Writing Right Out In Public: Scene #5

[ecosophia]

The fifth scene of my novel-in-process The Road To Amalin finally came together this afternoon -- more to the point, I finally had the time to get to work on it, having ground temporarily to a halt on a foreword to an anthology I'm co-editing. Without further ado...

**************************

High and shrill, a chorus of birds greeting the new day woke Embery. She lay there blinking for a moment before memory returned, reminded her where she was and why she and Tay were curled up fully clothed under quilts damp with cold dew. She extracted herself from under the quilts, tucked them around Tay, clambered out from under the spindle-bush that had sheltered them through the hours of darkness.

Dawn spread cold and gray over the little hollow as she stretched out the aches a night’s sleep on hard ground. The birds sang on—a comfort, that, for they’d surely fall silent if anyone from the monastery or the village blundered through the wild land nearby. Reassured, she reached back under the spindle-bush and shook Tay gently awake.

A short while sufficed to shake out the quilts—they’d need to hang in sunlight later to dry, but that would have to wait for some safer place—and to share a loaf of bread and water from the spring for a cold meal. Then they shouldered satchels and blanket rolls, and went back to the place where the highroad could be seen. With the sun just gilding the tips of the distant hills, it was early yet for travelers, and nothing moved on the road except a fox trotting past on some errand of its own. That seemed like a hopeful omen, and so they scrambled down the slope to the road, crossed it as quickly as possible, slipped into the shadows of the wood on the far side.

“Below Mollory Edge,” she said to Tay once they were well away from the road, following a deer-path under twisted oaks. “Where?”

“Up past the creek that flows into the marsh by Gellen’s farm. You go by the three rocks the other boys say were put there by a bad spirit, and then along the foot of the Edge until you get to a place where three thorn-trees grow out of the rock.” He glanced up at her. “I saw the trees and thought of how Tatennen met the lamia by a thorn-tree and answered her three riddles, and that’s why I sang Eremon’s song there.”

She was staring at him by the time he finished, and he quailed a little and said, “Did I do something wrong, Mother?”

“No.” She blinked, forced a smile onto her face, kept walking. “No, not at all. But there’s a story I haven’t told you yet, and it’s about three thorn-trees that grew from a cleft in the rock.”

“I’d like to hear that story,” said Tay.

“Sometime soon,” she promised. “Once we’ve found a safe place again.” That satisfied him, and the two of them wove their way among the oaks in silence thereafter. The birds finished their morning songs and settled into the desultory calls of the day. Off in the distance, the low harsh note of the monastery’s iron bell sounded the call to morning prayers, and a sudden wild desire flared in her to find a place where she would never have to hear that call, where she could raise a stone altar to the old lovely gods and goddesses with her own hands, and pray to them if she wanted to pray to anybody. It was a foolish enough thought, she knew; the old gods and goddesses were dead and gone, and no prayers could reach them ever again; for that matter, if there was a place left in the world where magisters and monks hadn’t proclaimed the Holy Law with staves and cords in hand for those who weren’t minded to listen, she’d never heard of it.

By the time the sun cleared the hills to the east they’d followed the wood as far as it would go, and veered west into a steep-walled valley not much visited even by sheep. A lively little stream wound through it, and they walked in the water for a while to throw hounds off the scent if the monks should go that far. Desperate though their situation was, her mood lifted as they walked. She thought of the three black sloes that Dreela placed in the hollow of the rock in a bitter hour, the only offering she had to give, and the three thorn-trees she’d found there that told her the long years of exile were over and the curse upon the house of Kendath had been lifted at last. That sent Embery’s thoughts straying back through one story after another, all the way to Tatennen’s birth and the terrible impiety that brought the vengeance of the gods down on Kendath’s kings. And the faun, she thought then. Is it waiting in exile as Dreela did all those years ago, waiting for some offering to be accepted?

The thought shattered as she shaped it. There was no one to receive such an offering any more—and was there even a faun waiting below Mollory Edge? The day before, as she’d stared into Tay’s anxious eyes, she’d been sure that he was telling the truth as he knew it, but that certainty was difficult to hold onto as the harsh light of a Raithwold morning dipped further and further into the valley. At most, she told herself, some old hermit who knows the old stories called out an answer when he heard Tay singing, and it may have been less than that, a stray noise, the movement of a wild beast.

