September 13, 2009

When in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns. -- Raymond Chandler

Miracle

 

Okay, guys.  Listen up.  I need a miracle.  Anyone got one you’re not using?   Out in the garage, up in the attic, in a shoebox under the bed?

            About thirty seconds ago, in a final death-defying sprint of several thousand words over the last two days, I finished the third draft of PEGASUS.  (I am therefore also blind, deaf, dumb, stupid, and crazy.  Just so you know.)   This ought to be great news. 

            It would have been great news either—say—the end of June, or if it were the kind of third draft where everything is pretty much done and all it needs now is a read-through and a few more semicolons.

            This is not the case here.  It doesn’t need a fourth draft—I don’t think:  if it does, even a miracle won’t save me—but it does need, still, an awful lot of work.

            And the deadline–to get the book out by autumn ‘10–is 8 October.

            Anybody got a miracle?

            And just to impel you to go look out in the garage and up in the attic and in the shoebox under the bed (also because I am blind, deaf, dumb, stupid and crazy and incapable of writing a blog entry tonight:  besides I have to read proofs) here is the next snippet of the beginning of PEGASUS.  If you want to reread the first to orient yourself, it’s here: 

http://robinmckinleysblog.com/2009/05/ 

And then this follows (although caveats about possible changes remain for when I rewrite the whole thing backwards in the eighteenth draft.  I can see one or two likely for the third-and-a-half draft.  Oh yes and there are probably typos, I’ve caught three rereading just now):

 

            Sylvi tried to concentrate on what she was reading.  She had begun to like reading a little better since Ahathin had become her tutor;  she would still rather be outdoors with her hawk and her pony, but it was rather thrilling, in a creepy, echo-of-centuries way, to be looking at Viktur’s own original journal.  She was allowed only to touch it wearing the gloves the librarian had given her, and there were furthermore these odd little wooden paddles for turning the pages.  But she had—carefully, carefully—turned all the pages over, back to the very beginning, to look at Viktur’s signature on the flyleaf:  Viktur, Gara of Stormdown, Captain of the White Fellowship, who do follow Balsin, Gara of Mereland, All Commander of His Companies.  Most of the curly handwriting was still surprisingly black and sharp against the pale brown flyleaf.  A tiny faded arrow, almost invisible, had been drawn just before Balsin, and the word King written in above, and the Gara of Mereland following had been struck out.  “Gara?” said Sylvi.

            “Lord,” said Ahathin.   “A gara is below a prince and above a baron.  It is a rank no longer much in use.”

             “Then Viktur was pretty important,” said Sylvi.  “Balsin was only a gara to begin with.” 

              “Viktur was important.  Some commentators say that Balsin would not have made king if Viktur had not supported him—that perhaps Balsin would not have been able to put a strong enough company together to come this far through the wild lands, nor to drive our foes out of it once they arrived.  That perhaps our country would not have been created, were it not for Viktur.”

              “Stormdown and Mereland—they’re here.”

               “The original Stormdown and Mereland are in Tinartia, which is Winworn now, where Balsin and Viktur originally came from.  They’d won a famous victory for their king—who now wanted to be rid of them before Balsin started having fancies about being king of Tinartia.  Everyone is very clear that Balsin was very ambitious.  It was apparently worth it to their king—whose name was Argen or possibly Argun—to lose half his army to be rid of Balsin.  Argen married the daughter of the king Balsin defeated, so presumably he thought he could afford it.”

               Sylvi cautiously turned the pages back to Viktur’s first sight of the pegasi, and then on to the second marker.  There was something that looked like the remains of a grubby fingerprint on one corner of the page she was looking at, and what might be a bloodstain on the bottom edge of the little book.  “ . . . and why cannot our magicians explain this lack to us?”

               She stopped, startled, and reread the entire sentence, and then looked up at Ahathin.  “That’s not—I haven’t seen that before, that last,” and gingerly she touched the brittle old page.  Even through the thin glove she could feel the roughness of the paper:  modern paper was silky smooth—their method of paper-making was one of the things the pegasi had taught their allies.  Mostly she did her studying in the room off her bedroom in the main part of the palace, where she now spent several (long) hours every day with Ahathin.  The copy of the First Annals she was reading was the copy several generations of royal children had read, and included several games of tic-tac-toe on the end papers, imperfectly erased, played by her next-elder and next-next elder brothers, who were only eleven months apart in age, and a poem her father had written about an owl when he had been a few years younger than she was now.  (It began:  The Owl flys at night.  To give the mice a fright.  It soars and swoops.  The mice go oops.)  Her eldest brother, and heir to the throne, had never written in his school books.

               She looked up at Ahathin, who stood beside her.  There was only one chair at the table.  She wanted to stand up herself, or drag another chair from another table so that Ahathin could sit down, but she knew she mustn’t.  The single chair and the presence of the honour guard with their hai meant that this was a formal occasion.  Princesses sat down.  Lesser mortals did not.  This included tutors—even tutors who were also magicians, and members of the Guild of Magicians.   She didn’t like formal occasions.  They made her feel even smaller and mousier than she usually felt.

               She also didn’t like it that the familiar, beat-up—almost friendly, if a school book was ever friendly—copy of the Annals that she knew had a missing phrase;  she didn’t like it that Ahathin was making such a fuss about her reading the missing phrase.  She especially didn’t like it when her own binding was so near—her binding to her pegasus.

               Ahathin was small and round and almost bald and wore spectacles and a harmless expression, but he was still a magician.  He looked no less small, round and harmless than he ever did right now as she stared at him, but for the first time she thought:  looking harmless is his disguise—it’s the way he gets people to react to him the way he wants them to react.  Like Fthoom is big and scary.  She had known Ahathin all her life.  She could remember him sitting on the floor to play with her when she was tiny—she could remember looking dubiously at her first set of speaking tiles, with human letters and words on one side and the gestures you were supposed to use with the pegasi on the other, and Ahathin patiently explaining them to her.  She’d learnt to sign ‘hello, friend’ from Ahathin.   

                She’d known him all her life, and suddenly she didn’t know him at all.  She tried to swallow the lump in her throat, but it stayed where it was.

                Ahathin nodded.  “It’s not in any of the copies of the Annals I’ve looked in—there are quite a few.”

                “Why?”

                 At his most harmless, he said mildly, “I don’t know.”

September 13, 2009 | Filed Under my books 

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