New ebook, only on my Payhip —

A Visit from the Scythians: Four Shaman Stories

Meghan Purvis, my #1 translation

My poem on Grendel, ‘Scapegoat’, has been published at Heroic Fantasy Quarterly.

Read online.

As always, I urge people to read a poem aloud, with the mouth and the ears.

My inspiration was Algernon Swinburne’s ‘The Leper’, which I read (aloud) over and over to steep myself in its ballad rhythms, somewhat halt, its stark simplicity of words, somewhat awkward, its rough rhymes. Swinburne does a medievalist diction here and I think he found in medieval poetry a choppy quality, rough edges that in medievalism (imitation of the medieval) are a part of the charm. In his poem these aid the rude simplicity, the stumblingly sincere narrator’s voice.

‘The Leper’ got called ‘one of Swinburne’s shockers’. It describes a lady being eaten away by leprosy, rejected in disgust by her erstwhile admirers, cared for in squalid circumstances by a lowly man, always devoted to her, whom she once despised. There is suggested necrophilia and the scenario sets up a questioning of God.

Sometimes Swinburne ‘shockers’ are side-on and deliberately lurid, and are lesser works for that. Other times, they stretch empathy into its most radical positions. The perverse story of ‘The Leper’ is told straight, with a sincerity as simple as that ballad metre, and goes straight for the heart. It has things in common with my primary Swinburne poem ‘Anactoria’, which again questions God through a story of obsessive love and sadomasochism (Sappho’s for a girl who abandoned her), not a ballad but first-person and voicy, and out to do much more than shock.

I didn’t think I’d got much of that choppy sincerity to the verse, but on a pre-publication re-read, I do catch that kind of simplicity I aimed for when I set out to write a poem like ‘The Leper’. And I hope I tweak your heart on behalf of the sentimental monstrous, like Swinburne. Here’s a link to his poem.

Grendel has been my ultimate outsider for decades and I love him dearly. One of my early abandoned novels was titled Grendel in Hell, and had steampunk demons before steampunk was a thing, because the Devil stood for artificiality as Against Nature (to invoke the title of a Decadent classic by Huysmans). I snipped off a little piece of this material and got it into ergot.

And because my Beowulf translation, abandoned after 1000 lines, won’t see the light of day, have a primer/reminder of the original, the section pertinent to ‘Scapegoat’. Starting at first mention of Grendel:

The times that dawned meant only torment for one,
An estranged spirit, weary with his years spent in the waste –
Each day to hear echo the enchantment in the court.
There the harp played and the bard’s lay leapt up.
An orator, taught in the lore of the origin of life,
Talked on the Omnipotent, on the cosmos his creation:
The symmetry of earth encircled by the seas,
The proud march of sun and moon, lamps for our path,
Embroidery of boughs and leaves, living, burgeoning;
Life too quickened in the creatures that stir, each in its kind.

So the king’s company lived in celebration, blessed,
Until one inflicted his envy upon them, an unholy fiend.
This grim figure they knew as ugly Grendel,
Rumoured to wander the wild moors and marshes,
Frightening men from the frontiers of the fens.
An age he had guarded the monsters’ home ground –
Such was his dark fate since God had forsaken
The tribe of Cain’s kindred until the end of time,
Condemned in him, because he killed his brother.
That feud did not profit him; far was he pursued
By the great judge for his guilt, a fugitive from men.
Owed to his ancestry are the unnatural things –
Ogres and elves and ghouls from the dead,
Even the giants who fought against God
In an epoch of havoc… but He had his own back.

One night he intruded, intrigued, into the house,
Hushed now the Ring Danes had drunk enough of wine.
Inside he found them, and saw how those fighting elite
Slept after the feast, forgot the sad state, the dark end of flesh.
The damned one, grim and greedy, at once was urged on,
Ferocious, in frenzy, and seized thirty lives as they slept –
Then escaped, ecstatic with his catch, back the way he came,
Towards his solitudes to enjoy his spoil of slain.
Then, in the half light from under the horizon,
The danger of Grendel dawned upon men.
After the laughter uplifted yesterday
Screams and cries clamoured to the morning sky.
The king, known for honour, the old noble,
Once they had searched and discovered the tracks
Of the cursed demon, sat downcast
As his strong heart strove under his heavy grief.
Too harsh that trouble, too hard and tenacious.
No pause – the next night unleashed another onslaught,
Double the flagrant murder. No doubts he felt
About his drastic feud; he was lost too deep in it.
His gist was unambiguous, and most of Hrothgar’s guests
Disbanded to secure beds, separate from the court,
Where was no grudge against them, about the outer grounds
Or among the animals, since a devil had joined the army.

