Some more of the book

[robinturner]

Our hero is back at the village and preparing for a mini-siege …
I'd half expected that we'd arrive at the mine to find people milling around the entrance and children playing in the sun. After all, although our village had been raided in the past by Lanbou hoping to pick up copper ingots, the last time was when my grandmother was a girl, so I couldn't expect military discipline. But to my satisfaction, the mine looked deserted. I stopped just outside the entrance and announced myself, since I didn't want any nervous guards shooting arrows at me. I was welcomed inside to where the already wide entrance broadened into a large clearing area before the mine proper began. This was where most of the villagers were assembled, which of course was where they shouldn't have been, but as I said, you can't expect military discipline, especially when the person left in charge is a priest-doctor. (Like any small settlement, we didn't warrant a triumvirate, just a chief, and although I had Branow and an old woman called Sarilu to act as my unofficial second and third, Branow was away with me and Sarilu was visiting relatives.)

So I was in a familiar situation: facing a hundred or so people who wanted to know what to do and were hoping it didn't include anything to do with sudden death. This time I had to give the full story, pitching it right so they'd be scared enough to be sensible, and not so scared they'd run away. To make sure they didn't consider that option, I pointed out that the mine was the safest place, adding some gory descriptions of what Lanbou could do to people in open country, and not mentioning that there was a large forest nearby which was anything but open. I also said some stirring things about how, united, we were strong, and divided, we were dismembered corpses. I then divided our forces.

I put most of the men of fighting age near the main entrance, with a smaller group at the rear entrance, just in case the raiders came round that way. The young women and children were in the middle of the mine, where there was a long, narrow passage that joined up with another mine; if the worst happened and we were under attack from both entrances, at least some of them would be able to make an escape that way. I'd shown the priest-doctor how to knock out the struts supporting the roof, and told It to do it as soon as the raiders broke through our resistance, rather than waiting for everyone to get through, though I rather doubted It would have the presence of mind to do that. Between each of these groups, I placed the remaining villagers: the old men and women past child-bearing age. They were the group I was relying on most if things got really bad, since even if they could do less damage than men in their prime, they would fight fearlessly: few things really scare a woman over forty or a man over seventy, least of all death. I also needed what my military head called the suicide group, though of course I didn't say that out loud. The main group of fighters would be fanned out around the rear of the large cavern, but I also needed a small group in the entrance itself to provide a token resistance to lure the enemy inside by dying dramatically. I could have asked for volunteers, talking about the briefness of life compared with the length of a glorious memory, but that trick only works with soldiers (and pretty stupid soldiers at that) so I just did my usual ``You, you, you, you'' thing, and didn't mention the dying part. I have to admit I chose men according to how little I liked them; there was no point in picking them on their fighting ability, since except for Branow, no one in the village was a particularly good fighter.

After that, it was just a matter of waiting and keeping discipline. Fear would only keep people in line so long; after a while, the thought of having your head sliced off recedes, and the thought that you really ought to check on the sheep comes to the fore. I prowled around with a short sword in my belt, twirling my blasting wand. From time to time, I slipped into the village to check on our runners and Gileki, who to my surprise was still up his tree and happy as always.

Two days passed like this, then, as I was sitting in the mine entrance watching the sky lighten, I heard screams floating up on the air. This meant our visitors had arrived, but it didn't necessarily mean they were killing people: it was the simplest of pre-arranged signals. I put my military head on, feeling calm, concentrated and almost happy, and roused my suicide group before moving cautiously out of the entrance. Peering out from behind a rock, I could see the edge of the village but not much else, and wished I hadn't given Gileki my spyglass. While wondering whether I should move down the hill to get a better view, risking being seen by someone who did have a spyglass, I spotted a small figure coming quickly up the trail. Gileki, true to form, had decided to ignore instructions and deliver the news in person. Fortunately, there didn't seem to be a pack of Lanbous coming after him. I fretted while he covered the last few hundred paces, then pulled him behind the rock as he came past. He opened his mouth wide, then shut it and grinned at me. ``Everything's fine,'' he panted. ``Lanbous came down our people ran off some Lanbous followed them as far as the wood now they're just pissing around in the village.''

``Did you see anyone else?'' I asked.

``No, just Lanbous.''

I asked Gileki for the spyglass, and he reluctantly surrendered his new toy. Focussing on the part of the village I could view around the rock, I could indeed see some Lanbous ``pissing about,'' but no sign of the monsters. At this point, my cocky head took over and had me squirming my way down the hill, trying to stay behind boulders but exposing myself to view recklessly. Eventually I reached a point where I could get a good view of the village.

