service, Dreela standing alone on the hillside above Kendath where she’d been left to die so many years before, looking down on the smoke rising from eight pyres far below. Grim though the image was, it cheered her, for Dreela had gone from the terrible hour of blood upon the snow to a place of safety, the protection of the minor god to whom she’d offered flowers as a child, the winding fate that brought her at last to Kendath’s high throne.

The door of the shack shut tight behind them, and Tay gave her an uncertain look.

“You’ve been thinking,” Embery said.

“Yes.” He met her gaze. “Why is the abbot so scared of the old stories?”

She burst into a smile, knelt impulsively and threw her arms around him. “Good,” she said. “Very good, Tay. Tell me this. Would anybody listen to his Holy Law if they could go about telling the stories of the land we don’t name instead?”

He pondered that. “The monks would,” he said. “Well, except for Brother Jurden. Nobody else.” Then:  “But I know I’ve got to learn the Law anyway.”

“Yes, you do,” Embery agreed. “You have to learn the Law and keep silence about the stories.” She closed her eyes, felt rather than saw his head nod, hoped that it would be enough.

The next day, she had her answer.

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In another day or so, when my fingers have recovered from a lively Magic Monday and an even more lively online debate about the current pop-culture fad for inept political magic, I'll post an essay discussing what's going on in these two scenes. In the meantime, questions are welcome. 

Comments

[jenniferkobernik]

I am enjoying this story, JMG. Growing up in rural Texas gave me both a respect (sometimes a rather wary respect) for real community and a deep empathy with anyone wanting to escape the oppression of their insular village! You're hitting both notes nicely in these scenes.

[ecosophia]

Thank you! My upbringing in suburbia taught me a lot about peer pressure and status consciousness, but not so much about community -- I'm glad that this part of the tale is ringing true.

[jenniferkobernik]

Oh yes! Particularly the ritualized exchange of edibles (and the occasional handicraft) upon all occasions of importance. Preserves, special recipes, handmade garments, wild game, favors, and gossip are the currency of my realm! And all the extremely nice calculations whereby one's credit, and thus status, is reckoned.

[ecosophia]

Hmm! Okay, that's good to know. I based that aspect of the story on some fairly theoretical writings on traditional gift economies and the like, and tried to figure out how that would work out in the life of an herbalist and midwife in something like a Scottish village in 1700. If that came out true to life, I'm delighted.

[jenniferkobernik]

Huh! Someone should tell them the gift economy is alive and well in Colorado County, Texas! Births, weddings, deaths, baptism, holidays, home visits, etc. all require small (usually edible, preferably homemade) gifts. We don't have a local midwife, but after they recover from the birth, new mothers often bring something similar to an OB nurse who was a particular comfort to them.

[ecosophia]

These days folklorists go out of their way not to talk about regional folk cultures in the United States, for reasons that basically boil down to class prejudice. Wasn't always that way! Still, many thanks for this -- you've given me some useful hints...

[jenniferkobernik]

You're very welcome! Let me know if you ever want to pick my brain further on the local customs.

[(Anonymous)]

“'The monks would,' he said. 'Well, except for Brother Jurden. Nobody else.'”

Is Brother Jurden going to be important, or is it just a throwaway line in there? It seems fairly important that a monk wouldn't listen to the Holy Law, so I'm wondering if you're foreshadowing something. I'm not sure what yet, but it seems like there should be something.

Will J

[walt_f]

Arguments about the proper range and caliber of Chekov's Gun are never-ending. I wouldn't be surprised if this line foreshadows a future role on the story for Brother Jurden, but I also wouldn't be surprised or disappointed if it didn't.

Even in the latter case this "throwaway" line has a lot of import for five words. It reinforces the point under discussion about the abbott's "fear of stories" by telling us that from his own point of view, given that one of his own has a shaky commitment to Holy Law, he is right to be fearful. This ties into what I expect will become a major motif if not the main theme of the novel, the power of stories. It also reminds us that the monks are individuals rather than cookie-cutter minions of badness, which is a facet of the world's realism. And most likely most important at least for the time being, it's another exposition of Tay's perceptiveness, that he could tell this. The Brother and Tay might have some additional connection, perhaps Jurden grew up in the village or nearby, or perhaps they've had some casual conversation. But it's unlikely that Jurden ever confided in Tay or otherwise publicly showed any overt doubt over doctrine, yet Tay picked up on it anyhow.

Based on five words, I imagine Brother J not exactly rejecting the Holy Law in favor of the stories, but seeking additional wisdom in them; writing in two journals, one suitable for casual (or if necessary official) inspection and the other kept carefully hidden; the latter documenting his points of comparison and contrast between the two bodies of narrative, searching for a deeper truth behind both...

[walt_f]

... and then the dialog and the story moves on, and perhaps Brother Jurden is never seen or mentioned again. Because that's what happens in the world, even though it often doesn't happen that way in stories. You glance down a side street on the way to somewhere, and see homes where people you'll never know anything about have spent their entire lives, and you keep walking. You hear a line of a conversation in passing, that sounds like it's tremendously important to the conversants, but the next line passes out of hearing. And in the real world, no critic shows up two eventful months later and complains, "But we never find out why the chandler was so angry at the miller's son!"

I mention this, just in case the final paragraph in the previous comment came across as a "fan suggestion" for something that "should" actually be in the story. Not my intent at all. It was an example of how certain kinds of details can work in a reader's imagination to create more of a perception of a complete world, because a perception of a complete world is made of stories, told or imagined, far more thoroughly than from descriptions.