So he usurped the house from the use of men,
At war against right, one against the world.
The ideal court was empty, abandoned to the enemy.
It went on a great while; throughout twelve winters
Scyld’s childrens’ chief suffered his inflictions,
Utmost sorrow, the gamut of grief.
The tale of it travelled, heard by the tribes
In elegies for Hrothgar under Grendel’s siege –
Hostilities sustained, season in, season out,
A vendetta without end, and vengeance for no fault.
Not for him arbitration, or atonement, or a truce;
No family saw a fee for his felonies,
No victim had his due; futile to demand
Handsome satisfaction at the slayer’s hands.
The uncanny creature only hunted them like quarry,
A shadow of death stalking their footsteps in the dark,
Ambushing in the unnatural night on the misty moors;
The haunts of hell’s initiates are a mystery.
So the enemy of men sought their harm and ignominy
And up against them on his own, overawed them.
He dwelt in Heorot the jewelled while the light was out –
With no grace to know the gift throne, nor to kneel
In loving kindness at that seat in the Creator’s sight.

Heavy was his punishment, crushing the heart
Of Scyld’s childrens’ king and comrade.
His under-chiefs sat often in conclave, to consult
On a strategy, what strength of spirit might attempt
In defence, what face the fear of his rush.
Some among them sacrificed at pagan shrines,
Worshipped stones, supplicated in prayer
The slayer of souls to help, to have pity on the people.
Such was their habit, the only hope of heathens;
Their hearts’ instinct turned to hell, ignorant of heaven.
The one God was unknown to them, the wonderworker,
Our sanctuary; they had not learnt His sacraments.
Lost is his case who in his soul’s last crisis
Must feel himself fall into the arms of the inferno.
Found is his desire who after his death day
May follow his weary heart into our father’s arms.
So Scyld’s great-grandson in the sorrows of his times
Seethed with suffering that had no cease;
Nor against his anguish the sagacious hero
Saw a promise of salvation. Too harsh,
Hard and tenacious, this trouble upon his people,
Worst disaster, urgent need, desperation in the night.

[ll. 86-194]

All right, that’s up until Beowulf’s advent. I wrote a poem from Beowulf’s perspective too: you can read ‘A Monster to Fight Monsters’ in this post.

I’ve published a new short story, ‘Women Who Lie Alone in Tombs’.

This is the description:

This short story is free for the week 23-30 April in our HistFic Outside the Box on Bookfunnel. My Amgalant novels are also on sale at 50% off.

Written for Jules, posted here for L——. You know who you are.

I have this story up alongside my old fanfiction on Ao3. But one or two people have been missing Temujin and Jamuqa — as I was myself when I wrote this story in 2020. It’s a snatch of them post-Amgalant. It’s fanfiction, by which I permissioned myself to be a bit more indulgent than in the novels.

The story has a retrospective on Temujin and Jamuqa. If you hate spoilers, perhaps beware.

Love and Conquest at the Gates of Samarkand

by Bryn

‘I’ve aged.’ Temujin fingered the skin of his face and thought how coarse he must look, to a love who did not change.

‘Gives you character. I like my men the way I like my leather: rumply, hardworn.’

This wasn’t true at all, in Temujin’s memory. ‘Since when?’

Gently he admitted, ‘Since you aged.’

They first met when both were eight years old. Jamuqa had lived to thirty-nine. Now Temujin was fifty-three, and Jamuqa a spirit. At this answer the mortal one of them felt a warmth of comfort, as from a fire and boiled food.

Fast march across the winter Kizil Kum – Red Sand – ought to seem like home to a Mongol, even though local guides told them nobody travelled through the desert. It wasn’t meant to be a feat to get to Samarkand, not for a Mongol army, but the khan’s old limbs disgraced them.