Anner’s sons saw Tay walking with something past Creel’s Head, her memory reminded her. Something that wasn’t human. She pushed her perplexities aside, turned her attention outward, tried to make herself think instead about whether someone might have seen them or guessed at their destination.

The valley ended in a ragged slope thick with gorse. They picked their way up it, looked back along the way they’d come, saw no sign of pursuit. The sun was high in the east by then, bare and bright in a sky empty of clouds for once, and by that unforgiving light they hurried across the bare ground atop the ridge and down the far slope.

Ahead, Mollory Edge loomed up gray and crannied, a ragged cliff left behind by the spirits knew what convulsion of the land in ages past. A glance to the right as they came down the slope showed three boulders, doubtless the three rocks of the boys’ stories, and off beyond it in the middle distance the silver line of the stream that flowed past Gellen’s farm to the marsh. She looked the other way, searching for the three thorn-trees, but just then Tay pointed and said, “There are the trees I told you about.”

There they were: three gnarled thorn-trees well leafed out, and all three of them rising from a crack in bare rock at the foot of the cliff. Embery’s breath caught. With Tay at her side, she finished the descent, crossed the meadow at its foot, approached the trees.

Two paces from them, no more, Tay stopped. “This is where I sang,” he said. “I should sing again, to let him know.” She nodded, gestured at him to begin, and he set aside his blanket roll and satchel, put his hands behind him as though reciting a lesson, and sang:

     “In the plains of Eshdar I made the great bull yield to my will,

     High on Druan Mountain I took an egg from the griffin’s nest,

     Three hundred warriors quailed before me at the Bridge of Ai,

     But need now lies upon me and the path I must take is hidden.

     Come to me, wise one of the hill, and offer me your counsel,

     Though I have nothing to offer you in return but my praise.”

After the first few words, Embery closed her eyes. To hear the song of Eremon so, not whispered in darkness with the door barred against the night but in open daylight in her son’s high clear voice, sent mingled dread and delight surging through her, pushing at the limits of her self-control. It was something Neely had warned her of more than once, the longing that might lead her to fling aside every caution and chant the praises of the old dead gods even though it meant throwing her life away. The thing had happened, or so she’d heard: in one of the western islands, in the broad plains of the north where oxcarts followed the great herds, and once, a lifetime ago, in the king’s city of High Leedaw itself. Whispered hints alone spoke of what they’d done that latter time.

The song ended. In the stillness that followed, wind muttering in the leaves of the thorn-trees seemed loud. Then, unmistakable, dead leaves rustled beneath a footfall, and she opened her eyes.

The first things she saw were a pair of eyes facing hers: great and golden, gazing out from a darkness beyond the branches of the thorn-trees, focused on her with the wariness of a wild thing. Dim shadows alone hinted at the thing’s body. Then it stepped forward, into daylight, and she knew that Tay hadn’t been wrong. From great curving horns that framed the shaggy head, down past bare skin and coarse black hair and manhood sheathed like a goat’s, to broad cloven hooves that trod the leaf-strewn stone: impossible or not, a faun of Amalin crouched beneath the thorn-trees in the clear light of day.

Comments

Names

[orathbone]

Hi JMG, I'm very much enjoying the tale as it unfolds and the insights into your writing style. Apologies if this has already been raised but I'm intrigued how you create/decide your character and place names. They are very resonant and of course names are so important to establishing a fantastic yet believable milieu.

Re: Names

[ecosophia]

Thank you! I'm enjoying the writing process as well -- as usual with my fiction, it's a process of discovery.

Names are a complicated matter. Sometimes I think of a name, write it down, and only later -- sometimes years later -- find a character to fill them; "Embery" is such a name. I thought of it almost twenty years ago while trying to come up with names for characters in a never-finished (and not very good) interplanetary epic fantasy; it's been waiting ever since. Other names just pop into my mind -- "Raithwold" is an example.

The Road to Amalin is challenging because the names need to sound almost but not quite right for this world. As you may have noticed, this story has a very realistic flavor -- it's not the kind of grand fantasy in which people have ornate names dripping with the flavor of the unreal. Thus it's taken a lot of careful listening to get the names right. I expect it to take a lot more as we move into the countries further south, and then finally cross the soaring mountain range that bars the way to Amalin...

[walt_f]

Oh, this is nice.

The quiet imagery of the three thorn trees. With that narrative power from Embery's story fragment in them, speaking of need and faith and redemption, they almost upstage the fawn.

