Paksworld

The brain, though still not ready to get back into classical Greek or pick up the calculus text, seems to have made another connection.  Or else, it’s the lack of dire mess in my office (though I thrive in having *some* mess, esp multi-colored mess, around me when I work.  Plus complicated music.)

Last night I considered doing some more work on the bedroom’s “organization” (lack thereof)  and the brain said “I’m WriterBrain now, not OrganizerBrain.  Let me remind you that you have several unfinished stories.”   So I said “Did you have one in mind?” because, again from experience, starting the *wrong* unfinished story sends WriterBrain into a frenzy of infodump.  Best to let the lake settle and take whatever the hand offers (some of you will recognize that reference in an instance.  Not mine.)  What WriterBrain offered up was the unfinished story of Aesil M’dierra.  I started that some years back, pulled it out again when working on Horngard I,  and got kind of stuck.   Last night, looked at again, and messed with, I saw what was wrong.  In a very dark mood I had written a very dark section of it very VERY vividly and it was dominating the rest in a bad way.   But by the time of the Horngard book, it was decades in her past.  In fact, she’s five years past it by the conclusion of this story, which means, to write it at that depth and intensity, this would have to be at least a novella and possibly part of a novel.  Sorry, Aesil, I don’t want you stuck in my head for a whole year.  I like you; I liked you when I first made you up, but not enough to live with you in the intimacy that giving you protagonist space and time would require.

Yes, I talk to my characters and they talk back.  She’s not actually that interested in re-examining her life that much.  Unlike the ones who march in demanding their book (or trilogy) her focus has always been somewhere behind my left year and behind me, when she’s standing in front of me.  She’s *there*, and vivid, sharp as crystal shards, but she’s never invited me all the way in, and…here we are.  However, in this instance, once I discarded the first half of what I had (leaving home, being thrown in jail, the vivid description of Valdaire’s jail and how (as in many European jails in the middle ages and even up to the 18th c.) if you didn’t have a way to buy your own food, you got very little if any from the jailers…the rescue from that, her arrival in Margay.)  Sudenly the story came alive again and Aesil was ready to show me how she got OUT of Margay.

Readers who have read “Mercenary’s Honor” either in Operation Arcana or in my collection Deeds of Honor will understand some of the backstory of enmity between Ilanz Balentos and the rulers of Vonja.  Other connections barely mentioned in other Paksworld fiction show up again, in the story I’m writing this week (and for however long it takes.  Who can know? Not me.)  You’ll know, sort of, where Margay is (between Vonja and Sorellin on the branch of the Guild League Road that connects the main one to Sorellin and goes east to the coast just south of the Eastbight…the Guild League standard design of it, though, doesn’t go much beyond Sorellin.   Aesil is so full of agency today (both today in my week and today in her world) that she interrupted senior commanders.  Her mind’s racing full speed trying to figure out how to rescue everyone she knows.  She can’t, of course, but it’s better than giving up.

Writerly egos really do work this way.  Inspired by the review copy of DEEDS OF YOUTH,  I was able to finish the sequel to “Consequences” (last story in that volume) yesterday.  MUCH faster than I finished the first one of the pair.  Together they cover the entirety of Kieri Phelan’s first independent mercenary command.  The original version I wrote in the neighborhood of 35 years ago hasn’t been found, so I was reconstructing from my memory of it.   I’m sure it’s not an accurate reconstruction, but nobody else knows the original at all.  Ha.  What you’ll finally get, when the collection after the new collection comes out, is  all there is.

An ego-correction was finding out, while doing what I thought was the final revision, that I had *reversed two characters’ names.”  Between stories.  Within weeks of having re-read “Consequences”.    Yes, OK, I’m good enough to write an exciting story in less than two weeks, a story that involves blocking out a clash of militaries (size, location, terrain, opposing forces’ different weapons, mobility, background of military theory for each, etc.)  and collapsing all the details the writer then knows into just the ones the *reader* needs to know to grasp what’s happening, the sequence of events, the personalities and back stories of the POV characters, and fitting all that into less than 7500 words at most.   But I’m not apparently good enough to noticed that between “Consequences” and (its current name, this may change) “Unintended,”  Crown Prince G-‘s name turns into younger Prince H-‘s name.