‘We’re at the gates of the enemy capital,’ said Jamuqa, ‘unexpected, by a road they don’t bother to put on the maps. We beat the wet, which would have bogged our horses to the elbows. Can you be less hard on yourself?’

‘We did this, Jamuqa. You and I.’

‘That’s more like it. The rest of Mongols, they came along for the ride.’

‘No. But when we made Mongol unity our cause, at twenty, did you envision we’d be here? Three thousand miles from where we started, and no lost battles to our name.’

‘I knew we’d never run out of enemies. But what feats the felt-tent people find possible, united? I had no idea.’

On his army’s urgent march Temujin, their Tchingis Khan, had not claimed the privacy of his own felt skirts about him. Tonight, while they waited outside the Samarkand gates for daylight, he set up his little travel-tent. Although he heard Jamuqa’s voice in the busiest day – in battle – still it was a luxury to concentrate on him and shape his presence.

He had obligations, before he indulged himself: spirits require gratitude, Jamuqa Spirit no exception. ‘The Hwarazm shah’s coins call him “the Second Alexander”, for his conquests where Alexander the Great once conquered kingdoms. It is your tactics which have undone Hwarazm.’

‘Not yet.’

‘We are at his capital and the shah is nowhere to be seen. He has run away from us and left his cities to defend themselves. Thirty years ago Mongols knew an obscure Mongol on the steppe to be the most intelligent tactician of the age. Now they know you preside in spirit over our victories. It is you who outface this legendary Alexander.’

‘Watch out about Hwarazm shah’s ridiculous titles, Temujin. Defeat him, you inherit them.’

This was a tease, since Temujin didn’t like the flattery of titles beyond Tchingis, his kingly name from God. When a challenger for kingship Jamuqa had gone in for extravagant titles – “universal khan” – in a game. Because, as he confessed at the last, he had secretly favoured his childhood friend, his blood brother – never truly his rival.

Titles weren’t safe ground perhaps, to dispute between them. Besides, Temujin was in a mood for more intimate subjects. ‘Yesterday in the desert Bo’orchu told me a tale of Alexander. West of here near a city Hamadan can be seen the Shir-e-gamgin, the Melancholy Lion. It is a lion in stone Alexander commissioned upon the death of his friend Hephaestion. The king of beasts, stooped to the ground with his head low: this was Alexander, in the midst of great conquests but sunken on his knees with grief.’

‘Bo’orchu told you?’

‘Yes. In apology, if you like, for his old suspicions of our friendship. I answered, that was me in the year up until you joined me as a spirit. He remembered me then, and agreed.’

‘The year of my absence. Before my death, instead of afterwards.’

‘Yes. It was that period we equated with description of the statue. Newly khan of the whole steppe, but without you. Distance I was used to, different sides in conflict. But you withdrew from us entirely, and you were ill.’

‘I tried, Temujin. I tried to leave you gently. I left you my tuq, which a man doesn’t part from alive. You were my other self, and I gave you this symbol of my soul. I declared myself dead to public life and went into the mountains, to live at peace for the time my illness let me. I’d warned you I wouldn’t live to forty.’

‘It was hard to think of you in that condition. When I was meant to feel triumphant. I hope you won’t say I was weak. Alexander survived his dead friend by eight months, and only thought of monuments to him and not of conquests.’

‘Well, I didn’t know what state you were in. Don’t imagine I did what I did for your sake only, Temujin. By my tuq in your hands I thought to have a piece of me in the great work you had ahead of you. A piece of me wasn’t enough. So I came back and asked for my execution.’

Temujin shivered, still, at mention of it. That event had been his most hair-raising hours on earth, never mind the wars he had participated in since.

He quoted to himself Jamuqa’s argument in persuasion of him to the act:

We have drunk our blood with lightning ash and holy Onon water: that drink shall never be dissolved. That drink is in my veins, your blood and mine, the alcohol of us, our selves and the charisma that in each of us has cast a spell upon the other. Then let us use the old techniques, techniques to tie one dead to one alive.

A rival, killed with preservation of the blood by the one who vanquished him, becomes his slave in the spirit world. Jamuqa, in his eagerness to live through and with his blood brother, turned himself into that tethered tutelary spirit.

‘And so I have a fortune Alexander did not have,’ smiled Temujin. ‘Certainly I wouldn’t have proved a great, but continued a poor figure like that lion. Few of my friends, I admit, understood our friendship while you lived. But they saw how our union in spirit salvaged me.’

