He paused here for a sip of water, a smile teasing his green lips.
“Before he could kill his first, though, he was discovered and thrown into jail, and the key was thrown away. Literally. Fairies can live for a long time without food or water, but it can cause madness. Then Prince _____ and Princess _____ married, uniting two warring fairy kingdoms, and one of the provisions of the agreement was to release the prisoners who had committed crimes now forgotten. Fearing such confinement-induced-madness could harm fairy society, the criminals were exiled to the human world. When it comes to fighting humans, however, one fairy doesn’t stand a chance. He must have a position of power before he could actually do any harm, so the exiles put no humans in harm’s way. Resentful of his own people for jailing him, and still holding a grudge against the humans, our criminal tolerated his exile, and waited.”
The table was silent. The humans looked at each other uncomfortably, while HRH looked plain annoyed. I swallowed past the sand that seemed to suddenly coat my throat.
“And?” HRH finally said, looking up at him. “How does our wedding compare with that one exactly?”
Yuri shook his head and smiled at her. “I’m sorry, dear, I have so many stories in my head sometimes I go on a tangent or seven. I’m sure I had a point when I started.” He raised his glass and stated, “A toast to my lovely, powerful wife. May we have a very productive marriage!”
Everyone but me and Steven toasted the happy couple. Steven’s hands clenched on his knees.
“Steven,” I whispered out of the corner of my mouth.
“Cass?” he replied.
“We’re going to need some more crates.”
Mur Lafferty is the author of The Shambling Guide to New York City and Ghost Train to New Orleans (Orbit). She lives in Durham, North Carolina, where she podcasts her writing angst, plays video games, and pets her dogs. She is the winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and the Manly Wade Wellman Award. Although she acts tough, in private she collects LEGO figures of Unikitty.
At my request, she offered this afterword.
Lots of things about meeting Dave can make an impression on someone. His unflinching honesty, his welcoming nature, his loyalty to his friends, his living his life his own way. He’s been generous to me and my family, inviting us to yearly parties, giving me one of my first interviews for my podcast, and blurbing my first book (which contained a complaint that his latest book was late to Tor because he was busy reading mine).
It’s hard choosing one thing to pinpoint as the start of a Drake-inspired story.
Getting invited to a Drake party is a thrill, as it almost definitely means you get a tour of his amazing house with the dumbwaiter and secret door. My house has bookshelves stocked with books, and more books in stacks in other places, the car, under the couch, everywhere, but Dave has a dedicated library. And he’ll let you wander in it and gawk at his book collection.
Strangely, and perhaps embarrassingly, Dave was the person who introduced me to history from the point of view from primary records: the point of view from someone who lived through historical events, instead of reading a historian’s take on past events. Dave prefers these records, and nearly all of his historical accounts are eyewitness accounts. His interest in history and adherence to primary records stayed with me for some reason, and I wanted to write a story about a historian, and the grifter who takes his place.
Dave has never failed to be kind, welcoming, or available to me if I needed something from him, and it was an honor to be invited to this anthology.
Working with Dave, or, Inmates in Bellevue
S.M. Stirling
Dave Drake and I have known each other for decades now—dear God, it really is decades!
We’ve sometimes been lumped together as “military SF” writers, though both of us have grazed extensively in the varied paddocks of the science fiction and fantasy estate. It would be more accurate to call us historically oriented writers; human history is very colorful. More often than not the color is blood-red, war is the motor of history, and conflict makes a story. I started out intending a career in history and still love to study it, though closer acquaintance with academia made the life of a freelance writer look secure and welcoming by contrast. Dave approached the past through their languages and literatures, as a classicist.
Oddly enough, I can say I know and have collaborated with two SF authors who have translated ancient literature, Dave Drake with Latin and Harry Turtledove with the Byzantine variety of Greek. As for myself . . . well, I can read a newspaper in French if it isn’t too complex; I tried to do Proust in the original, and the result was not happy. My mother grew up speaking Spanish in Peru and told me she dreamed in it all her life, but alas she and my aunt used it as a secret code when they didn’t want their children to understand them.
Dave and I both attended law school, an experience from which I benefited not at all save in the Nietzschean sense that all that does not kill you makes you stronger, and Dave, as I understand it, very little. Dave has said that he found driving a bus more satisfying than practicing law. My own take is that I would rather juggle live squid in a laundromat.
The project we worked together most closely on was The General for Baen Books, a series which amounted to a science fictional retelling of the life of the great Byzantine (or as he would have put it, Roman) general who conquered (or as he would have put it, reclaimed) much of the Mediterranean Basin for the Empire in the sixth century a.d. Only we had a better ending. It’s fun to be God.
Belisarius fought in the service of his ruler, the equally great, if much less personally agreeable, Emperor Justinian—the patron whose servants produced the Hagia Sophia and the Justinian Code of laws.
Jim Baen was always an enthusiast for Belisarius, probably because he was held up as an exemplar of the flexible, ingenious strategist by Liddel Hart, the British military reformer and writer of the period between the World Wars. Jim also had a practice of pairing established and newer authors as collaborators; this often had very fruitful results, both in terms of the writing it produced and giving the junior author, which I very much was at the time, a valuable tutorial in the craft while earning a living, or at least “not starving.”
