From My Fantasy Writing Desk
I’ve been doing the final rewrites before I send the manuscript Of Kings and Griffins off to my copyeditor. With every book I write, I get obsessed with the opening paragraphs. Just yesterday, I worked through yet another rewrite of them with one of my closest writer friends. I’ll have to let this version sit a bit to know if it really is “the one.” Feel free to leave critique comments! I welcome all reactions and refinements.
Here are the two first paragraphs:
The Great King’s body lay on an ebony bier. The golden sun disk adorning his white robe gleamed in the light from the oil lamps, at odds with the pallor of his face. As Great King, Muwatti had ruled with a shrewd and measured governance. Tesha’s gaze slipped from the dead man to the brooding figure who stood at the head of the bier, arms crossed, the untried son who would soon take the throne. She pulled her infant closer against her and pressed her arm against her husband, Hattu. Would the unwavering trust shared between Muwatti, the Great King, and Hattu, his brother, continue with this new ruler?
Muwatti had died only that morning, but already death pinched the skin covering his cheekbones and hollowed his eye sockets, the decay sped along by the illness that had wracked his body. His aquiline nose, so like Hattu’s, stood out more sharply in death than in life. Tesha shivered at the resemblance. Despite the incense that burned in braziers, she choked on the odor of rot that seeped toward her. Tesha felt as if she balanced on loose stones that would give way at the slightest shift of her weight.
Archaeology I Enjoyed
Juicy, Spicy Romans
Here are two Roman recipes for fruit with savory and spicey flavors added. I had not seen this website of Historical Italian cuisine before. Good find thanks to Tinney S. Heath, whose books set in Renaissance Italy are excellent.
I think I’d probably have to get creative with some substitutions in these fruit salads. If you want to include the garum, a fish sauce that is an extremely Roman ingredient, my historical culinary friend Laura Kelley suggests that it’s easy to make (see her website) or you can use the modern Italian equivalent, colatura. She offers a similar recipe with her expert experiments on her SilkRoad website.
There are some other challenges with ingredients that the commentary doesn’t quite resolve, but the basic idea of some spiced, savory fruit is a lovely one for summer eating that I did not realize was part of Roman cuisine. Yum. Click here for Historical Italian Cooking “Ancient Roman Fruit Salads”
Containing Mesopotamian Contagion
I found this an interesting article on epidemics in Mesopotamia in Ancient Near East Today. The writer has collected passages from ancient sources about responding to contagious disease. First off, I am struck by how they show a clear awareness of disease spread by close contact.
One letter from the king of Mari, an 18th century BCE city on the Euphrates river, says of the king’s wife: “Since she is often at the palace, it will infect the many women who are with her. Now give strict orders: No one is to drink from the cup she uses; no one is to sit on the seat she takes; no one is to lie on the bed she uses, lest it infect the many women who are with her. This is a very contagious infection!” This seems to describe ancient social distancing long before scientific knowledge of contagion and disease spreading. Observation and logic got them a long way.
Second point of interest to me, the mechanism of where the diseases come from is usually referred to as the gods. The phrase “hand-of-god” is used and epidemics are referred to as the “devouring-of-god.” Some cultures, like the Hittites I write about, viewed human sins or crimes as the underlying cause that gods punished, so the solution was to identify the sin or crime and repair the harm in some way the offended god would indicate through divination.
Other Near Eastern cultures saw the gods as so capricious that there was no point trying to identify what caused the punishment/illness. My upcoming novel, Of Kings and Griffins, has a mysterious illness that the characters must battle both among the gods and mortals. They do use a form of “contact tracing” at one point, but not for the same reasons we do today. Divinations and divine capriciousness are both involved. Click here for “Epidemics in Mesopotamia” September, 2020 Ancient Near East Today