All fixed now.  G- is back to being G- across the narrow temporal gulf between reading story C and writing story U.   Be sure that from now on in I will be looking harder when writing subsequent related stories to existing stories, and doing the name check *earlier* in the process.   First-readers of story U liked it a lot.  I still like it a lot today, having spent last night and today cleaning it up.  Is it spotless and shiny, all ready for its debut later?  I’ll know better after letting the resident Nitpicker at it.  Meanwhile, a snippet.

……………………………………….

“Get a horse,” the king said.  “A good one.”

……………………………………

Meanwhile, in the daily life stuff, it’s been very, VERY hot so I’m feeding horses later and later in the evening and today moved the morning feed up to “nearly all hard feed in the morning because it’s cooler and better for them.”

A US Senator (former football coach, whoop-te-do) is taking out his spite on the Department of Defense by blocking all promotions that require Senate approval and thus leaving many commands without a commander when the previous one reached legal retirement age.  Including my branch, the Marines, who are without a Commandant for the first time in over 100 years.  (And, dear friends, you really truly do not want to leave the Marines to their own devices without a solid command structure.  You don’t want to leave ANY military that way, but we have particularly…strong…well…our nickname with at least one other branch is Uncle Sam’s Misquided Children, and our reputation is “If you want something absolutely totally destroyed, call in the Marines.”  I, of course, am now a sweet old lady, perfectly harmless except for the razor edge on tongue and pen.

I called said Senator’s Senate office today and gave a brief and non-profane description of his misdeeds (this is only one of them; the guy’s a raging racist and a contributor to the J6 insurrection) before calling on him to resign.  He won’t, of course, but this is what I can do legally, for now.  Let him know he’s not the strong noble hero he thinks he is but a pissant southern neo-Confederate who broke his oath of office, tried to overturn the government, and has pissed off a Marine veteran.  At least one.  Sure there’s more.   I’m feeling that the Senator, who never served in any branch, should perhaps contemplate the effect of Marines minus a complete command structure on something closer to his heart than the rest of the country, since he doesn’t care about the rest of the country, just his billionaire donors and the white folks in his home state.  Needs to be reminded that the Senate doesn’t command the military.  That’s an executive function, and it needs a whole, unbroken, chain of command from POTUS on down to the lowest level just-out-of-boot-camp E-1.

So I think I need to call his office *daily* with things he clearly doesn’t know, and needs to know, about the real, serious, deal it is to stand in the way of the Marines having a  Commandant.  His name, in case you don’t know it, is Tommy Tuberville, and he pronounced it TUBBER-vill.  Wouldn’t want to say a Senator’s name wrong, would we?  (Rubber-Tubber?  Flubber-Tubber?)  I leave the cussing out to the senior NCOs, who are superb at it (an art form, once they’re up in grade)  and recommend that former officers and lower grade enlisted just list any four or eight of his “errors” as politely as possible within the need to make it clear what a [redacted] he is.

The proof copy of Deeds of Youth, that’s what!

Because I’m a writer with a fat glob of Ego, I took a picture of it lying on its padded yellow envelope for posterity or at least later gleeful gloating over just as I’m sitting here now with the book beside me, periodically opening it and reading more.  Yes, I could call up the stories on the screen and read them off the file, but…it’s a real, physical BOOK, with pages, and I can look at it and touch it  and feel the smoothness of the pages and (on and on and on.  Did I remember to admit the large glob of Ego?  Yes?  OK.

I really, really needed to see another new book with my name on it.  Yes, some of the stories were published before but…in this format, it’s new.

I can’t remember if I’ve listed the contents before, so I’ll do that now.   I know I have said before that the protagonists in the stories (each different) are older in each successive story.

“Bad Day at Duke’s East”

“The Dun Mare’s Grandchild”

“Dream’s Quarry”

“Gifts”

“First Blood”

“Mercenary’s Honor”

“Consequences”

Realizing now I should’ve taken a picture of the inside somewhere too.  DUH.  Tomorrow, maybe.  You can see by the shadow it’s not just a cover flat kind of thing, it’s got thickness.  But I’ve typoed almost every word in this sentence…BED NOW!

This week I finished (for now, anyway) a Paksworld story that does not involve any swords, any fighting, anything (as some would say) exciting.    But Paksworld, though founded on adventures of the military sort, is a bigger world than that.  Behind every military society is its nourishing civilian root system.   Even the nomadic tribes of Central Asia, even the ones who trained girls as warriors and considered a young woman marriageable only when she proved brave enough to kill, had a civilian root that kept the warriors alive from birth until they qualified, and fed them and clothed them afterward.  Somebody cared for the herds, trained the horses, tanned the hides that made the leather armor, made the saddles and bridles and bits.  Somebody milked the mares and sheep or cattle, made the cheese, ground the grain for meal or flour to make the noodles or dumplings.