Outside the door of the tent, with his horse and weapons ready to go, stood Jamuqa’s tuq of black yak hair, the Mongols’ banner when at war. Temujin’s own white-haired standard was kept for days of peace, and had only flown at short intervals since Tchingis Khan owned both.

Jamuqa fell silent for a while. Temujin lay down to ease his back, on comfy skins that had come off animals in Altai Mountains (where Jamuqa’s bones were sealed inside a tree). Through the smokehole overhead the stars shone over Samarkand city, which kept a strange quiet for its concentrated population – an unimaginable mass to Temujin, despite that he had seen cities. The Mongol army, of course, made its nightly noises and no more: no unseemly excitement, no faults of discipline.

Jamuqa’s face bent over him, the image cutting in on his half-closed eyes. He saw Jamuqa with his eyes either shut or open. ‘Do you know what?’

‘No.’ Temujin shook his head awake again, but stayed on his back with Jamuqa in the familiar one-legged squat beside him.

‘Never mind Alexander, who wasn’t such a big thing where I lived. Do you remember Sultan Sanjar, a hero of mine when I was young?’

‘I do. Your heroes were rare.’

‘These were his grounds eighty years ago. The last Great Seljuq, and the only one of them arguably great in a personal capacity. Your hero, Ile Dashi of Black Qatat, defeated him.’

‘Let’s not argue heroes. That was the Battle of Qatwan, and I respect both sides.’

‘It didn’t stop Sanjar, who waged war until he was seventy. I heard about him as if he were my uncle, but you know what nobody told me? When I was in love with you and young.’ Jamuqa’s triangular face, as he said this, changed the way a cloud changes, into his face at twenty. ‘When I tried on you what was illegal and we argued.’

Temujin didn’t want to interrupt him, although he itched to expand on that too-brief account: how they discovered they were both in love, and spent a legendary night together – before the famous argument, which was about integrity as much as illegality.

At the age he was he knew to simply listen and let Jamuqa talk.

‘There I was, a young Mongol who liked cock as much as he liked ayrag, or ever so slightly more. Now Bo’orchu suggests acceptance with his Alexander story, but when I was alive I was the bad influence on you.’

Temujin shut up at this juncture too.

‘Nobody told me Sultan Sanjar had a love life. His was a mess. In no way exemplary for a young Mongol to follow. But it was mamluks.’

‘Mamluk soldiers? It’s the first I’ve heard myself.’

‘See? I had to get the gossip as a spirit. If I’d known that fact about him at eighteen, I might have had the nerve to say, I’m the other kind, like Sultan Sanjar.’

‘Tell me about his messes.’

‘Several of them. He’d fall infatuated with a soldier and grant him offices above what he was fit for. Then, when his piece proved corrupt or crashingly incompetent, there’d be a public bust-up. Public, since both held public offices. You and I, Temujin, decided we were public figures – both in the running to be khan, and in those circumstances we couldn’t contravene the law.’

‘To be fair that was me, when young and stupid, and you took the side of love. Was there scandal for the sultan?’

‘Complaint, as his aides and peers mopped up the damage. Lampoons sung in the streets. Despite it, he remained the greatest of the Seljuks, talked about in the fashion I heard when I was young.’

‘Private lives are often swept away for public figures. Sanjar’s government was otherwise a fine one. I hear of him in anecdotes about his sense of justice. Because he stood high in general estimation, mischievous speech didn’t take hold of his reputation like a weed. I understand it, as a matter of fact. I am wrapped up in respect, such that I feel stifled in sable furs.’

‘No Mongol wants to taint you, Tchingis, with gossip of that sort. Even if they have to exculpate me.’ Jamuqa knocked a hand on his upright knee. ‘I wish I’d had the courage to announce myself explicitly. Before I involved you in risk of exposure, before our night together. But after I’d been given generalship over the Mongols’ first war in ages, and we won. Twenty years old, at the peak of my reputation. I could have told the assembled chiefs: you can cut my head off, or you can ask me to direct your wars, it’s up to you. But I’m a man who lies with men.’