Since building-worlds-with-story-fragments seems highly relevant here, I remembered another author who did it well, besides Tolkien. George R. R. Martin, in his early space SF ("Thousand Worlds") stories, such as the ones anthologized in the Sandkings collection. Every story in that volume is at least a little bit disturbing, some much more than a little bit. One of the stories, The Stone City, is the most successful SF story I've ever read at conveying the vastness of deep space and deep time (despite having FTL ships and alien star empires and all that). One way it does this is by referencing fragments of legends and myths that are so obviously attenuated by time and distance that you know there's no hope of filling them in. Erika Stormjones seems in good company with all those lost contemporaries of Beowulf.

(Martin doesn't seem to be as interested in that technique in the Song of Ice and Fire series. He's more inclined to tell every branch of the present story in full (which might be why he's so bogged down now) while his characters disregard all but the most unavoidable reminders of their history, such as the ruins of Valyria. If anything, Westeros seems like a place that has lost most of its stories, for no particular reason given.)

Around here, the birds start their chorus when it's still nearly full dark, an hour or so before sunrise. Of course that wouldn't necessarily wake Embery or Tay right away.

("What You Need to Know About How Nature Works: A Guide for Authors" is something I've long wished existed, though it wouldn't sell enough copies to reward its own author much. You're the rare exception who doesn't need it. Chapter One: Actually, the Moon Doesn't Just Rise or Set Any Time of Night In Any Phase it Feels Like. Somewhere around Chapter Eight would cover what you can and can't see reflected in clear glass, and when. Chapter Ten should be What Wounds You Can't Just Ignore, and How Long They Really Take To Heal. Okay, now I'm just ranting.)

How nature really works

[(Anonymous)]

Friends who write fantasy fiction have actually asked my daughter to do a web-page about horses, after hearing her grumble about the outrageous ways in which some authors mistreat the poor animals. Horses need to eat and drink. They can't be ridden at a full gallop for 30 miles then left to stand, etc. Poul Andersen covered some of this in his essay, "Thud and Blunder." L. Sprague de Camps _Ancient Engineers_ is a good guide to technology of earlier times.

Rita Rippetoe

Re: How nature really works

[ecosophia]

Please encourage your daughter to do that web page! In the meantime, your comment sent me chasing after "On Thud and Blunder," which is solid gold for the aspiring fantasy writer, and I'm delighted to discover that it's available online in all its barbarian glory. I'll probably reference it at length in an upcoming discussion of the ongoing story.

[ecosophia]

It's a worthwhile rant. I know about the birds -- when we lived in Cumberland, the local catbirds (or, as we not very fondly called them, the local "shut the f*** up birds") used to start making a racket when the first dim gray light showed in the east. That's one of the reasons why Embery wakes when the morning's still gray, and the sun touches the hilltops only when they're on their way.

I'm still just beginning to get a sense of the stories of Amalin. As you've probably noticed, they're modeled on Greek mythology to some extent, but the thorn trees popped up there unexpectedly, and Dreela is a figure all her own, who may have more to do with all this than I have any idea yet.

[walt_f]

A row of three thorn trees, signifying divine redemption and the end of an exile? Obvious Christian symbolism!

(Okay, probably not, but I've seen plenty of attribution of "obvious Christian symbolism" to various elements of various fiction that's been way more far-fetched than that.)

[ecosophia]

Hah! Did you ever read Frederick Crews' The Pooh Perplex, a parody of academic literary criticism? It's hilarious and spot on, and one of the fictional critics whose analysis of Winnie the Pooh is included in the collection is exactly that kind of Christian-symbolism peddler. You'll be pleased to know that Eeyore is Christ...

[walt_f]

Was it the nail in the tail? :b

I haven't read that one, but it looks like fun (and there's a 2001 "sequel" adding post-modern critics to the slate).

"Christ figures" became a kind of running joke in my high school senior year American Lit class back in the 70s. It started out more or less legitimate. (Rev. Dimmesdale and Billy Budd, sure; and it was American literature after all.) But it culminated with a Faulkner novel for which we managed to show every single character being a Christ figure. One does some woodwork at some point, making him a carpenter, and so obviously Jesus. One goes fishing, so he's a fisherman, and so obviously Jesus. One argues with his father; one suffers for others' benefit; one has a name that starts with J... you get the idea.

Since then I've tended to notice examples, especially the far-fetched ones, as they've come up in actual criticism.