The big civilizations in our world depended on agriculture, yes…but also on trade.  No one place had every useful mineral:to make bronze, you need copper and tin both.  Traders came to ancient Britain for tin.  So in Paksworld, resources are distributed unevenly…and as a result expertise is distributed unevenly.  A maritime culture must have an abundant source of wood…and something you can make sails from…the kind of sail material affects the sails you can make from it, how heavy they are (and thus how they stress the wood they’re hung from.)   A horse-using culture must have an abundance of grass nutritious for horses and terrain they an run on.  If you want a society that uses wheels, be sure you provide them with what it takes to make useful wheels in both simple and more advanced forms.

In this story, “Bank Transfer,” the setting is in the most advanced human culture that invented world has: Aarenis.  It has cities and towns with quite competent stone and wood buildings.  It knows how to mine, refine, and fashion tools and weapons of steel (though stone blades are not unknown, just always considered old and rare.)   Its trade networks span much of the continent, with regular movement of food, raw materials, manufactured goods from place to place, and local manufacture of goods in most towns and cities.   Its monetary system is unified across Aarenis by the Guild League, the association of most occupational guilds to form a strong political and economic force, and intersects with other monetary systems by clearly understood exchanges under the authority of the Moneychangers Guild.  For the registered members, paper exchange has been replacing  (at least for short terms) the movement of physical coinage.   A letter of credit between a bank in the South and one in the North allows a loosening of supply during the winter, when no physical travel is possible.  In the near term and close by, a banker can issue a draught–a letter–to one of its depositors, and it functions like one of our paper checks used to…the bank and the gulld its member bank belongs to guarantees payment.  The process itself is different: a draught for, say, 100 natas (a large sum)  is carried by the bank customer, and will be annotated with the amounts due to as many merchants as it takes to use up the amount, with their signature.  It’s normal for a draught to be in use only within a set time (1-3 days is common)  and for a set number of recipients, within one city.  It saved the customer having to walk around with a large, thief-tempting, amount of coinage.   And it’s useless to thieves, unless they’ve killed the customer and stolen their seal, which is stamped on each annotation on the draught, as well as the merchant who collects from the bank.

So in this story a woman in her early thirties is a trader–a sutler, a supplier to the military, any military.  She’s near the bottom of the sutler hierarchy: she has only one wagon, she’s not as busy as she wants.  Her father was a one-wagon trader; her grandfather came to Valdaire with a pushcart, selling whatever he could, often rags.  She and her blind sister live in a building she inherited, along with the business, about 12 years ago when her father died.  She and her sister live in one room of that building (she has rented out the rest, except for part of the ground floor and cellar, where she stores what she sells and the horses that pull the wagon)  and her life is tightly constrained by her responsibilities and the effect of a theft shortly after her father died.  She’s working hard, but not making progress toward an easier life.  When opportunity appears, she must not only choose between risk and opportunity, but convince her banker–and others–that she is capable of turning opportunity into actual profit.  (It is not an accident that I see her in her early thirties…my mother was thirty-two when she fled from an unsafe marriage and traveled almost 2000 miles (it may have been more, given the old roads back then) and started a new life as a mother, after I was born.  Grethna isn’t pregnant, has never been married, but the journey she undertakes has distinct echoes, to me.)  What Grethna has is the stolid kind of courage that persists and persists and persists.  How will she deal with her banker, who still thinks of her as a mere girl?   How will she deal with this opportunity that beckons but demands abilities she’s not sure she has?

The story has major spoilers for the book that’s Horngard I (I hope someday in reality!)  and thus can’t reasonably be published until I find out whether Horngard I will be published, and wait out its birthing.  Meanwhile I’ll be thinking about whether Grethan is thickening into character who might generate enough plot for a full book, or a longer piece.  Why not just write that?  Because Horngard I needs to come first.  I started this story right after the faceplant, when I had the quite reasonable fear that this new head injury might permanently put me back to “no longer able to write.”  I knew I wouldn’t know the full extent of the concussion’s damage for at least two months, maybe more, because that’s how long it takes to assess  a repeat concussion.  What you get the week right after isn’t the full story….things could get worse or better.  So I started a story intended to be fairly simple and short, as a test: can I still “round” a plot to a conclusion, and tighten it into a good solid, satisfying knot.  After the 2018 concussion, I couldn’t.  Not for years.  I’ve done that now, and my two best first-readers agree.