To have to live dishonestly hurt Jamuqa, Temujin knew. Mongols valued honesty, and Jamuqa was Mongol. He said, in hopes to help, ‘I have urged them towards an honest memory of my life and acts. I have encouraged them to gather different people’s accounts, and I have related mine, whether I am proud or ashamed. Oddly, this leaves me confident that history has a circumstantial knowledge of how I killed my half-brother for theft of food from the family, when we were nearly starved, in my childhood. But how I loved? I have not given the collectors a precise report of you.’

‘You won’t, either. I won’t let you. It’s too late for gestures of that sort.’

‘Alexander has a great love story attributed to him. He seems to me exceptional. I think I won’t, although I had two great loves: my first wife Borte; my anda Jamuqa, and great matters hung on the course of those loves – the khanship, our work for the unity of Mongols. They should not believe the private side of life less important to record.’

‘I am no Hephaestion,’ said Jamuqa, ‘and might have spoiled your chances there. Loyal lieutenant to the great one. Whereas your history and mine: it’s complicated. After our argument I fought against you, and later I pretended I did, in order to send you information on your enemies. Out of this I have the name of untrustworthy. No mate for you, in story.’

‘That’s not fair.’ Temujin thought of his own words on the night he agreed to Jamuqa’s execution. Across the arena where men slay and are slain, our stomachs were hollow for each other. ‘You sacrificed for love more than any man whose story I have heard. First your reputation, to cede to me the glory. In the end your life, to be with me.’

‘I did tear up my reputation in your service, and I don’t regret that now. It isn’t acknowledgement I ask for. I find a pity, I concede, that one of your virtues goes unacknowledged, Temujin. Your constancy. It wasn’t easy to love the two of us, your queen and me, amidst the demands of public life. You did extraordinarily well.’

The compliment only made Temujin feel guilty. ‘In the past, perhaps,’ he said, to deflect it.

Jamuqa smiled knowingly, and didn’t insist.

By Temujin’s early ideals, sex meant a union of persons. He experienced that with one, and then, confusingly, with two. But where he did not love there was no soul exchange in the act, and he used to suffer from a sense of void. Used to, because Jamuqa was with him always now, which rescued him from that effect.

Jamuqa interpreted his face and offered, ‘It’s complicated.’

‘Did Sultan Sanjar have children? I forget.’

‘He had political wives, a couple, as a king of course, and out of one of them two daughters. And no end of nephews and cousins. That wasn’t why he was the last of the Seljuqs.’

Even Jamuqa had had a political wife, but no issue. Temujin’s child count stood at thirteen. After Borte, his other wives were matters of diplomacy, and he had learned to pay them the attention they were due, although Borte was the mother of nine.

‘I am not a poor husband any more,’ he said to Jamuqa, ‘and glad I am not. But you know I still prefer these nights when I commune with you alone.’ The queen he had brought on the western campaign, Ulun, had custody of the baggage wagons, which hadn’t crossed the  desert.

‘“Commune” is your word now? Do you remember the description you once gave me of the melting-together spirits do? Back when I didn’t believe in spirits, but to listen to your talk, I wanted to.’

‘Yes. I do.’ He picked up Jamuqa’s spirit-hand, admiringly. Jamuqa was put together like an antelope, and he like a bear. ‘More fantasy on my part than knowledge. Rather obviously, I was justifying that we wait.’

‘You were helping me to sublimate my passions.’

‘I was stupid,’ he said for the second time that night. ‘And I don’t know whether I believed myself. I told you we’d have forever in the afterlife…’

‘It’s lucky I believed you, at the end. And took the jump to join with you, when the horses trampled me. I’m forever, Temujin. It only gets better when you’re a spirit too.’

Temujin, at fifty-three, believed him absolutely. This voice in his head, this image in his eyes. His dead love, with whom he conjured up a bliss impossibly sublime, even in their single night together at nineteen.

***

In his most uncertain hours Temujin thought he had killed his friend, by a rite which Jamuqa never believed in but staged for Temujin’s sake, to let him go gently, to give him an idea to hold onto.

For Temujin did have dark hours in these conquest years. Wars off the steppe were on another level than struggles between tribes at home. Jamuqa had taught him war, Jamuqa had been the one armoured up inside against hard sights. Tchingis Khan performed what was expected of him, but when he couldn’t help but shut his eyes he pushed his tutor spirit into the driver’s seat and hid at the rear of the wagon, in a wicker hutch of the mind like the layer of felt around him now where he lay at one with Jamuqa.