At that point my main work had been an alternate history series featuring a lot of military conflict—alternate history’s origins are partly an outgrowth of war-gaming and its emphasis on how historical conflicts might have turned out differently, and the consequences of that, as summed up in the old ditty:
“For want of a nail the shoe was lost;
For want of a shoe, the horse was lost;
For want of a horse, the message was lost;
For want of the message, the battle was lost;
For want of the battle, the kingdom was lost;
And all for the want of a horse-shoe nail.”
The General gave me the opportunity to do a space-opera/planetary romance series together with a writer whose work I had read and admired for years, and I accepted eagerly.
At this point a brief (but hopefully interesting) historical digression is necessary.
Belisarius’ life certainly provided an interesting template for fiction, since he operated during the wild-and-wooly transition between Classical Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. This period is often called the Volkerwanderung—the Migration Era, the period between the collapse of the western portion of the Roman Empire and the emergence of the early stages of the familiar states of Europe and the first conquests of Islam in the Middle East and North Africa, and their aborted drive into Europe.
When the limes, the fortified frontier zones of the Roman Empire along the Rhine and Danube, collapsed in the early 400s, warrior peoples from beyond flooded into the temptingly rich and demilitarized provinces beyond, rather like hungry diners cracking the claw of a lobster to gorge upon the sweet flesh within. Most of the invaders were Germanic speakers; at that time those closely related languages predominated all the way f
rom the North Sea to the Ukraine, including many areas that later became Slavic or Magyar-speaking.
Behind the Germanics, pushing them on and following them into the former Imperial territories, were nomadic steppe peoples from Central Asia, like the Huns of Attila fame (much like the later Avars, Bulgars, Pechenegs, Magyars, and Mongols). The Hunnic impact started a remarkable series of chain migrations, with groups picking up and moving and bouncing into each other like billiard balls all across the continent and beyond.
When the Huns arrived, migrating from Poland to Tunisia started to look good—which is precisely what the East Germanic tribe of the Vandals did, bouncing down as far as the southern Balkans before going north again, crossing the whole of Central Europe, crossing the Rhine, invading Gaul, then invading Spain, dragging along an Iranian-speaking group known as the Alans they’d picked up in the Danube Basin, and eventually moving into North Africa . . . of which more later!
In the Roman world, war had long been a matter for paid specialists, and the provincials were largely defenseless against groups among whom every free man was a warrior; there was very little between them and the drawn butter and waiting teeth.
Some of the “barbarian” invaders were relatively civilized, with monarchic political structures, a small literate class, and cultures already heavily influenced by Rome; many were already Christians, for example, though mostly of heretical varieties. The Goths and Burgundians came into this category.
Though the veneer of civilization could be rather thin—several generations after they invaded and settled in Italy, a group of the supposedly Christian Lombards slaughtered some Italian peasants who refused to take part in a feast on the meat of horses they’d just sacrificed to the old Gods. What made it into the chronicles, usually written by Churchmen, wasn’t necessarily in full accord with the facts on the ground!
Other invaders were outright savages from the remoter parts of Europe, still collecting heads and practicing human sacrifice, folk to whom written words were baleful magic, and cities incomprehensible. They tended to smash things up rather than take them over.
Saxon pirates were raiding as far south as Spain from the third century on; by “Saxon” Romans more or less meant “German in a boat,” and the raiders included elements from all over the northern Germanic world from the Rhine-mouth to Sweden. The whole phenomenon was strikingly reminiscent of the later, and better-known, Viking episode.
The Irish, at this time poetically inclined head-hunters who considered murder and theft the highest expression of human excellence and wrote epics about stealing the neighbor’s cow, were doing a fair bit of raiding themselves. Being even more backward than the Saxons they did it in skin coracles rather than wooden rowboats, but that didn’t stop them from getting as far as Gaul.
When the last Roman troops were withdrawn from Britannia, the Irish (known as the Scotii at the time) started settling in western Britain, especially the part later known as Scotland, after their tribal ethnonym. The Saxons, and their Anglian and Jutish kin did the same on the other side of the island, hence England and the language in which this essay was composed.
Meanwhile, East Rome—what we came to call the Byzantine Empire—was also feeling its oats and coming off the back foot.
Based on the richer and more anciently civilized lands of the Hellenistic world, and including what’s now Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, in the early 500s a.d. it had a series of strong Emperors who reformed the administration and the army; it had never been as dependent on barbarian mercenaries as the Western Empire, though the Balkans were repeatedly devastated by Goths, Huns, and similar “undesirables.” Then in 527 a.d., Justinian the Great became sole emperor, with a battle-tried army, a full treasury, able generals and limitless ambitions. He was the last emperor to speak Latin as his mother tongue, and nobody had told him that the Dark Ages were about to set in, or that plague and Persian invasions were coming. He set out to reconquer the lost provinces of the West, and gave it the old college try.