However, it was not an easy task, and  I can tell the concussion has left residual damage.  It will take longer to work it all out and see how much, but…at least I can write a short, relatively simple, piece.   Now to write another, about something else.  I wouldn’t mind being stuck in Paksworld for the rest of my life, but I’d like the ability to switch back to SF occasionally if I can.  The two types seemed to generate stories for each other 20 years ago.   Only way to know is to start something short there, too.

However again, when it’s not past bedtime on a hot summer night in Texas, I will hunt up a snippet of Horngard I  as soon as I can.  You deserve it.

Third However….Sharon Lee & Steve Miller have a new book Liaden Universe book coming out, SALVAGE RIGHT, and it’s a fast-moving fascinating book.   Science Fiction with autonomous self-aware ships and space stations, characters that include many-times-reborn not-exactly clones, Liadens, Terrans, persons not easily defined, spies embedded in rescue organizations, wheels with wheels within weirdness, the Uncle’s unsociable sister, mysterious holdovers from a previous universe, a norbear, instances of Korval’s Tree, and much, much, more.  We finally see the end (I hope!) of the old Tinsori Light, but not the end of the Lyre Institute for Exceptional Children, alas.

Part V

The next day, marching once more at the head of his company, dusty, unable to see farther than the Crown Prince’s entourage ahead of him, he was caught between annoyance and amusement at himself.  Who did he think he was, indeed–as he’d heard others say–he who did not know, could not name, either of his parents, or his place of birth or anything remotely respectable in his past until his arrival at Aliam Halveric’s home as a starveling.  How could any of these people respect, let alone admire him?

Yet here he was, with an independent contract, and the promise of a chance to earn–in good time–a grant of land.  He had seen it, even.  “Go take a look,” the prince had said.  “It’s empty, cold, near barren.  But it’s the largest area in my father’s realm not already occupied, or at least claimed. No one has wanted it.  No fields, no orchards, no towns: barren, some say, and too much work, say others.  Yet it is my father’s, and I would see it useful and well-governed.  Go see.”

And he had borrowed a horse–after the horse-master had checked with the  Crown Prince yet again, and given him, he was sure, the worst horse in the royal stables, gray about the muzzle and eyes, with splints in both forelegs and a hitch of some kind in the off hock.  He had ridden, at a pace that let the old horse loosen up and enjoy the trip, day after day through forest and hills, until on a wet day the view had opened to a broad plain with hills off to either side, a brisk little river…that might, someday, run a mill.  Hills on three sides, then, and a wide, presently soggy, plain rising slightly to the north, where it disappeared into a dank mist.

His mind produced an image of the mill on the river, near a town…here.  A bridge over the river, wide enough for wagons to carry supplies and troops to march. Another town over there–out of sight except in his mind.  He rode out onto the soggy plain: even this early in the year, it had grass the old horse was glad to eat.  And ample room for any number of troops to drill.  He could see it all: a big walled fort to guard the land and the track–that would become a road–to Vérella.  His mind built it quickly into what it could be.  A base for protection and for training.  Aliam’s home was crowded between a mountain and the dense Lyonyan forest of elventaig: this would be open.  Colder, yes, but then his troops would be fit to fight Pargun over there to the east in those hills, hold off the horse nomads, if any threatened.  His horse’s hoofprints and the grass showed that the land was fertile enough for grain.  And in the shelter of the hills the towns would have walled gardens and fruit orchards.

He rode back to Vérella, treating the old horse so carefully the horsemaster was amazed at the difference in the animal.  “He’s not limping at all–what did you do?  What poultice?  A special herb?”

“No, just careful riding, never fast and not too long at one time. He’s a good fellow, this one.”  He patted the horse and it rubbed its head on him.

And so the offer of a chance at a land grant had become a promise of one…in good time, which meant at the Crown’s convenience, but at least it would not be given away, he was assured.

Reason enough to keep his temper with those boys and their arrogance, reason enough to keep a smooth tongue to all.  Aliam would be happy with him, if he knew, but he was not minded to write Aliam about it, not until the grant was actually his.  Still the dust was annoying, and he did wish the nobility would not make it worse by galloping past him every time they wanted to come to or leave the Crown Prince’s presence.  If he’d had a horse–he’d sold his along with all the other gifts Aliam had given him to outfit his troops for this very mission–he could have seen over some of this dust.