[(Anonymous)]

"What You Need to Know About How Nature Works" - oh, yes! How about "Chapter Nine - How People Really Die and Just How Much Blood a Body Really Holds?" I remember seeing a medieval picture of the beheading of John the Baptist with blood fountaining from the body; my first thought was "how gratuitously gory," my second "Wait! The painter has probably seen beheadings, at least of animals, and this is the reality!"

[ecosophia]

That book needs to be written. I get the impression that most writers of fantasy have never even cut the head off a chicken.

[(Anonymous)]

The whole chapter,even without that finnal apearence, i find it very alive and haunting. I liked the ambient provided by your description of the wilderness and the surroundings of the characters.

I dont know why, but the dread/delight feeling feels very familiar.
I'll surely stay tuned.

Guillem

[ecosophia]

Thank you! I like the way the story is developing.

[drhooves]

Very nice work. This chapter definitely takes a sudden turn, and I see you worked in the idea of "gods not listening" from your blog post last September. You're also maintaining a continuity which I'm struggling with in my story - I'm going to break down and write down one line descriptions of what I've got so far, and try to keep things a bit more on track without losing the creative outlet. It's definitely been an eye-opening exercise.

I hope the foreword you mention is for the OSS Anthology. I'm looking forward to getting that. Also, I discovered after exchanging some emails with Zendexor, that my submission was never received, in the flurry of late entries near the deadline. Apparently this happened with a couple of other submissions as well. So, I'm in the process of re-writing that effort (which it badly, and I mean badly, needed) and will plop it in his inbox soon.

[ecosophia]

Yes, it's the OSS anthology; I've gotten everything formatted and copyedited, and am trying to fumble my way through to the right way to handle the introduction. Do go ahead and submit your story -- we're eagerly planning a second anthology.

[(Anonymous)]

Very evocative!

When published, I would appreciate a map...

I strongly felt the rhythm in several places, e.g. in the sentence that ends "damp with cold dew", and there were several occurences of tripartite asyndeta (three phrases containing verbs of action with no "and" before the third element) that had something poetic about them, maybe folk tales or even Welsh triads? Surprising in an early sketch of the book!


Matthisa

[ecosophia]

I'll probably have to wait until it's finished to do a map, as I have only the vaguest idea of the geography as yet!

I read a lot of folk tales and, yes, Welsh triads -- Druids tend to do that -- so it's quite possible that's shaping the style. Mostly I just listen for the right sound as I write.

Following along

[(Anonymous)]

Speaking of keeping up with the Joneses and other Welsh, here is my third chapter. http://gkaybishop.weebly.com/purple-orb-process.html

Following Along pt. 2

[(Anonymous)]

I had no sooner posted Chapter 3 than I discovered a continuity error, which I have now gone in and fixed. I will post the edited chapter when the next scene JMG writes is up, thus showing the process of revision.

Lilith

[(Anonymous)]

Speaking of fantasy with a religious turn in a Scottish setting: Have you read George McDonald’s Lilith?

Re: Lilith

[ecosophia]

Not for many, many years. I should probably give McDonald another reading one of these days.

The Faun

[ferngladefarm.blogspot.com.au]

Hi John Michael,

I'm very much enjoying this story.

I was wondering if you have any sense of what the character of the Faun will be like?

Chris

Re: The Faun

[ecosophia]

I have no idea at all. I'll be discovering that when I next have time to sit down and write, as the next scene -- in which Embery and Tay talk with the faun -- is one of the pivotal scenes of the book.

[sea_spray]

Are you still looking for more people to join the writing in public challenge?
I have a few scenes from a story seed I think is "a non physical being, helps, a boy lost in the woods". I hope you can give advice or recomend some sources on the nonphysical aspects of it.

[ecosophia]

By all means. What do you have in mind?

joining the challenge

[sea_spray]

Hi JMG

I have joined the challenge!
https://sea-spray.dreamwidth.org/

Do you know if there's any list of the people participating in this challenge?

Once i have more material I'm hoping you will be able to give a little advice on the non physical aspects in the situations I’m writing about. I plan to leave that side a bit mysterious and use it as the main foreground of the story while the back drop is a de-indrustrial future of the kind you asked for in the after oil collections.

Re: joining the challenge

[ecosophia]

As far as I know, no, there's no list of participants -- but welcome to the challenge!

I can certainly offer advice about matters nonphysical if that would be helpful; if nothing else, it might make a good subject for a Magic Monday question. ;-)