Dave is a classicist and has been for a long time. I doubt there were many people in Vietnam in ’69 stuffing shells into a 90mm in a tank and reading Horace in the original. He not only reads ancient literature, he’s deeply familiar with the history—in particular, with the history as the people of the time saw it and saw their own ancestors and recorded in their chronicles. Naturally he’d read Procopius of Caesarea, the publically sycophantic and privately scathing (he thought Justinian was possessed by demons) historian of Justinian’s reign and Belisarius’ campaigns.
So we had the perfect template for a rousing adventure story: pirates, barbarian invaders, ambitious Emperors, bloody chaos everywhere. It would suck megalithically to have to live there, but that’s another matter.
But the most flavorful setting for a story is useless without gripping characters.
Dave did the basic work of building the setting. He picked a scenario that’s been a fertile one for many SF writers: a far future in which humans have settled many planets, founded a Galactic Empire (Federation, to be technical), and then fallen apart in civil wars and regressed technologically and socially. Assuming that faster-than-light travel ever becomes possible, it’s depressingly plausible.
The planet Bellevue—a real madhouse—has recovered a little from the collapse of the old culture over a thousand years before. What civilization there is lingers around a vast inland sea, and the great river valleys to the east of it. The eastern sector, the Colony, is descended from immigrants from the Muslim world, mostly Sunni Arabs with a sprinkling of others and Swahili-speaking East Africans further to the south. The great middle oceanic basin was colonized by settlers from Latin America, who speak languages—Spanjol and Sponglish—derived from Spanish. To the northwest is the Base Area, where the Federation’s military forces were centered; the ones on Bellevue happened to be mostly speakers of English, or as it came to be called, Old Namerique. After the collapse they came roaring down to conquer areas around the sea, each wave more backward and barbaric than the last, until only the heartland around the East Residence was left, where the Gubernio Civil (Civil Government) rules.
Enter Raj Ammanda da Luis Whitehall, from a noble but not wealthy background in backward, remote Descott County—the Appalachia of the Civil Government—whose prime export is fighting men. Not entirely by coincidence, the current governor, Barholm Clerett, comes from a Descotter family, though in his case it was his uncle who shot his way onto the Governor’s Chair.
As an aside, this is an important part of the series’ dynamic: the Gubernio Civil, like the Roman and East Roman/Byzantine Empires, has a monarchic form of government without much sense of dynastic legitimacy. Medieval European states did have a strong dynastic sense; even when there was a civil war, it was usually about controlling the monarch, not replacing him. That only happened when there was no clear legitimate heir, or a dynasty died out; nobody would obey you if you simply tried to seize the throne because you wanted it. But Rome started out as a Republic, and long remembered it. “Imperator,” the term from which our “Emperor” derives, originally simply meant “worthy to command Romans,” a title bestowed in the field by acclamation; “imperium” meant more or less “power” or “authority.” The alternative term for imperial ruler, “Kaiser” or “Tsar” derives of course from Julius Caesar’s name.
The first emperor, Augustus Caesar (formerly Octavian), was always careful to maintain the forms of the Republican government, even as he abolished the substance. His uncle Julius had been much less careful about that . . . which, together with his habit of sparing enemies and of going about without a bodyguard of barbarian mercenaries, was a major reason he ended up lying on the Senate steps bleeding to death from fifty-four stab wounds.
But in essence being emperor meant having the support of most of the army; the first sole rulers of Rome had simply been successful warlords in the civil conflicts which ended the Republican era. Being the previous emperor’s son only mattered if t
he soldiers cared about it, which they sometimes did . . . and often didn’t.
A monarchy where anyone with the necessary military force can seize the crown is indeed one where the head bearing said crown rests uneasy. Incompetent generals may ruin the state the monarch (the Governor, in Bellevue’s case) rules; competent ones may overthrow and kill him.
Raj Whitehall is utterly loyal and has no desire to sit in the Governor’s Chair . . . but his governor never quite believes that. From that, much of the plot derives. He’s starved of troops and supplies as Governor Barholm sends him out to reconquer the barbarian military governments, but he succeeds anyway. Which makes his troops (and the army in general) respect and admire him . . . which makes the governor even more paranoid.
(The Caliphate on which the Muslim-dominated Colony is based had exactly the same problem and for very much the same reason: it was originally an elective office, not a hereditary monarchy. It became one by coup d’état, but the memory of the original arrangement never died.)
This gave us the central tension of the series: Raj loses by winning. Of course, if he loses, he certainly loses, and almost certainly dies. Heads I win . . .
In the case of Bellevue, more is at stake than pleasing the Governor or restoring the Gubernio Civil to a dominant position. This is science fiction, after all! Because under the Governor’s Palace in East Residence are immense catacombs dating back to before the fall of the interstellar Federation, and among the ruins is a perfectly functional computer—a Sector Command model, waiting for the time and the man to restore civilization on Bellevue. Raj is the man . . . and to complicate matters, the Gubernio Civil has a religion which worships the memory of computers. This is known in the trade as a “Crystal Dragon Jesus” religion.
Onward, Drake! Page 9