***

Dawn struck the gates of Samarkand. Alexander once conquered here. More recently, the city’s self-titled king, the Second Alexander, Hwarazm shah, had massacred its inhabitants in a three days’ sack as punishment for revolt. Ten thousand lives paid for the same number of residents from Hwarazm whom Samarkandis had killed in the streets.

Hwarazm shah had only won Samarkand thirteen years ago, to add to his rapid empire, to call his new capital for the prestige its depth of history lent him.

Today it was Tchingis Khan with his fearsome reputation, and two options.

Samarkand’s inhabitants chose the one that wasn’t massacre again. They sent out their unconditional surrender.

#

I had this up at Green Splotches journal for speculative poetry, but they seem to be down. So I’ll post here. One day I’ll blog about what Beowulf has meant to me, but … this poem says most of it.

A Monster to Fight Monsters

The dragon lies quenched in the sea, I lie in state on my pyre
and the people sing.

Of the world’s kings, Beowulf had been
The tenderest-hearted, the gentlest in spirit,
Truest of loyalty, thirstiest for glory.

A funny thing to say about a king
in elegy, but that’s my story:
Lof-geornost was I, yearningest for love,
most eager to earn it – gentle monster.
I was a monster on the humans’ side.

They say he has the strength of thirty in his fist’s grip.

The words they used for monsters fit me too:
giant, freak, and wonder.
Yet the tale is of our two-way love affair.

Nor only at home. When I went to the Spear Danes
I spoke my beot before Hrothgar
in Heorot hall, where humans sat to feast by day,
an ogre in the night.

The chief of Scyld’s children sat downcast
As his strong heart strove under his heavy grief.

– Not after me.
I presented my boast, as requisite:
how I had swum with water-snakes and harpy fishes,
dragged to where they banquet at the bottom of the sea;
I throttled them and threw them on the shore.
(I am an innocent monster, on your side. I can help.)
Happy were the stranger Danes to believe in me,
in my advent against Grendel’s visitation.
All celebrated me,
his goblin arm nailed to the gables, torn by mine.

Heorot rose up, arched gables
Like a hart’s gilt horns – not yet, not for years, but to be
Burnt in the blaze ignited from the ashes
Of old hate, old shames among the oath-sworn.

Heorot since has blazed away, and by no dragon’s fire.
I have slain you, dragon, and you me,
because that is what we monsters can.
Then there is what we can’t.
Grendel’s terror campaign was simple, though atrocious;
the unfightable isn’t from the outside but within.
I watched them try to peace-weave, spider’s webbing on a wound;
plug grievances the way they stanched a beer keg,
but the harp has a line about feud:

Chests lost grip on the uproar of hearts.

Give me ogres, give me dragons,
let me not participate in human argument.
One time I performed a stunt in battle –
staved in Dayraven with my naked embrace
(as if I were wrestling monsters)
but my fame wasn’t won in ranks of war.

In spite of that, my people thrust me on the Geatish throne
for faithful service to the royal family, self-wiped-out;
and because I had no human strings to snarl the knot of feud.
Never a wife, nor children, and no knowledge.

Not even a fine king saved his house.
I drove ogres from Heorot and left it to its own.
Now feuds wind home to the Geats.
Mismanaged foreign marriages, cut reconciliations.

So the societies of humans
make themselves extinct through their self-contradictions,
as they have before. We, too, walked in ruins
of an architecture we ascribed to giants.

I did what I am expert in.
The Weather Geats only had Beowulf to send,
old to the bone, against the ancient drake.
For firefighters such as Beowulf and Siegfried
arrive, rare birds, out of nowhere, nobody knows why.
A few of us go wild.
But I remained tame until my end:
ogre-big, obediently sitting at the feast;
as if they strapped a dragon to make a flying milk-cart;
and they idolised me in proportion to my size
because I might have been a Grendel, and was not.
You were outraged, dragon – you and the others I killed
felt cheated, when you felt me: this isn’t a man!

You and Grendel both, of course,
infatuated with their things, as much as I with them:
you on your hoard of wrought utensils,
he fascinated by the music.