One of the monsters was there, this time encased completely in armour and looking through something like a spyglass, but wider. It wasn't looking at me, thank the Three, but it was looking fixedly up at the mine. That was strange, since there was nothing to see up there, so the creature had to be using some kind of sorcerous device, not a simple spyglass. I'd read accounts of things called---if you translate from the Old Speech---life-lookers, but had never seen one. Maybe now I had.

I squirmed back up to the mine entrance as quickly as I could.

Comments

[sjcarpediem.livejournal.com]

I'm really liking this! There is just enough detail--too much more I think would encumber the story, too much less would raise too many questions in the reader as the action sailed on.

Would your Hero really talk about "taking the piss" and "pissing about" so much? It's a really British expression...

[solri.livejournal.com]

As I mentioned in a previous post, swear words are a bugger to write in SF/FF! Obviously I'm trying to avoid characters coming out with expressions that are very culturally specific: you wouldn't want someone exclaiming "Jesus Christ!" for example. I'd pretty much decided to invent my own blasphemies but keep scatological swearing as is, but I'd forgotten about the UK/US divide. I'm not sure how important it is, though. Would American readers finding an expression like "pissing about" hilarious or just odd? Tolkien bases the dialogue of hobbits on the rural (British) english of his time, but then hobbits are rather quaint anyway: it's OK for Sam to say "You've landed us in a pretty pickle," but it would sound weird coming from, say, Elrond.

[sjcarpediem.livejournal.com]

I was trying to decide this myself when I was debating whether it was worth mentioning and eventually decided to comment on it because... I don't know.

I definitely noticed it the first time, and re-read that line to make sure I hadn't missed anything; there was another line with "catch you up" (in AmEn this would be to tell someone what had happened, in a uni-directional fashion; your meaning would be rendered "catch up with you", or comparing news bi-directionally) that required the same processing. Once I re-read to make sure I hadn't read incorrectly, then remembered that you're British I had no problems understanding. It's not hilarious, just a little odd.

Lately I'm aware that my English isn't exactly "normal", though. I'm not a SF/FF reader, so I have no idea how familiar such readers would be with other dialects/usages, nor how normal it is for them to filter... I have no idea, so I thought I'd mention it. I want to say that literate people wouldn't have a problem (or would only have problems on the level I described), but at this point I'm too disconnected from my linguistic culture to know.

As you mention with the comparison between Sam and Elrond, it may turn out to be completely appropriate for American readers that your Hero and Gileki use what we'd think of a London low-brow...

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about your story today, and realized that I am continually but unconsciously characterizing him as male. See, I automatically use a "he" pronoun when representing the person. (I can't use "it" because "it" feels dehumanizing, or depersonalizing, or whatever, and don't even use "it" for mammals, usually. I also can't use "it" because it takes a lot of conscious effort to override my automatic expectation that people are gendered.)

Anyway, the person seems to act like a male, to think like a male, and to do things that one typically associates with males in a medieval-type world. I can't remember - by this point, is the reader supposed to grasp that this person is not male? How will you override the impression of masculinity - will you have the person soon do a lot of things that would seem more "feminine" to the reader? Added to clarify - I guess this is a broader question of how one overrides implicit expectation based on stereotyping, in a work of fiction where one isn't supposed to do a lot of detached, conscious thinking - can two stereotypes battle it out to transcend both of them, or is there another way to go about it?

[solri.livejournal.com]

Our hero is coming across as pretty male at the moment because It's doing typically male things at the moment: most of the time It has Its military head on, as It would put it. (I agree about the pronoun problem - I've settled on a capitalised "It", not least because it makes people go "Huh?" and has a slight aura of inhumanity, which kind of goes with the character.) But apart from the bit at the beginning where It explicitly talks about being a neuter, there are a few clues (and will be more); e.g. "I knew from long experience that you can't reason with men when they're emotional."

I'm still developing my thoughts on what the neuters are like. My image is something like what you'd get if you took a nine-year-old girl and made her taller than the average man, and that goes for some of the psychology as well as the physical appearance. For example, our hero's bossiness doesn't just come from military experience but is also part of Its character: It's not ordering people around because It's the chief but because It knows best.

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

I noticed the It for the priest-doctor - the capitalization made me think of a deity, but after reading lots of pages with its use, I imagine I'd get used to seeing It. (The deity idea was nicely offset by your mention that the person may not be able to handle the situation.)

I think a man might say, "You can't reason with men when they're emotional," if including himself in the generic group. I like your very tall nine-year-old girl analogy.