When a horse’s cerebrum–the thinking part of its brain, small compared to the rest–is treated as an external storage device for about 30 minutes of a particular human memory by a dragon who is looking for a place to stash that memory so the human in question can’t reveal something the dragon wants kept secret, the horse is immediately faced with an terrifying situation.  The horse cannot understand human memory, but it can feel the emotional surge of that memory (it was a very, VERY emotional memory)  and it knows these new surges are connected to its owner/trainer.

When the owner is with the horse (best case) the horse has much less cognitive dissonance to trouble it.  This is a horse bonded to its human from the hour after its birth; it’s been trained by its human, and its human is a steady reassuring presence in its life.   Extra emotion is familiar (the human is a person of strong emotions.)   The horse can check in with its senses–smell, taste, touch, hearing, sight–and its excellent memory of *horse* experience–and identify the extra emotional surge as just like its owner.

The difficulty comes when the human (or the human’s father, another familiar human) is not with the horse for an extended length of time.  When the human…is sick, or injured, or forcibly separated, and the horse encounters only those it hasn’t worked with closely.  Then the emotional surge of unassimilated human memories conflicts with its own horse-memories and the horse–for want of a better word–goes crazy.  Nothing makes sense anymore.  The smell of its owner, the touch of its own, the sound of its owner’s voice, are all gone, and what’s left is the intense emotion of its owner but without the owner’s presence.  The horse wants to find its owner but it’s not allowed to go find the owner.

The dragon expected horse and owner to be together and thus made no provision for protecting the horse.  After all,  a horse’s cerebrum is small: somewhere between a walnut and a lemon in size, if you should take that layer (it’s flattish) and roll it into a ball.  Yet–to a dragon–a horse’s use of its cerebrum is limited to the simplest of “thoughts” and there would be ample room to stuff in those memories where they’d be safe, and yet unused and unavailable to the human until the dragon came along to reverse the procedure.

Why would a dragon, who prizes wisdom, do something so obviously (to us) foolish?   It’s impossible to understand dragonish motivation completely (at least for me) but dragons do like to carry out their own plans, and by their overall powers, they’re usually able to bend reality to their will.  The dragon had a plan for certain people to meet in a certain way at a certain time, and neglected to calculate the likelihood that any two humans in an urban area may, however unlikely, encounter each other.  Perfectly normal random events, strings of them for both individuals, put them in the same place at the same time.

We could say the dragon over-reacted, or was having a control-issues moment, but whatever the cause, the horse is now carrying its owner’s memory of that encounter and the owner is…in a life-changing situation.  The dragon isn’t there anymore (it’s off doing something else, and is confident the horse and owner will continue as it expects…)  The dragon has many dozens of irons in its fire and hasn’t thought it needed to revisit these two new ones (the man with a memory gap of the same length that the horse has the memory dump) for another year and a bit.

Writers are even trickier than dragons…that dragon’s in for a surprise.

When the storm passed, they rode on, over the melting lumps of ice and the wet grass.  Oktar’s sheepskin, sodden with rain, hung over his horse’s rump; he walked, leading his mount, his bare feet so cold from the ice he could not feel the bruises.  His grandfather rode ahead, not speaking to him, but muttering continually to the horses, who bobbed their heads as if they understood.

Home was too far behind to imagine, that cold night.  Read the rest of this entry »

When he had the flasks full; Oktar splashed back to hand them up.  His feet were bruised by rocks, aching from cold.  His grandfather looked down at him.  “Drink one swallow.  Then give flask. Catch your horse.”

Read the rest of this entry »

As light revealed the land around them, Oktar knew they were north of the town, riding north, winterwards as the horsefolk said, and the reason he hadn’t been able to feel the rein was that he had none–his grandfather held Oktar’s horse’s rein as well as his own in his one good hand.  The horses moved at a brisk walk, ears forward, alongside a stone wall with sheep on the other side of it.  Oktar turned to look behind.  Nothing of the town showed but a blur of smoke in the distance.  Read the rest of this entry »

“Again?” Oktar’s mother glared at him. “Bloody nose, black eye, shirt torn, a complaint from the judicar–you’re a disgrace!”

“They said we were dirty stinking horse–” he paused; the word they’d used was forbidden. “–droppings,” he finished.

“You should ignore them,” his mother said. “They are ill-bred; you should not dirty your hands with them.” Read the rest of this entry »