As the War Swedes sweep over the Weather Geats
bury my bones not far from human voices,
even if unknown. Like Grendel once,
I want to hear them sing.

Down from the Spear-Danes’ early days,
That grandest age under the clans’ kings,
We hear of heroes, the tales of how they triumphed.
In his heyday Scyld Scefing sailed
To seize fortresses and free the sea.
The panic of war bands he became, who had been
Once a baby abandoned to the weather.
He found ease from those times, his fortunes rose,
His honour climbed up under the clouds of the sky
Until throughout the whales’ streets, in a wheel about him,
Cities submitted and sent him tribute. He was a true king.

by Bryn Hammond

I have a novelette in a new anthology, Queer Weird West Tales edited by Julie Bozza.

The call went, ‘If it’s weird, if it’s queer, if it’s on a frontier…’
My story, ‘A Truce with Evil’, is set in a fantasy version of the Russian-Siberian frontier of the 16th century.

I talk about the story, its inspirations and background, in this interview on Julie Bozza’s blog:

QUEER WEIRD WEST TALES: author Bryn Hammond

‘Steppe nomads are how I got to this frontier in the first place. My historical fiction series Amgalant is set in the 13th century, when the taiga is a frontier for Tchingis Khan as well. In ‘A Truce with Evil’ I have Bilbil, a spirit who lived in the 13th century, hark back to the Mongol intrusion.’

This is rich and diverse anthology, with settings of the American Old West and beyond from an ancient Roman wall to outer space. I loved its range of story, style, and of queer representation.

I am happy to have a story in an anthology from Bell Press.

Bell Press publishes literary anthologies and operates on the unceded Coast Salish Territories of the Musqueam, Tsleil Waututh, and Squamish people.

The Knot Wound Round Your Finger is an anthology on the theme of memory. Memories lost, memories made. What to discard and what to keep? How do we form them and how do they form us? From speculative and historical fiction to memoir and creative non-fiction, each piece explores these fragments of the past and how they trouble us or offer comfort.

Edited by Devon Field

Contributors: Deborah Bean, Mark Blickley, Helen Bowie, Heather Diamond, Benjamin Gardner, Heidi Greco, Bryn Hammond, Geoff Hart, NC Hernandez, Joanna Michal Hoyt, Shereen Hussain, Ibrahim Babátúndé Ibrahim, Vandana Nair, Stephen O’Donnell, Emma Prior, Karen Rollins, Lorraine Schein, Carsten Schmitt, Shanon Sinn

My short story, ‘Ill Spirits’, concerns the memory work a shaman does in a community.

“The stitching Taliat said to Paliap perplexed, ‘A shaman works in grief and love as I work in skin and sinew.’”

I wrote this story because I hadn’t found room in Amgalant, yet, to say enough about shamans, emotions, and spirits as a memory of harm, suffered and inflicted. Late in Two, Temujin comes close:

“Our sane spirits sit at the hearths of their fathers and cause us no disquiet. We don’t have a justice court of God, we have the ghosts of our injustices and they haunt us, and they aren’t just, Borte. They are hurt creatures… Ill spirits are another sort of history, the history of our ill acts. If our spirits can’t be escaped, why, our victims can’t escape. Justice is an artifice. What is actual is emotions.”

I stole a line from him to write ‘Ill Spirits’. I stole the title, with its play on ill as in malign and ill as in sick. In my draft my shaman in the story said after him, ‘Justice is an artifice. What is actual is emotions’, but I gave him his own lines, to press the same point.

The story — as does Amgalant on the belief system of the Mongols — owes heavily to the wonderfully rich study Shamans and Elders: Experience, Knowledge, and Power among the Daur Mongols by Caroline Humphrey with Urgunge Onon (Oxford UP 1996). For an explanation of Mongols’ understanding of spirit attacks as caused by social harm, often to the most vulnerable, see my post on Mongols and the plague, where I quote extensively from Humphrey and Onon.

While writing, I was aware that shamans have been ill-served by fiction. Zen Cho, in a Roundtable on Faith Depiction in SFF transcribed at Strange Horizons, says this is still the case. So I am out to undo a few misconceptions on the way.

For soft stags and hard does, see Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity (St. Martin’s Press 2000).

The Knot Wound Round Your Finger is now available in ebook and paperback.
Order at Bell Press.