None of Tolkien's imitators, during the Era of Tolkien Imitators, appears to have imitated that, or even attempted to. A mountain in Middle Earth isn't "tall" or "enormous" or "imposing." It's "the mountain in whose vast morning shadow eight Elven legions perished in the Battle of [whatever] at the close of the [whichever] Age." Or something of that nature. A story, even if it's only referred to and not actually told.

[ecosophia]

I have no idea whether Brother Jurden will appear again or not, and if so, how important it will be. One of the consequences of the way I write things is that I let my characters do the talking, and they routinely say things I'm not expecting. Not all those things make it into the final story, but a lot of them do -- and in some cases important characters and major themes come into a story that way, without even so much as asking leave.

So we'll see what comes of it!

[ecosophia]

Tolkien's habit of weaving in scraps of untold stories is to my mind one of his best worldbuilding techniques, and you're right that next to nobody's picked up on it. To be fair, he had an unfair advantage -- as a philologist specializing in Old English, he spent his professional life studying the remnants of a vanished cultural tradition in which little glimpses of long-lost tales were all over the place. Beowulf was one of dozens, maybe hundreds, of Old English heroic epics; we know the names of some of the others -- but it's the only one that survived, and so all the others exist solely as the sort of tantalizing references Tolkien strewed all over Middle-earth.

Some fantasy authors have tried to do it, and usually overdid it. Tolkien's genius was that he was subtle about it. We pass some ruins -- well, they belonged to an old kingdom, but Aragorn looks grim and won't say anything about them. Here are the Barrow-downs, and glimpses of Arnor's history that are never filled in. Over there's Hollin, and Legolas says something reminiscent about the stones -- and that's all you get. It's brilliant.

[(Anonymous)]

Some of these mysteries are then resolved in the Appendices... That's why some people hate them, though I loved them! In fact, I think the Appendices create more unsolved mysteries than they solve. Cue Queen Beruthiel's cats...

[ecosophia]

...who can always be found somewhere near the Hill of Tuna.

;-)

Style or flow decision

[(Anonymous)]

I was half-expecting a fly-by moment of warning in the form of a divination similar to the kind that my folks used to say “my nose itches, I smell peaches, somebody’s coming with a hole in his breeches.” If the left side of the nose itched it was a woman coming, etc. The kind of stuff now relegated to superstition but which may have been meaningful in times past or magical. So far, nothing has been intimated of that mindset. Except for the existence of the faun, your characters have done and said nothing that the most adamant modern rationalist materialist might find acceptable in historic fiction. Is this a conscious stylistic decision that heightens the ‘reality’ of the faun? Or an overlooked detail of the kind that might be added back in during revision? Or an unconscious choice that allows further development down the line? For example, the habit of daily divination coming back into the characters’ lives as a useful thing for fugitives whereas it was too dangerous to practice in a village filled with cold northern eyes and rigid religion. Or none of the above and MMyOB?

Re: Style or flow decision

[ecosophia]

Remember that at this stage of writing a novel I'm flying blind, letting the story tell itself to me in the way it wants to be told. Stylistic decisions come in later, when I know what the story's about and can put details in back all the way to the beginning as necessary to make it all consistent and believable. Thus I have no idea, at the moment, why the only things even approximating magic in Raithwold are the bits of grandmother's wisdom the women practiced at the childbirth scene. I have some speculations; it's at least possible that something is very wrong with the world, and the journey of Embery, Tay, and the faun to Amalin will be the means of restoring something that's lost, or healing something that's broken, or what have you...but I don't know yet. I don't even know why the faun is hiding in Raithwold -- but I expect to find that out shortly.

[drhooves]

Another fine scene - interesting that you refer to it as # 3, though I assume it may end up being 3.1, 3.9, or 4.2 before it's all over? Even though I've only got a handful of scenes, I'm already fighting the urge to tie them all together or write down an outline.

I could relate to the feelings of Embery during the service - reminds me of confirmation class and services I was forced to attend back in 7th and 8th grade, and trying not to show my disdain for it all.

The other thing that's coming across very strong for me is the setting. While not the biggest fantasy fan in fiction, so far Raithwold has been vivid and "real" enough to hold my interest - I definitely find it easy to relate to and place myself in the scene. So far, it's more along the lines of historical fiction, versus a nebulous world that I have trouble grasping.

And now, back to my own story, which is lagging a bit.

[ecosophia]

It's #3 because it comes after the second scene I wrote and before the one that, at the moment, is #4. Things may get chopped up and reordered by the time it all comes together, but we'll see.

I'm very glad you're finding Raithwold vivid! That's one of the few things I'm consciously trying to do here -- get this story down out of the vague 1066-ish olde worlde hack-fantasy daydream realm, into something that's gritty and solid and unexpected.

[drhooves]

The setting is gritty and solid for sure, and you've got some of the conflict already introduced, which of course helps spice things up. Now I'm curious about the "unexpected" surprises on the way....

Got a couple more short scenes posted in my effort too....
https://drhooves.dreamwidth.org/2620.html

gift economy

[(Anonymous)]

I'm loving the story and I'm following along and learning lots. Even though I'm not writing along your project has inspired me to write more and work on some of my short story ideas. Spring is a busy time and I've never considered writing a novel but I do seem to have some ideas that might work. The future is fertile . . .

A thought about the gifting in the 3rd scene. Not everyone participates in the social obligations of gifting with wholehearted generosity, especially when times are tough; when its an obligation on behalf of extended family; and it's being given to a newcomer or stranger to the community. It would be quite understandable for the people dropping off gifts to have a range of attitudes about it. There might be something there that would add to Embery's uneasiness about continued life in the village.